She also did not mind the sudden glare of publicity.
Now that the newspapers had it all the TV reporters had been to see her, and she had seen her own courageous face on the six o’clock report. Fem was sending someone around. The someone phoned first. She was a woman of about sixty, veteran of the lib years, who sniffed, “We never do this, interviewing somebody just because she’s somebody’s wife. But they wanted it. I couldn’t turn down the assignment, but I want to be honest with you and let you know that it’s distasteful to me.”
“I’m sorry,” Dorrie apologized. “Do you want me to cancel out?”
“Oh, no,” said the woman, speaking as though it were Dorrie’s fault, “it’s not your fault, but I think it’s a betrayal of everything Fem stands for. Never mind. I want to come up to your home. We’ll do a fifteen-minute spread for the cassette edition, and I’ll write it up for the print. If you can—”
“I—” Dorrie began.
“—try to talk about you, rather than him. Your background. Your interests. Your—”
“I’m sorry, but I’d really prefer—”
“—feelings about the space program and so on. Dash says it’s an essential American objective and the future of the world depends on it. What do you think? I don’t mean answer the question now, I mean—”
“I don’t want to have it in my home,” Dorrie inserted into the conversation, without waiting for a place for it.
“—think about it, and answer on camera. Not at your home? No, that’s not possible. We’ll be over in an hour.”
Dorrie was left with a dwindling spot of light to talk to, and then even that was gone. “Bitch,” she said, almost absent-mindedly. She didn’t really mind having the interview in her home. She minded not being given a choice. That she minded a lot. But there was no choice available to her, except to go out before the Fem person showed up.
Dome Torraway, Dee Mintz as was, felt strongly about having choices. One of the things that had attracted her to Roger in the first place, apart from the glamour of the space program and the security and money that went with it — and apart from Roger’s rather nice-looking, studly self — was that he was willing to listen to what she wanted. Other men had been mostly interested in what they wanted, which was not the same from man to man but very consistent within the range of relationships of any one man. Harold always wanted to dance and party, Jim always wanted sex, Everett wanted sex and parties, Tommy wanted political dedication, Joe wanted mothering. What Roger wanted was to explore the world with her along, and he seemed perfectly willing to explore the parts of it that she wanted as much as the parts that were important to him.
She had never regretted marrying him.
There were a lot of lonely times. Fifty-four days when he was in Space Station Three. Any number of shorter missions. Two years on tour duty all over the world, working with the whole system of ground monitoring stations from Aachen to Zaire, with no proper home anywhere. Dorrie had given that up, after a while, and gone back to the apartment in Tonka. But she hadn’t minded. Perhaps Roger had; the question had never crossed her mind. Anyway, they had seen each other quite often enough. He had been home every month or two, and she kept her time full. There was her shop — she had opened it while Roger was in Iceland, with a five-thousand-dollar check he sent her for her birthday. There were her friends. There were, from time to time, men.
None of these filled her life, but she didn’t expect it to be filled. She rather expected to be lonely. She had been an only child, with a mother who could not stand her neighbors, and so she had not had very many friends. The neighbors couldn’t stand her mother very well, either, because her mother was a speed freak on a small scale, likely to be burned right out of her mind most afternoons, which made things complicated for Dorrie. But she didn’t mind that; she didn’t know there was any other way to live.
At thirty-one Dorrie was as healthy, as pretty and as competent to deal with the world as she ever had been or would be again. She described herself as happy. This diagnosis did not come from any welling up of joy inside herself. It came from the observed fact, looking at herself objectively, that whenever she decided she wanted something she always got it, and what other definition of happiness could there be?
She used the time until Ms. Hagar Hengstrom and her crew from Fem arrived to assemble a selection of ceramic ware from her shop on the coffee table before the couch she intended to sit in. What time was left she devoted to the less important task of brushing her hair, checking her make-up and changing into her newest laced-pants suit.
When the doorbell rang she was quite ready.
Ms. Hagar Hengstrom pumped her hand and walked in, brilliant blue hair and a curly black cigar. She was followed by her lightperson, her soundperson, her cameraperson and her prop boys. “Room’s small,” she muttered, appraising the furnishings with contempt. “Torraway will sit over there. Move it.”
The prop boys jumped to manhandle an easy chair from its place by the window to the corner now occupied by a breakfront, which they tugged into the center of the room. “Wait a minute,” said Dorrie. “I thought I’d just sit on the couch here—”
“Don’t you have the light reading yet?” Hengstrom demanded. “Sally, start the camera. You never know what we might use for rollunder.”
“I mean it,” Dorrie said.
Hengstrom looked at her. The voice had not been loud, but the tone was dangerous. She shrugged. “Let’s set it up,” she proposed, “and if you don’t like it we’ll talk it over. Run through for me, will you?”
“Run through what?” The pale young girl with the hand-held camera was pointing it at her, Dorrie noticed; it distracted her. The lightperson had found a wall socket and was holding a crucifix of floods in each hand, moving them gently to erase shadows as fast as they formed each time Dorrie moved.
“Well, for openers, what are your plans for the next two years? You’re surely not just going to hang around waiting for Roger Torraway to come home.”
Dorrie tried to make her way to the couch, but the lightperson frowned and waved her in the other direction, and two of the prop boys shoved the coffee table out of reach. She said, “I’ve got my shop. I thought you might like to have some of the pieces from it on camera while you interviewed me—”
“That’s fine, sure. I meant personally. You’re a healthy woman. You have sexual needs. Back up a little, please — Sandra’s getting a buzz from something on the sound system.”
Dorrie found herself standing in front of the chair, and there seemed nothing to do but to sit in it. “Of course—” she began.
“You have a responsibility,” Hengstrom said. “What sort of an example are you going to set young womanhood? Turning yourself into a dried-up old maid? Or living a naturally full life?”
“I don’t know if I want to discuss—”
“I’ve checked you out pretty carefully, Torraway. I like what I’ve found out. You’re your own person — as much as any person can be, anyway, who accepts the ridiculous farce of marriage. Why’d you do it?”
Dorrie hesitated. “Roger’s really a very nice person,” she offered.
“What about it?”
“Well, I mean, he offered me a great deal of comfort and support—”
Hagar Hengstrom sighed. “Same old slave psychology. Never mind. The other thing that puzzles me is your getting involved in the space program. Don’t you feel it’s a sexist shuffle?”