The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  Lily was confused. Carlos had come flying in the back door, she had turned to him with a smile, saying, ‘Hello,’ and he screamed, ‘Bitch! Useless bitch!’ at her and flew to his room and slammed the door. She had been about to go to his room when the doorbell rang, and now here were these policemen, and they were talking to him and he was not answering. What had he done? Her large eyes deepened in her skull. The dark circles around them absorbed them until her eyeholes looked like the sockets in a fleshless skull. The police left. She turned to Andrea. ‘What? What was it?’

  Eleven-year-old Andrea explained what had happened. She explained it over and over again, as Lily asked, ‘Yes, what was it? What did he do?’ Finally Lily understood. Some boys had tried to hang her child. Hang him. Literally. Kill him. Lily began to mutter.

  By the time Carl came home from work, Lily was pacing the house, talking wildly, crying, thrusting her fists at the air, screaming at some invisible enemy who seemed to live in the ceiling. She would stop walking suddenly, raise her face and fist and scream at him. Whoever he was, he was a bastard, he was a fucker, he was a shit. Carl tried to find out what was the matter, but he couldn’t understand what she was saying. Andrea watched, said nothing until he turned to her.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’

  She did not understand either, but she told him what she knew. Carl tried to steer Lily to a chair.

  ‘It’s okay, Lily, it’ll be all right. Come on, sit down. Come on.’

  She sat, but she raved. Carl went to check on Carlos, who was still lying on his bed. He would not speak to his father, but he did not vilify him. He never vilified his father. Carl assured himself that Carlos was all right, and returned to Lily.

  ‘Listen, Lily, it’s nothing. I did the same thing when I was a kid. Me and the kids in the neighborhood tried to hang some pansy on the block. It was all right. No harm done. Just kids. That’s the way kids are.’

  His voice was soothing, smoothing, shrugging. It was nothing. Lily got wilder.

  He shrugged. ‘Kids are rotten, Lily, people are rotten, nothing you can do about that. He’s okay.’

  Lily quietened a bit. She would not look at him, she was still staring out at some malevolent being, but she quieted. As her noise diminished, Carlos perked up his ears. He got off the bed and opened the door.

  ‘Come on now, Lily, I’ll get you a drink,’ Carl was saying.

  Carlos slipped down the hall and the steps, and sat on a step just out of sight of the living room. His father brought his mother a drink. She sipped it. He sipped his. She was no longer gasping or crying; she was quiet.

  ‘But listen, Lily,’ Carl began again, ‘why did you let him go to the store alone? You know you should have gone with him. And when he didn’t come back right away, how come you didn’t go out looking for him?’

  Lily began to breathe deeply again. Carlos moved down two steps. His large feeling eyes, eyes like his mother’s, watched. Carl’s voice, as smooth as ever, shifted from comfort to complaint. ‘You know the kid has troubles. So how come you let him go out alone?’

  She started to answer. She sat up straight and said, ‘My God, Carl, he’s eight years old, he can walk to the corner store and get an ice cream, he has to, what will he do if he’s never allowed to be free …’ and then her voice rose again and she was off, crying, screaming, tearing at her hair. Carl rose, disgusted.

  ‘For God’s sake, Lily,’ he protested, but it was useless. Her clamor filled the house. Carlos came down to the bottom of the stairs and watched. He felt satisfied. He had known it was all his mother’s fault.

  11

  At seven thirty, Carl called Mira. Could she come over? At the time she thought he had called her because he simply didn’t know what to do. Later, she thought he had called her because he wanted someone else to do it, he wanted to be justified.

  Lily was pacing and raving when Mira entered. When she saw her friend, she ran over to her, crying, gesticulating, and Mira embraced her stiffly, then Lily broke away. Her eyes were tragic and earnest; she was trying to tell Mira something. Mira concentrated on Lily’s face. She listened, nodding. Lily calmed a little. Mira said, ‘Let’s sit down, and then you tell me.’

  They sat together on the couch; Carl sat across the room. Lily talked and jumbled everything together. Mira would stop her, patiently, and ask questions. Sometimes Lily would start to rave again. Then Mira would put her hand out and touch Lily’s arm lightly, gently. Lily would start and look with terror at Mira, who would then smile kindly and ask Lily to explain again. Finally, Mira got the story, but she still did not have the explanation for Lily’s state.

