The Women's Room Read Online Free PDF

years of dancing school, two years of piano, and two years of water-color painting. (Mrs Ward had loved the novels of Jane Austen in her youth.) At home, Mrs Ward taught her not to cross her legs at the knee, not to climb trees with boys, not to play tag in the alley, not to speak in a raised voice, not to wear more than three pieces of jewelry at a time, and never to mix gold and silver. When these lessons had been learned, she considered Mira ‘finished.’
    But Mira had a private life. Being so much younger than herclassmates, she had no friends, but she did not seem to care. She spent all her time reading, drawing, daydreaming. She especially loved fairy tales and myths. Then she was sent for two years of religious instruction, and her concerns changed.
    At twelve, her preoccupation was determining the precise relation of God, heaven, hell, and earth. She would lie in bed at night looking out at the moon and clouds. Her bed stood beside a window, and she could lie comfortably on her pillow and gaze up and out. She tried to imagine all the people who had died, standing around up there in the sky. She tried to make them out; surely they must be peering down, longing for a friendly face? But she never caught a glimpse of one, and after reading a little history and considering how many millions of people had in fact inhabited the earth, she began to worry about the population problems of the afterworld. She imagined searching for her grandmother, dead three years now, and wandering forever through mobs of people and never finding her. Then she realized that all those people would be very heavy, that it was impossible that they should all be up there without the heavens falling down. Perhaps then there were only a few up there and all the rest were in hell.
    But Mira’s social studies texts implied that the poor – whom Mira already knew to be the wicked – were not really wicked at heart but only environmentally deprived. God, Mira felt sure, if He was worth anything at all, would be able to see through such injustices to the good heart, and would not consign to hell all the juvenile delinquents who appeared in the pages of the New York Daily News which her father brought back from the city each night. This was a knotty problem, and gave her several weeks of heavy brainwork.
    To solve it, she found it necessary to look into herself, not just to feel her feelings, but to examine them. She believed she really wanted to love and be loved, really wanted to be good and have the approval of her parents and her teachers. But somehow she could never do it. She was always making nasty cracks to her mother, resenting her father’s fussiness; she resented that they treated her like a child. They lied to her and she knew it. She asked her mother about an ad in magazines, and her mother said she did not know what sanitary napkins were. She asked her mother what fuck meant; she had heard it at the schoolyard. Her mother said she did not know, but later Mira heard her whisper to Mrs Marsh, ‘How can you tell a child a thing like that?’ And there were other things, things she could not put her finger on, that told her her parents’ idea of being good and her own were not the same. Shecould not have said why, but her parents’ idea of what she should do felt like someone strangling her, stifling her.
    She remembered one night when she had been very fresh to her mother about something, had been fresh because she was right and her mother refused to admit it. Her mother scolded her severely, and she went into the dark porch of the house and sat on the floor sulking, feeling very wronged. She refused to go in to dinner. Her mother came out to the porch and said, ‘Come on, now, Mira, don’t be silly.’ Her mother had never done a thing like that before. She even reached out her hand to Mira, to pull her up. But Mira sat sulking and wouldn’t take the hand. Her mother went back to the dining room. Mira was near to tears. ‘Why do I