The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

‘It was irresponsible, simply irresponsible! She had a daughter to care for … she was always irresponsible …’ He gazed off into the clouds. We looked at him. He turned back to Chris and put his arm around her shoulders. ‘Come on, honey, you come home with Daddy,’ he smiled, and said good-bye, gracefully, to us.

  Chris glanced at us with blank eyes. Mira started, she put out her hand, but they had turned, they were walking away. Chris looked tiny and helpless, weighed down by a large hand on her shoulder.

  Howard Perkins came up to us blinking. ‘She was great, you know, really great. Once. My theory is she went nuts in menopause. Women do, you know? She was getting old, she was no longer attractive to men, and her basic hostility to them took over …’

  ‘Fuck off, Howard,’ Mira said, and everyone turned and looked at her. Howard looked at her offended, then his ectoplasm drifted off into the crowd.

  The friends waited until the crowd had left. Ben was there, with his arm around Mira, and Harley was there and Iso and Clarissa and Kyla and Tad, looking gangly and lost, and Grant, looking fierce, and Bart, who watched as Chris went off with her father. He turned to Mira, he shrugged, he spread his arms. ‘Nothing really changes,’ he said with a full throat. She took his hand. ‘It does, it does. It just takes longer than we do.’

  The group walked slowly toward their cars. They did not speak. Then Ben and Tad and Grant got into Harley’s car, and Iso and Kyla and Clarissa got into Mira’s car, and the two cars drove back, dropping people at their homes, each of them returning alone, separate.

  Mira got out her brandy and sat by the telephone, her head in her hands. The phone didn’t ring. Ben’s arm around her at the funeral had brought it all back, the warmth of love, the consolation that love brought to the terribleness of life. She picked up the receiver and dialed Ben’s number. It rang and rang. She put it down. She felt frantic. She tried to remember all the arguments, the reasoning she had brought to bear on their split, the words, words, words she had said to herself to explain, to break, to cut in half. They seemed ridiculous now, with that mass of exploded flesh piled into a grave and labeled Val. Val of the dashiki and the glass of wine lifted in air, the sudden loud laugh, the lifted eyebrow, Val who could not be put down but who was now put out, and that was in store for her too, for Mira, and for Ben, Ben who was so vivid, his thick dark-haired arms, his hair streaming uncontrollably out of his scalp like grass, his eyes, brown and alive, his laughter … She picked up the phone and dialed again. No answer. Life was too short and too cold to give up love. Even if it meant giving up everything else. She poured another brandy and dialed again. No answer.

  So what if it ended the same way her first marriage had? So what if she had a child at forty-one or -two and never wrote her dissertation, or wrote it and got the degree and then sat in Africa fanning herself, watching her child play with the strange flowers that grew in the compound? And it might not end. It might stay vital and warm, their love, they might continue to excite each other forever, they might get in bed every night for the next thirty years and reach out to each other with the same desire, they might wait to see each other every day for the next thirty years with the same interest and eagerness …

  That was ridiculous. Ridiculous. That was the thing of all things most unlikely. That was why it had been turned into the ideal. From the ideal it got turned into a norm that somehow never materialized. She felt unbearably alone. She got up, put on her coat, picked up her brandy bottle, and drove to Iso’s. Kyla and Clarissa were already there. They were all sitting in silence. She passed the bottle around. They poured brandy into glasses and held them up: ‘To Val,’ they said, and drank.

  ‘There’s just nothing to say. There are no words,’ someone said.

  No words to wrap her body in like a shroud, like clean white sanitized bandages, around and around and around until she was all clean and white and sanitized and pure, her blood dried, her mass of exploded flesh covered, her stink deodorized, and she sanitary, polite, acceptable for public notice, a mummy propped on a table for public ceremony, its very presence a promise, a guarantee that she will no longer disturb or threaten, that she will not rise up in rage with hair wild on her head, a knife in her hand, screaming, ‘No! No! Kill before you accept!’

