Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  10

  Just off the Freedom Trail (Phil)

  Phil came back to Boston with anxiety and mixed urges. Something snotty in Boston stuck in his craw, cozy and stratified and damp at the core: he hated to come back, he hated to be away too long. Cambridge was even worse: the imperial domes of M.I.T. fading into its industrial fringe, separated by careful demolition from the nearby slums where he’d spent his lousy childhood. But this time he returned on his own terms, with a meal ticket, a synecure, a niche.

  He even managed to visit his mother every two weeks with only minor friction. The older of his stepbrothers was married and living in Schenectady. The younger had dropped out of school and the old man had got him apprenticed in the union. He was still at home, but he’d grown his hair long and smoked dope and Phil liked him all right. The old man was having trouble with his heart and Phil tried to behave himself. His mother was looking older than she should and tired. Arthritis knotted her hands till she could hardly comb her hair. He thought of the years of her life spent cleaning other people’s floors and chattered about how well he was doing for himself.

  He and Jackson rented a floor-through on Pearl Street in Cambridgeport, a mixed-up area where nobody was in the majority. The old frame houses crowded the rambling brick sidewalks, but in spite of the tides of through traffic, the neighborhood felt green and pastoral, especially in the summer. Big maples and horse chestnuts. Kids sitting on steps playing guitars, children with their wagons and bikes, dogs in back yards. Fences every place. Every front yard the size of a tablecloth had a wire fence or a privet hedge around it. Jackson was driving a hack, Phil picked up a part-time bartending stint and they eased into life in Cambridge.

  People drifted through their apartment, crashed there, came and went in that ebb and flow Phil liked. Jackson was loosening too, took readily to the traffic. He was dropping his monkish withdrawal. Getting more into his old army role of father confessor, listening and nodding and mumbling in his chest and scratching his balls and looking wise.

  On and off girls lived with them. Of the women Phil brought home, a certain tithe would always fall for Jackson, hoping and hanging on and maybe sharing his mattress for a while. Jackson was bone and steel and brain: he couldn’t be caught. Once in a while they would get into a little momentary tug-of-war over a piece, but it never lasted. It was a game. With a regular kitchen, Jackson took up cooking and they started eating well. Jackson got involved in the local food co-op and guys from that came through talking and arguing and eating and turning on together. Always they had food to eat and dope to smoke and wine to ease the body and friends to rap with and things happening and warm bodies to take off to bed. After the tensions of New York and the manic din and weird funky anomie, it was all easy. He was doing okay hustling J. Singleton Proxmire, professor of English, and making it in his department. Two of his poems got accepted by the Hudson Review, where J. Singleton Proxmire had an in, and three by a little poetry mag called Barking Dog. He felt good. Things were coming on for them.

  They weren’t that far from East Cambridge, where he’d grown up in Roosevelt Towers. But he put off going by. He had some funny notion he had heard coming out of his mouth one time he was stoned with Jackson. He would go over there and he would meet himself, fifteen, mean, sore, halfway to a junkie. And zap, he would be transferred back to his undernourished asthmatic adolescence, simmering with hatred and self-hatred, back on the corner hanging out, shooting up in the hallways, getting laid among the garbage in the vacant lot behind the high rise, marked KEEP OUT, though it held nothing even they could find to steal.… His buddy Joe Rosario was the only person he could ever talk about class and poverty to without fudging it in rhetoric, without exaggerating one way or the other. Joe was in Boston too, teaching at Northwestern, but he was knocking himself out in the anti-war movement and went to seven meetings a week. Phil only saw him when Joe had a drink at Finnegan’s Wake.

  Then in early June Miriam turned up. Since she was starting graduate school at M.I.T. in September, she had decided there was no point spending the summer in Brooklyn. She had a job lined up and she obviously expected him to live with her somewhere.

  Nine months, long time. He remembered how she had left him when her family whistled. Remembered her crying and crying like a busted hose. As he met her at the airport and brought her back to Pearl Street, he realized he was no longer in love with her and experienced a wild sense of liberation, like a wrecking ball swinging free. She sensed that quickly—she was always quick—sensed him holding back. The next morning she started looking for a place. She lucked into a sublet from an Italian-American social worker who was going to Europe for the summer. But in a week of installing her at the acute angle of Hanover and Charter in the North End, he was hooked again. Back to wanting her. Caught in that sense of intimacy.

