The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  ‘Oh, they save me, really, they save my sanity. I know he wants to drive me back there, but I’m not going to let him do it. I won’t. I won’t,’ she ended, stubborn, recalcitrant as ever. Her chin jutted out, and those terrible eyes stared at some fire in the distance, and beneath the shapeless housedress, her thin body tightened and looked hard and angular as steel.

  13

  ‘She hasn’t learned the lesson,’ Martha said in that direct way that managed to combine grimness with humor. ‘Fucking bastards are only telling her one thing: YOU HAVE NOT LEARNED TO ACCEPT YOUR LIFE. And she had damn well better do it, or they’ll have her back in there so fast she won’t know what hit her.’

  ‘She’s fighting so hard.’

  ‘Fuck it! Adjustment is the thing. When the world is crazy you had better be crazy along with it or they’ll stick you in the madhouse. Fucking psychiatrists. I’m surprised they didn’t try to fuck up more than her mind. Every attractive woman I know who’s gone to a shrink, including myself, ended up bare-assed on that couch.’

  Mira had a problem with Martha’s language and her directness, but somehow Martha brought something refreshing into her life. After a conversation with Martha, Mira felt she had a little more room to breathe. But sometimes she felt like a voyeur on Martha’s life.

  ‘Really! What happened?’

  Martha recounted it easily, laughing at the psychiatrist’s line, laughing at the ease with which she had swallowed it, laughing at her own expectations.

  ‘I knew he was a turd. But I adored him! Transference, you know. So I figured this was my chance. If I screwed him, it might happen, I might finally make it to orgasm.’ She laughed heartily. ‘He was such a klutz! My God, I don’t think he understood the first thing about a woman’s body. But I imagine he thinks he did me a great favor: physical therapy, you know? They’re all convinced that the sacred prick can solve all ills, and I’m quite willing to believe that, being a worshiper of the sacred prick myself. The only problem is I still have to find one that’s sacred!’

  Mira felt her lips purse.

  ‘Well, Martha, I don’t know about what you’re saying, but when Lily got out of the hospital, I thought that because of her bad feelings about men it might be a good idea for her to go to a woman psychiatrist, and I talked to Newton Donaldson about it – Norm’s psychiatrist friend, you know? And he said that would be the worst thing in the world. He acted really shocked. He said that would lead to homosexuality.’

  ‘Oh, he did? And did you ask him what happens when male patients go to male psychiatrists?’

  ‘No,’ Mira said uneasily.

  ‘No,’ Martha cackled back at her. ‘Of course not! You just took his word as the word of God, the way you take Norm’s. You should hear yourself: Norm said this, Norm said that. The Great God Norm!’ She sat back laughing, waving her drink around.

  Sometimes Mira felt a strong dislike for Martha. ‘How’s school?’ she asked tightly.

  Martha giggled. ‘Getting too hot for you, huh? Okay.’ She launched into a discussion of how school was, and although she was talking only about herself and the people she met and the structure she had entered into, Mira felt just as uncomfortable as she had when Martha talked about her, Mira’s, life. She wondered if she was masochistic, if that was why she held on to Martha. Martha did slash and jab. But Mira knew that was not it. Martha was a touchstone. She had an unfailing shit detector. She did not pick up every truth, but she picked up every lie. It was, she said, because she had been such a liar all her life. ‘I lied my way from kindergarten to twelfth grade. Successfully. So now I know the creature when I meet it.’ And with anything except lies, she was generous. She listened and she tried to see – only that, to see. She did not have immediate slots for all behavior – Lily’s crazy, Carl ought to put his foot down, Natalie’s a whore, Paul’s a bastard – the kind of thing Norm came up with as the final significance of every event. If someone said to Martha, ‘I feel so useless,’ she would not, like most people, immediately answer, ‘Why should you feel like that, that’s silly, of course you’re not useless.’ Or stupid, or inadequate, or wrong, or whatever it was. She would just say, ‘Why?’ and listen to the why and try to see how that felt. One could trust Martha to challenge one’s lies and yet not to deny one’s reality. That made Martha very rare.

  Still, she made Mira uneasy. She broke all the rules and she got away with it. Years ago, Mira had envied Martha the easy way she could curse out George and tell him what a klutz he was, and the easy way he could laugh at her attacks, crying out laughing, ‘I know, I know!’ Yet when everyone condemned George for a coward and a lecher, Martha shrugged off the world’s judgment and supported him: he had done the best thing possible under the circumstances. She could talk about going to law school and either not notice or not care that the people around her regarded her as deranged and deluded. And going back to college had given Martha confidence and authority in spheres other than the personal. This was especially difficult for Mira, who had always seen herself as the intellectual in every group. Martha had entered into not just a new sphere, but one larger than the one women usually occupied. At the university, relations were professional: feelings were the same, but rules were different. The politics of the kaffeeklatsch, if similar in nature, were more personal in reference than the politics of the classroom, the dean’s office, the teacher-student conference. When Martha talked about this, her descriptions had the verve and awed humor of the one kid in the neighborhood who had been permitted to venture off the block, or the one villager who had returned to tell the others about the big city. School was great and terrible, wonderful and awful, but it was exciting. And there was the double challenge of crossing lines. Martha’s French professor had, after a conference on her term paper, invited her out for drinks. He was tall and tanned, a skier. His name was David. They had laughed a lot and he had let his large brown eyes wash over her. One evening after class she went up to ask him a question; they talked for a while, and again he invited her out for drinks. This came to be a habit, every Tuesday evening. One Tuesday, he suggested dinner, and since George was out of town and she had had only a cup of soup before class, Martha accepted. In time, the suggestions moved further. Martha was perturbed. Today was Monday, and she had promised to give him an answer the next night.

