The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  After Kyla left, Iso languished for a few days, but with her spectacular flexibility had within a week made new friends and was as busy as ever. And instead of daily visits from Kyla, she had daily visits from Clarissa.

  Clarissa and Duke were having continual squabbles. She did not want to talk about them. ‘It’s the same old shit, you know, who’s going to do the dishes. The trouble is, I guess, I don’t ever want to do them. I hate all that, cooking, cleaning. I can’t stand it. When Duke was away, I heated up TV dinners and threw the tray in the garbage. The silverware would pile up and I wouldn’t wash that until there wasn’t anymore. And I only cleaned up when he was coming home – if then. I don’t care about food. Why should I have to cook?’

  ‘Yeah. How about a housekeeper? I don’t mind cleaning, Clarissa,’ Iso grinned. ‘And I need money. I’ll do it for you for – let’s see – three bucks an hour.’

  Clarissa did not smile. ‘That would just mask the problem.’

  ‘It sounds serious,’ Mira said.

  ‘Oh, I guess it’s manageable.’ She would brush it off and return to other subjects. But the next time the women were together, it would come up again, and be brushed off again.

  These days, Grete was often part of the group at Iso’s. She would show up around four carrying a bottle of wine, wearing some outlandish costume or other and looking like the princess in a fairy-tale book. She found oddly embroidered blouses, used sari fabric to make something flowing, found strange beads and jewelry with great heavy stones, and wore them all as if they were her native dress. She tied her dark hair in kerchiefs and put heavy elaborate earrings on. Iso said Grete raised dress into a fine art. Grete was interested in art, and was planning a dissertation on the relations between a set of late eighteenth-century sketches and poetic images of the same period. She revitalized the group, and all summer the talk was wonderful.

  Clarissa’s problem continued. One day, when they were talking about reciprocity in politics, she broke in: ‘That’s what Duke’s doing! I just realized it.’

  ‘I guess from General Motors to Duke isn’t such a leap,’ Grete said. Grete had come from a poor family, and was prejudiced – her own word – against anybody with money.

  ‘Okay. I see it now. Every time Duke goes to a Harvard party – and he hates them – or if he listens to a new album, and admits a rock group 1 like is good, or if he buys a particularly fancy shirt, he acts afterward as if he has the right to expect something in return, as if I owe him something. He’ll sit on the couch while I clean up the dinner dishes alone, and when I complain, he gets really irritated, he says he never even has time to read the papers. And I’ve been getting angry at this, but you know you hate to turn into a continual nagger. And I haven’t understood what was going on.’

  ‘It’s his idea of compromise,’ Mira laughed.

  ‘Yes. Quid pro quo. There’s something wrong with it, logically. I can’t put my finger on it, though.’

  ‘He’s expecting you to adopt the traditional role,’ Grete began, ‘while he …’

  ‘Yes. While he what?’

  ‘Dabbles in your values.’

  Clarissa raised her chin and began clicking off points. ‘Okay. So a proper quid pro quo would be my dabbling in his values. But I do. I went to a party given by his fellow officers and never once criticized Nixon. I visited his Rhinebeck relatives and drank after-dinner coffee with the women in the living room while the men sat drinking brandy in the dining room and talking politics.’

  ‘People still do that!’ Grete gasped.

  ‘I don’t know about people: they do. Okay. I was looking for a line of attack: got it. Thanks.’

  That was the end of Duke for the day.

  Another time Clarissa was discussing the effect of social structures on the nineteenth-century English novel, which was her dissertation subject. ‘It starts early, of course it’s there in the eighteenth century – in Defoe, say – in a subliminal way, but in people like Crabbe and Austen it becomes a full-blown subject: money, money, money. It’s at the root of everything else. Just like Duke these days,’ she added, then stopped short. Her head was bent forward, her hair hanging down almost covering her face, but Mira could see the little frown on her forehead, almost see the mind ticking away the realization that she never made these discoveries alone, only when she was with the women, talking about something else, as if they could come into her mind only unbidden, and as if that bothered her. She said nothing about it, however.

  ‘Money! I love money!’ Grete cried, waving her braceleted arms in the air. ‘But not too much money.’

  Clarissa raised her head soberly. ‘Yes, I like it too. But not like Duke. He talks about it all the time, he’s obsessed with it. Ever since he has been living here. We go out and he looks in all the shops and he wants everything. He wants to buy some pictures from David, not because he likes them so much, but because he thinks David’s going to be famous someday, and he wants an investment. He’s talking about leaving the army – although he really loves it – and joining up with some guys at MIT whom he met through Harley. They’re talking about using computers to do urban planning. It’s a lucrative field these days, apparently. They want to set up a consulting firm even though they’re still in school.’

  ‘A consulting firm to do what?’ Iso was sitting under the window, the light shining on her hair, one long leg dangling over the chair arm, one slender hand holding the small cigar she had recently taken to.

  ‘You look just like Katharine Ross.’

  ‘I don’t!’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘Do you like Katharine Ross?’

  ‘Ummmm,’ Clarissa grinned and licked her lips.