  It didn’t burn and pinch in the old way, but it was strong. He still wanted to be with her, he wanted her a lot, and the talking was better. She was getting tougher, chewier. He liked sleeping at the sublet. But when he thought of them living together in the fall, he felt it as a narrowing. Suppose he wanted to bring home a girl from the bar. Would he call up first? He wanted Miriam to move in to Pearl Street. She’d be on hand for him and so would the rest of that easygoing scene. And she’d be out-numbered.

  She and Jackson didn’t get on. They rubbed each other the wrong way. She brought out all of Jackson’s latent Midwestern uptightness. After all, he remembered Jackson’s ex-wife: Sissy and Miriam had nothing in common besides being female. Sissy had been slim and long-legged and narrow-hipped, blond and athletic and polished, cool and expensive. She moved artfully, climbing stairs, sitting down: he had never seen her awkward till the end, when she was scared and angry.

  But Miriam with her flamboyance and her earthiness and her sensuality put Jackson right up against the wall. It tickled Phil to see him bridling and setting his jaw: her presence caused him to brood about sex more than he liked. Still, they spent far more time at her place. Days when she wasn’t working they would sleep late, then run down five flights to shop for lunch. In the yard of the Eliot School across the street, kids would be playing baseball or basketball, and he would stop to kibitz. Old men sat out in chairs on the sidewalk, there were little old women in black gossiping in Italian.

  Miriam would have her shopping bag on her arm and they would stop at the bakery for fresh hot bread. The markets spilled out onto the sidewalk with fruit and vegetables that never any place else looked so fetching, so vivid. He swore the fish was more beautiful, the squid, the crabs, the flounder, the eels, the blowfish, the steamers and quahogs, the cod and halibut, spread out in rainbow splendor on the ice. Always at noon the narrow streets were jammed, and there were even a few pushcarts. The butchers had luscious veal and furry rabbits hanging outside. They drank espresso at shops patronized by middle-aged men who eyed them curiously. But the neighborhood was still the old working-class Italian island; and not even enough freaks had moved in for people to have started being hostile. When he spoke to people in the street they answered him. Always a grand wash seemed to be in progress, sheets and shirts and tablecloths whipping in the wind off the nearby and mostly invisible bay, suspended over the narrow passageways. Miriam’s progress through the streets did not go unappreciated. Phil was constantly amused, though Miriam was not.

  They spent a lot of time out of doors. They strolled past the dusty monument maker, past the workshop where the man and his son made plaster figures of swordfish, angels, mermaids, and madonnas. Miriam greeted her neighbor underneath, who had lived there for forty-three years, as she often repeated. Phil liked to rap about Boston. He felt it was something he was turning her on to, though sometimes she complained he was cramming it down her throat.

  “The first draft riot occurred in the North End, you know that? They try to tell us fighting the draft is new, but that’s bullshit.”

  “Was that World War I?” Miriam was eating lemon slush out of a paper cone.


  “You scientists know nothing, ha. Civil War. The federal marshals handing out draft notices were attacked by a woman who thought they were after her husband. A crowd beat them up and then started fighting the police. Aw, they attacked a police station and the Cooper Street Armory. The troops fired into the crowd and charged with bayonets. The protesters broke into a gun shop in Dock Square but the police busted obvious leaders. Twenty people were killed and five sent to prison for ‘causing’ the riot. Sound familiar?” He strolled along with his hand on the back of her neck, under the fall of her hair.

  They scrambled through the hole in the fence up into Copps Hill Burying Ground and sauntered among the worn old gravestones, with the kids riding tricycles and their mothers talking and an old man reading a newspaper in Italian and a couple holding hands. It was a neighborhood park, essentially, useful and green, in spite of the tourists following the signs for the Freedom Trail from Christ Church past the bocce players. They crossed the street and stood in the shade of the old trees looking down on the play ground and across the inner harbor to the Charlestown Navy Yard, where his old man had briefly been employed, and the three masts of the Constitution sticking up behind the squat mass of the Port Authority building. Then they wandered back home full of goodies and laden with bags of more, well sunned and walked out, and fell into bed. They had a nice big double bed and there they would fuck under a big reproduction of Rouault’s sad-eyed David the King until Phil revolted and threw it in the closet. “Jesus, it reminds me of a spaniel sitting there wanting some too, with those sad soulful entreaties. Enough to take the edge off.”

