The Female Man

by Joanna Russ

  I gambled for chores and breakfast with an old, old woman, in the middle of the night by the light of an alcohol lamp, somewhere on the back roads of the swamp and pine flats of South Continent. Watching the shadows dance on her wrinkled face, I understood why other women speak with awe of seeing the withered legs dangling from the shell of a computer housing: Humpty Dumptess on her way to the ultimate Inside of things.

  (I lost. I carried her baggage and did her chores for a day.)

  An ancient statue outside the fuel-alcohol distillery at Ciudad Sierra: a man seated on a stone, his knees spread, both hands pressed against the pit of his stomach, a look of blind distress, face blurred by time. Some wag has carved on the base the sideways eight that means infinity and added a straight line down from the middle; this is both the Whileaway schematic of the male genital and the mathematical symbol for self-contradiction.

  If you are so foolhardy as to ask a Whileawayan child to “be a good girl” and do something for you:

  “What does running other people’s errands have to do with being a good girl?

  “Why can’t you run your own errands?

  “Are you crippled?”

  (The double pairs of hard, dark children’s eyes everywhere, like mating cats’.)

  XIII

  A quiet country night. The hills East of Green Bay, the wet heat of August during the day. One woman reads; another sews; another smokes. Somebody takes from the wall a kind of whistle and plays on it the four notes of the major chord. This is repeated over and over again. We hold on to these four notes as long as possible; then we transform them by one note; again we repeat these four notes. Slowly something tears itself away from the not-melody. Distances between the harmonics stretch wider and wider. No one is dancing tonight. How the lines open up! Three notes now. The playfulness and terror of the music written right on the air. Although the player is employing nearly the same dynamics throughout, the sounds have become painfully loud; the little instrument’s guts are coming out. Too much to listen to, with its lips right against my ear. I believe that by dawn it will stop, by dawn we will have gone through six or seven changes of notes, maybe two in an hour.

  By dawn we’ll know a little something about the major triad. We’ll have celebrated a little something.

  XIV

  How Whileawayans Celebrate

  Dorothy Chiliason in the forest glade, her moon-green pajamas, big eyes, big shoulders, her broad lips and big breasts, each with its protruding thumb, her aureole of fuzzy, ginger-colored hair. She springs to her feet and listens. One hand up in the air, thinking. Then both hands up. She shakes her head. She takes a gliding step, dragging one foot. Then again. Again. She takes on some extra energy and runs a little bit. Then stops. She thinks a little bit. Whileawayan celebratory dancing is not like Eastern dancing with its motions in toward the body, its cushions of warm air exhaled by the dancer, its decorations by contradictory angles (leg up, knee down, foot up; one arm up-bent, the other arm down-bent). Nor is it at all like the yearning-for-flight of Western ballet, limbs shooting out in heaven-aspiring curves, the torso a mathematical point. If Indian dancing says I Am, if ballet says I Wish, what does the dance of Whileaway say?

  It says I Guess. (The intellectuality of this impossible business!)

  XV

  What Whileawayans Celebrate

  The full moon

  The Winter solstice (You haven’t lived if you haven’t seen us running around in our skivvies, banging on pots and pans, shouting “Come back, sun! Goddammit, come back! Come back!")

  The Summer solstice (rather different)

  The autumnal equinox

  The vernal equinox

  The flowering of trees

  The flowering of bushes

  The planting of seeds

  Happy copulation

  Unhappy copulation

  Longing

  Jokes

  Leaves falling off the trees (where deciduous)

  Acquiring new shoes

  Wearing same

  Birth

  The contemplation of a work of art

  Marriages

  Sport

  Divorces

  Anything at all

  Nothing at all

  Great ideas

  Death

  XVI

  There is an unpolished, white, marble statue of God on Rabbit Island, all alone in a field of weeds and snow. She is seated, naked to the waist, an outsized female figure as awful as Zeus, her dead eyes staring into nothing. At first She is majestic; then I notice that Her cheekbones are too broad, Her eyes set at different levels, that Her whole figure is a jumble of badly-matching planes, a mass of inhuman contradictions. There is a distinct resemblance to Dunyasha Bernadetteson, known as The Playful Philosopher (A.C. 344—426), though God is older than Bernadetteson and it’s possible that Dunyasha’s genetic surgeon modelled her after God instead of the other way round. Persons who look at the statue longer than I did have reported that one cannot pin It down at all, that She is a constantly changing contradiction, that She becomes in turn gentle, terrifying, hateful, loving, “stupid” (or “dead") and finally indescribable.

