The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  ‘Six soon.’

  ‘Why doesn’t she get an abortion?’

  Bliss explained. Mira sat there hushed. ‘Lordy, lordy.’ she sighed finally.

  ‘In the old days, nobody had birth control.’

  ‘In the old days, babies died.’

  ‘So did mothers.’

  They fell silent. Bliss dropped Mira off and picked up her children. She put away the groceries, saw that the children were washed up, and put them to bed. She climbed the fence and knocked at Adele’s back door, and handed her the food and wine.

  ‘Come in for a while,’ Adele said. She looked desolate.

  ‘I can’t, the kids are alone,’ Bliss said, glad of an excuse. She did not want to have to look too hard at Adele’s pain.

  She went back and cleaned up the kitchen, then took a shower and washed her hair. She stayed a long time in the bathroom. She put lotion on her body after the shower and stood gazing at herself in the full-length mirror.

  She was thirty-one. Her body was smooth and white, and when she let it down, her red hair hung halfway to her waist. She looked like a flame, she thought, white at the center. She put on a wrapper and straightened the bathroom, then padded out in soft terry slippers and poured herself a glass of diet soda. She turned on the TV set and settled down on the couch with the dress she was making. It needed only a few touches, things that had to be done by hand. It would be beautiful, she thought. She was making it for her party.

  She liked this time of night when everything was quiet, especially when Bill was gone. She could sit with her thoughts and her quietness. Somehow, when Bill was around, even though he gave no sign of sensitivity, she had the feeling that he could sense her thoughts. And these days, she did not want him to sense them.

  Bliss had been brought up in a tight, poor home where there was often not enough food. Her father called himself a rancher, which was, she told people, a fancy word for dirt farmer. In fact, he had not really even been that, and the Texas shack – it was not much more than that – looked as bad as any she’d seen pictures of in Kentucky or Tennessee. There were a lot of children; some died. But Bliss was her mother’s pet. The woman saw Bliss’s quick mind, saw her sizing up situations and finding the best way to survive. The father was often drunk and sometimes brutal, but after a few years, he no longer touched Bliss. She scared him. When she was ten, her brothers in their teens, he abandoned them; they were not much worse off than they had been before. Her brothers were saved by the war: they were drafted and afterward remained in the army. It was a better life than they’d had in Texas. Bliss’s mother pinched and hoarded; Bliss worked hard in school. Together they got Bliss into the state teacher’s college, and somehow, she got through. She had no illusions about her intelligence. She knew she was smart and quick and clever, but not intellectual. She had known since infancy that life was survival and she had only contempt for people who had yet to discover that. You did what you had to do, because the world was wide and cold and heartless, and you, no matter who or where you were, were alone.

  She had met Bill during her first year of teaching. She taught a first-grade class in a little Texas town that paid her a salary of $2000 a year and seemed to expect she would be grateful for it. Actually, she could live on that and send money to her mother – a thing she did until the day her mother died. Bill had been a pilot in the air force during the war, and afterward he got a job piloting a small private plane for a Texas businessman. He was earning $7000 a year. Bliss married him. She was not without affection for him. She thought he was cute and funny and eminently manipulable. She thought the reason her marriage was so much better than those she saw around her was that she expected so much less than the other women: survival, not happiness.

  When Bill had gotten the job with Crossways, they had had to move to the New York area. It was a good job, with a great future: in ten years, Bill would earn over $30,000 a year. But she dreaded the move. She associated New York with Jews and niggers, both of whom she hated. And she was a little worried about her hick edges showing in the big city. She had lain in bed at night in Texas, planning her demeanor. She would be calm and cool, which was her nature anyway; she would not talk about her past; and she would keep a watchful eye out. It was her normal behavior. She did not have to violate herself.

