Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  But Phil and Jackson reinforced each other even while they competed. Between them was high tension, playful relaxation, and no touching. She doubted they discussed her except in joking; yet her nightmare was that they would unite against her. That nightmare swelled from the way they would close ranks to punish her, to refuse, to tease in a way that passed closer and closer to unbearable pain. She wanted to be fully herself with each, but she felt kept in her place as they shared her, as they fought over who was really the smarter, more talented, sexier, more dominant male in the family.

  What she called friendship with Beth, as they came closer, was a different animal than how they were with the guys from Going-to-the-Sun. When Ryan moved out, he had left behind a small black and white television that didn’t work. Jackson and Rick, who had worked in a radio shop, spent all of two Saturdays taking the set apart. Now after a fashion it worked. Often she wished the volume did not work so well. Now the guys from Going-to-the-Sun would come to watch basketball or football and they would sit by the set drinking and betting and contradicting each other loudly. The main thrust of the football afternoons and the basketball evenings lay in that verbal game surrounding every play dimly visible on the grainy twelve-inch picture. Alone with her, Phil had contempt for jocks and fans.

  “It’s training to the American male to get your rocks off watching two guys pound each other, or twelve guys pound each other. You learn to let the peasants do the dying for you on the evening news. Shut up and take it, shut up and watch it, shut up and let it be done. They’re the experts. Beat your palms together when they give you the signal.” Yet Phil shouted and groaned and argued statistics with the rest of them.

  Sometimes the game would be rained out and there would be nothing to watch but movies about the R.A.F. or Roy Rogers. Then they would get so stoned they could not speak coherently but fell dimly into giggles. As well as they all knew one another—Phil and Jackson and Terry and Rick and John—they could not seem to sit and talk, but must everyone be elsewhere, looking at something besides each other: if not the set, then the inside of their heads.

  She tended to clear out and go over to Tech Square, where she had a desk. If Dorine was around they might go for a walk or to see a friend. “Why do they get into that?” she asked Dorine. “It’s so mindless, I can’t recognize them. My father wasn’t into those sport rituals at all.”

  “Well, do you think your father was some kind of ideal?”

  Miriam was startled. “Of course not. I see what you mean. His manhood was never in question because he was always Standing firmly on top of my mother and us. Maybe it’s better they should have their rituals.”

  “I just wish John wouldn’t come. ‘Hi,’ he says, ‘how’re you doing,’ and goes in and sits down in front of the set. Let’s go see Sally.”

  Sally was pregnant and going to have the baby, although the father had skipped out. She did not have enough money to go to a doctor who would let her have natural childbirth. Since she was big on doing things the natural way, like having the baby to begin with, she had decided to have the baby at home. She said, where she came from, lot of women had their babies at home and they didn’t make a big deal of it. Dorine and Miriam were frightened of the possibilities, so about every two weeks they went and argued with her for a while. All that happened was that Sally got bigger and stayed just as stubborn.

  Sally was afraid that if she went into the hospital they would take the baby away from her—maybe they would put her under a drug and make her sign a paper—because she was not married and had no money and did not intend to put down any father’s name at all. She didn’t want her baby to be registered or get a birth certificate. Then her baby would never have to go to school and be taught to be stupid and if he was a boy he would never be drafted. She had a fantasy about bringing her baby up on her own, getting back to the country where they would have a small farm and raising him hidden away where he would grow into a beautiful person. Sometimes she talked of taking her baby back home to Tennessee, but then she would say she just couldn’t go back.

  Sally never came to see them where they lived because of what Jackson had said to her boy friend when she found out she was pregnant. Sally could barely read and write; she had only gone to school part time and had left school in the tenth grade. “How would she know?” Jackson had said, and then, “Well, it’s the oldest trick in the world, I guess they don’t have to learn that one out of a book.” Sally had a room in the house of a married couple who were too strung out to be of use. Miriam thought she could have three babies and they wouldn’t notice.

