The Women's Room (9 page)

Part of her knew that she was simply surviving in the only way she could. Dull day by dull day she paced through her responsibilities, moving toward some goal she could not discern. The word
freedom
had dropped from her vocabulary; the word
maturity
replaced it. And dimly she sensed that maturity was knowing how to survive. She was as lonely as ever; except sometimes at night, she and Norm, cuddled
up together, would talk seriously. One night she was discussing what she wanted: to go back to school and eventually get a Ph.D. and teach. Norm was horrified. He mentioned the problems, financial difficulties, her exhaustion – she would have to do all that and still cook and clean, because when he went back to school he would no longer have time to help her. She argued that they could share. He reminded her that after all he was the one responsible for earning the living: he didn’t insist, he wasn’t peremptory, he didn’t demand. He merely stated it and asked if that weren’t so. Frowning and puzzled, reluctantly, she agreed. It was what she had wanted: Norm was responsible, not like Lanny. He would never leave her to go out and get drunk with the boys while she listened to a crying baby, down on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor. Medical school was difficult, demanding, he added. She could do that, she insisted: do what he said he couldn’t, go to med school and still help out in the house. He pulled out his big gun: there would be guys, they would give her a hard time, male professors insisting she screw her way to a degree. He was too obvious this time. She pondered. ‘Sometimes I think you’d like to lock me up in a convent, Norm, where only you could visit me.’

‘It’s true. I would.’ He was serious.

She turned away from him, and he fell asleep. In three months, the protection she had sought had already become oppressive. It was what she had wanted too, wasn’t it? If she had been less wretched, she would have laughed.

15

Survival is an art. It requires the dulling of the mind and the senses, and a delicate attunement to waiting, without insisting on precision about just what it is you are waiting for. Vaguely, Mira thought of ‘The End’ as Norm’s finishing both med school and his internship, but that was so far off, and five years of the boredom she was living in seemed so unendurable that she preferred not to think at all.

Norm went back to school, and as she had expected, no longer watched TV. But she found that she could not concentrate even though it was off. She suspected the problem was not just tiredness; when she picked up a serious book, one that made her think, she thought. And that was unbearable, because to think involves thinking about one’s own life. She read at night, read voluminously. It was like
the beginning of her adolescence. She read junk: mystery novels, light social satirists like O’Hara and Marquand and Maugham. She could not handle anything more true.

She blamed Norm for nothing. She took care of him, worried about him, cooked what he liked, and asked nothing of him. It was not Norm she hated, but her life. But what other life could she have, being the way she was? Although Norm was often ill-tempered, he insisted that he loved her and was happy with her. It was the stupid school he hated, the stupid finicky professors. He was not doing well: he got through his first year with an undistinguished record. He blamed his low grades on being upset about her. For she was pregnant.

It was May that she missed her period. This made her nervous because she was regular, but also because, after her first disastrous attempts with a diaphragm, Norm had insisted that they continue in the old way. He did not like her fiddling for ten minutes in the bathroom when he was full of ardor. And she suspected that he wanted control over the situation himself. She worried about the risk with condoms, but sometimes, when they were very broke, Norm used nothing at all, and withdrew before orgasm. She felt that was risky; he assured her it was all right.

The way she gave herself over to him in this area seemed strange to her in later years. The fact was she hated using a diaphragm. She had come to dislike sex entirely, for he would get her aroused and leave her dissatisfied; now, when she masturbated, she wept. She realized, looking back, that she had given her life over to him just as she had perforce given her life over to her parents. She had simply transferred her childhood. And Norm, although he was seven years older than she, had been in the army during the war and had a few adventures, was not old enough to have a twenty-year-old child. Perhaps, in some dark hidden place in her mind, she had wanted a child: perhaps what she was waiting for, what she called maturity, involved having one and getting it over with. Perhaps.

