The Women's Room (10 page)

They may, you say wearily, but who’s interested? Well, you can go read about whales, or stockyards, or rivets if you like, or
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
. Truthfully, I hate these grimy details as much
as you do. I love Dostoevsky, who doesn’t harp on them but suggests them. They are always there in the background, like Time’s winged chariot. But grimy details are not in the background of the lives of most women; they are the entire surface.

Mira had gone down twice, and she was to go down again. Then she drowned. After all her years of growth and preparation, she reached maturity – for isn’t giving birth to a child the realization of maturity? And then began the dwindling down. Woolf saw that, noticed it often – how women shrink after marriage. But Mira’s going down, or even drowning, is also called sanity, accepting the inevitable one is not powerful enough to change. Still she was right when she wept walking down the aisle to be married; she was right when she wept in the rocking chair, choosing death.

Our culture believes strong individuals can transcend their circumstances. I myself don’t much enjoy books by Hardy or Dreiser or Wharton, where the outside world is so strong, so overwhelming, that the individual hasn’t a chance. I get impatient, I keep feeling that somehow the deck is stacked unfairly. That is the point, of course, but my feeling is that if that’s true, I don’t want to play. I prefer to move to another table where I can retain my illusion, if illusion it be, that I’m working against only probabilities, and have a chance to win. Then if you lose, you can blame it on your own poor playing. That is called a tragic flaw, and like guilt, it’s very comforting. You can go on believing that there is really a right way, and you just didn’t find it.

People I respect most, like Cassirer, beautiful soul, insist that the inside remains untouched by the exterior. Is this true, do you suppose? All my life I’ve read that the life of the mind is preeminent, and that it can transcend all bodily degradation. But that’s just not my experience. When your body has to deal all day with shit and string beans, your mind does too.

17

Norm’s confident sense that somehow this baby was all Mira’s doing infected her. Although she was aware that rationally this was ridiculous, Norm’s behavior – apologetic towards his parents for his rebellious wife who had gone and done exactly what they had warned her not to do, kindly tolerant of Mira’s condition, tossing off his poor grades at the end of the first year as being not
really
her fault – was more potent than
any rational argument. And by now, of course, it was all her doing. The thing was growing inside her. She began to feel squeamish, a drop of oil crushed by a boot. The roofing company she worked for did not like pregnant women in their office: pregnancy was somehow obscene and ought to be hidden, like used sanitary napkins. Mira stuffed what was left of her pride into the small box of mementos where it belonged, and went begging. She explained that her husband was a student – a
medical
student. It was a magic word. They allowed her, out of the kindness of their hearts, to work up to her eighth month, only adjuring her always to appear clean, neat, and well-groomed.

She was sick during the entire pregnancy, with constant nausea and stomach pain. It never occurred to her that this might be other than physically caused. Her small body swelled up enormously with the child, and by the seventh month she was miserably uncomfortable. She ate constantly to calm her stomach, and gained thirty-five pounds. During the last month, after she had stopped working, she was so off balance that even walking was an effort and lying down was not much better. Mostly she sat in the darkened living-bedroom, her great belly propped by cushions on either side of her, feet propped on a footstool, and read
Remembrance of Things Past
. She shopped, and cleaned the apartment and cooked, and took the laundry to the laundromat (little dreaming that after the baby was born this would become one of her greatest pleasures – the chance to get out of the house alone, or at least accompanied only by a great white silent uncrying laundry bag). She ironed sheets and Norm’s shirts and paid bills and read the recipe columns of the newspapers searching for an interesting or different way to serve inexpensive foods. The thing she most notably did not do was think.

I don’t know what it is like to be pregnant voluntarily. I assume it’s a very different experience from that of the women I know. Maybe it’s joyful – something shared between the woman and her man. But for the women I know, pregnancy was terrible. Not because it’s so painful – it isn’t, only uncomfortable. But because it wipes you out, it erases you. You aren’t you anymore, you have to forget you. If you see a green lawn in a park and you’re hot and you’d love to sit on the grass and roll over in its cool dampness, you can’t; you have to toddle over to the nearest bench and let yourself down gently on it. Everything is an effort – getting a can down from a high shelf is a major project. You can’t let yourself fall, unbalanced as you are, because you’re responsible for another life besides your own. You have been turned, by some tiny
pinprick in a condom, into a walking, talking vehicle, and when this has happened against your will, it is appalling.

