The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  ‘Martha? Are you okay?’

  The voice grew a little stronger. ‘Mira!’

  ‘Do you need help?’

  ‘Oh, God, Mira!’

  ‘I’ll be right there.’

  She threw some clothes on and went out into the chilly October night. The moon had been orange earlier, but it was fading now. The stars glittered overhead just as they would for young lovers with the world before them. Or so they think, Mira thought bitterly. She knew Martha’s trouble had to be David.

  Martha’s front door was unlocked, and she went in. Martha was sitting on the edge of the bathtub leaning over the toilet, seat up. She had a bottle in her hand. She looked up when Mira came in. Her face was swollen and her cheek was black and blue. One nostril was red and swollen, and a thin line of blood trickled down from it. Her shoulder, exposed in the nightgown, was also black and blue.

  Mira sighed. ‘My God.’

  ‘Don’t call Him, He’s on their side,’ Martha said, then suddenly crumpled, let her face fall in her hand, and began to sob wildly.

  Mira let her cry, and gently removed the bottle from her hand and looked at it. It was Ipecac. Mothers know it; it makes babies vomit, and you use it on those terrible nights when you suspect a child has swallowed half a bottle of Grandma’s sleeping pills.

  ‘What did you do?’

  Martha couldn’t talk. She was sobbing. She just shook her head back and forth, and then suddenly, vomited gigantically, a rush of liquid with feather bits in it. Mira waited until she was through, then washed her face with a cool cloth. Martha would not let Mira wipe up the toilet. ‘Look, I know what it’s like. I’ve done it for the kids enough times.’

  ‘So have I. I’m used to it.’

  ‘You never get used to it!’ Martha insisted, and got down on her knees and cleaned the bowl. When she was through, she stood up. ‘I think that was it. I feel okay.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Took a bottle of sleeping pills.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘About ten minutes before I took the Ipecac,’ Martha said, and laughed.

  ‘I need a shower, then I’ll air this place out,’ she said.

  ‘You’re an agreeable suicide, I must say,’ Mira smiled. ‘Mind if I have a drink?’

  ‘No. Pour me one too.’

  Martha got into the shower. Mira sat in Martha’s bedroom, drinking, smoking. Everybody should clean up their own vomit. Everybody should clean up the toilet they use. Why not? Problem was kids. Can’t ask them. I wonder why not? Martha’s bedroom was austere and delicate at the same time. Plain and stark, but with delicate prints, gracefully framed, straight-hanging draperies in delicate fabric. It was very restful, very nice. Why not? Balances, balances. Things didn’t have to be the way they were.

  Martha emerged looking horrible. Her delicate face had deep lines in it, unpleasant lines along her mouth, a deep frown on her forehead; her eyes were puffy. She sat down on the end of the bed and took the drink Mira handed her. Mira waited, looking at her. She sipped. She looked up.

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ she said.

  Mira looked listening.

  ‘David came for dinner tonight,’ she said, breathing deeply, launching into the just quieted wound. ‘It was a little celebration. His paper was accepted by the Journal of Comparative Literature, and he was so happy. I was so happy for him. You know, I haven’t been doing much cooking lately – no time since I’ve been working – but this afternoon I ran around getting filet specially sliced for tournedos, fresh asparagus. I boiled a chicken yesterday – my kids hate boiled chicken! – just so I’d have broth to make risotto. I bought a little jar of caviar – really splurging – and hard-boiled some eggs. And I bought fresh strawberries – the last of the season and I paid an arm and a leg for them – and red wine. And it was great. If I do say so myself. It was beautiful, and I was so happy, and everything felt so right. I felt so happy doing it for him, I felt I could do it forever and ever. And he looked so beautiful sitting there. He was very funny, talking about his colleagues’ reactions to the news about his article. It’s such a jealous, backbiting department. He was funny, but he really understands them. He’s not like most men, you know? He thinks about what people are feeling as well as what they’re saying. So he’s interesting.’

