Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  “You tell me. I’m only half grown, only half there. All right, maybe I’m gay, maybe I’m straight, maybe I’m bisexual. Maybe he’s a way I could find out what everybody else seems to think I just have to know.”

  “Beth, be careful. I couldn’t stand for you to get hurt. And him! He just shouldn’t be given a chance to mess up any more good women.”

  “You’re giving Phil another chance.”

  “But Phil’s not the same. And neither am I. What I’m trying with him isn’t what I ever had with a man before. I like Phil, somehow I do, I still do. He knows how to play. Except when I’m with him or sometimes in the house, I never play.”

  “Well, I’m not the same person as Miriam either.”

  “Beth … you know you’ve admired Miriam a whole lot. This wouldn’t have a little bit of competitiveness in it?”

  “I’d never have gone near him in a million years when she was involved with him.… I don’t know, maybe he seems to count more because of her. How can I tell? … For once I want to choose what happens with a man. I don’t want to live with him, Dorine, I don’t love him. But I find him so attractive I feel like a fool.”

  “That doesn’t sound good to me.”

  “Don’t worry, Dorine. Not about me. First Wanda and the theater group and then him, I feel as if I’m coming unstuck inside. Everything is breaking loose in me and bumping around. I’ll never be able to sleep again. I can’t even stand still. I don’t know, Dorine, whatever it all is, at least it’s exciting.”

  25

  How to Fall Is as Important as

  How to Get Up

  One Saturday in early November, Connie moved out, taking with her everything she had brought or bought down to the toys that had seemed to be all the children’s, and of course she took David. That was essentially the end, because none of them had the heart to look for someone else. The quarrels were too fresh, the force centrifugal, and they were all broke.

  Connie married her boy friend and moved to an apartment complex in Waltham. That was the last they saw of her, except for arguments over who owed what on the phone, the gas, the electric bills. She developed a last-minute conviction that she was being taken for more than her share and wrote nasty notes. It sat badly in Beth’s mind. Connie said she did not want them to see David any more. What David thought of all that they would never know.

  Dorine decided she could not go with Sally and Laura and Beth into the women’s theater house. Through a woman sculptor Dorine worked for she got into a mixed commune of some graduate students, a sociologist, two city planners, a couple of artists. There were no children. It was a well-built comfortable house and Dorine called it less protective than their old Somerville house but interesting, and she felt lucky to move in.

  With Sally and Laura, Beth moved into the three-story rambling Roxbury house that had been a parish house and was already extensively changed—“remodeled” was too bourgeois a term for what had been done to it. It was strange but livable, and there were already eleven women and four children there. With their two, that made half a dozen and felt sometimes like a herd. Two of the kids were Wanda’s, boys four and six. With so many children, so many women, so much activity—the exercises, the practicing, other children running in and out, constant work going on—the house could never be as closed as Beth’s old commune.

  Though no men lived there, a couple of the women had boy friends who stayed over and Jane was married, though her husband lived in New York. When he came, he stayed in the house. The phone constantly rang, among hammering and banging and children’s intent voices. Some rooms were set aside on the top floor for people to work and read in silence, and a room was kept for meditation and yoga.

  Beth had to grip herself hard not to bolt. She had never lived with such a crowd. She had liked living alone. She had worked on herself and learned to live with four other women and three children, with a room of her own and a door to shut that she often did shut. Now she shared a room with Sally in the midst of a tribe.

  Because of the constant theater exercises and the acting out of feelings and the experimenting with touching and dancing together—because of all this traffic with the inner life, people tended to express what they were going through. Fairly early Beth stood up and tried to explain her trouble with the communal roar. She did not want to withdraw. She did not want to make everyone else into a Them, a block outside. But she needed help. Part of her still wanted to be separate and quiet.

  At first she minded that when she sat down at the table she never knew who was going to be at supper. Someone who did not live in the house might be sitting right across from her. She found the looser style hard to adjust to. She missed the old house. She had loved to come down to meals knowing they would be there together, every day. It had been small and warm, and at the good times she had felt like an ideal daughter in an idealized family.

