The Women's Room (39 page)

Who knows, maybe Norm thought things like that. It could have been.

So when he sat down and was silent she could hear her heart beating because she knew it was about to happen, that her expectations were
coming true, and she tried to help, she tried not to help too much, it was difficult to find the right balance, she didn’t want to push him and repel him by her pushiness, she only wanted to welcome him, to tell him he was welcome in her dark world where you could look out at the night and be part of it at the same time, and so she said in a low voice, ‘The moon is so beautiful tonight.’

And when he didn’t answer she could hear her words in her head, hear them over and over, words of an asshole, a gushing idiot, gurgling, ‘The moon is so beautiful tonight,’ like something out of an Italian opera, except those words were thankfully in Italian so that when the lovers went into their duet you could believe it because you couldn’t understand what they were saying. Feeling stupid, feeling denied, she opened her mouth obediently to say the usual words, ‘How was your day?’ but they wouldn’t come out.

‘I love to watch it from this angle in winter,’ was what she said. ‘When the tree branches are outlined against it. It is all so fine, so complex. Just one tree. Look, see what I mean? Just one tree, but look at the interconnections. Like the most delicate lace. Imagine what the roots must be like.’

He sipped his drink. She could hear the ice cubes tinkle in his glass. He cleared his throat. Her heart felt tender, overflowing. It was so hard for him. She wanted to put her hand out and touch him, but she restrained herself.

‘Mira,’ he said finally, ‘this is very hard for me and I don’t expect you to understand it at all, I don’t understand it myself, and I don’t want you to think it reflects on you at all, it’s just me, just me …’

She turned her head toward him, puzzled. A deep line invaded her forehead.

‘Well, I guess you’ve noticed that I haven’t been home much recently and that’s because … oh, hell, what’s the use of dragging it out! Mira, I want a divorce.’

CHAPTER FOUR

1

As I understand it, the medieval view of sin was very personal. Dante placed his murderers in a higher circle of hell than those who committed fraud. A sin is a violation not of a law but of a part of the self; punishment is meted out according to what part of the self has been abused. In the neat hierarchy of Dante’s hell, sins of concupiscence are less severe than sins of irascibility but the worst are those that violate the highest faculty, reason.

This seems strange to us, who think about crime (not sin – the only sin left is sex) according to the degree of harm done to the victim. Only that strange category, the victimless crime, remains to remind us of earlier ways of thinking. But I find the old notions somehow appealing. Not that I want to go back to them – it is outrageous to have some outer authority tell you what is proper use and abuse of your own faculties, and it is ludicrous to hold reason higher than body or feeling. Still there is something true and profoundly sane about the belief that acts like murder or theft or assault violate the doer as well as the done to. We might even, if we thought this way, have less crime. The popular view of crime, as far as I can deduce it from movies and television, is that it is a breaking of a rule by someone who thinks they can get away with that, implicitly, everyone would like to break the rule, but not everyone is arrogant enough to imagine they can get away with it. It therefore becomes very important for the rule upholders to bring such arrogance down. So television crime is a contest between two powers, and in a way this conception subtly encourages the spirited to defy the rules. Some of the most popular rule upholders are liked because they too break the rules, are unorthodox in approach, although they are on the side of the angels.

Whereas in fact, I imagine it costs someone something to break and enter, to steal, to murder, costs something quite apart from the fear of discovery or punishment. I don’t know what exactly – my experience
with ordinary criminals is nonexistent – but I think that one’s way of perceiving himself and his relation to the world must be jarred, must contain some hurt, some rift, a germ of hopelessness. Of course, lots of people besides those who commit crimes feel that way too, I suppose. And of course the worst crimes are perfectly legal. So maybe none of this makes any sense, maybe it is impossible to talk about crime. But then the old categories come flaming up, looking better than ever, although in need of revision: a good life is one in which no part of the self is stifled, denied, or permitted to oppress another part of the self, in which the whole being has room to grow. But room costs something, everything costs something, and no matter what we choose, we are never happy about paying for it.

