Women Within

by Anne Leigh Parrish

  They linked arms.

  “How can one hate one’s own child?” Constance asked.

  “The same way one hates anyone, I suppose. Hate is hate.”

  “And love is love.”

  She felt his affection in the distance he closed between them. When they were again in Los Angeles, preparing for the fall semester, busy with their own lives, she would miss him, she thought. In a way, she missed him already. They still shared a bed, but nothing more. That had been her choice. She regretted it.

  She stopped walking, released Darren’s arm, and gazed down into the troubled sea. The ship rose and fell with the waves beneath it, yet no rain fell.

  “It’ll be a rough night. You’re not given to seasickness, are you?” Darren asked.

  She looked into his face. It was a good face, displaying kindness and honesty. He’d been particularly honest in telling her about that girl. Might he be an asset? A refuge from herself?

  “Marry me,” she said.

  His expression didn’t change.

  “Isn’t that supposed to be my line?” he asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “To some people.”

  “To you.”

  “Yes, a little.”

  “Well, then.”

  They went in to dinner, watching the wine in their glasses slosh, laughing at the crooked manner in which they and everyone else had to walk in order to avoid falling, then awoke to clear skies and flat seas. They never spoke of marriage again.

  chapter six

  The party was in honor of Constance’s friend, Elaine, who’d been appointed head of the new Women’s Studies Department. They’d met at the grocery store, of all mundane, non-academic places, and recognized one another instantly. Previous encounters were cheerfully recalled. The faculty lounge. The quad. The new students’ orientation. Reaching for the same bag of apples became a touchstone.

  Elaine taught in two departments, Sociology and Anthropology, what she called “soft sciences.” She’d been on digs in the Southwest and once in Africa. Her articles on ancient burial rites were highly acclaimed.

  Elaine was divorced, with two teenaged boys under her roof. Her ex-husband was in television and developed situation comedies that typically featured a strong male character and a silly female one. Elaine’s blond hair rose from her head in an afro, though she didn’t have a single drop of African blood in her veins. Some lovely fluke of nature, she called it. The hair on her sons’ heads was straight and black, like their father’s. She wore Dashikis to class, which she found at a thrift shop. She doubted they were genuine. The colors, for one thing, were muted, compared to the vibrancy she’d observed in Kenya.

  Despite her apparent passion for all things African, the curriculum she was to oversee was centered primarily on Europe and the United States. She was coordinating with a number of faculty members from both English and History, also Political Science and Fine Arts, as well as her own joint fields to develop a course of study that would expose students to the many roles women had played over time. The theme throughout was how consistently their contributions had been overlooked.

  Many of those faculty members would be at Constance’s party, including Darren. Ten years had passed since they’d gone abroad. They were cordial when they crossed paths at work. Sometimes he called and they went out for a drink. One rainy weekend he helped her with a leaky dining room window. He remarked that a house of that grandeur—as compared to his much smaller bungalow—should have been better built.

  “Well, it’s not,” Constance had said, laughing as they soaked up the water with one clean towel after another. His gaze had lingered. Romance, though, was off the table.

  Meredith was also due. Now twenty-eight, she worked for a financial advisor in Hollywood. Her passion for numbers was still surprising to Constance, though she’d majored in math at Berkeley, a field that wasn’t all that welcoming to women. She understood investments quite well, particularly in terms of estate planning. Though Constance admired her perseverance, she couldn’t imagine a more boring way to make a living. She kept that to herself.

  Elaine wanted to meet Meredith. She was thrilled that Constance’s daughter was making her way in a man’s field. She loved Constance’s elegant home, and spent as much time there as possible, an arrangement Constance often found inconvenient.

  The truth was that Elaine was clingy. The face she gave the world was that of a tough, independent woman, a survivor, unflappable. Constance had been witness to a number of crying jags, usually after a few glasses of wine. Elaine’s husband had left her nearly six years before, yet the event was painfully raw. Her unrelenting sorrow grated on Constance’s nerves. She was brilliant at not showing it.

  The other bone of contention between them, also unvoiced, was that Constance was jealous of Elaine’s appointment. She was certain she knew more about women through time than Elaine did. During her almost thirty years teaching history, she had stressed one thing—women had never been given their rightful place. After the publication of her thesis, she’d presented a number of articles about English women during the War of the Roses, all exposing that shameful fact. Then she turned to America’s own past and wrote Silent and Unseen, which began with the settlement at Jamestown and ended with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. It detailed the wives and daughters of landowners, merchants, and craftsmen, all living obscurely as befit the unchanging heritage of their sex. It had been poorly reviewed and never taken up as teaching text, which infuriated her.

  She suggested the party not only to prove to herself that she could overlook a professional rivalry, but because she was bored. People made a wonderful distraction, in limited doses. She’d been much more aware of this since her tenant, Edna May, had moved out. Edna May was a college student, one of a series of young women who’d occupied Meredith’s vacant bedroom. The rent Constance charged was minimal. The company provided by the students was just enough to fill a void but not enough to overwhelm.

