The Women's Room (29 page)

Lily’s independence and courage crumbled under this oblique approach. If he had abused her as her father had, she would have found the strength to fight him. As it was, she fell into line. His contempt was so cruel to her that she would do anything to avoid it. She scrubbed and vacuumed; she labored over cookbooks. Still, he always found a flaw: a spot left undusted, a meal he didn’t like. Many nights he turned his back on her in bed. He had discovered on their honeymoon that Lily was sexual. It is odd, it seems to defy all textbook knowledge, but Lily enjoyed sex. She would have orgasm after orgasm while Carl watched her with incredible disgust. It was a worse punishment to her than any strap when she touched Carl with light fingers and he shivered and pulled away. She felt that he thought she was filthy. She tried to prove to him that she was worthy.

Despite the frequently turned back, Lily got pregnant. This really shook Carl up. A child would mean the end of his life. Lily would have to quit her job – there would no longer be money enough to play poker with the guys three nights a week, or to hang out with the bunch at Carmine’s on Saturday nights. There would be a squalling kid to contend with. He insisted she have an abortion.

Slavelike, Lily obeyed. She went through it like a robot, barely seeing the dirty back room, the sleaziness around her. But that act changed her, and changed her relation to Carl. She never forgave him for the abortion. She did not talk about it, to him or to anyone else, until years later. It hardened her toward him. She wasn’t sure she wanted a child: the thought of it terrified her. But the abortion had violated some inner part of her she had not even known to exist. Having a child became tremendously important. It was the sign of victory in the power struggle that her marriage to Carl had become. She got pregnant again a few months later and this time she was adamant. None of Carl’s arguments touched her. Not even his refusal to have sex with her could touch her. She did not even have to quit her job: she was fired. Receptionists are not permitted to be visibly pregnant. Carl wanted her to find another, for a few months, at least, but she refused. She was fighting for her right to stay at home and do nothing but care for the apartment. She did still try to keep it to Carl’s satisfaction. Carl muttered, and gave up two nights of poker and Saturday nights at Carmine’s. Lily clamored to be taken out: Carl took her to a Chinese restaurant once every few
weeks. ‘You can’t have everything,’ he said resentfully to her. The baby was a girl, a calm, happy child. Carl ignored it, calling Lily if the baby fussed. Lily was confused. She felt she had won the battle but lost the war.

They moved, under Lily’s prodding, to a small house in Jackson Heights. A couple of years later, Lily got pregnant again, and after the baby – an intense, clamorous, wild creature – was born, they moved again. Carl had gotten a good job with a New Jersey-based firm; he had money enough to purchase a small house in a suburban neighborhood. He missed his old poker buddies. He sank into domesticity: reading the paper, watching TV, mowing the lawn. He fell into the habit of answering the increasingly clamorous Lily, no matter what she said, with, ‘Yeah, Lily, it’s okay, it’ll be all right.’

6

Carlos was an enormous baby. He had a large head and at two was as big as some four-year-olds. He also had a tempestuous disposition: he was easily frustrated and threw tantrums continually. He reminded Lily of her father. She was terrified of him. He tried continually to climb up on her; he was always reaching for her, touching her, holding on to her leg. And she continually pushed him away. She did not want him on her. She would pick one hand off her ear, only to have him grab her around the neck, would pull that one off only to have him grab her arm. She would peel both his hands away and try to set him down on the floor and he would scream and turn blue.

Lily’s denial of the infant (Carl had nothing to do with either child) had seemingly contradictory consequences. On the one hand, he was inordinately shy. He would put his hands over his face if a stranger came into the room; sometimes, although he could walk, he would crawl into a corner and hide from guests, even familiar ones like his grandmother. But he was screamingly aggressive with Lily. As he grew older, he carried both his shyness and his aggression into the outer world. He was violent and abusive with the children he knew, and would run and hide from any strange child.

At five, he no longer tried to touch Lily, and pulled away from her if she touched him. He had picked up his father’s unspoken judgments with an acuity that was astonishing. ‘You, what are you good for, you ain’t good for nothin’, you can’t even wash the floor right. Why don’t
you go wash the floor, stupid?’ Lily would flutter and scold. When Carl came home, she complained to him. Carl would say, ‘He’s just a kid, Lily, it’s all right, he’ll outgrow it.’ He’d sit down at the dinner table, and add, ‘Beside, he’s right; look, you didn’t even put forks on the table.’

