The Women's Room Page 9

  He nodded understandingly at this. ‘I’ll have them bring it,’ he said kindly, and patted her hand.

  She began to understand that because of the way she’d acted during delivery, they thought she was crazy and would harm the child. Later in the week, a nurse confirmed that sometimes women do. Sometimes they even kill themselves, or try to. It had a name: post-partum depression. She smiled bitterly. It was insanity, of course. All women were thrilled to get pregnant, overjoyed to go into labor, and worked their mightiest to help the nice doctor. They were all good little girls and when their babies were born, they were just so happy! And cuddled the little darlings and cooed. Of course. And if you didn’t do that, you were nuts. It never occurred to anyone to ask why women would kill the babies that had cost them so much pain, or kill themselves after the pain was over. But she had learned her lesson. They had the power. You had to act the way they expected you to act or they could keep the child of your own body and your own pain from you. You had to figure out their expectations and adjust yourself to them, and if you did that you might be able to make it in this world. When the nurse came again with the child, Mira smiled at her. She asked again about the indentations and the pointed head, not trusting what the morning nurse had told her. She understood that those marks were a stigma upon her, not the child: she had not pushed. Finally the nurse laid the infant in her arms, and after watching her for a few minutes, left.

  It felt funny. The nurse had said not to leave its neck unsupported, because it could not hold up its own head. And not to touch the top of the head because it was still soft, the skull wasn’t closed yet. It was terrifying. The baby looked old and wizened like an aged man. It had some fuzz on its head. When she was sure the nurse was gone, she stopped smiling and opened the receiving blanket. She peered in. Two arms, two legs, hands and feet intact. She looked with amazement at the ten tiny nails on hands and feet. They were a little bluer than the rest of the body, which was splotched red and blue. Nervously, peering up to see if the nurse had returned, Mira undid the pins on one side of the diaper. A penis, tiny as a worm, suddenly darted up and pissed right in her eye. She laughed.

  She closed the diaper up again, and surveyed the baby. She saw family resemblances, mostly to a dead uncle of hers. It was lying with closed eyes, but its mouth was working and the tiny hands were convulsively clutching. It must be scared, she thought, after all that time in the warm dark. She put her pinky into the tiny palm when it opened, and it grabbed her finger hard and held it fast. The tiny fingers turned blue with the effort, the nails were dead white. Something went through her body as he clenched her pinky. He seemed to be trying to get it to his mouth. She smiled: always, always, from the very beginning: I want, I want. She left her finger in his grasp and helped him guide it to his mouth. He tried to suck at it, although he didn’t seem really to know how. She held him close against her breast and lay back resting with him. He settled against her, almost turning toward her, and relaxed. After a while, the nurse came and took him away.

  Mira rested against the pillow, her body utterly still. Her arms felt empty. She felt something happening inside her body, a pull that started around her genitals and pierced through her stomach, her chest, her heart, right into her throat. Her breast ached. She wanted to put it in his mouth; she wanted to hold him in her arms. She wanted to put her finger in his hand, and to let him lie against her, warmed by her body, feeling her heartbeat. She wanted to take care of him. What she was feeling, she knew, was love, a love blinder and more irrational than even sexual love. She loved him because he needed her; it was secondary that he happened to be hers, to have come from her body. He was helpless and he would move against her as if her body were his own, as if she were a source of everything he wanted. She knew that her life would from now on be dictated by that tiny creature, that his needs would be the most important thing in her life, that forever and forever she would be trying to fill that convulsive grasp, that rosebud hole of mouth, wiping urine out of her eye. But somehow it was all right because of that love, which was not just love, which was more even than need: it was absolute will and the answer to all ache.

  20

  She had heard, during the course of the day, voices outside the pink curtains. They were soft, even whispered, and she had not heard what they were saying. But now the nurse, apparently deciding she was sane after all, pulled back the curtains around her bed. She was in a large bright room with three other women; the beds were all placed with the headboards against the walls. The women greeted her like a late guest for whom they had been waiting.

  ‘Oh, you’re awake! We tried not to disturb you.’

