The Women's Room (36 page)

‘I don’t know. I never seem to want anything’.

‘Do I complain about your bills for clothes, or the kids’ music lessons or camp?’

‘I want this, then. I want three hundred dollars for Samantha.’

‘No, Mira. And that’s the end of it.’ He stood up and left the room, and in a few minutes, she heard the shower running. He was going out to a meeting that evening.

She stood up too, and only then did she realize her whole body was shaking. She held on to the back of the kitchen chair. She wanted to pick it up, she wanted to race upstairs with it and smash open the bathroom door and crash it down on his head. She glanced at a carving knife lying on the counter, and imagined picking it up and stabbing it into his heart, stabbing it over and over. She was breathing in little gasps.

She felt that he had eradicated her. He was annoyed that she did not understand her powerlessness. How had it happened, that he had all the power? She remembered the evening she had sat in a rocking chair deciding to die. She had power then. The power to die, anyway. She felt that she could not fight him. She could not give that money to Samantha without his permission. Yet somehow if she didn’t, that would be the end of something. She had allowed him to close out her friends from their life, and that had shrunk her, but if she allowed him to do this, she would be eradicated. But she could not move.

When he came back downstairs dressed freshly to go out, he glanced at her standing in the kitchen.

‘I may be late, so don’t wait up,’ he said in a normal voice, as though nothing had happened. He pecked her cheek as he passed her and went out the kitchen door to the garage. She thought of running out and locking the garage door, forcing him to sit in the car breathing in carbon monoxide. She was astounded at the images that were popping into her head.

One of the boys came tearing into the kitchen. ‘Hey, Mom, the Good Humor man’s here, can I have a quarter?’

She turned on him like a vindictive fury: ‘No!’ she shrieked.

16

She moved through the evening like a sleepwalker. She sat in the family room while the boys watched television and didn’t even turn it off when they went to bed, just sat there, and the news came on and people were still talking about Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, and everyone thought they were dead, and that roused her. Dead for a cause. In her youth she had spouted integration lines but had long since given up even thinking about it. What was the use? She thought though that it must be nice to die for a cause. Since you had to die anyway. Better for a cause. Because otherwise. Her mind was a numb jumble. She rose and switched off the set, and poured a brandy, but that was the wrong thing to do because the brandy settled and heated her insides, the heat came washing over her, and she began to cry, but it wasn’t crying, it was wild, tempestuous, gusty sobbing, she could not control it, it felt as if all her insides were coming up with the sobs.

As she settled down – it took a long time – she wondered about them, those three young men who believed they could change things. They had probably not expected to die, had not sought it out, had not plotted martyrdom. They had simply believed the cause was worth the risk. But when the cause was yourself, all the guilts rose up. How dare you fight for yourself? It was so selfish. Maybe Chaney was fighting for himself, though, and one didn’t think that selfish. She had another brandy, and another. She got drunk. She began to imagine scenes. Norm would come in from his meeting and she would stand up and say … She made up noble speeches in her head. She argued him point by point and he was astonished at her logic and capitulated, apologized, asked forgiveness. Or he would come in and she would smash him over the head with the cleaver and watch him die, hopefully slowly. Or he would not come in, he would get drunk and crack up his car and be killed. He would be assaulted in the street and stabbed by a street thief. Then all her problems would be over.

The sky was starting to get light when she realized that Norm was not coming home at all. At the same time she realized that Norm was not the enemy, only the embodiment of the enemy. Because what could he do to her if she wrote that check? Would he beat her up, divorce her, deny her money for food, make her pay it back? There was nothing he could do. She began to see that his authority over her was based on
mutual agreement, that it was founded on nothing but air, and that that was why he had to assert it so often in such odd ways. It could be broken by her simply turning her face away from him. Why was she so terrified of doing that? There was something more, out there, out in the world, something that gave him the power, wasn’t there? Or was it just that she feared losing his love? What love? What was it, their marriage? She sat rocking drunkenly on the solid chair and watched the sun come up over the trees. She had fallen asleep when the boys came bounding in crying out at her, ‘Mom, you didn’t wake us up! Mom, we’re gonna be late!’

