The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  ‘STOP, STOP, STOP!’ Chris shrieked, jumping up. ‘Do you have to do this to me? Stop! I can’t stand it! I can’t stand anymore.’ She ran into her room and slammed the door. Val got drunk and sloshed to bed.

  The next morning, Chris gazed at her mother coolly over the coffee cups. ‘All right, I’ll go.’

  Val gasped, flushed, smiled, reached out for Chris’s hand. But Chris pulled away. She looked at her mother with a cold face.

  ‘I said I’ll go. But I’ll never forgive you for wanting to be rid of me at the time I needed you most. I’ll go. But don’t expect to see me again, or hear from me again – ever.’

  A few days later, Val drove Chris out to the farm. She walked into the farmhouse like a prisoner being delivered to jail, and did not kiss her mother or say good-bye when Val left.

  19

  Stella Dallas she had said. Yes. But not quite. Her daughter was not inside a brightly lighted mansion with music pouring out of it, marrying a society heir. And Val may have been standing out in the rain, but she was not crying.

  If only she had been Stella Dallas. If only she could have cried. I think to this day that would have softened everything, that would have made everything pliable enough to recover. I think. But that’s afterthought.

  The truth is, she wrote Chris off. She hardened herself against the pain and decided they would not be close for a while, but would be again in a few years. She felt that betrayal was inevitable in a relationship as close as theirs had been. Chris was too dependent on her. It is essential to a child’s growth that their parents fail them, through inadequacy or malice; and since Val was strong and intelligent, her failure seemed malicious. Of course, she could have let Chris creep back inside her. She ruled that out. The rest followed as things will follow. There was nothing she could do for Chris, ‘except die,’ she told Mira, ‘and I have no intention of doing that.’

  She wrote to Chris occasionally, but Chris did not answer. And Val did not write true letters. Because Val had gone over the line. No one knew it but she.

  Morality is fine, but it is limited. Morality is a set of rules for people to live together; it presumes the being together and it presumes the main chance. It has no hold over and no relevance to people who have passed over the edge. For instance, a few years ago a plane crashed in the Andes, and the survivors finally reached a point where they ate human flesh. That produced a so-called moral question. Except it didn’t really, because who could answer it? You can bring one dogma or another, one citation or another, one authority or another to bear on it; you can talk until you die. But you can’t say whether that was right or wrong. You are a Jew and your husband and your children have been turned to ashes by the Nazis (you were saved because your body appealed to some of them) and you are walking down a street in Argentina and you see the man who was the commandant of the concentration camp where you were held, and you have a gun in your pocket, a gun you carry everywhere you go, your finger always near its trigger as it lies nestled in your pocket, and you see this man … Oh, why go on? Some things cannot be categorized, judged, they can only be lived out by those who are willing to live them out, or perhaps, those who have to live them out. And such people do not worry about consequences.

  I wonder if that is true. It is nice to sit here with the sun pouring through the window, a glass of iced tea on the desk, a walk on the beach in the offing, and write about people who don’t worry about consequences. Are there such people? Doesn’t even the most committed militant, his soul too scarred to live well, his hopes blasted, even as he heads his tank for the wall, his plane for the aircraft carrier, think fleetingly about the possibility that it is really just a nightmare that will end, that somehow he will be saved, will go back home and sit by the fire and pick up the cup of tea, the knitting, and laugh about stories of the old times and wipe a tear or two? …

  Oh, God. What’s the use? Everything I write is lies. I am trying to tell the truth, but how can I tell the truth? I have been thinking for a long time now that extraordinary circumstances place one outside the human race, outside usual human concerns, and the rest of us cannot judge people who find themselves in such a condition. But even as I write it, a cold nervous germ attacks my spine, creeps up, all the way to my brain, and suggests that all life is like that, all lives.

  But if that is so, how can one tell even the simplest story? I give up. I can’t think anymore. All I can do is talk, talk, talk. Well, I will do what I can. I will talk, talk, talk. I will tell you the rest of what I know, take it to as much of an end as it has. It is not over. It will never be over. But I am finite. That is the only reason this account will end.

