Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  “My father grew up in a house like the one tonight. He thought it a horror. He couldn’t wait to live in an up-to-date house. He’s always building another one. The one they’re in now, the guy who threw it up, he’s into a Machine for Living rhetoric. It’s big as a shopping plaza and just as garish. All angles and glass walls that birds kill themselves on. Nothing works. The doors don’t shut, where there are any. The fireplace fills the living room with smoke. You can hear any noise. The plumbing kicks like a mule. I’d live in a trailer before that.”

  “Did you grow up in that kind of house?”

  “Smaller scale. We lived out in a fancy suburb. The thing that used to impress the other kiddies was that we had our own tennis courts. I broke my wrist out there once. Fell on it. I don’t fall well—I never have.”

  “Want me to attach metaphorical meaning to that?”

  He grinned. “As you wish. I’ve seen Phil fall down a flight of stairs and get up and walk off. If I did that, I’d break my back.” He heard himself speaking Phil’s name and stiffened, his eyes going up to the softly patterned canopy over the light bulb. “Arabian nights fantasy, the two of you. He wouldn’t chop off your head and throw you out with the other chicks because you kept bringing stories home.”

  “Do you really want to talk about Phil and me, or do you want to toss out one of those barbed remarks and go back inside?”

  “Toss a remark and run. No.” He let go of her ankle and pulled her down to him. “Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars or two hundred sorrows. Just go directly to bed.”

  “What were you like as a child?” His sad-eyed face was framed in her hands like a permanent question.

  “A snot. I was one of those awful children who beat up others who don’t admire their daddies enough.”

  “Don’t you want me to know you? You hoard your past You feed me one dry dog biscuit at a time.”

  “No. I want you to love me.”

  “Do you? But you don’t want to love me.”

  “Miriam, Miriam, I do. But freely. Not under compulsion.”

  “Who’s compulsing you?”

  “You are. When you ask me to do what I do.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What do you think I’m doing but loving you?” He gathered her against him. “Come on, take off this frippery stuff.”

  She wished she could ask him what made this sex loving and other sex cold to him, but she did not want to destroy the closeness and therefore kept quiet.

  Afterward she sat cross-legged, still naked, and took his wallet from the pants lying over the foot of the bed. Reading his driver’s license: “Douglas M. Jackson. Why can’t I call you Doug?”

  “That stands for Douglas MacArthur Jackson. Can you imagine going through the reserves and into the Army with a name like that? Christ, how did I survive? I loathe and detest that name more than you can conceive. My old man’s hero. Not that he served under him—you can bet your boots on that. Essential war industries, getting rich on the home front. He almost sent me to military school.”

  “If you had a child, what would you name him or her?”

  “I have a child.” His face stiffened.

  “Jackson, Jackson, I forgot. I forgot for just a moment.”

  “I never forget.”

  “Why can’t you ever see him? What is it?”

  The words were chunks of iron dropping from his mouth. “Her name was Cecily but I used to call her Sissy. She wanted what I seemed to be. What I thought I was. What I was trained to be. She had her sights on me and I went along. She wanted a ring, I got her a ring. She wanted a wedding, I got her a wedding. She wanted a house, I got her a house. She was a good-looking woman, a thoroughbred from a family that regularly coughed up college presidents and bank managers and even a senator. They all live to be ninety and stand six feet tall and are always right because they laid down the rules. Then I stopped producing, so she got a divorce.” He laughed dryly. “I knew she’d been with another man but I couldn’t prove it. She took me to the cleaners. The judge practically wept for her, married to such a degenerate drug addict bum. He was probably her uncle. Then she pulled the real sly one. She agreed to a cash settlement, no alimony. That was supposed to be a great gesture, I wasn’t going to be pinned to the wall for thirty years. Then she married the lawyer.”

  “The lawyer who got the divorce?”

