The Women's Room (13 page)

Mira would sit there with them as long as she could. When he could walk, Normie would play in the grass – or snow – with other infants. But around three thirty, he began to fuss and cry. Everyone understood. All children had their bad time. If a woman left early, or was too distracted to talk much, no one commented. The babies came first; the babies were everything; no one expected anything else.

Mira would walk home carrying the tired, fretful Normie in one arm, pushing the carriage with the other. Getting upstairs was a bit of a problem. She did it in shifts, carrying baby, groceries, and purse up first, entering the apartment, laying the baby on the floor and putting the groceries in the kitchen, then returning for the carriage. After Clark was born, she would take only babies and purse, and return for groceries and carriage. She was always anxious, fearing that either baby or babies would hurt themselves or that the carriage and groceries would be stolen while she was upstairs.

When she got back into the apartment, her heart sank. This was the worst time of day. The baby would wake up fussy, wanting to be played with: Normie was cranky and hungry. And she had to start dinner. On nights when Norm came home early, he wanted to eat immediately. She would work in the kitchen, then go and play with them, then return as she smelled something burning or heard something boiling over. (Norm complained much about her cooking in those years.) But each time she returned to the kitchen, one child or the other, sometimes both, screamed. She let them cry, peeled her potatoes or turnips, strung the beans, and then went back to them. Norm did not like to come home to their confusion, so she tried to feed them before he got in, but whichever one she fed first, the other cried and fussed.

Norm sometimes played with them a little, but he had no notion of
how to play with a baby except to throw it in the air and catch it, and she would not let him do that. They had just eaten, and she wanted them to relax so they could sleep, and not get all excited. Even so, more often than not, while she and Norm sat at the kitchen table trying to talk, they were interrupted several times by fretful children. Mira was always leaping up to go to them, and after a while, Norm brought a book to the table and simply read while he ate.

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Things changed, of course. Babies grow. By the time she had perfected the art of vacuuming with a child on her hip (screaming at the noise of the vacuum), they were able to walk. And then, there were the evenings.

Norm would go into the living room to study directly after dinner. Mira would wash and dry the dishes, thinking only that in a little while she would be free. She would take her shower then, brush her hair out, and go into the living room with a book. From eight thirty to eleven, she read. By ten she was sleepy, but there was no point in going to bed then, since the baby would wake at eleven for his final bottle. She and Norm rarely talked. Norm finished med school the June after Clark’s birth, but then he was interning and he seemed to study even more than before. Often, he was on duty at night, and Mira found herself looking forward to that. For he could not sleep in ‘this damned place with all the noise’ when he was there in the daytime, so he would drive from the hospital to his mother’s house where he could sleep in peace in his old bedroom. Sometimes he ate there too, and Mira did not see him for three or four days. Norm was apologetic about this once he realized Mira was not going to complain. But she found it easier with him gone. She could adjust her schedule completely to the babies and wasn’t nearly as anxious when they cried. Norm was often tired and irritable: it was hard, she thought, to be under pressure all day long, and have to come home to a tiny place full of screaming infants. It would be better when they had a little more money.

They had little sex life. Norm was away, or he was tired. But the pattern that had begun at their marriage had enforced itself now as unbreakable. Coitus was quick and unsatisfying. Mira lay back and permitted it. Norm seemed to realize she did not enjoy it; strangely, this seemed to please him. She could only guess at this: they never
discussed it. Once or twice, she tried to talk to him about it, but he adamantly refused. He refused with charm, not hostility, teasing her, calling her a ‘sexpot,’ or smiling that he was completely happy, and putting his hand on her cheek. But it seemed to her that he felt it was somehow proper for her not to enjoy sex; it made her more worthy of respect. On the rare occasions when he wanted to make love, he apologized to her for it, explaining that for a male body it was necessary.

