Regiment of Women (18 page)

“Yes, ma'am.”

“You look like a dirty little whore.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Are you?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Why did you have your breasts removed?”

“They're going out of style, ma'am.”

“Would you rather be a woman?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Ah, you hate women!”

“No, ma'am.”

“Have you ever had anal therapy?”

Stanley had told him never to admit to having received psychiatric treatment. He must not stand out as an oddball.

“No, ma'am.”

“You could use it,” the little doctor said, her beady eyes boring into his. “Even if you think otherwise. It would help to make you a healthier man. It will be available at the camp. Think about it.”

She left, crying loudly: “Alcorn, O.K.”

The pseudonym had been chosen by the Council as more or less an anagram of his real name and thus easier for him to accept and remember than one altogether alien. His chest was flat, his nose was blunted, and his hair style was gamine, short, brushed forward, with little feathers at the ears.

“All right, Alcorn,” the sergeant called out. “Go through the door, down the hall to the disrobing room, get into your clothes, get your baggage, and report outside to the trucks.” She spoke in a weary, contemptuous monotone.

From the PFC in charge, Cornell reclaimed the wire basket in which he had left his clothing, stepped into his bikini underpants and half slip, and put on the wash-and-wear shirtwaist dress for which Murray the tailor had exchanged the chino trousers and female gear he wore in the subway tunnel. It had been strange at first to dress normally again, and disheartening to look down at the flat bosom. He wore no hose, it being midsummer and hot. His shoes were simple penny loafers.

With the change of name it had not been necessary for Willie to look up the records for Georgie Cornell, so his true age was irrelevant. A new file was added for Georgie Alcorn, age
25,
with a bogus history. Like most governmental bureaus, the Sperm Service was smothered in reams of paper, incompetently filed, and no official cared as long as the quotas were filled with living bodies.

Cornell's principal difficulty lay in maintaining the distinction asked by the Movement: one must be of one mind, but two styles of demeanor. Mentally, one was a Man. This identification had been simple enough all his life. But according to Stanley, maleness meant being forceful of spirit, not necessarily always downright aggressive, but possessing the capability of so being when the situation demanded. As, in fact, Cornell had been in his escape from jail.

But Cornell had spent almost thirty years in supposing that such a condition of soul was peculiarly feminine; and all the world outside the subway tunnel agreed.

Further to complicate the matter, in his assignment Cornell now had to
act
as a man by the Movement definition, while continuing to appear as a normal, passive male by accepted standards so as not to attract attention to himself.

He now wondered whether he had gone too far in extracting the aspirin from that sergeant. He picked up his clutch purse and the little valise, containing only a change of underwear and a nightie—uniforms would be forthcoming at camp—and, smiling at the sour-looking one-striper who managed the disrobing room, went through the door and into the parking lot, where three large, olive-drab-painted trucks, with white stars on their doors, were drawn up.

A thin, tall-for-a-girl corporal took his name and checked it off on a roster.

“On board, Alcorn,” she said, and when he started for the second vehicle—because of some quirk, the same by which he never took the very first stool at a lunch counter—she shouted: “The first truck, jerk!”

He restrained an impulse to make a snotty rejoinder. The bed of the truck was dark under a canvas roof, and very high above the ground, with only one cast-iron step for access. He hitched up his skirt to take the steep climb, and in a quick turn of head saw the corporal ogling his exposed thigh. Cornell stuck out his tongue.

“Here.” A boy's face looked out and a hand was extended to him. He clambered up. There were facing benches along the sides of the vehicle. One was filled with conscripts. The other side still had some room, and he sat down, his suitcase at his knees. He had banged someone with it in the awkwardness of boarding, but heard no complaint.

He looked across and said to any of the three young men in that area of the bench: “Sorry.”

One of them smiled, one moued, and the other's general expression of melancholia did not change. The smiling one had given him the hand.

“Hi,” said he. “I'm Gordie.”

“Georgie.”

