Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  She was annoyed at him for wanting to trip: she had been looking forward to being with him after a weekend when she had not got away from her family. Acid was something else than being together, really together. She had little time left. Why was he bitterly impatient to be off to Boston? Her family was screaming about him night and day. When she managed to come to him, she could not stay long. Sonia was drugged all of the time, incoherent and sometimes unconscious. The third operation had accomplished nothing. The cancer had reached too many organs. Sonia was getting cobalt treatments with side effects as bad as the disease. She was losing her hair and control over her body.

  Miriam wanted to be held and comforted and listened to. She wanted a concentrated message of mutual strength and reaffirmation that she was who she thought she was and Phil was her friend and her love. But he wanted to run back into his psyche and escape the anxiety of plans falling like plaster from the damp ceiling.

  She did not drop the acid with him but sat sullenly on the mattress cross-legged drinking cream soda and eating macaroni salad from a deli and an orange section by section, sorry for herself for all she wanted from him that she wasn’t getting.

  “Jackson would describe your state as excessive attraction to particular forms.” Phil spoke coldly. He was disappointed in her too and waiting for the first rush of the acid to take him.

  “That particular form is my mother. I seem to recall that your own had considerable power to upset you.”

  “I would not deny that I am excessively attached to particular forms. That extravagant attention, for example, I pay to your skin. Fetishism.”

  “Since I live in that skin, you don’t expect me to agree? Excessive as measured against what? The lady in 4B?”

  “That’s no lady, that’s my tenant. Even positing that the physiological pressure produces a natural urge to put a prick in something, why the frenzy about where? The saint would put it in anywheres, a tree, a chicken, an old woman—”

  “Pardon my Jewish ignorance, but I’d expect a saint wouldn’t put it in anywheres at all.”

  “I mean a saint with balls. He’d give his sperm to the universe.”

  “And expect it to thank him? Deposit twenty spermatozoa for the next three minutes, pul-lease.”

  “Tell you a story. It’s beginning. Coming on. Story I read in Jackson’s book. About this Buddhist monk. To wean himself from excessive attachment to the things of this world, he contemplated day by day the rotting, the putrefaction of a corpse of a beautiful woman he’d been attracted to. Saw her go from beauty into shit.”

  “All he found out was that she was a body too—just like him! Did he think he’d smell better? All things smell when they die, especially male philosophies about women! I won’t represent the world. Or physical being. Or procreation. Or spring. I’m a person just as much as you are!”

  “You don’t see. I’ll show you.” He crawled over to root in a box of books. Slowly he turned pages, muttering and frowning. “Why do these books smell like basements? Books rotting too. It’s not here. Never step in the same river twice, never pick up the same book. I know it was in this book, Buddhist Texts. But it’s gone.… Been taken away. Impermanence is all, see?”

  “You made it up, just to hit me over the head. Don’t you see what you’re doing with it? Saying you’re a spirit living in your body, but I’m an animal because I am a body.”

  The book dropped. He was staring at the wall. “Dozens of them baking in the sun. Bellies split open. Guts cooking. Saw dogs eating a kid once.… And his arm came right off on my lap.… And the nurses, V.C. nurses the Marines had worked over. Just pieces of them left.… Just bloody pieces …” He crept toward her. Stopped, shook his head, looking from side to side. As if swimming through thick water, came on toward her to put his hand at last on her thigh. “Frozen. Cold. White. Take off your clothes. Why are you sitting with clothes on? I want to come in. Keep warm. Hurry! Why does it take so long? Why are you doing this to me? Don’t you want me to be safe? Hurry!”

  When she was undressed he sprawled against her, his cheek to her belly, his eye to her navel. “Trying to see in. I remember a story about a man who got shot in the belly and the doctors put in a glass window.… Wouldn’t that be weird?”

  “Better a door in your head so I could watch your brain change colors.”

  “What color is it now? Look and see.”

  “Silver. A kind of silver gray like a sea gull’s wings.”

  “They’re dirty. They’re always over Boston. In the winter you look at the Charles, it’s all frozen, and there they are sitting on the ice all facing in one direction as if they were listening to a speech. They face right into the wind, all of them sitting in rows on the ice. Hold me. Hold me!”