  ‘Then it’s okay,’ Iso laughed. ‘I’ll look like her.’

  ‘They want to solve problems. They think cities and institutions would come to them and they would get together all the relevant data and feed it into the computer and tell the city what to do about pollution, say, or school systems, or cross-country migrations, or the birth-rate. They think they can plan our future. They believe the reason things are such a mess is because they are never planned, they always happen haphazardly.’

  Grete groaned. Mira said, ‘Ugh.’ Iso giggled: ‘Thank heaven for the failure of human planning.’

  ‘Duke thinks he’ll make a fortune. I don’t care whether he does it or not – that’s his decision. But all this emphasis on money. I don’t understand it. He used to be so idealistic.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Iso said thoughtfully. ‘Like last night at dinner, when he got on the subject, it was a little scary. As if he feels he’s against a wall and only money is going to keep those soldiers out there from shooting their rifles at him. There’s a desperateness about him, you can’t call it greed, although it sounds like greed. But I always think of greed as an avidity for something you don’t need just for the sake of possession. Duke acts as if he needs money horribly, as if he were being hounded by duns.’ She turned to Clarissa. ‘Maybe he’s taken up secret gambling.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Mira said remembering Norm, ‘that’s how men feel.’

  ‘What I find appalling,’ Grete waved her arm, ‘is that the very people who understand nothing about living are the ones who are presumptuous enough to imagine they can plan our lives.’

  Mira glanced swiftly at Clarissa. She knew that Clarissa was a little edgy about Duke, that one could not say too much about him without offending her. But Clarissa smiled at Grete. ‘Yeah. I told them if they were going to do this, they’d better get a few poets, preferably women, to join them.’

  Mira decided then that the situation between Duke and Clarissa was really serious. Clarissa stopped talking about Duke, though, after that. It was only through Iso, in whom Clarissa had begun confiding, that Mira and Grete learned that things were bad indeed. Iso did not go into detail, but apparently Clarissa had shown up several nights in July with a tear-swollen face and eyes. Clarissa did not mention these things when the women were together. Mira
felt hurt: she felt the whole point of the group was to be a group, to provide a community for each other. She sensed that Clarissa’s withdrawal from the group, after Val’s and Kyla’s, would in time lead to its disintegration.

  Clarissa’s withdrawal, however, had less to do with a reluctance to share her experiences with them all than with her feelings about Iso. She felt in close rapport with her friend; she felt utter trust in her, and utter comfort with her. It was easier when she was alone with Iso, easier and somehow better. Many nights she would storm out after an argument with Duke and walk the five blocks to Iso’s. Sometimes she would sleep there on Iso’s lumpy couch. Duke was bewildered, he did not understand what was happening to them. He kept trying to grab Clarissa back. The conviction had grown in his mind that it was those women who were somehow taking her away from him, and he sought for any way to discredit them, to snipe at them. His hate and fear of the group expanded to include what he called women’s lib; in time his remarks were directed just at women, period. Clarissa would flare up: ‘I’m a woman’; he would rage, ‘But you’re different!’ And Clarissa would storm out again. The harder he pulled, the harder she pulled. Duke was frantic, but there was no one he could talk to. Twice he went out himself, late, and picked up prostitutes and went to their rooms. Both times, he was unable to perform sexually. What he really wanted was to talk. His sense of potency was undermined, and one night he tried to force himself on Clarissa. She fought him off; he slapped her; she socked him in the jaw, hard, and he sat there a little stunned, wondering how this could be happening, happening to them, who loved each other; she gazed coldly at him and turned away and walked out. She closed the door softly, instead of slamming it as she usually did after an argument. Duke sat there, rubbing his jaw, blinking at the door, sensing that something final had happened.

  Clarissa’s evenings with Iso had grown more and more intimate. They would kiss hello; they would frequently put an arm about each other. When Clarissa was especially tense, Iso would rub her back. Clarissa let herself relax into her friend, and ramble on, giving up the need she had always had to remain in control and to make logical sense out of things. She felt she did not have to worry about boring Iso, and she rambled about the trivialities that express the dissolution of a marriage. When she was especially upset, Iso would make her a drink, and stroke her head as she spoke, sitting on a chair beside the couch where Clarissa lay.

  Clarissa did not know what was happening to Duke and her, or why. She tried to get past the surface irritations to the real issue, but every time she thought she saw it, she would draw back in horror, sure that couldn’t be it. It couldn’t be, not with Duke and her, it couldn’t be the same trite fucking shit everybody else talked about. Surely they were better than that, larger, smarter. But over and over again, in these terrific arguments about dishes and cooking and her work – ‘He says reading all day is not work. It was when he was finishing up at the Point, of course’ – the same pattern emerged. ‘He’s trying to make a housewife out of me!’ she gasped to Iso. ‘Why? Why? I thought one of the things he loved about me was my mind, my independence, my personality. Why is he trying to turn me into the thing he claims, always claimed, bores him? Why?’

  It did not make sense. It was beyond answer.

  Clarissa sat up. She sipped her drink soberly. ‘Something just came into my head. Val – I remember disliking her that night – talking about how the institutions get you in the end. No matter how you struggle.’

