The Women's Room (71 page)

13

The first time she had the nightmare was a week before her orals, and she had it every night after that. She would wake up damp and shaking and get up and smoke and pace around the apartment. But she did not tell Harley. She did not tell anyone.

She dreamed she was in the room where orals were held, a wood-paneled room with small paned windows and a broad shining table. The three men who were to examine her were sitting at one end of the table quarrelling as she walked in. She had just stepped
inside the door when she spied the pile in the corner. Instantly she knew what it was, but she was incredulous, she was so ashamed, she moved nearer to check it out. It was what she thought. She was horrified. Those stained sanitary napkins, those bloody underpants were hers, she knew they were hers, and she knew the men would know it too. She tried to stand in front of them, but there was no way she could conceal them. The men stopped quarrelling, they had turned to face her, they were peering at her …

Her apprehension became severe anxiety. She made more lists, swiftly, grimly; she ran to the library first thing in the morning and read until Child closed, but at the end of the day she knew she had absorbed nothing, that she had read words, words, words. She did tell Harley about her panic, but he could not take it seriously.

‘Kyla, for God’s sake! That’s ridiculous! You have nothing to worry about!’

He was impatient with her repeated fears; he insisted her examiners were all assholes and she would run circles around them. Beneath his impatience, she sensed his disdain for grown men who would involve themselves with something as trivial as English literature, but she was too panicked, too caught up in terror, to talk about it. She barely spoke to Harley: she read, day and night, made lists, crossed things out, and every day, dreamed the same dream.

The day of her exam, she entered the wood-paneled room and saw the shining broad table and the three eminences sitting at it. They were quarrelling about which window, if any, should be open and how wide. Their quarrel lasted some minutes and contained surprising snarliness: over a window? she thought. They were like an aged trio who have lived together squabbling for fifty years. She glanced at the corner, but it was empty. She sat down. Her whole body was shaking.

A little over two hours later, the judgment having been whispered in her ear by the director, she trembled down the wooden stairs of Warren House. She could not see, but she held her chin firm. She would not cry here, not in front of them, not in Warren House. She walked down carefully, holding on to the banister. She would not fall here, not here. Objects glimmered and swam in her vision, but there was a group of people, they did look familiar, it was, yes, it was Iso and Clarissa and Mira and Ben, and someone asked, ‘How did you do?’ and she said, the words gurgled out of her wet throat, ‘I passed,’ and they cheered, but they must have seen, must have been able to know, because they gathered her in their arms and helped her out and things were gray,
but then there was fresh air and she was being held up and they were walking, they were all walking together and the air was fresh and sweet and it was April, and things were in bud.

They took her to the Toga and ordered drinks, and asked her about it, and she repeated some of the questions and watched their horrified faces, and then she was able to laugh too. ‘Wasn’t that impossible? They only asked it to shake me up, but it did shake me up!’

They drank and drank. Someone got up to phone Val, who showed up a half hour later, and someone, she had a vague feeling – it was Mira, she thought, after Iso whispered to her – telephoned Harley. But Harley never came. Kyla did not ask why, she did not ask about it. They ordered food, and after a while they left and stopped to buy a gallon of cheap wine and went back to Iso’s and sat talking and drinking until late. Kyla did not leave.

It was after one when Iso shut the door on Val. She came back to see Kyla perched like a tiny child on the edge of a wooden chair, her arms around herself, hugging herself, shivering.

‘I really failed. That’s the truth,’ she said.

Iso paled. She sat down. ‘You mean you lied?’

‘Oh. No. No, they said I passed. Hooten came up and whispered to me that I passed.’ Iso sighed. ‘But I really failed.’

Iso poured them more wine. ‘Iso, it’s no use. I can’t do it. I can’t make it in their world. I can’t stand it.’ She told Iso about her dream.

‘Did you talk to anybody about it? That might have helped. Did you tell Harley?’

She shook her head. ‘He would only have had more contempt for me than he has.’ She described Harley’s response to her panic. ‘It’s all of a piece – Harley, Harvard, the whole fucking world, for God’s sake! I’m just going to go home and have a couple of babies and spend the rest of my life baking bread and growing flowers and sewing gorgeous clothes. I can’t stand this, I can’t.’

