Lives of Girls and Women (25 page)

She patted herself around the midriff. “Anyway they won’t be able to say I’m pining, will they? It’ll be a scandal if I split the seams.”

We heard her high heels going down the sidewalk. On leafy, cloudy, quiet evenings under the trees, sounds carried a long way. Sociable noise of the United Church affair washed as far as our steps. Did my mother wish she had a hat and a summer sheer dress on, and was going? Her agnosticism and sociability were often in conflict in Jubilee, where social and religious life were apt to be one and the same. Fern had told her to come ahead. “You’re a member. Didn’t you tell me you joined when you got married?”

“My ideas weren’t formed then. Now I’d be a hypocrite. I’m not a believer.”

“Think all of them are?”

I was on the verandah reading
Arch of Triumph,
a book I had got out of the Library. The Library had been left some money and had bought a supply of new books, mostly on the recommendation of Mrs. Wallis the doctor’s wife, who had a college degree but not perhaps the tastes the Council had been counting on. There had been complaints, people had said it should have been left up to Bella Phippen, but only one book—
The Hucksters
—had actually been removed from the shelves. I had read it first. My mother had picked it up and read a few pages and been saddened.

“I never expected to see such a use made of the printed word.” “It’s about the advertising business, how corrupt it is.”

“That’s not the only thing is corrupt, I’m afraid. Next day they will be telling about how they go to the toilet, why do they leave that out? There isn’t any of that in
Silas Marner
. There isn’t in the classic writers. They were good writers, they didn’t need it.”

I had turned away from my old favourites,
Kristin Lavransdatter,
historical novels. I read modern books now. Somerset Maugham. Nancy Mitford. I read about rich and titled people who despised the very sort of people who in Jubilee were at the top of society—druggists, dentists, storekeepers. I learned names like Balenciaga, Schiaparelli. I knew about drinks. Whisky and soda. Gin and tonic. Cinzano, Benedictine, Grand Marnier. I knew the names of hotels, streets, restaurants, in London, Paris, Singapore. In these books people did go to bed together, they did it all the time, but the descriptions of what they were up to there were not thorough, in spite of what my mother thought. One book compared having sexual intercourse to going through a train tunnel (presumably if you were the whole train) and blasting out into a mountain meadow so high, so blest and beautiful you felt as if you were in the sky. Books always compared it to something else, never told about it by itself.

“You can’t read there,” my mother said. “You can’t read in that light. Come down on the steps.”

So I came, but she did not want me to read at all. She wanted company.

“See, the lilacs are turning. Soon we’ll be going out to the farm.” Along the front of our yard, by the sidewalk, were purple lilacs gone pale as soft, delicate scrub-rags, rusty specked. Beyond them the road, already dusty, and banks of wild blackberry bushes growing in front of the boarded-up factory, on which we could still read the big, faded, vainglorious letters: MUNDY PIANOS.

“I’m sorry for Fern,” my mother said. “I’m sorry for her life.”

Her sad confidential tone warned me off.

“Maybe she’ll find a new boy friend tonight.”

“What do you mean? She’s not after a new boy friend. She’s had enough of all that. She’s going to sing ‘Where’er You Walk.’ She’s got a lovely voice, still.”

“She’s getting fat.”

My mother spoke to me in her grave, hopeful, lecturing voice. “There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women.

Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals.
He shall hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse
. Tennyson wrote that. It’s true.
Was
true. You will want to have children, though.”

That was how much she knew me.

“But I hope you will—use your brains. Use your brains. Don’t be distracted. Once you make that mistake, of being—distracted, over a man, your life will never be your own. You will get the burden, a woman always does.”

“There is birth control nowadays,” I reminded her, and she looked at me startled, though it was she herself who had publicly embarrassed our family, writing to the Jubilee
Herald-Advance
that “prophylactic devices should be distributed to all women on public relief in Wawanash County, to help them prevent any further increase in their families.” Boys at school had yelled at me, “Hey, when is your Momma giving out the proplastic devices?”

