The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  She shrieked. ‘Fuck off, Ben!’

  One advantage to not using indecorous language is that when you do use it, it carries quite a wallop. Mira had, in the last year, uttered words that had been foreign to her tongue, but she had done this mainly with her women friends, rarely in front of Ben. Like her mother, she had categories.

  He stopped dead in the middle of a sentence. He looked at her. He lowered his eyes. He said: ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that. But I think – Mira, I mean it – that the last thing I said was true. I can’t imagine going without you. It would be too painful. I couldn’t stand it.’

  He looked up at her again. She was looking at him with a twisted mouth, and tears were streaming down her cheeks.

  ‘Yes, I believe that, Ben,’ she said in a hushed voice. ‘You wanted to go, and it would hurt you to go without me, and so you simply assumed I would go with you because that was the simplest solution to the problem. And you never, never once,’ she rose, and her voice rose, ‘never thought about me! About my needs, my life, my desires! You eradicated me, me as a person apart from you, as successfully as Norm did!’

  She ran from the room and into the toilet and locked the door. She sat there weeping. Ben sat for a long time, smoking his little foul-smelling cigarettes down to the last half inch. Eventually the bathroom door opened, and Mira came out and went into the kitchen and poured a drink. Ben sat, his mouth pursing and unpursing. He put out his cigarette and lighted another. Mira returned and sat down across from him. She crossed her legs lotus-fashion. Her eyes were puffy, but her face looked bony, austere, and her back was very straight.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay. Your needs, your life, your desires. What are they?’

  Mira seemed almost to squirm. ‘I don’t know exactly …’

  He leaped forward, pointing one finger. ‘Aha!’

  ‘Shut up, Ben,’ she said coldly. ‘I don’t know exactly because I haven’t had enough room in my life to think about what I wanted. But I know I love what I’m doing now, and that I’d like to go on doing it. I want to finish my dissertation. Beyond that, I can’t want, because I don’t know what I can get. I learned long ago, before I was twenty,’ she said bitterly, ‘not to want what I could not get. It hurts too much. Anyway, I think I’d like to teach. I know I want to do literary criticism, and I will finish my dissertation. And,’ she turned her head aside and said, with a phlegmy throat, ‘I also love you and would not like to separate from you. I want you too.’

  He was across the room in two bounds, was kneeling on the floor before her chair, and had her in his arms, his head in her lap.

  ‘I love you too, don’t you see? Mira, don’t you see? I can’t bear the thought of separating from you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said coldly. ‘I see that. I also see that you were willing to eradicate me in order to keep me. Ironic. That’s what Val says. The paradox of what gets called love.’

  He sat back on the floor and crossed his legs. He sipped her drink. ‘Okay. What can we do then? Mira, will you come to Lianu with me?’

  ‘And what should I do in Il-lianu?’ she lilted, but he did not catch her allusion.

  ‘I don’t know. I really don’t. Look, I’ll do everything I can … I don’t know what will be available. But we’ll buy all the books you need, we’ll Xerox every article – I’ll help you. We’ll take it all down there with us. We’ll subscribe to every journal that you think is important. And you can write your dissertation there. There’s no real problem. You can mail your copy to Everts. And after that …’

  ‘And after that?’ Her voice surprised her. It was so low, so cold, so controlled. It was not the self she had known.

  He sighed. He took her hand. ‘Look, sweetheart, I can’t say there’s much down there for you. Surely I can get you a secretarial job in a government office, possibly even a job as a transla – no, you can’t speak Lianish. But something.’

  ‘I want to teach.’

  He sighed and slumped. ‘Ten years ago,’ he waved his arms around, ‘that would have been possible. Now? I just don’t think so. There are still a few white teachers there, but they’re being phased out, and mostly they’re in sectarian schools.’ He looked directly at her. ‘I don’t think that will be possible.’

  ‘Yet,’ her mouth twisted as if she were about to cry again, ‘you simply assumed I would go. Knowing I’ve spent the last five years of my life preparing to teach.’

  His head drooped. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, with pain in his voice.

  They sat silent for a while. ‘I won’t be down there forever,’ he said finally. ‘The days of whites in Africa are numbered. We’ll come back.’ He looked up at her again.

  She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Yes. That’s true.’ Her heart rose. The thing could be worked out. With rising excitement, she said, ‘And if you don’t get thrown out in a couple of years, and I feel stultified, I could always come back. My dissertation should be finished. Of course it will be difficult to do it so far from a library. It will take much longer than it needs to. But I could spend the time waiting for books … gardening,’ she smiled, for the first time.

  His brow was clouded. ‘But, Mira, sweetheart, you couldn’t just go off and abandon your child.’

  ‘My child?’

  He started. ‘Well sure. Isn’t that what this is all about? Our kid. The one we’re going to have.’

  She froze. Her entire body felt freezing cold. She felt as if she had taken a drug, or were dying, and was pressed against some terrible wall where only basic truths could be uttered, and had found hers, and it horrified her, it was I am, I am, I am. And the second basic truth came right after the first, the way the lower part of a wave follows the upper: I want, I want, I want. And in the next second she realized that these were two statements that she had never felt permitted to utter, or even to think. Cold, in a white frigid corner, she opened her blue lips:

  ‘I don’t want to have another child, Ben.’

