was quite literally putrid, made as near as I could figure out from dead animal juices, in which vegetables had been soaked and cooked till any trace of flavor or nourishment was entirely removed. I took one taste of that, and then I realized what the really nauseating part of the odor was, in the diner and the drugstore both. It was rotten meat, dead for some time, and then heated in preparation for eating.
The crackers that came with the soup were good; they had a nice salty tang. I ordered more of those, with another glass of milk, and sat back sipping slowly, trying to adjust to that smell, now that I realized I’d probably find it anywhere I could find food.
After a while, I got my insides enough in order so that I could look around a little and see the place, and the other people in it. That was when I turned around and saw Larry sitting next to me.
He was beautiful. He is beautiful. I know that’s not what you’re supposed to say about a man, and he wouldn’t like it, but I can only say what I see, and of course that’s partly a matter of my own training and my own feelings about myself.
At home on the ship, I always wanted to cut off my hair, because it was so black, and my skin was so white, and they didn’t go together. But they wouldn’t let me; they liked it that way, I guess, but I didn’t. No child wants to feel like a freak, and nobody else had hair like that, or dead-white colorless skin, either.
Then, when I went down there, and saw all the humans, I was still a freak because I was so small.
Larry’s small, too. Almost as small as I am. And he’s all one color. He has hair, of course, but it’s so light, and his skin is so dark (both from the sun, I found out), that he looks just about the same lovely golden color all over. Or at least as much of him as showed when I saw him that time, in the diner.
He was beautiful, and he was my size, and he didn’t have ugly rough skin or big heavy hands. I stared at him, and I felt like grabbing on to him to make sure he didn’t get away.
After a while I realized my mouth was half-open, and I was still holding a cracker, and I remembered that this was very bad manners. I put the cracker down and closed my mouth. He smiled. I didn’t know if he was laughing at the odd way I was acting, or just being friendly, but I smiled back anyhow.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I mean, hello. How do you do, and I’m sorry if I startled you. I shouldn’t have been staring.”
“You,” I said, and meant to finish, You were staring? But he went right on talking, so that I couldn’t finish.
“I don’t know what else you can expect, if you go around looking like that,” he said.
“I’m sorry . . . .” I started again.
“And you should be,” he said sternly. “Anybody who walks into a place like this in the middle of a day like this looking the way you do has got to expect to get stared at a little.”
The thing is, I wasn’t used to the language; not used enough. I could communicate all right, and even understand some jokes, and I knew the spoken language, not some formal unusable version, because I learned it mostly watching those shows on the television screen. But I got confused this time, because “looking” means two different things, active and passive, and I was thinking about how I’d been looking at him, and . . . .
That was my lucky day. I didn’t want him to be angry at me, and the way I saw it, he was perfectly justified in scolding me, which is what I thought he was doing. But Iknew he wasn’t really angry; I’d have felt it if he was. So I said, “You’re right. It was very rude of me, and I don’t blame you for being annoyed. I won’t do it any more.”
He started laughing, and this time I knew it was friendly. Like I said, that was my lucky day; he thought I was being witty. And, from what he’s told me since, I guess he realized then that I felt friendly too, because before that he’d just been bluffing it out, not knowing how to get to know me, and afraid I’d be sore at him, just for talking to me!
Which goes to show that sometimes you’re better off not being too familiar with the local customs.
*
The trouble was there were too many things I didn’t know, too many small ways to trip myself up. Things they couldn’t have foreseen, or if they did, couldn’t have done much about. All it took was a little caution and a lot of alertness, plus one big important item: staying in the background—not getting to know any one person too well—not giving any single individual a chance to observe too much about me.
But Larry didn’t mean to let me do that. And . . . I didn’t want him to.
He asked questions; I tried to answer them. I did know enough at least of the conventions to realize that I didn’t have to give detailed answers, or could, at any point, act offended at being questioned so much. I didn’t know enough to realize that reluctance or irritation on my part wouldn’t have made him go away. We sat on those stools at the diner for most of an hour, talking, and after a little while I found I could keep the conversation on safer ground by asking him about himself, and about the country thereabouts. He seemed to enjoy talking.
Eventually, he had to go back to work. As near as I could make out, he was a test-pilot, or something like it, for a small experimental aircraft plant near the city. He lived not too far from where I was staying, and he wanted to see me that evening.
I hadn’t told him where the motel was, and I had at least enough caution left not to tell him, even then. I did agree to meet him at the diner, but for lunch the next day again, instead of that evening. For one thing, I had a lot to do; and for another, I’d seen enough on television shows to know that an evening date was likely to be pretty long-drawn-out, and I wasn’t sure I could stand up under that much close scrutiny. I had some studying-up to do first. But the lunch-date was fine; the thought of not seeing him at all was terrifying—as if he were an old friend in a world full of strangers. That was how I felt, that first time, maybe just because he was almost as small as I. But I think it was more than that, really.
*
I drove downtown again, and found a store that seemed to sell all kinds of clothing for women. Then when I got inside, I didn’t know where to start, or what to get. I thought of just buying one of everything, so as to fill up a suitcase; the things I had on seemed to be perfectly satisfactory for actual wearing purposes. They were quite remarkably—when you stopped to think of it—similar to what most of the women I’d seen that day were wearing, and of course they weren’t subject to the same problems of dirtying and wrinkling and such as the clothes in the store were.
I walked around for a while, trying to figure out what all the different items, shapes, sizes, and colors, were for. Some racks and counters had signs, but most of them were unfamiliar words like brunchies, or Bermudas or scuffs; or else they seemed to be mislabeled, like dusters for a sort of button-down dress, and Postage Stamp Girdles at one section of a long counter devoted to “Foundation Garments.” For half an hour or so, I wandered around in there, shaking my head every time a saleswoman came up to me, because I didn’t know, and couldn’t figure out, what to ask for, or how to ask for it.
The thing was, I didn’t dare draw too much attention to myself by doing or saying the wrong things. I’d have to find out more about clothes, somehow, before I could do much buying.
I went out, and on the same block I found a show-window full of suitcases. That was easy. I went in and pointed to one