“That is not enough, though of course it is a great boon and religion is the enemy of it as it is of everything that might ease the pangs of life on earth. It is self-respect I am really speaking of. Self-respect.”

I did not quite get the point of this, or if I did get the point I was set up to resist it. I would have had to resist anything she told me with such earnestness, such stubborn hopefulness. Her concern about my life, which I needed and took for granted, I could not bear to have expressed. Also I felt that it was not so different from all the other advice handed out to women, to girls, advice that assumed being female made you damageable, that a certain amount of carefulness and solemn fuss and self-protection were called for, whereas men were supposed to be able to go out and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what they didn’t want and come back proud. Without even thinking about it, I had decided to do the same.

Baptizing

In our third year at high school Naomi switched to Commercial; suddenly freed from Latin, Physics, Algebra, she mounted to the third floor of the school where under the sloping roof typewriters clacked all day and the walls were hung with framed maxims preparing one for life in the business world.
Time and Energy are my Capital; if I Squander them, I shall get no Other
. The effect, after the downstairs classrooms with their blackboards covered with foreign words and abstract formulae, their murky pictures of battles and shipwrecks and heady but decent mythological adventures, was that of coming into cool ordinary light, the real and busy world. A relief to most. Naomi liked it.

In March of that year she got a job in the office of the Creamery. She was through with school. She told me to come and see her after four o’clock. I did, without much idea of what I was getting into. I thought Naomi would make a face at me from behind the counter. I was going to put on my quavery old-lady voice and say to her, “What is the meaning of this? Yesterday I bought a dozen eggs here and they was every one rotten!”

The office was in a low stucco addition, built on to the front of the old Creamery. There were fluorescent lights and new metal filing cabinets and desks—the sort of surroundings in which I felt instinctively out-of-place—and an efficient noise of typewriters and an adding machine. Two girls besides Naomi were working there; I found out later their names were Molly and Carla. Naomi’s nails were coral; she had done her hair quite successfully; she was wearing a pink and green plaid skirt and pink sweater. New. She smiled at me and waggled her fingers above the typewriter in minimal greeting, then went on typing at a great rate and conducting a gay, disjointed, incomprehensible conversation with her coworkers. After several minutes of this she called to me that she would be through at five o’clock. I said I had to go home. I felt that Molly and Carla were looking at me, at the ink on my bare red hands, my slipping woollen kerchief, wild hair, schoolgirlish pile of books.

Well-groomed girls frightened me to death. I didn’t like to even go near them, for fear I would be smelly. I felt there was a radical difference, between them and me, as if we were made of different substances. Their cool hands did not mottle or sweat, their hair kept its calculated shape, their underarms were never wet—they did not know what it was to have to keep their elbows pinned to their sides to hide the dark, disgraceful halfmoon stains on their dresses—and never, never would they feel that little extra gush of blood, little bonus that no Kotex is going to hold, that will trickle horrifyingly down the inside of the thighs. No indeed; their periods would be discreet; nature served and did not betray them. Nor would my coarseness ever be translated into their fineness; it was too late, the difference lay too deep for that. But what about Naomi? She had been like me; once she had had an epidemic of warts on her fingers; she had suffered from Athlete’s Foot; we had hidden in the Girls’ Toilet together when we had the curse at the same time and were afraid to do Tumbling—one at a time, in front of the rest of the class—afraid of some slipping or bleeding, and too embarrassed to ask to be excused. What was this masquerade she was going in for now, with her nail polish, her pastel sweater?

