ALL THE WOMEN: Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill OR, FOR STARTERS HE: I can't stand stupid, vulgar women who read Love Comix and have no intellectual interests.
ME: Oh my, neither can I.
HE: I really admire refined, cultivated, charming women who have careers.
ME: Oh my, so do I.
HE: Why do you think those awful, stupid, vulgar, commonplace women get so awful?
ME: Well, probably, not wishing to give any offense and after considered judgment and all that, and very tentatively, with the hope that you won't jump on me-I think it's at least partly your fault.
(Long silence)
HE: You know, on second thought, I think bitchy, castrating, unattractive, neurotic women are even worse. Besides, you're showing your age. And your figure's going.
OR
HE: Darling, why must you work part-time as a rug salesman?
SHE: Because I wish to enter the marketplace and prove that in spite of my sex I can take a fruitful part in the life of the community and earn what our culture proposes as the sign and symbol of adult independence-namely money.
HE: But darling, by the time we deduct the cost of a baby-sitter and nursery school, a higher tax bracket, and your box lunches from your pay, it actually costs us money for you to work. So you see, you aren't making money at all. You can't make money. Only I can make money. Stop working.
SHE: I won't. And I hate you.
HE: But darling, why be irrational? It doesn't matter that you can't make money because I can make money. And after I've made it, I give it to you, because I love you. So you don't have to make money. Aren't you glad?
SHE: No. Why can't you stay home and take care of the baby? Why can't we deduct all those things from your pay? Why should I be glad because I can't earn a living? Why- HE (with dignity): This argument is becoming degraded and ridiculous. I will leave you alone until loneliness, dependence, and a consciousness that I am very much displeased once again turn you into the sweet girl I married. There is no use in arguing with a woman.
OR, LAST OF ALL
HE: Is your dog drinking cold fountain water?
SHE: I guess so.
HE: If your dog drinks cold water, he'll get colic.
SHE: It's a she. And I don't care about the colic. You know, what I really worry about is bringing her out in public when she's in heat like this. I'm not afraid she'll get colic, but that she might get pregnant.
HE: They're the same thing, aren't they? Har har har.
SHE: Maybe for your mother they were.
(At this point Joanna the Grate swoops down on bat's wings, lays He low with one mighty swatt, and elevates She and Dog to the constellation of Victoria Femina, where they sparkle forever.)
I know that somewhere, just to give me the lie, lives a beautiful (got to be beautiful), intellectual, gracious, cultivated, charming woman who has eight children, bakes her own bread, cakes, and pies, takes care of her own house, does her own cooking, brings up her own children, holds down a demanding nine-to-five job at the top decision-making level in a man's field, and is adored by her equally successful husband because although a hard-driving, aggressive business executive with eye of eagle, heart of lion, tongue of adder, and muscles of gorilla (she looks just like Kirk Douglas), she comes home at night, slips into a filmy negligee and a wig, and turns instanter into a Playboy dimwit, thus laughingly dispelling the canard that you cannot be eight people simultaneously with two different sets of values. She has not lost her femininity. And I'm Marie of Rumania.
VI
Jeannine is going to put on her Mommy's shoes. That caretaker of childhood and feminine companion of men is waiting for her at the end of the road we all must travel. She swam, went for walks, went to dances, had a picnic with another girl; she got books from town; newspapers for her brother, murder mysteries for Mrs. Dadier, and nothing for herself. At twenty-nine you can't waste your time reading. Either they're too young or they're married or they're bad-looking or there's something awful about them. Rejects. Jeannine went out a couple of times with the son of a friend of her mother's and tried to make conversation with him; she decided that he wasn't really so bad-looking, if only he'd talk more.
They went canoeing in the middle of the lake one day and he said: "I have to tell you something, Jeannine."
She thought: This is it, and her stomach knotted up.
"I'm married," he said, taking off his glasses, "but my wife and I are separated. She's living with her mother in California. She's emotionally disturbed."
"Oh," Jeannine said, flustered and not knowing what to say. She hadn't liked him particularly, but the disappointment was very bad. There is some barrier between Jeannine and real life which can be removed only by a man or by marriage; somehow Jeannine is not in touch with what everybody knows to be real life. He blinked at her with his naked eyes and oh lord, he was fat and plain; but Jeannine managed to smile. She didn't want to hurt his feelings.
"I knew you'd understand," he said in a choked voice, nearly crying. He pressed her hand. "I knew you'd understand, Jeannie." She began reckoning him up again, that swift calculation that was quite automatic by now: the looks, the job, whether he was "romantic," did he read poetry? whether he could be made to dress better or diet or put on weight (whichever it was), whether his hair could be cut better. She could make herself feel something about him, yes. She could rely on him. After all, his wife might divorce him. He was intelligent. He was promising. "I understand," she said, against the grain. After all, there wasn't anything wrong with him exactly; from shore it must really look quite good, the canoe, the pretty girl, the puffy summer clouds, Jeannine's sun-shade (borrowed from the girl friend she'd had the picnic with). There couldn't be that much wrong with it. She smiled a little. His contribution is Make me feel good; her contribution is Make me exist. The sun came out over the water and it really was quite nice. And there was this painful stirring of feeling in her, this terrible tenderness or need, so perhaps she was beginning to love him, in her own way.
"Are you busy tonight?" Poor man. She wet her lips and didn't answer, feeling the sun strike her on all sides, deliciously aware of her bare arms and neck, the picture she made. "Mm?" she said.
"I thought-I thought you might want to go to the play." He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face with it. He put his glasses back on.
"You ought to wear sunglasses," said Jeannine, imagining how he might look that way. "Yes, Bud and Eileen were going. Would you like to join us?" The surprised gratitude of a man reprieved. I really do like him. He bent closer-this alarmed her for the canoe, as well as disgusted her (Freud says disgust is a prominent expression of the sexual life in civilized people) and she cried out, "Don't!
We'll fall in!" He righted himself. By degrees. You've got to get to know people. She was frightened, almost, by the access of being that came to her from him, frightened at the richness of the whole scene, at how much she felt without feeling it for him, terrified lest the sun might go behind a cloud and withdraw everything from her again.
"What time shall I pick you up?" he said.
VII
That night Jeannine fell in love with an actor. The theatre was a squat, low building finished pink stucco like a summertime movie palace and built in the middle of a grove of pine trees. The audience sat on hard wooden chairs and watched a college group play "Charley's Aunt." Jeannine didn't get up or go out during the intermission but only sat, stupefied, fanning herself with her program and wishing that she had the courage to make some sort of change in her life. She couldn't take her eyes off the stage. The presence of her brother and sister-in-law irked her unbearably and every time she became aware of her date by her elbow, she wanted to turn in on herself and disappear, or run outside, or scream. It didn't matter which actor or which character she fell in love with; even Jeannine knew that; it was the unreality of the scene onstage that made her long to be in it or on it or two-dimensional, anything to quiet her unstable heart; I'm not fit to live, she said. There was more pain in it than pleasure; it had been getting worse for some years, until Jeannine now dreaded doing it; I can't help it, she said. She added, I'm not fit to exist.