The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  ‘Yes.’ Then she glinted her eyes at them. ‘You want me to tell you how you’ve changed?’

  ‘NO!’ they shouted, laughing.

  She reverted to the evening. She wanted to emphasize certain things. She did not want them to grow up unthinking, echoing the words they had heard that night. She wanted to underline a moral. But they would have none of it. They could not, they insisted, judge the opinions, the positions taken that evening.

  She was a little liquorish, down to basic impulse. She wanted to pound the table with her fist, to insist vehemently on the evil of bigotry, stereotyping, prejudice. She wanted to insist on her rightness. She began angrily, ‘Yes, that’s all fine, you won’t prejudge, that sounds wonderful. Except as you yourselves have admitted, everything and everyone around you is infected with bigotry and stereotyping, and by the time you actually meet and know some of its victims, you won’t be able to see them except through the lenses you’ve been handed.’

  They continued to demur, to argue. ‘Why should we let you brainwash us?’ Norm demanded.

  She wanted to rise up like a Victorian father and proclaim THE TRUTH, to boom and pound them into submission. How dare they refuse to submit to her greater knowledge, her larger moral experience!

  Suddenly she crumpled; she sat staring at her drink, her throat full of tears. They didn’t trust her moral judgment because she had forfeited her right to be their guide by letting them know she was a sexual being. She sniffled, engulfed in self-pity. Never again would they look up to her; never again could she guide them gently with a mother’s firm but loving hand. She blew her nose. They, however, paid no attention to her. They were talking to each other, repeating remarks made that evening, giggling together.

  ‘Yeah, and the look on Uncle Charles’s face when he leaned forward and sneered at Mommy and said how would she like it if her grandchildren all had slanty eyes!’ They both roared.

  She listened.

  ‘And Mommy said slanty eyes might be better than some she saw around her, and his popeyes nearly popped right out of his head!’

  They continued, laughing through most of their survey. They were talking about ugliness. That was what bothered them: the people were ugly. They would not like to be like them. The boys perceived there was something wrong with their lives, with their thoughts, with the world, if it made people as ugly as that. She let out her breath. The boys were all right.

  9

  Mira and Ben spent New Year’s Eve alone. There were parties going on, but they had not seen each other since before Christmas, and wanted only to be together. Ben brought over his TV set and plugged it in in the bedroom. They sprawled on the bed half-dressed, drinking bourbon – Ben’s drink – talking over the family visits. The subject was profoundly interesting to both of them. Both had noticed a difference in atmosphere in their families, an increase in anger, hate, and fear. And each felt that they had been somehow different, and that had been noticed.

  ‘After thirty-four years, my mother just stopped calling me Benny.’

  Mira recounted at length her discussions with the boys, and Ben, far from being bored at hearing about mere children who were not even his own, listened intently and asked serious questions. He recalled his own youth, and drew comparisons; he offered suggestions. He wondered if they were feeling this or that which he had felt at their age. It was beautiful talk and made them both feel rich and full and close.

  Ben opened the champagne as the countdown began, and when the balloons broke in Times Square, they wrapped their arms together and drank it from wide-mouthed, stemmed glasses. But the position didn’t work. They spilled champagne on each other and themselves, and giggled, and ended by laughing and kissing, with champagne spilled all over the bed. A change of linen was necessary if they were not going to sleep on a damp mattress, and they went about it gazing more at each other than at what they were doing, loving each other’s every bend, every motion. Then they had to bathe themselves, their skin sticky with the sweet drink, so they filled the tub and poured in half the box of bubble bath Mira’s aunt had given her for Christmas. It stunk: it was acid sweet and lavendery, but that seemed funny too. They took the champagne bottle into the bathroom with them and set their glasses beside the tub and immersed themselves. They bathed each other, loving every limb, every curve and angle, the jut of neck muscle and the knob of collarbone, the sheen of flesh, the fine lines under the eyes, the sad ones around the mouths. They poured water on each other, and every handful was a handful of love.

  ‘It’s like bathing in warm sperm,’ Mira laughed.

  ‘No, it’s like bathing in what comes out of you. Something does. What do you call it?’

