The Women's Room (42 page)

‘The problem,’ Mira began firmly, trying to hold at bay the wave of insanity she felt washing over her, ‘is that these women think too much about men. I mean, their men are everything to them. If the men think they are attractive, they are; if they don’t, they’re not. They give men the power to determine their identities, their value, to accept or reject them. They have no selves.’ She finished, pursing her thin, severe mouth.

‘Yes,’ Lily said, her tragic eyes scanning the lawn for another example to tell Mira about.

‘Why don’t they just forget about the men and be themselves?’ Mira insisted.

Lily turned her terrible eyes toward her as if she were foolish. ‘Yes,’ she said again. ‘We all know that. How do you do it?’

‘You just cut them out of your heart, the way I did Norm,’ Mira said self-righteously.

‘Oh, Carl is so cold, so cold. He makes me feel so worthless.’ She talked on about Carl for a long time, telling tale after tale.

‘Stop talking about Carl! Stop thinking about him!’ Mira cried finally.

Lily shrugged. ‘He was most of the life I knew. I lived life through Carl. I was in the house and he was in the world. When I was young, I had energy, but they put it all out. The kitchen light went out and I didn’t know how to fix it. It was a funny bulb, you know? That long thin kind, what do you call them? Fluorescent? I didn’t know you could buy them in stores. I thought they lasted forever. Carl went to the store and got one, and he stood on a stepladder and took out the plastic square in the ceiling and took out one bulb and put in another. I couldn’t get over how he did that. How did he know to do that? All I could do was sit in the dark and cry.

‘Carl, the mechanical man, killed himself so he could kill me. Why did he need to do that? He walks around like an automaton: I kept screaming, I shrieked. So he locks me in here. In Harlem the government pushes heroin to keep the niggers down and doctors by the thousands give barbiturates and tranquilizers to all the housewives: keep the natives quiet. When the drugs don’t work anymore, they put the blacks in jail and us in here. Don’t make noise. I read a poem once, it had a line, something like “You keep stiller when everytime you move something jangles.” This time he won’t get me out. He never had enough money to take us out to dinner, but he has the twelve thousand dollars a year it costs him to keep me in here.

‘Why should he miss me? All I ever was was trouble. He takes the kids to McDonald’s; he pays a woman to clean the house. He doesn’t miss sex, we never had sex. I went to see a lawyer about it once and he said if you have sex once a year you can’t divorce your husband for that. Is that true the other way round too? Once a year. It was the one thing I liked, so he turned off. Sometimes after I had my shower and was lying in bed, he’d go in to take a shower too, and I’d get really excited because he never took his shower at night, and I’d hop out of bed and put my best nightgown on and I’d lie there waiting and he’d shave, and he’d be humming, and I’d be getting all aroused and then he’d come into the bedroom and get in bed and turn over and switch off the light and settle himself down and say,
“Good
night, Lily!” real happy, you know? A sadist, he is, a Nazi. So of course I’d scream and shout. What would you do? Why did he have to do that? I wouldn’t have cared if he put a pillow over my face, I was that desperate. I tried, but I couldn’t have an affair. I just felt too guilty. I tried to masturbate. My doctor told me my insides were all drying up, they were like the insides of an eighty-year-old woman. He tried to tell me how to masturbate, but I could never do it. Carl, who knows what he is? It’s as though he
put me in a box and inside it was all the color and the passion and sex, and then he spent the rest of his life holding a hose over the box, putting me out. What did I know about him? I married a suit.’

She is still there, Lily. Mira hasn’t seen her in years. I haven’t either. It’s not because I don’t care about her, it’s that I sometimes get confused about who is who, I think I’m Lily, or that she’s me, and when I’m there I’m never sure which of us is supposed to get up and bend and kiss the other and walk down the stone paths to the gate and go out into the parking lot with all the other people who look just the same as the ones inside who get into cars and drive away. And even when I’m in the car I’m not sure I’m supposed to be, I don’t feel as if I’m in my body. My body is driving the car, is sitting on the seat, but I’m still in the hospital, my voice is going on endlessly, wildly, I can’t stop it, it keeps running on and on. She had boundless energy, Lily, but it all went into her eyes and her voice. She never tires, she never even flags, she never runs out of material. She talks about Moslem women, Chinese women, women in in the macho countries, Spanish, Italian, Mexican women: ‘All women are our burden,’ she says, and I know she didn’t read that in a book because she doesn’t read. ‘I don’t feel separate when I hear about them, I feel as if it’s happening to me. I think we are reincarnated and I can remember being other women in other times, in other places. I carry the weight of that with me, I bend under the load of faggots slowly climbing a hill in Greece; I slink down the streets furtively in purdah, feeling wrong that I’m seen at all; my feet are crippled from being bound; I have the clitoridectomy and become my husband’s possession, feeling nothing in sex and giving birth in agony. I live in countries where the law gives my husband the right to beat me, to lock me up,
disciplina.’