  This was rougher. If she did not have a specific task assigned and she missed supper, no one would come in search of her. The house was not a close-knit family but tribal. It was a confederacy. The commune was not so loose that nothing got done, like Going-to-the-Sun. The women were always changing the place into something more exciting, more comfortable, more inviting. Walls were always being painted, furniture being repaired or made, posters going up and toys created. Someone was always kneading bread or baking cookies. The food was good, lots of whole grains and fresh fruits and vegetables. At the same time, since they always had guests, it went quickly. If Beth blinked too long at a platter, it was empty.

  Though she could always go into a quiet room, the house was not peaceful. It breathed a fierce energy. Sometimes Beth felt as if she had moved into Wanda. She knew she confused her feelings about working with Wanda with her sense of the house itself—it all blurred inside her. Never had she worked this hard. Some evenings she dragged herself upstairs and fell prone across the covers of her bed. She would wake hours later with the light still burning, her clothes on, stiff and confused.

  Often after the sessions together, her body ached. Her small weak body. An inferior instrument. Wanda called her out on that attitude. “You have to stop hating yourself. Your body will do whatever you teach it. It’s a good body and you must stop treating yourself like a bad dog that ought to be whipped.”

  Sometimes her fatigue was good, was a sense of being well used. Sometimes it was a fatigue of defeat. Wanda was trying to teach them a way of falling from judo, so that they could fall and not be injured. They must not clench their muscles and freeze when they fell. Learning how to fall correctly was the first step in self-defense, the first step in acrobatics, the first step in a true physical ease that would improve their dancing. But Beth felt as if that fear of falling went through her brain, back into the base of her spine. Always she froze and then hit hard, shatteringly.

  Wearily again and again she tried. Wanda could coax her, could order her, could shout at her, could sing to her in that husky electric voice that she must loosen, that she must trust, that she must relax and go with the fall. Still her body tightened and when she hit the floor it hurt, it always hurt.

  When she looked at her body in the shower, her brief sexual fantasies of the early fall seemed ridiculous. She was marked with blue and purple and yellow bruises. She ached. Fortunately she had a job where nobody looked at her: she worked three evenings a week as cleaning woman in an office building. She preferred it to secretarial work. Nobody was around except the night janitor, who ignored her.

  Wanda talked a great deal about energy levels. “Women have been taught to dampen our own vigor. To cut back and stay passive and keep a low profile. Most of the work women do in this society has no beginning and no end. No product. It’s upkeep, maintenance, service, nurture. When the work is done well, it’s invisible. When it’s badly done, people complain. Typically our days are scattershot—ten tasks going on at once and none of them such that one begins, one defines a problem, one tries, one solves that problem, and then one rests.”

&nbs
p; Wanda made them aware how they moved, how they rested, how they occupied space. She demonstrated how men sat and how women sat on the subway, on benches. Men expanded into available space. They sprawled, or they sat with spread legs. They put their arms on the arms of chairs. They crossed their legs by putting a foot on the other knee. They dominated space expansively.

  Women condensed. Women crossed their legs by putting one leg over the other and alongside. Women kept their elbows to their sides, taking up as little space as possible. They behaved as if it were their duty not to rub against, not to touch, not to bump a man. If contact occurred, the woman shrank back. If a woman bumped a man, he might choose to interpret it as a come-on. Women sat protectively, using elbows not to dominate space, not to mark territory, but to protect their soft tissues.

  Further, men commented on how women looked and walked on the streets. Women did not stand in groups observing men critically and aloud informing them of their approval or disapproval, commenting that they found a man attractive or ugly, that they wanted to use him sexually or that they thought he could be bought for a price. A woman walked with a sense of being looked at: either she behaved as if being evaluated by men were a test and she tried to pass it; or she walked with chin lowered, eyes lowered. She pretended that, if she did not look at the men, the men could not see her. She walked very fast, pretending to be invisible, deaf, dumb, and blind.