  “I had another lawyer on paper, but I wasn’t contesting it. It was supposed to be such a generous deal. He wasn’t a divorce lawyer, he was the family lawyer doing the divorce as a special favor. Then she married him. Haha. Chuck Magnusson. I try to get anywhere near Jerry and they can put me in the can. We don’t fight in the same class, Magnusson and I.”

  “Did she hate you? Is that why?”

  “She pretended to be scared of me. We had some ugly scenes. The only way I could shut her up was physical. And I suppose she was really scared about how I’d changed. Any change scares people like that. She kept saying she couldn’t talk to me any more. I didn’t notice her trying to listen.”

  “Had they set you up from the beginning? Was she involved with him before?”

  “I’ll never really know, will I? I was pretty sure I knew who she’d been seeing—a real estate developer. But Magnusson was a way superior catch. He’d been divorced himself three years before—very different scene. Visitation rights, friendly going back and forth, no scandal, no menace, everybody polite. I understand they all get together for barbecues and other social occasions, all the half brothers and half sisters and half-wits and half-truths and bitter halves.” He sat tight, his arm wooden under her touch.

  “Jackson, you know I am not Cecily. Do you really in any part of your mind think we’re the same?”

  He looked at her. Then he said in a gentle voice, “You’re both cunts.”

  She tried to abate her anger. “You and I both have livers, large and small intestines, kidneys, spines, blood vessels, nerves, spleens, stomachs, hearts and, I had thought, brains in common. What conclusions do you draw from anatomy? That I am about to take you to the cleaners? Wow, Jackson, I might as well develop the paranoid fantasy that you want me to keep you.” She brushed the hair from her eyes, “After all, in a couple of years I’ll be able to. What on earth do you think I want from you, that you’re so concerned to hang onto?”

  “Possession.”

  “What are you talking about? The first thing you wanted after we went to bed was to separate me from Phil.”

  “Now you’re jealous when you know I’ve seen him.”

  “You’re damned straight I am. Why should you have the privilege and I be denied it? I miss seeing him!”

  “I’m sure you do,” he said flatly.

  “What a drag you are! You think you invented friendliness.”

  “You think you’re not always pushing at me? Why do you think we struggle so much? You’re always trying to shove me around.”

  “If you don’t want to be open with me, what do you want with me? I’m in love with you and I’m starving to death.”

  “That’s what it is: I don’t want to be eaten.”

  She shook her head. “I fell into that. Right into your hands.”

  “What better place? All this talking, it creates flak. When you shut your mouth and open your legs, we do much better.”

  She ran into Phil in a bookstore off Harvard Square. A feeling of being watched made her raise her head from the table of remaindered books she was leafing through and turn slowly. Phil was standing by the poetry books still holding whatever he had been reading and looking at her, his intense stare crossing the store. She immediately dropped her gaze. Stifling hot in her red poncho. The first time in the museum courtyard, that gaze asking her questions. Now more pain, more anger, but still questions. She could not turn away. She met his gaze again and felt her lips part as if she could say something across the distance. She could not move. She stood transfixed, the glossy book of Indian sculpture growing heavy in her
sweating hands.

  Suddenly Phil grinned, while something tore in her. He looked beautiful and funny grinning at her rigidity, till he crooked his index finger and made a Svengali face. “Come,” he mouthed at her. “Come!” Playing hypnotist. Obediently taking the part he offered, she played zombie. She came walking toward him with hands stuck out past students who turned to look at her and then away (drug episode).

  “All right, buddy,” she said, “I saw you put that book under your coat. Stealing pornography again.”

  “I’ll go along quietly, sir or madam, but don’t take my dirty book.… How about a wake at Finnegan’s? A drink is surely in order.”

  “Phil, Phil, it’s been so long—”

  “Not by my choice.”

  “He didn’t exactly give me a choice, Phil. I wanted him. Those were his terms.”

