The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  ‘You’re moving?’

  ‘I have no choice,’ Sam’s voice said acidly. This was sweet, bubbly Samantha, who wiggled through the days getting delight from everything?

  She poured coffee for them.

  ‘What happened?’

  She told her story tonelessly, as if she had told it many times before, but she lingered over every detail. It was her epic, etched in her memory by sheer pain. It had started years ago, soon after Sam and Simp moved from Meyersville. ‘But we didn’t tell anyone. Pride, I guess. It all seemed too shameful.’ Simp had lost his job and had taken months to find another. They had gone deeply into debt. She took a job, trying to help out. Eventually, he found something but they were still impoverished trying to pay back the debts. Then his teeth had needed repair and it had taken them two years to pay for them. Meantime he lost his job again. That time he got another before too long, but Samantha was beginning to feel worn out, even doomed. Everyone else was doing well, or so it seemed to her: moving up and out into larger worlds. She skimped on everything, but they were never able to break even. Then Simp lost his job again. There were arguments: Sam wanted him to get out of sales and go into another field. He would make a good junior-high teacher, she thought, and he had a college degree. He could substitute and take some ed courses and eventually get a teaching job. But he was adamant. Sales was where the money was and one day he’d get his break. It wasn’t his fault. He got orders. But there was always something: the manufacturer didn’t deliver on time, the manufacturer went out of business, the territory he’d been given was a poor one. This time, though, he did not make such an effort to get another job. He’d sit at home poring through the newspaper and wouldn’t go into town unless he saw an interesting ad. He was underfoot all the time and they were living on a tiny unemployment check.

  Mira remembered that she had condemned Sam in her mind for leaving her children, and she recalled Sam’s pert appearance and manner, recalled not liking it, finding it artificial, brittle even. She had thought Sam greedy.

  ‘But where was Simp? I mean, I remember some accidents, that happened then when no one was home …’

  Samantha shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ She turned away. The toneless monotony of her voice gave way, and she put her face in her hands. The rest came from deep in her throat, a voice like a clot of tears. She couldn’t earn much, she had no training, she got a job typing for $75 a week, Simp got unemployment, she stretched but it was impossible to pay the mortgage and eat. The situation was aggravated by her coming home every night to find him sitting there with his third martini, not having made any effort at all. ‘He couldn’t lower his pride, wouldn’t even think of taking a job pumping gas, anything, anything at all, to feed his kids!’ Then her checks started to bounce and she made inquiries and found that during the days he went out, God knows where, and wrote checks, God knows for what, at all the local bars. Their mortgage payments went further and further into default.

  ‘It got to be too bad. Every night I’d come home and scream at him. The kids never came home if they could help it. It was terrible. I had to cancel our joint checking account and warn the bank not to cash his checks. I couldn’t stand it anymore. It was like living with a monstrous child. So I made him leave.’

  She blew her nose and poured more coffee. ‘So.’ She sat back, her eyes in dry hollows, her mouth a rubber band pulled out of shape. ‘The other day the sheriff came. I got hysterical and I tried to keep him from nailing that thing to my door. My poor kids! The neighbors. Well, everyone knows now. There’s nothing left to lose. I don’t know where we’ll go. Simp is living with his mother in her big house in Beau Reve. I called him and he said we should go on welfare. While I was packing, I cleaned out his closet – there were some boxes on the shelf, and behind them was that.’ She pointed to a giant stack of papers, which would have been several feet high if it had been put in one pile. ‘Bills. All Bills. Some of them are two years old. Most he never even opened. Just stuck them up there as if they’d go away themselves.’

  She took the cigarette Mira offered her, lighted it, and inhaled deeply. ‘Ummm. Luxury. I’ve given it up for the duration,’ she said smiling. It was her first smile. ‘Thing is, altogether we owe out about sixty thousand dollars. Can you imagine that? I can’t. Whenever Simp borrowed money, I always cosigned the notes. So now, they can’t get anything from him because he doesn’t work, but I do, and so they’re putting liens on my pay. I mean, I have two kids to feed! On my pay!’ Tears rose to her eyes again. ‘I’m thirty-one years old and the rest of my life is already signed over to that debt. The only thing that’s saved me is my friends. They are so wonderful.’

  The women in the neighborhood had gathered together when they learned about Samantha’s difficulty, and with great delicacy had done what they could. ‘Made a great pot of spaghetti tonight, Sam, but I made too much and you know my family and leftovers, I was wondering if you could do me a favor – your kids like spaghetti, don’t they? – and give it to your kids for lunch or something.’ ‘Sam, Jack went fishing yesterday and I’m drowning in bluefish. Could you use a couple? Please?’ ‘Sam, Nick and I are going to the club tonight and that place is so damned boring, why don’t you come along with us and liven it up?’ Delicacy, care, not to appear to be giving charity; tact about the hand-me-down clothes, the little recreations, about being sure always to pick her up so she wouldn’t have to put gas in her car. ‘The thing that hurts me most is the thought of leaving them.’

