The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  ‘If only he’d talk to me!’ she burst out in a sob, leaped up, and ran into the toilet and shut the door.

  Mira waited. After some minutes, she stood up and walked to the bathroom door and stood there. After another minute or two, she knocked. She could hear Kyla sobbing. She opened the door. Kyla lunged at her, threw her arms around Mira’s waist, buried her head in her bosom and cried. They stood like that for a long time. Mira had never heard anyone cry so long so hard. She thought that Kyla’s heart must really be broken, and then thought that the old worn-out phrase did mean something. Kyla’s heart was not broken, but breaking. After the break, there is silence. She thought too that she had never loved anyone as much as Kyla loved Harley, and she felt humbled, awed in the face of such love.

  After a time, a long time, Kyla’s sobs subsided. She asked to be left alone, and Mira went back to the kitchen, where they had been sitting, feeling dizzy from so much emotion and so much drinking in one day, and put on a pot of coffee. Kyla came out, her face somewhat smoothed out, her bouncy manner returned.

  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t drink.’

  ‘I’m making coffee.’

  ‘Good. I have to give a report at the meeting, and I’d like to be in control.’ She looked at her watch. ‘God, I have only forty minutes.’ She gulped down the rest of her drink, and tossing her hair over her shoulder with a shake of her head, began to tell Mira about her first experiments with alcohol back in Canton, Ohio, in her teenybopper days. She had been a cheerleader, the most popular girl in the class, twice vice-president of it, ‘never president, they always gave that to a guy,’ and had been nicknamed Lightning. Her parents were wonderful, purely wonderful, her father a professor in a local college, her mother a champion baker of pies, their house in the middle of farm country looking out over hills and sunsets, wonderful, wonderful, peaceful. But then she had gone to college in Chicago, so different but wonderful too, but suddenly it had become harder to go home.

  ‘I don’t know why. They’re so wonderful, they love me so much. Then when I married Harley! Oh, they adore Harley! Dad builds a fire and Mom sets a little table in front of it all done up with a lace-edged cloth and silver, you know, late Christmas night, then Dad plays the piano and we sing and Mom brings out all sorts of wonderful things, they have such a nice life, they’re so happy, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, why I hate to go there …’

  She broke off, her head full of tears again, but this time she did not sob, but merely blew her nose for a while. ‘And last Christmas it was really terrible – all my fault, I’m sure, I shouldn’t drink, I had three eggnogs and I gulp so, just an alcoholic at heart, I have to watch it, but somebody – oh, I suppose it was me – brought up the Democratic convention, I was so upset by it, Daley and his white gestapo and Humphrey complaining about the whiffs of tear gas he was getting up there in his protected hotel suite, and my father blew his stack, he screamed and raved about the unwashed hippies, the ungrateful filthy wastrels … oh, all that sort of thing, you know. And Harley was wonderful, he kept coming in as interpreter, and he made me shut up and by then I couldn’t hear what anybody was saying, I was screaming at my father. I wasn’t even talking about Chicago anymore, I was talking about something he’d done when I was little – I can’t even remember, and my mother was very angry with me, her face was so big, I could see it glaring, and my father was shouting, and Harley got it all under control, I don’t know what he did, he made me go to bed, when we left everything seemed to be okay, everybody was smiling and my father kept clapping Harley on the back and saying, “I’m glad she’s got someone like you to look after her, she needs a level head,” and I was still confused, because I’m the practical one, Harley’s always off at his lab or in his study, I look after him, and besides I’m more articulate than Harley and he and I agree totally on politics, so I couldn’t understand what was happening, it was as if everything I knew was shifting under my feet, as if nothing was what I thought it was, so I decided I just couldn’t drink anymore, I just can’t, but here I went and did it again, so now you know, and I’m terribly sorry.’

  She overstayed her time, and left, almost literally flying out the door, her green bookbag in the air behind her, ten minutes late for her meeting. Before she went she hugged Mira. ‘Oh, thank you, Mira, thank you so much, you’re so wonderful, I feel so much better, you are wonderful, thank you, thanks!’

