Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  2

  Marriage Is a Matter of Give and Take

  The days were long but blurred except for weekends when she and Jim could be together. Often they went shopping or to the stock-car races, especially if Dan was driving. Usually they went out with Frankie and the girl he was seeing that month. She was thrown together with Frankie’s girl friends. Some she liked and some she didn’t, but she had to get along with all of them while becoming attached to none: because in three weeks he would be through with that one. Then the suddenly dropped girl would be calling her to cry and wonder what she had done.

  She looked at Jim at the table, in the shower, lying beside him in bed, studying him and her feelings, trying to understand what this was, this marriage, this loving. A pain bloomed in her flesh sometimes when she looked at him, a beautiful frightening jagged pain of loving. Why? Because of his straight nose and his gray eyes and the way one brow slanted higher than the other and the turn at the corner of his mouth?

  What did such a sweet pain mean? For a year she had schemed, lied to her mother and father, used an elaborate code on the phone like a heroine in a spy movie, all to be with him. Now here they were married, month after month. She had loved him and been sure she knew him; every day it hit her how little they knew each other. Yet they seemed to go on exactly the same.

  Every day she had to go to work too early. She wished she could arrive at nine-thirty when she had to punch in, but Jim had to be at work by nine and he wanted the car with him. Where they were living in East Syracuse, there really was no other way to get downtown to Edwards, where she worked. So every day she had half an hour, forty-five minutes to kill before work. The downtown had been urban-renewed and there were benches, especially in the square in front of St. Mary’s and the County Courthouse, where sometimes she could read for a while without being pestered. Or she wandered past the parking lots paved over rubble and looked at the fancy new yellow stucco townhouses, the high-rise apartments, and wondered what it would be like if they lived near things she might want to do, instead of so far out. By the museum a playground had an elephant slide, and even at that hour children were crawling through the elephant’s belly and sliding down his trunk. Watching, she felt a peculiar nostalgia; not for her own childhood certainly. For children she would have?

  She did not like selling in Daytime Dresses where a nervous manager was always breathing down her neck, telling her to fold boxes or work on stock if she lacked a customer. She hated being checker at the fitting rooms, pulling clothes out of women’s hands and counting to make sure nothing was stolen.

  In March, after she had been married and working full time for nine months, she was transferred to Notions, on the ground floor. Notions tended to be quiet and mostly she just had to show customers where hangers or sewing supplies were located. All day long music engulfed her. Records were in the middle of Men’s Wear, just through the archway. In June she began to notice the music more. The person who put on the records now was a college boy pretending to be his brother just graduated from high school. If the store had known he was twenty and in college, they would not have hired him. He called her Mrs. Walker and seemed to think that was funny. She called him Larry. He told her she was a child bride, that she had been married at age thirteen and would have ten children by the time she was thirty.

  She liked the music Larry played. Sometimes it was soul, sometimes it was people saying things sharper and cleaner than people ever talked to each other in her life. She had always liked music but mainly as part of the ambience of dating. She had had an AM radio to share with Nancy but never before a record player. Her mother could not see buying records when she could turn on the radio free. Jim had a phonograph and with her discount she began to buy some of the records Larry played. It was like bringing home a mood, a thick potent mood. She was beginning to listen carefully to the music and to the words too, hearing the records over and over all day while she stood by her cash register. Music stopped being background for dancing or driving in the car or eating pizza and began to be great charges of feeling, someone and then someone else talking to her with power.

  It seemed to her that the music was a messenger from another place, some level where people lived more fully, felt more strongly, reached out and experienced in a way that no one about her ever did. Sort of how she had imagined being with Jim would be, beforehand. She tried to explain that to Jim, but he thought she meant the life that rock musicians led. Sure, he said, they had a lot of money and different girls every night and all the drugs they wanted and cars and great clothes. That was the life.

  It wasn’t just rock music. Sometimes Larry played piano music or violins with orchestras that spoke of completely other inner and outer landscapes. When a customer suddenly asked for a folding umbrella, she found it hard to disconnect. But of course she did. All her life she had been polite and serviceable. After a customer had taken out bad temper on her and called her stupid and blamed her for things that did not work or were out of stock, she scarcely knew she was angry until she found herself shaking.

  Jim was not interested when she tried to talk about the store, and she had to agree, her days were empty. She liked Larry. She liked to look at him. He had even longer hair than Jim and gentler features. He talked differently, though he preferred to talk to several of the other girls. She was fifth or sixth choice. She should not mind that. She was married. She was not supposed to mind if men ignored her, and besides, they mostly always had. But she did mind that he didn’t like to talk to her as much as she liked to listen to him. She wished she knew all the names that danced through his talk. If she had been able to go to college, of course she would. Often Larry carried books with him and sometimes he would loan her a paperback.