  She sipped her drink again and bent over to wipe her nose. She was sniffling. Blood was trickling out along with mucus. She blew it and wiped it and sat up, but the sniffing continued.

  ‘And we were sitting with snifters of the cognac he’d brought, and Lisa was in her room doing homework and Jeff was asleep and we were sitting in the living room, on the couch, not too close because I wanted to be able to look at him, and we had coffee on the table in front of the couch, half-drunk …’

  She began to cry then. Mira waited.

  She pulled herself up again. ‘And then Lisa went to bed, and I leaned back against the arm of the couch, looking at him, basking in it, in him, feeling warm and sexy and comfortable and just loving looking at him, and all of a sudden he turns to me with a serious, solemn face, and says, “Martha, I have something to tell you.”’

  She was crying as she spoke now, interspersing words and gasps.

  ‘But I was still drifting, floating, in that miraculous place, and I didn’t pay attention, I put out my hand and said, “Yes, darling,” or something stupid like that, and he took my hand, and he said, “Martha, Elaine’s pregnant.”

  ‘Then he put his head in his hands, and I sat up, and I screamed “What!” and he shook his head, still in his hands, kept shaking it, and then I realized he was crying, and I moved over to him and I held him, held his head and back, and rocked him, and he talked, he said it was some kind of accident and he didn’t know how it happened, she was trying to trap him because she knew he wanted out of the marriage, and I was crying too, and rocking him and saying, “Yes, I understand, baby, it’s okay, it’ll be okay,” and in a while he started to calm down, but all the while my mind was whirring and it got hotter and hotter and hotter, and when he stopped crying I threw him away from me, I sat back and shrieked at him. Accident? When they weren’t sleeping together? How did that come about? Okay, lie number one, but I always knew that was a lie. But she knew about me, she knew he wanted out, how come he trusted her with birth control, I mean didn’t he have any idea? And then I remembered him saying how much he would like to have a son. He loved his daughter but …’ Martha laughed bitterly. ‘And I looked at his face and I knew. I knew it was what he really wanted. He never intended to divorce her. He made me wreck my life for him, but he never had any intention of damaging his. I looked at him and I could have killed him. I just roared and went for him. I pounded him, I kicked him, I scratched him. He defended himself. I guess I look like a mess, but believe me, he’s a picture too. Then I threw him out. That motherfucker, that cocksucker, that fucking bastard!’ She was gone again, screaming in rage and pain, sobbing. The children’s bedroom doors remained adamantly closed. Martha cried for half an hour. ‘Oh, God, I don’t want to live anymore,’ she gasped out finally. ‘It hurts too much.’

  3

  By this time, all of us had a word. It was THEM, and we all meant the same thing by it: men. Each of us felt done in by one of them, but that wasn’t it. Because each of us had friends, and our friends were also being done in by them. And each of our friends had friends … But it wasn’t only husbands. We had heard about Lily’s friend Ellie, whose husband was a brute, who finally got a separation from him, but then he would break into the house and beat her up in the middle of the night, and she couldn’t stop him. Literally. The cops wouldn’t do anything because he still owned the house. Her lawyer said there was nothing he could do. Maybe there was, but Bruno had threatened him too and maybe he was frightened. She couldn’t get anyone to help her. She didn’t want to go down to the police station and sign a complaint about Bruno. She felt he would lose his job, and she didn’t especially want to see him go to jail. But finally,
that’s what she had to do. And he did lose his job. He didn’t go to jail. But he stopped paying her anything. So big deal. She won. Won what? Status as a welfare mother.

  Or Doris. Roger wanted the divorce, and she was angry, so she really soaked him. She asked for fifteen thousand a year for her and the three kids. But after all, he was making thirty-five. And she had quit school when they got married and supported him for three years while he finished. She’d agreed to put her eggs in his basket, which is what he wanted, and then he breaks the basket. You can’t blame her. She was thirty-five and hadn’t worked in years. When she had worked, she’d been a typist. She had no pension plan, no seniority built up. But Roger got furious at the judge’s decision, and got himself transferred out of the state. She can’t touch him. He sends her a hundred a month for the kids. Three kids. She can’t do a thing.

