by Joanna Russ
"I did get up at eight," says Jeannine, aggrieved. (She's lying.) "I did. I walked around the lake. I don't know why you keep telling me how late I get up; that may have been true a long time ago but it's certainly not true now, and I resent your saying so." The sun has gone in again. When Bud isn't around, there's Jeannie to watch out for, Mrs. Dadier tries to anticipate her wishes and not disturb her.
"Well, I keep forgetting," says Mrs. Dadier. "Your silly old mother! Bud says I wouldn't remember my head if it wasn't screwed on." It doesn't work. Jeannine, slightly sulky, attacks her toast and jam, cramming a piece into her mouth cater-cornered. Jam drops on the table. Jeannine, implacably convicted of getting up late, is taking it out on the table-cloth. Getting up late is wallowing in sin. It's unforgivable. It's improper. Mrs. Dadier, with the misplaced courage of the doomed, chooses to ignore the jam stains and get on with the really important question, viz., is Jeannine going to have a kitchenette of her own (although it will really belong to someone else, won't it) and is she going to be made to get up early, i.e., Get Married. Mrs. Dadier says very carefully and placatingly:
"Darling, have you ever had any thoughts about" but this morning, instead of flinging off in a rage, her daughter kisses her on the top of the head and announces, "I'm going to do the dishes."
"Oh, no," says Mrs. Dadier deprecatingly; "My goodness, don't. I don't mind." Jeannine winks at her. She feels virtuous (because of the dishes) and daring (because of something else). "Going to make a phone call," she says, sauntering into the living room. Not doing the dishes . She sits herself down in the rattan chair and twirls the pencil her mother always keeps by the telephone pad. She draws flowers on the pad and the profiles of girls whose eyes are nonetheless in full-face. Should she call X? Should she wait for X to call her? When he calls, should she be effusive or reserved? Comradely or distant? Should she tell X about Cal? If he asks her out for tonight, should she refuse? Where will she go if she does? She can't possibly call him, of course. But suppose she rings up Mrs. Dadier's friend with a message? My mother asked me to tell you... Jeannine's hand is actually on the telephone receiver when she notices that the hand is shaking: a sportswoman's eagerness for the chase. She laughs under her breath. She picks up the phone, trembling with eagerness, and dials X's number; it's happening at last. Everything is going well. Jeannine has almost in her hand the brass ring which will entitle her to everything worthwhile in life. It's only a question of time before X decides; surely she can keep him at arm's length until then, keep him fascinated; there's so much time you can take up with will-she-won't-she, so that hardly anything else has to be settled at all. She feels something for him, she really does. She wonders when the reality of it begins to hit you. Off in telephone never-never-land someone picks up the receiver, interrupting the last ring, footsteps approach and recede, someone is clearing their throat into the mouthpiece.
"Hello?" (It's his mother.) Jeannine glibly repeats the fake message she has practiced in her head; X's mother says, "Here's Frank. Frank, it's Jeannine Dadier." Horror. More footsteps.
"Hello?" says X.
"Oh my, it's you; I didn't know you were there," says Jeannine.
"Hey!" says X, pleased. This is even more than she has a right to expect, according to the rules.
"Oh, I just called to tell your mother something," says Jeannine, drawing irritable, jagged lines across her doodles on the telephone pad. She keeps trying to think of the night before, but all she can remember is Bud playing with his youngest daughter, the only time she's ever seen her brother get foolish. He bounces her on his knee and gets red in the face, swinging her about his head while she screams with delight. "Silly Sally went to town! Silly Sally flew a-r-o-o-und!" Eileen usually rescues the baby on the grounds that she's getting too excited. For some reason this whole memory causes Jeannine great pain and she can hardly keep her mind on what she's saying.
"I thought you'd already gone," says Jeannine hastily. He's going on and on about something or other, the cost of renting boats on the lake or would she like to play tennis.
"Oh, I love tennis," says Jeannine, who doesn't even own a racket.
Would she like to come over that afternoon?