  If it was a down to go and see Sally, it was usually an up to visit Beth. Beth was still living in a funny dim room in a dingy warren in Back Bay, ugly and crowded with books and yet cozy. On the walls were notes Beth made to herself: NOBODY LOVES A DOORMAT, THEY JUST WALK ON OVER. THE MIRROR IS THE FIRST DAILY TRAP. CHICK—small, fuzzy, helpless, stupid, cute, lays eggs and in the end gets eaten. CAT—predator, active, alert, tough, independent, mean, quick. The language says one is predator and the other is prey, LOVE IS WHAT WOMEN DO INSTEAD OF KNOWING OR FIGHTING OR MAKING OR INVENTING.

  “That’s a new one.” Miriam pointed to the wall. Every so often Beth painted over a section she got tired of. “ ‘Love is what women do instead …’ Do you really believe that?”

  “Sure,” Beth said. “Don’t you?”

  Beth was finely made, small-boned, small-featured and colored in pastels, yet she seemed sure of her own identity. She seemed to have her own cry that she uttered through the confusions they all lived in.

  “No! I wouldn’t love more if I did nothing else—there’d be less of me to love with!”

  “But you’d think it was even more important than you do now.” Beth was sitting on her bed cross-legged in green corduroy pants and an orange sweater that did not really go with the pants and made her skin look sallow: no one with freckles should wear that shade of orange. It looked large and probably had been given to her. It was the waif in Beth. Miriam was always bringing her things too. She would have liked to show Beth how to dress but had somehow never managed to get onto that subject.

  “Loving is just how I react, interact with another.”

  “Nonsense,” Beth said cheerfully. She had a way of contradicting without malice that Miriam enjoyed. “What’s called loving is part sexual service—mutual or not. Part of what I call life-support functions: all those daily jobs that make the house to function like cleaning the toilet and making food to appear and garbage to vanish and beds to be usable and floors to be passable and clothes to be wearable. That assure the house has in it what’s used for blowing the nose and making the headache go away and putting salve on the sore thumb. Part is plain body servant. Part is emotional self-titillation. Playing dramas with, around, under another person to make you feel alive. That’s what I see people meaning when they talk about love. That’s what I used to mean.”

  “That’s not loving, that’s just living with somebody.” Dorine said. “You can do all that and not be in love.”

  “Right, but why? Why sign that contract without pay, just for keep? Because you say to yourself you’re in love. If you lived with another woman, would you take on doing all that?”

  “Dorine does it all in our household, already.”

  “And aren’t you a little bit in love?” Beth smiled at Dorine.

  “It’s just that I admire him a whole lot. I know he doesn’t care about me.”

  “Jackson? Oh dear.” Dorine’s face hurt Miriam. Dorine’s heart-shaped face with its look of resignation. Miriam saw Dorine suddenly as waiting on Jackson’s attention, as waiting hopelessly, passively for him to like her, for him to grant her dignity as a person. It was seeing in Dorine the caricature of her own waiting. It was feeling the iron pain of wanting, wanting, wanting him to love her.

  She began to cry and for a moment she could only sob while tears ran out. Beth and Dorine were staring. She could not even speak to reassure. She could only weep a
nd weep, heavily. It seemed to her that her pain went deep into her childhood, plunging harsh roots into her earliest sense of self. It was the waiting for the good morning when Sonia would suddenly lift her back into her lap, the only loved baby again. It was the waiting for the good evening when Lionel would suddenly beam on her and love her as his own darling girl, would suddenly see how good she was and love her. It was the constant striving to prove herself worthy, the constant struggle to win the love that must surely come, that was surely promised her. It was Jackson’s enigmatic face that must surely open, his eyes that surely must finally see her and love her and redeem her and accept her as his woman.

  Beth came and put her arms around her, light arms enfolding. As Miriam sat in the kitchen chair, Beth was leaning forward over her, stroking her face and hair. Strange to feel Beth’s softness. Not like a mother holding. Gentle firm hand on her hair and cheek. Slowly the tears eased.

