The Female Man by Joanna Russ
CONTENTS
This book is dedicated
to Anne, to Mary and to
the other one and
three-quarters billions of us.
THE FEMALE
MAN
A Bantam Book / February
1973
The epigraph on page v excerpted from THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE copyright © 1967 by
R. D. Laing
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1975 by
Joanna Russ.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in
part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.
For information address; Bantam Books, Inc.
Published simultaneously in the United States
and Canada
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books,
Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the
portrayal of a bantam, is registered in the
PRINTED IN THE
If Jack
succeeds in forgetting something, this is of little use if Jill continues to remind
him of it. He must induce her not to do so. The safest way would be not just to
make her keep quiet about it, but to induce her to forget it also.
Jack may act upon Jill in many ways. He may make her feel guilty for keeping on
"bringing it up." He may invalidate
her experience. This can be done more or less radically. He can indicate merely
that it is unimportant or trivial, whereas it is important and significant to
her. Going further, he can shift the modality
of her experience from memory to imagination: "It's all in your
imagination." Further still, he can invalidate the content: "It never happened that way." Finally, he can
invalidate not only the significance, modality, and content, but her very
capacity to remember at all, and make her feel guilty for doing so into the
bargain.
This is not unusual. People are doing such things to each other all the time.
In order for such transpersonal invalidation to work, however, it is advisable
to overlay it with a thick patina of mystification. For instance, by denying
that this is what one is doing, and further invalidating any perception that it
is being done by ascriptions such as "How can you think such a
thing?" "You must be paranoid." And so on.
R. D.
Laing, The Politics of Experience,
Penguin Books, Ltd.,
PART ONE
I
I was born on a farm on Whileaway.
When I was five I was sent to a school on South Continent (like everybody else)
and when I turned twelve I rejoined my family. My mother's name was Eva, my
other mother's name Alicia; I am Janet Evason. When I
was thirteen I stalked and killed a wolf, alone, on North Continent above the
forty-eighth parallel, using only a rifle. I made a travois for the head and
paws, then abandoned the head, and finally got home with one paw, proof enough
(I thought). I've worked in the mines, on the radio network, on a milk farm, a
vegetable farm, and for six weeks as a librarian after I broke my leg. At
thirty I bore Yuriko Janetson; when she was taken
away to a school five years later (and I never saw a child protest so much) I
decided to take time off and see if I could find my family's old home—for they
had moved away after I had married and relocated near Mine City in South
Continent. The place was unrecognizable, however; our rural areas are always
changing. I could find nothing but the tripods of the computer beacons
everywhere, some strange crops in the fields that I had never seen before, and
a band of wandering children. They were heading North
to visit the polar station and offered to lend me a sleeping bag for the night,
but I declined and stayed with the resident family; in the morning I started
home. Since then I have been Safety Officer for the county, that is S & P
(Safety and Peace), a position I have held now for six years. My Stanford-Binet corrected score (in your terms) is 187, my wife's 205
and my daughter's 193. Yuki goes through the ceiling on the verbal test. I've
supervised the digging of fire trails, delivered babies, fixed machinery, and
milked more moo-cows than I wish I knew existed. But Yuki is crazy about
ice-cream. I love my daughter. I love my family (there are nineteen of us). I
love my wife (
II
Jeannine Dadier
(DADE-yer) worked as a librarian in
"I don't believe it," said Jeannine
Nancy Dadier softly. Mrs. Allison was a Negro. It was
an unusually warm, hazy day with a little green showing in the park: imaginary
green, perhaps, as if the world had taken an odd turning and
were bowling down Spring in a dim bye-street somewhere, clouds of
imagination around the trees.
"I don't believe it," repeated
Jeannine Dadier, not knowing what they were talking
about. "You'd better believe it!" said Mrs. Allison sharply. Jeannine
balanced on one foot. (Nice girls don't do that.) She climbed down the ladder
with her books and put them on the reserve table. Mrs. Allison didn't like
W.P.A. girls. Jeannine saw the headlines again, on Mrs. Allison's newspaper.
WOMAN APPEARS FROM NOWHERE ON BROADWAY,
POLICEMAN VANISHES
"I don't—" (I have my cat, I have my room, I
have my hot plate and my window and the ailanthus tree).
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Cal
outside in the street; he was walking bouncily and his hat was tipped forward;
he was going to have some silly thing or other to say about being a reporter,
little blond hatchet face and serious blue eyes; "I'll make it some day,
baby." Jeannine slipped into the stacks, hiding behind Mrs. Allison's P.M.-Post : Woman Appears from Nowhere on Broadway,
Policeman Vanishes. She daydreamed about buying fruit at the free market,
though her hands always sweat so when she bought things outside the government
store and she couldn't bargain. She would get cat food and feed Mr. Frosty the
first thing she got to her room; he ate out of an old china saucer. Jeannine
imagined Mr. Frosty rubbing against her legs, his tail waving. Mr. Frosty was
marked black-and-white all over. With her eyes closed, Jeannine saw him jump up
on the mantelpiece and walk among her things: her sea shells and miniatures.
"No, no, no!" she said. The
cat jumped off, knocking over one of her Japanese dolls. After dinner Jeannine
took him out; then she washed the dishes and tried to mend some of her old
clothing. She'd go over the ration books. When it got dark she'd turn on the
radio for the evening program or she'd read, maybe call up from the drugstore
and find out about the boarding house in
"Hey, baby?" It was a horrid shock.
It was
"No," said Jeannine hastily. "I
haven't got time."
"Baby?" He was pulling her arm. Come for a cup of coffee. But she
couldn't. She had to learn Greek (the book was in the reserve desk). There was
too much to do. He was frowning and pleading. She could feel the pillow under
her back already, and Mr. Frosty stalking around them, looking at her with his
strange blue eyes, walking widdershins around the
lovers. He was part Siamese;
"Later," said Jeannine desperately.
"The vanishing
woman. That's you." She
closed her eyes and daydreamed about Mr. Frosty curled up on the mantel,
peacefully asleep, all felinity in one circle. Such a spoiled
cat.
"Baby?" said
"Oh, all right," said Jeannine
hopelessly, "all right."
I'll watch the
ailanthus tree.
III
Janet Evason
appeared on Broadway at two o'clock in the afternoon in her underwear. She
didn't lose her head. Though the nerves try to keep going in the previous
track, she went into evasive position the second after she arrived (good for
her) with her fair, dirty hair flying and her khaki shorts and shirt stained
with sweat. When a policeman tried to take her arm, she threatened him with le savate, but he vanished. She seemed to regard the crowds
around her with a special horror. The policeman reappeared in the same spot an
hour later with no memory of the interval, but Janet Evason
had returned to her sleeping bag in the
"Go to sleep," said the anonymous
friend-for-the-night, a nose, a brow, and a coil of dark hair in the dappled
moonlight.
"But who has been mucking about with my
head!" said Janet Evason.
IV
When Janet Evason
returned to the
So there's me also.
V
The first man to set foot on Whileaway appeared in a field of turnips on North
Continent. He was wearing a blue suit like a hiker's and a blue cap. The farm
people had been notified. One, seeing the blip on the tractor's infrared scan,
came to get him; the man in blue saw a flying machine with no wings but a skirt
of dust and air. The county's repair shed for farm machinery was nearby that week,
so the tractor-driver led him there; he was not saying anything intelligible.
He saw a translucent dome, the surface undulating slightly. There was an
exhaust fan set in one side. Within the dome was a wilderness of machines:
dead, on their sides, some turned inside out, their guts spilling on to the
grass. From an extended framework under the roof swung hands as big as three
men. One of these picked up a car and dropped it. The sides of the car fell
off. Littler hands sprang up from the grass.
"Hey, hey!" said the tractor-driver,
knocking on a solid piece set into the wall. "It fell, it passed
out!"
"Send it back," said an operator,
climbing out from under the induction helmet at the far end of the shed. Four
others came and stood around the man in the blue suit.
"Is he of steady mind?" said one.
"We don't know."
"Is he ill?"
"Hypnotize him and send him back."
The man in blue—if he had seen them—would have
found them very odd: smooth-faced, smooth-skinned, too small and too plump,
their coveralls heavy in the seat. They wore coveralls because you couldn't
always fix things with the mechanical hands; sometimes you had to use your own.
One was old and had white hair; one was very young; one wore the long hair
sometimes affected by the youth of Whileaway,
"to while away the time." Six pairs of steady curious eyes studied
the man in the blue suit.
"That, mes enfants," said the tractor-driver at last,
"is a man.
"That is a real Earth man."
VI
Sometimes you bend down to tie your shoe, and
then you either tie your shoe or you don't; you either straighten up instantly
or maybe you don't. Every choice begets at least two worlds of possibility,
that is, one in which you do and one in which you don't; or very likely many
more, one in which you do quickly, one in which you do slowly, one in which you
don't, but hesitate, one in which you hesitate and frown, one in which you
hesitate and sneeze, and so on. To carry this line of argument further, there
must be an infinite number of possible universes (such is the fecundity of God)
for there is no reason to imagine Nature as prejudiced in favor of human
action. Every displacement of every molecule, every change in orbit of every
electron, every quantum of light that strikes here and not there—each of these
must somewhere have its alternative. It's possible, too, that there is no such
thing as one clear line or strand of probability, and that we live on a sort of
twisted braid, blurring from one to the other without even knowing it, as long
as we keep within the limits of a set of variations that really make no
difference to us. Thus the paradox of time travel ceases to exist, for the Past
one visits is never one's own Past but always somebody else's; or rather, one's
visit to the Past instantly creates another Present (one in which the visit has
already happened) and what you visit is the Past belonging to that Present—an
entirely different matter from your own Past. And with each decision you make
(back there in the Past) that new probable universe itself branches, creating simultaneously
a new Past and a new Present, or to put it plainly, a new universe. And when
you come back to your own Present, you alone know what the other Past was like
and what you did there.
Thus it is probable what Whileaway—a
name for the Earth ten centuries from now, but not our
Earth, if you follow me—will find itself not at all affected by this sortie
into somebody else's past. And vice versa, of course.
The two might as well be independent worlds.
Whileaway, you may gather, is in the future.
But not our future.
VII
I saw Jeannine shortly afterward,
in a cocktail lounge where I had gone to watch Janet Evason
on television (I don't have a set). Jeannine looked very much out of place; I
sat next to her and she confided in me: "I don't belong here." I can't
imagine how she got there, except by accident. She looked as if she were
dressed up for a costume film, sitting in the shadow with her snood and her
wedgies, a long-limbed, coltish girl in clothes a little too small for her.
Fashion (it seems) is recovering very leisurely from the Great Depression. Not
here and now, of course. "I don't belong here!" whispered Jeannine Dadier again, rather anxiously. She was fidgeting. She
said, "I don't like places like
this." She poked the red, turfed leather on the
seat
"What?" I said.
"I went hiking last vacation," she
said big-eyed. "That's what I like. It's healthy."
I know it's supposed to be virtuous to run
healthily through fields of flowers, but I like bars, hotels, air-conditioning,
good restaurants, and jet transport, and I told her so.
"Jet?" she said.
Janet Evason came on
the television. It was only a still picture. Then we had the news from
(The first thing said by the second man ever
to visit Whileaway was, "Where are all the
men?" Janet Evason, appearing in the Pentagon,
hands in her pockets, feet planted far apart, said, "Where the dickens are all the women?")
The sound in the television set conked out for
a moment and then Jeannine Dadier was gone; she
didn't disappear, she just wasn't there any more. Janet Evason
got up, shook hands again, looked around her, questioned with her eyes,
pantomimed comprehension, nodded, and walked out of camera range. They never
did show you the government guards.
I heard it another time and this is how it
went:
MC: How do you like it here, Miss Evason?
JE (looks around the studio, confused): It's
too hot.
MC: I mean how do you like it on—well, on
Earth?
JE: But I live on the earth. (Her attention is
a little strained here.)
MC: Perhaps you had better explain what you
mean by that—I mean the existence of different probabilities and so on—you were
talking about that before.
JE: It's in the newspapers.
MC: But Miss Evason,
if you could, please explain it for the people who are
watching the program.
JE: Let them read. Can't they read?
(There was a moment's silence. Then the M.C.
spoke.)
MC: Our social scientists as well as our
physicists tell us they've had to revise a great deal of theory in light of the
information brought by our fair visitor from another world. There have been no
men on Whileaway for at least eight centuries—I don't
mean no human beings, of course, but no men—and this society, run entirely by
women, has naturally attracted a great deal of attention since the appearance
last week of its representative and its first ambassador, the lady on my left
here. Janet Evason, can you tell us how you think
your society on Whileaway will react to the
reappearance of men from Earth—I mean our present-day Earth, of course—after an
isolation of eight hundred years?
JE (She jumped at this one; probably because
it was the first question she could understand): Nine hundred years. What men?
MC: What men? Surely you expect men from our
society to visit Whileaway.
JE: Why?
MC: For information, trade, ah—cultural
contact, surely. (laughter) I'm afraid you're making
it rather difficult for me, Miss Evason. When
the—ah—the plague you spoke of killed the men on Whileaway,
weren't they missed? Weren't families broken up? Didn't the whole pattern of
life change?
JE (slowly): I suppose people always miss what
they are used to. Yes, they were missed. Even a whole set of words, like
"he," "man" and so on—these are banned. Then the second
generation, they use them to be daring, among themselves, and the third
generation doesn't, to be polite, and by the fourth, who cares? Who remembers?
MC: But surely—that is—
JE: Excuse me, perhaps I'm mistaking what you
intend to say as this language we're speaking is only a hobby of mine, I am not
as fluent as I would wish. What we speak is a pan-Russian even the Russians
would not understand; it would be like Middle English to you, only vice-versa.
MC: I see. But to get back to the question—
JE: Yes.
MC (A hard position to be in, between the
authorities and this strange personage who is wrapped in ignorance like a
savage chief: expressionless, attentive, possibly civilized, completely
unknowing. He finally said): Don't you want men to return to Whileaway, Miss Evason?
JE: Why?
MC: One sex is half a species, Miss Evason. I am quoting (and he cited a famous
anthropologist). Do you want to banish sex from Whileaway?
JE (with massive dignity and complete
naturalness): Huh?
MC: I said: Do you want to banish sex from Whileaway? Sex, family, love, erotic attraction—call it
what you like—we all know that your people are competent and intelligent
individuals, but do you think that's enough? Surely you have the intellectual
knowledge of biology in other species to know what I'm talking about.
JE: I'm married. I have two children. What the
devil do you mean?
MC: I—Miss Evason—we—well,
we know you form what you call marriages, Miss Evason,
that you reckon the descent of your children through both partners and that you
even have "tribes"—I'm calling them what Sir ———— calls them; I know
the translation isn’t perfect—and we know that these marriages or tribes form
very good institutions for the economic support of the children and for some
sort of genetic mixing, though I confess you're way beyond us in the biological
sciences. But, Miss Evason, I am not talking about
economic institutions or even affectionate ones. Of course the mothers of Whileaway love their children; nobody doubts that. And of
course they have affection for each other; nobody doubts that, either. But
there is more, much, much more—I am talking about sexual love.
JE (enlightened): Oh! You mean copulation.
MC: Yes.
JE: And you say we don't have that?
MC: Yes.
JE: How foolish of you. Of course we do.
MC: Ah? (He wants to say, "Don't tell
me.")
JE: With each other. Allow me to explain.
She was cut off instantly by a commercial
poetically describing the joys of unsliced bread. They shrugged (out of camera
range). It wouldn't even have gotten that far if Janet had not insisted on
attaching a touch-me-not to the replay system. It was a live broadcast, four
seconds' lag. I begin to like her more and more. She said, "If you expect
me to observe your taboos, I think you will have to be more precise as to
exactly what they are." In Jeannine Dadier's
world, she was (would be) asked by a lady commentator:
How do the women of Whileaway
do their hair?
JE: They hack it off with clam shells.
VIII
"Humanity is unnatural!" exclaimed
the philosopher Dunyasha Bernadetteson
(A.C. 344—426) who suffered all her life from the slip of a genetic surgeon's
hand which had given her one mother's jaw and the other mother's teeth—orthodontia
is hardly ever necessary on Whileaway. Her daughter's
teeth, however, were perfect. Plague came to Whileaway
in P.C. 17 (Preceding Catastrophe) and ended in A.C. 03, with half the
population dead; it had started so slowly that no one knew about it until it
was too late. It attacked males only. Earth had been completely re-formed
during the Golden Age (P.C.300-ca. P.C.180) and natural conditions presented
considerably less difficulty than they might have during a similar catastrophe
a millennium or so earlier. At the time of The Despair (as it was popularly
called), Whileaway had two continents, called simply
North and South Continents, and a great many ideal bays or anchorages in the
coastline. Severe climatic conditions did not prevail below 72° S and
68° N latitude. Conventional water traffic, at the time of the
Catastrophe, was employed almost exclusively for freight, passenger traffic
using the smaller and more flexibly routed hovercraft. Houses were
self-contained, with portable power sources, fuel-alcohol motors or solar cells
replacing the earlier centralized power. The later invention of practical
matter-antimatter reactors (K. Ansky, A.C. 239)
produced great optimism for a decade or so, but these devices proved to be too
bulky for private use. Katharina Lucyson Ansky (A.C. 201-282) was also responsible for the
principles that made genetic surgery possible. (The merging of ova had been
practiced for the previous century and a half.) Animal life had become so
scarce before the Golden Age that many species were re-invented by enthusiasts
of the Ansky Period; in A.C. 280 there was an
outbreak of coneys in Newland (an island off the neck
of North Continent), a pandemic not without historical precedent. By A.C. 492,
through the brilliant agitation of the great Betty Bettinason
Murano (A.C. 453-A.C. 502) Terran
colonies were re-established on Mars, Ganymede, and in the Asteroids, the Selenic League assisting according to the Treaty of Mare Tenebrum (A.C. 240). Asked what she expected to find in
space, Betty Murano made the immortal quip,
"Nothing." By the third century A.C. intelligence was a controllable,
heritable factor, though aptitudes and interests continued to elude the
surgeons and intelligence itself could be raised only
grossly. By the fifth century, clan organization had reached its present
complex state and the re-cycling of phosphorus was almost completely
successful; by the seventh century Jovian mining made it possible to replace a
largely glass-and-ceramics technology with some metals (which were also
re-cycled) and for the third time in four hundred years (fashions are sometimes
cyclic too) duelling became a serious social
nuisance. Several local Guilds Councils voted that a successful duellist must undergo the penalty of an accidental murderer
and bear a child to replace the life lost, but the solution was too
simple-minded to become popular. There was the age of both parties to consider,
for example. By the beginning of the ninth century A.C. the induction helmet
was a practical possibility, industry was being drastically altered, and the Selenic League had finally outproduced
South Continent in kg protein/person/annum. In 913 A.C. an obscure and
discontented descendant of Katy Ansky put together
various items of mathematical knowledge and thus discovered—or
invented—probability mechanics.
In the time of Jesus of
That is, a prudent ecologist makes things work
as nearly perfectly as they can by themselves, but you also keep the kerosene
lantern in the barn just in case, and usually a debate about keeping a horse
ends up with the decision that it's too much trouble, so you let the horse go;
but the Conservation Point at La Jolla keeps horses. We wouldn't recognize
them. The induction helmet makes it possible for one workwoman to have not only
the brute force but also the flexibility and control of thousands; it's turning
Whileawayan industry upside down. Most people walk on
Whileaway (of course, their feet are perfect). They
make haste in odd ways sometimes. In the early days it was enough just to keep
alive and keep the children coming. Now they say "When the re-industrialization's complete," and they still walk.
Maybe they like it. Probability mechanics offers the possibility—by looping
into another continuum, exactly chosen—of teleportation. Chilia
Ysayeson Belin lives in
Italian ruins (I think this is part of the Vittore Emmanuele monument, though I don't know how it got to
Newland) and she's sentimental about it; how can one add indoor plumbing
discreetly without an unconscionable amount of work? Her mother, Ysaye, lives in a cave (the Ysaye
who put together the theory of probability mechanics). Pre-fabs
take only two days to get and no time at all to set up. There are eighteen Belins and twenty-three Moujkis (Ysaye's family; I stayed with both). Whileaway
doesn't have true cities. And of course, the tail of a culture is several
centuries behind the head. Whileaway is so pastoral
that at times one wonders whether the ultimate sophistication may not take us
all back to a kind of pre-Paleolithic dawn age, a garden without any artifacts
except for what we would call miracles. A Moujki
invented non-disposable food containers in
her spare time in A.C. 904 because the idea fascinated her; people have been
killed for less.
Meanwhile, the ecological housekeeping is
enormous.
IX
JE: I bore my child at thirty; we all do. It's
a vacation. Almost five years. The baby rooms are full of people reading,
painting, singing, as much as they can, to the children, with the children,
over the children… Like the ancient Chinese custom of the three-years'
mourning, an hiatus at just the right time. There has been no leisure at all
before and there will be so little after— anything I do, you understand, I mean
really do—I must ground thoroughly in those five years. One works with feverish
haste… At sixty I will get a sedentary job and have some time for myself again.
COMMENTATOR: And this is considered enough, in
Whileaway?
JE: My God, no.
X
Jeannine dawdles. She always hates to get out
of bed. She would lie on her side and look at the ailanthus tree until her back
began to ache; then she would turn over, hidden in the veils of the leaves, and
fall asleep. Tag-ends of dreams till she lay in bed like a puddle and the cat
would climb over her. On workdays Jeannine got up early in a kind of waking
nightmare: feeling horrid, stumbling to the hall bathroom with sleep all over
her. Coffee made her sick. She couldn't sit in the armchair, or drop her
slippers, or bend, or lean, or lie down. Mr. Frosty, perambulating on the
window sill, walked back and forth in front of the ailanthus tree: Tiger on
Frond. The museum. The zoo. The bus to
The cat spoke.
She jerked awake. I'll
feed you, Mr. Frosty.
Mrrrr.
If I had the money,
if I could get my hair done…He comes into the library; he's a college
professor; no, he's a playboy. "Who's that girl?" Talks
to Mrs. Allison, slyly flattering her. "This is Jeannine." She
casts her eyes down, rich in feminine power. Had my nails done today. And these are good clothes,
they have taste, my own individuality, my beauty. "There's something about
her," he says. "Will you go out with me?" Later on the roof
garden, drinking champagne, "Jeannine, will you —"
Mr. Frosty, unsatisfied and jealous, puts his
claw into her leg. "All right!" she says, choking on the sound of her
own voice. Get dressed quick .
I do (thought Jeannine, looking in the
precious full-length mirror inexplicably left by the previous tenant on the
back of the closet door) I do look a little bit
like…if I tilt my face. Oh! Cal will be SO — MAD— and flying back to the bed, she strips off
her pajamas and snatches at the underwear she always leaves out on the bureau
the night before. Jeannine the Water Nymph. I dreamed about a young man somewhere. She doesn't
quite believe in cards or omens, that's totally
idiotic, but sometimes she giggles and thinks it would be nice. I have big eyes. You are going to meet a tall, dark —
Placing Mr. Frosty firmly on the bed, she pulls on her
sweater and skirt, then brushes her hair, counting strokes under her breath.
Her coat is so old. Just a little bit of make-up, lip pomade and powder. (She
forgot again and got powder on her coat.) If she got out early, she wouldn't
have to meet
"How do, Jeannine. Going out?"
Doubling up in a fit of hysterics, Miss Dadier escaped. Ooh! To look
like that!
There was
XI
Etsuko Belin,
stretched cruciform on a glider, shifted her weight and went into a slow turn,
seeing fifteen hundred feet below her the rising sun of Whileaway
reflected in the glacial-scaur lakes of
XII
Six months ago at the Chinese New Year,
Jeannine had stood in the cold, holding her mittens over her ears to keep out
the awful sound of firecrackers.
XIII
I met Janet Evason
on Broadway, standing to the side of the parade given in her honor (I was). She
leaned out of the limousine and beckoned me in. Surrounded by
Secret Service agents. "That one," she said. Eventually we
will all come together.
XIV
Jeannine, out of place, puts her hands over
her ears and shuts her eyes on a farm on Whileaway,
sitting at the trestle-table under the trees where everybody is eating. I'm not here. I'm not here . Chilia Ysayeson's youngest has
taken a fancy to the newcomer; Jeannine sees big eyes, big breasts, big
shoulders, thick lips, all that grossness. Mr. Frosty is being spoilt, petted
and fed by eighteen Belins. I'm not here.
XV
JE: Evason is not
"son" but "daughter." This is your
translation.
XVI
And here we are.
PART TWO
I
Who am I?
I know who I am, but what's my brand name?
Me with a new face, a
puffy mask. Laid
over the old one in strips of plastic, a blond Hallowe'en
ghoul on top of the S.S. uniform. I was skinny as a beanpole underneath
except for the hands, which were similarly treated, and that very impressive
face. I did this once in my line of business, which I'll go into later, and
scared the idealistic children who lived downstairs. Their
delicate skins red with offended horror. Their clear young voices raised
in song (at three in the morning). I'm not Jeannine. I'm not Janet. I'm not
Joanna.
I don't do this often (say I, the ghoul) but
it's great elevator technique, holding your forefinger to the back of
somebody's neck while passing the fourth floor, knowing he'll never find out
that you're not all there.
(Sorry, But watch out.)
You'll meet me later.
II
As I have said before, I (not the one above,
please) had an experience on the seventh of February last, nineteen-sixty-nine.
I turned into a man.
I had been a man before, but only briefly and
in a crowd.
You would not have noticed anything, had you
been there.
Manhood, children, is not reached by courage
or short hair or insensibility or by being (as I was) in Chicago's only
skyscraper hotel while the snow rages outside. I sat in a
Manhood, children… is Manhood.
III
Janet beckoned me into the limousine and I got
in. The road was very dark. As she opened the door I saw her famous face under
the dome light over the front seat; trees massed electric-green beyond the
headlights. This is how I really met her. Jeannine Dadier
was an evasive outline in the back seat.
"Greetings," said Janet Evason. "Hello. Bonsoir.
That's Jeannine. And you?"
I told her. Jeannine started talking about all
the clever things her cat had done. Trees swayed and jerked in front of us.
"On moonlit nights," said Janet,
"I often drive without lights," and slowing the car to a crawl, she
turned out the headlights; I mean I saw them disappear—the countryside blent misty and pale to the horizon like a badly exposed
Watteau. I always feel in moonlight as though my eyes have gone bad. The
car—something expensive, though it was too dark to tell what—sighed
soundlessly. Jeannine had all but disappeared.
"I have, as they say," (said Janet
in her surprisingly loud, normal voice) "given them the slip," and
she turned the headlights back on. "I daresay that's not proper," she
added.
"It is not,"
said Jeannine from the back seat. We passed a motel sign in a dip of the road,
with something flashing lit-up behind the trees.
"I am very sorry," said Janet. The car?
"Stolen," she said. She peered out the side window for a moment,
turning her head and taking her eyes off the road. Jeannine gasped indignantly.
Only the driver can see really accurately in the rear-view mirror; but there
was a car behind us. We turned off onto a dirt road—that is, she turned off—and
into the woods with the headlights dark—and on to another road, after which
there was a private house, all lights out, just as neat as you please.
"Goodbye, excuse me," said Janet affably, slipping out of the car;
"Carry on, please," and she vanished into the house. She was wearing
her television suit. I sat baffled, with Jeannine's hands gripping the car seat
at my back (the way children do). The second car pulled up behind us. They came
out and surrounded me (such a disadvantage to be sitting down and the lights
hurt your eyes). Brutally short haircuts and something unpleasant about the
clothing: straight, square, clean, yet not robust. Can you picture a
plainclothesman pulling his hair? Of course not.
Jeannine was cowering out of sight or had disappeared somehow. Just before
Janet Evason emerged on to the porch of that private
house, accompanied by a beaming family: father, mother, teen-age daughter, and
family dog (everyone delighted to be famous), I committed myself rather too
idiotically by exclaiming with some heat:
"Who are you looking for? There's nobody
here. There's only me."
IV
Was she trying to run away? Or
only to pick people at random?
V
Why did they send me? Because
they can spare me. Etsuko Belin strapped me
in. "Ah, Janet!" she said. (Ah, yourself.)
In a plain, blank room. The cage in which I lay goes in and out of existence
forty-thousand times a second; thus it did not go with me. No last kiss from
Spasibo.
Sorry.
Let me explain.
I was so rattled that I did not take in all at
once that I was lying across her—desk, I learned later—and worse still.
Appeared across it, just like that (in full view of five others). We had
experimented with other distances; now they fetched me back, to make sure, and
sent me out, and there I was again, on her desk.
What a strange woman; thick and thin, dried
up, hefty in the back, with a grandmotherly moustache, a little one. How
withered away one can be from a life of unremitting toil.
Aha! A man.
Shall I say my flesh crawled? Bad for vanity,
but it did. This must be a man. I got off its desk. Perhaps it was going out to
manual work, for we were dressed alike; only it had coded bands of color sewn
over its pocket, a sensible device for a machine to read or something. I said
in perfect English:
"How do you do? I must explain my sudden appearance. I am from another time."
(We had rejected probability/continuum
as unintelligible.) Nobody moved.
"How do you do? I must explain my sudden appearance. I am from another
time."
What do you do, call them names? They didn't
move. I sat down on the desk and one of them slammed shut a part of the wall;
so they have doors, just as we do. The important thing in a new situation is
not to frighten, and in my pockets was just the thing for such an emergency. I
took out the piece of string and began playing Cat's Cradle.
"Who are you!" said one of them.
They all had these little stripes over their pockets.
"I am from another time, from the
future," I said, and held out the cat's cradle. It's not only the
universal symbol of peace, but a pretty good game, too. This was the simplest
position, though. One of them laughed; another put its hands over its eyes; the
one whose desk it was backed off; a fourth said, "Is this a joke?"
"I am from the future." Just sit
there long enough and the truth will sink in.
"What?" said Number One.
"How else do you think I appeared out of
the air?" I said. "People cannot very well walk through walls, now
can they?"
The reply to this was that Three
took out a small revolver, and this surprised me; for everyone knows that anger
is most intense towards those you know: it is lovers and neighbors who kill
each other. There's no sense, after all, in behaving that way towards a perfect
stranger; where's the satisfaction? No love, no need; no need, no frustration;
no frustration, no hate, right? It must have been fear. The door opened at this
point and a young woman walked in, a woman of thirty years or so, elaborately
painted and dressed. I know I should not have assumed anything, but one must
work with what one has; and I assumed that her dress indicated a mother. That is,
someone on vacation, someone with leisure, someone who's close to the
information network and full of intellectual curiosity. If there's a top class
(I said to myself), this is it. I didn't want to take anyone away from
necessary manual work. And I thought, you know, that I
would make a small joke. So I said to her:
"Take me to your leader."
VI
… a tall blonde woman
in blue pajamas who appeared standing on Colonel Q————'s desk, as if from
nowhere. She took out what appeared to be a weapon… No answer to our questions.
The Colonel has kept a small revolver in the top drawer of his desk since the
summer riots. He produced it. She would not answer our questions. I believe at
that point Miss X————-, the Colonel's secretary, walked into the room, quite
unaware of what was going on. Luckily Y————-, Z————-, Q————-, R————, and myself
kept our heads. She then said, "I am from the future."
QUESTIONER: Miss X———— said that?
ANSWER: No, not Miss X————. The—the
stranger.
QUESTIONER: Are you sure she appeared standing on Colonel Q————'s desk?
ANSWER: No, I'm not sure. Wait. Yes I am. She
was sitting on it.
VII
INTERVIEWER: It seems odd to all of us, Miss Evason, that in venturing into such—well, such absolutely
unknown territory—that you should have come unarmed with anything except a
piece of string. Did you expect us to be peaceful?
JE: No. No one is, completely.
INTERVIEWER: Then you should have armed
yourself.
JE: Never.
INTERVIEWER: But an armed person, Miss Evason, is more formidable than one who is helpless. An armed
person more readily inspires fear.
JE: Exactly.
VIII
That woman lived with me for a month. I don't
mean in my house. Janet Evason on the radio, the talk
shows, the newspapers, newsreels, magazines, ads even. With somebody I suspect
was Miss Dadier appearing in my bedroom late one
night.
"I'm lost." She meant: what world is
this?
"F'godsakes, go
out in the hall, will you?"
But she melted away through the Chinese print
on the wall, presumably into the empty, carpeted, three-in-the-morning corridor
outside. Some people never stick around. In my dream somebody wanted to know
where Miss Dadier was. I woke at about four and went
to the bathroom for a glass of water; there she was on the other side of the
bathroom mirror, semaphoring frantically. She made her eyes big and peered
desperately into the room, both fists pressed against the glass.
"He's not here," I said. "Go
away."
She mouthed something unintelligible. The room
sang:
Thou hast led capti-
i-vi-ty Ca-ap-tive!
Thou hast led capti-
i-vi-ty Ca-ap-tive!
I wet a washcloth and swiped at the mirror
with it. She winced. Turn out the light, said my finer instincts, and so I
turned out the light. She remained lit up. Dismissing the whole thing as the
world's aberration and not mine, I went back to bed.
"Janet?" she said.
IX
Janet picked up Jeannine at the Chinese New
Festival. Miss Dadier never allowed anyone to pick
her up but a woman was different, after all; it wasn't the same thing. Janet
was wearing a tan raincoat.
"Happy Perseverance, Madam Chiang,"
said Jeannine.
Then they chatted about the weather.
"Oh, I couldn't," said Jeannine
suddenly. (She put her hands over her ears and made a face.) "But that's
different," she said.
Janet Evason made
another suggestion. Jeannine looked interested and willing to understand,
though a little baffled.
"Cal's in there," said Jeannine
loftily. "I couldn't go in there."
She spread her fingers out in front of her like two fans. She was prettier than
Miss Evason and glad of it; Miss Evason
resembled a large boy scout with flyaway hair.
"Are you French?"
"Ah!" said Miss Evason,
nodding.
"I've never been to
It—would—make—her—sick!
(She stared at a carp with its guts coming out.) I'm
shaking all over.
"Who did your hair?" she asked Miss Evason, and when Miss Evason
didn't understand:
"Who streaked your hair so
beautifully?"
"Time," and Miss Evason
laughed and Miss Dadier laughed. Miss Dadier laughed beautifully, gloriously, throwing her head
back; everyone admired the curve of Miss Dadier's
throat. Eyes turned. A beautiful
body and personality to burn. "I can't possibly go with
you," said Miss Dadier magnificently, her fur
coat swirling; "There's
Crazy Jeannine nodded, petrified.
"Good," said Janet Evason. "We'll get you a leave from work." She
whistled and around the corner at a dead run came two plainclothes policemen in
tan raincoats: enormous, jowly, thick-necked, determined men who will continue
running—at a dead heat—through the rest of this tale. But we won't notice them.
Jeannine looked in astonishment from their raincoats to Miss Evason's raincoat. She did not approve at all.
"So that's why it doesn't fit," she
said. Janet pointed to Jeannine for the benefit of the cops.
"Boys, I've got one."
The Chinese New Festival was invented to
celebrate the recapture of
The Depression is still world-wide.
(But think—only think!—what might have
happened if the world had not so
luckily slowed down, if there had been a really big war, for big wars are
forcing-houses of science, economics, politics; think what might have happened,
what might not have happened. It's a lucky world. Jeannine is lucky to live in
it
She doesn't think so.)
XI
(Cal, who came out of the Chinese luncheonette
just in time to see his girl go off with three other people, did not throw the
lunch buns to the ground in a fit of exasperated rage and stamp on them. Some
haunted Polish ancestor looked out of his eyes. He was so thin and slight that
his ambitions shone through him: I'll make it some day, baby. I'll be the
greatest. He sat down on a fire plug and began to eat the buns.