  ‘What will happen now?’

  She shrugged again. ‘Unless I can come up with three hundred dollars for one month’s mortgage payment, we’re out on the street as of Friday. If I could have a month, Nick – May’s husband, he’s a lawyer and he’s been just great – might be able to get something out of Simp and make some arrangements to tide us over until I can find a place.’

  ‘What about your parents?’

  ‘My father died last winter. His retirement annuity ended with his death. My mother is living on Social Security and his insurance – he didn’t have much. She barely gets by. I haven’t told her any of this. She’s in Florida living with my aunt. It would just upset her and there’s nothing she can do.’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘Yeah. You know what really gets me – I like working. I mean if I had been the man – I wouldn’t have minded. And Simp could have stayed at home. You know? But everything hangs on them. You’re no one without them. If they flub up, you’re finished. It’s like – you’re dependent, you know what I mean?’

  Mira did not want to think about that.

  ‘Totally dependent,’ Samantha went on. ‘I mean on everything. If they work or not, if they drink or not, if they go on loving you or not. Like poor Oriane.’

  ‘Oriane?’

  ‘You know, they were really living great, and she’d moved all the way to the Bahamas with him, and then one day he decides he doesn’t want to live with her anymore and he just takes off and leaves her with a rented house, two boats unpaid for, three kids, and no money in the checking account. You heard about that.’

  ‘Yes. It’s because they don’t care about their kids. They just don’t care about them. So they’re free. Women are victims. All the way through,’ Mira heard herself say.

  ‘And now she has cancer.’

  ‘What?’

  Sam shook her head. ‘She’s going in for surgery next week. Breast cancer.’

  ‘Oh, my God.’

  ‘It just goes on and on. Last year the woman who lives two doors down from me tried to commit suicide. Nick said women are unstable, but I know she did it because that was the only way she could control her husband. He’s an awful runaround, and he’s not nice to Joan. Everything seems to be falling apart. I don’t understand it. When I was a kid, things didn’t seem to be like this. It’s as though there’s more freedom, but all it means is more freedom for men.’

  Samantha reminded Mira a little of Lily. She went on and on talking almost oblivious of her audi
ence, and the expression on her face under all the strain was bewilderment, the total bewilderment of a person who wakes up to find herself a dung beetle.

  ‘You know, I really liked being a housewife. Isn’t that crazy? I did. I love doing things with the kids, and when we were broke and had no money for Christmas gifts, I enjoyed getting together with the children and Alice and her kids and we’d all make things to give as gifts. And I didn’t mind cleaning and cooking; I loved to have company and set the table and arrange flowers and cook something really snazzy. Isn’t life ironic?’

  Mira murmured something.

  ‘I never really wanted very much. I mean, I wanted a home and a family and a decent life, but I was never very ambitious. I’m not smart enough to be ambitious, I guess. And now …’ She let it hang, opening her hands like someone who has suddenly realized the small palmfuls of water she has carried so carefully from the well have already seeped through her fingers.

  Mira, though, was barely listening. Three hundred dollars. It was little enough. Norm spent that in a month and a half at the golf club. She had her checkbook in her purse. All she had to do was to take it out and write a check to Samantha. It was nothing. But she could not do it. She tried. She worked her mind down to her bag, she imagined her hand pulling out the checkbook. If she could get that far, she couldn’t turn back. But she couldn’t get that far.

  But she left Samantha promising to see if she couldn’t do something. Samantha smiled tiredly. ‘Listen, thanks for stopping over and listening to my sad tale. I’m sure you didn’t need it. The world is full enough of them.’

  Not my world, Mira thought.

  15

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Norm said.

  ‘Norm, poor Samantha!’

  ‘I feel very very sorry for Samantha,’ he said solemnly, ‘but I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to lay out my hard-earned money to help that creep Simp.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be helping Simp. He doesn’t even live there now.’

  ‘He owns the house, doesn’t he? It would be different if I thought he’d ever repay it, but from what you say, he’s a loser and a stupid bastard, and I’d never see that money again.’

  ‘Oh, Norm, what difference does it make? We have plenty.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say. That money comes out of my hide.’

  ‘What do you think I do all day? What have I done all these years? I work as hard as you do.’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Mira.’

  ‘What do you mean, come off it?’ Her voice rose wildly. ‘Am I not an equal participant in this marriage? Don’t I contribute to it?’

  ‘Of course you do,’ he said placatingly, but there was an edge of disgust in his voice. ‘But you contribute different things. You don’t contribute money.’

  ‘My work enables you to make that money!’

  ‘Oh, Mira, don’t be ridiculous. Do you think I need you to do my work? I could live anywhere, I could have a housekeeper, or live in a hotel. I support your way of life by my work, not the reverse.’

  ‘And I have nothing to say about how it’s spent?’

  ‘Of course you do. Don’t I give you everything you want?’

  ‘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.