The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  He looked around. ‘I didn’t really notice.’

  ‘And I planted some flowers.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ he smiled at her benevolently. She had such a simple, sweet life: She could do things like plant flowers and get pleasure from it. Because he provided her the means.

  What do you do with yourself all day,

  Said little man to little maid,

  You have nothing to do but play

  Move about dust and tea on a tray

  And sing aloud to your heart’s content,

  While I’m out struggling to pay the rent.

  She cleared her throat and launched into what in her mind she called her column of Family Notes:

  ‘Normie broke a window playing baseball this afternoon.’

  ‘I hope you told him he’d have to pay for it out of his allowance!’

  ‘He didn’t mean to do it.’

  ‘I don’t care. He’s got to learn responsibility!’

  ‘All right, Norm. I’ll tell him you said …’

  ‘Why do you always have to make me the heavy? I’d think you’d be just as interested in his getting a little sense of responsibility! That kid thinks money grows on trees.’

  In my yard is a little money tree;

  It flowers and it flowers, but none of it’s for me.

  I rake and hoe and water to keep the tree in health,

  And all the neighbor women envy me my wealth.

  But all the little dollars growing on that tree

  Belong to Norm the Doctor, none of them to me.

  ‘Yes, Norm. And Clark got an A on a math test.’

  ‘Good, good.’ He rose. He sighed. He was tired. He put his glass down on the wooden tabletop. ‘I’m going to bed,’ he said. ‘Big day tomorrow.’

  Big day tomorrow. She heard him finish in the bathroom, was aware of the bedroom light being turned off. She rose and picked up his glass. She rubbed the table with the sleeve of her robe, drying it and erasing the watermark. She carried his glass into the kitchen, returned, poured herself another brandy, and turned off the light. She never went to bed when he did if she could help it.

  8

  Big day tomorrow: she wondered what that felt like. All her tomorrows were big days – tomorrow, for instance, she would tackle the living room. Yet they were not big days. What would that be like, a big day? The only way she could envision such a thing was to imagine going out early, just getting in the car and driving – oh, driving anywhere, to Manhattan, say, and going to – oh, a museum, or on a boat ride around the island. Just not doing her work, letting it go. Not coming home on time, leaving the kids, letting them fend for themselves. Coming home late, as late as Norm, a little drunk, maybe.

  No, of course she would not do such a thing. She did not even want to. The kids would be worried, frightened. Norm did his part, she would do hers. She did.

  Some nights, the conversation ran differently. Norm would come home perhaps a little earlier; he would be in a gay mood. She always recognized, with a little heart-fall, the occasion. Then, after she’d asked him about his day, he would turn to her with a special sweet smile on his face and say, ‘And what did the little mother do today?’

  Mira knew that Norm thought she was a wonderful mother. Not that he said so to her, but she’d heard him say it to other people, and he frequently mentioned it when he was scolding the boys: ‘Why did you do something like that to worry your mother, when you know what a wonderful mother she is?’ He himself had no patience with them. They always seemed to spill the milk when he was sitting at the lunch table with them; they always came home crying about some childhood tragedy on days when he was there to lay contempt on them for it. But somehow, whenever Norm asked her this question, her insides curled up. And he always had that same smile on his face, coy and fatherly at the same time, a smile you would use on a little girl who had just climbed up into your lap. It always made Mira blush, or at least feel hot in the face. And she’d stammer out something about the price of loin lamb chops or meeting Mrs Stillman at the dry cleaner or the vote to buy Christmas trees for each classroom taken by today’s meeting of the PTA. Whatever she said she would stammer out with the high color and tongue-tripping of the novice adulteress. But he never seemed to notice. Perhaps he expected her to be nervous when he interrogated her, like the string of young receptionists continually being hired and fired at the office, or like the young women who consulted him whispering about vaginal rash and who were breathless, blushing, and soft-spoken in response to his shot-out questions.