She'll have to come back to feed her cat.)
PART THREE
I
This is the lecture. If you don't like it, you
can skip to the next chapter. Before Janet arrived on this planet
I was moody, ill-at-ease, unhappy, and hard to
be with. I didn't relish my breakfast. I spent my whole day combing my hair and
putting on make-up. Other girls practiced with the shot-put and compared
archery scores, but I—indifferent to javelin and crossbow, positively repelled
by horticulture and ice hockey—all I did was
dress for The Man
smile for The Man
talk wittily to The Man
sympathize with The Man
flatter The Man
understand The Man
defer to The Man
entertain The Man
keep The Man
live for The Man.
Then a new interest entered my life. After I
called up Janet, out of nothing, or she called up me (don't read between the
lines; there's nothing there) I began to gain weight, my appetite improved,
friends commented on my renewed zest for life, and a nagging scoliosis of the
ankle that had tortured me for years simply vanished overnight. I don't even
remember the last time I had to go to the aquarium and stifle my sobs by
watching the sharks. I rode in closed limousines with Janet to television appearances
much like the one you already saw in the last chapter; I answered her
questions; I bought her a pocket dictionary; I took her to the zoo; I pointed
out New York's skyline at night as if I owned it.
Oh, I made that woman up; you can believe it!
Now in the opera scenario that governs our
lives, Janet would have gone to a party and at that party she would have met a
man and there would have been something about that man; he would not have
seemed to her like any other man she had ever met. Later he would have
complimented her on her eyes and she would have blushed with pleasure; she
would have felt that compliment was somehow unlike any other compliment she had
ever received because it had come from that man; she would have wanted to
please that man, and at the same time she would have felt the compliment enter
the marrow of her bones; she would have gone out and bought mascara for the
eyes that had been complimented by that man. And later still they would have
gone for walks, and later still for dinners; and little dinners tete-a-tete with that man would have been like no other
dinners Janet had ever had; and over the coffee and brandy he would have taken
her hand; and later still Janet would have melted back against the black
leather couch in his apartment and thrown her arm across the cocktail table
(which would have been made of elegant teak-wood) and put down her drink of
expensive Scotch and swooned; she would have simply swooned. She would have
said: I Am In Love With
That
I made her up. I did everything but find a
typical family for her; if you will remember, she found them herself. But I
taught her how to use a bath-tub and I corrected her English (calm, slow, a
hint of whisper in the "s," guardedly ironic). I took her out of her
workingwoman's suit and murmured (as I soaped her hair) fragments of sentences
that I could somehow never finish: "Janet you must… Janet, we don't… but
one always…"
That's different, I said, that's different .
I couldn't, I said, oh, I couldn't.
What I want to say is,
I tried; I'm a good girl; I'll do it if you'll show me.
But what can you do when this woman puts her
hand through the wall? (Actually the plasterboard partition
between the kitchenette and the living room.)
Janet, sit down.
Janet, don't do that.
Janet, don't kick Jeannine.
Janet!
Janet, don't!
I imagine her: civil, reserved, impenetrably formulaic. She was on her company manners for
months. Then, I think, she decided that she could get away with having no
manners; or rather, that we didn't honor the ones she had, so why not? It must
have been new to someone from Whileaway, the official
tolerance of everything she did or tried to do, the leisure, the attention that
was so close to adulation. I have the feeling that any of them can blossom out
like that (and lucky they don't, eh?) with the smooth kinship web of home
centuries away, surrounded by barbarians, celibate for months, coping with a
culture and a language that I think she—in her heart—must have despised.
I was housed with her for six and a half
months in a hotel suite ordinarily used to entertain visiting diplomats. I put shoes on that woman's feet. I had fulfilled
one of my dreams—to show
She never communicated with her home, as far
as I know.
She wanted to see a man naked (we got
pictures).
She wanted to see a baby man naked (we got
somebody's nephew).
She wanted newspapers, novels, histories,
magazines, people to interview, television programs, statistics on clove
production in the
She was neat but lazy—I never caught her doing
anything.
She held the baby like an expert, cooing and
trundling, bouncing him up and down so that he stopped screaming and stared at
her chin the way babies do. She uncovered him. "Tsk."
"My
goodness." She was astonished.
She scrubbed my back and asked me to scrub
hers; she took the lipstick I gave her and made pictures on the yellow damask
walls. ("You mean it's not washable?)"
I got her girlie magazines and she said she couldn't make head or tail of them;
I said, "Janet, stop joking" and she was surprised; she hadn't meant
to. She wanted a dictionary of slang. One day I caught her playing games with
Room Service; she was calling up the different numbers on the white hotel phone
and giving them contradictory instructions. This woman was dialing the numbers
with her feet. I slammed the phone across one of the double beds.
"Joanna," she said, "I do not
understand you. Why not play? Nobody is going to be hurt and nobody is going to
blame you; why not take advantage?"
"You fake!" I said; "You fake,
you rotten fake!" Somehow that was all I could think of to say. She tried
looking injured and did not succeed—she only looked smug—so she wiped her face
clean of all expression and started again.
"If we make perhaps an
hypothetical assumption—"
"Go to hell," I said; "Put your
clothes on."
"Perhaps about this sex business you can
tell me," she said, "why is this hypothetical assumption—"
"Why the devil do you run around in the nude!"
"My child," she said gently,
"you must understand. I'm far from home; I want to keep myself cheerful,
eh? And about this men thing, you must remember that to me they are a
particularly foreign species; one can make love with a dog, yes? But not with
something so unfortunately close to oneself. You see how I can feel this
way?"
My ruffled dignity. She submitted to the lipstick again. We got her dressed.
She looked all right except for that unfortunate habit of whirling around with
a grin on her face and her hands out in the judo crouch. Well, well! I got
reasonably decent shoes on Janet Evason's feet. She
smiled. She put her arm around me.
Oh, I couldn't!
?
That's different.
(You'll hear a lot of those two sentences in
life, if you listen for them. I see Janet Evason
finally dressing herself, a study in purest awe as she holds up to the light,
one after the other, semi-transparent garments of nylon and lace, fairy webs,
rose-colored elastic puttees—"Oh, my." "Oh, my goodness,"
she says—and finally, completely stupefied, wraps one of them around her head.)
She bent down to kiss me,
looking kind, looking perplexed, and I kicked her.
That's when she put her fist through the wall.
II
We went to a party on
"You'll tell me what to do," she
says, "won't you?" Ha ha. He he. Ho ho.
What fun. She bounces up and down.
"Why didn't they send someone who knew
what he was doing!" I whisper back.
"What she
was doing," she says unself-consciously,
shifting gears in a moment. "You see, under field conditions, nobody can
handle all the eventualities. We're not superhuman, any of us, nicht wahr? So you take
someone you can spare. It's like this—"
I opened the door, Janet a little behind me.
I knew most of the women there: Sposissa, three times divorced; Eglantissa,
who thinks only of clothes; Aphrodissa, who cannot
keep her eyes open because of her false eyelashes; Clarissa, who will commit
suicide; Lucrissa, whose strained forehead shows that
she's making more money than her husband; Wailissa,
engaged in a game of ain't-it-awful with Lamentissa; Travailissa, who
usually only works, but who is now sitting very still on the couch so that her
smile will not spoil; and naughty Saccharissa, who is
playing a round of His Little Girl across the bar with the host. Saccharissa is forty-five. So is Amicissa,
the Good Sport. I looked for Ludicrissa, but she is
too plain to be invited to a party like this, and of course we never invite Amphibissa, for obvious reasons.
In we walked, Janet and I, the right and left
hands of a bomb. Actually you might have said everyone was enjoying themselves.
I introduced her to everyone. My Swedish cousin. (Where
is Domicissa, who never opens her mouth in public?
And Dulcississa, whose standard line, "Oh,
you're so wonderful!" is oddly missing from the air tonight?)
I shadowed Janet.
I played with my ring.
I waited for the remark that begins
"Women—" or "Women can't—" or "Why do women—" and
kept up an insubstantial conversation on my right. On my left hand Janet stood:
very erect, her eyes shining, turning her head swiftly every now and again to
follow the current of events at the party. At times like this, when I'm low,
when I'm anxious, Janet's attention seems a parody of attention and her energy
unbearably high. I was afraid she'd burst out chuckling. Somebody (male) got me
a drink.
A ROUND OF "HIS LITTLE GIRL"
SACCHARISSA: I'm Your Little Girl.
HOST (wheedling): Are you really?
SACCHARISSA: (complacent): Yes I am.
HOST: Then you have to be stupid, too.
A SIMULTANEOUS ROUND OF "AIN'T IT
AWFUL"
LAMENTISSA: When I do the floor, he doesn't
come home and say it's wonderful.
WAILISSA: Well, darling, we can't live without
him, can we? You'll just have to do better.
LAMENTISSA (wistfully): I bet you do better.
WAILISSA: I do the floor better than anybody I
know.
LAMENTISSA (excited): Does he ever say it's
wonderful?
WAILISSA (dissolving): He never says anything!
(There follows the chorus which gives the game
its name. A passing male, hearing this exchange, remarked, "You women are
lucky you don't have to go out and go to work.")
Somebody I did not know came up to us: sharp,
balding, glasses reflecting two spots of lamplight. A long,
lean, academic, more-or-less young man.
"Do you want something to drink?"
Janet said "A-a-a-h" very long, with
exaggerated enthusiasm. Dear God, don't let her make a fool of herself.
"Drink what?" she said promptly. I introduced my Swedish cousin.
"Scotch, punch,
rum-and-coke, rum, ginger-ale?"
"What's that?" I suppose that,
critically speaking, she didn't look too bad. "I mean," she said
(correcting herself), "that is what kind of drug? Excuse me. My English
isn't good." She waits, delighted with everything. He smiles.
"Alcohol," he says.
"Ethyl
alcohol?" She puts her hand
over her heart in unconscious parody. "It is made from grain, yes? Food? Potatoes? My, my! How wasteful!"
"Why do you say that?" says the
young man, laughing.
"Because," answers my Janet,
"to use food for fermentation is wasteful, yes? I should think so! That's
cultivation, fertilizer, sprays, harvesting, et cetera. Then you lose a good
deal of the carbohydrates in the actual process. I should think you would grow cannabis, which my friend tells me you already
have, and give the grains to those starving people."
"You know, you're charming," he
says. "Huh?" (That's Janet.) To prevent disaster, I step in and
indicate with my eyes that yes, she's charming and second, we really do want a
drink.
"You told me you people had
cannabis," Janet says a little irritably.
"It isn't cured properly; it'll make you
choke," I say. She nods thoughtfully. I can tell without asking what's
going through her mind: the orderly fields of Whileaway,
the centuries-old mutations and hybridizations of cannabis sativa, the little
garden plots of marihuana tended (for all I know) by seven-year-olds. She had
in fact tried some several weeks before. It had made her cough horribly.
The youngish man returned with our drink and
while I signalled him Stay, stay, she's harmless,
she's innocent, Janet screwed up her face and tried to
drink the stuff in one swallow. It was then I knew that her sense of humor was
running away with her. She turned red. She coughed explosively. "It's
horrible!"
"Sip it, sip
it," said he, highly amused.
"I don't want it."
"I tell you what," he proposed
amiably, I'll make you one you will like."
(There follows a small interlude of us punching each other and whispering
vehemently: "Janet, if you—")
"But I don't like it," she said
simply. You're not supposed to do that. On Whileaway, perhaps, but not here.
"Try it," he urged.
"I did," she said equably.
"Sorry, I will wait for the smokes."
He takes her hand and closes her fingers
around the glass, shaking his forefinger at her playfully: "Come on now, I
can't believe that; you made me get it for you—" and as our methods of
courtship seem to make her turn pale, I wink at him and whisk her away to the
corner of the apartment where the C.S. vapor blooms. She tries it and gets a
coughing fit. She goes sullenly back to the bar.
A MANUFACTURER OF CARS FROM LEEDS (genteelly):
I hear so much about the New Feminism here in
SPOSISSA, EGLANTISSA, APHRODISSA, CLARISSA,
LUCRISSA, WAILISSA, LAMENTISSA, TRAVAILISSA (dear God, how many of them are
there?), SACCHARISSA, LUDICRISSA (she came in late): Oh no, no, no! (They all
laugh.)
When I got back to the bar, Clarissa was going
grimly into her latest heartbreak. I saw Janet, feet apart—a daughter of Whileaway never quails!—trying to get down more than three
ounces of straight rum. I suppose one forgets the first taste. She looked
flushed and successful.
ME: You're not used to that stuff, Janet.
JANET: O.K., I'll stop.
(Like all foreigners she is fascinated by the
word "Okay" and has been using it on every possible occasion for the
last four weeks.)
"It's very hard not having anything,
though," she says seriously. "I suppose, love, that I'm hardly giving
anything away if I say that I don't like your friends."
"They're not my friends, for God's sake.
I come here to meet people."
?
"I come here to meet men," I said.
"Janet, sit down."
This time it was a ginger moustache. Young. Nice. Flashy. Flowered waistcoat. Hip. (hip?)
Peals of laughter from the corner, where Eglantissa's latest is holding up and wiggling a chain made
of paper clips. Wailissa fusses ineffectually around
him. Eglantissa—looking more and more like a
corpse—sits on an elegant, brocaded armchair, with her drink rigid in her hand.
Blue smoke wreathes about her head.
"Hullo," says Ginger Moustache. Sincere. Young.
"Oh. How do you do?" says Janet.
She's remembered her manners. Ginger Moustache produces a smile and a cigarette
case.
"Marijuana?" says Janet hopefully.
He chuckles.
"No. Do you want a drink?"
She looks sulky.
"All right, don't have a drink. And
you're—"
I introduce my cousin from
"Why do you people catabolize
foodstuffs in this way?" she bursts out. Still on her mind, it seems. I
explain.
"Sickness," he says. "I'm not
an alcohol head; that's not my bag. I agree with you. I'd just as soon see
people eating the stuff."
(Amicissa dreams:
perhaps he won't have the insatiable vanity, the uneasy aggressiveness, the
quickness to resent any slight or fancied neglect. Perhaps he won't want to be
top dog all the time. And he won't have a fiancée. And he won't be married. And
he won't be gay. And he won't have children. And he won't be sixty.)
"A-a-ah," says Janet, letting out a
long breath. "Yes. Aha."
I left them for a while. I was alert to any
opportunity. I was graceful. I smiled.
My brassiere hurts.
When I got back they had reached the stage of
Discussing His Work. He was teaching high school but was going to be fired. For
his ties, I think. Janet was very interested. She mentioned the—uh—day
nurseries in—well, in
"We have a saying: when the child goes to
the school, both mother and child howl; the child because it is going to be
separated from the mother and the mother because she has to go back to
work."
"The tie between mother and child is very
important," said Ginger Moustache reprovingly. ("Excuse me, let me
move that cushion behind your back.")
"I'm sure Swedish mothers really groove
on their kids, though," he added.
"Huh?" said my Janet. (He took it as
an ignorance of English and relented.)
"Listen," he said, "some time I
want you to meet my wife. I know this is a bad scene—I mean meeting you here
with the plastic people, y'know?—but some day you're going to come out to
"Six you take care of?" said Janet
with considerable respect.
"Sure," he said. "They're in
He means do you understand, Janet? She thought
it simpler to say yes.
"Hey," said Ginger Moustache,
springing to his feet, "it's been great meeting you. You're a real ballsy
chick. I mean you're a woman."
She looked down at herself. "What?"
"Sorry about the slang; I mean you're a
fine person. It's a pleasure—to—know—you."
"You don't know me," she was
developing the nasty look. Not very nasty as yet but
frustrated-angry, tapping-the-fingers, now-look-here-I-want-this-explained.
She is quite spoiled, in her own way.
"Yeah, I know," he said. "How
can we get to know each other in ten minutes, huh? That's true. It's a formal
phrase: pleasuretoknowyou."
Janet giggled.
"Right?" he said. "Tell you what, give me your name and address." (she gave him mine) "I'll drop you a line. Write a
letter, that is." (Not a bad fellow this Ginger
Moustache.) He got up and she got up; something must interrupt this
idyll. Saccharissa, Ludicrissa,
Travailissa, Aphrodissa,
Clarissa, Sposissa, Domicissa,
the whole gang, even Carissa herself, have formed a
solid wall around this couple. Breaths are held. Bets get made. Joanissa is praying in a heap in the corner. Ginger
Moustache got up and Janet trailed him into the hall, asking questions. She's a
good bit taller than he is. She wants to know about everything. Either she does
not mind the lack of sexual interest or—as is more likely in a
foreigner—prefers it. Though he's got a wife. The
harsh light from the kitchenette strikes Janet Evason's
face and there on one side, running from eyebrow to chin, is a strange, fine
line. Has she been in an accident?
"Oh, that!"
says Janet Evason, chuckling, bending over (though
somewhat hampered by her party dress), laughing, gasping with little feminine
squeaks from the top of the compass right down to the bottom, hoarse and
musical, "Oh, that!"
"That's from my third duel," she
says, "see?" and guides Moustache's hand (his forefinger, actually)
along her face.
"Your what?"
says Moustache, momentarily frozen into the attractive statue of a pleasant
young man.
"My duel," says Janet, "silly.
Well, it's not
"My God," he says.
"Ssh, don't
tell anyone." (She's very pleased with herself. She chuckles.) "This line I got in my third duel; this one—it's practically gone—in my second. Not bad, hey?"
"Are you sure you don't mean
fencing?" says Ginger Moustache.
"Hell, no," says Janet impatiently;
"I told you, duel." And she draws her forefinger across her throat
with a melodramatic jerk. This mad chick doesn't seem so nice to Moustache any
more. He swallows.
"What do you fight about—girls?"
"You are kidding me," says Janet.
"We fight about bad temper—what else? Temperamental
incompatibility. Not that it's so common as it used to be but if you
can't stand her and she can't stand you, what's to be done?"
"Sure," says Ginger Moustache.
"Well, goodbye." Janet became suddenly repentant.
"That—well, I suppose that's rather
savage, isn't it?" she says. "I beg pardon. You will think badly of
us. Understand, I have put all that behind me now; I
am an adult; I have a family. We hope to be friends, yes?" And she looks
down at him solemnly, a little timidly, ready to be rebuked. But he hasn't the
heart to do it.
"You're a great chick," says he.
"Some day we'll get together. Don't duel with me,
though."
She looks surprised. "Huh?"
"Yeah, you'll tell me all about
yourself," Ginger Moustache goes on. He smiles and broods. "You can
meet the kids."
"I have a daughter," says Janet. "Baby brat Yuriko." He smiles.
"We got homemade wine. Vegetable
garden. Sara puts things up. Great place."
(He's into his duffle coat by now after searching in the hall closet.)
"Tell me, what do you do? I mean for a living?"
"Whileaway is
not here-and-now," Janet begins; "You might not understand. I settle
family quarrels; I look after people; it's—"
"Social work?" asks Ginger
Moustache, extending to us his fine, shapely, tanned, uncalloused
hand, an intellectual's hand, but I have hardened my heart and I peep out from
behind Janet Evason with the divine relief of my
female irony and my female teeth:
"She's a cop. She puts people in
jail."
Ginger Moustache is alarmed, knows he's alarmed,
laughs at himself, shakes his head. How wide is the gap between cultures! But
we grok. We shake hands. He goes off into the party
to fetch Domicissa, whom he pulls by the wrist (she
silently protesting) to the hall closet. "Get on your Goddamn coat, will
you!" I heard only whispers, vehement and angry, then Domicissa
blowing her nose.
"So long, hey! Hey, so long!" cried he.
His wife's in
Janet had just asked me to explicate the
marriage system of
Saccharissa has just said, pouting, "
Aphrodissa was sitting in someone's lap, her left eyelash half off.
Janet was rather at a loss. Mustn't judge. Shut one
eye. Peek. Busy, busy couple, kissing and grabbing. Janet
backed off slowly to the other side of the room and there we met the lean
academic with the glasses; he's all sharp, nervous and sharp. He gave her a
drink and she drank it.
"So you do
like it!" he said provokingly.
"I would suhtinly
like," said Saccharissa with great energy,
"to see all those women athletes from the Olympics compete with all those
men athletes; I don't imagine any of these women athletes could even come neah the
men."
"But American women are so unusual," said the man from
"Why, to conquer the men!" cried Saccharissa, braying.
"In mah baby
brain," said Janet, imitating quite accurately, "a suhtin conviction is beginnin' to
fo'm."
"The conviction that somebody is being
insulted?" said Sharp Glasses. He didn't say that, actually.
"Let's go," said Janet. I know it's the wrong party, but where are you going to find
the right party?
"Oh, you don't want to go!" said
Sharp Glasses energetically. Jerky, too, they're always so jerky.
"But I do," said Janet.
"Of course you don't," he said;
"You're just beginning to enjoy yourself. The party's warming up.
Here," (pushing us down on the couch) "let me get you another."
You're in a strange place, Janet. Be civil.
He came back with another and she drank it. Uh-oh. We made trivial conversation until she recovered. He
leaned forward confidentially. "What do you think
of the new feminism, eh?"
"What is—" (she tried again) 'What
is—my English is not so good. Could you explain?"
"Well, what do you think of women? Do you
think women can compete with men?"
"I don't know any men." She's
beginning to get mad.
"Ha ha!"
said Sharp Glasses. "Ha ha ha! Ha ha!"
(He laughed just like that, in sharp little bursts.) "My name's
"Janet."
"Well, Janet, I'll tell you what I think
of the new feminism. I think it's a mistake. A very bad
mistake."
"Oh," said Janet flatly. I kicked
her, I kicked her, I kicked her.
"I haven't got anything against women's
intelligence," said
He's being good-humored the only way he knows
how. Don't hit him.
"What you've got to remember," said
Don't, Janet.
"Not only that, you
gals are going about it the wrong way."
You're in someone else's house. Be polite.
"You can't challenge men in their own
fields," he said. "Now nobody can be more in favor of women getting
their rights than I am. Do you want to sit down? Let's.
As I said, I'm all in favor of it. Adds a decorative touch to the office, eh?
Ha ha! Ha ha ha! Unequal pay is a disgrace. But you've got to remember,
Janet, that women have certain physical limitations."
(here he took off his
glasses, wiped them with a little serrated square of blue cotton, and put them
back on) "and you have to work within your physical
limitations.
"For example," he went on, mistaking
her silence for wisdom while Ludicrissa muttered,
"How true! How true!" somewhere in the background about something or
other, "you have to take into account that there are more than two
thousand rapes in New York City alone in every particular year. I'm not saying
of course that that's a good thing, but you have to take it into account. Men
are physically stronger than women, you know."
(Picture me on the back of the couch, clinging
to her hair like a homuncula, battering her on the
top of the head until she doesn't dare to open her mouth.)
"Of course, Janet," he went on,
"you're not one of those—uh—extremists. Those extremists don't take these
things into account, do they? Of course not! Mind you, I'm not defending
unequal pay but we have to take these things into account. Don't we? By the
way, I make twenty thousand a year. Ha! Ha ha ha!" And off he
went into another fit.
She squeaked something—because I was
strangling her.
"What?" he said. "What did you
say?" He looked at her nearsightedly. Our struggle must have imparted an
unusual intensity to her expression because he seemed extraordinarily flattered
by what he saw; he turned his head away coyly, sneaked a look out of the corner
of his eye, and then whipped his head round into position very fast. As if he
had been a bird.
"You're a good conversationalist,"
he said. He began to perspire gently. He shifted the pieces of his napkin from
hand to hand. He dropped them and dusted his hands off. Now he's going to do it
"Janet—uh—Janet, I wonder if you—"
fumbling blindly for his drink—"that is if—uh—you—"
But we are far away, throwing coats out of the
coat closet like a geyser.
Is that your method of courtship!
"Not exactly," I said. "You
see—"
Baby, baby, baby. It's the host, drunk enough not to care.
Uh-oh. Be ladylike.
She showed him all her teeth. He saw a smile.
"You're beautiful, honey."
"Thank you. I go now." (good for her)
"Nah!" and he took us by the wrist
"Nah, you're not going."
"Let me go," said Janet.
Say it loud. Somebody will come to rescue you.
Can't 1 rescue myself?
No.
Why not?
All this time he was nuzzling her ear and I
was showing my distaste by shrinking terrified into a corner, one eye on the
party. Everyone seemed amused.
"Give us a good-bye kiss," said the
host, who might have been attractive under other circumstances, a giant marine,
so to speak. I pushed him away.
"What'sa
matter, you some kinda prude?" he said and
enfolding us in his powerful arms, et cetera—well, not so very powerful as all
that, but I want to give you the feeling of the scene. If you scream, people
say you're melodramatic; if you submit, you're masochistic; if you call names,
you're a bitch. Hit him and he'll kill you. The best thing is to suffer mutely
and yearn for a rescuer, but suppose the rescuer doesn't come?
"Let go,————-," said Janet (some
Russian word I didn't catch).
"Ha ha, make
me," said the host, squeezing her wrist and puckering up his lips;
"Make me, make me," and he swung his hips from side to side suggestively.
No, no, keep on being ladylike/
"Is this human courting?" shouted
Janet. "Is this friendship? Is this politeness?" She had an
extraordinarily loud voice. He laughed and shook her wrist.
"Savages!" she shouted. A hush had
fallen on the party. The host leafed dexterously through his little book of
rejoinders but did not come up with anything. Then he looked up
"savage" only to find it marked with an affirmative: "Masculine,
brute, virile, powerful, good." So he smiled
broadly. He put the book away.
"Right on, sister," he said.
So she dumped him. It happened in a blur of
speed and there he was on the carpet. He was flipping furiously through the
pages of the book; what else is there to do in such circumstances? (It was a
little limp-leather—excuse me—volume bound in blue,
which I think they give out in high schools. On the cover was written in gold
WHAT TO DO IN EVERY SITUATION.)
"Bitch!" (flip flip
flip) "Prude!" (flip flip) "Ball-breaker!"
(flip flip flip flip) "Goddamn
cancerous castrator!" (flip) "Thinks
hers is gold!" (flip flip)
"You didn't have to do that!"
Was ist?
said Janet in German.
He gave her to understand that she was going
to die of cancer of the womb.
She laughed.
He gave her to understand further that she was
taking unfair advantage of his good manners.
She roared.
He pursued the subject and told her that if he
were not a gentleman he would ram her stinking, shitty teeth up her stinking
shitty ass.
She shrugged.
He told her she was so ball-breaking, shitty,
stone, scum-bag, mother-fucking, plug-ugly that no normal male could keep up an
erection within half a mile of her.
She looked puzzled. ("Joanna, these are
insults, yes?")
He got up. I think he was recovering his cool.
He did not seem nearly so drunk as he had been. He
shrugged his sports jacket back into position and brushed himself off. He said
she had acted like a virgin, not knowing what to do when a guy made a pass,
just like a Goddamned scared little baby virgin.
Most of us would have been content to leave it
at that, eh, ladies?
Janet slapped him.
It was not meant to hurt, I think; it was a
great big stinging theatrical performance, a cue for insults and further
fighting, a come-on-get-your-guard contemptuous slap meant to enrage, which it
jolly well did.
THE MARINE SAID, "YOU STUPID BROAD, I'M
GONNA CREAM YOU!"
That poor man.
I didn't see things very well, as first off I
got behind the closet door, but I saw him rush her and I saw her flip him; he
got up again and again she deflected him, this time into the wall—I think she
was worried because she didn't have time to glance behind her and the place was
full of people—then he got up again and this time he swung instead and then
something very complicated happened—he let out a yell and she was behind him,
doing something cool and technical, frowning in concentration.
"Don't pull like that," she said.
"You'll break your arm."
So he pulled. The little limp-leather notebook
fluttered out on to the floor, from whence I picked it up. Everything was
awfully quiet. The pain had stunned him, I guess.
She said in astonished good-humor: "But
why do you want to fight when you do not know how?"
I got my coat and I got Janet's coat and I got
us out of there and into the elevator. I put my head in my hands.
"Why'd you do it?"
"He called me a baby."
The little blue book was rattling around in my
purse. I took it out and turned to the last thing he had said ("You stupid
broad" et cetera). Underneath was written Girl
backs down—cries — manhood vindicated . Under
"Real Fight With Girl" was written Don't
hurt (except whores) . I took out my own pink book, for we all
carry them, and turning to the instructions under "Brutality" found:
Man's bad temper is the woman's fault. It is
also the woman's responsibility to patch things up afterwards.
There were sub-rubrics, one (reinforcing)
under "Management" and one (exceptional) under "Martyrdom."
Everything in my book begins with an M.
They do fit together so well, you know. I said
to Janet:
"I don't think you're going to be happy
here."
"Throw them both away, love," she
answered.
III
Why make pretensions to fight (she said) when
you can't fight? Why make pretensions to anything? I am trained, of course;
that's my job, and it makes me the very devil angry when someone calls me
names, but why call names? All this
uneasy aggression. True, there is a little bit of hair-pulling on Whileaway, yes, and more than that, there is the
temperamental thing, sometimes you can't stand another person. But the cure for
that is distance. I've been foolish in the past, I admit. In middle-age one
begins to settle down;
I ought to add there was a fourth duel in
which nobody got killed; my opponent developed a lung infection, then a spinal
infection—you understand, we weren't near civilization then—and the
convalescence was such a long, nasty business. I took care of her. Nerve tissue's hard to regrow. She was
paralyzed for a while, you know. Gave me a very salutary
scare. So I don't fight with weapons now, except on my job, of course.
Am I sorry I hurt him?
Not me!
IV
Whileawayans are not nearly as peaceful as they sound.
V
Burned any bras lately har
har twinkle twinkle A
pretty girl like you doesn't need to be liberated twinkle har
Don't listen to those hysterical bitches twinkle twinkle
twinkle I never take a woman's advice about two
things: love and automobiles twinkle twinkle har May I kiss your little hand twinkle twinkle
twinkle. Har. Twinkle.
VI
On Whileaway they
have a saying: When the mother and child are separated they both howl, the
child because it is separated from the mother, the mother because she has to go
back to work. Whileawayans bear their children at
about thirty—singletons or twins as the demographic pressures require. These
children have as one genotypic parent the biological mother (the
"body-mother") while the non-bearing parent contributes the other
ovum ("other mother"). Little Whileawayans
are to their mothers both sulk and swank, fun and profit, pleasure and
contemplation, a show of expensiveness, a slowing-down of life, an opportunity
to pursue whatever interests the women have been forced to neglect previously,
and the only leisure they have ever had—or will have again until old age. A
family of thirty persons may have as many as four mother-and-child pairs in the
common nursery at one time. Food, cleanliness, and shelter are not the mother's
business; Whileawayans say with a straight face that
she must be free to attend to the child's "finer spiritual needs."
Then they go off by themselves and roar. The truth is they don't want to give
up the leisure. Eventually we come to a painful scene. At the age of four or
five these independent, blooming, pampered, extremely intelligent little girls
are torn weeping and arguing from their thirty relatives and sent to the
regional school, where they scheme and fight for weeks before giving in; some
of them have been known to construct deadfalls or small bombs (having picked
this knowledge up from their parents) in order to obliterate their instructors.
Children are cared for in groups of five and taught in groups of differing
sizes according to the subject under discussion. Their education at this point
is heavily practical: how to run machines, how to get along without machines,
law, transportation, physical theory, and so on. They learn gymnastics and
mechanics. They learn practical medicine.
They learn how to swim and shoot. They
continue (by themselves) to dance, to sing, to paint, to play, to do everything
their Mommies did. At puberty they are invested with Middle-Dignity and turned
loose; children have the right of food and lodging wherever they go, up to the
power of the community to support them. They do not go back home.
Some do, of course, but then neither Mother
may be there; people are busy; people are traveling; there's always work, and
the big people who were so kind to a four-year-old have little time for an
almost-adult. "And everything's so small,"
said one girl.
Some, wild with the desire for exploration,
travel all around the world—usually in the company of other children—bands of
children going to visit this or that, or bands of children about to reform the
power installations, are a common sight on Whileaway.
The more profound abandon all possessions and
live off the land just above or below the forty-eighth parallel; they return
with animal heads, scars, visions.
Some make a beeline for their callings and
spend most of puberty pestering part-time actors, bothering part-time
musicians, cajoling part-time scholars.
Fools! (say the older
children, who have been through it all) Don't be in such a hurry. You'll work
soon enough.
At seventeen they achieve Three-Quarters
Dignity and are assimilated into the labor force. This is probably the worst
time in a Whileawayan's life. Groups of friends are
kept together if the members request it and if it is possible, but otherwise
these adolescents go where they're needed, not where they wish; nor can they
join the Geographical Parliament nor the Professional Parliament until they
have entered a family and developed that network of informal associations of
the like-minded which is Whileaway's substitute for
everything else but family.
They provide human companionship to Whileawayan cows, who pine and die
unless spoken to affectionately.
They run routine machinery, dig people out of
landslides, oversee food factories (with induction helmets on their heads,
their toes controlling the green-peas, their fingers the vats and controls,
their back muscles the carrots, and their abdomens the water supply).
They lay pipe (again, by induction).
They fix machinery.
They are not allowed to have anything to do
with malfunctions or breakdowns "on foot," as the Whileawayans
say, meaning in one's own person and with tools in one's own hands, without the
induction helmets that make it possible to operate dozens of waldoes at just about any distance you please. That's for
veterans.
They do not meddle with computers "on
foot" nor join with them via induction. That's for old veterans.
They learn to like a place only to be ordered
somewhere else the next day, commandeered to excavate coastline or fertilize
fields, kindly treated by the locals (if any) and hideously bored.
It gives them something to look forward to.
At twenty-two they achieve Full Dignity and
may either begin to learn the heretofore forbidden jobs or have their learning
formally certificated. They are allowed to begin apprenticeships. They may
marry into pre-existing families or form their own. Some braid their hair. By
now the typical Whileawayan girl is able to do any
job on the planet, except for specialties and extremely dangerous work. By
twenty-five she has entered a family, thus choosing her geographical home base
(Whileawayans travel all the time). Her family
probably consists of twenty to thirty other persons, ranging in age from her
own to the early fifties. (Families tend to age the way people do; thus new
groupings are formed again in old age. Approximately every fourth girl must
begin a new or join a nearly-new family.)
Sexual relations—which have begun at puberty—
continue both inside the family and outside it, but mostly outside it. Whileawayans have two explanations for this.
"Jealousy," they say for the first explanation, and for the second,
"Why not?"
Whileawayan psychology locates the basis of Whileawayan character in the early indulgence, pleasure,
and flowering which is drastically curtailed by the separation from the
mothers. This (it says) gives Whileawayan life its characteristic independence, its
dissatisfaction, its suspicion, and its tendency toward a rather irritable
solipsism.
"Without which" (said the same Dunyasha Bernadetteson, q.v.)
"we would all become contented slobs, nicht war?"
Eternal optimism hides behind this
dissatisfaction, however; Whileawayans cannot forget
that early paradise and every new face, every new day, every smoke, every
dance, brings back life's possibilities. Also sleep and
eating, sunrise, weather, the seasons, machinery, gossip, and the eternal
temptations of art.
They work too much. They are incredibly tidy.
Yet on the old stone bridge that links New
City, South Continent, with Varya's Little Alley
Ho-ho is chiseled:
You never know what is
enough until you know what is more than enough.
If one is lucky, one's hair turns white early;
if—as in old Chinese poetry—one is indulging oneself, one dreams of old age.
For in old age the Whileawayan woman—no longer as
strong and elastic as the young—has learned to join with calculating machines
in the state they say can't be described but is most like a sneeze that never
comes off. It is the old who are given the sedentary jobs, the old who can
spend their days mapping, drawing, thinking, writing, collating, composing. In the libraries old hands come out from under
the induction helmets and give you the reproductions of the books you want; old
feet twinkle below the computer shelves, hanging down like Humpty Dumpty's; old
ladies chuckle eerily while composing The Blasphemous Cantata (a great favorite
of Ysaye's) or mad-moon cityscapes which turn out to
be do-able after all; old brains use one part in fifty to run a city (with
checkups made by two sulky youngsters) while the other forty-nine parts riot in
a freedom they haven't had since adolescence.
