Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  When she walked in the double glass doors at Logical, past the receptionists, she felt her body clench. She felt herself flattening to the low profile she must maintain. The organization was bigger, the hierarchy more rigid. Everything went through channels. Gradually decisions had come to be made invisibly, and recently there had been an ugly scene when Dick discovered some of the younger staff swapping information about salaries. At the same time, because of media jokes, everyone imagined that he knew something about the women’s movement and felt free to tease her, because it was known she lived in a women’s commune. They were free to make what they called jokes, but she was not free to answer, because she was a clerical worker. She was supposed to smile and make the little gestures that indicated appeasement, the little gestures half flirtation and half submission.

  She was always being criticized because she did not smile enough. Her face felt frozen at Logical. She was expected to duck her chin or twist her shoulders and give that little laugh when she spoke, that little laugh that says, “Why it’s only little ole me speaking.” She had become so conscious of that little laugh that her throat would shut on it. She sat very still when they spoke to her, she thought of how calm Sally sat: she tried to wait them out. But she was too angry to be good at placidity.

  Some of the younger technical people were too stoned to care. The directors did not understand this. The directors were of another generation and did not know the younger technical staff they had hired. The best young programer now that Miriam was gone, hired for her job, was Bill, and in the ten months he had been working there she had never seen him straight. He was a complete computer freak. He lived and breathed and ate and slept computers. Never in a million years would he question what his work was for, as Miriam had begun to. He never goaded her and he did not care whether she smiled at him or looked cross-wise. He brought his programs in and he might stand looking into inner space for ten minutes, he might even chat, but if she answered he never heard what she said the way she meant it anyhow. He was easy to get on with because he was totally out of contact: no friction possible.

  To see him with Abe or Dick was high comedy. Neither of them understood Bill was stoned. He wrote good code and they valued him and he did not bug them about salary raises. He did not appear to notice anything, not office politics or infighting, and he never pestered them about stock options. They saw him as absent-minded from seriousness.

  The network of dealing among the younger employees remained invisible to the directors. She bought for the house at Logical where the grass, the hash, the occasional tab of mescalin or acid were of higher quality and better price than in Cambridge. There was traffic too in the drugs the women’s house would not touch, coke and quaaludes and barbiturates and speed. The secretaries bought with the technical people except Efi, who grew marijuana at home under purple lights. Everybody was a customer except the directors and the business manager. Even Neil was a customer, although he did not know it, because Miriam bought with the women’s commune. Now that the baby was born Neil expected her to have grass in the house along with wine and scotch and ginger ale and beer. He did not ask Miriam where she got the stuff as long as it was satisfactory.

  Beth had not come to like Neil any better. She saw him as Miriam’s owner and disliked being in the house when he arrived, sniffing the air, perhaps cruising the stove, asking for Ariane and immediately beginning to dote and worry and cuddle her. “Oh, Ted’s on his way. I told him to eat with us. We have to work tonight on a proposal for NSA. Why don’t you put on a dress?”

  “I doubt if I have a clean dress. Why didn’t you warn me before I put supper on? Are you prepared to do a loaves and fishes miracle with four lamb chops?”

  “I tried to call, but the phone was busy. Which I guess is why you don’t have a dress to put on and Ariane isn’t cleaned up. What you find to chatter about for hours to those women …

  “I was talking to Dr. Miller about Ariane’s sore throat, if you want to know!”

  He jerked around. Felt Ariane’s forehead, cooed at her to open her mouth for him. “What sore throat? Where did she get a sore throat? Did you take her temperature?”

  “How do I know where she got it? In the supermarket.”

  “Have you been taking her over to those children again? They always have colds. I’ve never seen that little girl, Feather, whatever her name is, when her nose wasn’t dripping.”

  They were no longer polite, that was it. He did not use the same soft voice to Miriam he used to the technical staff. And he looked at his child the way he had used to look at his wife.

