Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  Borrowing sheets from the general supply, Beth spread out a sleeping bag in the room she painted red and white. Dorine said it looked like the inside of a candy cane, but this was the first time Beth had ever chosen what something was to look like. Miriam had made a lot of tie-dyed curtains when she lived in the house and left them when she moved out. Beth commandeered a pair for each of her windows. At Good Will in Cambridge she got a desk and chair, but a bed would have to wait till she had more money.

  Sally did not work. She earned a little cash making clothes for people or on consignment for stores that sold things women in the youth ghetto made. She sewed smocks and long dresses and long skirts and loose blouses, often in a patchwork of pieces fitted carefully. Sally spent a great deal of time getting things for the house cheaply or free. Being the only one who did not regularly bring money in, she made up by what else she brought them. She found Beth a free bed the next week. Laura had given her car, a six-year-old Saab, to the house when she came, and they all moved the bed.

  Sally’s resistance was mute, stubborn, and total. She was utterly unco-operative with the economic system. Marvelously inventive in ways to survive without a job, a husband, a family, a name, her life was filled with making and maneuvering. Sally’s mysticism was earthy, centered on cooking and feeding and growing plants and reading palms and her own body. She called herself Sally only: she said she had no last name because no woman had her own last name. Last names were to show possession and for the use of the state.

  She read nothing. She did not listen to the radio or watch the small television Connie had brought with her. She doubted all information from out there. She trusted words little. More than anyone else in the house she touched. Yet there was little sexual in her touch: it was a form of caring and direct knowledge.

  Once Beth heard Laura ask Sally, “Where do you come from?”

  “Out of a woman’s body.” Sally smiled. “Just like Fern and you.”

  Her voice was not from Boston. It was from Tennessee. Both children hung on her when she let them.

  Connie had been divorced by her husband; that is, she had agreed to the divorce and carried it out. “Was I supposed to keep him on a chain? He’d left anyhow.” Connie smoked all the time and Beth could not have shared a room with her, she would have got sick. Connie was thin and avid-looking with large nervous eyes and glasses she took on and off and on and off. She taught seventh grade in Newton. She had wanted to be a writer, she had wanted to work on a magazine, she had wanted to do anything except be a teacher. She had a boy friend who was also a teacher and divorced, who taught high school social studies. He was active in recycling. He came over on a bicycle and told them they should not have a car. Beth had trouble accepting that because she was just learning to drive, and driving was independence. He was always cornering one of them in the kitchen and telling them they should wash and flatten tin cans and keep each kind of bottle separate. When he caught her, Beth always invited him to do anything he pleased with their garbage.

  Dorine had returned to school part time to study biology. She had a theory that the next assault on people was going to be biological, that the power structure was going to do something hideous with genetics to breed a passive, idiot population of consumers, and that women had to take over biology before it was turned completely into a weapon. Dorine’s room sprouted women’s posters all over the walls. She told Beth for seven months she had been in a consciousness-raising group that had recently broken up, feeling they had gone as far as they could together. Several of them were working in a free clinic now. “Besides, this whole house is a continuous C-R group, you know?”

  Everyone was aware of Dorine’s tendency to become common maidservant, to do silently the tasks that others put off or forgot. Dorine herself would say out loud, “I’m doing it again, aren’t I?” when she automatically began picking up after the children or clearing the table while the others were still chatting.

  “Oh, my relationships with men …” Dorine sat at the head of her bed with her legs drawn up, hugging them. Beth sat cross-legged at the foot. “I don’t know that I can say they’re better. They’re shorter. Yeah, you might say that now I have short miserable affairs instead of long miserable affairs. Sometimes I can see what’s coming down in a couple of weeks and break it off, instead of letting it go on and on like a terminal disease, until the man gets nauseated and ends it. I suppose that’s some kind of change.” She made a face. “Nothing I would give a party to celebrate.”

