“Cal, come get me.”
Shocked at her own treachery, she bursts into tears. She hears Cal say “Okay, baby,” and he tells her what bus he’ll be on.
“Cal!” she adds breathlessly; “You know that question you keep asking, sweetheart? Well, the answer is Yes.” She hangs up, much eased. It’ll be so much better once it’s done. Foolish Jeannine, to expect anything else. It’s an uncharted continent, marriage. She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand; X can go to hell. Making conversation is just work. She strolls into the kitchenette where she finds herself alone; Mrs. Dadier is outside in back, weeding a little patch of a garden all the Dadiers own in common; Jeannine takes the screen out of the kitchen window and leans out.
“Mother!” she says in a sudden flood of happiness and excitement, for the importance of what she has just done has suddenly become clear to her, “Mother!” (waving wildly out the window) “Guess what!” Mrs. Dadier, who is on her knees in the carrot bed, straightens up, shading her face with her one hand. “What is it, darling?”
“Mother, I’m getting married!” What comes after this will be very exciting, a sort of dramatic presentation, for Jeannine will have a big wedding. Mrs. Dadier drops her gardening trowel in sheer astonishment. She’ll hurry inside, a tremendous elevation of mood enveloping both women; they will, in fact, embrace and kiss one another, and Jeannine will dance around the kitchen. “Wait ’til Bro hears about this!” Jeannine will exclaim. Both will cry. It’s the first time in Jeannine’s life that she’s managed to do something perfectly O.K. And not too late, either. She thinks that perhaps the lateness of her marriage will be compensated for by a special mellowness; there must be, after all, some reason for all that experimenting, all that reluctance. She imagines the day she will be able to announce even better news: “Mother, I’m going to have a baby.” Cal himself hardly figures in this at all, for Jeannine has forgotten his laconism, his passivity, his strange mournfulness unconnected to any clear emotion, his abruptness, how hard it is to get him to talk about anything. She hugs herself, breathless with joy, waiting for Mrs. Dadier to hurry inside; “My little baby!” Mrs. Dadier will say emotionally, embracing Jeannine. It seems to Jeannine that she has never known anything so solid and beautiful as the kitchen in the morning sunlight, with the walls glowing and everything so delicately outlined in light, so fresh and real. Jeannine, who has almost been killed by an unremitting and drastic discipline not of her own choosing, who has been maimed almost to death by a vigilant self-suppression quite irrelevant to anything she once wanted or loved, here finds her reward. This proves it is all right. Everything is indubitably good and indubitably real. She loves herself, and if I stand like Atropos in the corner, with my arm around the shadow of her dead self, if the other Jeannine (who is desperately tired and knows there is no freedom for her this side the grave) attempts to touch her as she whirls joyfully past, Jeannine does not see or hear it. At one stroke she has amputated her past. She’s going to be fulfilled. She hugs herself and waits. That’s all you have to do if you are a real, first-class Sleeping Beauty. She knows.
I’m so happy.
And there, but for the grace of God, go I.
PART SEVEN
I
I’ll tell you how I turned into a man.
First I had to turn into a woman.
For a long time I had been neuter, not a woman at all but One Of The Boys, because if you walk into a gathering of men, professionally or otherwise, you might as well be wearing a sandwich board that says: LOOK! I HAVE TITS! there is this giggling and this chuckling and this reddening and this Uriah Heep twisting and writhing and this fiddling with ties and fixing of buttons and making of allusions and quoting of courtesies and this self-conscious gallantry plus a smirky insistence on my physique—all this dreary junk just to please me. If you get good at being One Of The Boys it goes away. Of course there’s a certain disembodiment involved, but the sandwich board goes; I back-slapped and laughed at blue jokes, especially the hostile kind. Underneath you keep saying pleasantly but firmly No no no no no no. But it’s necessary to my job and I like my job. I suppose they decided that my tits were not of the best kind, or not real, or that they were someone else’s (my twin sister’s), so they split me from the neck up; as I said, it demands a certain disembodiment. I thought that surely when I had acquired my Ph.D. and my professorship and my tennis medal and my engineer’s contract and my ten thousand a year and my full-time housekeeper and my reputation and the respect of my colleagues, when I had grown strong, tall, and beautiful, when my I.Q. shot past 200, when I had genius, then I could take off my sandwich board. I left my smiles and happy laughter at home. I’m not a woman; I’m a man. I’m a man with a woman’s face. I’m a woman with a man’s mind. Everybody says so. In my pride of intellect I entered a bookstore; I purchased a book; I no longer had to placate The Man; by God, I think I’m going to make it. I purchased a copy of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women; now who can object to John Stuart Mill? He’s dead. But the clerk did. With familiar archness he waggled his finger at me and said “tsk tsk"; all that writhing and fussing began again, what fun it was for him to have someone automatically not above reproach, and I knew beyond the shadow of a hope that to be female is to be mirror and honeypot, servant and judge, the terrible Rhadamanthus for whom he must perform but whose judgment is not human and whose services are at anyone’s command, the vagina dentata and the stuffed teddy-bear he gets if he passes the test. This is until you’re forty-five, ladies, after which you vanish into thin air like the smile of the Cheshire cat, leaving behind only a disgusting grossness and a subtle poison that automatically infects every man under twenty-one. Nothing can put you above this or below this or beyond it or outside of it, nothing, nothing, nothing at all, not your muscles or your brains, not being one of the boys or being one of the girls or writing books or writing letters or screaming or wringing your hands or cooking lettuce or being too tall or being too short or traveling or staying at home or ugliness or acne or diffidence or cowardice or perpetual shrinking and old age. In the latter cases you’re only doubly damned. I went away—“forever feminine,” as the man says—and I cried as I drove my car, and I wept by the side of the road (because I couldn’t see and I might crash into something) and I howled and wrung my hands as people do only in medieval romances, for an American woman’s closed car is the only place in which she can be alone (if she’s unmarried) and the howl of a sick she-wolf carries around the world, whereupon the world thinks it’s very comical. Privacy in cars, in bathrooms, what ideas we have! If they tell me about the pretty clothes again, I’ll kill myself.