The Last Word


The Last Word

A wife can go to the basement for many reasons, but only two of them are universal. The first is to point out to her husband how he has failed her.

The furnace is going to be fixed right now.

"Jimmie!" I call upstairs, banging on the furnace with a poker so that he can't pretend he doesn't hear me. "Come down here this minute and fix the furnace!"

I've told him and told him. Since last fall the furnace has needed fixing. The house gets cold. I might as well talk to a stump.

Men are mesmerized by figures—of all kinds—and any kind of spurious instrument reading will be believed ahead of a woman. But it's no use pointing to the thermometer. A woman knows when she's cold, and all the gadgets ever inflicted upon humanity by men who never outgrew their electric trains won't convince a woman that she's comfortable when she's not.

A dozen times I've told him. "Jimmie, you've just got to fix the furnace today." And a dozen times he has kept his anonymity secure behind the paper and answered, "ummmhumph?"

The only thing more certain than that a man will get amorous at the wrong time is that nothing will be fixed around the house unless a woman stands over her husband with a whip.

We don't like to whip them, but they won't learn. After 10,000 years, you'd think they'd have absorbed a little initiative about important things. I'll bet the cave woman had to browbeat her mate fifty times a night before she was certain the stone was properly in front of the mouth of their cave.

Men are funny. Their minds absorb only meaningless, ephemeral data, like the name of the current welterweight champion, and crazy notions—like this latest fantasy Harry invented.

Now Jimmie's infected. There'll be no peace in the house until the idea is sealed off, encysted like a tubercle.

Women are aliens!Isn't that silly?

But it's the sort of thing you'd expect from Harry. Jimmie thinks Harry is a wit. Well, maybe he is. Wit is something unreal and meaningless. He isn't funny, though. Humor is basic; it's about earthy things like children and sex. It isn't fantasy.

So it didn't worry me when Harry started spinning out one of his dull stories to Jimmie. We were in the kitchen—Lucille and I—and she told me all about it.

"Sometimes I worry about Harry," she said soberly. "He gets the craziest ideas."

"Don't let it bother you," I said frankly. "All men are like that." Which was only a small evasion, hardly worth considering; Harry was worse than most.

Lucille was a bride, you see, and being a bride is an uncomfortable state at best. The man loses those attentive ways he put on before the wedding, and he becomes just as thoughtful and romantic as an old leather slipper. As a matter of fact, the resemblance is surprising.

"Marriage is a poor compromise with necessity," I pointed out. "I suppose that's because we have to marry men."

Lucille shook her head wearily. "Why do we put up with it?"

"Because they're so lovable."

She sighed. A slow, tender smile softened the willful lines of her face; I wasn't surprised that Harry had married her. "I suppose so," she said thoughtfully. "Harry can really be a dear when I try. But it's such an effort."

"What is it this time?"

"Harry has this wild idea that women are aliens. I think he's half way convinced himself like a boy telling ghost stories until he starts glancing fearfully over his shoulder."

I tittered. "Not really?"

She nodded helplessly. "He's working himself into a state—you know the way men do. The things that are close to them are unimportant. But something abstract and distant—some injustice on the other side of the world—will mount them on a white horse and send them charging wild-eyed to the rescue. They get banged-up and bruised, and they come creeping home to be comforted, and we take them back. Men never learn; they just keep on making the same mistakes day after day, year after year. And there's nothing we can do about it."

"That's their charm. They're just boys grown tall."

"Somebody said that before," Lucille said cattily.

"Of course." I shrugged. "Otherwise it wouldn't be worth saying. I suppose Harry has got it all worked out?"

"Naturally. You know: men and women are so different it's as if we belonged to different worlds, the way we think, the way we act, the things we like."

I smiled slyly. "Well, maybe he's not so far off at that."

Lucille wasn't in the mood for jokes. "He couldn't be more wrong!"

"That's true," I conceded.

"Harry says we were jettisoned. Some time in the past. Our alien mates dumped us here on Earth—to get rid of us because they couldn't stand having us around any longer."

I laughed then. I couldn't help it. "Just like a man!" I gurgled. "Wishful thinkers to the last."

"You wouldn't think it was so funny if it was your husband!" she snapped angrily.

"You're right," I said, sobering instantly. After all, laughter is a tool, not a master. "You say he's telling this stuff to Jimmie?"

"So now you're worried?" she said loftily.

"Of course I'm not. Jimmie's too sensible to get taken in by a notion like that. Besides," I added as reassurance, "he'll think it's just another of Harry's stories."

"I know," Lucille meowed. "Jimmie's slow that way."

"Better slow," I slashed back, "than paranoiac. Where are you going?"

