Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

“Is Johnny okay? I don’t know if you should tell him you saw me or not.… What do you think?”

  “I’ll see. He cries a lot. He cries for everybody.” Luis looked superior. He had continued to grow and put on weight. “He cries for Wanda and you and Sally and Fern. He cries for his girl friend and Rudy his kitten and Harriet the goat. But I tell him we’re going to break out one of these days.”

  “We won’t be able to go back to New Hampshire, Luis. Probably not ever.”

  “But we can do lots of things. We’ll be okay. I’m not scared. I’m only scared of having to stay here. He hates us. He’s always making threats about where he’s going to send me, how he’s going to take us away from each other. He’s going to send me away to some school where they’ll make me be a soldier, and keep Johnny at home. Can they draft kids now? Can he do that? The old lady says it costs too much.…”

  “Military school? It isn’t getting drafted, don’t be afraid. It’s just an extra strict kind of school. But we’ll get you before he can do that. Promise!”

  “When? Will she come for us?”

  “No. It will be me and maybe somebody else. If I appeared suddenly one morning when you guys were walking to school and I looked funny—maybe I would have a wig on or my hair dyed? Do you think Johnny would get in the car or would he be scared?”

  “Are you kidding? Would we get in the car? Ha! That’s a joke. The hard part is when you come and you talk to me and then you go away.”

  “I’ll maybe come once more and tell you to expect us, but maybe not. Maybe we’ll just come with a car one morning. I think it won’t be more than a month now. It’s to be right around the time Wanda gets out. So when you hear them talking about that, you’ll know to be expecting us. Then a friend is going to take you to another city and you’ll have to both wait there with that person for us to get there the next day. But you’ll know we’re on our way, and that first night, you’ll get to talk to us on the telephone so you know for sure we’re on our way. Okay?”

  “Got it!” Luis put out his hand to shake hers. He was into being very controlled these days. She wanted to seize him and hug him hard, to let her feelings out and share his. But no doubt he needed his stoicism. As Wanda needed her sense of struggle. She shook his hand and held it as long as she dared.

  Beth asked Miriam if she would do a small errand. To her astonishment, Miriam insisted on taking a much bigger part. She would meet Laura and Wanda on the Connecticut Turnpike where Laura would bring Wanda from Alderson on the day of her release, and she would bring Wanda to Beth at Miriam’s house, where they would hide overnight and disguise themselves. Miriam entered passionately into the planning. “Suppose they were my children? Of course she has to get them back!” Miriam brushed the heavy hair back from her eyes, frowning. “For once I don’t mind the risk, Beth. I want to do it! Maybe I even need to do it!”

  “But Neil wouldn’t go along. Why do you want to take risks for us?”

  “You think I always lie to myself. Sure, I’ve done a lot of that for years now. But oh, Beth, after a while the pain gets through. The pain gets through! I have so little self-respect left I need to prove to myself I’m still here. I can’t even love my children right if I’m a dishrag.”

  “Are you very unhappy?”

  “I was much unhappier with Phil and Jackson. Now … it’s just nothing. It’s being dull and bored and servile. I feel as if my life is over.”

  “Wanda’s eight years older than you. She began another life when she was thirty-five.”

  “Come on, you call it the women’s movement, but what do you have for an ordinary woman? I’m not twenty-one, I’m not attractive. No one looks twice and I don’t care. I love my two children and I see them growing and changing and I see the world closing in on Ariane already. I see it. How nervous she is to please. But what have you got for me? I love my kids and I don’t burn banks down or run around the streets with picket signs.”

  “You’re beginning to understand how trying to be a good woman has oppressed you. It isn’t me who’s making you feel the weight that’s crushing you.”

  “Yeah, sure. I feel it. You call it oppression, I call it pain!”

  “Pain is individual. Internal. You think it’s your problem, your fault. You still see it as private. If you were in a group with other women, you’d find out that what you think of as your private problems are common as Social Security numbers and fillings. You didn’t mess up, you didn’t fail. You don’t have to feel guilty. You can fight it!”

