Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  “Phil, she didn’t say anything like that. She was saying that if an act is supposed to mean something, that meaning had better be made clear. After all, it’s hard to see how blowing up the women’s John has clear strategic value.”

  “If that’s what she meant, why didn’t she say that? Big Mama Berg is taking over. Let her say what she means, if she means anything at all.”

  Beth had taken advantage of Miriam’s intervention to flee to Dorine’s room. Miriam followed. Beth was sitting on the bed’s edge with her head on Dorine’s shoulder, while fat tears slid down her nose. Dorine was wearing her sheepskin coat ready to leave.

  “Shut the door,” Beth hissed. “Shhh. I’m ashamed to react this way! Oh, I wish I was better with words!”

  “Phil can talk circles around an auctioneer. I never get the better of him in an argument.”

  “But you can stand up to him! I put so much effort into breaking through the wall of fear, of doubt of myself, what comes out is an anticlimax. I’m such an idiot.” She sat up and blew her nose.

  “At least you try,” Dorine said. “I don’t even do that.”

  “Why do you get so frightened in a little argument?”

  Beth blew her nose again. “It’s crossing taboos. You know, asserting myself, contradicting somebody. Even to argue with somebody means you’re saying you’re right and they’re wrong.”

  “Not necessarily. Phil argues for the fun of it. He’ll take a position just to contradict somebody else.”

  “But don’t you see, that’s the thing that makes it hard—that it’s naked competition. A contest. Well, I wasn’t brought up to put myself forward in open competition. I try, I kick myself in the behind until I open my mouth.”

  Beth and Dorine giggled together, Dorine saying, “How do you kick yourself in your own ass?”

  Beth said, “Well, it’s easier when you always have your foot in your mouth.” They got up and began checking the room for objects Dorine had forgotten to pack, slippers beside the mattress, a drawing of her Lennie had done when they were first together tacked to the closet door.

  “I wonder why I can argue, then? If it’s upbringing? I come from just as male-centered a home as you do.” Miriam drifted in their wake, feeling sorry for herself. Why did Dorine have to move out? She hadn’t ever wanted Beth to take Dorine away, only to get her on her feet again.

  “Oh, you believe in it, like they do,” Beth said.

  “Believe in what?” Miriam was holding herself. Leaving her, leaving her. People were always leaving her.

  “Words!” Dorine spoke with surprising firmness. “All those words. That theorizing. You think it means something, just like they do. You can do it too.”

  “I wish I could,” Beth said. “I want to be better with words. I want to be able to answer them back. But I don’t believe that’s how you do anything. I only want to use words as weapons because I’m tired of being beaten with them. Tired of being pushed around because I don’t know how to push back.”

  “You’re wrong if you think I take the conversations in this house seriously. Most of it is just playing around.”

  “I don’t think so,” Beth said slowly. “It’s more. I think it’s a way of putting things in their place and people in their place and keeping them there.”

  “Oh, Bethie. They argue with each other all the time. It’s jaw exercise. It’s Indian wrestling.”

  “In a society where people were ranked for Indian wrestling, people would practice it a lot. They’re making a pecking order.”

  “Bethie, how come you argue with me so well? Aren’t those words you’re using?”

  “I’m not afraid of you. You’re my friend.”

  “How can you be afraid of Phil? You confuse verbal violence with something real. And don’t you think Jackson is your friend?”

  “If I’m not his equal, how can I be his friend? He treats Orpheus as more of an equal than me.”

  That night Jackson moved his stuff into the room that Dorine had been using. The room could not immediately regain its air of neglect, for Dorine had circumspectly cleaned it, but it took on that Spartan grimness of all Jackson’s dwelling places. The mattress, devoid of sunflower spread, sagged. The walls without prints or posters stood bleak and grimy. Without curtains the window gaped on the wall of the house next door. Still for a week or so the room mingled their odors before the scent of her perfume, her bath powder and her sweat faded into Jackson’s pipe and grass and socks and harsher sweat, the damp wool of his socks drying on the radiator and his boots wet from snow cooking beside it.

