The Women's Room by Marilyn French Read Free Book Online Page B

been fun, an elaborate puzzle, and people had been unwelcome distractions from the play of mind. Suddenly her body had been invaded by a disgusting, smelly substance that brought pain to her lower half and anxiety to her mind. Could other people smell her? Her mother said she would havethis the rest of her life, until she got old. The rest of her life! The blood caked on the napkin and chafed her. It smelled. She had to wrap it up in toilet paper – she used nearly a quarter of a roll – then carry it to her room and put it in a paper bag and later carry it downstairs and put it in the garbage. Five or six times a day for five or six days a month she had to do this. Her clean white smooth body had this inside it? Mrs Mittlow had said that women build poisons up in their bodies and they had to be gotten rid of. Women always whispered about it, for men, she understood, were not subject to such things. They did not have the same poisons in them, Mrs Mittlow said. Mira’s mother said, ‘Oh, Doris!’ but Mrs Mittlow was insistent. The priest had told her, she said. So men remained in charge of their bodies; they were not invaded by painful and disgusting and bloody events they could not control. That was the great secret, that was what boys knew and laughed at, that’s why they were always poking each other and looking at girls and laughing. That was why they were the conquerors. Women were victims by nature.
    Bad enough the body, but even her mind was invaded by shadowy longing, yearnings as deep and vague that, as she sat on her bed near the window, she thought only death could fill them. She fell in love with Keats. Mathematics was no longer fun and she dropped out of calculus. Latin was all about men doing stupid things, so was history. Only English stayed interesting – there were women in it, blood, suffering. Still, she kept her pride. Part of her mind dropped out of the world, but her feelings were kept strictly private. Whatever she felt, she reasoned, at least she didn’t have to show it. She had been shy and withdrawn, but she became stiff, aloof, mechanical and rigid. Her posture and walk became stiff – her mother urged her to wear a girdle although she was slender, because her bottom might wiggle when she walked, and boys would see. Her demeanor towards boys was hostile, even furious. She hated them because they knew. She knew they knew and that they were not subject, they were free, and they laughed at her, at all women. The girls who laughed with them knew too but had no pride. It was because the boys were free that they ruled the world. They went about on motorcycles, they even had their own cars, they went out alone at night, and their bodies were free and clean and clear and their minds were their own, and she hated them. She whirled to attack if one of them even dared to speak to her. They might, at night, control her imagination, but she was damned if in the daytime they so much as touched it.

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    Gradually, as her body developed mature configurations, and boys began to cluster around her, Mira began to perceive that boys wanted girls as much as girls wanted them. She also heard some whispered stories about things called wet dreams. And if she still did not see males as being like her – but then she did not see females as being like her, either – at least they were not quite the terrifying strangers they had been. They too were subject to nature: that was some consolation. Their bodies too had changed: they were less skinny and pimply, and the smell of male cologne and hair cream reinforced her sense that they, like girls, cared about how they appeared. Perhaps some of their laughter had been out of embarrassment as severe as hers. Perhaps they did not look down on women as much as she thought. Perhaps.
    She was attending a small local college, still much alone. She had lost her age handicap, because she had worked as a clerk in a department store for a year after high school in order to save