The Female Man

It's a stout machine, with broad tires (compared to ours) and a receiver for registering radio beacons. She rode into the remaining night hung between the plantations of evergreens, then out into the sunrise again. There was an almighty cheeping and chirping, the result of one limb of the sun becoming visible over the horizon. She could see the inflated main dome of the house before she reached the second bicycle drop; somebody going West would pick it up in time and drop it near the monorail. She imagined great masses of sulky girls being requisitioned to ride bicycles coast-to-coast from regions that had a bicycle surplus to those crying out for bicycles. I imagined it, too. There was the sound of a machinist's ground-car off to the left-Janet grew up with that noise in her ears. Her bicycle was singing the musical tone that lets you know you're on course, a very lovely sound to hear over the empty fields. "Sh!" she said and put it on the rack, where it obediently became silent. She walked (and so did I) to the main dome of the house and let herself in, not knowing whether everyone was sleeping late or had got up early and already gone out. She didn't care. We found the empty guest room, ate some stirabout-that's not what you think, it's a kind of bread-from her knapsack, lay down on the floor, and fell asleep.

XVIII

There's no being out too late in Whileaway, or up too early, or in the wrong part of town, or unescorted. You ca

On Whileaway eleven-year-old children strip and live naked in the wilderness above the forty-seventh parallel, where they meditate, stark naked or covered with leaves, sans pubic hair, subsisting on the roots and berries so kindly planted by their elders. You can walk around the Whileawayan equator twenty times (if the feat takes your fancy and you live that long) with one hand on your sex and in the other an emerald the size of a grapefruit. All you'll get is a tired wrist.

While here, where we live-!

PART FIVE

I

I had got stuck with Jea

Jea

So I remember the horsehair petticoats of my teens, which bounded out of one's hands every time one tried to roll them or fold them up. One per drawer. The train groaned and ground to a stop somewhere between one hundred and eightieth and one hundred and sixty-eighth streets. We can look over the plain of the Bronx, which is covered with houses, to something near the river in the distance-a new stadium, I think.

Petticoats, waist-cinchers, boned strapless brassieres with torturous nodes where the bones began or ended, modestly high-heeled shoes, double-circle skirts, felt applique'd with sequins, bangle bracelets that always fell off, winter coats with no buttons to hold them shut, rhinestone sunburst brooches that caught on everything. Horrible obsessions, The Home, for example. We sat looking over the tenements, the faraway bridge, the ball park. There were public parks on islands in the river where I don't remember there being anything of the kind. Jea

II

JEANNINE: Cal is too much. I don't know if I ought to give him up or not. He's awfully sweet but he's such a baby. And the cat doesn't like him, you know. He doesn't take me any place. I know he doesn't make much money, but you would think he would try, wouldn't you? All he wants is to sit around and look at me and then when we get in bed, he doesn't do anything for the longest time; that just can't be right All he does is pet and he says he likes it like that. He says it's like floating. Then when he does it you know, sometimes he cries. I never heard of a man doing that MYSELF: Nothing.

JEANNINE: I think there's something wrong with him. I think he's traumatized by being so short. He wants to get married so we can have children-on his salary!

When we pass a baby carriage with a baby, we both run over to look at it. He can't make up his mind, either. I never heard of a man like that. Last fall we were going to go to a Russian restaurant and I wanted to go to this place so he said all right, and then I changed my mind and wanted to go to the other place and he said OK, fine, but it turned out to be shut. So what could we do? He didn't know. So I lost my temper.

ME: Nothing, nothing, nothing.

SHE: He's just too much. Do you think I should get rid of him?

ME: (I shook my head)

JEANNINE (Confidingly): Well, he is fu

(She bent down to pick lint off her blouse, giving herself a momentary double chin. She pursed her lips, pouted, bridled, drooped her eyelids in a knowing look.)

Sometimes-sometimes-he likes to get dressed up. He gets into the drapes like a sarong and puts on all my necklaces around his neck, and stands there with the curtain rod for a spear. He wants to be an actor, you know. But I think there's something wrong with him. Is it what they call transvestism?

JOANNA: No, Jea

JEANNINE: I think it might be. I think I'll throw him over. I don't like anybody calling my cat, Mr. Frosty, names. Cal calls him The Blotchy Ski