The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  What bothered her was not that the tasks that had to be done were exerting. It was not even that they were tedious. It was that she felt that the three others lived their lives and she went around after them cleaning up their mess. She was an unpaid servant, expected to do a superlative job. In return, she was permitted to call this house hers. But so did they. Most of the time she did not think about it: only every morning, when she returned from dropping the kids at the bus. She made up little rewards for herself: I will do this and that, then I will sit and read the paper. She charged into it, sticking a batch of washing in the machine, cleaning the kitchen, making up beds and straightening rooms, and then attacked the rest of the house, in which something had to be done every day, it was so big. Down on her hands and knees in one of the endless bathrooms, she would tell herself that in a way she was fortunate. Washing the toilet used by three males, and the floor and walls around it, is, Mira thought, coming face to face with necessity. And that was why women were saner than men, did not come up with the mad, absurd schemes men developed: they were in touch with necessity, they had to wash the toilet bowl and floor. She kept telling herself that.

  About eleven thirty, she made a fresh pot of coffee and sat down with The New York Times, which (another new luxury) she had delivered. She sat for an hour at least, savoring it. In the afternoon, she did her errands or on days when there were no errands, she might visit Lily or Samantha or Martha. But she had to be home by three, when the boys got in. They were not yet old enough to be left alone. She didn’t mind that too much, although it would have been nice, just once in a while, to feel free to stay out as long as she wanted. She didn’t know what she would have done with such freedom – Lily’s, Martha’s, and Samantha’s children came in around then too, and the women were involved with children. It was just a feeling of freedom she craved. But she enjoyed talking to the boys when they got in. They were smart and funny, and she hugged them a lot. They would talk over a snack, then change their clothes and go out. She had another hour to herself. She would take the laundry out of the dryer and fold it carefully, patiently. She would take something out of the freezer to defrost. Then she would take a book and sit down. The boys ran in and out and she was frequently interrupted, so she read only light things in the afternoons. Then it was time to prepare dinner. Norm usually got in about six thirty, and nowadays they all ate together. But Norm continually picked on the boys at the dinner table: they were using the wrong fork, they had their elbows on the table, they were chewing with their mouths open. So dinnertime was always tense. Afterward, the boys would go off to do homework, Norm would settle in the family room with the paper, and Mira would clean up the kitchen. The boys took their own baths now, and all she had to do was to remind them about it, keep track that they did it, and wash the tubs afterward. They would come in to watch TV for a while before bed, but they had to watch what Norm wanted to see. Once she insisted they be allowed to see a children’s special, and Norm had sulked the rest of the night. She would sit with them, reading or mending. Then they would go to bed. Norm would sit for a while longer, and by ten he would be asleep in the chair. She would go over and shake him: ‘Norm, don’t fall asleep in the chair.’ He would awake and stand and stumble groggily to the bedroom.

  Then Mira would switch off the TV set. She was too tired now to read seriously, but she did not want to go to bed. She would pour a snifter of brandy and turn out all the lights and sit in the corner of the family room, by the window – sit and drink and smoke until eleven or twelve, then go to bed.

  She was living the American Dream, she knew that, and she tried to get her mask on straight. She had her hair done at the right shop and when they saw gray and advised dye, she let them dye it. She bought expensive three-piece knit suits: she had her nails manicured. She had a holder full of charge cards.

  There were moments of beauty. Sometimes, before she made the boy’s beds, she would think about them, and love would gush into her heart, and she would lie down on their beds and smell the sheets, bury her face in them. Their beds smelled just like the boys. Sometimes, when she was having her coffee and reading her paper, the sun would slant in through the big kitchen window and pour across the wooden table and her heart would walk slowly through the large house and feel its cleanliness and order and would think that the comfort of order might after all be the best one could hope for, might even be enough.

  She was not unhappy. She lived much through her friends, all of whom were having troubles. After listening to Lily or Sam or Martha all afternoon, it felt good to come home to her peaceful and orderly house. Given what she knew about others’ lives, how could she complain about her own?

  First there was Lily.

