Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  So she had left Washington scared. Scared she was becoming what Wilhelm had suggested. Scared of losing herself. Scared of falling into a mire of being used, abused, handled, disregarded, degraded. Miriam, twenty-five-year-old bag of sexual tricks and good times for busy gentlemen. Wilhelm disliked Neil, but then she was not sure she did not dislike Wilhelm. She felt chilled to the bone, frozen like winter mud through to her spine. She had indeed followed her curiosity into his elegance and cynicism and learned something, but the face this knowledge wore was the skull. Back to Neil, quickly. She could not read on the plane, she detested chatting with Dick, who sat beside her. Would he say anything to Neil? Unlikely. He could not after all be sure anything had happened. He could only suspect. She stared at the white masses of cloud and longed to be back with Neil instantly. Right now to fall into his arms and tell him Yes, Yes, Yes, quickly before he changed his mind and turned from her.

  Side by side they sat on their new Danish couch, teak and black leather, with the new free-form teak coffee table bought at Harbor Design the week before and just delivered.

  “You talked so long on the phone to our keypunch operator, I was afraid there would be nothing left for me,” he teased her.

  “How do you like the couch? Does it feel good?”

  “Finally we can do a little living in our living room. I’m tired of sitting around the dining-room table all evening. Now perhaps you should do something about the windows? Draperies? Shutters? I don’t care. Something interesting. Just so we haven’t the present option of looking at the people’s TV across the street or the inside of a window blind.”

  “We have to start going around to antique-junk shops to find another chair or two. Maybe a leather chair. Or something carved. I think we should have old pieces in the house too. But isn’t this comfortable?”

  “I told you—in all my years of sitting in people’s houses on what they call couches, this is the only object I ever rested my behind on that didn’t make it complain.”

  Miriam slid over and curled up, her head on his slightly bony shoulder. Neil put his arm around her. So good to know she could approach him without having to take atmospheric readings: that he would like to have her touch him, that he would not likely decide she was impinging or corrupting or undennining him by displaying her affection. “You let me love you—that’s the nicest thing about you.”

  “The nicest thing about you is doing it. You’re so funny. Why wouldn’t I permit you to love me? Do you think I’m crazy? I know a good thing when I see one.” His hand slid down her arm to cup her breast.

  “Loving is great—everybody should have someone to love him or her. That’s what this country needs.”

  “Indeed. I can’t imagine either of us starting a war.”

  “I must say, I’m glad you’re overage for fighting one.” He did not know how some men measured out their love like platinum. In a general way he knew about her past involvements, but he would never quite understand. “Neil, you’re good for me. You can’t comprehend how much you mean to me—”

  His hand tightened on her breast. “Before I met you, I was lonely, Miriam. Just as they say fish would have no word for water or birds for air, I never said to myself I was lonely because it was a constant in my life, not a variable. I never learned to reach out, to open up, to be with others. But as soon as you touched me, you opened me up.”

  “I want to make you happy. I want to be good for you. Sometimes still I mistrust myself. I think I can’t possibly be what you want for the rest of your life, because you really are a good person, Neil, in a way I’m not.” She curled up closer. “But I’m trying! Trying hard.… Are you happy? Am I succeeding?”

  “Of course I’m happy. We’re still learning about each other and how to communicate and how to please. I love you, Miriam, but I’m not capable of saying so in ten different ways. I don’t have that gift of words. I think we’re doing well in our marriage. I know that sometimes I’m awkward. I don’t have practice in knowing what a woman likes.”

  “Practice on me. Practice makes perfect.”

  “There’s one more thing I think about.… Here we are in our own house. A big house with plenty of room. I’m thirty, you’re twenty-six. We’re not kids. I was so late finding my own woman, we’re behind for our ages. Shouldn’t we start a family? It would get Mother off our backs. I know you don’t like that needling. But they say it’s harder to have a baby later on, harder to conceive, harder to carry and deliver.”

