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The Female Man

Two ancients on the direct computer line between city and quarry (private persons have to be content with spark-gap radio), fighting at the top of their lungs while five green girls wait nearby, sulky and bored: I can't make do with five greenies; I need two on-foot checkers and protective gear for one!

Can't have.

Incomp-

You hear.

Is me!

(affected disdain)

If catastroph-

Won't!

And so on.

VIII

A troop of little girls contemplating three silver hoops welded to a silver cube are laughing so hard that some have fallen down into the autumn leaves on the plaza and are holding their stomachs. This is not embarrassment or an ignorant reaction to something new; they are genuine connoisseurs who have hiked for three days to see this. Their hip-packs lie around the edge of the plaza, near the fountains. One: How lovely!

IX

Between shifts in the quarry in Newland, Henla Anaisson sings, her only audience her one fellow-worker.

A Belin, run mad and unable to bear the tedious-ness of her work, flees above the forty-eighth parallel, intending to remain there permanently. "You" (says an arrogant note she leaves behind) "do not exist" and although agreeing philosophically with this common view, the S amp; P for the county follows her-not to return her for rehabilitation, imprisonment, or study. What is there to rehabilitate or study? We'd all do it if we could. And imprisonment is simple cruelty.

You guessed it.

XI

"If not me or mine," (wrote Dunyasha Bernadetteson in 368 A.C.) "O.K.

"If me or mine-alas.

"If us and ours-watch out!"

XII

Whileaway is engaged in the reorganization of industry consequent to the discovery of the induction principle.

The Whileawayan work-week is sixteen hours.

PART FOUR

I

After six months of living with me in the hotel suite, Janet Evason expressed the desire to move in with a typical family. I heard her singing in the bathroom: I know That my Rede-emer Liveth And She Shall stand Upon the latter da-ay (ruffle)

On Earth.

"Janet?" She sang again (not badly) the second variation on the lines, in which the soprano begins to decorate the tune: I know (up)

Tha-at my (ruffle)

Re-eedeemer (fiddle)

Liveth

And She

Shall stand (convex)

And She

Shall stand (concave)

"Janet, he's a Man!" I yelled. She went into the third variation, where the melody liquefies itself into its own adornments, very nice and quite improper: I know (up)

That my redee (a high point, this one) mer Li-i-veth (up up up)

And She

Shall stand (hopefully)

And She shall stand (higher)

Upon the la-a-a-a-atter da-a-a-y

(ruffle fiddle drip)

O-on Earth (settling)

"JANET!" But of course she doesn't listen.

II

Whileawayans like big asses, so I am glad to report there was nothing of that kind in the family she moved in with. Father, mother, teenage daughter, and family dog were all delighted to be famous. Daughter was an honor student in the local high school. When Janet got settled I drifted into the attic; my spirit seized possession of the old four-poster bed stored next to the chimney, near the fur coats and the shopping bag full of dolls; and slowly, slowly, I infected the whole house.

III

Laura Rose Wilding of Anytown, U. S. A.

She has a black poodle who whines under the trees in the back yard and bares his teeth as he rolls over and over in the dead leaves. She's reading the Christian Existentialists for a course in school. She crosses the October weather, glowing with health, to shake hands clumsily with Miss Evason. She's pathologically shy.

She puts one hand in the pocket of her jeans, luminously, the way well-beloved or much-studied people do, tugging at the zipper of her man's leather jacket with the other hand. She has short sandy hair and freckles. Says over and over to herself Non Sum, Non Sum, which means either I don't exist or I'm not that, according to how you feel it; this is what Martin Luther is supposed to have said during his fit in the monastery choir. "Can I go now?"