  Laura was new to Beth, but at first she did not feel so. At first Laura was always reminding her of Karen because of wearing army surplus and acting loud and blunt and dogmatic. Laura told people very quickly that she was bisexual. She told that to Beth when they first sat down at the breakfast table together. Beth found herself shrinking, as if Laura might suddenly reach out and dominate her as Karen had.

  Laura did not become Karen more as the days passed, but rather Beth began to see Laura. She was aggressive in her speech. She talked loudly, she asked questions and contradicted the answers. Even upstairs Beth could hear her marching in the front door. She would let the door bang open and shout, “Hey, I’m home!” or “Back from the wars!” or “God, what a shitty day!” at the top of her lungs. “Where the fuck is everybody? What’s happening? Let’s get it on!”

  Beth noticed slowly that Laura made noise as much to give herself living space as to attack anybody. She was quick to take offense, quick to withdraw, quick to sense insult. She was perhaps the shyest woman in the house when it came to speaking of herself except in comical or mock heroic stories, and when it came to asking for anything at all.

  Laura had worked on a suburban paper: she had essentially written it and put it out. But when the paper went from weekly to daily, the owners brought in a new editor to put over her, because there could not be a woman editor. She was expected to go on doing the same job at the same wages, while he polished his editorials and lunched with business leaders. She had quit. Now she was working for an underground paper. She fought all the time with the men on the staff, but sometimes she won an inch, two inches. At least she could let her sexual identity and her politics hang out, she said, but often she was depressed about her battling role.

  Her relationships with men consisted mostly of pickups and brief adventures in which she was determined to remain unexploited emotionally. She said that without the house she would go crazy. Her bisexuality seemed to Beth more a thing she would argue to other women as necessary to their dignity than something she pursued. However, Dorine told her Laura had fallen in love with a woman at the paper and that they had lived together for two months. While Laura was covering a demonstration in Washington, the ex-boy friend had got the woman back. Laura had been badly hurt, and she was still protecting that large sore. She was convinced she had been sent out of town intentionally.

  Of the children Fern was the more physical, walking already and yanking at anything she could reach, tugging and tasting. Into whatever was left open, unlocked, ajar. David was the more verbal and moodier. Connie was always worrying aloud because he was the only male in the house. “Don’t fret, I’m gonna fill up the house with babies,” Sally said calmly. “I figure to have another little baby. Soon as I work through in my mind how I want to do it this time.”

  Because Beth was happy in the house and because the need for money forced her into a job as a typist downtown, and finally because the thought of Miriam married made her shy, it was awhile before she called. Miriam Stone, Mrs. Neil Stone, was her name. She had to find out that strange name before she could find her. Miriam Berg was no more. Women must often lose a friend that way, and never be able to find each other again.

  Saturdays, Laura was teaching her to drive. She barked, she teased, she tried to make Beth grasp too many things at once, but she was overall patient and Beth was learning. Amazingly the car obeyed her. When she was married, she had got a learner’s permit and Jim had begun to give her lessons. But the lessons happened le
ss and less often after the first few. Since Jim kept the car with him anyhow, she did not push. Now it would be a piece her car too, once she had her license.

  The next Saturday Laura had a conference to cover. Connie gave Beth a quick parking lesson in the morning before she took the car to run errands and drop David by his father’s for the day. So Beth called Miriam and asked if she could come over. Miriam sounded surprised and pleased, but the conversation kept being interrupted by someone asking questions behind her. Beth felt shy on the phone anyhow. After lunch she took a house bike. It was a long bike ride but the day was cool and buoyant and sunny, to be enjoyed.

  The house was on a corner lot, the lawn neglected and puddled. Freshly painted a dark gray with dark green trim, it was a big turn-of-the-century structure with a tower jutting out at the corner. In front the big maple was not yet in leaf and dense bushes made a bare and twiggy thicket on the side facing the cross street. It looked formidable because of the dark color or perhaps because, unlike their house, it did not seem to be standing ramshackle and wide open. She had a brief memory of childhood, of going to call on girl friends. In her neighborhood children did not ring the bell or knock. She used to stand outside and yell, “DO-LORE-ES! DO-LORE-ES! Come on out and play!”