  “So help me, then. Face it, Beth, I’m no kid. I’m the mother of two children. I wouldn’t let them go for my life to live over again. They’re the world to me, Ariane and Jeffrey. They’re far more mine than they are Neil’s, for all he wanted them so much. He’s so proud of himself spending time with them on Sunday afternoon.”

  “You keep saying you’re not young. So maybe you won’t catch another man. Is that it?”

  “What have you got to replace it? Come on. I’m not about to start having relationships with women. Maybe that works for you. Okay, I’ll believe it on faith. It’s like a joke to me. I can’t be turned on by another woman. Maybe I’m too old to change. Maybe it’s been too easy for me to make it with men. What am I supposed to do then? You think I’m going to run off to Vermont and join a traveling circus? Beth, I can’t. It isn’t in me. Maybe I could have at nineteen. But my kids are real people too. And they’re damned sure what they want, from day to day. Loud and clear.”

  Beth paced around the table. “I can’t give you a one, two, three answer. I hear what you’re saying, and I know it’s real. But I can’t present you with a replacement for Neil. He’s security, he’s your income, he’s your love, he’s your insurance policy, he’s your government, he’s your sex life, he’s your society in one.”

  “You can say, go to work. Okay, by now I’m scared. I’ve lost my confidence by attrition, that beautiful technical arrogance. I haven’t stood on my own two feet and presented a technical idea in years! I haven’t even spoken in public. I’ve lost my cool. There’s a depression in my field. Route 128 is a disaster area—companies folding, thousands out of work.” Miriam shook her hair back, sighing. “And what does it mean, I quit because I didn’t want to hire my brain to the military. Now I’ll go back and take the same kind of job. Who am I kidding? I do less damage darning socks.” Miriam was getting excited. Words gushed from her. Beth had the feeling that Miriam had been brooding and studying her situation for months but had never spoken a word. Her voice rose, thickening, and the words spouted. “And suppose I get some job, by the time I pay child care, what do I have left? Even if I get something from Neil. I gave him grounds for divorce once myself. I wonder if a smart lawyer like Neil would hire couldn’t make a lot out of Phil.… I wonder … Anyhow, suppose by some miracle I get enough child support to pay for day care. How can I celebrate turning my children over to enforced baby sitting? Most women who do it can’t get any other kind of work. It’s lousy for the kids. And I’d come home at night tired. What would I have to give them?” Miriam sat down as if exhausted, then bounced up again. “I hate to sound like a bragging, pushy mama, but Ariane is … brilliant! She has an incredible mind. She’s full of insights. Did you look at those montages she’s doing? She goes part time to a really free creative nursery, but the tuition is high.…”

  “The whole ball of wax sticks together. That’s a Wanda expression. You set your own terms that make the problem insoluble.”

  “How did Wanda managed to work in the theater with two boys? I guess they’re old enough to be in school.”

  “Everybody took care of the children.”

  “I don’t know.… Different women have different ideas about child rearing. I wouldn’t care for Laverne imposing her notions on my children, any more than she would like mine.”

  “But, Miriam, you can’t have it both ways! If the kids are solely your responsibility, then all you can do is hire the time of a woman who won’t love them. If others ca
re about them and therefore care for them, you can’t have complete control.”

  Miriam looked dubious. “Most people are such pigs about children.”

  “I’m going to think about what you asked me. I can’t come up with magic. My answer is going to be dull and practical.… I’m going to bring you things to read and some lists of groups that exist.”

  Phil and Dorine volunteered to take the boys to Cleveland. They were meeting in a Greek restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue where the bouzoukia music on the jukebox made background and they talked softly. It was early and uncrowded. Beth would be picking up Luis and Johnny and then turning them over to … Dorine and Phil? She must decide. “I don’t feel good about your doing it,” Beth said to Dorine. “What you’re working on, what you’re doing with your life is important. I don’t want to get you into trouble.”

