Tender is the Flesh

He detests being this efficient. But he doesn’t stop answering, resolving problems, trying to find the best option for the plant.

What he would like to do is tell her that “later” means later and that when she insults her employees, she just comes across as a disloyal boss.

She gives him the same speech every time, tells him how difficult it is even in this day and age to be a woman and have a career, says that people continue to hold prejudices against her, that only recently have they started greeting her and not her assistant who’s a man, because they think he’s the one who’s head of the laboratory, it was her choice not to have a family, and socially she has to pay for it, because people continue to think that women have to fulfil some biological plan, when her great accomplishment in life has been to press ahead, to never give in; being a man is so much easier, she says, this is her family—the laboratory—but no one understands, not really, she’s revolutionizing medicine, she tells him, and people continue to care whether her shoes are feminine, or that her roots are showing because she didn’t have time to go to the hairdresser, or that she’s gained weight.