  Mira took a nap, woke, heated a TV dinner, and prepared to study late into the night to make up for what she called a wasted day. She read for several hours, but her concentration was poor, and around one in the morning she stopped, carried her brandy bottle into the living room, and sat by the window huddled in flannel pajamas, a wool robe, and a blanket pulled up around her chin – the landlord turned the heat down at ten. She sat as still inside as she could, trying to let whatever it was she was feeling rise up and show itself. What kept coming into her mind was a scene in Lehman Hall a week or two ago, when Val had embarrassed her horribly. A group of them were sitting around talking about the months, or year, or two years ago when women had not been permitted in Lamont Library, or in the main dining room of the Faculty Club.

  ‘It was a problem,’ Priss was saying, ‘because there are classrooms upstairs in Lamont, and female teaching assistants still couldn’t use the front door, they had to go in the side entrance and climb the back stairs to teach their classes. Like in Rome, you know, slaves teaching the children of the freeborn.’

  ‘The same thing happens at Yale,’ Emily said. ‘Mory’s is such an institution they hold committee meetings there, but no women are allowed to eat there, so they have to go in a back way and climb a back staircase to where the meetings are held.’

  ‘Well, that won’t last long,’ Val said dryly. ‘God, the whole world’s going to pot. I mean, once they let women in, heaven knows what will come next! It’s a terrible degrading of standards. I mean, you have to consider the real reason they keep women out. You know, they say to let women enter med school, or Harvard, or whatever, means lowering their standards, but you know as well as I that women do better than men in high-school grades. So that’s not what they mean. And women don’t mangle books or dirty the card catalog any more than men do, right? So they’re just being polite, the men, when they talk about standards. It’s a euphemism. They don’t want to embarrass us. The real reason is sanitary. You let women through front doors and what will they do? Splat, splat, a big clot of menstrual blood right on the threshold. Every place women go they do it: splat splat. There are little piles of clotty blood all over Lamont Library now. There are special crews hired just to keep the place decently mopped down. That’s an expense! And they have to put in separate toilets. That’s an expense too, and it takes up space! But what can you do? Women will do it: splat splat. Just one more example of the decaying standards of the modern world, letting women in. Nobody,’ she concluded bitterly, ‘cares about decorum anymore.’

  Despite her embarrassment, Mira had ended laughing. Val had caught precisely her feeling about herself at Harvard. She was defilement – how, she wasn’t sure – but a defilement of pure thought, pure mind, pure marble busts of pure marble men. The aetheriality of Harvard made her conscious of flesh and feeling in a way she had not been before; her earlier life, back in the suburbs, so full of flesh and feeling, had made her hyperconscious of her intellect, her connection with ideas and abstractions. Never right, she thought without self-pity. Was anyone? For here, underneath all the intellect, the abstraction, the disconnection, were the same old salt tears and sperm, the same sweet blood and sweat she’d wiped up for years. More shit and string beans. The anguish of Howard, of Iso, of Kyla were only more obvious than her own. They thought her balanced and content because she’d lived longer and was more used to pain. She bore it better, or at least more silently. All the fancy words – adaptation, maturity, sublimation – all they really meant was learning that the empty gaping need in you was never going to be filled, that one was doomed to live f
orever with unfilled cunt, unencompassed prick. The need was not just sexual: cunt and prick were in every mind, and receptive and twitching or dry and limp, the need was pain.

  They called her wonderful. Thank you, thank you, Mira. You’ve helped me so much. I feel so much better. You’re wonderful. When she did not know, really, what they were feeling, did not understand their particular pain, their particular need. How then could she help? She had not helped, she had done nothing but listen. Yet they were not lying. She had helped, listening. She had not denied their truths. She had not asked, by flicker or gesture, that they censor themselves. She had not insisted that they be happy people with happy problems, that their problem was that they had not learned how to fit into a rational and comprehensible world. All she had done was, unblinking and uninterrupting, let them be whatever horrible creature they thought they were.