It was true. Lily was guilty of being a poor housewife. She kept the place clean, but she was disorganized. Her mind was perpetually confused, because she knew she had wanted it, had wanted to be a housewife and stay home with the children, but there was something nagging at her from underneath, somehow she didn’t like her life. She decided it was Carl’s fault: he never talked to her, never played with the children. She began a campaign of complaint and nagging. Carl would sigh on the nights when she launched into this tirade: he would put down his paper and turn off the TV and sit with crossed arms in his chair and face her.

‘Okay, Lily, okay. What do you want to talk about?’

She paused. ‘Well – what happened at work today?’

Carl was silent for a long time, pondering. Finally, he said, ‘Well, yes, something did happen today. These guys came into the shop with tools and wires and they made holes and they drilled and clasped and strung and worked for about an hour. Then they put a new telephone at the other end of the shop.’

Lily laughed nervously. ‘Carl …’ she began to protest.

He picked his paper up. ‘That’s it, Lily. That’s what happened at work today.’

She would complain that he had nothing to do with the children. For instance, Carlos wouldn’t eat anything except cookies and peanut butter sandwiches. He had to learn to eat. Carl would let it slide. ‘Okay, Lily, it’s all right, he wants to eat peanut butter, let him eat peanut butter.’ But every once in a while, when Carlos refused his dinner, Carl would rise up and grab Carlos and haul him up to his room and beat him with his belt. Then Lily would scream and cry and wring her hands. He would look at her blandly. ‘Well, what do you want? You were saying he needs to learn. I don’t know what you want, Lily.’

Lily was as stubborn as he; her complaints did not cease. The voice swooped up higher and down lower with every passing year. Carl could not stand it anymore. He called his brother and for three months the two of them and assorted friends built a room over the garage. It was a large bright room, with its own bathroom, and a staircase on
the outside of the house. It could not be reached from inside. He moved in. He would come home from work and eat with the family. Immediately afterward, he would depart for his room, to which he had the only key. There he would watch TV and read his paper in silent tranquillity, and sleep undisturbed by tentative fingers. Lily clamored when she saw him, but he answered mildly, ‘Look, you got the house, you got the kids, I pay the bills. We go out together, don’t we? Nobody knows. What have you got to complain about?’ It was at about this time that Mira met Lily and wondered at her flashy social appearance. Lily did not seem to be trying to attract men; it never occurred to Mira that Lily was trying to seduce her own husband.

7

Mira’s experience was so different. She had completely settled into her new, easier life. The mornings were bad. She hated to get up. Norm had to call her, then shake her, and she would stagger downstairs and hang like an exhausted alcoholic over a clutched mug of coffee.

The children were unhappy in the morning, like her. They would argue and complain about the breakfast. They refused to eat an egg that was cooked too long or not long enough. They no longer liked this cereal. They wanted English muffins, or they wanted toast. She left the kitchen to dress while they lamented their miserable existences, and more often than not, she came back from driving them to the bus stop to throw their breakfasts in the garbage.

