The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  Mira glanced over at Iso, and was surprised to see that frozen face dancing with laughter. Isolde had strange eyes – pale green and dead looking, the eyes of an ancient person, someone who sees all human effort as futile. Mira, whose own face had been carefully set in concerned-sympathetic, burst out laughing too. Val blurted out, ‘Half your problem is that you’re male,’ and strode off for coffee. Lewis turned worriedly back to Mira and Iso: ‘Even my mother! And I love my mother!’ Iso cracked up.

  Beside them, Clarissa gazed silently at Morton Awe as he explained in detail the respective merits of various available and unavailable records of The Abduction from the Seraglio, and Missy listened, with detailed questions, to Mark’s recipe for home-baked bread. Kyla, who was trying to kick smoking, sat alone at the end, sucking on a plastic spoon and reading Greek. To the questions of each newcomer, she rapped out like a drill sergeant: ‘Oral fixation, innocuous substitute.’

  ‘I’ll never get in. No first-year people will. Jones limits his seminars to two and three GSs.’

  ‘Sonia Toffler got in.’

  ‘She did!!!?’

  ‘Don’t go, hang around. I want to go to the Coop and buy some records.’

  ‘I have to go. I have to study Latin. I study ten hours a day.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘No, I’m an overachiever. No brains, pure grind.’

  ‘What do you think of Purdy?’

  ‘Man, he’s an asshole.’

  Mira finally had something to say and leaned forward to join the conversation. ‘He wrote an excellent book on Milton.’

  ‘Yeah, if you like verb clusters.’

  ‘You mean there are verbs in Paradise Lost? Shit, man, all these years and I never knew that.’

  ‘Listen, man, how else can Adam and Eve make out? Fuck is a verb.’

  ‘Maybe for you. For me it’s an adjective. I never made it to the verb stage. Pass the fucking salt, will you?’

  ‘I really gotta go.’ Hollow eyes, hollow voice. ‘I’m a wreck. I’ll never make it here.’

  ‘Shit, man, you went to Swarthmore. I come before you a manga from PC.’

  ‘PC?’

  ‘See? Providence College, man. You think you got troubles?’

  ‘So I took the room in the graduate dorm. You know how the undergraduates live in the Houses, suites of rooms, those libraries with grand pianos and Oriental rugs and chandeliers and shit? Well, my room’s so small it holds a bed and a bureau. Period. There’s a window, but it’s so high I have to stand on a chair to look out. And the plumbing leaks, so all my books are piled on the radiator to dry out. I’ll keep them there, I guess. There’s no room for a bookcase.’

  ‘Did you hear that Lawrence Kelly got into Bailey’s seminar on Renaissance Humanism?’

  ‘How’d he manage that?’

  Awed silence.

  ‘He must be sharp.’

  ‘He’s from Berkeley. Worked with Malinowski.’

  ‘Oh. Malinowski’s an old friend of Bailey.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I have always thought there were disadvantages to having attended Our Lady of the Swamp.’

  ‘When’s the language exam?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘This place sucks with elitism. Three languages. Christ! They’ve gotta prove their superiority.’

  ‘Oh, it sucks, man.’

  ‘Why did you come here then?’ Mira heard herself ask sharply. But they ignored her.

  ‘Yeah, but remember it used to be five. Old Norse, for Chrissakes. And Gothic and Icelandic. Real living culture.’

  ‘I wonder if they’d accept an obscure Bantu dialect? I’ve got that down letter perfect. Interesting language – only two hundred words.’

  ‘Inflected, I take it?’

  ‘Yeah. All roots. To make a verb you add fuck, to make a noun, you add it.’

  ‘You’re gross, Brad.’

  ‘Damn fuckers. Three languages, a general exam in the entire literature of the English language, and we’re supposed to study all the time living on the measly two thou they give us. I mean, they got to be kidding.’

  ‘Listen, at least you have the two thou. I have a job tending bar at night and I still had to borrow money.’

  ‘Yeah, it shits, man.’

  ‘Everything shits.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  It was after three. Mira rose and left for the library. No one said good-bye.

