The Women's Room Read online

  Val amused us with many such evening entertainments, but I thought it made sense, at least as much sense as the way things are presently ordered. I said the major problem was for the young women to bring up the children. It was different when everyone lived on the land, and a woman could grow her crops and kids at the same time. She said if a society wanted children, it would have to pay for them the same as it paid for guns and bombers. She said that if it paid for them, it might value them a little more and spoil them a little less.

  At any rate, it does seem true that a young woman may sometimes behave in a way that can be called titillating, and that men take such behavior as being directed entirely at them. Now there’s no doubt that most of us are a little finer, a little more attractive and electric when there’s someone in the room who appeals to us sexually. I’ve often seen blushing young men with shining eyes behave in the same way, but no one says of them that they want to be raped. If, after taking a few steps forward, they then decide to retreat, no one accuses them of being cunt teasers. In fact, the disappointed woman probably thinks it’s all her fault. The mating game is as complicated as the dances derived from it – that terrible, wonderful, macho flamenco, for instance. Maybe it was easier back in the old days when it was performed with bodyguards called chaperons: the girls could be as free and gay and thoughtless as the boys without having to worry about consequences. Now we have the pill, but that doesn’t work quite the same way. It might have helped poor Mira though. There was just no rational way out of her dilemma; all the alternatives rot. Like being in a burning building, the fire beyond you, two windows in front of you, one looking down on a tiny bunch of firemen holding a canvas that looks no bigger than your thumb, the other looking down on the filthy Hudson River. When you are in situations like that, the only thing you can do is close your eyes and plunge. No amount of ratiocination can help you decide whether the fire is only a corridor deep and you could reach the staircase beyond, whether your chances are better with the water or the net.

  12

  One evening, after a long silence, Lanny called and asked Mira to go out. Her heart fluttered a little, like a bird long grounded, whose broken wing has healed, and who is tentatively trying it out. Perhaps he would be willing to try it her way – to be friends, to stay close and loving until someday she would be ready to risk. And she knew, as soon as she opened the door to him, that she, or at least her body, loved the gangling awkward figure with the pale disconnected eyes and the smooth long hands. But he was stiff and polite; in the car, he barely spoke.

  ‘You seem angry?’ she ventured.

  ‘Why should I be angry?’ But there was a sarcastic twang in his voice. It silenced her.

  After a long pause, she asked coolly: ‘Why did you call me, then?’

  He did not answer. She glanced at him. His mouth was working.

  ‘Why?’ she pursued.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said in a dull voice.

  Her mind was in tumult. He had called her, it seemed, against his will. What could that be but love, something beyond simple desire? She wanted to go someplace quiet, where they could talk, but he drove to Kelley’s, a college hangout near the campus where they had often gone. It was a saloon: knotty pine paneling and college pennants, a long bar in front, a few tables and a jukebox in back: red-checkered tablecloths, blaring music, and the smell of beer. As usual on Saturday nights, the place was mobbed; they were standing four deep at the bar. She did not like standing at bars, and Lanny took her to the rear, and unusually polite, helped her with her coat. She sat down; he went to the bar to get their drinks. There was a bartender who waited table, but with such a crowd, they would have to wait long for him. Lanny disappeared into the mob at the bar. Mira lighted a cigarette. She sat. She smoked another cigarette. Men paused and gave her the once-over on their way to the toilet. She was humiliated and anxious. He had met some friends, no doubt. She glanced at the crowd, but she could not spot him. She smoked another cigarette.

  She was tamping it out when Biff and Tommy came in through the back door and saw her. They came to the table, asked where Lanny was, stood around talking. Tommy went up to the bar and came back in a few minutes with a pitcher of beer, and he and Biff sat down with her. She talked with them, but she was stiff and the corners of her mouth were trembling. After the pitcher was nearly empty, Lanny suddenly appeared, carrying one glass – her Canadian Club. He stared coldly at his friends, then at her, plunked the glass down in front of her, and stalked stiffly back to the bar. Biff and Tommy looked at each other and at her: all three shrugged questioningly. They went on talking.

  Mira’s innards were quivering. She was angry with Lanny, but much more she was confused, uneasy, and even frightened. Why had he called her in the first place? Had he intended to take her out and ignore her all night? She remembered, miserably, many nights when he had done that, but there had always been a group of friends with them. She felt, above all, humiliated, and that gave her strength. The hell with him. She would act as if she didn’t care. She would act as if she were having fun. She would have fun. She grew very animated, and her friends responded with high spirits.

  Other people joined them. Biff got another pitcher of beer, and brought her a Canadian. She was touched. Biff was so poor. She smiled at him and he glowed at her. Biff always treated her as if she were fragile and innocent; he hovered, protecting her, but never tried to make a claim on her. His haggard cheeks, his tattered jacket cuffs hurt her. She wanted to give him something. She knew he would never approach her sexually. Because of his limp, probably: he was in college by virtue of a scholarship given to poor children with disabilities. Biff had had polio. So, bright as he was, attractive as he could have been if he’d had enough to eat, he never made the first move with women. And because she felt safe with him, she could afford to love him. She smiled her love at him and he smiled love back. Tommy was gleaming at her too, and Dan. They were all singing together now, over a third or fourth pitcher, she had lost count, being on her third Canadian.