Pregnancy is a long waiting in which you learn what it means completely to lose control over your life. There are no coffee breaks, no days off in which you regain your normal shape and self, and can return refreshed to your labors. You can’t wish away even for an hour the thing that is swelling you up, stretching your stomach until the skin feels as if it will burst, kicking you from the inside until you are black and blue. You can’t even hit back without hurting yourself. The condition and you are identical: you are no longer a person, but a pregnancy. You’re like a soldier in a trench who is hot and constricted and hates the food, but has to sit there for nine months. He gets to the point where he yearns for the battle, even though he may be killed or maimed in it. You look forward even to the pain of labor because it will end the waiting.

It is this sense of not being a self that makes the eyes of pregnant women so often look vacant. They can’t let themselves think about it because it is intolerable and there is nothing they can do about it. Even if they let themselves think about afterwards, it is depressing. After all, pregnancy is only the beginning. Once it is over, you have really had it: the baby will be there and it will be yours and it will demand of you for the rest of your life. The rest of your life: your whole life stretches out in front of you in that great belly of yours propped on cushions. From there it looks like an eternal sequence of bottles and diapers and cries and feedings. You have no self but a waiting, no future but pain, and no hope but the tedium of humble tasks. Pregnancy is the greatest training, disciplining device in the human experience. Compared to it, army discipline that attempts to humble the individual, get him into the impersonal line that can function like a machine, is soft. The soldier gets time off to get back to his identity; he can, if he is willing to take the risk, retort to his superior, or even bolt. At night, as he lies on his bunk, he can play poker, write letters, remember, look forward to the day he’ll get out.

All of this is what Mira did not think about, or at least tried not to think about. It was in these months that she developed her pursed lips and the set frown on her brow. She saw the situation as the end of her personal life. Her life, from pregnancy on, was owned by another creature.

What is wrong with this woman?? you ask. It is Nature, there is no recourse, she must submit and make the best of what she cannot
change. But the mind is not easily subdued. Resentment and rebellion grow in it – resentment and rebellion against Nature itself. Some wills are crushed, but those that are not contain within them, for the rest of their days, seeds of hate. All of the women I know feel a little like outlaws.

18

At the end of her pregnancy, Mira could sleep only for brief snatches. Her body was so big and painful that any position hurt after a while. She would get up gently, so as not to wake Norm, put on the cotton wrapper which was the only thing that fit her now, and tiptoe into the kitchen. She would make tea and sit drinking it at the kitchen table, staring blankly at the walls which someone had papered in yellow oilcloth patterned with little red houses with smoke coming out of their chimneys, and a little green tree next to each.

One night she could not sit. She paced the kitchen for an hour, thoughtless, listening to her body. The pains began and she woke Norm. He examined her and timed her, joked about the good luck that his course in gynecology had occurred the previous semester. He said it was early, but that he would take her to the hospital.

The nurses were cold and brusque. They sat her down and asked for information: father’s name, mother’s name, address, religion, Blue Cross number. Then they gave her a hospital gown and told her to get undressed in a cold damp room that looked and smelled like the locker room of a gym. She was in some pain now and the very air of the place irritated her as it brushed against her skin. They ordered her to get up on a table, and they shaved her pubic hair. The water was warm but it got cold as soon as they put it on her body, which was already shivering. Then they gave her an enema: it drove her insane, she couldn’t believe they were doing this to her. Her belly and abdomen were aching worse and worse, as if part of her insides were pulling away from the rest and wrenching the organs with it and pounding down on her pelvic bones like a steady hammer. There was no let-up, no rest, it just kept happening. At the same time, they were pumping warm water into her backside. It pulsed upward in a different rhythm, then bent her double with a different cramp. When it was over, they told her to get up on the table again, and they wheeled her into a different room. It was bare and functional: white walls and four beds, two against each wall, foot
to head. They put her feet up into stirrups and laid a cloth over her knees. Every so often a nurse or an orderly would come into the room, lift the cloth and peer in. Out in the hall, beds on wheels were lined up waiting to enter the delivery room. The women on them were moaning, some crying, some silent. One screamed, ‘God damn you, Morris, you bastard!’ and another kept weeping, ‘Oh, God, dear God, Mary, Jesus, Joseph, help me, help me.’ The nurses threaded through the corridors unheeding. One woman shrieked, and a nurse turned and snapped at her, ‘Stop being such a baby! You’d think you were dying!’