  “I hadn’t noticed that,” Miriam said, smiling. It was a good summer based around her sublet.

  “Smoking dope and tobacco in the same pipe. Jackson, you have no style. Why don’t you pour a little chocolate in too? Or mayonnaise. Everything in the Midwest comes covered with a thin pale greasy layer—salads, bacon, sandwiches, hamburgers. When a boy baby is born to a family like yours, he’s slapped on the behind and coated with mayonnaise.”

  “Listen to the gourmet. Why, before I met you, you thought a meal was a hot dog, and a seven-course dinner was seven hot dogs.”

  “Remember who turned you on in the first place.”

  “My Uncle Sam. You were just a scrawny nineteen-year-old, too stupid to use his asthma to stay out of the stew.”

  “A lot of good your conniving did you. Three years in the reserves, and you ended up in Nam anyhow.”

  “And that,” Jackson said soulfully, with his hand on his belly, “is where I went wrong. Led astray. Where the lures of the wicked lay in wait and tempted me. I always tell that to my father, on the rare occasions we hold converse these dark days. It’s usually good for a twenty.”

  Phil had been drafted, but Jackson had been caught by surprise. Old Jackson had had things worked out in his life. Very fancily he had taken concurrent M.A.s in sociology and business administration, married his girl friend Sissy, and gone to work for a conglomerate. Their parents kicked in lest they live in squalor on his measly salary of sixteen thou, and helped them into a split level in the woods outside St. Paul. Soon enough Jackson wiggled upward, they moved to a suburb near Dayton, had a baby, while Jackson switched his reserve duty to his new location. He had joined the reserves after college, figuring his deferments might come home to roost. Then the President called up Jackson’s unit and he found himself in it for real.

  “Man, you know, in the reserves you can just ooze up from rank to rank,” Jackson had told him long ago. “When they activated us I was a top sergeant. Hadn’t done more than clean rifles in years. The next thing I knew I was jumping out of a helicopter leading an attack and landing in a rice paddy, sinking up to my hips in the muck.… I hated the Army. It was two weeks of hyped-up shit every summer. All the guys saying to each other as we crawled through the woods on our bellies slapping at mosquitoes, ‘If my secretary could see me now,’ while some nineteen-year-old with stripes on bellowed orders.” Jackson’s stripes did not last long, with a little help from his friends. The Army had been, as they say, a radicalizing experience for Jackson.

  Phil hadn’t needed any pointers on how shitty things were. But they had locked into each other strengths and weaknesses and somehow the pattern fit, meshed. Jackson had turned him on to books. Jackson was big then on Hermann Hesse and gave him Steppenwolf to read. That was Jackson identifying, the lean gray bookish wolf of the steppes who was going to bring them through somehow alive and fight the brass to save their skins. Bunch of kids, lot of them from college, painting peace symbols on their helmets but following orders just the same. They called the company hangout the wolf den. Less than half of them came back to the world.

  Jackson had tried to return to his life and pick up the leads where they had been cut from his hands. He tried. Sort of. But he was full of anger and bitterness and depressions he could not handle and rages that spilled out and a boredom he could not hide. Phil went to a better school than he’d quit, got into N.Y.U. in English. He went into a brief incandescent dream in which books seemed more real than his life—hard now to remember his idealism about departments of English and the teaching of literature. Vacations he’d go to Medford a couple of days and then off to Jackson’s. Each time the tensions were rawer. Sissy stopped being polite and then she stopped flirting and bared her teeth. She was scared. She was losing what she thought she needed. She was fighting for what she felt entitled to. He was a messenger of chaos come to wake in Jackson all she could not understand or accept.

