The Women's Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

of vipers, and I swore never, never to act that way. I believed Sigmund’s ‘anatomy is destiny’ and tried to develop a sympathetic, responsive nature. I remember Martha saying that she hadn’t had a real mother; her mother did nothing in the way women were supposed to – she collected old newspapers and pieces of string and never dusted and took Martha to a cheap cafeteria to eat every night. So when Martha got married and tried to make friends with other couples, she didn’t know how. She didn’t know you were supposed to serve drinks and food. She just sat there with George, talking to them. People always left early, they never came back, they never invited her. ‘So I went out and bought The Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping . I did it for years religiously. I read them like the Bible, trying to find out how to be a woman.’
    I hear Martha’s voice often as I walk along the beach. And others’ too – Lily, Val, Kyla. I sometimes think I’ve swallowed every woman I ever knew. My head is full of voices. They blend with the wind and the sea as I walk the beach, as if they were disembodied forces of nature, a tornado whirling around me. I feel as if I were a medium and a whole host of departed spirits has descended on me clamoring to be let out.
    So this morning (shades of the past!) I decided on a project to fill this vacant stretching summer. I will write it all down, go back as far as I have to, and try to make some sense out of it. But I’m not a writer. I teach grammar (and I hate it) and composition, but as anyone who’s ever taken a comp course knows, you don’t have to know anything about writing to teach it. In fact, the less you know the better, because then you can go by rules, whereas if you really know how to write, rules about leading sentences and paragraphs and so forth don’t exist. Writing is hard for me. The best I can do is put down bits and pieces, fragments of time, fragments of lives.
    I am going to try to let the voices out. Maybe they will help me understand how they ended as they did, how I ended here feeling engulfed and isolated at the same time. Somehow it all starts withMira. How did she manage to get herself, at the age of thirty-eight, to hide in that toilet?

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    Mira was an independent baby, fond of removing her clothes and taking a stroll on a summer’s day to the local candy store. The second time she was returned home by a policeman she had directed. Mrs Ward began to tie her up. She did not mean to be unkind: Mira had been crossing a busy boulevard. She used a long rope, so Mira could still move around, and tied it to the handle of the front door. Mira continued in her disconcerting habit of removing all her clothes, however. Mrs Ward did not believe in corporal punishment and used stern reproach and withdrawal of affection instead. It worked. Mira had trouble removing all her clothes on her wedding night. In time, Mira’s fury and tears at being tied up abated, and she learned to operate within a small space, digging into things since she was not permitted to range outward. The leash was then removed, and Mira showed herself to be a docile and even timid child, only somewhat given to sullenness.
    She was a bright child: she finished all the textbooks on the first day of school and, bored, spent the rest of the term enlivening her classmates. The solution decided upon was to move her ahead, into a class ‘more on her level,’ as the teacher put it. She was moved ahead several times, but never found such a class. What she did find was classmates years older, inches taller, pounds heavier, and with a world of sophistication greater than hers. She could not talk to them, and retreated into novels she kept hidden in her desk. She even read walking to and from school.
    Mrs Ward, convinced that Mira was headed for great things – which meant a good marriage, to that good woman – scraped together money to send her for lessons. She had two years of elocution, two