The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  After Duke’s transfer, we saw less of Clarissa. Like the rest of us, she was studying for orals. She had to be home at dinnertime, and, because she wanted to spend her evenings with Duke, she did not take any time off from reading during the day. But in early April, still before her orals, she began to appear at Iso’s in the late afternoon. She did not seem as serene; it would be hard to put one’s finger on the difference; Mira said she had shadows in her face. But Clarissa said nothing.

  Her orals went splendidly, and the group of friends went out to celebrate. Duke joined them as soon as he got home; he glowed with her triumph – unlike Kyla and Mira, she felt exultant afterward – and with pride. He had managed to get a couple of days leave to spend with her, and everyone who stopped in to visit them during those days found them both rosy and round; Clarissa especially looked pink with sensuality. Iso said you always felt you’d just gotten them out of bed. Then Duke went back, and Clarissa poked around in the library seeking a dissertation topic, and began to gather with her friends again. But now she mentioned difficulties. Things were hard for Duke.

  ‘Okay, he’s forced to live a schizophrenic life. He comes home and takes off his uniform, he puts on jeans and a Moroccan shirt and an Indian headband that he has to wear because he can’t let his hair grow long. Actually I like it, but he’d rather have long hair. He puts on his beads and we go down to the Square to eat or go to a movie, or just walk. But next day he’s back in his uniform, saluting and standing at attention, listening to his peers talk about weirdos and hippies in Indian bands. I think he’s having trouble with this constant switching.’

  ‘How does he show it?’ Iso asked with a wicked glint. ‘Does he expect you to stand at attention when he walks in the door? Do you have to fill out a work sheet in triplicate every day?’

  The women laughed, but Clarissa raised her eyebrows. ‘That’s closer than you think. Okay, at the same time he wants to be part of his generation, part of my world, he does regard Harvard as a hotbed of radicalism.’

  ‘He should hear what we usually talk about,’ Kyla said dryly.

  ‘No, no, he’s right!’ Val protested.

  The rest of them hooted. They were, they insisted, as disgustingly apolitical as it was possible to be – except for her. Their political apathy was shameful.

  ‘I agree, I agree,’ Val laughed. ‘But still you’re political. You aren’t very active, I confess. But one reason you’re not more active is that the political concerns around here are too mild, too detached from your own radicalism to interest you.’

  ‘We? We?’ Four voices cried at her.

  ‘Damn straight!’ she insisted cheerfully. ‘Why did we all get together? Why are we friends? We share hardly anything: we come from different parts of the country, we have very different interests, we are of different ages, our backgrounds have little in common. Why do we hate so much about Harvard? Why do most of the graduate students turn us off the way they do?

  ‘We hate the political, the economic, and the moral structure of Harvard, of the country for that matter, just as much as SDS does. But even I am not a member of SDS: I went to two meetings and left. God, what a group! It isn’t their militancy that bothers me. It’s that they have the same fucking values as the people they want to destroy. They’re as patriarchal as the Catholic Church, as Harvard, as General Motors and the United States government! We’re rebels against all establishments because we’re rebels against male supremacy, male surface bonding, male power, male structures. We want a completely different world, one so different that it’s hard to articulate, impossible to conceive of a structure for it –’

  ‘A world where I could bake bread and grow flowers and be taken seriously as an intelligent person,’ Kyla murmured, biting her lip.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Or where Duke would not feel he had the right to insist I cook dinner every night because somehow what he does all day is work and what I do isn’t. Even though he loves to cook and I hate it,’ Clarissa said with a little asperity.

  The women all turned to her. She hadn’t mentioned that before.

  ‘Yes. We’re all rebels against the pompous, self-aggrandizing, hollow white male world and its delusions of legitimacy; we all sympathize with illegitimates of every sort because we all feel illegitimate ourselves; we’re all antiwar, antiestablishment, anticapitalism –’

  ‘Yet we’re not Communists,’ Kyla argued, crossing and uncrossing her legs. She turned to Clarissa. ‘We really are shamefully apolitical.’

  ‘For Christ sakes, what’s in Communism for us? It’s – in practice at least – just one more variety of the same animal.’

  ‘Okay,’ Clarissa said thoughtfully. ‘But I think most of us accept socialism in principle.’

  They looked at each other. All of them nodded.

