The Women's Room (41 page)

Christmas came, then Easter, then summer. Norm insisted on a divorce, Mira held him up. She counted the years, counted what he would have had to pay a housekeeper, nurse, laundress, chauffeur, prostitute – for that is what she felt, now, to have been her most painful role – and presented Norm with the bill.

‘The money is all yours. You told me some time ago you could live just as well in a hotel. Consider that you have lived with paid services for fifteen years. That is what it would have cost you.’

Norm was outraged, his lawyer was outraged, her lawyer thought she was insane. They went over and over her account. In the end, they settled: Mira as well as her lawyer knew the judge would never grant her what she asked, despite Norm’s high income. What she got was the house as long as she lived in it (there was a mortgage, and
joint ownership – if she moved, she would receive half of their parity), the car (paid for: a ’64 Chevrolet), six thousand a year in alimony and another nine in child support (until the children reached twenty-one). She figured it out. With the house and furniture and her clothes, she figured she had been paid two thousand dollars a year for the fifteen years they had been married and would receive six thousand a year every year they were not. It was a strange arrangement, but by now Mira was as thin and brittle as a saltine. ‘Not quite slave labor, I guess. I got something besides room and board.’

Mira did well in school, and liked being back doing scholarly work. Martha was surviving. Samantha was surviving. Lily was barely surviving. The boys went on. The years went on. Mira’s work was good, even brilliant. Her teachers advised her to go on for a Ph.D. Mira listened to ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and thought that something had happened to popular music. Lily had another breakdown. Martha finished her BA and was accepted at the university law school. She had not been deranged after all. Mira made out applications, asked for recommendations. Martin Luther King was killed. Bobby Kennedy was killed. My Lai happened, although we didn’t know it yet. The mail arrived. Mira had been accepted at Yale and Harvard. She sat there looking at the letters, unable to believe them. Norm was remarried, to the woman Mira had once called his little chippy. Mira was about to put the house up on the market when Norm called and told her he would buy out her half. He was willing to pay her $5000 less than she thought her half was worth considering what the house would bring on the open market. They quarreled. She accepted his offer when he came up $2500. After all, she would have been the one who would have had to clean it up every morning, expecting buyers. Sigh, sigh. Shit, man. Enough, I can’t understand anymore. What happened was bad enough without reviewing it. I’m sorry I started this. But I guess I had to do it. And now I feel I have to finish it. It’s only July 26. School doesn’t open until September 15. Besides, as they used to say, what else do I have to do?

Mira sold all the furniture to Norm. She got the boys enrolled in a good private high school. And one morning in August of 1968, Mira packed her suitcases in her car to drive to Boston. She stood for a while in front of the empty house. The boys were with Norm. They were all coming back tomorrow, when Norm and his new wife would move in. She wondered what that woman would feel like, moving into her house, full of furniture
she had chosen and cared for and devoted her life to. Yes. She saluted it.

‘Good-bye, furniture,’ she said. And the furniture, being furniture, sat.

5

Before she left, Mira made two visits. The first was to Martha. Martha knew she was coming, but when she arrived, Martha was wearing an old, stained wrapper that made her look pregnant, and had a kerchief wrapped around her head. She was down on her hands and knees, holding a small tool, scraping the wax off the kitchen floor.

‘You don’t mind if I do this while we talk. I have so little time these days,’ Martha said.

Mira sat on a kitchen bench. She sipped the gin and tonic Martha had given her. Martha talked. She was through her first year of law school. She didn’t know what she wanted to specialize in. She was interested in international law, but that was an impossible field for a woman. She talked much of the intricate politics of the school. Martha had gained much weight. Her delicate frame looked odd under all that flesh. Martha rarely looked Mira in the eyes these days. She talked to walls, floors, knives and forks. She never mentioned David. George was unhappy. During their separation he had learned some independence. Now he felt constrained by Martha’s competence. He thought he wanted a divorce.

‘Funny, isn’t it? He’s having an affair with a woman in his office, but that’s not why he wants his divorce. He wants a swinging pad in Manhattan. He wants to try what he never had. You can understand it, except it’s all so goddamned adolescent.’ She laughed. She worked at the wax, square inch by square inch. She worked very slowly.

‘If you have another of those putty knives, I’ll help you,’ Mira said, ‘At the rate you’re going, you’ll be done in two weeks.’

‘It’s okay. I’m such a perfectionist that I’d redo what you did anyway.’

‘Is George serious?’

‘About the divorce? I don’t know. He’s serious about having an apartment in New York. He misses his bachelor bliss,’ she laughed, ‘although he didn’t think it was such bliss when he had it.’

Scrape, scrape.

‘But it would be messy for me. I have two years of school to go. My job is only part-time, I barely pay for food out of it. And what George wants now is a fancy place, not the dump he had before. I can’t imagine how we’ll pay for everything. He got a good raise a couple months ago, but he’s a dreamer if he thinks that will cover it. We still have two thousand dollars in debts from the separation, one thousand of it being what he owes the shrink.’