  He did not take her arm. It was strange to walk with him and not touch, through the streets where a south wind smelled warm and a little smoky, stirring papers in the gutters and promising more rain. The sun was in and out, drying the morning’s puddles. Across Mass Avenue the Yard looked busy. It was a relief when they were sitting in the booth in the dimness of the bar. They ordered dark beer and faced each other. His legs grazed hers under the table. Her knees felt watery. She kept staring into his face looking for estrangement, hatred.

  “Phil, I don’t underestimate my guilt. I can’t get my mind around it. It’s such a relief to see you again!”

  “Seeing is believing, as they say. Would you believe I knew it would happen?”

  “Why, then? Why let it?”

  “He’s my friend. We’re bound up together too. I thought I’d kept you apart long enough so the thing with me was very strong. I thought we’d got to the point where we could handle anything.”

  She put her face in her hands. Shame was the taste.

  He tugged gently at her fingers until he had pried her hand loose. He held it lightly in his only half-closed hand. “Come on. No suds, baby. You love him, huh?”

  “You know it.”

  “That figured. So, is it good?”

  She shook her head. “It’s awful.”

  “Shit! He’s closed himself up, right? I thought he couldn’t do it to you. Thought he’d be too scared of losing you.”

  “He’s more scared of me than he is of losing me, Phil. It’s rotten to complain to you about this. How are you?”

  “Getting it on. I hung around with that leather chick, for a while. Wasn’t much of a trade, Miriam. I got the short end of the stick. She had money and drugs, but she was a bad fuck. Nothing in bed but whining and do me something. The energy level of a maggot. But she bought me things and turned me on to anything. She couldn’t make coffee in a pot, but we could go down to the S. S. Pierce and buy pâté de foie gras and smoked trout in cans. You aren’t such a great companion on a trip, but when I got up there, I’d just want to step on her. But she got me this vest—nice, uh?”

  Miriam was astonished to find herself mildly jealous of the woman. She felt that was in the worst of all possible taste and unjust, but she had the uncanny sense that Phil knew and that was why he was grinning again.

  “You can have it if you want to.” He made to take it off.

  “No! It would look ridiculous, all that fringe hanging off my boobs. It looks handsome on you, or you in it, whatever one’s supposed to say.”

  “You’re supposed to tell me I’m devastating and ask for the next dance.”

  “I would if I could.” She smiled for the first time. “I can never remember your eyes—that color.”

  “I can never remember how hard it is to keep my self-righteous anger against you. You’re always sacrificing me to someone you think is bigger.”

  “Phil, don’t say that!”

  “You lack respect for me. Maybe ’cause I’m no good.” He took her hand again, just the fingers, his finger against the tips of hers. “But I’m learning to live with my mean self. You know McGeorge Bundy is lecturing at B.U. tomorrow?”

  “What has that to do with the price of fish?”

  “I want you to go and hear him.”

  “Nu, Phil, are you handing out penances?”

  “Something will entertain you, and I don’t mean his speech. They think they’re off the hook now Nixon’s in, all those bastards who used us and sent us over there to rot and die all those years, they’re all fading back into the foundations and corporations and universities. Chalk that one up to experience, boys, and we’ll write another book about it. Memoirs by and by. They’re war criminals and we can’t forget it.… Will you go?”

  She nodded, taking down the time and place.

  “I’m late now to meet Joe Rosario. Can you go my bail?”

  “I’ll be ready. See you there.”

  Miriam could not get in. They were checking tickets carefully, but obviously Phil and his friends had provided themselves with tickets. But she heard the uproar. In the middle of the speech they began to play tapes of bombing and Phil stood up holding aloft the papier-mâché figure of a burned child. A mob of campus and regular police stampeded them at once and they never got to finish their guerrilla theater.

  Miriam collected Phil from the Charles Street jail the next day. He had been roughed up but he was in high spirits. As he had had nothing to eat for eighteen hours, she took him to Jackson’s by cab. There Phil washed and got into Jackson’s shirt and pants, complaining about their tackiness, while Jackson cooked up a garlicky spaghetti and sauce. The evening seemed to flow all right.