  They had been able to avoid New York by buying a little house in the New Jersey suburbs. Bliss drove Bill to Newark when he had a flight. And there were few Jews and no niggers, so Bliss didn’t have to deal with that. In the four years she’d been there, she had scraped off any unfinished edges she might have had. She felt she had not had many anyway; the cityfolk had proven to be not very different from Texas folk, and did not live up to their legendary superiority. She suspected that Mira, for instance, looked down on her because she was a Southerner. Just some of Mira’s remarks about the South and how it treated ‘the colored people,’ as she called them. Inside, Bliss curled her lip at such talk. The South, she felt, treated niggers better than the North treated its ‘colored folk.’ The South understood niggers: they were children, incapable of taking care of themselves. When nigger maids got sick, the white women in Redora took them straight to the doctor and sat there while they were being examined, and paid the bill afterward. The nigger women didn’t have sense enough to do that by themselves.

  There was much Bliss disapproved of in the North. Welfare, for instance, which was starting to be a big thing. A lot of Puerto Ricans coming up to New York to get a free handout. Bliss knew what she had come from, and she knew she had made it. If she could do it, so could they. She still remembered what it was like. She remembered hunger, a pain you got used to after a while, and always being full of gas. She remembered her parents’ faces and was astonished when she considered the ages they must have been. Both had great gaps instead of teeth; both were wrinkled, spare, like very old people. She remembered wanting to get out. She would lie in bed when she was eight, nine, ten, clenching her teeth, hearing her father batter her mother, or, after he was gone, her brothers arguing violently and her mother trying to shush them, hearing the rage that is poverty, and knowing. She did not have to say anything to herself. She clenched her teeth against the present and knew that she had to get out, that she would get out, that getting out was worth anything it cost. It was worth herself, it was worth her feelings.

  And she had done it.

  And she was as happy as she’d ever imagined being. They had to be careful about money, it would continue to be tight until Bill made pilot, which would be, they thought, a few years off. But there was always enough food; she had a decent little house, and here she was, with a beautiful peach chiffon dress in her lap, a shade lighter than her hair, bringing out all its highlights. She stitched contentedly.

  At eleven, she switched off the TV, checked the locks and lights, and went upstairs to the bedroom. She carried a novel in her hand, a paperback that Amy Fox had lent her. It was a love story set in the Deep South in the Reconstruction era. On its cover was a beautiful red-haired woman in a low-cut white gown with her breasts popping out of it. It showed only her bust, because she was near the bottom of the cover. Behind her, full length, stood a handsome man holding a riding whip, and behind him, in the background, was a white plantation house gleaming against greenness. She didn’t usually read such trash. She didn’t usually read books. But Amy had gotten her interested, and somehow she felt sort of in the mood for something light and relaxing, a fairy story. She thought she might start it tonight.

  She took off her robe and draped it over a chair in the bedroom. She turned toward the bed and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over Bill’s chest of drawers. Her hair was down, and her shoulders gleamed warm peach against the white nightgown. She stood there, not thinking about herself, just looking at an image. It was beautiful. Unthinking still, she slipped the nightgown off her shoulders and meditated on her body. It was beautiful, white and slender, the breasts round and lifted, the legs slim and unmarred. It would not always
be so. Bliss thought about her mother’s body, with the skin hanging from the bone on fleshless arms. She ran her hands over her breasts, her sides, her belly, her thighs. Her blood ran to her touch, as if it had been waiting. Since she was grown and had a regular room to take a bath in, no one but Bill had ever seen her body. And no one but Bill had ever touched it. She had never been much concerned about sex, she had not had room for that. Sex was for the wealthy. Suppose she had let herself get attracted to someone? Suppose he was a truck driver or a ditch-digger, or a no-good like her father? And if she had had to get married (if she’d been really attracted to someone, that’s most likely what would have happened; she couldn’t have held him off until afterward the way she had Bill) then there she would have been, forever and forever.

