One of the albums on my iPod is Free to Be You and Me. (Others include Free to Be a Family and Marlo Thomas’s Thanksgiving. There is a pattern here.) I grew up on that album, but it’s been a long time since I listened to it. I was happy when the story of Atalanta came on this morning while I was on the erg. (The link is to Youtube for same story from the TV version of the album.) It’s a great piece to erg to. No golden apples in this story; by dint of hard training Atalanta ties inthe race and wins both a new friend and the right to choose her own destiny. But I’d forgotten how unsatisfyingly inconclusive the ending is.
So here’s my ending.
After the race, Young John caught a ship and traveled the world, while Atalanta explored the world from the land. Both saw great marvels and learned many things during their travels. They tried to write to each other now and then, but both moved around so much that it was difficult to keep in touch.
After a few years they met each other unexpectedly one day, in a distant marketplace whose name was a byword for strange and magical objects. Atalanta caught sight of Young John first, as he haggled over strange navigational instruments in a busy market stall. So much time had passed between them that she wasn’t entirely sure it was him, at first. But as he made his purchase he turned his head toward her, as if he’d felt the pressure of her eyes on him, and the joy in his face as he recognized her seemed to erase the time since their last meetng. They spent the rest of that day together, telling each other of their travels. As they talked, they realized that though both had loved their time spent traveling, they’d been a little lonely. Each had made many good friends in the countries they’d visited, but they always seemed to be saying goodbye to those friends and leaving for yet another new place. They decided to travel together for a little while, for the companionship.
After a while, they’d stopped saying “When we split up I think I’ll travel to “Madagascar” and begun saying “Let’s go to Hyderabad next!” They began to revisit some of the places they’d been to separately, so that Atalanta could show Young John things he’d never seen, and John could show Atalanta things he knew she’d love. When they said “Hello again!” to friends they’d made and left along the way, people began to smile at them in a funny way that implied all sorts of things, and Atalanta and John laughed to each other about the things people assumed.
Still, after a few more years they realized that they’d become partners, that they depended on each other, that when either of them saw a new thing they wondered first what the other would think of it. One day on a whim, realizing that neither of them would ever be this close to anyone else, they decided to get married by a priest in a far and strange temple that was famed in a country no one in their homeland had even heard of. After another year or two, Atalanta thought it might please her father to learn of her marriage, and so she wrote him a letter.
One day, realizing they were not far from where they’d started, they decided to pay a visit to Atalanta’s father the King, John’s mother the midwife, and all their childhood friends. Everyone in the village was overjoyed to see Young John again, and the people in the palace were equally happy to see Atalanta (who was, after all, still their princess.) The village was proud of their well-traveled princess and of the wisdom she’d acquired on her travels, and the courtiers became fond of Young John after he showed them new trade routes on maps they’d never seen, and explained the principles of navigation. From then on, though Atalanta and Not-so-young John were still not ready to settle down, whenever they passed near home they stopped in for a short visit. After they left, sometimes in the evenings the King would wander down to the village to visit John’s mother, where he would say, “I still don’t hold with young women traveling the world on their own. In my day, they all wanted to get married and raise the heirs to the kingdom, as princesses should! But I confess I do feel a bit better about my daughter, knowing that she has your John to protect her from the wide world now.”
And John’s mother would nod and smile and curtsey, because that’s what you do when the King himself visits your cottage. When he left, she would laugh and laugh, because she’d talked to John, and listened to Atalanta’s stories, as the King never had (being always too tied up in grave matters of state, as Kings so often are.) The neighbors would hear her laughing and they’d all smile too – because they’d all heard from John and Atalanta about their travels, and they knew that in truth she protected him as often as the other way around.
Do you suppose Free to Be You and Me fanfic already exists, or have I just invented it?
Well, I like that better than some I’ve heard. The old thinking was that a woman like Atalanta, who could compete on the same level with men, would have problems with woman things — painful menstruation, difficulties with pregnancies, unable to nurse a baby.
Since I can’t believe that a capable woman wouldn’t take these new tasks seriously, I never liked the concept.