I know they could feed us more. I know the guards get a lunch. I've never seen a guard eat—they always go to their break room, but I know they go there for lunch. And they aren't as skinny as us. And I've seen them throwing out food—food to be dumped out in the refugee camps.
But when you walk through that door. The smells are amazing. Bread, fresh bread. And donuts. And cakes. And pies. And chicken frying. And usually some roast beef roasting. Things you took for granted before the Collapse. But now you know. You know how important they are.
You learn to swallow a lot of saliva. As you smile.
With all this good food and all of us being hungry, no one eats any of it. That's the first rule.
The first few days a few people couldn't handle it. One guy started laughing and crying at the same time and started stuffing his face with donuts. His cheeks were bulging with tears streaming down them as the guards dragged him away and back to the camps.
A few tried sneaking food but they were always caught. Always. The guards are all over the store watching us, looking left then right then left again with their hands on their automatic rifles. And then there are the cameras. All to keep us from the food. And there is food everywhere; it's a grocery store after all.
They start you on stocking canned foods, things you can't tear open with your teeth. Helps you build your self-control. And builds their trust in you. They could lose a fortune if they let a newbie loose in the produce section.
After a few weeks in canned foods, you move to frozen, then boxed and bagged foods, then produce, then the deli. Man, if you can work the deli they know you can handle anything. And then, if you show the willpower and are quick enough that you can chat up the customers, they train you on a register. I made it to the register in two months. I knew this was my one shot and I wasn't going to blow it.
The register is a big deal. When you're looking at salami all day you can kind of steel yourself against it. But when you are on register, who knows what's coming down your belt. Could be some apples, then a corned beef sandwich, and then some chocolate cake. You've got to be ready for anything.
But also when you're on register you have the most direct contact with the customers. And it's all about the customers. Maintaining the illusion they are paying for. The pleasant, normal environment. Whoever said you couldn't buy happiness has never been rich. Or, for that matter, hungry.
You can't just smile; you have to mean it. And you have to be ready with some light conversation, lots of them want that. There are rules about what you can say to them. You have to think like they do. One awkward comment and it's back to the camps. So you have to be good. Real good. All while you're scanning their items and taking their money.
So this one day after I had been inside a few months, I finished my stocking and they put me on a register. Like I said, I'm good at the register. Fast. Courteous. I hardly notice the food anymore. I like to pick out one item with every customer and say something like, “I've heard the cherry pies are excellent today.” They leave with a smile, thinking they made a good purchase with their thousands of dollars.
I know it'd be safer to just speak when spoken to but I feel pretty comfortable by now. I'm empathizing with the customers. I figure if someone is going to spend as much money on groceries as I used to on a car, well, they should feel good about their purchase.
So this one day I'm working the register. This old guy is coming down my line. They're almost all old. A few of them are my age, but they are the kids of the old rich ones. He's got on one of those banker suits and I'm thinking he was a Wall Street guy before the Collapse. Had enough gold and cash stashed away that he could afford to buy his way in. He looks at me as I'm scanning things and I can tell he's going to talk to me.
"Son, I just can't get used to these prices. You people make a fortune off me every time I come in here.” He picks up one of the oranges he's buying. “I mean, my God, thirty dollars a pound!"
I pick up the orange and think back to what that guard who transferred in had told me. He'd been in one of the orange groves they had got started again. Soldiers everywhere. Guard towers and patrols and barb wire encircling the whole grove. All to keep the refugees out. A cargo helicopter would dash in, load up and head back.
Thirty bucks a pound sounded like a bargain to me, but I say, “End of the season, prices shoot up. Pears only seventeen dollars a pound."
"Nah, I'll keep the oranges but you people are going to put me in the camps.” He laughs. I laugh too. And ring up his oranges.
"Well, I suppose you don't see much of this money."
None, not even much of the food, I think. “I'm fine. They take very good care of me.” I weigh his lettuce.
He sobers up a little. “So were you in those camps?"
For years. I shrug and say, “A little while.” I scan the cereal.
"Are they as bad as they say?"
I remember the open sewage, the food riots, the soldiers firing into the mobs. “Not really. People like to complain. Want someone else to solve their problems.” I scan one of the canned soups and enter a quantity of four.
He smiles and nods. This is what he wanted to hear. “So what did you do before the Downturn? Get much schooling?"
On the inside they always call it the “Downturn,” not the Collapse. I glance at the guard up at the manager's station. He is watching us very closely. This is the longest I've ever talked to a customer. I'm getting nervous. I lick my lips. I graduated from Penn State, worked as a civil engineer. I ring his milk up.
"School wasn't really for me, at least I thought then. Never applied myself. Never held a job for too long either, just day work. That's why I'm glad for this job. Learning a skill. Learning responsibility.” He only has a small bag of coffee. I weigh it. Gold dust would be cheaper.
He smiles again. “That's good. Hard work is good for you. Builds character. Do you have any family?"
Now I'm getting very nervous. Where is he going with this? I see the guard at the manager station has called another guard over. Both are whispering and looking at me. I remember Sarah and Eddie, back in the camps. I say a quick prayer that they are safe and can last until I get promoted enough that I can bring them inside too.