  4

  All the women were attractive when they were young, but Lily was gorgeous. She had a large-boned, classic face – wide-browed, strong-jawed – and large, well-spaced brown eyes, and a slender neck. Her body was perfect. That is, it was the kind of body you were supposed to have, but didn’t: shoulders broad but not too broad, nice bust, slender waist, no belly, slim hips, and long slender legs, all perfectly proportioned. She had dyed red hair and eyebrows, and she was inclined to buy rather showy clothes: lots of sequins and chiffon and silver threads. When Lily walked into a restaurant or bar, all the male heads turned. That probably would have pleased her had she been aware of it. She wasn’t. She wasn’t even aware of her beauty. She worried about her looks all the time. She studied magazines to learn about makeup, and experimented for hours with different brands and kinds. She used darkish foundation for parts of her face, a light foundation for others, a special kind for the oily skin around her nose. She plucked her eyebrows, and dyed them with great care. She used three different makeups on her eyes. Over the foundations she placed special rouge and powder. She could discuss these cosmetics with great intelligence and knowledge. Mira wondered why she bothered: ‘You’re so beautiful, you don’t need them,’ she said and Lily just looked at her. ‘Oh, you’ve never seen me without makeup,’ Lily said seriously. ‘I’m a fright.’ She described all the flaws in her appearance. There were, it appeared, nothing but flaws.

  Her life was the same way. On the surface, it appeared fine. Carl, her husband, was a calm and affable man, who seemed never to get excited about anything. During any minor crisis with the children, he would always say, ‘It’s all right, Lily, it’ll be all right.’ Andrea, the older child, seemed to have her father’s serene nature. Little Carl, whom they called Carlos, was more difficult. But Lily lived with a tearing wretchedness so severe that she had to have four-fifths of her stomach removed when she was only twenty-seven. In conversation she was always miserable, but it was never clear why. Her voice soared up and down; she was always tugging at her hair or wrenching her mouth out of shape. People said simply, ‘Lily is emotional,’ or ‘Lily is nervous.’ In another time, that might have ended discussion, but the culture Lily and Mira lived in believed that happiness was an inalienable right and tried to discover what was wrong if they didn’t have it. So people added: ‘Lily is neurotic.’ That was not a description, it was a judgment. Lily did not question why she was unhappy: she seemed to know. But in conversation she tossed from problem to problem, making statements so elliptical and vague that it was difficult to deduce what was bothering her. She was never very concrete about anything.

  Mira’s earliest conversations with her, when both still lived in Meyersville, were about Lily’s childhood, which had been cruel. One is always forced to pay for that. Economic theories are all based on the wrong principle. In life, you pay for pain and get rewarded for pleasure. Lily’s father was a maniac, a sweet, slight man with an Italian accent, who on the outside was a Good Man, that is, one who supports his family and doesn’t drink or do worse. His marriage to Lily’s mother was arranged by her family when she was sixteen. She didn’t want the marriage or the man, and she ran away, but true to old dicta about women, she did it half-heartedly. Frightened and unable to take care of herself in the worl
d, she returned to the family, telegraphing ahead to tell them what train she would be on. They met her in Grand Central Station, with her fiancé in tow. And right there in the middle of the station, with her family standing there, he beat her up, blacked one eye and bloodied her nose. A month later, she married him. Was das Weib mill? It was an old Sicilian family.

  His mode of operation did not change. When children came, they simply provided more objects for his continuing and seemingly causeless rage. He supported them decently on his bricklayer’s wages and they were never hungry, if often bruised. Over the years, he saved enough to buy a three-story house in the Bronx, renting out the top floor. The stories of his brutality in her childhood, and Lily’s anguish over it, I will omit. Enough is enough.

  When Lily was graduated from high school, she wanted to get a job in an artist’s studio. She had always wanted to be an artist, although she had only a vague notion of what artists do. But her family regarded such an aim as proof of her rebellious and selfish nature. Her mother, who when the husband came in angry and searching for prey, cried out, ‘Hit the kids! Don’t hit me!’ saw to it that Lily got a perfectly good job in a garment factory, earning $25 a week, $20 of which went to the family. But even after she was working, her father beat her.

  One morning after a bad night, Lily looked at her puffed face and the bruises on her shoulders in a mirror, and went boldly to her mother. ‘Ma, I’m eighteen years old. I bring money into this house. I’m not a child anymore. When is he going to stop beating me?’