She shook herself awake and gazed at them.

They were running around grabbing books, yelling at her and each other.

‘We didn’t even have breakfast,’ Normie said reproachfully.

She sat and looked at him. ‘You never eat it anyway.’

He stopped and blinked at her. He recognized some change. But there was no time to pursue it, and they took off to run the mile to the bus stop since obviously she was not going to drive them. She sat there with a nasty smile on her face, then got up and fixed herself some coffee. Afterward, she took a shower and dressed and took her checkbook and went out to the car and drove to Samantha’s house, and handed her a check for $350. ‘A little extra to tide you over,’ she explained. ‘Actually, I can’t explain, but it’s for me, not you.’

She entered the amount and recipient in large letters in their joint checkbook. But Norm did not mention it, not ever.

17

All this while you are asking, ‘What about Norm? Who is he, this shadow man, this figurehead husband?’

You may not believe this, but there isn’t much I can tell you. I did know him, I even knew him fairly well, but there still isn’t much I can tell you. I can tell you what he looked like. He was tallish, about six feet; blond, blue-eyed. In the early years he had a crew cut. As he aged, he got red in the face and put on some weight, but not too much. He kept trim playing golf and squash. He looked very handsome in turtleneck sweaters and white buck shoes. When the styles changed in the seventies, he kept up. He let his hair – what was left of it by then – get a little longer – and he grew side-burns and started to wear
colored shirts and wide ties. He had a pleasant face, still does. He has a pleasant personality, knows a few jokes, nothing too salacious. He watches football games and sometimes goes up to West Point to see one. He reads what he has to to keep up in his profession, and nothing else except a few front pages of the newspaper. When he’s home, he watches TV and likes cowboy and detective shows. He has no vice to an extreme. He was in many ways the ideal man of the fifties.

You think I am making him up. You think: Aha! A symbolic figure in what turns out to be after all an invented story. Alack, alas, I wish he were. Then he would be my failure, not life’s. I’d much prefer to think that Norm is a stick figure, more because I am not much of a writer than because Norm is a stick figure.

I have, over the years, read a lot of novels by male novelists, and there is no question in my mind that their female characters – except for those of Henry James – are stick figures with padding in certain places. So maybe the problem is just that we don’t know each other very well, men and women. Maybe we need each other too much to be able to know each other. But the truth is, I don’t think men knew Norm any better than I did. And it’s not just Norm. I don’t think anyone knew Carl either, or Paul, or Bill, or even poor Simp, although I have more of a sense of him than of the others. When you slip out of respectability, when you fall below the line, somehow you become clearer. Do you know what I mean? It’s as though being a white middle-class male is a full-time occupation, like being a colonel in the army who was trained at West Point. Even when you aren’t wearing your fancy costume you have to stand like a ramrod and talk without opening your mouth too wide and make jokes about booze and broads and walk like a machine. And the only way out is if you get kicked out for some terrible breach and end up on skid row talking to some kid in a Salvation Army soup kitchen; then you can afford to let yourself show. Simp slid down: that’s an unforgivable sin to the other white middle-class males – almost as bad as going gay. And so I can imagine him sitting there in the bars he still frequents with his mother’s money, sitting elegantly with his second double martini, talking easily about the big killing he expects to make this afternoon, expecting a call at three (in the bar? you wonder) that should do it, and he’s no more hollow than the others who sound the same way except in his case you know it isn’t true and you peer in at him and figure that somehow he doesn’t know it isn’t true, he isn’t clever enough to be a good liar; he bought an image and it was all he bought and now it’s all he has, and he is going round and round in it,
living in it the way children live in daydreams.

Anyway, the others kept their uniforms, and so that was all anyone ever knew of them. Soldiers, like niggers and chinks, all look alike.

Still, I’ll try to tell you what I do know about Norm.

He was a happy baby. His father was a pharmacist, his mother a housewife, and gregarious. He had a younger brother who became a dentist. Both Norm and his brother were fairly bright at school, fairly athletic, fairly social. They were not extreme in any way that I know of, and it is that very moderateness that makes it so hard to talk about them.

