The Women's Room (64 page)

Iso’s eyes were brilliant, her lips were shiny, her hair was a halo of honey. Mira wished Iso would hold out her arms to her. She wanted to go to her friend and embrace her, to be embraced. But she couldn’t move.

She doesn’t care about me, she thought, not that way. I’m old. I’m unattractive.

They gazed at each other for a long moment. Then it passed. Iso turned and yawned. ‘It’s late,’ she said. ‘I’d better go.’

7

Mira went to her parents’ home in New Jersey for Christmas. She went without joy. The Wards were elderly and very proper. In the forty years they had been married, neither of them had ever appeared at the breakfast table in a robe, nor had either of their children until last Christmas when Mira visited them. She had not only come down in a robe but sat around in that robe for an hour or two. They were so shocked they could not speak.

Mr Ward had never appeared at the dinner table without shirt, tie and jacket, even on weekends when he spent the day working on the lawn, and Mrs Ward never appeared without a ‘good’ dress and jewelry. When Mira wore her slacks and sweater, they drew their breaths in sharply. It was particularly difficult for them, since it seemed somehow indecorous to reprimand a thirty-nine-year-old daughter with grown children of her own, who came to visit only once a year. They were silent, but tense and jarred.

The Wards had fixed habits. They changed for dinner at four, had drinks at five: two manhattans. That was the only thing they drank and they could not understand anyone drinking anything else or anything more. Dinner always consisted of things like a lamb chop and two teaspoons of peas with canned potatoes, and perhaps a salad of sliced lettuce with a peach half, heavily dosed with mayonnaise. Or there might be a broiled chicken breast and two teaspoons of canned string beans.
Or a slice of roast beef and a baked potato: but that was only on special occasions. There was always cake afterwards, one of two kinds, black and white, one of which Mrs Ward baked every week, and had done for nearly forty years.

Their house was much like their food. Everything was of good quality, but drab, chosen with an eye to durability and what the Wards called ‘good taste’ which meant nothing they would call ‘flashy.’ The faded Wilton carpet was a deeper brown than the beige wallpaper; the tweed chair coverings had lasted eighteen years. One reason their furniture stayed in good condition, they rather pointedly reminded Mira, was because they did not smoke. They opened windows vividly when Mira was visiting.

Not that they did not love her. But their house was so clean, so quiet, so orderly when she was not there, that it caused them both physical pain to endure the disorder she created. Oh, she was careful, they’d agree to that: she emptied her ashtrays at night, brought her own brandy and gin, and washed her glasses. But the cigarette odor hung in the lemon-waxed living room for several days after she left. There was a trace of the smell of alcohol in the kitchen every morning. Her toothbrush cluttered up the bathroom sink, to say nothing of her comb and brush, and sometimes, even stray hairs. They didn’t complain. But she sensed their difficulty in accepting what felt to them like defilement; she violated the narrow patterns of their life.

She wanted to violate more. She wanted to talk to them. But that was impossible. The rules guiding conversation were strictly abided by. There were various levels of propriety. Mrs Ward’s friends might stop in for coffee of an afternoon and whisper a shocking story. Mr Ward might meet someone at the hardware store and hear a ghastly tale. They might, alone in their bedroom, communicate these horrors to each other, and sometimes Mrs Ward would whisper the tale to the wife of a visiting couple, when she went into the kitchen with Mrs Ward to help her put out the coffee and cake which was served after the men had had three highballs. But such tales were never, never discussed publicly, and never in front of the children. Mira, hardly a child, might now be granted her mother’s confidence as they sat in the living room in the afternoon, hearing Mr Ward hammer at something in the cellar. But that confidence would be conveyed in a low voice, with an eye cocked toward the cellar door, and it was understood that the information would not be brought up later, when the three of them were together. As a child, Mira had understood these distinctions implicitly. She had not
given them much thought, but it seemed clear to her that the line was between men and women. There were certain facts of life that men either were not strong enough to bear or were not to be bothered with, that women whispered among themselves. Yet she felt sure that her mother occasionally, privately, related these incidents to her husband. It seemed to her a ritual game with no point at all, and she wanted to break it, to open it up to the air.