  9

  One day, about a month after school started, Iso took Mira aside shyly, and invited her to come to dinner. ‘I have a roommate – she doesn’t go to Harvard – and she’s really lonely – this place is so lonely. So I thought – well, I’ve invited a few of the better people, you know?’ Iso’s mouth barely moved when she spoke. For some reason, she touched Mira deeply.

  It was the first invitation Mira had received since her arrival, and she was excited by it. A possible future was opening up. She stopped at Kupersmith’s that afternoon and bought some cheap plants for her windowsill; when she arrived home, she unwrapped the contact paper she had bought the week before and cut it out and plastered it over the stained top of the cocktail table. She ripped down the brittle plastic curtain from the kitchen windows, and measured the frame: she would buy a heavy red cotton curtain, a red tablecloth, new towels. She would be entertaining soon.

  The night of the dinner party, she set her hair and bathed in oil, and dressed in a girdle and heels and a Kimberley suit. She spent twenty minutes applying makeup. She eased her way down the stairs, thinking she had forgotten how miserable high heels felt, and tottered down the uneven brick sidewalks for four blocks to reach Iso’s.

  Iso lived on the third floor of an old three-decker on a tree-lined side street. The scarred front door was open and one could simply walk into the house. She climbed the creaking steps to the third floor and knocked timidly. She tried not to feel as if she were slumming. The house had cracked walls and peeling paint; the banister between the second and third stories was loose. She tried to relax her arms and back, but a thin noise made her shudder. She expected a rat to leap out at her.

  Iso came to the door in the same bulky sweater and baggy pants she had worn earlier in the day.

  ‘Well, don’t you look nice,’ she said with surprise.

  Mira could hear talking from within, and her heart began to beat hard. What did she expect? A new life, a group of fascinating brilliant charming sophisticated people? Iso led her into the living room. It was like Mira’s: the wallpaper was varying shades of brown, a huge radiator dominated one wall, the windows were gray and looked down on some cars parked in a neighboring yard. But one whole wall of Iso’s place held books stacked in homemade bookcases, and the floor opposite it held five feet of records. Over the record player hung a huge oil painting of five women standing in an embrace, a rough imitation, Mira thought, of Matisse’s La Danse.

  And there in the room were Brad attacking Harvard elitism, Lewis describing a gory war novel he had just read, Missy asking Davey Potter about the best way to drive to New York from Boston, and Val, looking glazed as Morton Awe discussed the respective merits of various available and unavailable recordings of Mahler’s Ninth. A bearded young man sat cross-legged on the floor holding on to a bottle of wine. Mira let herself down into an overstuffed chair of maroon velour, and crossed her legs at the ankle. She lighted a cigarette and leaned slightly to throw her match into an ashtray that lay on the floor in front of the bearded man, and the arm of the chair fell off. She gasped.

  Iso darted over and replaced it. ‘Sorry,’ she said between closed lips. ‘My furniture all comes from Goodwill.’ She left the room and returned to the kitchen.

  The bearded man cocked an eyebrow at Mira. ‘Just like home,’ he said sarcastically.

  She fluttered. ‘Yes, my place too. Do you live in Cambridge?’

  ‘Doesn’t everybody?’ he responded wearily, and turned away from her.

  ‘Grant,’ Iso called from the kitchen, ‘pour Mira
some wine, will you? And see if anyone needs a refill.’

  Mira decided Grant was Iso’s boyfriend.

  The wine passed around, but people drank slowly. Grant was putting records on the turntable and people were talking about somebody, some woman singer. Mira thought she was horrible. Her voice went all over the place, she did not seem to be rooted anywhere. She had a strange name too: Aretha. Then they began to talk about somebody with a stranger name, and they put her record on. She was even worse, and Mira wondered about these people: how could they like such sounds? This person – it was a woman, but you couldn’t tell whether she was male or female from her voice – was called Odetta. Mira did not dare to ask what they thought of Peggy Lee.

  She turned to Grant, breathing in, trying to try again, and asked him what he was majoring in. He made some crack, mentioned Galbraith, waved his arm in air. She was confused. ‘Economics,’ he said curtly, turning away again.