  It all fell apart then. Ben was hurt, shocked, whatever. He could understand her not wanting to have another child with Norm, or anyone else, perhaps, but not with him. They argued, he passionately, she desperately, for she was arguing against herself. She loved Ben, she would have loved (once, long ago) to have his child, it would have been joy (once, long ago) to go with him to a new place and grow flowers and bake bread and talk to a little one pattering around learning to say, ‘Hot! Mats hot!’ and have him come home at night and explain to her the subtleties of Marcusan theory while she explained to him the subtleties of Wallace Stevens’ versification. Assuming he still had the leisure to be interested in such discussions. But now (after forty years) she wanted to do her own work, she wanted to pursue this stuff, this scholarship that she loved so much. It would be a sacrifice to go to Africa – it would hurt her career, would slow her work. But she was willing to do it, she would take the books with her, she would have things sent out. But she could not, no, she could not have another child. Enough, she said. Enough.

  There would be plenty of help in Africa, Ben said. And when we come back? Or suppose I need something here and have to come back for a few months? That could be arranged, he said reluctantly. She had enough experience to be able to translate what was reluctance now to furious refusal later. And what about when they came back? The child would still be hers, although he was the one who wanted it. It would be her responsibility. There was not plenty of help here. He would do what he could, he said, but he was too honest to promise more.

  She sat alone with her brandy, late. She and Ben did not break up, they simply did not see each other very often. There was little impulse for it, because every time they did see each other, they had an argument. She felt that Ben was regarding her from a height, that with part of his mind he was looking down coldly at this woman he had loved for almost two years, whom he had just discovered to be selfish and egotistical. When they slept together, their sex life was poor: he was mechanical and she uninspired. She felt
terribly squashed at his manner; she felt an intense need to protest, to justify, to vindicate herself from his unspoken charge. But she was too proud to do that, she understood that his superiority, her abasement, had nothing to do with them, were cultural accretions, that humanly he was not superior, she not beneath, but still …

  She felt utterly alone. Val did not answer the phone. Iso and Kyla and Clarissa could not help, they listened to her, but they did not understand what it was like to be forty and alone, what did they know about aloneness? She tried to tot things up in columns. Column one – last chance for happy love; column two – what? Myself. Myself. She remembered sitting alone on the porch of her mother’s house, insisting on myself. How horribly selfish! Maybe she was what Ben seemed to think she was.

  She pulled at her hair, hurting her scalp, trying to think it through. All she had to do was pick up the phone, say, Ben, I’ll go, Ben, I love you. He’d be there in a moment, he’d love her the way he used to love her. Her hand stopped in midair. The way he used to love her. Then he didn’t love her anymore? No, not when she insisted on her own desires. But if he didn’t love her insisting on her own desires, how did he love her? When her desires were the same as his. She poured another brandy. She felt herself getting drunk, but she didn’t care. Truths were discovered in drunkenness sometimes. If he only loved her when her desires were the same as his, and stopped loving her when her desires were different from his, then that meant he didn’t love her but only a reflection of himself, a complement who could comprehend and appreciate, but who was smaller and flattering.

  But that was how it had been at the beginning. She felt smaller than he, she flattered him, sincerely, because she found him more important, larger, better than herself.

  That was what he had been led to expect.

  She put her glass down.

  That was what she had led him to expect. And now she was reneging.

  But she was different now.

  She was different partly because of him.

  That didn’t count. He was different partly because of her too.

  She leaned her head against the chair back. Suppose she went to him passionately, the way she loved it when he came to her, and grabbed him, the way she loved it when he grabbed her, and demanded, insisted, ‘I love you! I want you! Stay here in Cambridge with me. Let us go on as we have. You can make a career here too!’

  She smiled grimly and picked up the brandy. ‘Hah!’ she heard. It was Val’s voice.

  She pulled her feet up onto the seat of the chair and wrapped the blanket around them and her legs. She was sipping her brandy, and rocking in the chair, rocking her body back and forth, wrapped in the blanket from neck down. It will get you in the end: wasn’t that what she had said? Mira was smiling, but it was a grim hard smile, it had no mirth. The phone rang. She jumped up, checking her watch. Past one. One of the boys, probably. But it was Iso.

  ‘Mira. I just heard. Val’s dead.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  1

  Yes. That was what happened: everything opened up, anything seemed possible, and then everything closed up, dilation, constriction. It will get you in the end. But she also said: Why does every order have to be a permanent order? It was all that led me to this beach. I see I have dandelion greens in my hand. How did they get there, do you suppose?

  If there is dilation and constriction, then there has to be dilation again. Either that or death. Law of nature. If it isn’t it ought to be.

  Val was dead. It happened right under our eyes, but we didn’t even notice it. Mira thought about Val only when she needed to talk to her. No, that’s not fair. Val mattered to her, to all of them. Just not as much as she would perhaps have liked to matter, not as much as any of us would like to matter.

