Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [47]
Connie sank on the broad bed, giggling. “You look … ridiculous.”
“To a cat I presume I always look ridiculous. Awkward creatures by comparison, waddling around in clothes. Come! Talking is ridiculous to animals who commune through scents, colors, body language—all our minute posturing with the tongue and lips and teeth.” Luciente made a wide-eyed pleading face. “Come on, just do it once and we can get on with the day’s exploring. Just do it and get it over with.”
“You want me to make faces at your cat?”
“Just be introduced. Tilia thinks you’re hostile.”
“All my life I been pushed around by my father, by my brother Luis, by schools, by bosses, by cops, by doctors and lawyers and caseworkers and pimps and landlords. By everybody who could push. I am damned if I am going to be hassled by a cat.”
Luciente looked back levelly with her eyes like black beans. “Person must not do what person cannot do. Let’s go. No,” she said to Tilia and reached out Tilia stalked to the door, raised a paw, and slashed at it. Luciente let her out and on the far side of the screen door she paused and buried the house and its inhabitants with that gesture of disdain.
They followed the cat out. The rose on the hut was in full bloom, its scent spicing the air. The roses were luscious semi-double white cups marked on the skirts with dark crimson. “Your rose is beautiful.”
“Let me cut you one.” Luciente used a clippers from a knife with many parts. “For your hair.”
“My hair. I’m embarrassed. I hate it this way.”
“Why not change it, then?”
“I used to dye it along the part where it turned white. But in the hospital I can’t fix it.”
“When we wish to change our hair color, we change the proteins. It doesn’t grow out as it was.” Luciente was urging her along, arm around her shoulders. In a summer sleeveless shirt of a muted gold, her body was obviously female. Connie smiled to herself. Perhaps it was the lighter clothing, perhaps it was a matter of expectations—anyhow, Luciente now looked like a woman. Luciente’s face and voice and body now seemed female if not at all feminine; too confident, too unself-conscious, too aggressive and sure and graceful in the wrong kind of totally coordinated way to be a woman: yet a woman.
“I wish I could help you with your hair,” Luciente said. “Myself, I never alter my appearance except for dressing up at festivals. But many of us play with appearance.”
“Tell me about this making faces at animals. You do it with puppy dogs and mice and termites too?”
“We have a holiday, Washoe Day, when we celebrate our new community, named for a heroine of your time—a chimpanzee who was the first animal to learn to sign between species. Now we have rudimentary sign languages with many mammals. Some, like apes, use sign language with each other. Most, like cats and dogs, have other ways of communing and only sign to us.”
“Tell me—what do you say to a cow you’re about to eat?”
“Exactly. It’s changed our diet. So has the decision to feed everyone well. For each region we try to be ownfed and until the former colonies are equal in production, mammal meat is inefficient use of grains. Some regions raise cattle on grasses—”
“You never eat meat? It must be like living on welfare.”
“We do on holidays, and we have a lot of them. As a way of culling the herd. We say what we’re doing. They know it. In the same spirit, in November we hunt for a short period. That is, our village does. We’re Wamponaug Indians. We need some experience with free-living animals as prey and predator, to body the past of our tribe fully … . Though I confess I never hunt. Some of