“Oh, honey,” she said, “I’m here because they can do without me. I was S & P because they could do without me. There’s only one reason for that, Laur, and it’s very simple.
"I am stupid."
Janet sleeps or pretends to, Joanna knits (that’s me), Jeannine is in the kitchen. Laura Rose, still resentfully twitching with unconquered Genghis Khan-ism, takes a book from my bookshelf and lies on her stomach on the rug. I believe she is reading an art book, something she isn’t interested in. The house seems asleep. In the desert between the three of us the dead Elena Twason Zdubakov begins to take shape; I give her Janet’s eyes, Janet’s frame, but bent with age, some of Laur’s impatient sturdiness but modified with the graceful trembling of old age: her papery skin, her smile, the ropy muscles on her wasted arms, her white hair cut in an economical kind of thatch. Helen’s belly is loose with old age, her face wrinkled, a never-attractive face like that of an extremely friendly and intelligent horse: long and droll. The lines about her mouth would be comic lines. She’s wearing a silly kind of khaki shorts-and-shirt outfit which is not really what Whileawayans wear, but I give it to her anyway. Her ears are pierced. Her mountain twig has become a carved jade pipe covered with scenes of vines, scenes of people crossing bridges, people pounding flax, processions of cooks or grain-bearers. She wears a spray of red mountain-ash berries behind one ear. Elena is about to speak; from her comes a shock of personal strength, a wry impressiveness, an intelligence so powerful that in spite of myself I open my arms to this impossible body, this walking soul, this somebody’s grandma who could say with such immense elan to her legal assassin, “Face facts, child.” No man in our world would touch Elena. In Whileawayan leaf-red pajamas, in silver silk overalls, in the lengths of moony brocade in which Whileawayans wrap themselves for pleasure, this would be a beautiful Helen. Elena Twason swathed in cut-silk brocade, nipping a corner of it for fun. It would be delightful to have erotic play with Elena Twason; I feel this on my lips and tongue, the palms of my hands, all my inside skin. I feel it down below, in my sex. What a formidable woman! Shall I laugh or cry? She’s dead, though—killed dead—so never shall Ellie Twa’s ancient legs entwine with mine or twiddle from under the shell of a computer housing, crossing and uncrossing her toes as she and the computer tell each other uproarious jokes. Her death was a bad joke. I would like very much to make love skin-to-skin with Elena Twason Zdubakov, but she is thank-the-male-God dead and Jeannine can come shudderingly out of the woodwork. Laur and Janet have gone to sleep together on the couch as if they were in a Whileawayan common bedroom, which is not for orgies, as you might think, but for people who are lonesome, for children, for people who have nightmares. We miss those innocent hairy sleepies we used to tangle with back in the dawn of tine before some progressive nitwit took to deferred gratification and chipping flint.
“What’s this?” whispered Jeannine, furtively proffering something for my inspection.
“I don’t know, is it a staple gun?” I said. (It had a handle.) “Whose is it?”
“I found it on Janet’s bed,” said Jeannine, still whispering. “Just lying there. I think she took it out of her suitcase. I can’t figure out what it is. You hold it by the handle and if you move this switch it buzzes on one end, though I don’t see why, and another switch makes this piece move up and down. But that seems to be an attachment. It doesn’t look as if it’s been used as much as the rest of it. The handle’s really something; it’s all carved and decorated.”
“Put it back,” I said.
“But what is it?” said Jeannine.
“A Whileawayan communications device,” I said, “Put it back, Jeannie.”
“Oh?” she said. Then she looked doubtfully at me and at the sleepers. Janet, Jeannine, Joanna. Something very J-ish is going on here.
“Is it dangerous?” said Jeannine. I nodded—emphatically.
“Infinitely,” I said. “It can blow you up.”
“All of me?” said Jeannine, holding the thing gingerly at arm’s length.
“What it does to your body,” said I, choosing my words with extreme care, “is nothing compared to what it does to your mind, Jeannine. It will ruin your mind. It will explode in your brains and drive you crazy. You will never be the same again. You will be lost to respectability and decency and decorum and dependency and all sorts of other nice, normal things beginning with a D. It will kill you, Jeannine. You will be dead, dead, dead.
“Put it back.”
(On Whileaway these charming dinguses are heirlooms. They are menarchal gifts, presented after all sorts of glass-blowing, day-modeling, picture-painting, ring-dancing, and Heaven knows what sort of silliness done by the celebrants to honor the little girl whose celebration it is. There is a tremendous amount of kissing and hand-shaking. This is only the formal presentation, of course; cheap, style-less models that you wouldn’t want to give as presents are available to everybody long before this. Whileawayans often become quite fond of them, as you or I would of a hi-fi set or a sports car, but all the same, a machine’s only a machine. Janet later offered to lend me hers on the grounds that she and Laur no longer needed it.)
Jeannine stood there with an expression of extraordinary distrust: Eve and the hereditary instinct that tells her to beware of apples. I took her by the shoulders, telling her again that it was a radar set. That it was extremely dangerous. That it would blow up if she wasn’t careful. Then I pushed her out of the room.
"Put it back."
V
Jeannine, Janet, Joanna. Something’s going to happen. I came downstairs my bathrobe at three A.M., unable to sleep. This house ought to be ringed with government spies, keeping their eyes on our diplomat from the stars and her infernal, perverted friends, but nobody’s about. I met Jeannine in the kitchen in her pajamas, looking for the cocoa. Janet, still in sweater and slacks, was reading at the kitchen table, puffy-eyed from lack of sleep. She was cross-noting Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and Marital Patterns of Nebraska College Sophomores, 1938-1948.
Jeannine said:
“I try to make the right decisions, but things don’t work out. I don’t know why. Other women are so happy. I was a very good student when I was a little girl and I liked school tremendously, but then when I got to be around twelve, everything changed. Other things become important then, you know. It’s not that I’m not attractive; I’m pretty enough, I mean in a usual way, goodness knows I’m no beauty. But that’s all right. I love books, I love reading and thinking, but Cal says it’s only daydreaming; I just don’t know. What do you think? There’s my cat, Mister Frosty, you’ve seen him, I’m terribly fond of him, as much as you can be of an animal, I suppose, but can you make a life out of books and a cat? I want to get married. It’s there, you know, somewhere just around the corner; sometimes after coming out of the ballet or the theatre, I can almost feel it, I know if only I could turn around in the right direction, I’d be able to reach out my hand and take it. Things will get better. I suppose I’m just late in developing. Do you think if I got married I would like making love better? Do you think there’s unconscious guilt—you know, because Cal and I aren’t married? I don’t feel it that way, but if it was unconscious, you wouldn’t feel it, would you? Sometimes I get really blue, really awful, thinking: suppose I get old this way? Suppose I reach fifty or sixty and it’s all been the same—that’s horrible—but of course it’s impossible. It’s ridiculous. I ought to get busy at something. Cal says I’m frightfully lazy. We’re getting married—marvelous!—and my mother’s very pleased because I’m twenty-nine. Under the wire, you know, oops! Sometimes I think I’ll get a notebook and write down my dreams because they’re very elaborate and interesting, but I haven’t yet. Maybe I won’t; it’s a silly thing to do. Do you think so? My sister-in-law’s so happy and Bud’s happy and I know my mother is; and Cal has a great future planned out. And if I were a cat I would be my cat, Mister Frosty, and I’d be spoiled rotten (Cal says). I have everything and yet I’m not happy.