She stopped at the kitchen door and held a finger to her lips for silence. She listened for a moment. "Harry doesn't know I know," she said softly, straightening. "I think he'd die of fright if he thought I'd found out. Right now he's in the living room torn between a childish pride in his shrewdness and his daring and a nightmare terror that I'll read his thoughts or find his notes or listen at keyholes."

"Silly man! As if that were necessary!"

She shook her head at her own frailty. "I can't bear to think of him in there, shaking. I'll comfort him." She pushed open the door and called out, "Harry off on one of his stories again? Tell us when he's through so we can bring in the refreshments."

It was just right. Even from the kitchen, I could feel the men in the living room relax. Right then I stopped worrying about Harry. Lucille would handle him. She would wear him on her finger and make him think he was a wild, brave, independent thing. If it were necessary, she could make him believe that the world was flat and that it was created every day anew, when he came home to her.

This is a fine technique. It may be, as some women say, the flowering of male psychology's 10,000 years, and I certainly won't minimize anything that works so well. But sometimes I wonder if it's worth the trouble.

A man, after all, isn't the totality of existence, no matter how we kid ourselves and them. And the technique has its dangers: one little slip and your man becomes disillusioned; sometimes he develops fantasies, like Harry. That's the way misogynists are made.

I prefer the tame kind myself.

"It sounds pretty bad," I said. "Do you think you'll have to put him away?"

"Oh, no!" she said quickly. "I couldn't do that. I couldn't stand to think of him raving in an asylum. He can be cute—Oh, you! You were just teasing!"

I chuckled. I had learned what I wanted to know. "I think—down deep—you're proud of him."

"I guess I am." She sighed as if it were a hopeless situation, but she didn't actually mind it. "He's so clever and sly about it. The real trouble is that he's not very good at it."

"They never are."

"He's got these quotations that prove everything—he thinks. And he's found all the little details that document women's alienness—the cute little ashtrays that won't hold a cigarette, the lamps you can't read by, the drapes that keep out the southern exposure which was the reason you bought the house, the bobbypins that rain down, the stockings hung over towels to dry, the slipcovers that twist and crease, the jar caps we don't screw down—all these things that men can't abide. Straightening up the house—he calls it 'hiding things.' Quotations! I could give him quotations!"

She had looked them up—because these are things that women don't remember—with a persistence that Harry could never match.

Ambrose Bierce: "Women would be more charming if one could fall into her arms without falling into her hands."

Van Wyck Brooks, about Mark Twain: "His wife not only edited his works but edited him."

O. Henry: "If men know how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry." And: "A man asleep is certainly a sight to make the angels weep. Now, a woman asleep you regard as different. No matter how she looks, you know it's better for all hands for her to be that way."

Thornton Wilder: "A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot's tied in a mighty public way."

"That's the heart of Harry's story," Lucille said wistfully. "He says it's conquest by marriage. By a process of procreation, we're absorbing men, breeding out the humans, breeding in the aliens. And now he's afraid that men have outlived their usefulness."

"Oh, no!" I exclaimed sympathetically.

Lucille nodded sadly. "He's read about fertilization by salt water and electrical stimulus, and he's scared. Once we can have children without them, he thinks we'll just let them die out and have a female race. And he's afraid that if I suspect what he knows that I'll do away with him—just as women have done away in the past with all the men who learned the truth about them."

"The poor man," I sighed.

"He's got statistics to prove it. 'Why,' he says, 'are there more men than women in asylums?'"

"Statistics!" I snorted. Men put such trust in them, and they're worthless. People aren't numbers, and numbers aren't people. Women knew that centuries before Korzybski. There's just no correlation at all. Kinsey should have known better. Women have never bothered with abstractions. We leave them for the men to amuse themselves with—but sometimes they get themselves so confused.

"Before we marry them," Lucille said reminiscently, "they have a sort of rough, animal charm—untamed and exciting—but afterwards they're just shaggy dogs, pointless. They're eager to please in their clumsy, sprawling way, but the thrill is gone. Their happiest moment is when they can stretch out and doze while someone pats them kindly on the head."

"We've done what we could with them," I said, shrugging. "The material just won't stretch any farther. Basically they're unromantic and undemonstrative. They take us for granted—that saves thinking up new ways to be attractive to us—and they're absolutely stupid about things that matter."

"Like house cleaning," Lucille said.

"Table manners," I added.

"Attentiveness."

"Gossip."

"Motherhood."

"Children."

"Clothes."

"Fur coats."

"Kitchens."

"Other women."

We were silent for a moment—a difficult feat for a woman—considering the last item on the list. Considered seriously, it sums up the whole problem of men. Women know women, and women know men. But men never know women and seldom even understand each other.

And they don't even try.

Of course, we don't exactly encourage it, either.