  Persons who look at Her longer than that have been known to vanish right off the face of the Earth.

  XVII

  I have never been to Whileaway. Whileawayans breed into themselves an immunity to ticks, mosquitoes, and other insect parasites. I have none. And the way into Whileaway is barred neither by time, distance, nor an angel with a flaming sword, but by a cloud or crowd of gnats. Talking gnats.

  PART SIX

  I

  Jeannine wakes from a dream of Whileaway. She has to go to her brother’s this week. Everything suggests to Jeannine something she has lost, although she doesn’t put it to herself this way; what she understands is that everything in the world wears a faint coating of nostalgia, makes her cry, seems to say to her, “You can’t.” She’s fond of not being able to do things; somehow this gives her a right to something. Her eyes fill with tears. Everything’s a cheat. If she gets up right now, she’ll be able to make the early bus; she also wants to get away from the dream that still lingers in the folds of her bedclothes, in the summery smell of her soft old sheets, a smell of herself that Jeannine likes but wouldn’t admit to anybody. The bed is full of dreamy, suspicious hollows. Jeannine yawns, out of a sense of duty. She gets up and makes the bed, then picks paperback books up off the floor (murder mysteries) and puts them away in her bookcase. There are clothes to wash before she goes, clothes to put away, stockings to pair and put in the drawers. She wraps the garbage in newspaper and carries it down three flights to put it in the garbage can. She routs Cal’s socks from behind the bed and shakes them out, leaving them on the kitchen table. There are dishes to wash, soot on the window sills, soaking pots to scour, a dish to put under the radiator in case it goes on during the week (it leaks). Oh . Ugh. Let the windows go, though Cal doesn’t like them dirty. That awful job of scrubbing out the toilet, whisk-brooming the furniture. Clothes to iron. Things always fall off when you straighten other things. She bends and bends. Flour and sugar spill on the shelves over the sink and have to be mopped up; there are stains and spills, rotting radish leaves, and encrustations of ice inside the old refrigerator (it has to be propped open with a chair to defrost itself). Odds and ends of paper, candy, cigarettes, cigarette ashes all over the room. Everything has to be dusted. She decides to do the windows anyway, because it’s nice. They’ll be filthy in a week. Of course nobody else helps. Nothing is the right height. She adds Cal’s socks to her clothes and his clothes that she has to take to the self-service laundry, makes a separate pile of his clothes that have to be mended, and sets the table for herself. She scrapes old food from her cat’s dish into the garbage, washes the dish, and sets out new water and milk. Mr. Frosty doesn’t seem to be around. Under the sink Jeannine finds a dishcloth, hangs it up over the sink, reminds herself to clean out under there later, and pours out cold cereal, tea, toast, orange j
uice. (The orange juice is a government package of powdered orange-and-grapefruit and tastes awful.) She jumps up to rummage around for the mop head under the sink, and the galvanized pail, also somewhere down in there. Time to mop the bathroom floor and the square of linoleum in front of the sink and stove. First she finishes her tea, leaves half the orange-and-grapefruit juice (making a face) and some of the cereal. Milk goes back in the refrigerator—no, wait a minute, throw it out—she sits down for a moment and writes out a list of groceries to buy on the way back from the bus in a week. Fill the pail, find the soap, give up, mop it anyway with just water. Put everything away. Do the breakfast dishes. She picks up a murder mystery and sits on the couch, riffling through it. Jump up, wash the table, pick up the salt that falls on the rug and brush it up with the whisk-broom. Is that all? No, mend Cal’s clothes and her own. Oh, let them be. She has to pack and make her lunch and Cal’s (although he’s not going with her). That means things coming out of the icebox again and mopping the table again—leaving footprints on the linoleum again. Well, it doesn’t matter. Wash the knife and the plate. Done. She decides to go get the sewing box to do his clothes, then changes her mind. Instead she picks up the murder mystery. Cal will say, “You didn’t sew my clothes.” She goes to get the sewing box out of the back of the closet, stepping over her valises, boxes of stuff, the ironing board, her winter coat and winter clothes. Little hands reach out of Jeannine’s back and pick up what she drops. She sits on her couch, fixing the rip in his summer suit jacket, biting off the thread with her front teeth. You’ll chip the enamel . Buttons. Mending three socks. (The others seem all right.) Rubbing the small of her back. Fastening the lining of a skirt where it’s torn. Inspecting her stockings for runs. Polishing shoes. She pauses and looks at nothing. Then she shakes herself and with an air of extraordinary energy gets her middling-sized valise from the closet and starts laying out her clothes for the week. Cal won’t let me smoke. He really cares about me . With everything cleaned up, she sits and looks at her room. The Post says you should get cobwebs off the ceiling with a rag tied to a broom handle. Well, I can’t see them. Jeannine wishes for the she-doesn’t-know-how-many-times time that she had a real apartment with more than one room, though to decorate it properly would be more than she could afford. There’s a pile of home-decorating magazines in the back of the closet, although that was only a temporary thing; the thought doesn’t really recur to her much. Cal doesn’t understand about such things. Tall, dark, and handsome She refused her lover the noble thing to . mimosa and jasmine She thinks how it would be to be a mermaid and decorate a merhouse with seaweed and slices of pearl. The Mermaid’s Companion. The Mermaid’s Home Journal. She giggles. She finishes packing her clothes, taking out a pair of shoes to polish them with a bottle of neutral polish, because you have to be careful with the light colors. As soon as they dry, they’ll go back in the valise. Trouble is, though, the valise is bloody well falling apart at the seams. Cal, when he comes, will find her reading Mademoiselle Mermaid about the new fish-scale look for eyes.