  Slowly she climbed the steps. At least they were as sagging as her own. A ladder and cans of paint with colors dripped down their sides stood on the porch.

  “Beth! It is you!” Miriam hugged her, bulky coat and all. They made glad noises at each other as Miriam took her coat and they stood somewhat uncertainly in the huge high-ceilinged entrance hall. “Oh, the house. You don’t really want a damn tour, do you? It’s mostly a mess. Look, the beautiful woodwork, etc. Isn’t it somebody’s Moorish dream?”

  All around the entrances to the living room, dining room and den off the hall and on the stairway were carved wooden arabesques. High on the stairway was a stained-glass window. The living room had a marble fireplace. The few pieces of furniture huddled together around the hearth as if for warmth, a couple of Danish chairs and a couch consisting of cot and bolster.

  The dining room, in more usable shape, was furnished with big oak pieces, a round table on claw legs, a high glass-fronted cabinet. They drifted through to the kitchen. The front hall had been too imposing, the living room too empty, but the kitchen gave her a thread of connection. The stove was new and big with two ovens and the refrigerator too was new, but mostly the kitchen was old-fashioned with a pantry off it and a sagging floor covered with shabby linoleum showing older linoleum through holes. Miriam put on a kettle for tea and brought out some tins for Beth to choose. She picked Earl Grey for the lavender scent.

  Miriam’s lustrous black hair was loose on the shoulders of a dull golden Indian shift, embroidered down the front and at the hem with green and orange. That remembered warmth and kindness wove almost compulsively around Beth as she sat chewing whole wheat bread with grape preserves.

  “Yes, I learned to bake bread. Bethie, you can’t guess how sensual it is! It competes with fucking. The dough feels alive in your hands. Isn’t it delicious? I’m serious. Don’t I bake great bread?”

  Different, yes, but how? The year and a half had calmed and burnished Miriam. Beth watched her cross to the cupboard. Her gracefulness had taken a stately turn. Beth thought she could guess. Miriam had lost self-consciousness, she had settled more into her full body. No longer feeling so observed from many sides, she did not watch herself with that same nervously sexual wariness. She was not hunter or hunted. She was actually at home. Was that the result of her marriage? Beth began to wonder if she generalized about marriage from too small a base. Could marriage be good for Miriam?

  The bread was delicious. She stared at a pegboard studded with instruments whose uses were strange to her, choppers and grinders and whirls of wire and odd-shaped spoons. “Do you like to cook now?” Beth winced at the flatness of her question. It was a poor question for all that she wanted to pack into it. It stood for what she would have liked to ask outright. When she had last seen Miriam, Miriam had like her been fighting for her scrap of social dignity, survival as a person. Was it true then that a kitchen, a marriage bed made Miriam happy, this big dark gray house of Mr. and Mrs. Stone?

  As if Miriam read something of her intent, she gave Beth a slow sweet smile. “Stay to supper and find out.”

  “But you never did like to cook. The whole issue of food was a war between Jim and me—when I was married.”

  “You were married. Sometimes I forget.” Miriam dripped honey on a slice of dark bread. “I guess I was afraid if I gave any signs of liking the things women are supposed to I’d get stuck somehow. I wouldn’t be taken seriously in my profession. I’d get even worse treatment from the men I was involved with.”

  “I don’t enjoy ‘life support’ work. I don’t mind if everybody shares it, but nothing will ever make me like it.”

  “But I feel good as a woman now—Neil’s done that for me. I don’t feel like I’m battling all the time in every area of my life. For the first time in my whole life, somebody really loves me. I don’t have to fight him, I don’t have to be struggling on that front. I can enjoy being a woman. So I can do all kinds of things I never did, like cooking, like baking. And they give real pleasure to people, and to me.”

  “Why did you get married? Did you really want to?”