  Beth’s developing awareness made it hard to go to the drugstore. Sometimes she felt raw and sore. She remembered childhood fantasies about saying a magic word that made her invisible. Now she was personally invisible but visible as one of a class: girl, cunt, you there.

  Once in a while Beth ate with Dorine at her new commune. It was an affluent, comfortable house full of well-educated women and men who talked a great deal and teased each other in ways Beth could not follow. It was a house in which many people were somewhat political and heated arguments were common. Dorine seemed at home there, but Beth was not at ease. She preferred Dorine to eat at her house. Dorine stopped by to see each of them, Laura, Sally, and Beth, and took the children out. Usually she got Fern and Blake for an afternoon on weekends. Dorine fitted naturally into their house, though she said it was too hectic for her to live there. Beth got to spend as much time talking with her as when they lived together. Laura she saw less of in the big house, because she was seriously involved with Lynn and spent as much time as she could with her.

  Sally was accustomed to sharing a room, since she’d lived with Connie, but Beth found the lack of privacy hard to get used to. Slowly she learned to use the meditation room when she needed space around her no one could cross. Sally was relatively easy for her to live with, because she was still and had no compulsion to smother silence under words.

  A fierce argument raged over whether they should have Christmas for the children. Wanda was in favor, feeling they should not give their children something to feel deprived about by comparison with children in bourgeois families. They would buy nothing but make presents. But other women were totally opposed. The argument woke Beth to the world outside. Weeks had melted past. The house voted not to have Christmas. Beth decided that it was time for her to go and see Miriam.

  Wednesday afternoon when she arrived at Miriam’s, Phil was bouncing Ariane on his lap and Miriam was running a load of laundry through and talking full tilt, sitting on the counter with her legs dangling. What was it? Miriam looked less haggard. She was still heavier than was good for her, but she seemed more focused. She was talking gaily, swinging her legs: she looked younger. The waterlogged, drowning, slow quality was gone. Her hair seemed alive, her body radiated energy. Partly her face looked different, Beth realized, because the glasses held together with tape had been set aside. Probably, since she seemed able to see, she had succeeded in breaking in her lenses again, after trying off and on in a desultory manner for months.

  “Oh, Beth, what happened to you? I thought you’d got lost for good. What do you mean by disappearing from the ongoing soap opera of my life? Sally’s more faithful, she at least calls. I miss you guys—even more than I miss my two afternoons of liberty! But wow, do I miss them. I just got that thesis done in time.” She peered into Beth’s face. “Where did you get those bruises?”

  “Trying to learn to fall properly.” Briefly Beth explained.

  “Oh, have I missed you. Look, Ariane’s mastered sitting up and she’s started to creep like a midget racer. Hey, remember Phil?”

  “Miriam is trying to make me jealous by going on how she missed you, gone for two weeks.” Phil bouncing Ariane? Beth blinked. Yet Ariane bubbled and giggled till she drooled and clung to him with stubby fists and sharp little nails. “But Miriam won’t give me my dues of admitting I was missed.”

  Phil had stayed skinny, gaunt and sharpened-looking. Still, he did not look broken, as Dorine had implied. Wanda’s mystique about energy had taught her to be seasitive to vitality and inertia. She felt a strong burst of energy coming off Miriam, radiating heat and light and excitement. From Phil she thought she felt a narrow intense beam, focused back on Miriam. They seemed to her like sun and moon. Yet, listening to them, she did not think that was how they saw each other.

  “Well, missed or not, I’m glad he’s back, Bethie: He’s given me a good kick. Here I was sinking into domesticity, fading into the breakfast dishes. Not that Ariane isn’t an amazing daily miracle. She doesn’t miss a thing. But my intellectual level was settling at Dr. Seuss. I’d reached the point where the highlight of my days was interminable gossip sessions with Laverne Ryan about whether Tom or Neil was meanest last night and psychologizing our poor children to death.”

