“No, she’s not. Don’t you remember that business with Ned Price?”
“What business?”
“He was her thesis advisor. He ended up leaving his wife.”
“You can’t assume the two things are related.”
“You’re playing devil’s advocate. I know you’re trying to keep an open mind, because that’s the kind of person you are, but I’m telling you, Darren did something really dumb, and he’ll rue the day. You know it, too.”
“Oh, come on. It doesn’t matter what I know or don’t know.”
Some of her guests came into the kitchen to thank Constance and say good-bye. She protested that they were leaving too early, then said she understood and thanked them profusely for coming.
The party was down to the Chairman, his wife, Darren, and Gabrielle. Both couples were sitting easily on the large sectional sofa. Darren smiled when Constance and Elaine entered the room. He didn’t ask about the champagne. He looked woozy. Maybe he was just deliriously happy. Constance had never noticed before how close together his eyes were or the how red his nose got when he drank. Even the sound of his voice as he described the houses they’d been looking at, since his was too small, grated. At the mention of each, Gabrielle gave an approving nod. She was flushed and a little glassy-eyed.
Meredith appeared. She looked composed. Whatever had assailed her was now past. She said hello to everyone and shook Gabrielle’s hand. They were roughly the same age; another insult, Constance thought. Darren was in his fifties, as was Constance. He had a good twenty-five years on his new wife.
Elaine was in a chair across from the sectional, babbling at Gabrielle about home renovation projects. Gabrielle clearly wasn’t listening. She turned to Meredith and said she’d heard that she worked in investments. Might she be interested in pointing her in a good direction?
“Investments?” Constance asked. All conversation ceased.
“Gabrielle’s father left her a little something,” Darren said.
The way Gabrielle patted his hand said she wanted him to change the subject.
“He was in real estate,” Darren added.
“What’s his name?” Meredith asked.
“Frank Hawkins,” Gabrielle said.
“He built half the Sunset Strip!” Meredith said.
“That’s right.”
“Well. I’ll speak to my supervisor. I’m sure he’d be happy to set up an appointment.”
Elaine looked at Constance. One of her eyebrows was raised, as if to say, He married her for her money!
Certainly a possibility, Constance thought, then decided that Darren just wasn’t that sort. Gabrielle was beautiful and elegant. Her talents as a scholar weren’t bad either. Constance had never used her as a teaching assistant, because her field was early American history, but those who had said good things. Why would someone with her assets—both physical and financial—waste her time looking back?
That’s what it meant to study history, didn’t it? To look back? And what did all that looking back do? It never accurately predicted the future. The future always did as it pleased. Knowing the foibles of one’s forebears made one cynical, even jaded. Constance wondered when that had happened to her. She’d begun with great passion for the past and the secrets it held. The dead were more real to her than the living. Her own life had contained ambitions and expectations, which were now played out. She had never felt so bitterly disappointed.
Constance drank a glass of wine, then a second, third, and fourth. The Chairman and his wife had left. They’d filled her ears with warm words, and admiration again for her charming home. Meredith asked her if she were all right. Constance waved her away.
As Constance sank, Gabrielle seemed to rise. She was alert, talking a lot, and paying Constance one compliment after another. Her home was lovely, her daughter was wonderful, her students were full of praise for her insights and compassion. Constance didn’t know what she was talking about. She was a good professor, and a fair one, but hardly compassionate.
“And you have so many interests,” Gabrielle said.
“Do I?”
“Your sewing. I understand you’re very dedicated.”
Constance caught Darren’s eye. She hoped he registered the irritation she was trying to convey. His expression remained bland and pleasant.
“I only do it now and then,” Constance said.
“Let’s go take a closer look.”
Gabrielle got up and walked across the room to the corner where the tapestry sat on its stand. The sound of her sandals was loud and firm, at odds with the mellow jazz Constance had playing on the stereo system. Constance went with her. She turned on the floor lamp next to the tapestry. Gabrielle sat in the chair in front of the stand and ran her finger over the tapestry, tilting the frame a little up, then a little down, to better view the stitched—and still bare—images.
Constance stood by. She felt like a servant, waiting for her mistress to give her an order. Gabrielle remained intent on the canvas.
“Such a sweet piece,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And the whole role of embroidery—generations of women sitting quietly, occupying their hands rather than their minds.”
“I think that’s the idea.”
“It’s only how it looks from the outside, though. When you’re sewing, I’m sure your mind’s not a blank.”
“No.”
Constance turned and looked behind her at her three remaining guests, hoping Gabrielle would take the hint and get up.
“My mother embroidered pillows and seat cushions. She wasn’t very good at it actually. And I’m not even sure she took much pleasure from it. Her expression was always so fierce, as if the whole thing made her angry,” Gabrielle said.
