The Women's Room (8 page)

The lindy is a man’s dance. The male gets to hurl and whirl his partner all around the floor and he can just stand there. It must have been invented for men who didn’t know how to dance. Mira was dizzy from all the swinging around, but she was loving it. She was moving and swinging and her head pounded, but the outside world had disappeared, she did not have to think about Lanny. She was music and movement, she was irresponsible, she did not even have to think about her partner, since whoever he was, she didn’t care about him. She was whirling in a great ballroom, she was sheer motion.

As a song ended, Biff appeared suddenly at her side and took her elbow in his hand. He whispered in her ear: ‘I think you’d better leave.’

She turned on him indignantly. ‘Why?’

‘Mira.’ His voice was urgent. ‘Come on.’

‘I have to wait for Lanny.’

‘Mira.’ His voice was low, but almost desperate. She was totally bewildered.

‘Trust me,’ he said, and since she did, she docilely allowed him to guide her through the crowd and out the back door. They stood there for a moment, then he said quickly, ‘Let’s go upstairs.’

Upstairs was an apartment shared by Biff and Lanny and two other boys. She had been there at many parties, and Biff had often been the one to drive her home after Lanny collapsed, using Lanny’s car. So she felt no nervousness at all. But the fresh air had made her know how drunk she was, three Canadians being more than her system was used to, and when they got upstairs, she fell on the couch.

‘No,’ Biff said, and pointed toward the bedroom.

She obeyed him easily, let him help her up and lead her gently toward
the bedroom she knew was Lanny’s. He helped her gently onto the bed, and when she was lying there watching the room swirl, he softly placed a blanket over her, went out, and closed the door. She thought she heard him fuss with the key, but the dizziness made her so wretched that she forced herself to go to sleep.

After a time she awoke, gradually, drifting in and out of puzzlement. She seemed to hear noise, shouting, slamming, arguing. It grew louder. She tried to sit up. The room was still whirling, and she half-sat, resting her body on her arm. She listened, trying to make out what was happening. The noises grew nearer, they seemed to be coming down the hall toward the bedrooms. There was a crash, slams, it sounded like a fight. She leaped up and headed for the door and tried to open it. It was locked. She fell back and sat on the bed, sitting there with her shoes off, huddled in the blanket. The noises subsided. There were door slams, several of them. Then silence. She started to get up again, planning to pound for Biff to let her out, when suddenly the door flew open, light poured in blinding her, and a figure was standing in the doorway.

‘I hope you’re satisfied, you slut!’ Lanny shouted.

She blinked. He slammed the door. She sat there blinking. There were other slams, then again quiet, then the door opened again. Biff came in and switched on a dim lamp on the bureau. She blinked at him. He came over and sat on the bed beside her.

‘What happened?’

His voice sounded thin, like someone else’s voice. He talked around and around; she did not understand what he was saying. She asked questions; he tried to parry them. She insisted. At last she understood. The dancing, he said, and Lanny’s leaving her alone. It was all Lanny’s fault, the bastard. So those guys got the wrong impression. It was not her fault. They didn’t know her as Biff knew her, didn’t know her innocence, her ‘purity’ he called it. So …

‘All of them?’ she asked, appalled.

He nodded grimly.

Her mind churned that. How would they manage that? ‘In turns?’ she asked him.

He shrugged disgustedly.

She put her hand on his arm. ‘Biff, you had to fight them all off? Oh, Biff!’

He was frail; he weighed less than she did. ‘It was okay. Not real
fighting, just some shoving and yelling. No harm done.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll take you home. I’ve got the keys to Lanny’s car.’

He had tried hard enough to spare her the ugliness, as if not knowing were somehow less ugly than knowing. But nothing could spare her that. He drove her home in sympathetic silence, and while she was endlessly grateful to him not only for doing what he had done for her, but for being who he was, she could not speak to him. She thanked him over and over, in a monotone, but could not say anything more. She went up to her room and lay on the bed and fell immediately into a deep sleep and slept for fourteen hours. The next day she did not get up at all. She told her mother she didn’t feel well. All Sunday she lay there.

