The Women's Room (Virago Modern Classics)

by Marilyn French

  But either obliterates the individual. There were things going on in the world while Mira was caring for her children. Eisenhower had been elected; Joseph McCarthy was having some trouble with the United States Army. But the most striking event in Mira’s life apart from the children occurred one day when she was down on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor, and one of the babies began to cry, and Norm was out – at the hospital, sleeping at his mother’s, somewhere. And she sat back on her heels, shaking her head up and down, half smiling, half grimacing, remembering her fears of marrying Lanny. It had all happened anyhow. Oedipus couldn’t escape his fate, and neither could she. The scenario had been written before she was even born.

  3

  Once, when Tad had been listening to Val talk about her former husband, he shook his head slowly and said, ‘I used to wish I’d known you when you were young. I used to imagine you riding your bike down the street with your hair flying, passing me on the sidewalk and waving, and me standing there, a sophisticated twenty, giving you a special eye, marking you out for myself. I don’t wish that anymore. You women eat men. You get men to make you pregnant, to take care of you and the kids while they’re little, and then you shut the door, you toss them out, you clutch your kids – and they are your kids – and go on your merry way. I’m glad I met you now, when you’re merry, when you have time for me.’

  This statement wasn’t really fair to Val, but she was struck by it and repeated it to me. It wasn’t at all true to me, but I was struck by it too. Because it sounds – it feels – almost as if men were cut off by nature from the blind true core of things, as if they could reach it only through women, as if they had to resent even their own children for coming between their women and them. And there is no contest between a baby and its father – in my book anyway. A baby becomes your life by necessity, not by choice. This arrangement is ancient: it lies curled in the heart of myth. What I do not know is if it is necessary. Can you imagine a world where neither mother nor father required the other for survival, where both mother and father could love and tend the baby, could get in touch with the beating engine that drives life? I can, vaguely. But only vaguely. What I can’t do is envision a social structure that could contain such an arrangement without changing what is called human nature – that is, eradicating not only capitalism but greed, tyranny, apathy, dependency – oh, well.

  At any rate, Tad was twenty-four to Val’s thirty-nine and it seemed to all of us that he adored her, and he did: but still, he saw her as a devourer. It’s as though, deep, deep at the heart, the silent heart that rarely erupts, that keeps still because if it didn’t the world would be destroyed, deep there underneath, the sexes hate and fear each other. Women see men as oppressors, as tyrants, as an enemy with superior strength to be outwitted. Men see women as underminers, slaves who rattle their chains threateningly, constantly reminding the man that if they wanted to, they could poison his food: just watch out.

  I know a lot about what women feel in marriage; what I don’t know is what men feel. God knows there is a slew of books on the market reciting the woes there are in marriage from the male point of view. The problem is, they are not honest. Did you ever read a book by a male that showed the hero clinging to his wife because she was an efficient housekeeper? Or because she understood his sexual problems and didn’t make him feel too inadequate about it – something he could not count on another woman to do? Or because she did not much like sex, and so he was off the hook – not liking sex much himself? No, you didn’t. Or maybe you did, but if so, it was a comic novel, and the main character got called an antihero.

  Anyway, I don’t want to write a dishonest account, so I am trying to figure out what Norm felt through these years. One problem I have is that Mira didn’t know much about what Norm felt through those years. I suspect he was considerably more involved with getting through medical school than he was with her and the babies. (Absolutely proper, you nod your head.) Although he was grouchy and grumbly often, when she asked him what was wrong, he would stroke her cheek and tell her nothing: he was completely happy with her. (Nevertheless she had to put up with the tantrums and the grumbling.) And although he would watch her with the baby, looking up from his book across the room, and get misty-eyed, he also had begun to order her about peremptorily, something he had never dared to do before the children were born.

  I can’t even write the next sentence I had intended because Val’s hoot comes charging in: ‘Hah! After the kids were born, he knew he had her, she was dependent on him and would have to take anything he dished out!’ There’s probably truth in that, but I was trying to get what Norm felt, and if he felt that, he didn’t know he felt it, which is almost as good as not feeling it at all. Isn’t it? Or no, that’s repression, I guess. I’m confused. Subside, Val. I’m trying to get to Norm.

  Okay, here he had married his dream girl – and there’s no question but that Norm did love Mira. He loved what he saw as her independence, but it was independence of a particular sort, a sort he didn’t have: it seemed to him that she always pursued truth and when that pursuit conflicted with the notions of the people in her world, she simply told them to go to hell – not in those words, of course. At the same time, though, she was very dependent – fragile, sensitive, frightened. He felt she needed him to protect her, and being fragile, sensitive, and frightened himself, he could feel strong when he put his arm around her and assured her he could take care of her.

  This is all understandable. The thing that bothers me – or if truth be told, the thing that bothers Val, since she won’t go away – is that these qualities that appeal to us in each other have nothing to do with reality. Maybe it’s our culture, Val, that posits such a relationship as desirable. Please go away, just for a little while.