  The music played, the wine passed, the conversation floated by her. Val got up and went out into the kitchen for a while. When she returned, she sat down on the floor beside Mira, tapping Grant’s knee, telling him to pull in his tentacles. Mira decided Grant was Val’s boyfriend.

  ‘You look out of it,’ Val said.

  Mira had not realized how close to tears she was, but words now came pouring out. ‘It was a mistake, I guess, coming back at my age. I don’t know what they’re talking about, I don’t know who they are, I don’t know how to talk to them, and I thought – just the other night I thought I saw, thought I understood, knew what had been wrong with my life, but you don’t change by just deciding something, and everything is just the same, who is that, Grant, anyway? And does anyone like Brad, he’s so obnoxious, doesn’t he realize how obnoxious he is? I don’t know what they’re talking about,’ she concluded, liquid-eyed, looking at Val.

  Val was broad and handsome with bright eyes that were almost black and she looked straight at you. ‘I know, I know. They’re talking about music, they talk about music a lot. That’s because they don’t have anything else to talk about, they don’t know how to make conversation, music is their one common bond. You may not realize it, but they’re in worse shape than you, more disjointed, more frightened, more bewildered.’

  Mira stared at her. ‘You understand them.’

  Val shrugged. ‘Well, I’ve lived in Cambridge for ten years now.’

  ‘You’ve been at Harvard for ten years?’

  ‘No. Just started. I’ve been living in a commune in Somerville. I’ve had an assortment of jobs, was involved with the peace movement, sometimes lived on welfare. When they decided to use my politics against me to cut off my income, I decided to use my wit against them. I applied for fellowship at Harvard and got it. So here I am.’

  Mira gazed at her wistfully. ‘I guess it isn’t age. It’s – I feel as if I come from a different world. The suburbs – not that I liked them, I never felt part of them really – but they have different rules. I don’t feel part of it here, either.’

  ‘Maybe you will, in time,’ Val smiled. ‘I think of Cambridge as a home for the homeless.’

  A new woman entered, tallish, very slender, with a body that really was willowy – long and graceful, and seemingly full of bends and curves. Iso came from the kitchen, a little flushed, and introduced her. It was Ava, the roommate. Ava lowered herself to the floor, where she sat cross-legged, her upper body rising from the lotus of her legs like a stem, her head like a daffodil. She glanced up shyly at the strangers. Grant leaped up and handed her a glass of wine, which she accepted with a flutter of eye, a demure, self-deprecating smile. Her head was bent forward, and her long shiny black hair hung straight and silky, almost hiding her face. She looked once at Val and Mira, raising her eyes as if looking were a significant act, then lowered them again. She gazed at her wine. She did not speak. The room at large was talking about the war.

  Iso had set up a bridge table in the entrance hall, which was just large enough for that, had covered it with a bright cloth and a vinegar jar full of daisies. She announced dinner, which was spaghetti and cheese and salad and Italian bread heated with garlic. Everyone filled a plate and returned to their places. Mira was careful with the arm of the chair. They ate and spoke desultorily; the wine passed. Someone questioned Ava: no, she was not a student, she was just a secretary, she answered in a soft voice. Her replies to other questions were saved from curtness only by her soft shy manner. After she had helped Iso clear the plates, Ava left the room, went into a bedroom and closed the door. A few minutes later, music poured from the room, a Brahms Intermezzo, flawlessly played. Everyone looked up. It was Ava, Iso explained, almost apologetically. She was shy with strangers.

  ‘Can we open the door?’

  ‘She’ll stop. She won’t play for people, only for herself,’ Iso said, and there was something hedged in her voice, a warning, perhaps, the tone one might hear in the voice of the mother of a problem child talking to critical neighbors.

  Conversation returned to the war. Iso was talking about Vietnam, which, it appeared, she had visited several years before, getting into the country illegally, and escaping by hitching a ride on an Air Force plane. She spoke in her stiff, expressionless manner, and it was difficult to believe that this reticent stiff woman had done such adventurous things. The group questioned her. She had, it seemed, been everywhere, to Africa, Asia, and Mexico, had spent months in an ashram in India, had lived with Indians in Yucatán.

  ‘I used to get restless. I’d waitress for a while to make some money, then put my pack on my back and take off.’