  ‘Yes. But she did accept. She consented to her eradication just as if she had been Stella Dallas.’

  ‘But there’s no way not to do that, is there? I mean, whether you fight or submit, climb on a crag or creep in a cave, you’re participating in it, in your destiny, you’re creating it, you’re responsible, aren’t you?’

  ‘But shit, man, we don’t have to contribute to that, we don’t have to help slide her into the deep freeze by labeling her, by defining her, she was this, she was that – neat as an obituary.’

  Words soaking up her juices like the brown paper the fishmonger wraps around an eviscerated, decapitated, scaled fish.

  ‘But saying nothing obliterates her too. You know, the Greek word for truth – altheia – doesn’t mean the opposite of falsehood. It means the opposite of lth, oblivion. Truth is what is remembered.’

  ‘All right. Then let’s say: she died for truth, and she died of it. Some truths are mortal illnesses.’

  ‘All truths are mortal illnesses.’

  They clinked their glasses again, and drank them down.

  2

  The rest of us survived.

  Kyla grew disgusted with her search for a topic. She went over to the law school and asked the professors if she could sit in on their classes. After a month, she was bouncing again. She was furious – ‘All law cares about is property!’ – but full of life. Law was something that worked the way she thought, something she could get into, something that might help. She applied to law schools for the fall, a late application, but she was accepted at Stanford, and went out there immediately and got a job to save the money and pay her tuition.

  I had a letter from her last month. She’s graduated from law school now and is cramming for her bar exams. She has a ‘little job’ for a judge as law clerk. That doesn’t sound like a little job to me. I expect to see her come flying through my window like Batwoman, bearing in her hand the new ten commandments.

  Clarissa stayed out the semester, reading documents more and literature less; in June, she went to visit a cousin of hers in Chicago, and walked into a Chicago TV station, with suggestions for some new, historical, lively programming. They hired her on the spot. She came back to Cambridge for her possessions, her new, older face glowing. She claimed TV was the most potent force for social change in the history of humankind. I said I thought it was the most conservative force in existence, except for the Catholic Church. As usual with Clarissa and me, we agreed in our disagreement.

  These days she is the producer of a Chicago program that is being touted as the most interesting and spectacular new program in the decade, and there is talk of putting it on national TV. Clarissa, though, doesn’t get flapped by such things. She goes through her days efficiently, intelligently, with her eyes firmly fixed on ideas and people at once. She proves it can be done. It can be done. Someday, I expect to see her come flying through my TV screen like Superwoman, holding in her hand a list of candidates for President, all women.

  Grete married Avery. They both finished their degrees. They seemed to be settling down to a quiet, culturally rich Cambridge life, but suddenly they took off for California. Grete got a job in a film. I don’t know how. How do people do such things? She had only a small part, but she was very good and very beautiful, and she kept getting jobs. She finally landed a major role in a major film with an all-male cast except for her. She wrote that she’s going to change the Hollywood biases after she has enough money and fame. She wants to direct movies, maybe even write them, movies with strong women’s parts, movies with people in them like Val and Iso and Kyla and Clarissa and herself.

  Avery is in southern California, teaching in an alternative school. He has no money, but Grete has lots. They spend every oth
er weekend together, and are trying to keep their marriage intact. They sound as though they’re rather enjoying this pain.