  Mira did not know. ‘Lubricant,’ she decided finally, and that struck them both as hilarious.

  ‘Mira,’ Ben said suddenly, ‘I have to tell you something.’

  He was serious, and she felt her heart slow: thinking how terror always lurked just under the surface of joy.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I hate champagne.’

  She giggled. ‘So do I.’

  He picked up the bottle. ‘I christen thee Mira Voler,’ he said, pouring it over her head. She wailed and mock-cried and grabbed her glass and poured its contents over his head, and they wrestled rather weakly in the slippery tub, their bodies already intertwined, but ended in an embrace. Then they dried each other vigorously, with some rump-slapping and bear-hugging, and padded naked into the kitchen and got out the feast they had prepared earlier, and carried overloaded plates of food back to the bed to stain the fresh bed linen. And talked and talked, exchanging, interrupting, arguing, laughing, and suddenly Ben said, ‘I meant it, you know. Let’s get married.’

  Mira stopped. She realized that for some time now, they had rarely spoken of the future in terms of the singular personal pronoun: it was almost always ‘We.’ It might be ‘when I get my degree,’ but it would be followed with ‘we can take a trip.’ Their vague plans included taking a cottage in Maine with the boys, going to England and driving through the countryside, applying for travel grants for the same year.

  ‘We don’t have to get married. We’re wonderful as we are. Maybe marriage would spoil what we have.’

  ‘We could be together all the time.’

  ‘We could do that now if we wanted. We seem to prefer being together only some of the time.’

  He bent toward her. ‘We don’t have to do it right away. But someday – I’d like to have a kid of my own.’ He touched her fingertips lightly. ‘And you’re the only person in the world I’ve ever felt I’d want to have it with.’

  She did not answer then, could not have answered then, nor the rest of that night. And next day the subject seemed to be forgotten, as Ben returned to his card files, his blank paper, and his typewriter, and she to the joyful abandon of seventeenth-century sermons.

  After the holidays, the friends decided to have a second New Year, together. Kyla offered her house, the finest of the graduate student residences. Kyla had hunted, in her swift, unerring way, and had found the bottom floor of an old mansion, all parquet floors, carved moldings, high painted ceilings, and a fireplace in every room. There were stained-glass windows over window seats, and old-fashioned, heavy sliding doors between the rooms. The kitchen had a separate breakfast nook which looked out on an overgrown garden full of wild flowers.

  Kyla had hung plants at the sunny windows, had sewn brilliantly colored hangings for the others, and covered the window-seat cushions with the same fabric. The bedroom, a corner of which was Kyla’s study, held a huge fur rug before the fireplace. They had turned the dining room, which was large, into the living and dining room, and the living room proper was given over to Harley for a study. The couple had collected prints and paintings done by friends who were artists, and the walls were covered with witty and elegant designs.

  The group decided to dress formally: they all got into it, and the men went so far as to rent dinner jackets. The women shopped the ‘reduced’ racks
and found swishy, low-cut things. Kyla wore a white Grecian dress and a rhinestone-studded band around her hair; Clarissa wore sea-green chiffon; Iso came in flame red satin long and narrow, with a slit up the side. Val wore low-cut black velvet with a feather boa, and Mira found a pale blue bare-backed gown which was the sexiest thing she’d ever owned.

  They were delighted with themselves and with each other. The evening began quietly, with drinks and talk and Segovia playing Bach on the record player. Harley looked beautiful in a black velvet dinner jacket and a white ruffled shirt that softened his severe pale face and heightened his white-blond hair. Duke looked elegant; formal clothes suited him. His weight disappeared inside the dark jacket. Tad looked as if his arms were a little too long for his jacket, and Ben looked uneasy, like a mechanic at a wedding, but a sense of elegance touched them all, and their gestures showed it. Everything felt graceful.