After her return, after that heart-sinking moment of coming back to the greasy frying pan and the littered table, there was cleaning. The afternoons, though, were better. Money was plentiful despite all the loans, and one thing Norm was willing to spend it on was the house. So Mira’s afternoons were spent in an orgy of planning decor and buying furniture, rugs, draperies, lamps, pictures. Slowly the house filled up. It got to be hard to handle, so she bought herself a small file box and some packages of 2 × 3 cards. On each card she wrote one task that had to be performed, and filed them in sections. The section headed
WINDOW WASHING
would contain cards for each room in the house. Whenever she washed the windows in one room, she would mark the date down on the card, and place it at the end of the section. The same was true for
FURNITURE POLISHING, RUG SHAMPOOING
, and
CHINA
. Regularly she removed all the dishes from the dining room closet,
washed them by hand – they were good china, not to be entrusted to the dishwasher – and returned them to their freshly washed shelves. She did the same in the kitchen; she did the same thing with the books, removing them, dusting them carefully, and returning them to clean, wiped, and waxed shelves. She did not make cards for ordinary, daily cleaning, only for the large, special tasks. So each day, after the small chores of cleaning kitchen, making beds, and cleaning the two main bathrooms, she would also perform a thorough cleaning of one room, washing mirrors and windows, waxing any visible wooden floors, cleaning the small ornaments, dusting ceilings and walls and furniture surfaces, and vacuuming. She would then mark on the appropriate card the large task accomplished. That way, she reasoned, she would always keep up. It took her two weeks to go through the whole house – ten working days. She did not clean on weekends. And extraordinary tasks, like cleaning every dish in the kitchen and pantry, she did only twice a year. The same was true of the curtains. It was good housewifery, performed in the old way. Mira’s mother cleaned this way, although without the cards. And had scrubbed sheets and shirts on a scrub board, and walked two miles each way to the market. The Wards’ house was always shining and smelled fresh, of lemon oil and soap.

Mira would feel tremendously satisfied when she finished her morning’s work. She would bathe then, using expensive bath oil, and smooth an expensive lotion all over her body when she was through. She felt luxurious. She would stand in the door of her enormous closet in a thick velour robe and choose her outfit for the afternoon. She chose her perfume and makeup to complement the outfit. She would walk through the house, dressed to go out, relishing the silence, the order, the shine of polished wood in the sun. Her mother-in-law had given her a clock similar to one she owned, an old-fashioned clock with a great glass dome over it, that struck the hour with chimes, the quarter hours with little bells. It ticked loudly: you could hear it in most of the downstairs rooms. She walked listening to its ticking, feeling the order and the peace, the cleanliness, the comfort. She would walk to the kitchen; the morning light had slid away, and the paler light shone on the old hutch, making the clean china pieces, old pitchers and cups, charming unmatched plates standing on end on the shelves, gleam and reflect. The beauty was her doing. The clock ticked.

She would go out then on a shopping expedition, or to do errands, or on an infrequent visit to one of her friends. The boys were older now; she could tarry a bit, and not get home until four. But she was
usually annoyed when she did get home. There was always something, it seemed: muddy footprints, finger marks on a clean wall, a blackened towel. She would rage at the boys; they largely ignored her. They did not understand, she knew that. The cleanliness and order were her life, they had cost her everything.

When she came home, it was usually to go out again: the boys had appointments with the dentist, the orthodontist, games with Little League, Scout meetings, Clark had violin lessons, Normie, trumpet lessons. On Saturday mornings she took them for riding lessons, waited and took them back, while Norm went out to play golf. Her nights were calmer than they had been. Norm was very busy these days, and often did not come home for dinner. She fell into the habit of feeding the boys early, and continued it even on nights when he did come home. It was better: they could eat and go off and do homework and then watch TV, or on summer evenings, go out and play ball for a while before baths and bed. Norm was more pleasant at the dinner table when the boys were not there. After about nine o’clock, she was free. Norm would sit watching TV, she would glance up at it and back at her book, but he tired early and went to bed. She liked sitting there alone, listening to the silence of the sleeping house, the night noises outdoors – a barking dog, a car starting up – all measured by the ticking clock.

In nice weather, she worked in the garden. She would drive to the nursery in the spring and pick up boxes of spring flowers, pansies, violets, crocuses, iris, lilies of the valley, daffodils, and jonquil, and set them lovingly in the damp sweet-sour earth. The air was soft and a little wet, and she enjoyed feeling the cool, damp, dungy earth in her hands. She stood, looking around, planning the garden. She would buy white wrought-iron pieces with delicate tracery, and set them there, by the rock garden. She bought lounges for the patio, and glass-topped tables. She hung a bird feeder.

When Norm did not come home for dinner, or when he ate and went out again to a meeting, Mira would spend the evening reading. Then, at about eleven, she would pour herself a drink and turn out the lights and sit and think. He never came in very late, always by twelve, and he always tripped on the doorstep from garage to kitchen hall, and he always yelled out complaining, ‘Why the hell don’t you keep a light on?’ Still, she never left it on.