  ‘How do you feel? Do your stitches hurt?’

  ‘Your baby is beautiful. I saw the nurse bring him in. He’s going to be a hoosher! He woke up the whole maternity ward last night.’ She laughed, showing several missing teeth.

  Mira laughed too. ‘I feel fine, thank you. And you?’

  They all felt fine. They were in the middle of a conversation. Later, Mira could not remember what it had been about. It didn’t matter: their talk was never linear, it did not have a beginning and an end, a point to be made. It went round and round and round. They could talk about anything, because the point was not in what they said. For four days, Mira listened to them; she even joined in. They compared how many stitches they had but never complained about them, except once, when the curtain was drawn and the nurse was bathing Amelia, Mira heard her whisper a little anxiously that she was having considerable pain ‘down there’. They compared pounds and ounces of childflesh produced, oohing at tiny Amelia’s thirteen-pounder. They compared number and order of children. Grace had seven, Amelia four, Margaret had two, and this was Mira’s first. ‘Your first!’ they exclaimed, smiling with joy, as if she had accomplished some marvelous feat. She had. She was one of them now.

  They talked about their other children. Margaret was worried about her three-year-old: would he accept the new baby? Grace laughed, then caught herself and put her hand on her side with a gasp. She had had a Caesarean. She didn’t worry about such things anymore, she resumed. Her children would be confused if they did not find a new baby in the small crib every two years. How old was her eldest? Mira asked. Sixteen, she said. Mira wanted to ask, but did not, how old she herself was. She could have been anywhere between thirty-four or -five and fifty-odd, Mira calculated, but she looked fifty-odd. She was the one with the missing teeth. When Mira saw her husband, who visited that evening, she knew that Grace had to be in her thirties: her husband looked young.

  They talked and talked and talked, but had great delicacy. If one of them leaned back against the pillow and closed her eyes, the others lowered their voices and sometimes subsided into complete silence. They talked about babies, children, rashes, colic, formulas, diets, fretting. They talked about the best way to repair a torn carpet, their favorite recipes for hamburger, easy ways to make a sunsuit. They had their children categorized and discussed them that way: one had a temper, another was shy, a third was smart, a fourth didn’t get along with his father. But they seemed to make no judgments about these things. They gave her no sense that they were pleased or displeased with temper, shyness, intelligence, or harmoniousness. Their children simply were, they were what they were, and the women loved them no matter what they were. It was their children who occupied them; they rarely mentioned their husbands. When they did, it was in passing, as one might mention the rules of the institution in which one is incarcerated. Husbands were strange, inexplicable creatures to whom one must defer, outer constrictions which must be placated. One would eat no fish, another no vegetables, another refused to eat with children at the dinner table. One bowled three nights a week and had to be fed early. One permitted no vacuuming to be done while he was in the house. Their private relations with their men, their feelings, were hidden, and Mira felt strongly that they were secondary to the great, the engrossing fact of children.

  She was drawn to these women because of their warmth
and their easy acceptance of her. She realized that had she lived down the block from any of them, they might not be so accepting. The hospital ward, like any artificial collective, makes for easy bedfellows. Their conversation often bored her, although she learned from it: she went home and mended the carpet in the bed-living room as Amelia had suggested, and it worked. But it was not their conversation itself she listened to: she listened to what lay beneath it. As they grew stronger and the pain of the stitches subsided, they laughed more often and more heartily. Husbands, mothers-in-law, children: all were subjects for humor. But they never talked about themselves.