  He would listen, patiently, tolerantly to her trivialities, wanting to show his affection, waiting for her to finish. Then he would gaze at her kindly, stretch a little, and say, ‘Coming to bed?’ as if it were a question. Sometimes she would say, ‘I think I’ll look at the paper first,’ or ‘I’m not really tired yet,’ but he would simply put his hand out to her and she knew, she knew she had to stand up, to take his hand, to go to bed with him. She had no other choice. She knew it: so did he. It was an unwritten law. Maybe it was even a written law: he had rights over her body even when she did not want him to. Dutifully she would rise, but something inside her squirmed and squealed. She felt like a peasant girl commandeered by a noble in the droit de seigneur. She felt bought and paid for, and it was all of a piece; the house, the furniture, she, all were his, it said so on some piece of paper. He’d check lights and locks as she stood there, then come back and put his arm around her and gently propel her up the stairs and into the bedroom. Her reluctance seemed to please him.

  And she would feel her body moving differently from usual. Sometimes she would see a woman in the beauty shop, sometimes in the street, who moved the way she felt she was moving, as if their hips and arms and necks were borrowed pieces of porcelain that had to be taken special care of, as if they were jewels that belonged to someone else, as if movement did not arise in muscle and bone but was dictated by some outer music. Such bodies were not connections of bone and muscle, fat and nerve. Like slave girls brought in to dance for the sheik, they were soft tender skin oiled in warm baths and perfumed: for him. Their bodies existed only in the eye and hand of the owner even when he was not present. She remembered seeing Bliss move this way in the days when she had started to sing all the time. Mira had thought Bliss was moving to the music she sang. She did not know how her own movements looked, but they felt like that.

  Norm always insisted she come into his bed, and he always insisted on using rubbers. Her diaphragm lay drying in a box in her bed table. She would lie there waiting for him to get it on – he always had trouble with them – already feeling helpless and violated. Then he would lie down and lean toward her and take her nipple in his mouth and suck it until it hurt and she would push his head away. He assumed that meant she was ready, and he entered her, came in a few seconds, head thrown back, eyes shut, hands on her body but mind a thousand miles away, and she would lie there watching him with grim sarcasm, wondering what he was thinking about, what movie star or patient’s body, or perhaps just a color or scent, he was imagining. It was over fast and he never looked at her. He got right up and went into the bathroom and cleaned himself thoroughly. By the time he returned she had gone to her own bed and closed her eyes and was soothing her genitals into relaxation. He would say, ‘Good night, sweetie,’ get in bed and fall instantly to sleep. She would lie there soothing herself for a half hour or longer until she became aroused, then masturbate for fifteen or twenty minutes until she came and when she came she would cry, hard, bitter tears that she did not understand, for at the moment of orgasm the thing she felt besides relief was emptiness, an agonizing, cruel, and hopeless vacuum.

  Over the years, Mira had picked up a little sexual knowledge. She had, for some months, tried to get Norm to make love in a somewhat more tender way, but he was totally resistant to change. He believed that anything other than what he did impeded his pleasure, and that seemed to him wrong, unnatural. The only other act he was willing to perform was fellatio, and
that Mira firmly vetoed. On the whole, Norm probably felt that what was pleasant for him was pleasant for her, or if it were not, it was because like so many women, she was frigid. Mira gave up her attempts to change him, but she sought other ways to make the whole thing less wretched for her. She would try to think of other things, to let him do what he wanted and keep her mind elsewhere. But she was never successful at this because the moment his head came down on her breast, she was so full of rage that she could not concentrate on anything else. And no matter how short it was, she felt violated and used and will-less, and every month, every year, this feeling grew. She dreaded the least sign of desire in him. Fortunately, these signs appeared less and less often.

  9

  Things were changing for Mira’s friends. Paula and Brett were divorced and Paula remarried a man remarkably like Brett, only a shade more alive and considerably better off. Roger and Doris were divorced and Doris was grim and bitter, working in a state office typing out forms all day. Samantha had announced gaily that she was bored and was getting a job. Mira was appalled: the baby, Hughie, was only three, and even Fleur was still really a baby at six. She put it down to greed. Samantha no longer had dyed hair, and her cheek color was her own, but she still walked like a mechanical doll. And things kept happening: Fleur was taken sick at school while Sam was at work, and a neighbor had to care for the child, who was running a high fever. Hughie, whom Sam left all day with the same neighbor, fell out of a tree house and broke his wrist and was languishing for hours in the hospital emergency room before Sam could get there and sign the permission to treat him. Mira pressed her lips together at such news. It was all because Sam wasn’t home that these things happened. If she had been home with her children as she should have been, things wouldn’t have been so bad, and they might not have happened at all. She, Mira, would certainly never have allowed a three-year-old son of hers to play in a tree house. Mira was cool and disapproving whenever Sam called with the latest catastrophe.

