The Women's Room (Virago Modern Classics)

by Marilyn French

  So they look at me strangely: I have other problems. Because the school year ended last week and in the flurry of papers and exams I didn’t have to think about it, and then suddenly it was there – two and a half whole months with nothing to do. The joys of the ten-month year. To me it looked like the Sahara Desert, stretching on and on under the crazy sun, and empty, empty. Well, I thought, I’ll plan my courses for next year; I’ll read some more fairy tales (Fairy Tales and Folklore), try to understand Chomsky better (Grammar 12), try to find a better writing handbook (Composition 1–2).

  Oh God.

  It comes to me that this is the first time in years, maybe in my life, that I am completely alone with nothing to do. Maybe that is why everything comes crowding in on me now. These things that jar their way into my mind make me think that my loneliness may not be entirely the fault of the place, that somehow or other – although I can’t understand it – I have chosen it.

  I have bad dreams, dreams full of blood. I am pursued, night after night, and night after night I turn and strike out at my pursuer, I smash, I stab. That sounds like anger. It sounds like hate. But hate is an emotion I have never permitted myself. Where could it come from?

  As I walk along the beach, my memory keeps going back to Mira those first weeks in Cambridge, tottering around on her high heels (she always walked shakily in high heels, but she always wore them) in a three-piece wool knit suit, with her hair set and sprayed, looking almost in panic at the faces that passed her, desperate for a sharp glance, an appraising smile that would assure her she existed. When I think of her, my belly twists a little with contempt. But how do I dare to feel that for her, for that woman so much like me, so much like my mother?

  Do you? You know her: she’s that blonded made-up matron, a little tipsy with her second manhattan, playing bridge at the country club. In the Moslem countries, they make their women wear jubbah and yashmak. This makes them invisible, white wraiths drifting through streets buying a bit of fish or some vegetables, turning into dark narrow alleys and entering doors that slam shut loudly, reverberating among the ancient stones. People don’t see them, they are less differentiated than the dogs that run among the fruit carts. Only the forms are different here. You don’t really see the woman standing at the glove or stocking counter, poking among cereal boxes, loading six steaks into her shopping cart. You see her clothes, her sprayed helmet of hair, and you stop taking her seriously. Her appearance proclaims her respectability, which is to say she’s just like all other women who aren’t whores. But maybe she is, you know. Distinction by dress isn’t what it used to be. Women are capable of anything. It doesn’t really matter. Wife or whore, women are the most scorned class in America. You may hate niggers and PRs and geeks, but you’re a little frightened of them. Women don’t get even the respect of fear.

  What’s to fear, after all, in a silly woman always running for her mirror to see who she is? Mira lived by her mirror as much as the Queen in Snow White. A lot of us did: we absorbed and believed the things people said about us. I always took the psychological quizzes in the magazines: are you a good wife? a good mother? Are you keeping the romance in your marriage? I believed Philip Wylie when he said mothers were a generation of vipers, and I swore never, never to act that way. I believed Sigmund’s ‘anatomy is destiny’ and tried to develop a sympathetic, responsive nature. I remember Martha saying that she hadn’t had a real mother; her mother did nothing in the way women were supposed to – she collected old newspapers and pieces of string and never dusted and took Martha to a cheap cafeteria to eat every night. So when Martha got married and tried to make friends with other couples, she didn’t know how. She didn’t know you were supposed to serve drinks and food. She just sat there with George, talking to them. People always left early, they never came back, they never invited her. ‘So I went out and bought The Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. I did it for years religiously. I read them like the Bible, trying to find out how to be a woman.’

  I hear Martha’s voice often as I walk along the beach. And others’ too – Lily, Val, Kyla. I sometimes think I’ve swallowed every woman I ever knew. My head is full of voices. They blend with the wind and the sea as I walk the beach, as if they were disembodied forces of nature, a tornado whirling around me. I feel as if I were a medium and a whole host of departed spirits has descended on me clamoring to be let out.

