Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  “Moby Dick. Now I understand that name!”

  But the days of wandering and games playing were few. She needed him, she needed him dreadfully. Afternoons they stayed home, smoking hash in his water pipe and lying naked on the bed and painting on the walls. Often he read to her his own and other poems and they lay forehead to forehead dreaming and touching and talking. She began to understand that he had feared losing her when she began to have sex with other men. For all his boasting, often he could not make it. He had feared she would discover that not all men required to be coaxed to erection and that she would not return to him; or worse, she would return with scorn, with pity, with secret contempt.

  She feared she would never make him understand that she did not mind the extra effort. She came easily with him. She was relaxed and totally there with him, and she had the confidence that if one thing failed he would try something else, he would not withdraw from her. With other men sex was sometimes satisfactory and more vigorous, but only with him was it magical. Only his body held in her arms seemed beautiful and precious and intricate and wiry and frail. He was the Player King. He was a wan knight-errant come at once for succor and battle. He was wounded and subtle and he floated in her body as in a river and brought up treasure. Sex was a speaking, and no matter how much more endowed her section leader had been, sex with him had been dumb by comparison. Sex was only a part of the touching with Philip, an intensification of touching with the fingers and tongue and memory and intelligence.

  “Sometimes I have a secret myth, Philip. I imagine that we’re really brother and sister.”

  “I don’t know how in that lovely family of yours you would have developed a taste for incest.”

  “Philip! Don’t you know what I mean?”

  His face was shadowed, half turned from her. “I understand better than you do. Now shut up.”

  Sores in him she stubbed on, hurting both of them. She felt as if she were growing out of him in a union more comradely than lovers and closer, if less violent. Only alone with him could the grief within her cut loose. She could not comprehend her pain. Guilt and pity and grief and loss. She felt lacerated, crying to exhaustion. She came and went from the hospital. Sonia had good days when she was lucid and demanding, bad days when the sedation blurred her mind and she cried and talked randomly. Days of greater pain and lesser pain. But from week to week she was visibly decaying. Sonia was dying. Her mother was slowly dying.

  Nobody in the family would acknowledge what was happening. She hated her father and her brother and her sister and she felt impacted with them in mutual guilt. Not one of them had listened when Sonia talked of her pain. She had satirized her mother’s complaints. Dr. Steinbaum said, “I don’t understand how Mrs. Berg could have waited so long before she came in. The pain had to have been considerable for months. It’s impossible to understand what makes these women wait so long when they know something serious is wrong.”

  But Miriam understood. None of them had listened. All of them told Sonia she was a drag, always complaining. They tuned out, till she could not believe in the legitimacy of her feelings. Who was she to have serious pain? Who was she to feel anything real? Only Sonia, who never did feel quite right. She must have been afraid. She must have thought of cancer and her father dying. She must have brooded, but she could not speak because no one wanted to listen.

  Now Sonia was gradually and miserably dying from operation to operation in the hospital room she shared with two others. The women in those beds came and went, came in for an operation and walked out, came in for an operation and went behind the screens and were wheeled out, but Sonia remained. The room was hot in the long summer days. Sonia lay slightly yellow and with her flesh loosened from her bones against the mound of pillows, with the flowers changed once a week beside her and a red geranium plant and a couple of best sellers that never changed and her rented TV at the foot of the bed. She would leave the room only for another operation. Yet her father continued heartily saying, “When your mother comes home, we’ll have to do something about that couch in the living room.”