  ‘Do you know, this is amazing!’ Kyla leaped up. ‘We have never discussed this before, never gone around the room itemizing pieces of belief! I wouldn’t have been able to say what anybody here believed, except I knew we all shared something profound …’

  ‘But everybody believes what we believe,’ Mira said puzzled.

  They howled. ‘What was it you were telling us about Christmas with the Wards?’

  She giggled. ‘I’ve been here too long. The rest of the world has totally disappeared.’

  ‘And Duke doesn’t believe what we believe. I wonder if any man does,’ Clarissa said, a pained frown on her face.

  Val gazed at her sympathetically. ‘I know. That’s what makes things so hard. And of course, our sort of radicalism is the most threatening sort ever to come down the pike. Not because we have guns and money. They tried to laugh us out of existence, now they’re trying to tokenize us out of existence – the way they’ve done with blacks, not very successfully, I think – but their refusal to take us seriously at all is a measure of their terror.’

  Kyla sat straight up and stared at Val. She was puffing alternately on two cigarettes without knowing it.

  ‘Because what we threaten is male legitimacy itself. Take a man and a woman both born to WASP families of note, both well educated, monied – both, in other words, with all the badges of legitimacy our society has to offer. And the man will be seen as serious, and the woman as trivial, no matter what she does or tries to do. Look at the way they treated Eleanor Roosevelt. And when a man loses his sense of legitimacy, what he is really losing is a sense of superiority. He has come to find superiority over others necessary to his very existence. Illegitimate men, like blacks or Chicanos, follow the pattern, but they can assert superiority only over women. When a man loses superiority, he loses potency. That’s what all this talk about castrating women is about. Castrating women are those who refuse to pretend men are better than they are and better than women are. The simple truth – that men are only equal – can undermine a culture more devastatingly than any bomb. Subversion is telling the truth.’

  The women sat in silence.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Kyla moaned softly.

  ‘Some men escape. Some men do,’ Mira insisted.

  ‘For a while, maybe. And by themselves, as individuals some men would. But the institutions get us all in the end. Nobody escapes,’ Val said grimly.

  ‘I won’t believe that!’ Mira said, her eyes misted.

  Val turned to her. ‘You will. Someday.’

  Mira flung her face away from Val.

  ‘Okay.’ Clarissa began slowly. ‘So Duke, for instance, has a sense of something inimical in his environment. In fact, it’s awfully close to home, but he can’t admit that, so he blames it on Cambridge or Harvard. And he’s frustrated, because he’s used to shooting at enemies, and he can’t even find this one. He just feels it around him like a fine mist, and he’s constantly swinging around to try to grab something that just went by, but there’s nothing there.’

  ‘But he always feels damp.’

  ‘Yes. So when something appears in a newspaper, or a magazine, or on TV – he launches into a lecture, hectoring me
about the evils of sloppy liberalism. And sometimes his thinking is very sloppy too and I have to point that out. And invariably that leads to a fight.’

  ‘Well, of course I’m not the person who tactfully should say this, but I am the person who can say it: is it possible to live with somebody whose values you don’t share?’ Iso was leaning forward, gazing very hard away from Kyla.

  Val looked at Clarissa. ‘What do you think? Duke will be in the army for the rest of his life.’

  Clarissa’s face froze up. She spoke through tight lips. ‘I think love can change people,’ she said, but her voice was tight. Everyone knew that things had gone too far. The subject was changed, the wine bottle was passed, but no one took any except Iso. All of the women except Iso disliked Val that night, and strangely, they did not feel good about each other either. They did not want to have to look at their own concessions, their own complicity in the thing Val had described, through the life of another. Their move apart from Val and each other was subtle, barely traceable, yet it was sensible, and all of them felt it. But the breach brought a lack, and all of them moved closer than ever to Iso, who somehow in this thing was innocent, unable to harm.

  16

  It was spring again in Cambridge and people bloomed like flowers along the sidewalks; coats were left off or thrown open, and wonderful absurd clothes flared up – embroidered shirts, appliquéd pants, long skirts, short skirts, boots, sandals of all sorts, and the man in the kilt was seen in the Coop. The Hare Krishna people sparkled white and orange again, their old raincoats and jackets removed; and the sound of the guitar was heard in Holyoke Center.