  She shrank. A child. Baby lying there in front of them, she tried to see it. But he was right, time was passing in her as well as outside. He wanted a child very much; she had promised him a child. Why not soon? After all, her efforts to get back into doing research that meant something had failed abjectly. Abe could save that six months crap for somebody who hadn’t observed that the company was always short on money, always in debt to the bank, and that there were always favorites who alone got to play their own games, as Wilhelm would have said. By the time she had the baby and took off a few months, they’d be done with the missile contract. She’d get a crack at something good. In the meantime she’d finish her thesis, get her doctorate, and put herself in a better arguing position, with more leverage.

  A baby in her arms. That whole adventure. To feel life in her quickening, to grow large with life. She would be a real woman then, she would be what they had all tried to prove she was not. Jackson with his carping. Becoming a mother, she would contain her mother and no more miss her and no more carry that old guilt. She would prove them all wrong. She would prove that Neil was right to love her and marry her, to take a chance on her. She would validate her womanhood. She would bear her own baby to love as hard as she could.

  She saw herself stepping proudly through her pregnancy, ripe as a pear and glowing, full and bountiful as a sheaf of ripe wheat. Suckling her own baby. Her flesh moved. She would have Neil’s child and he would love her even more, they would really be bound together securely, they would be a family. She would be strong for her child, strong in loving.

  She could feel Neil waiting: patiently, patiently but with a marked tension. He wanted that from her, he wanted it badly. She would satisfy him. She would be a mother, a good mother, warm and nurturing and protective. Why not? “You’re right, it is time. Okay, let’s go upstairs and make a baby. Maybe we can get it together. It’s about the right time of month, I think. Why not?”

  22

  In the Fullness of Time

  Until the early fifth month she had not been visibly pregnant, she had borne the slight bulge encompassed within the curves of her full body. Thereafter she had begun to show but continued active and enjoying herself until halfway through her eighth month she took a leave of absence from Logical. She was feeling fine and could have gone on working, but she wanted off the project and she wanted to finish her thesis before the baby was born. The summer had melted away, leaving her little advanced, and she had not managed to get back to it since.

  She looked forward to having days in the house to work on her thesis, to shop for baby things, to fix the house up. She felt as if she had not had a real vacation since she was nineteen. Always she had been in school or working or both. Always she had been engaged in making a living, worried about her progress in her work, anxious and responsible. Now she had only to wait: moving inexorably toward an event that was inside her and would happen involuntarily as weather and yet she had chosen that it happen. To meet a person who did not yet exist but was present. The heartbeat under her heart.

  When she spoke, she called it “the baby.” She did not want to assign a sex. If the child was a boy, he was to be named Jeffrey Thorne: Jeffrey after Neil’s grandfather, Thorne after Abe’s middle name. If the child was a girl she would be Ariane, after a name Miriam had read in a book. She wanted her daughter to have a pretty name, like the one she had always envied Allegra. Neil liked the idea of carrying on family traditions. He had in fact asked her if she didn’t want to call their daughter Sonia.
She had shuddered. Ariane—she loved that name. It was Greek, Cretan. It was a weaver-woman. Ar, to rhyme with far. Ar-ee-ahn. She had asked Neil’s secretary, Efi, who came from a Greek-speaking family, how to pronounce it.

  The house was too large for one person wandering through. At times it spooked her. Her fears would gather in corners and mutter. The fear of punishment: that her child would be born with something wrong. She tried not to think of that, but whenever she saw a blind woman begging downtown in front of Filene’s, a woman in the subway with a strange livid birthmark on her face, a man missing an arm, that fear would grip her belly. Sonia had told her some people believed that thinking bad thoughts could harm the child. Sonia said she had listened to symphonic music a great deal while she was pregnant in order that her children would love music and please their father. Only Allegra could carry a tune. Those torturous music lessons, glacial afternoons chained to the piano. Mark had been forced to study the violin and always he had made it squeal like a mating cat.