  She no longer had to act: she was having fun. She was having more fun than she did when Lanny was around. He always made her feel as if she didn’t belong, as if she should not be joining in, but should be sitting in a chair against the dining room wall, faintly smiling, watching the men around the table eat and drink. It was sex, she thought, that caused the problem. With these friends, that didn’t come up, so they could be just friends, could have fun together. They were her comrades, her brothers, she loved them all. They had crisscrossed arms and were holding hands around the table, singing ‘The Whiffenpoof Song.’

  Lanny did not return. People were playing the jukebox, and Tommy asked her to dance. She agreed: they were playing an old Glenn Miller record that she liked. They kept playing. They put on ‘Sentimental Journey,’ ‘String of Pearls,’ and ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside.’ She kept dancing. They kept buying pitchers of beer, and a fourth Canadian sat melting and sweating on the table. Other people arrived, people she didn’t know well but who were in her class and knew her name. They were playing Stan Kenton now; the music, like her head, seemed louder, wilder. She noticed while she was dancing that there was no other girl in the back, that she was the only one dancing, that the guys were standing around almost as if they were lined up, waiting. But it seemed all right, because, she reasoned, there was only one guy dancing at a time, too.

  The lindy is a man’s dance. The male gets to hurl and whirl his partner all around the floor and he can just stand there. It must have been invented for men who didn’t know how to dance. Mira was dizzy from all the swinging around, but she was loving it. She was moving and swinging and her head pounded, but the outside world had disappeared, she did not have to think about Lanny. She was music and movement, she was irresponsible, she did not even have to think about her partner, since whoever he was, she didn’t care about him. She was whirling in a great ballroom, she was sheer motion.

  As a song ended, Biff appeared suddenly at her side and took
her elbow in his hand. He whispered in her ear: ‘I think you’d better leave.’

  She turned on him indignantly. ‘Why?’

  ‘Mira.’ His voice was urgent. ‘Come on.’

  ‘I have to wait for Lanny.’

  ‘Mira.’ His voice was low, but almost desperate. She was totally bewildered.

  ‘Trust me,’ he said, and since she did, she docilely allowed him to guide her through the crowd and out the back door. They stood there for a moment, then he said quickly, ‘Let’s go upstairs.’

  Upstairs was an apartment shared by Biff and Lanny and two other boys. She had been there at many parties, and Biff had often been the one to drive her home after Lanny collapsed, using Lanny’s car. So she felt no nervousness at all. But the fresh air had made her know how drunk she was, three Canadians being more than her system was used to, and when they got upstairs, she fell on the couch.

  ‘No,’ Biff said, and pointed toward the bedroom.

  She obeyed him easily, let him help her up and lead her gently toward the bedroom she knew was Lanny’s. He helped her gently onto the bed, and when she was lying there watching the room swirl, he softly placed a blanket over her, went out, and closed the door. She thought she heard him fuss with the key, but the dizziness made her so wretched that she forced herself to go to sleep.

  After a time she awoke, gradually, drifting in and out of puzzlement. She seemed to hear noise, shouting, slamming, arguing. It grew louder. She tried to sit up. The room was still whirling, and she half-sat, resting her body on her arm. She listened, trying to make out what was happening. The noises grew nearer, they seemed to be coming down the hall toward the bedrooms. There was a crash, slams, it sounded like a fight. She leaped up and headed for the door and tried to open it. It was locked. She fell back and sat on the bed, sitting there with her shoes off, huddled in the blanket. The noises subsided. There were door slams, several of them. Then silence. She started to get up again, planning to pound for Biff to let her out, when suddenly the door flew open, light poured in blinding her, and a figure was standing in the doorway.

  ‘I hope you’re satisfied, you slut!’ Lanny shouted.

  She blinked. He slammed the door. She sat there blinking. There were other slams, then again quiet, then the door opened again. Biff came in and switched on a dim lamp on the bureau. She blinked at him. He came over and sat on the bed beside her.

  ‘What happened?’

  His voice sounded thin, like someone else’s voice. He talked around and around; she did not understand what he was saying. She asked questions; he tried to parry them. She insisted. At last she understood. The dancing, he said, and Lanny’s leaving her alone. It was all Lanny’s fault, the bastard. So those guys got the wrong impression. It was not her fault. They didn’t know her as Biff knew her, didn’t know her innocence, her ‘purity’ he called it. So …

  ‘All of them?’ she asked, appalled.

  He nodded grimly.

  Her mind churned that. How would they manage that? ‘In turns?’ she asked him.

  He shrugged disgustedly.

  She put her hand on his arm. ‘Biff, you had to fight them all off? Oh, Biff!’

  He was frail; he weighed less than she did. ‘It was okay. Not real fighting, just some shoving and yelling. No harm done.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll take you home. I’ve got the keys to Lanny’s car.’

