Character Analysis
Penny is Gordon's live-in girlfriend and a born-and-raised California girl. She is not Jewish, which may not seem like a big deal at first, but when you hear Gordon's mom's side of things, well, that there is a deal breaker as far as she is concerned.
Penny is an interesting character in the Timescape lineup. Although she appears in more chapters than Marjorie, she doesn't get a point-of-view chapter of her own. As such, all the information we receive about her comes from Gordon's perspective. So what we can say about Penny really reflects on Gordon as much as it does her.
Dr. Bernstein and Mrs. Hyde
The key problem in Gordon and Penny's relationship is that Penny doesn't fit into the social stereotype boxes Gordon tries to cram people into. At first, Gordon finds Penny's ability to exhibit seemingly contradictory traits exhilarating. He initially describes her as:
"Graduate student in literature, dutiful daughter to an Oakland investor, by turns lyrical and practical, with a political compass that saw virtues in both Kennedy and Goldwater. At times brazen, then timid, then wanton […]." (7.59)
Here, his tone seems to be praising her ability to effortlessly wear so many social roles, to embrace so many opposing characteristics. But as the novel progresses, this praise quickly turns into frustration at his inability to solve the puzzle that is Penny: "He realized that he still could not get a grip on the real Penny, the woman behind so many different faces" (19.63).
It's an ironic twist in the man's character. Gordon can understand physics—a branch of knowledge that requires us to view the world in ways very different to our everyday perception of it—but when it comes to people in society, Gordon can't view them outside the narrow boxes high school cliques are made of. In Gordon's mind, you're either Jewish or a WASP, liberal or conservative, wanting to marry someone or not wanting to be with them at all.
In contrast, Penny's mind is much more flexible in social terms. She can vote for the conservative Goldwater yet still be completely at ease with gay people (19.61), and she can be a literature student who isn't for socialism. In Gordon's mind, this is like saying Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde can be bros.
But as Penny puts it so well: ''I know I don't fit your stereotypes, but that's your problem, Gordon'' (16.168). You go, girl.
Happy Ever After
For a while at least. Gordon and Penny do marry at some point post-1963, but Gordon remembers that "[h]e had never been able to relax" with Penny, and his "intuition told him that no such exterior analysis could capture what rubbed and chafed between them." After their divorce, Gordon marries Marsha Gould, a Jewish woman from the Bronx. Gordon thinks of the event as though "some inevitable paradigm had come home" (46.54).
Although Gordon goes against the grain to change science, he ultimately can't look beyond his social and cultural stereotypes. As for Penny, her fate is left a mystery.