  ‘Well, of course you’re upset, some kids tried to kill your child.’

  But that was not it. Lily raved and cried. ‘Roots, roots, roots!’ she screamed. ‘You need roots! But how can you have them when everywhere they try to kill you? I tried to make a home for them, in a neighborhood, and what happens? Where do we go now? A strange place, no roots! I need roots!’

  After a long time, Mira began to make some connections. Home, security, terror, and violence were all connected in Lily’s mind. The contradictions among them, or perhaps their consanguinity, were driving her mad. Without someplace where one can feel safe, where one can sleep, one goes mad. Mira tried to say this to Lily.

  ‘So you feel you and your children are unsafe, that you have no place to go, that …’

  But Lily wasn’t hearing. Her voice reached another register. It swirled around them like a noose. She went round and round and round, repeating herself, unhearing, clamorous, in agony. She was dizzy with her own feelings, her own voice. She was flying around on a carnival machine that would not stop, she could not make it stop and she screamed and screamed.

  ‘Oh, my God, let me die, I want to die, please, somebody, kill me. Carl, kill me! Mira! Somebody! Kill me! I can’t stand it anymore!’ She leaped up and ran to the kitchen, Carl and Mira behind her. She had pulled open a drawer, there was a large knife in it, Carl grabbed her, he held her, she was wire and taut against him, she was screaming, ‘Kill me, kill me, kill me! I can’t stand it!’

  After Carl had her wrists tightly in his hands, she stood there slender and vulnerable, her whole body shaking, weeping, ‘Please, please, please. Please kill me.’

  ‘I think,’ Mira said softly, slowly, amazed at the ease with which she had found the solution. ‘You had better take her to the hospital.’

  Carl was suddenly in control. It was not until later, much later, that Mira realized this. Yet he probably did not know what he was about. In fairness, that was probably true. The question is, are you responsible for what you do not let yourself know you are doing? Suddenly, everything was different. Carl had Lily’s coat in his hands, he had it on her. A moment ago she had been violent, but now she was paste.

  ‘Do you want me to go with you?’ Mira asked, anxious. How would he drive and control her at the same time? ‘We can put the kids in the back seat and I can hold Lily in the front seat.’

  ‘No, no, Mira it’s okay, it’s fine, I can manage. If you’d just stay with the kids until I get back …’

  ‘I can’t. My kids are alone. I’ll take them back to my place. You can pick them up there.’

  ‘Sure. Okay.’ He put his hand on Lily’s back and pushed her gently. ‘Okay, Lily, it’s okay, come on now,’ he kept saying as he pushed her gently toward the door and down the front steps and into the car. He treated her as if she were a bomb that might explode indoors. She had subsided. She must have known the moment Carl took control. She must have been waiting for it; she accepted it totally. Meekly, only whimpering a bit, she left and walked down the steps and got in the car. She was sitting hunched over in the front seat when they drove off.

  12

  Lily was given a sedative and placed in the violent ward of the hospital for the night. They kept her there for a few days, then told Carl they would either transfer her to a state mental hospital or he could put her in a private one. He put h
er in an expensive and luxurious private hospital.

  Mira thought about it. She concluded it was all Lily’s fault. Mira remembered Lily pushing Carlos away, peeling him off her body; remembered Lily giving him cookies when he would not eat lunch; remembered Lily’s wild complaints and impossible demands. She pressed Carl for money for clothes, went to the Bargain Shop and bought something, bringing it home saying it wasn’t much, in fact it was crap, but with her sewing machine she could turn it into something fine. She would cut and sew and piece, and end up ripping it to shreds. No, in Mira’s judgment, and judgment then meant apportionment of praise and blame, or rather blame and blamelessness, Carl had done everything he could. He was kind and tolerant, and Lily was mad. It was all understandable of course: Lily was insane because of her childhood. But she was clearly insane.

  After some months, Lily got out of hospital. Mira didn’t even know it until Lily called one day. Mira could not see her that day, or that week, in fact. She was spring cleaning. She visited Lily the next week: they had coffee and discussed clothes. Lily kept trying to break in, to tell Mira of the horror of shock treatments, about her terrified letters, ‘HELP!’ written in lipstick on toilet paper, plastered on her windows until the nurse came in and found it. Or notes dropped from the window on the heads of visitors on Sundays. Or her frenzied pleas to Carl to get her out, whenever he visited. Mira smiled, nodded. Of course. She did not visit Lily soon again.

