Regiment of Women

by Thomas Berger

  But what if Aster were suffering some damage which, if treated promptly, was reparable? Left alone and unreported, in this isolated place, she might remain interminably in a vegetable state. He went to her. She was still gazing at nothing. He sat on the edge of the bed, lifted her neck, and explored her scalp. It was wrong that she should have suffered for her liberalism. Never had he raised a hand against tyrannical Dr. Prine. He felt terribly tender towards poor Aster, lying there with bared breasts and in her jockey shorts, and he rubbed her neat pate. She wore a modified crewcut, but her hair was too silken to stand up. With his little finger he traced the convolutions of her delicately modeled ear, penetrating the shell-pink aperture….

  Aster jerked her head away and next her trunk, reared up on the far elbow, and said, in an objective kind of voice: “I guess it didn’t work. I bit off more than I could chew.”

  Her melon breasts had dropped into their alternative position, the left one hanging very near his forearm.

  “How do they get so big when they are bound all your life?” There was a certain resentment in his question.

  She got off the bed and stood on the far side, hands on hips, without shame, in all her rounded softness.

  She said levelly: “Now, Georgie, you stand up and take off my clothes.”

  “I guess if they weren’t bound they would grow even bigger.”

  She lifted one hand and twitched the index finger.

  “Come on.”

  He cleared his head of the distracting wonderment and asked: “Are you O.K.?”

  She continued to twitch her finger.

  “I didn’t intend to hurt you. I don’t think I did, anyway.” He frowned. “Or maybe I did. Anyway, I hope I didn’t. I mean both: I hope I didn’t want to hurt you, and I hope I didn’t hurt you.” Was he talking gibberish?

  “I’m giving you a direct order,” said Aster. She had definitely changed.

  He looked at her awhile. “If you’re O.K., then it doesn’t matter what I meant, I guess.”

  She straightened her finger and pointed it at him like a weapon. “Let me tell you this, Georgie. Only I stand between you and emasculation. I’ve had enough of your nonsense. Now you drop those trousers and bend over.” She seized the rat-tailed hairbrush from the vanity table and held it by the bristle-end.

  Cornell stared at the long, tapered handle. He shook his head, saying ironically, without fear: “I thought you belonged to the new school.”

  He had struck home. She colored and turned the brush around. “I’m just going to spank your fanny. You’ve been a bad boy.”

  But she had lost it by now and soon threw the brush down. “Just give me back my uniform, please. It doesn’t fit you anyway. We’ll forget what happened. This type of therapy is still in the formative stages. Obviously there are many bugs to iron out. That doesn’t mean it won’t work. We simply have to try harder. We must put accidents of this sort to a positive use.”

  “You’re scared,” he said, “and you’re talking shit.” The ugly word seemed appropriate to his attire. “I stripped these clothes off you and I’m keeping them—unless you’re big enough to take them back. It’s as simple as that. If you’re cold, put on the stuff I took off. I’m keeping the uniform, not because I prefer female clothes, which I’ve only worn when in some kind of crisis, but because I’m going to get out of here—out of this cell, out of the hospital, out of the camp.”

  He raised a fist. “Don’t try to stop me. If you are thinking of kicking or grabbing my balls, just remember your breasts are vulnerable too, and besides, they’re naked.”

  She crossed her arms on her bosom.

  “Where will you go, Georgie? You’re only running away from yourself.”

  “I’m going to get away from women.”

  “Where would that be? We are everywhere.” She made a mocking mouth. “There are supposed to be a few savage tribes, in remote spots like the South American jungles and New Guinea, where men are dominant, but women are still there.”

  “I don’t want to be a boss,” Cornell shouted. “Can’t you understand? I just don’t want to be bossed. Is that crazy?”

  “It’s unrealistic. The human condition is such that, of two sexes, one will dominate. Men held power for centuries—”

  “That’s true?” shouted Cornell.

  “—and lost it,” Aster said.

  “That’s not the history I was taught in school.”

  “Naturally not. You don’t dare tell that to children. They would be confused about authority. They wouldn’t know what to believe.”

  “But I haven’t heard it since growing up, except from perverts and revolutionaries.”

  “Well,” Aster said, still hugging herself, “it’s simpler just to let it go unsaid. What harm does it do? And even many adult males might get the wrong idea if they knew. History is the bunk anyway. Life is lived now.”

  He asked: “You weren’t unconscious at any time, there on the bed, were you? But you didn’t resist, either. Why?”

  “I was trying to understand.”

  “Did you feel anything when I was sucking your breasts?”

  She nodded vigorously. “You know I’m sincerely interested in curing you, Georgie. I’m paying most of the expenses out of my own pocket. But the whole experiment will go out the window if you run away. I’ll be seriously embarrassed.”

  “I don’t mean that,” said Cornell. “I mean, did you feel anything personal?”

  “Of course, I just told you.”

  “That’s professional!”

  He opened the door.

  “Georgie!” cried Aster.

  He left the room. It seemed to him that, all in all, she was worse off than he. He had never before thought that of a woman. But with power came a terrible responsibility: you had either to wield it or relinquish it.