Mira was thrust into freedom just as she had been chuted into slavery, or at least that is how she thought of it. She could have refused Norm a divorce or she could have acceded easily, demanding nothing, but she agreed to the divorce and submitted a bitter bill, totting up the cost of her services for fifteen years. Norm was horrified that she could view their marriage in that way, but at the same time he argued that she had not deducted her food, lodging, and clothes.

Their separation and divorce did not feel like good freedom to her, it felt more like being thrown out of the igloo in the middle of a snowstorm. There is lots of space to wander in, but it’s all cold.

She alternated between cold bitter moods in which she sat at a desk listing pages and pages of labors she had performed, and checking out with employment agencies the going rate for such workers, and simply falling apart. Some days she raged like an out-of-control train, charging through the house, cleaning it with compulsive ferocity, purging basement and attic and every closet of fifteen years of shit. Still pieces of Norm remained: there were the boys, to begin with, and at times she turned that fury on them. Other times she wept, inconsolably, ceaselessly, and would have to wear sunglasses to the market next day. Some days she would spend in the bathroom bathing and oiling her body, shaving her legs and underarms, touching up her hair dye, applying makeup, studying herself in a variety of costumes, then undressing and putting on a shabby old robe.

She began to drink during the days. Several times she was staggering when the boys came in from school. Norm found her drunk once when he came in to get something he had left behind, and he warned her severely that if she did not ‘shape up,’ as he put it, he would take the boys away from her. She was disheveled, her hair sticking out at all
angles, and she slouched, in old baggy pants she used for gardening, in her usual chair. She leaned back and laughed.

‘Go ahead!’ she crowed at him. ‘You want them so much, take them! They’re yours too. They’re built like you. They both have the great manly appurtenance!’

Shocked and apprehensive, Norm backed out of the room and did not return to the house again. Mira giggled every time she thought of it. She told the story to Martha, told it over and over. ‘Hah! “I warn you, Mira, I’ll take the boys away from you!” Hah! He wants them like he wants me. They’d put a cramp on his style with his little chippy.’

At night, though, the drinking led her into depression. One night Martha called. They had taken to calling each other at any hour: there were no husbands to complain. She called at one, one thirty, and two, and still there was no answer. She got worried, and dressed, and drove over to Mira’s. The car was in the garage. Martha rang the doorbell and kept ringing it until Normie, eyes full of sleep, finally answered. Martha acted as though it were not unusual for her to come visiting at three in the morning, and sent Normie back to bed. Both boys had adopted, in the face of the inexplicable chaos that had suddenly entered their lives, a kind of ignorance. They saw, heard, and said nothing. They gazed blankly and went their own ways. So Normie went back to bed and even to sleep, while Martha wandered through the house looking for Mira. She found her finally, on the floor of her bathroom. Her wrists were cut. There was blood on the floor, but not a great deal. Martha washed off Mira’s arms and made tourniquets for them. The cuts in the wrists were not really deep. Mira had managed to cut the smaller blood vessels but miss the large vein in the wrist. Still, she was unconscious. Martha cleaned up the bathroom and washed Mira’s face with cold water. Mira began to come to.

‘What did you do, pass out?’

Mira stared at her. ‘I guess so.’ She glanced at her arms. ‘Oh, yeah. Gee, I did it. I really did it. I’ve been wanting to do it for a long time.’

‘Well, you didn’t do it very well,’ Martha said.

Mira stood up. ‘I need a drink.’

They went downstairs.

‘Are your kids alone?’

Martha nodded.

Mira looked at her watch. ‘Is it okay?’

‘Lisa’s fourteen, for God’s sake, it ought to be.’

‘Yeah.’

They sat drinking, smoking.

‘I kept thinking I ought to care about the boys, but I didn’t.’

‘No. I know. Nothing else matters when you feel that much pain.’

‘No. Not even getting even with Norm. Because, you know, he might feel guilty for a little while, but mostly he’d be annoyed at the crimp I put in his plans, saddling him with the boys. But he could even handle that: he has enough money. There’s just nothing I can do to him except kill him. If I could beat him up, I’d feel better, but I can’t, I’d have to shoot him or something. And that’s not very satisfying. What I want is to make him cry, to see him living in pain the way I am.’

‘I imagine that’s the way George feels about me.’