  He had tried hard enough to spare her the ugliness, as if not knowing were somehow less ugly than knowing. But nothing could spare her that. He drove her home in sympathetic silence, and while she was endlessly grateful to him not only for doing what he had done for her, but for being who he was, she could not speak to him. She thanked him over and over, in a monotone, but could not say anything more. She went up to her room and lay on the bed and fell immediately into a deep sleep and slept for fourteen hours. The next day she did not get up at all. She told her mother she didn’t feel well. All Sunday she lay there.

  13

  She was overwhelmed. This was what it was all about, all the strange things she had been taught. Everything fell into place, everything made sense. And that everything was too big for her. Other girls went to bars, other girls danced. The difference was she had appeared to be alone. That a woman was not marked as the property of some male made her a bitch in heat to be attacked by any male, or even by all of them at once. That a woman could not go out in public and enjoy herself dancing without worrying what every male in the place was thinking or even worse, what they might do, seemed to her an injustice so extreme that she could not swallow it.

  She was a woman and that alone was enough to deprive her of freedom no matter how much the history books pretended that women’s suffrage had ended inequality, or that women’s feet had been bound only in an ancient and outmoded and foreign place like China. She was constitutionally unfree. She could not go out alone at night. She could not in a moment of loneliness go out to a local tavern to have a drink in company. The twice she had taken the train during the daytime, to make excursions to museums in New York, she had been continually approached. She could not even appear to be lacking an escort; if that escort decided to abandon her, she was helpless. And she couldn’t defend herself: she had to depend on a male for that. Even frail, limping Biff could handle such a situation better than she. Had those guys gotten her, all the rage and hauteur and fighting in the world wouldn’t have helped her.

  And she would never be free, never. Never. It would always be like this. She thought about her mother’s friends and suddenly understood them. No matter where she went or what she did, she would always have to worry about what men were thinking, how they looked at her, what they might do. One day some months before, in an elevator on her way to the dentist’s office, she had overheard an ugly aged woman with dyed red hair and a crooked back talking to another woman, fiftyish and fat, about rape. Both of them were clucking their tongues, talking about locks on doors and windows, and they looked to her as if to include her in conversation, as if she were one of them. She had looked away, full of contempt for them. Who would want to rape them? It was wishful thinking, she thought. Yet a few nights later there was an item in the newspaper about an eighty-year-old woman, raped and killed in her own apartment.

  She thought about what would have happened had Biff not been there and her mind went black with the horror, the blood, the desecration. It was not her virginity she treasured, but her right to herself, to her own mind and body. Horrible, horrible it would have been, and her beloved Lanny would no doubt have called her slut and said she had gotten what she deserved. He would simply have erased her from his list of women one is required to treat with respect. That was the way things were. And no matter how high she held her head, no matter how alone she walked, that is the way things would stay. It was ridiculous to talk about injustice; it was useless to protest. She knew from her few experiences of talking about women and freedom that such protests were always taken by men as invitations to their taking greater freedoms with her.

  Mira retreated. She was defeated. Her pride, such as was left her, was spent entirely in not letting the defeat show. She walked alone on campus, head high, an icy look on her face. She sat alone in the cafeteria, or with Biff, or a girl from class. She averted her eyes from any male who passed her, and never smiled at them even when they greeted her. She was never sure which of them had been there that night, there had been so many, such familiar faces, so dizzy and smoky an air. If she happened to see Lanny at a distance, she walked the other way.

  At the end of the school year, she met Norm. He was the son of friends of the family, and she met him at a family cookout. He was gentle and intelligent, he treated her with respect, and he never pressed her toward sex. Her dream of choosing and living a life of her own had vanished. Any life in which she was alone would contain the risk of encountering that pack of savages. Bitterly, she thought she was being unkind to those usually called savages, who would probably never behave that way: only civilized men behave that way. Bittern
ess closed her in. She had lost her life. She would live out a half-life, like the rest of women. She had no choice but to protect herself against a savage world she did not understand and by her gender alone was made unfit to deal with. There was marriage and there was the convent. She retreated into the one as if it were the other, and wept at her wedding. She knew she was renouncing the world, the world that a year before had shimmered with excitement and allure. She had been taught her place. She had learned the limits of her courage. She had failed, she had been vanquished. She would devote herself to Norm, and crept into his arms as into a fortress. It was true what they said: a woman’s place is in the home. When Biff heard she was getting married, he came up to her in the cafeteria, congratulating her in front of a group of young men. ‘I really congratulate Norm,’ he said loudly. ‘He’s getting a virgin, that I know.’ It was to justify her in some way, she knew; but also, he meant it as a compliment to her. She closed her mind to him, then. They thought one thing or they thought another: but their thinking was all the same.

  14

  Some dramatic sense, probably culled from reading plays, or female Bildungsromane, which always end with the heroine’s marriage, make me want to stop here, make a formal break, like the curtain going down. Marriage should mean a great change, a new life. But it was less a new beginning for Mira than a continuation. Although the external events of her life changed, the internal ones remained much the same.