The Women's Room (37 page)

And indeed it was. They had been married for fourteen years, and Norm would avow that they had no serious problems. She was a wonderful mother, an excellent housekeeper, a good hostess. She was not very sexual, but Norm respected that in her. He felt that his choice of her had been wise and looked down complacently at those of his colleagues who had domestic problems. He felt good about himself and his life, good about Mira. His face had set over the years, in good, kindly lines. They had lived out the life that had been expected of them, and for Norm, it was fairly fulfilling. Only sometimes, when they went to a movie or a musical comedy playing on Broadway, and an attractive woman moved her body in a certain way – not just any attractive woman, but one who had a certain helplessness and vulnerability about her even as she wiggled her flesh – then something would rise in him like a cry, a longing to reach out and grab hard, to hold and pull even over objections, to – but he never even thought the word – to rape, to overcome and possess and keep in possession. It had been his earliest feeling about Mira, but he had never acted upon it. Nor would he now. He would laugh at himself and his cosmic desires, laugh them away into absurdity, and go home and insist quietly and factually on having sex with the reluctant Mira, and never equate the act with the feeling.

18

What is a man, anyway? Everything I see around me in popular culture tells me a man is he who screws and kills. But everything I see around me in life tells me a man is he who makes money. Maybe these two are related, because making money in our world often requires careful avoidance of screwing and killing, so maybe the culture provides the unlived part. I don’t claim to know, and I don’t even care much. I figure
that’s their problem. Women are trying hard these days to get out from under the images that have been imposed on them. The difficulty is there is just enough truth in the images that to repudiate them often involves repudiating also part of what you really are. Maybe men are in the same boat, but I don’t think so. I think they rather like their images, find them serviceable. If they don’t, it’s up to them to change them. I do know that if that is what men are, I’m willing to dispense with them forever and have children only through parthenogenesis, which would mean I’d have only female children, which would suit me fine. But the other side of the image, the reality, is just as bad. Because if the men I’ve known haven’t much indulged in killing and are no great shakes at screwing and have made money (for the most part) in only moderate amounts, they haven’t been anything else either. They’re just dull. Maybe that’s the price of being on the winning side. Because the women I know have gotten fucked, literally and figuratively, and they’re great.

One advantage to being a despised species is that you have freedom, freedom to be any crazy thing you want. If you listen to a group of housewives talk, you’ll hear a lot of nonsense, some of it really crazy. This comes, I think, from being alone so much, and pursuing your own odd train of thought without impediment, which some call discipline. The result is craziness, but also brilliance. Ordinary women come out with the damnedest truth. You ignore them at your own risk. And they’re permitted to go on making wild statements without being put in one kind of jail or another (some of them, anyway) because everyone knows they’re crazy and powerless too. If a woman is religious or earthy, passive or wildly assertive, loving or hating, she doesn’t get much more flak than if she isn’t: her choices lie between being castigated as a ball and chain or as a whore. What I don’t understand is where women suddenly get power. Because they do. The kids, who almost always turn out to be a pile of shit, are, we all know, Mommy’s fault. Well, how did she manage that, this powerless creature? Where was all her power during the years she was doing five loads of laundry a week and worrying about mixing the whites with the colors? How was she able to offset Daddy’s positive influence? How come she never knows she has this power until afterward, when it gets called responsibility?

What I’m trying to understand is winning and losing. Now the rule of the game is that men win as long as they keep their noses comparatively clean, and women lose, always, even extraordinary women. The Edith Piafs and Judy Garlands of the world become great by capitalizing on
their losing. That part is clear. What is not clear is what game we’re playing. What do you win when you win? I know what you lose, having some experience with that side. What I don’t know is what rewards are involved with winning besides money. Maybe that’s it; maybe that’s all there is. I guess so, because when I look at all the winners, all the Norms of the world, I can’t see much else: money and a certain ease in the world, a sense of legitimacy.