  “I don’t know what got into me, to make me do that.” Miriam scrubbed her eyes gently, blew her nose hard. “Really. It wasn’t what you said, Dorine.”

  Beth backed off and went to sit on the bed. “You do know why you cried!”

  “Oh, sometimes he gets to me. Sometimes I wish I’d never met him.” Even as she said that a desolation crept in her nerves. To live without him … bleakness, emptiness.

  “I don’t understand it. I like him,” Beth said. “He’s obviously a much better man for you than Phil? Can’t you see that?”

  “Leave off your broad didactic manner for the rest of the afternoon, would you, Bethie? Please?”

  Dorine laughed nervously. “He’s not always nice, Beth. He has a streak of meanness. I guess every man does.”

  “But you don’t have a streak of meanness in you?” Beth was sitting lotus position, something she had recently learned to do.

  “Not the same way.…” Dorine wrinkled her nose, surprised by the question. “I have bitchy days. I get fed up, especially at work.”

  “Do you act mean, then?”

  “If I did, I’d be fired. You have the same kind of job, you know what I mean. They keep telling me to smile.”

  “So you come home and take it out at home?”

  “No … I get depressed. Sometimes I just want to go to bed and lie there and never get up. I hate myself then.”

  “You turn it inward. Just as I do. But I’m trying to learn to get mad. Even if I can’t express it directly, I want to know I’m mad. It’s hard for me to express anger; all my life I’ve been trained to turn it inside.”

  “I don’t have any trouble getting mad,” Miriam said. She was feeling more herself. She was ashamed of crying. She had exposed parts of herself that were not appropriate. She spoke firmly, to make up for what had slipped out. “I had an interview the other day and this glib psych type started telling me how I could only expect a certain level of job since I’m a woman, implying what an unfeminine thing it was to have expectations that I might be paid what I’m worth or want to do something technically interesting. I figured I wasn’t about to get a job there anyhow, so I let him have it.”

  “I wonder if you find it so easy to get mad when it counts?” Beth looked at her, head perched to one side. “I used to get mad sometimes at my husband. Then I learned not to. Because he was bigger and stronger and he could punish me, he could make it cost too much.”

  “I’m not married to either of them. I’m independent. Look, I’m not in the same bind other women get into—maybe I’ve been lucky. My work is at the center of my life, and no matter what happens with Phil or with Jackson, I go on doing that.”

  “That’s true.” Dorine sighed, holding out her hand as if to signal a halt. “I envy you that, I really do. What can being in the typing pool mean to me? It’s a burning waste of time. A machine could type bills and invoices all day. Most of the girls, they’re around my age and they hope to get married, or they’re older and back to work. The kids are in school and the family needs the money, they can’t get along on what the old man makes. It’s not a salary you can live on. You can’t have a life on it, not an apartment, not a car.”

  Beth said, “I’m trying to make a center to my life that isn’t a man. My job’s not quite as bad as yours, but it’s nonsense too. But I’m trying to make a center in my own self.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Miriam said. “But you seem to me to know who you are.”

  “Not yet. I’m trying. So much of it is undoing things. Finding that I’m not what people told me I was. I don’t know, Miriam, maybe you don’t have the same difficulties as Dorine with men, but I can’t understand about Jackson. You should be so right together.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “I have. You know how he can play off his silences. I come away thinking what a boob I am to dare to ask. Or else I think I got an answer and it isn’t till I try to say it over to myself I realize I got nothing.”

  “Eppis. Welcome to the club.”

  “Oh, he says some things. He says you won’t be a real woman. He says you’re afraid to be a real woman with him.”

  A shield buckled in her and she cringed. Scalding anger. How could that son of a bitch say that when she tried so hard with him? Real woman her ass. Scalding jealousy he would say that to Beth. “You know, if I ever said to him he wasn’t a real man, he’d never touch me again. But he can say that about me. God help you if you’re made of flesh and blood instead of moonshine and you don’t exactly fit those idols he hauls around.”

