Unaccompanied Women Read online

CHAPTER 13

  the body electric

  O pumpkin plump! O pumped-up corpulence . . .

  O fatty dishes of love!

  —from “Ruben’s Women,” WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

  IN HER PREGNANCY my landlady is getting more beautiful every day, and oh, how I wish I could admire her unrestrained by my fears, which come with change. Just when I am beginning to manage my increased rent, there looms a new threat to my stability: a blessed event. So I’m a little paranoid, but I can easily—too easily—imagine her house becoming crowded when the baby arrives, and so they sell and move away, leaving me once again at the mercy of strangers. Or they stay: I look at the tiny—and getting tinier—backyard that separates her house from my cottage. Where will this child play? On my patio. At night, in my dreams, I see rocking horses and miniature fire trucks outside my door and hear the scraping of plastic shovels and buckets and the thumping and falling against my French doors when he begins to walk. And then, in no time at all, he will have playdates: There will be a passel of toddlers flooding the banks of my privacy, little fists hammering at my door, cries of “Juice!” ringing in my ears. My life will become a natural disaster. Maybe I wish they would move. Maybe I wish I would stop having nightmares. Maybe I wish I had some control over any of this. But I have no choice save one: If I wish to avoid an ever-darkening cloud of depression, I must try to enjoy these months of gestation along with this gorgeous mother-to-be.

  She parades her pregnancy around the neighborhood for everyone to see. Like her belly, her breasts are plumping up, her skin is radiant, and I wonder where her maternity clothes are, those clothes I wore only forty years ago, smocks that billowed out like umbrellas meant to hide the somewhat embarrassing matter of a baby growing inside, a baby the result of—shhh—sexual intercourse. Forty years ago, my income from teaching the sole support of my husband and me, I begged my obstetrician to lie about my due date. Forty years ago my school district did not allow a woman to teach past six weeks of pregnancy—purposes of insurance, I was told, though I suspect it had more to do with purposes of propriety. I pretended for as long as I could that simple weight gain accounted for the tightness of my blouses and my skirts and my trousers; the kids, of course, knew all along that pregnancy was upon me, and behaved rather better than when I was not pregnant. The district office, usually dumber than the kids by quite a bit, remained oblivious, and I managed to extract three more months of pay before the smock took over.

  The intervening decades have brought some improvements. It is no longer necessary to hide one’s pregnancy; indeed, flaunting it is the style now, and I do believe a healthy one; women are allowed to work as far into their pregnancy as they see fit. My landlady does not have a job, but if she did, she would undoubtedly share her pregnancy with the workplace as she has with the neighborhood. She is a lovely creature to watch. I do wonder, however, what will become of the diamond in her navel. Will it pop out? Will it, at some point, shoot across a room or straight out back where I live? I would catch it and take good care of it, for I would like a jewel. I don’t have one. I did have a ring—a star sapphire—from my aunt, given her by her husband. I never wore it. It was too big, someone might actually see it, think I was showing off. So it’s stored in my underpants drawer, where no thief will think to look, or if he does, he won’t see it because I have hidden it still further in a wadded-up sock. Boy, am I clever.

  I love my aunt for having willed me her star sapphire, but what I would like now is for a man to give me a jewel. I know, I am not being modern, I am being a cliché and an old-fashioned one at that. Okay, I could buy myself a jewel, even a diamond, but it wouldn’t be the same as if a man went to some trouble, thought enough of me, to buy me a diamond. I would like him to think I was pretty enough to wear a jewel. A diamond is my first choice, thank you very much. However, I would be willing to start with an emerald and go from there.

  I had a wedding ring, one I paid for myself since my affianced was not working and I was. Six years later, when the divorce was final, I took it off and put it in the jewelry box my mother had given me for my graduation from high school and which, fifty-two years later, still holds my National Honor Society pin, my Delta Gamma anchor pin, my high school ring, and the Add-a-Pearl necklace with one pearl, a gift from my grandmother, which never got added to because she died. My wedding ring, a circlet of little diamonds, got stolen by the neighbor kid, who was a thief and a junkie and meaner than sin. He knew what was hockable, left behind the pins and the necklace, helped himself to the ring and a bottle of scotch, and skedaddled to the Nevada desert, where it was too much trouble for anyone to go after him. I don’t miss my wedding ring any more than I miss my marriage. But it was pretty, and as it was deemed appropriate for a married woman, it was the one and only time I would wear diamonds.