  “Oh, he gets irritated with me,” Miriam said, giving Ariane orange goo out of a jar as she sat giggling and banging in her high chair. Gouts of orange were splattered over Miriam’s arms and spotted on her cheekbone and dabbed on her worn shirt. It was an old tie-dyed T-shirt, faded but pleasant, where the new stains came to rest with the old without rancor. “He comes home tired and he wants to relax, he wants sympathy and attention. He wants Ariane clean and bubbly and ready to be played with. I’ve been cooped up all day with the baby, and I want to talk, I want to use my head and my tongue. So we’re already at war, with our different needs. I’ve become too emotionally dependent on him, I know it. I get two afternoons a week at your house and maybe Sally gets here once. Except for Saturdays I hardly see you. He’s knocking himself out trying to save Logical and getting ready for his seminar this fall. If it wasn’t for Laverne around the corner, I’d disintegrate from talking only baby talk. I never imagined I’d be friends with Tom Ryan’s wife, but I couldn’t do without her!”

  “What do you talk about? She seems kind of pathetic.”

  “Oh, relationships. Our marriages, our children. She has three kids, including a baby, six months. The dependency thing. I don’t think she’s solved it either, but at least she knows what I’m fighting.” Miriam pushed her glasses back. At some point they had dropped and the frames cracked. Now they were held together at the bridge with tape.

  “But you’re getting your thesis done. Doesn’t that help?”

  “But it’s taking me forever to type it. If I were still at Logical, I’d just give it to one of the secretaries …”

  Yes, Beth thought, the staff did things like that.

  “It’s as if Ariane can’t stand to see me at the typewriter, it’s a signal for her to start screaming. I can hardly believe I’m close to done.”

  “Then what will you do?”

  “Bethie, I can’t think past the point of my degree. The house is always a mess, I haven’t cooked anything new in months. I see the red dress I started making in the ninth month sitting upstairs. I never read a book. It’s a miracle if I look at the paper. Neil asks me what I do all day, and it seems to me I chase my tail and that’s about it.”

  “My life begins when I get home from work.”

  “They’re not having much luck getting new contracts. Things are tight in the industry, companies going bankrupt.”

  “I almost hope they fire me.”

  “Why? What will you do?”

  Beth shrugged. “I’ve been thinking lately maybe I’d like to do women’s theater.”

  “You want to be an actress? You’re putting me on.”

  “Don’t sound so shocked. I think maybe I want to do women’s theater with a group. That’s different.”

  “You astonish me. I never thought you wanted to get up on a stage! You have a hidden side.” Miriam was smiling.

  “I want to act out things women need to express. You’d have to see what we’ve been doing. Miriam, would you come?”

  “I’d love to!”

  “Tomorrow night? Please.”

  “I’d have to get a baby sitter.” Miriam looked dubious. “You never imagine how many things you won’t be able to do.”

  “I think I do imagine.”

  “But don’t you ever want to have your own baby?” Miriam hugged Ariane up out of the chair and nuzzled her, while Ariane chewed on her hair. Ariane w
as a fat curly child with black eyes and Miriam’s skin. She was a child everyone wanted to pick up and squeeze. Two months older than Blake, she was much fatter and bigger and noisier. Miriam said, “She has the character of a jolly little Napoleon. A will of iron and lungs to go with it. She always wins. My father says she looks just like I did at her age, but I’ve seen photographs. I was a big baby, but sallow, rather melancholy. Just what I’d like—a child I could push around. But this tigress! She doesn’t even sleep much. I think she uses solar energy.”

  “How come she has so many toys?” Both looked around. As far as she could see through the rooms and hall, toys were scattered, dolls, plush animals, square pegs to be pounded into holes, pull-toys, rings and stakes, busy-boxes, things on wheels. Ariane had more toys than the three children at the commune, perhaps six times as many. The house was going under in a breaking wave of scattered toys, and every time Beth came, something new was underfoot.

