The Women's Room (Virago Modern Classics)

by Marilyn French

  She was attending a small local college, still much alone. She had lost her age handicap, because she had worked as a clerk in a department store for a year after high school in order to save enough money to go at all. The Wards were in hard times. So she was eighteen or almost eighteen, like the others, except for the veterans who were swarming back from World War II. Girls tried to be friendly with her, but she talked to them only to discover that they were as silly as the girls in high school, interested in nothing but boys and clothes. She retreated, as usual, to her books. In 1948, the Saturday-night date was a necessity for anybody who was anybody: Mira was often nobody. But her mind had returned, and if it was not as clear as it had been, it included more. She loved to sit and read and grapple with Hawthorne’s moral philosophy, or figure out alone the political implications of Rousseau’s philosophy. She was disappointed if she found her own discoveries in someone else’s book, as she almost always did. She would sit in the cafeteria, drinking coffee and reading, and look up to find them – boys – fluttering, clustering around her. She was bewildered, surprised, incomprehending, and flattered. They sat all around her, they told jokes, they teased her. Some asked her out for a Saturday-night date. She would go to a movie with one of them. They wanted to ‘neck,’ but she despised it. She had slapped the face of the first male who had placed a kiss on her lips, finding it wet and ugly, hating the feel of another flesh against her own. Some accused her (who was so afraid of her own desire that male violence be committed upon her) of committing violence upon them by her attitude. This gave her pause. Nevertheless, she would get out of the car. ‘My parents don’t allow me to sit in cars in the driveway,’ she would explain firmly.

  Still, they hovered in the cafeteria. They laughed and joked, sparring for attention. She had the sense of being the only spectator in a circus full of monkeys who would one by one jump on the cafeteria table to perform, scratching their underarms and making faces until they were pushed off by another squeaking member who did somersaults and grunts. If their behavior only mildly entertained her – Mira was very serious – her wonder at why they had selected her kept her in awed silence. She smiled at their jokes, which were mostly scatological but sometimes sexual, having learned enough to pick up what it was they were talking about – most of the time, at least. What she did not know was why they were funny. She hid her ignorance under smiles, and was astonished to learn later that she had gained a reputation for easy virtue by her tolerant acceptance of their foreign language.

  She did not learn this, however, until sometime later, and only then was she able to connect it with her difficulties in cars. Still, she would have been all right had she followed her feelings, but she had been doing some reading in psychology. She had learned that her form of orgasm was immature and showed that she had not yet moved into the ‘genital’ stage of development. Maturity was the great goal: everyone agreed about that. A mature woman relates to males: everyone knows that too. So when they slid their arms around her, or tried to grab her body, she began to sit passively and even to turn her face towards theirs. They would bend their heads toward her, and kiss her. Then they would try to get their slimy tongues inside her mouth. Ugh! But since she had not cut them off entirely, as she had done before, they felt, with what reasoning she never knew, that she owed them something. They would pull her back, they would struggle to get a hand inside her blouse or on her thigh under her skirt. They would begin to breathe hard. It outraged her. She felt invaded, violated. She did not want their slimy mouths, their clumsy hard strange hands, their breath, on her mouth, her clean body, her fine ears. She couldn’t stand it. She would pull violently away, grateful that they were parked in her driveway, and uncaring about what they thought or said, leap out of the car and run up to her doorstep. Sometimes they followed and apologized, sometimes they only slammed the door she had left hanging open, and pulled out of the driveway with screeching tires. It didn’t matter. She didn’t care. She stopped going out on Saturday-night dates.

  10

  One bright fall day (Mira was nineteen) a tall, gawky boy named Lanny, who was in her course in the Structure of Music, approached her as she was walking across campus, and began to talk. She had noticed him in class: he seemed intelligent, he knew something about music. They talked briefly, and suddenly, gracelessly, he asked her to go out. She was surprised. She looked at his eyes. They were shining at her. She liked his awkwardness, his lack of polish: it was such a change from the hollow suave manner adopted by most of the young men. She agreed to go.