  “I’m not sacrificing myself—I don’t expect to get caught. And, Beth, who doesn’t have something precious in herself that deserves to be protected? Besides, Phil and I function well together. We both drive, we’re used to night driving. I know we can do it. We can’t control the off chance, but we won’t take extra risks. Each of us knows how the other thinks and reacts—which is good when we may be dealing with emergencies.”

  “But you,” Beth said to Phil. Still tanned from the summer, he looked healthy. Thin but not gaunt. An edge was gone from him. At the same time she sensed him more directly. She remembered the wall of glass she had felt between him and the world, except for Miriam, long ago in the coffeehouse. She could not quite make sense of the shifts and alterations—appearance? habit? “Why do you want to do this? We’ve … never got along.”

  “Disliked each other self-righteously.”

  “Well?”

  “Dorine wants to, for you. And I always thought Wanda had plenty of guts. But how do you think you’ll understand?”

  “I have to trust you.”

  Phil grinned. “And I have to trust you worked this thing out well enough so we won’t be caught. You don’t know how much I don’t want to go back inside.”

  “You served time.” She tried to feel that with her mind.

  “That’s part of it. I used to know those kids, especially Luis. He’s a real fine kid. And nobody with all their marbles would doubt Wanda is one tough mother.” He shrugged. “You take the risk I might fuck up. I take the risk your plan might be full of worms.”

  “You keep questioning that. Because a woman can’t possibly plan an action?”

  “Don’t call me names without provocation. Anybody not a mental case worries when they take risks. You think if you were a man I’d say, ‘Yassah?’ Come off it.”

  “Of course, you’ve always been scrupulously fair with women, all these years, so I ought to believe in your sudden conversion.”

  “You don’t think Dorine knows what I’m like?”

  “Every woman’s man is an exception,” Dorine said. “I have to say that before Beth does.”

  “Are all men bad and all women good? Or are there differences?” He shook his head heavily and then leaned back. Dorine was sitting with her arms folded across her breasts, keeping herself from interfering. “Make up your mind. Trust me or don’t. I don’t have enough self-hatred left in me to take a whole lot of kicking.”

  “Why do you want to? Is it for Dorine? Is it because you were in jail? I can’t feel you. And I can’t play with Wanda’s life by spreading a thick coat of good will over everything and saying, ‘It’s so nice you want to do this that I’ll take it like a lollipop.’ ”

  “Do you ever know just why anybody does an act? Did you really understand why Wanda went to jail rather than testify?”

  “Yes, I do think I finally understand that! Being politically naïve isn’t like being female, it changes.” With what? Having exorcised her anger at Wanda for leaving her for any reason? Taking action herself that carried risk?

  “Well, it’s a nice clear action. Suppose some bastards had taken me away from my mother? It could have happened to her just for being poor and alone.”

  She stared at him. “Do you think doing time changed you?”

  “What kind of question is that? … You’re a thing in their-power. They can beat you, strip you, starve you, take away your letters and your pictures and piss on them and tear them up in front of you. Tell you what to read, deny you paper and pencil, bust you for staring. They can take your health away real slow or break your back in two minutes. ‘Desperate’ just has no meaning till you’re inside. Then nothing ever is the same again. Not touching a woman, not taking a crap or looking at the sky or buying a paperback or smiling in the mirror.… Doing Time. While people outside give up on you. Go on and live and forget you and take your woman or your kids away and let them have absolute mastery over you, mastery to death.”

  “You think the effects were all bad? You never spoke to me for real before. Talking to communicate, not to manipulate. You always tried to make me give you something.”

  “How the hell do you presume that’s jail and not Dorine? This woman is strong. And stubborn. We’ve been struggling and struggling with each other. Jesus, there are more direct ways to change your habits!”

  “Beth, he’s done a lot of his changing here.” Dorine turned to Phil. “I think you came back with less … structures … but you might have rebuilt them into something harder.” Dorine unclasped her hands from that protective, restraining clutch across her breasts.

  “We’re all so divided and put down, it has a funny side,” Beth said softly. “Your ex-con, poor-child oppression. My female, lesbian oppression. I guess we might try to pull together instead of across the table.”

