The Women's Room (4 page)

I am going to try to let the voices out. Maybe they will help me understand how they ended as they did, how I ended here feeling engulfed and isolated at the same time. Somehow it all starts with
Mira. How did she manage to get herself, at the age of thirty-eight, to hide in that toilet?

5

Mira was an independent baby, fond of removing her clothes and taking a stroll on a summer’s day to the local candy store. The second time she was returned home by a policeman she had directed. Mrs Ward began to tie her up. She did not mean to be unkind: Mira had been crossing a busy boulevard. She used a long rope, so Mira could still move around, and tied it to the handle of the front door. Mira continued in her disconcerting habit of removing all her clothes, however. Mrs Ward did not believe in corporal punishment and used stern reproach and withdrawal of affection instead. It worked. Mira had trouble removing all her clothes on her wedding night. In time, Mira’s fury and tears at being tied up abated, and she learned to operate within a small space, digging into things since she was not permitted to range outward. The leash was then removed, and Mira showed herself to be a docile and even timid child, only somewhat given to sullenness.

She was a bright child: she finished all the textbooks on the first day of school and, bored, spent the rest of the term enlivening her classmates. The solution decided upon was to move her ahead, into a class ‘more on her level,’ as the teacher put it. She was moved ahead several times, but never found such a class. What she did find was classmates years older, inches taller, pounds heavier, and with a world of sophistication greater than hers. She could not talk to them, and retreated into novels she kept hidden in her desk. She even read walking to and from school.

Mrs Ward, convinced that Mira was headed for great things – which meant a good marriage, to that good woman – scraped together money to send her for lessons. She had two years of elocution, two years of dancing school, two years of piano, and two years of water-color painting. (Mrs Ward had loved the novels of Jane Austen in her youth.) At home, Mrs Ward taught her not to cross her legs at the knee, not to climb trees with boys, not to play tag in the alley, not to speak in a raised voice, not to wear more than three pieces of jewelry at a time, and never to mix gold and silver. When these lessons had been learned, she considered Mira ‘finished.’

But Mira had a private life. Being so much younger than her
classmates, she had no friends, but she did not seem to care. She spent all her time reading, drawing, daydreaming. She especially loved fairy tales and myths. Then she was sent for two years of religious instruction, and her concerns changed.

At twelve, her preoccupation was determining the precise relation of God, heaven, hell, and earth. She would lie in bed at night looking out at the moon and clouds. Her bed stood beside a window, and she could lie comfortably on her pillow and gaze up and out. She tried to imagine all the people who had died, standing around up there in the sky. She tried to make them out; surely they must be peering down, longing for a friendly face? But she never caught a glimpse of one, and after reading a little history and considering how many millions of people had in fact inhabited the earth, she began to worry about the population problems of the afterworld. She imagined searching for her grandmother, dead three years now, and wandering forever through mobs of people and never finding her. Then she realized that all those people would be very heavy, that it was impossible that they should all be up there without the heavens falling down. Perhaps then there were only a few up there and all the rest were in hell.

But Mira’s social studies texts implied that the poor – whom Mira already knew to be the wicked – were not really wicked at heart but only environmentally deprived. God, Mira felt sure, if He was worth anything at all, would be able to see through such injustices to the good heart, and would not consign to hell all the juvenile delinquents who appeared in the pages of the
New York Daily News
which her father brought back from the city each night. This was a knotty problem, and gave her several weeks of heavy brainwork.

To solve it, she found it necessary to look into herself, not just to feel her feelings, but to examine them. She believed she really wanted to love and be loved, really wanted to be good and have the approval of her parents and her teachers. But somehow she could never do it. She was always making nasty cracks to her mother, resenting her father’s fussiness; she resented that they treated her like a child. They lied to her and she knew it. She asked her mother about an ad in magazines, and her mother said she did not know what sanitary napkins were. She asked her mother what
fuck
meant; she had heard it at the schoolyard. Her mother said she did not know, but later Mira heard her whisper to Mrs Marsh, ‘How can you tell a child a thing like that?’ And there were other things, things she could not put her finger on, that told her her parents’ idea of being good and her own were not the same. She
could not have said why, but her parents’ idea of what she should do felt like someone strangling her, stifling her.

