The Women's Room (3 page)

3

Perhaps you find Mira a little ridiculous. I do myself. But I also have some sympathy for her, more than you, probably. You think she was vain and shallow. I suppose those are words that could have been applied to her, but they are not the first ones that spring to my mind. I think she was ridiculous for hiding in the toilet, but I like her better for that than for the meanness of her mouth, which she herself perceived, and tried to cover up with lipstick. Her meanness was of the tut-tut variety; she slammed genteel doors in her head, closing out charity. But I also feel a little sorry for her, at least I did then. Not anymore.

Because in a way it doesn’t matter whether you open doors or close them, you still end up in a box. I have failed to ascertain an objective difference between one way of living and another. The only difference I can see is between varying levels of happiness, and I cringe when I say that. If old Schopenhauer is right, happiness is not a human possibility, since it means the absence of pain, which, as an uncle of mine used to say, only occurs when you’re dead or dead drunk. There’s Mira with all her closed doors, and here’s me with all my open ones, and we’re both miserable.

I spend a lot of time alone here, walking along the beach in any weather, and I think over and over about Mira and the others, Val, Isolde, Kyla, Clarissa, Grete, back at Harvard in 1968. That year itself was an open door, but a magical one; once you went through it, you could never return. You stand just beyond it, gazing back at what you have left, and it looks like a country in a fairytale book, all little patches and squares of color, fields and farms and castles with turrets and pennons and crenellated parapets. The houses are all cozy, thatched-roof cottages, slowly burnishing in the afternoon sun, and the people who live in castle or cottage have the same simple outlines and offer themselves for immediate recognition. A good prince or princess or fairy has blond hair and blue eyes, and bad queens and stepmothers have black hair. I think there was one girl who had black hair and was still good, but she’s the exception that proves the rule. Good fairies
wear blue gauzy tutus and carry golden wands; bad ones wear black and are humpbacked and have big chins and long noses. There are no bad kings in fairyland, although there are a few giants of unsavory reputation. There are lots of wicked stepmothers and old witches and crones, though. When I was a child, fairyland as it appeared in the books was the place I wanted to live, and I judged my surroundings according to how well they matched it: beauty was fairyland, not truth. I used to try to concentrate hard enough to make fairyland come true in my head. If I had been able to do it, I would gladly have deserted the real world to go there, willingly abandoning my parents. Perhaps you call that incipient schizophrenia, but it seems to me that that’s what I did in the end, lived in fairyland where there are only five basic colors, clear lines, and no beer cans cluttering up the grass.

One reason I like the Maine coast so much is that it allows so little room for such fantasies. The wind is hard and cold and raw; my face is a little chapped all winter. The sea pounds in and no matter how many times I see it it excites me the same way the skyline of New York does, no matter how many times I see that. The words are trite – grand, powerful, overwhelming – oh, it doesn’t matter what one calls it. The thing is as close as I can come to a notion of God. The sheer naked power of those great waves constantly rolling up with such an ominous rumble, hitting against the rocks and sending up skyfuls of white froth. It is so powerful and so beautiful and so terrifying at the same time that for me it is a symbol of what life is all about. And there’s the sand and the rocks and all the life they foster – snails, mussels. I often smile to myself, calling the rocks snail tenements, shellfish ghettos. They are, you know: the snails are more crowded together there than the people in Hong Kong. The sand wasn’t designed for easy walking, and the gray Maine sky seems to open out into the void itself. This sky has no notion of – it can never have been in – brilliant lands where olives grow and tomatoes turn blood red and oranges shine among the green leaves of trees in front yards behind white stucco walls dusty under the sun, and the sky is nearly as blue as the sea. Here, everything is gray: sea, sky, rocks. This sky looks only to the north, to icy poles; you can almost see the color fading and fading as the sky arches northward, until there is no color at all. The white world of the Snow Queen.