  So this morning (shades of the past!) I decided on a project to fill this vacant stretching summer. I will write it all down, go back as far as I have to, and try to make some sense out of it. But I’m not a writer. I teach grammar (and I hate it) and composition, but as anyone who’s ever taken a comp course knows, you don’t have to know anything about writing to teach it. In fact, the less you know the better, because then you can go by rules, whereas if you really know how to write, rules about leading sentences and paragraphs and so forth don’t exist. Writing is hard for me. The best I can do is put down bits and pieces, fragments of time, fragments of lives.

  I am going to try to let the voices out. Maybe they will help me understand how they ended as they did, how I ended here feeling engulfed and isolated at the same time. Somehow it all starts with Mira. How did she manage to get herself, at the age of thirty-eight, to hide in that toilet?

  5

  Mira was an independent baby, fond of removing her clothes and taking a stroll on a summer’s day to the local candy store. The second time she was returned home by a policeman she had directed. Mrs Ward began to tie her up. She did not mean to be unkind: Mira had been crossing a busy boulevard. She used a long rope, so Mira could still move around, and tied it to the handle of the front door. Mira continued in her disconcerting habit of removing all her clothes, however. Mrs Ward did not believe in corporal punishment and used stern reproach and withdrawal of affection instead. It worked. Mira had trouble removing all her clothes on her wedding night. In time, Mira’s fury and tears at being tied up abated, and she learned to operate within a small space, digging into things since she was not permitted to range outward. The leash was then removed, and Mira showed herself to be a docile and even timid child, only somewhat given to sullenness.

  She was a bright child: she finished all the textbooks on the first day of school and, bored, spent the rest of the term enlivening her classmates. The solution decided upon was to move her ahead, into a class ‘more on her level,’ as the teacher put it. She was moved ahead several times, but never found such a class. What she did find was classmates years older, inches taller, pounds heavier, and with a world of sophistication greater than hers. She could not talk to them, and retreated into novels she kept hidden in her desk. She even read walking to and from school.

  Mrs Ward, convinced that Mira was headed for great things – which meant a good marriage, to that good woman – scraped together money to send her for lessons. She had two years of elocution, two years of dancing school, two years of piano, and two years of water-color painting. (Mrs Ward had loved the novels of Jane Austen in her youth.) At home, Mrs Ward taught her not to cross her legs at the knee, not to climb trees with boys, not to play tag in the alley, not to speak in a raised voice, not to wear more than three pieces of jewelry at a time, and never to mix gold and silver. When these lessons had been learned, she considered Mira ‘finished.’

  But Mira had a private life. Being so much younger than her classmates, she had no friends, but she did not seem to care. She spent all her time reading, drawing, daydreaming. She especially loved fairy tales and myths. Then she was sent for two years of religious instruction, and her concerns changed.

  At twelve, her preoccupation was determining the precise relation of God, heaven, hell, and earth. She would lie in bed at night looking out at the moon and clouds. Her bed stood beside a window, and she could lie comfortably on her pillow and gaze up and out. She tried to imagine all the people who had died, standing around up there in the sky. She tried to make them out; surely they must be peering down, longing for a friendly face? But
she never caught a glimpse of one, and after reading a little history and considering how many millions of people had in fact inhabited the earth, she began to worry about the population problems of the afterworld. She imagined searching for her grandmother, dead three years now, and wandering forever through mobs of people and never finding her. Then she realized that all those people would be very heavy, that it was impossible that they should all be up there without the heavens falling down. Perhaps then there were only a few up there and all the rest were in hell.

  But Mira’s social studies texts implied that the poor – whom Mira already knew to be the wicked – were not really wicked at heart but only environmentally deprived. God, Mira felt sure, if He was worth anything at all, would be able to see through such injustices to the good heart, and would not consign to hell all the juvenile delinquents who appeared in the pages of the New York Daily News which her father brought back from the city each night. This was a knotty problem, and gave her several weeks of heavy brainwork.