She leans away from the telephone to consult an imaginary appointment book, imaginary friends; she allows reluctantly that oh yes, she might have some free time. It would really be fun to brush up on her tennis. Not that she's really good, she adds hastily. X chuckles. Well, maybe. There are a few more commonplaces and she hangs up, bathed in perspiration and ready to weep. What's the matter with me? She should be happy, or at least smug, and here she is experiencing the keenest sorrow. What on earth for? She digs her pencil vindictively into the telephone pad as if it were somehow responsible. Damn you. Perversely, images of silly Cal come back to her, not nice ones, either. She has to pick up the phone again, after verifying an imaginary date with an imaginary acquaintance, and tell X yes or no; so Jeannine rearranges the scarf over her curlers, plays with a button on her blouse, stares miserably at her shoes, runs her hands over her knees, and makes up her mind. She's nervous. Masochistic. It's that old thing come back again about her not being good enough for good luck. That's nonsense and she knows it. She picks up the phone, smiling: tennis, drinks, dinner, back in the city a few more dates where he can tell her about school and then one night (hugging her a little extra hard)"Jeannie, I'm getting my divorce." My name is Jeannine. The shopping will be fun. I'm twenty-nine, after all. It is with a sense of intense relief that she dials; the new life is beginning. She can do it, too. She's normal. She's as good as every other girl. She starts to sing under her breath. The phone bell rings in Telephoneland and somebody comes to pick it up; she hears all the curious background noises of the relays, somebody speaking faintly very far away. She speaks quickly and distinctly, without the slightest hesitation now, remembering all those loveless nights with her knees poking up into the air, how she's discommoded and almost suffocated, how her leg muscles ache and she can't get her feet on the surface of the bed. Marriage will cure all that. The scrubbing uncleanably old linoleum and dusting the same awful things, week after week. But he's going places. She says boldly and decisively:
"Cal, come get me."
Shocked at her own treachery, she bursts into tears. She hears Cal say "Okay, baby," and he tells her what bus he'll be on.
"Cal!" she adds breathlessly; "You know that question you keep asking, sweetheart? Well, the answer is Yes." She hangs up, much eased. It'll be so much better once it's done. Foolish Jeannine, to expect anything else. It's an uncharted continent, marriage. She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand; X can go to hell. Making conversation is just work. She strolls into the kitchenette where she finds herself alone; Mrs. Dadier is outside in back, weeding a little patch of a garden all the Dadiers own in common; Jeannine takes the screen out of the kitchen window and leans out.
"Mother!" she says in a sudden flood of happiness and excitement, for the importance of what she has just done has suddenly become clear to her, "Mother!" (waving wildly out the window) "Guess what!" Mrs. Dadier, who is on her knees in the carrot bed, straightens up, shading her face with her one hand. "What is it, darling?"
"Mother, I'm getting married!" What comes after this will be very exciting, a sort of dramatic presentation, for Jeannine will have a big wedding. Mrs. Dadier drops her gardening trowel in sheer astonishment. She'll hurry inside, a tremendous elevation of mood enveloping both women; they will, in fact, embrace and kiss one another, and Jeannine will dance around the kitchen. "Wait 'til Bro hears about this!" Jeannine will exclaim. Both will cry. It's the first time in Jeannine's life that she's managed to do something perfectly O.K. And not too late, either. She thinks that perhaps the lateness of her marriage will be compensated for by a special mellowness; there must be, after all, some reason for all that experimenting, all that reluctance. She imagines the day she will be able to announce even better news: "Mother, I'm going to have a baby." Cal himself hardly figures in
this at all, for Jeannine has forgotten his laconism, his passivity, his strange mournfulness unconnected to any clear emotion, his abruptness, how hard it is to get him to talk about anything. She hugs herself, breathless with joy, waiting for Mrs. Dadier to hurry inside; "My little baby!" Mrs. Dadier will say emotionally, embracing Jeannine. It seems to Jeannine that she has never known anything so solid and beautiful as the kitchen in the morning sunlight, with the walls glowing and everything so delicately outlined in light, so fresh and real. Jeannine, who has almost been killed by an unremitting and drastic discipline not of her own choosing, who has been maimed almost to death by a vigilant self-suppression quite irrelevant to anything she once wanted or loved, here finds her reward. This proves it is all right. Everything is indubitably good and indubitably real. She loves herself, and if I stand like Atropos in the corner, with my arm around the shadow of her dead self, if the other Jeannine (who is desperately tired and knows there is no freedom for her this side the grave) attempts to touch her as she whirls joyfully past, Jeannine does not see or hear it. At one stroke she has amputated her past. She's going to be fulfilled. She hugs herself and waits. That's all you have to do if you are a real, first-class Sleeping Beauty. She knows.
