Ursula Le Guin: Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

She laughed again, and she looked at me. Just for a moment. But she looked, she saw. She wasn’t looking at me to see what she looked like, she was looking at me to see what I looked like. That is unusual, in my experience.

I got the impression, even then, that people didn’t often say funny things to this girl, that she wasn’t used to clowning, but she liked it. The peculiar thing was that I wasn’t much used to clowning, either. With people I didn’t know well—which was the entire human species except for my parents and Mike Reinhard and Jason Thoer—I was either completely speechless, or said extremely serious things that instantly prevented any further conversation. But still, I am male, and it seems to me that at our age acting funny is almost an instinctive form of behavior in men. The girls laugh at things, but they seem basically serious. Whereas the fellows horse around and clown and make everything into a joke. My only real relationship with Mike and Jason, who were the nearest thing I had to friends, was a joking relationship. The point was never to be serious about anything. Except maybe sports scores. One of the main subjects to talk about was sex, but we kept unserious about sex, either by telling dirty jokes, or by being gross—using the special technical vocabulary of the sexual engineer, as if women were machines with interchangeable parts. I was pretty good at the dirty jokes, but my engineering vocabulary was unconvincing.

I might as well say here that at fifteen I still didn’t know what “scoring with a girl” meant. I thought it meant you’d gone out and had a good time at a movie or a party or something. I knew the facts of life, all right, but I didn’t connect that phrase with them. So that when Mike, who was way ahead of me physically, started telling us that he had finally scored with this girl, I said, “Yeah, what did you do?” And he gave me this look and said, “What do you think we did?” and I have never felt so stupid in my life. I am getting red talking about it into this tape recorder. Mike had to go tell a lot of other fellows about me asking, “What did you do?” It was good for lots of humor. However, they forgot about it eventually, and I kept a good string of dirty jokes worked up, so that I could talk with Mike and Jason. It beat eating lunch alone, I guess.

But one more thing about humor and seriousness : it doesn’t necessarily go on like that. Older women sometimes say the funniest things, and older men often get deadly serious. My father has no sense of humor left at all. He is a kind man, but nothing ever strikes him as funny. And I’ve heard my mother and her friend Beverley laughing in the kitchen till they were bumping around like drunks and gasping. They were laughing about something dumb Beverley herself had done. Just listening to them whooping in there made me laugh, for nothing, for pleasure.

Well, anyhow, it was really neat to have this girl laugh like that at my feeble jokes, so I went on. “Sounds to me as if what you need is two aspirin tablets and a tourniquet. Bring the leg in to me tomorrow. We have a three-legged centaur that needs a transplant.” And so on. I mean feeble. But she laughed at me till I ran out; and then I said, “But how come no time? You got a job?”

“I give some lessons.”

I couldn’t remember what instrument she played. It would be uncool to ask. “You like it?”

She shrugged and made a face. “Oh, well, it’s music,” she said. Like people say, “Oh, well, it’s a living.” But the implication is different.

“That’s what you want to be, a music teacher?”

“No,” she said, the way she’d said “Bah.”

“No teacher. Just music.”

She was so fierce she sounded like Tarzan, but it wasn’t directed at me, exactly. She had a nice voice, clear and soft, with that fierceness in it. I went into an ape act. “No teacher. Urgh, urgh, kill teacher. Good teacher, yum yum. No teacher. Good tummy, fat, full of teacher.” Natalie said, “Teacher lousy, all bones!” The man across the aisle was giving us Send to Siberian Prison Camp Look No. 12. That kind of look can create a bond between you. “What are you going in for?” Natalie asked.

“Urgh, urgh, professional gorilla. Taking Advanced Grooming now, in Home Ec,” and I showed her how to groom my knapsack and eat the fleas neatly. Then I said, “I’m going to be a teacher.” That seemed funnier for some reason than the ape act, and we both laughed.

“Honest?”

“No, I don’t know. Maybe. Something. Depends on where I go to college, I guess.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“MIT.”

“Mental Institute of… Texas…”

“Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Or else Cal Tech. Science. Laboratories, acres of laboratories. White rats. Dedicated men in white coats laboriously sneaking up sideways on the secrets of the Universe. Frankenstein’s monster. All that.”

“Yeah,” Natalie said. She didn’t say it questioningly, or agreeing-without-understanding, or mocking, or meaning nothing. She said it firmly. That’s it. Yeah. “That’s neat,” she said.

“It’s also expensive.”

“Oh, well,” she said, “you can always handle that.”

“How?”

“Scholarships—working—That’s why I’m giving lessons. So I can get to Tanglewood this summer.”

“Tanglewood, New South Wales?”

She gave a laugh-snort and said, “It’s a music school thing.”

“Near the Mental Institute of Texas. Yes.”

“Right.”

It was my stop. I got up and said, “So long,” and she said, “So long,” and I got off in the rain. Only after I got off I thought I could have ridden on two more blocks with her, to her stop, and we could have sort of finished the conversation. It had ended so fast. I jumped up and down in the rain doing the ape act as the bus started up again, but she was on the other side of the bus; nobody saw me but the Director of Siberian Prison Camps, and he looked away quickly and winced.

The reason I have reported that conversation on the bus with Natalie Field so exactly is that it was an unimportant conversation that was extremely important to me. And that’s important, that something unimportant can be so important.

I guess I tend to think that important events should be solemn, and very grand, with muted violins playing in the background. It’s hard to realize that the really important things are just normal little happenings and decisions, and when they turn on the background music and the spotlights and the uniforms, nothing important is going to happen at all.

What stuck in my head after that conversation was just one word, the most commonplace, meaningless word. It wasn’t the way she looked, or the way she looked at me, or my acting like a clown and making her laugh, or it was all that, but all sort of compressed into one word, “Yeah,” the way she said it. Firmly, certainly. Yeah, that’s what you’re going to do. It was like a rock. Whenever I looked into my head, there was this rock.

And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn’t know where I was at all.

It was really getting bad. It had been coming for a while, for a long while I guess, but it was the car that really brought it on.

You see, in giving me that car my father was saying, “This is what I want you to be. A normal car-loving American teen-ager.” And by giving it to me he had made it impossible for me to say what I wanted to say, which was that I had finally realized that that’s what I wasn’t, and was never going to be, and I needed help finding out what I was instead. But to say that, now, I had to say, “Take your present back, I don’t want it!” And I couldn’t. He’d put his heart into that gift. It was the best he could possibly give me. And I was supposed to say, “Take yourself back, dad, I don’t want you”?