  She held. For long periods it was as if she were alone. He withdrew into his head. He would begin staring at wrinkles in the sheet or fine hairs on her leg and get lost. He would mumble. She would lose contact. Was Allegra right in saying that she made quarrels happen? Early in the summer she had wanted confrontation with her father. But that wish to meet head on had guttered out. What was the use? She had no more stomach for bad words. She wished she had gone the quiet way of the summer before.

  But lying was sour in the long run, even lying by omission. Yet telling the truth was a bucket of worms. Give in or lie: those seemed the only options. She could not decide which horn was less painful to hang on. Lying was immediately more comfortable but in the long run less tolerable: or was it? She tossed and turned in her life and seemed not to fit any longer.

  Was it right to choose a graduate school by proximity to Phil? Wasn’t that weakness? To attach too much importance to the relationship could crush it. Perhaps that was what Phil’s ascetic ramblings meant. Was she really applying to M.I.T. because of Phil? Or was that the logical choice? Her hand came and went in his fine blond hair. His lips were parted. He stared at the wall, panting. She did not know where he was. Not with her.

  Churnings in her, flotsam and jetsam, anguish and guilt. Maybe she really was hurting her mother. Maybe Sonia really did lie in pain over her. For the first two years at Michigan, she had put the strongest part of herself into her classes. This last year she had begun to direct some energy into relationships. But as she proceeded into polar realms of abstraction and cerebral landscapes of more awesome complication, the demands were greater. If she were really to go on in mathematics, she must commit the bulk of her energies to it. But she was no longer sure that was what she wanted. She had awakened in her senses. She was curious about the persons behind the faces she encountered.

  But if she did not march on to graduate school, what would she do? A B.A. in math was worth nothing. She did not want to teach high school like her parents. She wanted something interesting to do with her head, but perhaps no longer to pledge her life to those grand Platonic forms. She felt stymied, a hand resting idly on Philip’s thin, well-turned shoulder. He had a good chin, firm and slightly squared, precise and almost delicate. Probably his mother’s had been like that: easy to break.

  “S’a kind of contempt, think of it. Forgetting a promise. Shows he didn’t take it seriously. I hate people who make promises and don’t take it seriously. He didn’t believe I’d get my shit together. Didn’t believe ’cause he thinks I’m a loser.”

  He sat up, frowning. His hands pounded at each other, turning and knocking fist on palm. His hands fought. She felt in herself a muscled hostility to the invisible Jackson. Damned ascetic blowhard. Older than Phil. She imagined him sour and self-righteous. Sitting on a bed of nails scowling. If it were not for Phil’s dilemma, she would wish Jackson in Mexico forever.

  “He’s jealous of me. I won’t let him meet you. I do that to bug him, because he gets curious. Intellectual curiosity is his cutting edge. He’s kind of possessive of me.… I want you to relate through me. Through my body. Through my mind. Through my eyes. But he’s jealous too because I have a thing with a woman like he thinks he wants. He was married to the sort of g
irl he was supposed to marry. WASP from Homewood, Illinois. He met her at Northwestern, they got married and had a kid. No kids! You hear me? No reproducing. I don’t want any more of me. That’s all, you hear me?” He tried to push his hand up into her.

  “You’re hurting me! Be careful.”

  “You be careful too. No babies.”

  “I want a baby inside me even less than you do. Can’t you get that straight?”

  “You be straight with me. I put it in you. How can I be sure you aren’t keeping some there? Making babies with it. The queen bee, you know about her? When the male bee fights it out with the other males for the great privilege, they go up and away. Then he puts it to her and, the poor bastard, it breaks right off inside her. He dies. She rips it right off him and flies away with it to make babies.”

  “You’re hurting me, Phil. Now quit it! I’m not a queen bee! I’m not a crocodile. I’m not a monk’s corpse. I’m me!” She twisted his wrist free of her and pulled away.

  “Don’t pull away from me, don’t ever pull away from me! Don’t thrust me away. Don’t close yourself to me.”

