The Women's Room (31 page)

It was Lily’s idea. She had not been out in ages, she said, and neither had her friends Sandra and Geraldine, so why didn’t they all get together, the old crowd, and all go bowling together? Martha and George, Samantha and Simp, Mira and Norm, Lily and Carl, and the two new couples, old friends of Carl’s and Lily’s. It sounded like fun; they agreed.

They sat in the bowling bay, talking when it wasn’t their turn, ordering great trays of drinks from the bar. Mira was glad to see them. She wondered at Sam, who looked tight and tired, but who bubbled over as much as ever about the latest catastrophe in her household. Simp was suave in his usual slimy, intimate way; he was drinking double martinis at a great rate, but alcohol never showed on him. Martha looked happy. She was tiny and delicate, with skin like porcelain and large deep blue eyes. She looked sweet, which was possibly the reason she so shocked people.

‘Oh, what a fucking idiot!’ she was saying, laughing at George. ‘That asshole! I told him it was wrong but he wouldn’t look, he wouldn’t come down and step back and
look!
He just kept on going like a blind fucking idiot! He stopped when the panel he was about to put up slanted so much it was almost parallel with the staircase molding. God!’ she laughed. ‘Each one had slanted just a little more. I screamed at him, but, oh, that man is useless.’

George sat looking at her without expression, but Sam was uncomfortable with the form of Martha’s criticism. Had it been couched in the usual laughter and in milder language, it would have been a funny story, but there was too much real anger in Martha’s voice amid the laughter, and her diction was too strong.

‘Oh, well,’ Sam’s voice swooped comfortingly down, ‘George is a poet, not a carpenter. Simp had an awful time hanging a lamp and my father finally had to come over to help us. Remember, Simp?’ she turned to him brightly.

‘Sam, I could of gotten it up myself. It was Hughie – he kept picking up the screws and losing them.’

‘Oh, Simp!’

‘It’s true!’ he almost whined. ‘That kid gets into everything.’

‘Well, at least George tries,’ Mira said stiffly. ‘Norm doesn’t even bother. Last week I had to restring a venetian blind all by myself. Norm sat there watching a football game.’

‘Well, he works all week, Mira,’ Carl said lazily.

‘What do you think I do?’ she retorted sharply.

‘And this way,’ Carl continued as if he hadn’t heard her, ‘he got to watch the football game and your ass all at once.’

George kept out of the conversation triggered by his inadequacies. He usually kept out of conversations, and when he talked, it was to the women. George worked in an anonymous job for a large corporation. He wrote poetry in his spare time, but never showed it to anyone. He had fixed up primitively some space in the attic where he kept his collection of mystical books and where he spent most of his time when he was home. They had two children and a nine-year-old jalopy that Martha never set foot in without first kicking and cursing. George was considered strange by men and some of the women. This was because he never stood in the kitchen talking about football and cars. He always sat with the women, sometimes talking, more often silent. He had confided to Mira that he preferred women – they were, he said, more alive, more interesting, more sensitive. They were involved with other people – the men were not. When George did talk, he always hooked the conversation to some mystic doctrine or other: he could talk for hours about the Kabala or the Vedas. No one was interested; no one listened. And if that were not enough to disqualify him from manliness, he wore his body like a slippery garment hung on a wire hanger. His arms dangled, his knees dipped; he often looked as if he were about to fall over. Mira thought he was ashamed of having a body at all, and that when he was in his ‘study,’ he lost it. Yet George liked to dance, and did it well, and he was, Martha said often, a great lover.

‘You ought to try George,’ Martha said whenever Mira complained about her sex life with Norm. ‘I’m serious. He’s good.’ Mira would gaze at her a little incredulously. She had never heard a woman say that about her husband. ‘Any problems we have in sex are my doing,’ Martha would insist. ‘The lovemaking is great; I just can’t get it off.’

‘What about when you masturbate?’

‘I can’t. Can’t masturbate. I can’t have an orgasm no matter what, and George is willing – God, he’s even happy – to spend hours helping me. Nothing works. I think I may go to a shrink.’

After their turns, Mira and Martha sat down together apart from the others.

‘Lily’s friends are a strange lot,’ Mira said disapprovingly.