At the time, it felt like a disaster. How would they live? White and drawn, she went to a gynecologist. She came home with the news on an evening when Norm was studying for an important exam. She was worn out from work, the bus rides, the hour’s wait in the doctor’s office. She imagined as she walked the two blocks from the bus stop that maybe Norm would have cooked some dinner. But he was studying, eating cheese and crackers when she came in, and he was irritated with her for being out so late, although he knew where she had gone and why.
As she entered the apartment, she looked across the room at him: he stared mutely back. For three weeks they had discussed little else: there was no need to speak.

Suddenly he threw the book he had been holding across the room.

‘You’ve just ruined my life, do you realize that?’

She sat down on the edge of a rocking chair.
‘I
just ruined
your
life?’

‘I’ll have to quit school now, how else are we going to live?’ He lighted a cigarette with nervous intensity. ‘And how am I supposed to study for this exam when you come home with this? If I flunk it, I flunk out. Did you realize that?’

She sat back, half closing her eyes, detached. She wanted to point out to him the illogic of his last sentences. She wanted to point out to him the injustice of his attack. But the fact that he felt right in making it, felt that he had legitimate grounds to treat her like a naughty child, overwhelmed her. It was a force against which she could not struggle, for his legitimacy was supported by the outside world, and she knew that. She tried. She leaned forward.

‘Did I chase you around the bed? You said your way was safe.
You
said it, Mr Medical Student!’

‘It is!’

‘Yeah. That’s why I’m pregnant.’

‘It is. I tell you.’

She looked at him. His face was nearly blue at the edges, his mouth a tight cruel accusing line.

Her voice faltered. ‘Are you saying you are not the father of this child? Are you suggesting it happened some other way?’

He glared at her with bitter hate. ‘How should I know? You tell me you never slept with anybody but me, and how can I tell? There sure was enough talk about you and Lanny. Everybody talked about you. You were free enough in those days, why should it be different now?’

She leaned back again. She had told Norm about her fear of sex, her fear of men, her timidity in a part of the world she did not understand. And he had listened sweetly, caressing her face, holding her close to him. She had thought he understood, thought it even more because he seemed, despite his stories about army adventures, to share it – her shyness and fear and timidity. She thought she had escaped, but all she had done was to let the enemy into her house, let him into her body, he was growing there now. He thought in the same way they did; he, like them, believed he had innate rights over her because he
was male and she was female; he, like them, believed in things they called virginity and purity, or corruption and whoredom, in women. But he was gentle and respectful; he was among the best of men. If he was like them, there was no hope. It was not worthwhile living in such a world. She leaned back farther and closed her eyes; she began to rock gently in the chair. She went into a quiet darkened place in her mind. There were many ways to die, she did not have to think about that now. All she had to do was find a way out, and she had done that. She would die, and all this would end. It would go away. She would never again have to feel what she was feeling now, which was just like what she had been feeling for years, except stronger. The rockets were exploding all over her body. Her heart ached no more than her stomach or her brain. It was all exploding in fire and tears, and the tears were as hot and hurtful as the fires of rage. There was nothing to be said. He simply would not have understood. It went too deep, and it seemed that she was alone, that she was the only person who felt this way. It must be that, although she felt entirely right, she was wrong. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

After a long time, Norm approached her. He knelt down at the side of her chair. ‘Honey,’ he said sweetly. ‘Honey?’

She rocked.

He put his hand on her shoulder and she shuddered away from it.

‘Get away from me,’ she said dully, her tongue cleaving to the roof of her mouth. ‘Just leave me alone.’

He pulled a footstool over and sat close to her, putting his arms around her legs, laying his head in her lap. ‘Honey, I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t know how I’ll finish school. Maybe my folks will help us.’