  And they were bad together, baaad. Phil left at school his earnest new scholarly identity, his passion for Keats, and arrived in fatigues and street-corner leer, the lining of his jacket hiding the magic pills. They traded atrocity stories, their own, ones they had merely heard told as their own. They reminisced about whores for hours in the kitchen till Sissy barricaded herself in the bedroom. She refused to cook for them, and they brought back take-out and filled up the house with bags of french fries, the bones of barbecued spareribs and gnawed chicken, paper plates and cups of half-drunk Coke and 7-Up. They spread their untidy feast over the pale carpeting and the glass and chrome Design Research furniture and Phil pissed in the potted avocado tree. On weekends like those Sissy could be made to represent Mom and apple pie and the American Dream and the vast pile of crap waving at them from every plastic ad with a blond selling a refrigerator. The last time he went to visit, Jackson left with him, after breaking up the living room and trying unsuccessfully to flush Sissy’s mink coat down the toilet.

  Jackson went into a strange violent scene in New York, holed up in a commune supported by a couple of dealers and some girls who hustled, on Third between C and D. When Jackson climbed out of that, he withdrew into ascetic monkishness. Jackson had the basement cell on Tenth Street and the janitor’s job and was into needing nothing, no one, self-sufficient and lean and bony and ogling the death’s head in the mirror, all established as a way of life by the time Phil had picked up Miriam at the MOMA.

  “I’d never have gone to school if you hadn’t pushed me,” Phil said. “But while you were nudging me into the system, you were climbing out.”

  “Does anybody really influence another? Maybe it’s all genetically determined. If we could read the DNA, who knows? I was programmed to zig, then zag. I am all zagged out.”

  Unconfrontable Jackson. They had talked for years about sharing rooms. But always before something had precluded it. “Miriam’s sublet will be up soon. She’s starting to look. I think she kind of expects I might move in with her.”

  Jackson tapped his pipe out. “I could get somebody else to split the rent. If you’re into the domesticity routine? I guess you could get used to it. Might as well get it over.”

  “Yeah. I just don’t know if I want to.”

  “What’s the matter, you scared of some other guy cutting you out if you don’t set up house?”

  “Don’t project that shit on me. She’s free. So am I. I do what I want to whoever I
want when I want to.”

  “Sure,” Jackson drawled, grinning. “Have fun. They’re all so easy to get on with in the beginning. Women are always agreeable. For a while, for a while, for a while.”

  “Not that she’s pushing me. She knows better than to try that. But I told her, how come she doesn’t move in here. Would that bug you a lot?”

  “I don’t have to deal with her. She’s no worse than the other chicks you’ve let loose in here.”

  “Aw come on, Jackson, they’re not in her class.”

  “She’s smart, or so she tells us. But I’ll bet you a nickel bag she’ll never move in while I’m here.”

  “She says she couldn’t work here, there’s too much traffic.”

  “It’s your worry. Just so she splits the expenses when she eats here, it’s the same to me.”

  “You’re so scared someone’s going to cop one meal without putting into the kitty, I can’t believe it.”

  “I didn’t know you’d inherited a fortune. Or is your princess keeping you these days?”

  “Aw come on, we get by. It gives me a large pain to hear about voluntary poverty around here, when everybody has bread to buy dope and clothes and bikes and records. Poverty my sweet ass! Poverty is when you don’t have it for food, man. We live pretty well, if you ask me.”

  “It is because I do not ask you that we live well. And small thanks I get for my clever managing.”

  “Sure, Jackson, you’re the best housewife on all of Pearl Street!”

  Jackson punched him in the chest not quite playfully, then shambled off to his room before Phil could get his breath back. He was always susceptible in the chest. Dirty pool. He’d get back at Jackson later. One way or the other. Noisy sex scene. Bring some of the political heavies home from the bar tonight. Maybe Joe Rosario, who always got Jackson uptight when they argued by making him feel like a liberal. Joe would get more and more vehement and more and more militant and finally he would stand there pounding and roaring and representing the whole Third World in their kitchen. Besides, Jackson liked politics in words and Joe liked to do it in the streets. Phil hated all those meetings where people jawed at each other in their stupid factions, but he was drawn to Joe’s energy and anger. Phil got his breath back and smiled to himself. Jackson wasn’t always right: though Phil could remember when, at nineteen, that thought would have seemed disloyal.