‘Yeah, unusual.’ They examined the four surreptitiously. Harry was short and fat and gray-faced. They had heard that he did something illegal, was a bookie or something, but he didn’t fit any movie-criminal image they knew. He seemed sad and tired, and lifted his eyelids with
effort. Tom was huge; tall and muscular, he looked as if he used his body for heavy work. He was dark-haired, and sat or stood apart from those who were strange to him, glaring out under heavy dark eyebrows. His wife also remained aloof, not near him, but not far from him. She was wearing a pale blue dress with silver threads through it, made of a sleazy fabric, form-fitting. She had a good body. She had exchanged pale blue satin heels for bowling shoes, but they stood on the floor under the bench where she’d lain her silver bag. She had dyed blonde hair piled high on her head, and false eyelashes. It was a strange outfit to go bowling in.

Lily managed to knock down three pins, and sighing, turned and joined Martha and Mira. She sank on the bench. She too was dressed for a party, wearing a satin blouse with her slacks and a rhinestone comb in her hair.

‘That Geraldine is really something,’ Martha said.

Geraldine was short, like her husband, and a little plump, but shapely. She was tremendously energetic: she spoke, handled her ball and rolled it down the alley all in gusts of strength that didn’t seem to end.

‘Yes, she’s sexy. She always was,’ Lily said.

Mira looked at the woman intently. What was that – sexy? What was it about her that made people call her that? She was no more attractive than any of them, certainly not more than Lily. Her body was, in Mira’s thin view, overweight. She did not wiggle it, or arch it, or any of those things Mira had seen other women do. Yet the men seemed fascinated by her.

‘That – what’s his name, Lily? – the big man? …’

‘Tom.’

‘Yes. He looks as if he hates her.’

The man was watching Geraldine bowl, his face smoldering.

‘Yes,’ Lily sighed. ‘He’s strange. Geraldine is a good kid, she’s fun, alive, you know? Tom is just – oh, I don’t know. They’re all from the old neighborhood, Carl and Tom and Harry and Dina, they all grew up together, except Dina’s much younger. They’re all strange, those men, they all believe in the old ways. Carl is bad, but Tom is the worst. They don’t know how to live, those men. They only know how to kill. Harry’s okay, he’s pretty good to Geraldine, except these Mafia types in big black cars keep coming around to terrify her every once in a while. I guess Harry gets in trouble with them. Poor Sandra, she never gets out of the house. Tom keeps her under lock and key. That’s
why I planned this evening – I thought it would help her, give her a little break.’

‘You don’t mean he literally locks her up!’ Mira exclaimed.

‘Well … She lives in a little house in Farmington, miles from stores, and she doesn’t have a car.’

‘She must have friends with cars.’

Lily looked away evasively. ‘Ye-es, I suppose.’

Geraldine got a strike. She jumped up and down and clapped her hands and turned to Carl with glowing eyes and cried, ‘I’m great, ain’t I, Carlie?’ and hugged him and George, who was standing next to him, and ran over to Sandra and hugged her. She pranced over to the three women and flopped on the bench beside them.

‘Did’ja see that?’

Her warm brown eyes smiled directly at you. She babbled on happily about her poor bowling, her improvement, and watched the others in their turn, crying with joy at a good score, oohing in pity at a poor one. When it was her turn again, she marched to position singing
ta-da!

She was, in fact, the center of more emotions than she knew. Everyone watched her, and everyone responded. Samantha envied Geraldine’s spontaneity and gaiety, but she did not like the way Simp acted with her: ‘She’s desperate, that’s what I think, frantic, you know?’ Sam appealed to Mira and Martha. Mira agreed, but thought she was also innocent. ‘That’s a dangerous combination. I’m a little worried for her.’

Martha cackled. ‘Christ, what a fool you are! She’s a calculating bitch in heat!’

‘Oh, she just likes attention,’ Lily demurred mildly. ‘She’s always been like that. She doesn’t mean any harm.’

‘She’s great!’ Martha said. ‘I love her! But she’s still a calculating bitch in heat.’

The men’s response was not verbal. Simp, seeming not to notice that she acted the same way to everyone, slid beside her and insinuated an arm around her, smiling his intimate smile close to her face. Norm held stiffly aloof from her, but his eyes followed her; Carl, too, was distant, but whenever she came up to him, he smiled and put an arm around her. But Tom watched her gloweringly, and when she hopped up to him, teasing him about something, he spat some words at her and turned away. Harry sat on the bench smiling mildly and sleepily at everything. Whenever she came up to him, she put an arm around him, or hugged him,
or touched him in some way. He remained impassive, but smiled at her blankly.

They finished bowling and went into the restaurant for more drinks and some food. The restaurant was a large blank room with long tables and a jukebox. A bar extended the length of one wall. The place looked poor and not especially clean; only a few teenagers stood at the bar. Norm curled his lip and glared at Mira.