  As she was dressing on the evening of their date, she noticed that she was excited, that her heart was pounding, that her eyes had a special shine. Why? Although she had liked his manner, there was nothing extraordinary about him, was there? She felt as if she were falling in love, but couldn’t understand why or how. During the evening they spent together, she found herself deferring to him, smiling at all his demands, seeing his face as beautiful. When he brought her home that night, she turned to him and when he kissed her, she kissed him back, and the kiss penetrated her whole body. Terrified, she pulled away; but he knew. He let her go, but two nights later they went out again.

  Lanny came to her with a kind of intensity. He had a wild imagination; he was disconnected, gay, unbound. He had been spoiled – totally accepted, totally approved – by his family, and he was a free spirit, full of gaiety and assurance and eccentricities. He told her that when he woke up in the morning, he immediately began to sing, that he would take his guitar with him into the toilet and sit there, singing and playing, while he defecated. She was astounded, being herself one of those people who have to drag themselves up in the morning in a silent house where such behavior would have been seen as an insane disturbance of the peace. He was like that all the time. He would collect people, call her suddenly, come pick her up, and a whole car load of them would be off to a tavern, someone’s house, Greenwich Village. Wherever they were, he was restless, he wanted to be off again, to get a pizza, to play some music, to visit someone he had just thought of but who was suddenly his best friend. He kept her out all night, and he rarely pressed her sexually. She was enchanted. She felt herself stodgy beside him, bound by obligations like papers due, a job to go to, books to be read – in short, responsibilities. He shrugged off such trivia; it was not, he said, what life was all about. Life was about joy. She leaned toward him, yearning; she wanted to be like him, but could not. So she lived his life and her own too. She stayed out all night, night after night, and slept much of the day, but she did her work as well. She grew quite haggard and tired, and she began to feel resentment because it seemed to her that Lanny only wanted an audience. He grew chilly when she tried to participate, when she jumped up into the singing group and stood with her arms around his (and she believed her) friends. For him, she was the smile of approval, the applause, the admiring gleam.

  They were rarely alone at night, because when she had to leave, everyone would pile into the car with them and drive her home. Or he would get too drunk to drive, and someone else would drive her home. But on the few occasions when he did take her alone, and would put his arms around her in the driveway, she would turn to him fully, loving to kiss him, loving to hold him and have him hold her. The impulses in her body no longer frightened her; she felt ecstatic. She loved the way he smelled, not like most of the boys, of shaving lotion or cologne, but of himself. She loved his hands on her body, and he never pressed them too far. She thought she was in love. After a time, she began to invite him into the house. He took it as a further invitation, which it probably was, but she would allow herself to get just so passionate before she pulled away.

  They talked about it, he all reassurance, she all doubt. But she could not move. She wanted him: her body wanted his, and her mind wanted the experience. But her mother’s dire message about sex was engraved on her brain. It had nothing to do with dirt and sin: it was far more potent. Sex, Mrs Ward said, led to pregnancy no matter what boys said, there was no sure way to
avoid it. And pregnancy led to marriage, to a marriage enforced on both, which meant poverty, resentment, an immediate baby, and ‘a life like mine,’ Mrs Ward ended, her face alone testimony to what that was like. Mira had long noticed, and resented her father’s adoration of her mother, her mother’s disdain of him. The turned cheek when Mr Ward tried to kiss his wife hello in the evenings, the bitter grimaces at his statements, the arguments fiercely whispered in the dark at night when Mira was supposed to be sleeping, the grinding poverty of their life that was only now beginning to abate: all represented a life no one would choose who had a choice. She told Lanny some of this, told him of her fear of pregnancy. He said he would ‘use something.’ She told him of her mother’s warning that nothing was safe: he said that if she got pregnant, they’d get married. He even offered, finally, to marry her first.

