The Women's Room (Virago Modern Classics)

by Marilyn French

  ‘That’s not true!’ Kyla exclaimed. ‘I do both. I really take care of Harley, I take care of the apartment, 1 cook – Harley always makes breakfast, of course,’ she added quickly. ‘And I do what I want to do too.’

  Isolde’s quiet voice broke in startlingly. ‘And look at you.’

  Everyone turned to look at Isolde instead, even Kyla, who almost jumped around in her chair to face her.

  ‘You’re a nervous wreck, you have bags under your eyes, you get hysterical every time you have three drinks …’

  ‘Wait a minute, I’m not that bad …’

  ‘For Superwoman,’ Val smiled at Kyla, ‘it may be possible if difficult. What about more ordinary mortals?’

  It went on like that. It was Clarissa, finally, who came up with a solution, who suggested that the only way to resolve it was to insist that everyone should have some selflessness, that everyone should act in both roles. Everyone agreed.

  But you know, it didn’t help. It was a rhetorical solution. Because the fact is that everyone doesn’t act in both roles and probably can’t and not everyone would be willing to accept that and so the whole thing seemed to me as if we’d been talking about the street plan and architecture of heaven. In fact, it didn’t make much sense even for us to insist that men and women both should be selfless, because although we were all in graduate school, all of us took the female role at home, especially Kyla and Clarissa, who had husbands, and Val, who had a child, and sometimes a man staying with her. Even Ava, who rarely did domestic tasks, would rush home from work when she and Iso were having guests for dinner because she was convinced that Isolde’s cooking would poison everyone. She’d cook chicken tarragon and risotto and worry over it. And we were supposed to be ‘liberated.’

  I mentioned this, and Isolde sighed. ‘I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes,’ she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1

  After all her elation in the hospital, it was dirty dishes Mira came home to and her life, for several years afterward, seemed an unending mound of them. She and Norm stayed in their two-room apartment for a few months after Normie was born, but it was too crowded, so they moved to a place with a bedroom and living room. When she found herself pregnant a second time, she was distressed only briefly. Might as well have it now, she told herself, not finishing the thought. Now, she meant, when I am nobody already and have no other life anyway.

  For months, her day began at 2:00 A.M. with one of the babies waking hungry. She would rise quickly when the baby began to cry, gather him up in blankets, and take him out of the room before he could awaken Norm. She would lay him on the living room floor, gently shutting the bedroom door before his yells got too loud. Clutching her old flannel bathrobe about her – the apartment was always cold at that hour – she would go into the kitchen, turn on the oven, leaving the door open, then heat the bottle. When the baby could hold up its head, she carried him with her, propping him against her as she worked at the stove. She would close the kitchen door and sit with the baby at the table, feeding him in the warm room.

  She usually got back to bed again, the baby full and changed, by about 3:00, and could sleep until 6:30 or 7:00, when Normie or Clark would again realize that their stomachs were empty. Norm also got up then, so there was an hour of chaos, with baby screaming, Norm showering, and Mira trying to heat a bottle, make coffee, and cook some eggs for Norm. After Clark was born, the chaos was compounded by little Normie, old enough to move but not yet to walk, crawling restlessly among the kitchen chairs and his mother’s feet in search of adventure. After Norm left, Mira could sit down and feed the baby – or babies – boiled eggs and cereal, bathe them and dress them, and put the little one back in a clean bed, laying him on the floor – you can’t fall off the floor – while she changed the urinous sheets. By nine she had baby clothes soaking in the deep sink and soiled diapers boiling in a large pot. She could then make the bed, clean up the bathroom, get the bottles in the sterilizer, dress herself, and clean the apartment, which, because it housed so many people and was so small, was constantly dusty and messy. By eleven thirty she had scrubbed the baby’s clothes and the diapers on a washboard and hung them out on the clothesline strung from the apartment window to a pole out in the backyard. This was tricky, especially in cold weather, when her fingers froze. If she dropped something, she had to leave the children alone and run down three flights of stairs, go back into the yard, retrieve it, run back up panting, rewash it, and hope she did not repeat her error. Then she would put the potatoes in the stove-top oven and start baking them, and begin to heat the jars of strained meat. This was also tricky: Normie didn’t like liver and lamb and spat them out when she fed them to him. Clark didn’t like chicken. But some days they would spit out things they had swallowed the day before.

  Babies need fresh air, so after cleaning up the lunch dishes (having swallowed some tea while she was feeding them, and eating the skins from the baked potatoes), she would bundle the baby up, put on warm clothes herself, gather the baby in one arm and the collapsible carriage in the other, and lug both down three flights of stairs. The real problem came at the bottom, when she needed both hands to set up the carriage, but had to find someplace to put the baby. Sometimes a neighbor helped her. Sometimes she simply had to lay the baby on the sidewalk. This problem was aggravated when there were two, neither of whom could walk. After settling them in, she would walk to the grocery store. She had to shop every day for perishables, since she could not carry much at a time. From there, she would walk to the park, where there were other young mothers sitting on benches, airing their children.