  That seemed little enough. Mira’s friends had always done that for each other. But for Howard, Iso, and Kyla, that seemed a great gift. That meant no one did such things for them.

  The idea seemed a great truth when it descended upon her around four in the morning: a space to be and a witness (flawed as any witness had to be). It was enough or if not enough, it was all, all that we could do, in the end, for each other.

  18

  Val belonged to a great many political action groups, and Mira would sometimes attend meetings with her. She was no longer desperate in her aloneness, but she always went with the half-hope of meeting an interesting man. However, the men in these groups were idealistic, intense, egotistic, and asexual. At least, they didn’t look twice at Mira. And although she was still unconsciously placing the entire onus of initiation on the male, in fact, she was not in the least interested in them. They struck her as adolescent egomaniacs, Tamburlaines and Edward IIs in little.

  The meetings were held in shabby Cambridge apartments, with coffee served in polyethylene cups that everyone would end up cracking and squeezing. Mira was often asked to serve the coffee.

  One Thursday, Anton Werther, a brilliant student at the school of government, was arguing with Val. Anton was remarkable for his beautiful dark complexion and his utter contempt for the entire world. Val was talking ruefully of the follies of idealism – the Left’s refusal to vote for Humphrey after the 1968 convention, the belief of some left-wingers that a Nixon victory would be a catalyst to revolution – would result in a Nixon Supreme Court, which would, she lamented, put the country back forty years.

  ‘That’s not politics, that’s religion,’ Anton said, managing to look down on Val even though both of them were seated on the floor.

  Val was silenced. ‘My God, you’re right!’ she said.

  A man sitting in a corner, a dark man in a white shirt with rolled up shirt-sleeves, spoke up. ‘Yes, and of course one must be able to proceed politically. But ideally – and I think we’re all idealists, or we’d be out doing something more fruitful than this – politics and religion are the same thing. Or politics and ethics, if you prefer. Politics is simply one sphere of application of morals.’

  Anton had enough respect for the speaker that he turned his head slightly toward him. ‘Let’s leave morals for the women and children where they belong, Ben. How successful was moral thinking in Lianu?’

  Ben laughed. He had a spontaneous, hearty laugh. He seemed to find himself as amusing as anything else. He pulled on the sodden end of a filterless cigarette. ‘I’ll have to admit, Anton, that Lianu is not at present concerned with finding a usable human morality. Its only interest is survival, which means power, and that’s of course what you’re talking about. But I think that unless in all our deeds we remember the ultimate intention, whatever we do will be as poisoned as anything else done in history.’

  ‘Libraries are full of pious precepts; they’ve never had the least effect on political reality,’ Anton snarled.

  ‘Well,’ Mira shouted, knowing she would not be heard if she did not, ‘there was Christianity.’

  Anton swung around and let his cigarette fall out of his mouth. Some people laughed. Mira flushed. ‘And what did that accomplish besides inquisitions?’

  ‘Whatever it did,’ Mira said a little waveringly, ‘it was an ethical system that had an effect on political reality.’

  ‘It was,’ Anton sneered, ‘a superstition used by the outs to get in.’

  ‘It left a legacy,’ Val said. ‘At least now we feel guilty for the rotten things we do.’

  ‘Tell that to the Nazis.’

  ‘An ethical tradition kept the British from murdering Gandhi,’ Ben put in. ‘Imagine what the Nazis would have done to him.’

  ‘Pre-cisely!’ Anton crowed precisely. ‘And in any fight between the British with their so-called ethics (simply overlooking the horrors of British imperialism), in any fight between these ethical British and the Nazis, who would have won?’

  ‘That has nothing to do with ethics. That depended on resources, preparation, armament, population …’

  ‘Exactly!’ Anton summed up. ‘Power. Now let’s get serious, children.’

  The problem on the agenda was praxis: should the group spend the little money they had on handouts? If so, should they be distributed in the Square and certain other key locations, or distributed door-to-door in Cambridge? If the latter, where would they get the manpower?