  “You’d all deserted her to a life of suds and socks and Her Master’s Voice. See, I told you for years, it’s one thing to be playing earth mother to grown men. At least our diapers don’t need changing. But you wanted a real baby—”

  “Instead of you frauds. Look at my darling. You have to admit you’re no competition. She’s twice as smart and twice as pretty!” Miriam wiped Ariane’s mouth, beaming at her.

  But Ariane began to cry and Miriam had to take her. Phil said, “I’ll admit item one. She’s here. She’s on the scene, we have her now—”

  “I like that we. Listen to him!” But Miriam no longer was. She was trying to comfort Ariane, who was lost in cranky wailing. “It’s past her nap time. I’d better take her up. Not that she won’t howl, she hates to be deprived of your company. She’d give me away to the Salvation Army to keep you in the house. Come on, mama’s baby, time for your nap. Now don’t fight me!”

  Ariane screamed all the way upstairs as Miriam carried her kicking and bellowing. Left in the kitchen with Phil, after a while Beth asked, “Are you still living at Jackson’s?”

  “Sure, I’m basically lazy. I want a home made for me.” He smiled at her. “Still don’t know why I resisted setting up house with Miriam all those years. Was I real sensitive and ahead of my time refusing to domesticate her? Or just scared?” He shrugged. “By now, what does that matter? It’s a whole new ball game.”

  “Does Jackson ever see her?”

  Phil shook his head heavily. “He never asks me how she is. If I mention her, he doesn’t answer. He knows I see her regular. I tell him I’m coming over. But he won’t ask one thing. What a pious fraud he is, what a stiff one!”

  “You didn’t stay together long after Miriam moved out.”

  “We were pissed at each other. I blamed him, and he thought I was a stupid prick to be caring so much. Or he was letting on that’s how he felt. Miriam was so far into Freud she couldn’t talk English, doting on that mercenary shrink. I just lit out. Decided it was time to be moving on. A bad scene all around.” He shook his head as if he had water in his ears, scowling.

  He asked her about the theater group, about Wanda in particular. “You come back and find the whole landscape turned upside down. Joe was always running around, but I never thought he’d leave her. He made such a fuss about the boys. She used to dep
ress me because she’d make me think of my mother—stoical, strong, putting up with hell and never asking pity, a real workhorse.” His gaze stayed on the swinging door Miriam had gone through, until she came back through it.

  “That was Neil on the phone. You can both stay to supper tonight, loves, because he won’t be home till late. He’s meeting some computer types from Palo Alto at the airport and they’re having supper at Tech Square. So stay and stay, and we’ll have some roast lamb from yesterday cold—made it with lemon and mint and rosemary—and I’ll make us a Greek salad with feta and black olives. We’ll have good bread I made and lots of wine—it will be lovely. I can whip that up in five minutes, no cooking to do, and be with you the whole time.”

  Phil went to stand by Miriam, resting his head on her shoulder. “Notice that we get leftovers. Scraps from yesterday’s table, crumbs, cold meat, used rosemary—”

  “It sounds wonderful!” Beth said with fierce loyalty. “I don’t want her cooking for me.”

  “Beth has a rule, have you noticed?” Phil gestured with his free hand. “Nobody can criticize you except her.”

  “Laverne is jealous because you’re here all the time, Phil. She thinks it’s shocking. She’s been gossiping about me. I bet she wishes you’d drop over there.”

  “It’s only right I should oust her from your affections. After all, she did me dirty once, by indirection. Anyhow, I’m on her right side now. I’ll have you know I’ve been invited to her big Christmas blast.”

  “So? Even we have been invited.” Miriam dodged away from his hand. “Would one of you stick the wet clothes in the dryer? I want to sit down peacefully and not feel responsible for a thing.”

  Phil was frowning at Miriam, so Beth after a moment moved the clothes. “You’re invited? I assumed not. So, do you feel like chatting with your other old roommate? Christmas is a little early for Auld Lang Syne.”

  “What are you talking about?” Miriam froze. “Him?”