  Or Tina, who dared to have a lover after she was divorced. Phil had one too, but of course, that’s different. He didn’t have the kids. He said he wasn’t going to give her money as long as that man was hanging around, and if she wanted to give him legal trouble about it, he’d take the kids away. ‘Any judge,’ he said threateningly, a judge himself emerging from the heavens, ‘any judge in this country would take those kids away from a woman who lets a man stay in her house overnight. A whore is a whore, and don’t you forget it.’ Maybe he wasn’t right about that, but Tina was too terrified to find out. ‘Phil,’ she said, ‘he’s a nice guy. The kids like him. He pays more attention to them than you ever did.’ That was not exactly calculated to work. It might have mattered if what they were having was a human encounter as she thought, but he was just nose-thumbing in a power struggle. Tina didn’t sue him, he didn’t pay. She’s on welfare too. If you want to find out who all the welfare mothers are, ask your divorced male friends. It sounds easy, you know, going on welfare. But apart from the humiliation and resentment, you don’t really live very well. In case you didn’t know. Which is unpleasant for a woman, but sends her into fits when she looks at her kids.

  The point is that we all heard these stories, we kept hearing them. It seemed everybody was getting divorced. After a while you even stopped asking why. We had all, without reason, got married, and now we were all, without reason, getting divorced. After a while it didn’t seem abnormal. We didn’t feel the world was falling apart. Anyone who’s been married any length of time knows how rotten marriage is, and we’d listen to the news commentators deploring the high divorce rate as just so much more pious hypocrisy. It wasn’t that we were or were not married that bothered us. It was that we were all so poor that we could be invaded (even Norm would come into the house and read Mira’s mail – he had the right, he said, he owned the house), we could be beat up, we could be done anything to and no one, no one, from the cops to the courts to the state legislatures, no one was on our side. Sometimes even our friends and families weren’t on our side. We gathered together uneasily in little groups of twos or threes, muttering, bitter. Even our shrinks weren’t on our side. We excoriated THEM to the point of nausea, but that was all it was, vomiting the immediate cause of indigestion. The sickness, though, was chronic. We understood that the laws were all for THEM, that the setup of society was all for THEM, that everything existed for THEM. But we didn’t know what to do about it. We half believed there was something terribly wrong with US. We crept into our holes and learned to survive.

  4

  George and Martha got back together, at a cost. They did it mainly because of money problems, but George had never really been able to function alone, and was grateful for Martha’s difficulty. And George is a good guy. He did not ever use what happened against Martha, not even when he was very angry.

  But the truth is, he didn’t need to. The affair with David finished her. She was never the same afterward. But I’m getting ahead of myself again. Will this story never end? My God, on and on and on. Only an atomic blast would end it. Sometimes I understand hawks: they too, like me, have moments of such intolerable pain and they would be willing to see it all go up, and would even cheer the mushroom cloud.

  Christmas came, then Easter, then summer. Norm insisted on a divorce, Mira held him up. She counted the years, counted what he would have had to pay a housekeeper, nurse, laundress, chauffeur, prostitute – for that is what she felt, now, to have been her most painful role – and presented Norm with the bill.

  ‘The money is all yours. You told me some time ago you could live just as well in a hotel. Consider that you have lived with paid services for fifteen years. That is what it would have cost you.’

  Norm was outraged, his lawyer was outraged, her lawyer thought she was insane. They went over and over her account. In the end, they settled: Mira as well as her lawyer knew the judge would never grant her what she asked, despite Norm’s high income. What she got was the house as long as she lived in it (there was a mortgage, and joint ownership – if she moved, she would receive half of their parity), the car (paid for: a ’64 Chevrolet), six thousand a year in alimony and another nine in child support (until the children reached twenty-one). She figured it out. With the house and furniture and her clothes, she figured she had been paid two thousand dollars a year for the fifteen years they had been married and would receive six thousand a year every year they were not. It was a strange arrangement, but by now Mira was as thin and brittle as a saltine. ‘Not quite slave labor, I guess. I got something besides room and board.’

