The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  Val was sitting silent, which was unusual enough that we all turned and looked at her.

  ‘No, I’m not disagreeing. Certainly things are better for your generation. But I am wondering how much better. You all come from top schools, you’re all privileged, given the general state of women, and none of you has any kids yet. I don’t want to be a doom-monger, but I think you may be underestimating what you’re up against.’

  ‘In a way it doesn’t matter. We have to believe that we can do anything we want to; otherwise we’re fucked before we begin,’ Clarissa argued.

  ‘Yes. If you don’t fall head over heels into the trap because you didn’t see if beforehand,’ Val warned grimly.

  ‘You really are being a doom-monger,’ Iso protested.

  ‘Maybe. But you are being naive if you really believe that a situation that has existed as long as written history has changed so much in fifteen or twenty years that you are not going to have to deal with it. You feel lucky. You’ve escaped. The hell you have. You’re still in the convent. Along with all the little boys. Who was saying before that all the male grad students at Harvard seem to be missing the basic organ? Everybody wants to stay locked in here, because nobody wants to become what they know they’re going to have to become when they get out there. And the chances are they’ll become it: you don’t have much chance against IT.’

  ‘The IT theory of history!’ Kyla proclaimed.

  ‘We need Milton here to explain how we’re free.’

  ‘Sufficient to have stood but free to fall,’ Kyla laughed.

  ‘Are you? Are you?’ Val stormed hugely.

  ‘Maybe not, but …’ Kyla began again to tell us of her wonderful marriage, their agreements, their arrangements …

  ‘Their filthy refrigerators,’ Mira put in.

  ‘Oh, Mira!’ Kyla said with testy affection. ‘Why do you always have to bring us down to the level of the mundane, the ordinary, the stinking, fucking refrigerator? I was talking about ideals, nobility, principles …’ And leaped up and charged across the room and threw herself on Mira and hugged her, kept hugging her, saying, ‘Thank you, oh, thank you, Mira, for being so wonderful, so awful, for always remembering the stinking, filthy refrigerator!’ She caroled on, the others in laughter, that serious conversation ended.

  Mira grimaced. ‘How can I forget it?’ she wailed.

  ‘Oh, poor Mira!’ Kyla cried. ‘Stuck forever through history with the stinking refrigerator!’

  ‘Write a paper about it,’ Clarissa suggested. ‘“The Image of the Refrigerator in the Twentieth-Century Novel.”’

  ‘“The Frost-Free Syndrome in ‘Fire and Ice,’”’ Iso called.

  ‘No, NO!’ Mira shouted. ‘It has to be a filthy refrigerator, one that needs to be cleaned, not just defrosted. Not that defrosting isn’t bad enough!’

  ‘That could be a song,’ Iso decided. ‘“It was bad enough when I had to defrost you, baby, but now I have to clean you out.”’

  ‘Or, “You ain’t nothin’ but a filthy frig, but I love you just the same,”’ Kyla sang.

  They all clamored, shouting titles at her. She laughed, and then, as titles flew around the room, echoing many that had recently adorned the first pages of papers written by this very group, she hung her head, her eyes streaming, gasping with laughter. She pulled her head up, finally.

  ‘You can all go fuck yourselves!’ she shouted, and they shrieked, they hooted, they whistled between their teeth. Kyla began to applaud, then the others; Clarissa stood up, they all stood up, she was surrounded by a circle of applauding madwomen all shrieking with laughter: ‘You did it! You did it!’ they cried.

  ‘Have I passed a test?’ she yelled. ‘An initiation rite?’

  ‘See how many you know,’ Kyla challenged, bending down and baring her teeth at Mira.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, how many are there? There aren’t many, that’s the problem. Now in Shakespeare’s time …’

  ‘He made his up!’ Clarissa declared. ‘You have to use those available to you from IT!’

  ‘The IT theory of language!’ Iso agreed.

  ‘Shit,’ Mira said, and they all applauded and hooted again. ‘Listen, there just aren’t many. Poverty of language. There’s damn and hell and bitch and bastard and shit and fuck and motherfucker. Now there’s an interesting word …’

  But she didn’t have a chance then, in that room. Amid the applause, the animated talk, Iso had put the record player on and soon Janis Joplin was ripping across the room and they had broken into groups of two having tête-à-têtes that would, in time, become the subject of other tête-à-têtes, and in time, everybody would know everything about everybody else, and everybody would talk about everything they knew about everybody else and everybody accepted everything about everybody else. That was the way that was.