  Nobody made Miriam work that summer, but she was getting on so badly with Lionel she would not ask for money and he did not offer her any. Phil got her a job posing for an informal class doing figure drawing. Posing paid better than typing and was not quite as boring. Phil was penny-pinching because he had been accepted into graduate school at Boston University in the fall. A former teacher of his had moved there with a full professorship and had got Phil in. Phil wavered about going. Sometimes he said, “Aw, I’ve got to be able to gouge a living from those academic factories. I figure I should knock down a degree in three years. I’ll treat it like any other job. Anybody that can tend bar on Saturday night can handle a department of English. My only problem will be hiding my contempt for those soft damp bastards.” Other times he said he was being co-opted. That spring he had got friendly with Joe Rosario, a bright economist just getting his Ph.D. at N.Y.U., who had grown up in East Harlem, and they argued about revolution and went to the anti-war demonstrations that Joe helped organize. Joe made a fuss about Phil being a Vietnam veteran who was against the war, but that embarrassed Phil. After all, he said, he’d gone. Phil’s politics confused her: they seemed all emotion and reaction.

  She wondered where her father thought she got the money to exist that summer: did he think she printed it on a press in her closet or begged it on the subway? She felt hostile to him. In childhood he had been her adored parent. She was always trying to please him and failing: her good was never good enough. He was obviously superior to the fathers of her friends: had suffered more, had more friends, was better-looking and had a wonderful voice and talent. Even as a high school teacher he seemed special, popular with students, always arranging something exciting for assemblies, with friends among the younger and less hidebound faculty.

  She kept wanting him to ask her where she was getting the money to spend on subway fare and clothing and books. But he had the habit of not permitting practical matters to intrude. It was convenient for him to forget to give her money. It was a fierce struggle carried out entirely on one side. He was oblivious and she could not make him ask the questions to which she could deliver the crushing replies. She realized for the hundredth time, although with diminished pain, that she did not loom large in Lionel’s view of the world.

  He expected her to take over the housewife role Sonia had always played, even when she used to work. When Miriam was little she had naturally filled in with Mark and Allegra, keeping an eye on them, wiping their noses, changing their diapers, giving them milk and cookies after school till Sonia could get home. But the idea of taking over Sonia’s place now made her sick. She mutely refused. She refused to see the lint on the rug and the laundry overflowing the hamper.

  Mark had worked the summer before at a camp up in New Hampshire. He had liked being a camp counselor and obviously he did not like spending the summer in Brooklyn. His room always smelled of grass, but nobody else in the family seemed to notice. As far as she could figure out, he spent his time looking at nudie magazines and masturbating with the radio turned to the Top Forty. He got out the stamp collection he had used to cherish in the eighth through tenth grades and pored over it for a couple of weeks, tearing stamps off the occasional letters that arrived. Then one day he took the two books into Manhattan and did not bring them back.

  “Did you get enough for a nickel bag?” she asked him politely when he came home.

  He did a suspicious double-take. “Don’t try to sound smart.”

  She shrugged and turned away.

  “Hey, Fatty-Pan, when are you going to iron my shirts? Off your tuchis and get with it.”

  Fatty-Pan was an old affectionate family name for her, and it struck her that she had never found it particularly affectionate. “Mark, if you found it beneath your notice, I might point out I am no fatter than you are.”

  “So when are you going to iron my shirts?”

  “When are you going
to iron my shirts? I don’t like to iron. Why don’t you take your shirts to your friendly neighborhood laundry and get them done? Or why not learn to iron yourself?”

  “You can kiss my ass, Fatty. You know you’re supposed to be doing the ironing in this house. You think you can sit around taking it easy just because she’s in the hospital.”

  “I haven’t noticed you doing much. I haven’t seen that you’re too busy to trot down to Flatbush and Nostrand to the laundry. I don’t see why I should make your bed and wash your clothes or iron your shirts. I am not your maid. What am I asking you to do for me?”

  “Not to tell the old man how late you get in at night.”

  “Kiss off, Mark. You’ll tell him the same day I tell him what makes your room smell so good. It’s not incense, baby brother mine. And no use looking in my room, because it’s clean.” Must she quarrel with everyone in her family? She felt alienated from them, sick of the family roles, stuck together in mutual guilt. “Mark, I don’t want to jump on you. Smoke what you please. It’s a terrible summer and I know you’re bored.”

