Strangers at the Feast Read Free

stepping on other people’s toes. (Academics, Ginny knew, had colossal toes.) She’d published a book of poetry on Colonial themes, which had garnered her attention that could work against tenure. Also, some people did not appreciate the ironyof their popular lecture course—The History of the American Family—being taught by a woman who showed up at every university function with a different date, one of them, regrettably, a graduate student.
    Perhaps because she was a bit of a loner, social networks had always fascinated her. After majoring in anthropology, she spent two years in Sudan and Nigeria studying the family structures and social mores of the Dinka and Yoruba. She lived in a grass hut and sipped Nescafé from a tin cup every morning. She strung beads and wove grass baskets and herded cattle, and at night, by the soft glow of an oil lamp, scribbled data and observations in her notebook. It was a mind-opening and spiritually stimulating experience that ended unfortunately with an affair with Dr. Blaise Langley, her married field advisor, whose ideas about his own family structure and mores were, in the end, a bit too open-minded for Ginny’s taste.
    Back home, American cultural geography won her over for graduate school. She was done with ringworm and mosquito nets and advisors who thought they were Indiana Jones. For the first ten years, she was consumed with research and teaching. Migration maps were thumbtacked to her apartment walls; encyclopedic census reports barricaded her bed. She skipped out of parties early and smuggled thermoses of coffee into the special collections division, reading through the night about life on the frontier.
    The early settlers amazed her—they had pluck, they led lives of sweaty drama. Theirs was a world of corsets and whipping posts and indentured servitude. People worked the land and died in ungainly ways. Modern life, in comparison, seemed a cinch.
    As the smallest political unit of society, the family struck Ginny as the perfect microcosm for examining social change. Alimony, social security, domestic architecture, medicine, child care, war—they were all products, to some degree, of the evolving family. Ginny had once spent countless nights fervently debating other PhD candidatesas to whether industrialization caused or reflected the shift from extended to nuclear family.
    Now, at thirty-four, she didn’t care so much. Like those college dorm-room debates about the meaning of life, the conversations were like bubble gum or gobstoppers—junk you eventually lost the taste for, or feared you’d choke on.
    Her first years teaching—when she watched her students shuffle into class in their Puma sneakers and Diesel jeans, slinging overstuffed North Face backpacks onto their desks—she went off on passionate tangents about the Dinka and the Yoruba, pleading against capitalism and urban individualism (God, she hoped they didn’t know she lived alone in a high-rise), and their eyes would collectively roll. They liked their lives. They liked their gizmos. And now, though she hid her cell phone and iPod when she approached the room where she gave her Primitive Utopias lecture, as soon as she was clear of campus, Ginny pawed through her purse and rescued her electronic friends and then, like her students, lost herself in a private sea of sound waves.
    At least she listened to world music.
    But Ginny had recently curtailed her tirades against consumer culture, her outrage over the societal ramifications of industrialism. She worried it sounded like the misery of a single woman with too much time on her hands. Also, her classes were beginning to bore her. Semester after semester her lectures were the same—the curse of history, you had nothing new to talk about. Once in a while, just to spice things up, to see some faint shock on her students’ faces, she’d dim the lights and throw on a slide show of Colonial birth-control methods.
    Here we have a very leathery-looking