The Women's Room (55 page)

She would be fine. She was fine. A weight seemed to drift from her heart. It’s because I’m drunk, she thought. Things don’t matter so much when you’re drunk.

They went into the kitchen for dinner. Val sat Mira between Ben and Bart. They had a shrimp bisque, praised it, and talked about food. Ben described Lianese food. Grant, still sulky and eating greedily, finished and wiped his beard, and described the rotten dried-out food his mother had cooked. Bart laughed.

‘Man, you don’t know dried-up food until you’ve eaten my aunt’s. She isn’t really my aunt,’ he told Mira, ‘she’s just the only person who’s willing to take me. Anyway, she’s a nice old lady, and she gets the check from the welfare, and she cooks spaghetti. On Monday, she cooks spaghetti, and she leaves it in the pot. She cooks two pounds, and it sits there. She never puts it away. By Friday, man! the spaghetti is ready to sprout. It is so dry, it crackles!’

They laughed. ‘You exaggerate!’ Mira exclaimed.

‘No, he doesn’t,’ Chris said in a low, dry voice, sounding like her mother.

‘She’s a good lady, though,’ Bart added. ‘She doesn’t have to have me. It’s ’cause she’s so old, I guess. She hardly eats anything herself. She gives me practically all the money she gets for keeping me. For clothes, she says.’

‘You do have beautiful clothes, Bart,’ Mira said.

‘He’s got great taste,’ Val assented.

‘Clothes. Who the fuck cares about clothes,’ Grant intoned.

The conversation turned to the meaning of style. Style was an expression of the ethos, of the person, of culture, subculture, rebellion – they argued and ranted and laughed. Bart, though, was the expert.

Now you,’ he told Val, ‘really have a style. You understand your body, yourself, and you dress great. You,’ he turned to Mira, ‘dress a little uptight. But you’re getting better. I really like those pants you have on. What fabric are they?’ He reached out and took an inch or so of fabric from the thigh portion of her pants and rubbed it between his fingers.

‘Cotton and polyester.’

‘Nice. Now you two,’ he said to Grant and Ben, ‘between you have the taste of a Zulu. Not to knock my own kind!’

‘Fuck clothes,’ Grant repeated.

‘You can fuck clothes because you got a closetful from your daddy.’

‘All I ever got from my father was a rap on the head.’

‘And a few on the tail too, if I recall,’ Val put in.

Grant looked at her dangerously. ‘And I seem to keep getting those.’

‘Then you should be calloused by now.’

‘I’m the only one I know who had a great father,’ Ben said. ‘He worked on the railroad, and he was away a lot. But when he was home, he was really there. He talked to me and my brothers, and my little sister too. And to my mother. I remember the two of them sitting outside on the back step on summer nights, holding hands.’

‘Maybe absence was the secret,’ Val laughed.

‘Maybe! But you know what sociologists say about the absent father.’

‘Man, I’m glad my father’s absent,’ Bart said. ‘I only met him once, but he scared the shit out of me. My aunt says he used to beat my mother blind and he does the same thing to his wife and kids now.’

Through all this, Mira was paralysed. Her thigh still tingled where Bart had touched it, barely touched it, as he picked up the fabric of her pants to feel it. Her heart had stopped when he did that. How could he dare? How did he dare? The blood pulsed in her head, it was a constant beating rhythm. Slowly, it slowed. She calmed. He was unpolished, he did not know that men did not do such things to women they were not intimate with. But, she argued, suppose Grant had done that? She would not have liked it, she would have felt it a violation, but she would have shrugged it off, attributing it to Grant’s lack of social finish. Her thigh would not have continued to tingle, as it was doing. No, there was more to this. She sat watching Bart talk and laugh, so young, only a year older than Chris, yet so much older, willing to take on Grant and Ben, and even Val, although he generally deferred to her. Yet, look closer, forget the dark skin which automatically made him old and wise, one of the witches and demons of the earth who know everything the moment they are born and spend the rest of their lives undermining us, the innocent, the privileged, the genteel … He had soft round cheeks, like Chris’s, and his eyes were still dewy with faith, or hope, or was it charity? It was his color. Her teeth set as she faced that. Her real protest was: how could he dare touch her with his dark
hands? His hand was lying on the table beside his plate; she lowered her eyes and looked at it. What would it be like to have a dark hand like that on your body? And suddenly she put her head back, silent, but in her throat, a cry, a cry of agony and awareness and lament: of course, her brain pounded, of course!

But it was not bigotry. It was the strangeness. She had never jumped rope with a black child, never held hands walking home from first grade. And over the years she had, despite her nice neat liberal ideas, absorbed the sense of horror of the big black buck. Prejudice lay in the body.