Gordie was a husky lad with long blond hair and quite a bosom. Cornell did not remember having seen him during the examination, and wondered whether the breasts were prosthetic.

“I wonder,” said Gordie, “how long we'll have to wait here.”

With great assurance Cornell said: “We'll pull out for camp as soon as the truck is full.” Even if he had no way of knowing that; perhaps they must stay until all three vehicles were loaded.

He thought he saw, now that his vision had adjusted to the lack of light, a certain resentment in the face of the boy who sat on Gordie's right, a wan brunet in textured stockings. Cornell realized he must be careful: he himself did not much care for know-it-alls.

He took off the edge: “At least that's what I
think.”

“I wonder where we're going,” asked Gordie.

Cornell checked an impulse to answer this, though he was equipped to pronounce the alternatives: Staten Island or New Brunswick, N.J., the two local sperm camps. He wanted to de-alienate the brunet.

“Don't ask me,” he said, shaking his head in a clueless, self-deprecatory way.

The brunet turned back and said quickly: “Camp Kilmer, I just know.” He recrossed his legs the other way. “I just hate Jersey.” He gave Cornell a defiant look.

To which Cornell responded ingratiatingly: “I know what you mean.” But the brunet turned away again; he was not to be won so easily.

A new arrival was trying to get aboard. Cornell beat Gordie to the tailgate. It was Jackie.

“Georgie!” he said. “I was afraid I'd never see you again.” Cornell pulled him up.

“Where's Howie?”

Jackie callously elevated one shoulder. “Probably rejected. Probably sterile.” Lowering the shoulder pettishly, he banged the brunet with the overnight case he was carrying.

The brunet rubbed his textured knee and gave Jackie a resentful look. Jackie was totally indifferent. Cornell understood that Jackie was the feckless, self-concerned type of boy who might bring him more trouble as friend than as enemy. He decided a little discipline might be in order.

“Watch that case, for Mary's sake,” he told Jackie. “And sit down. Right here.”

Jackie accepted these orders almost gratefully. The brunet, however, had another grudge now, having suffered without being noticed. Cornell could see
he
had got the blame.

He decided to show compassion. “Poor Howie,” he said to the truck at large. “He's the boy who was next to me inside. He's very patriotic. He'll probably kill himself if he's 4-F.”

The brunet said spitefully: “He's a fool then.”

“You and I know that, but he's awfully unsophisticated.” He was taking a certain chance: there might be other patriots in the company and, Stanley had warned him, spies as well. “We are all willing to do our duty, of course, but if, through no fault of your own, you can't—”

“I know lots of fellows who haven't been called up,” said the brunet. “You make friends in the right places.
I
could have. I probably should have.” He was very vain.

“Gee, I wish I could have,” Cornell said, giving the fellow an admiring once-over. This proved successful. The brunet came off it and actually smiled.

Cornell moved to exploit his advance. “Hi, I'm Georgie.”

“Farley.” Farley lowered his eyes in embarrassment at his abdication from hostility. Cornell sensed it was time to let him alone for a while. And anyway, there suddenly was Howie, who climbed into the truck without assistance, canvas bag swinging from a shoulder strap. He wore a tartan miniskirt and scarlet knee-stockings and was a far cry from what he had been when last seen.

He was radiant, bubbling. “I made it, Georgie!” Jackie uttered a doleful sound.

With Howie's arrival, both benches were filled. The corporal slammed the tailgate with an awful noise, and almost immediately the truck moved off, just as Cornell had predicted.

And it turned out that Farley had been right about their going to Camp Kilmer, in New Jersey, another piece of luck for Cornell, because this was the sort of success that might sweeten the temperamental brunet.

The Lincoln Tunnel was foul with seepage from the Hudson Sewer above, and most of the men put on their gas masks. Jackie, wouldn't you know, had forgotten his, and Cornell had to share his own mask with that exasperating acquaintance, holding his breath in between.