  To solve it, she found it necessary to look into herself, not just to feel her feelings, but to examine them. She believed she really wanted to love and be loved, really wanted to be good and have the approval of her parents and her teachers. But somehow she could never do it. She was always making nasty cracks to her mother, resenting her father’s fussiness; she resented that they treated her like a child. They lied to her and she knew it. She asked her mother about an ad in magazines, and her mother said she did not know what sanitary napkins were. She asked her mother what fuck meant; she had heard it at the schoolyard. Her mother said she did not know, but later Mira heard her whisper to Mrs Marsh, ‘How can you tell a child a thing like that?’ And there were other things, things she could not put her finger on, that told her her parents’ idea of being good and her own were not the same. She could not have said why, but her parents’ idea of what she should do felt like someone strangling her, stifling her.

  She remembered one night when she had been very fresh to her mother about something, had been fresh because she was right and her mother refused to admit it. Her mother scolded her severely, and she went into the dark porch of the house and sat on the floor sulking, feeling very wronged. She refused to go in to dinner. Her mother came out to the porch and said, ‘Come on, now, Mira, don’t be silly.’ Her mother had never done a thing like that before. She even reached out her hand to Mira, to pull her up. But Mira sat sulking and wouldn’t take the hand. Her mother went back to the dining room. Mira was near to tears. ‘Why do I have to be so sullen, so stubborn?’ she cried to herself, wishing she had taken the hand, wishing her mother would come back. She didn’t. Mira sat on and a phrase came into her head: ‘They ask too much. It costs too much.’ What the cost was, she was not sure; she labeled it ‘myself.’ She adored her mother, and she knew that by being sullen and fresh she lost her mother’s love; sometimes Mrs Ward would not speak to her for days. But she went on being bad. She was spoiled, selfish, and fresh. Her mother told her all the time.

  She was bad, but she didn’t want to be bad. Surely God must know that. She would be good if it didn’t cost so much. And in her badness, she was not really bad. She only wanted to do what she wanted to do: was that so terrible? Surely God would understand. He did understand because they said He saw the heart. And if He understood her, then He understood everyone. And no one really wanted to be bad, everyone wanted to be loved and approved. So there was no one in hell. But if there was no one there, why have it? There was no hell.

  When Mira was fourteen, she had finished all the interesting books they would allow her to take from the library – they did not permit her into the adult section. So she leafed through the unappetizing family bookcase. The family itself had no notion what was in it: their books had collected themselves, being leavings from the attics of dead relatives. Mira found Paine’s Common Sense and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, as well as Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness, a book she read with complete incomprehension.

  She became convinced of the nonexistence not only of hell but also of heaven. However, without heaven a new problem arose. For if there were neither hell nor heaven, there was no final reward or punishment, and this world was all there was. But this world – even by fourteen one knows this – is a terrible place. Mira did not need to read the newspapers, to see pictures of exploding ships and burning cities, to read rumors of places called concentration camps, to realize how terrible it was. She needed only to look around her. There was brutality and cruelty everywhere: in the classroom, in the schoolyard in the block she lived on. One day, as she walked to the grocery store on an errand, she heard a boy screaming, and the thwack of a strap in the end house. Having been brought up with gentleness, Mira was horrified and wondered why a parent would do such a thing to a child. Had her parents done that to her, she would have been worse than she was, she knew that. She would have tried to defy them in any way she could. She would have hated them. But the terribleness of life existed even in her own home. It was a tight, silent place; there was little conversation at the dinner table. There were always tensions between her mother and father that she did not understand, and often tensions between her mother and her, as well. She felt as if she were in the middle of a war in which the weapons were like light beams, darting across the room, wounding everybody, but unable to be grasped. Mira wondered if the insides of everybody were as tumultuous and explosive as hers. She looked at her mother and saw bitter misery and resentment in her face; she saw sadness and disappointment in her father’s. She herself felt wild clamorous emotions toward them both – love, hate, resentment, fury, and a crying ache for physical affection – but she never moved, never threw herself at either of them in either love or hate. The rules of the household forbade such behavior. She wondered if anyone at all was happy. She had more reason to be than most: she was treated well, fed well, clothed well, safe. But she was a screaming battlefield. So what were other people? If this were the only world there was, there could not be a God. No benevolent mind could have created this earth. Finally, she disposed of the problem by dispensing with the deity.

