But she was afraid to bring the argument to a head.
Mira started back to school, extremely nervous, taking only two courses, unsure of how she would be able to manage after all these years. But there was a whole group of them at the local university, middle-aged women back at school. She was astonished to find them and they to find each other. All had the same trepidations, all had domestic concerns. Mira was not alone. Her courses seemed amazingly easy, and she did three times the work necessary, not out of anxiety but from interest. She had the time. She had plenty of time.
She began, for the first time in years, to think wistfully about sex. She replayed Martha’s stories in her mind, imagining Martha and David together, wondering if she could feel the way Martha felt. But Martha and David were strange, she thought. Not everyone was like them. Each of them loathed their own body. They took showers three times a day. Martha shuddered at her own genitals and tried to fight David off the first time he tried to kiss them. He adored her cunt, he insisted on cunnilingus, and after she relaxed, she liked it. But there was always a period of distaste first. And she adored the penis, worshiped it almost, while he felt it to be absurd and repulsive. She enjoyed fellatio more than intercourse, and David learned to lie back and enjoy it too. When they had intercourse, it was his thrust and the feel of his organ that sent her swooning; and it was the sight of her
swoon, the sense of her liquidity, that sent him over. Each of them experienced ecstasy through the other, almost
for
the other. And out of bed too, it was as if each of them lived in the other, wanted to be the other, experienced life much of the time as the other would experience it. It was, Mira thought, enlarging, as if you could live outside yourself. But too intense. The ‘too’ never left her mind. How could you keep that up?
Late in October, late, very late at night, Mira’s telephone rang. A thin, distant voice called her name. It was Martha. She was not recognizably talking, or crying. She called faintly, ‘Mira,’ then seemed to fall away from the phone. Then, ‘Mira?’ again, then a silence that seemed to hold distant sighs or sobs or wire noises.
‘Martha? Are you okay?’
The voice grew a little stronger. ‘Mira!’
‘Do you need help?’
‘Oh, God, Mira!’
‘I’ll be right there.’
She threw some clothes on and went out into the chilly October night. The moon had been orange earlier, but it was fading now. The stars glittered overhead just as they would for young lovers with the world before them. Or so they think, Mira thought bitterly. She knew Martha’s trouble had to be David.
Martha’s front door was unlocked, and she went in. Martha was sitting on the edge of the bathtub leaning over the toilet, seat up. She had a bottle in her hand. She looked up when Mira came in. Her face was swollen and her cheek was black and blue. One nostril was red and swollen, and a thin line of blood trickled down from it. Her shoulder, exposed in the nightgown, was also black and blue.
Mira sighed. ‘My God.’
‘Don’t call Him, He’s on their side,’ Martha said, then suddenly crumpled, let her face fall in her hand, and began to sob wildly.
Mira let her cry, and gently removed the bottle from her hand and looked at it. It was Ipecac. Mothers know it; it makes babies vomit, and you use it on those terrible nights when you suspect a child has swallowed half a bottle of Grandma’s sleeping pills.
‘What did you do?’
Martha couldn’t talk. She was sobbing. She just shook her head back and forth, and then suddenly, vomited gigantically, a rush of liquid with feather bits in it. Mira waited until she was through, then washed her face with a cool cloth. Martha would not let Mira wipe
up the toilet. ‘Look, I know what it’s like. I’ve done it for the kids enough times.’
‘So have I. I’m used to it.’
‘You never get used to it!’ Martha insisted, and got down on her knees and cleaned the bowl. When she was through, she stood up. ‘I think that was it. I feel okay.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Took a bottle of sleeping pills.’
‘How long ago?’
‘About ten minutes before I took the Ipecac,’ Martha said, and laughed.
‘I need a shower, then I’ll air this place out,’ she said.
‘You’re an agreeable suicide, I must say,’ Mira smiled. ‘Mind if I have a drink?’
‘No. Pour me one too.’
Martha got into the shower. Mira sat in Martha’s bedroom, drinking, smoking. Everybody should clean up their own vomit. Everybody should clean up the toilet they use. Why not? Problem was kids. Can’t ask them. I wonder why not? Martha’s bedroom was austere and delicate at the same time. Plain and stark, but with delicate prints, gracefully framed, straight-hanging draperies in delicate fabric. It was very restful, very nice. Why not? Balances, balances. Things didn’t have to be the way they were.