  7

  It wasn’t always that way. Mira and Val and I were part of what one eminent professor of English in this exalted institution had referred to sneeringly as the ‘Geritol crowd.’ There were a few older men, too, mostly Jesuit priests. I don’t know why Harvard accepted us at all; it was not its usual practice. Perhaps because of the war – we were eminently undraftable. But we were few enough in number to feel terribly alone in that mass of undirected faces, all of which looked under twenty. They weren’t of course: Kyla was twenty-four, Isolde, twenty-six, Clarissa, twenty-three. But Mira and I were thirty-eight and Val was thirty-nine. That was quite a difference. Many of our professors were younger than we were; the chairman of graduate studies was thirty-five. It is strange. All of us had lived much alone and had great confidence in our own perceptions, and were not used to being treated like fools, or patronized. When the graduate chairman treated us like recalcitrant children, it made us very uncomfortable. But we didn’t know what to do about it. You couldn’t seem to assert human equality within the limitations of institutional relations. If you know what I mean. So you dropped out. At least I did. I mean, you just didn’t talk much to them, you did your work and got your grades and had nothing at all to do with them if you could help it. When you were finished and asked for recommendations, you got nice letters about your excellence as a mother figure, or your elderly stability.

  Anyway, it took us some time to find each other, and in the beginning, Mira walked the streets of Cambridge feeling like a foreign and condemned species. With her tinted, curled hair, her three-piece knit suit, her stockings and girdle, her high heels and matching purse, she felt like a dinosaur in the Bronx. She passed them, one after another, mostly young faces, bearded if male, with long hair if female, wearing shabby jeans or Civil War uniforms or capes or long granny dresses or saris or anything else their imaginations had come up with. No one looked at her; no one looked at anyone else. If they did happen to look at her, their eyes clicked her into her category and clicked off. She went berserk.

  She was forced to look at things about herself she had never seen before. Her years at the university in New Jersey had not prepared her for this. The university was sprawled right in the middle of suburbs; the people there were used to suburban matrons, they were used to suburban life, they were suburbanites themselves. There, she was considered a member of the human race. Men’s eyes sometimes flickered as they passed her, reassuring her that she was still attractive. Sometimes she could sense a head turn to look at her as she passed, or even after she had passed.

  It was only after she moved to Cambridge, which is so insistently young, which was, in 1968, so insistently opposed to everything Mira seemed to represent, that she began to realize how much she depended on those flickers of eye, those head turnings for her sense of importance. The first few days she was there, she would run for shelving paper or thumbtacks to fix up her apartment a little, and run back and stare wildly in the mirror, work with her hair, try different makeups, put clothes on and off in front of the mirror. She ran out and bought pleated skirts and white socks; she took her pearls out of their dusty box. But nothing worked. For the first time since
her divorce from Norm, she felt utterly and utterly without a face. In New Jersey, she had had her friends; some of the couples they’d been friendly with continued to invite her for an occasional dinner, always, of course, inviting some single man of their acquaintance at the same time. She’d been a known quantity: a divorced woman who lived in a fine large house and had two sons and was going back to school.

  But Cambridge was full of young people who moved like arrows toward a target; they were angry, they couldn’t understand how the old world could be so rotten and still insist on continuing. They couldn’t understand why it didn’t die of its own disease, or preferably, seeing its own disease, commit suicide. They moved toward targets not seeing each other, bumping into each other by accident on Mass Ave, and not even remembering to say, ‘Excuse me.’ They were young people who had had everything, had had much, anyway. They knew about everything except limitation.

  But Mira did not see that. She saw everything in terms of herself. She felt it was she, her person, that they were rejecting. She sat late at night with her brandies, realizing how all her life she had maintained her ego by things like the butcher smiling when he saw her, complimenting her on her appearance; or the floor waxer looking at her with a glint in his eye; or a male head turning as she walked across the campus at the university. It appalled her; she remembered Lily. How do you stop doing that? How can one maintain oneself by such absurdities? How can one rid oneself of them?

