by
Lucia Berlin
topic/female-subjugation
Elena Ferrante,
Jonathan Franzen,
Helen Garner,
Alba de Céspedes,
Lucia Berlin,
Dayna Tortorici,
Martin Amis,
Doris Lessing
When she was gone Rickie Evers dropped his gold cigarette lighter on the floor and when he reached down for it he ran his hand up my leg, stroked the inside of my knee.
I took a bite of the Baked Alaska and said I wondered how they ever managed to do it. He picked his lighter up and told me I had Baked Alaska on my chin. When he wiped it with the big linen napkin his arm brushed my breast. I was embarrassed, I still didn’t even wear a training bra.
Bella Lynn came back from the powder room sauntering in her crooked seams, pretending not to notice all the men staring at her. The whole dining room had been staring at Bella Lynn and Rickie Evers throughout the meal. I think the Mexican busboy saw what Evers did when he dropped his lighter.
men are DOGS
That was the extent of Maya’s objections. Gratitude was still a big part of her feeling toward Paul. Her first husband had left her when Sammy was nine months old and she was pregnant with Max. It had seemed like a miracle when Paul came along and loved Sammy and Max as well as her. She was determined to have a good marriage, to be a good wife. Still only nineteen, she had no idea what being a good wife meant. She did things like hold the hot part of the cup when she passed him coffee, offering him the handle.
noooo girl
[...] “I understand,” I retorted, “so if reputation doesn’t count and a woman of forty-three is free to act like a girl in search of a husband, if you yourself approve all this, you mean that I, too, could … ” ‘What do you have to do with it?” he immediately interrupted, in an irritated, reproachful tone. “How can you compare your case with Clara’s, mamma? You have a husband, two grown children … Clara is alone, and we all know the world of the cinema … ” He was lying the way one lies to a child, and suddenly I realized that it wasn’t the first time he’d spoken to me like that. He’s always done it, or at least for so many years that I’ve forgotten any other way he has of speaking. And as I answered him compliantly, admitting that my case is different, I, too, was lying, out of fear of him, of his judgment. He came over to me, caressed me. “You understand, right?” he said, and I nodded. But maybe because of the lie or maybe because in a confused way I sensed that he was right, I felt an uncontrollable sadness rising in me. I’m afraid that because my way of being seems natural to him it no longer has any value in his eyes. Rather, he admires Clara, who is so different from me and with whom I no longer have anything in common, not even our past as young wives, which today, with her present life, she denies, derides. I wondered if for Michele I’m still a living woman or already, like his mother, a portrait on the wall. So I am for my children. Certainly, so my mother is for me. I wished desperately to escape the evil spell of that portrait. “I’m afraid,” I was about to say, but he, ignorant of my thoughts, wouldn’t have understood.
I called Clara and told her I’d like to come see her, and she invited me to lunch, but we didn’t set a day. I said how grateful I was for what she’s doing for us, I repeated, “Let’s hope for the best.” She said that in reality she didn’t have much hope, but that I shouldn’t discourage Michele, because she was still intending to try several paths. “The script has an interesting beginning, don’t you think?” I answered vaguely. I didn’t want to confess that I don’t know anything about it. “Of course,” Clara continued, “it all has to be rewritten, but as it’s been corrected, it might work. The plot, of course, is very dark, very risqué.” I said, “Yes … yes … ” “That’s also its strength, its attraction, I don’t deny it,” she observed. “That man who says he’s a different person to every woman is very successful. And then when he goes to the street with the prostitutes, and the following scene, when he comes home and there’s his wife, who says, ‘I kept dinner warm for you’ … There are wonderful ideas, a great film could be made. But I’m afraid it won’t work, no producer is courageous enough. I advised Michele to lighten it, but he says it’s impossible and ultimately he’s not wrong. Its character is really in that fever, that sexual obsession.” Then she said, “Too bad,” and added that Michele would have had a lot of talent for the cinema, and repeated, “Too bad.”
When Michele came home I didn’t tell him I’d talked to Clara.
oh god
[diary relevance: my theory about men trying to preserve their dilemmas for posterity rather than set things right in life]
[...] Sitting down again, he said we’ll soon get used to Marina, she’s a good girl and he likes her. It’s true. He likes her because she’s pretty. He, like Riccardo, smiles when he sees her around, because she possesses that animal meekness that men take for sweetness. Not even what happened between them serves to make Michele suspicious: he thinks she’s an example of loving, female obedience that flatters him, too, because he’s a man. But I know what a different idea he has of a woman like Clara, for instance, even if he doesn’t talk about her or complain that she never called. [...]