  Beth leaned forward anxiously. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I don’t ever understand what people mean when they say things like that. They’re a real good way of putting each other down, that’s all I know.”

  “Sometimes when you talk with him, I feel a little jealous. Isn’t that silly?” Miriam said.

  Beth looked stricken. “But he talks to me as if I’m a child. He’s patronizing.”

  “At least he talks to you,” Dorine said. “He just listens to my troubles like a shrink and nods his head.”

  “Bethie, I don’t know why he makes me jealous. I’m never really jealous of Phil, who gives me six times the cause.”

  “Maybe you don’t love Phil,” Dorine said.

  “Don’t say that. I do. It’s a different kind of loving, but I love him. I don’t feel he’s holding back on me the way Jackson does.” Strange too to think that they would never sit around, the three of them, talking about Phil in the same way they did Jackson. Phil did not play the father, the judge, the external patriarchal conscience. “What Phil is, he shares with me. Maybe if you feel a man is really with you, then you don’t get jealous when he’s with someone else. But if he’s not giving you what you want, maybe you mind everything he gives anybody else, even the time of day.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Beth said. “Mostly I’ve been interested in men who hadn’t anything to do with me. Most people don’t notice me anyhow.”

  “I was sick with jealousy after John broke up with me. Sick.” Dorine closed her eyes, lifting her face blindly. “I used to lie in bed knowing he was upstairs with her. I could have shared him with her, I really could, if only I’d felt he still cared about me. But to be thrown out like that. It made me feel used. That I was a thing he wanted and then got tired of. When he comes over with Rick, I still can’t bear it. He acts as if nothing had ever happened between us, he just says hi and gives me a vacant look. He doesn’t even see me. He doesn’t care that I always leave.”

  “You shouldn’t live there, I think sometimes,” Beth said.

  “But I want Dorine with me. I’d be lonely without her. And she doesn’t have enough money to live by herself.”

  “Where would I go?” Dorine shrugged. “It’s better with Miriam in the house. Being the only woman was bad. Ryan used to talk as if I was beneath contempt. Chlorine, he called me. I wouldn’t go back to Going-to-the-Sun for anything. That was bottom.”

  “I don’t know … I’ve been thinking,” Beth said. “I’ve liked living alone.
But now I’m thinking maybe I’d like to live in a house with other women.”

  “Just women?” Dorine made a face. “Like a dormitory.”

  “If they were women you liked? It doesn’t mean you couldn’t see men. In a house with other women, you couldn’t end up like you were in Going-to-the-Sun.… Anyhow, I’m not trying to do it this week. But it’s on my mind.”

  “But why?” Miriam asked her. “I think of you as being satisfied by yourself, being complete. I can’t imagine living with a bunch of other women.”

  “Why? Why shouldn’t we help each other sometimes, instead of always giving and giving and taking care of men and making them feel strong? I have nightmares too. I’m scared too. Going on from day to day trying to make myself be the kind of person I want to be, I need support. I want help.… I daydream too much. I make a new world in my head. I’m strong and heroic inside, where it’s easy.… I’ve been going to a group of women that meet together at M.I.T. and talk once a week and that’s made me think a lot about other women.… That, if we have the same problems, maybe we can help each other too.…”

  As they went back home on the subway, Miriam puzzled why she disliked Beth’s idea so much. Perhaps if Beth lived in a house with other women she would have less time to be her friend. She saw more of Dorine, but she cared far more for Beth. She admired Beth, which was rare for her to feel for another woman. Beth was different but equal. A desire to please Beth rode around with her always, along with the desire to please Phil and Jackson. She would buy Beth little gifts of a scarf or a bag of organic figs or some apricot leather to eat, just as she brought Phil poetry or wild shirts. For Jackson she bought books about ideas that people were arguing about—books by biologists explaining war as mammalian aggression, books inventing categories of social consciousness—and tobacco for his pipe.