  ‘He’s really cute, a real doll, you know? And I like him a lot, even if he isn’t as smart as he imagines he is. And of course, it flatters me that he should pick me out of a class of girls a hell of a lot younger and thinner than I am. But the politics of it bothers me. If I screw him and I get an A for the course, I’ll always feel – not that I didn’t earn the A, I know I did – that I am subject to the accusation that I earned it on my back. I don’t like that.’

  ‘Why not tell him that?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. That’s it. I’ll ask him to wait until the term is over, and if he’s still interested, then we’ll see. Yes, that’s it.’

  She left, cheerful, busy, confident. Mira sat. Her mind felt like a red sea, swirling and hot as fire, liquid fire. She understood for the first time what it meant to be consumed with jealousy. Martha was perturbed, Martha had problems. But what problems! It was not just that Martha had such an attractive-sounding man interested in her; it was not even that she was accomplishing something, getting a degree and making plans for law school. It was that Martha, who up till a couple of years ago had been confined to the same narrow circle Mira inhabited, now felt ease and confidence in that larger world, that she could move through it without terror, could go so far as to let herself in for difficulties by going out for drinks with David, by risking that the acquaintance might turn sexual, and felt able to deal with it even after it had.

  It staggered Mira. She felt deeply that it took some special qualities to move out of the little circle, and whatever they were – courage, confidence, energy, resiliency – she did not possess them. She sat that night and many nights after, considering. She felt ashamed, a coward. She remember
ed her teachers’ high estimate of her intellect and abilities the way an aged athlete might remember the touchdown that had won the trophy for his high-school team. Her childhood ambitions rose again in her memory. She brushed them away, but they stuck like threads of cobweb that get trapped in a shred of broken plaster even as you try to dust them off.

  Above all, she had to get rid of the jealousy: it was too painful. So she sat with two, then three, and even sometimes four brandies, watching the moon weave through the clouds, and applied her mind to the subject of human effort. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust: what did it all mean in the end? She reminded herself that what gets called accomplishment in the world is often meretricious, and even when it is not, it is futile. All the works of men’s hands and minds come to dust in the end. Consider, for instance, how much time and concentration it must have taken to come up with the idea of the lever, or what a stroke of imaginative brilliance had been required to come up with the notion of putting those little green leaves around the meat as you roasted it. Everything was so hard, and took so long. Mira remembered writing papers in school, spending months reading, thinking hard, coming up with a conclusion that seemed astoundingly original and perceptive, only to run across it a year later in an essay published before she was born. What did it cost to build a kingdom? An empire? Only to have it, in time, disappear like Mira beneath a nameless desert. People violated their insides by murdering others by sword or gun, poison or starvation, to set up a dynasty that would fall in a year or ten or a hundred. What difference did the extra zeroes make when the thing was doomed to fall sometime?

  It was men who did these things. Pompous and self-aggrandizing, they tried to erect permanently in the outside world symbols of the penile erection they could not maintain in their flesh. Delusion, hideous delusion, to which they had sacrificed millions of less insane humans. The Great God Norm: was it true she quoted him like a god? She could remember when she thought him less intelligent than herself. What had happened? He had moved from frightened boy to authoritative man, but she knew he was still as hollow as ever. Still, she’d allowed his position to dictate hers. Suppose now she moved, slid out from under him saying, ‘I’m not comfortable here.’ What was the point, what was to be gained? She would cause suffering to others and herself, and for what? Did she dare disturb the universe?

  And if she succeeded in extricating herself, then what? She might have the excitement and joy Martha seemed to be living with, but everything in Mira told her there was only one direction for that excitement and joy – increasing loneliness. You could break society’s rules, and you might even get away with it, but after such success, what return? Forever and forever you would be alone. Perhaps then you could make great art, or good art. But for what: in a world where poems are used to start fires and paintings are bombed off walls, where libraries are destroyed and monuments crumble, and even the art that survives is just so much dead stone sitting in a room in a museum where no one goes because they don’t understand what they are looking at. Would it matter to the people of 1964 if Beowulf had simply vanished forever? Would the world be different?