Well, I said I was going to try to avoid fairy-tale fantasies, but I seem to be incorrigible. So I’m feeling alone and a little superior standing in this doorway looking back at fairy-tale land and almost enjoying my pain. Maybe I should turn around. But I can’t, I can’t
see ahead yet, only backward. Anyway all of this is ridiculous. Because I was on my way to saying that Mira had lived all her life in fairy-tale land and when she went through the doorway, her head was still full of fairyland images, she had no notion of reality. But obviously she did; fairyland was her reality. So if you want to stand in judgment on her you have to determine whether her reality was the same as other people’s, i.e., was she crazy? In her economy, the wicked queen was known by her face and body shape, and the good fairy by hers. The good fairy showed up whenever she was needed, never took a dime for all her wand-waving, and then conveniently disappeared. I leave it to you to decide on Mira’s sanity.

4

I no longer try to label things. Here, where everything seems so arid and austere, the place teems with life: in the sea, in the sky, on the rocks. I come here to get away from a greater emptiness. Inland a couple of miles stands the third-rate community college where I teach courses like ‘Fairy Tale and Folklore’ (can’t get away from it!) and ‘Grammar 12,’ mostly to female students who aim to do well enough here to get into the state college and acquire teacher certification and the joys of the ten-month year. Wait, I think, just wait and see how much joy it holds.

Look at those snail clusters on that rock. There are thousands of snails, and mussels too, among the heaped boulders, clustering together like inhabitants of an ancient city. They are gorgeous, they shimmer with colors they’ve had for thousands of years: red and gold and blue and white and orange. They all live together. I find that extraordinary. Each one occupies its own tiny space, no one seems to push around for more room. Do you suppose there are snails with too little room who just die? It is clear that their life must be mainly interior. I like to come here and stare at them. I never touch them. But as I look, I keep thinking that they don’t have to create their order, they don’t have to create their lives, those things are just programmed into them. All they have to do is live. Is that an illusion, do you suppose?

I feel terribly alone. I have enough room, but it’s empty. Or maybe I don’t, maybe room means more than space. Clarissa once said that isolation was insanity. She never says anything carelessly, her words come out of her mouth like fruit that is perfectly ripened. Unripe
fruit she doesn’t deal in: that’s why she is silent so often. So I guess isolation is insanity. But what can I do? At the one or two parties a year I’m invited to, I have to listen to academic gossip, snarling retorts (never made in fact) to the president, nasty cracks about the mediocrity of the dean. In a place like Harvard, academic gossip is pretentious and hollow, full of name dropping and craven awe, or else it oozes complacency, the invulnerability of the elect. In a place like this, where everyone feels a loser, the gossip is mean-minded and full of that kind of hate and contempt that is really disgust at one’s own failure in life. There aren’t many single people here except for a few very young male instructors. There are damned few women, none single, except for one sixty-year-old widow who does needlepoint at faculty meetings. I mean, not everything is in your head, is it? Do I have to accept total responsibility for my fate? I don’t think it’s my fault that I’m lonely. People say – well, Iso wrote (she would!) – that I should drive down to Boston on weekends and go to the singles bars. You know, she could do it and she’d find someone interesting. But not me. I know it. I’d meet some middle-aged swinger with a deep tan and sideburns (not quite a beard) and a mod suit (pink jacket, maroon pants) and a belly kept in by three hours a week at the gym or the tennis club, and I’d die of his emptiness even more than I’m dying of my own.

So I walk the beach. I’ve been coming out here all year, since last September, with a kerchief tied around my head, blue jeans splashed with the paint I used to try to make my apartment a bit more livable, an embroidered poncho Kyla brought me from Mexico, and in the winter months, a heavy, lined nylon jacket over that. I know I am already pointed to, whispered about as a madwoman. It is so easy for a woman to seem mad if she once deserts The Image, as Mira did when she ridiculously went out and bought short pleated skirts because she was back in college. But on the other hand, maybe they are right, maybe I am mad. There aren’t too many people here – a few surfcasters, some women with children, people like me who just come down to walk. But they all look at me strangely.

So they look at me strangely: I have other problems. Because the school year ended last week and in the flurry of papers and exams I didn’t have to think about it, and then suddenly it was there – two and a half whole months with nothing to do. The joys of the ten-month year. To me it looked like the Sahara Desert, stretching on and on under the crazy sun, and empty, empty. Well, I thought, I’ll plan my courses for next year; I’ll read some more fairy tales (Fairy Tales and
Folklore), try to understand Chomsky better (Grammar 12), try to find a better writing handbook (Composition 1–2).