  Because of course, what did Norm actually protect Mira from? Well, other men, I suppose. He used to say to her, often, often, shaking his head wisely, ‘You don’t know men. I do. They’re terrible.’ And when Mira said she thought she had some notion about them, he would shake his head no, and tell her about being attacked at the corner candy store when he was a gentle ten, by a bunch of Irish Catholic kids who hung around in wait for public schoolers. Or about how his friends in the army had given the business to the one poor Jew who had unhappily been assigned to their unit. He would unfailingly report to her every story of rape he heard.

  But in fact, Norm was not around Mira enough to protect her against men. She did it herself, by locking herself in, by not looking at them or thinking about them. She could do this because she was a married woman.

  I’m still trying to come to Norm. He had married his girl. Things weren’t bad. She was working to support them while he went to med school. They didn’t have the material things he wanted, but he had her pretty body in bed when he wanted it, and she was a fair cook. Med school was hard for him, but being married, he studied more than he would if he had been single. He didn’t have money to go carousing with the boys; he didn’t even want to. He liked sitting there studying at night and looking up to see Mira mending or ironing or reading, intent on her work, the sweetness of her face slowly hardening into severity. It made him feel content, at home, settled.

  Am I getting there?

  And if he got irritated with her once in a while for things that were not her fault, well, he was only human, wasn’t he? In a way, although he never thought this through, it was nice to have someone you could yell at without worrying about their never speaking to you again. All day at school he had to be polite. With his father too, he had to be polite. He had yelled at his mother, but she got angry and wouldn’t speak to him for days. In the end, of course she always took him back, but he suffered. Mira couldn’t manage to stay angry that long, and he could always get around her, get her to caress him again. He was sure Mira was as happy with him as he was with her.

  But then the kids came. God, first she swelled up like a balloon, then she gets all anxious and self-involved, and he has to worry about her all the
time and she never seems to consider him and then, when it’s over, the baby is there, it is there, there, there. Not that he doesn’t love it. But it is always there. He wasn’t blaming her: the kid is always crying or she has to do its laundry or she has to cook its potato. But after all, she was his, totally his, isn’t that what women were supposed to be – there for you completely? Suddenly she isn’t his at all, she belongs to the kid.

  I don’t know. I think I’m missing something. I feel as if Val were curling up the edges of the letters even as I type them. If you want to write letters of complaint about my handling of Norm, please address them to her.

  4

  In 1955, while other people were worried about the Cold War and were building air-raid shelters, Mira and Norm were worried about the down payment on a small house they wanted to buy in Meyersville. Norm had finished his internship, and had entered as an assistant in the practice of an old friend of his family. He had wanted to go on with his training, he wanted to specialize, but he couldn’t bear living another year in that tiny apartment cooped up with the kids. With the help of their parents, they bought a small house in the suburbs. It had two bedrooms, and a dining room. Mira was thrilled, even though they had no furniture. The relatives swept out their attics, and the young couple were established.

  Meyersville was a ghetto of sorts, in a world made up of small enclaves designed to isolate classes and colors, the aged and infirm, from each other. It contained a large number of identical small houses, each with its own refrigerator and stove and washing machine and fenced yard. And almost all of the people who moved in were young couples with small children who were not welcome in apartments, who needed the yard and the washing machine. People who once would have rented little houses in their hometowns, now that rented houses were nearly extinct, bought houses in Meyersville for a $500 down payment and a 41/2 percent VA mortgage. The distinctions that existed in Meyersville – race was not even a question – were three: religion, age and education. There were many Catholics, numerous Protestants, a few Jews. There were a very few elderly retired couples who could put up with the noise of streets full of children all day long. But there was a nearly fifty-fifty division between those men who had gone to college and those who had not. A college degree was still a mark of something in 1955. What it marked was not intelligence or culture, but upward mobility, although of all the people Norm and Mira knew in their years there, the two who became really wealthy were non-college men, one who ran a used-car lot and eventually became a Chevrolet dealer and millionaire, the other a real-estate agent who got in on a couple of good land deals. At any rate, Norm was not too uncomfortable there with his M.D. There were other young doctors, lawyers, accountants, teachers: people Norm considered respectable. And there were their wives who had been nurses, teachers, or private secretaries: people Mira could talk to, or so she thought. They were all in the same condition. They were broke and struggling, they had small children, they aspired. Little by little, block by block, they sorted themselves out. For all of them, without question, there was one standard: money. Nothing else came near it in value. They were the young people who drove shabby old cars packed with kids and went out into the world longing, longing. They wanted a new couch for the living room, a dining room set, a new car. They could only dream of things like trips to Europe, fur coats, and sunken swimming pools. Whatever they wanted, the visions that danced in their heads really were of lollipops – of things, that is.