  Sean and Oriane had moved to the Bahamas and bought a boat and were living, according to her letters, the paradisal life of the rich on Sean’s inheritance from his father. And Martha had gone back to school. She started part-time, and when she did well, matriculated as a full-time student. She wanted, she said, to be a lawyer. Mira pressed her lips at that too. It was absurd. Norm agreed. By the time Martha finished all her training, she would be thirty-seven or -eight. Who was going to hire a middle-aged, novice female lawyer? She wouldn’t even get into law school, Norm assured Mira. Mira believed it. All she had to do was look around her to know it was true. ‘Well, if it amuses her,’ Mira would say finally, brushing past the real reason for her unhappiness. For few of her friends were available anymore: everybody was at work, at school, at study, or just gone. She saw them mostly at an occasional evening get-together. Then something happened to end that.

  It was Lily’s idea. She had not been out in ages, she said, and neither had her friends Sandra and Geraldine, so why didn’t they all get together, the old crowd, and all go bowling together? Martha and George, Samantha and Simp, Mira and Norm, Lily and Carl, and the two new couples, old friends of Carl’s and Lily’s. It sounded like fun; they agreed.

  They sat in the bowling bay, talking when it wasn’t their turn, ordering great trays of drinks from the bar. Mira was glad to see them. She wondered at Sam, who looked tight and tired, but who bubbled over as much as ever about the latest catastrophe in her household. Simp was suave in his usual slimy, intimate way; he was drinking double martinis at a great rate, but alcohol never showed on him. Martha looked happy. She was tiny and delicate, with skin like porcelain and large deep blue eyes. She looked sweet, which was possibly the reason she so shocked people.

  ‘Oh, what a fucking idiot!’ she was saying, laughing at George. ‘That asshole! I told him it was wrong but he wouldn’t look, he wouldn’t come down and step back and look! He just kept on going like a blind fucking idiot! He stopped when the panel he was about to put up slanted so much it was almost parallel with the staircase molding. God!’ she laughed. ‘Each one had slanted just a little more. I screamed at him, but, oh, that man is useless.’

  George sat looking at her without expression, but Sam was uncomfortable with the form of Martha’s criticism. Had it been couched in the usual laughter and in milder language, it would have been a funny story, but there was too much real anger in Martha’s voice amid the laughter, and her diction was too strong.

  ‘Oh, well,’ Sam’s voice swooped comfortingly down, ‘George is a poet, not a carpenter. Simp had an awful time hanging a lamp and my father finally had to come over to help us. Remember, Simp?’ she turned to him brightly.

  ‘Sam, I could of gotten it up myself. It was Hughie – he kept picking up the screws and losing them.’

  ‘Oh, Simp!’

  ‘It’s true!’ he almost whined. ‘That kid gets into everything.’

  ‘Well, at least George tries,’ Mira said stiffly. ‘Norm doesn’t even bother. Last week I had to restring a venetian blind all by myself. Norm sat there watching a football game.’

  ‘Well, he works all week, Mira,’ Carl said lazily.

  ‘What do you think I do?’ she retorted sharply.

  ‘And this way,’ Carl continued as if he hadn’t heard her, ‘he got to watch the football game and your ass all at once.’