  Mira did well in school, and liked being back doing scholarly work. Martha was surviving. Samantha was surviving. Lily was barely surviving. The boys went on. The years went on. Mira’s work was good, even brilliant. Her teachers advised her to go on for a Ph.D. Mira listened to ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and thought that something had happened to popular music. Lily had another breakdown. Martha finished her BA and was accepted at the university law school. She had not been deranged after all. Mira made out applications, asked for recommendations. Martin Luther King was killed. Bobby Kennedy was killed. My Lai happened, although we didn’t know it yet. The mail arrived. Mira had been accepted at Yale and Harvard. She sat there looking at the letters, unable to believe them. Norm was remarried, to the woman Mira had once called his little chippy. Mira was about to put the house up on the market when Norm called and told her he would buy out her half. He was willing to pay her $5000 less than she thought her half was worth considering what the house would bring on the open market. They quarreled. She accepted his offer when he came up $2500. After all, she would have been the one who would have had to clean it up every morning, expecting buyers. Sigh, sigh. Shit, man. Enough, I can’t understand anymore. What happened was bad enough without reviewing it. I’m sorry I started this. But I guess I had to do it. And now I feel I have to finish it. It’s only July 26. School doesn’t open until September 15. Besides, as they used to say, what else do I have to do?

  Mira sold all the furniture to Norm. She got the boys enrolled in a good private high school. And one morning in August of 1968, Mira packed her suitcases in her car to drive to Boston. She stood for a while in front of the empty house. The boys were with Norm. They were all coming back tomorrow, when Norm and his new wife would move in. She wondered what that woman would feel like, moving into her house, full of furniture she had chosen and cared for and devoted her life to. Yes. She saluted it.

  ‘Good-bye, furniture,’ she said. And the furniture, being furniture, sat.

  5

  Before she left, Mira made two visits. The first was to Martha. Martha knew she was coming, but when she arrived, Martha was wearing an old, stained wrapper that made her look pregnant, and had a kerchief wrapped around her head. She was down on her hands and knees, holding a small tool, scraping the wax off the kitchen floor.

  ‘You don’t mind if I do this while we talk. I have so little time these days,’ Martha said.

  Mira sat on a kitchen bench. She sipped the gin and tonic Martha had given her. Martha talked. She was through her first year of law school. She didn’t know what sh
e wanted to specialize in. She was interested in international law, but that was an impossible field for a woman. She talked much of the intricate politics of the school. Martha had gained much weight. Her delicate frame looked odd under all that flesh. Martha rarely looked Mira in the eyes these days. She talked to walls, floors, knives and forks. She never mentioned David. George was unhappy. During their separation he had learned some independence. Now he felt constrained by Martha’s competence. He thought he wanted a divorce.

  ‘Funny, isn’t it? He’s having an affair with a woman in his office, but that’s not why he wants his divorce. He wants a swinging pad in Manhattan. He wants to try what he never had. You can understand it, except it’s all so goddamned adolescent.’ She laughed. She worked at the wax, square inch by square inch. She worked very slowly.

  ‘If you have another of those putty knives, I’ll help you,’ Mira said, ‘At the rate you’re going, you’ll be done in two weeks.’

  ‘It’s okay. I’m such a perfectionist that I’d redo what you did anyway.’

  ‘Is George serious?’

  ‘About the divorce? I don’t know. He’s serious about having an apartment in New York. He misses his bachelor bliss,’ she laughed, ‘although he didn’t think it was such bliss when he had it.’

  Scrape, scrape.

  ‘But it would be messy for me. I have two years of school to go. My job is only part-time, I barely pay for food out of it. And what George wants now is a fancy place, not the dump he had before. I can’t imagine how we’ll pay for everything. He got a good raise a couple months ago, but he’s a dreamer if he thinks that will cover it. We still have two thousand dollars in debts from the separation, one thousand of it being what he owes the shrink.’