Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

“Oh.” I picked up the phone. “It’s probably Mother with a plan to kidnap Perdita. Hello?”

“This is Evangeline, Perdita’s docent,” the voice on the phone said. “I hope you’re happy. You’ve bullied Perdita into surrendering to the enslaving male patriarchy.”

“I have?” I said.

“You’ve obviously employed mind control, and I want you to know we intend to file charges.” She hung up.

The phone rang again immediately, another universal. “What is the good of signatures when no one ever uses them?” I said, and picked up the phone.

“Hi, Mom,” Perdita said. “I thought you’d want to know I’ve changed my mind about joining the Cyclists.”

“Really?” I said, trying not to sound jubilant.

“I found out they wear this red scarf thing on their arm. It covers up Sitting Bull’s horse.”

“That is a problem,” I said.

“Well, that’s not all. My docent told me about your lunch. Did Grandma Karen really tell you you were right?”

“Yes.”

“Gosh! I didn’t believe that part. Well, anyway, my docent said you wouldn’t listen to her about how great menstruating is, that you all kept talking about the negative aspects of it, like bloating and cramps and crabbiness, and I said, ‘What are cramps?’ and she said, ‘Menstrual bleeding frequently causes headaches and depression,’ and I said, ‘Bleeding? Nobody ever said anything about bleeding!’ Why didn’t you tell me there was blood involved, Mother?”

I had, but I felt it wiser to keep silent.

“And you didn’t say a word about its being painful. And all the hormone fluctuations! Anybody’d have to be crazy to want to go through that when they didn’t have to! How did you stand it before the Liberation?”

“They were days of dark oppression,” I said.

“I guess ! Well, anyway, I quit and now my docent is really mad. But I told her it was a case of personal sovereignty, and she has to respect my decision. I’m still going to become a floratarian, though, and I don’t want you to try to talk me out of it.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said.

“You know, this whole thing is really your fault, Mom! If you’d told me about the pain part in the first place, none of this would have happened. Viola’s right! You never tell us anything !”

Over the years, a lot of people (mostly guys) have asked me, “ Where did you get the idea for “Even the Queen”? And I usually say something like “You’re kidding me, right?” Or “Wish fulfillment, pure wish fulfillment.”

But it was actually more complicated than that. The initial idea came from several places. The first was those “Modess, because…” ads I talk about in the story. As a kid, I loved those ads because they had full-page photos of women wearing long white gloves and gorgeous evening gowns by Schiaparelli and Yves St. Laurent.

I used to cut those pictures out and put them in a scrapbook. They seemed to me to epitomize glamour. Just like the women in the story, I had no idea what “Modess” was. I assumed it was a brand name for a perfume, or for a brand of jewelry, like Tiffany. I still remember the shock and betrayal I felt when I finally figured it out. (For you guys out there, think Ralphie and the Little Orphan Annie / Ovaltine decoder ring episode.)

The second place “Even the Queen” came from was something my grandmother had said to me. As a teenager, I had a thing for Anne of Green Gables and Little Women and the “olden days” when girls got to wear long skirts and petticoats, and one day I was waxing rhapsodic about how much fun it must have been to have lived back then, and my grandmother said, “I have two words for you: Kleenex and tampons.”

The third was a conversation I had in an elevator at Clarion West with some of my students. Everyone in the elevator was female, and somebody asked if anybody had any ibuprofen she could borrow for her cramps, and a lively discussion ensued in which we all agreed that if guys had periods, the person who’d invented ibuprofen would have been a cinch to win the Nobel Prize.

But the episode that really convinced me I needed to write about this came when I was on a panel at a certain feminist science-fiction convention that shall remain nameless. (You know who you are.) I don’t remember what the panel was about, but I do remember that one of the panel members said that women only thought of their menstrual cycle as a “curse” because the male-dominated patriarchy had taught them to, and that left on their own, women would welcome and embrace their menses.

I thought then (and think now) that this was one of the most idiotic things I had ever heard. In the first place, no one had had to say anything to me to make me despise menstruation, and in the second, nobody in my generation ever called it “the curse.” Yet when I finally encountered the term (probably in one of those olden days / long skirts books I was always reading), I thought the name was perfect .

After the panel, I did some research and found out this theory was not just the ravings of one lunatic but actually pretty common in feminist circles, and then I talked to every young woman I could find (just in case attitudes had changed), and they were all as outraged and/or gobsmacked as I had been. And horrified to learn that tampons hadn’t been around forever.

Plus, some of my fellow women science-fiction writers had been on my case because I wrote stories about time-travelers and old movies and the end of the world instead of writing stories about “women’s issues.”

So I decided to write one.

Cath refused to take the Tube.

“You loved it the last time we were here,” I said, rummaging through my suitcase for a tie.

“Correction. You loved it,” she said, brushing her short hair. “ I thought it was dirty and smelly and dangerous.”

“You’re thinking of the New York subway. This is the London Underground.” The tie wasn’t there. I unzipped the side pocket and jammed my hand down it. “You rode the Tube the last time we were here.”

“I also carried my suitcase up five flights of stairs at that awful bed and breakfast we stayed at. I have no intention of doing that, either.”

She wouldn’t have to. The Connaught had a lift and a bellman.

“I hated the Tube,” she said. “I only took it because we couldn’t afford taxis. And now we can.”

We certainly could. We could also afford a hotel with carpet on the floor and a bathroom in our room instead of down the hall. A far cry from the—what was it called? It had had brown linoleum floors you hadn’t wanted to walk on in your bare feet, and you’d had to put coins in a meter above the bathtub to get hot water.

“What was the name of that place we stayed at?” I asked Cath.

“I’ve repressed it,” she said. “All I remember is that the tube station had the name of a cemetery.”

“Marble Arch,” I said, “and it wasn’t named after a cemetery. It was named after the copy of the Roman arch of Constantine in Hyde Park.”

“Well, it sounded like a cemetery.”

“The Royal Hernia!” I said, suddenly remembering.

Cath grinned. “The Royal Heritage .”