Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  Her office mate was balding around a scraggly brown beard that fell into two wispy points. He was married and had two children with a third on the way, and was just moving his family from a house in a tract in Woburn to a bigger house in a more expensive development in Lincoln. His desk bristled with photographs of his children.

  Just about everyone had long hair or a beard or both, although some of them wore tweedy jackets and some of them dressed in leather and some wore jeans. Only the president, Abe Tyler, was confined to mere sideburns, although the secretaries were sleek and soignée and wore make-up, and the only other woman in the place who had a technical job dressed like the secretaries, department store snappy. Miriam was a bit outstanding in that setting. She was grateful for having been hired and determined not to develop the legend that had tagged her at school. When Fred asked where she lived, she said she shared an apartment with friends.

  Although the technical staff looked hairy enough to have had the usual experiences of being hassled in the streets, threatened by police, pushed around, she could tell from their incessant talk that their life styles were pretty much suburban, with an overlay of hip clothes and dope and rock music. Most of them were married, most of them had children, most of them were buying homes and furnishing them way beyond their incomes. They spent warily, the worn copies of Consumer Reports circulating, but they were always buying something. They spent hours each day wandering with coffee cups through each other’s offices—Chemex coffee made fresh by the secretaries every two hours—to trade puzzles and games and gossip as often as real work problems.

  What had drawn her to Logical was that it was not a businessman’s company at all. It had been started by and belonged to research types. Abe Tyler and Dick Babcock and Neil Stone had got together two years before to create a place where they could do the kind of work they were interested in without a lot of pressure from business-oriented types: a place where they could function in a good loose creative environment for the development of their science. Logical was an exciting company with a lot of good people who’d been drawn by their names—they were all of some reputation, especially Tyler, although of the directors only Stone had his doctorate. The relaxed atmosphere and the chance to do work that was far out technically attracted people too.

  She would be working on a dynamite project that would be into pattern recognition and heuristic programing techniques, in the direction of artificial intelligence. It dovetailed beautifully with what she had been doing on her thesis. It was as far as possible from the dead-end programing jobs she had been offered. It was a chance to do something new and interesting that might even advance the state of the art. And she was to be paid for it a daydream salary, starting at ten thousand dollars a year. On that kind of money she should save half of it. Then she could quit or take a leave of absence and travel. She could make true all those imaginings with Phil. They could have a place at the shore the very next summer where everything would be clean and golden and baked by the sun, and Phil would look healthy again. He would be out of the city, away from Finnegan’s, away from dealers, away from the bad scenes where he talked himself out instead of writing.

  The compiler they were building with its sophisticated language would be a tool for people in the sciences who wanted to use computers but did not understand them, who would never have the time to waste learning an alien discipline. This sort of compiler would make it possible for a person to describe problems to a computer without being terribly precise, and the machine could work out the best way of proceeding. Whenever she thought of the possibilities inherent in the project, she felt excited, she had the feeling of being on the brink of something vital. It was a good sense, a high tight feeling in her chest. She had been right to wait for something meaningful; she was justified.

  Fred was working on the same project and so was Jaime Lesander, a delicate-looking boy—she thought of him as a boy although in fact he must be a year or so older than she was. He looked like a perennial undergraduate with porcelain features under a frizzle of dark blond hair. He was gentle and whimsical and she liked him. He and Fred played Go. Jaime always won but he was willing to play because he kept hoping that Fred’s game would improve. He brought Fred books in strange English, including a book of aphorisms translated literally from the Japanese.

  Their boss, if that was the right word since he was generally less authoritarian than Fred, was Neil Stone. It was the custom for everyone to call him Neil, never Mr. Stone. He wore a close curly dark brown beard. His eyes were hazel with a lot of green in them—or perhaps the walls did that. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and rumpled sports shirts that seemed too large. Every morning he came in looking brisk and neat. It was one of his endearing characteristics that within an hour of beginning serious work his tie was awry, his shirttails out, his shoelaces untied, his fly unzipped, his cuff button fallen off. When he had to go off to negotiate a contract or represent the company, Abe’s secretary Efi gave him an inspection and grooming. He was slender, wiry, of medium height. He was soft-spoken and moved quietly. Sometimes he would walk into her office and be standing there watching her before she was aware.

  Once she heard Fred on the phone to his wife call someone The Cat, and she knew at once it was Neil. That made her smile. He was clean, quiet, graceful and quick as a cat. She even thought she saw a bit of the cat about his eyes, tilted slightly. He was still ruddy from the summer. His nose was long and aquiline; she wondered if he was Jewish. He had that nose Mark glared at in the mirror, her mother’s nose. A shade more marked than her own. He was all in all a pleasant-looking man, in spite of his untidiness and the air he had of being about to lose a shoe or his pants. She especially liked when he smiled suddenly and his even white teeth showed in his beard. He had a good smile. His face crinkled up, his eyes danced, and his teeth gleamed.