  They did not complain, they did not insist, they did not demand, they did not seem to want anything. Mira, used to the egotistic male world with its endless ‘I’, being in fact part of it herself, was astonished by the selflessness of these women. She had always enjoyed asserting her intellect, her opinions, her knowledge, but as she listened to what a month ago she would have called stupid conversation, she heard what the women were really saying and it shamed her. It was: yes, I am like you. I worry about the same things as you – the everyday, the trivial, the petty economics, and small repairs. And I, like you, know that these mundane events somehow mean more than the large sweeping things, the corporation mergers, invasions, depressions, and decisions of the President’s Cabinet. Not that the things I am concerned with are important. Heavens, no, they’re just little things, but they matter, you know, they matter most to a life. To my life, my children’s life, even my husband’s life, although he’d never admit it. My husband threw a tantrum because there was no coffee in the house one morning! Would you believe it? A grown man. Yes, these things matter very much to them. And my own life – well, my life is bounded by small things. When Johnny has had a good day at Little League; when the sun pours through the kitchen window in a certain way on a fall morning; when I am able to transform cheap meat into a delicious stew, or my shoddy room into something almost – not quite – beautiful; those are the times I am happy. When I feel useful, when there is harmony in my world.

  She listened and she heard their acceptance, their love, their selflessness, and for the first time in her life, she thought that women were great. Their greatness made all the exploits of warriors and rulers look like pompous self-aggrandizement, made even the poets and painters look like egotistical children jumping up and down shouting, ‘Look at me, Ma!’ Their pains, their problems, were secondary to the harmony of the whole. The same women who had moaned or cursed downstairs in the labor room had chosen to forget the pain, the bitterness. Brave they were. Brave and good-humored and accepting, they picked up the dropped stitches and finished knitting something warm for someone else, letting their own teeth rot and skimping on clothes to pay Johnny’s dentist bill, laying aside their desire like a crushed flower from their first prom stuck in the back of a baby book.

  She looked at them with eyes blinded by sunlight and smiled, hearing Margaret worry again about whether her three-year-old was unhappy without her, and Amelia worrying about whether her mother was remembering to put fruit rather than candy in Jimmy’s lunchbox, and Grace, silent and lined with her worries, hoping that Johnny had got his bike fixed, and that Stella was coping with the cooking. She smiled with them, laughed with them at the absurdities of the big world. She was unable to be with them with more than her heart, but that was that. She felt she had arrived, finally, at womanhood.

  21

  Valerie, of course, snorted when she heard this. We were sitting around in Val’s place one night, Iso and Ava, Clarissa, Kyla, and me, and Mira told us about her experience of childbirth. It was in the late fall of 1968, and we didn’t know each other well as a group. We were still skirting around the edges of politeness, not yet sure enough of each other to let it go completely, but getting there.

  Although we weren’t aware of this then, we had been brought together by our dislike of the same things – values and behavior we saw all around us at Harvard. Our dislike was of a specific kind: all the first-year graduate students were unhappy there. But we were not so much unhappy as outraged, and our dislike, as we would come to realize, was the expression of a profound and positive sense of the way things ought to be. On this evening, however, we were still feeling each other out.

  We were complimenting Val on the beauty of her apartment. She had little money, but she’d painted it, filled it with plants, and strewn it with odds and ends collected in her travels. It was a delightful place.

  And Mira said – in that sort of gushing suburban way she had – how wonderful women were, look at Val’s beautiful apartment, no man would have been willing to do it or would have had the imagination, especially with so little money. And Kyla, who had also beautifully fixed up her and Harley’s apartment, jumped to agree. Then Mira said she’d suddenly seen how great women were after giving birth to Normie, and she described the experience. And Val snorted.

  ‘You bought it! You bought the whole damned bag!’

  Mira blinked.

  ‘How convenient to have a whole class of people who give up their lives for other people! How nice, while you’re out doing things that serve your ego, to have somebody home washing the bathroom floor and picking up your dirty underwear! And never, never cooking brussels sprouts because you don’t like them.’

  Everybody burst in at once.

  ‘It’s true, it’s true!!’ Kyla crowed.

  ‘How come you don’t do that for me?’ Isolde grinned at Ava.

  Clarissa, serious-faced, tried to get a word in – ‘I don’t think …’

  But Val was not to be stopped. ‘I mean, Mira, don’t you hear what you’re saying? “Women’s greatness lies in their selflessness.” You might as well say women’s place is in the home.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Mira began to turn a little pink. ‘I’m not prescribing, I’m describing. The constrictions exist. No matter what you say about the way things ought to be, they are the way they are. And if the world changed tomorrow, it would be too late for those women …’

  ‘Is it too late for you?’ Kyla shot in.