Bart’s hand lay on the table beside his plate. It was a short thick hand, chocolate colored, its palm paler, almost pink. It had short nails, and its fingers looked somehow like a child’s fingers, curved naturally, with an unselfconsciousness it is impossible to affect, looking vulnerable and sweet and strong and capable. Mira put her own pale thin hand over it, settling down very lightly on Bart’s. Bart turned quickly. Grant was raving about his rotten father. Mira whispered: ‘Will you pass me the bread, Bart, please?’ She removed her hand, he smiled and passed the basket. It was over. She settled back into herself.

She wondered if he knew, if he had guessed her agitation at his touching her, and the way she had chosen to confront her problem. She wondered if he would forgive her if he did know. He would forgive her if he had felt the same way about white flesh, but suppose he had not? White was the master race, after all. If he had not? Her eyes misted. Perhaps he would not forgive her. If he knew. But of course he knew, if not about her, about her race. Was there forgiveness for that?

‘You look misty,’ a voice said in her other ear. She turned to Ben’s sweet kind face.

‘Do you believe in forgiveness?’

He shook his head. ‘In forgetting, maybe.’

‘Yes. Forgetting.’

‘Do you have something specific in mind?’

‘Oh, well, what you were saying about Africa. Or anyplace that’s been oppressed, any people who have been oppressed, black people, any people, women, for instance,’ her voice faded out.

‘There’s only one way,’ he said softly. Grant and Bart were currently arguing about the Proper Family Structure. Both agreed that a male should be dominant in the house, and that every house should contain a father, a mother, and some children. Beyond that, they agreed on nothing. ‘And that is – well, independence. I don’t know how else to
put it. People – the Lianese – will forgive us only when they don’t need us anymore, when they’re equal to us.’

‘But that won’t be – in terms of power, I mean – for a long time. Probably never. Lianu is a small country.’

‘Yes, but there will be a federation of black African countries. I don’t mean absolute equality. When they or their league is equal in bargaining power.’

Mira laid her head in her hands. ‘Tears were streaming down her face. I drank too much, she kept thinking, I drank too much.

‘What is it?’ Ben’s voice didn’t sound annoyed or impatient. It sounded kind, concerned. Still, she could not stop crying, and she didn’t know why she was crying. After he laid his hands on her back, she lifted her head.

‘What is it?’ he asked again.

‘Oh, God! Life is impossible!’ she cried, and jumped up and ran to the bathroom.

20

‘Oh, I just got drunk. I was nervous and I drank too much. So I blew it,’ Mira shrugged, as if she didn’t care.

‘I’ve never seen you like that before,’ Val insisted.

She tried to tell Val all of what had been going on in her head about Bart, ashamed of it as she was.

Val listened soberly, nodding her head. ‘It seems strange to me,’ she said finally, ‘that although you thought of Bart as the stranger, the foreign element, you were feeling like a stranger yourself. As if you were saying – I want to love you, man, but can I forgive you for what you’ve done to me? – as if you were perceiving similarities between Bart’s relation with whites and your relation with men.’

‘Oh, Val, that’s ridiculous! God, you insist on interpreting everything according to your fanatic, your monomaniacal beliefs! I just got drunk and soupy and feeling sorry for myself! That’s all there was to it!’

Val gazed at her for a moment, then moved her head slightly. ‘Okay. Sorry,’ she said, her voice sounding a little tight. ‘I have to go to the library.’ She picked up her books and left.

Mira sat there in Lehman Hall feeling slightly guilty, slightly relieved, trying to feel justified. Val had been kind to her. She’d had the dinner party, invited Ben. But why did she have to insist that everybody see
the world in the fanatical way she did? Mira picked up her books and walked out of the building, head down, ruminating. She decided she would never speak to Val again; she decided she would call her that night and apologize. Tears came to her eyes again. I’m having a nervous breakdown, she thought. Why was it so hard to know anything, anything at all?

‘Mira!’ a voice floated to her, and she looked up. A vision drifted toward her, a beautiful woman who looked like a young Katharine Hepburn, her hair, honey brown and glistening, floating out behind her in the sunlight, tall and slim, in pants and a sweater and a jacket that was open and flying behind her in the wind. It was Iso.

‘Iso!’

‘You look very sober.’

‘My God. You look gorgeous. What did you do?’

‘This is my natural self,’ Iso crowed, turning in a complete circle. ‘What do you mean, what did I do?’

They laughed. ‘It’s wonderful!’ Mira exclaimed. ‘What
did
you do?’