  Val acted so strange and distant and cool after her return from Chicago that the women, caught up in their own lives anyway, did not stop in very often. Chris acted sullen and impossible, and they were hurt. They did not know the whole story of the rape, but because sex had never been a tabooed subject in Val’s household, they assumed that Chris’s shock was merely that and would soon be assuaged. Val herself never called any of them, and they felt some breach coming from her.

  Mira, who was probably closest to her, felt guilty about it, and kept meaning to stop in. But something in her dreaded seeing Val. She felt as she had when she first knew Val, that Val could tell her something she did not know, and wasn’t sure she wanted to know: but she felt this more intensely now. She felt almost as if Val had a contagious fatal disease. But one day she forced herself; she called, and Val said, rather half-heartedly, that she would be home.

  Val was wearing jeans and a shirt; she had lost weight. Her face had lost its fullness, it was harder, firmer, older. Her hair was full of gray. The changes were slight, but she did not look the same person.

  They talked small talk for a while. Kyla and Harley had gone to Aspen; Clarissa and Duke were having troubles; Iso was deeply into the research for her thesis; the boys were with Norm and would be going with Mira and Ben to Maine in August.

  ‘How’s Chris?’

  Val’s voice was thin, emotionless. ‘She’s in the Berkshires, on a farm. They seem to think she’s getting better.’

  ‘She was really upset,’ Mira said, half-questioning, half making a statement, but she heard the edge of prim judgment in her voice. Chris was excessively upset was what she was really saying.

  Val heard it too. She merely nodded.

  ‘I’m sorry, Val. I don’t understand, I guess. I’ve never been raped.’

  ‘No. But almost, as I recall.’

  Mira’s eyebrows rose. ‘The night in Kelley’s; God!’ She shivered. ‘I had forgotten, I wanted to forget. Why is that?’

  ‘Sanity, I suppose. Most women don’t want to know much about rape. It’s men who are interested in it. Women try to ignore it, try to pretend the victims asked for it. They don’t want to face the truth.’

  Mira felt her insides begin to shake, as if every blood cell in her body had suddenly become wary. But she had gone too far. ‘The truth …?’ her voice asked tremulously.

  Val sat back in her chair and lighted a cigarette. She had the same authority in posture and movement that she had always had, but it was heightened by her new leanness, and a lack, something gone, an ease, a fluidity; an expansiveness of movement. She was more intense, more focused, and narrower, like a light beam that finds its object and concentrates all force on it. She told Mira the story of the rape then, all of it. When she finished, Mira was tightly gripping the arms of her chair. Val sat back, and her voice eased a little.

  ‘Last fall – at some meeting or other held out in Concord or Lexington, I don’t recall – one of the participants asked me for a ride back to Cambridge. He was a young guy, a little stiff and pompous, a minister, in fact. He wanted to talk. He talked all the way back, and since we got stuck in traffic at one point, that took quite a while.

  ‘He was a gentle little fellow, the kind who is always careful about other people’s feelings, or so it seems, the kind who can’t say shit naturally and can’t br
ing themselves to say screw. Needless to say, my language shocked him.’

  Mira laughed a little, but Val did not even smile.

  ‘What he wanted to talk about was this dream he’d been having for months on and off. He was, he said, happily married – he was in his mid-twenties, I imagine – and they had a little boy. He was having problems with the little boy, arguments with his wife. She thought he was too authoritarian and perfectionistic with the child. But his dream was not about that. It was about a girl he’d known in college, years before. He dreamed about her all the time, but could not remember the dream. What did that mean?

  ‘I asked him how he had felt about the girl. He had loved her, adored her, but she was a bit of a flirt, she flitted from man to man, and came back to him when she needed him. He always waited for her with open arms. I asked him if he’d screwed her. He answered, no, no, he had never’ – and here Val did grin – ‘engaged in the act of sexual intercourse with her, and neither, he imagined, had anyone else. They would have felt too sinful: it was a small religious college in the middle of farm country.

  ‘I asked him how he felt about her now. He thought of her as ultimately desirable, but his memory of her was singed with anger. He had loved her, he had wanted her, and he had done nothing. He was angry with her but angrier with himself. “What could you have done?” “I could have raped her.”

  ‘I wasn’t even surprised. This guy was unbearably stiff and boring, impossibly correct, Christian, mild, meek, all that. But at heart, a rapist.’

