The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  ‘Does he still go?’

  ‘No. He’s got me now,’ Martha laughed humorlessly.

  Martha had not yet looked directly at Mira.

  They talked about their children, about the future. Martha’s voice was monotonous; it had neither highs nor lows.

  ‘Do you ever see him?’ Mira asked finally. Martha stopped scraping and pushed the kerchief back on her forehead.

  Not often. The law school is across campus from liberal arts. Sometimes I see him in the student center. He doesn’t seem to see me. He looks just the same. I hear rumors about him: he’s involved with a married woman student. French major. So they say.’

  She resumed her scraping. She’d completed about two square feet.

  ‘And you? How do you feel now?’

  Martha stood up. ‘Ready for a refill?’ She walked to the counter, stood with her back to Mira and poured two drinks. ‘How I feel.’ She said it as a statement. ‘I don’t know. I don’t feel anything, really. I feel as if I’ll never feel anything again. He’s a bastard but I love him. I feel like all the slobs in the song, “My Man Bill,” you know? I’d go back to him tomorrow if he asked. I know I would. I’m not saying I wouldn’t give him hell, but I’d go back. But he won’t ask.’

  ‘Why don’t you look for someone else?’

  Martha shrugged. ‘I do. At least I think I do. But my heart isn’t in it. Right now all I care about is getting that degree and getting out. I’ve been in school too long. My God, I’m thirty-six years old.’

  ‘So am I and I’m just starting.’

  Martha laughed. ‘No one can say we don’t try.’

  ‘But I feel the way you do – as if nothing can ever matter again the way things used to matter. As if nothing again could touch the heart that closely, hurt that much.’

  ‘Maybe that’s getting old.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  She left Martha still crouched on the floor, five square feet of the kitchen floor dewaxed. ‘Good luck,’ Martha said tonelessly. ‘And keep in touch.’

  In touch. What did that mean, send Christmas cards? How can you keep in touch with someone who is beyond touch, who has cut the nerves before they reached the skin, so as not to feel a touch, any touch at all? She understood what Martha was doing, and why, but it made her feel terribly alone. But what was Martha’s alternative? To go on feeling? As Lily did?

  Mira walked across the grounds of Greenwood Mental Hospital. It was made up of many open squares of grass surrounded by trees that obscured the chain-link fence that rose twelve feet high around it. There were trees in the squares too, and benches. There were a few beds of flowers. People wandered or sat, nicely dressed people. You could not tell if they were patients or visitors. At Lily’s dormitory, Mira inquired for her, and a nurse smilingly led her out to a corner of the grass where several young women sat on benches talking. Lily jumped up when she saw Mira and as they met they embraced awkwardly, Mira’s stiffness and Lily’s hard tension meeting at the same time as their affection did.

  Lily was terribly thin, but she was dressed nicely, much better than she dressed at home, in neat brown pants and a beige sweater. She was wearing makeup, a lot of makeup, and her hair was freshly dyed. The other young women were introduced. They too, were well dressed and heavily made up, with brilliant eye shadows, false eyelashes, orangey pancake makeup, heavy rouge, deep red lipstick. Mira did not know if they were patients or guests. They talked for a while about the weather, and then the three young women left. Lily had cigarettes but no matches, and was delighted with Mira’s lighter. ‘You always have to ask the nurse for a light. One of the rules here. They’re afraid the crazies will burn the place down.’

  ‘Those women,’ Mira nodded to the departing figures. ‘Are they guests?’

  ‘Oh, no. They’re like me.’ Lily laughed. ‘What this place is is a country club for women whose husbands don’t want them anymore.’

  Mira looked around. That sounded like Lily’s insanity, but almost everyone around them was female, between thirty and fifty.

  ‘Aren’t there any men?’

  ‘Oh, yes, but they’re mostly old alcoholics.’

  ‘Are there old alcoholic women too?’

  ‘Yes, lots of them. We’re all people nobody wants.’ Lily smoked hastily, as if she were anxious to finish her cigarette so she could have another and light it herself. ‘All my friends are like me, though.’ She talked about them, about herself.