  What happened took some piecing together. Roughly, it ran like this. A young black woman, Anita Morrow, who worked as a domestic during the day, attended classes at Northeastern at night. She wanted to be an English teacher. (The prosecutor held this up to ridicule during her trial, claiming Anita was nearly illiterate.) Anita had been walking from her class to the MTA one night when a man attacked her. He came up behind her and put his arm across her throat and dragged her into an alley. He threw her down and pulled her skirt up, but Anita had grown up on the streets and she had a knife in her pocket. She kicked him in the chin, and got up fast, and when he grabbed her again, she stabbed him. She kept stabbing him, blood and fear pounding in her ears, but the noises, her cries and his, had attracted some people. They saw her stabbing him after he had fallen, and they ran to stop her. They held on to her until the police arrived.

  She was charged with murder. The man was from a respectable white family, he had a wife and six kids. The knife was Anita’s. The prosecutor claimed she was a prostitute, she had lured him into the alley, and when he backed out, stabbed him in order to rob him. The major issue in the trial was whether or not Anita was educable. If she was attending school simply to find more trade, then she was a prostitute, and prostitutes can’t be raped. These things were not stated, but implied.

  Anita was interviewed by the Boston Phoenix. Claims were made that in the Phoenix interview, her grammar and syntax were cleaned up to make her look literate. The Phoenix quoted her: ‘I want to go back to where I went to school. They couldn’t help it, the teachers there – we was wild, we wouldn’t listen. But we didn’t learn, you know? But I know I could talk to them kids because I know them, I am one of them, and I know I could make them see what I see. Like there’s this Blake poem, it goes “My mother groan’d! my father wept./Into the dangerous world I leapt.” Now you know babies don’t leap. That man was telling us about it, he was saying life springs out, even into danger, even into what’s terrible like it was terrible there, in my neighborhood. Then it says: “Helpless, naked, piping loud” – just as if a baby’s crying was a kind of music, like whistling down a dark street. I know the feeling, but I carry my knife too. And then “Like a fiend hid in a cloud.” Wow! He’s saying a baby’s a fiend! Well you know as well as me that’s true. That’s true!’ She laughed, her eyes glowing, the reporter claimed, and went on talking about poetry.

  The state brought expert witnesses to judge Anita’s grammar, syntax, and spelling. She was found sadly wanting: she would never, they insisted, be able to achieve teacher certification. Anita Morrow was found guilty of murder on grounds of illiteracy. Her trial had been attended, all the way through, by a group of militant feminists. The day of her sentencing, they picketed the courthouse. Only the Phoenix covered that, but they had a picture of the women shouting and waving their signs. Val was among them. Anita was sentenced to twenty years to life for first-degree murder. There was a picture of her being led from the courthouse, her face a child’s, full of bewilderment and terror. ‘He tried to rape me, so I stabbed him,’ she said incredulously to the group of women before they led her back into the armed car.

  Val’s group was small and did not have many resources, but apparently they were large enough to warrant federal attention, because an FBI informant infiltrated them. It was only because of her that anyone found out anything afterward. The group was outraged by what had happened to Morrow, and they planned to rescue her. They had elaborate arrangements for after the rescue. She would be sent from group to group of sympathetic women until the case died down, then shipped to Cuba or Mexico, until they could find contacts who would forge the papers for her to teach school someplace. It was a crazy plan, born out of utter desperation. Perhaps they did not expect it to work. Perhaps subconsciously they foresaw what would happen, and were willing for it to happen to bring the thing to public notice.

  On the day when Anita was to be transferred to the state prison (because she was deemed unreliable and dangerous to society, she was not released pending her appeal), the women arrived singly, dressed in jeans or skirts, disguised as just women, and hung around the street until Morrow was brought out to the van. Then suddenly, they mobilized in a circle, pulling guns out of skirts and coat
s.

  But the authorities expected them. Behind the brick wall was a policeman, two, three: they stepped out with machine guns – the women had only handguns – and mowed them down. Four, five, six, seven, eight policemen came out with machine guns. Two pedestrians were wounded, the six women were all dead. Morrow was thrust into the van, and it sped off. That was all. But the police had sent so many bullets into two of the bodies that as they were lying there dead, they exploded, wounding some of the approaching cops. Later it was claimed the women had been carrying grenades that did not, for some odd reason, explode before. Val’s was one of the exploded bodies. One of the cops died, and was given a ceremonial funeral: the mayor even attended. The other lived, but his face and his thighs were scarred.

  There were a lot of people at Val’s funeral. Iso said probably half of them were FBI agents, but I don’t think so, I think Val had a lot of secret friends, people she’d spoken to once and said something real to. I’ll bet that minister who was a rapist at heart was there. Howard Perkins was there, and Neil Truax, Val’s onetime husband. Chris brought him over and introduced him to us. Chris looked pale and blank and helpless. Her father was handsome and elegant, nicely gray at the temples, nicely tanned for December, nicely tight across the stomach (tennis or squash). He shook his head as he shook our hands, kept shaking his head, glancing at Chris, put his hand on her head and smiled at her and tousled her hair. She just looked at him.