He was not much devoted to sex. His mother had seen to it, from his earliest years, that he slept with his hands on top of the blankets, even going so far as to pull them out if they slid under during his sleep. She never, never permitted her boys to lie abed in the mornings and warned Mira often and direly of the dangers of such indulgence. When Norm was five, he engaged in a contest with some other boys in the neighborhood to see which of them could pee farthest. His mother caught him and threatened him with the loss of his organ if he ever did such a thing again: the threat probably made less of an impression on him than her white face and her gasps for breath as she dragged him home. He fell in love when he was nineteen, with the first girl he’d ever dated. They became engaged, but while he was away at college, she eloped with the mechanic at the Esso station in their town. Norm carried his tragic betrayal for many years after that. A group of his friends set him up with Antoinette, the town pump, and he lost his virginity on the back seat of a ’39 Ford. The experience was accompanied with enough guilt and a variety of unknown unpleasant sensations or emotions that he did not actively seek it again. There was in Norm, in those days at least, a certain delicacy: he laughed along with his friends about the experience, and about Antoinette, but he had a vague sense that somehow that wasn’t the way it should have been, wasn’t the way he would have chosen it to be.

When he was a child, he loved to draw, but his family did not encourage such activity. They did not actively forbid it either. It was just that the entire family was geared in a different direction. The only pictures they hung were Currier and Ives prints; they neither read nor listened to music. And they felt no lack. Such things simply did not exist in their world. Norm was given riding lessons – his father had been in the cavalry in the First War. He was encouraged in his desire to go to West Point. His temper tantrums were always of the same
variety: he kicked in the radio every time West Point lost a game. It was hard on their radios, but somehow this was accepted by the family, which permitted no other expression of anger. Any other rage was treated as an aberration, and Norm was sent coldly to his room and given no dinner.

Norm learned to be what his father would have called a gentleman. He did everything, but nothing extraordinarily well. He did nothing with passion. He studied, and made C’s. He played ball, but rarely first string. His social life was pleasant, but not wild. He dated, but was not sexually aggressive.

He met Mira through their families. She seemed to him very pretty, fragile, and innocent, yet at the same time somehow sophisticated. It was probably her mind that seemed sophisticated to him, because she had thought about things and he had not; but as he became more involved with her, he began to hear things about her from his friends at the university, and got the impression that Mira was not the innocent he thought. He never tried to resolve the conflict of two impressions: when he wanted to keep her to himself, he mentioned the outside world as the mass of teeming aggressive maleness he felt it to be and that he knew frightened her. When he was angry with her, he hurled at her accusations of whoredom. For him she had the mythic quality of virgin/whore in one, although that is not the way he thought about it. He did not think about it at all. He did not think about anything dangerous. His feelings toward his parents, about his profession, about the world he moved in, were always proper, tinged with humor, shrugged off. This avoidance of penetration into the difficult, the dangerous, was as characteristic of him as his moderation. He walked always on the wide, the beaten path and found those who chose narrower ones either crazy or unmannerly. Those words, in fact, were almost synonymous in his vocabulary, craziness being only a heightened degree of lack of manners. In a sense, he was the ideal gentleman of an age older than the fifties.

Mira seemed the perfect partner for him. He was the scientist, the one who dealt with facts, understanding the worldly areas of sports, money, and status; she was artistic, literary. She could play the piano a little, knew something about art and theater. She had a refined quality that seemed to be inborn. She would reflect well on him. It never occurred to him, despite her two years at the university, that she would act differently from his mother: she would care for him and their children, and she could provide the cultural note, the finish,
so absent in his own family. And in all surface ways, their marriage was acceptable. Both came from middle-class, Republican families. If she had had some training in Catholicism, neither she nor her family was now religious, and would not evoke his own family’s contempt for non-protestants. She had some education, she was healthy, she had not been brought up with wealth and would not object to the labor required of her in the early years. And besides, Mira had a helplessness, a vulnerability that touched his deepest core. It seemed perfect.