  ‘Before I got sick I went to see my aunt. She said I was a spoiled brat, she said her husband was worse than Carl. She said Carl was a good husband compared to most. My aunt said I should be grateful for Carl, he doesn’t push me around. Sometimes I think she’s right, but I can’t stand it, I can’t stand living with him. I wanted a divorce, that’s why I’m here. I wanted a divorce, but then when he walked out of the house I ran after him, I ran all the way down the street screaming for him, trying to hold on to his jacket. I couldn’t be alone, I didn’t know how to do things. How could I do it? Pay bills. I’ve never paid a bill in my life. And the bulb in the kitchen light went out and I just sat there and cried. I thought I’d be living in the dark. I cried and I begged him to come back, the Nazi, the martinet, and I kept trying to get him to act human. So he had me locked up again. My aunt, she belongs to a suicide group. A suicide group! She wanted me to join.’ Lily laughed richly.

  ‘Suicide group?’

  ‘Yes, they call each other up, you know, late at night, they say things like, “This is a gray day and tomorrow the sky will be bluer,” or “I’m here pulling for you, I know you’ll have the courage to come through this.”’ She laughed again, the old rich laugh, and there was no hysteria in it. Nor did she seem to be shaking. ‘I saw an ad for a group like that once. It had big letters CALL US IF YOU NEED ANYTHING, something like that, and then it said if you had a drug problem or if you felt suicidal or if you had any problem at all you wanted to talk to someone about, to call them, and they had this telephone number. Then in small print it said, “Mondays through Thursdays, noon until 10:00 P.M.” I took the number down but I never used it. I never felt bad at those hours.’ Laughter.

  ‘The trouble is,’ she continued, breaking often into laughter, ‘I’m not suicidal! It’s like having a cold instead of pneumonia: there’s nothing anybody can do. The psychiatrist – what a joke! He has us all wearing makeup, dolled-up like Mrs Astor’s horse. We walk around with all this makeup, going to tea, my dear.’

  A small plump woman meandered across the lawn and dropped alone on a bench. She had frizzy hair and a bewildered look. ‘There’s Inez,’ Lily said. ‘Her husband doesn’t come to see her much, not like Carl. He shows up with the kids almost every Sunday. They don’t stay long, but nobody is going to be able to say he didn’t do everything right. Inez’s husband only comes once in a while. I listen to them talking. She cries, the tears run down her cheeks, she cries softly, you know, not huge sobs or shrieks, just like a continual soft rain. And she whimpers, she says, “Please, Joe, let me out. I promise I’ll be good this time, I’ll try to be a good wife, honest, I’ll really try, I’ll learn how.” But she’s too smart, you know? She could never retard herself enough to be a good wife.’

  Inez suddenly got up from the bench and knelt on the ground behind it. It looked as if she were worshiping the tree.

  ‘She loves bugs,’ Lily said. ‘She watches them all the time. She used to read books about bugs when she lived at home, but her husband thinks that’s crazy, she doesn’t vacuum the rug or wash the dishes, all she does is read about bugs. The psychiatrist agreed with him. They think she shouldn’t be encouraged in crazy ways, so they won’t let her have any books. But she still watches the bugs!’ Lily crowed triumphantly.

