The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  But part of her understood. There were in love and they were protecting their love. It was understandable, and she did not much blame their motives. What hurt was Bliss’s betrayal of her. Of course, Mira had to be the victim. Because she knew, she might talk. Well, let her talk, no one would believe her now; Adele would not hear the story from someone she would not speak to. Oh, Mira supposed she could go charging over to Adele’s, insist on being let in, shout out the truth. She could keep a watch on Bliss’s house, and on a night when Paul was there, drag Adele bodily to find them together. But what good would it do? Adele might believe Mira was being vicious because Paul had left her for Bliss. Or she might believe Mira, but she would never again be her friend. Adele would hate Bliss; she might never trust another woman. She would go on living with Paul, humiliated and contemptuous. And Paul and Bliss would lose what they had, and Adele might tell Bill and Bliss would lose what she had, and only Paul would end up rather untouched, finding consolation in some new face and body. No, it was not worth it. Because the only thing Mira wanted was for things to go back to being the way they had been: and that was impossible. She wanted Bliss’s love, something, she told herself, she had had, remembering their long, close talks. But one could not expect Bliss’s love for Mira to be stronger than her desire to protect herself. She had had Bliss’s love, but would never have it again, no matter what happened. Bliss could never like Mira again after what she had done to her.

  Mira went over and over it until she understood it so well that the thing did not even hurt her anymore. All her love for Bliss had been translated into understanding, which was nonfeeling, and which she had chosen over hate. What was left at the end (when she knew it was the end – it came to her with a kind of surprise one day after she’d cleaned the house and had a free hour and wanted to go talk to someone) was loneliness. She had no friends left.

  One night when he was home and in a good mood, she told Norm the whole thing, including her theory. He pooh-poohed it. She had too active an imagination. It was ridiculous: no one would believe that Mira would do a thing like that. He was uninterested in the rest of it, except he had some sympathy for Bill. ‘Poor slob,’ he said. ‘When the O’Neills went to visit Adele’s folks last summer, Bill even went over and mowed their lawn.’

  Over the years Mira had come to feel it was useless to speak to Norm. Their ways of looking at the world seemed too different. Norm could not understand why Natalie or Bliss or Adele should matter so much to her. She argued that he got upset with certain patients, or with some of the big names in the local medical association, if they seemed to dislike him. That was different, he said, that was business, his livelihood was at stake. For their personal affection he did not give one straw. And he could not understand why she did, why she let stupid sluts and housewives bother her. She paled when he said that. ‘And I? What am I?’

  He put an arm around her affectionately. ‘Honey, you have a mind.’

  ‘So do they.’

  He insisted she was different, but she pulled away from him. She knew there was something terribly wrong with what was being said, but she didn’t know what it was. She defended the women from his attacks and he was puzzled about why she should defend the very people who had betrayed her. She gave it up.

  She moved out in search of new friends, but without the enthusiasm she’d had years ago. She liked Lily, who lived a few blocks to the north, and Samantha, who lived a good ten blocks away, and Martha. But Martha lived in a different town, and without a car Mira could not visit her. Mira visited Lily and Samantha on occasion, but it was a far different thing to walk some distance to someone’s house and sit, almost formally, with coffee or a drink, than to run next door or two houses down where you can see the kids when they come home, or leave them a note telling them where you are, so if they need you, they can run over. Mira deeply missed that kind of community, the daily intimacy and companionship of people who lived close by. She thought she would probably never have it again.

  As it happened, she would have lost it anyway. In the spring of 1960, Norm announced that he had finished paying back his family, and a month or two later, he completed arrangements to leave the local practice he was involved in and join a group in the modern new medical clinic they were building. He would pay off his share of the costs over the next five years, out of his share of the profits, which were expected to be staggering. It was time, he said, for them to move to a ‘real’ house. Early in the summer he found a place that suited him, and took Mira to see it. It was beautiful, but it overwhelmed her. It was too big and too isolated. ‘Four bathrooms to clean!’ she exclaimed. He found her provincial and petty in her concerns. ‘Three miles to the nearest store, and I have no car.’ He wanted the house. He promised her a car and help in the house if she insisted, although he added, ‘What else do you have to do?’

  Mira debated. She would like to have the house, of course: she too had wanted material success. But it frightened her. She felt she was sinking, sinking – into what she wasn’t sure. Norm’s parents were proud of their son: to be able to own a house like that at only thirty-seven! But they were also a bit anxious: he wasn’t getting himself too far in debt now, was he? Paying off the new partnership, buying the house and another car too. They glanced significantly at Mira. She was an ambitious driving woman, she supposed, in their eyes. She no longer cared what they thought, but the injustice nevertheless scratched her. Her own parents were more enthusiastic: Mira had really done well for herself, marrying a man who could afford a house like that.

  Mira sank. She was thirty when they moved to Beau Reve.

