Professors and Other Misfits

Edgar Margin held the elevator door and glanced at his watch as the young woman waddled toward him, smiling apologetically.  His watch showed 7:56.  The heavy girl swayed side to side, step by step, as did her short-cropped, limp hair.  As the door began to close, she held out her hand to stop it. 

Good God! He thought. Five seconds.

When she was in, Edgar Margin pressed the close door button and then the fourth floor button.  The young student’s obesity revolted him, but he forced a smile, thought a moment, and said, “It takes four seconds for the door to close if you punch the floor button.  However, if you punch the close button first, the door closes in one second.  By that simple act I save thirty seconds each workday; that’s approximately two hours a year.”

The girl looked at him blankly with her backpack dragging on the floor at the end of her arm.

“Pardon me,” Edgar Margin said.  “What floor did you want?”

“Actually, I was coming to see you, Professor Margin.”

He looked down at his wristwatch.  “I have a faculty meeting in three minutes.  See me after class.  You are—?

“Sarah Lamb.”

Pretending to recall her name he said, “Of course.”  He remembered her in class, the girl with the fat legs and arms.  “You sit in the front row by the window.”

Edgar Margin recoiled as she nodded, blushed, and raised a meaty arm to push back her short, brown hair.  His eyes became magnets drawn to slacks that bulged almost to bursting.  As he tried to avoid her eyes, a pungent perspiration odor found its way into his nostrils, and he stiffened and looked away to avoid it.

Neither spoke as the elevator moved up, the girl fidgeting with her backpack, Edgar Margin at attention, seemingly deep in thought and trying to hold his breath, knowing that when he took the next breath the scent would still be there.  He looked at her eyes; she smiled girlishly and looked away.

A red and white striped tie provided striking counterpoint to his gray, three-piece suit.  He liked to look fit and hoped to be a model to his students and colleagues.  Slim and sturdily built, he was rather handsome with pinkish cheeks.  Beneath light eyebrows that almost disappeared into his fair skin, his large, sky-blue eyes bulged slightly, conveying thoughtfulness, intellectuality, and interest.  But those eyes could as well become penetrating, dogmatic, even accusing and judgmental.  His facial features seemed delicate, overly handsome, one might say effeminate.  Having begun to lose his sandy hair in his twenties, he wore what was left of it in a crew cut, as if in retribution.  Now nearing forty, he had come to terms with impending baldness by using a cream that kept each hair standing at attention the way he liked to stand—ramrod straight. 

The elevator door opened, and Edgar Margin held it open and nodded gallantly.

“No, thanks, Dr. Margin.  I’m going back down.  See you in class.”

Edgar Margin stepped out toward his office, the tapping of his hard heels on the plastic tile floor reverberating in the long corridor.  He always counted them: twenty-seven taps, no more, no less.