  ‘And there’s Sylvia.’ She pointed to a very thin woman, tiny, neat, and plain. Her hair was done in an elaborate beehive, and her mouth was a brilliant red gash. ‘Her husband never comes. She’s been here for eight months. She got married fifteen years ago and she wanted k
ids, but her husband couldn’t have any, so she went to work, she was an art teacher in a grade school. She just lived for her husband. Then about a year ago her husband walked out on her and went to live with a fat Puerto Rican woman who had five kids. They lived just a few blocks away from her, she kept seeing him. She tried to go it alone, but she was miserable. She was so bitter, because she’d wanted kids and hadn’t had them because of him. She begged him to come back. She was so lonely. He wouldn’t do it, he just kept telling her how ugly she was. So she looked at the Puerto Rican woman and she looked at herself and she figured it out and she took all her savings and went to the hospital and had an operation, silicone, you know? To give her breasts. Two thousand dollars it cost her. But when she was recovering, the nurse looked at her and said, “You poor thing, did you have a mastectomy?” It was a terrible failure. She cried, but the doctor took his money just the same. Then she put on suntan lotion and went to her husband, and finally he came back, but every time they had sex he put a pillow over her face because he said he couldn’t stand to look at her. She started to feel sick. She thought he was poisoning her. She said he was still seeing the other woman. He said she was crazy. She got worse and worse, she was crazy suspicious, she would call him up at work. She couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking he was trying to kill her, she was scared when he had the pillow over her face that he would smother her. He took her to a psychiatrist and the doctor asked him if there was any truth to her suspicions and he swore there wasn’t and the doctor said she was paranoid and she ended up here. She is sort of peaceful, but she cries a lot. They give her medication for that. No matter what life does to you, if you cry, you’re crazy. Even animals cry, don’t they, Mira? Anyway, for a while now she hasn’t been crying, so they thought they’d let her out and they notified her husband. And he came tearing over, he didn’t want her let out. What a damn fool! He came in the open convertible with the Puerto Rican woman and her five kids, and the nurse saw them and told the doctor and the doctor confronted him and he admitted it, admitted he’d been seeing her all along and the doctor was furious and said that it was his lie that had kept her locked up for eight months. He blames the husband. But I say, how come he believed the husband and not Sylvia? I mean, it’s just as possible she might be telling the truth. But they’d never think that. They always believe the man. All women are a little crazy, they think. So she’s getting out next week, and she’s going back to live with him. Her husband!’ Lily laughed. ‘I told her I thought this place had made her go crazy!’

  ‘The problem,’ Mira began firmly, trying to hold at bay the wave of insanity she felt washing over her, ‘is that these women think too much about men. I mean, their men are everything to them. If the men think they are attractive, they are; if they don’t, they’re not. They give men the power to determine their identities, their value, to accept or reject them. They have no selves.’ She finished, pursing her thin, severe mouth.

  ‘Yes,’ Lily said, her tragic eyes scanning the lawn for another example to tell Mira about.

  ‘Why don’t they just forget about the men and be themselves?’ Mira insisted.

  Lily turned her terrible eyes toward her as if she were foolish. ‘Yes,’ she said again. ‘We all know that. How do you do it?’

  ‘You just cut them out of your heart, the way I did Norm,’ Mira said self-righteously.

  ‘Oh, Carl is so cold, so cold. He makes me feel so worthless.’ She talked on about Carl for a long time, telling tale after tale.

  ‘Stop talking about Carl! Stop thinking about him!’ Mira cried finally.

  Lily shrugged. ‘He was most of the life I knew. I lived life through Carl. I was in the house and he was in the world. When I was young, I had energy, but they put it all out. The kitchen light went out and I didn’t know how to fix it. It was a funny bulb, you know? That long thin kind, what do you call them? Fluorescent? I didn’t know you could buy them in stores. I thought they lasted forever. Carl went to the store and got one, and he stood on a stepladder and took out the plastic square in the ceiling and took out one bulb and put in another. I couldn’t get over how he did that. How did he know to do that? All I could do was sit in the dark and cry.

  ‘Carl, the mechanical man, killed himself so he could kill me. Why did he need to do that? He walks around like an automaton: I kept screaming, I shrieked. So he locks me in here. In Harlem the government pushes heroin to keep the niggers down and doctors by the thousands give barbiturates and tranquilizers to all the housewives: keep the natives quiet. When the drugs don’t work anymore, they put the blacks in jail and us in here. Don’t make noise. I read a poem once, it had a line, something like “You keep stiller when everytime you move something jangles.” This time he won’t get me out. He never had enough money to take us out to dinner, but he has the twelve thousand dollars a year it costs him to keep me in here.

