The Women's Room Read Online Free PDF Page B

have to be so sullen, so stubborn?’ she cried to herself, wishing she had taken the hand, wishing her mother would come back. She didn’t. Mira sat on and a phrase came into her head: ‘They ask too much. It costs too much.’ What the cost was, she was not sure; she labeled it ‘myself.’ She adored her mother, and she knew that by being sullen and fresh she lost her mother’s love; sometimes Mrs Ward would not speak to her for days. But she went on being bad. She was spoiled, selfish, and fresh. Her mother told her all the time.
    She was bad, but she didn’t want to be bad. Surely God must know that. She would be good if it didn’t cost so much. And in her badness, she was not really bad. She only wanted to do what she wanted to do: was that so terrible? Surely God would understand. He did understand because they said He saw the heart. And if He understood her, then He understood everyone. And no one really wanted to be bad, everyone wanted to be loved and approved. So there was no one in hell. But if there was no one there, why have it? There was no hell.
    When Mira was fourteen, she had finished all the interesting books they would allow her to take from the library – they did not permit her into the adult section. So she leafed through the unappetizing family bookcase. The family itself had no notion what was in it: their books had collected themselves, being leavings from the attics of dead relatives. Mira found Paine’s Common Sense and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil , as well as Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness , a book she read with complete incomprehension.
    She became convinced of the nonexistence not only of hell but also of heaven. However, without heaven a new problem arose. For if there were neither hell nor heaven, there was no final reward or punishment, and this world was all there was. But this world – even by fourteen one knows this – is a terrible place. Mira did not need toread the newspapers, to see pictures of exploding ships and burning cities, to read rumors of places called concentration camps, to realize how terrible it was. She needed only to look around her. There was brutality and cruelty everywhere: in the classroom, in the schoolyard in the block she lived on. One day, as she walked to the grocery store on an errand, she heard a boy screaming, and the thwack of a strap in the end house. Having been brought up with gentleness, Mira was horrified and wondered why a parent would do such a thing to a child. Had her parents done that to her, she would have been worse than she was, she knew that. She would have tried to defy them in any way she could. She would have hated them. But the terribleness of life existed even in her own home. It was a tight, silent place; there was little conversation at the dinner table. There were always tensions between her mother and father that she did not understand, and often tensions between her mother and her, as well. She felt as if she were in the middle of a war in which the weapons were like light beams, darting across the room, wounding everybody, but unable to be grasped. Mira wondered if the insides of everybody were as tumultuous and explosive as hers. She looked at her mother and saw bitter misery and resentment in her face; she saw sadness and disappointment in her father’s. She herself felt wild clamorous emotions toward them both – love, hate, resentment, fury, and a crying ache for physical affection – but she never moved, never threw herself at either of them in either love or hate. The rules of the household forbade such behavior. She wondered if anyone at all was happy. She had more reason to be than most: she was treated well, fed well, clothed well, safe. But she was a screaming battlefield. So what were other people? If this were the only world there was, there could not be a God. No benevolent mind could have created this earth. Finally, she disposed of the problem by dispensing with the deity.
    Next, she set about