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the desire to move in with a
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Joanna Russ - The Female Man typical family. I heard her singing in the
bathroom:
I know
That my
Rede-emer
Liveth
And She
Shall stand
Upon the latter da-ay (ruffle)
On Earth.
"Janet?" She sang again (not badly) the second variation on the lines, in
which the soprano begins to decorate the tune:
I know (up)
Tha-at my (ruffle)
Re-e-edeemer (fiddle)
Liveth
And She
Shall stand (convex)
And She
Shall stand (concave)
"Janet, he's a Man!" I yelled. She went into the third variation, where the
melody liquefies itself into its own adornments, very nice and quite improper:
I know (up)
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Joanna Russ - The Female Man
That my redee (a high point, this one)
mer
Li-i-veth (up up up)
And She
Shall stand (hopefully)
And She shall stand (higher)
Upon the la-a-a-a-atter da-a-a-y
(ruffle fiddle drip)
O-on Earth (settling)
"JANET!" But of course she doesn't listen.
II
Whileawayans like big asses, so I am glad to report there was nothing of that
kind in the family she moved in with. Father, mother, teenage daughter, and
family dog were all delighted to be famous.
Daughter was an honor student in the local high school. When Janet got settled
I drifted into the attic;
my spirit seized possession of the old four-poster bed stored next to the
chimney, near the fur coats and the shopping bag full of dolls; and slowly,
slowly, I infected the whole house.
III
Laura Rose Wilding of Anytown, U.S.A.
She has a black poodle who whines under the trees in the back yard and bares
his teeth as he rolls over and over in the dead leaves. She's reading the
Christian Existentialists for a course in school. She crosses the October
weather, glowing with health, to shake hands clumsily with Miss Evason. She's
pathologically shy. She puts one hand in the pocket of her jeans, luminously,
the way well-beloved or much-studied people do, tugging at the zipper of her
man's leather jacket with the other hand. She has short sandy hair and
freckles. Says over and over to herself Non Sum, Non Sum, which means either
I
don't exist or
I'm not that
, according to how you feel it; this is what Martin Luther is supposed to have
said during his fit in the monastery choir. "Can I go now?"
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Joanna Russ - The Female Man
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
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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
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Joanna Russ - The Female Man 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
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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
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