She remembered one night when she had been very fresh to her mother about something, had been fresh because she was right and her mother refused to admit it. Her mother scolded her severely, and she went into the dark porch of the house and sat on the floor sulking, feeling very wronged. She refused to go in to dinner. Her mother came out to the porch and said, ‘Come on, now, Mira, don’t be silly.’ Her mother had never done a thing like that before. She even reached out her hand to Mira, to pull her up. But Mira sat sulking and wouldn’t take the hand. Her mother went back to the dining room. Mira was near to tears. ‘Why do I have to be so sullen, so stubborn?’ she cried to herself, wishing she had taken the hand, wishing her mother would come back. She didn’t. Mira sat on and a phrase came into her head: ‘They ask too much. It costs too much.’ What the cost was, she was not sure; she labeled it ‘myself.’ She adored her mother, and she knew that by being sullen and fresh she lost her mother’s love; sometimes Mrs Ward would not speak to her for days. But she went on being bad. She was spoiled, selfish, and fresh. Her mother told her all the time.

She was bad, but she didn’t want to be bad. Surely God must know that. She would be good if it didn’t cost so much. And in her badness, she was not really bad. She only wanted to do what she wanted to do: was that so terrible? Surely God would understand. He did understand because they said He saw the heart. And if He understood her, then He understood everyone. And no one really wanted to be bad, everyone wanted to be loved and approved. So there was no one in hell. But if there was no one there, why have it? There was no hell.

When Mira was fourteen, she had finished all the interesting books they would allow her to take from the library – they did not permit her into the adult section. So she leafed through the unappetizing family bookcase. The family itself had no notion what was in it: their books had collected themselves, being leavings from the attics of dead relatives. Mira found Paine’s
Common Sense
and Nietzsche’s
Beyond Good and Evil
, as well as Radclyffe Hall’s
Well of Loneliness
, a book she read with complete incomprehension.

She became convinced of the nonexistence not only of hell but also of heaven. However, without heaven a new problem arose. For if there were neither hell nor heaven, there was no final reward or punishment, and this world was all there was. But this world – even by fourteen one knows this – is a terrible place. Mira did not need to
read the newspapers, to see pictures of exploding ships and burning cities, to read rumors of places called concentration camps, to realize how terrible it was. She needed only to look around her. There was brutality and cruelty everywhere: in the classroom, in the schoolyard in the block she lived on. One day, as she walked to the grocery store on an errand, she heard a boy screaming, and the thwack of a strap in the end house. Having been brought up with gentleness, Mira was horrified and wondered why a parent would do such a thing to a child. Had her parents done that to her, she would have been worse than she was, she knew that. She would have tried to defy them in any way she could. She would have hated them. But the terribleness of life existed even in her own home. It was a tight, silent place; there was little conversation at the dinner table. There were always tensions between her mother and father that she did not understand, and often tensions between her mother and her, as well. She felt as if she were in the middle of a war in which the weapons were like light beams, darting across the room, wounding everybody, but unable to be grasped. Mira wondered if the insides of everybody were as tumultuous and explosive as hers. She looked at her mother and saw bitter misery and resentment in her face; she saw sadness and disappointment in her father’s. She herself felt wild clamorous emotions toward them both – love, hate, resentment, fury, and a crying ache for physical affection – but she never moved, never threw herself at either of them in either love or hate. The rules of the household forbade such behavior. She wondered if anyone at all was happy. She had more reason to be than most: she was treated well, fed well, clothed well, safe. But she was a screaming battlefield. So what were other people? If this were the only world there was, there could not be a God. No benevolent mind could have created this earth. Finally, she disposed of the problem by dispensing with the deity.