  “Oh, Neil’s always bringing her a treat.” Miriam spoke apologetically. “She does have an awful lot, doesn’t she? Her grandparents buy her toys too, so does Jaime. Even my father, who remarried by the way. The widow of a doctor. I tell you, after a few years of dating the kind of women he kept telling my mother she ought to be, he’s gone and married another version of her. Another woman who adores him and thinks he’s a wonder, and what is she? But this one has money.… And my sister Allegra, who married into peanut butter, has a baby now. We keep sending each other pictures. That’s just a bad joke about the peanut butter. Everybody’s married.”

  “My sister Nancy too. She ran away and married a guy who just got out of the Army. Knew him for two weeks. I don’t care, it can be everybody, everybody in the world. Except me.”

  “Don’t play innocent with me.” Laura had her elbows planted on the kitchen table. “You told us about Karen. Why not come out of the closet? The first step in our liberation is being able to love each other, to give each other that love and support and tenderness we’ve given men. Men don’t have to be gentle and nurturing because they can find a woman to do it for them. But all women are starved for tenderness. Come out of the closet and you’ll feel stronger, you’ll respect yourself.”

  “I’m not in the closet, Laura. I don’t have any sex life, and I don’t want one. I don’t feel gay, I don’t feel straight, I don’t feel anything.”

  “Because you’re afraid of what you do feel. Don’t you see, Beth, you’re still concealing, you’re still letting them make you ashamed of loving another woman. When you stop letting them make you ashamed and afraid, you’ll be stronger, you’ll feel good and beautiful in your love. Stand up with us and be counted!”

  “But I don’t know if I count!” Beth turned her face to and fro. She felt pushed. She was angry with Laura for trying to make her do something she didn’t want to, and angry because Laura was succeeding in making her feel guilty.

  “You’re afraid. Somebody might see you. You might lose your job or lose your friends. Because that’s what it means in this society. If nobody knows, cool. If somebody knows, they can treat you like a mad dog, they can lock you up and deny you a living. It’s you they mean, Beth, you with Karen.”

  Beth turned her face in blind distress from side to side. She found it hard to look at Laura’s accusing bright face. “I went to bed with two men, I went to bed with one woman. I don’t think I wanted to go to bed with any of them! Maybe what I’d like to march for is the right not to have to. Ever!”

  Laura leaned forward, speaking softly. “Was being with Karen like being with your husband?”

  Beth shook her head no.

  “Better? Was it different? Another woman loving you?”

  Beth nodded. Added immediately, “But both men were different too. I want to stay as I am! I don’t want to be with anybody!”

  “Sometimes you want to pretend you’re a child. Beth, Beth, you’re equivocating. You’re still in the closet and why? Are you still not able to love yourself, and therefore you can’t really love other women? Or are you simply scared of what the society can do to you if you stand up and say you love women?”

  “Laura, are you so sure you love yourself better than I love myself? Maybe I wish people would just stop going to bed with each other for a year! Maybe we’d all get straight in our heads then. We’d see what really connects us.”

  “Being turned on by that woman scared you. It scares you still, and so you want everybody to be afraid of each other the way you’re afraid. Beth, loving is nothing to fear!”

  “Yes, I’m afraid.” Beth stood up. She felt pummeled and raw. Her hands and legs were shaking. Slowly she climbed the steps to her room to lie clutching her pillow, shaking.

  24

  Out of the Closet

  and into the Frying Pan

  Dorine marched in and sat on the side of Beth’s bed. “Come on, Bethie, it’s not like you to lie and sulk. Don’t let Laura get to you. You know, she feels very embattled. Besides, I’m going to march with her, so she won’t feel like nobody in the house is supporting her.”

  Beth sat up on one elbow. “You’re marching with the radical lesbians? But you’ve never even … I mean, have you ever been involved with a woman?”

  “Well, no. But I’ve thought about it.”

  Beth began to giggle. “You’ve sinned in your thoughts.”