  Mira leaned back, half laughing. ‘Look, all I’m saying is that women are great because they get so little and give so much …’

  ‘Exactly!’ Val stormed.

  Isolde giggled. ‘She’ll never be allowed to get it out.’

  ‘They have so little room,’ Mira went on doggedly, ‘but they don’t get bitter and mean, they try to make that little room graceful and harmonious.’

  ‘Tell it to the women in the schizophrenic wards. Or the ones who sit in their kitchens drinking themselves to death. Or the ones covered with bruises from the husbands who got drunk last night. Or the ones who burn their children’s hands.’

  ‘I’m not saying all women …’

  ‘Okay,’ Clarissa began authoritatively, and the room quietened a bit, ‘but not all these things spring from the same root. Men have constrictions too.’

  ‘I’m not worried about men,’ Val exclaimed. ‘Let them worry about themselves. They’ve taken pretty good care of themselves for the past four thousand years. And women’s problems do all spring from the same root: that they’re women. Everything Mira’s told us about her life shows it to be one long training in humiliation, an education in suppressing self.’

  ‘That’s as if you’re saying women have no individual identity,’ Isolde demurred.

  ‘They don’t. Not when you talk about women’s greatness or women’s constrictions: as soon as you say that, you’re admitting an identity among all women, which implies lack of individuality. Kyla asked if Mira had been destroyed by her constrictions, and the answer is yes, or nearly so. Look!’ she plunked her glass down on the table, ‘my real point is that to tell women they’re great because they’ve given themselves up is to tell them to go on doing it.’

  Mira held up her hand like a traffic cop ordering Stop. ‘Wait,’ she ordered. ‘I want you to keep quiet a minute, Val, because I want to answer you, but I have to figure out what I want
to say.’

  Val laughed and got up. ‘Okay. Who wants more wine?’

  When she returned, Mira said, ‘Okay,’ in that thoughtful way we had all picked up from Clarissa, whose mind clicked points off like a clock measuring precise moments, each one preceded by ‘Okay.’ ‘Yes. I want them to go on doing it.’

  Howls.

  ‘I mean it. What will happen to the world if they don’t do it? It would be unbearable. Who else would do it? The men go to work to make life possible and the women work to make it bearable.’

  ‘Why are you in graduate school, then?’ Kyla was nearly leaping out of her chair. ‘Why are you living in – pardon me – that sterile grungy drab apartment of yours? Why aren’t you making a nice cozy home for your boys and your husband?’

  ‘I was! I would be!’

  ‘And you loved it.’

  ‘I hated it.’

  They all laughed, and Mira too grinned wryly, then began to laugh.

  ‘Okay. You’re not saying – tell me if I’m wrong, Mira – but you’re not saying that creating felicity is all women should do. You’re saying it’s part of what they should do. Am I right?’ Kyla still perched forward, as if Mira’s answer were the most important thing in the world to her.

  ‘No. I’m saying it’s what they do do, and it’s beautiful.’

  ‘Okay.’ It was Clarissa this time. ‘But if they want to and can do other things as well, so much the better, right?’

  Mira nodded, and everyone leaned back. A kind of peace fell among them. They were glad that their boundaries meshed. But the peace was only momentary.

  Val leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. ‘Sure, sure. As long as women do what they’re supposed to do, what they’ve always done, we’re told. (But I doubt it: when they were out plowing the fields or hauling in the fishing nets or marching to war, as they did in Scotland and other places, they didn’t have much time for interior decoration or gourmet cuisine. This whole shit about what woman’s labor is supposed to be is only about a hundred years old – do you realize that? It’s no older than the industrial revolution, and probably really began on a wide scale in the Victorian period.) Well, anyway, if women do what is now conceived to be their natural and proper job and have any time or energy left over, they then have permission to do something else. But in fact if you’ve been brainwashed into selflessness, it wouldn’t occur to you to do what you wanted to do, you wouldn’t even think in such terms. There isn’t enough you to want.’