  2

  Yes, I know, you think you see it all. Having shown you the nasty underside of life in the young, struggling white middle class, I will now show you the nasty underside of life in the older, affluent, white middle class. You are a bit chagrined. I start you off at Harvard, in the middle of an exciting period full of exciting people with new ideas, only to drag you through an afternoon of soap opera. I’m sorry. Really. If I knew any exciting adventure tales, I’d write them, I assure you. If I think of any as we go, I’ll be glad to insert them. There were important things happening during the years just described: there was the Berlin Wall, John Foster Dulles, Castro, who was the darling of the liberals until he shot all those people (having read his Machiavelli) and became suddenly the devil. And a senator of less than national fame took the Democratic nomination and forced Lyndon Johnson to go along with him.

  Sometimes I get as sick of writing this as you may be at reading it. Of course, you have an alternative. I don’t. I get sick because, you see, it’s all true, it happened, and it was boring and painful and full of despair. I think I would not feel so bad about it if it had ended differently. Of course, I can’t talk about ends, since I am still alive. But I would have a different slant on things, perhaps, if I were not living in this inconsolable loneliness. And that is an insoluble problem. I mean, you could go up to a stranger on the street and say, ‘I am inconsolably lonely,’ and he might take you home with him and introduce you to his family and ask you to stay for dinner. But that wouldn’t help. Because loneliness is not a longing for company, it is a longing for kind. And kind means people who can see you who you are, and that means they have enough intelligence and sensitivity and patience to do that. It also means they can accept you, because we don’t see what we can’t accept, we blot it out, we jam it hastily in one stereotypic box or another. We don’t want to look at something that might shake up the mental order we’ve so carefully erected. I have respect for this desire to keep one’s psyche unviolated. Habit is a good thing for the human race. For instance, have you ever traveled from place to place, spending no more than a day or two in each? You wake up in the morning a bit unnerved, and every day you have to search for where you put your toothbrush last night, and figure out whether you unpacked your comb and brush. Every morning you have to decide where to have your café and croissant, or your cappuccino or kawa. You even have to find the r
ight word. I said si for two weeks after I entered France from Italy, and oui for two weeks after I entered Spain from France. And that’s an easy enough word to get right. You have to spend so much energy just getting through the day when you have no habits that you don’t have any left for productive labor. You get that glazed look of tourists staring up at one more church and checking the guidebook to see what city they’re in. Each day you arrive in a new place you have to spend two or more hours finding a decent cheap hotel: subsisting becomes the whole of life.

  Well, you see what I mean. Every new person you meet and really take in violates your psyche to some degree. You have to juggle your categories to fit the person in. Here where I am, people see me some way – I don’t know exactly how. Middle-aged matron, rabid feminist, nice lady, madwoman: I don’t know. But they can’t see me who I am. So I’m lonely. I guess maybe I wouldn’t be able to say who I am myself. One needs some reflection from the outside to get an image of oneself. Sometimes, when I am really low, the words of Pyotr Stephanovich come into my mind: You must love God because He is the only one you can love for Eternity. That sounds very profound to me, and tears come into my eyes whenever I say it. I never heard anyone else say it. But I don’t believe in God and if I did I couldn’t love Him/Her/It. I couldn’t love anyone I thought had created this world.

  Oh God. (Metaphorically speaking.) So people handle loneliness by putting themselves into something larger than they are, some framework or purpose. But those big exterior things – I don’t know, they just don’t seem as important to me as what Norm said to Mira or Bliss to Adele. I mean, do you really care about 1066? Val would scream that it was significant, but my students don’t care about 1066. They don’t even care about World War II or the Holocaust. They don’t even remember Jean Arthur. For them, Elvis Presley is part of the quaint, irrelevant past. No, it’s the little things that matter. But when you’re dealing with a lot of insignificant lives, how do you put things together? When you look back on your life, are there places where you can put your finger, like crossroads on a map or a scholar’s crux in Shakespeare, where you can say, ‘There! That is the place where everything changed, the word upon which everything hinged!’

  I find that difficult. I feel like a madwoman. I walk around my apartment, which is a shithouse, full of landlord’s odds and ends of leftover furniture and a few dying plants on the windowsills. I talk to myself, myself, myself. Now I am smart enough to provide a fairly good running dialogue, but the problem is there’s no response, no voice but mine. I want to hear another’s truth, but I insist it be a truth. I talk to the plants but they shrivel and die.

  I wanted my life to be a work of art, but when I try to look at it, it swells and shrinks like the walls you glean in a delirious daze. My life sprawls and sags, like an old pair of baggy slacks that still, somehow, fits you.

  Like Mira, Val, and lots of others, I went back to the university late in life. I went with despair and expectations. It was a new life, it was supposed to revitalize you, to send you radiant to new planes of experience where you would get tight with Beatrice Portinari and be led to an earthly paradise. In literature, new lives, second chances, lead to visions of the City of God. But I have been suspecting for a while now that everything I ever read was lies. You can believe the first four acts, but not the fifth. Lear really turned into a babbling old fool drooling over his oatmeal and happy for a place by the fire in Regan’s house in Scarsdale. Hamlet took over the corporation by bribing the board and ousting Claudius, and then took to wearing a black leather jacket and German Army boots and sending out proclamations that everyone would refrain from fornication upon pain of death. He wrote letters to his cousin Angelo and together they decided to purify the whole East Coast, so they have joined with the Mafia, the Marines, and the CIA to outlaw sex. Romeo and Juliet marry and have some kids, then separate when she wants to go back to graduate school and he wants to go live on a commune in New Mexico. She is on welfare now and he has long hair and an Indian headband and says Oooom a lot.