When Mira was young public conversation could include only certain stipulated topics. One might discuss one’s children, but unless they were very small, there could be no mention of problems. Toilet training, yes; failing out of high school, no. Carousing at night, never. One could discuss one’s house endlessly, and might mention money but not money problems. The cost of the new water boiler was okay; the hike in taxes was okay; but difficulty in meeting payments was not. One could discuss one’s husband or wife, but again, only in certain ways. It was acceptable to mention that he had just joined the golf club, bought a new lawn mower, received a promotion. You were on shaky ground if you mentioned he’d been called in for an income tax audit. And if you related that on Saturday night he’d gotten drunk at the club and gotten into a fight, the shock would be less at the deed than at the fact that you told it. Certain things could be suggested, but must not be specified. So when the Adams girl three houses down had been raped one night last summer, everyone knew that she’d been walking from the bus stop at ten o’clock when a man came at her and well … you know … the poor thing screamed, but no one came … she’s in the hospital now, but she seems to be all right. Sigh. Tsk, tsk. The result of these lacunae was that everyone imagined the incident in the most violent, the most degraded way their imaginations could find. ‘She was attacked’ no doubt meant many things to each of Mrs and Mr Ward’s friends and the unspoken pictures each formed rose like a vivid sublife hovering beyond the pale.

The Wards disapproved of Jews, the colored, Catholics who had many children, divorce, and any unusual behavior. Mrs Ward, on her own, had low opinions of the Irish (shantytown habits), Italians (dirty, garlicky), the English, who were cold (she never said whether she included her husband in that category), Germans (drinkers and bullies), the French (sexy: although she did not know any), and Communists, who hovered as a vague but powerful devil. Other ethnic categories were too strange even to be considered members of the human race. However, in the past twenty years their neighborhood
had changed, and people of all sorts moved in. Mrs Ward, who was curious and gregarious, would stoop to coo over a baby in a carriage, and find herself in conversation with its mother. She could explain this to anyone. She would say constantly: ‘Well they’re – [fill in the blank], but they’re really very nice.’ She even had a Jewish friend.

Mira’s divorce was a terrible blow to them. They could not forgive Mira for being the first member of the family so to disgrace it. Although they knew that it was Norm who wanted the divorce, and that Mira had been an exemplary wife, they still believed deep down that a woman’s first job is to hold on to her husband, and that Mira had failed. It hurt them that Norm was now living in that magnificent house with a second wife; they would mention it only briefly to Mira, but always with a pained line between their eyes.

‘We passed your old house the other day on our way to the Baxters’ and Norm’s putting in new shrubs,’ they would say.

When Mira arrived, there was always a flurry of hugs and kisses, an offer of lunch, and then they would sit around the dining room table drinking coffee. How was her trip down? Much traffic? Was the car holding up? How was school? This was another difficult spot, since Mrs Ward could not for the life of her understand why a middle-aged woman would want to go back to school, and always had to forbear when the subject came up. What was she doing now? Orals. Yes. And what was that? Oh, and after that? When, the questions insisted, are you going to be finished and rejoin the adult world? Dissertation. Oh, yes, of course. And what did that involve? They had asked the same questions last year, and would ask them the next.

Friends were acceptable subjects of conversation, and so Mira told them whatever news she had about her friends. But they could never remember anyone but Val, despite the number of times Mira mentioned Iso, and recently in her letters, Clarissa and Kyla. It seemed that Val was her own age, and thus could be classified as a friend, while the others got lumped in with ‘the young students.’ Mira decided to tell them about their parties. They listened in puzzlement. Mrs Ward did not understand why these young students, none of whom had very much money, would want to waste what little they had on such foolish enterprises.

‘For fun,’ Mira said, but that was a word neither of the Wards comprehended.

As she talked on, she slid in ‘Ben’ several times, but neither of them asked who he was.