“Maybe it did.”
“My father was the one who made her angry. She was jealous of his success. She was an ambitious person but didn’t pursue what she wanted.”
“And what was that?”
“Anything that didn’t have to do with being a housewife.”
Gabrielle sat back from the canvas. She was concentrating hard.
“It’s aggressive, don’t you think? Piercing something with a needle?” she asked.
“It’s just a craft.”
“While the men were hunting or fighting or engaging in politics or building a real estate empire, the women sewed and sewed, piercing, penetrating, as if they were men too, in that moment. Maybe it made them feel less excluded, or let them take a break from nurturing—which was their only valued role, right? Though I’d be the first to admit that’s a bit of a stretch.”
Constance had no words. Worried that her growing silence might be interpreted as astonishment, she walked quickly into the kitchen where she drank a glass of water.
Through the window over the sink, the backyard was illuminated by the exterior floodlights. It was deep and lush, a luxury of water stolen from the Colorado River, there in Southern California. It invited her to enter, wander, and collect herself. She’d had a stone bench installed, much like the one she and Darren had discovered in France, and it had been there that she’d conceived the outline of Silent and Unseen, and the “unyielding divide between the sexes,” as one sour reviewer had put it.
In all the years she’d spent thinking and re-thinking what it meant to be female, she’d never once imagined the plain, simple, and blinding truth Gabrielle had just pronounced.
How could it be proven, or disproven? And did it need to be?
“What are you doing in here, all by yourself?” Elaine asked. Constance hadn’t heard her come in.
“Just getting a drink of water.”
“Well, they just left. I told them good-bye for you.”
“What? Why didn’t you come and get me? They must have thought me awfully rude!”
“Not really. Gabriella said she had to go, that she wasn’t feeling well.”
“Oh.”
“And naturally Darren jumped up and got her purse for her, and ushered her out like a little girl.”
“Hm.”
“Meredith is still here, though. She and Gabrielle certainly hit it off, didn’t they?”
Constance took in Elaine’s wide, flushed face. Her eyes were full of triumph and confidence. She’d had a good evening, clearly.
Constance excused herself so she could give the bartender his check. The caterers had returned as pre-arranged, and removed the remaining food and dirty dishes and silverware. While they worked, Meredith, Constance, and Elaine sat and recalled moments from the party, commented on how people looked and whether or not they’d enjoyed themselves, what the weather would be like the following day, and over the course of the coming season. The caterers left, saying Constance could expect a bill in about another week, then Meredith and Elaine also said good-night.
When Constance was alone, she went to the tapestry and sewed for at least an hour until her vision blurred and her needle hand ached.
It’s only to pass the time, a way to endure loneliness, she thought. Nothing to do with men and women. Or with men versus women.
In, out, in, out, her needle went. From one painted patch to another. When she needed to, she plucked more yarn from the basket on the floor below the stand.
In, out, in, out.
chapter seven
Meredith didn’t bring up the house again. She bought a small place on the other side of the faculty golf course, surrounded by trees and with a creek in back. She admitted that the quiet wasn’t easy to get used to after living in Los Angeles her entire life. Constance understood that Meredith simply wanted to be near her. She forced herself to be pleasant when she stopped by, which she did several times a week.
Meredith sought out Eunice when Constance was sleeping, something she did more and more, even without the pills. At first Eunice said it really wasn’t appropriate to follow her on her rounds through the wing, then relented. Clearly, Meredith needed a friend. Eunice invited her to an upscale coffee bar near Lindell. It sat in a new cluster of high-end stores.
Meredith blew into her coffee without taking a sip.
“Your mother seems comfortable at Lindell,” Eunice said.
“She should be, by now.”
“I mean that she’s well settled. Some people never really adjust to leaving their own home.”
Eunice’s tone had become a little defensive, and she hadn’t meant it to be. She just didn’t know what else to talk about, and Meredith didn’t have much to offer. Until she all of a sudden did.
Her mother was a deeply frustrated woman, she said, and it had taken years for her to realize that. She always acted as though she were satisfied with her career and that she loved teaching, but in fact she really didn’t like it all that well. She said all the time that her students were stupid, with very few exceptions. And she was bitter about her thesis, even now, after all these years. She’d been talked into a subject she didn’t really care for. She yielded under pressure, and had always regretted that decision.
After she retired, she tried writing a book about sex trafficking—could Eunice believe that? She didn’t finish it. She began two others, Meredith didn’t know what about. Then she volunteered at a shelter for abused women. Her mother, with her beautiful clothes, in a place like that. Meredith suggested, more than once, that she tone herself down just a little, and Eunice could imagine how that had been received.
