The Women's Room (35 page)

Martha was on an endless high, with her mouth always full of David. (One way or another, Mira thought nastily.) David was also married and the father of one child, a two-year-old girl. But it sounded to Mira as though Martha, undaunted by such details, was thinking about David not as a lover but as a permanent condition of her life. ‘I almost get it off with him. Sex is glorious, and just talking is glorious, and being with him makes me feel full all the way
down. I don’t have to be anything, I can just be. I can’t tell you how great it is.’

But Mira knew. Don’t we all? Isn’t that what they feed us, what our imaginations are full of from the time we can think about love? Mira was happy for her friend, although her sense of personal lack was heightened by this perpetual bliss going on in the very next room and unable to be blotted out. She had to work to keep her detached perspective. She had to remind herself of how transitory love was, how fragile; she had to put the thing in its social context and remember claims of spouses, children, the entire social fabric. But nothing could keep the buoyancy of Martha’s feelings from spilling over all of it, like well-tended farmland simply wiped out by a flood. The flood, while it lasted, was all there was, and was such an intense reality that transcendence was difficult to maintain in the face of it. Mira felt perched on the roof of a shaky chicken house being totteringly borne downstream. But she kept her balance, and worked much in her garden.

She was working in her garden with a little transistor radio perched near her, listening to a broadcast about the three young civil rights workers who had disappeared in Mississippi, when the phone rang and Amy Fox, an old friend from Meyersville, came screaming on about Samantha. Mira did not understand but it sounded as if she were saying that Sam was going to be put in jail. Amy kept saying, ‘I know you’re a good friend of hers, and maybe you could help.’

Mira tried to phone Samantha, but was told the telephone had been disconnected. That was odd. She had not heard from Sam in weeks. Mira showered and dressed and drove to Samantha’s house. It was a seven-room house in a pleasant suburb, hundred-foot plots with some old trees left behind by the builder. Children were bicycling in the street, but the place had the deserted look of most suburbs. As she approached Samantha’s front door, she noticed something – a notice of some sort – tacked onto it. Were they sick? She moved closer: it was a notice of repossession signed by the sheriff’s office. Repossession? She rang the bell, wondering if Samantha were at work, but she answered the door. Mira just stood looking at her. Was this Samantha, the mechanical doll? She was wearing old slacks and a shabby shirt. Her hair was short, uncurled, and unkempt and its color was a mousy brown. She wore no make-up and her face was pale and haggard.

‘Sam,’ she began, putting out her hands.

‘Hi, Mira.’ Samantha did not take the hands. ‘Come in.’

‘Amy called.’

Samantha shrugged and led Mira into the kitchen. The house was full of boxes.

‘You’re moving?’

‘I have no choice,’ Sam’s voice said acidly. This was sweet, bubbly Samantha, who wiggled through the days getting delight from everything?

She poured coffee for them.

‘What happened?’

She told her story tonelessly, as if she had told it many times before, but she lingered over every detail. It was her epic, etched in her memory by sheer pain. It had started years ago, soon after Sam and Simp moved from Meyersville. ‘But we didn’t tell anyone. Pride, I guess. It all seemed too shameful.’ Simp had lost his job and had taken months to find another. They had gone deeply into debt. She took a job, trying to help out. Eventually, he found something but they were still impoverished trying to pay back the debts. Then his teeth had needed repair and it had taken them two years to pay for them. Meantime he lost his job again. That time he got another before too long, but Samantha was beginning to feel worn out, even doomed. Everyone else was doing well, or so it seemed to her: moving up and out into larger worlds. She skimped on everything, but they were never able to break even. Then Simp lost his job again. There were arguments: Sam wanted him to get out of sales and go into another field. He would make a good junior-high teacher, she thought, and he had a college degree. He could substitute and take some ed courses and eventually get a teaching job. But he was adamant. Sales was where the money was and one day he’d get his break. It wasn’t his fault. He got orders. But there was always something: the manufacturer didn’t deliver on time, the manufacturer went out of business, the territory he’d been given was a poor one. This time, though, he did not make such an effort to get another job. He’d sit at home poring through the newspaper and wouldn’t go into town unless he saw an interesting ad. He was underfoot all the time and they were living on a tiny unemployment check.