‘Does he still go?’

‘No. He’s got me now,’ Martha laughed humorlessly.

Martha had not yet looked directly at Mira.

They talked about their children, about the future. Martha’s voice was monotonous; it had neither highs nor lows.

‘Do you ever see him?’ Mira asked finally. Martha stopped scraping and pushed the kerchief back on her forehead.

Not often. The law school is across campus from liberal arts. Sometimes I see him in the student center. He doesn’t seem to see me. He looks just the same. I hear rumors about him: he’s involved with a married woman student. French major. So they say.’

She resumed her scraping. She’d completed about two square feet.

‘And you? How do you feel now?’

Martha stood up. ‘Ready for a refill?’ She walked to the counter, stood with her back to Mira and poured two drinks. ‘How I feel.’ She said it as a statement. ‘I don’t know. I don’t feel anything, really. I feel as if I’ll never feel anything again. He’s a bastard but I love him. I feel like all the slobs in the song, “My Man Bill,” you know? I’d go back to him tomorrow if he asked. I know I would. I’m not saying I wouldn’t give him hell, but I’d go back. But he won’t ask.’

‘Why don’t you look for someone else?’

Martha shrugged. ‘I do. At least I think I do. But my heart isn’t in it. Right now all I care about is getting that degree and getting out. I’ve been in school too long. My God, I’m thirty-six years old.’

‘So am I and I’m just starting.’

Martha laughed. ‘No one can say we don’t try.’

‘But I feel the way you do – as if nothing can ever matter again the way things used to matter. As if nothing again could touch the heart that closely, hurt that much.’

‘Maybe that’s getting old.’

‘Maybe.’

She left Martha still crouched on the floor, five square feet of the
kitchen floor dewaxed. ‘Good luck,’ Martha said tonelessly. ‘And keep in touch.’

In touch. What did that mean, send Christmas cards? How can you keep in touch with someone who is beyond touch, who has cut the nerves before they reached the skin, so as not to feel a touch, any touch at all? She understood what Martha was doing, and why, but it made her feel terribly alone. But what was Martha’s alternative? To go on feeling? As Lily did?

Mira walked across the grounds of Greenwood Mental Hospital. It was made up of many open squares of grass surrounded by trees that obscured the chain-link fence that rose twelve feet high around it. There were trees in the squares too, and benches. There were a few beds of flowers. People wandered or sat, nicely dressed people. You could not tell if they were patients or visitors. At Lily’s dormitory, Mira inquired for her, and a nurse smilingly led her out to a corner of the grass where several young women sat on benches talking. Lily jumped up when she saw Mira and as they met they embraced awkwardly, Mira’s stiffness and Lily’s hard tension meeting at the same time as their affection did.

Lily was terribly thin, but she was dressed nicely, much better than she dressed at home, in neat brown pants and a beige sweater. She was wearing makeup, a lot of makeup, and her hair was freshly dyed. The other young women were introduced. They too, were well dressed and heavily made up, with brilliant eye shadows, false eyelashes, orangey pancake makeup, heavy rouge, deep red lipstick. Mira did not know if they were patients or guests. They talked for a while about the weather, and then the three young women left. Lily had cigarettes but no matches, and was delighted with Mira’s lighter. ‘You always have to ask the nurse for a light. One of the rules here. They’re afraid the crazies will burn the place down.’

‘Those women,’ Mira nodded to the departing figures. ‘Are they guests?’

‘Oh, no. They’re like me.’ Lily laughed. ‘What this place is is a country club for women whose husbands don’t want them anymore.’

Mira looked around. That sounded like Lily’s insanity, but almost everyone around them was female, between thirty and fifty.

‘Aren’t there any men?’

‘Oh, yes, but they’re mostly old alcoholics.’

‘Are there old alcoholic women too?’

‘Yes, lots of them. We’re all people nobody wants.’ Lily smoked
hastily, as if she were anxious to finish her cigarette so she could have another and light it herself. ‘All my friends are like me, though.’ She talked about them, about herself.

‘Before I got sick I went to see my aunt. She said I was a spoiled brat, she said her husband was worse than Carl. She said Carl was a good husband compared to most. My aunt said I should be grateful for Carl, he doesn’t push me around. Sometimes I think she’s right, but I can’t stand it, I can’t stand living with him. I wanted a divorce, that’s why I’m here. I wanted a divorce, but then when he walked out of the house I ran after him, I ran all the way down the street screaming for him, trying to hold on to his jacket. I couldn’t be alone, I didn’t know how to do things. How could I do it? Pay bills. I’ve never paid a bill in my life. And the bulb in the kitchen light went out and I just sat there and cried. I thought I’d be living in the dark. I cried and I begged him to come back, the Nazi, the martinet, and I kept trying to get him to act human. So he had me locked up again. My aunt, she belongs to a suicide group. A suicide group! She wanted me to join.’ Lily laughed richly.

