The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  ‘Why didn’t you join sooner?’

  ‘Because I wanted to see. I wanted to join, very much, but I had to see first.’

  ‘And what did you see?’ Clarissa sounded intently curious.

  ‘The way things could be,’ Val said abruptly, sadly, and stood and went for another beer. On the table near where she sat was a report on conditions in prisons for political prisoners in South Vietnam. She was helping a group that was trying to put it together. More and more, Val was neglecting her schoolwork.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Iso said when she returned. ‘What did that have to do with people apart from us?’

  Val shrugged apologetically. ‘Well, you know, I have a lot of visions. I grew up in the late forties, the fifties, when the best minds believed you couldn’t make it as a person if you got too involved with the world. Oh, there were the socialists too, and they had a dogma, at least, but they’d been fairly well silenced by the early fifties. My generation grew up reading Joyce and Woolf and Lawrence and those crummy poets of the fifties. And granted maybe Lawrence wanted a community of three, and Woolf tried to get beyond the isolated self, still all of them felt the world was grimy and power was disease, death itself. And in everyday culture too. All the lovelorn columns gave the same advice: if you’re having trouble, get away from your mother-in-law, move out of town where all those acid aunts and pompous uncles can’t get at you.’

  ‘It’s true. We all learned to live emotionally alone,’ Mira put in.

  ‘Yes. Salvation was a personal affair. But look at us! We have a community, a real community. We share almost everything but still have our privacies. We can love and nourish one another without oppressing each other. It’s fantastic to realize that it can be done. It makes me think my vision can come true.’

  ‘Which vision is this?’ Clarissa smiled.

  ‘Okay.’ She lighted a cigarette and sat back looking like the chairman of the board about to deliver the annual report. We all settled down for what we knew would be a lecture.

  ‘Wait!’ Kyla giggled. ‘I want to get my pad and take notes!’

  ‘The old neighborhoods didn’t work. The Italians hated the Irish and the Irish hated the Jews, and neighborhoods warred with each other. But the breakdown of the neighborhoods also meant the end of what was essentially an extended family: only blacks still have it. With the breakdown of the extended family, too much pressure was put on the single family. Mom had no one to stay with Granny, who couldn’t be depended on not to set the house on fire while Mom was off grocery shopping. The people in the neighborhood weren’t there to keep an idle eye out for the fourteen-year-old kid who was the local idiot, and treated with affection as well as tormented – I’m not saying the old neighborhoods were all good. So we came up with the idea of putting everybody in separate places. We lock them up in prisons, mental hospitals, geriatric housing projects, old-age homes, nursery schools, cheap suburbs that keep women and the kids off the streets, expensive suburbs where everybody has their own yard and a front lawn that is tended by a gardener so all the front lawns look alike and nobody uses them anyway. Did you ever see a family using their front lawn? Anyway, the faster we lock them up, the higher up goes the crime rate, the suicide rate, the rate of mental breakdown. The way it’s going, there’ll be more of them than us pretty soon. Then you’ll have to start asking questions about the percentage of the population that’s not locked up, those that claim that the other fifty-five per cent is crazy, criminal, or senile.

  ‘We have to find some other way. The kids who go off to communes have a good idea, but the idea isn’t usable in that form because most communes reject technology. And we can’t do that. We need it and we have to learn, somehow, someday, to love technology, to live with it, to humanize it. Because not only couldn’t we live decently without it, we’re not going to live without it. That’s not a possibility. It’s second nature – I mean that – it’s our environment now, and no more artificial than the first cultivated ground, the first domesticated animals, the first tools. But communes are a good idea. People criticize communes because they don’t last, but why in hell, will you tell me, should they last? Why does an order have to become a permanent order? Maybe we should live one way for some years, then try another.

  ‘Anyway, for a long time now, I’ve been thinking about this, and talking to people, and I don’t claim originality for my ideas because I’m sure I’ve stolen them from everywhere, and I don’t even claim to offer a good idea, but just, maybe, another track. So I was thinking – I was in Spain, I guess – and you know, some of the poorest, the sorriest Spanish towns are beautiful. The houses are all connected, at least it looks that way from the road. They are little white stucco houses, built at crazy angles to each other, but connected by one wall, and they’re built in a circle. They have those red tile roofs, and they look like a bunch of people with outspread arms holding onto each other to stay warm and safe. Well, we can stay warm, and comparatively safe without doing that, but I’m not sure we can stay sane without that. They sit up there, the houses, baking under the sun, and they’re cool and dim inside, and the dust settles down at the threshold. I’m sure they smell, and lack bathrooms, and all the things we’d want – and most of those, by the way, I think we’re right to want, unfashionable as it is to say so. But they cluster on the sides of those hills looking as beautiful and as natural as the olive groves just beyond.

