Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  She kept trying to sit up and he kept climbing on her. His fox face sharpened, his chin was digging into her, his hands were strong claws tearing. He was getting angry. It felt bad. She could not bring herself to hit him. The laboratory politeness restrained her. She could not hit somebody on the group she was working with. She could only laugh and shove at him and try to get up. Her body felt vast and waterlogged. She seemed to be trying to move vats of blubber by remote control. Down there somewhere her huge legs in the depth of the bed. She could not hit a graduate student in the biochemistry department who worked on her group. She kept telling him he was a married man and he kept trying to force her legs apart.

  She felt exhausted and nauseous. The elastic on her panties had given way long ago and he had actually got in for an instant. She began to be a little scared and said, “Okay, okay, let me get my diaphragm.”

  But he had a rubber. It was ridiculous. She had not seen one of those since the second time with Phil. The act was disgusting in a dry sort of way and it went on forever. Forever he was lying on her stomach pushing into her. It hurt but she was too sodden to feel strongly. It was a nuisance. She felt nauseous with him riding on her belly. She had to piss. His motion inside irritated her bladder. It went on forever and finally he pulled out. Presumably he had come, she got up at once and ran to the bathroom, stumbling till she found it. She could no longer remember where her own room was or how to negotiate the distance between. She could not even manage to find her clothes so, grimacing with resentment, she had to climb back beside him and go to sleep.

  When she woke in the morning he was up already. She heard his voice talking on the room phone. She lay still and listened, alerted by the grate of triumph in his voice. “Five dollars, Al. Sure, come by on your way out to breakfast. You couldn’t ask for more proof.” He hung up.

  A bet with Al. Hung over and sick to her stomach, she imagined making many holes in his body with a knife. She immediately dragged out of bed.

  “Good morning, good morning, Miriam baby.” Ryan was beaming. “How’s the head?”

  “Working.” Scooping up her clothes as she went, she slammed into the bathroom and put herself together as quickly as she could work the zippers and buttons. But when she hopped out, Al Manganaro was already at the door. “Hey, how about some breakfast, Ryan? Well, well.”

  “I hear you have a bet with Ryan,” she said sweetly, strolling past them swinging her leather pouch. “Gee, I wish I could help you decide who won, but since I passed out, I haven’t the foggiest if I was had or not. I mean, you’d think if anything had really happened I’d remember—but maybe it just wasn’t memorable. To breakfast?”

  From that moment on Ryan was her enemy. The hatred was mutual but controlled, as both of them cared more for the group’s work than for each other.

  Lionel had let the flat near Nostrand go and taken a studio apartment in Brooklyn Heights. He said that it was convenient, and besides, the kids came home so seldom. Self-pityingly he said that to her, but she did not believe he would be pleased if they invaded. In fact, Allegra, faced with Christmas vacation and only invited to spend half of it with her boy friend, descended on her for the last four days. She gave up her bed to Allegra and slept at the commune with Phil.

  “How come you didn’t go to Lionel’s? You always liked shopping Christmas vacations.”

  “The merry widower? He’s in Florida visiting friends.”

  “So how come you couldn’t borrow the key? I’m glad to have you, but you don’t know anybody here.…”

  “He told Mark and his roommate Loudmouth they could stay. And Mark told me I’d interfere with their social life. Isn’t that rich?”

  “I don’t like our brother.”

  “He’s going to be a success, though.” Allegra was doing something elaborate to her hair with a wire brush, sitting at Miriam’s desk. She spoke matter-of-factly. “He’s the only one in the family with that kind of head—where do you think the momser got it? If you ask him why he likes somebody, like Loudmouth he rooms with, there’s always an ulterior motive.… Do you like the way Dad is acting? I mean, really, do you?”

  “I haven’t been home that much. Every time I walked in the door of the old flat, a weight fell on me. I’d feel like I couldn’t breathe.”