The young are rather priggish about the old on
Whileaway. They don't really approve of them.
Taboos on Whileaway:
sexual relations with anybody considerably older or younger than oneself,
waste, ignorance, offending others without intending to.
And of course the usual legal checks on murder
and theft—both those crimes being actually quite difficult to commit.
("See," says Chilia, "it's murder if
it's sneaky or if she doesn't want to fight. So you yell 'Olaf!' and when she
turns around, then—")
No Whileawayan works
more than three hours at a time on any one job, except in emergencies.
No Whileawayan
marries monogamously. (Some restrict their sexual relations to one other
person—at least while that other person is nearby—but there is no legal
arrangement.) Whileawayan psychology again refers to the distrust of the mother and the
reluctance to form a tie that will engage every level of emotion, all the person,
all the time. And the necessity for artificial
dissatisfactions.
"Without which" (says Dunyasha Bernadetteson, op. cit.)
"we would become so happy we would sit down on
our fat, pretty behinds and soon we would start starving, nyet?"
But there is too, under it all, the incredible
explosive energy, the gaiety of high intelligence, the obliquities of wit, the
cast of mind that makes industrial areas into gardens and ha-has, that supports
wells of wilderness where nobody ever lives for long, that strews across a
planet sceneries, mountains, glider preserves, culs-de-sac,
comic nude statuary, artistic lists of tautologies and circular mathematical
proofs (over which aficionados are moved to tears), and the best graffiti in
this or any other world.
Whileawayans work all the time. They work. And they work. And they work.
VII
Two ancients on the direct computer line
between city and quarry (private persons have to be content with spark-gap
radio), fighting at the top of their lungs while five green girls wait nearby,
sulky and bored:
I can't make do with five greenies; I need two
on-foot checkers and protective gear for one!
Can't have.
Incomp-
?
You hear.
Is me!
(affected disdain)
If catastroph—
Won't!
And so on.
VIII
A troop of little girls contemplating three
silver hoops welded to a silver cube are laughing so hard that some have fallen
down into the autumn leaves on the plaza and are holding their stomachs. This
is not embarrassment or an ignorant reaction to something new; they are genuine
connoisseurs who have hiked for three days to see this. Their hip-packs lie
around the edge of the plaza, near the fountains. One: How lovely!
IX
Between shifts in the quarry in Newland, Henla Anaisson sings, her only
audience her one fellow-worker.
A Belin, run mad and
unable to bear the tedious-ness of her work, flees
above the forty-eighth parallel, intending to remain there permanently.
"You" (says an arrogant note she leaves behind) "do not
exist" and although agreeing philosophically with this common view, the S
& P for the county follows her—not to return her for rehabilitation,
imprisonment, or study. What is there to rehabilitate or study? We'd all do it
if we could. And imprisonment is simple cruelty.
You guessed it.
XI
"If not me or mine," (wrote Dunyasha Bernadetteson in 368
A.C.) "O.K.
"If me or mine—alas.
"If us and ours—watch
out!"
XII
Whileaway is engaged in the reorganization of industry consequent
to the discovery of the induction principle.
The Whileawayan
work-week is sixteen hours.
PART FOUR
I
After six months of living with me in the hotel suite, Janet Evason
expressed the desire to move in with a typical family. I heard her singing in
the bathroom:
I know
That my
Rede-emer
Liveth
And She
Shall stand
Upon the latter da-ay
(ruffle)
On Earth.
"Janet?" She sang again (not badly)
the second variation on the lines, in which the soprano begins to decorate the
tune:
I know (up)
Tha-at my (ruffle)
Re-e-edeemer
(fiddle)
Liveth
And She
Shall stand (convex)
And She
Shall stand (concave)
"Janet, he's a Man!" I yelled. She
went into the third variation, where the melody liquefies itself into its own
adornments, very nice and quite improper:
I know (up)
That my redee (a
mer
Li-i-veth (up up up)
And She
Shall stand (hopefully)
And She shall stand
(higher)
Upon the la-a-a-a-atter
da-a-a-y
(ruffle fiddle drip)
O-on Earth (settling)
"JANET!" But of course she doesn't
listen.
II
Whileawayans like big asses, so I am glad to report there was nothing
of that kind in the family she moved in with. Father, mother, teenage daughter,
and family dog were all delighted to be famous. Daughter was an honor student
in the local high school. When Janet got settled I drifted into the attic; my
spirit seized possession of the old four-poster bed stored next to the chimney,
near the fur coats and the shopping bag full of dolls; and slowly, slowly, I
infected the whole house.
III
Laura Rose Wilding of
She has a black poodle who
whines under the trees in the back yard and bares his teeth as he rolls over and
over in the dead leaves. She's reading the Christian Existentialists for a
course in school. She crosses the October weather, glowing with health, to
shake hands clumsily with Miss Evason. She's
pathologically shy. She puts one hand in the pocket of her jeans, luminously,
the way well-beloved or much-studied people do, tugging at the zipper of her
man's leather jacket with the other hand. She has short sandy hair and
freckles. Says over and over to herself Non Sum, Non Sum, which means either I
don't exist or I'm not that , according to how you feel it;
this is what Martin Luther is supposed to have said during his fit in the
monastery choir. "Can I go now?"
IV
The black poodle, Samuel, whined and scurried
across the porch, then barked hysterically, defending the house against
God-knows-what.
"At least she's White," they all
said.
V
Janet, in her black-and-white tweeds with the
fox collar like a movie star's, gave a speech to the local women's club. She
didn't say much. Someone gave her chrysanthemums which she held upside-down
like a baseball bat. A professor from the local college spoke of other
cultures. A whole room was full of offerings brought by the club—brownies,
fudge cake, sour cream cake, honey buns, pumpkin pie—not to be eaten, of
course, only looked at, but they did eat it finally because somebody has to or
it isn't real. "Hully gee, Mildred, you waxed
the floor!" and she faints with happiness. Laur,
who is reading psychology for the Existentialists (I said that, didn't I?),
serves coffee to the club in the too-big man's shirt they can't ever get her
out of, no matter what they do, and her ancient, shape less jeans. Swaddling graveclothes. She's a
bright girl. She learned in her thirteenth year that you can get old films of
Mae West or Marlene Dietrich (who is a Vulcan; look at the eyebrows) after
midnight on UHF if you know where to look, at fourteen that pot helps, at
fifteen that reading's even better. She learned, wearing her rimless glasses, that the world is full of intelligent, attractive,
talented women who manage to combine careers with their primary
responsibilities as wives and mothers and whose husbands beat them. She's put a
gold circle pin on her shirt as a concession to club day. She loves her father
and once is enough. Everyone knows that
much as women want to be scientists and engineers, they want foremost to be
womanly companions to men (what?) and caretakers of childhood; everyone knows that a large part of a woman's
identity inheres in the style of her attractiveness. Laur
is daydreaming. She looks straight before her, blushes, smiles, and doesn't see
a thing. After the party she'll march stiff-legged out of the room and up to
her bedroom; sitting tailor-fashion on her bed, she'll read Engels on the
family and make in the margin her neat, concise, perfectly written notes. She
has shelves and shelves of such annotated works. Not for her "How
true!!!!" or "oiseaux = birds." She's
surrounded by mermaids, fish, sea-plants, wandering fronds. Drifting on the
affective currents of the room are those strange social artifacts half
dissolved in nature and mystery: some pretty girls .
Laur is daydreaming that she's Genghis Khan.
VI
A beautiful chick who swims naked and whose
breasts float on the water like flowers, a chick in a rain-tight shirt who says
she balls with her friends but doesn't get uptight about it, that's the real
thing.
VII
And I like Anytown;
I like going out on the porch at night to look at the lights of the town:
fireflies in the blue gloaming, across the valley, up the hill, white homes
where children played and rested, where wives made potato salad, home from a
day in the autumn leaves chasing sticks with the family dog, families in the
firelight, thousands upon thousands of identical, cozy days.
"Do you like it here?" asked Janet
over dessert, never thinking that she might be lied to.
"Huh?" said Laur.
"Our guest wants to know if you like
living here," said Mrs. Wilding.
"Yes," said Laur.
VIII
There are more whooping cranes in the
IX
This then is Laura's worst mind: perpetually
snowed in, a dim upstairs hall wrapped in cotton wool with Self counting rocks
and shells in the window-seat. One can see nothing outside the glass but
falling white sky—no footprints, no faces—though occasionally Self strays to
the window, itself drowned in snowlight, and sees (or
thinks she sees) in the petrified whirling waste the buried forms of two dead
lovers, innocent and sexless, memorialized in a snowbank.
Turn away, girl; gird up your loins; go on
reading.
X
Janet dreamed that she was skating backwards,
Laura that a beautiful stranger was teaching her how to shoot. In dreams begin
responsibilities. Laura came down to the breakfast table after everybody had
gone except Miss Evason. Whileawayans
practice secret dream interpretation according to an arbitrary scheme they
consider idiotic but very funny; Janet was guiltily seeing how contrary she
could make her dream come out and giggling around her buttered toast. She
snickered and shed crumbs. When Laura came into the room Janet sat up straight
and didn't guffaw. "I," said Laur severely,
the victim of ventriloquism, "detest women who don't know how to be
women." Janet and I said nothing. We noticed the floss and dew on the back
of her neck—Laur is in some ways more like a
thirteen-year-old than a seventeen-year-old. She mugs, for instance. At sixty
Janet will be white-haired and skinny, with surprised blue eyes—quite a
handsome human being. And Janet herself always likes people best as themselves,
not dressed up, so Laur's big shirt tickled her,
ditto those impossible trousers. She wanted to ask if it was one shirt or many;
do you scream when you catch sight of yourself?
She soberly held out a piece of buttered toast
and Laur took it with a grimace.
"I don't," said Laur
in an entirely different tone, "understand where the devil they all go on
Saturday mornings. You'd think they were trying to catch up with the sun."
Sharp and adult.
"I dreamed I was learning to use a
rifle," she added. We thought of confiding to her the secret dream-system
by which Whileawayans transform matter and embrace
the galaxies but then we thought better of it.
Janet was trying in a baffled way to pick up
the crumbs she had dropped; Whileawayans don't eat crunchables. I left her and floated up to the whatnot, on
which were perched two biscuit-china birds, beak twined in beak, a cut-glass
salt dish, a small, wooden Mexican hat, a miniature silver basket, and a
terracotta ashtray shaped realistically like a camel. Laur
looked up for a moment, preternaturally hard and composed. I am a spirit,
remember. She said: "The hell with it."
"What?" said Janet.
This response is considered quite polite on Whileaway.
I, the plague system darting in the air between them, pinched Janet's ears,
plucked them up like Death in the poem. Nowhere, neither
undersea nor on the moon, have I, in my bodiless wanderings, met with a more
hard-headed innocence than Miss Evason brings to the
handling of her affairs. In the bluntness of her imagination she
unbuttoned Laur's shirt and slid her pants down to
her knees. The taboos in Whileawayan society are
cross-age taboos. Miss Eva-son no longer smiled.
"I said the hell with it," the
little girl repeated aggressively.
"You said—?"
(Imitation Laura was
smiling helplessly and freshly over her shoulder, shivering a little as her
breasts were touched. What we like is the
look of affection.)
She studied her plate. She drew a design on it
with her finger. "Nothing," she said. "I want to show you
something."
"Show, then," said Janet. I bet your
knees turn in. Janet didn't think so. There are these fashion magazines
scattered through the house, Mrs. Wilding reads them, pornography for the
high-minded. Girls in wet knit bathing suits with their hair dripping, silly girls
drowned in sweaters, serious girls in backless jersey evening dresses that
barely cover the fine-boned lyres of their small chests. They're all slim and
young. Pushing and prodding the little girl as you fit a dress on her. Stand
here. Stand there. How, swooning, they fell into each other's arms. Janet, who
(unlike me) never imagines what can't be done, wiped her mouth, folded her
napkin, pushed back her chair, got up, and followed Laur
into the living room. Up the stairs. Laur took a notebook from her desk and handed it to Miss Evason. We stood there uncertainly, ready to laugh or cry;
Janet looked down at the manuscript, up over the edge at Laura, down again for
a few more lines. Peek.
"I can't read this," I said.
Laura raised her eyebrows severely.
"I know the language but not the
context," Janet said. "I can't judge this, child."
Laura frowned. I thought she might wring her
hands but no such luck. She went back to the desk and picked up something else,
which she handed to Miss Evason. I knew enough to
recognize mathematics, that's all. She tried to stare Janet down. Janet
followed a few lines, smiled thoughtfully, then came to a hitch. Something wrong. "Your teacher—" began Miss Evason.
"I don't have a teacher," said
perspicacious Laur. "I do it myself, out of the
book."
"Then the book's wrong," said Janet;
"Look," and she proceeded to scribble in the margin. What an
extraordinary phenomenon mathematical symbols are! I flew to the curtains,
curtains Mrs. Wilding had washed and ironed with her own hands. No, she took
them to the cleaner's, popping the clutch of the Wildings' station wagon. She
read Freud in the time she would have used to wash and iron the curtains. They
weren't Laur's choice. She would have torn them down
with her own hands. She wept. She pleaded. She fainted. Et
cetera.
They bent over the book together.
"Goddamn," said Janet, in surprised
pleasure.
"You know math!" (that
was Laur).
"No, no, I'm just an amateur, just an
amateur," said Miss Evason, swimming like a seal
in the sea of numbers.
"The life so short, the craft so long to
learn," quoted Laur and turned scarlet. The rest
goes: I mene love.
"What?" said Janet, absorbed.
"I'm in love with someone in
school," said Laur. "A
man."
A really extraordinary expression, what they
mean by calling someone's face a study—
she can't know that I know that she doesn't know that I know!— crossed Janet's
face and she said, "Oh, sure," by which you can tell that she didn't
believe a word of it. She didn't say, "You're too young." (Not for him, for her, nitwit).
"Of course," she added.
XI
I'm a victim of penis envy (said Laura) so I
can't ever be happy or lead a normal life. My mother worked as a librarian when
I was little and that's not feminine. She thinks it's deformed me. The other
day a man came up to me in the bus and called me sweetie and said, "Why
don't you smile? God loves you!" I just stared at him. But he wouldn't go
away until I smiled, so finally I did. Everyone was laughing. I tried once, you
know, went to a dance all dressed up, but I felt like such a fool. Everyone
kept making encouraging remarks about my looks as if they were afraid I'd cross
back over the line again; I was trying
, you know, I was proving their way of life was right, and they were terrified
I'd stop. When I was five I said, "I'm not a girl, I'm a genius," but
that doesn't work, possibly because other people don't honor the resolve. Last
year I finally gave up and told my mother I didn't want to be a girl but she
said Oh no, being a girl is wonderful. Why? Because you can wear pretty clothes
and you don't have to do anything; the men will do it for you. She said that
instead of conquering Everest, I could conquer the conqueror of Everest and
while he had to go climb the mountain, I could stay home in lazy comfort listening
to the radio and eating chocolates. She was upset, I suppose, but you can't
imbibe someone's success by fucking them. Then she said that in addition to
that (the pretty clothes and so forth) there is a mystical fulfillment in
marriage and children that nobody who hasn't done it could ever know.
"Sure, washing floors," I said. "I have you," she said, looking mysterious. As if
my father didn't have me, too. Or my birth was a beautiful experience et patati et patata , which doesn't quite jibe with the
secular version we always get when she's talking about her ailments with her
friends. When I was a little girl I used to think women were always sick. My
father said, "What the hell is she fussing about this time?" All
those songs, what's-its-name, I enjoy being a girl, I'm so glad I'm female, I'm
all dressed up, Love will make up for everything, tra-la-la.
Where are the songs about how glad I am I'm a boy? Finding The
"Would you
like to live like that?" I said.
He said, "That's irrelevant, because I'm
a man."
I haven't the right hobbies, you see. My hobby
is mathematics, not boys. And being young, too, that's a drag. You have to take
all kinds of crap.
Boys don't like smart girls. Boys don't like
aggressive girls. Unless they want to sit in the girls' laps, that is. I never
met a man yet who wanted to make it with a female Genghis Khan. Either they try
to dominate you, which is revolting, or they turn into
babies. You might as well give up. Then I had a lady shrink who said it was my
problem because I was the one who was trying to rock the boat and you can't expect them to change . So I
suppose I'm the one who must change. Which is what my best
friend said. "Compromise," she said, answering her fiftieth
phone call of the night. "Think what power it gives you over them."
Them! Always Them, Them,
Them. I can't just think of myself. My mother thinks that I don't like boys, though I try to tell her: Look
at it this way; I'll never lose my virginity. I'm a Man-Hating Woman and people
leave the room when I come in it. Do they do the same for a Woman-Hating Man?
Don't be silly.
She'll never know—nor would she credit if she
knew—that men sometimes look very beautiful to me. From the
depths, looking up.
There was a very nice boy once who said,
"Don't worry, Laura. I know you're really very sweet and gentle
underneath." And another with, "You're strong, like
an earth mother." And a third, "You're so beautiful when
you're angry." My guts on the floor, you're so beautiful when you're
angry. I want to be recognized.
I've never slept with a girl. I couldn't. I
wouldn't want to. That's abnormal and I'm not, although you can't be normal
unless you do what you want and you can't be normal unless you love men. To do
what I wanted would be normal, unless what I wanted was abnormal, in which case
it would be abnormal to please myself and normal to do what I didn't want to
do, which isn't normal.
So you see.
XII
Dunyasha Bernadetteson (the most
brilliant mind in the world, b. A.C. 344, d. A.C..
426) heard of this unfortunate young person and immediately pronounced the
following shchasniy,
or cryptic one-word saying:
"Power!"
XIII
We persevered, reading magazines and covering
the neighbors' activities in the discreetest way
possible, and Janet—who didn't believe us to be fully human— kept her
affections to herself. She got used to Laur's
standing by the door every time we went out in the evening with a stubborn look
on her face as if she were going to fling herself across the door with her arms
spread out, movie style. But Laur controlled herself.
Janet went out on a few arranged dates with local men but awe silenced them;
she learned nothing of the usual way such things were done. She went to a high
school basketball game (for the boys) and a Fashion Fair (for the girls). There
was a Science Fair, whose misconceptions she enjoyed mightily. Like oil around
water, the community parted to let us through.
Laura Rose came up to Miss Evason
one night as the latter sat reading alone in the living room; it was February
and the soft snow clung to the outside of the picture window. Picture windows
in Anytown do not evaporate snow in the wintertime as
windows do on Whileaway. Laur
watched us standoffishly for a while, then came into
the circle of fantasy and lamplight. She stood there, twisting her class ring
around her finger. Then she said:
"What have you learned from all that
reading?"
"Nothing," said Janet. The soundless blows of the snowflakes against the glass. Laur sat down at Janet's feet ("Shall I tell you
something?") and explained an old fantasy of hers, snow and forests and
knights and lovelorn maidens. She said that to anyone in love the house would
instantly seem submarine, not a house on Earth but a house on Titan under the
ammonia snow. "I'm in love," she said, reviving that old story about
the mythical man at school.
"Tell me about Whileaway,"
she added. Janet put down her magazine. Indirection is so new to Miss Evason that for a moment she doesn't understand; what Laur has said is: Tell me
about your wife. Janet was pleased. She had traced Laur's scheme not as concealment but as a kind of elaborate
frivolity; now she fell silent. The little girl sat tailor-fashion on the
living room rug, watching us.
"Well, tell me," said Laura Rose.
Her features are delicate, not particularly
marked; she has a slightly indecently milky skin and lots of freckles. Knobby
knuckles.
"She's called
Leave! (I told my compatriot)
First of all, it's wrong.
Second of all, it's wrong.
Third of all, it's wrong.
"Oh my goodness," said Janet slowly,
as she does sometimes, this being her favorite saying after, "You are
kidding me."
(Performing the
difficult mental trick of trying on somebody else's taboos.)
"Now then," she said, "now
then, now then." The little girl looked up. She is in the middle of
something terribly distressing, something that will make her wring
her hands, will make her cry. As a large Irish setter once bounded into my room
and spent half the day unconsciously banging a piece of furniture with his
tail; so something awful has got into Laura Rose and is giving her electric
shocks, terrifying blows, right across the heart. Janet took her by the
shoulders and it got worse. There is this business of the narcissism of love,
the fourth-dimensional curve that takes you out into the other who is the whole
world, which is really a twist back into yourself,
only a different self. Laur was weeping with despair.
Janet pulled her up on to her lap—Janet's lap—as if she had been a baby; everyone knows that if you start them young
they'll be perverted forever and everyone knows
that nothing in the world is worse than making love to someone a generation
younger than yourself. Poor Laura, defeated by both of us, her back bent,
glazed and stupefied under the weight of a double taboo.
Don't, Janet.
Don't, Janet.
Don't exploit. That little
girl's sinister wisdom.
Snow still blew across the side of the house;
the walls shook, muffled. Something was wrong with the television set, or with
the distance control, or perhaps some defective appliance somewhere in suburban
Anytown sent out uncontrolled signals that no
television set could resist; for it turned itself on and gave us a television
salad: Maureen trying unsuccessfully to slap John Wayne, a pretty girl with a
drowned voice holding up a vaginal deodorant spray can, a house falling off the
side of a mountain. Laur groaned aloud and hid her
face against Janet's shoulder. Janet—I—held her, her odor flooding my skin,
cold woman, grinning at my own desire because we are still trying to be good. Whileawayans, as has been said, love big asses. "I
love you, I love you," said Laur, and Janet
rocked her, and Laur—not wishing to be taken for a
child—bent Miss Evason's head fiercely back against
the chair and kissed her on the mouth. Oh my goodness.
Janet's rid of me. I sprang away and hung by
one claw from the window curtain. Janet picked Laur
up and deposited her on the floor, holding her tight through all the hysterics;
she nuzzled Laur's ear and slipped off her own shoes.
Laur came up out of it and threw the distance control
at the television set, for the actress had been telling you to disinfect the
little-mouse "most girl part" and the set went dead.
"Never—don't—I
can't—leave me!" wailed Laur. Better to cry.
Businesslike Janet unfastened her shirt, her belt, and her blue jeans and
gripped her about the hips, on the theory that nothing calms hysterics so fast.
"Oh!" said Laura Rose, astounded.
This is the perfect time for her to change her mind. Her breathing grew
quieter. Soberly she put her arms around Janet and leaned on Janet. She sighed.
"I want to get out of my damned
clothes," said Janet, voice unaccountably breaking in the middle.
"Do you love me?"
Dearest, I can't because you are too young;
and some day soon you'll look at me and my skin will be dead and dry, and being
more romantically inclined than a Whileawayan, you'll
find me quite disgusting: but until then I'll do my best to conceal from you
how very fond I am of you. There is also lust and I hope you understand me when
I say I'm about to die; and I think we should go to a safer place where we can
die in comfort, for example my room which has a lock on the door, because I
don't want to be panting away on the rug when your parents walk in. On Whileaway it wouldn't matter and you wouldn't have parents
at your age, but here—or so I'm told— things are as they are .
"What a strange and lovely way you have
of putting it," Law said. They climbed the stairs, Laur
worrying a bit at her trailing pants. She bent down (framed in the doorway) to
rub her ankles. She's going to laugh in a minute and look at us from between
her legs. She straightened up with a shy smile.
"Tell me something," she said in a
hoarse, difficult whisper, averting her gaze.
"Yes, child? Yes, dear?"
"What do we do now?"
XIV
They undressed in Janet's bedroom in the midst
of her piles of material: books, magazines, sources of statistics, biographies,
newspapers. The ghosts in the windowpanes undressed
with them, for nobody could see in at the back of the house. Their
dim and pretty selves. Janet pulled down the shades, lingering at each
window and peering wistfully out into the dark, a shocking compound of
familiar, friendly face and awful nude, while Laur
climbed into Janet's bed. The bedspread had holes in it where the pink satin
had worn thin. She shut her eyes. "Put out the light."
"Oh no, please," said Janet, making
the bed sway by getting into it. She held out her arms to the little girl; then
she kissed her on the shoulder, the Russian way. (She's the wrong shape.)
"I don't want the light," said Laur and
jumped out of bed to turn it off, but the air catches you on your bare skin
before you get there and shocks you out of your senses; so she stopped,
mother-naked, with the currents of air investigating between her legs.
"How lovely!" said Janet. The room is pitilessly well lit. Laur got back into bed—"Move over"—and that awful
sensation that you're not going to enjoy it after all. "You have lovely
knees," Janet said mildly, "and such a beautiful rump," and for
a moment the preposterousness of it braced Laura Rose; there couldn't be any
sex in it; so she turned off the overhead light and got back into bed. Janet
had turned on a rose-shaded night lamp by the bed. Miss Evason
grew out of the satin cover, an antique statue from the waist up with
preternaturally living eyes; she said softly, "Look, we're alike, aren't
we?" indicating her round breasts, idealized by the dimness. "I've
had two children," she said wickedly and Laur
felt herself go red all over, so unpleasant was the picture of Yuriko Janet-son
being held up to one breast to suck, not, it seemed to Laur,
an uncollected, starry-eyed infant but something like a miniature adult, on a
ladder perhaps. Laur lay stiffly back and shut her
eyes, radiating refusal.
Janet turned out the bedside light.
Miss Evason then
pulled the covers up around her shoulders, sighed in self-control, and ordered Laur to turn over. "You can at least get a back-rub
out of it."
"Ugh!" she said sincerely, when she
began on the muscles of Laura's neck. "What a mess."
Laura tried to giggle. Miss Evason's voice, in the darkness, went on and on: about the
last few weeks, about studying freshwater ponds on Whileaway,
a hard, lean, sexless greyhound of a voice (Laur
thought) which betrayed Laura in the end, Miss Evason
stating with an odd, unserious chuckle, "Try?"
"I do love you," Laur
said, ready to weep. There is propaganda and propaganda and I represented again
to Janet that what she was about to do was a serious crime.
God will punish, I said.
You are supposed to make them giggle, but
Janet remembered how she herself had been at twelve, and oh it's so serious.
She kissed Laura Rose lightly on the lips over and over again until Laura
caught her head; in the dark it wasn't really so bad and Laura could imagine
that she was nobody, or that Miss Evason was nobody,
or that she was imagining it all. One nice thing to do is rub
from the neck down to the tail, it renders the human body ductile and makes the
muscles purr. Without knowing it, Laur was in over
her head. She had learned from a boy friend how to kiss on top, but here there
was lots of time and lots of other places; "It's nice!" said Laura Rose in surprise;
"It's so nice!" and the sound
of her own voice sent her in head over heels. Janet found the little bump Whileawayans call The Key— Now you must make an effort, she said— and with
the sense of working very hard, Laur finally tumbled
off the cliff. It was incompletely and desperately inadequate, but it was the
first major sexual pleasure she had ever received from another human being in
her entire life.
"Goddammit, I can't!" she shouted.
So I fled shrieking. There is no excuse for
putting my face between someone else's columnar thighs—picture me as washing my
cheeks and temples outside to get rid of that cool smoothness (cool because of
the fat, you see, that insulates the limbs; you can almost feel the long bones,
the architectura,
the heavenly technical cunning. They'll be doing it with the dog next). I sat
on the hall window frame and screamed.
Janet must be imagined throughout as
practicing the extremest self-control.
What else can she do?
"Now do this and this," she
whispered hurriedly to Laura Rose, laughing brokenly. "Now do that and
that. Ah!" Miss Evason used the girl's ignorant
hand, for Laura didn't know how to do it; "Just hold still," she said
in that strange parody of an intimate confession. The girl's inexperience
didn't make things easy. However, one finds one's own rhythm. In the bottom
drawer of the Wildings' guest room bureau was an exotic Whileawayan
artifact (with a handle) that Laura Rose is going to be very embarrassed to see
the next morning; Janet got it out, wobbling drunkenly.
("Did you fall down?" said Laura
anxiously, leaning over the edge of the bed.
"Yes.")
So it was easy. Touched with strange
inspiration,
Laur held the interloper in her arms, awed, impressed, a
little domineering. Months of chastity went up in smoke: an electrical charge,
the wriggling of an internal eel, a knifelike pleasure.
"No, no, not yet," said Janet Evason Belin. "Just hold it.
Let me rest."
"Now. Again."
XV
A dozen beautiful
"girls" each "brushing" and "combing" her long,
silky "hair," each "longing" to "catch a man."
XVI
I fell in love at twenty-two.
A dreadful intrusion,
a sickness.
In your terms, I was distractedly in love. Whileawayans account for cases of this by referring back to
the mother-child relationship: cold potatoes when you feel it. There used to be
an explanation by way of our defects, but common human defects can be used to
explain anything, so what's the use. And there's a mathematical analogy, a
four-dimensional curve that I remember laughing at. Oh, I was bleeding to
death.
Love—to work like a
slave, to work like a dog. The
same exalted, feverish attention fixed on everything. I didn't make a sign to
her because she didn't make a sign to me; I only tried to control myself and to
keep people away from me. That awful diffidence. I was
at her too, all the time, in a nervous
parody of friendship. Nobody can be expected to like that compulsiveness. In
our family hall, like the Viking mead-hall where the bird flies in from
darkness and out again into darkness, under the blown-up pressure dome with the
fans bringing in the scent of roses, I felt my own soul fly straight up into
the roof. We used to sit with the lights off in the long spring twilight; a troop
of children had passed by the week before, selling candles, which one or
another woman would bring in and light. People drifted in and out, lifting the
silk flap to the dome entrance. People ate at different times, you see. When Vitti left for outside, I followed her. We don't have lawns
as you do, but around our dwellings we plant a kind of trefoil which keeps the
other things off; small children always assume it's there for magical reasons.
It's very soft. It was getting dark, too. There's a planting from
"I'll be leaving in six months," I
said. "Going to
Silence. I was miserably conscious that
"I thought you might like company,"
I said.
No answer. She had picked up a stick and was
taking the heads off weeds with it. It was one of the props for the computer
receiver pole, knocked into the ground at one end and into the pole itself at
the other. I had to ignore her being there or I couldn't have continued
walking. Ahead were the farm's trees, breaking into the fields on the dim
horizon like a headland or a cloud. "The moon's up," I said. See the
moon. Poisoned with arrows and roses, radiant Eros coming at
you out of the dark. The air so mild you could bathe in it. I'm told my
first sentence as a child was See the Moon, by which I think I must have meant:
pleasant pain, balmy poison, preserving gall, choking sweet. I imagined
We reached the trees. (I remember, she's going to Lode-Pigro to put
up buildings. Also, it'll be hotter here in July. It'll be intensely hot,
probably not bearable.) The ground between them was carpeted in needles,
speckled with moonlight. We dissolved fantastically into that extraordinary
medium, like mermaids, like living stories; I couldn't see anything. There was
the musky odor of dead needles, although the pollen itself is scentless. If I
had told her, "Vittoria, I'm very fond of
you," or "Vittoria, I love you," she
might answer, "You're O.K. too, friend," or "Yes, sure, let's
make it," which would misrepresent something or other, though I don't know
just what, quite intolerably and I would have to kill myself—I was very odd
about death in those strange days. So I did not speak or make a sign but only
strolled on, deeper and deeper into that fantastic forest, that enchanted
allegory, and finally we came across a fallen log and sat on it
"You'll miss—" said Vitti.
I said, "Vitti,
I want—"
She stared straight ahead, as if displeased.
Sex does not matter in these things, nor age, nor time, nor sense, we all know that. In the daytime you can see that the trees
have been planted in straight rows, but the moonlight was confusing all that
A long pause here.
"I don't know you," I said at last.
The truth was we had been friends for a long time, good friends. I don't know
why I had forgotten that so completely. Vitti was the
anchor in my life at school, the chum, the pal; we had gossiped together, eaten
together. I knew nothing about her thoughts now and can't report them, except
for my own fatuous remarks. Oh, the dead silence! I groped for her hand but
couldn't find it in the dark; I cursed myself and tried to stay together in
that ghastly moonlight, shivers of unbeing running
through me like a net and over all the pleasure of pain, the dreadful longing.
"Vitti, I love
you."
Go away! Was she wringing her hands?
"Love me!"
No! and she threw one
arm up to cover her face. I got down on my knees but she winced away with a
kind of hissing screech, very like the sound an enraged gander makes to warn
you and be fair. We were both shaking from head to foot. It seemed natural that
she should be ready to destroy me. I've dreamed of looking into a mirror and
seeing my alter ego which, on its own initiative, begins to tell me unbearable
truths and, to prevent such, threw my arms around Vittoria's
knees while she dug her fingers into my hair; thus connected we slid down to
the forest floor. I expected her to beat my head against it. We got more
equally together and kissed each other, I expecting my soul to flee out of my
body, which it did not do. She is untouchable. What can I do with my dearest X,
Y, or Z, after all? This is Vitti, whom I know, whom
I like; and the warmth of that real affection inspired me with more love, the
love with more passion, more despair, enough
disappointment for a whole lifetime. I groaned miserably. I might as well have
fallen in love with a tree or a rock. No one can make love in such a state. Vitti's fingernails were making little hard crescents of
pain on my arms; she had that mulish look I knew so well in her; I knew
something was coming off. It seemed to me that we were victims of the same
catastrophe and that we ought to get together somewhere, in a hollow tree or
under a bush, to talk it over. The old women tell you to wrestle, not fight, or
you may end up with a black eye; Vitti, who had my
fingers in her hands, pressing them feverishly, bent the smallest one back
against the joint. Now that's a good idea. We scuffled like babies, hurting my
hand, and she bit me on it; we pushed and pulled at each other, and I shook her
until she rolled over on top of me and very earnestly hit me across the face
with her fist. The only relief is tears. We lay sobbing together. What we did
after that I think you know, and we sniffled and commiserated with each other.
It even struck us funny, once. The seat of romantic love is the solar plexus
while the seat of love is elsewhere, and that makes it very hard to make love when you are on the point of
dissolution, your arms and legs penetrated by moonlight, your head cut off and
swimming freely on its own like some kind of mutated monster. Love is a
radiation disease. Whileawayans do not like the
self-consequence that comes with romantic passion and we are very mean and
mocking about it; so
Vitti and I have stayed together in a more commonplace way ever
since. In fact, we got married. It comes and goes,
that abyss opening on nothing. I run away, usually.
Vittoria is whoring all over North Continent by now, I should
think. We don't mean by that what you do, by the way. I mean: good for her.
Sometimes I try to puzzle out the different
kinds of love, the friendly kind and the operatic kind, but what the hell.
Let's go to sleep.
XVII
Under the Mashopi
mountain range is a town called
XVIII
There's no being out
too late in Whileaway, or up too early , or in
the wrong part of town , or unescorted .
You cannot fall out of the kinship web and become sexual prey for strangers,
for there is no prey and there are no strangers—the web is world-wide. In all
of Whileaway there is no one who can keep you from
going where you please (though you may risk your life, if that sort of thing
appeals to you), no one who will follow you and try to embarrass you by
whispering obscenities in your ear, no one who will attempt to rape you, no one
who will warn you of the dangers of die street, no one who will stand on street
corners, hot-eyed and vicious, jingling loose change in his pants pocket,
bitterly bitterly sure that you're a cheap floozy,
hot and wild, who likes it, who can't say no, who's making a mint off it, who
inspires him with nothing but disgust, and who wants to drive him crazy.