  Meantime, and in some cases, for a long time, they had to do without things, and they lived day to day with their longing, not realizing that life was passing, never to be recovered. The men took their aspirations to work, where desire gave a fine competitive edge to their behavior. Most of them had no friends. The women stayed home with the children, watched the sky to see whether to pull the laundry off the line before it rained, or whether they should turn on the lawn spray because it would not rain. Along the main streets of towns like this, the few old buildings were razed. The streets were widened, and on either side of them sprang up shops selling garden furniture and equipment, used-car lots, discount furniture houses, television and appliance stores, carpet outlets. Some people say the uglification of America began then, but lots of main streets were ugly enough before that. Perhaps materials of ugliness changed: chrome, glass, neon, and plastic replaced board and brick. There was more ugliness because there were more people. It seemed almost as if World War II had not killed as many people as it spawned. The world burst out, and people burst out too. Because of the GI Bill, men who would not have otherwise, went to college. Everyone aspired, everyone wanted it, the good life. And the good life was made up, everyone knew, of frost-free refrigerators and hi-fis with two speakers and wall-to-wall carpeting and a clothes dryer.

  It’s easy enough to sneer at now, from this vantage point. It didn’t work, la dolce vita did not come packed with the detergent inside the new washing machine. But for women especially, the new washing machine or dryer or freezer really was a little release from slavery. Without them and without the pill, there would not be a woman’s revolution now. Facts, ma’am, I just want the facts. Grimy pounds and pence matter. And Woolf did know that, even if she didn’t think they belonged in literature. After all, she was the one who asked: Why have women no money? Haven’t they, throughout time, worked as hard as men, labored in vineyard and kitchen, in field and house? How is it the men ended up with all the pounds and pence? Why do women not have a room of their own, when in her day, at least, every gentleman had his study?

  Well, the world exploded: few people had rooms of their own. They had to make do with washing machines and a backyard barbecue. The working classes had entered the realm of the human.

  5

  Mira’s life was so much easier after the move that she felt like a lady of leisure. Little by little the 2:00 A.M. feedings had vanished, then the seven feedings a day had shrunk to six, then five, then four, and finally even the bottles were gone. In another year, the diapers also went. It is a great day in a woman’s life when the diapers vanish, but few women are assured enough to get rid of them: they pack them away up in the attic – ‘just in case.’ There was still laundry, of course, but now she had a machine to wash it in, and had to wash only three times a week. There was still cleaning, too. Mira had thought the cleaning would be easier once they had a larger place, but in fact a larger place has more space to clean, a fact she had not considered. Her experience with cleaning was that it grew in direct parallel with wealth, and the only way to avoid it is to be born male or pay another woman to do it. Still, life felt luxurious. The long summer days stretched before her; she hummed in the kitchen, washing the breakfast dishes, the boys tumbling and playing out in the backyard. Maybe she would get a life back. Once a week, on a night when Norm came home early enough, her friend Theresa would drive her to the library and she would get stacks of books, all by one author. She read all the James, Huxley, Faulkner, Woolf, Austen, and Dickens the library possessed, read uncritically, making no distinctions. She took out popular and scholarly books on psychology, sociology, anthropology and only after a time was she able to see the difference among more or less simplistic approaches to a discipline. She forgot most of what she read, having no context to put it in, and she felt, after a time, that it was all somehow useless, that she wasn’t really learning anything. But in the first years, she was happy. Her home hummed and sparkled, her children were beautiful and cried only once or twice a day. She was getting her life back.

  The children still napped in the afternoon, so she had an hour or two of leisure then. They went to bed by seven, and she was able now to stay up later, so she had some hours of leisure then too. In the evenings, she read, even if Norm had the TV set on; in the afternoons, she had a social life.

  It is often noticed that women in suburbia, much like the women in ancient Greece, are locked into the home and see no one but children all day. The Greek women saw slaves, who might have been interesting people. But suburban
women have each other.

  The women on the block were all anxious to make friends, and a newcomer was invited to endless kaffeeklatsches. In time, groups formed. Mira had several friends: Bliss, Adele, and Natalie. Each of them had other friends, so there was a kind of cell network. Mira was twenty-five, her friends a year or two older. They all had small children. And they were all married to men who thought of their lives in terms of career, not job.

  They spent most of their free time in each other’s kitchens and yards. They sat over coffee, hot or iced, and a home-baked, packaged coffee cake, watching the children. When the weather was poor, they sat in the kitchen rather than the living room because it was easier for the woman whose house it was to reach over and get the cookies for whatever child came in crying, or to refill the coffee cups, and when the children came in with mud or chocolate or shit all over them, they would mess up only the kitchen. The houses were close enough together that they could even risk leaving napping children alone: with the windows open, you could hear anything loud that happened in another house.

  In summer, they sat in the grass or on homemade patios, sipping iced tea or coffee, watching the children in the sandbox or the plastic pool. They didn’t bother much about their clothes: they always had children’s sticky hands all over them, or the sour milk of babies’ spit-up. Conversation was a physical challenge, words uttered while a baby clung to a neck or sat on a lap tugging Mother’s ear, or while leaping up to get to Johnny before he swallowed that stone, to get to Midge before she clobbered Johnny over the head with that shovel, or to pull Deena out from the little space in the fence where she’d wedged herself trying to escape from the yard.