  Phil had gone through weeks of excited castle building while Hal was cutting his first album that included Phil’s “Hudson Blues”:

  The Hudson River

  runs deep but wide.

  That’s Jersey’s smoking

  on the other side…

  He could taste the money he was going to make. He would get free of tending bar, life would be easier, looser, less haggard. He would get off the bottle, he would only dope for the goodness of it, no more deadening escape.

  The record came out and faded into the record stores. It crept along. Everybody assumed that Phil in fact must be making a mint, but Phil received what amounted to one twenty-fifth of a cent out of the total royalties allotted to songwriters who couldn’t command bigger fees: perhaps a more minute amount than his or her mind could grasp. It had come so far to something like $347. Phil had spent more than that celebrating the wealth that was to come to liberate him.

  Still he could not quite relinquish his dreams. The album was still selling, though slowly. The song would turn to gold yet and he would quit Finnegan’s and be born again. Late at night when they used to lie making love and sharing their minds, he talked into the dark obsessively of the time when Going-to-the-Sun had begun to play his songs and he had tasted a local celebrity. He wrote little now, he hardly ever sat down to work on a poem or a song. He had had a bad fight with Joe centered around the extent to which he was doing hard drugs, a bitter fight that had left Phil with a sour brooding anger, a sense that Joe no longer trusted him. Phil had got into the habit of spending more and more time in the bars talking. He had bar friends who got off on hearing him spiel, hearing him float intricate worlds of fantasy on the drifting smoke. That instant audience hooked him. Still, when Hal came to Boston in December to play some gigs, Phil’s dreams revived. One night when Phil was invited to a party at Hal’s motel, he dragged Miriam along after insisting he supervise what she wore. He had her dress flamboyant and sexy.

  They had good hash and poor catered food. She danced for a while, but she had put in a long day at work and by eleven she wanted to sleep. She managed to avoid letting Hal actually corner her long enough to make a move. He had a girl with him, long and blond and silent, as he had his luggage and instruments and his golden chow, but he was obviously curious to try Miriam. Phil kept away. They had a small scene between them before he would leave.

  When they finally got home he was moody and mean. “Aw, would it have hurt you to fuck him?” he said in the face of her sore joking. “You said yourself he’s attractive.”

  “Abstractly. He doesn’t attract me. Besides, I wouldn’t go to bed with the grooviest man in the world while his girl friend is sitting there brooding on the whole show.”

  “Aw, come on. She wouldn’t have said boo.”

  “I know it. That’s what I mean.”

  “Aw, shit, get off it. You’ve gone to bed with plenty of studs for no good reason. This was a good reason.”

  “To you. Why the hell don’t you fuck him?”

  “You think I wouldn’t, to get out of that bar?”

  “Phil, you’re being silly. My ass isn’t worth that much to him. He’s used to getting laid wherever he goes. It wouldn’t do you any good, and it would nauseate me. Besides, you know damned well I’m not getting involved with anybody outside this household.”

  “What’s the use of that horse shit? Do you think I care? Let J
ackson lay his purity rap on the cat, makes as much sense. He’s turned on by you because you’re vital and sensuous and then he wants to put you in a can.”

  “Amen. But that’s how it is. I have enough trouble dealing with the scene in this house.”

  “Sacrificing me to him again. He always wins. Have you noticed that? He thinks it’s because he’s Clark Kent, the All-American Boy. Pure as Ivory Soap, wholesome as Mom’s apple pie. He can kiss my sweet ass.”

  “You never really fight. You say that to me. To him you’ll make a joke. You fight each other through me. You never take each other on directly.”

  “Aw, your ass. I’m not afraid of Jackson. I can take him any time and he knows it.”

  “What does that mean? I’m saying you never talk straight to each other about what’s wrong.”

  “We understand each other.” Phil drew himself up straight to glare at her. “I said, we understand each other!”

  “I doubt it. You both go out from your front lines and make signs at the other. You have rituals.”

  “Trying to make trouble between us. That’s what you’re always after.” Narrowing his sea-colored eyes to squint at her, he shook his forefinger in her face slowly. His eyes looked out of focus.