  “You were hurting me.”

  “I won’t. Hold me.” He dragged himself over. “Don’t pull away. Got to be inside.”

  “I don’t like to be hurt, Phil. Understand that. It doesn’t turn me on. It makes me close up tight.”

  “Healthy Miriam. Whereas we both know who’s the masochist in this room. You’re my soft padded luxury torture rack. My lioness with the velvet tongue who bites me to the bone.”

  Sighing, wincing, she put her arms around him. “I’m a big girl from Flatbush who loves you and likes to fuck. I’m not Queen Bee, and I’m not the Great Devouring Mother. I’m not something you read about in Jung’s Symbols of Transformation!”

  “Changed and unchanging. I wear myself out on your marble belly. I turn into sperm. I cream away. You are unmoved.”

  She began to giggle. “Idiot, child, nincompoop! Dear Philip, have I ever complained? You have standards of virility in your head that have nothing to do with me.”

  “It all begins here. The whole thing.” He had his cheek on her belly again, his eye at her navel. “Here it begins.”

  Life? He was mumbling and staring, his fingers flexing. “All begins here.” He was flushed and excited. “Round and round. In circles. Break the magic circle. Follow me in. Follow me out. But can’t return. Where it begins and begins.” He kept mumbling about beginning and circles and magic stones. Sweating heavily he complained now and then of cramps in his gut. “When he got his, I told him I’d get him out. But it came off in my hand. I couldn’t get him back. It wouldn’t fit together! It wasn’t my fault!” Time leaked away. He was caught in a loop of his psyche and could not break out. He responded obliquely to whatever she said when he heard at all, so she could not comfort him. He seemed more frantically to beat to and fro in his loop, mumbling about beginnings and circles and somebody’s arm, something that wouldn’t fit back together.

  Lying beside her purse was the blue textbook for her fall course on complex variables, which had sweated on it the print of her palm. She had wept into it and sweated upon it but learned nothing. Some of the hypercompetitive men in her math classes were always talking about cracking the books. She got a picture from that phrase of the books as nuts that they split open, gobbled the meats and tossed aside, ravaged and empty. That seemed a predatory way to feel about books.

  Why did she call them hypercompetitive? They saw her the same way, from things they dropped from time to time in conversation, but she did not feel herself competing directly with them. She suddenly saw herself as if from a great distance, playing a game with grades. Women were not supposed to compete, she was not supposed to compete, she could never compete with Mark. So she saw herself rather as trying to do things as they should be done, learning ideally, proceeding upon a Platonic hierarchy of ideas and levels of abstraction. That is, trying to please Daddy again. She moaned aloud, disgusted.

  “What, what?” He was sweating heavily, tossing to and fro.

  She felt a rising panic coming off him. She began to be a little afraid. “Phil? What’s wrong? What is it?” He did not seem to hear. He clung and stared at her with a remote paranoid glare, muttering nonsense.

  “You want to push me out!” He sat up glaring. “While you stay inside waiting. Eating it all up. See how it looks like a hill but it’s really a cave. What is it that’s inside? What’s really waiting?”

  “There’s no it! There’s only me. Phil, don’t look at me that way. It’s Miriam, me, just me.”

  “Me.” He smiled in a crafty conspiratorial way and turned to the wall. “Me. Ha.”

  “Phil!” Now she was afraid. She took a deep breath. Then she knelt beside him and put her arms around his shoulders and began to stroke his back and chest. “Phil, Phil, it’s me. Relax.”

  Slowly, slowly he relaxed and after what felt like an hour he leaned against her, very slowly. Leaned against her his full weight until they were lying with him sprawled partly over her. “She pushed me away. Don’t do that. Let me stay.”

  “I’m holding you. It’s all right. Philip, don’t go so far off. I don’t know how to help you then.”