  The women had much to talk about, because most of them had made Christmas visits to their parents or a relative, and they talked intimately, almost as they would if the men had not been there. Mira talked about her conversation with the boys, omitting the discussion of Iso and their fascination with sex; she described the hatefulness and vindictiveness of her relatives. Kyla and Harley had had a similar experience; the rage of their elders against the young, against war protesters, seemed excessive, seemed, Kyla thought, to have a different source. The men listened, speaking rarely, but they did not withdraw. Their interest could be felt: they were there, and the activeness of their participation made the conversation rich with a vibrating intensity. Harley suggested that what the elders were feeling was rage at the freedom of option open to young people: ‘It’s a luxury to refuse to go to war. They wouldn’t have dared. They imagine everybody young is gaily shacking up with everybody else. They’re jealous.’ The whole room got into it: everyone had some personal experience with a parent or relative that illuminated the situation. Everyone agreed that the feeling in the air ‘out there’ in the ‘real world’ was dire, full of hate and anger. ‘I wonder what will happen when they explode,’ Duke said ominously.

  But they were too happy to feel threatened. Clarissa, whose family was also angry, had done some investigating of family history on her visit. ‘I was asking so many questions my mother brought out an old family album I’d never seen. It shows five generations of my forebears, farm people mostly, from North and South Dakota. Their faces are fascinating; they’re so strong, worn and lined, and you can tell they’re tanned from working outdoors, and their mouths are a little grim. But so strong! You just don’t see faces like that now. My parents don’t look like that – well, of course they don’t farm – but neither do my aunts and uncles, who do keep up the farm. They are America, those faces. They’re what people mean when they talk about moral virtue and the backbone of America. They were tough. My great-grandmother had twelve children and lived to be eighty-seven, working on the farm right up until the end. My grandmother is ninety and still does the cooking for the aunts and uncles who live on the farm, and all their kids. But my forebears weren’t like the image we have. One relative was run out of town on a rail for embezzling money from the bank to spend on his fancy woman, who lived right there, over the dressmaker’s shop. One uncle was an atheist and the town scandal. He’d stand outside the church on Sundays, on a big flat rock, and when the congregation came out, he’d start ranting and sermonizing on the evils of religion. He died at eighty-three by falling into a pigpen and the town said it was the judgment of God. My great-great-grandfather had three wives at once, one of them an Indian, a Kiowa. I like to think I’m descended from her. There’s a little confusion about the children, who belonged to whom. There are no pictures of her, but there’s one of him looking very prosperous and respectable in a black suit and a gold watch chain. Hardly your image of a trigamist.

  ‘They were utterly bourgeois; they kept their butteries clean and their pantries in order, and their barns full of hay, and I imagine the women walking around with clean white aprons and a ring of keys hanging at their belts, feeling very contented because of the bacons and hams hanging in the larder, the fresh eggs, in the white bowl, the vegetables stored in the root cellar, enough to get them through the winter, and them all sitting at the round parlor table doing needlework while the men carved wood or read aloud to them, and the fire blazed, and the lamp hanging over the table swayed slightly when the wind blew fiercely. They were bourgeois, but they weren’t like our picture of them. Morality meant something different to them. They accepted the peculiarities of the people they lived with.’

  ‘The men,’ Val interrupted.

  Clarissa nodded thoughtfully. ‘That may be. I don’t know any legends of atheistic or polygamous grandaunts. But Grandaunt Clara – I was named for her – was a crack shot with a rifle and ran her farm alone for thirty years after Uncle Tobias got his foot caught in a cart wheel and died of gangrene. I think because they were tougher, because they had fewer choices, because they worked so damned hard, they could afford to be freer in some ways …’ Her voice drifted off. ‘I don’t know. I can’t quite articulate what it is I feel about them. They were, most of them, very religious. But their eyes – the eyes in those photographs – the eyes in those grim, worn, stern faces – are like the eyes of visionaries. And the vision wasn’t of hams and bacon sides hanging in the larder, and a full root cellar.’ She breathed in deeply and threw back her head. ‘OH! They took me to this crazy place, unbelievable! It’s in West Bend, Iowa, and it’s called the Grotto of the Redemption. It’s supposed to be a Christian monument, some priest started it in 1912. It’s quite mad, it is made up of tiny stones piled on each other, and it’s a cross between a monastery, a Buddhist temple, and Disneyland. It has twisting towers and carvings and grotesqueries like Victorian houses. It is crazy, wild, but it came out of them too, along with the plowed fields, the silage nicely stored for winter, the fat cows out in the meadow. They made it.’

