For all its activity, it was a lazy life because it went nowhere. One day was like another: the sun shone or it did not; jackets were needed, or heavy snowsuits and boots. Toilet training proceeded or snagged. Sometimes the sheets froze on the clothesline. The women worked in the mornings, the late afternoons, and sometimes in the evenings, when they would mend or iron or sew a new outfit for Cheryl or Midge while the TV set blared ‘Dragnet’ or Mike Wallace. It was not a bad life; it was a hell of a lot better than collecting coins at a toll booth all day, or examining cans as they came off the assembly line. The unspoken, unthought-about conditions that made it oppressive had long since been accepted by all of them: that they had not chosen but had been automatically slotted into their lives, and that they were never free to move (the children were much more effective as clogs than confinement on a prison farm would be). Having accepted the shit and string beans, they were content.
6
Their daily conversations drew them very close. Most of them would never again know with such detail and intimacy the elements of others’ lives. They never forgot to ask how Johnny’s cough was today, whether Mira’s period was still so heavy, or if Bill had been able to fix the broken toilet. Indeed, while it was broken, the family had been using your toilet, or your neighbor’s, so you knew when it got fixed as well as you knew your own showering habits.
Most often, they talked about the children. Each one looked at her own with shiny eyes, finding beauty and cleverness in all of them. And indeed, they were all beautiful and clever and funny, even if sometimes they broke each other’s heads. The women treated with tender pity the sobs of the worst bully, the worst whiner. Once in a while they spoke sharply to the children, sometimes they struck them. But a little later, there the child would be, sobbing sorrowfully on Mother’s lap, resting against her breast. This is not to say that sometimes you would not hear in the street a woman calling a child, her harriedness and frustration shrieking out in her voice, or even that there were not, in this neighborhood, parents who punished their children by hitting them with belts. But it was not usual. This generation of children was gently nourished far from the sprawling city and its infected tenements, from impoverished farms and their misery.
The children were endlessly interesting to the women: their colic, their fever, their funny doings and sayings, their grades at school, their stubbornness, whatever. You might find such conversations boring: you may prefer to talk about cars, or football games. But I find them humane, and believe it or not, they were educational too, for we learned a lot about what to do for a child whose fever won’t come down, or how to get that stain out of Johnny’s sunsuit, and in the process, we learned something about acceptance of many variations. For the children were all different, and although one might be larger and stronger, another smarter, another prettier than the others, there was no ultimate difference among them. They were differentiated only by our love for them: you loved your own most, naturally.
But there were other things besides children. The menu for a special dinner (in-laws coming Sunday) could provide several hours of discussion; a new pair of shorts or a blouse could occupy them through two cups of coffee. They sighed and laughed together about housecleaning, but the houses were each immaculate. Probably because mess is so constant when there are small children about, the women kept their houses cleaner than they did in later years. Husbands were rarely discussed, but were always in the background. They were usually brought up to illustrate some absurdity or some constriction:
‘Paul likes his coffee strong, so I make it strong and add water to mine.’
‘Norm refuses to eat pork.’
‘Hamp will not touch a baby’s diaper. Never has. So when they were little, I couldn’t leave them with him at all. That’s why I toilet-trained them so early.’
No one ever questioned such statements, asked why Natalie or Mira didn’t simply insist, or Adele make the coffee the way she liked it and let Paul make his own. Never. Husbands were walls, absolutes, in small things at least. The women often would howl and cackle at them, at their incredible demands and impossible delusions, their inexplicable eating habits and their strange prejudices, but it was as if they were de black folk down at de shanty recounting the absurd pretensions of de white massas up at de big house.
For the men, of course, were experiencing life on a different level. Hamp flew around the country for his company, so he went first class and ate at expensive restaurants and was fawned over by stewardesses and waiters; Bill was a navigator for an airline and flew all over the world, staying at expensive hotels and resorts, eating at fancy restaurants, fawned over by stewardesses and waiters. And even Norm and Paul had a good share of expensive lunches out, ‘company’ dinners, and fawning over by nurses and secretaries. They brought their demands home; they began to see home and the women in them as provincial, small-minded, shabby. Increasingly, and perhaps inevitably, the equals they had married became servants. So when Bill had a cold one winter, he lay in bed bored and miserable, and called Bliss – she counted – twenty-three times to climb the stairs to bring him some tea, ginger ale, another aspirin, a magazine. Bliss caught his cold, but he had to make a flight, so he insisted she get up and drive him to the airport. She did. Lily told us an absurd, hilarious story about Carl, furious at Lily’s cooking, deciding he would make potato pancakes the way his mother did, spilling the batter on the stove, where it stuck, and in a rage, throwing the whole bowl across the kitchen, saying it was her job anyway, and storming out of the house to eat at McDonald’s, and leaving her with the mess, the kids to be fed and bathed, both of them crying at the failure of Daddy’s boasted dinner and at the shock, the noise, and confusion. Samantha could bubble over for twenty minutes about her poltergeist ice-cube trays that were always somehow banging her on the head (they were, really), and how Simp wouldn’t permit her to buy others. Martha ran a continuing saga on the incidence of lethality of any tool in George’s hand: he’d just dropped a hammer from a ladder and it had hit Jeff on the head and he’d had to have ten stitches. The Cold War was innocuous compared to Sean’s insistence on clean sheets daily and Norm’s year-long refusal to teach Mira to drive.