"Do you suppose it's marriage?" Lucille asked suddenly.

"What's marriage?" I said, taken off guard.

"That spoils them. Before, they seem to have flashes of insight—certainly moments of exhilaration—"

"We only read it into them," I said confidently, "before we know better. Before we marry them, that is. Besides," I went on nonsequitur—which is not only a woman's privilege but her duty because it contains a deeper logic, "it's the only way they're safe—for them and for us."

"You're right. Harry's finished with his story. Shall we go in?"

And we did. And Jimmie made that horrible slip. "Hi, alien," he said to me, spluttering like he does when he's really tickled.

I could have killed him.

Harry was glassy-eyed with terror, and it didn't improve his color or bring back the strength into his legs when Jimmie tried to repeat the whole absurd story.

Harry knew, with a cold, fearful certainty, that he was betrayed, lost, doomed… But when Lucille told him to fix the hot water heater, all he could say was, "Yes, dear." As we left, I thought:I leave him to your tender mercies, sister!

That was the last of it, I thought. To Jimmie it was only a joke, and Harry would soon think whatever Lucille wanted him to think.

Which goes to show how wrong even a woman can be.

Next morning Lucille called up and said Harry was sick. It was a heart attack—why did it have to hit him then? This crazy notion of his that should have died got a rebirth when he got sick. Now Jimmie is convincing himself that there is some truth in it.

Women are aliens! Isn't that crazy?

That's the second reason I'm in the basement. A woman always has at least two reasons for everything she does: the reason she gives and the real reason. We're subtle, clever, sophisticated creatures. We manage things so well that only another woman suspects.

Sir James Barrie said, "Every man who is high up loves to think that he has done it all himself; and the wife smiles, and lets it go at that."

His wife told him. The fool!

Some of us are fools. We become fools over men, but I guess we wouldn't be human if we didn't.

Where is that lazy, shrinking husband of mine? I'm not going to spend all night banging on the furnace. Machinery! I hate it. It hates us.

"Jimmie!"

Sometimes I think we should be sterner with them. We let them play with their earthmovers and their skyscrapers, their factories and their atomic bombs, but some of them are going to get hurt. Some of us might get hurt, too.

It's time to call a halt to the game.

I know what he's doing up there. He's looking up quotations to convince himself that his madness is sanity. I can look up quotations, too. If he doesn't come down soon, I'll tell him one, how I'm waiting here, as Wordsworth said:


"The reason firm, the temperate will,

Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;

A perfect woman, nobly planned,

To warn, to comfort, and command."


There haven't been many men who understood us as well as that. James Stephens came close. He said: "Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more."

But Virginia Woolf, being a woman, understood best of all. "Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size."

"Jimmie!"

He hears me all right. He's just scared. Can you imagine? Scared of me. He only outweighs me by forty pounds. And I couldn't shoot a gun or use a knife or swing a club if I had one.

Women are aliens!

Wouldn't you know that Harry would get it twisted all around. Women aren't aliens. Men are!

We were here first.

It's obvious. Harry's story is as full of holes as a hairnet. Can you imagine a bunch of men getting up enough nerve to dump their women? Of course not.

But to run away. That's something else, and it's just like them.

I know what their women did. They sighed and said, "Good riddance!" and went back to getting the work done. They wouldn't follow. "Let them come back if they want to," they said. Besides, they wouldn't have any ships. No sensible woman would trust herself that far from the life-giving earth. The world's work is done close to it—the closer the better.

So we adopted them—soft-hearted creatures that we were. And we let them think that this was their world to run and ruin as their childish hearts desired. They amused us. They were so cute, so clumsy, so blind—these coarse, crude, unsubtle creatures who think all things should happen in their time and will never learn that the world runs in woman's time.

Which is as it should be.

I know why Harry's sick. When Lucille told him the truth, it was just too much for his poor, frightened heart. Don't blame Lucille. It isn't easy to learn the subtle shadings of effect each word will produce, the gentleness necessary to handle these great, overgrown teddy bears whose soft minds are so easily bruised.

Give her time; she'll learn.

But what I can't understand is Harry's fears about women dispensing with men now because we can do without them. Why, we never needed them in the first place. What do they think we did before they came?

When it comes to babies, men just aren't smart at all.

Here comes Jimmie now. I can hear his faltering footsteps on the stairs. He's afraid, too!

Isn't that silly? Whoever heard of anyone getting rid of a lovable, old, shaggy dog just because he isn't useful?

Men don't realize their real position in this world. Now I'll have to tell Jimmie, and it will be a fearful shock.

"Jane," he says timidly, peeking around the door-frame from the bottom step. "Is that you, Jane?"

"Ah," I say, "there you are—pet!"

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