But there were pleasures in Mira’s life: the children themselves. They were a deep pleasure, especially when she was alone with them and wasn’t anxious about preparing Norm’s dinner, or about their making noise. Holding their tiny bodies, bathing them as they gurgled with pleasure, oiling and powdering them while they poked at her face or at their own, trying to figure out what eyes and noses were, she would smile endlessly, unconsciously. She had seen their birth and the birth of her love for them as miraculous, but it was just as miraculous when they first smiled, first sat up, first babbled a sound that resembled, of course, mama. The tedious days were filled with miracles. When a baby first looks at you; when it gets excited at seeing a ray of light and like a dog pawing a gleam, tries to capture it in its hand; or when it laughs that deep, unselfconscious gurgle; or when it cries and you pick it up and it clings sobbing to you, saved from some terrible shadow moving across the room, or a loud clang in the street, or perhaps, already, a bad dream: then you are – happy is not the precise word – filled. Mira still felt as she had the first time she held Normie in the hospital, that the child and her feeling for it were somehow absolute, truer and more binding than any other experience life had to offer: she felt she lived at the blind true core of life.

Suddenly teeth appeared, tiny white shoots in the vulva-soft pink of their gums. They moved, crawled, stood up, took some steps, with the exaltation and delight and terror the first human must have felt when she stood up on her hind legs. Then they were talking, two words, seven, then no more counting. They looked at her seriously, looked in her eyes and asked and spoke. They were complete little people talking to her from a mind she knew nothing about and would have to learn to apprehend; although this person had grown in her body, had torn it emerging, had once shared pulse and food and blood and joy and grief, it was now a separate person whose innards, mind and spirit and emotion, she would never completely comprehend. It was as if one weren’t born suddenly, but progressively; as if each birth were also a
death, each step they made in development moving them further away from her, from their oneness with her, and in time, far, far away from her, they would merge with others, have children themselves, join and separate, until the final separation, which would also be a birth into a new mode. They would ask questions, make statements and demands: ‘Dis blue?’ ‘Hot. Mats hot.’ ‘Cookie!’ Spoken imperiously. She would answer or agree or negate, but she had no idea where her statements went, into what context of thinking and feeling, what network of colors and tastes and sounds they had already built up.

Not that they didn’t have personalities from the beginning. Mira had her own set of old wives’ tales and believed in them as much as if she had been an old Irishwoman sitting by a hearth in Galway. Normie, who had lain in a churning anxious unhappy womb, who had had to be dragged out of her by metal tongs, was independent and unfriendly. He did not smile until he was over four months old. He tottered around the apartment as soon as he could walk, resenting any guidance from Mira, furious if he were not permitted to touch something. Yet he was also demanding; he was often fussy, and would not calm even if she held him. He wanted something, but didn’t know what. He was very bright; he talked early and was drawing deductions before he could walk. Staring at the coatrack as she held him in her arms after he’d wakened from a daytime sleep one day, he said, ‘Daddy bye-bye.’ She didn’t understand at first, then realized he saw that Norm’s raincoat was missing, which had to mean so was Norm. He was a restless, searching child, seeming always to want to be a step ahead of where he was.

Clark, on the other hand, had rested in a still, accepting womb. His birth had been easy – he seemed to just slide out. He smiled at ten days, and Norm said it was gas, but Clark did it every time he saw her and finally Norm had to admit it was a smile. He clung to her, he smiled at her, he pattered to her, he loved her. Yet she could leave him in a jump seat for an hour and he would bounce around and entertain himself. He was, in the early years, what people called an angel of a baby, and sometimes Mira worried that he was too good. She broke her attention away from Normie purposely sometimes to go and play with Clark, fearful that Normie’s demanding nature would accustom her to cater to it alone and ignore Clark.

Of course there were worries too. Oh, God, I remember those years! A petulant afternoon convinces you you’ve turned out a monster; two rainy days of squabbling children and you’re sure you have a severe case
of sibling rivalry (which is all your fault – you’re giving them insufficient attention) on your hands. Every fever is a potential killer, every cough wrenches your own insides. Some dimes taken from a table indicate a potential thief; one well-drawn picture indicates a potential Matisse. Lordy, lordy. Well, I’m glad I know better for my grandchildren, if I ever have any.