  Bliss understood how many women could become prostitutes: if you have to pay the bill, you’d damn well better make them pay the first installments. Otherwise you’d go on paying it by yourself forever and forever – like her mother. Adele and Mira, for God sakes, complaining about money. She said nothing, or she made a joke, but she sat there smirking inwardly. Poverty. What did they know about poverty? Her mother with her creased face, knobbed hands from scrubbing clothes on a washboard, calluses and hunched back from lugging great tin vats of water to wash the clothes in, bathe the children in, scrub the bare floor. Her mother digging roots in the weedy, dry vegetable garden. Yes. She pulled her nightgown back on and turned toward the bed. But something made her turn and look again, catch sight of herself again in the mirror with her hair down. She realized her body was throbbing: it felt as if every pore were a tiny open mouth, hungry, thirsty, dying of thirst. As it would. Shrivel and die. She turned out the light and slid into bed. The cool sheets caressed her. She felt, as she lay there, like a white flower, spread out in the bed throbbing, warm, waiting to be picked.

  13

  The women’s heads turned with every new arrival, and Mira realized that everyone was waiting for Paul. Over the year or so that they had been giving these parties, Paul’s star had risen. Before that, he had been Adele’s husband, occasionally glimpsed in the backyard awkwardly plucking weeds. But now he was the center of the parties, although no one admitted that.

  There were rumors about him and his affairs which half-titillated the women much as they deplored them. He was handsome, he danced well and liked to dance, and he liked women. He had a line for each of them – they had privately compared notes – which he would repeat, with variations, whenever the mood was right. Mira realized that she felt disappointed after a party in which she had not danced with Paul or in which the mood was not sufficiently intimate for him to murmur, looking at her intensely, ‘You have eyes like a cat, did you know that? Sexy eyes.’ Mira had never thought of herself as possessing anything that could be so described, but secretly, she was pleased. And she sensed that the others felt the same way. Bliss said he’d told her she had a beautiful neck and he’d like to get his hands around it; Natalie said he’d told her she smelled of sex. Mira was quietly appalled at that, but Nat seemed to think it a compliment.

  Mira was talking with Bliss in the living room, when she noticed a tiny start on Bliss’s face and turned around to see that Paul and Adele were standing in the doorway. She turned back to continue the conversation: ‘Yes, really beautiful. I envy you your talent. Such a color!’ Bliss was wearing a flowing chiffon dress in a pale peach color that brought out the highlights in her red hair.

  The party was at Bliss’s house, and the usual crowd was there. One new couple had been invited, Samantha and Hugh Simpson, who had recently moved in a few blocks away, and who were friends of Amy and Don Fox. Mira went to Samantha, who was standing alone, and introduced herself. Samantha was very young, no more than twenty-three or -four: not much younger, Mira thought, than I was when I moved here. Now I’m the only one left under thirty. Samantha was bubbly; she was talking happily about their new house, and how nice it was to be in a house, and about all the catastrophes that had occurred since she had moved in. ‘So Simp – my husband – had to take the lock off the bathroom door, and Fleur was crying hysterically and I was trying to calm her through the door, and we had no tools and Simp had to go up and down the block to find someone home who had tools …’ So it went. The catastrophes were always comic, even when in fact they were not, even when a child ended up with an injury. The catastrophes were comic, the men were inadequate, and the women functioned against overwhelming odds, defeated before they began. This was the myth, Mira realized, listening to Samantha; it was a myth of heroism and good humor. This was how they made it out. She liked Samantha, in spite of the way she looked.

  ‘You must come over for coffee one day,’ she began.

  ‘Oh, I’d love to! Since the moving was done and Simp went back to work, I’ve been so lonely!’

  They talked. The party simmered. People shifted from group to group. The dancing began. Mira went to get herself another drink. Bliss was getting out more ice.

  ‘God, you look gorgeous. Really!’ Mira said again.

  Bliss turned with a snarky smile. ‘Thanks. Paul thinks so too, I guess. He asked me to go to the Bahamas with him. Some lawyers’ conference. Think I should go?’

  Mira had learned enough sophistication to be able to play the snarky game. ‘Why not? It’s a long cold winter. But I’m jealous. He didn’t ask me.’

  ‘Oh, just wait. He will.’

  And in time, he did. It was after midnight and people had begun to undress – the men removing their jackets and ties, the women their shoes and earrings. Paul was dancing in a brown shirt and cream trousers that showed his slimness; his handsome Irish face was pink with heat and wine. He was dancing the cha-cha with Mira with a bottle of Beaujolais in his hand. ‘Have some,’ he kept saying.

