by Joanna Russ
"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 Man. Keeping The Man. Not scaring The Man, building up The Man, pleasing The Man, interesting The Man, following The Man, soothing The Man, flattering The Man, deferring to The Man, changing your judgment for The Man, changing your decisions for The Man, polishing floors for The Man, being perpetually conscious of your appearance for The Man, being romantic for The Man, hinting to The Man, losing yourself in The Man. "I never had a thought that wasn't yours." Sob, sob. Whenever I act like a human being, they say, "What are you getting upset about?" They say: of course you'll get married. They say: of course you're brilliant. They say: of course you'll get a Ph.D. and then sacrifice it to have babies. They say: if you don't, you're the one who'll have two jobs and you can make a go of it if you're exceptional, which very few women are, and if you find a very understanding man. As long as you don't make more money than he does. How do they expect me to live all this junk? I went to a Socialistnot really Socialist, you understandcamp for two summers; my parents say I must have gotten my crazy ideas there. Like hell I did. When I was thirteen my uncle wanted to kiss me and when I tried to ran away, everybody laughed. He pinned my arms and kissed me on the cheek; then he said, "Oho, I got my kiss! I got my kiss!" and everybody thought it was too ducky for words. Of course they blamed meit's harmless, they said, you're only a child, he's paying you attention; you ought to be grateful. Everything's all right as long as he doesn't rape you. Women only have feelings; men have egos . The school psychologist told me I might not realize it, but I was living a very dangerous style of life that might in time lead to Lesbianism (ha! ha!) and I should try to look and act more feminine. I laughed until I cried. Then he said I must understand that femininity was a Good Thing, and although men's and women's functions in society were different, they had equal dignity. Separate but equal, right? Men make the decisions and women make the dinners. I expected him to start in about that mystically-wonderful-experience-which-no-man-can-know crap, but he didn't. Instead he took me to the window and showed me the expensive clothing stores across the way. Then he said, "See, it's a woman's world, after all." The pretty clothes again. I thought some damn horrible thing was going to happen to me right there on his carpet. I couldn't talk. I couldn't move. I felt deathly sick. He really expected me to live like that he looked at me and that's what he saw, after eleven months. He expected me to start singing 'I'm So Glad I'm A Girl" right there in his Goddamned office. And a little buck-and-wing. And a little nigger shuffle.
"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 knownor would she credit if she knewthat 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 Janetwho 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 Vittoria," said Janethow crude, once said!and there goes something in Laura Rose's heart, like the blows of something light but perpetually shocking: oh! oh! oh! She reddened and said something very faintly, something I lip-read but didn't hear. Then she put her hand on Janet's knee, a hot, moist hand with its square fingers and stubby nails, a hand of tremendous youthful presence, and said something else, still inaudible.
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 lapJanet's lapas 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. JanetIheld 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 Laurnot wishing to be taken for a childbent 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.
"Neverdon'tI can'tleave 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 hereor 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 chuck
le, "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 thighspicture 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.