13

She was overwhelmed. This was what it was all about, all the strange things she had been taught. Everything fell into place, everything made sense. And that everything was too big for her. Other girls went to bars, other girls danced. The difference was she had appeared to be alone. That a woman was not marked as the property of some male made her a bitch in heat to be attacked by any male, or even by all of them at once. That a woman could not go out in public and enjoy herself dancing without worrying what every male in the place was thinking or even worse, what they might do, seemed to her an injustice so extreme that she could not swallow it.

She was a woman and that alone was enough to deprive her of freedom no matter how much the history books pretended that women’s suffrage had ended inequality, or that women’s feet had been bound only in an ancient and outmoded and foreign place like China. She was constitutionally unfree. She could not go out alone at night. She could not in a moment of loneliness go out to a local tavern to have a drink in company. The twice she had taken the train during the daytime, to make excursions to museums in New York, she had been continually approached. She could not even appear to be lacking an escort; if that escort decided to abandon her, she was helpless. And she couldn’t defend herself: she had to depend on a male for that. Even frail, limping Biff could handle such a situation better than she. Had those guys gotten her, all
the rage and hauteur and fighting in the world wouldn’t have helped her.

And she would never be free, never. Never. It would always be like this. She thought about her mother’s friends and suddenly understood them. No matter where she went or what she did, she would always have to worry about what men were thinking, how they looked at her, what they might do. One day some months before, in an elevator on her way to the dentist’s office, she had overheard an ugly aged woman with dyed red hair and a crooked back talking to another woman, fiftyish and fat, about rape. Both of them were clucking their tongues, talking about locks on doors and windows, and they looked to her as if to include her in conversation, as if she were one of them. She had looked away, full of contempt for them. Who would want to rape them? It was wishful thinking, she thought. Yet a few nights later there was an item in the newspaper about an eighty-year-old woman, raped and killed in her own apartment.

She thought about what would have happened had Biff not been there and her mind went black with the horror, the blood, the desecration. It was not her virginity she treasured, but her right to herself, to her own mind and body. Horrible, horrible it would have been, and her beloved Lanny would no doubt have called her slut and said she had gotten what she deserved. He would simply have erased her from his list of women one is required to treat with respect. That was the way things were. And no matter how high she held her head, no matter how alone she walked, that is the way things would stay. It was ridiculous to talk about injustice; it was useless to protest. She knew from her few experiences of talking about women and freedom that such protests were always taken by men as invitations to their taking greater freedoms with her.

Mira retreated. She was defeated. Her pride, such as was left her, was spent entirely in not letting the defeat show. She walked alone on campus, head high, an icy look on her face. She sat alone in the cafeteria, or with Biff, or a girl from class. She averted her eyes from any male who passed her, and never smiled at them even when they greeted her. She was never sure which of them had been there that night, there had been so many, such familiar faces, so dizzy and smoky an air. If she happened to see Lanny at a distance, she walked the other way.

At the end of the school year, she met Norm. He was the son of
friends of the family, and she met him at a family cookout. He was gentle and intelligent, he treated her with respect, and he never pressed her toward sex. Her dream of choosing and living a life of her own had vanished. Any life in which she was alone would contain the risk of encountering that pack of savages. Bitterly, she thought she was being unkind to those usually called savages, who would probably never behave that way: only civilized men behave that way. Bitterness closed her in. She had lost her life. She would live out a half-life, like the rest of women. She had no choice but to protect herself against a savage world she did not understand and by her gender alone was made unfit to deal with. There was marriage and there was the convent. She retreated into the one as if it were the other, and wept at her wedding. She knew she was renouncing the world, the world that a year before had shimmered with excitement and allure. She had been taught her place. She had learned the limits of her courage. She had failed, she had been vanquished. She would devote herself to Norm, and crept into his arms as into a fortress. It was true what they said: a woman’s place is in the home. When Biff heard she was getting married, he came up to her in the cafeteria, congratulating her in front of a group of young men. ‘I really congratulate Norm,’ he said loudly. ‘He’s getting a virgin, that I know.’ It was to justify her in some way, she knew; but also, he meant it as a compliment to her. She closed her mind to him, then. They thought one thing or they thought another: but their thinking was all the same.

14

Some dramatic sense, probably culled from reading plays, or female
Bildungsromane
, which always end with the heroine’s marriage, make me want to stop here, make a formal break, like the curtain going down. Marriage should mean a great change, a new life. But it was less a new beginning for Mira than a continuation. Although the external events of her life changed, the internal ones remained much the same.