‘Oh, George is so full of self-pity he can’t even think about anger. It would be refreshing if he could.’

‘Yeah. Listen, Mira, you have to do something.’

‘I know,’ she sighed.

‘What about going back to school?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay.’ Martha stood up. ‘I’ll be at school tomorrow, I have a nine o’clock class. I’ll meet you at the student center at noon for lunch, and then we’ll wander around and see what we can find out.’

‘Okay.’

So it was settled. No further discussion of anything was necessary: by this time they knew the insides of the other’s mind so well that they never had to explain an action or a motivation.

2

There was a march that spring from Selma to Montgomery; and a new music was being heard, made by strange-looking creatures who called themselves the Beatles. The march seemed admirable to many of Mira’s generation, an admirable symbol of an impossible aspiration. The Beatles just seemed loud. Neither seemed to have greater import: the generation that reached adulthood in the fifties had no comprehension of the possibility of change.

Mira enrolled for the fall term at the university, which agreed to grant her full credit for her two years of earlier work. The episode with her wrists had calmed her down. She had done her best not to survive and had discovered she could not do well enough. So she settled down to
trying to survive. She worked a lot in the garden. She had little to do with the boys. They came and went, and asked of her only meals and clean clothes, being not terribly fussy about either. She would gaze at them sometimes, wondering when and how it happened that she had lost her feeling for them. She had memories that did not seem very old, of holding them on her lap and talking to them and listening to what they said. But the further she tried to push her memory, the further it receded. They were twelve and thirteen now: the last physical affection she could remember showing them was in the old house, which meant at least five years ago. Clark had been pounced on by a gang of boys and had come in sobbing and bruised, and she had set him on her lap and sat there holding him while he cried, and in time he calmed and just sat leaning against her shoulder, his eyes sunken into reddened sockets from crying, still catching his breath, and then he’d put his thumb in his mouth, which he still did at night, and suddenly Norm walked in and exploded.

‘Are you trying to make a faggot out of that kid, holding him on your lap, Mira? Letting him suck his thumb, for God’s sakes! What in hell is the matter with you?’

Scurried getting down, Mira’s protests, storming from Norm, more tears by Clark followed, and Clark was sent to his room in disgrace, while Norm shook his head, pouring himself a drink, muttering about the stupidity of women and the unconscious possessiveness of mothers. ‘I’m not blaming you, Mira, I know you didn’t think. But I’m telling you you have to think! You can’t treat a son that way.’

Had she, after that, had impulses, wanted to reach out and touch them, wanted to hold them when they touched her, and restrained herself? She could not remember. That had been another world, a world dictated by Norm. Everything seemed different now. She did as she pleased. She cleaned only when it was necessary, she wore old clothes around the house. Meals were simple and relaxed and suited to the boys’ taste. In time, as calmness was restored around them, they spent more time at home, and sometimes they even sat down near Mira and started a conversation. But Normie was the image of Norm, and Clark had his coloring and his eyes, and when she looked at them, something in her felt hard. They were part of Them. She remembered Lily tearing Carlos’ hands away from her body, fighting him off as if he were full-grown and trying to attack her. She found herself, as they spoke, continually correcting their grammar, reminding them of homework or chores, telling them they were filthy and needed showers,
reproaching them for not cleaning their rooms. It was effective. They did not stay long and soon stopped sitting down with her. She did not care.

The only person she had deep feeling for was Martha, who was having a terrible summer. Money problems were mounting: she feared losing the house. ‘It wouldn’t matter, except apartments are even more expensive than the house is. Where are we going to live? I can’t blame George, although I suspect he is being a bastard about it. I suppose that’s his way of showing anger. He has his apartment and he sees his shrink twice a week: that’s expensive. I have to get a job. But with the house, the kids, and school, I don’t know where I’ll find the time. And David. I’m starting to get really upset with him. It’s been almost nine months now, and he’s still living with Elaine. He does give me money every once in a while, that’s the only way I’ve survived this long, but now that’s his excuse for staying with her. The Boston job fell through. It seems to me he’s used whatever excuse was handy. He has the ideal world: two women, two families, both centered around him. He has a fucking harem, for God’s sakes!’