  ‘I know all this, I’ve known it always,’ Mira said faintly.

  ‘That story – and God knows how many others, how many pieces of history, laws, traditions, customs – everything congealed for me while I walked the streets of Chicago with Chris, watching the men looking at her. And it became an absolute truth for me. Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women, all men are rapists, and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes.’

  Mira’s head lay in her hand. ‘I have two sons,’ she said softly.

  ‘Yes. That’s one way they keep their power. We love our sons. Thank God I don’t have one. It would hold me back.’ Her face was fierce.

  Mira sat up. ‘Hold you back?’

  ‘Everything came together. That guy – the minister – and the way Tad treated Chris, the kid who raped her, the lawyers who raped her soul, the courts and the way they treated her, the cops with their guns hanging down and the way they looked at her, and the men on the streets, one after another, looking at her, making remarks. There was no way I could protect her from it, and the way she’s feeling now, no way I can help her to bear it.

  ‘And my mind was wandering, I wasn’t able to control it. I thought about marriage and its laws, about fear of going out at night, fear of traveling, about the conspiracy among men to treat women as inconsequential – there are more ways to rape than one. Women are invisible, trivial, or demons, castraters; they are servants or cunt, and sometimes both at once. And gay men can be as bad as straight ones – some gay men hate women even more than straight ones do. All these years, these centuries, these millennia, and all that hate – look at the books – and under it all, the same threat, the same act: rape.

  ‘And I thought: Christ! for years I worked in the civil rights movement, in the peace movement, to free political prisoners. I worked with the committee on Somerville schools, with the committee on Cambridge schools. All this while, I’d been thinking – people, or children. But half the people I was trying to help were males, males who would as soon rape me or my daughter as look at us. They’d take your body if they could, your soul if they can, get you in control and then abuse you or discard you. I have been spending my precious life helping them! A bunch of rapists! Because there is no turning back once you’ve faced this. All men are the enemy!’

  Her eyes were fiery, and her voice passionate, but controlled.

  Mira could not breathe. No, no, let it not be so, she kept repeating in her mind.

  ‘You are expected to enjoy your own eradication! “What should a girl do if she’s raped?” “Lie back and enjoy it.” “What should a pacifist do if his wife is raped?” “Get between them.” It’s not possible for a husband to rape his wife: the word has no legal standing in context because rape is his right.

  ‘I tell you,’ Val’s voice dropped low, and full of fury, ‘I am sick of it. Shit, I used to pick up male hitchhikers! No more. Let them use their own feet, fight their own fucking battles, no man, ever again, in any way, will get any help from me. Never again will I treat a man as anything other than the enemy. I imagine Fetor, the state’s attorney who browbeat Chris, has a daughter, and I’ll lay you ten to one if she ever got raped, he’d treat her the way he treated Chris. I’m sorry.’ Val glanced at Mira’s face. ‘I know you have sons. That’s good. That will keep you able to live in the world, keep you,’ she drawled the word sarcastically, ‘sane.’

  Mira’s face was drenched with pain. Val’s was clear, firm, she looked like a tough old soldier raising a standard. ‘As for me, I’m glad I don’t because he would interfere with my vision, I’d have to think about him and that would deflect me from the truth. A son would make me want not to see this, not to feel it, want to push it back down into my innards where it’s lain for so long, slowly poisoning me.’

  ‘But how can you live without men? I mean, you know, men are the bosses if you want to get a job, they control the foundations if you want to get a grant, a man is your dissertation adviser …’

  ‘I’ve dropped out of that world. I belong to all women’s groups now. I shop at a feminist market, bank in a women’s bank. I’ve joined a militant feminist organization, and in the future I will work only in that. Fuck the dissertation, the degree, Harvard. They’re all part of the male world. You can’t compromise with it. It eats you alive, rapes your body and soul …’

  ‘But, Val, how will you live?’

  She shrugged. ‘I’m willing to live any way at all. There’s a bunch of women living in an old house in North Cambridge. They get by. I’ll join them soon. I don’t look for pleasure any more in life. It’s a luxury I can’t afford. For forty-odd years I’ve been a member of an oppressed people consorting with the enemy, advancing the enemy’s cause. In some places that’s called slavery. I’m through with it. I want to work with these women, those who give their lives up for our cause.’