  Only his hands were nervous. Often while he was talking his hands would tap, tap with a pencil, with a piece of chalk, with a ruler on the desk. Or they would walk over each other like long-legged spiders. He was very controlled, his low voice, his measured graceful movements, his explanations famous for their precision. If he said there were six points to be covered he never stopped with five. There was an elegance to his presentations that pleased her aesthetically: he was a good man at the board. Logical had a weekly seminar and his were always heavily attended. She enjoyed their Monday meetings to discuss the project. He was very controlled, except for that nervous vitality leaking out through his thin restless hands.

  “The truth is,” she told Beth, “far from it being a drag, I’m happier at work than any place else.”

  “Things aren’t better at home, uh?”

  “Not better. It isn’t what I wanted for us. I thought I’d be able to have a good relationship with each of them. But that isn’t happening. They’re sharing me. I don’t know … I suppose it takes a long time to work out a good relationship with anybody and longer with three or four than two.”

  “But it’s not getting better?”

  “Maybe I’m too demanding. They both think so. I don’t know what to think any more. I’m the medium but they’re the message—that’s what it feels like.”

  “Change your mind about living in a house with me and some other women?”

  “Beth, what do you want that for? You’re in a women’s liberation group now, right? Isn’t that enough support?”

  “It’s okay, but it’s just a consciousness-raising group that meets once a week. They’re students. They have different problems than I do, and it’s no use pretending I don’t feel that. They have families taking care of them, they have boy friends, and they’ll have professions. None of them are alone the way I am. They just plain can command more money, more help. Some of them give lip service to feeling close to women who work, and then they come out with things about organizing secretaries and say things that show they think secretaries are stupid and naïve.… No, I don’t feel I get that much help from them. I get frightened sometimes, I feel as if I’m
fighting the whole world and I must be wrong because everything, everything in the streets and the books and the media, all says I’m wrong. I need a warm place tool”

  One evening in middle November when Dorine called the hospital, she was told that Lennie had been released. Upset, Dorine spent several hours speculating why he hadn’t let her know before she got up the nerve to call his mother’s apartment. Lennie was there and she told him she’d hitch down to see him the next weekend.

  Sunday night Dorine came back with a temperature. “I’m sick of myself,” was all she would say. Other times she said she had caught a bad cold in the November rain. She did not go to work Monday or Tuesday but stayed in bed. Miriam brought her a radio to listen to WBCN and made soup and tea and toast, carrying breakfast and supper in on a tray. Dorine was collapsed, often weeping. Perhaps she was sick in order to be cared for. Although she was not really that weak, she would not read or try to sit up. She wanted to go back to her childhood and have her mother tiptoeing in to feel her forehead with a gentle hand, whispering concern about her for a change, instead of whispering to Dorine’s father secrets and plans from which she was excluded.

  Her throat was raw and her voice husky. It was Wednesday night before she wanted to talk about what had happened. “He’s out of the hospital, all right. Got a job already.”

  “In New York?”

  Dorine nodded. Her heart-shaped face lolled against the heaped pillows. Her hair was matted with sweat. “His aunt got him a job in the display department at Ohrbach’s.”

  “He isn’t coming back then? Does he want you to go to New York?”

  “For what?” Dorine let her lids shut. “He’s living at home and he’s got a girl already. He used to go out with her sister. The sister’s married and she brought Shirley to the hospital.”

  “Is he involved with her already? Are you sure?”

  Dorine’s eyes opened slightly. “So, he should wait? He’s changed cities, so he changes women. He says she’s sweet. She’ll pose for him and worry about him. After he moves out into an apartment, she’ll come and cook and do his wash. What do I care?”

  “Dorine, what happened? Was he cold to you?”

  “He came over where I was staying with my girl friend. We went to bed. Afterward he talked about Donna, the great love of his life. He isn’t in love with Shirley, he isn’t even pretending. It made me sick. Why should I go to New York? What does it matter, me or Shirley, we’re the same, a piece of ass that takes care. I’m thankful he didn’t marry me! He’d never have noticed the difference.”

  Thursday morning again Dorine did not get up to go to work, and when Miriam returned, Dorine was in bed waiting to be taken care of. Miriam began to be a little frightened. She did not say anything to Jackson, and Phil she could not speak to. He was taking so many things she couldn’t even tell what he was on. He had drifted off into a morass where she could not reach him. He was seldom interested in making love, his anger flared out at random gestures, phrases that struck him cross-eyed. Miriam would worry about that tomorrow. For the meantime she had acquired a sick child who would not get up. She called Beth.

  Beth came and shut herself up with Dorine. When she came out she said she was going to go ahead and look for a house they could rent: Beth, Sally, Dorine, and Miriam if Miriam wanted, and maybe Gloria from the Computer Center.

  “But what has that got to do with it?” Miriam asked plaintively. “Lennie doesn’t live here any more.”

  “That’s only part. She despises herself. She plays servant. It has to stop.” Beth stood with her arms crossed. Her hair was wet from the rain that fell for the fifth straight day, damp and lank against her cheeks. In jeans and an old shirt she looked like a little boy.

  “Why do you think setting up a convent is going to help her?”