  Camille lives: she runs a small popular hotel in Bordeaux. I’ve met her. She has bleached blonde hair, thick orange makeup, and a hard mouth, and she knows everything about the price of vermouth, clean sheets, bottled orange drink, and certain available female bodies. She’s thicker all around than she used to be, but she still has a shape. She meanders around in a shiny pale blue pantsuit, and sits in her bar laughing with friends and keeping an eye out for Bernard, the married man who is her latest lover. Except for her passion for Bernard, she is tough and fun. Don’t ask what it is about Bernard that makes her so adore him. It is not Bernard, but love itself. She believes in love, goes on believing in it against all odds. Therefore, Bernard is a little bored. It is boring to be adored. At thirty-eight, she should be tough and fun, not adoring. When he leaves her, a month or two from now, she will contemplate suicide. Whereas, if she had been able to bring herself to stop believing in love, she would have been tough and fun and he would have adored her forever. Which would have bored her. She then would have had to be the one to tell him to clear out. It is a choice to give one pause.

  Tristan and Isolde got married after Issy got a divorce from Mark, who was anyhow turned on to a groupie at that point. And they discovered the joys of comfortable marriage can’t hold a candle to the thrills of taboo, so they have placed an ad in the Boston Phoenix asking for a third, fourth, or even fifth party of any gender to join them in tasting taboo joys. They will smoke, they will even snort a little coke, just to assure a degree of fear about being intruded upon by the local police. Don’t judge: they, at least, are trying to hold their marriage together. And you?

  The problem with the great literature of the past is that it doesn’t tell you how to live with real endings. In the great literature of the past you either get married and live happily ever after, or you die. But the fact is, neither is what actually happens. Oh, you do die, but never at the right time, never with great language floating all around you, and a whole theater full of witnesses to your agony. What actually happens is that you do get married or you don’t, and you don’t live happily ever after, but you do live. And that’s the problem. I mean, think about it. Suppose Antigone had lived. An Antigone who goes on being an Antigone year after year would be not only ludicrous but a bore. The cave and the rope are essential.

  It isn’t just the endings. In a real life, how can you tell when you’re in Book I or Book III, or Act II or Act V? No stagehands come charging in to haul down the curtain at an appropriate moment. So how do I know whether I’m living in the middle of Act III and heading toward a great climax, or at the end of Act V and finished? I don’t even know who I am. I might be Hester Prynne, or Dorothea Brooke, or I might be the heroine of a TV drama of some seasons back – what was her name? – Mrs Muir! Yes, she walked on the beach and was in love with a ghost and originally she looked like Gene Tierney. I always wanted to look like Gene Tierney. I sit in a chair and I have no one to knit woolen stockings for so it’s irrelevant that I don’t know how to knit. (Val could, oddly. Nothing works the way it does in books. Can you imagine Penthesilea knitting?) I’m just sitting here living out even to the edge of doom – what? Valerie’s vision? Except she forgot to tell me what comes next.

  3

  Mira had a new life. It was supposed to be glorious, it was supposed to be what all those hard years in the two-or-three-room apartments were for. This was what it was all about. Norm had worked hard for long hours, so had she: for this. Not everyone who worked hard for long hours achieved this; they were lucky. She had her own car – Norm’s old one; he bought a new little MG for himself – and a house with four bathrooms. She also had (after some wrestling with her conscience and some tense discussion with Norm, who did not want to say straight out that he did not want to pay for help in the house, so said instead that they could only get a colored woman and she would no doubt rob them blind – as if they had anything to steal) a washer-dryer, a dishwasher, a man to wax the kitchen fl
oor every two weeks, and a laundry to do the sheets and Norm’s shirts. Never again, frozen sheets in January.

  She told herself this as she paced the large, mostly empty rooms. She stood in the wide foyer, with its impressive chandelier and the winding staircase, and told herself she must be happy, she had to be. She had no other choice: there was a moral imperative on her to be happy. She was not actively unhappy. She was just – nothing.

  The rhythms of life were different in Beau Reve. She would get up at seven with Norm, and make coffee while he showered and shaved. He no longer ate breakfast at home. She would sit with him over the coffee for a few minutes while he gave her her chores for the day – suits to be cleaned, shoes to be mended, some business at the bank, a telephone call to the insurance agent about the dent in his car. Then he left her and she woke the children, who dressed as she prepared the eggs. She dressed as they ate them, then she drove them the mile to the school bus stop. Everyone but Norm was grouchy in the morning and they spoke little. Then she returned to the house.

  That was the worst time. She would come in through the door from the garage to the kitchen and the house would smell of bacon and toast. The greasy frying pan sat on the stove, the spattered coffeepot behind it. Dirty dishes lay on the kitchen table. The four beds were unmade and there was soiled underwear lying about. There was dust in the living and dining rooms, the family room held used soda glasses and potato chip crumbs from the night before.