You think I hate men. I guess I do, although some of my best friends … I don’t like this position. I mistrust generalized hatred. I feel like one of those twelfth-century monks raving on about how evil women are and how they must cover themselves up completely when they go out lest they lead men into evil thoughts. The assumption that the men are the ones who matter, and that the women exist only in relation to them, is so silent and underrunning that even we never picked it up until recently. But after all, look at what we read. I read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Freud and Erikson; I read de Montherlant and Joyce and Lawrence and sillier people like Miller and Mailer and Roth and Philip Wylie. I read the Bible and Greek myths and didn’t question why all later redactions relegated Gaea-Tellus and Lilith to a footnote and made Saturn the creator of the world. I read or read about, without much question, the Hindus and the Jews, Pythagoras and Aristotle, Seneca, Cato, St Paul, Luther, Sam Johnson, Rousseau, Swift … well, you understand. For years I didn’t take it personally.

So now it is difficult for me to call others bigots when I am one myself. I tell people at once, to warn them, that I suffer from deformation of character. But the truth is I am sick unto death of four thousand years of males telling me how rotten my sex is. Especially it makes me sick when I look around and see such rotten men and such magnificent women, all of whom have a sneaking suspicion that the four thousand years of remarks are correct. These days I feel like an outlaw, a criminal. Maybe that’s what the people perceive who look at me so strangely as I walk the beach. I feel like an outlaw not only because I think that men are rotten and women are great, but because I have come to believe that oppressed people have the right to use criminal means to survive. Criminal means being, of course, defying the laws passed by the oppressors to keep the oppressed in line. Such a position takes you scarily close to advocating oppression itself, though. We are bound in by the terms of the sentence. Subject-verb-object. The best we can do is turn it around. And that’s no answer, is it?

Well, answers I leave to others, to a newer generation perhaps, lacking the deformities mine suffered. My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don’t even need to shrug. I simply don’t care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don’t matter. It is too late for me to care. Once upon a time I could have cared.

But fairyland is back beyond the door. Forever and forever I will hate Nazis, even if you can prove to me that they too were victims, that they were subject to illusion, brainwashed with images. The stone in my stomach is like an oyster’s pearl – it is the accumulation of defense against an irritation. My pearl is my hatred: my hatred is learned from experience: that is not prejudice. I wish it were prejudice. Then, perhaps, I could unlearn it.

19

I guess I should get back to the story, but I turn in that direction with such weariness. Oh, those lives, those lives! Those years. You know how you feel when someone whispers to you that so-and-so is ill and you say, ‘Too bad,’ and ask what the matter is and they whisper ‘Women’s troubles’? You never pursue it. You have this vague sense of oozings and drippings, blood that insists on pouring out of assorted holes, organs that drip down with all the other goo and try to depart, breasts that get saggy or lumpy and sometimes have to be cut off. Above all there is the sense of a rank cave that never gets fresh air, dark and smelly, its floor a foot thick with sticky disgusting mulch.

Yes. And for every story I’m telling you, I’m leaving out three. For instance, I didn’t tell you all of what happened to Doris and Roger, or Paula and Brett, or Sandra and Tom, or poor Geraldine. I know, but I’m not telling. There’s no point in telling, it is all just more of the same. I’m not going in detail into what happened to Oriane, although I will tell you that after they cut off her breast, Sean went to see her in the hospital and turned his beautiful face away with disgust.

‘Don’t let Timmy see that thing when you get home,’ he said with a twisting mouth. ‘It’s disgusting.’

He shouldn’t have worried. When she got home, she committed
suicide. Not his fault, though: she just shouldn’t have loved him as much as she did, shouldn’t have let his opinion matter so much to her. Should. Shouldn’t. For every great woman I know now, there’s an Oriane, an Adele, a Lily, or an Ava. Someplace.

Wrecked, wrecked. All survivors, all of us. We survived the battlefield of our own lives, and the only help we got came from each other. It was Alice who sat night after night with Samantha until she got over the hysteria, the sense of betrayal, the awful hurting hate. It was Martha who came and found Mira lying on the floor with her wrists slit. It was Mira who put Martha to bed and got rid of the rest of the sleeping pills and sat with her as she realized that she would live. No one could save Lily, though. She was beyond us.

Do you believe any of this? It is not the stuff of fiction. It has no shape, it hasn’t the balances so important in art. You know, if one line goes this way, another must go that way. All these lines are the same. These lives are like threads that get woven into a carpet and when it’s done the weaver is surprised that the colors all blend: shades of blood, shades of tears, smell of sweat. Even the lives that don’t fit, fit. Ethel, for instance. You don’t know Ethel, but she was a college friend of mine who wanted to be a sculptor. She got married, of course. She’s gone quite queer in the head and collects shells. Her house is full of them and she doesn’t talk about anything else. No one visits her anymore.