But no one ever suggested that the situation could be changed; no one ever challenged the men’s right to demand and control. Only Martha directly put her husband down. ‘He’s inept, he’s a klutz!’ she’d laugh. The rest of them only laughed and shook their heads at one’s stubbornness, the other’s thickness. Husbands, like children, had their eccentricities, and women had to put up with them. And if on occasion the clean sheets or the slippery ice-cube trays or the driving lessons were the subjects of real arguments, they happened inside the house, quietly, late at night, and were never mentioned in the open sunlight with the children padding in the grass. The women had intimations, but no one said anything about causes when Samantha developed a rash all over her hands, or Natalie was seen to start drinking in the afternoon, lugging her rye bottle from house to house since none of the women could afford to buy liquor except for evening entertainment, when men were present. No one seemed to hear the day Bliss went tearing out of her house screaming for Cheryl to get her bike out of the street, and Bliss’s voice went out of control and sounded like hysterical shrieking. All of them heard their own voices do the same thing on occasion, days when the washing machine overflowed, the bacon burned, Johnny fell down and cut his head open, and then Norm or Paul or Hamp called and said they were not coming home until late that evening because they were going to a professional dinner, a business conference, a party for someone on the staff.
No one remarked or made connections if they were all sitting in Mira’s kitchen and Bliss was in the middle of a funny story about Bill’s demandingness and suddenly Bill stuck his head in and asked was Bliss there and she immediately leaped up and left, laughing and rolling her eyes as she went.
There were two cultures – the world, which had men in it, and their own, which had only women and children. Within
their own world they were there for each other physically and emotionally. They gave, through good humor and silent understanding, support and affection and legitimacy to each other and to the concerns they shared. Mira thought that they were more important to each other than their husbands were to them. She wondered if they could have survived without each other. She loved them.
7
Within the next few years, the material circumstances of most of them had improved a little, enough that they could afford once or twice a year to buy a dress or the fabric to make one, to buy some liquor and food and give a party. Bliss and Bill bought a cheap coffee table and a lamp for their bare living room; Norm and Mira had a slipcover made for the old couch Norm’s mother had given them. Children were older; some were even in school. The women had extra energy, and decided to use it this way. The living rooms were about to be used publicly, and their husbands to be integrated into their community. Up until now, the men had spoken to each other only rarely and briefly over the lawn mower on a Sunday afternoon.
Mira gave the first party. Almost everyone arrived at once. The small living room was immaculate and had been cleared for the party: the clean laundry that had that afternoon been piled on a corner of the couch, the toys that had been scattered on the floor, had been swept into closets for the evening. The few small tables held plates of deviled eggs and olives, cheese and crackers, and baskets of potato chips and pretzels. Although the women saw each other almost every day, the air when they arrived was frenetic. The men looked as they usually looked: a little less formally dressed than when they went to work, but neat and groomed in blazers and sports jackets, shined shoes. But the women! The shabby slacks, the unmade-up faces, the curlers and aprons had vanished. They were done up in low-cut dresses, rhinestone jewelry, high-piled hair, stockings, high-heeled shoes, eye shadow, rouge. They were all attractive, and tonight in their glamorous outfits, they looked gorgeous, and they knew it. They invaded the living room edgily; their voices were higher pitched than usual; they laughed louder and more easily than usual.
The men, sensing something different, shrugged and left the living room to the ‘girls,’ stood with their highballs in the kitchen discussing football scores, cars, the best buys in tires. The women settled uncertainly in the unfamiliar room in their unfamiliar clothes, and looked at each other, seeing the curve of a figure or the length of an eyelash as they had never seen it before. They were only half-conscious of what was happening.
These women were never away from their children. Going out cost money for babysitters, dinner, tickets for a play or a movie, money they almost never had. They had all been trained by pregnancy not to think too much about the future: the future was simply more of the present. Their horizons were limited by their lives.
But tonight they had entered the living room all dressed up and fit to kill, as they giggled about it among themselves. They had seen themselves and each other anew. They were still young; they were attractive. Gazing at themselves in the full-length mirrors before they left their houses, they saw that they did not look very different from the creatures on whom they had modeled themselves – those glamorous women in the fashion and movie magazines. They began dimly to realize that they had another self from the one they lived with daily. It was a kind of miracle. It seemed as if they might have another chance, could live out a life different from the one they had. What kind of life it was they didn’t know. They didn’t pursue the subject. Not one of them would have given up her children, and few would have given up their husbands: and both of these acts seemed necessary for a different life. Yet they all felt somehow stretched.