  Before him was the aisle which led through the cartons and dead-ended at the lavatory. He went left, along a wall of whitewashed cinder block, at length found a door, opened it, and looked into a garage containing several ambulances painted in olive-drab with big white crosses. A mechanic in grease-spotted coveralls was leaning on the hood of the nearest vehicle. She started when she saw him, threw down her cigarette, and ground it to fragments with the sole of her Army boot.

  “Sorry, ma’am.” She backed away obsequiously and disappeared around a stack of thick-treaded tires above which was posted a large no-smoking sign. She had taken him for an officer—in a uniform which pinched in some places and bagged in others, and showed an inch of skin between the trouser cuffs and the tops of his bobby socks. But the insignia of a first lieutenant in the Medical Corps were pinned to the collar.

  He went between the ambulances and out the wide entrance onto the parking lot of blacktop, from which point he could see part of the hospital complex, with its one-story wards connected by covered ramps. He had no geographical sense of which section of camp he was in. It was terribly hot there on the asphalt under the ferocious, dirty yellow sky of—September? When typing Ida’s correspondence in the old days he could seldom remember the date from one letter to the next, having to consult his desk calendar each time. Now he had even lost the seasons. If it was September, he would be thirty next month.

  Away in the distance he could see groups of conscripts being marched hither and yon. He had no idea which direction one would choose to reach an exit gate. He had grown to the age of thirty not only without acquiring any skill: he lacked the precision of mind from which a skill could be developed. He was at the edge of a big, hot, empty parking area; over there were some buildings and beyond them some people. The heat was dampening his armpits, which were unprotected in this female shirt without perspiration shields, and the trousers were stifling his lower body.

  He had been standing there helplessly for some time when an olive-drab staff car came around the corner of the hospital and pulled up on the asphalt. The driver, an enlisted woman, got out and opened the door for the passenger in the rear.

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sp; Cornell turned and walked quickly into the garage, but before he could reach a place of concealment he heard a shout.

  “Ma’am! Lieutenant! Will you come here, please? The general wants a word with you.”

  He could do nothing but return. When he reached the car, the driver, a corporal, still holding open the rear door, said: “General Cox is inspecting the hospital. She would like a tour of the garage.”

  A tall, robust, leathery-skinned woman emerged from the car. She was in her late fifties and wore a beautifully tailored uniform of lightweight cloth, mirror-polished shoes, and a cap with a shiny bill and gold braid.

  “You are the garage officer,” said she, giving him a withering once over. “And you are a disgrace, girl. Where’s your cap? And look at that mess you call a uniform.” When her inspection reached his feet, she exploded: “Sweat socks and loafers? What the hell goes on around here? I just found a secret room with a half-naked officer in it, stretched out on the bed, crying her eyes out. It was obvious from the furnishings that she had been keeping a man there.”

  Cornell rubbed his nose.

  “And you slob you, what’s your name?”

  “Hind,” answered Cornell in a slurred way and in a higher octave than his normal voice.

  “Hind what?”

  “Hind, Ida.”

  The general stuck her face into Cornell’s and cried: “Hind, ma’am!”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’ll tell you this, Hind: you’re going on report. Now escort me through this garage of yours. From here it looks like the camp dump.”

  Cornell led the general into the mouth of the garage.

  “Here are our ambulances, General. And there’s a stack of tires. Now, over there you see one of those gadgets that lift a car up high so you can get in under it and oil the wheels. And that, I think—the upright thing near the far corner—is a gas pump, or else it’s to put air in the tires with.”

  The general wiped her face with one hand while fisting the other.

  “Hind, are you that weakminded or are you pulling some sort of shit on me?”

  Before Cornell could respond, a door in the rear opened and in came the mechanic he had encountered earlier. She was smoking again. She saw them and ran out.

  “One of your women, Hind?” cried the general, growing apoplectic. “Smoking around gas and oil?”

  “Oh, no, ma’am. That’s strictly forbidden.” Cornell pointed to the sign.

  “Hind,” said the general, “I should say you have a very feeble hold on your grade as of this moment.” She kicked a greasy rag into a standing pool of oil. “How often do you wash these ambulances?”

  “Every once in a while,” Cornell answered. He looked around and saw a hose hanging from an overhead tank. There was a pistol-shaped nozzle on the end of it, which he seized and brandished. “We have the latest in car-washing equipment.”

  “That’s a grease gun, you fucking idiot!” The general threw her head back and roared: “Put yourself under arrest!”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Cornell’s intention was to let the gun swing away, but his finger caught in the mechanism and in trying to free it he pressed the trigger and squirted grease on the general’s shirtfront. Purely an accident, but while the general looked incredulously down at the green-black mess, Cornell deliberately shot more grease into her eyes.

  He ran to the storeroom door, opened it, and dashed inside. To go straight ahead would be to reach the room where he had left poor Aster. Back in the garage, the general was going vocally berserk. He should have given her a mouthful of grease as well.

  He turned left, wending through the crates in the dim light from the occasional overhead bulb. Somewhere must be a door that led to a ramp connecting this wing with the rest of the hospital. He followed the wall, with detours here and there because of the stacked cartons and in one place a wheeled stretcher, at last gained a door, tried it, and found it locked.

