As I left with Chin Ping, Teresa was beginning to go into her psychotic breakdown. Another hour, and her renewed personality would be writing some more 'Steintrack' songs for us.
Outside, overhead, high above the urbstak, diatoms and divers peacocks phantasmally nested in the sun itself. I sneezed. Something throbbed under my zygomatic arch.
KIT REED
Songs of War
No one can accuse Kit Reed of being antifem-lib—or antifeminine. As wife, mother and author she has quietly succeeded in doing what others are just talking about. Now, with sweet piercing wit, she has used the medium of the science fiction story to write the definitive story of the feminine liberation movement. Or has she? . . .
For some weeks now a fire had burned day and night on a hillside just beyond the town limits; standing at her kitchen sink, Sally Hall could see the smoke rising over the trees. It curled upward in promise, but she could not be sure what it promised, and despite the fact that she was contented with her work and her family, Sally found herself stirred by the bright autumn air, the smoke emblem.
Nobody seemed to want to talk much about the fire, or what it meant. Her husband, Zack, passed it off with a shrug, saying it was probably just another commune. June Goodall, her neighbor, said it was coming from Ellen Ferguson's place; she owned the land and it was her business what she did with it. Sally said what if she had been taken prisoner. Vic Goodall said not to be ridiculous, if Ellen Ferguson wanted those people off her place, all she had to do was call the police and get them off, and in the meantime, it was nobody's business.
Still there was something commanding about the presence of the fire; the smoke rose steadily and could be seen for miles, and Sally, working at her drawing board, and a number of other women, going about their daily business, found themselves yearning^after the smoke column with complex feelings. Some may have been recalling a primal past in which men conked large animals and dragged them into camp, and the only housework involved was a little gutting before they roasted the bloody chunks over the fire. The grease used to sink into the dirt and afterward the diners, smeared with blood and fat, would roll around in a happy tangle. Other women were stirred by all the adventure tales they had stored up from childhood; people would run away without even bothering to pack or leave a note, they always found food one way or another and they met new friends in the woods. Together they would tell stories over a campfire, and when they had eaten they would walk away from the bones to some high excitement that had nothing to do with the business of living from day to day. A few women, thinking of Castro and his happy guerrilla band, in the carefree, glamorous days before he came to power, were closer to the truth. Thinking wistfully of campfire camaraderie, of everybody marching together in a common cause, they were already dreaming of revolution.
Despite the haircut and the cheap suit supplied by the Acme Vacuum Cleaner company, Andy Ellis was an under-achiever college dropout who could care less about vacuum cleaners. Until this week he had been a beautiful, carefree kid, and now, with a dying mother to support, with the wraiths of unpaid bills and unsold Marvelvacs trailing behind him like Marley's chains, he was still beautiful, which is why the women opened their doors to him.
He was supposed to say, "Good morning, I'm from the Acme Vacuum Cleaner Company and I'm here to clean your living room, no obligation, absolutely free of charge." Then, with the room clean and the Marvelsweep with twenty attachments and ten optional features spread all over the rug, he was supposed to make his pitch.
The first woman he called on said he did good work but her husband would have to decide, so Andy sighed and began collecting the Flutesnoot, the Miracle Whoosher and all the other attachments and putting them back into the patented Bomb Bay Door.
"Well thanks anyway ..."
"Oh, thank you," she said. He was astounded to discover that she was unbuttoning him here and there.
"Does this mean you want the vacuum after all?"
She covered him with hungry kisses. "Shut up and deal."
At the next house, he began again. "Good morning, I'm from the Acme Vacuum Cleaner company . . ."
"Never mind that. Come in."
At the third house, he and the lady of the house grappled in the midst of her unfinished novel, rolling here and there between the unfinished tapestry and the unfinished wire sculpture.
"If he would let me alone for a minute I would get some of these things done," she said. "All he ever thinks about is sex."
"If you don't like it, why are we doing this?"
"To get even," she said.
On his second day as a vacuum cleaner salesman, Andy changed his approach. Instead of going into his pitch, he would say, "Want to screw?" By the third day he had refined it to, "My place or yours?"
Friday his mother died so he was able to turn in his Marvelvac, which he thought was just as well, because he was exhausted and depressed, and, for all his efforts, he had made only one tentative sale, which was contingent upon his picking up the payments in person every week for the next twelve years. Standing over his mother's coffin, he could not for the life of him understand what had happened to women—not good old Mom, who had more or less liked her family and at any rate had died uncomplaining—but the others, all the women in every condition in all the houses he had gone to this week. Why weren't any of them happy?
Up in the hills, sitting around the fire, the women in the vanguard were talking about just that: the vagaries of life, and woman's condition. They had to think it was only that. If they were going to go on, they would have to be able to decide the problem was X, whatever X was. It had to be something they could name, so that, together, they could do something about it.
They were of a mind to free themselves. One of the things was to free themselves of the necessity of being thought of as sexual objects, which turned out to mean only that certain obvious concessions, like lipstick and pretty clothes, had by ukase been done away with. Still, there were those who wore their khakis and bandoliers with a difference. Whether or not they shaved their legs and armpits, whether or not they smelled, the pretty ones were still pretty and the others were not; the ones with good bodies walked in an unconscious pride and the others tried to ignore the differences and settled into their flesh, saying: Now, we are all equal.
There were great disputes as to what they were going to do, and which things they would do first. It was fairly well agreed that although the law said that they were equal, nothing much was changed. There was still the monthly bleeding; Dr. Ora Fessenden, the noted gynecologist, had showed them a trick which was supposed to take care of all that, but nothing short of surgery or menopause would halt the process altogether; what man had to undergo such indignities? There was still pregnancy, but the women all agreed they were on top of that problem. That left the rest: men still looked down on them, in part because in the main, women were shorter; they were more or less free to pursue their careers, assuming they could keep a baby-sitter, but there were still midafternoon depressions, dishes, the wash; despite all the changes, life was much the same. More drastic action was needed.
They decided to form an army.
At the time, nobody was agreed on what they were going to do or how they would go about it, but they were all agreed that it was time for a change. Things could not go on as they were; life was often boring, and too hard.
She wrote a note:
Dear Ralph,