  Yet before she had taken lessons she had wanted to bang on Aunt Yette’s piano. Once in a great while Aunt Yette would play Brahms or Chopin. Aunt Yette made many mistakes, for her hands were arthritic. Yette would never play when Lionel was around, for he would mock her old-fashioned style. Grandma said Aunt Yette played with feeling. Lionel liked no one’s playing but his own, although the piano was not his favorite instrument: it forced him to turn away from his audience.

  How sour she was toward him. Everybody said she would mellow toward her own childhood after she had a baby, that she would understand her own parents. Reconciliation, too late for Sonia. Miriam had always thought she understood Lionel too well. Sonia had been more mysterious in the terrible pressure of her love and suffering, her loneliness in the midst of a loud unregarding family. Miriam carried with her unborn child her buried mother, whose forgiveness she would earn in motherhood.

  “You’re awfully moralistic about your father,” Neil told her. He liked Lionel: they got on. They found each other fair-minded and agreeable. Lionel had come to visit with a girl friend, although he called this one his fiancée, Mrs. Fran Gutmacher, the widow of a doctor whose children were grown. She was carefully kept and corseted and rather shy, beaming and clinging. “You don’t judge anybody else by the standards you use on him.”

  At first Neu had not really understood what he was getting into when she decided on the Lamaze method. But she had been sure she could get him involved. The idea of being knocked out while some doctor pulled out her baby was disgusting. Several wives of Logical personnel had had their babies by natural childbirth, and each recommended her own doctor. Dr. Foreman was not only willing to deliver by natural childbirth, but indeed set up his procedures on that assumption.

  Sometimes she was afraid. Sonia had brought her up on stories of the pain of childbirth. Sonia had told her it was the worst pain in the world. Nothing else hurt that much. They were in the kitchen helping Mama make chicken soup. Allegra was cutting the carrots. She was chopping onions. Why had she always got stuck chopping onions? She was crying. “When you get older, then you’ll cry for real,” Sonia was saying darkly. “The reason why mamas love their babies is because they suffer so much to bring them into the world.”

  But the literature and Dr. Foreman assured her that fear caused pain. If she were not afraid of the natural process of birth there would be no pain. She would not be passively delivered but would actively give birth. Neil and she together would bear their child. Until she was taken into the delivery room he would be with her. He was not allowed to be present during birth, which seemed bizarre to her. Why should he be with her during the labor, long and tedious and surely mostly a drag, and then miss the climax? They were trained to speak of everything in the plural—“when we go into labor”—then he was robbed of the actual moment.

  Early in the ninth month she began to get so big that Neu teased her about twins. By the middle of the day her back ached. She felt like an obscene joke, the way people looked at her—as if she should not be out in public. Men made remarks, she was everybody’s thing to comment upon freely. She felt like a wounded whale. Her pregnancy that had felt pear-shaped and glorious now crushed her, as if inside there were no more room for organs but only a giant kicking and writhing.

  “You must be going to have a boy,” Efi said, patting her stomach. “He’s so active.”

  When she repeated that Beth got angry. “Will you do that to her? Dress her in pink and teach her to keep still?”

  That Friday Ted and his wife Barbara came over for supper: roast duck she had made with a crisp skin, apple stuffing, bulghur wheat and broccoli with mornay sauce. For dessert orange mousse. Now they were all sitting in the living room. Barbara was admiring the new dark blue draperies and they were gossiping about Logical. Ted had not been interested in going along with her on the natural childbirth thing, Barbara said. Therefore she had had a spinal block to make sure at least that she would be conscious, even though she hadn’t felt anything.

  “But you know, after they did it, my legs went numb. I got scared, because I’d heard about a woman who was paralyzed for life because the spinal tap had been done wrong. So I kept saying to the nurse, ‘Nurse, something’s wrong, my legs are numb.’ And she kept saying in that cheerful opaque way, ‘Now, dear, everything’s fine, be quiet.’ But damn her, it never occurred to her to tell me right out that my legs were numb because the injection always does that.”