  “Yes!” Miriam clasped her hands on the table, leaning toward her. “Oh yes, Beth, I did! I wanted so badly for some man finally to gamble on me as a woman. Oh, you know he hurt me so bad.”

  “Jackson?” Beth said softly.

  Miriam nodded, “I was sick of being treated as a thing that couldn’t be trusted. Sick of being punished. Of being pulled and hauled and held off. Yes, deep inside I wanted somebody to say he really wanted me, really wanted to commit himself to me and mean it. Not to hold back the words, not to hold back the love, not to hold back his head or his hand or his trust. It felt so good! It still feels beautiful. I kept thinking at first, Neil doesn’t really see me, he’ll get disillusioned, he’ll withdraw. But he didn’t. Sometimes I dance around here by myself with joy. Thinking that I’m loved, finally I can love somebody without being charged my soul, without paying in blood.” Miriam rose and came around the table to put her hands on Beth’s shoulders. “I don’t mean to sound egotistical, wrapped up and wallowing in comforts. It’s just that it feels so nice to be happy for a change.”

  “You moved out of Pearl Street that winter?”

  “Apparently the night you left town. I had a fight with them. I felt fed up in a final, bitter, ugly way and I couldn’t take any more.” Miriam shuddered and sat down.

  “I was angry with you for not helping me. I know it’s irrational. I couldn’t get hold of you. But I was mad at you because you weren’t there to help me.”

  “I was angry at myself.”

  “I felt you let me down. But I don’t now. If I hadn’t let them scare me, everything would have been all right.”

  “Why did you stay away so long? Did you go back to him? Everybody thought you had.”

  “How could people think that! No. I was scared that he’d trace me. I made up my mind not to come back until I was free and clear.”

  “So you got a divorce?”

  “It’s a matter of time now. Everything’s worked out and I feel pretty secure. Part of me will always be a little scared until I’m free. Miriam, even if I loved somebody, I’d never get married again. It’s too scary.”

  “But that depends on the person. If you trust a man, it’s not scary. If you really communicate, if you love and trust each other—I know Neil wouldn’t want to hurt me. I know him.”

  “I guess I’d like to feel that way about somebody,” Beth said doubtfully. “I guess I would. But I don’t see what that has to do with asking the state to register you as a legal bind. If I trusted somebody and loved them, I’d figure they wouldn’t need to be tied up with a contract.”

  “But sometimes you want to make a
public statement, a public commitment about the way you feel. You want to be a family. I want to have kids with Neil, and sure you can do it the way Sally does, but not if you work at a job, not if you want your kids to get a good education. Sometimes you just want to stand up and say, ‘We are a family. We are together.’ ”

  “I could see some ceremony where you get married by saying so and divorced by saying so. But this is the patriarchal way, where you lose your name and become property. I’ve gone through it once, to be owned by somebody no matter what I want.”

  “If you loved a man a whole lot and trusted him, Bethie, it wouldn’t feel like ownership. It would feel like loving.”

  “You forget, I had the same training in falling in love as you did,” Beth said somberly, sitting up straight. “I did think I was in love with Jim.”

  Miriam gave her that sweet slow smile again and took her hand. “Thinking you’re in love in high school, full of true romances, is not quite the same as growing slowly to love somebody when you’ve been through a few men and you have some idea who you are. You won’t make the same mistakes.” Miriam stood up. “Now, you must agree to stay to supper, because then we can run down to the fish market and get a nice piece fish to feed you. But if you don’t and you won’t, I have to put the roast in. Come, will you eat my married food?”

  Beth stayed. “Sally said you married your boss. Doesn’t it feel funny at work? You are still working, aren’t you?”

  “Beth, you’re the limit!” Miriam put on her coat. “Marriage hasn’t changed my personality! I’m more of a person now, not less, because I’m not wasting all that energy fighting those I should be getting love and support from. Neil was head of the project I was working on. Naturally, I was put on a different project, and now I’m under Dick Babcock, not Neil. Worse luck.”