‘Suicide group?’

‘Yes, they call each other up, you know, late at night, they say things like, “This is a gray day and tomorrow the sky will be bluer,” or “I’m here pulling for you, I know you’ll have the courage to come through this.”’ She laughed again, the old rich laugh, and there was no hysteria in it. Nor did she seem to be shaking. ‘I saw an ad for a group like that once. It had big letters CALL US IF YOU NEED ANYTHING, something like that, and then it said if you had a drug problem or if you felt suicidal or if you had any problem at all you wanted to talk to someone about, to call them, and they had this telephone number. Then in small print it said, “Mondays through Thursdays, noon until 10:00
P.M.
” I took the number down but I never used it. I never felt bad at those hours.’ Laughter.

‘The trouble is,’ she continued, breaking often into laughter, ‘I’m not suicidal! It’s like having a cold instead of pneumonia: there’s nothing anybody can do. The psychiatrist – what a joke! He has us all wearing makeup, dolled-up like Mrs Astor’s horse. We walk around with all this makeup, going to tea, my dear.’

A small plump woman meandered across the lawn and dropped alone on a bench. She had frizzy hair and a bewildered look. ‘There’s Inez,’ Lily said. ‘Her husband doesn’t come to see her much, not like Carl. He shows up with the kids almost every Sunday. They don’t stay long,
but nobody is going to be able to say he didn’t do everything right. Inez’s husband only comes once in a while. I listen to them talking. She cries, the tears run down her cheeks, she cries softly, you know, not huge sobs or shrieks, just like a continual soft rain. And she whimpers, she says, “Please, Joe, let me out. I promise I’ll be good this time, I’ll try to be a good wife, honest, I’ll really try, I’ll learn how.” But she’s too smart, you know? She could never retard herself enough to be a good wife.’

Inez suddenly got up from the bench and knelt on the ground behind it. It looked as if she were worshiping the tree.

‘She loves bugs,’ Lily said. ‘She watches them all the time. She used to read books about bugs when she lived at home, but her husband thinks that’s crazy, she doesn’t vacuum the rug or wash the dishes, all she does is read about bugs. The psychiatrist agreed with him. They think she shouldn’t be encouraged in crazy ways, so they won’t let her have any books. But she still watches the bugs!’ Lily crowed triumphantly.

‘And there’s Sylvia.’ She pointed to a very thin woman, tiny, neat, and plain. Her hair was done in an elaborate beehive, and her mouth was a brilliant red gash. ‘Her husband never comes. She’s been here for eight months. She got married fifteen years ago and she wanted kids, but her husband couldn’t have any, so she went to work, she was an art teacher in a grade school. She just lived for her husband. Then about a year ago her husband walked out on her and went to live with a fat Puerto Rican woman who had five kids. They lived just a few blocks away from her, she kept seeing him. She tried to go it alone, but she was miserable. She was so bitter, because she’d wanted kids and hadn’t had them because of him. She begged him to come back. She was so lonely. He wouldn’t do it, he just kept telling her how ugly she was. So she looked at the Puerto Rican woman and she looked at herself and she figured it out and she took all her savings and went to the hospital and had an operation, silicone, you know? To give her breasts. Two thousand dollars it cost her. But when she was recovering, the nurse looked at her and said, “You poor thing, did you have a mastectomy?” It was a terrible failure. She cried, but the doctor took his money just the same. Then she put on suntan lotion and went to her husband, and finally he came back, but every time they had sex he put a pillow over her face because he said he couldn’t stand to look at her. She started to feel sick. She thought he was poisoning her. She said he was still seeing the other woman. He said she was crazy. She got worse and worse, she was crazy suspicious, she would call him up
at work. She couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking he was trying to kill her, she was scared when he had the pillow over her face that he would smother her. He took her to a psychiatrist and the doctor asked him if there was any truth to her suspicions and he swore there wasn’t and the doctor said she was paranoid and she ended up here. She is sort of peaceful, but she cries a lot. They give her medication for that. No matter what life does to you, if you cry, you’re crazy. Even animals cry, don’t they, Mira? Anyway, for a while now she hasn’t been crying, so they thought they’d let her out and they notified her husband. And he came tearing over, he didn’t want her let out. What a damn fool! He came in the open convertible with the Puerto Rican woman and her five kids, and the nurse saw them and told the doctor and the doctor confronted him and he admitted it, admitted he’d been seeing her all along and the doctor was furious and said that it was his lie that had kept her locked up for eight months. He blames the husband. But I say, how come he believed the husband and not Sylvia? I mean, it’s just as possible she might be telling the truth. But they’d never think that. They always believe the man. All women are a little crazy, they think. So she’s getting out next week, and she’s going back to live with him. Her husband!’ Lily laughed. ‘I told her I thought this place had made her
go
crazy!’