  “It was pretty depressing. But do you like his bachelor pad? It makes me uncomfortable. The same with his sideburns. And he’s letting his hair grow—haven’t you noticed? Every time I see him, he’s sneaking to get it a little bit longer. And those shirts!”

  “I guess that’s how he wanted to dress. No more white-on-white specials from Grandfather.” For years Lionel had worn white dress shirt irregulars with French cuffs from his father, who had been in the shirt business. They had always been baggy. Only Sonia pretended to think they were wonderful, very distinguished, she said. Even after Grandfather died, they had a lifetime supply. Mark had worn them too all through high school, but he revolted and said he wouldn’t go to college if he had to wear them any more.

  “So maybe he deserves purple shirts for a while. But he embarrasses me.” Allegra made her eyes wide. “He doesn’t look like anybody’s father. He thinks he’s Marcello Mastroianni.”

  “Is he giving you money?”

  “He puts me through school. Same with Mark. You’re the only one off his back. He keeps asking me, ‘When are you getting married?’ As if I’m not trying.”

  “How is your boy friend?”

  Allegra shrugged. “It’s obvious if I marry him I’ll have to put him through medical school. That sounds too much like Mama!”

  “You’re so young, Allegra, don’t let them hurry you. Women who marry young, they always look sad to me in a few years.”

  Allegra frowned at the ends of hair, looking for splits. “Miriam, don’t you get lonely? Don’t you get scared?”

  “I was lonely when I was younger. I have more trouble making sure I get the time alone that I need than I do finding people to spend time with. Scared of what?”

  “Of being alone. Of losing your looks. Of getting old and not having anybody.”

  “Sure, sometimes.”

  “Well, I do often.” Allegra threw the comb down. “What do you get scared of, big sister? You must be afraid sometimes.”

  “When I was younger I was scared that nobody would ever love me. I was scared of men, scared to talk to them, scared of being rejected if I showed I liked someone. I feel that less now. I support myself, and as soon as I finish the classes I have to take for my doctorate, I’ll be working full time. I worry a lot about finding work I really want to do. I don’t want to get stuck in some dead-end job. That’s awfully easy for a woman. I don’t want a job in a company where I’ll be expected to go on doing shit work for years and never get a promotion and never get a chance to show what I can do. I don’t want to go to work for the military or one of those big corporations. I don’t even know if creative work in my field exists outside a university. But universities are tight and prejudiced against women. It’s rotten hard for a woman to get a decent job around a university.”

  “Is that what you really worry about?” Allegra narrowed her eyes.

  Miriam nodded. “I don’t want to be poor, if the truth be known. I want to live comfortably. I’m tired of the half-life of a student. I want to be able to help my friends when they need help. I want to buy interesting clothes. I’m sick of eating in greasy spoons. I don’t want a lot of money, Allegra, really. I just want a decent living. I want the things that make life pleasant. When I bought that reconditioned air conditioner for fifty dollars, do you know what a change that made in my life? This room gets hot in the summer, believe me, right up under the roof. I had enough hard times growing up.”

  “It wasn’t so bad. You exaggerate.”

  “By the time you were growing up, it wasn’t.”

  Allegra was still frowning. “But if you really get a Ph.D., who’ll marry you? Dad says you’re educating yourself right out of a husband.”

/>   Miriam’s turn to shrug. “I can’t imagine getting married before I’m thirty, frankly. I’ve too much wanderlust.”

  “But all the men will be gone by then.”

  “Good. I’ll marry a nineteen-year-old.” She laughed.

  “You’re still seeing Phil, after all this time! You might as well marry him. It’s been years!”

  “I’m not going to, Allegra, I told you that. Don’t worry.”

  “What will you do with him when you do marry?”

  “I don’t know.” Miriam hugged herself. “I can’t imagine. But that’s years and years away.”

  “I should send your little sister a bouquet, I like having you over here every night. But I wouldn’t mind half an hour alone with her, I’ll tell you true.”

  Miriam rose on her elbow and tapped Phil’s chest. “No.”

  “How come?”

