From:

VOYAGES OF A MILE-HIGH FILLE DE JOIE

" Can a woman a little less than a mile high find happiness with a little white mouse? Over and over again, through all the changes of season, I have asked myself that question. And each day, and each year, and each new region of the earth's anatomy, gives a different answer. When he first was brought under my father's roof, after having been washed ashore in the detritus of some picayune maritime disaster, no more than two inches high and quivering with such terror as only the most delicate of ivory dolls might know, I thought him as pretty a toy as a young girl could ask. No other child of my acquaintance could boast of having an entire miniature man of her own, alive, to play dollhouse with. Such a perfect little ivory treasure he was, with his torn velvet knee breeches, his wind and sea tattered lace cuffs, his outlandishly tied cravat, and the ludicrous shards of a powdered wig raveling out over the back of his jacket collar and right ear. I had never imagined such a ridiculous costume on a male animal. The men of our country dressed, dare I say even now, in spite of the great proofs he later gave of his manliness, in a much more masculine fashion. And the manners, the foolish japes, that contortion which he called making a leg, the bizarre gestures, the adorable squeaking of that tiny voice. It was quite like having a performing dog, a monkey, and a clown all under the one powdered, bedraggled wig.

At first my mother demurred at my keeping him, since she feared that such small vermin might well carry lice or other pestilence on their bodies to infect us. However, when once she had satisfied herself by inspection, much to the little thing's terror and dismay, of his cleanliness and freedom from every kind of noisome infestation, she was content to let me play with him for hour upon hour, the more especially as that activity kept me so well occupied that she seldom had need to trouble herself with me. Hence it happened that I spent my days, first teaching him some few words of command, and then training him in the management of a bit of twisted wire, that he might amuse me by jumping back and forth through its opening.

On occasion, it would happen that my father would bring some rude peasant or other into my chamber, there to demand that I remove my new plaything from the box wherein I kept him mewed, and put him through the tricks he had by that time mastered. On these occasions, not all my mother's protestations, both as to the impropriety of my father allowing men into his daughter's bedchamber, and as to the annoyance of being obliged to follow after these visitors with a broom, would avail to turn my father from his purpose. Indeed, his usual response to my mother's entreaties, a rough epithet and a clip of his hand across her mouth, was not often lacking. Which, when I witnessed, I much marveled at the fabled pleasures of marriage or of men's society, that might avail to lead even so harsh a termagant as my mother into such condition as that I daily saw her endure and forbear to challenge. And for what? For the mere pleasure of mastery over that part of a man which they say wants no bone to stiffen it. For, were I to be quite candid, I should have to acknowledge that with all other beings than my father, who wielded this one means to keep her in order, my mother knew how to return in kind all that was given her. How much more delightful appeared the company of my enticing figurine, which might not dare to challenge me, even were his tiny brain able to entertain such an idea.

Alas, soon enough I was forced to share him. Such crowds of hangers-on, such a gallimaufrey of gawkers flocked to my father's halls to peep and marvel, that my father and I were forced to take up residence at an inn, which might better accomodate the tramplings of the multitude than our rude cottage. In addition, so much incensed had my mother become with the constant traffic through our doors, that she brought in a pailful of pig-swill, emptied it over my father's boots, and bade him set his guests to work if this liked him not. Even at the inn, adverse though the conditions were, I found it possible, with much exercise of the will, to maintain that sense of proprietorship proper to the sole owner of a rare wonder of nature. And when, after some several months, I was carried to the great house of the ruler of our country, there to be left by my father, where I was obliged to share my manikin with the females of my new master's household, his wife, his daughters, and his chosen ladies of pleasure, I felt too much singled out by destiny to complain overmuch at our common ownership.

At first I had feared to be in somewhat the same position in respect to the ladies of the household that my manikin held in respect to me, namely, an object of ridicule, both for my ignorance of courtly ways, and for the lowliness of my origins. However, I found that so great was our shared understanding of the peculiarities of our possession, that rather than being laughed at for an outsider, I was revered and deferred to for the greater extent of my expertise in the ways of this unique animal. On becoming aware of the full felicities of my position, my self-regard as much increased as did my self-assurance. Frequently thereafter, I found myself able, by the judicious threat of a temporary withholding of my manikins's favors, to prefer to the court many of my female relatives. At the last my exile had been much assuaged by the presence of my sisters, cousins, and others of my household, in various menial positions about the environs, though I forbore to bring my mother to join in my happiness. Truly, I might be said to be the foundation of the most part of the fortunes of my family, which thought comforts me greatly in my present exile.

How we all exclaimed at the cunning tricks of our little elf, his delightful errors, his pretty, helpless ways. How we delighted in the daily revelation of his many areas of ignorance, the lack of breeding so characteristic of that strange country from which he came. Nevertheless, my companions and I took the greatest of pains to spare his feelings. From the first day, when he lay curled up, sleeping the sleep of exhaustion on a heap of canary feathers in a shoebox in my great-aunt's vestibule, my aunt having remained with me as guardian of my innocence after my father's necessary departure, we forced ourselves to giggle silently if at all. More often we held back our laughter and contented ourselves with a raised eyebrow, or a discreet smirk at the corners of a mouth, behind a fan, passed seriatim around the room from one young lady to another, as sign of our quietly shared mirth.

Not that we were entirely the slaves of his modesty. It amused us to examine, under a strong light, the small perfections of his form. Perhaps we were too masterfully precipitate for his timidities, but it was not a week before the young queen's sisters, their nursemaids and I had him stripped. Although, to prevail upon him to endure this with less than his habitual outcry, I must own that we found it necessary to practice a small deception on him, which caused him to believe that I and all the others were mere children, not above nine or ten years of age, instead of the bouncing adolescents, and finished young ladies many of us were. Even this he proved unwilling to accept, and pretended in the end, as a salve to his poor remains of modesty, to be convinced by our fine words of what he well knew by our actions and figures to be false. Having thus overborn his feeble efforts at reason, strip him we did, and much marveled at the elegant attention to detail, the fidelity to nature the Great Maker of all things had observed in His manufacture of this diminished replica of our brothers. We never tired, even those of us who were already no strangers to love's art, of delighting in the grace with which his minute organs had been made. Often, indeed, my sisters and I would engage in the most savage warfare at the chessboard, the sole prize being the privilege of stroking his delicate, bird-fine thigh, or resting his pretty member on a forefinger, while we marveled at the speed and sensitivity with which it, so to speak, pricked up its tiny ears. So unthreatening a toy it was, even the youngest, the most impressionable child, would not fear to learn the mechanisms of love from observation of its shy and shrinking features."

This story tells Gulliver's second voyage in the voice of his Brobdingnagian keeper, Glumdalclitch. The story was first published in Playboy in 1977.

Copyright 1977 Judith Johnson Sherwin