  Why does she keep having these dreams about Whileaway?

  While-away. While. A. Way. To While away the time. That means it’s just a pastime. If she tells Cal about it, he’ll say she’s nattering again; worse still, it would sound pretty silly; you can’t expect a man to listen to everything (as everybody’s Mother said). Jeannine gets dressed in blouse, sweater, and skirt for her brother’s place in the country, while in the valise she puts: a pair of slacks to go berrying in, another blouse, a scarf, underwear, stockings, a jacket (No, I’ll carry it), her hairbrush, her makeup, face cream, sanitary napkins, a raincoat, jewelry for the good dress, hair clips, hair curlers, bathing suit, and a light every-day dress. Oof, too heavy! She sits down again, discouraged. Little things make Jeannine blue. What’s the use of cleaning a place over and over again if you can’t make something of it? The ailanthus tree nods to her from outside the window. (And why won’t Cal protect her against anything? She deserves protection.) Maybe she’ll meet somebody. Nobody knows—O nobody knows really—what’s in Jeannine’s heart (she thinks). But somebody will see. Somebody will understand. Remember the hours in California under the fig tree. Jeannine in her crisp plaid dress, the hint of fall in the air, the blue haze over the hills like smoke. She hauls at the valise again, wondering desperately what it is that other women know and can do that she doesn’t know or can’t do, women in the street, women in the magazines, the ads, married women. Why life doesn’t match the stories. I ought to get married . (But not to Cal!) She’ll meet someone on the bus; she’ll sit next to someone. Who knows why things happen? Jeannine, who sometimes believes in astrology, palmistry, occult signs, who knows that certain things are fated or not fated, knows that men—in spite of everything—have no contact with or understanding of the insides of things. That’s a realm that’s denied them. Women’s magic, women’s intuition rule here, the subtle deftness forbidden to the clumsier sex. Jeannine is on very good terms with her ailanthus tree. Without having to reflect on it, without having to work at it, they both bring into human life the breath of magic and desire. They merely embody. Mr. Frosty, knowing he’s going to be left at a neighbor’s for the week, has been hiding behind the couch; now he crawls out with a piece of dust stuck on his left eye-tuft, looking very miserable. Jeannine has no idea what drove him out “Bad cat!” There was something about her . She watches the blotchy-skinny-cat (as Cal calls him) sneak to his milk dish and while Mr. Frosty laps it up, Jeannine grabs him. She gets the collar around his neck while Mr. Frosty struggles indignantly, and then she snaps the leash on. In a few minutes he’ll forget he’s confined. He’ll take the collar for granted and start daydreaming about sumptuous mice. There was something unforgettable about her She ties him to a bed post and pauses, catching sight of herself in the wall mirror: flushed, eyes sparkling, her hair swept back as if by some tumultuous storm, her whole face glowing. The lines of her figure are perfect, but who is to use all this loveliness, who is to recognize it, make it public, make it available? Jeannine is not available to Jeannine. She throws her jacket over one arm, more depressed than otherwise. I wish I had money “Don’t worry,” she tells the cat. “Somebody’s coming for you.” She arranges her jacket, her valise, and her pocketbook, and turns off the light, shutting the door behind her (it latches itself). If only (she thinks) he’ll come and show me to myself .