They refused to admit it was illusion. As they sat there in the living room together, much as they sat in the kitchen most days, drinking highballs instead of coffee, they talked about Amy being unable to come because her youngest had measles, about Tommy’s reaction to having crabmeat crepes for dinner, and about the extension the Foxes were planning to put on their house after the new baby was born. But they were all itchy, simmering. At last someone (Natalie?) said, ‘Those men!’ and all instantly agreed. Someone (Bliss?) got up and said, ‘I’ll get them in here,’ and left for the kitchen, but did not return. The whole point, they all laughingly agreed, of being done up in uncomfortable bras and girdles, high heels, false eyelashes, and hair plastered into shape by hair spray, was not to sit around in the living room talking about the same things they talked about every day. Natalie had brought some records and she and Mira put them on the record player. Sinatra and Belafonte, Andy Williams and Johnny Mathis and Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee: that was what they all liked. Gradually the men drifted in; conversation grew more animated; groups dispersed and reformed; a few people started to get drunk. At last, Paul, Adele’s husband, got up and danced with Natalie; Sean danced with Oriane and then with Adele.
By midnight, many couples were dancing, dispersing, reforming. Almost everyone was flirting mildly with somebody. What else was the point of the rouge, the sequins, the corselets? And everyone agreed the next day that they had had a wonderful time, the best in years. There were no arguments about whether there should be more parties: the husbands were as agreeable as the wives.
This may sound foolish, but in fact, the parties were terribly innocent; terribly because innocence is terrible. A little flirtation was good for them. Both the men and the women had lived for years in worlds bounded by their own genders, and by their own occupations. If the women found it difficult to talk about things in the large, outer world, the men found it difficult to talk about anything but their work. They might move to the neutral zones of cars and games and even politics, but they could not talk personally, humanely, knew nothing of others except gossip and nothing of themselves except external image. And each group was ignorant of the other.
Was it wrong if at the end of the evening eyes were brilliant and cheeks were pink? Was it sinful if talking to someone else’s spouse brought out charm and humor one had not known one possessed? Or if the affection born of finding oneself attractive to someone else began to flow over all of them like icing on a cake? They may have looked like the sophisticates in Vogue, but most of them were as innocent as they had been at fourteen. Sex had been tried, children engendered, but still they knew nothing. Sex was for most of the men and all of the women a disappointment they never mentioned. Sex, after all, was THE thing that came naturally, and if it didn’t – if it wasn’t for them worth anywhere near all the furtiveness and dirty jokes and pinup calendars and ‘men’s’ magazines, all the shock and renunciation of hundreds of heroines in hundreds of books – why then it was they who were inadequate. For the men, sex was strangely lacking: it was a physical event that felt good, but when it was over they felt alone, unloving, spent. For the women, it was a tiresome duty. Why then did they so much enjoy the fluidities and poundings that a party aroused?
Probably because most people have an extremely limited sexual experience, it is easy for them, when things are wrong, to place the blame on their partner. It would be different if, instead of graying Theresa with her sagging breasts, her womb hanging low from having held six children, Don were in bed with – Marilyn Monroe, say. Or even Bliss. And Bliss might feel that Sean, since he was experienced with women, would excite her more than Bill did, and would know what to do to keep her excited. Nowadays, there are so many manuals and guidebooks on do-it-yourself sex, maybe things are different. But in those days, we looked outward: the problem was not in our ignorance, but in having the wrong partner. That deduction seems to be borne out: the excitement of a new partner in sex is often great enough to cover flaws in performance, and not until the affair has become custom do the flaws again stand out.
But all the sexual energy and discontent were below the surface for the women. They spoke merely of having parties. They planned them, did the work of giving them. The men came behind their wives like shadows. They had less color, less distinctiveness, less personality. They were like the males in pornographic movies: the film is wr
itten, directed, and produced by them, includes male figures, and is intended for them, intended to please men. But the whole film focuses on the female, upon her body, her joy as semen spurts all over her face or she is penetrated through her anus. Twentieth-century pornography, Iso said once, was like Greek tragedy, and situates emotion in the woman. So there.
The men did not complain about the parties; they were even willing to add an extra twenty dollars to the household allowance to help pay for them. They allowed the women to plan, shop, cook, clean, make a new dress or buy one. They stood in the kitchen every time, and every time had to be pried out. They came into the living room reluctantly, making jokes about the ‘girls.’ They allowed the women to ask them to dance and smiled with pleasure at the praise of their dancing style that was invariably offered. They were shy virgins at adultery and the women were the horny ones (or the cavey ones, as Val used to say). They were being wooed. They lapped it up.
8
I have been lumping together the eight or ten couples that made up these parties, but each of them was quite different. Theirs are some of the voices I hear.
Natalie: She was always up early. She had to drive Hamp to the station and get the older kids off to school. After the chaos of early morning, after bathing Deena and putting her into the playpen, she’d make a cup of instant coffee in the stained plastic cup she always used, and sit down at the cluttered kitchen table, planning her day.
Natalie was a large woman, generously built, with great physical energy. She loved to work with her hands: she painted and wallpapered, refinished furniture, and washed and waxed her own floors not out of economic necessity but because her body needed to be used. Her consuming interest was in her house. It was her pride and it always looked almost like a house in one of the home magazines – almost, because Natalie was never finished. She would end one project only to begin another, so the house was always in disarray.
The Women's Room (Virago Modern Classics) Page 12
