The Women's Room Read Online Free

a lot of time alone here, walking along the beach in any weather, and I think over and over about Mira and the others, Val, Isolde, Kyla, Clarissa, Grete, back at Harvard in 1968. That year itself was an open door, but a magical one; once you went through it, you could never return. You stand just beyond it, gazing back at what you have left, and it looks like a country in a fairytale book, all little patches and squares of color, fields and farms and castles with turrets and pennons and crenellated parapets. The houses are all cozy, thatched-roof cottages, slowly burnishing in the afternoon sun, and the people who live in castle or cottage have the same simple outlines and offer themselves for immediate recognition. A good prince or princess or fairy has blond hair and blue eyes, and bad queens and stepmothers have black hair. I think there was one girl who had black hair and was still good, but she’s the exception that proves the rule. Good fairieswear blue gauzy tutus and carry golden wands; bad ones wear black and are humpbacked and have big chins and long noses. There are no bad kings in fairyland, although there are a few giants of unsavory reputation. There are lots of wicked stepmothers and old witches and crones, though. When I was a child, fairyland as it appeared in the books was the place I wanted to live, and I judged my surroundings according to how well they matched it: beauty was fairyland, not truth. I used to try to concentrate hard enough to make fairyland come true in my head. If I had been able to do it, I would gladly have deserted the real world to go there, willingly abandoning my parents. Perhaps you call that incipient schizophrenia, but it seems to me that that’s what I did in the end, lived in fairyland where there are only five basic colors, clear lines, and no beer cans cluttering up the grass.
    One reason I like the Maine coast so much is that it allows so little room for such fantasies. The wind is hard and cold and raw; my face is a little chapped all winter. The sea pounds in and no matter how many times I see it it excites me the same way the skyline of New York does, no matter how many times I see that. The words are trite – grand, powerful, overwhelming – oh, it doesn’t matter what one calls it. The thing is as close as I can come to a notion of God. The sheer naked power of those great waves constantly rolling up with such an ominous rumble, hitting against the rocks and sending up skyfuls of white froth. It is so powerful and so beautiful and so terrifying at the same time that for me it is a symbol of what life is all about. And there’s the sand and the rocks and all the life they foster – snails, mussels. I often smile to myself, calling the rocks snail tenements, shellfish ghettos. They are, you know: the snails are more crowded together there than the people in Hong Kong. The sand wasn’t designed for easy walking, and the gray Maine sky seems to open out into the void itself. This sky has no notion of – it can never have been in – brilliant lands where olives grow and tomatoes turn blood red and oranges shine among the green leaves of trees in front yards behind white stucco walls dusty under the sun, and the sky is nearly as blue as the sea. Here, everything is gray: sea, sky, rocks. This sky looks only to the north, to icy poles; you can almost see the color fading and fading as the sky arches northward, until there is no color at all. The white world of the Snow Queen.
    Well, I said I was going to try to avoid fairy-tale fantasies, but I seem to be incorrigible. So I’m feeling alone and a little superior standing in this doorway looking back at fairy-tale land and almost enjoying my pain. Maybe I should turn around. But I can’t, I can’tsee ahead yet, only backward. Anyway all of this is ridiculous. Because I was on my way to saying that Mira had lived all her life in fairy-tale land and when she went through the doorway, her head was still full of