  “Phil, that’s vicious nonsense. I want you to communicate. I want us all to understand and help each other. I’m tired of the two of you fighting your status wars through my body.”

  “She’s tired.” He pirouetted to the mirror. “She’s tired. What has she done to get tired?” He flung himself on her bed, crossing his arms over his chest. Hollowly he intoned, “Here lies Philip Francis Boyle, a has-been in his twenties and now aging fast, about to pass that dreadful barrier to middle age. I talked it out. The body of Philip Francis Boyle lies in dribs and gobbets in all the bars and pads and coffeehouses and pissparlors of Cambridge. And the biggest, the juiciest part of all …” He rose on his elbow to tap Miriam’s stomach. “The Great Ear. The ear and the womb and the stomach. All absorbing bodies. All digesting bodies. Woman, you’ve swallowed me!”

  “Oh!” She turned from him. “The black widow myself! Wow! Just wow! Your brains are full of metaphors spinning idly. That’s about the ugliest thing you’ve ever said to me! If I’m so horrible, why don’t you leave? You’d better get out while the going’s good!” She seized him by the wrist and yanked at him, pulling him off the bed so he landed on his behind with a crash. “Now get out!”

  “Ow! Owww!” Foaming and cursing he lunged at her. “That does it, bitch!” He swung at her and she ducked but not fast enough. His fist caught her in the face, hard enough to knock her down. She sat down in a heap, twisting her leg.

  He stood over her with his fists trembling and she shielded her face, afraid he would hit her again. But something cracked then and he fell forward over her, mumbling and beginning to weep. “Just like my old man! My old man all over again.”

  Leaning back against the closet door, she held him. “There, there, Phil. We shouldn’t do this to each other.”

  “Did I hurt you? I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

  “I think you sort of did.”

  “Yeah. There might be a bruise. Let me get some ice.”

  The next morning she had a black eye to carry to work. Everyone there immediately asked her what had happened. She said she had been mugged. No, he had not got her purse: she had screamed and fought back. The assailant had run off.

  She was sure that if she had come up with an accident story—I ran into the door, I bumped into a post—no one would have believed her. But to say she had been mugged fit into everyone’s urban mythology straight away, until Fred Weathering asked her, “A black guy, uh?”

  “No,” she said firmly. “He was blond and clean-shaven.” But Fred looked skeptical. She liked Fred less and less. He had adopted a hearty avuncular manner toward her, but she could never quite relax. Between her and the men she worked with was the smelly memory of Ryan’s and Manganäro’s bet. With Jaime she did not worry because his passions had more to do with gadgets and games than women; and with Neil she had begun not to worry. He was quiet and clear: she could not imagine him speaking about women to any man at the office. He was almost old-fashioned in his consideration and his courtesy. She felt guilty when he questioned her about the mugging and scolded her for hitchhiking. He often seemed a little worried in his inquiries: it was partly his manner and the tone of his reserve. Not a man who pushed on anyone; if she had to have a boss she preferred it to be him. A good idea, a good piece of work produced an instant concentration from him that was a reward.

  “Miriammmm,” he said her name when he saw her passing and called her into his office, when he came to ask her something. His voice dwelt on the m’s, tasting them. With his quiet arrivals he aroused tension in Fred, who she had begun to suspect was working beyond his depth technically. He was a bluffer and not a good one, unlike Ted, Abe’s favorite who held everybody spellbound at his seminars and often made one of the team to get contracts or to renegotiate contracts on which as usual they were not managing to come in on schedule. No, Fred bluffed desperately and therefore poorly and he could not bluff Neil. So he was uneasy and at times haggard. When he tried to bluff her, she had to fight to contain her temper. Working with Fred she felt held back, and she preferred it when Neil gave her a piece to do alone. She felt he sensed that and tried to arrange the work that way. The younger technical people were divided between the Abe Tyler claque and the admirers of Neil, including her and Jaime who talked about him a lot together. She found Abe square and impersonal. He had a way of looking without looking, not quite hearing you. She never felt that way with Neil.

