The Women's Room Read Online Free Page B

heavy, lined nylon jacket over that. I know I am already pointed to, whispered about as a madwoman. It is so easy for a woman to seem mad if she once deserts The Image, as Mira did when she ridiculously went out and bought short pleated skirts because she was back in college. But on the other hand, maybe they are right, maybe I am mad. There aren’t too many people here – a few surfcasters, some women with children, people like me who just come down to walk. But they all look at me strangely.
    So they look at me strangely: I have other problems. Because the school year ended last week and in the flurry of papers and exams I didn’t have to think about it, and then suddenly it was there – two and a half whole months with nothing to do. The joys of the ten-month year. To me it looked like the Sahara Desert, stretching on and on under the crazy sun, and empty, empty. Well, I thought, I’ll plan my courses for next year; I’ll read some more fairy tales (Fairy Tales andFolklore), try to understand Chomsky better (Grammar 12), try to find a better writing handbook (Composition 1–2).
    Oh God.
    It comes to me that this is the first time in years, maybe in my life, that I am completely alone with nothing to do. Maybe that is why everything comes crowding in on me now. These things that jar their way into my mind make me think that my loneliness may not be entirely the fault of the place, that somehow or other – although I can’t understand it – I have chosen it.
    I have bad dreams, dreams full of blood. I am pursued, night after night, and night after night I turn and strike out at my pursuer, I smash, I stab. That sounds like anger. It sounds like hate. But hate is an emotion I have never permitted myself. Where could it come from?
    As I walk along the beach, my memory keeps going back to Mira those first weeks in Cambridge, tottering around on her high heels (she always walked shakily in high heels, but she always wore them) in a three-piece wool knit suit, with her hair set and sprayed, looking almost in panic at the faces that passed her, desperate for a sharp glance, an appraising smile that would assure her she existed. When I think of her, my belly twists a little with contempt. But how do I dare to feel that for her, for that woman so much like me, so much like my mother?
    Do you? You know her: she’s that blonded made-up matron, a little tipsy with her second manhattan, playing bridge at the country club. In the Moslem countries, they make their women wear jubbah and yashmak. This makes them invisible, white wraiths drifting through streets buying a bit of fish or some vegetables, turning into dark narrow alleys and entering doors that slam shut loudly, reverberating among the ancient stones. People don’t see them, they are less differentiated than the dogs that run among the fruit carts. Only the forms are different here. You don’t really see the woman standing at the glove or stocking counter, poking among cereal boxes, loading six steaks into her shopping cart. You see her clothes, her sprayed helmet of hair, and you stop taking her seriously. Her appearance proclaims her respectability, which is to say she’s just like all other women who aren’t whores. But maybe she is, you know. Distinction by dress isn’t what it used to be. Women are capable of anything. It doesn’t really matter. Wife or whore, women are the most scorned class in America. You may hate niggers and PRs and geeks, but you’re a little frightened of them. Women don’t get even the respect of fear.

    What’s to fear, after all, in a silly woman always running for her mirror to see who she is? Mira lived by her mirror as much as the Queen in Snow White . A lot of us did: we absorbed and believed the things people said about us. I always took the psychological quizzes in the magazines: are you a good wife? a good mother? Are you keeping the romance in your marriage? I believed Philip Wylie when he said mothers were a generation