  Elaine arrived early. She was nervous about mingling with so many people, she said. She’d tried to get some work done around the house, but was a useless mess. Her boys were off with their father for the week. Constance knew she was feeling the solitude of her empty home.

  Elaine sat while Constance worked. The caterers had brought too few devilled eggs, but too many fruit cocktails. Two telephone calls resulted in the vague promise that another tray of eggs was on its way. The shrimp was chilled and paired with red sauce. There were oysters on the half-shell, a platter of crudités and dip, pretzels, potato chips, cheese and crackers, and thinly sliced layer cake for dessert. The bartender had his station at the end of the living room. He’d already provided Elaine with two glasses of white wine. Constance watched her discreetly. She expected a flood of woe at any minute. To her surprise, none came.

  Instead, Elaine talked about the program she was to develop. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to contact women artists in the community; women authors; even a few actresses, assuming one could penetrate the veil of their publicity machines?

  “Let them tell their own stories about competing in a man’s world,” she said with a slight slur.

  “We could tell that tale ourselves, don’t you think?” Constance asked. She’d just rearranged a vase of white flowers—carnations, roses, and daisies—a second time.

  “Very true.” Elaine glanced into the living room, which Constance took to mean her wanting another drink.

  “I like your dress, by the way,” Elaine said.

  “Oh, thanks!”

  The dress was pale lavender and sleeveless, which Constance could still carry off at her age. Her arms had always been thin. Elaine had fancied up her daily dashiki with a necklace of hea
vy wooden beads. Constance asked her if they were African. They were.

  Meredith let herself in the back door. She was wearing a beige pantsuit, which Constance thought made her look much older than she was. She supposed it was intentional. To get people to trust you with their money, you had to look solid and serious, two conditions the young usually failed to attain. She kissed Constance on the cheek. Constance was sure her peach lipstick had left a mark, and reminded herself to go to the powder room before the guests arrived and check.

  Constance introduced Meredith to Elaine, who stood and gave her a warm hug. Meredith was visibly taken aback, then recovered. Constance could bet hugging wasn’t a known ritual in the staid offices where Meredith worked.

  Meredith and Elaine fell into an easy conversation. Constance left them and went through the living room to make sure the ashtrays were clean, the nut bowls full, the bartender at attention and not helping himself to anything. She asked him to pour her two glasses of dry sherry, one for her, one for Meredith.

  “You must be so proud of your daughter,” Elaine said, then looked longingly at the servings of sherry Constance had brought in.

  “Yes, she’s quite a girl,” Constance said.

  “Is that for me?” Meredith asked.

  “Of course.”

  “What is it?”

  “Sherry.”

  Meredith, as far as Constance knew, was not fond of alcohol. The sherry was to keep her mood mellow. She tended to fall into herself when she visited home.

  “A woman, managing money. Such empowerment,” Elaine said, warmly.

  “Well, I’m supervised. I don’t have any authority to make investments, only to recommend them,” Meredith said.

  “But that will change, right? In time, when you have more seniority.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  Meredith sipped her sherry. She seemed to like it. Constance could tell from the slight lift of one cheek, a gesture she’d seen many times over the years that expressed pleasure, which in another would be a smile, or laughter, a little gleam in the eye.

  The first guests arrived, professors from the History Department, including Chairman Banks who made straight for the bar and asked quietly for a Scotch on the rocks. He surveyed the bottles on offer and appeared pleased at the presence of Johnny Walker Red. Constance knew that was his preferred poison. He’d always ordered it at the faculty lounge the few times they’d gone in together, at day’s end.

  As the crowd grew from small to modest, Elaine left her safe perch in the kitchen and made the rounds. Constance studied her. She was poised, spoke clearly, nodded to show interest, made eye contact unwaveringly. An excellent dissembler, Constance decided. No wonder she’d earned her appointment. The goodwill shown her spilled over to Constance herself. She was complimented on her home, though many people had been there before over the years; the food was enjoyed wholeheartedly; she was thanked for having thought to include them.

  Some months before, Constance had installed the tapestry in a corner. She’d had a frame made and mounted on a stand. There was a chair in front of it, purely for show, because sewing had once again fallen by the wayside. Some guests admired it politely; one woman, the wife of a sociology professor, leaned in closely to examine the work, just as Constance had done to the tapestry on the wall of the French chateau. Constance became alarmed. She realized it had been stupid to display the tapestry in a public space. She hoped the woman (Nancy? Nina?) wouldn’t touch it. Constance willed her to walk away from it, which she did easily enough when her name (Nora) was called by her husband, standing at one of the food tables.

  Meredith had made a brief appearance and then took herself off somewhere, maybe to her old room. Constance hoped she wasn’t suffering from some aching nostalgia. It had been hard for her to leave the house, though she’d really left it years before, when she began college up north. During those years, she’d returned for vacations, but the summers were always spent away. Even so, when Constance announced that she was renting the room out, Meredith’s eyes had filled with tears.