Martha emerged looking horrible. Her delicate face had deep lines in it, unpleasant lines along her mouth, a deep frown on her forehead; her eyes were puffy. She sat down on the end of the bed and took the drink Mira handed her. Mira waited, looking at her. She sipped. She looked up.
‘Well, that’s that,’ she said.
Mira looked listening.
‘David came for dinner tonight,’ she said, breathing deeply, launching into the just quieted wound. ‘It was a little celebration. His paper was accepted by the
Journal of Comparative Literature
, and he was so happy. I was so happy for him. You know, I haven’t been doing much cooking lately – no time since I’ve been working – but this afternoon I ran around getting filet specially sliced for tournedos, fresh asparagus. I boiled a chicken yesterday – my kids hate boiled chicken! – just so I’d have broth to make risotto. I bought a little jar of caviar – really splurging – and hard-boiled some eggs. And I bought fresh strawberries – the last of the season and I paid an arm and a leg for them – and red
wine. And it was great. If I do say so myself. It was beautiful, and I was so happy, and everything felt so right. I felt so happy doing it for him, I felt I could do it forever and ever. And he looked so beautiful sitting there. He was very funny, talking about his colleagues’ reactions to the news about his article. It’s such a jealous, backbiting department. He was funny, but he really understands them. He’s not like most men, you know? He thinks about what people are feeling as well as what they’re saying. So he’s interesting.’
She sipped her drink again and bent over to wipe her nose. She was sniffling. Blood was trickling out along with mucus. She blew it and wiped it and sat up, but the sniffing continued.
‘And we were sitting with snifters of the cognac he’d brought, and Lisa was in her room doing homework and Jeff was asleep and we were sitting in the living room, on the couch, not too close because I wanted to be able to look at him, and we had coffee on the table in front of the couch, half-drunk …’
She began to cry then. Mira waited.
She pulled herself up again. ‘And then Lisa went to bed, and I leaned back against the arm of the couch, looking at him, basking in it, in him, feeling warm and sexy and comfortable and just loving looking at him, and all of a sudden he turns to me with a serious, solemn face, and says, “Martha, I have something to tell you.”’
She was crying as she spoke now, interspersing words and gasps.
‘But I was still drifting, floating, in that miraculous place, and I didn’t pay attention, I put out my hand and said, “Yes, darling,” or something stupid like that, and he took my hand, and he said, “Martha, Elaine’s pregnant.”
‘Then he put his head in his hands, and I sat up, and I screamed “What!” and he shook his head, still in his hands, kept shaking it, and then I realized he was crying, and I moved over to him and I held him, held his head and back, and rocked him, and he talked, he said it was some kind of accident and he didn’t know how it happened, she was trying to trap him because she knew he wanted out of the marriage, and I was crying too, and rocking him and saying, “Yes, I understand, baby, it’s okay, it’ll be okay,” and in a while he started to calm down, but all the while my mind was whirring and it got hotter and hotter and hotter, and when he stopped crying I threw him away from me, I sat back and shrieked at him. Accident? When they weren’t sleeping together? How did that come about? Okay, lie number one, but I always knew that was a lie. But she knew about me, she knew he wanted out,
how come he trusted her with birth control, I mean didn’t he have any idea? And then I remembered him saying how much he would like to have a son. He loved his daughter but …’ Martha laughed bitterly. ‘And I looked at his face and I knew. I knew it was what he really wanted. He never intended to divorce her. He made me wreck my life for him, but he never had any intention of damaging his. I looked at him and I could have killed him. I just roared and went for him. I pounded him, I kicked him, I scratched him. He defended himself. I guess I look like a mess, but believe me, he’s a picture too. Then I threw him out. That motherfucker, that cocksucker, that fucking bastard!’ She was gone again, screaming in rage and pain, sobbing. The children’s bedroom doors remained adamantly closed. Martha cried for half an hour. ‘Oh, God, I don’t want to live anymore,’ she gasped out finally. ‘It hurts too much.’
