Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  “I will, I will.” She threw her arms around his neck and they embraced, kneeling on the bed smeared with her blood in a large comma. Phil seemed happy. He put on a record and without deciding to, she got up and began to dance. After watching a moment he came and danced with her. It was new, dancing with another person instead of alone. She enjoyed the dancing more than she had the sex. They danced roles and attitudes, they danced flirtation and fight, they made faces and picked up props to embroider their attitudes—a pillow, a feather, a vase.

  “I can play with you!” She held his face between her hands. “We can play together. I’ve never played with anyone.”

  “We’ll play a great many games, pigeon, wait and see. I’m as full of games as Santa’s bag.”

  He walked her to the subway and, standing outside the turnstyle as she went through to the Seventh Avenue express, he said with sudden gravity, “You will come back? You won’t turn chicken?”

  “Oh! No! I tell you, if there were a subway strike tomorrow, I’d walk, I’d roller-skate. But I’ll come back.”

  She was born to herself. She had become beautiful and a woman and the Queen of Sheba and Merciful Mary and Holy Aphrodite. The dancing remained good and the sex improved. The last of her pimples vanished. She felt herself walking differently, moving with the joy she had always felt in her secret dancing.

  Phil worked evenings tending bar, but they had the days together. Every day during the week when she was supposed to be looking for work, she got up early and went into Manhattan with the paper. She went directly to his apartment and let herself in and climbed into bed with Phil, who would wake up gradually and hug her and cuddle and make up nonsense. Donald, whose apartment Phil was staying in, was at work by the time she came and did not know she had a key. By the time he came home from work she was gone. Phil’s bed was a studio couch in the living room but sometimes they used Donald’s big bed. He never seemed to notice. In the mornings they made love and talked and told stories.

  In the afternoons they went out to play in the city. Never again would she love New York as she did that summer, never would it seem so like a stage setting painted in with bold luminous strokes, such a fair that burned all day and all night with booths of all conceivable games and pleasures. Never before had she lied to her family, though she had always been secretive out of a fear of being mocked, especially by Lionel. But she understood she must protect her relationship with Phil from their scrutiny. Some days she announced she was going to the library to study. In August a friend who made films came through and Phil went off to spend a week with him and someone named Jackson out on the Island. He wanted her to come but instead she got a temporary typing job, to prove to her parents she was looking.

  Going to him on the subway, she felt lucid in her joy. He was the right man at the right time. In September she would return to school and probably when she came back to New York he would be gone or he would have another woman. She sensed a lightness in him: he might as easily drift off as stay. He had started school, then he had been drafted and sent to Vietnam. Now he was studying again at N.Y.U. She tried to be quite matter-of-fact about the likelihood of losing him when she left.

  They touched on so many changes in each other. She grew with him. He must be shielded from her mother, who would ask immediately what were his prospects. She would wail he was not Jewish, she would point out how unfit he was to be her husband. They would not understand that she did not want a good gray husband with a pay check. She wanted Phil, who made her open wide to sights and sounds and tastes and the feel of things, who made her sensual and beautiful, who made her mind spin and made her laugh and made her adventurous and daring, as before only in fantasy. It was the right time and the right man. Summer was all too short, like fireworks.

  “You have no idea how to dress, pigeon. You’re a slob. You dress like a Brooklyn high school social studies teacher, just like your mother, right? Your idea of getting dressed up is to attach a few rhinestones and put on uncomfortable shoes. Princess, only a poet could have perceived the woman through your Flatbush army uniform. You look so much better when you take your clothes off, it’s ridiculous. However, until the fuzz develop a more enlightened attitude toward beauty naked, we’ll have to put clothes over you in public.”

  It was drizzling and drab, a head cold of the air, but they did not mind. Donald had started out for work before the sky clouded over and left his fancy English umbrella that opened by touching a button in the leather handle. “Instant erection,” Phil said. “Machine over man.” He had also left his English raincoat, which would not fit Phil but looked elegant draped over his shoulder or held over his arm carelessly, with the label showing. Phil took her to a boutique, instructing her en route on general strategy and communications.

  He found the right dress at once and had her try it on for him. Attended by a saleswoman, he slumped in a chair. “Well, the style is pleasant but the color is dreadful on you.”

  The saleswoman tried to assure him that Miriam looked devastating in that dull dark yellow.

  “If you care for red Indians,” he said, fixing her with a stare.

  Miriam tried on five more dresses. She liked all of them, but she could tell from his eyes that he did not. However, he selected one to try again and to pretend he was deeply considering. In the meantime that yellow dress had been returned to the rack and removed from the rack to his side, under the raincoat. He got up abruptly. “Get dressed, Cecily. That blue number is the only possibility. How late are you open? … We’ll likely be back.”

  “Do you want me to put it aside for you?”

  “Yes, why don’t you do that?”

  The yellow dress was almost backless and made her tan glow. She walked back and forth in the apartment in it. She could not wear a brassiere with it because it would have shown, but somehow it worked anyhow. “I can’t take it home, you know.”

  “ ‘You know’ is what I say. Do not pick up my mannerisms. It cloys.”