"No. Never found the right woman.” What we're supposed to say. Never tell a guilt-provoking truth. I set aside the two loaves of bread so I can put them on top of a bag.
He smiles again. “That's good. Wait till you're financially stable before getting married. Too many young people today aren't thinking ahead."
I remember our wedding. Sarah had a small law practice and I was a junior partner at the engineering firm. We had a house, cars, savings—even started a college saving account before Eddie had been born a couple years later. All gone now. It had all been electronic, almost nothing hard. No gold, very little cash on hand. All gone.
The old man's groceries are all bagged and he signs his debit slip. He looks at me intently. “Son, I like you. You seem like good people. I know this is unusual, we're supposed to go through the agency and all, but my wife and I are looking for someone to help around the house. Yard work, cooking, cleaning, shopping. Couldn't pay you much, but there is an apartment over the garage—and meals, of course. It's not a big apartment but in a few years, when you choose to settle down, it might be big enough for a small family. Any chance you'd be interested?"
My heart pulses in my ears and I flush. I catch a glimpse of a future. Of bringing Sarah and Eddie inside. She could get a job—maybe here at the grocery, and Eddie could work as one of the boys they have sorting the garbage. And we could live together as a family. And eat together. Every day. Maybe not as much as we used to eat or want to eat, but enough. Again.
Do I dare risk it? This isn't the way it's done. A few years, a small promotion, a few more and another promotion. And then maybe Eddie could come in. And then a few more years and Sarah could come in. Do I gamble it all on this? Maybe get sent back out, but maybe, just maybe, get them in here now?
> The old man is waiting for my answer.
And then the dream ends. I see over the old man's shoulder the guard has walked up. He heard the offer. He grimly shakes his head once, while resting his hand on his rifle.
I lower my eyes. I can't look the old man in the eye. “No thank you, sir. I have a good job here. I want to put my time in, work my way up."
The old man smiles one last time as he picks up his groceries. “Well, I have to respect that. Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and all that. Have to respect that. I wouldn't want charity either."
I start working on the next customer's groceries. I still smile but I don't talk much. I still have seven hours till my shift is over. And dinnertime.
* * * *
Craig Rose has tried countless careers, most recently teaching high school before his current gig doing childcare full-time as a stay-at-home dad. He has enjoyed writing science fiction for several years as a hobby and this is his first published story. Most of his other stories are not as light-hearted and humorous as this one. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania with his wife and two sons.
[Back to Table of Contents]
James Tiptree Jr. and the Tiptree Awards by James Schellenberg
James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, Julie Phillips, St. Martin's, 2006, 469 pp.
Writing a biography of a writer is a tricky thing. A professional writer will have produced hundreds of thousands or even millions of words, both as sold to publications as well as in letters to other people. Such a mountain of fictional words can be daunting to analyse. In addition, most writers have some amount of self-awareness, and will be busy analysing their own lives and their own work; it's very tempting to piggyback on this, to the possible detriment of original analysis. The life of James Tiptree, Jr.—with an overwhelming amount of public and private wordage—is therefore not an unusual challenge for the biography of a writer, but it's still a challenge.
I've also noticed that biography, in general, can be a tricky thing. Does a life wrap up into neat little packages, complete with a message and a narrative trajectory? Possibly, but those would be the atypical cases. Narrative is tempting, though, since it's an old and venerable human impulse. The alternative—to present a shapeless mass of anecdote, arranged chronologically—simply isn't appealing. It's like a minefield, with no ideal choice in sight.
So we come to the biography of Alice B. Sheldon, a woman who lived a long and unusual life, gaining the most fame for herself in the guise of a man writing science fiction. Since her career as Tiptree only started in her mid-50s—the late 1960s—there is a lot of material to cover before the point which most people know. Was her life a simple line leading directly to the Tiptree moment? A narrative that concludes logically and/or inevitably with a manly pseudonym for a woman?
Perhaps. And in some ways, that's how Phillips presents Sheldon's early life. I was a bit alarmed at this “narrative” strategy, since I'm a bit nervous about reading an author's life through their writing. There will always be personal things in an author's work, since if nothing impinged from private life into the fictional sphere then everyone's writing would be identical—there has to be something unique in a book or story, or else why read it! But there's a reason why it's called fiction: writers who know what they're doing can filter their personal life, twist it around, make surprising connections, contemplate the darker aspects, and generally play with it as brutally or as sentimentally as necessary. Life events can be fodder, but fiction does not equal autobiography. Even if it comes anywhere close, it's like one of those stories told in the first-person with an unreliable narrator. You have to spend most of your time deciphering what is really going on.
All that said, I came to agree that Phillips’ strategy works, in this particular case. That's because Sheldon only started writing as Tiptree late in life, and then didn't write anything of equal power once her pseudonym was uncovered only a few years later. Clearly there were some personal obstacles to overcome before she could start expressing herself in this way, and then something about the covering notion of writing as a man let her write and then stopped her from writing once that cover was gone.