  ‘Give their lives up!’

  ‘Give their lives to. However you people in English want to put it.’

  ‘Sacrifice.’

  ‘It’s not sacrifice. It’s realization. Sacrifice is giving up something you value for something you value more. That’s not my state. Once I valued it – pleasure, joy, fun – but no matter what I did now, where I went, that is gone for me. There’s no way I could go back to it, don’t you see?’

  She looked gravely at Mira. ‘You look agonized.’

  Mira’s voice mourned, ‘But you were so great. The way you were.’

  ‘A great compromiser. What you see as my deformity, I see as my purification. Hate is a great definer. You lose something, but develop something else to fullness. Like blind people learning to hear with exquisite acuteness, or deaf people learning to read lips, eyebrows, faces. Hate has made me able to act as I should have been acting all along. My fucking love of mankind kept me from being a friend to womankind.’

  Mira sighed. She wanted to cry, to turn Val back to what she had been, like a reel of film you could rerun and stop where you chose. She couldn’t bear what she saw, heard: she was exhausted. She leaned toward Val. ‘Let’s have a glass of wine. For old times’ sake,’ and her voice creaked.

  Val really smiled for the first time. She got the bottle and poured out two glasses.

  ‘I feel as if this – all this new life of yours – will take you completely away from us – me,’ Mira said sadly.

  ‘Well,’ Val sighed, ‘not because I’ve stopped
caring about you. But it would be hard. You wouldn’t want to listen to me much, I suspect. And we wouldn’t see things the same way anymore. You have two sons, Ben – you have to compromise. I’m serious, I’m not being patronizing. I’d seem fanatic to you, and you’d seem cowardly to me. I’m part of the lunatic fringe now,’ she laughed, ‘the lunatic fringe that gets the middle to move over a bit. It feels right to me.’

  It was good-bye she was saying, Mira thought. Tears streamed down her face all the long walk home.

  20

  That summer seemed a period of renunciation for many of us. Was everybody playing Stella Dallas?

  Kyla had been persuaded by Harley’s arguments into giving their marriage one more chance. She returned to him, and promised not to see Iso at all anymore. He was very angry about Iso this time. She was puzzled. ‘You were so understanding before.’

  ‘I didn’t take it seriously before.’

  ‘Why not? I told you I loved her.’

  ‘Kyla, she’s a woman, for God’s sake.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, I don’t mind having a complement. But I don’t want to be supplanted.’ He made his anger sound like jealousy, and she was more pleased than not. He couldn’t be jealous if he didn’t love her, could he? She arranged to sublet the apartment, and began the packing. Harley helped her more than usual, but still, life began to feel empty. She took to stopping at Iso’s in the afternoons, full of guilt, but unable to help herself. She did not tell Harley about these visits. She told herself that in Aspen she would not be able to see Iso at all. Somehow that justified the deception.

  She was searching for a dissertation subject, but half-heartedly. She sat in Child leafing through books. She sat at home, rereading the Romantic poets. Suddenly Romantic poetry seemed everything Harley said it was: self-indulgent embroidery on the real business of life. She could not muster her old excited reactions to Wordsworth’s peculiar value-structures, or Keats’s language. Coleridge had come to seem a bore, Byron a spoiled child in a tantrum, Shelley an adolescent in a continual wet dream. She read more and more, but the more she read and reread, the more she saw all of them as adolescents, exalting their own sensuality or declaiming pretentious self-aggrandizing wisdom. She wondered how she had ever been able to take them seriously. Every day, she closed her book in disgust. When it was time to pack their books for Aspen, she added to Harley’s stacks only a complete Shakespeare. She decided she would spend the summer baking bread and growing flowers, and perhaps getting pregnant. She did not think of this as an abandonment but as a rest, a hiatus. Nevertheless, as they set off in the car for their first stop, Ohio and her parents’ house, she did not feel light and free, like a person starting on a vacation. She glanced at Harley’s profile, feeling the same rush of love she always felt when she looked at him without his knowing it, the same distant admiration for his excellence, yet she felt also diminished, even abject. She had a vague sense she was driving off to prison. But she brushed it away, and her spirits lightened as soon as Harley needed navigational help. Kyla loved to read maps.