The Female Man

I ambled ghostly beside her; it's so pretty in the mountains at that time of year, everything burns and burns without heat. I think she was enjoying herself, having finally put herself, as it were, beyond the reach of consequences; she took her little stroll until we were quite close to each other, close enough to converse face to face, perhaps as far as I am from you. She had made herself a crown of scarlet maple leaves and put it on her head, a little askew because it was a little too big to fit. She smiled at me.

"Face facts," she said. Then, drawing down the corners of her mouth with an ineffable air of gaiety and arrogance: "Kill, killer."

So I shot her.

Laur, who has been listening intently all this time, bloodthirsty little devil, takes Janet's face in her hands. "Oh, come on. You shot her with a narcotic, that's all. You told me so. A narcotic dart."

"No," said Janet. "I'm a liar. I killed her. We use explosive bullets because it's almost always distance work. I have a rifle like the kind you've often seen yourself."

"Aaaah!" is Laura Rose's long, disbelieving, angry comment. She came over to me: "Do you believe it?" (I shall have to drag Jeannine out of the woodwork with both hands.) Still angry, Laur straddles the room with her arms clasped behind her back. Janet is either asleep or acting. I wonder what Laur and Janet do in bed; what do women think of women?

"I don't care what either of you thinks of me," says Laur. "I like it! By God, I like the idea of doing something to somebody for a change instead of having it done to me. Why are you in Safety and Peace if you don't enjoy it!"

"I told you," says Janet softly.

Laur said, "I know, someone has to do it. Why you?"

"I was assigned."

Why? Because you're bad! You're tough." (She smiles at her own extravagance.

Janet sat up, wavering a little, and shook her head.)

"Dearest, I'm not good for much; understand that. Farm work or forest work, what else? I have some gift to unravel these human situations, but it's not quite intelligence."

"Which is why you're an emissary?" says Laur. "Don't expect me to believe that." Janet stares at my rug. She yawns, jaw-cracking. She clasps her hands loosely in her lap, remembering perhaps what it had been like to carry the body of a sixty-year-old woman down a mountainside: at first something you wept over, then something horrible, then something only distasteful, and finally you just did it.

"I am what you call an emissary," she said slowly, nodding courteously to Jeannine and me, "for the same reason that I was in S amp; P. I'm expendable, my dear. Laura, Whileawayan intelligence is confined in a narrower range than yours; we are not only smarter on the average but there is much less spread on either side of the average. This helps our living together. It also makes us extremely intolerant of routine work. But still there is some variation." She lay back on the couch, putting her arms under her head. Spoke to the ceiling.

Dreaming, perhaps. Of Vittoria?

"Oh, honey," she said, "I'm here because they can do without me. I was S amp; P because they could do without me. There's only one reason for that, Laur, and it's very simple.

"I am stupid."

Janet sleeps or pretends to, Joanna knits (that's me), Jeannine is in the kitchen. Laura Rose, still resentfully twitching with unconquered Genghis Khan-ism, takes a book from my bookshelf and lies on her stomach on the rug. I believe she is reading an art book, something she isn't interested in. The house seems asleep. In the desert between the three of us the dead Elena Twason Zdubakov begins to take shape; I give her Janet's eyes, Janet's frame, but bent with age, some of Laur's impatient sturdiness but modified with the graceful trembling of old age: her papery skin, her smile, the ropy muscles on her wasted arms, her white hair cut in an economical kind of thatch. Helen's belly is loose with old age, her face wrinkled, a never-attractive face like that of an extremely friendly and intelligent horse: long and droll. The lines about her mouth would be comic lines. She's wearing a silly kind of khaki shorts-and-shirt outfit which is not really what Whileawayans wear, but I give it to her anyway.