Actually, Lily and I aren’t so different: she’s inside those gates, I’m inside these. We’re both insane, both running on and over the same track, around and around hopelessly. Only I have a job and an apartment and I have to clean my own place and cook my own meals and I don’t have to have electric shocks twice a week. It’s strange how they think that giving you electric shocks will make you forget the truths you know. Maybe what they really think is that if they punish you enough, you’ll pretend to forget the truths you know, you’ll be good and do your housework. I’ve known for a long time that hypocrisy is the secret of sanity. You mustn’t let them know you know. Lily knows that too, and the last two times she used it, she pretended to be docile and sorry for her sins and they let her out. But now she’s too angry, she
won’t pretend. I sent her a letter, I told her what happened to George Jackson. But she hasn’t answered.

Mira sent Lily a book on bugs to give to Inez, but a nurse found it and took it away from her and Inez got wild and violent and tried to attack the nurse and she was sent to a different ward where they use straitjackets and give them electric shocks every day, and they don’t get dressed up and made up every morning. So much for good intentions. In Russia they put you in insane asylums if you disagree with the State: it’s not so different here. Keep the natives quiet.

6

‘It’s not that way for us,’ Kyla insisted. ‘We were lucky, we were born later.’

‘Yeah,’ Clarissa agreed. ‘I mean, I never thought about myself as being constricted. I played football all through high school.’

‘And I always knew I’d have a career.’

‘I will admit,’ Clarissa added, ‘that they managed to shunt me from science to the humanities. But it’s not terribly important to me where I use my mind, as long as I use it. And in fact, I’m sort of glad they pushed me in this direction.’

‘The humanities,’ Iso put in, ‘being more humane.’

‘The field is, if not all the players,’ Kyla said.

Val was sitting silent, which was unusual enough that we all turned and looked at her.

‘No, I’m not disagreeing. Certainly things are better for your generation. But I am wondering how much better. You all come from top schools, you’re all privileged, given the general state of women, and none of you has any kids yet. I don’t want to be a doom-monger, but I think you may be underestimating what you’re up against.’

‘In a way it doesn’t matter. We have to believe that we can do anything we want to; otherwise we’re fucked before we begin,’ Clarissa argued.

‘Yes. If you don’t fall head over heels into the trap because you didn’t see if beforehand,’ Val warned grimly.

‘You really are being a doom-monger,’ Iso protested.

‘Maybe. But you are being naive if you really believe that a situation that has existed as long as written history has changed
so much in fifteen or twenty years that you are not going to have to deal with it. You feel lucky. You’ve escaped. The hell you have. You’re still in the convent. Along with all the little boys. Who was saying before that all the male grad students at Harvard seem to be missing the basic organ? Everybody wants to stay locked in here, because nobody wants to become what they know they’re going to have to become when they get out there. And the chances are they’ll become it: you don’t have much chance against IT.’

‘The IT theory of history!’ Kyla proclaimed.

‘We need Milton here to explain how we’re free.’

‘Sufficient to have stood but free to fall,’ Kyla laughed.

‘Are you? Are you?’ Val stormed hugely.

‘Maybe not, but …’ Kyla began again to tell us of her wonderful marriage, their agreements, their arrangements …

‘Their filthy refrigerators,’ Mira put in.

‘Oh, Mira!’ Kyla said with testy affection. ‘Why do you always have to bring us down to the level of the mundane, the ordinary, the stinking, fucking refrigerator? I was talking about ideals, nobility, principles …’ And leaped up and charged across the room and threw herself on Mira and hugged her, kept hugging her, saying, ‘Thank you, oh, thank you, Mira, for being so wonderful, so awful, for always remembering the stinking, filthy refrigerator!’ She caroled on, the others in laughter, that serious conversation ended.