  Next, she set about planning a world where unjust and cruel things could not happen. It was based on gentleness toward and freedom for children, and moved upward using intelligence as the distinguishing characteristic. The rulers of the world – for she could not conceive of a world without rulers – were its most intelligent and wisest members. Everyone had enough to eat, and no one had too much, like gross Mr Mittlow. Although she was as yet innocent of Plato, she came up with a structure remarkably similar to his. But in a few months, she disposed of that also. It was simply that once she had the whole thing perfectly organized, it bored her. It was the same as when she used to imagine stories about herself, stories in which she was adopted, and one day a wonderful handsome man, one with a real face, not like Daddy Warbucks’, but possessed of equal resources, would drive up to the Wards’ front door in his long black car, and claim her. He would take her to wonderful foreign places and would love her forever. Or stories about how there really were fairies, only they didn’t appear anymore because people had stopped believing in them, but she still did, so one would come to her and offer her three wishes, and she had to think a long time about those, and kept changing her mind, but finally she decided the best wishes would be that her parents could be happy and healthy and rich and if they were then they would love her and they would all live happily ever after. The trouble was the endings of these stories were always boring, and you could never go beyond the end. She tried to imagine what life would be like once everything was perfect, but she could never do it.

  Later, much later, she would remember these years, and realize with astonishment that she had, by fifteen, decided on most of the assumptions she would carry for the rest of her life: that people were essentially not evil, that perfection was death, that life was better than order, and a little chaos good for the soul. Most important, this life was all. Unfortunately, she forgot these
things, and had to remember them the hard way.

  6

  Because at the same time that she was making all these decisions, she was being undermined. The problem was sex. Couldn’t you have guessed that? That Garden of Eden story hasn’t hung on all these years for nothing. Even though Genesis suggests and Milton insists that it wasn’t sex itself that caused the Fall, but was only the first place the reverberations were felt, we go on equating sex with fall because that’s the way it happens to us. The main problem with sex, I’m convinced (and now I’m beginning to sound like Val), is that it comes on us when we are already formed. Maybe if we were fondled and petted all our lives, it wouldn’t be such a shock, but we aren’t, at least I wasn’t and Mira wasn’t, and so the strong desire for bodily contact comes upon us as a violation.

  At the end of her fourteenth year, Mira began to menstruate and was finally let in on the secret of sanitary napkins. Soon afterward, she began to experience strange fluidities in her body, and her mind, she was convinced, had begun to rot. She could feel the increasing corruption, but couldn’t seem to do anything to counter it. The first sign was that when she lay in bed at night, trying to move ahead from her disposal of both God and Perfect Order to something more usable, she could not concentrate. Her mind wandered vaguely. She stared at the moon and thought about songs, not God. She smelled the air of the summer night and a tremendous sensation of pleasure encompassed her whole body. She was restless, could not sleep or think, and would get up and kneel on her bed, lean on the windowsill, peer out at the gently waving branches, and smell the sweet night air. She had sudden overwhelming desires to put her hand under her pajamas and rub the skin of her shoulder, her sides, the insides of her thighs. And when she did that, strange spurts would happen inside her. She would lie back and try to think, but only images rampaged through her head. These images were always, horrifyingly, of the same things. She had a code word for her decaying condition: she called it boys.