  In the forties and fifties, when I was growing into girldom, modesty was all the rage, which is to say that our bodies were to be kept under cover. We wore pearls made of paste on our unpierced ears and around our necks, where the necklaces descended onto the cashmere (if our dads could afford it, orlon if they couldn’t) of our sweater sets, cut loosely enough to suggest the presence of breasts but never ever to celebrate them. Pearls for purity, I suppose; diamonds were a girl’s best friend only if the girl was a slut or engaged. We good girls stuck to pearls and, as we launched ourselves into adolescence, added the circle pin, often made of pearls or the more humble silver alloy unadorned with jewels. We wore our circle pins sometimes at the neck just below our Peter Pan collar, sometimes on our lapel if we had one, most often on our sweaters and blouses, in the soft space below the shoulder and above the breast. Everyone had a circle pin, me too, a little halo announcing the angelic goodness of its wearer. There we were, an endless stream of virgins all in a row, ready for plucking. Mind you, one did not wear both a circle pin and pearls; that would have been too much, too bold. Gilding the lily was frowned on and not just in the Bible.

  The most coveted jewel of any sorority girl’s first twenty-one years, outside of the engagement ring, was the fraternity pin, the precursor of the (diamond) engagement ring and its promise of marriage, and it came with the right and responsibility to let the boy unhook your bra on a warm spring night in the arboretum. “She got pinned!” rang through the sorority house, a celebratory call of triumph. Before pinning, dating couples were relegated to a nook beneath the stairs of the house, called the beau parlor, where our housemother saw to it that the door remained open at least three inches and the feet of the boy and girl in it On the Floor at All Times. The road to pinning rarely ran smoothly, so when the fraternity boys came to serenade the sorority girl just pinned by one of their brothers, their music, an acknowledgment of what eventually would become betrothal, was sweet in the ears of the girl who had, so far as anyone knew, lived her life according to the rules. She had earned the right to display his pin on her left breast alongside her own pin of sisterhood. Two pins, she was the envy of every girl she knew. Her future was secure.

  Not so incidentally, girls who hadn’t pledged, who hadn’t made it through rush to the very last party, who still lived in the dorms, “unaffiliated,” rarely got pinned, because fraternity boys looked for sorority girls, not independents. This was the reason my all-knowing mother wanted me to rush, to make it through to the acceptance, signaled by an invitation from one or more of the top five sororities to final desserts, where, seduced by candlelight and cream puffs, not to mention the sweet sound of sorority girls all gussied up and singing “If You Wanna Be a DG” or “Not Thy Key, O Kappa” or “Pi Phi Arrow Forever,” I would be asked to pledge my loyalty, my purity (though the word was never used) to an organization whose chief purpose was the exclusion of others. Keeping people out was my sorority’s blood sport. I hated it and thrilled to it, spoke against it and never missed a hash session, where we determined whether this girl or that girl was pretty enough, smart enough, connected enough—Was she a legacy?—and, of course, virginal enough to become one of us.
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  All that earning our own pin and then the pin of a boy kept us busy. The Korean War came and went, noticed by us only because it decimated our football team. While we watched Mr. Peepers in the television room (separate from the beau parlor) and hoped for a panty raid, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death. We smoked Pall Malls and wore our camel hair coats open to the winter winds. We wore our Wigwam socks and white Keds through the slush of spring while Senator McCarthy, whoever he was, marched across the country, purging our nation of the Red Scare, those Commie pinkos. And we went to the movies, On the Waterfront being as close to blue collar as we wanted to get, but oh boy, though we’d never have admitted it, we wouldn’t have minded being Eva Marie Saint (What a name!) in that slip.

  Our real jewel, that jewel beyond compare, was our virginity, and our duty was to keep it safe until our wedding night, when our husbands could do whatever they wanted to our bodies and then we would have babies, our true purpose in life. Today we wonder, my friends of the fifties and I, where our heads were, how to account for our true ignorance of national events, our lack of interest in anything beyond our cashmered selves and the boys we hoped would claim us. We were indeed the Silent Generation, the generation that came after the Second World War, whose end returned women from factories and fields to the home, where my mother, a proud nurse’s aide during the war, counseled me on how to mix a highball, how to make a tossed salad, how to miter the corners of the sheets, how to play bridge, and, by example, how to defer to a man. All of these practices, so long as I got in to the right sorority, would make me pinnable, thus certifying my fitness for marriage to the right kind of boy, and the assurance of a diamond on the third finger of the left hand.

