The Women's Room Read Free Page B

drew her breath in sharply and left the booth.
    It was 1968.

2
    She washed her hands vigorously, also from force of habit, and combed her hair, which was arranged in careful curls. She stood back, examining it in the glaring light of the lavatory. It looked a strange color. Since she had stopped dyeing it last year, it had grown out not just grayer, but with a mousy brown tinge, so she had been tinting it, and this time it had come out perhaps a bit too orange. She moved closer to the mirror and checked her eyebrows and the blue eye shadow she had applied only an hour before. Both were still okay.
    She stepped back again and tried to see her whole self. She couldn’t do it. Ever since she had changed her style of dress – that is, ever since she had been at Harvard – her self refused to coalesce in the mirror. She could see bits and pieces – hair, eyes, legs – but the pieces wouldn’t come together. The hair and eyes went together, but the mouth was wrong; it had changed during the past years. The legs were all right, but didn’t go with the bulky shoes and the pleated skirt. They looked too thin under the thicker body – yet she was the same weight now she’d been for the past ten years. She began to feel something rising in her chest, and hastily looked away from the mirror. This was no time to get upset. Then she turned back jerkily, looking at nothing, pulled out her lipstick and applied a line of it to her lower lip, her eyes careful to look at nothing but the mouth. In spite of herself, however, her eyes caught her whole face, and in a moment her head was full of tears. She leaned her hot forehead against the cool tile wall, then remembered that this was a public place full of other people’s germs, and straightened up hurriedly and left the room.
    She climbed up the three flights of ancient, creaky stairs, reflecting that the ladies’ room was in an inconvenient location because it had been added long after the building was erected. The school had been planned for men, and there were places, she had been told, where women were simply not permitted to go. It was odd. Why? she wondered. Women were so unimportant anyway, why would anyone bother to keep them out? She arrived in the corridor a little late. No one was left in the hallway, lingering, loitering outside the classroom doors. The blank eyes, the empty faces, the young bodies that ten minutes earlier had paced its length, were gone. It was these that, passing herwithout seeing her, seeing her without looking at her, had driven her into hiding. For they had made her feel invisible. And when all you have is a visible surface, invisibility is death. Some deaths take forever, she found herself repeating as she walked into the classroom.

3
    Perhaps you find Mira a little ridiculous. I do myself. But I also have some sympathy for her, more than you, probably. You think she was vain and shallow. I suppose those are words that could have been applied to her, but they are not the first ones that spring to my mind. I think she was ridiculous for hiding in the toilet, but I like her better for that than for the meanness of her mouth, which she herself perceived, and tried to cover up with lipstick. Her meanness was of the tut-tut variety; she slammed genteel doors in her head, closing out charity. But I also feel a little sorry for her, at least I did then. Not anymore.
    Because in a way it doesn’t matter whether you open doors or close them, you still end up in a box. I have failed to ascertain an objective difference between one way of living and another. The only difference I can see is between varying levels of happiness, and I cringe when I say that. If old Schopenhauer is right, happiness is not a human possibility, since it means the absence of pain, which, as an uncle of mine used to say, only occurs when you’re dead or dead drunk. There’s Mira with all her closed doors, and here’s me with all my open ones, and we’re both miserable.
    I spend