The bed behind Mira was closed off by a pink curtain hanging on iron rings from a bar set in the walls. The woman in the bed kept expelling air in great gusts: ‘Unnh! Unhh!’ She called for the nurse, but no one came. She called several times, and finally gave a piercing shriek. A nurse ran in.

‘What is it now, Mrs Martinelli?’ There was irritation and contempt in her voice. Mira could not see the nurse, but she imagined her standing there with hands on her hips and a sneer on her face.

‘It’s time for the spinal,’ the woman wailed in the irritating whine of the child, the helpless, the victim known and accepted. ‘Tell the doctor to come, it’s time.’

The nurse was silent; there was a ruffling of a sheet. ‘It’s not time yet.’

The woman’s voice rose hysterically. ‘It is, it is! I ought to know, I’ve had five kids. I know when it’s coming. It’ll be too late, it happened before, it was too late and they couldn’t give it to me at all. Tell him, tell the doctor!’

The nurse left, and after a while a gray-faced man in a rumpled suit entered. He went to Mrs Martinelli’s bed. ‘Well, what’s this I hear about you stirring up a rumpus, Mrs Martinelli? I thought you were a brave girl.’

The woman’s voice cringed and whimpered. ‘Oh, Doctor, please give me the spinal. It’s time, I know it’s time, I’ve had five kids … you know I told you when I came to you what happened to me the last time. Please.’

‘It’s not time yet, Mrs Martinelli. Quiet down now and don’t bother the nurses. Don’t worry. Trust me. Everything will be fine.’

She was silent, and he trudged out, his mouth pursed, Mira was sure, with contempt for the troublesome woman. She firmed her own mouth. She would not do that, she determined; she would not act whiny and childish and cry. She would not utter a sound. She would be good.
No matter how bad the pain got, she would show them that a woman could have courage.

Mrs Martinelli was stubborn, though. She was silent only until the doctor left, like a child who has been warned that another cry will reap another blow, and waits until the parent has left the room to resume their whimpering. She cried softly, talking to herself, murmuring over and over without pause, ‘I ought to know, I’ve had five kids, it’ll be too late, oh, God, I know it’ll be too late, I know it, I know it.’

Mira tried not to feel. It was not the labor that was agonizing her: it hurt, but not too much. It was the scene – the coldness and sterility of it, the contempt of the nurses and the doctor, the humiliation of being in stirrups and having people peer at her exposed genitals whenever they chose. She tried to pull away into some inner place where all this did not exist. A phrase kept going through her mind: there is no other way out.

Suddenly Mrs Martinelli shrieked again. A nurse came in, sighing angrily under her breath. She did not speak; Mrs Martinelli was simply screaming now. The nurse ran out, then came back with another nurse. Swiftly they pushed back the pink curtain. Mira half sat up. A third nurse came in with the doctor and saw her.

‘Sit down, lie down!’ she ordered Mira, but Mira rose up and awkwardly turned her upper body to watch. They were beginning to wheel Mrs Martinelli’s bed out of the room. Mira looked: between Mrs Martinelli’s raised knees a small furry brown head was emerging from a pinkish doorway. A nurse glanced at Mira and quickly threw a cloth over Mrs Martinelli’s knees. The woman was just crying out, ‘Oh, Jesus, help me, God, help me.’ It was too late for the spinal, too late for reproach. They wheeled her into the delivery room.