  Thanks to my mother, who had been a Delta Gamma in her day, thereby making me a legacy, I got into the right sorority, but then things went downhill, for I never got pinned, never got engaged, never even brought a boy home for inspection. After college I put my lonely sorority pin into my jewelry box and, as a working girl in San Francisco, looked longingly into the windows of jewelry stores where diamonds winked back invitingly.

  Now, at age seventy-one, I still want a jewel to wear. I want a jewel to do for me what it seems to do for so many women—Elizabeth Taylor, for one, who is my age and sparkles with diamonds so brilliant that no one thinks to look below them to where her waist used to be. Then, of course, there is the queen. In 1976, Queen Elizabeth came to the Olympics to honor the athletes of England and Canada. I was there, too, a guest of one of my college friends who never got pinned either but who nonetheless married a man of some importance. Through him I was invited to the reception given by the queen. Now, we all know about the queen’s notorious dowdiness, how her hats made her look older when she wasn’t yet, how her skirts midcalf hid any possibility of femininity, her jackets tailored to create a sort of upholstered bosom. So the anticipation of seeing the queen in real life, while an event, since after all she was the queen, carried with it no glamour. However, on this night, the night during which she would shake the hands of athletes old and young, the Queen Got Dressed Up. Here she came through the doors at the end of the hall, white shimmering gown as décolleté as ever a queen would wear, long white gloves, even a train. And around her neck, ropes of diamonds, and in her hair—a diamond tiara. Omigod, she was beautiful, she was awe-inspiring, she shone, she was alight with diamonds, and in the presence of her radiance we bowed our heads and gave her our hearts. Next day she was back to her sturdy no-nonsense self, but for that one night in my life she was an unforgettable splendor.

  Today women, in their independence, buy their own diamonds with their own money if they don’t want to wait for a Hearts on Fire 2 carat surprise from a man suckered into purchasing it by the relentless advertising campaign. I, as a woman of today with enough money to buy maybe not a two-carat but a real diamond nonetheless, could walk down the street, where two blocks away the windows of two jewelry stores wink and blink and glimmer with diamonds aplenty. But I don’t want to buy myself a diamond. I want a man to give it to me.

  So let’s say somebody gave me a jewel, like a diamond. Where would I put it? Jewels, I think, are to be set off by the background, by a woman’s skin. What skin would I offer? Not the neck. Why would I want to call attention to my wattle, to the looseness of skin that started in my forehead and every day continues its descent to my neck, my bosom, and so on. So, where? If my jewel goes on my finger, which one? On my left hand I have bitten the nail of the index finger, and since I try to keep it hidden, a jewel would give me away. My right hand is pulsing with the enlarged veins of age because they’ve got too narrow to keep up with my heart. Do I want to call attention to my hands? Where else? My hair? Diamonds would get lost, my hair being the same color. My belly button is out of the question, couldn’t even find it. So why do I want a jewel, anyway?

  There is always the hope that beautiful jewels will draw attention away from the ravages of time, will in themselves be so breathtaking that the woman wearing them becomes beautiful, too, as happened with Queen Elizabeth, though jewels or no jewels, she is undeniably queenly. As a member of the bourgeoisie and so not eligible for a royal position, I would like one part of my body to be a proper setting for a precious stone. And there isn’t one, not one part I don’t keep as covered as I possibly can, though my nose isn’t bad, come to think of it. And of course my ears are okay, and what the hell, my lower lip is still full and—bereft of adornment. When young women began all this body piercing, I was horrified, but maybe I should be less scornful. After all, their bodies and faces and ears and tongues can accommodate many jewels; there may be a method to what I took to be their madness. And those beautiful Indian women: little diamonds in the soft part of the nose between the nostril and the bone. I could do that. If I did, I would glitter when I snored, and the man lying beside me, who had given me the diamond, would think me beautiful and well worth the enormous amount of money that one perfect diamond had cost him. Yes, I could accommodate a fine jewel.