  Iso nodded. ‘I was angry with her for that too, not because what she said isn’t true, but because she was being insensitive to you and Kyla and Mira. I mean there are times you shouldn’t tell the truth.’

  Clarissa looked at her and they both laughed. ‘Not even to your best friend?’ Clarissa glinted.

  ‘If you tell the truth all the time, you won’t have any best friends.’

  There was a silence. ‘Do you tell me the truth?’

  Iso paused. ‘Yes. As far as I can claim to know it.’

  Clarissa looked deep into Iso’s face. ‘I tell you the truth.’

  ‘I know,’ Iso smiled tenderly at her, stroking her face.

  ‘I had a horrible dream last night. Horrible.’

  ‘Tell.’

  ‘Duke and I are sitting in our living room when Kevin Callahan knocks and enters. Kevin is a real person. In the dream he’s a young man about three years older than I am, but in real life I haven’t seen him since I was a kid, maybe eight or nine. Last time I was home, my mother told me that he and his wife had adopted a child. I didn’t ask her about it but I think I just assumed at the time that the reason they adopted a child was that Kevin was impotent. I don’t know why I thought that. Maybe because when he was a kid, Kevin was very feminine. Anyway, Kevin notices that the house is a mess and tells Duke he should demand that I do a better job as a housewife. I get furious, I tell Kevin to go to hell, and I stomp off to the bedroom thinking that only an impotent male would insist on rigid sex roles.

  ‘But once I’m in the bedroom, I begin to feel sorry about my outburst. I ask Duke to explain to Kevin that I have taken a pill which is altering my behavior. I have taken this pill because Duke and I are to be married in forty-eight hours. This pill will eventually put me in a comatose state almost identical to death. When the pill has its full effect, I will be shipped to some distant place where the wedding ceremony will take place.

  ‘The time for shipping arrives. Drugged, I am placed in a boxcar where I lie down on a laser beam. I’m in a deathlike trance. Eventually – I don’t know if I’ve forgotten anything there – we arrive at the place for the wedding. A friend of my parents, who happens in real life to be an undertaker, takes over the arrangements for the ceremony. He is modeling a manikin/corpse of me, paying much attention to small details – the texture of my skin, the different colors of my hair. The doll he creates can walk, blink her eyelashes, and do whatever is demanded of a bride in a wedding. Somehow, it is decided that the bride/corpse/manikin will go through the ceremony instead of me. The audience will think it is me, and I will be able to escape the ceremony. The undertaker is also making an intricately carved bed/coffin which is to be placed on the altar. At the end of the ceremony, the couple will lie down on the bed/coffin as the audience watches.

  ‘The whole thing happens – the wedding, the lying down. But meantime, Duke and I run off to New York together. We aren’t even missed.’

  ‘“It can sew, it can cook, it can talk, talk, talk,”’ Iso quoted. ‘But you do escape, you and Duke.’

  ‘I feel as if I’ve been sleepwalking through my life. As if I’m Sleeping Beauty and still haven’t wakened up.’

  Iso gazed at Clarissa’s round, child’s face, still sweet despite new darkenings, the beginnings of lines. ‘Well, it was such a nice dream there in the rose arbor. Mummy and Daddy loved their little princess, and she never needed to need anything because before she could even ask, the good fairy whisked it in with her magic wand. And school was the same way. And Duke. And look at you, a bright, handsome young couple, well-connected, sure to have marvelous children, a marvelous future. An apartment full of gorgeous prints, rugs, vases, all picked up for peanuts on the Vietnamese black market –’

  ‘Iso!’

  ‘Related to a former muckamuck and another former muckamuck, families with places in Rhinebeck and Newport, apartments in the Dakota –’

  ‘Iso!’

  ‘You wanted me to tell you the truth. You thought you could get away from your values by burying yourself in Roxbury, but you always knew you’d come back and that you could come back.’

  Clarissa jumped up and flung herself out of Iso’s apartment. She didn’t even close the door. She ran all the way down the stairs.

  Iso sat there until Clarissa’s footsteps had vanished. She didn’t even get up and close the door. She felt pounded on, abused, used. She finished her cigar, then slowly, like an old person, walked to the door and shut it and locked it, all three bolts. For over a year no
w, she had been feeling good about herself, had felt she could be herself. And herself felt like a pair of open arms. And all that had happened was that people had treated her house like a restaurant, had drunk her drinks and eaten her food and basked in her kindness and sometimes, her love, and then, when they were healed, restored to self-respect, they had left. There were always more where they came from, of course. There would always be more, as long as she left her heart and door open, kept her refrigerator full.

  She remembered a day she had spent with Kyla, a day they had planned, saved up for emotionally. Kyla had the car and they drove out to Concord, parked, got out and walked. They walked far beyond the public places, invading fenced meadows and fields. Kyla was nervous and jerky, she was biting her lip again, she tripped over branches. Finally, she ducked through a wire fence and got her hair caught. Iso ran to her and tried to unsnag her, and Kyla began to shriek, scream, curse at her.