Free The Summer Before the Dark by Doris Lessing Page A

she was, the ever-available, ever-good-natured, popular Kate Brown.
    During the summer before, on her visit to the States, she had observed her own present condition …
    All over that continent are repeated variations of a building like a small town, but under a single roof, and these are sometimes miles-long and subdivided into sectors, each self-contained, each of which serves an airline. Some of the large airlines employ girls like the drum majorettes that are used at conventions and carnivals. These girls, dressed fancifully, and in arresting colours, patrol the area alongside the check-in desks of their airline. They are supposed to give information and guidance, and do, in fact, offer these services, but this is not their function. Which is, quite simply, to attach the idea of easily available and guiltless sex to that airline. Not a challenging or difficult or complex or mysterious sexuality—God forbid. The girls are attractive, but not very sexual. They have been chosen for their friendly perky daylight sexiness, and there they are, in ones and twos and threes, walking up and down, smiling, smiling, smiling, and, as you watch them (while the hours pass: if, for instance, your plane is late in leaving) they slowly become inflated, with a warm expandingair. They are intoxicated—but really, literally—with their own attractiveness, and by their public situation, dressed and placed where they will draw so many eyes towards them, and by their own helpfulness. They smile and smile and smile, and soon it looks as if these girls will one by one float off and up, carried by their own expanding gases of goodwill, which are being constantly replenished by so much attention. Yes, off they will float through the airport windows, and bob smiling around the sky like weather balloons among the ascending and descending airplanes. And inside the aircraft are girls in exactly the same condition: the air hostesses, every one of them intoxicated by her position as public benefactor, a love supplier. This isn’t true of the big airlines, the international lines, where the girls are working hard supplying attention and love in the form of food to their customers, but all over America the small, brisk aircraft flit, day and night, supplied plentifully by girls with nothing much to do. They offer drinks. They lay before you, with tenderness and intimate smiles, trays of packaged meals. They send loving messages through the intercom: “We love you, we need you, please come again, please love us.” And they walk up and down, up and down, smiling, smiling, being admired by men and by women. Their business is to be admired. As they move about displaying themselves, the fever rises. At the beginning of the flight a girl is fresh and radiant with general friendliness, but soon she seems ready to explode with the forces of attention she has absorbed. She is blown up with it; she probably has a temperature—she certainly looks as if she has, with flushed cheeks and glazed excited eyes.
    And she smiles. She smiles. She smiles.
    One can imagine that when she gets back to her room after a flight she is restless, can’t sit down, can’t sleep, can’tstop smiling, can’t eat. She is too stimulated, she can’t switch herself off. If she has a man, what can that poor nothing’s love be compared to what she has been receiving from dozens of men all day. And imagine what happens when this victim marries! Which of course is bound to happen very soon: the marriage rate is high in the profession, like the divorce rate. But for one year, two years, three years—at the most half a dozen—that girl has been on show, the focus of hundreds of pairs of eyes, all day; every minute of her working time a receptacle for admiration and desire and envy, the producer of warmth, comfort, attention. Then she marries. It must be like walking off a stage where a thousand people are applauding into a small dark room. Very likely she has no idea at all of what is