The Female Man

Janet is sitting next to Laura Rose on my nubbly-brown couch, half-asleep, half all over her friend in a confiding way, her head resting on Laur's responsible shoulder. A young she-tiger with a large, floppy cub. In her dozing Janet has shed ten years' anxiety and twenty pounds of trying-to-impress-others; she must be so much younger and sillier with her own people; grubbing in the tomato patch or chasing lost cows; what Safety and Peace officers do is beyond me. (A cow found her way into the Mountainpersons' common room and backed a stranger through a foam wall by trying to start a conversation-Whileawayans have a passion for improving the capacities of domestic animals-she kept nudging this visitor and saying "Friend? Friend?" in a great, wistful moo, like the monster in the movie, until a Mountainperson shooed her away: You don't want to make trouble, do you, child? You want to be milked, don't you? Come on, now.)

'Tell us about the cow," says Laura Rose. "Tell Jeannine about it," (who's vainly trying to flow into the wall, O agony, those two women are touching).

"No," mutters Janet sleepily.

"Then tell us about the Zdubakovs," says Laur.

"You're a vicious little beast!" says Janet and sits bolt upright.

"Oh come on, giraffe," says Laura Rose. "Tell!" She has sewn embroidered bunches of flowers all over her denim jacket and jeans with a red, red rose on the crotch, but she doesn't wear these clothes at home, only when visiting.

"You are a damned vicious cublet," said Janet. "I'll tell you something to sweeten your disposition. Do you want to hear about the three-legged goat who skipped off to the North Pole?"

"No," says Laur. Jeannine flattens like a film of oil; she vanishes dimly into a cupboard, putting her fingers in her ears.

"Tell!" says Laur, twisting my little finger. I bury my face in my hands. Ay, no. Ay, no. Laura must hear. She kissed my neck and then my ear in a passion for all the awful things I do as S amp; P; I straightened up and rocked back and forth.

The trouble with you people is you get no charge from death. Myself, it shakes me all over. Somebody I'd never met had left a note saying the usual thing: ha ha on you, you do not exist, go away, for we are so bloody cooperative that we have this solipsistic underside, you see? So I went up-mountain and found her; I turned on my two-way vocal three hundred yards from criminal Elena Twason and said, "Well, well, Elena, you shouldn't take a vacation without notifying your friends."

"Vacation?" she says; "Friends? Don't lie to me, girl. You read my letter," and by this I began to understand that she hadn't had to go mad to do this and that was terrible. I said, "What letter? Nobody found a letter."

"The cow ate it," says Elena Twason. "Shoot me. I don't believe you're there but my body believes; I believe that my tissues believe in the bullet that you do not believe in yourself, and that will kill me."

"Cow?" says I, ignoring the rest, "what cow? You Zdubakovs don't keep cows.

You're vegetable-and-goat people, I believe. Quit joking with me, Elena. Come back; you went botanizing and lost your way, that's all."

"Oh little girl," she said, so off-hand, so good-humored, "little child, don't deform reality. Don't mock us both." In spite of the insults, I tried again.

"What a pity," I said, "that your hearing is going so bad at the age of sixty, Elena Twa. Or perhaps it's my own. I thought I heard you say something else. But the echoes in this damned valley are enough to make anything unintelligible; I could have sworn that I was offering you an illegal collusion in an untruth and that like a sensible, sane woman, you were accepting." I could see her white hair through the binoculars; she could've been my mother. Sorry for the banality, but it's true. Often they try to kill you so I showed myself as best I could, but she didn't move-exhausted? Sick? Nothing happened.

"Elena!" I shouted. "By the entrails of God, will you please come down!" and I waved my arms like a semaphore. I thought: I'// wait until morning at least. I can do that much. In my mind we changed places several times, she and I, both of us acting as illegally in our respective positions as we could, but I might be able to patch up some sort of story. As I watched her, she began to amble down the hillside, that little white patch of hair bobbing through the autumn foliage like deer's tail. Chuckling to herself, idly swinging a stick she'd picked up: weak little thing, just a twig really, too dry to hit anything without breaking.