3
By this time, all of us had a word. It was THEM, and we all meant the same thing by it: men. Each of us felt done in by one of them, but that wasn’t it. Because each of us had friends, and our friends were also being done in by them. And each of our friends had friends … But it wasn’t only husbands. We had heard about Lily’s friend Ellie, whose husband was a brute, who finally got a separation from him, but then he would break into the house and beat her up in the middle of the night, and she couldn’t stop him. Literally. The cops wouldn’t do anything because he still owned the house. Her lawyer said there was nothing he could do. Maybe there was, but Bruno had threatened him too and maybe he was frightened. She couldn’t get anyone to help her. She didn’t want to go down to the police station and sign a complaint about Bruno. She felt he would lose his job, and she didn’t especially want to see him go to jail. But finally, that’s what she had to do. And he did lose his job. He didn’t go to jail. But he stopped paying her anything. So big deal. She won. Won what? Status as a welfare mother.
Or Doris. Roger wanted the divorce, and she was angry, so she really
soaked him. She asked for fifteen thousand a year for her and the three kids. But after all, he was making thirty-five. And she had quit school when they got married and supported him for three years while he finished. She’d agreed to put her eggs in his basket, which is what he wanted, and then he breaks the basket. You can’t blame her. She was thirty-five and hadn’t worked in years. When she had worked, she’d been a typist. She had no pension plan, no seniority built up. But Roger got furious at the judge’s decision, and got himself transferred out of the state. She can’t touch him. He sends her a hundred a month for the kids. Three kids. She can’t do a thing.
Or Tina, who dared to have a lover after she was divorced. Phil had one too, but of course, that’s different. He didn’t have the kids. He said he wasn’t going to give her money as long as that man was hanging around, and if she wanted to give him legal trouble about it, he’d take the kids away. ‘Any judge,’ he said threateningly, a judge himself emerging from the heavens, ‘any judge in this country would take those kids away from a woman who lets a man stay in her house overnight. A whore is a whore, and don’t you forget it.’ Maybe he wasn’t right about that, but Tina was too terrified to find out. ‘Phil,’ she said, ‘he’s a nice guy. The kids like him. He pays more attention to them than you ever did.’ That was not exactly calculated to work. It might have mattered if what they were having was a human encounter as she thought, but he was just nose-thumbing in a power struggle. Tina didn’t sue him, he didn’t pay. She’s on welfare too. If you want to find out who all the welfare mothers are, ask your divorced male friends. It sounds easy, you know, going on welfare. But apart from the humiliation and resentment, you don’t really live very well. In case you didn’t know. Which is unpleasant for a woman, but sends her into fits when she looks at her kids.
The point is that we all heard these stories, we kept hearing them. It seemed everybody was getting divorced. After a while you even stopped asking why. We had all, without reason, got married, and now we were all, without reason, getting divorced. After a while it didn’t seem abnormal. We didn’t feel the world was falling apart. Anyone who’s been married any length of time knows how rotten marriage is, and we’d listen to the news commentators deploring the high divorce rate as just so much more pious hypocrisy. It wasn’t that we were or were not married that bothered us. It was that we were all so poor that we could be invaded (even Norm would come into the house and read Mira’s mail – he had the right, he said, he owned
the house), we could be beat up, we could be done anything to and no one, no one, from the cops to the courts to the state legislatures, no one was on our side. Sometimes even our friends and families weren’t on our side. We gathered together uneasily in little groups of twos or threes, muttering, bitter. Even our shrinks weren’t on our side. We excoriated THEM to the point of nausea, but that was all it was, vomiting the immediate cause of indigestion. The sickness, though, was chronic. We understood that the laws were all for THEM, that the setup of society was all for THEM, that everything existed for THEM. But we didn’t know what to do about it. We half believed there was something terribly wrong with US. We crept into our holes and learned to survive.
4
George and Martha got back together, at a cost. They did it mainly because of money problems, but George had never really been able to function alone, and was grateful for Martha’s difficulty. And George is a good guy. He did not ever use what happened against Martha, not even when he was very angry.
But the truth is, he didn’t need to. The affair with David finished her. She was never the same afterward. But I’m getting ahead of myself again. Will this story never end? My God, on and on and on. Only an atomic blast would end it. Sometimes I understand hawks: they too, like me, have moments of such intolerable pain and they would be willing to see it all go up, and would even cheer the mushroom cloud.