  She was talking with Sally on the phone, her legs in new boots propped up. She was running her fingers over their surface like the hide of a beautiful toad, interestingly rough, as she listened to Sally describe her physical condition in the ninth month. Lately Sally was enjoying her pregnancy, telling each sensation and change. She no longer feared giving birth alone.

  “Dorine did a drawing of me last night. She did me undressed. Just plain looking like this great big hill of a woman. You can see it’s me all right, peeking over the belly. I look uncomfortable but real proud. I put it up over my bed.”

  “I didn’t know Dorine could draw. Did Lennie teach her?”

  “Isn’t that the limit? Like if I didn’t ask her the very same thing. She gave me this real sad look. ‘You think I’d have dared draw anything around him? Can you imagine what he’d have said?’ ”

  “I’m embarrassed. So are you settling in over there?”

  “There’s lots of work, for real. Of course none of us knows how to do nothing useful. Between us we can’t put up shelves or fix the toilet that runs all the time, or put in a ceiling light. We can’t even turn up the pilot light on the stove that keeps going out. But we’re learning.”

  “How?”

  “Beth went to the library and got out a boy’s book called How to Fix Things Around the House. She figured there’d be some book. Beth says there’s always a book in the library about how to do anything.”

  “Now that Ryan’s out, there isn’t anybody who knows how to do anything useful here. That’s one male role I notice both my men reject.”

  “But otherwise, you still like it, huh? We were kind of hoping you might move in. We have an empty bedroom for you.”

  “That’s nice, but I do enjoy polygamy. It suits me.”

  Passing, Jackson had given her the usual ironic stare, the raised eyebrow and slight smile with which he always commented on her telephone conversations—though he spent as much time on the phone. But at the last sentence he turned and glared.

  Getting off the phone quickly, she went after. “Now what was that dirty look for?”

  “Polygamy, hm? I don’t remember marrying again.”

  “That’s a figure of speech. You don’t imagine Sally understood me as saying we had a three-ring ceremony at the circus?”

  “I’m sure nature child didn�
��t understand much. Do you consider yourself married? To me? To us?”

  “I consider I’ve made a commitment to this setup. You make it clear enough you don’t want me getting close to anyone else. I don’t consider it marriage, but I do consider us a family, de facto.”

  “A de facto family. So I’m a de facto husband.” They were arguing in the hall. He stood with his hands behind him as if to keep them out of sight, out of reach, as if to emphasize that he would not touch her.

  It was cold in the hall with a draft whistling through. She held herself across the breasts, pulling the mustard shawl closer. “This is stupid. What’s got you uptight with me now, all of a sudden?” He had made them a pleasant lunch of scrambled eggs with bits of cheese and tomato, and they had sat on at the table long after it talking out a fantasy about what they would do if she had a computer console in her room the way Abe Tyler and some of the big shots at Project MAC did—all the games they would play on a computer, all the work they would make it do for them. Now the damp wind from the swamps of his mistrust was blowing. Perhaps any time they were loose and easy together had to be paid for, soon.

  “Marriage does not amuse me, strangely enough. I do not feel married. If I did, I’d jump out the window. Any window, any door, any fire escape, any loophole, any drain.”

  “Jackson, have I ever said to you I want to get married?”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “No, because you understand everybody better than they understand themselves, because you’re so wise. Supposing I will get married in a few years. How in hell do you presume I’d marry you? What would I get but a lot of grief?”

  “Pardon me.” He drew himself up. His eyelids drooped, his mouth curled. “I expect you’re shopping for a nice uppermiddle-class hubby. A professor with tenure and good prospects to carry you out to Utopia. Surely out past Route 128 there’s a fancy development in rolling hills called Utopia?”

  Why did that immediately make her think of the men who worked at Logical and why did that make her feel guilty? His eyes cold, his body drawn up rigid, his voice edged with contempt: it was all no good. It wasn’t better. Tears suddenly came loose in her. Gobbets of something raw and wet tearing loose. It hurt to cry, broken open. She could not breathe, she had to lean on the wall hiding her face in her shawl. “It’s so bad! So bad!”