  Mira was overwhelmed. ‘Did you go alone?’

  ‘Oh, sometimes. But you always meet people when you travel. I’d carry a camera and take pictures, and sometimes I was able to sell them to travel magazines. That helped.’

  People began to leave. Studying, they said. Grant left suddenly, curtly. Mira decided he was nobody’s boyfriend. Mira and Val remained and offered to help with dishes, but Iso refused. Ava stopped playing and came shyly into the room, accepting praise with a sweet smile, as she lowered her body to the floor.

  ‘Have you been playing long?’ Mira asked.

  ‘Since second grade. My second-grade teacher let me stay after school and play the piano in the classroom.’

  She spoke with shy glances at her auditors, then dropped her eyes again. She did not seem to want to talk anymore.

  ‘She didn’t have lessons until she was twelve,’ Iso said with pride. ‘Her daddy bought her a piano then.’

  ‘Yes, but he sold it when I was fifteen,’ Ava giggled.

  ‘They were having hard times,’ Iso explained as if she were Ava’s interpreter. But Ava shot her a warning look, a hard fiery glance that lasted only half a second, and Iso fell silent. In the awkwardness, Mira stood up, knocking the chair arm off again.

  ‘Oh, dear!’ she wailed, and the evening ended with smiles.

  10

  ‘Valerie isn’t a person, she’s an experience,’ Tadziewski said after knowing her only a few weeks.

  She was tall – over five foot ten – and big-boned and well padded. She also had a big voice, so that even when she was talking naturally, you could hear her halfway across Harvard Yard. She probably couldn’t help that, Mira thought, pursing her lips in distaste. Although she was Mira’s age, she did not seem to feel the slightest awkwardness at Harvard. She strode unselfconsciously across the Yard with her inevitable cape flying out behind her. She had capes from everywhere – Spain, Greece, Russia, Arizona. She wore boots, and her feet turned in as she walked, and she laughed a lot and loudly, and she would start a conversation with anyone, anyone at all. And she was obscene.

  Mira was drawn to Val because of the similarity in their ages, and because Val seemed to her to have experience and knowledge she lacked. But she was appalled by Val’s language, and somewhat put off by something direct, something – blatant – she did not know exactly what. She felt a little threatened, as if Val were simply not accountab
le to the rules in the way other people were, as if she held nothing sacred. This threat was not apparent, but very sensible; Mira could not have said how Valerie could harm her, but she felt vulnerable. She called it in her mind Valerie’s potential for saying or doing ‘anything, anything at all.’ Sometimes Iso and Val and Mira, bored with Lehman Hall, would go across the street to the Toga for lunch. Mira would order coffee, Iso milk, but Valerie had beer: she drank it by the quart. Valerie would never drop a subject when it grew too personal, and every subject seemed to grow personal when she was talking. She related everything to sex and used sexual words as casually as any others. Mira could bear to hear the word shit because Norm had been fond of it. But anything stronger caused her a small tremor and an anxious peering around to see if people were staring at them with shock.

  She was very drawn to Iso in spite of – or because of – Iso’s expressionless face, her dead eyes, her deadpan recital of interesting tales. Iso touched her, and Mira, herself reticent, inclined to be nonphysical, felt a deep urge to reach out and touch something in her friend, to touch her physically as well as psychically. But Iso’s impersonality made this impossible. Iso would talk about any subject except herself. She did ask other people personal questions, but they were so seemingly innocuous that they offended no one. ‘Who was your favorite cowboy star when you were little?’ or ‘What kind of books did you like when you were in your teens?’ or ‘If you had lots of money, what kind of car would you buy?’ These questions invariably stimulated a lively discussion, and the talk often had a free, childlike quality, the feeling of play, because they dealt with what seemed to be childlike subjects. But Mira could see Iso’s eyes watching faces as they grinned and giggled about Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger, and James Arness, watching, listening, hearing far more than the speakers imagined. Later she might say, ‘I think Elliott is one of those sensitive guys who got scared into acting authoritative because he was never man enough for the other kids. Underneath his superciliousness beats the heart of Tonto,’ thus granting more charity and understanding to a particularly unpleasant young man than anyone else could offer.