  She saw almost no one. She was busy with her housework, chauffeuring the boys, with the PTA and a bridge club of doctors’ wives and with their social life, which had become very formal. Other people entertained twenty for a sit-down dinner and had a maid and a butler. Mira had to do the same without help. She learned how. She was busy. Occasionally there would come a phone call. Sean had abandoned Oriane in the Bahamas, simply disappeared with all funds and left her there with the three kids, a rented house, and two unpaid-for boats. She had had to appeal to the governor of the island, to the American Embassy or whatever it was. They had paid air fare for her and the kids to the States; she was staying with Martha. Paula had divorced her rich man and was working as a medical receptionist somewhere, trying to support herself and her children. Theresa had gone mad with her eighth child, had drowned it in the bath, and was now in the state mental hospital.

  The phone calls came from another world. They had nothing to do with her. Out there, all was chaos. Her world was orderly, clean and shining. It was also – and to do her credit, it must be admitted, she knew it – mean and small and angry. The boys snarled at each other, she snarled at them for every violated towel; Norm was mostly absent, and when he was there it was clear that he felt that everything there must contribute to his pleasure or he roared, he damned, he consigned to the prison of their rooms the underminers of his plan.

  Mira was fall cleaning when John Kennedy was killed. She heard it on the radio, and did not believe it. She had voted for him over Norm’s extreme opposition: the difference in their votes had caused the worst fight they’d had in years. It was not possible that he was dead. She hung on the radio: reports varied. He was dead; he wasn’t. He was. Mira remembered when Marilyn Monroe killed herself. Somehow the two events fitted together in her mind. She didn’t understand how. Images, she thought. She mourned. She neglected her housecleaning to watch television depictions of the funeral, of Jackie Kennedy’s stoic strength, of Charles de Gaulle walking behind the horse-drawn funeral carriage. She even managed a smile at the thought of Charles de Gaulle walking in horseshit.

  Life went on. A phone call came: Sean had divorced Oriane, or gotten her to agree to a divorce. He was willing to pay $10,000 a year to support her and the three children: an opulent settlement, compared to what most divorced women get, but not enough, in those opulent times, to support four people. Sean bought himself a small estate on the water in East Hampton, and moved his mistress in.

  One afternoon, in a spurt of loneliness and lifelessness, Mira went to visit Lily. The mechanical face Lily had worn at Mira’s last visit was gone, but Mira was not prepared for the new one. Lily was old. She was the same age as Mira, thirty-four, but she looked – well, anything, actually. You could not name an age for her, you could only say she was old. She was terribly thin, even haggard. Her hair had grown out and was a number of colors – dark interspersed wth gray, getting red, then paler toward the ends. Lily was wearing a thin cotton housedress with no belt. She looked like a maidservant in some primitive village, underfed, overworked, used to blows and despair. Mira stood appalled: the visual image of Lily had more potency than any words. All her rationalizations, her explanations, her condemnations vanished: if this was how Lily looked, this was how Lily was. Suddenly she believed in the misery of Lily’s existence, felt it, perhaps. It was stark fact and beyond judgment, apportionment of blame; appearances of rectitude. It required no justification, no explanation. It simply was.

  Lily poured coffee with a shaking hand and forgot the milk. When their coffee was almost drunk, she leaped up and unboxed a cake she had bought especially for Mira. ‘I forgot,’ she said anxiously. One more failure.

  ‘Look at me, look what they’ve done to me,’ Lily said, but her speech sounded like song, like wailing controlled and brought into form. She held out her hands: they were almost orange, and Mira noticed then that Lily’s face too was jaundiced. ‘They have me jaundiced with their pills,’ Lily sang, ‘they have me oozing. Feel my hands.’ They were slippery moist. ‘My whole body oozes sweat. I shake all the time. I hate them, those doctors. They don’t care what they do to you as long as they can get you out of the office. I’m just a crazy woman, what do they care about me? Mira, I cut down the dosage but I don’t dare stop taking them. I can’t go back there, Mira, it will kill me, it will drive me crazy.’

