“Would you like to live like that?” I said.
He said, “That’s irrelevant, because I’m a man.”
I haven’t the right hobbies, you see. My hobby is mathematics, not boys. And being young, too, that’s a drag. You have to take all kinds of crap.
Boys don’t like smart girls. Boys don’t like aggressive girls. Unless they want to sit in the girls’ laps, that is. I never met a man yet who wanted to make it with a female Genghis Khan. Either they try to dominate you, which is revolting, or they turn into babies. You might as well give up. Then I had a lady shrink who said it was my problem because I was the one who was trying to rock the boat and you can’t expect them to change . So I suppose I’m the one who must change. Which is what my best friend said. “Compromise,” she said, answering her fiftieth phone call of the night. “Think what power it gives you over them.”
Them! Always Them, Them, Them. I can’t just think of myself. My mother thinks that I don’t like boys, though I try to tell her: Look at it this way; I’ll never lose my virginity. I’m a Man-Hating Woman and people leave the room when I come in it. Do they do the same for a Woman-Hating Man? Don’t be silly.
She’ll never know—nor would she credit if she knew—that men sometimes look very beautiful to me. From the depths, looking up.
There was a very nice boy once who said, “Don’t worry, Laura. I know you’re really very sweet and gentle underneath.” And another with, “You’re strong, like an earth mother.” And a third, “You’re so beautiful when you’re angry.” My guts on the floor, you’re so beautiful when you’re angry. I want to be recognized.
I’ve never slept with a girl. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t want to. That’s abnormal and I’m not, although you can’t be normal unless you do what you want and you can’t be normal unless you love men. To do what I wanted would be normal, unless what I wanted was abnormal, in which case it would be abnormal to please myself and normal to do what I didn’t want to do, which isn’t normal.
So you see.
XII
Dunyasha Bernadetteson (the most brilliant mind in the world, b. A.C. 344, d. A.C.. 426) heard of this unfortunate young person and immediately pronounced the following shchasniy, or cryptic one-word saying:
“Power!”
XIII
We persevered, reading magazines and covering the neighbors’ activities in the discreetest way possible, and Janet—who didn’t believe us to be fully human—kept her affections to herself. She got used to Laur’s standing by the door every time we went out in the evening with a stubborn look on her face as if she were going to fling herself across the door with her arms spread out, movie style. But Laur controlled herself. Janet went out on a few arranged dates with local men but awe silenced them; she learned nothing of the usual way such things were done. She went to a high school basketball game (for the boys) and a Fashion Fair (for the girls). There was a Science Fair, whose misconceptions she enjoyed mightily. Like oil around water, the community parted to let us through.
Laura Rose came up to Miss Evason one night as the latter sat reading alone in the living room; it was February and the soft snow clung to the outside of the picture window. Picture windows in Anytown do not evaporate snow in the wintertime as windows do on Whileaway. Laur watched us standoffishly for a while, then came into the circle of fantasy and lamplight. She stood there, twisting her class ring around her finger. Then she said:
“What have you learned from all that reading?”
“Nothing,” said Janet. The soundless blows of the snowflakes against the glass. Laur sat down at Janet’s feet ("Shall I tell you something?") and explained an old fantasy of hers, snow and forests and knights and lovelorn maidens. She said that to anyone in love the house would instantly seem submarine, not a house on Earth but a house on Titan under the ammonia snow. “I’m in love,” she said, reviving that old story about the mythical man at school.
“Tell me about Whileaway,” she added. Janet put down her magazine. Indirection is so new to Miss Evason that for a moment she doesn’t understand; what Laur has said is: Tell me about your wife. Janet was pleased. She had traced Laur’s scheme not as concealment but as a kind of elaborate frivolity; now she fell silent. The little girl sat tailor-fashion on the living room rug, watching us.
“Well, tell me,” said Laura Rose.
Her features are delicate, not particularly marked; she has a slightly indecently milky skin and lots of freckles. Knobby knuckles.
“She’s called Vittoria,” said Janet—how crude, once said!—and there goes something in Laura Rose’s heart, like the blows of something light but perpetually shocking: oh! oh! oh! She reddened and said something very faintly, something I lip-read but didn’t hear. Then she put her hand on Janet’s knee, a hot, moist hand with its square fingers and stubby nails, a hand of tremendous youthful presence, and said something else, still inaudible.
Leave! (I told my compatriot)
First of all, it’s wrong.
Second of all, it’s wrong.
Third of all, it’s wrong.
“Oh my goodness,” said Janet slowly, as she does sometimes, this being her favorite saying after, “You are kidding me.”
(Performing the difficult mental trick of trying on somebody else’s taboos.)
“Now then,” she said, “now then, now then.” The little girl looked up. She is in the middle of something terribly distressing, something that will make her wring her hands, will make her cry. As a large Irish setter once bounded into my room and spent half the day unconsciously banging a piece of furniture with his tail; so something awful has got into Laura Rose and is giving her electric shocks, terrifying blows, right across the heart. Janet took her by the shoulders and it got worse. There is this business of the narcissism of love, the fourth-dimensional curve that takes you out into the other who is the whole world, which is really a twist back into yourself, only a different self. Laur was weeping with despair. Janet pulled her up on to her lap—Janet’s lap—as if she had been a baby; everyone knows that if you start them young they’ll be perverted forever and everyone knows that nothing in the world is worse than making love to someone a generation younger than yourself. Poor Laura, defeated by both of us, her back bent, glazed and stupefied under the weight of a double taboo.
Don’t, Janet.
Don’t, Janet.
Don’t exploit. That little girl’s sinister wisdom.
Snow still blew across the side of the house; the walls shook, muffled. Something was wrong with the television set, or with the distance control, or perhaps some defective appliance somewhere in suburban Anytown sent out uncontrolled signals that no television set could resist; for it turned itself on and gave us a television salad: Maureen trying unsuccessfully to slap John Wayne, a pretty girl with a drowned voice holding up a vaginal deodorant spray can, a house falling off the side of a mountain. Laur groaned aloud and hid her face against Janet’s shoulder. Janet—I—held her, her odor flooding my skin, cold woman, grinning at my own desire because we are still trying to be good. Whileawayans, as has been said, love big asses. “I love you, I love you,” said Laur, and Janet rocked her, and Laur—not wishing to be taken for a child—bent Miss Evason’s head fiercely back against the chair and kissed her on the mouth. Oh my goodness.