  ‘So I started imagining, suppose we did that. Suppose we built houses in a circle, or a square, or whatever, connected houses of varying sizes, but beautiful, simple. And in the middle would be a garden with benches and trees and people could grow flowers, it would be a common. And outside, behind the houses, all the space usually given over to front and back lawns, would be common too. And there could be vegetable gardens, and fields and woods for the kids to play in. There’d be problems about somebody picking the tomatoes somebody else planted, or the roses, or the kids tramping through the pea patch, but the fifty groups or individuals who lived in the houses would have complete charge and complete responsibility for what went on in their little enclave. At the other side of the houses, facing them, would be a little community center. It would have a community laundry – why does everybody have to own a washing machine? – and some playrooms and a little café and a communal kitchen. The café would be an outdoor one, with sliding glass panels to close it in in winter, like the ones in Paris. This wouldn’t be a full commune: everybody would have their own way of earning a living, everybody would retain their own income, and the dwellings would be priced according to size. Each would have a little kitchen, in case people wanted to eat alone, a good-sized living space, but not enormous, because the community center would be there. Maybe the community center would be beautiful, lush even. With playrooms for the kids and the adults, and sitting rooms with books. But everyone in the community, from the smallest walking child, would have a job in it.’

  Mira looked incredulous.

  ‘Kids can do things!’ Val insisted. ‘It makes them feel good. True you have to risk an occasional accident. But those happen anyway. They can rock the carriage, they can fetch and carry, they can clean up the toys, set the table, help pod the peas.’

  ‘In Europe lots of little kids work. They help out in their parents’ shops and cafés,’ Iso said.

  ‘Sure. They would be allowed to do whatever they wanted to do. Since everybody would be doing something, they’d want to too. There wouldn’t be a rigid hierarchy of tasks, only of hours. Little kids might only be expected to give, say four hours a week to the community, twelve-year-olds and over, maybe eight, and adults, oh, I don’t know, say twelve or sixteen. But if there was somebody who wanted to spend more – somebody retired, say, or a poet who didn’t want to hold a regular job – they could put in extra time and it would give them a reduction in rent. Older people might want to spend time watching over the children, or growing vegetables. But the community would have its own government, everyone having one vote, and
would be responsible for its own garbage, its own rules, running its own kitchen and its – I insist on this,’ Val grinned, ‘outdoor café.’

  ‘One important thing that might cause trouble: it should have a quota system. There has to be a mixture of ages, so young people grow up knowing older people. I think there will also have to be a mixture of kinds, otherwise we’ll run into the same problem the old neighborhoods did. Like, I don’t go for these swinging singles apartment complexes. A certain proportion of various religions, colors, families, singles, pairs, you know.’

  ‘I see trouble,’ Iso said. ‘What about that swinging single?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Val stopped and wrinkled her forehead. She seemed to be thinking about this just as if it were a possible reality. ‘Well, I have to decide that later,’ she said finally, and we all laughed.

  ‘Okay. There are a certain number of clusters of these communities, the number to depend on the natural topography, and where people chose to put them. Each group of communities would center in a larger town. There are buses running back and forth all the time, all hours. In the larger center are some schools, but the schools wouldn’t be like ours. They wouldn’t divide people strictly by age. They would be voluntary, and people of all ages would attend them. The divisions among rooms would be based on activity. Some rooms would hold little animals, some plants, some paints and paper. And some would be devoted strictly to reading and writing, but reading and writing for fun, not for filling in workbooks. You know. Well, that’s another thing. The town center would also have shops, churches, local government buildings, offices for services. And you’d have to walk through it. There would be minibuses in the larger ones, but most of them would be smallish, and would be built with narrow lanes, trees, outdoor cafés, maybe even a square with a fountain, or a covered galleria like the one in Milan. And one of the schools will have an auditorium good enough to hold concerts in, for town meetings, for traveling theater groups, or ballets. And for amateur groups, too. And someplace in it – in the galleria, I guess, there will be an art gallery. Maybe just with local art.’ She stopped, and frowned. ‘No, with a combination. Some local, some from the city. But I suppose you’d have to have some glass, until the little kids learned not to touch them with ice-cream fingers. But open, not shut in. So everybody could see the pictures.’

  ‘Val, have you read Walden Two?’

  ‘Umm. You detect thefts?’

  ‘Just a bit.’

  ‘Well, I don’t put babies behind glass. And there really weren’t any kids in Walden Two. There were babies under glass and nubile boys and girls. No kids. That’s because it was written by a man. I once heard Mortimer Adler say that in the ideal world nobody would have to do the shitwork. Babies would be diapered by machine. My God! I hope he doesn’t have anything to say about the next world. Not that I so much love diapering. But the things babies need are to be held, fondled, crooned over, touched. And left alone. We do everything bass-ackwards. We don’t want to hold them much when they’re little, but when they’re a little older, we won’t leave them alone, we’re so busy protecting them. When Chris and I were living in the South, we stayed for a while in a well-to-do suburb, and those kids had their afternoons scheduled! Really! Doctor, dentist, orthodontist, dancing lessons, confraternity, temple, Scouts, Little League, music lessons – they never had a free wicked minute. I don’t know what will become of them.