On Whileaway
eleven-year-old children strip and live naked in the wilderness above the
forty-seventh parallel, where they meditate, stark naked or covered with
leaves, sans pubic hair, subsisting on
the roots and berries so kindly planted by their elders. You can walk around
the Whileawayan equator twenty times (if the feat
takes your fancy and you live that long) with one hand on your sex and in the
other an emerald the size of a grapefruit. All you'll get is a tired wrist.
While here, where we
live—!
PART FIVE
I
I had got stuck with Jeannine. I don't know
how. Also, everybody in the Goddamned subway car was
staring at my legs. I think they thought I was a cheerleader. Way up in the
Bronx we had waited for the Express, forty-five minutes in the open air with
tufts of grass growing between the rails, just as in my childhood, weeds
surrounding the vacant subway cars, sunlight and cloud-shadows chasing each
other across the elevated wooden platform. I put my raincoat across my knees—
skirts are long in nineteen-sixty-nine, Jeannine-time. Jeannine is neat, I
suppose, but to me she looks as if she's wandering all over the place: hanging
earrings, metal links for a belt, her hair escaping from a net, ruffles on her
sleeves; and on that kind of shapeless, raglan-sleeved coat that always looks
as if it's dragging itself off the wearer's shoulders, a pin in the shape of a
crescent moon with three stars dangling from it on three fine, separate chains.
Her coat and shoulder bag are overflowing into her neighbors' laps.
So I remember the horsehair petticoats of my
teens, which bounded out of one's hands every time one tried to roll them or
fold them up. One per drawer. The train groaned and
ground to a stop somewhere between one hundred and eightieth and one hundred
and sixty-eighth streets. We can look over the plain of the
Petticoats, waist-cinchers, boned strapless
brassieres with torturous nodes where the bones began or ended, modestly high-heeled
shoes, double-circle skirts, felt applique'd with
sequins, bangle bracelets that always fell off, winter coats with no buttons to
hold them shut, rhinestone sunburst brooches that caught on everything. Horrible obsessions, The Home, for example. We sat looking
over the tenements, the faraway bridge, the ball park.
There were public parks on islands in the river where I don't remember there
being anything of the kind. Jeannine's giving me gooseflesh, whisper, whisper
on the side of the neck (about somebody else's home permanent across the car),
never still, always twisting around to look at something, forever fiddling with
her clothes, suddenly deciding she just has to see out the window, I'll die if
I don't. We changed places so she wouldn't have the bar between the windows
cutting off her field of view. The sun shone as if on the Perfect City of my
twelve-year-old dreams, the kind of thing you see on a billboard under
Pittston, Future Jewel Of The Finger Lakes, the ramps, the graceful walkways,
the moving belts between hundred-story buildings, the squares of green that are
supposed to be parks, and above it all, in the cloudless modern sky, just one
sleek, futuristic Airplane.
II
JEANNINE:
MYSELF: Nothing.
JEANNINE: I think there's something wrong with
him. I think he's traumatized by being so short. He wants to get married so we
can have children—on his salary! When we pass a baby carriage with a baby, we
both run over to look at it. He can't make up his mind, either. I never heard
of a man like that. Last fall we were going to go to a Russian restaurant and I
wanted to go to this place so he said all right, and then I changed my mind and
wanted to go to the other place and he said OK, fine, but it turned out to be
shut. So what could we do? He didn't
know. So I lost my temper.
ME: Nothing, nothing, nothing.
SHE: He's just too much. Do you think I should
get rid of him?
ME: (I shook my head)
JEANNINE (Confidingly): Well, he is funny
some-times.
(She bent down to pick lint off her blouse,
giving herself a momentary double chin. She pursed her lips, pouted, bridled, drooped her eyelids in a knowing look.)
Sometimes—sometimes—he
likes to get dressed up. He gets into
the drapes like a sarong and puts on all my necklaces around his neck, and
stands there with the curtain rod for a spear. He wants to be an actor, you
know. But I think there's something wrong with him. Is it what they call transvestism?
JOANNA: No, Jeannine.
JEANNINE: I think it might be. I think I'll
throw him over. I don't like anybody calling my cat, Mr. Frosty, names.
ME: Has anyone proposed the choice to you
lately?
JEANNINE: I won't be a man.
ME: Nobody axed you to.
III
She was sick in the subway. Not really, but
almost. She indicated by signs that she was going to be sick or had just been sick
or was afraid she was going to be sick.
She held my hand.
IV
We got out at forty-second street; and this is
the way things really happen, in broad daylight, publicly, invisibly; we
meandered past the shops. Jeannine saw a pair of stockings that she just had to
have. We went in the store and the store owner bullied us. Outside again with
her stockings (wrong size) she said, "But I didn't want them!" They were red fishnet hose,
which she'll never dare wear. In the store window there was a zany-faced mannequin
who roused my active hatred: painted long ago, now dusty and full of hair-fine
cracks, a small shopkeeper's economy. "Ah!" said Jeannine
sorrowfully, looking again at the edge of the fishnet hose in her package.
Mannequins are always dancing, this absurd throwing back of the head and
bending of the arms and legs. They enjoy being mannequins. (But I won't be
mean.) I will not say that the sky ripped open from top to bottom, from side to
side, that from the clouds over Fifth Avenue descended seven angels with seven
trumpets, that the vials of wrath were loosed over Jeannine-time and the Angel
of Pestilence sank Manhattan in the deepest part of the sea. Janet, our only
savior, turned the corner in a gray flannel jacket and a gray flannel skirt
down to her knees. That's a compromise between two worlds. She seemed to know
where she was going. Badly sunburned, with more freckles than usual across her
flat nose, Miss Evason stopped in the middle of the
street, scratched her head all over, yawned, and entered a drugstore. We
followed.
"I'm sorry, but I've never heard of
that," said the man behind the counter.
"Oh my goodness, really?" said Miss Evason. She put away a piece of paper, on which she had
written whatever-it-was, and went to the other side of the store, where she had
a soda.
"You'll need a prescription," said
the man behind the counter.
"Oh my goodness," Miss Evason said mildly. It did not help that she was carrying
her soda. She put it down on the plastic counter top and joined us at the door,
where Miss Dadier was trying—softly but very
determinedly—to bolt. She wanted to get back to the freedom of
Miss Dadier looked
sulkily up at the sky, calling on the invisible angels and the Wrath of God to
witness, and then she said, grudgingly:
"I can't imagine
what you were trying to buy." She did not want to admit that Janet
existed. Janet raised her eyebrows and directed a glance at me, but I don't know.
I never know anything.
"I have athlete's foot," said Miss Evason.
Jeannine shuddered. (Catch her taking off her
shoes in public!) "I thought I'd lost you."
"You didn't," said Miss Evason tolerantly. "Are you ready?"
"No," said Jeannine. But she did not
repeat it. I'm not sure I'm ready. Janet led us put into the street and had us stand close together, all within one square of the
sidewalk. She looked at her watch. The Whileawayan
antennae come searching through the ages like a cat's whisker. It would have
been better to leave from some less public spot, but they don't seem to care
what they do; Janet waved engagingly at passersby and I became aware that I had
become aware that I remembered becoming aware of the curved wall eighteen
niches from my nose. The edge of the sidewalk, where the
traffic. Had been.
Now I know how I got to Whileaway,
but how did I get stuck with Jeannine? And how did Janet get into that world
and not mine? Who did that? When the question is translated into Whilewayan, Dear Reader, you will see the technicians of Whileaway step back involuntarily; you will see Boy Scout Evason blanch; you will see the Chieftainess
of the Whileawayan scientific establishment, mistress
of ten thousand slaves and wearer of the bronze breastplates, direct stern
questions right and left, while frowning. Etcetera.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh Jeannine was saying
miserably under her breath. I don't want to
be here. They forced me. I want to go home. This is a terrible place.
"Who did that?" said Miss Evason. "Not me. Not my people."
V
Praise God, Whose image we put in the plaza to
make the eleven-year-olds laugh. She has brought me home.
VI
Dig in. Winter's coming.
When I—not the "I" above but the "I" down here, naturally;
that's Janet up there—
When "I" dream of Whileaway, I dream first of the farms, and although words
are inadequate to this great theme, while I live I yet must tell you that the
farms are the only family units on Whileaway, not
because Whileawayans think farm life is good for
children (they don't) but because farm work is harder to schedule and demands
more day-to-day continuity than any other kind of job. Farming on Whileaway is mainly caretaking and machine-tending; it is
the emotional security of family life that provides the glamor.
I do not know this from observation; I know it from knowledge; I have never
visited Whileaway in my own person, and when Janet,
Jeannine, and Joanna stepped out of the stainless steel sphere into which they
had been transported from wherever the dickens it was that they were before
(etcetera), they did so alone. I was there only as the spirit or soul of an
experience is always there.
Sixty eight-foot-tall Amazons, the Whileawayan Praetorian Guard, threw daggers in all
directions (North, South, East, and West).
Janet, Jeannine, and Joanna arrived in the
middle of a field at the end of an old-fashioned tarmac that stretched as a
feeder to the nearest hovercraft highway. No winter, few roofs. Vittoria and Janet embraced and stood very still, as
Aristophanes describes. They didn't yell or pound each other's shoulders, or
kiss, or hug, or cry out, or jump up and down, or say "You old
son-of-a-gun!" or tell each other all the news, or push each other to
arm's length and screech, and then hug each other again. More farsighted than
either Jeannine or Janet, I can see beyond the mountain range on the horizon,
beyond the Altiplano, to the whale-herders and
underground fisheries on the other side of the world; I can see desert gardens
and zoological preserves; I can see storms brewing. Jeannine gulped. Must they do that in public ? There
are a few fluffy summer clouds above
"I'll they know we're here," says
Jeannine, the world falling about her ears, "why didn't they send someone
to meet us? I mean, other people."
"Why should they?" says Janet.
VII
JEANNINE : But we might lose our way.
JANET: You can't. I'm here and I know the way.
JEANNINE: Suppose you weren't with us. Suppose
we'd killed you.
JANET: Then it would certainly be preferable
that you lose your way!
JEANNINE: But suppose we held you as a
hostage? Suppose you were alive but we threatened
to kill you?
JANET: The longer it
takes to get anywhere, the more time I have to think of what to do. I can
probably stand thirst better than you can. And of course, since you have no
map, I can mislead you and not tell you the truth about where to go.
JEANNINE: But we'd get there eventually,
wouldn't we?
JANET: Yes. So there's no difference, you see.
JEANNINE: But suppose we killed you?
JANET: Either you
killed me before you got here, in which case I am dead, or you kill me after
you get here, in which case I am dead. It
makes no difference to me where I die.
JEANNINE: But suppose we brought a—a cannon or
a bomb or something—suppose we fooled you and then seized the Government and
threatened to blow everything up!
JANET: For the
purposes of argument, let us suppose that. First of all, there is no government
here in the sense that you mean. Second, there is no one place from which to
control the entire activity of Whileaway, that is,
the economy. So your one bomb isn't enough, even supposing you could kill off
our welcoming committee. Introducing an entire army or an entire arsenal
through the one point would take either a very advanced technology—which you
have not got—or vast amounts of time. If it took you vast amounts of time, that would be no problem for us; if you came through
right away, you must come through either prepared or unprepared. If you came
through prepared, waiting would only assure that you spread out, used up your
supplies, and acquired a false sense of confidence; if you came through
unprepared and had to spend time putting things together, that would be a sign
that your technology is not so advanced and you're not that much of a threat
one way or the other.
JEANNINE:(controlling herself): Hm!
JANET: You see, conflicts between states are
not identical with conflicts between persons. You exaggerate this business of
surprise. Relying on the advantage of a few hours is not a very stable way of
proceeding, is it? A way of life so unprotected would hardly be worth keeping.
JEANNINE: I hope—I don't hope really because
it would be awful but just to pay you out I hope!—well, I hope that some enemy
with fantastically advanced technology sends experts through that
what-do-you-call-it and I hope they freeze everybody within fifty miles with green rays —and then I hope they make that
whatever-you-call-it a permanent
whatever-you-call-it so they can bring through anything
they want to whenever they want to and kill you all !
JANET: Now there's an example worth talking
about. First, if they had a technology as advanced as that, they could open
their own access points, and we certainly can't watch everywhere at all times.
It would make life too obsessive. But suppose they must use this single one. No
welcoming committee—or defensive army, even—could withstand those fifty-mile
green rays, yes? So that's not worth sending an army against, is it? They would
just be frozen or killed. However, I suspect that the use of such a fifty-mile
green ray would produce all sorts of grossly observable phenomena—that is, it
would be instantly obvious that something or somebody was paralyzing everything
within a radius of fifty miles—and if these technologically advanced but unamiable persons were so obliging as to announce
themselves in that fashion, we'd hardly need to find out about their existence
by sending anyone here in the flesh, would we?.
(A long silence. Jeannine is trying to think of something desperately
crushing. Her platform wedgies aren't made for walking and her feet hurt.)
JANET: Besides, it's never at the first
contact that these things happen. I'll show you the theory, some day.
Some day (thinks
Jeannine) somebody will get yon in spite of all that rationality. All that rationality will go straight up into the air.
They don't have to invade; they can just blow you up from outer space; they can
just infect you with plague, or infiltrate, or form a fifth column. They can
corrupt you. There are all sorts of horrors. You think life is safe but it
isn't, it isn't at all. It's just horrors. Horrors!
JANET (reading her face, jerking a thumb
upwards from a closed fist in the Whileawayan gesture
of religion): God's will be done.
VIII
Stupid and inactive. Pathetic. Cognitive
starvation. Jeannine loves to become entangled with the souls of the
furniture in my apartment, softly drawing herself in to fit inside them, pulling one long limb after another into the cramped
positions of my tables and chairs. The dryad of my living
room. I can look anywhere, at the encyclopedia stand, at the cheap
lamps, at the homey bat comfortable brown couch; it is always Jeannine who
looks back. It's uncomfortable for me but such a relief to her. That long,
young, pretty body loves to be sat on and I think if Jeannine ever meets a
Satanist, she will find herself perfectly at home as his altar at a Black Mass,
relieved of personality at last and forever.
IX
Then there is the joviality, the
self-consequence, the forced heartiness, the benevolent teasing, the insistent
demands for flattery and reassurance. This is what ethologists
call dominance behavior.
EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD MALE COLLEGE FRESHMAN
(laying down the law at a party): If Marlowe had lived, he would have written very much better plays than Shakespeare's.
ME, A THTRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH (dazed with
boredom): Gee, how clever you are to know about things that never happened.
THE FRESHMAN (bewildered): Huh? OR
EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL AT A PARTY: Men don't
understand machinery. The gizmo goes on the whatsit
and the rataplan makes contact with the fourchette in at least seventy percent of all cases.
THIRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD MALE PROFESSOR OF
ENGINEERING (awed): Gee. (Something wrong here, I think)
OR
"Man" is a rhetorical convenience
for "human."
"Man" includes "woman."
Thus:
1. The Eternal Feminine leads us ever upward
and on. (Guess who "us" is)
2. The last man on earth will spend the last
hour before the holocaust searching for his wife and child. (Review of The Second Sex by the first sex)
3. We all have the impulse, at times, to get
rid of our wives. (Irving Howe, introduction to Hardy, talking about my wife)
4. Great scientists choose their problems as
they choose their wives. (A.H. Maslow, who should know better)
5. Man is a hunter who wishes to compete for
the best kill and the best female, (everybody)
OR
The game is a dominance game called I Must
Impress This Woman. Failure makes the active player play harder. Wear a hunched
back or a withered arm; you will then experience the invisibility of the
passive player. I'm never impressed—no woman ever is—it's just a cue that you
like me and I'm supposed to like that. If you really like me, maybe I can get
you to stop. Stop; I want to talk to you! Stop; I want to see you! Stop; I'm
dying and disappearing!
SHE: Isn't it just a game?
HE: Yes, of course.
SHE: And if you play the game, it means you
like me, doesn't it?
HE: Of course.
SHE: Then if it's just a game and you like me,
you can stop playing. Please stop.
HE: No.
SHE: Then I won't play.
HE: Bitch! You want to destroy me. I'll show
you. (He plays harder)
SHE: All right. I'm impressed.
HE: You really are sweet and responsive after
all. You've kept your femininity. You're not one of those hysterical feminist
bitches who wants to be a man and have a penis. You're a woman.
SHE: Yes. (She kills herself)
X
This book is written in blood.
Is it written entirely in blood?
No, some of it is written in tears.
Are the blood and tears all mine?
Yes, they have been in the past. But the
future is a different matter. As the bear swore in Pogo
after having endured a pot shoved on her head, being turned upside down while
still in the pot, a discussion about her edibility, the lawnmowering
of her behind, and a fistful of ground pepper in the snoot, she then swore a
mighty oath on the ashes of her mothers (i.e.
her forebears) grimly but quietly while the apples from the shaken apple tree
above her dropped bang thud on her head:
OH, SOMEBODY ASIDES ME IS GONNA RUE THIS HERE
PARTICULAR DAY.
XI
I study
I mean, of course, that she told stories to
me. Vittoria translates, speaking softly and
precisely: "Once upon a time a long time ago there was a child who was
raised by bears. Her mother went up into the woods pregnant (for there were
more woods than there are today) and gave birth to the child there, for she had
made an error in reckoning. Also, she had got lost. Why she was in the woods
doesn't matter. It is not germane to this story.
"Well, if you must know, it was because
the mother was up there to shoot bears for a zoo. She had captured three bears
and shot eighteen but was running out of film; and when she vent into labor,
she let the three bears go, for she didn't know how long the labor would last,
and there was nobody to feed the bears. They conferred with each other and
stayed around, though, because they had never seen a human being give birth
before and they were interested. Everything went fine until the baby's head
came out, and then the Spirit of the Woods, who is very mischievous and clever,
decided to have some fun. So right after the baby came out, it sent a rock slide
down the mountain and the rock slide cut the umbilical cord and knocked the
mother to one side. Aid then it made an earthquake which separated the mother
and the baby by miles and miles, like the
"Isn't that going to be a lot of
trouble?" said
'Damn!' Then she went back to civilization to
get a search party together, but by that time the bears had decided to adopt
the baby and all of them were hidden up above the
forty-ninth parallel, where it's very rocky and wild. So the little girl grew
up with the bears.
"When she was ten, there began to be
trouble. She had some bear friends by then, although she didn't like to walk on
all-fours as the bears did and the bears didn't like that, because bears are
very conservative. She argued that walking on all-fours didn't suit her
skeletal development. The bears said, 'Oh, but we have always walked this way.'
They were pretty stupid. But nice, I mean. Anyway, she walked upright, the way
it felt best, but when it came to copulation, that was
another matter. There was nobody to copulate with. The little girl wanted to
try it with her male-best-bear-friend (for animals do not live the way people
do, you know) but the he-bear would not even try. 'Alas' he said (You can tell
by that he was much more elegant than the other bears, ha ha)
I'm afraid I'd hurt you with my claws because you don't have all the fur that
she-bears have. And besides that, you have trouble assuming the proper position
because your back legs are too long. And besides that , you don't smell like a bear and I'm afraid my Mother would say it was
bestiality.' That's a joke. Actually it's race prejudice. The little girl was
very lonely and bored. Finally after a long time, she browbeat her bear-mother
into telling her about her origins, so she decided to go out looking for some
people who were not bears. She thought life might be better with them. She said
good-bye to her bear-friends and started South, and
they all wept and waved their handkerchiefs. The girl was very hardy and
woods-wise, since she had been taught by the bears. She traveled all day and
slept all night. Finally she came to a settlement of people, just like this
one, and they took her in. Of course she didn't speak people-talk" (with a
sly glance at me) "and they didn't speak bearish. This was a big problem.
Eventually she learned their language so she could talk to them and when they
found out she had been raised by bears, they directed her to the Geddes
Regional Park where she spent a great deal of time speaking bearish to the
scholars. She made friends and so had plenty of people to copulate with, but on
moonlit nights she longed to be back with the bears, for she wanted to do the
great bear dances, which bears do under the full moon. So eventually she went
back North again. But it turned out that the bears were a bore. So she decided
to find her human mother. At the flats to
" 'Play cards with me,' said the Spirit of Chance.
"'Not on your life,' said the little
girl, who was nobody's fool.
"Then the Spirit of Chance winked and
said, 'Aw, come on,' so the girl thought it might be fun. She was just going to
pick up her hand when she saw that the Spirit of Chance was wearing an
induction helmet with a wire that stretched back way into the distance.
"She was connected with a computer!
" That's cheating!' cried the little girl. She ran at the wall and
they had just an awful fight, but in the end everything melted away, leaving a
handful of pebbles and sand, and afterward that melted away, too. The little
girl walked by day and slept by night, wondering whether she would like her
real mother. She didn't know if she would want to stay with her real mother or
not. But when they got to know each other, they decided against it. The mother
was a very smart, beautiful lady with fuzzy black hair combed out round, like
electricity. But she had to go build a bridge (and fast, too) because the
people couldn't get from one place to the other place without the bridge. So
the little girl went to school and had lots of lovers and friends, and
practiced archery, and got into a family, and had lots of adventures, and saved
everybody from a volcano by bombing it from the air in a glider, and achieved
Enlightenment.
"Then one morning somebody told her there
was a bear looking for her—"
"Wait a minute," said
"I tell things," said my dignified
little friend (through
"Anyone who lives in two worlds,"
(said
(I learned later that she had spent three days
making up the story. It was, of course, about me).
XII
Some homes are extruded foam: white caves hung
with veils of diamonds, indoor gardens, ceilings that weep. There are places in
the
I gambled for chores and breakfast with an
old, old woman, in the middle of the night by the light of an alcohol lamp,
somewhere on the back roads of the swamp and pine flats of South Continent.
Watching the shadows dance on her wrinkled face, I understood why other women
speak with awe of seeing the withered legs dangling from the shell of a computer housing: Humpty Dumptess
on her way to the ultimate Inside of things.
(I lost. I carried her baggage and did her
chores for a day.)
An ancient statue outside the fuel-alcohol
distillery at Ciudad Sierra: a man seated on a stone, his knees spread, both
hands pressed against the pit of his stomach, a look of blind distress, face
blurred by time. Some wag has carved on the base the sideways eight that means
infinity and added a straight line down from the middle; this is both the Whileaway schematic of the male genital and the
mathematical symbol for self-contradiction.
If you are so
foolhardy as to ask a Whileawayan child to "be a
good girl" and do something for you:
"What does running
other people's errands have to do with being a good girl?
"Why can't you run your own errands?
"Are you crippled?"
(The double pairs of hard,
dark children's eyes everywhere, like mating cats'.)
XIII
A quiet country night. The hills East of
By dawn we'll know a little something about
the major triad. We'll have celebrated a little something.
XIV
How Whileawayans
Celebrate
Dorothy Chiliason in
the forest glade, her moon-green pajamas, big eyes, big shoulders, her broad
lips and big breasts, each with its protruding thumb, her aureole of fuzzy,
ginger-colored hair. She springs to her feet and listens. One hand up in the
air, thinking. Then both hands up. She shakes her head. She takes a gliding
step, dragging one foot. Then again. Again. She takes on some extra energy and runs a little bit.
Then stops. She thinks a little bit. Whileawayan celebratory dancing is not like Eastern dancing
with its motions in toward the body, its cushions of warm air exhaled by the
dancer, its decorations by contradictory angles (leg up, knee down, foot up;
one arm up-bent, the other arm down-bent). Nor is it at all like the
yearning-for-flight of Western ballet, limbs shooting out in heaven-aspiring
curves, the torso a mathematical point. If Indian dancing says I Am, if ballet says I Wish, what does the dance of Whileaway say?
It says I Guess. (The
intellectuality of this impossible business!)
XV
What Whileawayans
Celebrate
The full moon
The Winter solstice
(You haven't lived if you haven't seen us running around in our skivvies,
banging on pots and pans, shouting "Come back, sun! Goddammit, come back! Come back!")
The Summer solstice (rather different)
The autumnal equinox
The vernal equinox
The flowering of trees
The flowering of bushes
The planting of seeds
Happy copulation
Unhappy copulation
Longing
Jokes
Leaves falling off the trees (where deciduous)
Acquiring new shoes
Wearing same
Birth
The contemplation of a work of art
Marriages
Sport
Divorces
Anything at all
Nothing at all
Great ideas
Death
XVI
There is an unpolished, white, marble statue
of God on
Persons who look at Her longer than that have
been known to vanish right off the face of the Earth.
XVII
I have never been to Whileaway.
Whileawayans breed into themselves an immunity to ticks, mosquitoes, and other
insect parasites. I have none. And the way into Whileaway
is barred neither by time, distance, nor an angel with a flaming sword, but by
a cloud or crowd of gnats. Talking gnats.
PART SIX
I
Jeannine wakes from a dream of Whileaway. She has to go to her brother's this week.
Everything suggests to Jeannine something she has lost, although she doesn't
put it to herself this way; what she understands is that everything in the
world wears a faint coating of nostalgia, makes her cry, seems to say to her,
"You can't." She's fond of not being able to do things; somehow this
gives her a right to something. Her eyes fill with
tears. Everything's a cheat. If she gets up right now, she'll be able to make
the early bus; she also wants to get away from the dream that still lingers in
the folds of her bedclothes, in the summery smell of her soft old sheets, a
smell of herself that Jeannine likes but wouldn't admit to anybody. The bed is
full of dreamy, suspicious hollows. Jeannine yawns, out of a sense of duty. She
gets up and makes the bed, then picks paperback books up off the floor (murder
mysteries) and puts them away in her bookcase. There are clothes to wash before
she goes, clothes to put away, stockings to pair and
put in the drawers. She wraps the garbage in newspaper and carries it down
three flights to put it in the garbage can. She routs
Why does she keep having these dreams about Whileaway?
While-away. While.
I've been waiting for you so long. How much
longer must I wait?
Nights and nights
alone. ("You
can't," says the stairwell. "You can't," says the street.) A
fragment of old song drifts through her mind and lingers behind her in the
stairwell, her thoughts lingering there, too, wishing that she could be a
mermaid and float instead of walk, that she were someone else and so could
watch herself coming down the stairs, the beautiful girl who composes
everything around her to harmony:
Somebody lovely has just passed by.
II
I live between worlds. Half the time I like
doing housework, I care a lot about how I look, I warm up to men and flirt
beautifully (I mean I really admire them, though I'd die before I took the
initiative; that's men's business), I don't press my point in conversations,
and I enjoy cooking. I like to do things for other people, especially male
people. I sleep well, wake up on the dot, and don't dream. There's only one
thing wrong with me:
I'm frigid.
In my other incarnation I live out such a
plethora of conflict that you wouldn't think I'd survive, would you, but I do;
I wake up enraged, go to sleep in numbed despair, face what I know perfectly
well is condescension and abstract contempt, get into quarrels, shout, fret
about people I don't even know, live as if I were the only woman in the world
trying to buck it all, work like a pig, strew my whole apartment with notes,
articles, manuscripts, books, get frowsty, don't
care, become stridently contentious, sometimes laugh and weep within five
minutes together out of pure frustration. It takes me two hours to get to sleep
and an hour to wake up. I dream at my desk. I dream all over the place. I'm
very badly dressed.
But O how I relish my victuals! And O how I
fuck!
III
Jeannine has an older brother who's a
mathematics teacher in a
"Everyone's asking about you," says
Mrs. Dadier, giving her daughter a peck on the cheek.
"Mm," says Jeannine, still sleepy. I
duck behind the bookshelves that separate the living room from the kitchenette.
"We thought you might bring that nice
young man with you again," says Mrs. Dadier,
setting cereal and milk in front of her daughter. Jeannine retreats into sulky
impassivity. I make an awful face, which of course nobody sees.
"We've separated," says Jeannine,
untruly.
"Why?" says Mrs. Dadier,
her blue eyes opening wide. "What was the matter with him?"
He was impotent, mother. Now how could I say
that to such a nice lady? I didn't.
"Nothing," says Jeannine.
"Where's Bro?"
"Fishing," says Mrs. Dadier. Brother often goes out in the early morning and
meditates over a fishing line. The ladies don't. Mrs. Dadier
is afraid of his slipping, falling on a rock, and splitting open his head.
Jeannine doesn't like fishing.
"We're going to have a nice day,"
says Mrs. Dadier. "There's a play tonight and a
block dance. There are lots of young people, Jeannine." With her
perpetually fresh smile Mrs. Dadier clears off the
table where her daughter-in-law and the two children have breakfasted earlier;
Eileen has her hands full with the children.
"Don't, mother," says Jeannine,
looking down.
"I don't mind," says Mrs. Dadier. "Bless you, I've done it often enough."
Listless Jeannine pushes her chair back from the table. "You haven't
finished," observes Mrs. Dadier, mildly
surprised. We have to get out of here. "Well, I don't—I want to find
Bro," says Jeannine, edging out, "I'll see you," and she's gone.
Mrs. Dadier doesn't smile when there's nobody there.
Mother and daughter wear the same face at times like that—calm and deathly
tired—Jeannine idly pulling the heads off weeds at the side of the path with an
abstract viciousness completely unconnected with anything going on in her head.
Mrs. Dadier finishes the dishes and sighs. That's
done. Always to do again. Jeannine comes to the path
around the lake, the great vacation feature of the community, and starts round
it, but there seems to be nobody nearby. She had hoped she would find her
brother, who was always her favorite. ("My big brother") She sits on
the rock by the side of the path, Jeannine the baby. Out in the lake there's a
single canoe with two people in it; Jeannine's gaze, vaguely resentful, fastens
on it for a moment, and then drifts off. Her sister-in-law is worried sick
about one of the children; one of those children always has something. Jeannine
bangs her knuckles idly on the rock. She's too sour for a romantic reverie and
soon she gets up and walks on. Whoever comes to the lake anyway? Maybe Bro is
at home. She retraces her steps and takes a fork off the main path, idling
along until the lake, with its crowded fringe of trees and brush, disappears
behind her. Eileen Dadier's youngest, the little
girl, appears at the upstairs window for a moment and then vanishes. Bro is
behind the cottage, cleaning fish, protecting his sports clothes with a rubber
lab apron.
"Kiss me," says Jeannine. "O.K.?" She leans forward with her arms pulled
back to avoid getting fish scales on herself, one cheek offered invitingly. Her
brother kisses her. Eileen appears around the corner of the house, leading the
boy. "Kiss Auntie," she says. I'm so glad
to see you, Jeannie."
"Jeannine," says Jeannine
(automatically).
"Just think, Bud," says Eileen.
"She must have got in last night. Did you get in last night?"
Jeannine nods. Jeannine's nephew, who doesn't like anyone but his father, is
pulling furiously at Eileen Dadier's hand, trying
seriously to get his fingers out of hers. Bud finishes cleaning the fish. He
wipes his hands methodically on a dish towel which Eileen will have to wash by
hand to avoid contaminating her laundry, takes off his coat, and takes his
knife and cleaver into the house, from whence comes the sound of running water.
He comes out again, drying his hands on a towel
"Oh, baby," says Eileen Dadier reproachfully to her son, "be nice to
Auntie." Jeannine's brother takes his son's hand from his wife. The little
boy immediately stops wriggling.
"Jeannie," he says. "It's nice
to see you.
"When did you get in?
"When are you going to get married?"
IV
I found Jeannine on the clubhouse porch that
evening, looking at the moon. She had run away from her family.
"They only want what's good for
you," I said.
She made a face.
"They love you," I said.
A low, strangled sound. She was prodding the
porch-rail with her hand.
"I think you ought to go and rejoin them,
Jeannine," I said. "Your mother's a wonderful woman who has never
raised her voice in anger all the time you've known her. And she brought all of
you up and got you all through high school, even though she had to work. Your
brother's a firm, steady man who makes a good living for his wife and children,
and Eileen wants nothing more in the world than her husband and her little boy
and girl. You ought to appreciate them more, Jeannine."
"I know," said Jeannine softly and
precisely. Or perhaps she said Oh no.
"Jeannine, you'll never get a good
job," I said. "There aren't any now. And if there were, they'd never
give them to a woman, let alone a grown-up baby like you. Do you think you
could hold down a really good job, even if you could get one? They're all
boring anyway, hard and boring. You don't want to be a dried-up old spinster at
forty but that's what you will be if you go on like this. You're twenty-nine.
You're getting old. You ought to marry someone who can take care of you,
Jeannine."
"Don't care," said she. Or was it Not fair?
"Marry someone who can take care of
you," I went on, for her own good. "It's all right to do that; you're
a girl. Find somebody like Bud who has a good job, somebody you can respect;
marry him. There's no other life for a woman, Jeannine; do you want never to
have children? Never to have a husband? Never to have a house of your own?" (Brief
flash of waxed floor, wife in organdie apron, smiling possessively, husband
with roses. That's hers, not mine.)
"
"Now, really, what are you waiting
for?" (I was getting impatient.) "Here's Eileen married, and here's
your mother with two children, and all your old school friends, and enough
couples here around the lake to fill it up if they all jumped into it at once;
do you think you're any different? Fancy Jeannine! Refined Jeannine! What do
you think you're waiting for?"
"For a man," said Jeannine. For a plan. My
impression that somebody else had been echoing her was confirmed by a brief
cough behind me after these words. But it turned out to be Mr. Dadier, come out to fetch his sister. He took her by the
arm and pulled her toward the door. "Come on, Jeannie. We're going to
introduce you to someone."
Only the woman revealed under the light was
not Jeannine. A passerby inside saw the substitution through
the doorway and gaped. Nobody else seemed to notice. Jeannine is still
meditating by the rail: doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, poor man, rich man; maybe
he'll be tall; maybe he'll make twenty thou a year; maybe he'll speak three
languages' and be really sophisticated, maybe. Mister Destiny. Janet, who has
none of our notion that a good, dignified, ladylike look will recall the worst
of scoundrels to a shrinking consciousness of his having insulted A Lady
(that's the general idea, anyway), has gotten out of Bud Dadier's
hold by twisting his thumb. She is the victim of a natural, but ignorant and
unjustified alarm; she thinks that being grabbed is not just a gesture but is
altogether out of line. Janet's prepared for blue murder.
"Huh," says Bro. He's about to
expostulate. "What are you doing here? Who are you?"
Touch me again and I'll knock your teeth out!
You can see the blood rush to his face, even
in this bad light. That's what comes of being misunderstood. "Keep a civil
tongue in your mouth, young lady!"
Janet jeers.
"You just—" Bud Dadier
begins, but Janet anticipates him by vanishing like a soap bubble. What do you
think Bud stands for—Buddington? Budworthy? Or
"Bud" as in "friend"? He passes his hands over his face—the
only thing left of Janet is a raucous screech of triumph which nobody else
(except the two of us) can hear. The woman in front of the door is Jeannine.
Bro, scared out of his wits, as who wouldn't be, grabs her.
"Oh, Bro!" says Jeannine
reproachfully, rubbing her arm.
"You oughtn't to be out here alone,"
says he. "It looks as if you're not enjoying yourself. Mother went to
great trouble to get that extra ticket, you know."
'I'm sorry," says Jeannine penitently.
"I just wanted to see the moon."
"Well, you've seen it," says her
brother. "You've been out here for fifteen minutes. I ought to tell you,
Jeannie, Eileen and Mother and I have been talking about you and we all think
that you've got to do something with your life. You can't just go on drifting
like this. You're not twenty any more, you know."
"Oh, Bro—" says Jeannine unhappily.
Why are women so unreasonable? "Of course I want to have a good
time," she says.
"Then come inside and have one." (He
straightens his shirt collar.) "You might meet someone, if that's what you
want to do, and you say that's what you want."
"I do," says Jeannine. You too?
"Then act like it, for Heaven's sake. If
you don't do it soon, you may not have another chance. Now come on." There
are girls with nice brothers and girls with nasty brothers; there was a girl
friend of mine who had a strikingly handsome older brother who could lift
armchairs by one leg only. I was on a double date once with the two of them and
another boy, and my girl friend's brother indicated the camp counselors'
cottages. "Do you know what those are?