  “Phil, your mannerisms are sticky. Besides, I’m sure you picked up some of them yourself. Don’t be such a thorny prick.”

  He laughed. “I can’t push you around. Why not? Why don’t you quail at my frown?”

  “I’m too heavy to push around. You can’t lift me either.”

  “You’re so sure of me, sometimes I want to kick the shit out of you.”

  “Listen to me. I can’t take this dress home.”

  “Indeed, I’m sure modeling it for your parents would be a waste of your time. So park it here. Other wonders of the Western world will join it.”

  He taught her to wear funky colors and bold colors and cloth with an interesting texture. He taught her to look first at how the cloth lay against her body: how it lay when she stood, when she sat, when she moved. Walking wrapped in his long arm she would catch a glimpse of herself in a store window and be startled. She could have been any age. She looked as she probably would for years, matured and wearing her full body like a flag.

  Through Labor Day weekend and early September, a veining of sadness tinted the days. Sonia was putting pressure on her to spend more time at home. She could no longer pretend to be job hunting. Allegra was back in high school and Lionel was teaching full time, but Sonia was home and wanted her there. Sonia was not teaching this year. She was into her psychosomatic illnesses again. She kretchzed all day long of fatigue and stomach aches. Kept home by guilt, by pressure, Miriam quarreled with her. Why should Sonia want her around when all they did was fight?

  “Let me cut your hair,” Sonia would croon in that husky voice that wanted to wheedle her back to a pliable child again. “At least put it up! But you should want to go with us to Winkleman’s, he’s a nice boy. What’s wrong, you’re too stuck up to meet a nice boy? Running out of the house, running down the street like a wild wind, you’re just trying to get away from me!”

  Sonia was lonely and Miriam knew it. But it was tricky too. The husky croon urged her to remember how they had conspired in her early ch
ildhood, how Sonia had confided in her, how together they had managed and cared for their family. But Miriam felt that ever since Sonia had handed her her first sanitary napkin with a horrendous list of things she must not do (leave it in the bathroom, get blood on her clothes, flush it down the toilet lest she block the plumbing) they had been at war.

  Sonia was overweight, always overweight and ashamed. Lionel was not fat. He told her she had no self-discipline. He was always pointing out women her age who were gorgeous: even while they watched television he would point out actresses and he would tell Sonia this one was forty-six and that one was fifty-two and that one was twice a grandmother.

  Miriam felt as if Sonia were secretly angry at her for losing weight. She felt as if her mother were engaged in a campaign to overfeed her, leaving cakes and candy bars out and tempting her to nosh between meals on just a bite of this or that. “You eat all that chozzerai at school, and at home nothing’s good enough. You’ll get sick, mark my words, you’ll come down with mononucleosis like your cousin Michael.”

  Miriam resented being kept home, she resented feeling guilty when she escaped. She did not want to give up a moment of the precious time running through her fingers, time to be spent with Phil in bed tangling their bodies, through the parks and museums and over the bridges, to be flaunted through all their games and codes and confidences. It was a sweet honeydew melon to be eaten down to the rind. The second week she had got herself a diaphragm she kept at his apartment when she was not carrying it in herself or hiding it in a rolled sock, and she felt safe and glad in her body.

  In September Donald the Duck stopped going out to Fire Island every weekend, and they could no longer have the apartment to themselves all the time. She finally met him. He was stout and he waddled and he was meticulous in all of his habits, setting her teeth on edge. Yet a sequence of elegant bony model types came through the apartment to dine with him on gourmet meals he rustled up, as he put it, and to share his bed. On weekends Phil and Miriam had the studio couch and no privacy, but still they made long slow love and told stories and carried on, negating Donald and his elegant partners.

  Yet the time ran out. Instead of returning to school early as usual, she made her departure the last day before registration began. The afternoon before her plane she went into Manhattan, saying she absolutely had to do some last-minute shopping and would be back in a couple of hours, and no, Sonia could not come along because she complained too much about her feet and was slow in the stores.

  The afternoon hurt. It seemed covered with fine sticky hairs that secreted a substance sweet and poisonous. Twice they almost quarreled. He had done up her clothing in a neat parcel and rather formally he presented her with four poems he said he had written about her. They did not leave the apartment. It was a Tuesday and Donald the Duck was at work at the credit card corporation where he was a minor executive. They lay naked on the open couch and held each other, but all her best and most intricate efforts could not produce an erection in Phil.

  “You don’t want me to go away?”

  “No, I don’t want you to go away. I want you to throw over everything for me. I want you to quit school and come live in my closet and we’ll subsist on old rubber bands. I want you to want to, and if you wanted to, I’d be terrified, I’d run like hell.”

  “But I do want to. I love you, I love the person I am with you. But how can I explain to my parents about the winter? How will I support you in your old age if I don’t get my degree?”

  “Fly away, pigeon, fly away home. Your house is on fire, your books will all burn.”

  “What do you want, Philip?”

  “I want to be miserable at the top of my lungs. I want to scream and yell and break things. I want to fuck you, and I can’t even do that.”

  “But you have so many times and you will again. I’ll come and find you next summer.”

  “Are you going to keep yourself pure for me?”

  Sideways she looked at him. “Is that a trick question?”