  ‘Anyway,’ she resumed, businesslike, ‘these centers are still communities of a sort. They’re not very large. They also have their own governments, their own medical centers and so forth, but people work in them, they don’t give their labor, they get paid. People around, oh, ten or twelve work one day a week, people between, say, fifteen and nineteen work two days a week, people over that work three or four days a week, depending on their other interests and how much money they want to earn. Older people can drop down if they want to, can work less. Really old people, or infirm people who don’t want to work in the center, can work in the community only. But there’s always some sharing of shitwork. Like a person who’s a doctor four days a week may be put on the garbage detail of the community for a couple of weeks, and the person who works in the factory may be put in charge of decorating the community center for a holiday. You know? Everybody would cook sometime except the ones who really hated it. And everybody would clean sometime, ditto. Anyway, every so often, depending on population spread, there would also be a city. Oh, by the way, industrial centers would be just like the towns and cities: they would be built for pleasure as well as work, and they would be surrounded by countryside, so the ecological balance would stay in kilter. The way the Swiss built Geneva, you know? Anyway, the cities would hold the universities, the museums of note, major offices for businesses, concert halls. There are people living in the cities just as there are in the towns, but they live in little clusters, just like the ones in the country. They will also have a certain amount of open space, small open spaces for each cluster. And if you want to hear Gunther Schiller’s music, or see avant-garde theater, you may have to go to the city. Although you never know. The community theater group may decide to put on something unusual. Well,’ she sighed, and sipped her drink.

  They all stared at her. How many hours had she spent thinking up this daydream? Mira wondered.

  ‘It sounds nice,’ Kyla said, preparing to tear holes in it.

  ‘I know,’ Val answered sadly. ‘I don’t mean to suggest we should engineer perfection. Or even think about trying to do that. Only that we think about finding a more humane way to live, a way that feels better to us. I remember when Chris was little. I had a hard time for a few years after I left my husband. I had no money and he was holding out, thinking he could get me back that way. The damned fool never realized he’d have had a better chance if he’d been fair. Men always seem to think power is more attractive than lovingness. I suppose they have some reason to think so. Anyway, my life was pretty bad and hard and the only good thing about it was that he wasn’t in it with that unpredictable temper and that loud voice of his. I’d pick Chris up at the sitter’s and go home and cook dinner and clean up and I’d be exhausted from working in that crummy office all day, from stopping at the supermarket and carrying home a heavy bag of groceries in one arm and holding on to Chris with the other. And she’d be tired and cranky then too. And at last I’d draw a bath for her, happy it was her bedtime, and sit her in it with some toys and go back to the kitchen and wash the fucking dishes. And then I’d go back to her and I was tired and harried and I hated my life, and I’d just look at her sitting in the tub, crooning to herself and a rubber boat, maybe, hardly noticing me, I was just an appliance, and her skin was all shiny from the water and her hair had curled up, and she was talking to her toys, babbling away, and then she’d deign to notice me, and she’d grin and pound her toy in the water, splashing it all over me and getting soapsuds in my eye and I’d just have to reach out and hug her, she was so beautiful, so free, so much herself … I don’t know. Taking care of Chris, problem that it was, somehow kept me human. And if we all did that, all took care of each other, if that became, oh, not a requirement, but a custom, something people just did unless they really didn’t want to … I have this scene in my head: I see a rose garden tended by an elderly man who tends to be grouchy. And some children coming to see him, visiting him once in a while, as he tends the roses. And he always shoos them at first, growls at them, but he’s been there so long they’re not afraid of him, they stand around and talk to him and one day, one spring day after a couple of years, he starts to teach them how to tend roses, and even puts the clipper in one child’s hands and helps them to clip off the dead or dying sprouts. Well.’ She spread her hands out, and laughed a little. ‘You have to let me be a fool. Somebody has to do the dreaming.’

  Kyla ran across the room and held Val’s head; Iso got up and got her another drink; and Clarissa grinned across at her.

  ‘I think we’ve just elected you our community fool,’ she said.<
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  11

  The image of the party remained in Mira’s head. She thought about it in terms that belied her atheism, as a moment of grace vouchsafed them by something divine. They were all touched by it, and they would never be quite the same as they had been. There had been many wonderful parties, many comings-together, but this one transcended, it was an image of complete human harmony and love. Would it endure? Would they all, when they came together in the future, mesh in precisely that way, feel the grace of connection? Such grace could not be arranged or forced or even hoped for; there was no structure capable of creating it. Val would try: she would spend her precious time trying to come up with a structure that did not kill spirit. Bless her for trying, but it was hopeless, Mira felt. Best to swirl in the dance when it occurs, let yourself become the music, the motion, and then just remember. But they had all been touched by it: they could not ever be quite the same as they had been. She was sure of that much.

  The winter was long and cold and lonely. No one was taking classes any longer. Lehman Hall was empty of familiar faces. Everyone was holed up in Child or a carrel in Widener or at home, plowing through lists of books, taking piles of notes, scratching out book after book, only to add another thirty to the bottom of the list. Mira had tens of folders with lists of things like the various arrangements of The Canterbury Tales, the order of items in the Martin Marprelate controversy, or the dates of all editions of The Lams of Ecclesiastical Polity and The Anatomy of Melancholy.