Elm Creek Quilts [06] The Master Quilter by Jennifer Chiaverini

smiled and made some joke about his getting out of his office to enjoy the fine weather, but he didn’t get it. “We’re understaffed,” he replied instead. “Everyone has to help out.”
    Gwen had never particularly liked Craig, so she merely smiled again, nodded, and went on her way rather than explain. Bonnie and Craig were a prime example of opposites attracting, although Gwen had never figured out what Bonnie found so appealing. Of course, she found little to admire in the institution of marriage, so she probably wasn’t looking hard enough.
    She found Judy in her lab studying a long printout of rows and columns of numbers and letters—incomprehensible to Gwen, but apparently holding Judy and two of her graduate students spellbound. When Gwen asked if she had a moment to talk, Judy handed the printout to one of her students and led Gwen into an adjacent office. The room, though small, had a window, two laptops, and a color laser printer Gwen had coveted ever since Judy unpacked it. The walls were lined with bookcases—the shelves so full they bowed in the middle—and on the back of the door hung a quilt designed from a fractal pattern.
    “What’s going on?” Judy asked, leaning against the edge of a desk and gesturing to a seat.
    Gwen sank heavily into it. “I wasn’t named department chair.”
    “I thought the committee had all but given you the keys to the office.”
    “Never again will I believe anything until I see it in writing.”
    Judy shook her head, her long black hair slipping over her shoulder. “So they chose another man after all.”
    “No, they cleverly rendered me unable to complain on those grounds. The woman they chose is bright, capable, and only five years out of graduate school. She doesn’t even have tenure, but her work is hip, political, and socially relevant, which mine isn’t.”
    “Since when?”
    “Since I started concentrating on textiles, apparently.” Gwen’s head throbbed. She buried her face in her hands and massaged her forehead. “And naturally I had to make everything worse. I couldn’t just take the news stoically and write up a well-reasoned, formal protest after I regained control of my temper. I had to storm into Bill’s office and demand an explanation.”
    “How did that go?” When Gwen hesitated, Judy winced. “Never mind. I can guess.” She reached out and squeezed Gwen’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t worry about it. He’s probably more embarrassed than you are, no matter what you said. He must be ashamed of the committee’s ridiculous excuses.”
    “I doubt it. He seemed sincere when he told me to switch to studying ‘the arts that matter’ if I hope to be considered three years from now.”
    “So what are you going to do?”
    “I might write him a letter of apology.”
    “Sounds like overkill to me. I meant, what are you going to do about your research?”
    “I don’t know.” She wanted to pursue research that fascinated her, but had her passion blinded her to the obvious? Was her work irrelevant? She never wanted to become one of those academics who churned out journal article after journal article that no one would ever read. For a time, a time she had enjoyed enormously, studying the lives of women in history had been celebrated as the archiving of the almost forgotten past of an enormous, disenfranchised population. When had the climate shifted?
    “You have tenure, so they can’t fire you simply because they don’t like your research,” Judy reminded her. “But they can prevent you from advancing within the college and otherwise make your life miserable. I suppose you have to ask yourself which is more important: impressing the committee or continuing your current research, which until an hour ago you couldn’t have imagined abandoning.”
    “I could always return to it after my term as chair.”
    “That’s true, but three years is a long time to study something that bores you.”
    Gwen doubted she could stand even one year