Janet’s rid of me. I sprang away and hung by one claw from the window curtain. Janet picked Laur up and deposited her on the floor, holding her tight through all the hysterics; she nuzzled Laur’s ear and slipped off her own shoes. Laur came up out of it and threw the distance control at the television set, for the actress had been telling you to disinfect the little-mouse “most girl part” and the set went dead.
“Never—don’t—I can’t—leave me!” wailed Laur. Better to cry. Businesslike Janet unfastened her shirt, her belt, and her blue jeans and gripped her about the hips, on the theory that nothing calms hysterics so fast.
“Oh!” said Laura Rose, astounded. This is the perfect time for her to change her mind. Her breathing grew quieter. Soberly she put her arms around Janet and leaned on Janet. She sighed.
“I want to get out of my damned clothes,” said Janet, voice unaccountably breaking in the middle.
“Do you love me?”
Dearest, I can’t because you are too young; and some day soon you’ll look at me and my skin will be dead and dry, and being more romantically inclined than a Whileawayan, you’ll find me quite disgusting: but until then I’ll do my best to conceal from you how very fond I am of you. There is also lust and I hope you understand me when I say I’m about to die; and I think we should go to a safer place where we can die in comfort, for example my room which has a lock on the door, because I don’t want to be panting away on the rug when your parents walk in. On Whileaway it wouldn’t matter and you wouldn’t have parents at your age, but here—or so I’m told—things are as they are .
“What a strange and lovely way you have of putting it,” Law said. They climbed the stairs, Laur worrying a bit at her trailing pants. She bent down (framed in the doorway) to rub her ankles. She’s going to laugh in a minute and look at us from between her legs. She straightened up with a shy smile.
“Tell me something,” she said in a hoarse, difficult whisper, averting her gaze.
“Yes, child? Yes, dear?”
“What do we do now?”
XIV
They undressed in Janet’s bedroom in the midst of her piles of materiaclass="underline" books, magazines, sources of statistics, biographies, newspapers. The ghosts in the windowpanes undressed with them, for nobody could see in at the back of the house. Their dim and pretty selves. Janet pulled down the shades, lingering at each window and peering wistfully out into the dark, a shocking compound of familiar, friendly face and awful nude, while Laur climbed into Janet’s bed. The bedspread had holes in it where the pink satin had worn thin. She shut her eyes. “Put out the light.”
“Oh no, please,” said Janet, making the bed sway by getting into it. She held out her arms to the little girl; then she kissed her on the shoulder, the Russian way. (She’s the wrong shape.) “I don’t want the light,” said Laur and jumped out of bed to turn it off, but the air catches you on your bare skin before you get there and shocks you out of your senses; so she stopped, mother-naked, with the currents of air investigating between her legs. “How lovely!” said Janet. The room is pitilessly well lit. Laur got back into bed—“Move over"—and that awful sensation that you’re not going to enjoy it after all. “You have lovely knees,” Janet said mildly, “and such a beautiful rump,” and for a moment the preposterousness of it braced Laura Rose; there couldn’t be any sex in it; so she turned off the overhead light and got back into bed. Janet had turned on a rose-shaded night lamp by the bed. Miss Evason grew out of the satin cover, an antique statue from the waist up with preternaturally living eyes; she said softly, “Look, we’re alike, aren’t we?” indicating her round breasts, idealized by the dimness. “I’ve had two children,” she said wickedly and Laur felt herself go red all over, so unpleasant was the picture of Yuriko Janet-son being held up to one breast to suck, not, it seemed to Laur, an uncollected, starry-eyed infant but something like a miniature adult, on a ladder perhaps. Laur lay stiffly back and shut her eyes, radiating refusal.
Janet turned out the bedside light.
Miss Evason then pulled the covers up around her shoulders, sighed in self-control, and ordered Laur to turn over. “You can at least get a back-rub out of it.”
“Ugh!” she said sincerely, when she began on the muscles of Laura’s neck. “What a mess.”
Laura tried to giggle. Miss Evason’s voice, in the darkness, went on and on: about the last few weeks, about studying freshwater ponds on Whileaway, a hard, lean, sexless greyhound of a voice (Laur thought) which betrayed Laura in the end, Miss Evason stating with an odd, unserious chuckle, “Try?”
“I do love you,” Laur said, ready to weep. There is propaganda and propaganda and I represented again to Janet that what she was about to do was a serious crime.
God will punish, I said.
You are supposed to make them giggle, but Janet remembered how she herself had been at twelve, and oh it’s so serious. She kissed Laura Rose lightly on the lips over and over again until Laura caught her head; in the dark it wasn’t really so bad and Laura could imagine that she was nobody, or that Miss Evason was nobody, or that she was imagining it all. One nice thing to do is rub from the neck down to the tail, it renders the human body ductile and makes the muscles purr. Without knowing it, Laur was in over her head. She had learned from a boy friend how to kiss on top, but here there was lots of time and lots of other places; “It’s nice!” said Laura Rose in surprise; “It’s so nice!” and the sound of her own voice sent her in head over heels. Janet found the little bump Whileawayans call The Key—Now you must make an effort, she said—and with the sense of working very hard, Laur finally tumbled off the cliff. It was incompletely and desperately inadequate, but it was the first major sexual pleasure she had ever received from another human being in her entire life.
“Goddammit, I can’t!” she shouted.
So I fled shrieking. There is no excuse for putting my face between someone else’s columnar thighs—picture me as washing my cheeks and temples outside to get rid of that cool smoothness (cool because of the fat, you see, that insulates the limbs; you can almost feel the long bones, the architectura, the heavenly technical cunning. They’ll be doing it with the dog next). I sat on the hall window frame and screamed.
Janet must be imagined throughout as practicing the extremest self-control.
What else can she do?
“Now do this and this,” she whispered hurriedly to Laura Rose, laughing brokenly. “Now do that and that. Ah!” Miss Evason used the girl’s ignorant hand, for Laura didn’t know how to do it; “Just hold still,” she said in that strange parody of an intimate confession. The girl’s inexperience didn’t make things easy. However, one finds one’s own rhythm. In the bottom drawer of the Wildings’ guest room bureau was an exotic Whileawayan artifact (with a handle) that Laura Rose is going to be very embarrassed to see the next morning; Janet got it out, wobbling drunkenly.
("Did you fall down?” said Laura anxiously, leaning over the edge of the bed.
“Yes.")
So it was easy. Touched with strange inspiration,
Laur held the interloper in her arms, awed, impressed, a little domineering. Months of chastity went up in smoke: an electrical charge, the wriggling of an internal eel, a knifelike pleasure.