Mira remembered that she had condemned Sam in her mind for leaving her children, and she recalled Sam’s pert appearance and manner, recalled not liking it, finding it artificial, brittle even. She had thought Sam greedy.

‘But where was Simp? I mean, I remember some accidents, that happened then when no one was home …’

Samantha shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ She turned away. The toneless monotony of her voice gave way, and she put her face in her hands. The rest came from deep in her throat, a voice like a clot of tears. She couldn’t earn much, she had no training, she got a job typing for $75 a week, Simp got unemployment, she stretched but it was impossible to pay the mortgage and eat. The situation was aggravated by her coming home every night to find him sitting there with his third martini, not having made any effort at all. ‘He couldn’t lower his pride, wouldn’t even think of taking a job pumping gas, anything, anything at all, to feed his kids!’ Then her checks started to bounce and she made inquiries and found that during the days he went out, God knows where, and wrote checks, God knows for what, at all the local bars. Their mortgage payments went further and further into default.

‘It got to be too bad. Every night I’d come home and scream at him. The kids never came home if they could help it. It was terrible. I had to cancel our joint checking account and warn the bank not to cash his checks. I couldn’t stand it anymore. It was like living with a monstrous child. So I made him leave.’

She blew her nose and poured more coffee. ‘So.’ She sat back, her eyes in dry hollows, her mouth a rubber band pulled out of shape. ‘The other day the sheriff came. I got hysterical and I tried to keep him from nailing that thing to my door. My poor kids! The neighbors. Well, everyone knows now. There’s nothing left to lose. I don’t know where we’ll go. Simp is living with his mother in her big house in Beau Reve. I called him and he said we should go on welfare. While I was packing, I cleaned out his closet – there were some boxes on the shelf, and behind them was that.’ She pointed to a giant stack of papers, which would have been several feet high if it had been put in one pile. ‘Bills. All Bills. Some of them are two years old. Most he never even opened. Just stuck them up there as if they’d go away themselves.’

She took the cigarette Mira offered her, lighted it, and inhaled deeply. ‘Ummm. Luxury. I’ve given it up for the duration,’ she said smiling. It was her first smile. ‘Thing is, altogether we owe out about sixty thousand dollars. Can you imagine that? I can’t. Whenever Simp borrowed money, I always cosigned the notes. So now, they can’t get anything from him because he doesn’t work, but I do, and so they’re putting liens on my pay. I mean, I have two kids to feed! On my pay!’ Tears rose to her eyes again. ‘I’m thirty-one years old and the rest of
my life is already signed over to that debt. The only thing that’s saved me is my friends. They are so wonderful.’

The women in the neighborhood had gathered together when they learned about Samantha’s difficulty, and with great delicacy had done what they could. ‘Made a great pot of spaghetti tonight, Sam, but I made too much and you know my family and leftovers, I was wondering if you could do me a favor – your kids like spaghetti, don’t they? – and give it to your kids for lunch or something.’ ‘Sam, Jack went fishing yesterday and I’m drowning in bluefish. Could you use a couple? Please?’ ‘Sam, Nick and I are going to the club tonight and that place is so damned boring, why don’t you come along with us and liven it up?’ Delicacy, care, not to appear to be giving charity; tact about the hand-me-down clothes, the little recreations, about being sure always to pick her up so she wouldn’t have to put gas in her car. ‘The thing that hurts me most is the thought of leaving them.’

‘What will happen now?’

She shrugged again. ‘Unless I can come up with three hundred dollars for one month’s mortgage payment, we’re out on the street as of Friday. If I could have a month, Nick – May’s husband, he’s a lawyer and he’s been just great – might be able to get something out of Simp and make some arrangements to tide us over until I can find a place.’

‘What about your parents?’

‘My father died last winter. His retirement annuity ended with his death. My mother is living on Social Security and his insurance – he didn’t have much. She barely gets by. I haven’t told her any of this. She’s in Florida living with my aunt. It would just upset her and there’s nothing she can do.’

‘My God.’