  Val had been having trouble breathing: there was a pain in her chest that ‘wouldn’t go away. She was sure it was simply anxiety, or not-so-simply anxiety. She was neglecting her schoolwork and work on the antiwar committee, and she felt guilty, and frustrated, and terribly angry at the reports she was reading that no one else paid any attention to, or cared about. Somehow things had not gone well these past months. She didn’t take the time to think about it. She was too busy, too involved with ten different groups, but somehow, things had not gone well. She was losing touch, she felt, with what she vaguely called ‘life,’ but she could not help it. Somebody had to care about slaughtered people in Southeast Asia.

  It was a gorgeous day, and she decided to walk into the Square before going home from her meeting. She didn’t need anything, but a walk would feel good. Maybe her breath would ease. Maybe it was just lack of exercise and too much smoking: that would be good. That was something you could do something about. She walked idly, stopping to look in shop windows – a luxury for her. She browsed at a bookstore, bought a record, stopped at the market for a pound of spaghetti. It was good to be so idle, to wander around. Her breathing was coming easier, she thought. She could feel a faint smile on her face.

  The light had faded as she started home. People’s faces were dusky and cheerful, passing her like tiny dots of life pulsing along the dim street. Their conversation or laughter drifted before them, after them. She thought about how important that was: the way people on the street feel. In Warsaw, people ran, ran, with tense faces; in Washington, people did not walk talking together in light, gay voices. She realized she was humming. She decided to do this more often.

  Yes, she would do this more often, every day, in fact. But now, tonight, she was going home to write up the minutes of this afternoon’s meetings. But first she would cook some spaghetti sauce, cut up carrots and onions and garlic and parsley into slivers, and simmer them with tomatoes and salt and pepper and basil and oregano, and pour in beef gravy and the chunks of beef she’d had a couple of nights ago, and simmer it all together – her mouth began to water. And she would put on her new record and write to Chris – she hadn’t written in two weeks, it was shameful – and then get into a warm robe and sit down and write the fucking report and try to stay calm while she did it. Calmly, in abstract language, she would protest the invasion of Cambodia, while in her head were stories and images of what she had heard this afternoon. People, people everywhere just wanted to live. What was it they wanted, the ones who started wars? It was something she felt she would never understand.

  Still humming, she sautéed the vegetables, covering the pan, poured herself a glass of wine, and crossed the kitchen and switched on the TV set for the evening news. It was too early, some old Western was on; she ignored it, making her sauce, setting the table for one, drinking her wine. The sauce was simmering, it smelled delicious, she picked up the pot to smell it – she always did that – and then somebody was saying it, she heard him say it, it couldn’t be but he was saying it was, she turned around to look at the screen, it couldn’t be, but there it was, there were pictures, it was happening right before her eyes, she couldn’t believe it, and then the picture stopped and someone was pointing at a dirty shirt collar and talking about something else as if there were anything else to talk about and she heard this screaming, it was ungodly, it was coming from the back of her head, she could hear it, it was a woman screaming in agony, and when she looked, there was blood all over the kitchen floor.

  We didn’t know then that it was only a beginning. It was the time when the nightmare broke out into public vision, when you could really see, put your finger on, those subtle and tenuous currents that a lot of people besides Duke had been feeling but couldn’t see clear enough to shoot. Sometimes, when I walk the beach, and everything seems so quiet, so settled, I wonder what happened to that nightmare. I think nightmares are like the heat bubbling inside the earth: always there but only occasionally erupting to show the gaps, the murderous breaches.

  Val got her wits back eventually. She stopped screaming, although she was still sobbing, tears were streaming down her face as she got down on her hands and knees to wipe up the spaghetti sauce she’d spilled all over the floor, and to stay there, crouched down, crying in her hands, unable to believe it, unable to disbelieve it, crying out, ‘We’re killing our children! We’re killing our children!’

  There were telephone calls, meetings. Those days are all jumbled in my brain. But suddenly the tiny peace groups sprinkled around town were one group; suddenly their numbers expanded, tripled, quadrupled, passed count. A few days later – it was a few days, wasn’t it? – they killed children at Jackson State, unwilling, damned, in fact, if they were going to kill off white kids without killing off some black ones too.