‘Shit!’ Iso breathed.

‘You think it’s wrong?’

‘Oh, Christ!’ Iso stood up and started pacing. ‘I can’t stand what you’re feeling.’

‘They demoralized me, they had that kind of power. I gave them that kind of power. And you can tell from the dream what the grounds were. I can’t feel legitimate in the face of them. I’m sick of trying. I’m sick of trying to prove to Harley that I’m as rational and intelligent a human being as he, I’m sick of trying to prove
to Harvard that I too can write disembodied intellectual tours de force.’

Iso paced, holding
her
arms around herself, hugging herself. Kyla saw, and knew, that Iso was feeling her pain as keenly as she was. ‘The thing is,’ Iso said, her voice obviously fighting for calmness, ‘you’d be bored baking bread and growing flowers.’

‘No, I wouldn’t. They’re great things to do.’

‘Yes, they are. And almost everything in me wants to say they are the best things to do, that they are the things that really matter.’

‘Not according to Harvard. Or the Pentagon.’

‘No. And the thing is – it isn’t that I think Harvard or the Pentagon is right – or the male establishment, in any form – or that if you stay in it, you’ll do more important things than baking bread or growing flowers, because most of what they do is even more transient, less nourishing, less creative – and having babies has to be the greatest thing there is – but,’ she turned to face Kyla, ‘the seeds were planted in you so long ago. There’s no escape for you. Don’t you see that?’

She sat down, trembling, and sipped her wine.

Kyla stared at her.

‘I know because they’re in me too,’ Iso shivered.

‘Seeds.’

‘I’m bright. You’re bright. Maybe we’re even brilliant. We have had opportunities lots of women never get. Our aspirations are equal to our intelligence and our backgrounds. We want to make it in their fucking world. But suppose we quit, suppose we say the hell with it, let them destroy themselves, I’m going to go off and cultivate my garden. Well, suppose
you
do that. It would be different for me. Suppose you go off with Harley or somebody and quit the shit and just have babies and grow flowers and bake bread. You still won’t feel legitimate. You’ll still feel resentful, even more so, of the world out there. You’ll hate it twofold because you’ll feel you failed in it. And you’ll hate him – the man – the one who is legitimate out there, who can make it without its seeming to devour his soul.’

‘Only seeming to,’ Kyla said hardly, sarcastically. ‘Mira did call Harley tonight, didn’t she?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Iso said evasively.

‘And he wouldn’t come. Well, I suppose because you were there. But why wasn’t Harley at the foot of those steps?’

Iso looked into her drink.

‘So I’m in a bind?’ Kyla grinned and stretched out her legs. ‘The
paradoxical seeds of destruction have me in their grip?’

Iso laughed.

‘Come over here and give me a kiss, you doom-monger, you!’

Iso strode over. ‘Listen,’ she said, smiling, ‘I don’t want to be a substitute. You know – if Harley doesn’t come through, there’s always Iso.’

Kyla’s face wrenched out of shape. ‘Oh, God. I tried to make it the respectable way! Iso, I love you. I can’t promise anything. But then, can you?’

Iso laughed and sat on the floor and Kyla slid from her chair and sat with her, and they held each other, and kissed, for a long time.

14

‘It’s hard to keep up,’ Mira said, gazing around Val’s cluttered living room. Everywhere there were papers, piles of mimeographed leaflets, pamphlets. ‘As far as I know, she’s staying at Iso’s, and Harley’s blowing his top. He’s saying some really vicious things. I guess you were right. He didn’t, originally, take it seriously.’

‘Men,’ Val said with disgust.

Mira gazed at her. ‘I haven’t seen Tad for a long time. Is something wrong?’

Val’s mouth twisted. ‘Oh, that’s over.’

‘Are you okay?’

Val puffed on a cigarette. ‘We all seem to be going through the doldrums these days. Hey, what’s the etymology of that, English major? Doldrums.’

‘I don’t know. What happened?’