Oh, Mira was able to leave her parents’ tense home, and pick out little things – towels, throw rugs, some curtains – that would turn their furnished rooms into her own ‘home,’ and she enjoyed that. She and Norm had taken a small furnished place near Coburg, where Norm was in medical school. She had left school, and with few regrets. She did not want to go back there again, to have to look at those faces again.
She did most of her reading on her own anyway, she reasoned, and would learn as much out of school as in it. Norm would finish med school and his internship while she worked to support them, and once he was out, the future would be secure. They had worked it all out.

After a honeymoon spent in Norm’s parents’ New Hampshire cottage, they returned, he to the books and she to try to find a job. She was hindered in this because she could not drive; she asked Norm to teach her. He was reluctant. In the first place, he needed the car most days, in the second, she was not mechanically apt and would be a poor driver. He took her in his arms. ‘I couldn’t bear to live if anything happened to you.’ Something nagged at her, but she was so encompassed by his love, so grateful for it, that she did not probe to find out what it was. Taking buses, and begging her mother to drive her around, she finally found a job as a clerk-typist for $35 a week. They could live on that, but not well, and she decided to try to get a job in New York, commuting back and forth from New Jersey. Norm was horrified. The city! It was such a dangerous place. Commutation would eat up a third of what she earned. She would have to get up early and arrive home late. And then there would be the men …

Mira had never told Norm about the night at Kelley’s, but he either had the same fears as she, or he had sensed that she had them, because the unspoken threat contained in the word was one he was to continue to use for the next years – indeed, until it was no longer necessary. If he had not, Mira might have learned to overcome her fears. Armed by the title of
Mrs
, property of some man, she felt stronger in the world. They would be less likely to attack her if they knew some man had her under his protection.

She gave up the idea of the city, accepted the clerk-typist job; Norm got a part-time job, spending much of his time reading beforehand the texts he would be studying in the fall, and they settled into their life together.

She had enjoyed their honeymoon. It was incredible delight to be able to kiss and hold without fear. Norm was using only condoms, but somehow being married made it less threatening. She was shy about revealing her body. So was Norm for that matter. And the two of them giggled and delighted in their mutual shyness, their mutual pleasure. The only problem was, Mira did not reach orgasm.

After a month, she decided she was frigid. Norm said that was ridiculous, that she was only inexperienced. He had married friends and he knew that it would pass in time. She asked him, timidly, if it
would be possible for him to hold back a little, that she felt she was on the verge, but then he would come, and lose all erectness. He said no healthy male could or should try to hold back. She asked, even more timidly, if they could try a second time. He said that would be unhealthy for him, and probably impossible. He was a medical student, and she believed him. She settled back to enjoy what she could, and waited for him to fall asleep to masturbate herself to orgasm. He always fell asleep quickly after sex.

So they went on. They entertained friends on occasion: she learned to cook. He always shared the laundry chores with her and took her grocery shopping on Friday nights, when she got paid. If she teased him enough, he would help her clean the apartment on Saturday. Sometimes she felt very grown up: when offering a drink to a guest, say, or when putting on makeup and jewelry before leaving to go out with her husband. But most of the time she felt like a child who had stumbled, bumbled into the wrong house. Her job was stultifyingly dull; the long bus rides with other gray, tired people made her feel grimy and poor. At night, Norm turned on the TV (the one purchase they had made with wedding-gift money), and since there was only the kitchen and the bed-living room, she had no choice but to hear it. She tried to read, but her concentration was continually broken. The tube is demanding. Life felt hideously empty. But she told herself that was only because women are educated to think that marriage will be a sudden panacea to all emptiness, and although she’d fought off such notions, she had no doubt been infected by them. She told herself it was her own fault, that if she had wanted to do real studying and intellectual work, she could. But, she argued, she was so tired after eight hours in an office, two on buses, preparing dinner, washing dishes – a job Norm simply refused to touch. Besides, Norm always had TV on at night. Well, she argued back, it would be better when he started school; then he would have to study at night. Nevertheless, she was approaching her twentieth birthday: look, her other self said, what Keats had done by twenty. And finally her whole self would rise up and wipe it all out. Oh, don’t bother me with it! I do the best I can!