  “I suppose you’re having fun?”

  “No. I hate it. I hate being in the house.”

  “Is that why you go running into town all the time?”

  “What I do in town is my business, just like what you do in your room. Don’t hock me, Mark. I don’t want to play mother. I don’t want to take care of you and Allegra and him.” She put her hand tentatively on his arm.

  He shook it off, glaring as if she had done something disgusting. “You’re going to shape up. Don’t try to blackmail me with Dad. Because you won’t win. I will. Mother’s mad at you too.”

  Lionel was a sociable man and he continued to be invited out to dinner and to attend concerts and sit in on folk sessions. He was out in the evenings more often than he was home. He would never have considered checking up on whether Miriam was in her room when he got home, since he generally had no idea she had gone out. The first time Miriam spent a night with Phil, when the alarm went off and she got up in the pale yellow dawn to take the subway home, she was sure she would have a scene with a shocked Allegra.

  Indeed Allegra did wake up when she came in and watched her undress and climb into bed, but she said nothing. She did not speak about it until the next afternoon when they were making supper. Surprisingly Allegra with all her identification with the feminine hated to cook. “When I get married, I’ll have a cook or we’ll eat out. How can you knock yourself out cooking every night the way Mama did and not get fat? Oh, I suppose if I really have to, I’ll learn. That’s what cookbooks are for. But nobody is going to marry me because I’m a whiz with a mixing bowl, no matter what Mama thinks. That’s not where it’s at.”

  “Where is it at?” It seemed to Miriam that she had never before been able to look at her sister, because of jealousy. She was beginning to like her. It was a strange and fragile pleasure. Allegra was shorter and built more delicately. Her eyes were almost the same but not set above the high and strong Tartar cheekbones. Allegra’s face was oval and her hair was lighter and more toned with red, though that was partly the rinse she used.

  “It’s a matter of being desirable to a man—but never letting him feel too sure of you. That was Mama’s problem—don’t you see? She never felt sure of him but he always felt sure of her. So he didn’t have to bother trying hard to please her, and she was always shaking for fear she wasn’t doing right by him. Yet she was a very attractive woman.”

  “Mama?”

  “Come in the living room a minute. I want to show you something.” Allegra dried her hands on her shocking-pink apron and led Miriam to sit down on the couch (still threadbare with exposed foam leaking crumbs), where Allegra spread out over their laps the contents of a box of old family pictures. Rachel and husband and friends lined up in the Catskills when it was a roughing-it, kibbutznik circuit. Lionel in a private’s uniform too big on him standing very straight on West End Avenue, looking determined and scared. Herself gasping like a fish in the Coney Island sun, holding one sister and one brother by brute force for the camera. What Allegra passed her was a brown-toned photo of Sonia in her college graduation robes—Brooklyn College, Class of 1940—so young and bright and happy that Miriam could not meet the paper gaze.

  “You’re right. I can’t look at it.”

  “Why? Everybody gets old. I know someday I’ll get old and lose my looks. Every woman has to face that.”

  “But not every man?”

  “Our looks wear out sooner. Consider Dad. Besides, she didn’t take care of herself. She hasn’t been to have her hair done or a facial in all the time we were growing up.”

  “What mishegoss, Allegra. Do you really like those Bergs we never see out in New Rochelle, those ladies with the pink and blue hair and the corsets and the ironed faces?” She made herself look at the picture. The difference was in the hopefulness in that face. A curly eager girl with great earnestness and hope and energy looked back. The nose, the eyes, the chin were Sonia, but the message was different. She remembered her mother answering a question once. “Social studies, I thought, what could be more important? To teach kids the truth about history and government. But you get in the classroom and with the Regents and the paperwork and the principal and the hoodlums, you’re lucky you don’t get trampled to death.” A young idealistic woman who had thought she found in marrying a young idealistic man who was going to make people’s music a mission higher than the teaching which had begun to disappoint her. “She must have believed in him with a passion. Then slowly and painfully she must have let go of that. Maybe that’s why she was so frantic for us. We weren’t allowed to let her down too. Something had to come out.”