  She liked these women and was cheered when she saw them. They were often the only people she spoke to all day, since Norm was frequently absent at night, and even when he did come home he had to study. The women talked with passionate interest about stool color and formulas, colic and its causes; they compared notes, offered helpful hints, and admired each other’s children. It was as if there existed a secret sisterhood, an underground movement to which anyone could belong who had a baby. Any new women who strolled past with infants in carriages were easily welcomed, were immediate friends. But there was almost never any conversation about anything else. In the year or two Mira knew these women, she never discovered anything about their husbands except their first names, and sometimes, their occupations. This was not because of reticence. The women were simply not interested in anything but children; they really felt – although they could not have articulated it – like members of a secret cult that was fascinated by children, childbirth, and childrearing. They did not have to try to keep their group secret, they did not need rites, handshakes, rulebooks; no one else was in the least interested. They felt united by their profound and delicate knowledge; tacitly, by a smile or a nod, they told each other that this was the most, no, the only important thing in life. Outsiders seemed to them cut off from the beating heart of things.

  Mira would sit there with them as long as she could. When he could walk, Normie would play in the grass – or snow – with other infants. But around three thirty, he began to fuss and cry. Everyone understood. All children had their bad time. If a woman left early, or was too distracted to talk much, no one commented. The babies came first; the babies were everything; no one expected anything else.

  Mira would walk home carrying the tired, fretful Normie in one arm, pushing the carriage with the other. Getting upstairs was a bit of a problem. She did it in shifts, carrying baby, groceries, and purse up first, entering the apartment, laying the baby on the floor and putting the groceries in the kitchen, then returning for the carriage. After Clark was born, she would take only babies and purse, and return for groceries and carriage. She was always anxious, fearing that either baby or babies would hurt themselves or that the carriage and groceries would be stolen while she was upstairs.

  When she got back into the apartment, her heart sank. This wa
s the worst time of day. The baby would wake up fussy, wanting to be played with: Normie was cranky and hungry. And she had to start dinner. On nights when Norm came home early, he wanted to eat immediately. She would work in the kitchen, then go and play with them, then return as she smelled something burning or heard something boiling over. (Norm complained much about her cooking in those years.) But each time she returned to the kitchen, one child or the other, sometimes both, screamed. She let them cry, peeled her potatoes or turnips, strung the beans, and then went back to them. Norm did not like to come home to their confusion, so she tried to feed them before he got in, but whichever one she fed first, the other cried and fussed.

  Norm sometimes played with them a little, but he had no notion of how to play with a baby except to throw it in the air and catch it, and she would not let him do that. They had just eaten, and she wanted them to relax so they could sleep, and not get all excited. Even so, more often than not, while she and Norm sat at the kitchen table trying to talk, they were interrupted several times by fretful children. Mira was always leaping up to go to them, and after a while, Norm brought a book to the table and simply read while he ate.

  2

  Things changed, of course. Babies grow. By the time she had perfected the art of vacuuming with a child on her hip (screaming at the noise of the vacuum), they were able to walk. And then, there were the evenings.

  Norm would go into the living room to study directly after dinner. Mira would wash and dry the dishes, thinking only that in a little while she would be free. She would take her shower then, brush her hair out, and go into the living room with a book. From eight thirty to eleven, she read. By ten she was sleepy, but there was no point in going to bed then, since the baby would wake at eleven for his final bottle. She and Norm rarely talked. Norm finished med school the June after Clark’s birth, but then he was interning and he seemed to study even more than before. Often, he was on duty at night, and Mira found herself looking forward to that. For he could not sleep in ‘this damned place with all the noise’ when he was there in the daytime, so he would drive from the hospital to his mother’s house where he could sleep in peace in his old bedroom. Sometimes he ate there too, and Mira did not see him for three or four days. Norm was apologetic about this once he realized Mira was not going to complain. But she found it easier with him gone. She could adjust her schedule completely to the babies and wasn’t nearly as anxious when they cried. Norm was often tired and irritable: it was hard, she thought, to be under pressure all day long, and have to come home to a tiny place full of screaming infants. It would be better when they had a little more money.

  They had little sex life. Norm was away, or he was tired. But the pattern that had begun at their marriage had enforced itself now as unbreakable. Coitus was quick and unsatisfying. Mira lay back and permitted it. Norm seemed to realize she did not enjoy it; strangely, this seemed to please him. She could only guess at this: they never discussed it. Once or twice, she tried to talk to him about it, but he adamantly refused. He refused with charm, not hostility, teasing her, calling her a ‘sexpot,’ or smiling that he was completely happy, and putting his hand on her cheek. But it seemed to her that he felt it was somehow proper for her not to enjoy sex; it made her more worthy of respect. On the rare occasions when he wanted to make love, he apologized to her for it, explaining that for a male body it was necessary.

