Kylee

And if the phone doesn't ring? If no one asks? If you wait, and wait, and wait, and Prince Charming doesn't come riding up? What can you do?

In the fifties, when I was a young woman, there was nothing you could do and still be considered decent. Being able to choose and act on that choice was a privilege reserved for men. That should have told me something. I think it did, but I didn't want—or didn't know how—to deal with it at the time. So I put it away in that deep unconscious filing cabinet reserved for matters which must have frightened me with their too-clear implications of female servitude and subordination. It took me forty-two years of gathering such data unbeknownst to myself before I finally accumulated more than my file could hold and it burst open, forcing me to look.

Waiting is one of the earmarks of subservience. As Milton truly says, "They also serve who only stand and wait." Waiting is a service. The words waitress, lady-in-waiting, waiter are all service titles. Waiting delineates rank. Sergeants don't keep colonels waiting, but generals do. Teachers don't keep principals waiting, but superintendents do. Those in power can make their subordinates wait, can expect them to wait. To keep someone waiting is manipulation, a method of maintaining control; it is a way of announcing and wielding power.

My unconscious servitude to Rick began early in our courtship. I remember sitting on a bench by the service station for several hours while he fixed his car. It was an unspoken assumption in my youth that girls loved to keep boys company during such times, liked to hold things for them, enjoyed watching them clean the points, or change the brake shoes. Having their girl hovering around must have been like having their own private cheerleader. Girls did it because we wanted to be with them more than they wanted to be with us. We were more emotionally dependent upon them, as we had been trained to be. We needed to be around them, and though they liked having us around, they had other interests in their lives. We had been trained to have only one major interest, despite all the other things we might do, and that was them. Not because it is any more natural for us females to be dependent and to base our entire lives upon some male's approval and presence, but because patriarchy socialized us thus. It is great for male egos. It is catastrophic for ours.

But I didn't get a real taste of the despotism of waiting until Rick discovered the computer at the University of Minnesota. The next ten years were one long struggle against the humiliation of being constantly rejected for the computer—Rick's "iron mistress," his "three sexty." Ten years of being completely forgotten for whole days and suddenly remembered apologetically, of my putting the uneaten supper away and going to bed at midnight or one or two A.M., not having heard from Rick since morning when he promised to be home by six.

That he should have thought it natural to keep a human being waiting for six, seven, twelve hours without word made it clear to me again and again how he thought of me, how not completely human I was to him, how much just a part of himself—not a separate or real person to be taken seriously, or about whose esteem he needed to worry. He would never have kept any male friend whose friendship he valued waiting so consistently for years. No peer would have put up with it.

At the time, I thought it was all my fault. If I were more interesting, more sexy, more something, he would want to come home to me. I blamed myself, when the fault lay in Rick's patriarchal world view.

Part of the unwritten definition of wife is: the one who waits.

I tried to tell Rick over those long years how often I felt rejected and figuratively slapped in the face. I couldn't help but believe he secretly enjoyed the idea of my waiting for him, the constant service of wondering and worrying about him in his absence. Surely there was something more behind his making me wait than mere forgetfulness. He was an extremely intelligent man, but I couldn't get him to understand how deeply he wounded me by showing disdain for the hours of my life I wasted in waiting for him and for the hurt and rage and erosion of love for him this brought about in my heart.

And through it all, I must never make him wait for me. I must never reverse the sadomasochistic game. Yet by calling it that, I admit my own collusion in it. Years ago I should have ceased to care unduly when he came or went, should have planned my life as I wanted without consulting his. Should simply not have allowed him to tyrannize and manipulate me. But I knew that the moment I refused to supply this apparently necessary ego support, I would lose him.

And I did. When I became interested in the ERA, he often had to wait for me—to get off the phone, to come home from meetings, to come to bed. I ceased to pay much attention to when he came and went. I no longer cared a great deal when he was hours late or rejoiced overmuch when he was early. My life no longer centered around him, as his had never centered around me. I began to live an independent life, such as only men are entitled to. That's when I overstepped my bounds and it was all over.

And I've thought since, with considerable wryness, how for nineteen years I waited for him, and how he couldn't wait for me for one.