"Menopause
Alley!"
We all laughed. I didn't like it, but not
because it was in bad taste. As you have probably concluded by this point
(correctly) I don't have any taste; that is, I don't know what bad and good
taste are. I laughed because I knew I would have an awful fight on my hands if
I didn't. If you don't like things like that, you're a prude. Drooping like a
slave-girl, Jeannine followed Bro into the clubhouse. If only older brothers
could be regularized somehow, so that one knew what to expect! If only all
older brothers were younger brothers. "Well, who shall I marry?" said
Jeannine, trying to make it into a joke as they entered the building. He said,
with complete seriousness:
"Anybody."
V
The Great Happiness Contest
(this happens a lot)
FIRST WOMAN: I'm perfectly happy. I love my
husband and we have two darling children. I certainly don't need any change in my lot.
SECOND WOMAN: I'm even happier than you are.
My husband does the dishes every Wednesday and we have three darling children,
each nicer than the last. I'm tremendously happy.
THIRD WOMAN: Neither of you is as happy as I
am. I'm fantastically happy. My husband hasn't looked at another woman in the
fifteen years we've been married, he helps around the house whenever I ask it,
and he wouldn't mind in the least if I were to go out and get a job. But I'm
happiest in fulfilling my responsibilities to him and the children. We have
four children.
FOURTH WOMAN: We have six children. (This is too many. A long silence.) I have a part-time job as a clerk in
Bloomingdale's to pay for the children's skiing lessons, but I really feel I'm
expressing myself best when I make a custard or a
meringue or decorate the basement.
ME: You miserable nits, I have a Nobel Peace
Prize, fourteen published novels, six lovers, a town house, a box at the
Metropolitan Opera, I fly a plane, I fix my own car, and I can do eighteen
push-ups before breakfast, that is, if you're interested in numbers.
ALL THE WOMEN: Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill
OR, FOR STARTERS
HE: I can't stand stupid, vulgar women who
read Love Comix and have no intellectual interests.
ME: Oh my, neither can I.
HE: I really admire refined, cultivated,
charming women who have careers.
ME: Oh my, so do I.
HE: Why do you think those awful, stupid,
vulgar, commonplace women get so awful?
ME: Well, probably, not wishing to give any
offense and after considered judgment and all that, and very tentatively, with the hope that you won't
jump on me—I think it's at least partly your fault.
(Long silence)
HE: You know, on second thought, I think
bitchy, castrating, unattractive, neurotic women are even worse. Besides,
you're showing your age. And your figure's going.
OR
HE: Darling, why must you work part-time as a
rug salesman?
SHE: Because I wish to enter the marketplace
and prove that in spite of my sex I can take a fruitful part in the life of the
community and earn what our culture proposes as the sign and symbol of adult
independence—namely money.
HE: But darling, by the time we deduct the
cost of a baby-sitter and nursery school, a higher tax bracket, and your box
lunches from your pay, it actually costs us money for you to work. So you see, you aren't making money at all. You can't make money. Only
I can make money. Stop working.
SHE: I won't. And I hate you.
HE: But darling, why be irrational? It doesn't
matter that you can't make money because I can make money. And after
I've made it, I give it to you, because I love you. So you don't have to make money. Aren't you glad?
SHE: No. Why can't you stay home and take care
of the baby? Why can't we deduct all those things from your pay? Why should I
be glad because I can't earn a living? Why—
HE (with dignity): This argument is becoming
degraded and ridiculous. I will leave you alone until loneliness, dependence,
and a consciousness that I am very much displeased once again turn you into the
sweet girl I married. There is no use in arguing with a woman.
OR, LAST OF ALL
HE: Is your dog drinking cold fountain water?
SHE: I guess so.
HE: If your dog drinks cold water, he'll get
colic.
SHE: It's a she. And I don't care about the
colic. You know, what I really worry about is bringing her out in public when
she's in heat like this. I'm not afraid she'll get colic, but that she might
get pregnant.
HE: They're the same thing, aren't they? Har har har.
SHE: Maybe for your mother they were.
(At this point Joanna the Grate swoops down on
bat's wings, lays He low with one mighty swatt, and elevates She and Dog to the constellation of
Victoria Femina, where they sparkle forever.)
I know that somewhere, just to give me the
lie, lives a beautiful (got to be beautiful), intellectual, gracious,
cultivated, charming woman who has eight children, bakes her own bread, cakes,
and pies, takes care of her own house, does her own cooking, brings up her own
children, holds down a demanding nine-to-five job at the top decision-making
level in a man's field, and is adored by her equally successful husband because
although a hard-driving, aggressive business executive with eye of eagle, heart
of lion, tongue of adder, and muscles of gorilla (she looks just like Kirk
Douglas), she comes home at night, slips into a filmy negligee and a wig, and
turns instanter into a Playboy
dimwit, thus laughingly dispelling the canard that you cannot be
eight people simultaneously with two different sets of values. She has not lost her femininity . And I'm
Marie of
VI
Jeannine is going to put on her Mommy's shoes.
That caretaker of childhood and feminine companion of men is
waiting for her at the end of the road we all must travel. She swam, went for
walks, went to dances, had a picnic with another girl; she got books from town;
newspapers for her brother, murder mysteries for Mrs. Dadier,
and nothing for herself. At twenty-nine you can't waste your time reading.
Either they're too young or they're married or they're bad-looking or there's
something awful about them. Rejects. Jeannine went out
a couple of times with the son of a friend of her mother's and tried to make
conversation with him; she decided that he wasn't really so bad-looking, if
only he'd talk more. They went canoeing in the middle of the lake one day and
he said:
"I have to tell you something,
Jeannine."
She thought: This
is it, and her stomach knotted up.
"I'm married," he said, taking off
his glasses, "but my wife and I are separated. She's living with her
mother in
"Oh," Jeannine said, flustered and
not knowing what to say. She hadn't liked him particularly, but the
disappointment was very bad. There is some barrier between Jeannine and real
life which can be removed only by a man or by marriage; somehow Jeannine is not
in touch with what everybody knows to be real life. He blinked at her with his
naked eyes and oh lord, he was fat and plain; but Jeannine managed to smile.
She didn't want to hurt his feelings.
"I knew you'd understand," he said
in a choked voice, nearly crying. He pressed her hand. "I knew you'd
understand, Jeannie." She began reckoning him up again, that swift
calculation that was quite automatic by now: the looks, the job, whether he was
"romantic," did he read poetry? whether he
could be made to dress better or diet or put on weight (whichever it was),
whether his hair could be cut better. She could make herself feel something
about him, yes. She could rely on him. After all, his wife might divorce him.
He was intelligent. He was promising. "I understand," she said,
against the grain. After all, there wasn't anything wrong with him exactly;
from shore it must really look quite good, the canoe, the pretty girl, the
puffy summer clouds, Jeannine's sun-shade (borrowed
from the girl friend she'd had the picnic with). There couldn't be that much
wrong with it. She smiled a little. His contribution is Make me feel good; her contribution is Make me exist . The sun came out over the water
and it really was quite nice. And there was this painful stirring of feeling in
her, this terrible tenderness or need, so perhaps she was beginning to love
him, in her own way.
"Are you busy tonight?" Poor man. She wet her lips and didn't answer, feeling the
sun strike her on all sides, deliciously aware of her bare arms and neck, the
picture she made. "Mm?" she said.
"I thought—I thought you might want to go
to the play." He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face with it. He
put his glasses back on.
"You ought to wear sunglasses," said
Jeannine, imagining how he might look that way. "Yes, Bud and Eileen were
going. Would you like to join us?" The surprised gratitude of a man
reprieved. I really do like him . He bent
closer—this alarmed her for the canoe, as well as disgusted her (Freud says disgust
is a prominent expression of the sexual life in civilized people) and she cried
out, "Don't! We'll fall in!" He righted himself. By
degrees.
You've got to get to know people. She was frightened, almost, by the
access of being that came to her from him, frightened at the richness of the
whole scene, at how much she felt without feeling it for him, terrified lest
the sun might go behind a cloud and withdraw everything from her again.
"What time shall I pick you up?" he
said.
VII
That night Jeannine fell in love with an
actor. The theatre was a squat, low building finished
pink stucco like a summertime movie palace and built in the middle of a grove
of pine trees. The audience sat on hard wooden chairs and watched a college
group play "Charley's Aunt." Jeannine didn't get up or go out during
the intermission but only sat, stupefied, fanning herself with her program and
wishing that she had the courage to make some sort of change in her life. She
couldn't take her eyes off the stage. The presence of her brother and
sister-in-law irked her unbearably and every time she became aware of her date
by her elbow, she wanted to turn in on herself and disappear, or run outside,
or scream. It didn't matter which actor or which character she fell in love
with; even Jeannine knew that; it was the unreality of the scene onstage that
made her long to be in it or on it or two-dimensional, anything to quiet her
unstable heart; I'm not fit to live,
she said. There was more pain in it than pleasure; it had been getting worse
for some years, until Jeannine now dreaded doing it; I can't help it, she said. She added,
I'm not fit to exist.
I'll feel better tomorrow. She thought of Bud
taking his little girl fishing (that had happened that morning, over Eileen's
protests) and tears rose in her eyes. The pain of it. The painful pleasure. She saw, through a haze of distress,
the one figure on stage who mattered to her. She
willed it so. Roses and raptures in the dark. She was terrified of the moment
when the curtain would fall—in love as in
pain, in misery, in trouble. If only you could stay half-dead.
Eventually the curtain (a gray velvet one, much worn) did close, and opened
again on the troupe's curtain calls; Jeannine mumbled something about it being
too hot and ran outside, shaking with terror; who am I, what am I, what do I
want, where do I go, what world is this? One of the neighborhood children was
selling lemonade, with a table and chairs pitched on the carpet of dead pine
needles under the trees. Jeannine bought some, to color her loneliness; I did,
too, and it was awful stuff. (If anybody finds me,
I'll say it was too warm and I wanted a drink.) She walked blindly
into the woods and stood a little way from the theatre, leaning her forehead
against a tree-trunk. I said Jeannine, why are you
unhappy?
I'm not unhappy.
You have everything (I said). What is there
that you want and haven't got?
I want to die.
Do you want to be an airline pilot? Is that
it? And they won't let you? Did you have a talent for mathematics, which they
squelched? Did they refuse to let you be a truck driver? What is it?
I want to live.
I will leave you and your imaginary distresses
(said I) and go converse with somebody who makes more sense; really, one would
think you'd been balked of some vital necessity. Money?
You've got a job. Love? You've been going out with
boys since you were thirteen.
I know.
You can't expect romance to last your life
long, Jeannine: candlelight dinners and dances and pretty clothes are nice but
they aren't the whole of life. There comes a time when one has to live the
ordinary side of life and romance is a very small part of that. No matter how
nice it is to be courted and taken out, eventually you say "I do" and
that's that. It may be a great adventure, but there are fifty or sixty years to
fill up afterwards. You can't do that with romance alone, you know. Think,
Jeannine—fifty or sixty years!
I know.
Well?
(Silence)
Well, what do you want?
(She didn't answer)
I'm trying to talk to you sensibly, Jeannine.
You say you don't want a profession and you don't want a man—in fact, you just
fell in love but you condemn that as silly—so what is it that you want? Well?
Nothing.
That's not true, dear. Tell me what you want.
Come on.
I want love. (She dropped her paper cup of
lemonade and covered her face with her hands.)
Go ahead. The world's full of people.
I can't.
Can't? Why not? You've got a date here
tonight, haven't you? You've never had trouble attracting men's interest
before. So go to it.
Not that way.
"What way?" (said
I).
Not the real way.
"What!" (said
I).
I want something else, she repeated, something else.
"Well, Jeannine," said I, "if
you don't like reality and human nature, I don't know what else you can have," and I quit her and left her
standing on the pine needles in the shadow cast by the trees, away from the
crowd and the flood-lights fastened to the outside of the theatre building.
Jeannine is very romantic. She's building a whole philosophy from the cry of
the crickets and her heart's anguish. But that won't last. She will slowly come
back to herself. She'll return to Bud and Eileen and her job of fascinating the
latest X. Jeannine, back in the theatre building with Bud and Eileen, looked in
the mirror set up over the ticket window so lady spectators could put on their
lipstick, and jumped—"Who's that!"
"Stop it, Jeannie," said Bud.
"What's the matter with you?" We all looked and it was Jeannine
herself, sure enough, the same graceful slouch and thin figure, the same
nervous, oblique glance.
"Why, it's you, darling," said Eileen,
laughing. Jeannine had been shocked right out of her sorrow. She turned to her
sister-in-law and said, with unwonted energy, between her teeth: "What do
you want out of life, Eileen? Tell me!"
"Oh honey," said Eileen, "what
should I want? I want just what I've got." X came out of the men's room. Poor fellow. Poor lay figure.
"Jeannie wants to know what life is all
about," said Bud. "What do you think, Frank? Do you have any words of
wisdom for us?"
"I think that you are all awful,"
said Jeannine vehemently. X laughed nervously. "Well now, I don't
know," he said.
That's my trouble, too. My knowledge was taken
away from me.
(She remembered the actor in the play and her
throat constricted. It hurt, it hurt. Nobody saw, though.)
"Do you think," she
said very low, to X, "that you could know what you wanted, only after a
while—I mean, they don't mean to do it, but life—people—people could confuse
things?"
"I know what I want," said Eileen
brightly. "I want to go home and take the baby from Mama. Okay,
honey?"
"I don't mean—" Jeannine began.
"Oh, Jeannie!" said Eileen
affectionately, possibly more for X's benefit than her sister-in-law's;
"Oh, Jeannie!" and kissed her. Bud gave her a peck on the cheek.
Don't you touch me!
"Want a drink?" said X, when Bud and
Eileen had gone.
"I want to know," said Jeannine,
almost under her breath, "what you want out of life and I'm not moving
until you tell me." He stared.
"Come on," she said. He smiled
nervously.
"Well, I'm going to night school. I'm
going to finish my B.A. this winter." (He's going to night school. He's
going to finish his B.A. Wowie zowie.
I'm not impressed.)
"Really?" said Jeannine, in real
awe.
"Really," he said. Score one. That radiant look of gratitude. Maybe she'll react the same
way when he tells her he can ski. In this loveliest and neatest of social
interactions, she admires him, he's pleased with her admiration, this pleasure
lends him warmth and style, he relaxes, he genuinely likes Jeannine; Jeannine
sees this and something stirs, something hopes afresh. Is he The One? Can he
Change Her Life? (Do you know what you want? No. Then don't complain.) Fleeing
from the unspeakableness of her own wishes—for what
happens when you find out you want something that doesn't exist?—Jeannine lands
in the lap of the possible. A drowning woman, she takes X's willing, merman
hands; maybe it's wanting to get married, maybe she's
just waited too long. There's love; there's
joy—in marriage, and you must take your chances as they come. They say life
without love does strange things to you; maybe you begin to doubt love's
existence.
I shouted at her and beat her on the back and
on the head; oh I was an enraged and evil spirit there in the theatre lobby,
but she continued holding poor X by the hands—little did he know what hopes
hung on him as she continued (I say) to hold on to his hands and look into his
flattered eyes. Little did she know that he was a water-dweller and would drown
her. Little did she know that there was, attached to
his back, a drowning machine issued him in his teens along with his pipe and
his tweeds and his ambition and his profession and his father's mannerisms.
Somewhere is The One. The solution. Fulfillment.
Fulfilled women. Filled full.
My Prince. Come. Come away, Death. She stumbles into
her Mommy's shoes, little girl playing house. I could kick her. And X thinks,
poor, deceived bastard, that it's a tribute to him, of all
people—as if he had anything to do with it! (I still don't know whom she
saw or thought she saw in the mirror. Was it Janet? Me?) I want to get married.
VIII
Men succeed. Women get married.
Men fail. Women get married.
Men enter monasteries. Women get married.
Men start wars. Women get married.
Men stop them. Women get married.
Dull, dull. (see
below)
IX
Jeannine came around to her brother's house
the next morning, just for fun. She had set her hair and was wearing a swanky
scarf over the curlers. Both Mrs. Dadier and Jeannine
know that there's nothing in a breakfast nook to make it intrinsically
interesting for thirty years; nonetheless Jeannine giggles and twirls the
drinking straw in her breakfast cocoa fancifully this way and that. It's the
kind of straw that has a pleated section in the middle like the bellows of a
concertina.
"I always liked these when I was a little
girl," Jeannine says.
"Oh my yes, didn't you," says Mrs. Dadier, who is sitting with her second cup of coffee before
attacking the dishes.
Jeannine gives way to a fit of hysterics.
"Do you remember—?" she cries.
"And do you remember—!"
"Heavens, yes," says Mrs. Dadier. "Don't I,
though."
They sit, saying nothing.
"Did Frank call?" This is Mrs. Dadier, carefully keeping her voice neutral because she
knows how Jeannine hates interference in her own affairs. Jeannine makes a face
and then laughs again. "Oh, give him time, Mother," she says.
"It's only ten o'clock." She seems to see the funny side of it more
than Mrs. Dadier does. "Bro," says the
latter, "was up at five and Eileen and I got up at eight. I know this is
your vacation, Jeannine, but in the country—"
"I did
get up at eight," says Jeannine, aggrieved. (She's lying.) "I did. I
walked around the lake. I don't know why you keep telling me how late I get up;
that may have been true a long time ago but it's certainly not true now, and I
resent your saying so." The sun has gone in again. When Bud isn't around,
there's Jeannie to watch out for, Mrs. Dadier tries
to anticipate her wishes and not disturb her.
"Well, I keep forgetting," says Mrs.
Dadier. "Your silly old
mother! Bud says I wouldn't remember my head if it wasn't screwed
on." It doesn't work. Jeannine, slightly sulky, attacks her toast and jam,
cramming a piece into her mouth cater-cornered. Jam drops on the table.
Jeannine, implacably convicted of getting up late, is taking it out on the
table-cloth. Getting up late is wallowing in sin. It's unforgivable. It's
improper. Mrs. Dadier, with the misplaced courage of
the doomed, chooses to ignore the jam stains and get on with the really
important question, viz., is Jeannine
going to have a kitchenette of her own (although it will really belong to
someone else, won't it) and is she going to be made to get up early, i.e., Get Married. Mrs. Dadier
says very carefully and placatingly:
"Darling, have you ever had any thoughts
about—" but this morning, instead of flinging off in a rage, her daughter
kisses her on the top of the head and announces, "I'm going to do the
dishes."
"Oh, no," says Mrs. Dadier deprecatingly; "My goodness, don't. I don't
mind." Jeannine winks at her. She feels virtuous (because of the dishes)
and daring (because of something else). "Going to make a phone call,"
she says, sauntering into the living room. Not
doing the dishes . She sits herself down in the rattan chair
and twirls the pencil her mother always keeps by the telephone pad. She draws
flowers on the pad and the profiles of girls whose eyes are nonetheless in
full-face. Should she call X? Should she wait for X to call her? When he calls,
should she be effusive or reserved? Comradely or distant?
Should she tell X about
"Hello?" (It's his mother.) Jeannine
glibly repeats the fake message she has practiced in her head; X's mother says,
"Here's Frank. Frank, it's Jeannine Dadier."
Horror. More footsteps.
"Hello?" says X.
"Oh my, it's you; I didn't know you were
there," says Jeannine.
"Hey!" says X, pleased. This is even
more than she has a right to expect, according to the rules.
"Oh, I just called to tell your mother
something," says Jeannine, drawing irritable, jagged lines across her
doodles on the telephone pad. She keeps trying to think of the night before,
but all she can remember is Bud playing with his youngest daughter, the only
time she's ever seen her brother get foolish. He bounces her on his knee and
gets red in the face, swinging her about his head while she screams with
delight. "Silly Sally went to town! Silly Sally flew a-r-o-o-und!"
Eileen usually rescues the baby on the grounds that she's getting too excited.
For some reason this whole memory causes Jeannine great pain and she can hardly
keep her mind on what she's saying.
"I thought you'd already gone," says
Jeannine hastily. He's going on and on about something or other, the cost of
renting boats on the lake or would she like to play tennis.
"Oh, I love tennis," says Jeannine,
who doesn't even own a racket.
Would she like to come over that afternoon?
She leans away from the telephone to consult
an imaginary appointment book, imaginary friends; she allows reluctantly that oh
yes, she might have some free time. It would really be fun to brush up on her
tennis. Not that she's really good, she adds hastily. X chuckles. Well, maybe.
There are a few more commonplaces and she hangs up, bathed in perspiration and
ready to weep. What's the matter with me?
She should be happy, or at least smug, and here she is experiencing the keenest
sorrow. What on earth for? She digs her pencil vindictively into the telephone
pad as if it were somehow responsible. Damn you.
Perversely, images of silly
"
Shocked at her own treachery, she bursts into
tears. She hears
"
"Mother!" she says in a sudden flood
of happiness and excitement, for the importance of what she has just done has
suddenly become clear to her, "Mother!" (waving
wildly out the window) "Guess what!" Mrs. Dadier,
who is on her knees in the carrot bed, straightens up, shading her face with
her one hand. "What is it, darling?"
"Mother, I'm getting married!" What
comes after this will be very exciting, a sort of
dramatic presentation, for Jeannine will have a big wedding. Mrs. Dadier drops her gardening trowel in sheer astonishment.
She'll hurry inside, a tremendous elevation of mood enveloping both women; they
will, in fact, embrace and kiss one another, and Jeannine will dance around the
kitchen. "Wait 'til Bro hears about this!"
Jeannine will exclaim. Both will cry. It's the first time in Jeannine's life
that she's managed to do something perfectly O.K. And not too
late, either. She thinks that perhaps the lateness of her marriage will
be compensated for by a special mellowness; there must be, after all, some
reason for all that experimenting, all that reluctance. She imagines the day
she will be able to announce even better news: "Mother, I'm going to have
a baby." Cal himself hardly figures in this at all, for Jeannine has
forgotten his laconism, his passivity, his strange mournfulness unconnected to
any clear emotion, his abruptness, how hard it is to get him to talk about
anything. She hugs herself, breathless with joy, waiting for Mrs. Dadier to hurry inside; "My little baby!" Mrs. Dadier will say emotionally, embracing Jeannine. It seems
to Jeannine that she has never known anything so solid
and beautiful as the kitchen in the morning sunlight, with the walls glowing
and everything so delicately outlined in light, so fresh and real. Jeannine,
who has almost been killed by an unremitting and drastic discipline not of her
own choosing, who has been maimed almost to death by a vigilant
self-suppression quite irrelevant to anything she once wanted or loved, here
finds her reward. This proves it is all right. Everything is indubitably good
and indubitably real. She loves herself, and if I stand like Atropos in the corner, with my arm around the shadow of her
dead self, if the other Jeannine (who is desperately tired and knows there is
no freedom for her this side the grave) attempts to touch her as she whirls
joyfully past, Jeannine does not see or hear it. At one stroke she has
amputated her past. She's going to be fulfilled. She hugs herself and waits.
That's all you have to do if you are a real, first-class Sleeping Beauty. She
knows.
I'm so happy.
And there, but for the grace of God, go I.
PART SEVEN
I
I'll tell you how I turned into a man.
First I had to turn into a woman.
For a long time I had been neuter, not a woman
at all but One Of The Boys, because if you walk into a gathering of men,
professionally or otherwise, you might as well be wearing a sandwich board that
says: LOOK! I HAVE TITS! there is this giggling and this chuckling and this
reddening and this Uriah Heep twisting and writhing
and this fiddling with ties and fixing of buttons and making of allusions and
quoting of courtesies and this self-conscious gallantry plus a smirky insistence on my physique—all this dreary junk just
to please me. If you get good at being One Of The Boys
it goes away. Of course there's a certain disembodiment involved, but the
sandwich board goes; I back-slapped and laughed at blue jokes, especially the
hostile kind. Underneath you keep saying pleasantly but firmly No no no no
no no. But it's necessary
to my job and I like my job. I suppose they decided that my tits were not of
the best kind, or not real, or that they were someone else's (my twin
sister's), so they split me from the neck up; as I said, it demands a certain
disembodiment. I thought that surely when I had acquired my Ph.D. and my
professorship and my tennis medal and my engineer's contract and my ten
thousand a year and my full-time housekeeper and my reputation and the respect
of my colleagues, when I had grown strong, tall, and beautiful, when my I.Q.
shot past 200, when I had genius, then
I could take off my sandwich board. I left my smiles and happy laughter at
home. I'm not a woman; I'm a man. I'm a man with a woman's face. I'm a woman
with a man's mind. Everybody says so. In my pride of intellect I entered a
bookstore; I purchased a book; I no longer had to placate The Man; by God, I
think I'm going to make it. I purchased a copy of John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women; now who can object to
John Stuart Mill? He's dead. But the clerk did. With familiar archness he
waggled his finger at me and said "tsk tsk"; all that writhing and fussing began again, what
fun it was for him to have someone automatically not above reproach, and I knew
beyond the shadow of a hope that to be female is to be mirror and honeypot, servant and judge, the terrible Rhadamanthus for whom he must perform but whose judgment is
not human and whose services are at anyone's command, the vagina dentata and the stuffed teddy-bear he gets if he passes the
test. This is until you're forty-five, ladies, after which you vanish into thin
air like the smile of the Cheshire cat, leaving behind only a disgusting
grossness and a subtle poison that automatically infects every man under
twenty-one. Nothing can put you above this or below this or beyond it or
outside of it, nothing, nothing, nothing at all, not your muscles or your
brains, not being one of the boys or being one of the girls or writing books or
writing letters or screaming or wringing your hands or cooking lettuce or being
too tall or being too short or traveling or staying at home or ugliness or acne
or diffidence or cowardice or perpetual shrinking and old age. In the latter
cases you're only doubly damned. I went away—"forever feminine," as
the man says—and I cried as I drove my car, and I wept by the side of the road
(because I couldn't see and I might crash into something) and I howled and
wrung my hands as people do only in medieval romances, for an American woman's
closed car is the only place in which she can be alone (if she's unmarried) and
the howl of a sick she-wolf carries around the world, whereupon the world
thinks it's very comical. Privacy in cars, in bathrooms, what ideas we have! If
they tell me about the pretty clothes again, I'll kill myself.
I had a five-year-old self who said: Daddy won't love you.
I had a ten-year-old self who said: the boys won't play with you .
I had a fifteen-year-old self who said: nobody will marry you .
I had a twenty-year-old self who said: you can't be fulfilled without a child. (A year there where I had recurrent nightmares about abdominal
cancer which nobody would take out.)
I'm a sick woman, a madwoman, a ball-breaker,
a man-eater; I don't consume men gracefully with my fire-like red hair or my
poisoned kiss; I crack their joints with these filthy ghoul's claws and
standing on one foot like a de-clawed cat, rake at your feeble efforts to save
yourselves with my taloned hinder feet: my matted
hair, my filthy skin, my big flat plaques of green bloody teeth. I don't think
my body would sell anything. I don't think I would be good to look at. O of all
diseases self-hate is the worst and I don't mean for the one who suffers it!
Do you know, all this time you preached at me?
You told me that even Grendel's mother was actuated
by maternal love.
You told me ghouls were male.
Rodan is male—and asinine.
King Kong is male.
I could have been a witch, but the Devil is
male.
Faust is male.
The man who dropped the bomb on
I was never on the moon.
Then there are the birds, with (as Shaw so
nobly puts it) the touching poetry of their loves and nestings
in which the males sing so well and beautifully and the females sit on the
nest, and the baboons who get torn in half (female) by the others (male), and
the chimpanzees with their hierarchy (male) written about by professors (male)
with their hierarchy, who accept (male)
the (male) view of (female) (male). You can see what's happening. At heart I
must be gentle, for I never even thought of the praying mantis or the female
wasp; but I guess I am just loyal to my own phylum. One might as well dream of
being an oak tree. Chestnut tree, great-rooted hermaphrodite.
I won't tell you what poets and prophets my mind is crammed full of (Deborah,
who said "Me, too, pretty please?" and got struck with leprosy), or
Whom I prayed to (exciting my own violent hilarity) or whom I avoided on the
street (male) or whom I watched on television (male) excepting in my hatred
only—if I remember—Buster Crabbe, who is the former Flash Gordon and a swimming
instructor (I think) in real life, and in whose humanly handsome, gentle,
puzzled old face I had the absurd but moving fancy that I saw some reflection
of my own bewilderment at our mutual prison. Of course I don't know him and no
one is responsible for his shadow on the screen or what madwomen may see there;
I lay in my bed (which is not male), made in a factory by a (male) designed by
a (male) and sold to me by a (small male) with unusually bad manners. I mean
unusually bad manners for anybody.
You see how very
different this is from the way things used to be in the bad old
days, say five years ago. New Yorkers (female) have had the right to abortion
for almost a year now, if you can satisfy the hospital boards that you deserve
bed-room and don't mind the nurses calling you Baby Killer; citizens of
Toronto, Canada, have perfectly free access to contraception if they are
willing to travel 100 miles to cross the border, I could smoke my very own
cigarette if I smoked (and get my very own lung cancer). Forward, eternally
forward! Some of my best friends are—I was about to say that some of my best
friends are—my friends—
My friends are dead.
Whoever saw women
scaring anybody? (This was while I thought it important to be able to scare
people.) You cannot say, to paraphrase an old, good friend, that there are the
plays of Shakespeare and Shakespeare was a woman, or that Columbus sailed the
Atlantic and Columbus was a woman or that Alger Hiss was tried for treason and
Alger Hiss was a woman. (Mata Hari was not a spy; she
was a fuckeress.) Anyway
everyboy (sorry) everybody knows that what women have
done that is really important is not to constitute a great, cheap labor force
that you can zip in when you're at war and zip out again afterwards but to Be
Mothers, to form the coming generation, to give birth to them, to nurse them,
to mop floors for them, to love them, cook for them, clean for them, change
their diapers, pick up after them, and mainly sacrifice themselves for them.
This is the most important job in the world. That's why they don't pay you for
it.
I cried, and then stopped crying because
otherwise I would never have stopped crying. Things come to an awful dead
center that way. You will notice that even my diction is becoming feminine,
thus revealing my true nature; I am not saying "Damn" any more, or
"Blast"; I am putting in lots of qualifiers like "rather,"
I am writing in these breathless little feminine tags, she threw herself down
on the bed, I have no structure (she thought), my thoughts seep out shapelessly
like menstrual fluid, it is all very female and deep and full of essences, it
is very primitive and full of "and's," it
is called "run-on sentences."
Very swampy in my
mind. Very
rotten and badly off. I am a woman. I am a woman with a woman's brain. I
am a woman with a woman's sickness. I am a woman with the wraps off, bald as an
adder, God help me and you.
II
Then I turned into a man.
This was slower and less dramatic.
I think it had something to do with the
knowledge you suffer when you're an outsider—I mean suffer;
I do not mean undergo or employ or tolerate
or use or enjoy
or catalogue or file away or entertain
or possess or have .
That knowledge is, of course, the perception
of all experience through two sets of eyes, two systems of value, two habits of
expectation, almost two minds. This is supposed to be an infallible recipe for
driving you gaga. Chasing the hare Reconciliation with the hounds of
Persistence—but there, you see? I'm not Sir Thomas Nasshe
(or Lady Nasshe, either, tho'
she never wrote a line, poor thing). Rightaway you
start something, down comes the portcullis. Blap. To
return to knowledge, I think it was seeing the lords of the earth at lunch in
the company cafeteria that finally did me in; as another friend of mine once
said, men's suits are designed to inspire confidence even if the men can't. But
their shoes —! Dear God. And
their ears! Jesus. The
innocence, the fresh-faced naivete of power. The childlike simplicity with which they trust their lives to the
Black men who cook for them and their self-esteem and their vanity and their
little dangles to me, who everything for them. Their
ignorance, their utter, happy ignorance. There was the virgin We sacrificed on the company quad when the moon was full.
(You thought a virgin meant a girl, didn't you?) There was Our
thinking about housework—dear God, scholarly papers about housework, what could
be more absurd! And Our parties where we pinched and
chased Each Other. Our comparing the prices of women's
dresses and men's suits. Our push-ups. Our crying in Each Other's company. Our
gossip. Our trivia. All
trivia, not worth an instant's notice by any rational being. If you see Us skulking through the bushes at the rising of the moon,
don't look. And don't wait around. Watch the wall, my darling, you'd better.
Like all motion, I couldn't feel it while it went on, but this is what you have
to do:
To resolve contrarieties, unite them in your
own person.
This means: in all hopelessness, in terror of
your life, without a future, in the sink of the worst despair that you can
endure and will yet leave you the sanity to make a choice—take in your bare
right hand one naked, severed end of a high-tension wire. Take the other in
your left hand. Stand in a puddle. (Don't worry about letting go; you can't.)
Electricity favors the prepared mind, and if you interfere in this avalanche by
accident you will be knocked down dead, you will be charred like a cutlet, and
your eyes will be turned to burst red jellies, but if those wires are your own
wires—hang on. God will keep your eyes in your head and your joints knit one to
the other. When She sends the high voltage alone, well, we've all experienced
those little shocks—you just shed it over your outside like a duck and it does
nothing to you—but when She roars down high voltage and high amperage both, She
is after your marrow-bones; you are making yourself a conduit for holy terror
and the ecstasy of Hell. But only in that way can the wires heal themselves.
Only in that way can they heal you. Women are not used to power; that avalanche
of ghastly strain will lock your muscles and your teeth in the attitude of an
electrocuted rabbit, but you are a strong woman, you are God's favorite, and
you can endure; if you can say "yes, okay, go on"—after all, where
else can you go? What else can you do?—if you let yourself through yourself and
into yourself and out of yourself, turn yourself inside out, give yourself the
kiss of reconciliation, marry yourself, love yourself—
Well, I turned into a man.
We love, says Plato, that in which we are
defective; when we see our magical Self in the mirror of another, we pursue it
with desperate cries— Stop! I must possess you!—but
if it obligingly stops and turns, how on earth can one then possess it?
Fucking, if you will forgive the pun, is an anti-climax. And you are as poor as
before. For years I wandered in the desert, crying: Why
do you torment me so? and Why do you hate me so ? and
Why do you put me down so? and / will abase myself
and I will please you and Why, oh why have you forsaken me ? This is very
feminine. What I learned late in life, under my rain of lava, under my
kill-or-cure, unhappily, slowly, stubbornly, barely, and in really dreadful
pain, was that there is one and only one way to possess that in which we are
defective, therefore that which we need, therefore that which we want.
Become it.
(Man, one assumes, is the proper study of
Mankind. Years ago we were all cave Men. Then there is Java Man
and the future of Man and the values of Western Man and existential Man and
economic Man and Freudian Man and the Man in the moon and modern Man and
eighteenth-century Man and too many Mans to count or look at or believe. There
is Mankind. An eerie twinge of laughter garlands these paradoxes. For years I
have been saying Let me in, Love me, Approve me,
Define me, Regulate me, Validate me, Support me . Now I say Move over . If we are all Mankind, it
follows to my interested and righteous and right now very bright and beady
little eyes, that I too am a Man and not at all a Woman, for honestly now,
whoever heard of Java Woman and existential Woman and the values of Western
Woman and scientific Woman and alienated nineteenth-century Woman and all the
rest of that dingy and antiquated rag-bag? All the rags in it are White,
anyway. I think I am a Man; I think you had better call me a Man; I think you
will write about me as a Man from now on and speak of me as a Man and employ me
as a Man and recognize child-rearing as a Man's business; you will think of me
as a Man and treat me as a Man until it enters your muddled, terrified,
preposterous, nine-tenths-fake, loveless, papier-mache-bull-moose
head that I am a man . (And you are a
woman.) That's the whole secret. Stop hugging Moses' tablets to your chest,
nitwit; you'll cave in. Give me your Linus blanket,
child. Listen to the female man.