I'm so happy.
And there, but for the grace of God, go I.
PART SEVEN
Contents - Prev/Next
I
I'll tell you how I turned into a man.
First I had to turn into a woman.
For a long time I had been neuter, not a woman at all but One Of The Boys, because if you walk into a gathering of men, professionally or otherwise, you might as well be wearing a sandwich board that says: LOOK! I HAVE TITS! there is this giggling and this chuckling and this reddening and this Uriah Heep twisting and writhing and this fiddling with ties and fixing of buttons and making of allusions and quoting of courtesies and this self-conscious gallantry plus a smirky insistence on my physiqueall this dreary junk just to please me. If you get good at being One Of The Boys it goes away. Of course there's a certain disembodiment involved, but the sandwich board goes; I back-slapped and laughed at blue jokes, especially the hostile kind. Underneath you keep saying pleasantly but firmly No no no no no no. But it's necessary to my job and I like my job. I suppose they decided that my tits were not of the best kind, or not real, or that they were someone else's (my twin sister's), so they split me from the neck up; as I said, it demands a certain disembodiment. I thought that surely when I had acquired my Ph.D. and my professorship and my tennis medal and my engineer's contract and my ten thousand a year and my full-time housekeeper and my reputation and the respect of my colleagues, when I had grown strong, tall, and beautiful, when my I.Q. shot past 200, when I had genius, then I could take off my sandwich board. I left my smiles and happy laughter at home. I'm not a woman; I'm a man. I'm a man with a woman's face. I'm a woman with a man's mind. Everybody says so. In my pride of intellect I entered a bookstore; I purchased a book; I no longer had to placate The Man; by God, I think I'm going to make it. I purchased a copy of John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women; now who can object to John Stuart Mill? He's dead. But the clerk did. With familiar archness he waggled his finger at me and said "tsk tsk"; all that writhing and fussing began again, what fun it was for him to have someone automatically not above reproach, and I knew beyond the shadow of a hope that to be female is to be mirror and honeypot, servant and judge, the terrible Rhadamanthus for whom he must perform but whose judgment is not human and whose services are at anyone's command, the vagina dentata and the stuffed teddy-bear he gets if he passes the test. This is until you're forty-five, ladies, after which you vanish into thin air like the smile of the Cheshire cat, leaving behind only a disgusting grossness and a subtle poison that automatically infects every man under twenty-one. Nothing can put you above this or below this or beyond it or outside of it, nothing, nothing, nothing at all, not your muscles or your brains, not being one of the boys or being one of the girls or writing books or writing letters or screaming or wringing your hands or cooking lettuce or being too tall or being too short or traveling or staying at home or ugliness or acne or diffidence or cowardice or perpetual shrinking and old age. In the latter cases you're only doubly damned. I went away"forever feminine," as the man saysand I cried as I drove my car, and I wept by the side of the road (because I couldn't see and I might crash into something) and I howled and wrung my hands as people do only in medieval romances, for an American woman's closed car is the only place in which she can be alone (if she's unmarried) and the howl of a sick she-wolf carries around the world, whereupon the world thinks it's very comical. Privacy in cars, in bathrooms, what ideas we have! If they tell me about the pretty clothes again, I'll kill myself.
I had a five-year-old self who said: Daddy won't love you.
I had a ten-year-old self who said: the boys won't play with you .
I had a fifteen-year-old self who said: nobody will marry you .
I had a twenty-year-old self who said: you can't be fulfilled without a child. (A year there where I had recurrent nightmares about abdominal cancer which nobody would take out.)