  As a child she had loved to read. She had especially liked novels about history or faraway countries or animals. The other girls used to tease her. Historical books were for girls, The Little Maid of Bunker Hill. But books about dogs and the sea—Spike: Dog of the North and Treasure Island— were supposed to be for boys. For a long time she had even gone on reading in high school, randomly in the school library and at the branch. If she liked a book by an author, she would read everything else by that name. Nobody paid attention to what she read, unless they were paperbacks. Then her father sometimes would pick up one with a sexy cover and throw it in the garbage pail. She read a lot of Frank Yerby and Galsworthy, but she also read all of Aldous Huxley and Iris Murdoch. On such books she formed her notions of what was out there, past Syracuse.

  Gradually she had stopped reading. Partly it was knowing that they weren’t going to let her go to college. The books had betrayed her, leading her to want what she could not approach. She had to work downtown selling after school her senior year, and it was hard enough to get homework done. Her grades should have suffered, but she was known to be a good if unexciting student, and no one seemed to notice that the work she did had fallen off. She spent any free time trying desperately to see Jim or managing to see him, or discussing him with Dolores, or covering up for having seen him. Withdrawing her energies from school and the world glimpsed in books, she had put everything into her romance. Then getting married had been a full-time occupation for weeks.

  In the evenings now Jim watched sports on TV, baseball and basketball and football and racing when there was any. He also liked the comedies where the set kept laughing, so she would sit in a chair across from him and read while he watched, taking care to keep an eye on the set as she turned a page so she would know what to say when he spoke to her. She had begun bringing books home from the downtown library. She had originally gone in to kill time during bad weather, and besides she had walked over the whole downtown so many times she was tired of it. She spent her lunch hours picking out books to bring home.

  Nancy clipped magazine articles for her about fixing up the apartment with what they called unusual accessories to give it a bold, dramatic look, but the few times she tried, all she created was a mess that made Jim ask, “Now wha
t the hell is that?” She decided decorating would have to wait for that magical time when she could stop working. For now it was hard enough to keep the rooms straightened and moderately clean. She wished Jim would not drop his socks beside the bed when he took them off at night or scatter the paper on the floor or leave beer cans under his chair. But when she spoke to him, he got touchy and said she was nagging just like his mother, and she’d better quit it.

  She was studying him, learning him, trying to please him. She picked out clothes mainly in blue now because it was his favorite color. She learned to sleep with the window shut and to iron shirts. She was friendly but not too friendly to Frankie’s girls. She suffered his brother Dan to maul her. Yet Jim seemed to please her the same ways as before, or less: he aimed to please her with ritual gestures addressed to Any Girl. In bed he took her pleasure for granted. Before, when they had petted, he had made her come, but now he just pushed in and pumped away for a while until he had his orgasm. He always mumbled, “Um, was that good for you too, baby?” She was embarrassed to say anything, but she started wondering if that wasn’t a form of lying to him. Finally she told him one night that it wasn’t good for her. He called her frigid. “You better start shaping up as a woman!” He said he had been with plenty of girls, plenty, and they had all told him how good he was. In fact, they had scratched his back and moaned.

  Finally she asked Marie. Marie told her that men expected you to act a certain way. She told Beth to notice how women acted in movies. That was how you were supposed to be, and Beth had better start doing it right, or she’d find herself out in the cold.

  “But don’t you ever feel pleasure? I mean, can’t we?”

  “That’s a bunch of nonsense,” Marie said with a grimace. “Just get it over with. Do you want him looking for it someplace else?”

  Jim stayed mad at her until she began making noises like the movie actresses did. Then he loved her again.

  She had never masturbated. She would have been afraid to touch herself there before, for fear she would rupture her virginity or get a disease. Now she began to make herself come with her finger as he used to before they were married. She would do it in bed after he fell asleep, so that she could slip free of the excitement trapped in her limbs and tissues. Then she too could sleep.

  Since she was married, her mother and Marie talked to her differently. They complained about their husbands. They assumed a common level of grievance. That was being married. They saw a certain level of war as normal: women had to get things indirectly, wives had to plot and manage and evade. “You have to make him think he’s getting his way,” Marie warned. “Don’t cross him directly. You have to coax him along.” If she thought Jim was a slob, she ought to see Gene. Then Marie would begin tales of women whose husbands had left them suddenly after a month, a year, twenty years, forty years. Formerly Marie had been her ally against her mother, to escape to Jim; now Jim was suddenly the one to get around.