If you don't, by God and all the Saints, I'll
break your neck.)
III
We would gladly have listened to her (they
said) if only she had spoken like a lady.
But they are liars and the truth is not in them.
Shrill… vituperative… no concern for the
future of society… maunderings of antiquated feminism… selfish femlib… needs a good lay… this shapeless book… of course a
calm and objective discussion is beyond… twisted, neurotic… some truth buried
in a largely hysterical… of very limited interest, I should… another tract for
the trash-can… burned her bra and thought that… no characterization, no plot…
really important issues are neglected while… hermetically sealed… women's
limited experience… another of the screaming sisterhood… a not very appealing
aggressiveness… could have been done with wit if the author had… deflowering
the pretentious male… a man would have given his right arm to… hardly girlish…
a woman's book… another shrill polemic which the… a mere male like myself can
hardly… a brilliant but basically confused study of feminine hysteria which…
feminine lack of objectivity… this pretense at a novel… trying to shock… the
tired tricks of the anti-novelists… how often must a poor critic have to… the
usual boring obligatory references to Lesbianism… denial of the profound sexual
polarity which… an all too womanly refusal to face facts… pseudo-masculine
brusqueness… the ladies'-magazine level… trivial topics like housework and the
predictable screams of… those who cuddled up to ball-breaker Kate will…
unfortunately sexless in its outlook… drivel… a warped clinical protest
against… violently waspish attack… formidable self-pity which erodes any chance
of… formless… the inability to accept the female role which… the predictable
fury at anatomy displaced to… without the grace and compassion which we have
the right to expect… anatomy is destiny… destiny is anatomy… sharp and funny
but without real weight or anything beyond a topical… just plain bad… we
"dear ladies," whom Russ would do away with, unfortunately just don't
feel… ephemeral trash, missiles of the
sex war… a female lack of experience which…
Q.E.D. Quod erat demonstrandum. It has
been proved.
IV
Janet has begun to follow strange men on the
street; whatever will become of her? She does this either out of curiosity or
just to annoy me; whenever she sees someone who interests her, woman or man,
she swerves automatically (humming a little tune, da-dum,
da-dee) and continues walking but in the opposite
direction. When Whileawayan 1 meets Whileawayan 2, the first utters a compound Whileawayan word which may be translated as
"Hello-yes?" to which the answer may be the same phrase repeated (but
without the rising inflection), "Hello-no."
"Hello" alone, silence, or "No!"
"Hello-yes" means I wish to strike up a conversation,
"Hello" means I don't mind your
remaining here but I don't wish to talk; "Hello-no" Stay here if you like but don't bother me in any way; silence
I'd be much obliged if you'd get out of here; I'm
in a foul temper. Silence accompanied by a quick shake of the head
means I'm not ill-tempered but I have other
reasons for wanting to be alone . "No!" means Get away or I'll do that to you which you won't like .
(In contradistinction to our customs, it is the late-comer who has the moral
edge, Whileawayan 1 having already got some relief or
enjoyment out of the convenient bench or flowers or spectacular
mountain or whatever's at issue.) Each of these responses may be used as
salutations, of course.
I asked Janet what happens if both Whileawayans say "No!"
"Oh" she says (bored), "they
fight."
"Usually one of us runs away," she
added.
Janet is sitting next to Laura Rose on my nubbly-brown couch, half-asleep, half all over her friend
in a confiding way, her head resting on Laur's
responsible shoulder. A young she-tiger with a large, floppy
cub. In her dozing Janet has shed ten years' anxiety and twenty pounds
of trying-to-impress-others; she must be so much younger and sillier with her
own people; grubbing in the tomato patch or chasing lost cows; what Safety and
Peace officers do is beyond me. (A cow found her way into the Mountainpersons' common room and backed a stranger through
a foam wall by trying to start a conversation—Whileawayans
have a passion for improving the capacities of domestic animals—she kept
nudging this visitor and saying "Friend? Friend?" in a great, wistful
moo, like the monster in the movie, until a Mountainperson
shooed her away: You don't want to make trouble,
do you, child? You want to be milked, don't you? Come on, now.)
'Tell us about the cow," says Laura Rose.
"Tell Jeannine about it," (who's vainly trying to flow into the wall,
O agony, those two women are touching) .
"No," mutters Janet sleepily.
"Then tell us about the Zdubakovs," says Laur.
"You're a vicious little beast!"
says Janet and sits bolt upright.
"Oh come on, giraffe," says Laura
Rose. "Tell!" She has sewn embroidered bunches of flowers all over
her denim jacket and jeans with a red, red rose on the crotch, but she doesn't
wear these clothes at home, only when visiting.
"You are a damned vicious cublet," said Janet. "I'll tell you something to
sweeten your disposition. Do you want to hear about the three-legged goat who skipped off to the North Pole?"
"No," says Laur.
Jeannine flattens like a film of oil; she vanishes dimly into a cupboard,
putting her fingers in her ears.
"Tell!" says Laur,
twisting my little finger. I bury my face in my hands. Ay, no. Ay, no. Laura
must hear. She kissed my neck and then my ear in a passion for all the awful
things I do as S & P; I straightened up and rocked back and forth. The
trouble with you people is you get no charge from death. Myself, it shakes me
all over. Somebody I'd never met had left a note saying the usual thing: ha ha on you, you do not exist,
go away ,
for we are so bloody cooperative that we have this solipsistic underside, you
see? So I went up-mountain and found her; I turned on my two-way vocal three
hundred yards from criminal Elena Twason and said,
"Well, well, Elena, you shouldn't take a vacation without notifying your
friends."
"Vacation?" she says; "Friends?
Don't lie to me, girl. You read my letter," and
by this I began to understand that she hadn't had to go mad to do this and that
was terrible. I said, "What letter? Nobody found a letter."
"The cow ate it," says Elena Twason. "Shoot me. I don't believe you're there but my
body believes; I believe that my tissues believe in the bullet that you do not
believe in yourself, and that will kill me."
"Cow?" says
I, ignoring the rest, "what cow? You Zdubakovs
don't keep cows. You're vegetable-and-goat people, I believe. Quit joking with
me, Elena. Come back; you went botanizing and lost your way, that's all."
"Oh little
girl," she said, so off-hand, so good-humored, "little child, don't deform reality. Don't
mock us both." In spite of the insults, I tried again.
"What a pity," I said, "that
your hearing is going so bad at the age of sixty, Elena Twa.
Or perhaps it's my own. I thought I heard you say something else. But the echoes
in this damned valley are enough to make anything unintelligible; I could have
sworn that I was offering you an illegal collusion in an untruth and that like
a sensible, sane woman, you were accepting." I could see her white hair
through the binoculars; she could've been my mother. Sorry for the banality,
but it's true. Often they try to kill you so I showed myself as best I could,
but she didn't move—exhausted? Sick? Nothing happened.
"Elena!" I shouted. "By the
entrails of God, will you please come down!" and I waved my arms like a
semaphore. I thought: I'// wait until
morning at least. I can do that much. In my mind we changed places
several times, she and I, both of us acting as illegally in our respective
positions as we could, but I might be able to patch up some sort of story. As I
watched her, she began to amble down the hillside, that little white patch of
hair bobbing through the autumn foliage like deer's tail. Chuckling to herself,
idly swinging a stick she'd picked up: weak little thing, just a twig really,
too dry to hit anything without breaking. I ambled ghostly beside her; it's so
pretty in the mountains at that time of year, everything burns and burns
without heat. I think she was enjoying herself, having finally put herself, as
it were, beyond the reach of consequences; she took her little stroll until we
were quite close to each other, close enough to converse face to face, perhaps
as far as I am from you. She had made herself a crown of scarlet maple leaves
and put it on her head, a little askew because it was a little too big to fit.
She smiled at me.
"Face facts," she said. Then, drawing down the corners of her mouth with an ineffable air
of gaiety and arrogance:
"Kill, killer."
So I shot her.
Laur, who has been listening intently all this time,
bloodthirsty little devil, takes Janet's face in her hands. "Oh, come on.
You shot her with a narcotic, that's all. You told me so. A
narcotic dart."
"No," said Janet. "I'm a liar.
I killed her. We use explosive bullets because it's almost always distance
work. I have a rifle like the kind you've often seen yourself."
"Aaaah!" is Laura Rose's long, disbelieving, angry
comment. She came over to me:
"Do you believe it?" (I shall
have to drag Jeannine out of the woodwork with both hands.) Still angry, Laur straddles the room with her arms clasped behind her
back. Janet is either asleep or acting. I wonder what Laur
and Janet do in bed; what do women think of women?
"I don't care what either of you thinks
of me," says Laur. "I like it! By God, I
like the idea of doing something to somebody for a change instead of having it
done to me. Why are you in Safety and Peace if you don't enjoy it!"
"I told you," says Janet softly.
Laur said, "I know, someone has to do it. Why you?"
"I was assigned."
Why? Because you're bad! You're tough."
(She smiles at her own extravagance. Janet sat up, wavering a little, and shook
her head.)
"Dearest, I'm not good for much;
understand that. Farm work or forest work, what else? I have some gift to
unravel these human situations, but it's not quite intelligence."
"Which is why you're an emissary?"
says Laur. "Don't expect me to believe that." Janet stares at my rug. She yawns,
jaw-cracking. She clasps her hands loosely in her lap, remembering perhaps what
it had been like to carry the body of a sixty-year-old woman down a
mountainside: at first something you wept over, then something horrible, then
something only distasteful, and finally you just did it.
"I am what you call an emissary,"
she said slowly, nodding courteously to Jeannine and me, "for the same
reason that I was in S & P. I'm expendable, my dear. Laura, Whileawayan intelligence is confined in a narrower range
than yours; we are not only smarter on the average but there is much less
spread on either side of the average. This helps our living together. It also
makes us extremely intolerant of routine work. But still there is some
variation." She lay back on the couch, putting her arms under her head.
Spoke to the ceiling. Dreaming, perhaps. Of
"Oh, honey," she said, "I'm
here because they can do without me. I was S & P because they could do
without me. There's only one reason for that, Laur,
and it's very simple.
"I am stupid."
Janet sleeps or pretends to, Joanna knits
(that's me), Jeannine is in the
kitchen. Laura Rose, still resentfully twitching with unconquered Genghis
Khan-ism, takes a book from my bookshelf and lies on her stomach on the rug. I
believe she is reading an art book, something she isn't interested in. The
house seems asleep. In the desert between the three of us the dead Elena Twason Zdubakov begins to take
shape; I give her Janet's eyes, Janet's frame, but bent with age, some of Laur's impatient sturdiness but modified with the graceful
trembling of old age: her papery skin, her smile, the ropy muscles on her
wasted arms, her white hair cut in an economical kind of thatch. Helen's belly
is loose with old age, her face wrinkled, a never-attractive face like that of
an extremely friendly and intelligent horse: long and droll. The lines about her
mouth would be comic lines. She's wearing a silly kind of khaki
shorts-and-shirt outfit which is not really what Whileawayans
wear, but I give it to her anyway. Her ears are pierced. Her mountain twig has
become a carved jade pipe covered with scenes of vines, scenes of people
crossing bridges, people pounding flax, processions of cooks or grain-bearers.
She wears a spray of red mountain-ash berries behind one ear. Elena is about to
speak; from her comes a shock of personal strength, a wry impressiveness, an
intelligence so powerful that in spite of myself I open my arms to this
impossible body, this walking soul, this somebody's grandma who could say with
such immense elan to her legal assassin, "Face
facts, child." No man in our world would touch Elena. In Whileawayan leaf-red pajamas, in silver silk overalls, in
the lengths of moony brocade in which Whileawayans
wrap themselves for pleasure, this would be a
beautiful Helen. Elena Twason swathed in cut-silk
brocade, nipping a corner of it for fun. It would be delightful to have erotic
play with Elena Twason; I feel this on my lips and
tongue, the palms of my hands, all my inside skin. I feel it down below, in my
sex. What a formidable woman! Shall I laugh or cry? She's dead, though—killed
dead—so never shall Ellie Twa's ancient legs entwine
with mine or twiddle from under the shell of a computer housing, crossing and
uncrossing her toes as she and the computer tell each other uproarious jokes.
Her death was a bad joke. I would like very much to make love skin-to-skin with
Elena Twason Zdubakov, but
she is thank-the-male-God dead and Jeannine can come shudderingly
out of the woodwork. Laur and Janet have gone to
sleep together on the couch as if they were in a Whileawayan
common bedroom, which is not for orgies, as you might think, but for people who
are lonesome, for children, for people who have nightmares. We miss those
innocent hairy sleepies we used to tangle with back
in the dawn of tine before some progressive nitwit took to deferred
gratification and chipping flint.
"What's this?" whispered Jeannine,
furtively proffering something for my inspection.
"I don't know, is it a staple gun?"
I said. (It had a handle.) "Whose is it?"
"I found it on Janet's bed," said
Jeannine, still whispering. "Just lying there. I
think she took it out of her suitcase. I can't figure out what it is. You hold
it by the handle and if you move this switch it buzzes on one end, though I
don't see why, and another switch makes this piece move up and down. But that
seems to be an attachment. It doesn't look as if it's been used as much as the
rest of it. The handle's really something; it's all
carved and decorated."
"Put it back," I said.
"But what is
it?" said Jeannine.
"A Whileawayan
communications device," I said, "Put it back, Jeannie."
"Oh?" she said. Then she looked
doubtfully at me and at the sleepers. Janet, Jeannine, Joanna. Something very
J-ish is going on here.
"Is it dangerous?" said Jeannine. I
nodded—emphatically.
"Infinitely," I said. "It can
blow you up."
"All of me?" said Jeannine, holding
the thing gingerly at arm's length.
"What it does to your body," said I,
choosing my words with extreme care, "is nothing compared to what it does
to your mind, Jeannine. It will ruin your mind. It will explode in your brains
and drive you crazy. You will never be the same again. You will be lost to
respectability and decency and decorum and dependency and all sorts of other
nice, normal things beginning with a D. It will kill you, Jeannine. You will be
dead, dead, dead.
"Put it back."
(On Whileaway these
charming dinguses are heirlooms. They are menarchal
gifts, presented after all sorts of glass-blowing, day-modeling,
picture-painting, ring-dancing, and Heaven knows what sort of silliness done by
the celebrants to honor the little girl whose celebration it is. There is a
tremendous amount of kissing and hand-shaking. This is only the formal
presentation, of course; cheap, style-less models that
you wouldn't want to give as presents are available to everybody long before
this. Whileawayans often become quite fond of them,
as you or I would of a hi-fi set or a sports car, but all the same, a machine's
only a machine. Janet later offered to lend me hers on the grounds that she and
Laur no longer needed it.)
Jeannine stood there with an expression of
extraordinary distrust: Eve and the hereditary instinct that tells her to
beware of apples. I took her by the shoulders, telling her again that it was a
radar set. That it was extremely dangerous. That it would blow up if she wasn't
careful. Then I pushed her out of the room.
"Put it back."
V
Jeannine, Janet, Joanna. Something's going to
happen. I came downstairs my bathrobe at three A.M., unable to sleep. This
house ought to be ringed with government spies, keeping their eyes on our
diplomat from the stars and her infernal, perverted friends, but nobody's
about. I met Jeannine in the kitchen in her pajamas, looking for the cocoa.
Janet, still in sweater and slacks, was reading at the kitchen table,
puffy-eyed from lack of sleep. She was cross-noting Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma and Marital Patterns of
Jeannine said:
"I try to make the right decisions, but
things don't work out. I don't know why. Other women are so happy. I was a very
good student when I was a little girl and I liked school tremendously, but then
when I got to be around twelve, everything changed. Other things become
important then, you know. It's not that I'm not attractive; I'm pretty enough,
I mean in a usual way, goodness knows I'm no beauty. But that's all right. I
love books, I love reading and thinking, but
"Sometimes I want to die."
Then Joanna said:
"After we had finished making love, he
turned to the wall and said, 'Woman, you're lovely. You're sensuous. You should
wear long hair and lots of eye make-up and tight clothing.' Now what does this
have to do with anything? I remain bewildered. I have a devil of pride and a
devil of despair; I used to go out among the hills at seventeen (this is a
poetic euphemism for a suburban golf course) and there, on my knees, I swear
it, knelen on my kne, I
wept aloud, I wrung my hands, crying: I am a poet! I am Shelley! I am a genius!
What has any of this to do with me! The utter irrelevancy.
The inanity of the whole business. Lady,
your slip's showing. God bless. At eleven I passed an eighth-grader, a
boy, who muttered between his teeth, 'Shake it but don't break it.' The career
of the sexless sex object had begun. I had, at seventeen, an awful conversation
with my mother and father in which they told me how fine it was to be a
girl—the pretty clothes (why are people so obsessed with this?) and how I did
not have to climb Everest, but could listen to the radio and eat bon-bons while my Prince was out doing it. When I was five my
indulgent Daddy told me he made the sun come up in the morning and I expressed
my skepticism; 'Well, watch for it tomorrow and you'll see,' he said. I learned
to watch his face for cues as to what I should do or what I should say, or even
what I should see. For fifteen years I fell in love with a different man every
spring like a berserk cuckoo-clock. I love my body dearly and yet I would
copulate with a rhinoceros if I could become not-a-woman. There is the vanity
training, the obedience training, the self-effacement training, the deference
training, the dependency training, the passivity training, the rivalry
training, the stupidity training, the placation training. How am I to put this
together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my
transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition? I failed miserably
and thought it was my own fault. You can't unite woman and human any more than
you can unite matter and anti-matter; they are designed not to be stable
together and they make just as big an explosion inside the head of the
unfortunate girl who believes in both.
"Do you enjoy playing with other people's
children—for ten minutes? Good! This reveals that you have Maternal Instinct
and you will be forever wretched if you do not instantly have a baby of your
own (or three or four) and take care of that unfortunate victimized object
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for
eighteen years, all by yourself. (Don't expect much help.)
"Are you lonely? Good! This shows that
you have Feminine Incompleteness; get married and do all your husband's
personal services, buck him up when he's low, teach him about sex (if he wants
you to), praise his technique (if he doesn't), have a family if he wants a
family, follow him if he changes cities, get a job if he needs you to get a
job, and this too goes on seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year forever and
ever amen unless you find yourself a divorcee at thirty with (probably two)
small children. (Be a shrew and ruin yourself, too, how about it?)
"Do you like men's bodies? Good! This is
beginning to be almost as good as getting married. This means that you have
True Womanliness, which is fine unless you want to do it with him on the bottom
and you on the top, or any other way than he wants to do it, or you don't come
in two minutes, or you don't want to do it, or you change your mind in
mid-course, or get aggressive, or show your brains, or resent never being talked
to, or ask him to take you out, or fail to praise him, or worry about whether
he Respects You, or hear yourself described as a whore, or develop affectionate
feelings for him (see Feminine Incompleteness, above) or resent the predation
you have to face and screen out so unremittingly—
"I am a telephone pole, a Martian, a
rose-bed, a tree, a floor lamp, a camera, a scarecrow. I'm not a woman.
"Well, it's nobody's fault, I know (this
is what I'm supposed to think). I know and totally approve and genuflect to and
admire and wholly obey the doctrine of Nobody's Fault, the doctrine of Gradual
Change, the doctrine that Women Can Love Better Than Men so we ought to be
saints (warrior saints?), the doctrine of It's A Personal Problem.
"(Selah, selah,
there is only one True Prophet and it's You, don't
kill me,
"You see before you a woman in a trap. Those spike-heeled shoes that blow your heels off (so you become
round-heeled). The intense need to smile at everybody.
The slavish (but respectable) adoration: Love me or I'll die. As the
nine-year-old daughter of my friend painstakingly carved on her linoleum block
when the third grade was doing creative printing: I am like I am suppose to be Otherwise I'd kill myself Rachel.
"Would you believe—could you hear without
laughing—could you credit without positively oofing
your sides with hysterical mirth, that for years my secret, teenage
ambition—more important than washing my hair even and I wouldn't tell it to anybody—was to stand up fearless and honest like
Joan of Arc or Galileo—
"And suffer for the truth?"
So Janet said:
"Life has to end. What a pity! Sometimes,
when one is alone, the universe presses itself into one's hands: a plethora of
joy, an organized plenitude. The iridescent, peacock-green folds of the
mountains in South Continent, the cobalt-colored sky, the white sunlight which
makes everything too real to be true. The existence of existence always amazes
me. You tell me that men are supposed to like challenge, that it is risk that
makes them truly men, but if I—a foreigner—may venture an opinion, what we know
beyond any doubt is that the world is a bath; we bathe in air, as Saint Teresa
said the fish is in the sea and the sea is in the fish. I fancy your old church
windows wished to show worshippers' faces stained with that emblematic
brightness. Do you really want to take risks? Inoculate yourself with bubonic
plague. What foolishness! When that intellectual sun rises, the pure sward
lengthens under the crystal mountain; under that pure intellectual light there
is neither material pigment nor no true shadow any more, any more. What price
ego then?
"Now you tell me that enchanted frogs
turn into princes, that frogesses
under a spell turn into princesses. What of it? Romance is bad for the mind.
I'll tell you a story about the old Whileawayan
philosopher—she is a folk character among us, rather funny in an odd way, or as
we say, 'ticklish'. The Old Whileawayan Philosopher
was sitting cross-legged among her disciples (as usual) when, without the
slightest explanation, she put her fingers into her vagina, withdrew them, and
asked, 'What have I here?'
"The disciples all thought very deeply.
" 'Life,' said one young woman.
" 'Power,' said another.
"Housework,' said a third.
" 'The passing of time,' said the fourth, 'and the tragic
irreversibility of organic truth.'
"The Old Whileawayan
Philosopher hooted. She was immensely entertained by this passion for
myth-making. 'Exercise your projective imaginations,' she said, 'on people who
can't fight back,' and opening her hand, she showed them that her fingers were
perfectly unstained by any blood whatever, partly because she was one hundred
and three years old and long past the menopause and partly because she had just
died that morning. She then thumped her disciples severely about the head and
shoulders with her crutch and vanished. Instantly two of the disciples achieved
Enlightenment, the third became violently angry at the imposture and went to
live as a hermit in the mountains, while the fourth—entirely disillusioned with
philosophy, which she concluded to be a game for crackpots—left philosophizing
forever to undertake the dredging out of silted-up harbors. What became of the
Old Philosopher's ghost is not known. Now the moral of this story is that all
images, ideals, pictures, and fanciful representations tend to vanish sooner or
later unless they have the great good luck to be exuded from within, like
bodily secretions or the bloom on a grape. And if you think that grape-bloom is
romantically pretty, you ought to know that it is in reality a film of yeasty
parasites rioting on the fruit and gobbling up grape sugar, just as the human
skin (under magnification, I admit) shows itself to be iridescent with hordes
of plantlets and swarms of beasties and all the scum left by their dead bodies.
And according to our Whileawayan notions of propriety
all this is just as it should be and an occasion for infinite rejoicing.
"After all, why slander frogs? Princes
and princesses are fools. They do nothing interesting in your stories. They are
not even real. According to history books you passed through the stage of
feudal social organization in
"How many princes or princesses can say
as much?"
Joanna, Jeannine, and
Janet. What a feast of J's.
Somebody is collecting J's.
We were somewhere else. I mean we were not in
the kitchen any more. Janet was still wearing her slacks and sweater, I my bathrobe,
and Jeannine her pajamas. Jeannine was carrying a half-empty cup of cocoa with
a spoon stuck in it.
But we were somewhere else.
PART EIGHT
I
Who am I?
I know who I am, but what's my brand name?
Me with a new face, a
puffy mask. Laid
over the old one in strips of plastic that hurt when they come off, a blond Hallowe'en ghoul on top of the S.S. uniform. I was
skinny as a beanpole underneath except for the hands, which were similarly
treated, and that very impressive face. I did this once in my line of business,
which I'll go into a little later, and scared the idealistic children who lived
downstairs. Their delicate skins red with offended horror.
Their clear young voices raised in song (at three in the morning).
I don't do this often (say I, the ghoul) but
it's great elevator technique, sticking your forefinger to the back of
somebody's neck while passing the fourth floor, knowing that he'll never find
out that you haven't a gun and that you're not all there.
(Sorry. But watch out.)
II
Whom did we meet in that matron blackness but
The Woman Who Has No Brand Name.
"I suppose you are wondering," she
said (and I enjoyed her enjoyment of my enjoyment of her enjoyment of that cliche) "why I have brought you here."
We did.
We wondered why we were in a white-walled
penthouse living room overlooking the East River at night with furniture so
sharp-edged and ultra-modern that you could cut yourself on it, with a
wall-length bar, with a second wall hung entirely in black velvet like a stage,
with a third wall all glass, outside which the city did not look quite as I
remembered it.
Now J (as I shall call her) is really
terrifying, for she's invisible. Against the black curtains her head and hands
float in sinister disconnection, like puppets controlled by separate strings.
There are baby spotlights in the ceiling, which illuminate in deep chiaroscuro
her gray hair, her lined face, her rather macabre grin, for her teeth seem to
be one fused ribbon of steel. She stepped out against the white wall, a
woman-shaped hole, a black cardboard cut-out; with a crooked, charming smile
she clapped her hand to her mouth, either taking something out or putting
something in—see? Real teeth. Those disbodied, almost crippled hands clasped themselves. She
sat on her black leather couch and vanished again; she smiled and dropped
fifteen years; she has silver hair, not gray, and I don't know how old she is.
How she loves us! She leans forward and croons at us like Garbo.
Jeannine has sunk down into a collection of glass plates that passes for a
chair; her cup and spoon make a tiny, spineless chattering. Janet is erect and
ready for anything.
"I'm glad, so glad, so very glad,"
says J softly. She doesn't mind Jeannine's being a coward. She turns the warmth
of her smile on Jeannine the way none of us has ever been smiled at before, a
dwelling, loving look that would make Jeannine go through fire and water to get
it again, the kind of mother-love whose lack gets into your very bones.
"I am called Alice Reasoner,"
says J, "christened Alice-Jael; I am an employee
of the Bureau of Comparative Ethnology. My code name is Sweet
III
(Her real laugh is the worst human sound I
have ever heard: a hard, screeching yell that ends in gasps and rusty sobbing,
as if some mechanical vulture on a gigantic garbage heap on the surface of the
moon were giving one forced shriek for the death of all organic life. Yet J
likes it. This is her private laugh.
Alice is crippled, too; the ends of her fingers (she says) were once caught in
a press and are growing cancerous—and to be sure, if you look at them closely
you can see folds of loose, dead skin over the ends of her fingernails. She has
hairpin-shaped scars under her ears, too.
IV
Her pointed fingernails painted silver to
distract the eye, Alice-Jael plays with the window
console: the
"An artist's conception," she says.)
V
"I am," says Jael
Reasoner, "an employee of the Bureau of
Comparative Ethnology and a specialist in disguises. It came to me several
months ago that I might find my other selves out there in the great, gray
might-have-been, so I undertook—for reasons partly personal and partly
political, of which more later—to get hold of the three of you. It was very
hard work. I'm a field worker and not a theoretician, but you must know that
the closer to home you travel, the more power it takes, both to discriminate
between small degrees of difference and to transport objects from one universe
of probability into another.
"If we admit among the universes of
probability any in which the laws of physical reality are different from our
own, we will have an infinite number of universes. If we restrict ourselves to
the laws of physical reality as we know them, we will have a limited number.
Our universe is quantized; therefore the differences between possible universes
(although very small) must be similarly quantized, and the number of such
universes must be finite (although very large). I take it that it must be
possible to distinguish the very smallest differences—say, that of one quantum
of light—for otherwise we could not find our way to the same universe time
after time, nor could we return to our own. Current theory has it that one
cannot return to one's own past, but only to other people's; similarly one
cannot travel into one's own future, but only to other people's, and in no way
can these motions be forced to result in straightforward travel—from any baseline whatever . The only possible
motion is diagonal motion. So you see that the classical paradoxes of
time-travel simply do not apply—we cannot kill our own grandmothers and thereby
cease to exist, nor can we travel into our own future and affect it in advance,
so to speak. Nor can I, once I have made contact with your present, travel into
your past or your future. The best I can do in finding out my own future is to
study one very close to my own, but here the cost of power becomes prohibitive.
My Department's researches are therefore conducted in regions rather far from
home. Go too far and you find an Earth too close to the sun or too far away or
nonexistent or barren of life; come too close and it costs too much. We operate
in a pretty small optimal range. And of course I was doing this on my own,
which means I must steal the whole damn operation anyway.
"You, Janet, were almost impossible to
find. The universe in which your Earth exists does not even register on our
instruments; neither do those for quite a probable spread on either side of
you; we have been trying for years to find out why. Besides you are too close
to us to be economically feasible. I had located Jeannine and not Joanna; you
very obligingly stepped out of place and became as visible as a sore thumb;
I've had a fix on you ever since. The three of you got together and I pulled
you all in. Look at yourselves.
"Genetic patterns sometimes repeat
themselves from possible present universe to possible present universe; this is
also one of the elements that can vary between universes. There is repetition
of genotypes in the far future too, sometimes. Here is Janet from the far
future, but not my future or yours; here are the two of you from almost the
same moment of time (but not as you see it!), both of those moments only a
little behind mine; yet I won't happen in the world of either of you. We are
less alike than identical twins, to be sure, but much more alike than strangers
have any right to be. Look at yourselves again.
"We're all white-skinned, eh? I bet two
of you didn't think of that. We're all women. We are tall, within a few inches
of each other. Given a reasonable variation, we are the same racial type, even
the same physical type—no redheads or olive skins, hm?
Don't go by me; I'm not natural! Look in each other's faces. What you see is
essentially the same genotype, modified by age, by circumstances, by education,
by diet, by learning, by God knows what. Here is Jeannine, the youngest of us
all with her smooth face: tall, thin, sedentary, round-shouldered, a
long-limbed body made of clay and putty; she's always tired and probably has
trouble waking up in the morning. Hm? And there's Joanna, somewhat older, much more active, with
a different gait, different mannerisms, quick and jerky, not depressed, sits
with her spine like a ruler. Who'd think it was the same woman? There's Janet,
hardier than the two of you put together, with her sun-bleached hair and her
muscles; she's spent her life outdoors, a Swedish hiker and a farmhand. You
begin to see? She's older and that masks a good deal. And of course she has had
all the Whileawayan improvements—no rheumatism, no
sinus trouble, no allergies, no appendix, good feet, good teeth, no double
joints, and so forth and so forth, all the rest that we three must suffer. And I, who could throw you all across the room, though I don't look
it. Yet we started the same. It's possible that in biological terms
Jeannine is potentially the most intelligent of us all; try to prove that to a
stranger! We ought to be equally long-lived but we won't be. We ought to be
equally healthy but we're not. If you discount the wombs that bore us, our
pre-natal nourishment, and our deliveries (none of which differ essentially) we
ought to have started out with the same autonomic nervous system, the same
adrenals, the same hair and teeth and eyes, the same circulatory system, and
the same innocence. We ought to think alike and feel alike and act alike, but
of course we don't. So plastic is humankind! Do you remember the old story of
the Doppelganger? This is the double you recognize instantly, with whom you
feel a mysterious kinship. An instant sympathy, that
informs you at once that the other is really your very own self. The truth is
that people don't recognize themselves except in mirrors, and sometimes not
even then. Between our dress, and our opinions, and our habits, and our
beliefs, and our values, and our mannerisms, and our manners, and our
expressions, and our ages, and our experience, even I can hardly believe that I
am looking at three other myselves. No layman would
entertain for a moment the notion that he beheld four versions of the same
woman.
Did I say a moment? Not for an age of moments,
particularly if the layman were indeed a man.
"Janet, may I ask you why you and your
neighbors do not show up on our instruments? You must have discovered the
theory of probability travel some time ago (in your terms), yet you are the
first traveler. You wish to visit other universes of probability, yet you make
it impossible for anyone to find you, let alone visit you.
"Why is that?"
"Aggressive and bellicose persons,"
said Janet with care, "always assume that
unaggressive and pacific persons cannot protect themselves.
"Why is that?"
VI
Over trays of pre-cooked steak and chicken
that would've disgraced an airline (that's where they came from, I found out
later) Jael sat next to Jeannine and glued herself to
Jeannine's ear, glancing round at the rest of us from time to time to see how
we were taking it. Her eyes sparkled with the gaiety of corruption, the Devil
in the fable tempting the young girl. Whisper, whisper, whisper.
All I could hear were the sibilants, when her tongue came between her teeth.
Jeannine stared soberly ahead and didn't eat much, the color leaving her little
by little. Jael didn't eat at all. Like a vampire she
fed on Jeannine's ear. Later she drank a sort of super-bouillon which nobody
else could stand and talked a lot to all of us about the war. Finally, Janet
said bluntly:
"What war?"
"Does it matter?" said Miss Reasoner ironically, raising her silver eyebrows.
"This war, that war, isn't there always one?"
"No," said Janet.
"Well, hell," said Jael more genuinely, "the
war. If there isn't one, there just was one, and if there wasn't one, there
soon will be one. Eh? The war between Us and Them.
We're playing it rather cool just now because it's hard to work up an
enthusiasm for something forty years old."
I said, "Us and Them?"
"I'll tell you," said Sweet
"Oh, don't worry!" she added.
"Nothing spectacular is going to happen. All I will do in three days or so
is ask you about the tourist trade in your lovely homes. What's wrong with
that? Simple, eh?
"But it will get things moving. The long
war will start up again. We will be in the middle of it and I— who have always
been in the middle of it—will get some decent support from my people at
last."
"Who?" said Jeannine crossly. "Who, who, for Heaven's
sake! Who's Us, who's Them? Do you expect us to
find out by telepathy!"
"I beg your pardon," said Alice Reasoner softly. "I thought you knew. I had no
intention of puzzling you. You are my guests. When I say Them and Us I mean of
course the Haves and the Have-nots, the two sides, there are always two sides,
aren't there?
"I mean the men and the women."
Later I caught Jeannine by the door as we were
all leaving; "What did she talk to you about?" I said. Something had
gotten into Jeannine's clear, suffering gaze; something had muddied her
timidity. What can render Miss Dadier self-possessed?
What can make her so quietly stubborn? Jeannine said:
"She asked me if I had ever killed
anybody."
VII
She took us topside in the branch elevator:
The Young One, The Weak One, The Strong One, as she
called us in her own mind. I'm the author and I know. Miss
We went inside; "Jael!"
I exclaimed, "there are—"
"Look again," she said.
Look at the necks, look at the wrists and
ankles, penetrate the veils of false hair and false eyelashes to measure the
relative size of eyes and bone structure. The half-changed starve themselves to
be slim, but look at their calves and the straightness of their arms and knees.
If most of the fully changed live in harims and
whore-homes, and if popular slang is beginning to call them "cunts,"
what does this leave for us? What can we be called?
"The enemy," said Jael. "Sit here." We sat around a large table in
the corner where the light was dim, snuggling up to the fake oak paneling. One
of the guards, who had followed us inside, came up to Jael
and put one giant arm round her, one huge paw crushing her bearishly to his
side, his crimson epaulets, his gold boots, his shaved head, his sky-blue
codpiece, his diamond-chequered-costumed attempt to
beat up the whole world, to shove his prick up the world's ass. She looked so
plain next to him. She was all swallowed up.
"Hey, hey," he said. "So you're
back again!"
"Well, sure, why not?" (she said) "I have to meet someone. I have some business
to do."
"Business!" he said fetchingly.
"Don't you want some of the real thing? Come on, fuck business!"
She smiled gracefully but remained modestly
silent. This seemed to please him. He enveloped her further, to the point of vanishment, and said in a low voice with a sort of chuckle:
"Don't you dream about it? Don't all you
girls dream about us?"
"You know that, Lenny," she said.