  She was not fond of Ted and Barbara, but in a sense these evenings played themselves. Her job was to make the dinner a success and the house pleasant. Most of the time she was sunk into her body, lulled and communing with the child, who bobbed and swam and lurched there. For some time she had not been able to wear her contact lenses. Something about fluid balances changing. She had had to get glasses again. Neil did not like them. But he wore glasses. It wasn’t fair of him to make such a point of not liking her in glasses when he wore them too. Well, after the birth she’d immediately start in wearing her contacts again. But the unaccustomed glasses seemed to move her a little more distance from whoever she was talking to. She did not feel attractive, and somehow that took away some of the energy she used to make contact with others. There seemed … little point in trying hard.

  Watching Barbara, listening, she remembered she’d felt sure Neil would be brought around to natural childbirth. One of the reasons she had felt secure enough to marry him, to entrust herself (Sonia’s mistake riding in her), was that she felt sure he loved her and felt lucky to have her. Had he not told her many times how lonely he had been? So she should be able to get her way a reasonable proportion of the time. She had agreed to have the baby now, so it had been only reciprocal for him to agree with her on the method: and he had.

  When Ted and Barbara left, she dragged her heavy body upstairs after Neil. In ten minutes he was sleeping and she was launched on her nightly vigil. In the first months of pregnancy she had slept and slept and slept. She had dozed off in the office, head on her arms, in a movie theater once, often sitting in the living room. She had imagined she would snooze through her pregnancy, hibernating. But that excessive sleepiness had passed off and lately she could not sleep at all.

  The baby was a night person. Soon as she got ready for bed he—it—started to dance. The moon must call to it. It thought her a ballroom. Or perhaps it had already started the Canadian Air Force exercises that Neil did. Not that she could find a comfortable position any more. She felt as if her bodily processes had taken over. She and the fetus inhabited this vast swollen body like mice in an old house, while the big dilapidated body farted and belched and had to piss every five minutes. Even if the fetus would sleep at night instead of the daytime, how could she sleep with having to pee every time she moved? She could not regain her warm complacency of the middle pregnancy. She counted the days until the baby was due—in spite of Dr. Foreman’s warning that the baby would probably come late, she counted till she would get rid of this overstuffed disgusting body th
at could no longer do anything right—heartburn instead of digestion, backaches, water on the knee and swollen ankles. Soon she would have had her own body back, lively and properly shaped, and then she would do the dancing.

  Still she must have slept because suddenly she woke and had to poke Neil in the shoulder, calling plaintively in the dark. The muscle of her leg was bunched up like a tennis ball, a hard painful knot of muscle cramping. Without fully waking, Neil reached under the covers and, clumsy with drowsiness, kneaded it, massaged until the muscle slowly relaxed and the pain ebbed.

  Grateful for the easing of pain, she touched his cheek. He was sliding back into sleep. Very recently they had ceased making love. Neil and she had invented a theory that the fetus experienced her orgasms, but lately it had seemed to disapprove. Also Neil had become afraid they would hurt the child. His desire seemed to be in abeyance—indeed, who could desire her in her vast state?—although when she saw his morning erections she found herself making edgy jokes. If men and women each carried a baby half time, how different marriage would be.

  Though parking had become difficult she went every few days to the women’s commune. Sally, who was in her seventh month, came to see her even oftener. She would not discuss the father. Miriam had started out keeping a journal of her thoughts and sensations, but she had found it monotonous. Talking to Sally was more satisfying. Sally was on her second child and that made her something of an expert, though she said every child was a different journey.

  They talked about the dreams that nobody else wanted to hear. Miriam had dreamed vividly through her pregnancy and Sally had been doing so the last month, as if by contagion. Miriam felt as if she were describing a rich nocturnal country sometimes more real than her waking life. They wondered if their children dreamed inside. What would be dreaming to someone who had no images? But the blind must dream. Perhaps the embryos heard sounds or had motor dreams as Miriam used to see in Orpheus, when he would be chasing something or eating and little aborted motions would jerk his paws and muzzle and his eyes would dart rapidly.