  Mira sat stewing. For all our wealth and armament, we were not winning the Vietnam War, she wanted to shout at Anton. Nor did we win the Korean War. And for all his talk of practical politics, he was a lousy politician: how would he ever get people to vote his way when he simply overrode them, slapped them down without any regard for their dignity? Politics, she thought, remembering the Greek tragedies, begins at home.

  In fact, when the time came to vote, Ben, Val, and Mira, as well as most of the others, voted for Anton’s proposal.

  After the formal part of the meeting was over, Mira went over to Ben and told him her thoughts, laughing at herself. He smiled at her with a broad smile that included his eyes; he looked at her, really looked, as if she were a person. ‘I have this problem,’ he laughed, ‘I know it’s true, but Anton is always right. Besides,’ he added wryly, ‘we are all idealists, and no matter how Anton knocks that, he counts on it.’

  ‘Idealists always seem to be at a disadvantage. Do you suppose it’s possible to be both idealistic and practical at once?’

  ‘Sure it’s possible. There’s Mao.’

  ‘One to a generation?’

  ‘Not even that.’

  Someone called Ben’s name: ‘We need you on this,’ Brad yelled from across the room where the inner circle of the group – all men – were having an animated discussion. Ben excused himself and joined them, saying, ‘I can’t imagine why.’

  Mira and Val left. Almost everyone was gone except for the inner circle and a few young women who were cleaning up.

  ‘I really hate that Anton,’ Mira said.

  ‘Yeah. You wouldn’t be too happy at his being Dictator of the World.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be happy at anybody’s being Dictator of the World, but I’d rather have that guy Ben, or any bumbling idealist.’

  ‘I don’t agree – quite apart from Ben. Bumbling idealists invariably get overthrown by nonbumbling fascists. What I keep wondering is why we always have to choose between obnoxious alternatives. I mean, we live in moral schizophrenia: there are certain ways to behave at home, in town, in the nation, and entirely different ways of behaving politically. I mean, if the president of General Motors got treated at home the way he treats the world, he’d collapse. It’s all because of the man-woman split, I’m convinced of it. They get women to act humane and decent so they can sleep at night even though all day they’re out screwing the world. If Anton were a little humane – he really is bright, you know – if he were female, say …’

  ‘Impossible!’

  ‘Right! It’s his socialization that makes him so impossible.’

  ‘Oh, Val, that’s just fanatic. There are women w
ho aren’t humane, and I guess somewhere there are men who are. Hypothetically, at least.’

  ‘Sure. The point is that the roles are split on the male-female model. I’ll bet you if you ever meet a humane guy, ten to one he’ll be gay.’

  ‘Oh, Val!’

  ‘I mean, suppose Lenin had been female.’

  At that, Mira broke into giggling, and they both laughed all the way home, imagining improbable combinations – a female John Wayne, Henry Kissinger in skirts, Gary Cooper, Jack Palance as women. At the door, Mira was reluctant to have the evening end. ‘You know this guy, Ben? Come in and have a drink and tell me about him.’

  ‘Why not? I don’t have a class tomorrow. How about Nixon as a woman? Joe Namath?’

  They climbed the stairs giggling, and Val put her arm through Mira’s. ‘Ah, it’s wonderful being a woman. You can have so much more fun.’

  ‘If you’ve only one life to live,’ Mira intoned, ‘live it as a woman!’

  Mira fixed drinks, insisting avidly. ‘Tell me, tell me!’

  Ben Voler had been at a few meetings a year ago, but then he’d won some sort of grant to go back to Africa to Lianu, where he’d spent years doing research. He was a combination political scientist, sociologist, and anthropologist. He was older than most of the grad students, probably in his early thirties. He’d been married, but his wife couldn’t take Africa, and they’d split up. He’d recently returned, just this semester, in fact. He was teaching a seminar on Africa and writing his dissertation, but was considered even by the faculty to be the expert on Lianu in this country. He said the days of whites were over in Lianu and much of black Africa, and he said it was about time.