  Constance saw that her guests, maybe a total of twelve or thirteen people, had settled themselves comfortably in her large living room in small groups. Some were talking about an art show they’d been to, and the frenzied, abstract colors of a new Peruvian painter. Others described their summers, the trips they’d taken; one man had gone to Spain to visit a cousin he hadn’t seen in decades.

  Constance went down the hall from the kitchen. Her house was shaped like three sides of a square. The first wing held the living room, dining room, and kitchen. Meredith’s room—the rented room—was in the adjacent wing. It was empty. So was Constance’s room, the small den Constance used as an office, and the television room. She turned the corner to Lois’s old wing, which contained a quiet sitting area and a large bedroom that Constance hadn’t had the heart to redecorate or change even a little bit since her death almost thirteen years before. It was wasted space, to be sure, but then so much of the entire house was, with just Constance as the primary resident.

  Meredith sat in Lois’s green easy chair, the one she used to watch television from. Her legs were curled up under her, her eyes closed. They opened a moment after Constance entered the room. Maybe she’d been asleep.

  “What are you doing in here?” Constance asked.

  “Recovering.”

  “From?”

  “All your guests.”

  “They’re hardly a crowd. Come on, be sociable.”

  “You know I don’t like talking to people I don’t know.”

  “Oh, honestly! How do you handle your clients, then?”

  “We only talk about money.”

  Constance lowered herself onto the window seat.

  “And it’s different when the conversation has a chance to be random, is that it?” she asked.

  Meredith said nothing.

  “Because you might get asked something you don’t know how to answer?”

  “You always said I didn’t think very well on my feet.”

  “That’s not true!”

  Meredith shrugged.

  Constance realized she probably had wanted to avoid the party altogether but felt it her duty to come for a little while, at least.

  “Well, stay here then, if you like. I don’t imagine it’ll run on too much longer. Once the food’s gone, people will drift off,” Constance said.

  Meredith nodded, and closed her eyes again.

  When Constance returned to the kitchen, she was met by Elaine, who looked flushed and agitated. Even her dashiki was askew. She put her hand on Constance’s arm and whispered, “He’s here.”

  “Who?”

  “Darren.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry I wasn’t there to greet him. I had to go see what Meredith was up to.”

  “Is she all right? I thought she’d left.”

  “She’s in hiding. Gets a bit of stage fright around new people.”

  Elaine looked like she understood completely.

  “Well, let’s not keep Darren waiting,” Constance said.

  Why did his presence cause her to feel unmoored? It was a little bit like that day at sea, being tossed and rocked, never quite sure of where her feet would land next.

  He had his back to her, talking to someone. Constance arranged her face to look its most pleasant and gracious. She approached steadily, ready to announce her presence with a light touch on his arm.

  He was with a woman. Constance recognized her. She was a graduate student. She was tall, blond hair pinned up. She wore a white jumpsuit and high-heeled, gold-toned sandals. Her necklace was long, made of gold beads
, and hung well into her cleavage. On campus she dressed much more conservatively: quiet pantsuits, jackets, and skirts. Constance couldn’t recall her name. It was on the tip of her tongue when Darren caught sight of her and took her hand.

  “We thought you’d run out on us,” he said. He’d been drinking. She wondered where they’d stopped off. She smiled. Darren released her.

  “You remember Gabrielle,” he said.

  “Of course! What a pleasure to see you. I’m so glad you could come!”

  Gabrielle stared down at Constance. She smiled after a moment, as if she hadn’t recognized her at first.

  “We’re just back from Las Vegas,” Darren said.

  “How exciting! I love Las Vegas,” Constance said. The one time she’d gone, she’d been in the company of a lover. She’d bet over a thousand dollars playing blackjack and lost it all.

  “We just got married,” Darren said. His arm went around Gabrielle’s waist tightly, pulling her off balance.

  Words of congratulation flowed from those sitting down. Chairman Banks rose to shake Darren’s hand and give his best wishes to Gabrielle.

  “I’ve got a couple bottles of champagne around here somewhere. Let me just go and look,” Constance said.

  She was aware of Elaine watching her as she went at a calm, easy pace across the long room and into the kitchen. Then Elaine was next to her saying, “Oh, for God’s sake! Can you believe it? What was he thinking?”

  “I don’t think a mental process was involved.” Constance had the refrigerator open. She stared into it without seeing it.

  “Men. One day they’re geniuses, the next they’re retards.”

  Elaine didn’t usually speak so bluntly. Constance thought she was animated from the alcohol and having been the center of attention, if only briefly, among her colleagues.

  “There’s no reason to assume he’s making a mistake,” Constance said and closed the refrigerator. The two bottles of champagne at the back of the first shelf would keep. “I’m sure she’s a lovely person.”