  But there were pleasures in Mira’s life: the children themselves. They were a deep pleasure, especially when she was alone with them and wasn’t anxious about preparing Norm’s dinner, or about their making noise. Holding their tiny bodies, bathing them as they gurgled with pleasure, oiling and powdering them while they poked at her face or at their own, trying to figure out what eyes and noses were, she would smile endlessly, unconsciously. She had seen their birth and the birth of her love for them as miraculous, but it was just as miraculous when they first smiled, first sat up, first babbled a sound that resembled, of course, mama. The tedious days were filled with miracles. When a baby first looks at you; when it gets excited at seeing a ray of light and like a dog pawing a gleam, tries to capture it in its hand; or when it laughs that deep, unselfconscious gurgle; or when it cries and you pick it up and it clings sobbing to you, saved from some terrible shadow moving across the room, or a loud clang in the street, or perhaps, already, a bad dream: then you are – happy is not the precise word – filled. Mira still felt as she had the first time she held Normie in the hospital, that the child and her feeling for it were somehow absolute, truer and more binding than any other experience life had to offer: she felt she lived at the blind true core of life.

  Suddenly teeth appeared, tiny white shoots in the vulva-soft pink of their gums. They moved, crawled, stood up, took some steps, with the exaltation and delight and terror the first human must have felt when she stood up on her hind legs. Then they were talking, two words, seven, then no more counting. They looked at her seriously, looked in her eyes and asked and spoke. They were complete little people talking to her from a mind she knew nothing about and would have to learn to apprehend; although this person had grown in her body, had torn it emerging, had once shared pulse and food and blood and joy and grief, it was now a separate person whose innards, mind and spirit and emotion, she would never completely comprehend. It was as if one weren’t born suddenly, but progressively; as if each birth were also a death, each step they made in development moving them further away from her, from their oneness with her, and in time, far, far away from her, they would merge with others, have children themselves, join and separate, until the final separation, which would also be a birth into a new mode. They would ask questions, make statements and demands: ‘Dis blue?’ ‘Hot. Mats hot.’ ‘Cookie!’ Spoken imperiously. She would answer or agree or negate, but she had no idea where her statements went, into what context of thinking and feeling, what network of colors and tastes and sounds they had already built up.

  Not that they didn’t have personalities from the beginning. Mira had her own set of old wives’ tales and believed in them as much as if she had been an old Irishwoman sitting by a hearth in Galway. Normie, who had lain in a churning anxious unhappy womb, who had had to be dragged out of her by metal tongs, was independent and unfriendly. He did not smile until he was over four months old. He tottered around the apartment as soon as he could walk, resenting any guidance from Mira, furious if he were not permitted to touch something. Yet he was also demanding; he was often fussy, and would not calm even if she held him. He wanted something, but didn’t know what. He was very bright; he talked early and was drawing deductions before he could walk. Staring at the coatrack as she held him in her arms after he’d wakened from a daytime sleep one day, he said, ‘Daddy bye-bye.’ She didn’t understand at first, then realized he saw that Norm’s raincoat was missing, which had to mean so was Norm. He was a restless, searching child, seeming always to want to be a step ahead of where he was.

  Clark, on the other hand, had rested in a still, accepting womb. His birth had been easy – he seemed to just slide out. He smiled at ten days, and Norm said it was gas, but Clark did it every time he saw her and finally Norm had to admit it was a smile. He clung to her, he smiled at her, he pattered to her, he loved her. Yet she could leave him in a jump seat for an hour and he would bounce around and entertain himself. He was, in the early years, what people called an angel of a baby, and sometimes Mira worried that he was too good. She broke her attention away from Normie purposely sometimes to go and play with Clark, fearful that Normie’s demanding nature would accustom her to cater to it alone and ignore Clark.

  Of course there were worries too. Oh, God, I remember those years! A petulant afternoon convinces you you’ve turned out a monster; two rainy days of squabbling children and you’re sure you have a severe case of sibling rivalry (which is all your fault – you’re giving them insufficient attention) on your hands. Every fever is a potential killer, every cough wrenches your own insides. Some dimes taken from a table indicate
a potential thief; one well-drawn picture indicates a potential Matisse. Lordy, lordy. Well, I’m glad I know better for my grandchildren, if I ever have any.

  Yes, a blind true core. It was what I imagine it is like to live on a huge ocean liner run by engines buried in a base deck, and to tend, feed, and stoke, to hear and see, all day long, every day, the great pounding heart – except you watch it grow and change, watch it take over the ship. And that is magnificent, but it is also obliterating. You do not exist; even they are secondary, the children, to the fact of life itself. Their needs and desires are, must be, subordinate to their survival, to the great pounding heart that must be kept alive. The tender of a child is the priest in a temple; the child is the vessel; what is sacred is the fire within it. Unlike priests, however, tenders of children do not receive privilege and respect; their lives pass unnoticed even by themselves as the washing and feeding, the caring and slapping – ‘Hot! Match hot! No, no!’ – goes on.

  The face and body change; the eyes forget the world; the interests narrow to focus on the energies of one or two or three small bodies presently charging around the room screaming at high pitch on ‘horsies’ made of broomsticks. Sacred fire may occasionally smoke; sacred life often jars.