  “Not far. Right here. Hold me and I won’t disappear.” His face was seraphic and mild, his eyelids half shut. His hands drifted over her flanks and thighs gently, curiously. Gently he tossed her breast so it bounced back. “Ridiculous. All round in handfuls that bounce. If you squeezed my balls like that, they’d fall off and roll under the bed. If there was an under.” He began to laugh with his whole body loosely. “A bed with no under. Nothing but the cold bedrock. Full of cables and subways and sewers and F.B.I. men. Do you know that every telephone in Manhattan is bugged?”

  He did not want her to caress him. He said that was too much. He came into her and very slowly, pausing and stopping altogether for side trips and more mumbling and resting, he went on and on. She felt nervous. She was afraid he would shoot into a paranoid tangent again if she relaxed her wariness. She did not come for a long time. Finally she got too excited to control her responses and got launched and came. Still he went on until she began to feel supersensitive and then sore. Eventually one of the times he paused, he seemed to forget what he was doing altogether, and still never having come, slipped out of her, could not get back in, and lay beside her instead.

  About what must have been suppertime, although Phil would not eat and she felt too tense to do more than nibble, the phone rang. It rang once, then stopped. Next it begin to ring again. Miriam felt something cold slide in her, like a congealment of fear itself. She also thought as she ran flatfooted into the kitchen to the wall phone, how ridiculous for Allegra to use the code, now that everybody knew about Phil. Or perhaps Allegra was shy about speaking directly to him. “Hello?”

  “Is that … Miriam?”

  “Yes, Allegra, who did you expect? What’s up?”

  “We have to go to the hospital right away. She’s gone into some kind of coma.”

  “No!” Strange how distant the formica table top looked. She was standing with her naked right shoulder to the wall, feeling the sexual damp drying on her thighs, one ankle crossed over the other. Gripping the receiver between hunched shoulder and twisted neck with a quick stiff finger she drew in the crumbs from his breakfast that lay on the formica. Her finger kept drawing a zero or a circle. Where he said it all began. In mother. “Is this it?”

  “I guess so. How do I know! We have to go now. Can you get there right away, to the hospital?”

  “I’ll take a cab.”

  “If you can get one.”

  She felt cold. Something was coming to a sharp point, like a drill bit. “I’ll try. I can get there on the subway in an hour and a half. Anyhow, I’ll see you there.”

  “Hurry. I’ll tell Dad you’re on your way. We have to find Mark.”

  “I didn’t know he was lost.” The dry gasp of a mirthless laugh, like the beginning of someone vomiting
.

  “He’s playing baseball in the park. I think I know where. Wouldn’t it be like this? If my period hadn’t started I wouldn’t be home myself. I was supposed to go to Jones Beach with Roger, but I got cramps this morning.”

  When Miriam came to the bedroom door, she ran against a pane of electrified air. He was scowling that furious glare. His eyes were chips of broken glass. “Are they calling you here now?”

  “That was my sister.”

  “That’s what you say.” He nodded, smiling ironically.

  She knelt on the mattress, taking his chin in her palm. “Phil, that was my sister Allegra. My mother is in a coma.”

  He turned his face away. “You pulled away from me. Two can play. Two can be as cold as one.”

  She felt like screaming, Come off it, Phil, this is no time to play games! But she realized, staring into the chips of glass that were his eyes, that he was too far into his trip to understand. A queasy horror settled on her. She wanted to lie down. She wanted to turn to the wall and close her eyes. If only the phone had not worked. If only Allegra had lost the number.

  “Phil, listen to me. Sweetheart, listen. I didn’t go away because I wanted to. My sister called. My mother is very, very sick now. I have to go to the hospital where she is.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s dying.”

  “She’s been dying all summer. Let them all die. Do you think they care about us?”

  “Phil, she’s my mother. I have to go. She’s in a coma.”

  “Unconscious. But I’m conscious … That’s the sharpest pain … Time is static and I’m stuck … like a fly in honey.… Petrified. Time … is glass. If you leave me stuck here, I’ll be stuck forever, forever stuck, forever and ever and ever stuck.” He was breathing heavily, kneading the folds of his belly.

  “Are you in pain?”

  “Yes. Pain. Terrible cramps. Inside the tunnel in waves.”

  She could not tell if he was in physical pain or frightened into pain: but that was a meaningless distinction.