  I’ve been waiting for you so long. How much longer must I wait?

  Nights and nights alone. ("You can’t,” says the stairwell. “You can’t,” says the street.) A fragment of old song drifts through her mind and lingers behind her in the stairwell, her thoughts lingering there, too, wishing that she could be a mermaid and float instead of walk, that she were someone else and so could watch herself coming down the stairs, the beautiful girl who composes everything around her to harmony:

  Somebody lovely has just passed by.

  II

  I live between worlds. Half the time I like doing housework, I care a lot about how I look, I warm up to men and flirt beautifully (I mean I really admire them, though I’d die before I took the initiative; that’s men’s business), I don’t press my point in conversations, and I enjoy cooking. I like to do things for other people, especially male people. I sleep well, wake up on the dot, and don’t dream. There’s only one thing wrong with me:

  I’m frigid.

  In my other incarnation I live out such a plethora of conflict that you wouldn’t think I’d survive, would you, but I do; I wake up enraged, go to sleep in numbed despair, face what I know perfectly well is condescension and abstract contempt, get into quarrels, shout, fret about people I don’t even know, live as if I were the only woman in the world trying to buck it all, work like a pig, strew my whole apartment with notes, articles, manuscripts, books, get frowsty, don’t care, become stridently contentious, sometimes laugh and weep within five minutes together out of pure frustration. It takes me two hours to get to sleep and an hour to wake up. I dream a
t my desk. I dream all over the place. I’m very badly dressed.

  But O how I relish my victuals! And O how I fuck!

  III

  Jeannine has an older brother who’s a mathematics teacher in a New York high school. Their mother, who stays with him during vacations, was widowed when Jeannine was four. When she was a little baby Jeannine used to practice talking; she would get into a corner by herself and say words over and over again to get them right. Her first full sentence was, “See the moon.” She pressed wildflowers and wrote poems in elementary school. Jeannine’s brother, her sister-in-law, their two children, and her mother live for the summer in two cottages near a lake. Jeannine will stay in the smaller one with her mother. She conies downstairs with me behind her to find Mrs. Dadier arranging flowers in a pickle jar on the kitchenette table. I am behind Jeannine, but Jeannine can’t see me, of course.

  “Everyone’s asking about you,” says Mrs. Dadier, giving her daughter a peck on the cheek.

  “Mm,” says Jeannine, still sleepy. I duck behind the bookshelves that separate the living room from the kitchenette.

  “We thought you might bring that nice young man with you again,” says Mrs. Dadier, setting cereal and milk in front of her daughter. Jeannine retreats into sulky impassivity. I make an awful face, which of course nobody sees.