  “No. No, because I used to be jealous of her. No, because I love her now and she’d feel bad.”

  “How do you know?” Phil put his hand under her chin. “Sometimes when she’s holding forth I think she needs a touch of it.”

  “That isn’t what she needs, and do you want to make me upset?”

  “It might be interesting.” But he left Allegra to her own devices for the rest of her stay.

  She knew Allegra found her life bizarre and dangerous. She found Allegra’s wan ambitions tedious. Still she clung to Allegra and Allegra to her. Miriam missed women in her life. She had a growing need for women friends, and she tried to reach out to other women and bind them to her by doing them favors, by trying to find out what they wanted and helping them to get it, as she had brought Dorine together with Lennie. She tried to discover increasingly, as time went on, what Beth might want.

  Beth would be a superior sort of younger sister, with all Allegra’s delicacy. Beth was a small butterfly, a warbler, the miniature deer she had seen once with Phil in the Bronx Zoo, a deer only a foot high—a nocturnal creature with huge eyes and bones that would snap in the hand. She was fascinated too with Beth’s strange dry quality, cool and contained. Yet Beth was naive and girlish too. There was a quality of will in Beth that was totally lacking in Allegra, yet beside her Allegra would have seemed sophisticated.

  Like a squirrel, Beth carried about with her nuts and fruits to nibble on, and Miriam took to bringing her little delicacies for the smile that produced, a shining smile of surprise and delight almost too big for the thin freckled face. She liked to tease Beth: she could not help testing to see if Beth would be shocked. Beth seemed to want and to need nothing, but to live like a squirrel in the city eating her seeds and nuts and fruit and running to classes and concerts. As sexless as a child, perhaps, but Miriam liked that dry cool quality. It was a relief from her own vast yeasty sexuality. She wanted to think she might be as simple and as contained as that if only she decided to be.

  When she saw Beth leaving the computer center with Ryan one day in April, she felt a sharp pain of loss. Her enemy was carrying off a new friend. He would poison Beth against her. He would damage Beth. He would use her and tear that clear integrity.

  After the ugliness with Ryan, she was wary and careful with men at M.I.T. Indeed, her relations seemed to clarify. She had won admittance to a special seminar Wilhelm Graben was giving as his only contact with students while spending a few months at M.I.T. That in itself established a certain minimum of respect. It was also more exciting than anything else she had taken. He was one of the creators of the field, with a career in physics accomplished before he had encountered his first computer. He was urbane, witty, remote, still on the cutting edge of theory, and radiated a kind of amused power. She had almost a crush on him. Her work went well.

  With Phil, things were bumpy. School had given a structure to his life that nothing replaced. He was drifting, tending bar and writing an occasional song, marking time, with his court case pending, always pending. Hal got two club dates and at each he sang a number of Phil’s songs. Phil was excited by dreams of making it; he was ashamed and sure his songs were crap and he had sold out as a poet. Hal had a boat and they went sailing a lot during May. On the boat Hal was endurable, nautical and involved. Otherwise she found him rancid. He used others easily and moved on. His days were decorated with women. He had a chow who growled at everybody else and bit someone once a week, a dog he treated better than any human and fed raw beef. Putting up with Hal was a kind of penance.

  That spring, with the invasion of Cambodia and the stepping up of the war, there were many demonstrations. Phil had nightmares and spent more and more time with Joe, who had gone into a permanent condition of rage. Joe was a chesty muscular guy with a brilliant smile set off by a thick brown mustache. His deep ringing voice carried through Going-to-the-Sun, with his loud descending laugh. But he was not sleeping that spring, or eating or teaching his classes, he was driven, burning, furious, and half the time his fury turned on those around him, who were at least within his reach. He was always telling Miriam how bourgeois she was.