  In Santa Rosa, California, still jewel-less, I have come to do a reading from the book I wrote about being naked with men. Waiting for people to find seats, I hear a woman in the audience whisper to her friend, “She seems so comfortable with her own body, so at ease.” The friend answers, “You would, too, if you were getting all that sex.” They are talking about me. Well, with my clothes on, I’m pretty comfortable, and, truth be told, the attentions of men, their ministrations to my body, have loosened me up. So the women in the audience are partly right. Yet, at another reading, during the question-and-answer period, I am asked the age range of the men I got naked with. “Eighty-four to thirty-two,” I answer, and there is a gasp. Then, from a woman who looks directly at my torso, “What would a thirty-two-year-old want with you?” Again and again, wherever I go to read, to sign books, the question or a variation of it arises: “How do you get undressed in front of those men?” My answer, which always brings laughter, is, “Fast.” But it’s true. Faster than a speeding bullet I have covered myself from top to toe in, if I’m lucky, 400-thread-count linens while he was still wrestling with the top button of his shirt. More powerful than a locomotive, I have dived beneath bedclothes while he’s still pulling at his socks. “Where did you go?” he asks, and, half-hoping he won’t find me, I whisper from the depths of sheets and blankets and pillows, “Here I am.”

  . . . the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face;

  It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists;

  It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees—

  Walt Whitman knew what he was talking about; maybe only a homosexual male can truly appreciate the male body. If that is so, I run a close second as a fan of male nudity. I have never ever seen a naked man who was not comfortable in his skin, who did not walk naked from here to there with no thought of clutching at a robe or a bath towel or a curtain, who did not turn this way and that without sel
f-consciousness. I have seen more than one man strut his stuff while I, swaddled in sheets, lay on my side and offered up my heartfelt praise and admiration and (silent) envy. My memory conjures up Graham in all his beautiful nakedness, and I see him striding about, smoothing his hands over his very flat belly, prideful and happy that I share his delight in the splendor that is his body.

  Age entirely aside, how is it that men are like this while women, like me, prefer the dark to the light? Why do most men prefer to make love with the lights on? Maybe it’s that boys see each other naked at younger ages than girls do. Maybe it’s that girls’ bodies change more dramatically than boys’; maybe it’s that girls learn shame while boys learn pride. Girls’ bodies every month become a bloody mess; we are unclean in some cultures, men will have nothing to do with us. No matter how antiseptic the pads and tampons, no matter how floral the scent of vaginal douches, there is no escaping the sight and smell of blood that comes from us every month for thirty or forty years of our lives. I am hopeful that all this is changing. Surely girls—excuse me, young women—today take pride in their bodies; surely they prefer to make love with the lights on; surely, like my landlady, who glories in her pregnancy, they, too, stride about naked, comfortable in their own skin. I am not convinced. If what I wish were in fact true, advertising would have found a new tune to sing; instead, the relentlessness of the ads that drive us to oils and creams and rinses and gels and powder and paint and foundation and blush convinces old and young alike, if we are not careful, of our bodies’ imperfections. Shame on advertising.

  Maybe nothing at all has changed, for here comes Eve Ensler once again, who, having shown us where our vaginas are, has raised her sights to the belly. In her one-woman show, The Good Body, she exhorts us to love ourselves, even the ugliest part of our bodies, our bellies. “I think that when we truly end the internalized self-violence, when women actually live in their bodies, actually love their bodies as they are, feel safe and empowered in them, then the world will change.” Well, who could argue with that? So there she is up there on stage, pulling up her spaghetti-strapped top to reveal to the audience this loathsome thing, this hideous part, this post-forty belly that, in the next hour and a half, will become lovable. The problem, at least from where I’m sitting, is that she doesn’t have a belly, or much of one. What is she talking about here? Wait another twenty years, I want to tell her, then I’ll listen to you. Ms. Ensler, still in her youth as far as I’m concerned, has only a slight idea of the power of self-hatred that has lurked throughout most of our lives and threatens to explode unless we strike first: Smash all full-length mirrors, enter only those dressing rooms where the light is muted, insist on lights-off for love, stop reading women’s magazines and buying all that junk. Ensler’s audience, mostly women in their thirties and beyond, gives her a standing ovation. I leave depressed. The wheels of progress grind exceedingly slowly.