  George kept out of the conversation triggered by his inadequacies. He usually kept out of conversations, and when he talked, it was to the women. George worked in an anonymous job for a large corporation. He wrote poetry in his spare time, but never showed it to anyone. He had fixed up primitively some space in the attic where he kept his collection of mystical books and where he spent most of his time when he was home. They had two children and a nine-year-old jalopy that Martha never set foot in without first kicking and cursing. George was considered strange by men and some of the women. This was because he never stood in the kitchen talking about football and cars. He always sat with the women, sometimes talking, more often silent. He had confided to Mira that he preferred women – they were, he said, more alive, more interesting, more sensitive. They were involved with other people – the men were not. When George did talk, he always hooked the conversation to some mystic doctrine or other: he could talk for hours about the Kabala or the Vedas. No one was interested; no one listened. And if that were not enough to disqualify him from manliness, he wore his body like a slippery garment hung on a wire hanger. His arms dangled, his knees dipped; he often looked as if he were about to fall over. Mira thought he was ashamed of having a body at all, and that when he was in his ‘study,’ he lost it. Yet George liked to dance, and did it well, and he was, Martha said often, a great lover.

  ‘You ought to try George,’ Martha said whenever Mira complained about her sex life with Norm. ‘I’m serious. He’s good.’ Mira would gaze at her a little incredulously. She had never heard a woman say that about her husband. ‘Any problems we have in sex are my doing,’ Martha would insist. ‘The lovemaking is great; I just can’t get it off.’

  ‘What about when you masturbate?’

  ‘I can’t. Can’t masturbate. I can’t have an orgasm no matter what, and George is willing – God, he’s even happy – to spend hours helping me. Nothing works. I think I may go to a shrink.’

  After their turns, Mira and Martha sat down together apart from the others.

  ‘Lily’s friends are a strange lot,’ Mira said disapprovingly.

  ‘Yeah, unusual.’ They examined the four surreptitiously. Harry was short and fat and gray-faced. They had heard that he did something illegal, was a bookie or something, but he didn’t fit any movie-criminal image they knew. He seemed sad and tired, and lifted his eyelids with effort. Tom was huge; tall and muscular, he looked as if he used his body for heavy work. He was dark-haired, and sat or stood apart from those who were strange to him, glaring out under heavy dark eyebrows. His wife also remained aloof, not near him, but not far from him. She was wearing a pale blue dr
ess with silver threads through it, made of a sleazy fabric, form-fitting. She had a good body. She had exchanged pale blue satin heels for bowling shoes, but they stood on the floor under the bench where she’d lain her silver bag. She had dyed blonde hair piled high on her head, and false eyelashes. It was a strange outfit to go bowling in.

  Lily managed to knock down three pins, and sighing, turned and joined Martha and Mira. She sank on the bench. She too was dressed for a party, wearing a satin blouse with her slacks and a rhinestone comb in her hair.

  ‘That Geraldine is really something,’ Martha said.

  Geraldine was short, like her husband, and a little plump, but shapely. She was tremendously energetic: she spoke, handled her ball and rolled it down the alley all in gusts of strength that didn’t seem to end.

  ‘Yes, she’s sexy. She always was,’ Lily said.

  Mira looked at the woman intently. What was that – sexy? What was it about her that made people call her that? She was no more attractive than any of them, certainly not more than Lily. Her body was, in Mira’s thin view, overweight. She did not wiggle it, or arch it, or any of those things Mira had seen other women do. Yet the men seemed fascinated by her.

  ‘That – what’s his name, Lily? – the big man? …’

  ‘Tom.’

  ‘Yes. He looks as if he hates her.’

  The man was watching Geraldine bowl, his face smoldering.

  ‘Yes,’ Lily sighed. ‘He’s strange. Geraldine is a good kid, she’s fun, alive, you know? Tom is just – oh, I don’t know. They’re all from the old neighborhood, Carl and Tom and Harry and Dina, they all grew up together, except Dina’s much younger. They’re all strange, those men, they all believe in the old ways. Carl is bad, but Tom is the worst. They don’t know how to live, those men. They only know how to kill. Harry’s okay, he’s pretty good to Geraldine, except these Mafia types in big black cars keep coming around to terrify her every once in a while. I guess Harry gets in trouble with them. Poor Sandra, she never gets out of the house. Tom keeps her under lock and key. That’s why I planned this evening – I thought it would help her, give her a little break.’