Oh God.

It comes to me that this is the first time in years, maybe in my life, that I am completely alone with nothing to do. Maybe that is why everything comes crowding in on me now. These things that jar their way into my mind make me think that my loneliness may not be entirely the fault of the place, that somehow or other – although I can’t understand it – I have chosen it.

I have bad dreams, dreams full of blood. I am pursued, night after night, and night after night I turn and strike out at my pursuer, I smash, I stab. That sounds like anger. It sounds like hate. But hate is an emotion I have never permitted myself. Where could it come from?

As I walk along the beach, my memory keeps going back to Mira those first weeks in Cambridge, tottering around on her high heels (she always walked shakily in high heels, but she always wore them) in a three-piece wool knit suit, with her hair set and sprayed, looking almost in panic at the faces that passed her, desperate for a sharp glance, an appraising smile that would assure her she existed. When I think of her, my belly twists a little with contempt. But how do I dare to feel that for her, for that woman so much like me, so much like my mother?

Do you? You know her: she’s that blonded made-up matron, a little tipsy with her second manhattan, playing bridge at the country club. In the Moslem countries, they make their women wear jubbah and yashmak. This makes them invisible, white wraiths drifting through streets buying a bit of fish or some vegetables, turning into dark narrow alleys and entering doors that slam shut loudly, reverberating among the ancient stones. People don’t see them, they are less differentiated than the dogs that run among the fruit carts. Only the forms are different here. You don’t really see the woman standing at the glove or stocking counter, poking among cereal boxes, loading six steaks into her shopping cart. You see her clothes, her sprayed helmet of hair, and you stop taking her seriously. Her appearance proclaims her respectability, which is to say she’s just like all other women who aren’t whores. But maybe she is, you know. Distinction by dress isn’t what it used to be. Women are capable of anything. It doesn’t really matter. Wife or whore, women are the most scorned class in America. You may hate niggers and PRs and geeks, but you’re a little frightened of them. Women don’t get even the respect of fear.

What’s to fear, after all, in a silly woman always running for her mirror to see who she is? Mira lived by her mirror as much as the Queen in
Snow White
. A lot of us did: we absorbed and believed the things people said about us. I always took the psychological quizzes in the magazines: are you a good wife? a good mother? Are you keeping the romance in your marriage? I believed Philip Wylie when he said mothers were a generation of vipers, and I swore never, never to act that way. I believed Sigmund’s ‘anatomy is destiny’ and tried to develop a sympathetic, responsive nature. I remember Martha saying that she hadn’t had a real mother; her mother did nothing in the way women were supposed to – she collected old newspapers and pieces of string and never dusted and took Martha to a cheap cafeteria to eat every night. So when Martha got married and tried to make friends with other couples, she didn’t know how. She didn’t know you were supposed to serve drinks and food. She just sat there with George, talking to them. People always left early, they never came back, they never invited her. ‘So I went out and bought
The Ladies’ Home Journal
and
Good Housekeeping
. I did it for years religiously. I read them like the Bible, trying to find out how to be a woman.’

I hear Martha’s voice often as I walk along the beach. And others’ too – Lily, Val, Kyla. I sometimes think I’ve swallowed every woman I ever knew. My head is full of voices. They blend with the wind and the sea as I walk the beach, as if they were disembodied forces of nature, a tornado whirling around me. I feel as if I were a medium and a whole host of departed spirits has descended on me clamoring to be let out.

So this morning (shades of the past!) I decided on a project to fill this vacant stretching summer. I will write it all down, go back as far as I have to, and try to make some sense out of it. But I’m not a writer. I teach grammar (and I hate it) and composition, but as anyone who’s ever taken a comp course knows, you don’t have to know anything about writing to teach it. In fact, the less you know the better, because then you can go by rules, whereas if you really know how to write, rules about leading sentences and paragraphs and so forth don’t exist. Writing is hard for me. The best I can do is put down bits and pieces, fragments of time, fragments of lives.