"Sure I do," he said
enthusiastically. "Sure. I can see it in your face whenever you come here.
You get excited just looking at it. Like the doctors say, we can do it with
each other but you can't because you don't have nothing
to do it with, do you? So you don't get any."
"Lenny—" she began (slipping under
his arm) "you got us figured out just right. Scout's
honor. I've got business to do."
"Come on!" he said (pleading, I
think).
"Oh, you're a brick!" cried Jael, moving behind the table, "you surely are. Why,
you're so strong, some day you're going to squash us to death." He laughed, basso-profundo.
"We're friends," he said, and winked laboriously.
"Sure," said Jael
dryly.
"Some day you're gonna
walk right in here—" and this tiresome creature began all over again, but
whether he noticed the rest of us or saw someone or smelt someone I don't know,
for suddenly he lumbered off in a great hurry, rousting his billy-club
out of his azure sash, next the gun holster. Bouncers don't use their guns at
The Prick; too much chance of hitting the wrong people. Jael
was talking to someone else, a shadowy, thin-lipped party in a green engineer's
suit.
"Of course we're friends," said Jael Reasoner patiently. "Of
course we are. That's why I don't want to talk to you tonight. Hell, I don't
want to get you in trouble. See those crosses? One jab, one little rip or tear, and those girls will start an epidemic you
won't be able to stop for a month. Do you want to be mixed up in that? Now you
know we women are into plague research; well, these are some of the
experiments. I'm taking them across Manland to
another part of our own place; it's a short-cut. I wouldn't take them through
here except I have some business to do here tonight. We're developing a faster
immunization process. I'd tell all your friends to stay away from this table,
too, if I were you—not that we can't take care of ourselves and / don't worry;
I'm immune to this particular strain— but I don't want to see you take the rap
for it. You've done a lot for me in the past and I'm grateful. I'm very
grateful. You'd get it in the neck, you know. And you might get plague, too,
there's always that. Okay?"
Astonishing how each of them has to be
reassured of my loyalty! says
Jael Reasoner. Even more astonishing that they
believe me. They're not very
bright, are they? But these are the little fish. Besides, they've been
separated from real women so long that they don't know what to make of us; I
doubt if even the sex surgeons know what a real woman looks like. The
specifications we send them every year grow wilder and wilder and there isn't a
murmur of protest. I think they like it. As moths to the flame, so men to the
social patterns of the Army, that womanless world haunted by the ghosts of
millions of dead women, that discarnate femininity that hovers over everybody
and can turn the toughest real-man into one of Them, that dark force they
always feel at the backs of their own minds! Would I, do you think, force
slavishness and deformity on two-sevenths of my own kind? Of course not! I
think these men are not human. No, no, that's wrong —/ decided long ago that they weren't human. Work is power,
but they farm out everything to us without the slightest protest —Hell, they get lazier and lazier. They let us do their
thinking for them. They even let us do their feeling for them. They are riddled
with duality and the fear of duality. And the fear of
themselves. 1 think it's in their blood. What
human being would —sweating with fear
and rage —mark out two equally
revolting paths and insist that her fellow-creatures tread one or the other ?
Ah, the rivalries of cosmic he-men and the
worlds they must conquer and the terrors they must face and the rivals they
must challenge and overcome!
"You are being a little obvious,"
says Janet pedantically from inside her suit, "and I doubt that the power
of the blood—"
Hsst! Here comes my contact.
Our contact was a half-changed, for Manlanders believe that child care is woman's business; so
they delegate to the changed and the half-changed the business of haggling for
babies and taking care of children during those all-important, first five
years—they want to fix their babies' sexual preferences early. This means,
practically speaking, that the children are raised in brothels. Now some Manlander real-men do not like the idea of the whole
business being in the hands of the feminized and the effeminate but there's not
much they can do about it (see Proposition One, about child care,
above)—although the more masculine look forward to a time when no Manlander will fall away from the ranks of the he-men, and
with an obstinacy I consider perverse, refuse to decide who will be the sexual
objects when the changed and the half-changed are no more. Perhaps they think
sex beneath them. Or above them? (Around the shrine of
each gowned and sequinned hostess in The Knife are at
least three real-men; how many can a hostess take on in one night?) I suspect
we real women still figure, however grotesquely, in Manland's
deepest dreams; perhaps on that morning of Total Masculinity they will all
invade Womanland, rape everyone in sight (if they
still remember how) and then kill them, and after that commit suicide upon a pyramid
of their victims' panties. The official ideology has it that women are poor
substitutes for the changed. I certainly hope so. (Little girls,
crept out of their crèche at last, touching those heroic dead with curious, wee
fingers. Nudging them with their patent leather Mary Janes. Bringing their baby brothers out to a party
on the green, all flutes and oats and pastoral fun until the food gives out and
the tiny heroines must decide: Whom shall we eat? The waving
limbs of our starfish siblings, our dead mothers, or those strange, huge, hairy
bodies already beginning to swell in the sun?) I flashed that damned
pass—again!—this time at a half-changed in a pink chiffon gown, with gloves up
to his shoulder, a monument of irrelevancy on high heels, a pretty girl with
too much of the right curves and a bobbing, springing, pink feather boa. Where
oh where is the shop that makes those long rhinestone earrings, objects of
fetishism and nostalgia, worn only by the half-changed (and usually not by them
unless they're rich), hand-made from museum copies, of no use or interest to
fully six-sevenths of the adult human race? Somewhere stones are put together
by antiquarians, somewhere petroleum is transformed into fabric that can't burn
without polluting the air, and won't rot, and won't erode, so that strands of
plastic have turned up in the bodies of diatoms at the bottom of the Pacific
Trench—such a vision was he, so much he wore, such folds and frills and ribbons
and buttons and feathers, trimmed like a Christmas tree. Like Garbo playing Anna Karenina, decorated all over. His green
eyes shrewdly narrowed. This one has intelligence. Or is it only the weight of
his false lashes? The burden of having always to be taken, of having to swoon,
to fall, to endure, to hope, to suffer, to wait, to only be? There must be a
secret feminine underground that teaches them how to behave; in the face of
their comrades' derision and savage contempt, in the face of the prospect of
gang rape if they're found alone on the streets after curfew, in the face of
the legal necessity to belong—every one of them—to a real-man, somehow they
still learn the classic shiver, the slow blink, the knuckle-to-lip pathos.
These, too, I think, must be in the blood. But whose?
My three friends and I pale beside such magnificence! Four lumpy parcels, of no
interest to anyone at all, at all.
Anna, with a mechanical shiver of desire, says
that we must go with him.
"Her?" says Jeannine, confused.
"Him!" says Anna in a strained
contralto. The half-changed are very punctilious—sometimes about the changeds' superiority and sometimes about their own
genitals. Either way it works out to Him.
He's extraordinarily aware, for a man, of Jeannine's shrinking and he resents
it—as who would not? I myself am respectful of ruined lives and forced choices.
On the street once Anna did not fight hard enough against the fourteen-year-old
toughs who wanted his twelve-year-old ass; he didn't go to the extremity of
berserk rage, reckoning his life as nothing in defense of his virility; he
forestalled—by surrender—the plucking out of an eye, the castration, the throat
cut with a broken bottle, the being put out of his twelve-year-old action with
a stone or a tire chain. I know a lot about Manlanders'
history. Anna made a modus vivendi,
he decided life was worth it on any terms. Everything follows from that.
"Oh, you're lovely," says Jeannine,
heartfelt. Sisters in misfortune. This really pleases
Anna. He shows us a letter of safe-conduct he has from his boss—a real-man, of
course—and putting it back in pink-brocaded evening bag, draws around him that
fake-feather Thing which floats and wobbles in the least current of air-. It's
a warm evening. To protect his employer, the big boss (they are Men, even in
the child-rearing business) has had to give Anna K a little two-way TV camera
to wear in his ear; otherwise somebody would break his high heels and leave him
dead or half-dead in an alley. Everybody knows that the half-changed are weak
and can't protect themselves; what do you think femininity is all about? Even
so Anna probably has a bodyguard waiting at the entrance to The Knife. I'm
cynical enough to wonder sometimes if the Manlanders'
mystique isn't just an excuse to feminize anybody with a pretty face—but look
again, they believe it; look under the padding, the paint, the false hair, the
corsetry, the skin rinses and the magnificent dresses and you'll see nothing
exceptional, only faces and bodies like any other man's. Anna bats his eyes at
us and wets his lips, taking the women inside the suits to be real-men, taking
me to be a real-man (what else can I be if I'm not a changed?), taking the big
wide world itself to be—what else?—a Real-Man intent on worshipping Anna's ass;
the world exists to look at Anna; he—or she—is only a real-man turned inside
out.
An eerie sisterliness, a smile at Jeannine. All that narcissism! Brains underneath,
though.
Remember where their loyalties lie.
(Are they jealous of us? I don't think they
believe we're women.)
He wets his lips again, the indescribable silliness
of that insane mechanism, practiced anywhere and everywhere, on the right
people, on the wrong people. But what else is there? It seems that Anna's boss
wants to meet me. (I don't like that.) But we'll go; we maintain our outward
obedience until the very end, until the beautiful, bloody moment that we fire
these stranglers, these murderers, these unnatural and atavistic nature's
bastards, off the face of the earth.
"Dearest sister," says Anna softly,
sweetly, "come with me."
VIII
I guess Anna's boss just wanted to see the
alien poontang. I don't know yet what he wants, but I
will. His wife clicked in with a tray of drinks—scarlet skin-tights, no
underwear, transparent high-heeled sandals like
Cinderella's—she gave us a homey, cute smile (she wears no make-up and
is covered with freckles) and stilted out. Man talk. They seldom earn wives
before fifty. Art, they say, has had a Renaissance among the Manlander rich, but this one doesn't look like a patron:
jowly, pot-bellied, the fierce redness of an athlete forced into idleness. His heart? High blood pressure? But
they all cultivate their muscles and let their health and their minds rot.
There is a rather peculiar wholesomeness to the home life of a Manland millionaire; Boss, for example, would not think of
letting his wife go anywhere alone—that is, risk the anarchy of the
streets—even with a bodyguard. He knows what's due her. Their
"women," they say, civilize them. For an emotional relationship, turn
to a "woman."
What am I?
I know what I am, but what's my brand name?
He stares rudely, unable to conceal it: What are they? What do they do? Do they screw each other?
What does it feel like? (Try and tell him!) He doesn't waste a
second on the pink crosses in purdah; they're only
"women" anyhow (he thinks); I'm
the soldier, I'm the enemy, I'm the other self, the mirror, the
master-slave, the rebel, the heretic, the mystery that must be found out at all
costs. (Maybe he thinks the three J's have leprosy.) I don't like this at all.
J-one (Janet, by her gait) is examining the paintings on the wall; J-two and
J-three stand hand in hand, Babes in the Wood. Boss finishes his drink, chewing
on something in the bottom of it like a large teddy-bear, with comic
deliberation: chomp, chomp. He waves grandly toward the other drinks, his wife
having abandoned the tray on top of what looks for all the world like a New
Orleans, white-enamelled, bordello piano (Whorehouse
Baroque is very big in Manland right now).
I shook my head.
He said, "You have any children?"
Pregnancy fascinates them. The rank-and-file have forgotten about menstruation;
if they remembered, that would
fascinate them. I shook my head again.
His face darkened.
"I thought," said
I mildly, "that we were going to talk business. I'd like to do just that.
I don't mean— that is, I don't want to be unsociable, but time's passing and
I'd rather not discuss my personal life."
He said: "You're on my turf,
you'll Goddamn well talk about what I Goddamn well talk about."
Let it pass. Control yourself. Hand them the
victory in the Domination Sweepstakes and they usually forget whatever it is
they were going to do anyway. He glared and brooded. Munched
chips, crackers, saltsticks, what-not. Doesn't
really know what he wants. I waited.
"Personal life!" he muttered.
"It's not really very interesting,"
I volunteered,
"You kids screw each other?"
I said nothing.
He leaned forward. "Don't get me wrong. I
think you have a right to do it. I never bought this stuff about women alone
having no sex. It's not in human nature. Now, do you?"
"No," I said.
He chuckled. "That's right, cover up.
Mind, I'm not condemning you. It's only to be expected. Eh! If we'd kept
together, men and women, none of this would have happened. Right?"
I put on my doubtful, slightly shamed, sly,
well-you-know, all-purpose look. I have never known what it means, but they
seem to. He laughed out loud. Another drink.
"Look here," he said, "I expect
you have more intelligence than most of those bitches or you wouldn't be in
this job. Right? Now it's obvious to anyone that we
need each other. Even in separate camps we still have to trade, you still have
to have the babies, things haven't changed that much. Now what I have in mind
is an experimental project, a pilot project, you might say, in trying to get
the two sides back together. Not all at once—"
"I—" I said. (They don't hear you.)
"Not all at once," (he continued, deaf as a post) "but a little bit at a time.
We have to make haste deliberately. Right?"
I was silent. He leaned back. "I knew
you'd see it," he said. Then he made a personal remark: "You saw my
wife?" I nodded.
"Natalie's grand," he said, taking
some more chips. "She's a grand girl. She made these. Deep-fried, I
think." (A weak woman handling a pot of boiling oil.)
"Have some."
To pacify him I took some and held them in my
hand. Greasy stuff.
"Now," he said, "you like the
idea, right?"
"What?"
"The aversive
therapy, for Chrissakes, the pilot group. Social relations, getting back
together. I'm not like some of the mossbacks around here, you know, I
don't go for this inferior-superior business; I believe in equality. If we get
back together, it has to be on that basis. Equals."
"But—" I said, meaning no offense.
"It has to be on the basis of equality! I
believe that. And don't think the man in the street can't be sold on it,
propaganda to the contrary. We're brought up on this nonsense of woman's place
and woman's nature when we don't even have women around to study. What do we
know! I'm not any less masculine because I've done woman's work; does it take
less intelligence to handle an operation like the nurseries and training camps
than it does to figure the logistics of War Games? Hell, no! Not if you do it
rationally and efficiently; business is business."
Let it go. Perhaps it'll play itself out; they
do sometimes. I sat attentively still while he gave me the most moving plea for
my own efficiency, my rationality, my status as a human being. He ended by
saying anxiously, "Do you think it'll work?"
"Well—" I began.
"Of course, of course," (interrupted
this damned fool once again) "you're not a diplomat, but we have to work
through the men we have, don't we? Individual man can accomplish ends where
Mass-man fails. Eh?"
I nodded, picturing myself as Individual
"What we want" (he said, getting
into stride) "is a world in which everybody can be himself. Him. Self. Not this insane forcing of temperaments. Freedom. Freedom for all. I admire
you. Yes, let me say that I do indeed, and most frankly, admire you. You've
broken through all that. Of course most women will not be able to do that— in
fact, most women—given the choice—will hardly choose to give up domesticity altogether
or even" (here he smiled) "even choose to spend much of their lives
in the market-place or the factory. Most women will continue to choose the
conservative caretaking of childhood, the formation of beautiful human
relationships, and the care and service of others. Servants.
Of. The. Race.
Why should we sneer at that? And if we find there are certain traits connected
with sex, like homemaking, like reasoning power, like certain temperamental
factors, well of course there will be, but why derogate one sex or the other on
that account? People" (braced for the peroration) "people are as they
are. If—"
I rose to my feet. "Excuse me," I
said, "but business—"
"Damn your business!" he said in
heat, this confused and irritable man. "Your business isn't worth two
cents compared with what I'm talking about!"
"Of course not, of course not," I
said soothingly.
"I should hope so!"
Numb, numb. With boredom.
Invisible. Chained.
"That's the trouble with you women, you can't see anything in the abstract!"
He wants me to cringe. I really think so. Not
the content of what I say but the endless, endless feeding of his vanity, the
shaky structure of self. Even the intelligent ones.
"Don't you appreciate what I'm trying to
do for you?"
Kiss-me-I'm-a-goodguy.
"Don't you have any idea how important
this is?"
Sliding down the
slippery gulf into invisibility.
"This could make history!"
Even me, with all my training!
"Of course, we have a tradition to
uphold."
It'll be slow.
"—we'll have to go slowly. One thing at a time."
If it's practical.
"We'll have to find out what's
practicable. This may be—uh—visionary. It may be in advance of its time."
Can't legislate
morality.
"We can't force people against their
inclinations and we have generations of conditioning to overcome. Perhaps in a
decade—"
Perhaps never.
"—perhaps never. But men of good will—"
Did he hear that?
"—and women, too, of course, you
understand that the word 'men' includes the word 'women'; it's only
usage—"
Everyone must have his own abortion.
"—and not really important. You might
even say" (he giggles) " 'everyone and his
husband' or 'everyone will be entitled to his own abortion' " (he roars)
"but I want you to go back to your people and tell them—"
It's unofficial.
"—that we're prepared to negotiate. But
it can't be official. You must understand that I face considerable opposition.
And most women—not, you, of course; you're different—well, most women aren't
used to thinking a thing through like
this. They can't do it systematically. Say, you don't mind my saying that about 'most women,' do you?"
I smile, drained of personality.
"That's right,"
(he said) "don't take it personally. Don't get feminine on me," and
he winked broadly to show he bore me no ill-will. This is the time for me to
steal away, leaving behind half my life's blood and promises, promises,
promises; but you know what? I just can't do it. It's happened too often. I
have no reserves left. I sat down, smiling brilliantly in sheer anticipation,
and the dear man hitched his chair nearer. He looks uneasy and avid.
"We're friends?" he says.
"Sure," I say, hardly able to speak.
"Good!" he said. "Tell me, do
you like my place?"
"Oh yes," I say.
"Ever see anything like it before?"
"Oh no!" (I live in a chicken-barn and eat shit.)
He laughed delightedly. "The paintings
are pretty good. We're having a kind of Renaissance lately. How's art among the
ladies, huh?"
"So-so," I said, making a face. The
room is beginning to sway with the adrenalin I can pump into my bloodstream
when I choose; this is called voluntary hysterical strength and it is very,
very useful, yes indeed. First the friendly chat, then the uncontrollably
curious grab, and then the hatred comes out. Be prepared.
"I suppose," he said, "you
must've been different from the start—from a little girl, eh?—doing a job like
this. You've got to admit we have one thing up on you—we don't try to force
everybody into the same role. Oh no. We don't keep a man out of the kitchen if
that's what he really wants."
"Oh sure," I said. (Those
chemical-surgical castrati)
"Now you do," he said. "You're
more reactionary than we are. You won't let
women lead the domestic life. You want to make everyone alike. That's not what
I visualize."
He goes into a long happy rap about
motherhood, the joys of the uterus. The emotional nature of
Woman. The room is beginning to sway. One gets very reckless in
hysterical strength; the first few weeks I trained, I broke several of my own
bones but I know how to do it now. I really do. My muscles are not for harming
anyone else; they are to keep me from harming myself. That terrible
concentration, That feverish brightness. Boss-Idiot
has not talked to anyone else about his grand idea; he's still in First Cliche' stage and any group discussion, however moronic,
would have weeded out the worst of them. His dear Natalie.
His gifted wife. Take me, now; he loves me. Yes he
does. Not physically, of course. Oh no. Life seeks its mate. Its
complement. Romantic rubbish. Its other self. Its joy. He won't
talk business tonight. Will he ask me to stay over?
"Oh, I couldn't," says the other Jael. He doesn't hear it; there's a gadget in Boss's ear
that screens out female voices. He's moved closer, bringing his chair with
him—some silly flub-dub about not being able to talk the length of the room. Spiritual intimacy. Smiling foolishly he says:
"So you like me a little, huh?"
How terrible, betrayal
by lust. No,
ignorance. No—pride.
"Hell, go away," I say.
"Sure you do!" He expects me to act
like his Natalie, he bought her, he owns her. What do
women do in the daytime? What do they do when they're alone? Adrenalin is a
demanding high; it untunes all your finer controls.
"Get away," I whisper. He doesn't
hear it. These men play games, play with vanity, hiss, threaten, erect their neck-spines. It sometimes takes ten minutes to
get a fight going. I, who am not a reptile but only an assassin, only a
murderess, never give warning. They worry about playing
fair ,
about keeping the rules, about giving a good account of themselves. I don't
play. I have no pride. I don't hesitate. At home I am harmless, but not here.
"Kiss me, you dear little bitch," he
says in an excited voice, mastery and disgust warring with each other in his
eyes. Boss has never seen a real cunt, I mean as nature made them. He'll use
words he hasn't dared to use since he was eighteen and took his first
half-changed in the street, mastery and disgust mingling. That slavish
apprenticeship at the recreation centers. How can you love anyone who is a
castrated You? Real homosexuality would blow Manland to pieces.
"Take your filthy hands off me," I
say clearly, enjoying his enjoyment of my enjoyment of his enjoyment of that cliche'. Has he forgotten the three lepers?
"Send them away," he mutters in
agony, "send them away! Natalie can do them," forgetting gender in
his haste. Or perhaps he really thinks they are my lovers. Women will do what
men find too disgusting, too difficult, too demeaning.
"Look," I say, grinning
uncontrollably, "I want to be perfectly clear. I don't want your revolting
lovemaking. I'm here to do business and relay any reasonable message to my
superiors. I'm not here to play games. Cut it
out."
But when do they ever listen!
"You're a woman," he cries, shutting
his eyes, "you're a beautiful woman. You've got a hole down there. You're
a beautiful woman. You've got real, round tits and you've got a beautiful ass.
You want me. It doesn't matter what you say. You're a woman, aren't you? This
is the crown of your life. This is what God made you for. I'm going to fuck
you. I'm going to screw you until you can't stand up. You want it. You want to
be mastered. Natalie wants to be mastered. All you women, you're all women,
you're sirens, you're beautiful, you're waiting for me, waiting for a man,
waiting for me to stick it in, waiting for me, me, me."
Et patati et patata;
the mode is a wee bit over-familiar. I told him to open his eyes,
that I didn't want to kill him with his eyes shut, for God's sake.
He didn't hear me.
"OPEN YOUR EYES!" I roared,
"BEFORE I KILL YOU!" and Boss-man did.
He said, You led me
on.
He said, You are a
prude. (He was shocked.)
He said, You deceived
me.
He said, You are
a Bad Lady.
This we can cure!—as they say about pneumonia.
I think the J's will have sense enough to stay out of it. Boss was muttering
something angry about his erection so, angry enough for two, I produced my
own—by this I mean that the grafted muscles on my fingers and hands pulled back
the loose skin, with that characteristic, itchy tickling, and of course you are
wise; you have guessed that I do not have Cancer on my fingers but Claws,
talons like a cat's but bigger, a little more dull than wood brads but good for
tearing. And my teeth are a sham over metal. Why are men so afraid of the awful
intimacies of hate? Remember, I don't threaten. I don't play. I always carry
firearms. The truly violent are never without them. I could have drilled him
between the eyes, but if I do that, I all but leave my signature on him; it's
freakier and funnier to make it look as if a wolf did it. Better to think his Puli went mad and attacked him. I raked him gaily on the
neck and chin and when he embraced me in rage, sank my claws into his back. You
have to build up the fingers surgically so they'll take the strain. A certain squeamishness prevents me from using my teeth in
front of witnesses—the best way to silence an enemy is to bite out his larynx.
Forgive me! I dug the hardened cuticle into his neck but he sprang away; he
tried a kick but I wasn't there (I told you they rely too much on their
strength); he got hold of my arm but I broke the hold and spun him off, adding
with my nifty, weighted shoe one another bruise on his limping kidneys. Ha ha! He fell on me (you don't feel injuries in my state) and
I reached around and scored him under the ear, letting him spray urgently into the
rug; he will stagger to his feet and fall, he will plunge fountainy
to the ground; at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he
bowed, he fell, he lay down dead. Jael. Clean and satisfied from head to foot. Boss is pumping his
life out into the carpet. All very quiet, oddly enough.
Three J's in a terrible state, to judge from their huddling together; I can't
read their hidden faces. Will Natalie come in? Will she faint? Will she say,
"I'm glad to be rid of him, the old bastard?" Who will own her now?
You get monomaniacal on adrenalin. "Come on, come on!" I whispered to
the J's, herding them toward the door, buzzing and humming, the stuff still
singing in my blood. The stupidity of it. The asininity of it. I love it, I love it. "Come
on!" I said. Pushing them out the door, into the
corridor, out and into the elevator, past the fish swimming in the aquatic
wall, evil, svelte manta-rays and groupers six feet long. Poor fish! No
business done today, God damn, but once they get that way there's no doing
business with them; you have to kill them anyway, might as well have fun.
There's no standing those non-humans at all, at all. Jeannie is calm. Joanna is
ashamed of me. Janet is weeping. But how do you expect me to stand for this all
month? How do you expect me to stand it all year? Week after
week? For twenty years? Little male voice says: It Was Her Menstrual
Period. Perfect explanation! Raging hormonal imbalances.
His ghostly voice: "You did it because you had your period. Bad girl." Oh beware of unclean vessels who have that
dirty menstrual period and Who Will Not Play! I shooed
the J's into the Boss-man's car—Anna had long ago disappeared—skeleton keys out
of my invisible suit with its invisible pocket, opened the lock, fired the car,
started up. I'll go on Automatic as soon as we get to the highway; Boss's I.D.
will carry us to the border. No trouble from there.
"You all
right?" I asked the J's,
laughing, laughing, laughing. I'm drunk still. They said Yes
in varying musical keys. The Strong One's voice is pitched higher than that of
The Weak One (who believes she's an alto), and The Little One is highest of
all. Yes, yes, they said, frightened. Yes, yes, yes.
"Now I did not get that contract
signed," I said, putting on my sham teeth over my steel ones. "God
damn, God damn, God damn!" (Don't drive on adrenalin; you'll probably have
an accident.)
"When does it leave you?" That's The
Strong One: smart girl. "An hour, half an hour," I said. "When we get home."
"Home?" (from the back)
"Yes. My home."
Every time I do this I burn up a little life. I shorten my time. I'm at the
effusive stage now, so I bit my lip, to keep quiet.
After a long
silence—"Was that necessary?" from The Weak One.
Still hurt, still able to be hurt by them! Amazing. You'd think my skin would get thicker, but it
doesn't. We're all of us still flat on our backs. The boot's on our neck while
we slowly, ever so slowly, gather the power and the money and the resources
into our own hands. While they play war games. I put
the car on Autom. and sat
back, chilly with the reaction. My heartbeat's quieting. Breath
slower.
Was it necessary? (Nobody says this.) You
could have turned him off —maybe. You could have
sat there all night. You could have nodded and adored him until dawn. You could
have let him throw his temper tantrum; you could have lain under him
— what difference does it make to you ?—you'd have forgotten it by morning.
You might even have made the poor man happy.
There is a pretense on my own side that we are
too refined to care, too compassionate for revenge—this is bullshit, I tell the
idealists. "Being with Men," they say, "has changed you."
Eating it year in and
year out.
"Look, was it necessary?" says one
of the J's, addressing to me the serious urgency of womankind's eternal quest
for love, the ages-long effort to heal the wounds of the sick soul, the
infinite, caring compassion of the female saint.
An over-familiar mode! Dawn comes up over the
waste land, bringing into existence the boulders and pebbles battered long ago
by bombs, dawn gilding with its pale possibilities even the Crazy Womb, the
Ball-breaking Bitch, the Fanged Killer Lady.
"I don't give a damn whether it was
necessary or not," I said.
"I liked it."
IX
It takes four hours to cross the
Davy was there. The most
beautiful man in the world. Our approach had given him time to make
drinks for us—which the J's took from his tray, staring at him but he wasn't
embarrassed—curled up most unwaiterlike at my feet
with his hands around his knees and proceeded to laugh at the right places in
the conversation (he takes his cues from my face).
The main room is panelled
in yellow wood with a carpet you can sleep on (brown) and a long, glassed-in
porch from which we watch the blizzards sweep by five months out of the year. I
like purely visual weather. It's warm enough for Davy to go around naked most
of the time, my ice lad in a cloud of gold hair and nudity, never so much a
part of my home as when he sits on the rug with his back against a russet or
vermilion chair (we mimic autumn here), his drowned blue eyes fixed on the
winter sunset outside, his hair" turned to ash, the muscles of his back
and thighs stirring a little. The house hangs oddments from the ceiling; found
objects, mobiles, can openers, red balls, bunches of
wild grass, and Davy plays with them.
I showed the Js around: the books, the
microfilm viewer in the library in touch with our regional library miles away,
the storage spaces in the walls, the various staircases, the bathrooms molded
of glass fiber and put together from two pieces, the mattresses stored in the
walls of the guest rooms, and the conservatory (near the central core, to make
use of the heat) where Davy comes and mimics wonder, watching the lights shine
on my orchids, my palmettos, my bougainvillea, my whole little mess of tropical
plants. I even have a glassed-in space for cacti. There are outside plantings
where in season you can find mountain laurel, a tangled maze of rhododendron,
scattered irises that look like an expensive and antique cross between insects
and lingerie— but these are under snow now. I even have an electrified fence,
inherited from my predecessor, that encloses the whole estate to keep out the
deer and occasionally kills trees which take the mild climate around the house
a little too much for granted.
I let the J's peep into the kitchen, which is
an armchair with controls like a 707's, but not the place where I store my tools
and from which I have access to the central core when House has indigestion.
That's dirty and you need to know what you're doing. I showed them Screen,
which keeps me in touch with my neighbors, the nearest of whom is ten miles
away, Telephone, who is my long-distance backup line, and Phonograph, where I
store my music.
Jeannine said she didn't like her drink; it
wasn't sweet enough. So I had Davy dial her another.
Do you want dinner? (She blushed.)
My palace and gardens (said I) I acquired late
in life when I became rich and influential; before that I lived in one of the
underground cities among the damnedest passel of neighbors you ever saw,
sentimental Arcadian communes—underground, mind you!— whose voices would travel
up the sewer pipes at all the wrong times of day and night, shrill sacrifices
to love and joy when you want to sleep, ostentatious shuddering whenever I
appeared in the corridor, wincing and dashing back inside to huddle together
like kittens, conscious of their own innocence, and raise their pure young
voices in the blessedness of community song. You know the kind: "But we
were having fun!" in a soft,
wondering, highly reproachful voice while she closes the door gently but firmly
on your thumb. They thought I was Ultimate Evil. They let me know it. They are
the kind who want to win the men over by Love. There's
a game called Pussycat that's great fun for the player; it goes like this: Meeow, I'm dead (lying on your back, all four paws
engagingly held in the air, playing helpless); there's another called Saint
George and the Dragon with You Know Who playing You Know What; and when you can
no longer tolerate either, you do as I did: come home in a hobgoblin-head of a
disguise, howling and chasing your neighbors down the hall while they scream in
genuine terror (well, sort of).
Then I moved.
That was my first job, impersonating one of
the Manlanders' police (for ten minutes). By
"job" I don't mean what I was sent to do last night, that was open
and legitimate, but a "job" is a little bit under the table. It took
me years to throw off the last of my Pussy-fetters, to stop being (however
brutalized) vestigially Pussy-cat-ified,
but at last I did and now I am the rosy, wholesome, single-minded assassin you
see before you today.
I come and go as I please. I do only what I
want. I have wrestled myself through to an independence of mind that has ended
by bringing all of you here today. In short, I am a grown woman.
I was an old-fashioned girl, born forty-two
years ago in the last years before the war, in one of the few mixed towns still
left. It amazes me sometimes to think of what my life would have been like
without the war, but I ended up in a refugee camp with my mother. Maddened
Lesbians did not put cigarette butts out on her breasts, propaganda to the
contrary; in fact she got a lot more self-confident and whacked me when I tore
to pieces (out of pure curiosity) a paper doily that decorated the top of the
communal radio—this departure from previous practice secretly gratified me and
I decided I rather liked the place. We were re-settled and I was sent to school
once the war cooled off; by '52 our territories had shrunk to pretty much what
they are today, and we've grown too wise since to think we can gain anything by
merely annexing land. I was trained for years—we deplore what we must
nonetheless use!—and began my slow drift away from the community, that
specialization (they say) that brings you closer to the apes, though I don't
see how such an exceedingly skilled and artificial practice can be anything but
quintessentially human.
At twelve I artlessly told one of my teachers
that I was very glad I was being brought up to be a man-woman, and that I
looked down on those girls who were only brought up to be woman-women. I'll
never forget her face. She did not thrash me but let an older girl-girl do it—I
told you I was old-fashioned. Gradually this sort of thing wears off; not
everything with claws and teeth is a Pussycat. On the contrary!
My first job (as I told you) was impersonating
one of the Manlander police; my most recent one was
taking the place of a Manlander diplomat for eighteen
months in a primitive patriarchy on an alternate Earth. Oh yes, the Men also
have probability-travel, or rather they have it through us; we run the routine
operations for them. So far has corruption progressed! With my silver hair, my
silver eyes, and my skin artificially darkened to make me look even stranger to
the savages, I was presented as a Prince of Faery,
and in that character I lived in a dank stone castle with ghastly sanitary
arrangements and worse beds for a year and a half. A place that would make your
hair stand on end. Jeannine must stop looking so
skeptical—please reflect that some societies stylize their adult roles to such
a degree that a giraffe could pass for a man, especially with seventy-seven
layers of clothes on, and a barbarian prudery that keeps you from ever taking
them off. They were impossible people. I used to make up stories about the Faery women; once I killed a man because he said something
obscene about the Faery women. Think of that! You
must imagine me as the quiet, serene Christian among the pagans, the courteous
magician among the blunt men-o'-war, the overcivilized
stranger (possibly a Demon because he was understood to have no beard) who
spoke softly and never accepted challenges, but who was not afraid of anything
under Heaven and who had a grip of steel. And so on. Oh, those cold baths! And
the endless joking about how they
weren't queer, by God! And the bellicosity, the continual joshing that catches
in your skin like thorns and exasperates you almost to murder, and the constant
fingering of sex and womankind with its tragic, pitiable bafflement and its
even worse bragging; and last of all the perpetual losing battle with fear, the
constant unloading of anxious weaknesses on to others (and their consequent
enraged fury) as if fear and weakness were not the best guides we human beings
ever had! Oh, it was rich! When they found that not a knight in the Men's House
could lay a hand on me, they begged for instruction; I had half the warriors of
the mead-hall doing elementary ballet under the mistaken impression that they
were learning ju-jitsu. They may be doing it still. It made them sweat enough
and it's my signature, plain as day, to the whole bloody universe and any Manlander who turns up there again.
A barbarian woman fell in love with me. It's
terrible to see that slavishness in someone else's eyes, feel that halo she
puts around you, and know from your own person the nature of that eager
deference men so often perceive as admiration. Validate
me! she cried. Justify
me! Raise me up! Save me from the others! ("I am his
wife," she says, turning the mystic ring round and round on her finger,
"I am his wife.") So
somewhere I have a kind of widow. I used to talk to her sensibly, as no man
ever had before, I think. I tried to take her back with me, but couldn't get
authorization for her. Somewhere out there is a murderess as rosy and
single-minded as I, if we could only get to her.
May She save us all!
I saved the King's life once by pinning to the
festive Kingly board a pretty little hamadryad somebody had imported from the
Southern lands to kill His Majesty. This helped me a good deal. Those primitive
warriors are brave men—that is, they are slaves to the fear of fear—but there
are some things they believe every man is entitled to run from in abject
terror, viz . snakes, ghosts, earthquakes, disease, demons, magic,
childbirth, menstruation, witches, afreets, incubi, succubi, solar eclipses, reading, writing, good manners,
syllogistic reasoning, and what we might generally call the less reliable
phenomena of life. The fact that I was not afraid to pin a poisonous snake to a
wooden table with a fork (a piece of Faery handicraft
I had brought with me to eat meat with) raised my prestige immensely. Oh yes,
if it had bitten me, I would have been dead. But they don't move that fast.