Next, she set about planning a world where unjust and cruel things could not happen. It was based on gentleness toward and freedom for children, and moved upward using intelligence as the distinguishing characteristic. The rulers of the world – for she could not conceive of a world without rulers – were its most intelligent and wisest members. Everyone had enough to eat, and no one had too much, like gross Mr Mittlow. Although she was as yet innocent of Plato, she came up with a structure remarkably similar to his. But in a few months, she disposed of that also. It was simply that once she had the whole thing perfectly organized, it bored her. It was the same as when she used
to imagine stories about herself, stories in which she was adopted, and one day a wonderful handsome man, one with a real face, not like Daddy Warbucks’, but possessed of equal resources, would drive up to the Wards’ front door in his long black car, and claim her. He would take her to wonderful foreign places and would love her forever. Or stories about how there really were fairies, only they didn’t appear anymore because people had stopped believing in them, but she still did, so one would come to her and offer her three wishes, and she had to think a long time about those, and kept changing her mind, but finally she decided the best wishes would be that her parents could be happy and healthy and rich and if they were then they would love her and they would all live happily ever after. The trouble was the endings of these stories were always boring, and you could never go beyond the end. She tried to imagine what life would be like once everything was perfect, but she could never do it.

Later, much later, she would remember these years, and realize with astonishment that she had, by fifteen, decided on most of the assumptions she would carry for the rest of her life: that people were essentially not evil, that perfection was death, that life was better than order, and a little chaos good for the soul. Most important, this life was all. Unfortunately, she forgot these things, and had to remember them the hard way.

6

Because at the same time that she was making all these decisions, she was being undermined. The problem was sex. Couldn’t you have guessed that? That Garden of Eden story hasn’t hung on all these years for nothing. Even though Genesis suggests and Milton insists that it wasn’t sex itself that caused the Fall, but was only the first place the reverberations were felt, we go on equating sex with fall because that’s the way it happens to us. The main problem with sex, I’m convinced (and now I’m beginning to sound like Val), is that it comes on us when we are already formed. Maybe if we were fondled and petted all our lives, it wouldn’t be such a shock, but we aren’t, at least I wasn’t and Mira wasn’t, and so the strong desire for bodily contact comes upon us as a violation.

At the end of her fourteenth year, Mira began to menstruate and was finally let in on the secret of sanitary napkins. Soon afterward,
she began to experience strange fluidities in her body, and her mind, she was convinced, had begun to rot. She could feel the increasing corruption, but couldn’t seem to do anything to counter it. The first sign was that when she lay in bed at night, trying to move ahead from her disposal of both God and Perfect Order to something more usable, she could not concentrate. Her mind wandered vaguely. She stared at the moon and thought about songs, not God. She smelled the air of the summer night and a tremendous sensation of pleasure encompassed her whole body. She was restless, could not sleep or think, and would get up and kneel on her bed, lean on the windowsill, peer out at the gently waving branches, and smell the sweet night air. She had sudden overwhelming desires to put her hand under her pajamas and rub the skin of her shoulder, her sides, the insides of her thighs. And when she did that, strange spurts would happen inside her. She would lie back and try to think, but only images rampaged through her head. These images were always, horrifyingly, of the same things. She had a code word for her decaying condition: she called it
boys
.

Now, in the past fifteen years she had lived on earth, Mira had been quite alone, had lived mostly in her head. She had despised the children she saw jumping rope or playing tag in the streets: she found their occupations stupid. She despised the empty boredom of adults’ lives, gathered mainly from occasions when the Wards entertained friends, and found their conversation stupid. She respected only two people: her English teacher, Mrs Sherman, and Friedrich Nietzsche. But of all the stupid creatures that lumbered around on earth, the most stupid were boys. They were loud, truculent, sloppy, dirty, silly, boisterous, and dumb at school. Everyone knew that. Whereas she was smart and clean and neat and precise and able and got A’s even without studying. All the girls had been smarter than the boys until the last few years when the girls had started to get silly, too. One by one, they had started to lick their lips all the time to make them shiny, only to end up with chappedness around their mouth. They would pinch their cheeks to make them pink. And smoke in the girls’ room, even though you got expelled from school for that. Girls who had been smart in sixth grade acted stupid in class in seventh and eighth. They walked in groups and talked in whispers and giggled. She couldn’t even
find anyone to walk to school with. But now she discovered that if she didn’t want to act like them, she really wanted to know what it was they were whispering and giggling about. That her easy disdain for them should turn into a vulnerable curiosity outraged her.