  Life passed: the trees changed color, the flowers bloomed and died, the air was soft or chafing. The best one could do was sit and watch them and take pleasure in the inevitable one could not change. This was what women did. It was women who kept the world going, who observed the changing seasons and kept the beauty high, women who cleaned the world’s house, who kept the cobwebs off the windows so that people could keep on seeing out. Enduring continuation, the hard lot. No one pinned medals on you or gave you honorary degrees; you didn’t get to wear fancy costumes and walk in processions; your bust would never be set up in any hall of greats. But it was her task. The rest was the sound of puny voices raised against the wind.

  That winter and spring, Mira developed a serenity, a calm transcendence that shone from her face. People praised her for looking well, and she felt somehow blessed. She had, for all her confusion and unhappiness over the years, attained harmony and grace with herself and her life. Adjustment, Martha would have called it, but it felt tinged with divinity. She felt more feminine. She could sit silent at parties, listening to the men talk, smiling at them with tolerance and benevolence, instead of arguing and having to assert herself. Men moved towards her like a magnet: she felt beloved. Somehow, she thought, she had managed to make the right choices. She had escaped the old continuing pain. She felt like one of the elect, and unconsciously she believed that having now attained this grace, she would never lose it. She had achieved not just grace, but invulnerability.

  14

  She maintained her equilibrium even after Martha fell in love. It was David, the French teacher, who had understood perfectly Martha’s reluctances, who had been ‘just right,’ had waited until the term was over, had been passionately assertive afterward, but without being overbearing. He wanted her, but he did not think he had a right to her. He was wonderful. It was hard for Mira to listen, but listen she did, through hours and days and weeks of Martha’s joy, the joy that glistened in her eyes and glowed in her face and made her look ten years younger – his age, in fact. Mira listened to every shared coffee hour and lunch, every cocktail hour, every bedroom scene. He was Martha’s brother, her twin, her other self: Mira thought about the dangers of narcissism. He was a great lover, had a great prick and thrust and gave Martha the thrill of his, if not her own, orgasm: Mira thought about projection and forms of homosexuality. He was everything she, Martha, wanted to be but wasn’t – assertive and confident in the world, yet graceful at the same time: Mira thought about the theory that love is envy. They could tolerate each other because they were both obsessive, fanatical about details and about personal cleanliness. The worst argument they had had concerned whether the shampoo and conditioner bottles should be permitted to stand permanently on the tub ledge, or whether the tub ledge should at all times be kept immaculate and free from clutter. The argument had nearly led to blows, yet afterward they were both able to laugh at it.

  Martha was on an endless high, with her mouth always full of David. (One way or another, Mira thought nastily.) David was also married and the father of one child, a two-year-old girl. But it sounded to Mira as though Martha, undaunted by such details, was thinking about David not as a lover but as a permanent condition of her life. ‘I almost get it off with him. Sex is glorious, and just talking is glorious, and being with him makes me feel full all the way down. I don’t have to be anything, I can just be. I can’t tell you how great it is.’

  But Mira knew. Don’t we all? Isn’t that what they feed us, what our imaginations are full of from the time we can think about love? Mira was happy for her friend, although her sense of personal lack was heightened by this perpetual bliss going on in the very next room and unable to be blotted out. She had to work to keep her detached perspective. She had to remind herself of how transitory love was, how fragile; she had to put the thing in its social context and remember claims of spouses, children, the entire social fabric. But nothing could keep the buoyancy of Martha’s feelings from spilling over all of it, like well-tended farmland simply wiped out by a flood. The flood, while it lasted, was all there was, and was such an intense reality that transcendence was difficult to maintain in the face of it. Mira felt perched on the roof of a shaky chicken house being totteringly borne downstream. But she kept her balance, and worked much in her garden.

  She was working in her garden with a little transistor radio perched near her, listening to a broadcast about the three young civil rights workers who had disappeared in Mississippi, when the phone rang and Amy Fox, an old friend from Meyersville, came screaming on about Samantha. Mira did not understand but it sounded as if she were saying that Sam was going to be put in jail. Amy kept saying, ‘I know you’re a good friend of hers, and maybe you could help.’

  Mira tried to phone Samantha, but was told the telephone had been disconnected. That was odd. She had not heard from Sam in weeks. Mira showered and dressed and d
rove to Samantha’s house. It was a seven-room house in a pleasant suburb, hundred-foot plots with some old trees left behind by the builder. Children were bicycling in the street, but the place had the deserted look of most suburbs. As she approached Samantha’s front door, she noticed something – a notice of some sort – tacked onto it. Were they sick? She moved closer: it was a notice of repossession signed by the sheriff’s office. Repossession? She rang the bell, wondering if Samantha were at work, but she answered the door. Mira just stood looking at her. Was this Samantha, the mechanical doll? She was wearing old slacks and a shabby shirt. Her hair was short, uncurled, and unkempt and its color was a mousy brown. She wore no make-up and her face was pale and haggard.

  ‘Sam,’ she began, putting out her hands.

  ‘Hi, Mira.’ Samantha did not take the hands. ‘Come in.’

  ‘Amy called.’

  Samantha shrugged and led Mira into the kitchen. The house was full of boxes.