‘I let my hair down and I bought new clothes,’ Iso grinned.

‘Oh, God, if it could be that easy for me!’

‘You don’t need it,’ Iso flattered her.

‘Iso, have dinner with me tonight,’ she pleaded, finding a way out of her problem. If she could talk to someone, it would all become clear.

‘Oh, Mira, I’m sorry. I’m going to lunch now with Dawn Ogilvie – you know her? And I’m having dinner with Elspeth. And lunch tomorrow with Jeanie Braith. I’m sorry if I sound snooty. I’m just so delighted.’

She looked it. She beamed and glowed, she couldn’t stop shining.

‘You’re trying to be promiscuous,’ Mira ventured, a little smile around her mouth.

‘I’m trying to reach a place where I can be promiscuous,’ Iso corrected her. ‘I feel so good! I’m going to have a party, Saturday night, you’ll come, won’t you?’

‘I’ll come,’ Mira said admiring.

‘Anybody you want me to invite?’

‘You look beautiful.’

Iso turned a vulnerable child’s face to her. ‘Do you really think so?’ she asked, looking frightened.

‘I really think so,’ Mira said firmly. Iso glowed.

‘Well, I’m going to try.’ Her voice wavered. ‘I don’t have anything to lose, right?’

‘Right,’ Mira said, her voice wavering, full of tenderness, full of Val’s
kind of perception of the human race as a bunch of terrified children. ‘Oh, yes,’ she added, including herself in her teary pity for the race, ‘your party. Invite Ben Voler. You know him?’

‘The African guy. Yeah. Okay! Wish me luck!’ Iso drifted away.

The party was mobbed. Iso, obviously, knew everybody. Mira stood in the doorway of the dark living room which had been emptied of furniture, watching the dancers. Val was out on the floor making a fool of herself dancing with Lydia Greenspan; Iso was dancing, and Martin Bell, and Kyla, and even Howard Perkins, and the beautiful girl who looked like a gypsy, and Brad, and Stanley, who was dancing with Clarissa, who never looked at him and seemed to be dancing by and for herself. She was a marvelous dancer, and eventually, everyone else stopped and just watched her. She danced with her head bent, her eyes nearly closed. Her long dark hair fell across her face; her tautly muscled body wound and curved. Her dance was extremely sexual, but not sexy. Her body moved for its own pleasure, not for display, it joyed in sexuality as its own expression. Mira watched, suddenly perceiving the difference, although she could not have done what Clarissa was doing. How, she wondered, could Clarissa have so blanked out the room as to feel free to be herself? On the other hand, if one could not blank out rooms, would one feel free to be oneself when one was alone, a record blasting, dancing in one’s own empty apartment? Everything these days seemed too hard.

Iso was dressed in a long white Moroccan robe trimmed with red and gold braid. Her hair floated behind her. Her face had been transformed just the way they do it in the movies: the girl with the hat, the glasses, the pinched mouth, removes hat to reveal flowing blonde locks, takes off glasses and military jacket and is revealed as sex bombshell. Iso’s change was less dramatic, but the long hair – down to her shoulders – made her face look fuller, and her heightened color, her glamorous clothes gave what had been the face of a schoolmarm a cast of great sophistication, wisdom, experience. Mira was entranced.

‘Come on,’ Iso said. ‘It’s time you tried this.’ She reached out her hands.

‘I’d feel like a fool. I don’t know how to do it,’ Mira protested.

‘Just move your body the way the music feels,’ Iso said, and took her hands, and led her gently onto the floor.

She was dancing. Her awkwardness and self-consciousness vanished as soon as she realized that no one was looking at her. As the music blasted, she fell into it: she forgot herself and fell into its
rhythms and moods. Iso drifted away from her, and Kyla drifted to her: they did a
pas de deux
, grinning at each other. She danced opposite Brad, Howard, Clarissa. She began to understand. It was a wonderful kind of dancing. It was totally free. She was not dependent upon a partner, she did not have to bite her lip in irritation at his ineptness, or rage because she would like to spin and fly around the floor and he lifted and set his feet in the same single spot. She could do whatever she wanted, yet wherever her motion carried her there was someone else, she was in a group, she was one of them, they were together, all full of delight at their own bodies, their own rhythms. Suddenly, her eyes squeezed shut, then opened, she found herself opposite Val. Val was large and smiling, but her face flickered a little when she saw Mira, and Mira felt hurt, hurt for Val’s hurt, and she moved toward her and put her arms around Val and whispered in her ear, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ and moved back, and Val shrugged, grinning, glowing, and they danced, and moved apart to face someone else.