  No one who would not leave whatever they were doing and go with him on the streets that spring could escape his driven anger, and even minor political differences with those working with him blew up. The third week in May he stormed out of his apartment, leaving his wife Wanda and their little boy Luis and baby Johnny just at the crawling stage. For a week he hung around Going-to-the-Sun blowing hard, with two nineteen-year-old women doting on him. Phil had given him his room and moved in with her for a week and they were peaceful in the eye of the storm. In the meantime Wanda was running his Defense Committee, holding together the shaky coalition that his attacks threatened. On the eighth day of Joe’s terrible reign over Going-to-the-Sun, Wanda arrived at suppertime with Luis by the hand and the baby on her back—a small chunky woman with dark wiry hair and intense black eyes—burning, worried, overworked, desperate, and strong as a mule. She simply arrived in time to eat supper. Joe began making a great fuss over his sons. And after supper, when it was time for Luis to go home to bed, Joe went with her, A simple division of labor, Miriam thought wryly, watching them depart: she loves and he permits himself to be loved.

  Phil managed through the demonstrations not to get busted again, but Thursday he was clubbed and then gassed. Miriam sat up tending him. “If the enemy is the people who own banks and factories and the Pentagon, then I’m not the enemy. Am I?”

  He rolled his head to and fro in her lap, under the icebag. “Who said you were?”

  “You do. Your poems do.”

  “That’s something else.”

  Gently she touched his swollen nose. “I wish we could lose our history. You worry me.… Why can’t it be simple again? Without these reverberations of old pain.”

  His eyes opened. He lifted the ice pack. “Aw, pigeon, don’t take it so hard. Everything hurts as we go, I don’t ask that it don’t. I don’t want any other women I’ve ever seen, except for a change of bed now and then, I’m the one who likes you this way, remember?”

  “Don’t, Phil.”

  “You think it’s over with him, yet you’re still bleeding.”

  “Phil, it’s over. But no matter what happens, ever, I won’t cut you off again. I won’t.”

  “Promise me.” His voice was steely.

  “I promise.” She moved the ice pack back onto the swelling. “Tomorrow I have to go to work.… But we’ll have Saturday together. Do you think you’ll feel together enough to go to the street fair Saturday? On Garden Street, with music and goodies to eat and theater …”

  “Together enough! Me, the original street-fighting man? Sure, I like carnivals. That is, if the weather holds good.”

  14

  You Got to Feel It Spontaneously

  In the morning she woke to the sunlight filtering through strawberry-bronze curtains she and Phil had made from sheets. Jackson still snored softly on his back. She raised herself on her arm to look at him, his sleeping face unguarded. His lowered eyelids were rosy. His lashes were longer than hers. Those sil
ver hairs in his beard and mane glittered like real metal. These moments when she could contemplate him without being seen, without waking his wariness, were a gentle pleasure.

  From that sleep she could believe he would open his eyes and his face would open too: he would wake as vulnerably open as he looked in sleep. Well, things were better. Yes, better. Yesterday had been trying, however. She had had a job interview in one of the firms just off campus, those electronic companies that nestled like piglets to the teats of M.I.T., on the same street as Draper Labs where they did simulations of wars and submarine battles. It had been hate at first sight. Then she had gone out for a second interview in the afternoon at Lincoln Labs. She did not want that either: too large, too hierarchical. She had come home glum and wanted to creep into his leanness and be supported. But Jackson had perceived her mood as a demand. He had backed off into his Who are you anyhow, woman? mode. She had had to pull herself together and put off worrying until she could be alone. Today when Jackson had gone off to his morning class she would be able to bring her depression out front and study it and figure how to live with it or deal with it. But through the evening she had to conceal her problem to be with him.

  Dorine and Jackson and she had eaten hash brownies he had made till they were silly and easy giggling laughter swirled in the room. She and Dorine had danced together—Jackson would never dance but would glare under his brows at anybody who tried to pull him from his chair and tighten his muscles into rigor mortis. Watching them, he tilted back in his chair and smiled like an oriental potentate being entertained, and truthfully they were dancing in a few minutes not so much for the music or for each other as they had started, but to please his eyes.