The Female Man

"Oh, I love te

Would she like to come over that afternoon?

She leans away from the telephone to consult an imaginary appointment book, imaginary friends; she allows reluctantly that oh yes, she might have some free time. It would really be fun to brush up on her te

Perversely, images of silly Cal come back to her, not nice ones, either. She has to pick up the phone again, after verifying an imaginary date with an imaginary acquaintance, and tell X yes or no; so Jea

It's that old thing come back again about her not being good enough for good luck. That's nonsense and she knows it. She picks up the phone, smiling: te

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 Jea

"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 Jea

Mrs. Dadier will say emotionally, embracing Jea

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 Jea

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 te