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 I liked, and paid for it, and walked out with it, feeling a little braver. After all, nobody had to know there was nothing in it. On the corner, I saw some books displayed in the window of a drug store. It took all the courage I had to go in there, after my first trip into one that looked very much like it, but I wanted a dictionary. This place didn’t smell quite so strong; I suppose the pharmacy was enclosed in back, and I don’t believe it had a lunch counter. Anyhow, I got in and out quickly, and walked back to the car, and sat down with the dictionary.
It turned out to be entirely useless, at least as far as brunchies and Bermudas were concerned. It had “scuff, v.,” with a definition; “v.,” I found out, meant verb, so that wasn’t the word I wanted, but when I remembered the slippers on the counter with the sign, it made sense in a way.
Not enough sense, though. I decided to forget about the clothes for a while. The next problem was a driver’s license.
The policeman that morning had been helpful, if over-interested, and since policemen directed traffic, they ought to have the information I wanted. I found one of them standing on a streetcorner looking not too busy, and asked him, and if his hair hadn’t been brown instead of reddish (and only half there) I’d have thought it was the same one I talked to before. He wanted to know how old I was, and where was I from, and what I was doing there, and did I have a car, and was Isure I was nineteen?
Well, of course, I wasn’t sure, but they’d told me that by the local reckoning, that was my approximate age. And I almost slipped and said I had a car, until I realized that I didn’t have a right to drive one till I had a license. After he asked that one question, I began to feel suspicious about everything else he asked, and the interest he expressed. He was helpful, but I had to remember too, that it was the police who were charged with watching for suspicious characters, and—well, it was the last time I asked a policeman for information.
He did tell me where I could rent a car to take my road test, though, and where to apply for the test. The Courthouse turned out to be the big building behind the square where I’d parked the car that morning, and arranging for the test turned out to be much simpler than, by then, I expected it to be. In a way, I suppose, all the questions I had to answer when I talked to the policeman had prepared me for the official session—though they didn’t seem nearly so inquisitive there.
By this time, I’d come to expect that they wouldn’t believe my age when I told them. The woman at the window behind the counter wanted to see a “birth certificate,” and I produced the one piece of identification I had; an ancient and yellowed document they had kept for me all these years. From the information it contained, I suspected it might even be a birth certificate; whether or not, it apparently satisfied her, and after that all she wanted was things like my address and height and weight. Fortunately, they had taken the trouble, back on the ship, to determine these statistics for me, because things like that were always coming up on television shows, especially when people were being questioned by the police. For the address, of course, I used the motel. The rest I knew, and I guess we had the figures close enough to right so that at least the woman didn’t question any of it.
I had my road test about half an hour later, in a rented car, and the examiner said I did very well. He seemed surprised, and I don’t wonder, considering the way most of those people contrive to mismanage a simple mechanism like an automobile. I guess when they say Earth is still in the Mechanical Age, what they mean is that humans are just learning about machines.
*
The biggest single stroke of luck I had at any time came during that road test. We passed a public-looking building with a sign in front that I didn’t understand.
“What’s that place?” I asked the examiner, and he said, as if anyone would know what he meant, “That? Oh—the Library.”
I looked it up in my dictionary as soon as I was done at the License Bureau, and when I found out what it was, everything became a great deal simpler.
There was a woman who worked there, who showed me, without any surprise at my ignorance, just how the card catalogue worked, and what the numbering system meant; she didn’t ask me how old I was, or any other questions, or demand any proof of any kind to convince her I had a right to use the place. She didn’t even bother me much with questions about what I was looking for. I told her there were a lot of things I wanted to know, and she seemed to think that was a good answer, and said if she could help me any way, not to hesitate to ask, and then she left me alone with those drawers and drawers full of letter-and-number keys to all the mysteries of an alien world.
I found a book on how to outfit your daughter for college, that started with underwear and worked its way through to jewelry and cosmetics. I also found a whole shelf full of law books, and in one of them, specific information about the motor vehicle regulations in different States. There was a wonderful book about diamonds and other precious stones,