by Joanna Russ
“My goodness, look at that,” says Jeannine, very self-possessed and elegant, her fork in mid-air. “I thought you were going to knock someone’s hat off.”
Schrafft’s is full of women. Men don’t like places like this where the secret maintenance work of femininity is carried on, just as they turn green and bolt when you tell them medical events are occurring in your genito-urinary system. Jael has got something stuck between her steel teeth and her sham ones, and cocking an eye around Schrafft’s, she slips off her tooth cover and roots around for the blackberry seed or whatever, exposing to the world her steely, crocodilian grin. Back they go. In. Done.
“So?” says Jael. “Do we do business?” There is a long, uncomfortable silence. I look around Schrafft’s and wonder why women at their most genteel are so miserly; why is there no Four Seasons, no Maxim’s, no Chambord, for women? Women are very strange about money, feudal almost: Real Money is what you spend on the house and on yourself (except for your appearance): Magic Money is what you get men to spend on you. It takes a tremendous rearrangement of mental priorities for women to eat well, that is to spend money on their insides instead of their outsides. The Schrafft’s hostess stands by the cashier’s desk in her good black dress and sensible shoes; women left to themselves are ugly, i.e. human, but Gentility has been interfering here.
“This is awful food,” says Janet, who is used to Whileaway.
“This is wonderful food,” says Jael, who is used to Womanland and Manland.
Both burst out laughing.
“Well?” says Jael again. Another silence. Janet and I are very uncomfortable. Jeannine, one cheek bulging like a squirrel’s, looks up as if surprised that we could hesitate to do business with Womanland. She nods briefly and then goes back to building mashed-sweet-potato mountains with her fork. Jeannine now gets up late, neglects the housework until it annoys her, and plays with her food.
“Jeannine?” says Jael.
“Oh, sure,” says Jeannine. “I don’t mind. You can bring in all the soldiers you want. You can take the whole place over; I wish you would.” Jael goes admiringly tsk tsk and makes a rueful face that means: my friend, you are really going it. “My whole world calls me Jeannie,” says Jeannine in her high, sweet voice. “See?”
(Laur is waiting outside for Janet, probably baring her teeth at passing men.)
To Janet, Jael suddenly says:
“You don’t want me?”
“No,” says Janet. “No, sorry.”
Jael grins. She says:
“Disapprove all you like. Pedant! Let me give you something to carry away with you, friend: that ‘plague’ you talk of is a lie. I know . The world-lines around you are not so different from yours or mine or theirs and there is no plague in any of them, not any of them. Whileaway’s plague is a big lie. Your ancestors lied about it. It is I who gave you your ‘plague,’ my dear, about which you can now pietize and moralize to your heart’s content; I, I, I, I am the plague, Janet Evason. I and the war I fought built your world for you, I and those like me, we gave you a thousand years of peace and love and the Whileawayan flowers nourish themselves on the bones of the men we have slain.
“No,” said Janet dryly, “I don’t believe.” Now you must know that Jeannine is Everywoman. I, though I am a bit quirky, I too am Everywoman. Every woman is not Jael, as Uncle George would say—but Jael is Everywoman. We all stared accusingly at Janet but Miss Evason was not moved. Laur came through Schrafft’s revolving door and waved wildly; Janet got up to go.
“Think about it,” said Alice Reasoner. “Go home and find out about it.”
Janet began to weep—those strange, shameless, easy, Whileawayan tears that well out of the eyes without destroying the composed sadness of the face. She is expressing her grief about (for) Alice Reasoner. I think—when I stop to think about it, which is not often—that I like Jael the best of us all, that I would like to be Jael, twisted as she is on the rack of her own hard logic, triumphant in her extremity, the hateful hero with the broken heart, which is like being the clown with the broken heart. Jael averts her face in a death’s-head grimace that is only a nervous tic of Alice Reasoner’s, an expression that began perhaps twenty years ago as a tasting-something-sour look and has intensified with time into sheer bad-angelry, luminous with hate. She has cords in her neck. She could put out her captive’s claws and slash Schrafft’s tablecloth into ten separate, parallel ribbons. That’s only one one-hundredth of what she can do. Jeannine is playing an absorbing game with her green peas (she had no dessert). Jeannine is happy.
We got up and paid our quintuple bill; then we went out into the street. I said goodbye and went off with Laur, I, Janet; I also watched them go, I, Joanna; moreover I went off to show Jael the city, I Jeannine, I Jael, I myself.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
Goodbye to Alice Reasoner, who says tragedy makes her sick, who says never give in but always go down fighting, who says take them with you, who says die if you must but loop your own intestines around the neck of your strangling enemy. Goodbye to everything. Goodbye to Janet, whom we don’t believe in and whom we deride but who is in secret our savior from utter despair, who appears Heaven-high in our dreams with a mountain under each arm and the ocean in her pocket, Janet who comes from the place where the labia of sky and horizon kiss each other so that Whileawayans call it The Door and know that all legendary things come therefrom. Radiant as the day, the Might-be of our dreams, living as she does in a blessedness none of us will ever know, she is nonetheless Everywoman. Goodbye, Jeannine, goodbye, poor soul, poor girl, poor as-I-once-was. Goodbye, goodbye. Remember: we will all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we will all be free. I swear it on my own head. I swear it on my ten fingers. We will be ourselves. Until then I am silent; I can no more. I am God’s typewriter and the ribbon is typed out.
Go, little book, trot through Texas and Vermont and Alaska and Maryland and Washington and Florida and Canada and England and France; bob a curtsey at the shrines of Friedan, Millet, Greer, Firestone, and all the rest; behave yourself in people’s living rooms, neither looking ostentatious on the coffee table nor failing to persuade due to the dullness of your style; knock at the Christmas garland on my husband’s door in New York City and tell him that I loved him truly and love him still (despite what anybody may think); and take your place bravely on the book racks of bus terminals and drugstores. Do not scream when you are ignored, for that will alarm people, and do not fume when you are heisted by persons who will not pay, rather rejoice that you have become so popular. Live merrily, little daughter-book, even if I can’t and we can’t; recite yourself to all who will listen; stay hopeful and wise. Wash your face and take your place without a fuss in the Library of Congress, for all books end up there eventually, both little and big. Do not complain when at last you become quaint and old-fashioned, when you grow as outworn as the crinolines of a generation ago and are classed with Spicy Western Stories, Elsie Dinsmore, and The Son of the Sheik; do not mutter angrily to yourself when young persons read you to hrooch and hrch and guffaw, wondering what the dickens you were all about. Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers’ laps and punch the readers’ noses.
Rejoice, little book!
For on that day, we will be free.
About the Author
Joanna Russ, a former New Yorker, was born February 22, 1937. She received her B.A. in English at Cornell University and her M.P.A. in Playwriting and Dramatic Literature at Yale Drama School.
Ms. Russ has taught creative writing at universities and SF workshops (such as the famous Clarion workshops with Robin Scott Wilson) since 1966, and recently taught at the State University of New York at Binghamton, N.Y., where she still makes her home. Joanna Russ has written over forty short stories for a wide range of science fiction and trade magazines, journals and anthologies.
In 1972, she won the Nebula Award (best short story) for �
��When It Changed” (which appeared in Harlan Ellison’s Again Dangerous Visions and upon which THE FEMALE MAN is based). Joanna Russ is also the author of two previous novels, Picnic on Paradise (1968) and And Chaos Died (1970).
Aside from her writing and teaching activities, Ms. Russ also lectures frequently.
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