  He went on several steps, stopped decisively, and returned. He was large enough to break it down, the way even small policewomen did it on TV crime shows. He was about to hurl himself against it, shoulder foremost, when he decided instead to kick it in. He first raised, then, getting a still better idea, lowered, his foot. He searched through the pockets of the lieutenant’s trousers and found a ring of keys.

  A nearby ceiling light enabled him to be precise. He looked at the name on the lock, “Yale,” and then sorted through the keys to find which if any bore a similar designation. There had been a time when Cornell would have stupidly, malely, applied each key to the hole without predetermining its appropriateness. He found three Yales, tried them, and the second worked.

  He swung back the door—and saw not an exit but a room of the size of that in which he had lately been confined. The rumpled bed was heaped with a tartan blanket. Miniature portraits of baseball players were stapled to the wall above. A football and a plastic tommygun lay on top of a chest of drawers, and the floor was littered with various souvenirs of female childhood: Indian headdress of plastic feathers, toy cars, rubber hunting knife, and two holstered six-guns on a cartridge belt.

  Looking alternatively at the cowboy pistols and the machine gun, Cornell decided to arm himself. If he were stopped when leaving the camp, he would show his toy weapon. He seized the tommygun and pressed the trigger: click-clack.

  He heard a whimpering noise from the bed. Something was in it, something too small to make a large enough lump for him to have noticed hitherto. Something with the blanket pulled over its head.

  He was startled and frightened and might have run out had he not been holding the tommygun, which of course was only a toy, but it was something to clutch. He went to the bed and with the black muzzle lifted the edge of the blanket.

  Her eyes were pinched shut and her mouth was grimacing and her fingers were in her ears and her legs were thrashing, but it was Harriet all right, and she was having a tantrum.

  A woman is to be from her house three times:

  When she is christened, married, and buried.

  THOMAS FULLER, 1732

  13

  CORNELL THREW THE GUN ASIDE and with his hands pulled the blanket to the foot of the bed. Harriet wore a yellow jersey with a big number 18 stenciled on the chest. Below the waist her outfit consisted of short pants in navy blue, striped anklets, and dirty sneakers. She was dressed as a girl of eleven or twelve.

  Harriet was the other, the female, patient. Aster had lied to him. He hated to be lied to! Then and there he might have stamped his foot—but, instead, oddly enough, he considered an alternative. Was her name really Harriet? The only one she had given him in jail was Harry. He had always used to jump to conclusions; perhaps he had changed.

  He touched her shoulder. She squeezed her eyelids together even more dramatically and further knotted her face, to the degree that her little nose almost disappeared. He looked at the slight swellings on the bosom of the jersey. Were her breasts also larger than one thought? His hand traveled down and felt the taut band that stretched beneath the figure 18.

  Instantly her eyes and mouth opened, she seized his fingers and sank her teeth in his thumb. He grasped her short blonde hair and pulled until her eyes were mostly white. She let him go, and he returned the favor.

  He shook his hand, loose-fingered, then put it in his mouth. She rolled over, plunged to the floor, and pulled something from under the bed. It was a girl’s toolkit She took out a half-size hammer and shook it at him.

  Cornell threw up his hands. “Come on,” he said. “Cut the downing. The experiments are finished, and poor Aster will probably be court-martialed. Let’s get out of here before they come looking for us.”

  “The doctor sent you, didn’t she? It’s a trick. She’s trying to make me into a girl, but she can’t. I’m a man, and I can prove it”

  “All right,” he said. “Have it your way. But I’m getting out.”

  He stopped on the threshold. He had a certain feeling that she would change her tune.
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br />   She cried: “Wait a minute. I won’t go dressed like this.” She went to the chest of drawers and began to take out various items of male attire: skirt, frilly blouse, wispy underwear, high-heeled shoes, and even an old-fashioned garter belt. She had zipped down the fly of the shorts and was about to drop them when Cornell understood.

  “No,” he shouted. “Listen to me. We’re going to steal an ambulance and get out of here, but I can’t drive.” He went to her. “You’ve got to do the driving.” He put his hands at her slender waist, feeling with the lower fingers the sudden swell of her hips.

  She twisted around and moved away.

  “Don’t touch me!” she said. Then: “I still don’t trust you, but anything is better than pretending to be a ten-year-old. That Aster is the crazy one. I don’t care what happens to her. She deserves anything she gets.”

  “We can’t let the gate guard see a man at the wheel.”

  “A little girl is not much better.”

  It was true. His plan had been too facile.

  “Let’s see. You and I could switch shirts. Only the upper part of your body will be seen through the ambulance window, and that would look legitimate, a woman driving. I think that jersey would stretch enough so I could wear it and pose as the little girl.”

  She frowned. “Officers don’t drive ambulances.”

  “What designates an officer?” Cornell asked. “Just these collar pins. We’ll take them off.” He stripped to the waist and, after unpinning the insignia, handed her the shirt and tie. She peered at the scars from his breast-removal, then turned her back and pulled the jersey over her head. Behind the rear closure of the breastband, her spine was deeply grooved. He would have liked to run his finger through that warm slot.