  Looking back, Mira could imagine some of what he felt. He had come, it must have seemed to him, more than halfway, and she had not budged. That made her a flirt, a prick tease. He had offered her marriage: what more could any woman want?

  But the very qualities Mira loved in Lanny made her dread him as a husband. Mira understood – what young woman does not? – that to choose a husband is to choose a life. She had not needed Jane Austen to teach her that. It is, in a sense, a woman’s first, last, and only choice. Marriage and a child make her totally dependent on the man, on whether he is rich or poor, responsible or not, where he chooses to live, what work he chooses to do. I guess this is still true; I don’t know, I’m a bit out of touch, but sometimes on my car radio I hear a song that seems to be popular now. It’s pretty, but its lyrics go something like this: ‘If I were a carpenter, and you were a lady, would you still love me, would you have my baby?’ It asks the woman to ‘follow’ her man, in whatever condition he chooses to live, as if a man alone could be a substitute for a life. Anyway, I understand Mira’s hesitations. What she discovered suddenly was that she wanted to pick her own life. It was a breathtaking revelation to her, and it terrified her, for she didn’t know how she was going to be able to do that. She recognized it for the shocking, divisive, arrogant rending of the social fabric that it was. Even convincing her parents, for instance, that she would like to live away from home would be a terrible feat. And what would she do then? She had some idea of what kinds of jobs she wanted, but she never heard of women getting them. She knew she wanted to be sexual in a free way: how could she manage that?

  Whenever she thought of marriage to Lanny, the picture that presented itself was of herself on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor, a baby crying in the next room, while Lanny was out carousing with the boys. Life was about joy, he would insist, and if she asked for responsibility, she would become the oppressive, demanding wife – the ball and chain, the grim-faced haggard who did not understand that boys would be boys. She saw herself weepily complaining to him, him stalking out of the house to go find solace with his mates. Her film would not run any other way; she could not come up with a sweeter picture. The role he offered her was not the role she coveted. She continued to refuse to sleep with him.

  He began to call her less often, and when they did go out together, he would not speak to her. He was always in the center of a group of friends. Sometimes he abandoned her completely, and someone else would have to take her home. But no one made a pass at her. It was clear that she was Lanny’s property. She became aware that she had developed a reputation at school. She never fully understood how this happened. She was outspoken and free-thinking in class and out, and she would talk about anything. She had frequent serious discussions of conventional morality, and even about sex, which she approached dispassionately and abstractly, and with very little knowledge. She freely admitted to atheism; she attacked contemptuously bigotry and any sort of sloppy thinking, and she tolerated dull minds poorly.

  Increasingly, people regarded her strangely and made odd remarks. It was, however, not her mind or her manners that they criticized; it was her morals. She was loose, but a bitch, whatever that meant. It was clear that people believed she was sleeping not only with Lanny but with others as well. She applied for a job in the college bookstore and was told by the manager, a thin-necked, pimply-faced man in his twenties, that he not only wouldn’t hire her, but he felt sorry for the man she married. She was astonished by this, since she had never met him before, but he shook his head knowingly at her: He had heard plenty about her, he said. She was a castrater, domineering. Some people told her that others thought she was a snob. One day a young man from her history class came up to her on campus, smoking a pipe. He seemed to want to talk, and she was glad. She liked him – he seemed a gentle, intelligent fellow. He asked her a few questions: were her parents divorced? had she ever been taught Christian doctrine? As she grew wary and gazed at him intently, he pointed to her cigarette and told her that she should know she was not supposed to be smoking while walking across campus. It was forbidden to women, he said.

  The presumption of these males in telling her what she was supposed to be enraged her, but beneath the anger and contempt was a profound sense of discomfort, wrongness in the world. She felt that people were in league against her, trying to force her to give up what she had gone on calling ‘myself.’ However, she had some good friends – Lanny, Biff, Tommy, Dan – who were unfailingly kind and respectful, and with whom she felt easy and had fun. She did not care at all what people said behind her back, and although she wished they would not say such things to her face, she dismissed the people and their comments as stupid and insignificant.

