The Female Man

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 Man. That Is The Meaning Of My Life. And then, of course, you know what would have happened.

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 Manhattan to a foreigner—and I waited for Janet to go to a party and meet that man; I waited and waited. She walked around the suite nude. She has an awfully big ass. She used to practice her yoga on the white living room rug, callouses on her feet actually catching in the fuzz, if you can believe it. I would put lipstick on Janet and ten minutes later it would have vanished; I clothed her and she shed like a three-year-old: courteous, kind, irreproachably polite; I shied at her atrocious jokes and she made them worse.

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 East Indies, textbooks on wheat farming, to visit a bridge (we did). She wanted the blueprints (we got them).

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 Riverside Drive—incognitae—with Janet a little behind me. At the door, a little behind me. The February snow coming down outside. On the fortieth floor we got out of the elevator and I checked my dress in the hall mirror: my hair feels as if it’s falling down, my makeup’s too heavy, everything’s out of place from the crotch of the panty-hose to the ridden-up bra to the ring whose stone drags it around under my knuckle. And I don’t even wear false eyelashes. Janet—beastly fresh—is showing her usual trick of the Disappearing Lipstick. She hums gently. Batty Joanna. There are policemen posted all around the building, policemen in the street, policemen in the elevator. Nobody wants anything to happen to her. She gives a little yelp of excitement and pleasure—the first uncontrolled contact with the beastly savages.

“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.

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 America. Surely it’s not necessary, is it? (He beams with the delighted air of someone who has just given pleasure to a whole roomful of people.)

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 Sweden.

“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 Sweden—and quoted:

“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 Vermont and meet my wife. It’s a great, heavy scene. We’ve got six kids.”

“Six you take care of?” said Janet with considerable respect.

“Sure,” he said. “They’re in Vermont right now. But after this work hassle is over I’m going back. You grok?”

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 Sweden, not really. You’ve heard of me; I was on the television. I’m the emissary from Whileaway.”

“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 Vermont; Domicissa isn’t his wife.

Janet had just asked me to explicate the marriage system of North America.

Saccharissa has just said, pouting, “Po’ little me! I sho’ly needs to be liberated!”

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 Leeds. “Your conquering energy, dear lady, all this world-wide American efficiency! What do you dear ladies use it for?”

“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 Ewing. What’s yours?”

“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 Ewing. “Some of my colleagues are women. It’s not women’s intelligence. It’s women’s psychology. Eh?”

He’s being good-humored the only way he knows how. Don’t hit him.

“What you’ve got to remember,” said Ewing, energetically shredding a small napkin, “is that most women are liberated right now. They like what they’re doing. They do it because they like it.”

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; Vittoria says I’m comic with my tohu-bohu when Yuki comes home with a hair out of place. I hope not. There is this thing with the child you’ve borne yourself, your body-child. There is also the feeling to be extra-proper in front of the children, yet hardly anybody bothers. Who has the time? And since I’ve become S & P I have a different outlook on all this: a job’s a job and has to be done, but I don’t like doing it for nothing, to raise the hand to someone. For sport, yes, okay, for hatred no. Separate them.

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.