The Female Man

Goodbye to mannequins in store windows who pretend to be sympathetic but who are really nasty conspiracies, goodbye to hating Mother, goodbye to the Divine Psychiatrist, goodbye to The Girls, goodbye to Normality, goodbye to Getting Married, goodbye to The Supernaturally Blessed Event, goodbye to being Some Body, goodbye to waiting for Him (poor fellow!), goodbye to sitting by the telephone, goodbye to feebleness, goodbye to adoration, goodbye Politics, hello politics. She's scared but that's all right. The streets are full of women and this awes her; where have they all come from? Where are they going? (If you don't mind the symbolism.) It's stopped raining but mist coils up from the pavement. She passes a bridal shop where the chief mannequin, a Vision in white lace and tulle, sticks out her tongue at Jeannine. "Didn't do it!" cries the mannequin, resuming her haughty pose and balancing a bridal veil on her head.

Jeannine shuts her umbrella, latches it, and swings it energetically round and round.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye to everything.

We met in Schrafft's and sat, the four of us, at one table, ordering their Thanksgiving dinner, argh, which is so traditional you can't stand it. Gah.

"What's Indian pudding?" says Janet, baffled.

"No, don't, better not," says Joanna.

We munch in silence, slowly, the way Whileawayans eat: munch, munch, gulp.

Munch. Gulp, gulp, gulp, Munch. Meditatively. It's pleasant to eat. Janet screws up her eyes, yawns, and stretches athletically, leaning over the back of her chair and working her bent arms first to this side, then to that. She ends up by pounding on the table. "Mm!" she says.

"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.