  “It’s time to make those power brokers feel they aren’t safe either.” Phil leaned on the refrigerator rubbing his sore head.

  “And who gets their head bashed? Bundy? Or you?” Jackson sucked on his clay pipe, smoking his favorite gingery tobacco.

  “Someone’s got to be willing. You lost years to them too. Do you want to let them get away with it?”

  Miriam kept quiet. She wanted the evening to glide gently by and establish precedents. She wanted them to be together and friendly. She would look and see Phil gesturing and grimacing, Jackson tilted back sucking on his pipe and slowly scratching his chest, and she could almost believe in the surface ease.

  Two nights later the bill came due, when she mentioned something that had been troubling her. “I know I’m being irrational. The doctor told me I might skip a period or two before my body got over reacting to the pill. But honest, it makes me nervous.”

  He gave her a long measured stare. “If you’ve taken the pill every day, you can’t be pregnant. If you haven’t, why haven’t you?”

  “Jackson, you know damned well there was one night I missed, when we went to bed early and never got up again. I took it in the morning, that’s supposed to work. But how can one ever be sure, playing around with hormones? I’ve been getting a bad reaction to the pill, and I suppose this is just part of it, but it’s gruesome to have to worry.”

  “You’re starting early to worry out loud. What kind of reaction are you expecting? What reassurance do you want from me?”

  “I want you to tell me with great confidence it can’t possibly be so. I guess just mainly it’s better to share a worry. Don’t you find that natural?”

  “I find the whole thing a little too natural.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We’ll discuss it when it’s relevant. If you really are pregnant. If it’s not just your body wanting to be. I’m assuming that, in telling me, you are assuming that it would be mine?”

  The jagged ugly insinuation trailing worse arguments was lurking there just under the surface waiting for her. She could feel the suspicion, the fear, the hostility from him. It was too ugly. She had no stomach for it. She shut into herself and went home early to lie in her own bed, brooding and wondering.

  Saturday afternoon, shortly after two, Phil appeared. He posed against the door, arms outstretched. “Pigeon, I been crucified!”

  “Can they make that assault rap stick?”

  “For t
hat I have a lawyer. It’s the university. I’m out.”

  She came and put her hand on his shoulder. “Can’t you appeal. Won’t your sponsor Proxmire help you? He has clout.”

  “J. Singleton Proxmire has decided I’m one of the unwashed hoodlums the gates must be barred against. Barbarian, he called me. Said I don’t understand the fragility of academic freedom and the importance of the exchange of ideas. I said I’m more into real freedom for people, and as for expression of ideas, I’d been expressing mine. Aw shit.” He flung himself on the bed and spoke muffled into her pillow. “Looks like Joe’s in trouble too. A faculty type, even worse, and not at his own school. They may really go after him. They put four times the bail on him they had on me, and Wanda, his wife, had to go running around all night to raise it, so pregnant she looked like she might drop the kid in night court”

  “The woman who was yelling at the police?”

  Phil laughed. “That’s Wandal Pigeon, I was never cut out for the academic strait jacket and that’s the truth. I’ve conned my way as far as I can. I’d never have been able to write that asinine thesis on George Herbert. My Catholic background was supposed to be a big help. My Catholic background consists of Irish wakes and St. Patrick’s Day parades—a great day for the bar business—my mother’s fear of abortion, maudlin tenors singing ‘Mother Machree’ and ‘The Croppy Boy,’ and a big to-do on election days.” Phil started to laugh again, shaking the bed. “Old Singleton, he’s a converted Catholic, fills his house with religious paraphernalia and always gassing about the beauties of this or that missal. He’s a big one for looking into my baby-blue eyes and squeezing my knee, but I heard him call one of the other profs a disgusting faggot for actually getting laid.”

  She sat down on the bed’s edge and tapped his shoulder, “Why did you do it, really?”

  “Told you.” He mumbled into her pillow. “Besides, been impotent for a month.”