  Phil poured them all more retsina. Beth found she was sitting back. Her muscles felt sore, as if she had been holding up a weight. Why were they all suddenly easier? Beth knew she was going to agree that they would take Luis and Johnny to Cleveland. With the confrontation relaxed, Dorine began to interact with both of them. Beth watched Dorine and Phil together. Then she decided to bring that up out loud. “Do you think of yourselves as a couple?”

  “Well, yeah,” Phil said. “Loosely. In the context of the house.”

  “The center of my life is what I do. But I don’t have to be quite so inhuman about it now. I don’t need to prove to myself any longer that I can study, that I can work, that I can do research. I’m over the first and second humps—”

  “There are no camels with these humps,” Phil said. “We’re done proving to each other what we don’t need, and now we can enjoy what time we get. Sometimes we’re in different cycles and we can’t bring it together. She’s more into her head, I’m more into my hands. I need to make real objects, useful objects. Beds people lie on, fuck in. Babies’ cradles. Chairs. Desks. Tables. But we’re both back from the extremes of that dichotomy too.”

  “What does that word mean? I don’t follow you.”

  Dorine said, “For so long I hadn’t used my mind except to invent rationalizations and brood on my sorrows. When I began to work, I became superrational and super-controlled. I didn’t want to enjoy my body. I was scared of being captured by the old passivity.”

  “Yeah, remember that first year? Sex measured out like holy water. I was like to die.”

  “Now I don’t need to blot out everybody to be able to work.”

  “Aw now, my head trip was never control, I should hardly need to say—”

  “Ha,” Dorine said, wrinkling her nose. “You tried in your devious way. You were just too stoned to be good at getting power.”

  “Listen, growing up where I did, the way you felt like a man was by hurting, by beating, by putting down. Well, I identified with my mother too much to make it that way. Now, there were two models I saw, the champion, the hustler. The champion fights to win. The hustler wants to win too, but in such a way that it looks accidental. He doesn’t cream an opponent, he cons a mark.”

  “Women have a soft spot for hustlers, that’s why you did so well.” Dorine smiled sideways at
him. “Because the hustler isn’t alien. All women hustle. Women watch faces, voices, gestures, moods. The person who has to survive through cunning. Flattery, charm, manipulation …” Reminiscently she turned to Beth. “One of the things that used to hook me on our first rotten go-round was that I felt that Phil needed me, needed my sympathy, my caring.”

  “But I hustled women too. Aw, I hustled in the Army, I swear I hustled Jackson out of his marriage, I hustled into graduate school …”

  “To listen to him tell it, you’d think he had it made!” Dorine said.

  “Well, I was never a grade A hustler because my fantasies took over. They interfered with my ability to scan. The structures I built in my head got more and more real and what I tripped over in the street less and less important. Drugs helped. They helped a lot. They numbed me to the pain of losing and losing.”

  Beth said, “I couldn’t learn to hustle. So I was a victim, a loser. But that isn’t the whole universe! We can get outside of roles, finally! We can!”

  “Mother Mary, I’m trying.” Phil grinned. “But what a long slow tortuous winding it is.”

  “Jackson plays the sage but he’s really a champion type, isn’t he?” Beth said, remembering, remembering. “He has to win.”

  “We don’t see each other much. I can’t stand the smell of modest success. And I don’t wrestle with him in the old way, I don’t secretly want to be him.… But don’t you have to win too? I’m counting on that.”

  “In the plural. That makes a difference. I can’t define a victory that would be just for me … except the immediate one of getting my family together.”

  “Being with Phil makes me more, not less, Bethie. Try to see. We have separate problems and we have to solve them, each of us, but sometimes we keep each other warm and sometimes we help each other to survive, to see, to try. Now we can ask each other for things we want, at least sometimes. You know?”

  Beth looked from Dorine to Phil. “Maybe it’s the retsina. But I feel as if you want me to bless you. I’m only me. What you want, you do. I only want you to help me to get my love and our children together.”