IV
The black poodle, Samuel, whined and scurried across the porch, then barked hysterically, defending the house against God-knows-what.
“At least she’s White,” they all said.
V
Janet, in her black-and-white tweeds with the fox collar like a movie star’s, gave a speech to the local women’s club. She didn’t say much. Someone gave her chrysanthemums which she held upside-down like a baseball bat. A professor from the local college spoke of other cultures. A whole room was full of offerings brought by the club—brownies, fudge cake, sour cream cake, honey buns, pumpkin pie—not to be eaten, of course, only looked at, but they did eat it finally because somebody has to or it isn’t real. “Hully gee, Mildred, you waxed the floor!” and she faints with happiness. Laur, who is reading psychology for the Existentialists (I said that, didn’t I?), serves coffee to the club in the too-big man’s shirt they can’t ever get her out of, no matter what they do, and her ancient, shape less jeans. Swaddling graveclothes. She’s a bright girl. She learned in her thirteenth year that you can get old films of Mae West or Marlene Dietrich (who is a Vulcan; look at the eyebrows) after midnight on UHF if you know where to look, at fourteen that pot helps, at fifteen that reading’s even better. She learned, wearing her rimless glasses, that the world is full of intelligent, attractive, talented women who manage to combine careers with their primary responsibilities as wives and mothers and whose husbands beat them. She’s put a gold circle pin on her shirt as a concession to club day. She loves her father and once is enough. Everyone knows that much as women want to be scientists and engineers, they want foremost to be womanly companions to men (what?) and caretakers of childhood; everyone knows that a large part of a woman’s identity inheres in the style of her attractiveness. Laur is daydreaming. She looks straight before her, blushes, smiles, and doesn’t see a thing. After the party she’ll march stiff-legged out of the room and up to her bedroom; sitting tailor-fashion on her bed, she’ll read Engels on the family and make in the margin her neat, concise, perfectly written notes. She has shelves and shelves of such annotated works. Not for her “How true!!!!” or “oiseaux = birds.” She’s surrounded by mermaids, fish, sea-plants, wandering fronds. Drifting on the affective currents of the room are those strange social artifacts half dissolved in nature and mystery: some pretty girls . Laur is daydreaming that she’s Genghis Khan.
VI
A beautiful chick who swims naked and whose breasts float on the water like flowers, a chick in a rain-tight shirt who says she balls with her friends but doesn’t get uptight about it, that’s the real thing.
VII
And I like Anytown; I like going out on the porch at night to look at the lights of the town: fireflies in the blue gloaming, across the valley, up the hill, white homes where children played and rested, where wives made potato salad, home from a day in the autumn leaves chasing sticks with the family dog, families in the firelight, thousands upon thousands of identical, cozy days.
“Do you like it here?” asked Janet over dessert, never thinking that she might be lied to.
“Huh?” said Laur.
“Our guest wants to know if you like living here,” said Mrs. Wilding.
“Yes,” said Laur.
VIII
There are more whooping cranes in the United States of America than there are women in Congress.
IX
This then is Laura’s worst mind: perpetually snowed in, a dim upstairs hall wrapped in cotton wool with Self counting rocks and shells in the window-seat. One can see nothing outside the glass but falling white sky—no footprints, no faces—though occasionally Self strays to the window, itself drowned in snowlight, and sees (or thinks she sees) in the petrified whirling waste the buried forms of two dead lovers, innocent and sexless, memorialized in a snowbank.
Turn away, girl; gird up your loins; go on reading.
X
Janet dreamed that she was skating backwards, Laura that a beautiful stranger was teaching her how to shoot. In dreams begin responsibilities. Laura came down to the breakfast table after everybody had gone except Miss Evason. Whileawayans practice secret dream interpretation according to an arbitrary scheme they consider idiotic but very funny; Janet was guiltily seeing how contrary she could make her dream come out and giggling around her buttered toast. She snickered and shed crumbs. When Laura came into the room Janet sat up straight and didn’t guffaw. “I,” said Laur severely, the victim of ventriloquism, “detest women who don’t know how to be women.” Janet and I said nothing. We noticed the floss and dew on the back of her neck—Laur is in some ways more like a thirteen-year-old than a seventeen-year-old. She mugs, for instance. At sixty Janet will be white-haired and skinny, with surprised blue eyes—quite a handsome human being. And Janet herself always likes people best as themselves, not dressed up, so Laur’s big shirt tickled her, ditto those impossible trousers. She wanted to ask if it was one shirt or many; do you scream when you catch sight of yourself?
She soberly held out a piece of buttered toast and Laur took it with a grimace.
“I don’t,” said Laur in an entirely different tone, “understand where the devil they all go on Saturday mornings. You’d think they were trying to catch up with the sun.” Sharp and adult.
“I dreamed I was learning to use a rifle,” she added. We thought of confiding to her the secret dream-system by which Whileawayans transform matter and embrace the galaxies but then we thought better of it.
Janet was trying in a baffled way to pick up the crumbs she had dropped; Whileawayans don’t eat crunchables. I left her and floated up to the whatnot, on which were perched two biscuit-china birds, beak twined in beak, a cut-glass salt dish, a small, wooden Mexican hat, a miniature silver basket, and a terracotta ashtray shaped realistically like a camel. Laur looked up for a moment, preternaturally hard and composed. I am a spirit, remember. She said: “The hell with it.”
“What?” said Janet. This response is considered quite polite on Whileaway. I, the plague system darting in the air between them, pinched Janet’s ears, plucked them up like Death in the poem. Nowhere, neither undersea nor on the moon, have I, in my bodiless wanderings, met with a more hard-headed innocence than Miss Evason brings to the handling of her affairs. In the bluntness of her imagination she unbuttoned Laur’s shirt and slid her pants down to her knees. The taboos in Whileawayan society are cross-age taboos. Miss Eva-son no longer smiled.