  Ava is also married. I had a letter about her from Iso recently. Ava went to New York with only tremulous hopes, but did well. She did actually perform on the stage a couple of times, in the corps de ballet of an opera company, in a rear line. She kept dancing and practicing. But then she fell one day. Everyone was solicitous; they didn’t laugh. That bothered her. She knew they would have laughed if she’d been young. She fell again, and this time bruised her leg a little. Everyone ran to help her. She thought a lot about that. She was weary. She had a job as a secretary in a public relations office, and had been dating a young man, younger than herself, and very much in love with her. He had asked her to marry him, and she had told him, with her uncompromising honesty, that she did not love him. But it was wearing her out, working five days a week, dancing four nights a week and Saturdays, and occasionally giving performances, keeping her apartment up to whatever degree she kept it, having, at the very least, to come home at night and fix some toast and tea. The third time she fell, she agreed to marry the young man if he did not object to a wife who did not love him. He did not. And now she is living in Pittsburgh, I guess she must be living as a housewife. I can’t conceive of it. Ava, cooking and cleaning? There is no way I can see it. Only tense and surrendering over the piano, her thin shoulders hunched up, her fingers in command, as she communicates with it, this music, this instrument, her face hovering over it as tender and yielding as the face of love, as sad as that most tragic of mothers, Hecuba, and as strict and severe as the worst martinet. Or on her pointes, for I saw her dance once, lifted totally out of herself, in the music, become the music, translated into music.

  But Iso swears she is married and living in Pittsburgh. It must be. Iso says she goes to see the ballet companies that visit that city, whenever they do. She wrote Iso: ‘I keep falling. I am old. There is no hope.’

  Iso herself is splendid. There is something to be said for lowered expectations. She finished her dissertation within another year and almost immediately it was accepted for publication. She’s on a grant now, working on another book, living in England and working at the Bodleian and the British Museum. She is currently living with a marvelous woman she met in a pub who is divorced and has two young children and drives a cab. Iso writes about the children as if they were her own, and signs her name Isolde, but she also says she does not for a moment expect this to last. I don’t expect her to come flying through anything except the air, and she will hover lightly and drop little fragments of Middle English down upon us like a blessing, before she moves on to deserts new.

  She is still the center of us. There were bad feelings for a while, but in time Kyla wrote her a letter, then Clarissa. Mira and Grete had never stopped. We all write each other too, but it is Iso we all care most about. In my mind I will always see her striding jauntily down the street the way she looked when she first came out of disguise. She will bend to talk to a child with a dog, suddenly the child’s mother appears. She has streaming hair and black boots, and a frightened look. Iso will talk to her for a few minutes and wham! Mother and child and dog and Iso will go off for a walk in the park, a cup of coffee, a nice home-cooked meal.

  Ben went to Africa. Mira discovered later that Harley had driven Ben straight to the airport; he left right after the funeral, in fact, had delayed his flight so he could be there. Mira never heard from him again, but she heard about him through the grapevine. He stayed in Africa for a year and a half before they asked him to leave, and came back to a cushioned chair at a large state university. He is a consultant to a number of foundations and to the federal government, and is considered the world’s expert on Lianu. At thirty-eight, he is a high success. He married the woman who was his secretary in Lianu, and they have two babies. She takes care of the babies and the house and him because he is very busy, very successful. They live in a large house in a good neighborhood, and people think they are a model couple. They are invited everywhere and women everywhere are attracted to him. His wife shows signs of whiny clingingness. Yes.

  So, you see, the story has no ending. They go on, and who knows what they will make of their world in ten years, or twenty. Tad, I’ve heard, entered a Zen monastery. But that may be only a rumor. Grant is teaching in some little college in Oregon or Washington, where he is considered a firebrand, but is uncertain of tenure. And Chris. My heart hurts when I think of her. I don’t know what happened to Chris.

  And that’s all, I guess, except for Mira. She finished her dissertation, and when it was accepted, took her divorce money and went to Europe and traveled around alone for eight months, breathing it in, sucking it up. Then she came back and tried to get a job, but the market had dried up and nobody wanted to hire a woman over forty even if she had a Harvard degree, and so she ended up at this little community college near the coast of Maine, and she walks the beach every day, and drinks brandy every night, and wonders if she’s going mad.

