women shrink after marriage. But Mira’s going down, or even drowning, is also called sanity, accepting the inevitable one is not powerful enough to change. Still she was right when she wept walking down the aisle to be married; she was right when she wept in the rocking chair, choosing death.
Our culture believes strong individuals can transcend their circumstances. I myself don’t much enjoy books by Hardy or Dreiser or Wharton, where the outside world is so strong, so overwhelming, that the individual hasn’t a chance. I get impatient, I keep feeling that somehow the deck is stacked unfairly. That is the point, of course, but my feeling is that if that’s true, I don’t want to play. I prefer to move to another table where I can retain my illusion, if illusion it be, that I’m working against only probabilities, and have a chance to win. Then if you lose, you can blame it on your own poor playing. That is called a tragic flaw, and like guilt, it’s very comforting. You can go on believing that there is really a right way, and you just didn’t find it.
People I respect most, like Cassirer, beautiful soul, insist that the inside remains untouched by the exterior. Is this true, do you suppose? All my life I’ve read that the life of the mind is preeminent, and that it can transcend all bodily degradation. But that’s just not my experience. When your body has to deal all day with shit and string beans, your mind does too.
17
Norm’s confident sense that somehow this baby was all Mira’s doing infected her. Although she was aware that rationally this was ridiculous, Norm’s behavior – apologetic towards his parents for his rebellious wife who had gone and done exactly what they had warned her not to do, kindly tolerant of Mira’s condition, tossing off his poor grades at the end of the first year as being not really her fault – was more potent thanany rational argument. And by now, of course, it was all her doing. The thing was growing inside her. She began to feel squeamish, a drop of oil crushed by a boot. The roofing company she worked for did not like pregnant women in their office: pregnancy was somehow obscene and ought to be hidden, like used sanitary napkins. Mira stuffed what was left of her pride into the small box of mementos where it belonged, and went begging. She explained that her husband was a student – a medical student. It was a magic word. They allowed her, out of the kindness of their hearts, to work up to her eighth month, only adjuring her always to appear clean, neat, and well-groomed.
She was sick during the entire pregnancy, with constant nausea and stomach pain. It never occurred to her that this might be other than physically caused. Her small body swelled up enormously with the child, and by the seventh month she was miserably uncomfortable. She ate constantly to calm her stomach, and gained thirty-five pounds. During the last month, after she had stopped working, she was so off balance that even walking was an effort and lying down was not much better. Mostly she sat in the darkened living-bedroom, her great belly propped by cushions on either side of her, feet propped on a footstool, and read Remembrance of Things Past . She shopped, and cleaned the apartment and cooked, and took the laundry to the laundromat (little dreaming that after the baby was born this would become one of her greatest pleasures – the chance to get out of the house alone, or at least accompanied only by a great white silent uncrying laundry bag). She ironed sheets and Norm’s shirts and paid bills and read the recipe columns of the newspapers searching for an interesting or different way to serve inexpensive foods. The thing she most notably did not do was think.
I don’t know what it is like to be pregnant voluntarily. I assume it’s a very different experience from that of the women I know. Maybe it’s joyful – something shared between the woman and her man. But for the women I know,
Our culture believes strong individuals can transcend their circumstances. I myself don’t much enjoy books by Hardy or Dreiser or Wharton, where the outside world is so strong, so overwhelming, that the individual hasn’t a chance. I get impatient, I keep feeling that somehow the deck is stacked unfairly. That is the point, of course, but my feeling is that if that’s true, I don’t want to play. I prefer to move to another table where I can retain my illusion, if illusion it be, that I’m working against only probabilities, and have a chance to win. Then if you lose, you can blame it on your own poor playing. That is called a tragic flaw, and like guilt, it’s very comforting. You can go on believing that there is really a right way, and you just didn’t find it.
People I respect most, like Cassirer, beautiful soul, insist that the inside remains untouched by the exterior. Is this true, do you suppose? All my life I’ve read that the life of the mind is preeminent, and that it can transcend all bodily degradation. But that’s just not my experience. When your body has to deal all day with shit and string beans, your mind does too.
17
Norm’s confident sense that somehow this baby was all Mira’s doing infected her. Although she was aware that rationally this was ridiculous, Norm’s behavior – apologetic towards his parents for his rebellious wife who had gone and done exactly what they had warned her not to do, kindly tolerant of Mira’s condition, tossing off his poor grades at the end of the first year as being not really her fault – was more potent thanany rational argument. And by now, of course, it was all her doing. The thing was growing inside her. She began to feel squeamish, a drop of oil crushed by a boot. The roofing company she worked for did not like pregnant women in their office: pregnancy was somehow obscene and ought to be hidden, like used sanitary napkins. Mira stuffed what was left of her pride into the small box of mementos where it belonged, and went begging. She explained that her husband was a student – a medical student. It was a magic word. They allowed her, out of the kindness of their hearts, to work up to her eighth month, only adjuring her always to appear clean, neat, and well-groomed.
She was sick during the entire pregnancy, with constant nausea and stomach pain. It never occurred to her that this might be other than physically caused. Her small body swelled up enormously with the child, and by the seventh month she was miserably uncomfortable. She ate constantly to calm her stomach, and gained thirty-five pounds. During the last month, after she had stopped working, she was so off balance that even walking was an effort and lying down was not much better. Mostly she sat in the darkened living-bedroom, her great belly propped by cushions on either side of her, feet propped on a footstool, and read Remembrance of Things Past . She shopped, and cleaned the apartment and cooked, and took the laundry to the laundromat (little dreaming that after the baby was born this would become one of her greatest pleasures – the chance to get out of the house alone, or at least accompanied only by a great white silent uncrying laundry bag). She ironed sheets and Norm’s shirts and paid bills and read the recipe columns of the newspapers searching for an interesting or different way to serve inexpensive foods. The thing she most notably did not do was think.
I don’t know what it is like to be pregnant voluntarily. I assume it’s a very different experience from that of the women I know. Maybe it’s joyful – something shared between the woman and her man. But for the women I know,
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