One day, one of the shelter women really let her mother have it. Not physically, though it could very well have come to blows. Her mother had accused her of causing the mess she was in by choosing the wrong man. Well naturally this woman, with all her pent-up sorrow, let fly. Meredith wasn’t sure, but she suspected that her mother was asked not to return.
“And then?” Eunice asked.
Her mother left L.A. and returned to her childhood home, which must have been very odd. She always said it was a relief, a welcome change, but she was a practiced liar, which Eunice would have no way of knowing, of course.
Meredith tasted her coffee. Eunice studied her hands, wrapped around the heavy mug. The nails on one hand were longer than the other, which struck Eunice as odd, given how meticulous the rest of her appearance was. But women could be like that, she’d found. They paid close attention to certain things and let others go. In Eunice’s case, her blind spot always seemed to be her hair, which had retained its thick, springy texture as she’d aged. She washed it once a week and let it dry on its own. If she had to go outside, she pulled on a wool cap that had gotten some choice remarks from some of the residents. One man said she looked a gun moll. Eunice said she’d have to be in a dress for that to be the case, but he disagreed. All the sassiest women wore slacks in the thirties, he said. Eunice told him she was nothing, if not sassy.
Meredith said her mother had always taken the war between the sexes personally. When she was a young girl, her own mother…
She paused. She stared hard into her coffee cup.
“Her own mother what?” Eunice asked.
Got sent away, Meredith said, put away, was more like it. She was emotionally fragile. She’d wanted to be an actress and failed. It was hard on her, and she fell apart.
“That’s harsh,” Eunice said.
Meredith nodded.
“And hard for a little girl to see.”
“Yes.”
“So, what did she figure, your mom, about the whole thing? That a woman who tries to be anything other than a mother and a wife gets punished?”
Here Meredith leaned back in her vinyl chair and regarded Eunice across the wider distance she just put between them.
“I think she’d agree with that,” Meredith said.
“You’re a mom, a wife, or else.”
“Yes.”
“Well, she was a mom, at least.”
Meredith got a queer look. Eunice became uneasy.
“What was your father like? She never said anything about her husband,” she said.
“She never married.”
“Wow. Can’t have been easy, having a child out of wedlock in those days.”
Again the queer, strained look. Not exactly sad, or angry, just stressed as hell, Eunice thought.
“There was a man she wanted to marry. He didn’t want to marry her,” Meredith said.
“Your father?”
“No.”
“So, who was he? Or did she never say?”
“She never said.”
“That’s a hell of a mystery, right?”
“It is, indeed.”
Meredith stood up abruptly and said next time, she’d treat.
Constance weakened. She spent more and more time in bed. She lost interest in food. Meredith grieved. Eunice understood. It was hard watching a relative go downhill. Meredith spent hours with Constance while Constance slept, and Eunice worked around her quietly, leaving her to her private thoughts.
part two
chapter eight
Eunice Fitch lived in a drafty clapboard house her parents tried miserably to make a home in. The roof, which sagged under time’s weight and ravage, leaked—in Eunice’s room, as luck would have it. The plaster softened, yielded, and dripped its steady measure of every passing cloud
. Eunice’s solution was to get a large pot from the kitchen and push her bed as far back as possible. During a particularly rainy season, when sleep failed to come and the new day began in a ragged state, Eunice moved to a small room at the far end of the hall where the roof, for the time being, held fast.
Her parents often left her alone at night so they could play cards with another couple down the road. Her companion was usually the black and white television set in the living room, two floors below the unsound roof. One evening, she was treated to a festival of silent movies. Background music played, piano and strings, cheerful or dire, by turns. Eunice tried to read the lips of the silent movie stars but found herself relying on the subtitles instead. She loved the subtitles. They summed up the action and gave the gist, just enough to go on. She loved the queer lighting, the fabulous twenties gowns, and most of all Lillian Gish. Eunice was enthralled by her courage and beauty.
She sought to perfect the burning gaze, the taut skin around her eyes, the firm jaw. All these conveyed anguish from the firmest part of her soul, and made for an elegant display of suffering when she got teased at school after she spilled her milk down the front of her ill-fitting plaid dress. Her reward for this brilliant performance on a spring day full of birdsong was to be called a retard by the tallest boy in class.
Next, she cut her hair in a bob. Her red curls and waves lay gorgeously on the filthy bathroom floor. Her mother was outraged. Several slaps ensued.
“What the hell’s wrong with you? You look like an idiot.”
Eunice’s mother, Louise, was a small woman whose rage made her huge. Eunice ran to her father. He was planted in his easy chair, beer can in hand, watching a baseball game. He hit the mute button and looked at her with a blend of love and worry.
“You did that all by yourself?” he asked.
Eunice nodded, sending more strands of cut hair into her father’s lap. He picked them up.
Women Within Page 8