She knew it was true. She knew that he was just frightened, as frightened as she. But he felt he had a right to blame her. Upset as she had been when she heard the news, it had not occurred to her to blame him. She had seen it simply as a mess they were in together. She put her hands on his head. It was not his fault. It was just that everything was poisoned. It didn’t matter. She would die and be out of it. When she touched him, he began to cry. He was as frightened as she, more frightened maybe. He clutched her legs tighter, he sobbed, he apologized. He didn’t mean it, he didn’t know what had got into him, it was ridiculous childishness, he was sorry. He clutched and cried and she began to caress his head. He cheered up, he looked at her, he caressed her cheek, he joked, he wiped away the water that was running
down her face, he laid his head against her breast. She wept fully in great jolting sobs and he held her against him in astonishment, not having known, saying, ‘I’m sorry, honey, oh, God, I’m sorry,’ thinking, she imagined, that she was weeping about his suspicion of her fidelity, not knowing, never to know, never to understand. Finally he smiled up at her as her sobs came less often and less strong, and asked her if she weren’t hungry. She understood. She rose and made dinner. And in January, she had the baby, and a year and a half later she had another. Norm’s parents lent them money on a note: eight thousand dollars to be repaid when he went into practice. After that she got another diaphragm. But by then she was a different person.

16

Virginia Woolf, whom I revere, complained about Arnold Bennett. In a literary manifesto, she attacked his way of writing novels. She thought he placed too much emphasis on facts and figures, grimy dollars – or pounds – on exterior elements that were irrelevant to the dancing moments that were a person. That essence shone, she felt, through my accent, through ten-year-old winter coats and string bags laden with vegetables and spaghetti, shone in the glance of an eye, in a sigh, a heavy if enduring trudge down the steps of a train and off into the murky light of Liverpool. One doesn’t need a person’s bank statement to see their character. I don’t care much for Bennett, and I love Woolf, but I think his grimy pounds and pence had more to do with Rhoda and Bernard than she would admit. Oh, she did know. She understood the need for five hundred pounds a year; and a room of one’s own. She could envision Shakespeare’s sister. But she imagined a violent, an apocalyptic end for Shakespeare’s sister, whereas I know that isn’t what happened. You see, it isn’t necessary. I know that lots of Chinese women, given in marriage to men they abhorred and lives they despised, killed themselves by throwing themselves down the family well. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. I’m only saying that isn’t what usually happens. If it were, we wouldn’t be having a population problem. And there are so much easier ways to destroy a woman. You don’t have to rape or kill her; you don’t even have to beat her. You can just marry her. You don’t even have to do that. You can just let her work in your office for thirty-five dollars a week. Shakespeare’s sister did, as Woolf thought, follow her brother to London, but she never got there. She
was raped the first night out, and bleeding and inwardly wounded, she stumbled for shelter into the next village she found. Realizing before too long that she was pregnant, she sought a way to keep herself and her child safe. She found some guy with the hots for her, realized he was credulous, and screwed him. When she announced her pregnancy to him, a couple of months later, he dutifully married her. The child, born a bit early, makes him suspicious: they fight, he beats her, but in the end he submits. Because there is something in the situation that pleases him: he has all the comforts of home including something Mother didn’t provide, and if he has to put up with a screaming kid he isn’t sure is his, he feels now like one of the boys down at the village pub, none of whom is sure they are the children of their fathers or the fathers of their children. But Shakespeare’s sister has learned the lesson all women learn: men are the ultimate enemy. At the same time she knows she cannot get along in the world without one. So she uses her genius, the genius she might have used to make plays and poems with, in speaking, not writing. She handles the man with language: she carps, cajoles, teases, seduces, calculates, and controls this creature to whom God saw fit to give power over her, this hulking idiot whom she despises because he is dense and fears because he can do her harm.

So much for the natural relation between the sexes.

But you see, he doesn’t have to beat her much, he surely doesn’t have to kill her: if he did, he’d lose his maidservant. The pounds and pence by themselves are a great weapon. They matter to men, of course, but they matter more to women, although their labor is generally unpaid. Because women, even unmarried ones, are required to do the same kind of labor regardless of their training or inclinations, and they can’t get away from it without those glittering pounds and pence. Years spent scraping shit out of diapers with a kitchen knife, finding places where string beans are two cents less a pound, learning to wake at the sound of a cough, spending one’s intelligence in figuring the most efficient, least time-consuming way to iron men’s white shirts or to wash and wax the kitchen floor or take care of the house and kids and work at the same time and save money, hiding it from the boozer so the kid can go to college – these not only take energy and courage and mind, but they may constitute the very essence of a life.