Black Milk (15 page)

“Oh my God,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Do you see what you are doing to yourself? Here I am talking about marriage and motherhood and muffins, and you respond by alluding to Hitler and the Nazis.”

Baffled, I gape at her without so much as a blink.

“Forget about all the other finger-women,” she continues. “They’ve been eating away at you for years. Don’t belittle the beauty of the ordinary, of seeking simple pleasures. You and I can have so much fun together.”

“Really? Like what?”

She beams. “We can go to the farmers’ market every weekend, buy organic zucchini. We can wait in front of stores at dawn with thermoses in our hands, and dash inside the second the doors open and start grabbing sale items before anyone else. We can decorate our home from top to bottom with scented candles and flowers of matching colors. Trust me, you’ll love it. Have you ever set a beautiful dinner table? Do you know how gratifying it is when your family and friends commend your culinary skills?”

Before I find the chance to give her an obvious answer, we hear a sudden noise at the door. I open it slightly and peek out.

To my surprise, there is a line in front of the restroom. And at the very front stands Milady Ambitious Chekhovian in her dark green general’s uniform. Tapping her military boots and fidgeting nervously, she appears to be in mighty need of going to the toilet.

A shadow of panic crosses Mama Rice Pudding’s face. “Oh, no! Not that monster!”

“What do you want me to do?” I ask.

“Please don’t tell them I am here. They’ll tear me to shreds, those witches!”

She is right. Milady Ambitious Chekhovian with her doggedness, Miss Highbrowed Cynic with her pessimism, Little Miss Practical with her intolerance of anything that takes longer than ten minutes to prepare, would tear Mama Rice Pudding apart. I need to protect her from her sisters.

“Don’t worry, you are safe with me. I won’t whisper a word.”

Smiling warmly she reaches for my hand and gives it a gentle squeeze. Her fingers are not manicured and well groomed like Little Miss Practical’s; they aren’t decked with rings like Milady Ambitious Chekhovian’s or chewed up like Miss Highbrowed Cynic’s. They are rough from hard work, pink and plump. I am bewildered by the affection I feel for her. If she is my motherly side, isn’t it weird that I feel the need to mother her?

“Wait a minute, how are you going to get into America?” I ask. “Do you have a visa?”

“I don’t need a visa,” she says. “They don’t even search finger-women like me at airports.”

I can see why. It’d be hard to find a terrorist streak in her.

“I’m not worried about the external world,” she says. “You just keep that coven of finger-women away from me and I’ll be just fine.”

“Okay.”

“Please promise me that you will not let them ever crush me again.”

As I ponder how to skirt this demand and how to get her out of this restroom without the other Thumbelinas seeing her, the plane experiences turbulence. The pilot announces that everyone must return to their seats and fasten their seat belts.

A few seconds later, I open the door. The line has dispersed and I can see that Milady Ambitious Chekhovian is already in her seat.

“The coast is clear now,” I say to Mama Rice Pudding. “You can go out.”

“I will,” she says with a new edge to her voice. “But you haven’t given me your promise yet.”

It is one of those moments when I know I should be totally honest and tell the truth, but for the sake of courtesy or out of pure cowardice, I simply can’t. Instead, I tell her what she wants to hear, even though I know deep down inside that I can’t keep that promise.

“I swear I will not let the other finger-women silence you.”

A huge smile lights up her face. “Thanks. I know I can trust you.”

“By the way, who is this other chick you were talking about?” I hear myself asking.

“You will meet her when the time is ripe.”

“But why is she hiding?”

“She is not hiding. None of us is. It’s
you
who doesn’t acknowledge our presence. For years, you’ve given all your attention to Little Miss Practical, Miss Highbrowed Cynic, Milady Ambitious Chekhovian and Dame Dervish.”

“I understand,” I say, although I am not sure I do.

“Okay, we need to go now.”

“Well, it was really nice to meet you.”

“Likewise,” she says, blushing. “I guess I will see you around.”

Still smiling, she slips out the door. I stay in the restroom a few more seconds, slightly shaking—not knowing whether it’s due to the turbulence or to the confusion in my mind.

It dawns upon me that I don’t know myself very well. Throughout my adult life, I’ve favored certain voices inside me at the expense of others. How many inner voices are there that I have yet to meet?

I go back to my seat.

Until the plane touches down in New York, this is all I think about.

S
imone de Beauvoir, even more than fifty years after her death, remains a diva in the history of the feminist movement. At her funeral in 1956, thousands of mourners heard an unforgettable phrase: “Women, you owe her everything”—a phrase that says a lot about her charisma and legendary heritage. You may not agree with everything she said, you may not even like her personality, but you cannot turn a blind eye to her work or intellectual legacy.

“One is not born a woman, but becomes one,” she stated famously. For centuries girls were taught that their most important roles in life were sexuality, childbearing and motherhood. Armed with the small task of ensuring the continuation of the human race, young women were rarely, if ever, encouraged to pursue their studies and make more of their talents. In the France of the 1940s, motherhood was almost a religious duty, unquestionable and sacrosanct. Simone de Beauvoir knew what she was talking about, being raised by a staunch Catholic mother.