Sometimes as I try to write this all down, I feel as if all I’m doing is a thing I used to do as a child, draw paper dolls. They all looked pretty much the same except one had blond hair, one red, one black. And I’d draw sets and sets of clothes, all of them interchangeable: evening gowns, tailored suits, slacks, shorts, negligees. When I’d much rather be able to draw a Medea or an Antigone. But they, you see, had sharp edges and endings, and the people I know don’t. And their lives don’t. I see, I saw, the slow wearing down of the years. Not lives lived in quiet desperation: no, there was nothing quiet in these lives. There was passion, and extremity, screeching, and lacerations of the flesh – one’s own, of course. And all of us ended up wrecked. So it seems more a general than an individual problem. Oh, if you are looking for flaws, they are there, but this is not tragedy, after all. Or is it? I mean, Mira’s prissiness and smugness and superiority and coldness, or Samantha’s dependency, her childlike leaving of everything to Simp until it was too late, or Martha’s arrogant assumption that she could live the way she wanted to and have what she wanted, or Oriane’s intense
and undeviating love for Sean, or Paula’s driving ambition … Yes, those were all there.

But think about this: none of the men is wrecked. Well, Simp, of course. But he’s quite happy there in his mother’s house, with his martini allowance for the day, his delusions, his bar-room audience. But the others all have pretty good jobs, some are remarried, all of them live, to varying degrees, what is called the good life. It’s true, they’re dull, but after all that bothers other people, not them. They probably don’t find themselves dull. Sean lives on a little estate on Long Island and has two boats again. These days Roger has a swinging pad on the East Side and takes his vacations at Club Med, while Doris is on welfare. Can you figure that out? Is there any cause in nature for these things? Maybe the men are worse off than I think. Maybe they’re going through all kinds of inner torment and just don’t show it. It could be. I’ll leave their pain to those who know and understand it, to Philip Roth and Saul Bellow and John Updike and poor wombless Norman Mailer. I only know the women are all middle-aged and poor as shit and struggling with things like trying to get the oldest kid off heroin, get the girls through college, pay for the shrink who’s trying to treat daughter’s anorexia or son’s depression, or the orthodontist who’s trying to help Billy to close his mouth. It depresses me. I remember Valerie saying once, ‘Ah, don’t you see that’s why we’re so great. We know what matters. We don’t get caught up in their games!’ but it seems an awfully high price to me. I look back to my own life and all I see is bombed-out terrain, full of craters and overturned rocks and mudholes. I feel like a survivor who has lost everything but her life, who wanders around inside a skinny shriveled body, collecting dandelion greens and muttering to herself.

20

Samantha survived. She went through a year and a half of legal and economic hell, but she ended up in a small apartment on the wrong side of the right town. She knew that staying near her friends was all that would save her, and she was saved, whatever that means. She started back to school at night, aiming to get a better job. How she paid for it, I don’t know: talk about squeezing money from stones, Samantha knew how. Or rather, learned. They ate, and the kids were healthy and sometimes even happy. They helped Sam a lot, young as
they were. They understood. In 1964, Fleur was eight and Hughie was five. Now, ten years later, Fleur is in college. Somehow, they managed it. Of course Samantha changed. She grew very thin and there was a severity about her appearance that remains to this day. She was on welfare for only a few months: it shamed her horribly. But later she would say thank heavens it was there for those few months. Men like Sam, and sometimes she says she would like to get married again. But there is something. She draws away from them just a little, she’s hardly aware of it. She is not prepared yet to put her life in the hands of one of them, and that, after all, is still what marriage asks. So she goes on being single, has a pretty good job now as an office manager in a small local firm, and the three of them live as if they were rich on her $200 a week before taxes. But I am jumping ahead. Then, in the summer of 1964, there were only anguish and change and loss and hardship and the hideous question of whether they would survive, and if so, how? What would happen to deprived children in an affluent suburb? Who has not heard horror stories? Well, her children are the finest I know, but perhaps that is because of Samantha. That couldn’t be predicted, and had to be suffered through just as if the ending were different.