Then it was Mrs Ward’s turn. The Wards had many friends, couples they had known for thirty years or longer. They knew these people’s children and grandchildren. They knew their friends’ cousins, aunts, and uncles (mostly dead now). There were stories galore. This one’s daughter had moved, her husband having received a promotion and transfer to Minneapolis; that one had died. A baby had been born. Someone had gone off to college. And someone – her voice lowered – had gotten a divorce. And someone’s son was – even lower – on drugs.

Mira was astonished. Things were changing even in Bellview. She remembered from her childhood how pure and unsullied the immediate world of her parents had seemed. She always felt tainted in it, knowing herself not up to its standards. She was, of course, always sent from the room when her mother’s friends stopped in for a visit. After she was married and visited her mother on an occasional afternoon, she remembered being aware of an aura of sin hovering just above the heads of some of her parents’ oldest friends. There was a rumor of divorce in the Martinson family – a brother, she thought. There was a period when silence fell at the mention of Harry Cronkite’s name, but eventually they were speaking of divorce right at the dining room table, and of drugs too. Both Wards shook their heads. The world was in imminent trouble. It was true, Mira thought. Their world was, when things like drugs and a rumored abortion could break through the carefully wrought surface of their social life. Life breaks out everywhere, Mira thought.

But still she had to listen to the boring recital of actions performed by strangers, or people she could barely remember. They were actions without motive and without consequence, and about as interesting as a parts list for an atomic submarine. But the Wards derived pleasure from the telling. Occasionally Mr Ward would interrupt his wife with, ‘No, it wasn’t Arthur, it was the other brother, Donald, the one who lived in Cleveland,’ and sometimes there would even be a little argument about just which brother it was. But on and on they went. They could fill three days with it. It began to remind Mira of a pornographic book she had borrowed from Iso. It had a male narrator, and on just about every page, he had intercourse. There were some details: he was having intercourse with A, B, or C, on a fur rug in front of a fire, on a swing, in the bathtub. But most of the story was given over to the dull, repetitious recital of the physical details of the act.

‘That’s how they arouse themselves. They masturbate to it. They want it ritualistic,’ Iso explained.

‘It’s a mind-fuck,’ Kyla added.

‘I thought you liked them,’ Mira said, still unable to use the word.

‘Oh, I do when they’re with other people. You know, when you come together and two minds just set each other off and you can feel the sparks. It’s great! But this is a different kind.’

Mira wondered what her parents would do if she told them she thought they were having a mind-fuck.

‘How about a gin and tonic?’ is what she did say. They were shocked anyway.

After the good news had all been told, the bad had its turn. Since misbehavior and money problems were forbidden, the only bad news allowed was of sickness and death. And the Wards were a walking encyclopedia. They knew every detail of every symptom of every sickness of every friend. They knew each one’s doctor bills. Since the Wards and their friends were in their seventies, these were considerable. The hospital expenses were indeed staggering. The Wards were horrified by sickness itself, and by the extravagant costs, but beneath this, they were puzzled, although they could not articulate their problem. ‘I don’t know what’s happening to the world,’ they said worriedly.

Most of the Wards’ friends had been like them, poor during the Depression. They had lived frugally and worked hard and by the late forties, with the help of the war, they were fairly well off. They had not considered the implications of needing a war to improve an economy; they felt no moral question implicit in their new prosperity. They all believed in technology and were certain that progress, as they would call it, had been a good thing. They shuddered at the word
socialism
, and even socialized medicine seemed to them something tinged with evil. It was a strange society, Mira thought, that destroys the very people who support its principles. For these people were being wiped out by medical bills, and even the Wards, who as yet had no serious ailments, were having trouble living on Mr Ward’s pension with all the inflation. Mira’s feeble interest in politics had been somewhat increased by Ben, who talked about it constantly, but for the first time she saw it in practical application. Apart from any moral consideration, a system that does not support the people who support it is doomed. She tried, in simple language to suggest something of this to her parents, but they could not hear her. The things were in two different categories in their minds: capitalism was good, high medical
bills were bad, but they had no connection with each other. She gave up.