  Mira stood and walked over to the cabinet and pulled open a drawer searching for cake forks. Lily didn’t notice. Mira was shocked by the jumble of things thrown in the drawer. She rummaged through it, though, and found some forks.

  ‘Carl says I can’t do anything right. I don’t know, Mira, I try. I clean and clean and clean. If I don’t, they’ll send me back. And I couldn’t stand it, Mira, it’s torture, it’s medieval, you wouldn’t believe what they do to you! Now my memory is gone. Every time Carl came I begged him to get me out of there, and he kept saying, “It’s all right, kid, it’ll be all right.” He did NOTHING! Nothing! He didn’t really care what they were doing to me. Every day they come and get you and take you to that room and they strip you naked, stark naked, Mira, as if you were nothing, and they throw you down on the table and tie you down, Mira, they strap you to it! Then they give you this shock, oh, it’s terrible, it’s such a violation! They don’t care what they do to you, you don’t matter, you’re just a crazy woman, you have no dignity.’

  Lily had picked at her cake with her fork, but hadn’t eaten it. It was a mess of crumbs on her plate. Her face was wrenched; there was a terrible line between her eyes, and the eyes themselves stared out as if they still looked at horror. Her whole face was strained; the lines around her mouth looked as though they had been drawn with black pencil by a makeup man, and the skin was stretched tautly across her cheekbones.

  ‘So I come home and I try. I know they’ll send me back if I don’t. But Carl, what does he do? All he does is sit in that chair in front of the TV set. I ask him, I beg him to take us out on the weekend, on a picnic or a camping trip, something. The kids are growing up and we never do anything together. You need a family, it should be a home. All he says is that if I keep it up he’ll move back into that room over the garage. What difference would it make? One less body cluttering up the family room. He comes home at night like a Nazi, he comes in here and stands in the doorway and says, oh, he’s so cold, like a drill sergeant, “Lily, why aren’t the dishes dried?” What’s the point of drying dishes? They dry by themselves. But then I have to run and dry them, or else I have to argue with him, I have to say I didn’t have time, or that I don’t want to dry
them, it’s silly to dry them, and then we’re in an argument, and I’m always wrong, it doesn’t matter what I do or what I say, I’m in the wrong before I begin. I don’t know how it happens.’

  She was mashing the crumbs on the plate into a paste. Mira watched her. Mira’s mind was suspended. She felt as if she were in the deep seas on a raft.

  ‘I forgot to wash his socks. They’re dark and I didn’t want to put them in with the whites, you know, and there were only a few, and I forgot to do a separate load. Is that crazy? Is that so terrible? He acted like I was ready to be carted away. He was livid, he could hardly move his lips, his mouth was so tight. So I said I’d wash them by hand, and he had to leave, he only had half an hour, so I said wear your white socks, they’re clean, and he acted as if I had hit him or something. Or he could have worn dirty socks, couldn’t he, Mira? Am I crazy? So I washed them by hand, and he’s parading around the house acting as though there was a knife sticking out of his back, and I got so flustered I put the socks in the oven to dry, then Carlos threw a tantrum, oh, I don’t know, he didn’t want a soft-boiled egg, something like that, and I forgot the socks and they burned in the oven. What a smell!’ She began to giggle. ‘Burned socks! Have you ever …?’ Now she was really laughing, laughing with delight, tears streamed down her face. ‘You should have seen Carl’s face!’

  Lily’s movements were jerky and sudden, but not always directed. She jumped up to get more coffee, but then when she was up, she hovered, seemingly unsure of why she had risen. She kept talking. ‘I think men are dead. You know, they have no life. I read all the magazines, I watch all the TV shows, the women’s panels, you know. Those women are so wonderful, they have so much strength, such vitality. Do you know Mary Gibson? She’s great! She was saying how she flunks all the tests. I do too. The tests in the magazines, you know, score yourself on how good a wife you are, how good a mother, how feminine. I always flunk them. Mary said she thinks it’s the fault of the tests!’ Lily announced this as some outrageous, delightful piece of arrogance, laughing as she said it. ‘I love her. You ought to watch her, she’s on at ten o’clock, and then there’s Katharine Carson, she’s divorced and she really knows the score.’ Lily chattered on about her television friends, for that is, Mira thought, what they were, and probably the only friends she had.