The Female Man

by Joanna Russ

  The Depression is still world-wide.

  (But think—only think!—what might have happened if the world had not so luckily slowed down, if there had been a really big war, for big wars are forcing-houses of science, economics, politics; think what might have happened, what might not have happened. It’s a lucky world. Jeannine is lucky to live in it.

  She doesn’t think so.)

  XI

  (Cal, who came out of the Chinese luncheonette just in time to see his girl go off with three other people, did not throw the lunch buns to the ground in a fit of exasperated rage and stamp on them. Some haunted Polish ancestor looked out of his eyes. He was so thin and slight that his ambitions shone through him: I’ll make it some day, baby. I’ll be the greatest. He sat down on a fire plug and began to eat the buns.

  She’ll have to come back to feed her cat.)

  PART THREE

  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 fore
ign 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.

  A ROUND OF “HIS LITTLE GIRL”

  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.