  “As many tricks as you can learn. I’m sending you out to try what you’ve studied with me, pigeon. Unless I’m mistaken—and as you know, I am never, never mistaken—back at the school you’ll find it a different scene this year. You will try out what you’ve practiced and write me about your adventures. I want a letter every two weeks, each more outrageous than the last.”

  “Will you write me too? Please?”

  “I’ll send you poems, which is better, and I’ll tell you lies, which is worse. I’ll write, Miriam, hastily, badly, wildly, nastily, and unsteadily. Now get the hell out of here. And don’t look back!”

  7

  Is Sex More Fun Than Pinochle?

  Miriam wrote Phil every two weeks—the compromise between her craving to communicate with him, her massive class schedule, and her fear of seeming too dependent by flooding him with letters. She worked on the letters as carefully as on her problems for class, deleting the many paragraphs of longing and trying craftily to get reassurances from him that nobody else had quite replaced her, striving hard for a tone that would make her interesting. At the same time, she wanted to tell him everything about her life and extract his opinion on how she was conducting herself.

  DEAREST PHILIP,

  If you had not given me explicit orders, I would not bother with extracurricular activities here. I miss you. There is no one like you. It is all second rate and drab. But I am doing my best to carry out instructions. I’d still rather be with you in darkest Flatbush than with anybody else in Paris. It would be more interesting.

  I am living in Martha Cooke, which is better than my old dorm. It’s for women with high grade point averages and active on campus: elitism pure and simple. Still the accommodations are pleasant, the rules not so tight, and it’s right on campus.

  I have discovered something alarming. Being attractive is a con game. Men are so brainwashed in this society, they want to buy any product that comes well recommended. If you convey by how you act that you expect a man to find you irresistible and devastating, nine times out of ten he acts that way too! It’s ridiculous. When I think of the men who looked right through me last year—those same idiots are falling over themselves. It makes me want to belt them in the jaw, frankly. You could see me as I was, and the only difference is that now I’m a good con artist.

  Still I enjoy it sometimes. If I could get rid of the sense of conjuring trick, I would enjoy it more. All the time I was growing up I wished every day to be suddenly pretty like my sister Allegra. I think you were always handsome. You were born grinning. But I was lumpy and dreadful, and I was made to feel twice as lumpy. Now you’re my good fairy godmother—now don’t get angry. Neither the adjective nor the noun is appropriate! But the magic is.

  It’s other people make one beautiful or ugly. So if you know how to manipulate their reactions, if you do a good selling job, they decide you’re beautiful. Women are so dreadfully unhappy when they’re losing, which is 90% of women 90% of the time. My mother always felt that she isn’t attractive enough for my father, I think. That’s easier for me to see now. He’s good-looking in his way, I guess, though he doesn’t turn me on, I mean incest taboos aside. He’s too self-pitying and he takes advantage of her. When I was younger I always took his side because I wanted so badly for him to love me.

  I think my mother believes the only reason he’s stayed is because she supported us all—I guess it was only four or five years but it looms large. Because she felt she had to be this terrific housekeeper besides and glamorous too, and she hadn’t the foggiest notion how. He’s had affairs, I guess everybody in the family knows. When he was giving guitar lessons, he got involved with a girl and another time my mother was crying her eyes out because she found a letter from a woman singer he met at the Philadelphia folk festival.

  My mother has always felt inferior and while I was growing up she put that on me. I had to be twice as good at everything, nothing was ever good enough, but at the same time she assumed in her bones that I
would be inadequate. They put that on me till you came and cut the webs away.

  Well, this is tedious, isn’t it? I just keep thinking now about things I never saw so clearly. To the attack again. I went out for a while with a guy I had a crush on all last year from a math class. He has beautiful long lashes and the look of a wasted Renaissance prince. Alas, he turns out to be a virgin and impotent, or a virgin because impotent. I think about once a month some woman gets him almost to it and fails. I tried, dear Philip, I tried. I have put him back where I found him. It occurred to me that perhaps in his ascetic condition he has a vitamin deficiency or is actually undernourished. He appears lacking in energy. A good Jewish mama would fix him in no time.

  While playing my rotten game of tennis with a girl from my house, I picked up my second. He appeared a bit weak in gray matter but equipped with muscles and energy and willingness. Indeed the first time we were alone he jumped me. It was rather like being made love to by a cement mixer. I went through the proper demurrals he seemed to expect and allowed myself to be mauled and carried off—figuratively speaking, as the whole scene took place on a couch. Alas, again: he did not lack enthusiasm but staying power. A four-stroke man. For two weeks I tried to get him past that point. He doesn’t seem to grasp the the idea that intercourse consists of more than putting it in and coming. By the end of my fourteen days of patience I was becoming an irritable bitch. Lack of orgasm makes one nasty, I think, and his conversation lacked content and variety. So I dumped him.

  A great willingness and some idea of how to connect with men doesn’t seem to give one a satisfactory sex life. Let alone establishing Relationships. The Renaissance Prince was totally non-verbal except when discussing Abelian groups and the Four-Stroke Man was great on basketball and television and how he kept in shape with Tiger’s Milk.