Think of me in quilting and crinolines—not like a Victorian lady, like a player
in Kabuki—holding up that poor little broken-backed dinkus
amid general hurrahs. Think of me astride a coal-black charger, my
black-and-silver cloak streaming in the wind under a heraldic banner comprising
crossed forks on a field of reptile eggs. Think of anything you please. Think,
if you will, how hard it is to remain calm under constant insults, and of the
genuine charm of playing bullfight with a big, beautiful, nasty blond who goes hartyhar every chance he gets, and whom you can reel in and
spin out again as if you knew all his control buttons, as indeed you do. Think
of giving the King bad advice week after week: modestly, deliberately, and
successfully. Think of placing your ladylike foot on the large, dead neck of a
human dinosaur who has bothered you for months and has finally tried to kill
you; there he lies, this big, carnal flower gathered at last by Chaos and Old
Night, torn and broken in the dust, a big limpid Nada, a nothing, a thing, an
animal, a creature brought down at last out of his pride to the truth of his
organic being— and you did it.
I keep one precious souvenir of that time: the
look on the face of my most loyal feudal retainer when I revealed my sex to
him. This was a man I had all-but-seduced without his knowing it—little touches
on the arm, the shoulder, the knee, a quiet manner, a certain look in the
eyes—nothing so gross that he thought it to be me; he assumed it was all
himself. I loved that part. His first impulse, of course, was to hate me, fight
me, drive me off—but I wasn't doing anything, was I? I had made no advances to
him, had I? What sort of mind did he have? A pitiable confusion! So I got even
nicer. He got madder and guiltier, of course, and loathed the very sight of me
because I made him doubt his own reason; finally he challenged me and I turned
him into a faithful dog by beating him right into the ground; I kicked that man
so bloody hard that I couldn't stand it myself and had to explain to him that
what he believed were unnatural lusts were really a species of religious
reverence; he just wanted to lie peacefully on the ground and kiss my boot.
The day that I left I went out into the hills
with a few friends for the Faery "ceremony"
that was to take me away, and when the Bureau people radio'd
me they were ready, I sent the others away, and I told him the truth. I
divested myself of my knightly attire (no mean trick, considering what those
idiots wear) and showed him the marks of Eve; for a moment I could see that
stinking bastard's whole world crumble. For a moment he knew . Then, by God, his eyes got even
more moist and slavish, he sank to his knees and piously elevating his gaze,
exclaimed in a rapture of feudal enthusiasm—Humanity mending its fences—
If the women of Faery
are like this, just think what the MEN must be!
One of Her little
jokes. Oh Lord, one of Her hardest jokes.
If you want to be an assassin, remember that
you must decline all challenges. Showing off is not your job.
If you are insulted, smile meekly. Don't break
your cover.
Be afraid. This is information about the
world.
You are valuable. Push yourself.
Take the easiest way out whenever possible.
Resist curiosity, pride, and the temptation to defy limits. You are not your
own woman and must be built to last.
Indulge hatred. Action comes from the heart.
Pray often. How else can you quarrel with God?
Does this strike you as painfully austere? If
not, you are like me; you can turn yourself inside out, you can live for days
upside down, the most biddable, unblushing servant of the Lady since the Huns
sacked Rome, just for fun. Anything pursued to its logical end is revelation;
as Blake says, The path of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, to that place
where all things converge but up high, up unbearably high, that mental success
which leads you into yourself, under the aspect of eternity, where you are
limber and nice, where you act eternally under the aspect of Everything and
where—by doing the One Genuine Thing—you cannot do anything untruly or
half-way.
To put it simply: those are the times that I
am most myself.
Sometimes I am a little remorseful; I grow
sorry that the exercise of my art entails such unpleasant consequences for
other people, but really! Hate is a material like any other. If you want me to
do something else useful, you had better show me what that something else is. Sometimes
I go into one of our cities and have little sprees in the local museums; I look
at pictures, I get a hotel room and take long hot baths, I drink lots of
lemonade. But the record of my life is the record of work, slow, steady,
responsible work. I tied my first sparring partner in enraged knots, as Brynhild tied up her husband in her girdle and hung him on
the wall, but aside from that I have never hurt a fellow Womanlander;
when I wanted to practice deadly strategies, I did it on the school robot. Nor
do I have love-affairs with other women; in some things, as I told you, I am a
very old-fashioned girl.
The art, you see, is really the head, however
you train the body.
What does all this mean? That I am your
hostess, your friend, your ally. That
we are in the same boat. That I am the grand-daughter
of Madam Cause; my great-aunts are Mistress Doasyouwouldbedoneby
and her slower sister, Mistress Bedonebyasyoudid.
As for my mother, she was an ordinary woman—that is to say, very helpless—and
as my father was pure appearance (and hence nothing at all), we needn't trouble
about him.
Everything I do, I do by Cause, that is to say Because , that is to say out of necessity,
will-I, nill-I, ineluctably, because of the geas laid on me by
my grandmother Causality.
And now—since hysterical strength affects me
the way staying up all night affects you—I'm going to sleep.
X
In my sleep I had a dream and this dream was a
dream of guilt. It was not human guilt but the kind of helpless, hopeless
despair that would be felt by a small wooden box or geometrical cube if such
objects had consciousness; it was the guilt of sheer existence.
It was the secret guilt of disease, of
failure, of ugliness (much worse things than murder); it was an attribute of my
being like the greenness of the grass. It was in
me. It was on me. If it had been the
result of anything I had done, I would have been less guilty.
In my dream I was eleven years old.
Now in my eleven years of conventional life I
had learned many things and one of them was what it means to be convicted of
rape—I do not mean the man who did it, I mean the woman to whom it was done.
Rape is one of the Christian mysteries, it creates a luminous and beautiful
tableau in people's minds; and as I listened furtively to what nobody would
allow me to hear straight out, I slowly came to understand that I was face to
face with one of those shadowy feminine disasters, like pregnancy, like
disease, like weakness; she was not only the victim of the act but in some
strange way its perpetrator; somehow she had attracted the lightning that
struck her out of a clear sky. A diabolical chance—which
was not chance —had revealed her to all of us as she truly was, in
her secret inadequacy, in that wretched guiltiness which she had kept hidden
for seventeen years but which now finally manifested itself in front of
everybody. Her secret guilt was this:
She was Cunt.
She had "lost" something.
Now the other party to the incident had
manifested his essential nature, too; he was Prick—but being Prick is not a bad
thing. In fact, he had "gotten away with" something (possibly what
she had "lost").
And there I was, listening at eleven years of
age:
She was out late at night.
She was in the wrong part of town.
Her skirt was too short and that provoked him.
She liked having her eye blacked and her head
banged against the sidewalk.
I understood this perfectly. (I reflected thus
in my dream, in my state of being a pair of eyes in a small wooden box stuck
forever on a gray, geometric plane—or so I thought.) I too had been guilty of
what had been done to me, when I came home from the playground in tears because
I had been beaten up by bigger children who were bullies.
I was dirty.
I was crying.
I demanded comfort.
I was being inconvenient.
I did not disappear into thin air.
And if that isn't guilt, what is? I was very
lucid in my nightmare. I knew it was not wrong to be a girl because Mommy said
so; cunts were all right if they were neutralized, one by one, by being hooked
on to a man, but this orthodox arrangement only partly redeems them and every
biological possessor of one knows in her bones that radical inferiority which
is only another name for Original Sin.
Pregnancy, for example (says the box), take
pregnancy now, it's a disaster, but we're too enlightened to blame the woman
for her perfectly natural behavior, aren't we? Only keep it secret and keep it
going—and I'll give you three guesses as to which partner the pregnancy is in.
When you grow up as an old-fashioned girl, you
always remember that cozy comfort: Daddy getting angry a lot but Mummy just
sighs. When Daddy says, "For God's sake, can't you women ever remember
anything without being told?" he isn't asking a real question any more
than he'd ask a real question of a lamp or a wastebasket. I blinked my silver
eyes inside my box. If you stumble over a lamp and you curse that lamp and then
you become aware that inside that lamp (or that wooden box or that pretty girl
or that piece of bric-a-brac) is a pair of eyes watching you and that pair of eyes is not amused —what then?
Mommy never shouted, "I hate your bloody
guts!" She controlled herself to avoid a scene. That was her job.
I've been doing it for her ever since.
Now here the idiot reader is likely to hit
upon a fascinating speculation (maybe a little late), that my guilt is
blood-guilt for having killed so many men. I suppose there is nothing to be
done about this. Anybody who believes I feel guilty for the murders I did is a
Damned Fool in the full Biblical sense of those two words; you might as well
kill yourself right now and save me the trouble, especially if you're male. I
am not guilty because I murdered.
I murdered because I was guilty.
Murder is my one way out.
For every drop of blood shed there is
restitution made; with every truthful reflection in the eyes of a dying man I
get back a little of my soul; with every gasp of horrified comprehension I come
a little more into the light. See? It's me!
I am the force that is ripping out your guts; I, I, I, the hatred twisting your arm; I, I, I, the fury who
has just put a bullet into your side. It is I who cause this pain, not you. It
is I who am doing it to you, not you. It is I who will be alive tomorrow, not
you. Do you know? Can you guess? Are you catching on? It is I, who you will not
admit exists.
Look! Do you see
me?
I, I,
This is the underside of my world.
Of course you don't want me to be stupid,
bless you! you only want to make sure you're
intelligent. You don't want me to commit suicide; you only want me to be
gratefully aware of my dependency. You don't want me to despise myself; you
only want to ensure the flattering deference to you that you consider a
spontaneous tribute to your natural qualities. You don't want me to lose my
soul; you only want what everybody wants, things to go your way; you want a
devoted helpmeet, a self-sacrificing mother, a hot chick, a darling daughter,
women to look at, women to laugh at, women to come to for comfort, women to
wash your floors and buy your groceries and cook your food and keep your
children out of your hair, to work when you need the money and stay home when
you don't, women to be enemies when you want a good fight, women who are sexy
when you want a good lay, women who don't complain, women who don't nag or
push, women who don't hate you really, women who know their job, and above
all—women who lose. On top of it all, you sincerely require me to be happy; you
are naively puzzled that I should be so wretched and so full of venom in this
best of all possible worlds. Whatever can be the matter with me? But the mode
is more than a little outworn.
As my mother once
said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.
But the frogs die in earnest.
XI
I don't like didactic nightmares. They make me
sweat. It takes me fifteen minutes to stop being a wooden box with a soul and
to come back to myself in ordinary human bondage.
Davy sleeps nearby. You've heard about
blue-eyed blonds, haven't you? I passed into his room barefoot and watched him
curled in sleep, unconscious, the golden veils of his
eyelashes shadowing his cheeks, one arm thrown out into the streak of light
falling on him from the hall. It takes a lot to wake him (you can almost mount
Davy in his sleep) but I was too shaken to start right away and only squatted
down by the mattress he sleeps on, tracing with my fingertips the patterns the
hair made on his chest: broad high up, over the muscles, then narrowing toward
his delicate belly (which rose and fell with his breathing), the line of hair
to below the navel, and then that suddenly stiff blossoming of the pubic hair
in which his relaxed genitals nestled gently, like a rosebud.
I told you I was an old-fashioned girl.
I caressed his dry, velvety-skinned organ
until it stirred in my hand, then ran my fingernails
lightly down his sides to wake him up; I did the same— though very lightly—to
the insides of his arms.
He opened his eyes and smiled starrily at me.
It's very pleasant to follow Davy's hairline
around his neck with your tongue or nuzzle all the hollows of his long-muscled,
swimmer's body: inside the elbows, the forearms, the place where the back
tapers inward under the ribs, the backs of the knees. A naked man is a cross, the juncture elaborated vulnerable and delicate flesh
like the blossom on a banana tree, that place that's given me so much pleasure.
I nudged him gently and he shivered a little,
bringing his legs together and spreading his arms flat; with my forefinger I
made a transient white line on his neck. Little Davy was half-filled by now,
which is a sign that Davy wants to be knelt over. I obliged, sitting across his
thighs, and bending over him without touching his body, kissed him again and
again on the mouth, the neck, the face, the shoulders.
He is very, very exciting. He's very beautiful, my classic mesomorphic
monster-pet. Putting one arm under his shoulders to lift him up, I rubbed my
nipples over his mouth, first one and then the other, which is nice for us
both, and as he held on to my upper arms and let his head fall back, I pulled
him to me, kneading his back muscles, kneading his buttocks, sliding down to
the mattress with him. Little Davy is entirely filled out now.
So lovely: Davy with his head thrown to one
side, eyes closed, his strong fingers clenching and unclenching. He began to
arch his back, as his sleepiness made him a little too quick for me, so I
pressed Small Davy between thumb and forefinger just enough to slow him down
and then—when I felt like it—playfully started to mount him, rubbing the tip of
him, nipping him a little on the neck. His breathing in my
ear, fingers convulsively closing on mine.
I played with him a little more, tantalizing
him, then swallowed him whole like a watermelon
seed—so fine inside! with Davy moaning, his tongue
inside my mouth, his blue gaze shattered, his whole body uncontrollably arched,
all his sensation concentrated in the place where I held him.
I don't do this often, but that time I made
him come by slipping a finger up his anus: convulsions, fires, crying in no
words as the sensation was pulled out of him. If I had let him take more time,
I would have climaxed with him, but he's stiff for quite a while after he comes
and I prefer that; I like the after-tremors and the after-hardness, slipperier
and more pliable than before; Davy has an eerie malleability at those times. I
grasped him internally, I pressed down on him, enjoying in the one act his
muscular throat, the hair under his arms, his knees, the strength of his back
and buttocks, his beautiful face, the fine skin on the inside of his thighs.
Kneaded and bruised him, hiccoughing inside with all my architecture: little
buried rod, swollen lips and grabby sphincter, the flexing half-moon under the
pubic bone. And everything else in the vicinity, no doubt.
I'd had him. Davy was mine. Sprawled blissfully over him—I was discharged down
to my fingertips but still quietly throbbing—it had really been a good one. His
body so warm and wet under me and inside me.
XII
And looked up to see—
XIII
—the three J's—
XIV
"Good Lord! Is that all?" said Janet to Joanna.
XV
Something pierces the sweetest solitude.
I got up, tickled him with the edge of my
claw, joined them at the door. Closing
it. "Stay, Davy." This is one of the key words that the house
"understands"; the central computer will transmit a pattern of
signals to the implants in his brain and he will stretch out obediently on his
mattress; when I say to the main computer "Sleep," Davy will sleep.
You have already seen what else happens. He's a lovely limb of the house. The
original germ-plasm was chimpanzee, I think, but none
of the behavior is organically controlled any more. True, he does have his
minimal actions which he pursues without me—he eats, eliminates, sleeps, and
climbs in and out of his exercise box—but even these are caused by a standing
computer pattern. And I take precedence, of course. It is theoretically
possible that Davy has (tucked away in some nook of his cerebrum) consciousness
of a kind that may never even touch his active life—is Davy a poet in his own
peculiar way?—but I prefer to believe not. His consciousness—such as it is and
I am willing to grant it for the sake of argument—is nothing but the permanent
possibility of sensation, a mere intellectual abstraction, a nothing, a
picturesque collocation of words. It is experientially quite empty, and above
all, it is nothing that need concern you and me. Davy's soul lies somewhere
else; it's an outside soul. Davy's soul is Davy's beauty; and Beauty is always
empty, always on the outside. Isn't it?
"Leucotomized,"
I said (to the J's). "Lobotomized. Kidnapped in childhood. Do you believe me?"
They did.
"Don't," I said. Jeannine doesn't
understand what we're talking about; Joanna does and is appalled; Janet is
thinking. I shooed them into the main room and told them who he was.
Alas! those who were
shocked at my making love that way to a man are now shocked at my making love
to a machine; you can't win.
"Well?" said the Swedish Miss.
"Well," said I, "this is what
we want. We want bases on your worlds; we want raw materials if you've got
them. We want places to recuperate and places to hide an army; we want places
to store our machines. Above all, we want places to move from—bases that the
other side doesn't know about. Janet is obviously acting as an unofficial
ambassador, so I can talk to her, that's fine. You two might object that you
are persons of no standing, but whom do you expect me to ask, your governments?
Also, we need someone who can show us the local ropes. You'll do fine for me.
You are the authorities, as far as I'm concerned.
"Well?
"Is it yes or no?
"Do we do business?"
PART NINE
I
This is the Book of Joanna.
II
I was driving on a four-lane highway in
"Beat 'im! Beat
'im!" cried the little boy excitedly as I passed
another car in order to change lanes. I stayed in the right-hand lane for a
while, admiring the buttercups by the side of the road, and then, in order to
change lanes back, fell behind another car.
"Pass 'im! Pass
'im!" cried the distressed child, and then in
anxious tears, "Why didn't you beat
'im?"
"There, there, old sport," said his
indulgent Daddy, "Joanna drives like a lady. When you're grown up you'll
have a car of your own and you can pass everybody on the road." He turned
to me and complained:
"Joanna, you just don't drive
aggressively enough."
In training.
III
There's the burden of knowledge. There's the
burden of compassion. There's seeing all too clearly what's in their eyes as
they seize your hands, crying cheerily, "You don't really mind my saying
that, do you? I knew you didn't!" Men's shaky egos have a terrible appeal
to the mater dolorosa. At times I am seized by a hopeless, helpless longing for
love and reconciliation, a dreadful yearning to be understood, a teary passion
for exposing our weaknesses to each other. It seems intolerable that I should
go through life thus estranged, keeping it all to my guilty self. So I try to
explain in the softest, least accusing way I can, but oddly enough men don't
behave the way they do on the Late Late Show, I mean
those great male stars in their infancy in the Jean Arthur or the Mae West
movies: candid, clear-eyed, and fresh, with their unashamed delight in their
women's strength and their naive enjoyment of their own, beautiful men with
beautiful faces and the joyfulness of innocents, John Smith or John Doe. These
are the only men I will let into Whileaway. But we
have fallen away from our ancestors' softness and clarity of thought into
corrupt and degenerate practices. When I speak now I am told loftily or kindly
that I just don't understand, that women are really happy that way, that women
can better themselves if they want to but somehow they just don't want to, that
I'm joking, that I can't possibly mean what I say, that I'm too intelligent to
be put in the same class as "women," that I'm different, that there
is a profound spiritual difference between men and women of which I don't
appreciate the beauty, that I have a man's brain, that I have a man's mind,
that I'm talking to a phonograph record. Women don't take it that way. If you
bring up the subject with them, they begin to tremble out of terror,
embarrassment, and alarm; they smile a smile of hideous, smug embarrassment, a
magical smile meant to wipe them off the face of the earth, to make them abject
and invisible—oh no, no, no, no, don't think I believe any of that, don't think
I need any of that! Consider:
You ought to be
interested in politics.
Politics is baseball. Politics is football.
Politics is X "winning" and Y "losing." Men wrangle about
politics in living rooms the way Opera Fan One shouts
at Opera Fan Two about
No squabble between the Republican League and
the Democrat League will ever change your
life. Concealing your anxiety over the phone when He calls; that's your
politics.
Still, you ought
to be interested in politics. Why aren't you?
Because of feminine
incapacity.
One can go on.
IV
I committed my first revolutionary act yesterday.
I shut the door on a man's thumb. I did it for no reason at all and I didn't
warn him; I just slammed the door shut in a rapture of hatred and imagined the
bone breaking and the edges grinding into his skin. He ran downstairs and the
phone rang wildly for an hour after while I sat, listening to it, my heart
beating wildly, thinking wild thoughts. Horrible. Horrible and wild. I must find Jael.
Women are so petty (translation: we operate on
too small a scale).
Now I'm worse than that—I also do not give a
damn about humanity or society. It's very upsetting to think that women make up
only one-tenth of society, but it's true. For example:
My doctor is male.
My lawyer is male.
My tax-accountant is male.
The grocery-store-owner (on the corner) is
male.
The janitor in my apartment building is male.
The president of my bank is male.
The manager of the neighborhood supermarket is
male.
My landlord is male.
Most taxi-drivers are male.
All cops are male.
All firemen are male.
The designers of my car are male.
The factory workers who made the car are male.
The dealer I bought it from is male.
Almost all my colleagues are male.
My employer is male.
The Army is male.
The Navy is male.
The government is (mostly) male.
I think most of the people in the world are
male.
Now it's true that waitresses,
elementary-school teachers, secretaries, nurses, and nuns are female, but how
many nuns do you meet in the course of the usual business day? Right? And secretaries are female only until they get
married, at which time, they change or something because you usually don't see
them again at all. I think it's a legend that half the population of the world
is female; where on earth are they keeping them all? No, if you tot up all
those categories of women above, you can see clearly and beyond the shadow of a
doubt that there are maybe 1-2 women for every 11 or so men and that hardly
justifies making such a big fuss. It's just that I'm selfish. My friend Kate
says that most of the women are put into female-banks when they grow up and
that's why you don't see them, but I can't believe that.
(Besides, what about
the children? Mothers have to
sacrifice themselves to their children, both male and female, so that the
children will be happy when they grow up; though the mothers themselves were
once children and were sacrificed to in order that they might grow up and
sacrifice themselves to others; and when the daughters grow up, they will be mothers and they will have to sacrifice themselves for their children, so you begin to wonder whether
the whole thing isn't a plot to make the world safe for (male) children. But
motherhood is sacred and mustn't be talked about.)
Oh dear, oh dear.
Thus in the bad days,
in the dark swampy times.
At thirteen desperately watching TV, curling
my long legs under me, desperately reading books, callow adolescent that I was,
trying (desperately!) to find someone in books, in movies, in life, in history,
to tell me it was O.K. to be ambitious, O.K. to be loud, O.K. to be Humphrey
Bogart (smart and rudeness), O.K. to be James Bond (arrogance), O.K. to be
Superman (power), O.K. to be Douglas Fairbanks (swashbuckling), to tell me
self-love was all right, to tell me I could love God and Art and Myself better
than anything on earth and still have orgasms.
Being told it was all right "for you,
dear," but not for women .
Being told I was a woman.
At sixteen, giving up.
In college, educated women (I found out) were
frigid; active women (I knew) were neurotic; women (we all knew) were timid,
incapable, dependent, nurturing, passive, intuitive, emotional, unintelligent,
obedient, and beautiful. You can always get dressed up and go to a party. Woman
is the gateway to another world; Woman is the earth-mother; Woman is the
eternal siren; Woman is purity; Woman is carnality; Woman has intuition; Woman
is the life-force; Woman is selfless love.
"I am the gateway to another world,"
(said I, looking in the mirror) "I am the earth-mother; I am the eternal
siren; I am purity," (Jeez, new pimples) "I am carnality; I have
intuition; I am the life-force; I am selfless love." (Somehow it sounds
different in the first person, doesn't it?)
Honey (said the mirror, scandalized) Are you
out of your fuckin' mind ?
I AM HONEY
I AM RASPBERRY JAM
I AM A VERY GOOD LAY
I AM A GOOD DATE
I AM A GOOD WIFE
I AM GOING CRAZY
Everything was preaches and cream.
(When I decided that the key word in all this
vomit was self-less and that if I was
really all the things books, friends, parents, teachers, dates, movies,
relatives, doctors, newspapers, and magazines said I was, then if I acted as I pleased without thinking of all
these things I would be all these things in spite of my not trying to be all
these things. So—
"Christ, will you quit acting like a
man!")
Alas, it was never meant for us to hear. It
was never meant for us to know. We ought never be
taught to read. We fight through the constant male refractoriness of our
surroundings; our souls are torn out of us with such shock that there isn't
even any blood. Remember: I didn't and don't want to be a "feminine"
version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an
ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be
the heroes themselves.
What future is there for a female child who
aspires to being Humphrey Bogart?
Baby Laura Rose,
playing with her toes, she's a real pretty little sweetie-girl, isn't she?
Sugar and spice
And everything nice—
That's what
little girls are made of!
But her brother's a tough little bruiser (two
identical damp, warm lumps). At three and a half I mixed sour cream and ice
cubes on the window sill to see if they would turn into ice cream; I copied the words "hot"
and "cold" off the water faucets. At four I sat on a record to see if
it would break if pressure were applied evenly to both sides—it did; in
kindergarten I taught everybody games and bossed them around; at six I beat up
a little boy who took candy from my coat; I thought very well of myself.
V
Learning to
despise
one's
self
VI
Brynhild hung her husband on a nail in the wall, tied up in her
girdle as in a shopping bag, but she, too, lost her strength when the magic shlong got inside her. One can't help feeling that the
story has been somewhat distorted in the re-telling. When I was five I thought
that the world was a matriarchy.
I was a happy little girl.
I couldn't tell the difference between
"gold" and "silver" or "night gown" and
"evening gown," so I imagined all the ladies of the neighborhood
getting together in their beautiful "night gowns"—which were signs of
rank—and making all the decisions about our lives. They were the government. My
mother was President because she was a school teacher and local people deferred
to her. Then the men would come home from "work" (wherever that was;
I thought it was like hunting) and lay "the bacon" at the ladies'
feet, to do with as they wished. The men were employed by the ladies to do
this. Laura Rose, who never swam underwater a whole month in summer camp with
goggles on or slept in the top bunk, fancying herself a Queen in lonely splendor
or a cabin-boy on a ship, has no such happy memories. She's the girl who wanted
to be Genghis Khan. When Laura tried to find out who she was, they told her she
was "different" and that's a hell of a description on which to base
your life; it comes down to either "Not-me" or "Convenient-for
me" and what is one supposed to do with that? What am I to do? (she says) What am I to feel? Is "supposed" like
"spoused"? Is "different" like
"deteriorate"? How can I eat or sleep? How can I go to the moon?
I first met Laur a
few years ago when I was already grown up. Cinnamon and apples,
ginger and vanilla, that's Laur. Now having Brynhildic fantasies about her was nothing—I have all sorts
of extraordinary fantasies which I don't take seriously—but bringing my fantasies
into the real world frightened me very much. It's not that they were bad in
themselves, but they were Unreal and therefore culpable; to try to make Real
what was Unreal was to mistake the very nature of things; it was a sin not
against conscience (which remained genuinely indifferent during the whole
affair) but against Reality, and of the two the latter is far more blasphemous.
It's the crime of creating one's own Reality, of "preferring oneself"
as a good friend of mine says. I knew it was an impossible project.
She was reading a book, her hair falling over
her face. She was radiant with health and life, a study in dirty blue jeans. I
knelt down by her chair and kissed her on the back of her smooth, honeyed, hot
neck with a despairing feeling that now I had done
it —but asking isn't getting. Wanting isn't having. She'll refuse
and the world will be itself again. I waited confidently for the rebuke, for
the eternal order to reassert itself (as it had to, of course)—for it would in
fact take a great deal of responsibility off my hands.
But she let me do it. She blushed and pretended not to notice. I can't describe
to you how reality itself tore wide open at that moment. She kept on reading
and I trod at a snail's pace over her ear and cheek down to the corner of her
mouth, Laur getting hotter and redder all the time as
if she had steam inside her. It's like falling off a cliff, standing astonished
in mid-air as the horizon rushes away from you. If this is possible, anything
is possible. Later we got stoned and made awkward, self-conscious love, but
nothing that happened afterward was as important to me (in an unhuman way) as that first, awful wrench of the mind.
Once I felt the pressure of her hip-bone along
my belly, and being very muddled and high, thought: She's
got an erection. Dreadful. Dreadful embarrassment. One of us had to be male and it
certainly wasn't me. Now they'll tell me it's because I'm a Lesbian, I mean
that's why I'm dissatisfied with things. That's not true. It's not because I'm
a Lesbian. It's because I'm a tall, blonde,
blue-eyed Lesbian .
Does it count if it's your best friend? Does
it count if it's her mind you love through her body? Does it count if you love
men's bodies but hate men's minds? Does it count if you still love yourself?
Later we got better.
VII
Jeannine goes window-shopping. She has my
eyes, my hands, my silly stoop; she's wearing my blue plastic raincoat and
carrying my umbrella. Jeannine is out on the town on a Saturday afternoon
saying goodbye, goodbye, goodbye to all that.
Goodbye to mannequins in store windows who
pretend to be sympathetic but who are really nasty conspiracies, goodbye to
hating Mother, goodbye to the Divine Psychiatrist, goodbye to The Girls,
goodbye to Normality, goodbye to Getting Married, goodbye to The Supernaturally
Blessed Event, goodbye to being Some Body, goodbye to waiting for Him (poor
fellow!), goodbye to sitting by the telephone, goodbye to feebleness, goodbye
to adoration, goodbye Politics, hello politics. She's scared but that's all
right. The streets are full of women and this awes her; where have they all
come from? Where are they going? (If you don't mind the
symbolism.) It's stopped raining but mist coils up from the pavement.
She passes a bridal shop where the chief mannequin, a Vision in white lace and
tulle, sticks out her tongue at Jeannine. "Didn't do it!" cries the
mannequin, resuming her haughty pose and balancing a bridal veil on her head.
Jeannine shuts her umbrella, latches it, and swings it energetically round and round.
Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye to everything.
We met in Schrafft's
and sat, the four of us, at one table, ordering their Thanksgiving dinner, argh, which is so traditional you can't stand it. Gah.
"What's Indian pudding?" says Janet,
baffled.
"No, don't, better not," says
Joanna.
We munch in silence, slowly, the way Whileawayans eat: munch, munch, gulp.
Munch. Gulp, gulp, gulp, Munch. Meditatively. It's
pleasant to eat. Janet screws up her eyes, yawns, and stretches athletically,
leaning over the back of her chair and working her bent arms first to this
side, then to that. She ends up by pounding on the table. "Mm!" she
says.
"My goodness, look at that," says
Jeannine, very self-possessed and elegant, her fork in mid-air. "I thought
you were going to knock someone's hat off."
Schrafft's is full of women. Men don't like places like this where
the secret maintenance work of femininity is carried on, just as they turn
green and bolt when you tell them medical events are occurring in your genito-urinary system. Jael has
got something stuck between her steel teeth and her sham ones, and cocking an
eye around Schrafft's, she slips off her tooth cover
and roots around for the blackberry seed or whatever, exposing to the world her
steely, crocodilian grin. Back they go. In. Done.
"So?" says Jael.
"Do we do business?" There is a long, uncomfortable silence. I look
around Schrafft's and wonder why women at their most
genteel are so miserly; why is there no Four Seasons, no Maxim's, no
"This is awful food," says Janet,
who is used to Whileaway.
"This is wonderful food," says Jael, who is used to Womanland
and Manland.
Both burst out laughing.
"Well?" says Jael
again. Another silence. Janet and I are very
uncomfortable. Jeannine, one cheek bulging like a squirrel's, looks up as if
surprised that we could hesitate to do business with Womanland.
She nods briefly and then goes back to building mashed-sweet-potato mountains with her fork. Jeannine now gets up late, neglects
the housework until it annoys her, and plays with her food.
"Jeannine?" says Jael.
"Oh, sure," says Jeannine. "I
don't mind. You can bring in all the soldiers you want. You can take the whole
place over; I wish you would." Jael goes
admiringly tsk tsk and
makes a rueful face that means: my friend, you are really going it. "My
whole world calls me Jeannie," says Jeannine in her high, sweet voice.
"See?"
(Laur is waiting
outside for Janet, probably baring her teeth at passing men.)
To Janet, Jael
suddenly says:
"You don't want me?"
"No," says Janet. "No,
sorry."
Jael grins. She says:
"Disapprove all you like. Pedant! Let me
give you something to carry away with you, friend: that 'plague' you talk of is
a lie. I know
. The world-lines around you are not so different from yours or mine or
theirs and there is no plague in any of them, not any of them. Whileaway's plague is a big lie. Your ancestors lied about
it. It is I who gave you your 'plague,' my dear, about which you can now pietize and moralize to your heart's content; I, I, I, I am
the plague, Janet Evason. I and the war I fought
built your world for you, I and those like me, we gave you a thousand years of
peace and love and the Whileawayan flowers nourish
themselves on the bones of the men we have slain.
"No," said Janet dryly, "I
don't believe." Now you must know that Jeannine is Everywoman. I, though I
am a bit quirky, I too am Everywoman. Every woman is not Jael,
as Uncle George would say— but Jael is Everywoman. We
all stared accusingly at Janet but Miss Evason was
not moved. Laur came through Schrafft's
revolving door and waved wildly; Janet got up to go.
"Think about it," said Alice Reasoner. "Go home and find out about it."
Janet began to weep—those strange, shameless, easy, Whileawayan tears that well
out of the eyes without destroying the composed sadness of the face. She is
expressing her grief about (for) Alice Reasoner. I
think—when I stop to think about it, which is not often—that I like Jael the best of us all, that I would like to be Jael, twisted as she is on the rack of her own hard logic,
triumphant in her extremity, the hateful hero with the broken heart, which is
like being the clown with the broken heart. Jael
averts her face in a death's-head grimace that is only a nervous tic of Alice Reasoner's, an expression that began perhaps twenty years
ago as a tasting-something-sour look and has intensified with time into sheer
bad-angelry, luminous with hate. She has cords in her
neck. She could put out her captive's claws and slash Schrafft's
tablecloth into ten separate, parallel ribbons. That's only one one-hundredth
of what she can do. Jeannine is playing an absorbing game with her green peas
(she had no dessert). Jeannine is happy.
We got up and paid our quintuple bill; then we
went out into the street. I said goodbye and went off with Laur,
I, Janet; I also watched them go, I, Joanna; moreover I went off to show Jael the city, I Jeannine, I Jael,
I myself.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
Goodbye to Alice Reasoner,
who says tragedy makes her sick, who says never give in but always go down
fighting, who says take them with you, who says die if you must but loop your
own intestines around the neck of your strangling enemy. Goodbye to everything.
Goodbye to Janet, whom we don't believe in and whom we deride but who is in
secret our savior from utter despair, who appears Heaven-high in our dreams
with a mountain under each arm and the ocean in her pocket, Janet who comes
from the place where the labia of sky and horizon kiss each other so that Whileawayans call it The Door and know that all legendary
things come therefrom. Radiant as the day, the
Might-be of our dreams, living as she does in a blessedness none of us will
ever know, she is nonetheless Everywoman. Goodbye, Jeannine, goodbye, poor
soul, poor girl, poor as-I-once-was. Goodbye, goodbye. Remember: we will all be
changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we will all be free. I swear
it on my own head. I swear it on my ten fingers. We will be ourselves. Until
then I am silent; I can no more. I am God's typewriter and the ribbon is typed
out.
Go, little book, trot through Texas and
Vermont and Alaska and Maryland and Washington and Florida and Canada and
England and France; bob a curtsey at the shrines of Friedan, Millet, Greer,
Firestone, and all the rest; behave yourself in people's living rooms, neither
looking ostentatious on the coffee table nor failing to persuade due to the
dullness of your style; knock at the Christmas garland on my husband's door in
New York City and tell him that I loved him truly and love him still (despite
what anybody may think); and take your place bravely on the book racks of bus
terminals and drugstores. Do not scream when you are ignored, for that will
alarm people, and do not fume when you are heisted by persons who will not pay,
rather rejoice that you have become so popular. Live merrily, little
daughter-book, even if I can't and we can't; recite yourself to all who will
listen; stay hopeful and wise. Wash your face and take your place without a
fuss in the Library of Congress, for all books end up there eventually, both
little and big. Do not complain when at last you become quaint and
old-fashioned, when you grow as outworn as the crinolines of a generation ago
and are classed with Spicy Western Stories, Elsie Dinsmore, and The
Son of the Sheik; do not mutter angrily to yourself when young
persons read you to hrooch and hrch
and guffaw, wondering what the dickens you were all about. Do not get glum when
you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach
up from readers' laps and punch the readers' noses.
Rejoice, little book!
For on that day, we will be free.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joanna Russ, a former New Yorker, was born
February 22, 1937. She received her B.A. in English at