  ‘Why should he miss me? All I ever was was trouble. He takes the kids to McDonald’s; he pays a woman to clean the house. He doesn’t miss sex, we never had sex. I went to see a lawyer about it once and he said if you have sex once a year you can’t divorce your husband for that. Is that true the other way round too? Once a year. It was the one thing I liked, so he turned off. Sometimes after I had my shower and was lying in bed, he’d go in to take a shower too, and I’d get really excited because he never took his shower at night, and I’d hop out of bed and put my best nightgown on and I’d lie there waiting and he’d shave, and he’d be humming, and I’d be getting all aroused and then he’d come into the bedroom and get in bed and turn over and switch off the light and settle himself down and say, “Good night, Lily!” real happy, you know? A sadist, he is, a Nazi. So of course I’d scream and shout. What would you do? Why did he have to do that? I wouldn’t have cared if he put a pillow over my face, I was that desperate. I tried, but I couldn’t have an affair. I just felt too guilty. I tried to masturbate. My doctor told me my insides were all drying up, they were like the insides of an eighty-year-old woman. He tried to tell me how to masturbate, but I could never do it. Carl, who knows what he is? It’s as though he put me in a box and inside it was all the color and the passion and sex, and then he spent the rest of his life holding a hose over the box, putting me out. What did I know about him? I married a suit.’

  She is still there, Lily. Mira hasn’t seen her in years. I haven’t either. It’s not because I don’t care about her, it’s that I sometimes get confused about who is who, I think I’m Lily, or that she’s me, and when I’m there I’m never sure which of us is supposed to get up and bend and kiss the other and walk down the stone paths to the gate and go out into the parking lot with all the other people who look just the same as the ones inside who get into cars and drive away. And even when I’m in the car I’m not sure I’m supposed to be, I don’t feel as if I’m in my body. My body is driving the car, is sitting on the seat, but I’m still in the hospital, my voice is going on endlessly, wildly, I can’t stop it, it keeps running on and on. She had boundless energy, Lily, but it all went into her eyes and her voice. She never tires, she never even flags, she never runs out of material. She talks about Moslem women, Chinese women, women in in the macho countries, Spanish, Italian, Mexican women: ‘All women are our burden,’ she says, and I know she didn’t read that in a book because she doesn’t read. ‘I don’t feel separate when I hear about them, I feel as if it’s happening to me. I think we are reincarnated and I can remember being other women in other times, in other places. I carry the weight of that with me, I bend under the load of faggots slowly climbing a hill in Greece; I slink down the streets furtively in purdah, feeling wrong that I’m seen at all; my feet are crippled from being bound; I have the clitoridectomy and become my husband’s possession, feeling nothing in sex and giving birth in agony. I live in countries where the law gives my husband the right to beat me, to lock me up, disciplina.’

  Actually, Lily and I aren’t so different: she’s inside those gates, I’m inside these. We’re both insane, both runn
ing on and over the same track, around and around hopelessly. Only I have a job and an apartment and I have to clean my own place and cook my own meals and I don’t have to have electric shocks twice a week. It’s strange how they think that giving you electric shocks will make you forget the truths you know. Maybe what they really think is that if they punish you enough, you’ll pretend to forget the truths you know, you’ll be good and do your housework. I’ve known for a long time that hypocrisy is the secret of sanity. You mustn’t let them know you know. Lily knows that too, and the last two times she used it, she pretended to be docile and sorry for her sins and they let her out. But now she’s too angry, she won’t pretend. I sent her a letter, I told her what happened to George Jackson. But she hasn’t answered.

  Mira sent Lily a book on bugs to give to Inez, but a nurse found it and took it away from her and Inez got wild and violent and tried to attack the nurse and she was sent to a different ward where they use straitjackets and give them electric shocks every day, and they don’t get dressed up and made up every morning. So much for good intentions. In Russia they put you in insane asylums if you disagree with the State: it’s not so different here. Keep the natives quiet.

  6

  ‘It’s not that way for us,’ Kyla insisted. ‘We were lucky, we were born later.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Clarissa agreed. ‘I mean, I never thought about myself as being constricted. I played football all through high school.’

  ‘And I always knew I’d have a career.’

  ‘I will admit,’ Clarissa added, ‘that they managed to shunt me from science to the humanities. But it’s not terribly important to me where I use my mind, as long as I use it. And in fact, I’m sort of glad they pushed me in this direction.’

  ‘The humanities,’ Iso put in, ‘being more humane.’

  ‘The field is, if not all the players,’ Kyla said.