  She sat in the dark, smoking. In the dark, she could not see the shabby furnished apartment she lived in, the peeling wallpaper, the tottery Formica tables. She remembered sitting in the dark in her fancy house in Beau Reve, the year after Norm left, trying to get to the root of her bitterness, the uncontrollable rage that kept spurting out at the boys, at the butcher, the floor waxer. She felt so wrong in Cambridge. But then she’d always felt wrong. She had worked hard, had used all her intelligence, and she had discovered the secret of how to seem right, and had found out that the seeming was all. She had spent her life maintaining the appearance, like Martha poring over The Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping.

  All those years, those years, she had done it too. If she had not gone so far as to buy the magazines and rate herself on the tests, she always pored over them at the dentist’s office. Rate yourself: are you a good wife, are you still attractive? Are you understanding, compassionate, nutritive? Do you keep your eye shadow fresh? Have you, in the boredom of the long lonely hours of dusting and ironing his shirts, allowed yourself to consume a whole coffee cake? Are you OVERWEIGHT?

  Mira had pitted herself against the standard. She had dyed and dieted, spent hours trying on wigs to be sure her hairstyle suited her face, had learned the proper tone of voice in which to ask nasty questions: ‘Did Clark do something terrible, Norm, that you spanked him?’ ‘Oh. Well, do what you want, of course, dear. But we did promise the Markleys we’d come – yes, we did talk about it, dear, last night after you came in, remember? I don’t care about it at all, but I would feel bad calling her to say we won’t come because you forgot and made a golf date.’ She had been properly ginger with his male ego, his fragile pride. She needled rather than raise her voice, she never threw tantrums. She was a perfect mother: she never struck her children, they were clean and well-fed. Her house shone. Her meals were edible. She kept her figure. She had done it all, everything the magazines, the television, the newspapers, the novels, everything they told her she was expected to do. She never carped when Norm was out late night after night; she never expected that she and the boys should come before his work; she never asked him to do anything around the house.

  She had done everything right, she had been perfect, and he had still come home saying, ‘I want a divorce.’ Thinking it, she was filled with outrage, she threw her glass across the room, spilling brandy on the carpet, splashing it on the walls, and the glass flew into shreds and spattered her mind. She remembered the last time thoughts like these had invaded her perfectly made-up mind, and she had stumbled crying upstairs and seized a razor blade and hacked at her wrists, even then attacking herself, still Mrs Perfect Norm. When IT gets to you, you take yourself out of the scene, making way for a new Mrs Perfect Norm, in the modern form of suttee. Bury yourself in darkness, you are no longer necessary. By day, watch your step, obey the rules or they may call you castrater, bitch, slob, pig, cow, slut, whore, prostitute, chippy tramp. You are not a prostitute, even if once every ten days or so you go through the motions of sex with someone you have no desire for. You are not a prostitute because you aren’t getting paid. All you get is room, board and apparel. And Norm got what he paid for.

  Down on her hands and knees wiping up brandy, sweeping up glass splinters with a paper towel, thinking that women always have to clean up their own messes, wondering what it would feel like to have someone clean up after you, unable to remember that far back in her childhood, feeling the bitter sagging of the sides of her mouth, she suddenly sat back on her heels. She thought: It is useless to demand justice. She sat down with a fresh brandy, her mind feeling as if a door had opened and fresh air was blowing through. She had been presented with a set of terms: your function is to marry, raise children, and if you can, keep your husband. If you follow these rules (smile, diet, smile, don’t nag, smile, cook, smile, clean) you will keep him. The terms were clear and she had accepted them and they had failed her. Ever since the divorce, she had grown more and more bitter at that injustice, at the injustice of the way the world treats women, at Norm’s injustice to her. And all she was doing was getting more bitter, destroying her own life, what was left of it.

  There is no justice. There was no way to make up for the past. There was nothing that could make up for the past. She sat stunned for a while, freed of a burden, feeling her mouth soften, her brow unline.