  Nor did she worry about what people might be saying about her to Lanny. She was sure he knew she loved him, and also that she mistrusted him; she was sure he knew that if she would not sleep with him, she would not sleep with anyone. But their friendship soured. They had several bad fights. When they did not openly fight, they pulled against each other, as if they tugged at different ends of a one-foot rope, neither moving far in any direction. He called her rarely now; he told her that because of her he had been forced to resort to dating Ada, the campus prostitute. For the first time in her life, Mira felt jealous.

  Still, she could not give in. She didn’t want to be in a power struggle with him, but each of his actions convinced her of the rightness of her original judgment of him as untrustworthy. She was too frightened of sex to risk it without a sense that he was, and would be, there for her. Now, when they were together, he talked only about how much fun he had with his male friends; and pressured her toward sex. He seemed to have no other interest in her; when she spoke he barely listened. He never asked her about herself. Eventually, he stopped calling altogether.

  She was miserable. She curled in on herself. She felt she had to withdraw, feeling defeated, feeling that it was, after all, the world that she wanted and the world that she was repudiating. But she had no choice. She tried to tell herself that the life she wanted would someday be possible, that someday she would have it all, adventure and excitement and independence. But she also knew that such a life had, for her, to include sex, and there was no way she could reconcile that danger and those aspirations. She saw her choice clearly as being between sex and independence, and she was paralysed by that. Since she always risked pregnancy, which meant dependence, a sexual woman lived with Damocles’ sword always over her head. Sex meant surrender to the male. If Mira wanted the independent life, she would have to give up being sexual. The situation was a terrible incarnation of her masochistic fantasies. Women were indeed victims by nature.

  11

  Young men like to say that young women want to be raped; no doubt this statement is intended partly to alleviate their guilt about the kinds of pressure they place on women, but there is a germ of truth in it. Young women caught in psychological bonds like Mira’s probably, at moments, half welcome a violent solution to the dilemma. But the kind of rape they imagine is like the one in The Fountainhead: it springs from passion and love, and it has no consequences more serious than the consequences for Justine�
��s body of all her whippings and torture. No broken bones, scars, destroyed tissue. Act without consequence, arrows with rubber tips, comedy: like the cartoons they make for children in which the cat or bear or whatever gets smashed over and over, but always rises from its own ashes. Revocability is an ideal, it frees us from the grimness of puritanical insistence on the seriousness of all things.

  Sex, being what it is, is pretty drab for young people. Val used to say it was wasted on the young. She said they combined the utmost in desire with the utmost in ineptitude. I told her she’d been reading too much Shaw. She didn’t even smile. Earnestly, she went on, amending her statement: the males had the utmost in desire. Females, she said, whether it was from fear or physiology, wouldn’t reach the utmost in desire until their thirties. It was nature, she thought, that had made humans strangely; it had intended young men to rape and impregnate young women and then go their way, as the gods did in Greek myth. The young women were supposed to have the babies and bring them up alone. Then, in their thirties, the young women became sexually charged – if they hadn’t died along the way – at which point they become terrifying to the male of the species. The men sniff the female’s revenge, and identify such women with forbidden mothers, or scorpions, witches, and sibyls. By this time, most of the older males were dead from their adventures or dissipations, so the older women tried to seduce young men, although without the violence young men used on women. She said the ideal marriage was between exhausted middle-aged men and young women, or between middle-aged women and young men. The young woman would get pregnant by a young man, and then the older man would take over and take care of her without giving her too hard a time with sexual demands, and when he did make love, would have some idea of what he was about, and would give her at least some pleasure. Then, when she was older and the old geezer had kicked the bucket, she’d send her kids out into the world and take in some struggling young guy who could satisfy her sexually, after she’d taught him all of what she’d learned from her years with the old geezer.