I am excited, she thought. I’m excited and I don’t know for certain what excites me. I’m excited over what is going to happen, but I don’t have the slightest idea what it will be.
Anything could happen.
I could die tomorrow, she thought. Or I could meet a man and marry him, or I could write a book or get a part in a play or became a heroin addict or start sleeping with an artist or get a job in a sweatshop or almost anything.
Anything could happen.
She picked up two small bottles of cologne from the suitcase and carried them into the bathroom. It was a very small room: she saw at once that she would have to take showers. She was not tall, but the tub was still too small for her.
The sink was a shiny white, stained a deep rust-brown where the water ran from the tap to the drain. She started to open the medicine cabinet over the sink to put away the cologne, pausing to look at herself in the mirror on the front of the cabinet.
Her eyes were very brown and her hair was black and her skin very smooth and clear. She ran her fingers lightly over her face, touching the lips that were red without lipstick and the cheeks that were rosy without rouge, the pointed chin, the high forehead, the hollow of her throat.
“You know,” she told the mirror image, “you’re rather pretty. Not bad at all. Nice to look at, sort of.”
She didn’t smile. She studied the image very seriously, her eyes fixed upon the eyes reflected in the mirror.
“Pretty,” she repeated.
“And you’re free and white and precisely 21, and you’re all alone in New York in Greenwich Village and you don’t know a soul, and you’re going to have an exciting summer. Because anything can happen.”
“What can happen?” asked the reflection.
“Anything. You can write a book or act in a play or get a job or take dope or live with an artist or—”
“Or what?”
Her hand tightened on the bottle of cologne.
“Or what? Tell me.”
She stared into the mirror, her eyes burning into the eyes reflected there. She couldn’t breathe.
“Say it,” the mirror image demanded. “Damn you, say it!”
“Or you can sleep with a girl,” she said.
The bottle of cologne dropped from her hand. It bounced once on the floor; miraculously, it didn’t break. For several minutes she studied the mirror image without moving. Then, finally, she stooped over and picked up the bottle and placed it in the medicine cabinet. She left the bathroom quickly, closing the door.
When everything was unpacked and put away she stretched out on the bed and lit a second cigarette. The smoke tasted good. She held it in her lungs until it made her feel a little dizzy and then blew it in a cloud toward the ceiling. There was a network of thin cracks in the ceiling and she lay on the bed hardly thinking, studying the cracks in the plaster as if they were a map.
I’m a little girl from Indiana, she thought. A little girl from a little town called Rushville, a little girl who went to Indiana University to study literature and learn French and supposedly grow up.
Indiana University.
When you told people you went to Indiana University, they thought immediately of one of two things. The football team or the Kinsey Institute. Those were the two most important things the damn place had.
Kinsey. A snoopy bastard, she thought. Snoopy, prying son-of-a-bitch. Collected sex lives on little white IBM cards like high school kids collected dirty pictures.
She had never been interviewed. She wondered idly what it would be like to tell her life story to some bland, moon-faced little interviewer. Did many of the girls lie? It might be fun to feed them a line, to make up some good stories and throw their silly survey for a fall.
Suppose they interviewed her. Suppose she told them the truth and they wrote it all down and filed it away on a white IBM card.
What would the card say?
Janet Marlowe, she thought. Nickname: Jan. Age: 21. Socio-economic background: Upper-middle class. Father: Attorney. Mother: Deceased. Siblings: None.
Marital status: Single, she went on. Premarital experience: necked twice in a parked car during high school, kissed dates properly and went all the way once. Once, she thought. The lady tried it once and she didn’t like it.
Oh, there would be plenty of fascinating information on that white card. It probably wouldn’t even get a raised eyebrow from the interviewer, but then they were supposed to be utterly shock-proof.
The typical crush on a teacher in high school. The typical unnaturally strong attachment for her dead mother. The typical overwhelming awareness of the beauty of another girl. Everything was very typical, just the way the book said it was supposed to be when people didn’t turn out the way they were supposed to at all.
All the symptoms, strong enough and pronounced enough to send her reading through books on the subject before anything even happened.
And then, of course, something had happened.
What happened was also typical. It happened during her freshman year in college when she was rooming with a tall lovely blonde girl named Anne Daugherty. Anne was also majoring in literature and interested in the same things, they became friends, they went places together, they talked. It was the first time Jan had felt truly comfortable and close with another person.
And then... then, one day—
One day Anne kissed her.
It was almost ridiculous. They were sitting on the edge of Anne’s bed, sitting and talking, and all at once Anne leaned toward her and her mouth fastened on Jan’s.
It was over almost as quickly as it had happened, with Jan wide-eyed and shocked and Anne embarrassed and furious with herself for losing control. It was over in an instant, and instantly the closeness that existed between them was also over. They hardly talked after that; Anne’s mumbled apology went unheard.
And it might not have meant anything at all. Nothing like that happened again. The two girls avoided each other, and at the end of the semester Anne went to share a room with another girl in a dormitory on the other side of the campus.
It might have meant nothing at all — except that Jan realized that she had enjoyed the kiss, that she wanted the same thing Anne did.
And that meant a good deal.
That would have to go on the IBM card too, of course. It was typical, and it surely belonged on the card with the rest.
Janet Marlowe, the card would say.
Janet Marlowe: Lesbian.
She felt funny. For the first time she had coupled them up — the word and the name — and the sensation was both good and bad. Bad because it was a label she didn’t want for herself; good because any label was belter than a question mark, ignorance was not bliss. It was hell.
Lesbian. It wasn’t such a terrible word, not so ugly as “dike” or “butch,” not so weird-sounding and sterile as “hermaphrodite” or the other pseudomedical terms. It sounded almost gentle, gentle and peaceful.
She stood up after a moment, looking at herself in the mirror on the bedroom door, a full-length mirror slightly discolored at the edges. Christ, she thought, the whole place is full of mirrors.
Quickly, mechanically, she began to remove her clothes. She unbuttoned her dress and pulled it smoothly over her head. Then she unclasped her brassiere, stepped out of her panties, and unrolled her stockings. She placed them all neatly on the chair next to the bed and stood quite naked before the mirror.