  Everyone walked around in a daze. Some felt the hour of the wolf had arrived. Something worse than 1984 had happened. The government, a government elected into office just as Adolf Hitler had been, had suddenly shown itself to be a gang of murderers. The thing was a fait accompli, we had not even noticed. Some of the younger students were close to hysteria: who was next? If they could kill them why not us? Older people walked with the step of survivors, wondering what next. Mothers walked with the knowledge that those killed kids could have been theirs. Just an accident, the telegram reads, so sorry. The three years you wiped up shit and poured in string beans, the fifteen years you developed more elaborate techniques for same are declared null and void, along with the product, one nineteen-year-old male or female with –– eyes and –– hair, weighing one hundred and –– pounds more than it did when it pounded its way out of your uterus. A breathing person has been transformed into an unbreathing person: that’s all.

  Letters were written, telegrams sent. The group set up tables in the Square and offered telegrams for a dollar: all you had to do was fill out a form. People who two years ago, a year ago, had been muttering knowingly about arms caches and revolution went silent now, peering over their shoulders. There was a march; we gathered on the Cambridge Common and listened to speeches shouted through loudspeakers, unable to hear what was being said. It didn’t matter. The older people, expecting truth in the traditions they had been taught, stood erect, marched with firm heads. The younger ones, expecting betrayal at every corner, cowered and watched warily what was going on; it cost them more. They ducked when su
ddenly small boxes were thrown into the crowd from somewhere out on the perimeter. Small groups gathered as someone courageous opened what was a used cigarette box resealed with Scotch tape: each one contained three or four joints. The receivers lighted up, but still warily. Can marijuana be mixed with gunpowder? Would the FBI be that clever? The march began, down to Mount Auburn Street, up Mass Ave and across the bridge into Boston, down Commonwealth to the Common. All along the way, people stood watching, people in business suits with cameras, men in work clothes and hard faces. The whole world had been transformed into FBI agents and hardhats. They were equally dangerous. People marched, talked, joked, but the young shivered every time a helicopter hovered overhead. Some of us had been at People’s Park at Berkeley when the crowd was teargassed; all of us knew about it.

  We reached the Common and wandered, threaded through. It looked as if millions of people were there. We found a place to sit and rested on the grass. The sun was warm, the air was soft, the grass and trees smelled green. People on a podium we could not see were singing songs and giving speeches we could not hear. We sat there, barely looking at each other. There were only a few possibilities: they would destroy us here, now, with whatever means they chose; they would pay no attention to us at all; or we would manage, through our gathering together, to tell them to stop, stop, stop, stop, stop! None of us really believed the last. All of us wanted to believe the last. We sat watching the new arrivals, some bearing Vietcong flags, some pictures of Mao, some obscene condemnations of Washington, of Nixon, of that old devil, the military-industrial complex. Yes. Devils have a way of surviving. We were mostly silent. Slaves do not have much respect for each other, and the young among us felt like slaves that day – people alive and wanting to live whose government would as soon murder them as not, and would much rather murder them than listen to them. Voiceless, impotent, frightened, the young people sat on; the older people sat on, developing arthritic cramps and rheumatic aches, and then it was over, nobody had even tried to sell anything, and thousands, thousands of us walked toward the MTA. No one rushed: there was no point. People were walking as if they had been to church, really been to church. In time, we got on the subway. I remember wondering how the subway system managed. The train was crowded, but nobody was pushing, no one shouted. We all got off in a group and walked to a sub shop and picked up sandwiches. Then everybody went back to Val’s place – Mira, Ben, Iso, Clarissa, Kyla, and Bart too, whom they’d met along the way and Grant was there too, and some others – and they sat around Val’s kitchen watching TV, watching the same news shots on channel after channel, drinking coffee and eating sandwiches and every once in a while someone would say, ‘They’ll have to listen, there were so many of us,’ and then silence would fall again. I am afraid we felt a little virtuous. It was they who were killing the children, the yellow, the black, the red, the white children. It was they, not us. We had set ourselves against them. We had proven our purity. If we, poor as we were, lived well, it was not because we held with exploiting the folk of Africa or Asia; our fellowships had nothing directly to do with Mobil’s holdings in Angola, or Ford’s profits on arms. At least we hoped not. It is easy to scoff at our morals. I can do it myself. But what else could we do? Storm the Pentagon? Do you think that would have helped? We were willing to be poorer if that would help stop the killing. Poor as we were.