Mira grimaced. ‘How can I forget it?’ she wailed.

‘Oh, poor Mira!’ Kyla cried. ‘Stuck forever through history with the stinking refrigerator!’

‘Write a paper about it,’ Clarissa suggested. ‘“The Image of the Refrigerator in the Twentieth-Century Novel.”’

‘“The Frost-Free Syndrome in ‘Fire and Ice,’”’ Iso called.

‘No, NO!’ Mira shouted. ‘It has to be a filthy refrigerator, one that needs to be cleaned, not just defrosted. Not that defrosting isn’t bad enough!’

‘That could be a song,’ Iso decided. ‘“It was bad enough when I had to defrost you, baby, but now I have to clean you out.”’

‘Or, “You ain’t nothin’ but a filthy frig, but I love you just the same,”’ Kyla sang.

They all clamored, shouting titles at her. She laughed, and then, as titles flew around the room, echoing many that had recently adorned the first pages of papers written by this very group, she hung her
head, her eyes streaming, gasping with laughter. She pulled her head up, finally.

‘You can all go fuck yourselves!’ she shouted, and they shrieked, they hooted, they whistled between their teeth. Kyla began to applaud, then the others; Clarissa stood up, they all stood up, she was surrounded by a circle of applauding madwomen all shrieking with laughter: ‘You did it! You did it!’ they cried.

‘Have I passed a test?’ she yelled. ‘An initiation rite?’

‘See how many you know,’ Kyla challenged, bending down and baring her teeth at Mira.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, how many are there? There aren’t many, that’s the problem. Now in Shakespeare’s time …’

‘He made his up!’ Clarissa declared. ‘You have to use those available to you from IT!’

‘The IT theory of language!’ Iso agreed.

‘Shit,’ Mira said, and they all applauded and hooted again. ‘Listen, there just aren’t many. Poverty of language. There’s damn and hell and bitch and bastard and shit and fuck and motherfucker. Now there’s an interesting word …’

But she didn’t have a chance then, in that room. Amid the applause, the animated talk, Iso had put the record player on and soon Janis Joplin was ripping across the room and they had broken into groups of two having tête-à-têtes that would, in time, become the subject of other tête-à-têtes, and in time, everybody would know everything about everybody else, and everybody would talk about everything they knew about everybody else and everybody accepted everything about everybody else. That was the way that was.

7

It wasn’t always that way. Mira and Val and I were part of what one eminent professor of English in this exalted institution had referred to sneeringly as the ‘Geritol crowd.’ There were a few older men, too, mostly Jesuit priests. I don’t know why Harvard accepted us at all; it was not its usual practice. Perhaps because of the war – we were eminently undraftable. But we were few enough in number to feel terribly alone in that mass of undirected faces, all of which looked under twenty. They weren’t of course: Kyla was twenty-four, Isolde, twenty-six, Clarissa, twenty-three. But Mira and I were thirty-eight and Val was thirty-nine.
That was quite a difference. Many of our professors were younger than we were; the chairman of graduate studies was thirty-five. It is strange. All of us had lived much alone and had great confidence in our own perceptions, and were not used to being treated like fools, or patronized. When the graduate chairman treated us like recalcitrant children, it made us very uncomfortable. But we didn’t know what to do about it. You couldn’t seem to assert human equality within the limitations of institutional relations. If you know what I mean. So you dropped out. At least I did. I mean, you just didn’t talk much to them, you did your work and got your grades and had nothing at all to do with them if you could help it. When you were finished and asked for recommendations, you got nice letters about your excellence as a mother figure, or your elderly stability.

Anyway, it took us some time to find each other, and in the beginning, Mira walked the streets of Cambridge feeling like a foreign and condemned species. With her tinted, curled hair, her three-piece knit suit, her stockings and girdle, her high heels and matching purse, she felt like a dinosaur in the Bronx. She passed them, one after another, mostly young faces, bearded if male, with long hair if female, wearing shabby jeans or Civil War uniforms or capes or long granny dresses or saris or anything else their imaginations had come up with. No one looked at her; no one looked at anyone else. If they did happen to look at her, their eyes clicked her into her category and clicked off. She went berserk.