  “Just a women’s commune—why does that upset you? If she still wants to see Phil, she can. I don’t think she will. I don’t think she’ll want to see anybody for a while. She has to learn to do things on her own terms.”

  “Bethie, what are you getting into? Want her to collapse on you? You want to play housemother to Sally and Dorine?”

  “I’m not going to take care of them. You do that more than I do, Miriam. You even play mama with me. But I can’t be mothered and I won’t play mother. I need them to live with. I want to help raise Sally’s baby. It’s not so farfetched.”

  “You’re lonely?”

  “Yes. At night, in the mornings, when I’m down.”

  Before Beth left she had coffee with Jackson and told him about her idea, asking where she should look for a house. Miriam came and went, making mint tea for Dorine and carrying it on a tray with cinnamon toast. She felt ashamed, how she twinged sometimes when she saw Beth talking with Jackson. She could not help guessing that Jackson must also be drawn to Beth. There was a woman he might love, without all the disadvantages of her life and character. No competition, no history with Phil.

  Perhaps she could use her jealousy to refine herself, to confront what she disliked. That night she said to Jackson, “I admire Beth a lot.”

  He looked at her blankly. “What?”

  She repeated herself. “She knows who she is very clearly.”

  “She’s a nice kid,” he said without interest. “Young and naïve. Phil was quoting Dylan Thomas the other day, and it came out she thought he was talking about two guys: Dill and Thomas. Like dill pickles, I suppose.” Jackson smiled tolerantly.

  “She hasn’t had an education.” Miriam sat up very straight. “She sits in on courses, you know.”

  “She’s a bit young and bugeyed. Just needs a few more times around the track.”

  “I thought you liked her.”

  “Sure. She’s a nice kid. I guess she has a bit of a crush on me.

  Miriam shut up. She should have been relieved. Her jealousy faded into light ashes and blew away. It should be a relief to feel nothing where pain had been. Why wasn’t it good? That he could not see Beth at all—she did not think he was covering up, he would perhaps have been willing to let her taste her jealousy longer if he had known—disquieted her. What did Jackson see when he looked at her, Miriam, if he saw so little of Beth? A silly question, yet she could not grasp how he could look right through Beth and see nothing.

  Dorine was packing. Phil took notice. But he said nothing to Dorine. To Miriam he said, “Well, Jackson can finally take his room back and stop being a bloody martyr about sleeping on that cot. That’s a lot more comfortable than the bed of nails I camp on.” Meaning the sofa in the room with the hi-fi, where in fact Phil never did sleep, since if Jackson was with Miriam, Phil invariably crawled in with Dorine.

  No, it was Beth he picked the fight with, when she came to help Dorine finish packing. Dorine had signed the lease. All the others had some gross liability in the eyes of the landlord. Phil had been making jokes about Beth using Dorine to get the house, and Dorine as landlady and janitor extraordinary. But he went at Beth as soon as he could confront her, not about Dorine but about a bombing at Tech Square. A bomb had gone off in the women’s John, wrecking some plumbing and files in the office next door and damaging the ceiling.

  “Well, I thought it was kind of stupid,” Beth said, lowering her head.

  “Oh?” Phil smiled broadly, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. “How would you have done it intelligently? That should prove interesting to hear.”

  Beth swallowed visibly. Her adam’s apple swelled. “Well, first, they didn’t make it clear why they did it.…”

  “I think that would be clear enough. Is there anybody left alive who doesn’t know why our people bomb university buildings?”

  “I should think a lot of the secretaries didn’t understand. Now there’s no toilet. We have to go downstairs.”

  “Oh, pardon me. The secretaries have to go pee downstairs, so of course it was stupid to bomb the computer complex. It’s terrible how some of the boys who are drafted disturb the secretaries in the draft centers, too.”r />
  “They don’t understand why it was done. We don’t know what happens inside the computer. We don’t know what that stuff is. You have to make things clear to people. The workers in a place never know more than their little piece.” Beth sounded muffled and frantic. Miriam could see it was hard for her to argue. She could not quite look at Phil. She would glance quickly at him and then duck her chin again. Her throat sounded constricted.

  “The workers who make napalm don’t know what they’re doing, so it’s dreadful rude to fuss about it, picketing and boycotting and all. Your logic is marvelous, dear. I bet the other secretaries think the same way, if that’s what you call it.”

  “It isn’t enough to be big conspirators.” Beth’s voice was shaking with anger. “If you don’t explain to people the meaning of what you’re doing, it’s just to make you feel better.”

  “You, you? Darling, I didn’t blow it up, I beg your pardon.”

  “Whoever did! It was a bad time. I’ve been trying to talk to them about how we really are workers and we ought to relate to each other and help each other, and not to who we work for …”

  “That’s what people always say, have you ever noticed? That’s Jackson’s line, the theoretical radical for whom any action in the real world is always incorrect. There’s always somebody to criticize and say, ‘If you hadn’t rushed into it prematurely, if you’d gone on talking about it another six months, one year, two years,’ as if people could win any battles sitting talking to each other.”