‘It isn’t Tad. I mean, I don’t think so. There’s always the possibility I cared about him more than I knew. That’s
my
problem. Some people’s problem is that they think they care a lot about somebody and they really don’t. Mine is that I always figure I don’t care that much, that I can do fine without them, and discover I love them or need them more than I knew. But I don’t think that’s what it is this time. It’s guilt, it’s letting in the guilt fairy. Once you start to question your actions, once you begin to let yourself think you might have been wrong about something – then everything topples, because one wrong action last week was founded on a choice made fifteen years ago, and you have to question everything, everything.’

Val laid her head in her hands.

Mira stared at her in terror. It had never occurred to her that Val might be vulnerable like the rest of the race; she had obviously, unconsciously, been attributing to Val some superhuman impermeability. But here Val was, shaken.

‘What happened?’

‘It was during Easter break,’ she began.

Chris had come home for the vacation. It was the first time she and Val had seen each other since Christmas, and they were completely wrapped up in each other. They talked late into the night that Chris arrived. They did not want Tad there, they wanted to talk alone, but Tad insisted on staying. It was awkward, they were annoyed, but Val did not want to hurt him. Finally, about two thirty, he went to bed, and they could talk alone, which they did until morning, kissing and holding each other before they drifted off into different rooms.

But next day, Tad was angry. The women slept late since they had not gone to bed until seven, and he was awake and adrift until the middle of the afternoon, when they arose. He was angry because of their exclusion of him the night before. And tactlessly, he hit Val with his anger as soon as she got up, before she’d even had her coffee. He glared at her and made a sarcastic remark about her sleeping late. She ignored him, and sat down with her coffee. He was silent then, except for noisily ruffling the sections of
The Times
he pretended to be reading.

‘And you make me feel like a goddamned outsider,’ he said suddenly. ‘Last night, you and Chris didn’t want to talk to me at all. You didn’t talk to me at all. You acted as if I wasn’t even there. You
ignored
me!’ he said, leaping up and walking to the stove and cursing the empty coffeepot and noisily putting the kettle on the heat. He turned back to Val, glaring, and announced, ‘I’m either a part of this family, or I’m not.’

Perhaps if Val had been fully awake, she would have handled things differently. As it was, she lifted her eyes up and looked at him sarcastically. ‘Obviously,’ she said in a cool dry voice, ‘you’re not.’

He acted as if she had slapped him. His whole face flinched, and for a moment she thought he was going to cry. She felt sorry as soon as she saw him. She wanted to run up to him and hold him, and say she was sorry, but it was too late. He stood there unsteadily.

She tried to modify. ‘At least,’ she said more gently, ‘when it comes to my relation with Chris. After all, she is my child. We are very close, and we haven’t seen each other in a long time. There are times we want to
be alone.’ It might perhaps have been all right; she couldn’t tell. She had hurt him, and was going to have to pay a price for that. He might in his head understand, but would not be consoled easily. It might have been all right, yet perversely, as it seemed to her even at the time, she added, ‘In fact, you are a very small part of my life, Tad. You must realize that. I’m almost forty-one, I’ve had a complicated life. You come barging in and decide we should be lovers, and I agree, and you seem to feel that gives you carte blanche to move into my life permanently. Where the hell do you come off? Did you ever ask me if I wanted you as a permanent fixture in my life? You just move in. You are completely insensitive to other people. You either retreat totally or you assert yourself totally, and it never occurs to you how other people are feeling. You act as if we were married or something. You talk as if you expect I would never again have sex with anybody but you. Fat chance!’

By the time she was finished, Tad’s face was a petrified blank. He looked at her with no expression, and walked out of the kitchen into the living room and just sat holding his head.

She finished her coffee. She was hot and angry, and surprised. She had not realized she was that angry. ‘Love,’ she muttered to herself. It makes you, she felt, hide your own anger from yourself, out of fear, so that by the time it does come out, it is poisonous. But she was not sorry. She felt just as she had when she was reaming him. Chris stumbled into the kitchen, sleep-eyed and grouchy.

‘What’s the matter with Tad?’

Val told her. ‘Ummm,’ Chris mumbled. Last night she had been annoyed with her mother for not sending Tad away. This morning she felt her mother had been unduly unkind. ‘That was pretty raw, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, it was pretty raw!’ Val exclaimed in exasperation. ‘You think I can manage to do everything perfectly?’