"Ms. Margaret" by Phan Việt

from the Vietnamese by CS

      Today, I had dinner with Margaret. Tomorrow, she's moving out of Brown. Margaret has already been living here for seven years. She's been doing her PhD at the university for ten years and she still hasn't finished. I had been at Brown for two months before I got to speak to Margaret. To start with, I thought she hated me. In the end, I found out that talking to Margaret was an achievement in itself because Margaret thought talking to anyone was beneath her dignity. Margaret had a room on the second floor, but she had also occupied a small, empty room in the basement. She spent most of her time down there. My guess is Margaret would've thought talking to me beneath her dignity too if she hadn't seen me reading Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in the kitchen one day.
       “Do you like it?" she asked.
     “Not that much. Everyone says Dostoyevsky's great, but I'm not convinced yet.” I said.

     “Hell, what would they know? One guy says Dostoyevsky's great, so they all go round saying Dostoyevsky's great. Who cares?"
      From then on we started talking. We became friends, although she had already decided to move out of Brown because she found Charlie more and more insufferable. Charlie was a guy who lived on the second floor. Margaret called him "the nutjob".

      “The nutjob wants to steal my ideas,”  Margaret said to me. “Last week I was talking to him about my thesis, I told him I was reading this book. So today I went to the library and who had borrowed the book? That's right - the nutjob."
      Charlie wasn't the only one Margaret suspected of stealing her ideas. Even her PhD supervisor was under suspicion. Margaret was doing her PhD in theology. Her topic was violence in the Book of Mark: the New Testament. She'd been at it for ten years, sweating over her research since her time at Princeton, which she'd left to come to Chicago because she suspected her old supervisor had been trying to steal her ideas too.
      “The old man didn't want to let me graduate so he could publish my research as his own first. When I found out, I told him I was leaving. You know what he did? He wrote all these nasty letters about me to people so I couldn't get into any of the other unis.”
      “So how did you get a transfer here?”
      “Well, the guy who's supervising me now let me come across. I met him at a conference and I told him about my topic. After that he just let me come across.”
      “What a great guy!”
      “That's what I thought at the start,” said Margaret. “But now I can see he wants to steal my ideas too. Now I'm just going to have to stay away from the lot of them. What do I need them for anyway? Let me tell you, when you've been researching in this tiny little field for ten years, there's no one who can teach you a thing. Nobody can bullshit me - see?”
     That evening, Margaret and I had dinner at a little Thai restaurant on 55th Street. The place was deserted except for me and Margaret and two white guys who were probably students from our uni.
      “Margaret,” I said, “there's something I really want to ask you.”
      “Ask away!”
      “Are you planning on getting married at any stage?”
      “No!"
      Margaret's answer was so direct and decisive I had no idea what to say next. Having said her bit, she applied herself to the Thai rice, as if it was up to me to work out all the finer implications that hovered around this "No" of hers. 
      “Um . . . May I ask why not?”
      Margaret put the plate down, took a sip of water and looked me straight in the eye. She then delivered the following clear-cut answer:
     “Because I have absolutely no desire to live with other people. No desire whatsoever. I don't like men. And I don't like people in general. Human beings make me sick. I don't want to see tham. I don't want to go anywhere near them. And I definitely don't want to hear a single word that comes out of their filthy mouths. People have no idea how stupid they are. Look at the way they talk. Look at the way they laugh. They think what they're coming out with is pure gold. It's disgusting, I'm telling you. Just disgusting.”
      The two guys sitting a little way from us almost certainly heard every word of this. They gave Margaret a funny look. Then they gave me a funny look. Then they gave each other a funny look. I was sure I could tell what they were thinking - "Look at those two bitches" . . .
      “Oh, c'mon. You can't tell me you hate your parents too!"
      “Don't talk to me about my parents. My parents are the dullest pair of phonies on this planet. My mother's Jewish. My father's a Christian. Both into religion like crazy. I can't stand either of them. When I was little, my mother said straight up - you're never going to come to anything. You're ugly, you're dirty and you're going to be unhappy in life. That's what she said, the bitch. Think about it, how could a mother possibly say stuff like that to a child? When I got into uni, I left home. And I'm never going back. She could die tomorrow for all I care.” 
     “But," I said, lowering my voice, "but haven't you ever been in love? Have you ever been on a date with anyone?”
      “Love, huh? I don't know if that's what I'd call it. When I was at college, I did kind of like a few people. But they were never interested in me, so I let it slide.”
     “How do you know they weren't interested? Maybe they were interested, but they were too scared to do anything about it? When I first met you, I was scared stiff!”
      “How are you supposed to know if someone is interested in you then, missy?”
      “Um, look, I'm not an expert, but I guess it's the way they look at you, the way they behave around you, what they say . . .”
      “I don't know. Sounds too complicated to me. Back then, if there were people I was interested in but they didn't tell me they liked me then I just let it slide. I don't want to get married. I told you already, I don't want to live with ANYONE. People make me want to throw up. Living alone is what makes me happy.”
      And Margaret was right in a way too. She was probably the happiest person on campus, at least as far as I could judge. She wore the same clothes the whole year round, the same black t-shirt tucked into the same bell-bottomed jeans, with an enormous khaki coat thrown over the top in winter. Margaret never worried what other people thought of her or whether they paid attention to her. That was the way she kept going, day after day, labouring away on her research into violence in the Book of Mark in the basement.
      Here's the thing though. Looking back, I still can't help thinking - Margaret was really pretty. Ms. Margaret Ziegner had one of the most beautiful faces of all the American girls I met during those years in Chicago. . .