This is the sort of place
your
friends frequent, he was saying, silently.

‘No husbands next to wives!’ Samantha ordered. It was an old tradition with the friends, adopted in an effort to improve conversation. The group dutifully changed places, although they had been friends for so many years now that the split provided no real novelty. But Tom glowered at Sam. He sat his wife at the end of the table, and himself beside her next to Lily. He spoke to no one. Mira found herself at the end of the table next to Harry, with George on her other side. Geraldine was already on the floor, feeding coins into the jukebox. She danced back to the table.

‘Who wants to dance?’

Simp jumped up. Other couples followed. Norm led Samantha to the dance floor. Tom and Sandra were left at one end of the table, Harry and Mira at the other.

‘You’re different, huh?’

‘Different?’

‘I’m different too.’

‘Oh?’

‘I live in a sewer. Don’t I look it?’

She gazed at him disapprovingly.

‘I’ll bet your husband is a lousy lover.’

‘I beg your pardon!’

‘I can tell, I can always tell,’ he said easily, his sleepy eyes sliding around the room searching for the waitress. He signaled for another drink. He turned back to Mira. ‘You don’t have to get on your high horse with me. It ain’t worth it.’

She sipped her drink. Her words had sounded priggish even in her own ears. She stared down at the table.

‘I’m a lousy lover too,’ he continued easily, speaking in a soft foggy voice, barely moving his lips, his face impassive. He was not even looking at her; he seemed to be gazing tiredly into space. ‘Yeah, poor Geraldine, she didn’t know, she married me when she was sixteen,
she begged me to marry her so I did, poor kid, she had a father that was always beating up on her, she had to get out of the house. I was twenty-five, I’d known her all her life, on the block, you know? She has three kids now, look at her, you’d never know it, would you? Just a kid herself. But I can’t do nothin’ for her, not anymore. For years now it’s like this. If I’m away from her, I call her up, I come all over the place just talkin’ to her, you know? Just hearin’ her voice. I don’t do anything, it just happens by itself. It pours out all over my pants and down my leg. But when I’m with a woman, I can’t do nothin’. It isn’t just Geraldine. I’ve tried. I can’t do nothin’.’

The dancers returned when the music changed to rock. Simp asked Mira to dance; she stood up instantly. Geraldine was leading Carl in some combination of lindy and the twist. When the dance ended, Mira pulled a chair over from another table and sat between Martha and Samantha. Harry sat alone at the end of the table, gazing at the wall. Geraldine was riding high. She flew around the room with any partner she could drum up.

The pizzas arrived, and everyone but Geraldine began to eat.

‘Food, food, how can you think of food!’ She danced by herself, hovering near the table. ‘Hey, Harry, come on, sweetie!’

Harry did not turn to her, but nodded his head no.

‘Carlie?’ The music changed to a slow tune. ‘Oh! This is my favorite song!’ Geraldine exclaimed, near tears.

Sandra gazed at her with love. ‘I’ll dance with you, Dina,’ she said pityingly.

Tom’s large hand came down swiftly on her midarm, pounced and pulled her back hard into the chair.

‘Ow!’ she wailed.

‘You SIT!’ he commanded.

George stood up. ‘I’ll dance with you, baby,’ he said kindly, leaving his half-eaten slice of pizza.

Geraldine pressed her body into his, and they swayed together. More drinks arrived. When the pizza was gone couples stood to dance. A group of young men in black leather jackets, carrying motorcycle helmets, invaded the room. They gathered at the bar. Norm looked meaningfully at Mira. She ignored his lowering, but prepared herself to leave soon, gathering her cigarettes and lighter from the table, stuffing them in her purse. Geraldine replayed her favorite song. The other couples sat down. She and George remained on the floor boredly moving, swaying, pressed closely together. Martha
leaned forward and tried to talk to Sandra, but Sandra could barely raise her eyes. She mumbled brief answers. Every once in a while, Tom would remove his eyes from Geraldine to check on Sandra, the way one might check a prisoner taken earlier in the battle to make sure he did not start something while the fighting was still going on. The prisoner’s hands were tied behind his back and his feet fastened together, and you had thrown him in a corner of the trench, but meanwhile they were shooting at you out there and you had to shoot back and your face was smudged with mud and soot and was furious and watchful, but you had to turn around every once in a while to make sure the prisoner hadn’t loosened his bonds, wasn’t just then struggling to his feet ready to pick up a fallen rifle with bayonet attached and stab you through the back. Although she was looking at the table in front of her, Sandra’s eyes flickered every time he looked at her; she perceived it from a corner of her eye.