The camp, the gates of which they first saw receding from the back of the truck as it bumped along towards the interior, looked unprepossessing, and the facade of the barracks at which they deboarded maintained the same bleak tone. A stout sergeant appeared, cigar in the corner of her mouth and a dark stain on the front of her open-necked chino shirt. She arranged them into a single line and led it into the one-story frame building.

The interior was rather more attractive than one was prepared to find. There were flowered curtains at the windows and matching bedspreads on the cots. Continuing the scheme, little vases filled with plastic blossoms hung from the wooden posts which supported the roof, posts which themselves were painted pink, as were the walls. Each bunk shared a fuzzy turquoise bedside rug with its neighbor. Behind the cots were standing wardrobe closets, also turquoise, closed with shirred draperies, rather than doors, again in the fabric of the bedspreads and curtains.

The sergeant cried a halt when they were all inside. She began to read names from a roster and point to consecutive beds. Jackie, Cornell, Howie, and Gordie, in that order, were along the middle of the east wall. Farley was across the aisle. Unfortunately, Cornell had to share his closet with Jackie.

J
OHN
S
TUART
M
ILL
, 1869

E
ARLY
ON
THE
FOLLOWING
MORNING
they were issued their uniforms: simple one-piece, knee-length dresses in apple green; black shoes with squat one-and-a-half-inch heels; three pairs of opaque pantyhose in a muddy brown; three pairs of white cotton underpants of the kind you wore as a schoolboy; and to those who needed bras, two (for the first time Cornell did not regret having lost his boobs: the brassieres looked coarse and excessively stitched). There was also an exercise outfit consisting of pleated, flared-leg shorts in navy, two white pullover blouses, bobby socks, and sneakers which they were warned to keep sparkling.

A light cardigan, a raincoat, a plastic shower cap, and six plain handkerchiefs. A shoulder bag of green plastic, containing a compact and change purse. Also a vanity kit that was far from sufficient: card of hairpins, cheap comb, lipstick in one sickly pink shade for all, and a steel safety razor and a dozen blades. Cornell had been advised by sperm-term veterans in the Movement to bring along his own cosmetics and beauty-tools. All the conscripts had so done. Jackie's suitcase contained little else, being crammed with portable hair drier, electric shaver with manicure attachments, a set of heatable hair rollers, hormone creams in the giant-sized jars, and whatnot. The first thing he did on unpacking was look for a receptacle into which to plug his devices. The one he found was labeled “no v.,” which was good, but also “Direct Current,” which was very bad, the hair drier operating only on A.C. Nothing would stop the silly boy's hysteria but Cornell's promise that Jackie could share his machine.

They had dined the evening before, their first, on steak and eggs, a hearty repast in which few made more than a dent. They were chided about this by the medical officer who strolled, inspecting, about the mess hall: a lean, sallow woman, she was an incongruous advocate for a robust diet, but then, it was their semen that would be drained, not hers.

Dessert was a handful of vitamin capsules for each, washed down with a half pint of whole milk.

The sergeant extinguished the barracks lights at ten o'clock. At ten the next morning, by which hour most of the boys had risen long since and performed their toilets, several being in curlers, she returned with a metal triangle in one hand and a little mallet in the other, and was in the act of striking the latter upon the former when, face full of indignant wonder, she reacted to the passing parade.

“What are you boys doing up?” She pointed with her little mallet. “You just get back in those beds!”

Thirty men began to carry out the order.

“Oh, no, you don't,” the sergeant said. “You don't get into bed with your clothes on. You undress and put on your nighties, and you be quick about it.”

When this was accomplished and thirty heads touched thirty pillows, the sergeant strode to the center of the room.

“Now hear this,” she said, holding the triangle at one hip and the hammer at the other. “You are to sleep twelve hours a night, from ten to ten. Anyone out of bed between those hours, except for a quick trip to the john, will be in trouble with me, personally, and I am rough as a cob.” She lifted her instrument and struck it three times,
bing, bing, bing
. “This is the morning call. On hearing it you will rise.” She produced the signal again. “Well, all right, get those lazy heinies out of bed!”