  Clark called me the other night at two o’clock in the morning. I was sitting as usual, with a brandy and a cigarette. He said ‘Hi! I had nothing better to do and I wanted to talk to somebody and I thought – who else would be awake at two o’clock in the morning? So I called you.’ He laughed when I cursed him out, and he talked for an hour about this girl in his math class and general horniness, and his vagueness about a thing he was supposed to have, namely, a career, and his wish that he could just marry some rich girl and cook and take care of her house. I talked about the lack of men in my world – not being in any math class – and general horniness, and my vagueness about a thing I was supposed to have, namely, a career. We laughed a lot. Only I won, because in addition to all my other problems, I’m forty-four, which is a far cry from twenty-one.

  There are things I can do, I guess. But I have bad dreams. They are much more real to me than what is outside me, out there in that dinky town with its one lunch counter and its library that doubles as historical monument because it is actually a tiny eighteenth-century house, its one church that few people attend, and its one supermarket.

  I have these dreams every night. Last night I dreamed that I am living alone in an apartment very like the one I had in Cambridge. I am lying in bed and a man appears in the room. I am a little frightened, but I look at him with curiosity. He is white, taller than I am, and he has a scar on his lip. But the thing that I notice most is his eyes. They are empty. The threat he poses by being there does not frighten me, but the mindlessness in his eyes does. It is terrifying and repulsive: He has things in his hands – a pipe and a penknife. It is his mindlessness, though, not his tools, that makes him physically threatening. But I sit up, I act unfrightened, I act even agreeable. I say, ‘It’s cold, don’t you think? Do you mind if I turn up the heat?’ He nods, and I leave the room, and as soon as I do, I run down the stairs and out the door, and down another flight to the front door, and then I have to decide what to do. I hear his steps on the flight above. I decide to take my chances outside.

  Suddenly, I come a little closer to consciousness. This often happens to me in dreams. I come to, just a little, although at the time I think I am totally awake, and I decide to change something in the dream. Later, when I am really awake, I can look back and see I never was awake, I only dreamed that I was awake. Anyway, that is what happens in this dream. I come to enough to realize that downstairs from my apartment in Cambridge, there are only houses which at this time of night will be dark and silent. So I decide to put a little store next door to my house, a store that is conveniently open. I run into the store and ask them to hide me and to call the police. They do. That is good. I have done this in other dreams, and they have refused, been frightened themselves and refused.

  There is a series of scenes I don’t recall. Then I am in town, I am in a police station, I am in a police car. I give directions, they find my house, they go in to clear it out. But now there are five of them, all brutal in their mindle
ssness, sitting cross-legged in the circle on my living room floor. I know that it is not their bodies which threaten me, but the vacancy in their eyes. The police take them out, and I see but do not remark that the apartment is empty, utterly empty. The police remove them and I walk away feeling that that at least is that; then I return to the living room and see them still there. I run out to call back the police, but the stairs have been removed. I don’t know what to do. I hold on to the curving banister and slide down.

  Later, I go back up. The men are gone. So is everything else. The apartment is bare, cold. The police come up to check on me, they tell me to keep my front door closed. I go to lock it, but the inner doorknob is missing. I cry out: ‘He’s taken off the handles.’ I don’t any longer know who is standing outside the door. I don’t any longer care. I am confronting my predicament. If I close the door it will lock and I will never be able to open it from the inside. It can be opened from the outside, but I do not believe in the tale of Sleeping Beauty. Even if I did, I could hardly qualify. What prince is going to cut through brambles to reach me? Besides they are mostly spurious princes, from ahistoric European duchies. I stand there in terror. If I close the door I will be trapped; if I do not, I may wake up again to face a set of mindless eyes, a vacant, unthinking threat. I wake up.

  August is nearly over. School will open in two weeks and I have done nothing, I have not read Chomsky, or any new fairy tales, or found a better composition text. It doesn’t matter.

  I am a good scholar, and in a different market, I could have done decent work, but in this one, it seems hopeless. Maybe I’ll do it anyway, just for myself. What else do I have to do? as Norm used to ask me.

  I guess I keep expecting that there should be something out there that would make it easier to be in here. Like the snails, you know: They don’t do anything except exist. This is not the world I would have wished.