The Women's Room (12 page)

She looked at them with eyes blinded by sunlight and smiled, hearing Margaret worry again about whether her three-year-old was unhappy without her, and Amelia worrying about whether her mother was remembering to put fruit rather than candy in Jimmy’s lunchbox, and Grace, silent and lined with her worries, hoping that Johnny had got his bike fixed, and that Stella was coping with the cooking. She smiled with them, laughed with them at the absurdities of the big world. She was unable to be with them with more than her heart, but that was that. She felt she had arrived, finally, at womanhood.

21

Valerie, of course, snorted when she heard this. We were sitting around in Val’s place one night, Iso and Ava, Clarissa, Kyla, and me, and Mira told us about her experience of childbirth. It was in the late fall of 1968, and we didn’t know each other well as a group. We were still skirting around the edges of politeness, not yet sure enough of each other to let it go completely, but getting there.

Although we weren’t aware of this then, we had been brought together by our dislike of the same things – values and behavior we saw all around us at Harvard. Our dislike was of a specific kind: all the first-year graduate students were unhappy there. But we were not so much unhappy as outraged, and our dislike, as we would come to realize, was the expression of a profound and positive sense of the way things
ought
to be. On this evening, however, we were still feeling each other out.

We were complimenting Val on the beauty of her apartment. She had little money, but she’d painted it, filled it with plants, and strewn it with odds and ends collected in her travels. It was a delightful place.

And Mira said – in that sort of gushing suburban way she had – how wonderful women were, look at Val’s beautiful apartment, no man would have been willing to do it or would have had the imagination, especially with so little money. And Kyla, who had also beautifully fixed up her and Harley’s apartment, jumped to agree. Then Mira said she’d suddenly seen how great women were after giving birth to Normie, and she described the experience. And Val snorted.

‘You bought it! You bought the whole damned bag!’

Mira blinked.

‘How convenient to have a whole class of people who give up their lives for other people! How nice, while you’re out doing things that serve your ego, to have somebody home washing the bathroom floor and picking up your dirty underwear! And never, never cooking brussels sprouts because you don’t like them.’

Everybody burst in at once.

‘It’s true, it’s true!!’ Kyla crowed.

‘How come you don’t do that for me?’ Isolde grinned at Ava.

Clarissa, serious-faced, tried to get a word in – ‘I don’t think …’

But Val was not to be stopped. ‘I mean, Mira, don’t you hear what
you’re saying? “Women’s greatness lies in their selflessness.” You might as well say women’s place is in the home.’

‘Nonsense!’ Mira began to turn a little pink. ‘I’m not prescribing, I’m describing. The constrictions exist. No matter what you say about the way things ought to be, they are the way they are. And if the world changed tomorrow, it would be too late for those women …’

‘Is it too late for you?’ Kyla shot in.

Mira leaned back, half laughing. ‘Look, all I’m saying is that women are great because they get so little and give so much …’

‘Exactly!’ Val stormed.

Isolde giggled. ‘She’ll never be allowed to get it out.’

‘They have so little room,’ Mira went on doggedly, ‘but they don’t get bitter and mean, they try to make that little room graceful and harmonious.’

‘Tell it to the women in the schizophrenic wards. Or the ones who sit in their kitchens drinking themselves to death. Or the ones covered with bruises from the husbands who got drunk last night. Or the ones who burn their children’s hands.’

‘I’m not saying all women …’

‘Okay,’ Clarissa began authoritatively, and the room quietened a bit, ‘but not all these things spring from the same root. Men have constrictions too.’

‘I’m not worried about men,’ Val exclaimed. ‘Let them worry about themselves. They’ve taken pretty good care of themselves for the past four thousand years. And women’s problems
do
all spring from the same root: that they’re women. Everything Mira’s told us about her life shows it to be one long training in humiliation, an education in suppressing self.’

‘That’s as if you’re saying women have no individual identity,’ Isolde demurred.

‘They don’t. Not when you talk about women’s greatness or women’s constrictions: as soon as you say that, you’re admitting an identity among all women, which implies lack of individuality. Kyla asked if Mira had been destroyed by her constrictions, and the answer is yes, or nearly so. Look!’ she plunked her glass down on the table, ‘my real point is that to tell women they’re great because they’ve given themselves up is to tell them to go on doing it.’

Mira held up her hand like a traffic cop ordering
Stop
. ‘Wait,’ she ordered. ‘I want you to keep quiet a minute, Val, because I want to answer you, but I have to figure out what I want to say.’

Val laughed and got up. ‘Okay. Who wants more wine?’

When she returned, Mira said, ‘Okay,’ in that thoughtful way we had all picked up from Clarissa, whose mind clicked points off like a clock measuring precise moments, each one preceded by ‘Okay.’ ‘Yes. I want them to go on doing it.’

Howls.

‘I mean it. What will happen to the world if they don’t do it? It would be unbearable. Who else would do it? The men go to work to make life possible and the women work to make it bearable.’

‘Why are you in graduate school, then?’ Kyla was nearly leaping out of her chair. ‘Why are you living in – pardon me – that sterile grungy drab apartment of yours? Why aren’t you making a nice cozy home for your boys and your husband?’

‘I was! I would be!’

‘And you loved it.’

‘I hated it.’

They all laughed, and Mira too grinned wryly, then began to laugh.

‘Okay. You’re not saying – tell me if I’m wrong, Mira – but you’re not saying that creating felicity is all women should do. You’re saying it’s part of what they should do. Am I right?’ Kyla still perched forward, as if Mira’s answer were the most important thing in the world to her.

‘No. I’m saying it’s what they do do, and it’s beautiful.’

‘Okay.’ It was Clarissa this time. ‘But if they want to and can do other things as well, so much the better, right?’

Mira nodded, and everyone leaned back. A kind of peace fell among them. They were glad that their boundaries meshed. But the peace was only momentary.

Val leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. ‘Sure, sure. As long as women do what they’re supposed to do, what they’ve always done, we’re told. (But I doubt it: when they were out plowing the fields or hauling in the fishing nets or marching to war, as they did in Scotland and other places, they didn’t have much time for interior decoration or gourmet cuisine. This whole shit about what woman’s labor is supposed to be is only about a hundred years old – do you realize that? It’s no older than the industrial revolution, and probably really began on a wide scale in the Victorian period.) Well, anyway, if women do what is now conceived to be their natural and proper job and have any time or energy left over, they then have permission to do something else. But in fact if you’ve been brainwashed into selflessness,
it wouldn’t occur to you to do what you wanted to do, you wouldn’t even think in such terms. There isn’t enough
you
to want.’

‘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.