I am a woman. I (i) long to be of service (ii) like domestic order (iii) am socially quite skilful—at organising lists of appointments etc (iv) can do basic cooking (v) feel an urge to fill gaps where otherwise chaos, awkwardness, discomfort (physical, emotional, social) might occur (vi) like to make practical demonstrations of love. All I need to attend to is that I keep enough of myself free for my work and the hours of private mental time this requires. I mean that my attention to him and his needs should not outweigh my attention to myself for work. ‘All I need’! This terribly hard thing, for a woman.
heh
I think I am in the classic position of a woman artist who in order to maintain a marriage is obliged to trim herself so as not to make her husband feel—what? Something a man is not supposed to have to feel? This must be one of the reasons V is so against it when I have to do publicity. It’s also perhaps why he is encouraging to me about doing journalism. He is as generous as he can possibly be about my book and its success, but if I had success like that with a novel there’d be serious trouble—I don’t know what trouble exactly, but life would get tougher. Why are men so fragile? If he were getting more attention than I was, everyone would be at ease, it would be seen as normal and appropriate. Tilt it, and everything gets unhappy and shadowy. Maybe it’s true then. A woman artist who wants to develop as far as she can needs to live alone. He is a better novelist than I am—he can handle broader ideas, more characters etc—this is not the problem. The problem is that my success seems to get in his way. It somehow stops him from working.
What to do? I could accept without further complaint his demand for uninterrupted occupation of the flat. Work harder at cooking. Do less publicity. Pull my horns in. How dismal.
she's not wrong
With a friend who is married to a painter I compared notes about our respective husbands and their demands. In his determination to deter visitors, hers has disabled the buzzer and made adjustments to the heavy street door of their house that make it impossible for her to get in, even with her key, without putting down everything she is carrying. Like me, she is expected to run the house, do the shopping and cooking, and keep the home fires burning, all this without being permitted on the premises during work hours. I saw in her face my unhappiness. We did not know whether, or how, we could go on tolerating their regimes, or what we could do to change them. When I was leaving she said, ‘I’m beginning to experience it as violence.’
V admires a pair of grotesquely high heels that Marilyn Monroe is wearing in a photo. I look at them and see two instruments of torture. He speaks at some length about how women who wear high heels are showing that they like men, that they’re prepared to ‘put up with a bit of discomfort’ to please a man. They are much more feminine than women who wear flat shoes or runners.
i hate this guy
On the morning of Chip's conception she'd merely looked like she was shamming sleep, but on the morning of Denise's, seven years later, she really was pretending. Alfred in middle age had invited such venial deceptions. A decade-plus of marriage had turned him into one of the overly civilized predators you hear about in zoos, the Bengal tiger that forgets how to kill, the lion lazy with depression. To exert attraction, Enid had to be a still, unbloody carcass. If she actively reached out, actively threw a thigh over his, he braced himself against her and withheld his face; if she so much as stepped from the bathroom naked he averted his eyes, as the Golden Rule enjoined the man who hated to be seen himself. Only early in the morning, waking to the sight of her small white shoulder, did he venture from his lair. Her stillness and self-containment, the slow sips of air she took, her purely vulnerable object- hood, made him pounce. And feeling his padded paw on her ribs and his meat-seeking breath on her neck she went limp, as if with prey's instinctive resignation ("Let's get this dying over with"), although in truth her passivity was calculated, because she knew passivity inflamed him. He had her, and to some extent she wanted to be had, like an animal: in a mute mutual privacy of violence. She, too, kept her eyes shut. Often didn't even roll from the side she'd been lying on but simply flared her hip, brought her knee up in a vaguely proctologic reflex. Then without showing her his face he departed for the bathroom, where he washed and shaved and emerged to see the bed already made and to hear, downstairs, the percolator gulping. From Enid's perspective in the kitchen maybe a lion, not her husband, had voluptuously mauled her, or maybe one of the men in uniform she ought to have married had slipped into her bed. It wasn't a wonderful life, but a woman could subsist on self-deceptions like these and on her memories (which also now curiously seemed like self-deceptions) of the early years when he'd been mad for her and had looked into her eyes. The important thing was to keep it all tacit. If the act was never spoken of, there would be no reason to discontinue it until she was definitely pregnant again, and even after pregnancy no reason not to resume it, as long as it was never mentioned.