Waging a passionate war against bourgeois norms, she questioned the institutions of marriage and motherhood at great length. She said many women longed to rediscover themselves in their children—a “psychological need” she clearly did not share. She and Sartre were a committed but free couple—independent, self-reliant and sufficient for each other. Bourgeois marital life was full of lies, deceptions and unrealistic pledges of fidelity. Determined not to repeat the mistakes of their parents, they had made a pact: They would tell each other everything. They were both open to the idea of “experiencing contingent love affairs.” Besides, she believed that maternity was incompatible with the life she had chosen as a writer and intellectual. She needed time, concentration and freedom to pursue her ideals.

In
The Second Sex,
de Beauvoir reiterates Hegel’s famous dictum that the birth of children often goes hand in hand with the death of parents. Yet, despite her strong feelings on marriage and motherhood, de Beauvoir’s writings bear traces of another truth underneath: that if Sartre had wanted to have children, in her desire to please him she could have become a mother. She adored him. To her the sun of a new society rose from the depths of his eyes. He was the only man she respected more than she desired—the man whose time, work and ideas she had had to share with hundreds of other people, some of whom were women far more beautiful and ambitious than she was. And yet she knew how special she was in his eyes. Since the day their paths intersected in 1929 when they were both students at the
École Normale Supérieure
, he had been many things to her—a comrade, a lover, a father, a son, a brother, a tutor, a best friend and an impossible dream.

One should not be fooled by the terms of endearment she uses in her letters to him: “my little man,” or “my dear little being.” He was a giant to her—a man she addressed with the formal
vous
all the time. If he had wanted to start a family, she would have probably gone ahead, even though she clearly thought that motherhood was not meant for the likes of her. Though she was hurt by Sartre’s infidelities, she continued to defend the pact they had made. Simone de Beauvoir was a woman of impeccable analyses and unexpected conflicts.

If the broader society was not ready to address motherhood in a critical light, the intellectual circles—by definition progressive and open-minded—were just as unprepared, not to mention disproportionately male. There was a widespread silence in the world of books when it came to issues such as premenstrual syndrome, postpartum depression or menopause. Likewise, hardly anyone wrote about the Bermuda triangle of “ideal wife–diligent housekeeper–selfless mother” whereby so many women’s creative talents disappeared into the vortex. In a milieu such as this de Beauvoir faced deeply rooted prejudices and clichés. She wrote and spoke fervently on how women were being “forced to choose” between the brain and the body.

She was equally critical of those women who had willingly internalized gender inequalities, seeing themselves as inferior to their male counterparts. “Even the lowliest of men sees himself a demi-God when faced with a woman,” she remarked. Her mind was corrosive, her pen was sharp and her personality was highly contentious. Once she said she found it quite normal that many people among the middle class hated her. “If it were any other way, I would begin to doubt myself.”

 

It wasn’t only Western feminists who questioned the romanticized sacredness of motherhood. In the East, too, there were heated debates. The Japanese feminist movement opened up the term
bosei
—the natural motherly instinct—for discussion. They put forth the claim that maternal roles were more cultural than natural and biological.

Female writers in Japan brought new blood to these debates, questioning gender stereotypes through their fiction. In 1983 Yuko Tsushima published
Child of Fortune,
which features a remarkable female protagonist—a headstrong, nonconformist divorcée—torn between the realities of her heart and the ideal of womanhood taught by society. Although she doesn’t necessarily consider herself a feminist writer, Tsushima has critically explored themes of gender and sexuality in her works. Perhaps she is spiritually connected with another Japanese author of the past century, Toshiko Tamura—one of the country’s earliest, most outspoken female writers—whose royalties, after her sudden death in 1945, were used to establish a literary prize for women writers. In a story titled “A Woman Writer,” Tamura describes a scene where an angry husband, himself a writer, reprimands his wife, who is struggling to write a passage. The husband believes women are not good writers. They are indecisive and insecure, wasting a hundred pages to write only ten. His words reiterate the belief that men write for more serious and sublime reasons, and are therefore earnest writers, whereas for women writing is merely a hobby.

There is a similarly influential woman writer in Turkish literature whose unique voice continues to echo today, long after her passing. In the antagonistic environment of the 1970s, when the country was divided between leftists and rightists, Sevgi Soysal questioned, in clever, flowing prose, patriarchal precedents on all sides.

She was the writer of women dangling on the threshold—between sanity and insanity, society and the individual, setting the table and walking away, endless self-sacrifice and impromptu selfishness. . . . She created female characters who straddled the divide between living for others and following their hearts. One of her unforgettable fictional characters is Tante Rosa:

Soysal’s female characters are, for all intents and purposes, the exact opposite of the “ideal women” of Turkish society. Hers are women who make mistakes, stumble on their path and hurt their knees, and yet, each time, somehow manage to pull themselves together.

In another novel, she writes about a woman named Oya, who is deeply fragmented in her desires and obligations.

In my mind I organize a banquet in heaven. A long table with a snow-white tablecloth, elegant cutlery and silver candleholders. A huge glittering crystal chandelier hangs over the center of the table. There is roasted goose, rice with saffron and mouthwatering desserts on vast plates. Simone de Beauvoir sits in a high chair at one end of the table. Though she gives the impression of sulking, she is actually happy. On her right is Toshiko Tamura with her elegant eyeglasses, eating fried rice with chopsticks, putting thought into each grain. On her left is Sevgi Soysal, who doesn’t have much of an appetite, but she, too, is in a good mood. Humming a slow tune, she takes a sip from her wineglass.