Free The Women's Room by Marilyn French Page B

her home in sympathetic silence, and while she was endlessly grateful to him not only for doing what he had done for her, but for being who he was, she could not speak to him. She thanked him over and over, in a monotone, but could not say anything more. She went up to her room and lay on the bed and fell immediately into a deep sleep and slept for fourteen hours. The next day she did not get up at all. She told her mother she didn’t feel well. All Sunday she lay there.

13
    She was overwhelmed. This was what it was all about, all the strange things she had been taught. Everything fell into place, everything made sense. And that everything was too big for her. Other girls went to bars, other girls danced. The difference was she had appeared to be alone. That a woman was not marked as the property of some male made her a bitch in heat to be attacked by any male, or even by all of them at once. That a woman could not go out in public and enjoy herself dancing without worrying what every male in the place was thinking or even worse, what they might do, seemed to her an injustice so extreme that she could not swallow it.
    She was a woman and that alone was enough to deprive her of freedom no matter how much the history books pretended that women’s suffrage had ended inequality, or that women’s feet had been bound only in an ancient and outmoded and foreign place like China. She was constitutionally unfree. She could not go out alone at night. She could not in a moment of loneliness go out to a local tavern to have a drink in company. The twice she had taken the train during the daytime, to make excursions to museums in New York, she had been continually approached. She could not even appear to be lacking an escort; if that escort decided to abandon her, she was helpless. And she couldn’t defend herself: she had to depend on a male for that. Even frail, limping Biff could handle such a situation better than she. Had those guys gotten her, allthe rage and hauteur and fighting in the world wouldn’t have helped her.
    And she would never be free, never. Never. It would always be like this. She thought about her mother’s friends and suddenly understood them. No matter where she went or what she did, she would always have to worry about what men were thinking, how they looked at her, what they might do. One day some months before, in an elevator on her way to the dentist’s office, she had overheard an ugly aged woman with dyed red hair and a crooked back talking to another woman, fiftyish and fat, about rape. Both of them were clucking their tongues, talking about locks on doors and windows, and they looked to her as if to include her in conversation, as if she were one of them. She had looked away, full of contempt for them. Who would want to rape them? It was wishful thinking, she thought. Yet a few nights later there was an item in the newspaper about an eighty-year-old woman, raped and killed in her own apartment.
    She thought about what would have happened had Biff not been there and her mind went black with the horror, the blood, the desecration. It was not her virginity she treasured, but her right to herself, to her own mind and body. Horrible, horrible it would have been, and her beloved Lanny would no doubt have called her slut and said she had gotten what she deserved. He would simply have erased her from his list of women one is required to treat with respect. That was the way things were. And no matter how high she held her head, no matter how alone she walked, that is the way things would stay. It was ridiculous to talk about injustice; it was useless to protest. She knew from her few experiences of talking about women and freedom that such protests were always taken by men as invitations to their taking greater freedoms with her.
    Mira retreated. She was defeated. Her pride, such as was left her, was spent entirely in not letting the defeat show. She walked alone on campus, head high, an icy look on her face.