  The remark must have seemed ludicrous to the mother, who had bruises of her own. She roared, though, at Lily’s arrogance, which did not seem tameable. ‘As long as you live in this house, you get beaten!’

  Lily decided silently then that she would get out.

  She saved every penny she could, skimping on lunches, sacrificing the Saturday-night movie with her girlfriends that was her only pleasure without really feeling it as a sacrifice: she had a goal that swallowed up anything else. She got a small raise at the factory which she did not mention at home. After some months, she had a little sum of money.

  You will say that Lily was self-defeating, that she didn’t really want to get out. You will say, if she had, she would have taken that money and bought a train ticket to Peoria or Chicago. But Lily had never in her life been out of the Bronx, had never been permitted to act without supervision. She was frightened and her horizons were limited. She took a room at the YWCA three miles from her home. Probably she did not want to sever her connections with her family, only to assert her independence, her individuality. She was clever. Every day, when she went to work, she stuffed a piece of clothing in her bag, which she would then leave in her locker at the factory. On Friday nights, pretending she was going out with a girlfriend, she would take the week’s gleanings and carry them in a paper bag to her unslept-in room at the Y. Little by little, she garnered all she wanted: she didn’t dare to take all her clothes – that would have been noticed. Then she began to take pieces of her sewing machine, her only and prized possession. She took the small ones day by day, but the motor was a problem. So she waited until the last day, and one Sunday, when her parents were down the block visiting cousins, she packed the motor and the last of her personal belongings in a paper bag and left. She wrote a note telling her parents not to worry about her, that she could no longer tolerate the conditions at home, that she was living elsewhere.

  She thought her room at the Y a palace: she was free!

  Foolish Lily. She kept her job at the factory. It did not take long. On Tuesday her father was there waiting for her as she left work, and with him the parish priest. Her father grabbed her out of the line of women threading out, pulled her out roughly by the arm. He shouted at her: she was a slut, a whore, a mala femmina who had dared to leave her father’s house. He slapped her over and over. The priest watched. She whimpered, she tried to explain, she defended herself, she affirmed her virtue, she was living in a Y, she wasn’t cheap – it did no good. Her father looked to the priest for approval of his condemnation of the girl, and the priest gave it. Together they pushed and prodded her back to the Y, picked up her things, and dragged her back to the family home, where, after a glass of wine and some homemade cake and a general sense of virtue restored, the priest left and Lily was punished for her whorish ways. She never again went to church.

  She understood then that there was only one way she was going to get out of her father’s house, and she began to look around. Although she had a strong sexual nature, she had never put any energy into that forbidden field: there had been more pressing matters. She gained permission from her parents to ‘date’; that, somehow, was all right. She was accepting her place. In time she met Carl; he was mild and gentle, totally unlike her father. He was also steady – in personality and in life. Her parents approved. Lily and Carl became engaged. At that moment, things changed. She was permitted more liberty, her father stopped beating her, although he might slap her around a little. She understood that she was now seen as the property of another man.

  Because Carl was mild, this constriction seemed a liberation to her. She began to act more and more independently, and came home one night when she was twenty and announced that she had rented a store, that she was quitting her job, that she was going to open a dress shop. They didn’t even ask her where she got the money – perhaps they thought Carl was giving it to her. But it was her own savings of a year and a half. They shrugged: she was no longer their responsibility.

  Foolish Lily. What did she know about the clothing business? She went around to factories and bought what she liked, guessed at the markup, and worked in the store all day and into the night seven days a week. She was driven with energy; she was happy. On Saturday nights she would choose something from her own shop and paste inch-thick makeup on her face and she and Carl would go to a nightclub. Carl enjoyed taking her to nightclubs, he liked getting dressed up and showing her off and spending money with his friends. He was in no rush to get married.

  But Lily’s business did not do well. She was not hard enough, she had no experience. Women would buy a dress on Friday and return it on Monday obviously worn, and ask for their money back. She did not know how to refuse them. Her selection of clothes was not objective enough, it was based on her taste alone. For a while she kept the thing going, working alone in the shop, her energy unflagging. She kept it going until all her savings were gone, and the month arrived when she could not pay the rent. Her dream had lasted just a year. Tearful, she sold out her scanty remaining stock for less than cost, declared bankruptcy, and married Carl.