  ‘And you wonder what they were seeing.’

  Clarissa nodded.

  ‘You should know,’ Iso said softly. ‘What do you see?’

  Clarissa just stared at her.

  ‘You have the same eyes. I often wonder what it is you’re looking at. As if your eyes were so filled up with vision you didn’t have room to look around. Your dreams are prophetic. You’re always finding coincidences in things. Remember the day we were walking on Quincy Street and you found a feather and said that meant you should be an Indian at the costume party. And then the costume shop had exactly the same Indian headdress you’d dreamed about?’

  ‘You think that’s mystic?’

  ‘Well, it sure isn’t old-fashioned pragmatism. You’re always having strange dreams.’

  Clarissa considered. But Kyla leaped up then and dragged in a giant alarm clock set for midnight, and Harley and Ben fetched the champagne, and they pretended it was the week before and all counted out the countdown and poured out glasses and at the ring everyone toasted the new year.

  ‘Happy 1970! Happy 1970!’

  And everyone kissed everyone else, and everyone glowed because they were all happy and the future did seem good. They loved and were loved; they liked their work; they loved their friends, and they celebrated life, just being alive, in what they all believed, despite their intellects, to be the best of all worlds past and a new decade that was the beginning of a better one.

  More dancing, drinking, food, louder music. They were sitting in a circle made of the couch and some chairs, with the center space cleared for dancing. Kyla put a Joplin record on, then stood up and began to dance mildly, gracefully, swaying and turning. She was dancing to them, at them; her dance was an invitation to all of them at once. Her face glowed, her red hair flew, the white gown swung out widely when she turned. In a few moments, Clarissa got up and stood behind her, putting her hands on Kyla’s waist, adding to the picture her own shining dark hair, her own blue eyes full of vision, her sea-green dress. They danced together, Clarissa following Kyla�
�s movements almost as if the thing had been choreographed; they were two people dancing to the same spirit. Then Iso rose and joined them, and they were three steps; Iso the tallest, with her honey-brown hair, the red dress, put her hands on Clarissa’s waist, and followed their rhythms and movements easily, then Mira too, not knowing what moved her, got up and attached herself to the chain and the four of them glowed and moved and snaked around, all radiant, smiling, speaking to the room. And a sound came out of a throat – it was Tad’s, and sounded choked: ‘My God, how beautiful! How beautiful you are!’ The others sat watching without moving, and the women smiled at Val, who sat there gazing enraptured, and finally she got up and joined them too, and called Tad, and the men joined on and they snaked around the room and into the kitchen and back, then formed a circle and made up a dance that had pieces of the hora, of old square dance motions, and much sheer invention. They weaved and wound, and everybody glowed with love toward everybody else, and clasped hands and felt clasped, and faces sometimes brushed together, and the room whirled, the green plants, the red hangings, the blue cushions, the blue and green chair, red, green, blue, green, red, the whole world was color and motion and love. When they were exhausted, they stopped and hung on each other, all at once, arms around backs, together, accepted, joyful to be part of such beauty.

  The group was silent in the car going home. Only Mira, midway there, suddenly said, ‘I think that was the most beautiful night of my life.’

  10

  Val said: ‘It was a vision.’

  The women were gathered at Val’s one afternoon, chatting after the long hours of silent study up in Child, drinking coffee, Coke, beer, gin. They were all still bathed in the feeling of the party, still glowing: they could feel it still around them. They fell silent when Val said that, waiting for her to continue.

  ‘It was a vision of community. Of the possible. Of the person merged with the group, yet still separate. Of harmony. Not order, unshakable order at least; everybody was moving in a slightly different way. Everybody was dressed differently, looked different. Even the men had a little individuality – Harley’s ruffle-front shirt, Tad’s tie, Ben’s red lapels. And we made the group because we wanted to, not because we had to, not because we were afraid …’