Phillips points out in her introduction that Sheldon went by different names over the course of her life. She was born Alice Hastings Bradley, became Alice Davey during her first marriage, and then Alice Sheldon during her second. She was also fond of nicknames, so her own name became “Alli,” after her mother-in-law's formulation, and her writerly persona became “Tip.” Phillips notes that she has “mostly taken the liberty of using the name [Sheldon] liked best: Alli” (7)—this gives the biography a personal flavour that probably suits the material. I'll use “Sheldon” as appropriate in this review.
Born on August 24, 1915, Alice Bradley had an unusual early life. Her parents were amateur explorers of Africa, and they took her on two trips to the “dark” continent before she was 10. The epithet was still apropos at the time: she was often in regions where the tribes had never seen white people before, and members of her party of explorers were the first whites to see gorillas in their natural habitat.
Her mother Mary wrote extensively about the trips, and the difference between mother and daughter became clear early on. In one of Mary's books:
She defended cannibalism as rooted in custom and a dietary lack of protein, and related the horror of the Congolese on being told that whites killed in war without even eating the enemy ... [W]hat to Mary was an ethnographic observation was to Alice a threat: she could all too easily picture people getting eaten. Besides, if getting mad at somebody was a sin in Chicago, why was it alright to murder him in Africa? (33-34)
The Bradleys entertained extensively back home in Chicago, and the family was often written up in the society pages of newspapers. Mary Bradley was a famous woman at the time (if forgotten now), and Alice did not know how to escape her mother's shadow. Much of what Phillips writes about in the first segments of this biography—and later as well, although less so—deal with this mother-daughter relationship.
Phillips is also frank about Sheldon's sexuality throughout the book. She discusses how this worked in light of two things: Alice's never-acted-upon lesbian tendencies and the model set by her mother. Mary Bradley was smart and did things women weren't supposed to do, but she often fell back on her femininity and recommended that Alice do the same. Alice's family organized a debut for her, and she married a boy she met there within a few days. But none of this seemed to help:
As a sexual object—a beautiful woman—Alice was of course a success. But being a sexual object is not in itself an erotic experience, and models for women's sexual subjectivity—for wanting, and not just being wanted—were few and far between. She wanted to be equal to a man, purposeful and exploring, but didn't know how. (84)
Sheldon also lacked in role models in her professional life. This is a slightly different case, since there was clearly another factor at work: she was a precocious child, and never quite found an outlet for her supposed brilliance. This rootlessness plagued her throughout her life, and she moved from one endeavour to another without much result. For example, during WWII she joined the Women's Auxiliary Corps:
It did give her more confidence in her own capabilities, but as an experiment in what it meant to be a woman, or what it could mean, it was highly inconclusive. Ironically, Alice's time in the WAC would end up making it easier for her to pass as a man. In the 1970s, Tiptree's casual references to his Second World War service seemed to confirm his masculinity. Like many things Alice had done, the army made more sense in a male biography than a female one. (138)
In reading the heartaches and hard times of Sheldon's life, early and late, I can't help but think that she was a woman born before her time. Perfect equality might not exist yet in current times, but she would have many more role models for both her professional and personal behaviours. Sheldon struggled with bouts of depression throughout her life, exacerbating her feelings of alienation and lack of
self-confidence, and even this depression might be treatable nowadays.
The marriage to Huntington Sheldon, or “Ting” as she liked to call him, seemed to be the best that she could do, in terms of personal happiness and in the fight with her obsessive demons. And things really seemed to have worked out for them, at least until later. The Sheldons met while they were both doing photoanalysis during WWII, they worked for a couple of years in their own chicken hatchery, and then Ting returned to his CIA work, while Alice went back to school to get a PhD in psychology.
This gets us to Tiptree, since Sheldon starting writing science fiction stories after she found teaching in a university setting too draining. So it's halfway through the book that Phillips arrives at a chapter called “Birth of a Writer.” By this point, she has set up most of Sheldon's psychological contradictions and impulses, and marked out the context for her as a person, growing up as a smart and beautiful woman who never quite found her ideal path.
This is where the groundwork pays off, since, like in any biography of a writer, Phillips can't quote whole stories, only enough to give a flavour of the stories. And it's approximately true that the flavour of her life resembles the flavour of her stories. I'll talk about a few of her best/award-winning stories to help tie the biography side to the fiction side of Sheldon's life.
The first story that brought Tiptree any notice was “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain,” a 12 Monkeys-style scenario that was published early in 1969. Another early story, “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” took four years to get published, and it won the Hugo Award the following year in 1974—it's the story of an ugly girl who animates the body of a movie starlet, and needless to say her fate is not a happy one. Sheldon stuck to her disturbing ending, and her stubbornness paid off.
"Love Is the Plan, The Plan is Death” was written in 1971 and published two years later. It won Tiptree's first Nebula Award. It's told from the point of view of an alien creature, as the creature struggles futilely against the fate dictated for it by its biological and sexual instincts. The title of the story seems to say it all.
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