  “Don’t talk about her in the past tense.”

  “She’s dying, Allegra. For once admit it.”

  Allegra put her hands over her ears. “Don’t say that to me! You can be so ugly when you want to!” She marched back into the kitchen. Miriam put the box away on a shelf in the Danish-type room divider that housed books and hi-fi and television and miniature bar and knickknacks and plodded back to Allegra, who was peeling carrots with the languid fastidiousness she always affected with housework. Miriam considered it affected because it meant she ended up doing more than half of the work.

  After a while Allegra said, “You got a boy friend, mm?”

  “Is that an official family question?”

  “I should care? I only think you weren’t studying at the library till four this morning. All that studying you’re supposed to do, I’m beginning to wonder.”

  “If I tell you, who are you going to tell?”

  “Why should I? Maybe I’ll want to stay out sometime. But you better make up some cover story, like a girl friend you stay with, and you better let me know where you are in case something happens at night.”

  “How is that different from what I said about Mother, Allegra? Okay, say I’m staying with a girl friend. When you call, let the phone ring once, hang up, and dial again. So I’ll answer instead of Phil.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A friend. My best friend.”

  “Oh, sure, you’re staying out till four in the morning with a friend! You must think I’m super-backward.”

  “What I’m doing is obvious. But he’s still my friend. I like best to do that with friends.”

  “Has he asked you to marry him?”

  Miriam grinned. “If you knew him, you’d think that was funny. Marrying Phil—it would be like marrying the Fool in the Tarot pack. Have you seen that?”

  “Those cards people tell fortunes with. Thelma in my sorority did a reading for me just before I met Roger. But I’m not going to marry him. He’s only a summer romance. Is that what Phil is? Maybe he won’t ask you because you gave in too quickly.”

  “I guess he’d marry me if I had a good reason. It would be pointless. He’d never be a husband. He’d still be my friend.”

  “You mean like he hasn’t got a career?”

  �
��Well … no.”

  “Oh. Well, I wouldn’t marry Roger either. Mother thinks he’s wonderful, but I don’t want to be a dentist’s wife in Brooklyn. He’s going into practice with his father. If he’d consider moving out to California, for instance, I’d take him more seriously. But I don’t want to live and die in Brooklyn!”

  “Allegra, do you ever have sex with any of your boy friends?” Funny stiff question in a stiff household.

  “What do you mean? Like going to bed? In-the-bed sex?”

  “Fucking.”

  “You love ugly words don’t you?” Allegra made a face. “Do you think I’d do it with Roger? What a waste! He hasn’t even made me pet with him yet. Once I almost did it with Stan—it was very, very close. I almost got carried away.”

  “Stan? Which one was he?”

  “You don’t notice anybody, do you? Imagine not remembering a dynamite guy like Stan! I went out with him all last summer. He was president of the Sportsmanship Council and the veep of our senior class. I’m glad I didn’t get carried away, because we broke up. What does Phil look like? Show me his picture.”

  “I don’t have a picture of him.”

  “Why not? You can get one taken. Even in the subway, they have those booths.”

  “If you’re curious, maybe you can meet him sometime. He’s my height and fair and he has blue eyes—”

  “Is he Jewish?”

  Miriam shook her head. “Irish.”

  “Catholic!”

  “Well, he was raised Catholic. He’s violently anti.”

  “Oh, Miriam, you’ve done it! No wonder you can’t marry him. I mean even if he asked you. Mother would have a heart attack! He isn’t married already, is he? That would be the limit.”

  “No, not married or engaged. And he loves me. And he’s beautiful.”

  “Men aren’t beautiful. Unless they’re queer.”

  “Oh yes they are. I often find men beautiful. And oftenest of all I find Phil beautiful.”

  “Do you love him?” Miriam nodded.