I'm a sick woman, a madwoman, a ball-breaker, a man-eater; I don't consume men gracefully with my fire-like red hair or my poisoned kiss; I crack their joints with these filthy ghoul's claws and standing on one foot like a de-clawed cat, rake at your feeble efforts to save yourselves with my taloned hinder feet: my matted hair, my filthy skin, my big flat plaques of green bloody teeth. I don't think my body would sell anything. I don't think I would be good to look at. O of all diseases self-hate is the worst and I don't mean for the one who suffers it!
Do you know, all this time you preached at me? You told me that even Grendel's mother was actuated by maternal love.
You told me ghouls were male.
Rodan is maleand asinine.
King Kong is male.
I could have been a witch, but the Devil is male.
Faust is male.
The man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima was male.
I was never on the moon.
Then there are the birds, with (as Shaw so nobly puts it) the touching poetry of their loves and nestings in which the males sing so well and beautifully and the females sit on the nest, and the baboons who get torn in half (female) by the others (male), and the chimpanzees with their hierarchy (male) written about by professors (male) with their hierarchy, who accept (male) the (male) view of (female) (male). You can see what's happening. At heart I must be gentle, for I never even thought of the praying mantis or the female wasp; but I guess I am just loyal to my own phylum. One might as well dream of being an oak tree. Chestnut tree, great-rooted hermaphrodite. I won't tell you what poets and prophets my mind is crammed full of (Deborah, who said "Me, too, pretty please?" and got struck with leprosy), or Whom I prayed to (exciting my own violent hilarity) or whom I avoided on the street (male) or whom I watched on television (male) excepting in my hatred onlyif I rememberBuster Crabbe, who is the former Flash Gordon and a swimming instructor (I think) in real life, and in whose humanly handsome, gentle, puzzled old face I had the absurd but moving fancy that I saw some reflection of my own bewilderment at our mutual prison. Of course I don't know him and no one is responsible for his shadow on the screen or what madwomen may see there; I lay in my bed (which is not male), made in a factory by a (male) designed by a (male) and sold to me by a (small male) with unusually bad manners. I mean unusually bad manners for anybody.
You see how very different this is from the way things used to be in the bad old days, say five years ago. New Yorkers (female) have had the right to abortion for almost a year now, if you can satisfy the hospital boards that you deserve bed-room and don't mind the nurses calling you Baby Killer; citizens of Toronto, Canada, have perfectly free access to contraception if they are willing to travel 100 miles to cross the border, I could smoke my very own cigarette if I smoked (and get my very own lung cancer). Forward, eternally forward! Some of my be
st friends areI was about to say that some of my best friends aremy friends
My friends are dead.
Whoever saw women scaring anybody? (This was while I thought it important to be able to scare people.) You cannot say, to paraphrase an old, good friend, that there are the plays of Shakespeare and Shakespeare was a woman, or that Columbus sailed the Atlantic and Columbus was a woman or that Alger Hiss was tried for treason and Alger Hiss was a woman. (Mata Hari was not a spy; she was a fuckeress.) Anyway everyboy (sorry) everybody knows that what women have done that is really important is not to constitute a great, cheap labor force that you can zip in when you're at war and zip out again afterwards but to Be Mothers, to form the coming generation, to give birth to them, to nurse them, to mop floors for them, to love them, cook for them, clean for them, change their diapers, pick up after them, and mainly sacrifice themselves for them. This is the most important job in the world. That's why they don't pay you for it.
I cried, and then stopped crying because otherwise I would never have stopped crying. Things come to an awful dead center that way. You will notice that even my diction is becoming feminine, thus revealing my true nature; I am not saying "Damn" any more, or "Blast"; I am putting in lots of qualifiers like "rather," I am writing in these breathless little feminine tags, she threw herself down on the bed, I have no structure (she thought), my thoughts seep out shapelessly like menstrual fluid, it is all very female and deep and full of essences, it is very primitive and full of "and's," it is called "run-on sentences."
Very swampy in my mind. Very rotten and badly off. I am a woman. I am a woman with a woman's brain. I am a woman with a woman's sickness. I am a woman with the wraps off, bald as an adder, God help me and you.