The Female Man

She soberly held out a piece of buttered toast and Laur took it with a grimace.

"I don't," said Laur in an entirely different tone, "understand where the devil they all go on Saturday mornings. You'd think they were trying to catch up with the sun." Sharp and adult.

"I dreamed I was learning to use a rifle," she added. We thought of confiding to her the secret dream-system by which Whileawayans transform matter and embrace the galaxies but then we thought better of it.

Janet was trying in a baffled way to pick up the crumbs she had dropped; Whileawayans don't eat crunchables. I left her and floated up to the whatnot, on which were perched two biscuit-china birds, beak twined in beak, a cut-glass salt dish, a small, wooden Mexican hat, a miniature silver basket, and a terracotta ashtray shaped realistically like a camel. Laur looked up for a moment, preternaturally hard and composed. I am a spirit, remember. She said: "The hell with it."

"What?" said Janet. This response is considered quite polite on Whileaway. I, the plague system darting in the air between them, pinched Janet's ears, plucked them up like Death in the poem. Nowhere, neither undersea nor on the moon, have I, in my bodiless wanderings, met with a more hard-headed innocence than Miss Evason brings to the handling of her affairs. In the bluntness of her imagination she unbuttoned Laur's shirt and slid her pants down to her knees.

The taboos in Whileawayan society are cross-age taboos. Miss Eva-son no longer smiled.

"I said the hell with it," the little girl repeated aggressively.

"You said-?"

(Imitation Laura was smiling helplessly and freshly over her shoulder, shivering a little as her breasts were touched. What we like is the look of affection.)

She studied her plate. She drew a design on it with her finger. "Nothing," she said. "I want to show you something."

"Show, then," said Janet. I bet your knees turn in. Janet didn't think so. There are these fashion magazines scattered through the house, Mrs. Wilding reads them, pornography for the high-minded. Girls in wet knit bathing suits with their hair dripping, silly girls drowned in sweaters, serious girls in backless jersey evening dresses that barely cover the fine-boned lyres of their small chests. They're all slim and young. Pushing and prodding the little girl as you fit a dress on her. Stand here. Stand there. How, swooning, they fell into each other's arms. Janet, who (unlike me) never imagines what can't be done, wiped her mouth, folded her napkin, pushed back her chair, got up, and followed Laur into the living room. Up the stairs. Laur took a notebook from her desk and handed it to Miss Evason. We stood there uncertainly, ready to laugh or cry; Janet looked down at the manuscript, up over the edge at Laura, down again for a few more lines. Peek.

"I can't read this," I said.

Laura raised her eyebrows severely.

"I know the language but not the context," Janet said. "I can't judge this, child."

Laura frowned. I thought she might wring her hands but no such luck. She went back to the desk and picked up something else, which she handed to Miss Evason.

I knew enough to recognize mathematics, that's all. She tried to stare Janet down. Janet followed a few lines, smiled thoughtfully, then came to a hitch.

Something wrong. "Your teacher-" began Miss Evason.

"I don't have a teacher," said perspicacious Laur. "I do it myself, out of the book."

"Then the book's wrong," said Janet; "Look," and she proceeded to scribble in the margin. What an extraordinary phenomenon mathematical symbols are! I flew to the curtains, curtains Mrs. Wilding had washed and ironed with her own hands.

No, she took them to the cleaner's, popping the clutch of the Wildings' station wagon. She read Freud in the time she would have used to wash and iron the curtains. They weren't Laur's choice. She would have torn them down with her own hands. She wept. She pleaded. She fainted. Et cetera.

They bent over the book together.

"Goddamn," said Janet, in surprised pleasure.

"You know math!" (that was Laur).

"No, no, I'm just an amateur, just an amateur," said Miss Evason, swimming like a seal in the sea of numbers.

"The life so short, the craft so long to learn," quoted Laur and turned scarlet.

The rest goes: I mene love.

"What?" said Janet, absorbed.

"I'm in love with someone in school," said Laur. "A man."

A really extraordinary expression, what they mean by calling someone's face a study-she can't know that I know that she doesn't know that I know!-crossed Janet's face and she said, "Oh, sure," by which you can tell that she didn't believe a word of it. She didn't say, "You're too young." (Not for him, for her, nitwit).

"Of course," she added.

XI