‘Yeah. You know what really gets me – I like working. I mean if I had been the man – I wouldn’t have minded. And Simp could have stayed at home. You know? But everything hangs on them. You’re no one without them. If they flub up, you’re finished. It’s like – you’re
dependent
, you know what I mean?’

Mira did not want to think about that.

‘Totally dependent,’ Samantha went on. ‘I mean on everything. If they work or not, if they drink or not, if they go on loving you or not. Like poor Oriane.’

‘Oriane?’

‘You know, they were really living great, and she’d moved all the
way to the Bahamas with him, and then one day he decides he doesn’t want to live with her anymore and he just takes off and leaves her with a rented house, two boats unpaid for, three kids, and no money in the checking account. You heard about that.’

‘Yes. It’s because they don’t care about their kids. They just don’t care about them. So they’re free. Women are victims. All the way through,’ Mira heard herself say.

‘And now she has cancer.’

‘What?’

Sam shook her head. ‘She’s going in for surgery next week. Breast cancer.’

‘Oh, my God.’

‘It just goes on and on. Last year the woman who lives two doors down from me tried to commit suicide. Nick said women are unstable, but I know she did it because that was the only way she could control her husband. He’s an awful runaround, and he’s not nice to Joan. Everything seems to be falling apart. I don’t understand it. When I was a kid, things didn’t seem to be like this. It’s as though there’s more freedom, but all it means is more freedom for men.’

Samantha reminded Mira a little of Lily. She went on and on talking almost oblivious of her audience, and the expression on her face under all the strain was bewilderment, the total bewilderment of a person who wakes up to find herself a dung beetle.

‘You know, I really liked being a housewife. Isn’t that crazy? I did. I love doing things with the kids, and when we were broke and had no money for Christmas gifts, I enjoyed getting together with the children and Alice and her kids and we’d all make things to give as gifts. And I didn’t mind cleaning and cooking; I loved to have company and set the table and arrange flowers and cook something really snazzy. Isn’t life ironic?’

Mira murmured something.

‘I never really wanted very much. I mean, I wanted a home and a family and a decent life, but I was never very ambitious. I’m not smart enough to be ambitious, I guess. And now …’ She let it hang, opening her hands like someone who has suddenly realized the small palmfuls of water she has carried so carefully from the well have already seeped through her fingers.

Mira, though, was barely listening. Three hundred dollars. It was little enough. Norm spent that in a month and a half at the golf club. She had her checkbook in her purse. All she had to do was to take it out
and write a check to Samantha. It was nothing. But she could not do it. She tried. She worked her mind down to her bag, she imagined her hand pulling out the checkbook. If she could get that far, she couldn’t turn back. But she couldn’t get that far.

But she left Samantha promising to see if she couldn’t do something. Samantha smiled tiredly. ‘Listen, thanks for stopping over and listening to my sad tale. I’m sure you didn’t need it. The world is full enough of them.’

Not my world, Mira thought.

15

‘Absolutely not,’ Norm said.

‘Norm, poor Samantha!’

‘I feel very very sorry for Samantha,’ he said solemnly, ‘but I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to lay out my hard-earned money to help that creep Simp.’

‘You wouldn’t be helping Simp. He doesn’t even live there now.’

‘He owns the house, doesn’t he? It would be different if I thought he’d ever repay it, but from what you say, he’s a loser and a stupid bastard, and I’d never see that money again.’

‘Oh, Norm, what difference does it make? We have plenty.’

‘That’s easy for you to say. That money comes out of my hide.’

‘What do you think I do all day? What have I done all these years? I work as hard as you do.’

‘Oh, come off it, Mira.’

‘What do you mean, come off it?’ Her voice rose wildly. ‘Am I not an equal participant in this marriage? Don’t I contribute to it?’

‘Of course you do,’ he said placatingly, but there was an edge of disgust in his voice. ‘But you contribute different things. You don’t contribute money.’

‘My work enables you to make that money!’

‘Oh, Mira, don’t be ridiculous. Do you think I need you to do my work? I could live anywhere, I could have a housekeeper, or live in a hotel. I support your way of life by my work, not the reverse.’

‘And I have nothing to say about how it’s spent?’

‘Of course you do. Don’t I give you everything you want?’