Read Cannibals and Missionaries for Free Online Page A

her were always a puzzle, like a multiple-choice test.
    The problems of identity posed by forms to be completed were one of the perplexities of travel for a thinking reed. The majority seemed to know who and what they were and expressed it swiftly, in block letters, but a worry bird like herself could pore for half a minute over “Domicile.” She never knew whether to give her tax residence, which was Fayetteville, Arkansas, her home town, or Sunnydale, Massachusetts, which was the home of Lucy Skinner College and her semi-real residence. Then, on leaving a country, she often forgot which she had decided to put down on entering, thus making herself a mystery, she supposed, to compilers of statistics if those entry and exit forms were kept and ever actually compared.
    A person named Aileen, more commonly spelled Eileen, must have started out in life with an identity crisis, she reckoned, and Simmons was frequently written as Simons—she had learned that when looking herself up in Who’s Who: “ SIMMONS , see also SIMONS .” In her passport her eyes were “blue,” but in her old passport they had been “gray,” and her height in the current one had been officially corrected from 6’ 3” (a comical erratum of the U.S. Passport Office) to 5’ 3”. Her hair, which had had a gray or graying interval, unrecorded in a travel document, had returned to a shade she called for brevity’s sake “light brown.” She answered to “Dr. Simmons,” “President Simmons,” and, by preference, “Miss Simmons” or “Simmie.” She did not care for “Ms.”
    She was a chameleon, she imagined. The minute she stepped into a French airplane, she was talking French with the crew, not because she was a Francophile but because she knew how, having done two years of graduate work in French universities and lived with French families. She exercised her French, as she kept up her tennis, whenever the occasion presented itself—in restaurants, chiefly, but also in meetings with her French department staff and at dinners she gave for visiting conférenciers. When teased, she always said she was amortizing Senator Fulbright’s investment; she had been an early Fulbright scholar, at Montpellier and Strasbourg. In Strasbourg, she had also learned German, which she kept up by listening to records of lieder and Mozart and Strauss operas (she loved music) but she no longer tried to speak it with Germans. In Mexico, one summer, she had picked up some Spanish.
    As a girl, she had hoped to be a linguist and travel widely, but her Southern accent was a handicap. She carried it over—pure Arkansas, phoneticians said—into whatever tongue she studied, which meant she could never have taught a language at the college level. History had been a pis aller for her, but her real field, she had soon discovered, was administration. Here her being Southern, as well as petite and a woman and single, was an asset; she was a friendly, outgoing chatterbox and knew how to manage people.
    Her seat companion, she noticed, had not filled in the green-printed card. She had completed her landing-card and tossed the other, which was optional, with a sort of disdainful shrug onto the vacant seat between her and Aileen. She was one of those tiresome new young women, evidently, who resisted all attempts at classification and codification, as though they represented designs to “co-opt” her into the prevailing value framework. She was not going to be helpful to Air France by consenting to be an item in their information-storage system, which must answer, Aileen assumed, to some rational need in the planning of flights, though, come to think of it, she was not sure how it served the company to know whether a passenger was traveling for business or for sightseeing or for “other purposes”—she listed some: death in the family, love, health, crime, though crime, if it paid, ought to come under “Business” surely?
    Aileen’s mind was fond of playing games with