  “I have thought about it. It makes sense to me. It just seems like somehow I can never do it, for real. Some deep awkward inhibition that makes it something heavier than it should be. But suppose I did meet a woman sometime I could love, who could love me? Besides, Beth, I kind of enjoy demonstrations. Long as I don’t think I’ll get my head bashed in or one of those blinding gases sprayed over me. I don’t think this is going to be rough. It’s just a march, with a lot of chanting and posters.”

  “I feel so mixed up, Dorine. I feel she’s forcing me to decide something I don’t want.… When I saw Jim the last time, I felt … almost as if I could remember how I used to want him. I could remember loving him.… I don’t know, I’m more afraid of loving a woman now than before Karen. Then I didn’t know it was possible, I never worried about it. I don’t know! I don’t know! My life is hard already!”

  “I haven’t slept with anybody in months, myself. Though I think about it.” Dorine sighed. “I have a lot of dreams about fucking, and sometimes I have an orgasm right in my sleep, and that’s really nice.… Do you masturbate?”

  Beth shook her head, looking past Dorine.

  “Beth, don’t curl up when I ask you a question. I do. Don’t you know how?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You aren’t into your body.”

  “That isn’t the only way! I like to walk, I like to swim and work outside!”

  “I’m sorry, Beth, I don’t mean to bait you. You’re right to insist on being you. Your own way.… Speaking of complications, did you talk to Miriam this week? No? Then guess what. Go on, guess the least useful thing that could happen to her.”

  “Getting pregnant again?”

  “Never mind, you don’t have to guess. Phil is back.”

  “Oh.” Beth sat up, putting her feet over the side of the bed. “Will that matter to Miriam? I mean, she’s married now.”

  “But when an old friend arrives dirty, hungry, broke, and just altogether half destroyed, you don’t say, ‘Sorry, honey, I’m married.’ I wouldn’t exactly say he’s pleased to find her domestic in Brookline with a baby.… But you know, they were more friends than lovers in the years I knew them.”

  “You’ve spoken to him?”

  “Yeah, he called me. So I let her know and said, ‘Do you want me to give him your number?’ She started whooping with joy. Some people don’t know when they’re well off, Beth—including me.”

  “Why do you say it that way?”

  Dorine made that funny bittersweet smile. “Beth, I told you a lie. I said I hadn’t gone to bed with anybody in months? I went to bed with Phil this afternoon.”

  �
�But why? Oh, Dorine, you’ve been so strong lately. What did you go and do that for?”

  “He asked me to come and see him and I said I’d stop by on the way back from my afternoon lab. He’s staying at Jackson’s. Bethie, it’s funny—there they are, back together again. That marriage will outlast any we know. Anyhow, Jackson was at school, which was fine with me.”

  “I wouldn’t … mind … seeing Jackson again. It’s been a long time.”

  “That would be easy to arrange. Just stop by with me. Anyhow, Phil was there and we had a couple of beers together and we talked and talked and talked. I don’t know, I felt good talking to him. I felt I was different and he could see that and liked it and I could feel differences in him, though I don’t know what they mean yet. He’s been through bad things.”

  “You mean you felt sorry for him?”

  “No, I didn’t. I don’t know why I didn’t. He kept telling me how great I was looking. Then he said, ‘Hey, do you want to talk in bed?’ ”

  “But why?” Beth’s voice trailed upward.

  “Well, if a man occasionally asked so outright and friendly about it, no pressure, just ‘Do you want to?’ right in the middle of a good talk when I’m feeling close, I might have a lot more sex. I felt right about touching him and I could give some clues to what would please me—that’s new for me, Beth. I felt pretty mellow when we got up, good through my body and on top of things. I think I was still up on that when I got home and found Laura fighting everybody else in the house.”

  “So maybe you’re marching because you feel funny about what you did with Phil.”

  “Not so, Beth. This time I feel I can like Phil and it won’t hurt me. I can go to bed with him and he won’t use me. Look, I’m not there available and defenseless. My life has its own structure now. I have to make so much money, I have to spend so much time in the lab, I have duties here in the house.”