Yes, a blind true core. It was what I imagine it is like to live on a huge ocean liner run by engines buried in a base deck, and to tend, feed, and stoke, to hear and see, all day long, every day, the great pounding heart – except you watch it grow and change, watch it take over the ship. And that is magnificent, but it is also obliterating. You do not exist; even they are secondary, the children, to the fact of life itself. Their needs and desires are, must be, subordinate to their survival, to the great pounding heart that must be kept alive. The tender of a child is the priest in a temple; the child is the vessel; what is sacred is the fire within it. Unlike priests, however, tenders of children do not receive privilege and respect; their lives pass unnoticed even by themselves as the washing and feeding, the caring and slapping – ‘Hot! Match hot! No, no!’ – goes on.

The face and body change; the eyes forget the world; the interests narrow to focus on the energies of one or two or three small bodies presently charging around the room screaming at high pitch on ‘horsies’ made of broomsticks. Sacred fire may occasionally smoke; sacred life often jars.

But either obliterates the individual. There were things going on in the world while Mira was caring for her children. Eisenhower had been elected; Joseph McCarthy was having some trouble with the United States Army. But the most striking event in Mira’s life apart from the children occurred one day when she was down on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor, and one of the babies began to cry, and Norm was out – at the hospital, sleeping at his mother’s, somewhere. And she sat back on her heels, shaking her head up and down, half smiling, half grimacing, remembering her fears of marrying Lanny. It had all happened anyhow. Oedipus couldn’t escape his fate, and neither could she. The scenario had been written before she was even born.

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Once, when Tad had been listening to Val talk about her former husband, he shook his head slowly and said, ‘I used to wish I’d known you when you were young. I used to imagine you riding your bike down the street with your hair flying, passing me on the sidewalk and waving, and me standing there, a sophisticated twenty, giving you a special eye, marking you out for myself. I don’t wish that anymore. You women eat men. You get men to make you pregnant, to take care of you and the kids while they’re little, and then you shut the door, you toss them out, you clutch your kids – and they are
your
kids – and go on your merry way. I’m glad I met you now, when you’re merry, when you have time for me.’

This statement wasn’t really fair to Val, but she was struck by it and repeated it to me. It wasn’t at all true to me, but I was struck by it too. Because it sounds – it feels – almost as if men were cut off by nature from the blind true core of things, as if they could reach it only through women, as if they had to resent even their own children for coming between their women and them. And there is no contest between a baby and its father – in my book anyway. A baby becomes your life by necessity, not by choice. This arrangement is ancient: it lies curled in the heart of myth. What I do not know is if it is necessary. Can you imagine a world where neither mother nor father required the other for survival, where both mother and father could love and tend the baby, could get in touch with the beating engine that drives life? I can, vaguely. But only vaguely. What I can’t do is envision a social structure that could contain such an arrangement without changing what is called human nature – that is, eradicating not only capitalism but greed, tyranny, apathy, dependency – oh, well.

At any rate, Tad was twenty-four to Val’s thirty-nine and it seemed to all of us that he adored her, and he did: but still, he saw her as a devourer. It’s as though, deep, deep at the heart, the silent heart that rarely erupts, that keeps still because if it didn’t the world would be destroyed, deep there underneath, the sexes hate and fear each other. Women see men as oppressors, as tyrants, as an enemy with superior strength to be outwitted. Men see women as underminers, slaves who rattle their chains threateningly, constantly reminding the man that if they wanted to, they could poison his food: just watch out.

I know a lot about what women feel in marriage; what I don’t know is what men feel. God knows there is a slew of books on the market reciting the woes there are in marriage from the male point of view. The problem is, they are not honest. Did you ever read a book by a male that showed the hero clinging to his wife because she was an efficient housekeeper? Or because she understood his sexual problems and didn’t make him feel too inadequate about it – something he could not count on another woman to do? Or because she did not much like sex, and so he was off the hook – not liking sex much himself? No, you didn’t. Or maybe you did, but if so, it was a comic novel, and the main character got called an antihero.