She was soon great friends with Molly and Carla. Her conversation, when she came over to my house or summoned me to hers, was full of their diets, skin-care routines, hair-shampooing methods, clothes, diaphragms (Molly had been married for a year and Carla was to be married in June). Sometimes Carla came to Naomi’s house when I was there; she and Naomi always talked about washing, either washing their sweaters or washing their underclothes or washing their hair. They would say, “I washed my cardigan!” “
Did
you? Did you wash it cold or lukewarm?” “Lukewarm but I think it’s all right.” “What did you do about the neck?” I would sit there thinking how grubby my sweater was and that my hair was greasy and my brassiere discoloured, one strap held on with a safety pin. I would have to get away, but when I got home I would not sew my brassiere-strap on or wash my sweater. Sweaters I washed always shrank, anyway, or the neckline sagged; I knew I did not take enough trouble with them but I had a fatalistic feeling that they would shrink or sag whatever I did. Sometimes I did wash my hair, and did it up on horrible steel curlers that prevented me from sleeping; in fact I could spend hours, now and then, in front of a mirror, painfully plucking my eyebrows, looking at my profile, shading my face with dark and light powder, to emphasize its good points and minimize the bad, as recommended in the magazines. It was sustained attention I was not capable of, though everything from advertisements to F. Scott Fitzgerald to a frightening song on the radio—
the girl that I marry will have to be, as soft and pink as a nursery
—was telling me I would have to,
have to,
learn. Love is not for the undepilated.

As for hair washing: about this time I started to read an article in a magazine, on the subject of the basic difference between the male and female habits of thought, relating chiefly to their experience of sex (the title of the article made you think it would tell a great deal more about sex than it actually did). The author was a famous New York psychiatrist, a disciple of Freud. He said that the difference between the male and female modes of thought were easily illustrated by the thoughts of a boy and girl, sitting on a park bench, looking at the full moon. The boy thinks of the universe, its immensity and mystery; the girl thinks, “I must wash my hair.” When I read this I was frantically upset; I had to put the magazine down. It was clear to me at once that I was not thinking as the girl thought; the full moon would never as long as I lived remind me to wash my hair. I knew if I showed it to my mother she would say, “Oh, it is just that maddening male nonsense, women have no brains.” That would not convince me; surely a New York psychiatrist must
know
. And women like my mother were in the minority, I could see that. Moreover I did not want to be like my mother, with her virginal brusqueness, her innocence. I wanted men to love me,
and
I wanted to think of the universe when I looked at the moon. I felt trapped, stranded; it seemed there had to be a choice where there couldn’t be a choice. I didn’t want to read any more of the article but was drawn back to it as I would be drawn back when I was younger to a certain picture of a dark sea, a towering whale, in a book of fairy stories; my eyes nervously jumped across the page, starting at such assertions as:
For a woman, everything is personal; no idea is of any interest to her by itself, but must be translated into her own experience; in works of art she always sees her own life, or her daydreams
. Finally I took the magazine out to the garbage-pail, ripped it in half, stuffed it inside, tried to forget it. Afterwards when I would see an article in a magazine called “Femininity—It’s Making a Comeback!” or a quiz for teenagers with the heading “Is Your Problem That You’re Trying To Be a Boy?” I would turn the page quickly as if something was trying to bite me. Yet it had never occurred to me to want to be a boy.

Through Molly and Carla, and through her new position as a working girl, Naomi was becoming part of a circle in Jubilee that neither she nor I had really known existed. This circle took in the girls who worked in stores and in offices and the two banks, as well as some girls, married, who had recently left their jobs. If they were not married and did not have boy friends they went to dances together. They went bowling together in Tupperton. They gave showers for each other, for getting married and having babies (this latter was a new custom, offending some older ladies in town). Their relations with each other, though full of scandalous confidences, were yet hedged about with all kinds of subtle formalities, courtesies, proprieties. It was not like school; no savagery, meanness, no crude language, but always a complicated network of feuds obliquely referred to, always some crisis—a pregnancy, an abortion, a jilting—which they all knew about and talked about but guarded as their secret, keeping it away from the rest of the town. The most innocent, or consoling and flattering things they said might mean something else. They were tolerant of what most people in town would think of as moral lapses in each other, but quite intolerant of departures in dress and hair style, and people not cutting the crusts off sandwiches, at showers.