  And what slid into her mind now, seeing it all as she did from a distance and so, whole, spanning time and space, but complete, discrete, finished, was that what was wrong was deeper than the set of terms of their falseness. What was wrong was the assumption beneath them that she could have a life only through another person. She felt her wrists, her arms, rubbed her hand over her breasts, her belly, her thighs. She was warm and smooth and her heart beat calmly, fine pulsing energy was being driven through her, she could walk, she could talk, she could feel, she could think. And suddenly it was all right, the past, even if it was all wrong, because it had freed her, it had placed her here, still alive, more alive than she had been since the days long ago when she had taken off all her clothes and gone for a stroll to the candy store.

  There was no justice, there was only life. And life she had.

  8

  Unfortunately the world around us does not necessarily change in tempo with changes in us. Mira went back to school the second week and looked around her, seeing, wondering, judging, instead of creeping through it encapsulated in an image and being aware only of how she was seen, judged. She knew she would not again hide in a toilet unless Walter Matthau really was after her. But she had yet to speak to anyone.

  Then one day after Hooten’s Renaissance lecture, a short red-haired girl with wide blue eyes, long straight hair, and a creamy oval face approached her: ‘You’re a grad student in English, aren’t you? My name’s Kyla Forrester. Would you like to have some coffee?’

  Mira was so grateful for the overture that she kept her mouth from pursing at the girl’s appearance. Kyla’s hair was cut with bangs across the forehead, and she was wearing a flared miniskirt and a white turtlenecked sweater. She looked just like a cheerleader.

  Kyla took her to Lehman Hall, a cafeteria for students who did not live in Harvard Houses. She talked constantly as they crossed the yard, talked about loneliness and the horrible Harvard system, about the horribleness of Harvard graduate students, about all the zombies and creeps walking around in the world. She talked with flair and zest and energy, punctuating her remarks with wide flings of her free arm – the other being full of books – and expletive ‘Ug
hs!’ and ‘Yicks!’ Mira was completely charmed.

  Lehman Hall was a large dining room with carpet, twenty-foot windows, crystal chandeliers. The carpet was cheap tweed, the tables were plastic cafeteria type, the smell was of canned tomato soup. One long table near the east wall was the usual resort of graduate students in arts and sciences between the hours of twelve and three. Kyla introduced Mira to the group at the table.

  There was Brad, an intense young man with a wide mobile mouth, who interrupted his imitation of some professor long enough to say Hi; Missy, a short-haired girl scout from Iowa who was charming and interested, and who explained to Mira her urgent desire to computerize all of Milton; Isolde, a tall, very thin woman with mousy brown hair pulled back in a tight bun, a pale frozen face and manner, who sat with a book often before her; Val, a large woman around Mira’s age, who talked loudly and wore a flowing cape and who, it turned out, was in social science; and Clarissa, a silent young woman with long chestnut braids and watchful eyes. Kyla and Mira sat at the far end of the table and Kyla launched into a set of questions to which she already knew the answers.

  ‘How do you feel about being in this crummy place, well it’s obvious, it doesn’t touch you, you’re serene. I wish I had your kind of dignity, I get crawly about all the slimy creeps, how did you get that way? I mean I keep flipping out, I feel as if I’m climbing the walls, it’s a freak-out, man, just walking around in this place with all the zombies. What happened to life, did it disappear with the development of the brain? Well, obviously that didn’t happen to you, which means there’s hope, I mean, I don’t want to think I am going to end up like them, like the rest of them …’

  After that, Mira went every day to Lehman Hall; although its environment was not welcoming, there was at least always someone to talk to, or listen to.

  ‘I have these dreams,’ mild, handsome Lewis said anxiously. In his hands was the antiwar petition he was circulating. All the men were in danger of the draft. ‘I hate violence, so why should I have these dreams?’ He recounted them without any change of expression, his voice mild, his speech a steady modulated stream. He had sent hot pokers up the vaginas of the closest female members of his family, had arranged and gloated in disembowelings, electric shocks applied to delicate portions of anatomies, had tied people to stakes and poured honey over them and waited until the ants arrived, had castrated, mutilated, maimed, and killed. ‘Kill, kill, kill,’ he said with mild wonder, ‘there’s blood all over my dreams. Last night I lined up all the Harvard faculty and machine-gunned them. Do you suppose,’ he peered into Mira’s face, ‘there’s something wrong with me?’