  5

  Carl’s tranquil surface was the result of careful self-control as well as inherited temperament. Carl’s father had abandoned the family when Carl was five. His mother, a passive and tranquil woman, got a job cleaning houses, but the five children were left mostly to themselves. She earned very little; arriving home late at night, she was tired, and her own house went uncleaned, her children unfed. The oldest daughter, Marie, took over as best she could, but she was, as Carl would put it later, ‘selfish.’ She wanted her own life. Half-heartedly, she cooked, but that was all. She did it for four years, and when she was eighteen, she took off to live on her own. Nobody cleaned, and marketing was as haphazard as the money. It was a dismal life for a child, and frustrating to someone as fastidious as Carl already was. Still, even when he was older, he did not attempt to help out in household chores; he deeply believed they were women’s work. Carl had contempt for his mother’s weakness, her inability to take over and run things, to give a decent background to his life.

  All the children had to work. They did anything they could – sold newspapers, shined shoes, ran errands, swept up grocery shop floors. The middle son died of tuberculosis when he was twelve. After Marie abandoned them, Lillian took over. Carl, who was the youngest, followed his brother Edwin to the streets. The streets provided them with an outlet for some of what seethed inside them. Sports, mischief, and fight
ing filled non-working afternoons. Once, they got caught stealing fruit from a stand, and once they kidnapped a local ‘sissy’ and hanged him from a clothesline post. Someone saw the child, and cut him down before he strangled. In both cases, there was not too much fuss. But over the years, the boys on the street began to disappear into reformatories and, later on, prisons. Carl began to think about the future.

  Carl always said World War II was the best thing that ever happened to him. He had some flaws in his body – nothing serious, mostly the result of his inadequate diet as a child – but enough, when added up, to mark him 4-F. So when all the other men had been drafted, Carl was able to get a job in a defense plant, where he learned, eventually, to be a skilled machinist. He was very good at it: his German father, perhaps, had left him a legacy of precision and order. He did well and was liked: he had learned on the streets how to act cool. He seemed easygoing, affable, bland, unjudging. What went on under the exterior, one can only guess. Even Lily was never sure. He never cracked.

  Carl and Edwin and Lillian were all working so they moved their mother into a decent apartment, made her give up her job, and settled back to enjoy the fruits of her labors on their own behalf. But the woman was weak and worn out. She had long since given up; she cooked and marketed, but she never learned how to operate the washing machine they had bought her. She cleaned randomly, ineffectually. Carl’s early contempt was heightened: it was her Italian nature, he thought, that made her slovenly. Although she died, simply worn out, within two years after her assumption into a life of luxury, he did not change his opinion.

  Although Carl did not object to getting married, he did not want his life to change. Week nights, he hung out with his friends from the old neighborhood, playing cards; on Saturday nights he took Lily out, and he slept most of Sunday. He enjoyed his life. When his mother died, the home broke up: Edwin got married and Lillian got a job in Manhattan and moved. So when Lily said she was losing the shop, it seemed the right time. To Carl, marriage represented the perfect way for him to continue in his life as it was. He urged Lily to get a job. She was pleased at this; it seemed to her that he did not intend to constrict her as her mother had been constricted. She got a job as a receptionist in a fancy office. That was good, Carl said: she didn’t earn much, but it was easy work. She discovered only gradually, for Carl never articulated it, just what he expected of her. He wanted her to work so that they would continue to have the money to go to clubs on Saturday nights; he also expected her to keep the apartment immaculate, and to handle the marketing, cooking, and laundry chores with silent efficiency. He did not say this; but if something were neglected, he pointed it out in a cold, contemptuous remark. ‘You didn’t get the laundry done,’ or ‘The kitchen floor is filthy, Lily.’ He never helped. He sat in a chair reading his newspaper and watching TV, occasionally getting up to criticize her work. She argued with him, but somehow she always lost. Carl never raised his voice: he merely stared coldly at her. And if she were guilty of some sloppiness or neglect, he treated her with disdain, turning away from her in bed, not allowing her even to touch him, as if her body were defiled.