“God damn, M.uffy,” I go, gingerly feeling my jaw, “I’m on my honeymoon, and now I’ll probably have to like take all my meals through a straw.” / couldn’t imagine how we ever could have been friends.

“It’ll be worth it, to hear the story I’ve got this time,” she goes. I really wanted to hand her head to her, but I was still stunned.

“You die, bitch,” was all I could hoarsely murmur.

“Calm down, Bitsy,” she goes. “You want to like change outfits? Get out of that geeky schmatte and I’ll find your little bit of nothing in here.”

I did as she said, wobbling my jaw every now and then, feeling my head pound and throb as I wriggled out of my $380 Neiman-Marcus “schmatte.”

“This like what you wanted?” goes Maureen, extending the drop-dead lavender gauzy chemise-and-panty set. “ ‘Victoria’s Secret'? I don’t know them, but I do know their secret: they know you don't have any like boobs.”

My right hand clenched slowly into a hard fist.

Maureen just laughed. “Hey, ease up, Bitsy. You always zinged me about my fat ass, I always zinged you about being titless.’’

“Yeah,” I muttered. That's when I first really noticed what she was wearing: leather pants tucked into high boots, very butch; a sleeveless quilted cotton shirt covered with chain mail, / mean, for God’s sake; and some kind of crested helmet pushed back on her head. She wore her old sword— the one she’d picked up on Mars—on one hip. On the other hip she had a new sword, bigger, and like a dagger. She had a spear and a large sack made of some rough, filthy material. She looked like a combination of Santa Claus and Joan of Arc. Can you believe it? Sometimes / doubt she really has these adventures. I think like she goes away for a year or more and makes up some ridiculous Mardi Gras outf it and comes back just to see how much she can annoy me. She's either a for-sure scientific enigma or she's really like psycho, you knoW? ‘ ‘For Christ's sake, Muffy, where have you been!’ ’ She grinned at me. She never grinned before; she’d smile or she’d laugh, but she never grinned. She was losing that fine edge the Greenberg School had labored so long and so futilely to apply to her. “Run the shower so Mr. Honeybunch doesn’t wonder what’s going on in here.”

I reached behind myself and turned on the taps full blast.

' ‘Good, ’ ’ she goes. ‘ ‘Now, wait until you hear this story. And if you call me Muffy again, I’ll brain you.”

I was ready, believe me, I was more than ready to hang up my sword; but, like, two things occurred to me. The first was that there wouldn’t be anybody to look out for the wretched and downtrodden on all these planets without me, and the second was that every time I have an adventure I meet a real cute boy. That was better odds than 1 used to get at the Greenberg School. So I didn’t retire 01’ Betsy after all. 1 decided to go for one last shot at finding Mars and Prince Van. I mean, like, it wasn’t his fault that I got lost, was it? Let’s be fair about this, now.

I put together another full-on collection of wearables, crammed into two Oh-They’re-Just-Something-I-Stumbled-Over bags that leaped at my throat from a page in the Bean catalog.

I decided on the college-sophomore look. You know: too old to be a total squid, but still young enough so that the Mandatory Party Rule is still in effect. I had on a beige shirtdress with blue pins, a ’schmere sweater tied around my neck, and a pair of raggedy old Pumas on my feet. Come nightfall, I looked into the sky and felt a tug toward the God of War. I barely had to whoosh myself; like it was almost whooshed for me. The going was getting easier every time 1 tried it.

But, goddammit, the steering was as slippery as it ever was. Right from the second when 1 blammed into a big old tree, 1 knew I’d missed Mars again. And Mars is like a big place, right? You’d think it’d be easy enough to hit. Well, let’s see you try it. Get back to me on that.

Anyway, where I did end up, I was smushed against this tree. I couldn’t tell you what kind of tree, except it had bark—it had bark in my mouth, jammed into my nose, cutting up my knees. 1 was thinking, “Maureen Birnbaum killed by tree. Details on the hour.” The tree was like making no move to back off, so / did. I looked around and there were no witnesses, so 1 didn’t feel like such a total wheeze.

There was a dusty dirt road behind me, winding through the trees. 1 didn’t know which way 1 ought to go, so I thought I’d just kind of sit down with my Bean bags and wait for someone to come along. So it figures, as soon as I sit down, my imagination starts to work—maybe I’m all alone on this planet with like a road.

Chill out, Maureen. In a few minutes 1 hear a lot of clanking and bumping and rattling. Traffic sounds. No 1-95 traffic sounds, you know, but at least some creatures were hustling their buns toward me. I asked myself, I go, “Maureen, is that necessarily like a good thing?” So I take my bags and my sword and hide out behind this clump of underbrush. A few minutes later I see this little parade. There’s a bunch of Schwarzenegger types wearing hacked-up outfits, riding these big old horses that looked like a cross between a Clydesdale and a Peterbilt tractor. The men were all carrying swords and battleaxes and stuff.

They are fighting men. I have no problem with that. I got out from under the underbrush. “Hey,” I go.

Three of these totally bluff guys leap on me—from their horses—and bring me up in front of their leader. They yammer at me in some language, it could have been Greek for all I knew.

Finally the leader, who’s still up on his horse so 1 have to lean way back just to see his face—which was a cute face, in a sort of fierce and determined way, mature and all—this man leans down and gives me one of those amused little smiles. He goes, “May I ask your name, miss?”

I go, “You can call me Maureen, but Fve bailed out of all those sexist mister-and-miss things.”

He nodded pleasantly, but one of his young friends mutters something that sounded like “brahbehmuh.” Now, my God, Bitsy, you know Fm the last person in the world that would burn a bra. Without good underwired support, a fighting woman is just plain asking for trouble. Halfway through the action she’d be nearly helpless, what with the harmonic motion of her boobs interfering with her swordplay. I spun around real fast to see who’d made that little remark, but they looked at me all wide-eyed and innocent. Their leader goes, “Forgive them, they haven’t met many twentieth-century women, and those they have met were without exception hostile.”

“A typical generalization,” I go. This is where I got all haughty. In the back of my mind, though, certain questions are just like crying out to be asked. “Where the hell am I?” seemed like a good start.

This man with the dark skin and the bright eyes goes, “You’re a trifle north of the Kingdom of New Kuhmbuhluhn, east on the road from the ducal seat of Tchaimbuhsburk.”

“I meant what planet is this?” I go.

He shrugged. “Earth,” he goes. “What did you expect?” “Earth? Then something’s wrong.”

“What year do you think it is?”

I’m like easy to get along with, so I told him. He says it was now more than eight hundred years since civilization had been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. I looked at his weapons and his men’s armor and the whole knobby barbarian influence on this band of merry men. I didn’t have any trouble believing him. I mean, it couldn’t be that they were only making, you know, a daring fashion statement or something. Instead of traveling through space, I’d traveled through time. Prince Van and you, Bitsy, and my allowance were many hundreds of years in the past, dead and buried. 1 paused a moment for emotion.