by Joanna Russ
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. Vittoria, whom I did not even know. The trees, the bushes, the sky, were all sick with love. The worst thing (said Janet) is the intense familiarity, the sleepwalker's conviction of having blundered into an eruption of one's own inner life, the yellow-pollinating evergreen brushed and sticky with my own good humor, the flakes of myself falling invisibly from the sky to melt on my own face.
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.
Loveto 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 New Forest near the farmhouse and we wandered toward it, Vitti idle and saying nothing.
"I'll be leaving in six months," I said. "Going to New City to get tied in with the power plants."
Silence. I was miserably conscious that Vittoria was going somewhere and I should know where because someone had told me, but I couldn't remember.
"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 Vittoria cutting her way out of the night with that stick, whirling it around her head, leaving bruises in the earth, tearing up weeds, slashing to pieces the roses that climbed around the computer poles. There was no part of my mind exempt from the thought: if she moves in this quicksilver death, it'll kill me.
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 myselfI 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 ve
ry 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 Vittoria and I walked back separately, each frightened to death of the weeks and weeks yet to go before we'd be over it. We kept it to ourselves. I felt it leave me two and a half months later, at one particular point in time: I was putting a handful of cracked corn to my mouth and licking the sludge off my fingers. I felt the parasite go. I swallowed philosophically and that was that. I didn't even have to tell her.
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 Wounded Knee and beyond this the agricultural plain of Green Bay. Janet could not have told you where the equivalents of these landmarks are in the here-and-now of our world and neither can I, the author. In the great terra-reforming convulsion of P.C. 400 the names themselves dissolved into the general mess of re-crystallization so that it would be impossible for any Whileawayan to tell you (if you were to ask) whether Mashopi was ever a city, or Wounded Knee a kind of bush, or whether or not Green Bay was ever a real bay. But if you go South from the Altiplano over the Mashopi Range, and from that land of snow, cold, thin air, risk, and glaciers, to the glider resort at Utica (from whence you may see mountain climbers setting off for Old Dirty-Skirts, who stands twenty-three thousand, nine hundred feet high) and from there to the monorail station at Wounded Knee, and if you take the monorail eight hundred miles into Green Bay and get off at a station I won't name, you'll be where Janet was when she had just turned seventeen. A Whileawayan who had come from the Mars training settlement in the Altiplano would have thought Green Bay was heaven; a hiker out of New Forest would have hated it. Janet had come by herself from an undersea farm on the continental shelf on the other side of the Altiplano where she had spent five wretched weeks setting up machinery in inaccessible crannies and squeaking whenever she talked (because of the helium). She had left her schoolmates there, crazy for space and altitude. It's not usual to be alone at that age. She had stayed at the hostel in Wounded Knee, where they gave her an old, unused cubicle from which she could work by induction in the fuel-alcohol distillery. People were nice, but it was a miserable and boring time. You are never so alone, schoolmates or not. You never feel so all-thumbs (Janet). She made her insistence on change formally, the line of work came through, goodbye everybody. She had left a violin in Wounded Knee with a friend who used to cantilever herself out of the third story of the hostel and eat snacks on the head of a public statue. Janet took the monorail at twenty-two o'clock and sulkily departed for a better personal world. There were four persons of Three-Quarters Dignity in the car, all quiet, all wretched with discontent. She opened her knapsack, wrapped herself in it, and slept. She woke in artificial light to find that the engineer had opened the louvers to let in April: magnolias were blooming in Green Bay. She played linear poker with an old woman from the Altiplano who beat her three times out of three. At dawn everyone was asleep and the lights winked out; she woke and watched the low hills form and re-form outside under an apple-green sky that turned, as she watched it, a slow, sulphurous yellow. It rained but they sped through it. At the stationwhich was nothing but the middle of a fieldshe borrowed a bicycle from the bicycle rack and flipped the toggle to indicate the place she wanted to go. It's a stout machine, with broad tires (compared to ours) and a receiver for registering radio beacons. She rode into the remaining night hung between the plantations of evergreens, then out into the sunrise again. There was an almighty cheeping and chirping, the result of one limb of the sun becoming visible over the horizon. She could see the inflated main dome of the house before she reached the second bicycle drop; somebody going West would pick it up in time and drop it near the monorail. She imagined great masses of sulky girls being requisitioned to ride bicycles coast-to-coast from regions that had a bicycle surplus to those crying out for bicycles. I imagined it, too. There was the sound of a machinist's ground-car off to the leftJanet grew up with that noise in her ears. Her bicycle was singing the musical tone that lets you know you're on course, a very lovely sound to hear over the empty fields. "Sh!" she said and put it on the rack, where it obediently became silent. She walked (and so did I) to the main dome of the house and let herself in, not knowing whether everyone was sleeping late or had got up early and already gone out. She didn't care. We found the empty guest room, ate some stiraboutthat's not what you think, it's a kind of breadfrom her knapsack, lay down on the floor, and fell asleep.
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 strangersthe 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
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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 Bronx, which is covered with houses, to something near the river in the distancea new stadium, I think.
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: Cal is too much. I don't know if I ought to give him up or not. He's awfully sweet but he's such a baby. And the cat doesn't like him, you know. He doesn't take me any place. I know he doesn't make much money, but you would think he would try, wouldn't you? All he wants is to sit around and look at me and then when we get in bed, he doesn't do anything for the longest time; that just can't be right All he does is pet and he says he likes it like that. He says it's like floating. Then when he does it you know, sometimes he cries. I never heard of a man doing that