  The music changed to a slow dance and he grabbed Mira’s always stiff body around the waist with his free arm and held her close. He looked into her face. ‘Oh, those cat’s eyes,’ he murmured. ‘I wish I knew what was behind them. Why don’t you give me a chance to find out? Come to the Bahamas with me, I’m flying down on Tuesday.’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she grinned.

  Norm was dancing with Adele, teasing her all the while, so that their dance was really just a moving conversation. Hamp was sitting on the couch talking to Oriane. Hamp never danced. Sean was dancing with Samantha.

  ‘I’m jealous, can I cut in? I haven’t danced with Paul all night, have I, Pauly baby?’ Natalie was a little drunk.

  ‘Come to Poppa,’ Paul said, opening his arms to enclose both of them, but Mira laughed and slipped out. ‘Spoilsport!’ he called after her.

  Mira went into the bathroom. After a time – she was retouching her makeup – there was a knock. ‘Be right out!’ Mira called.

  ‘Oh, Mira?’ It was Samantha. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Samantha came in and pulled up her skirt. ‘Damned thing,’ she muttered. Mira glanced at her. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘No, it’s this damned corselet. Whenever I have to pee, it’s a major production.’

  Mira smiled. She did not ask why anyone as slender as Samantha would be wearing a thing like that. She was wearing one herself. Samantha finally got herself adjusted and sat on the toilet. Mira sat on the edge of the tub and lighted a cigarette. This sort of intimacy had shocked her when she first came to Meyersville, but she was used to it now.

  ‘Mira,’ Samantha began uneasily, ‘I saw you dancing with Paul. Paul – O’Connor?’

  ‘O’Neill. Yes.’

  ‘Well, what sort of person is he? I mean, is he a friend of yours?’

  Mira laughed. ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Mira!’ Samantha leaned forward and nearly whispered. ‘He put his hand on my – bottom! I was so embarrassed I nearly died! I didn’t know what to say! Luckily, my back was to the wall, so I don’t think anyone else saw. And then he said I had a – well, he said a sexy ass. Can you imagine?’

  ‘And then he asked you
to go to the Bahamas with him.’

  ‘Yes! How did you know? As if I could – I have to take the baby to the doctor on Tuesday. Besides, I never even met him before.’ ‘He’s going to have quite an entourage on this trip. He’s asked every woman in the room.’

  ‘Oh.’ Samantha looked disappointed.

  ‘Except Theresa and Adele, I warrant.’

  ‘Why not them?’

  ‘Because Theresa’s always pregnant, and Adele’s his wife.’

  Samantha gazed at Mira. Mira felt superior, sophisticated. Her voice took on an ‘older-woman-giving-advice’ quality. ‘Oh, he only does it to attractive women. I’m sure he meant part of what he said. But the rest … it’s just a game, the way he gets along socially. It is a little shocking at first, I guess, but at least he tries to talk to women. And he’s harmless.’

  Samantha’s face brightened. ‘Oh, I like him! I mean, I thought he was fun even if he did … I don’t know, Mira, these people seem awfully sophisticated to me. Maybe I’ve been too protected. I went to a junior college in the South and when I came back I lived at home and started dating Simp. Then we got married and lived with my folks. This is the first place of our own we’ve ever had. I feel like an awful baby.’

  Samantha stood and washed her hands and combed her hair, or rather, ran a comb along the top of it. Her hair was bleached light blond, almost white; it was piled in a high puff and sprayed hard, and there were little rigid curls around her face. She heightened the red on her cheeks. Mira watched her, thinking she looked like a mechanical doll.

  ‘Why do you dye your hair? Surely you’re not gray yet.’

  ‘I don’t know. I started because I thought it would make me look more sophisticated. And Simp likes it.’

  ‘Do you?’

  Samantha turned in surprise. ‘Why? I mean, I guess so.’ She was a little offended.

  ‘Oh, it’s just that it must be an awful lot of trouble.’