  Their second summer together came to its height and died away brown. Larry returned to school, where he told her he lived in a commune with three other men and two women. She would have liked to ask him questions, but they all seemed too personal. Another young man was hired in records who played only the Top Forty. Though she was sorry when Larry said good-by, she guessed he would not remember her in a month. Never had fall seemed sadder, more full of things dying and flying away and fading. She took walks sometimes near their apartment and watched the blackbirds gathering above the weedy suburban fields that stretched between their bulldozed development and the next. Really there was no place to walk. One house was like another, and out on the highway people tooted and roared past in a smell of exhaust.

  Something, something hung out there in music and birds wheeling against the dusk and crickets chirping in the weeds. Standing at the sink doing supper dishes on feet swollen from selling all day in Notions, she watched the moon rise orange and tarnished between two identical brick two-story apartments across the cul-de-sac. She was lonely. She felt she was perishing of loneliness. But how could she be lonely when she was married to Jim? Was everybody really lonely? Was Larry lonely in his commune? She asked Marie about loneliness and Marie snorted. “Lonely? Wait till you have children! Oh, I’d give my right arm to be alone for a day, just once!” But she was lonely with Frankie and Jim and Dan at the speedway in Cicero, and she was lonely with Jim sitting in the living room.

  “Hamburger, spaghetti, macaroni, meat loaf—don’t you know how to cook anything else? I might as well eat in a diner. Didn’t your mother teach you one damn thing that’s useful?”

  “I’m tired when I get home—the same as you are.”

  “You think standing around in an air-conditioned store all day is work? Jesus, you ought to be out there doing some real work for a change. Now I don’t want to come home to any more of these short-order meals. I didn’t get married to eat shit!”

  She could not understand the fuss he made about supper. For her it was something to be got out of the way so that they could have the evening to enjoy. She would just as soon eat some tuna fish, a peach, and a bit of cheese. He wanted meat, but then he lost his temper at the amount they had to pay at the supermarket and said she didn’t know how to shop. She found it hard to believe how much he cared. After all, even if she fussed for an hour, supper was all eaten up in ten minutes and they were full and the difference between making something difficult and something easy was only in how tired she was afterward. His ideas of big meals seemed designed to rob her of the precious bit of energy left after eight hours standing behind the counter, the energy to suppress her aching feet and aching back, to steal a little of something sweet from the fading day.

  When he looked at her that way, his gray eyes narrowed to slits of contempt, when his voice took on that edge of a saw, each tooth catching one by one in her throat, she had to hold tight to herself. A shrill of pain sang in her. She wanted to promise anything to make him look gently at her again, to make the lover reappear. The terror at the absence of love: coldness, coldness. If she got angry too, it did not work the same way. Experimentally she tried yelling back at him when he yelled.

  “Why should I have to fix a six-course meal? Your mother, your mother, I’m tired of hearing about how great a cook she is! She doesn’t have to work all day. You want me to quit? Fine! Let’s live on your pay check.”

  “You throwing that in my face?” His hand gripped her shoulder, burned into it. “You talk like that and you won’t see a pay check of mine till next Christmas!”

  He did not grow fearful before her temper as she before his. Her attempts to express anger, to defend herself, ended in tears, in begging forgiveness, in taking back her words abjectly, in a sense of humiliation and insulted flesh and bruises. The upper hand, he called it. Keeping the upper hand. A man wore the pants, he said, or he was henpecked. After they fought she despised herself. Her mother and Marie were right. If she could never win, if fighting had such a price attached to it, then it was better to avoid the open fight, to turn aside, to make the soft answer and pretend not to hear and not to see and not to understand.

  She felt as if he had developed jagged spikes that stuck out into her, so that she must retract not to encounter them. It seemed to her he became spinier and more angular and she became smaller and denser and compressed into a shape that would not touch off his alarm system. He was expanding and she was contracting. She began to suspect he enjoyed his temper, the temper he could not use at work where he was bottom dog. He was working at a garage owned by the man with the Ford dealership who was backing Dan—enough to get him hired but not enough to keep him from being subject to the other men’s jokes and expendable. At home he got noisier and she got quieter. He seemed to shine when he was angry. After a fight he ate with a good appetite. He slammed out of the house to see the boys and had a few beers and came home to sleep soundly. She cried and clutched the pillow and rehearsed everything said and unsaid, what she would have said if she dared. Then one evening
when he had slammed out, she picked up a novel about a married woman in France, by a Frenchwoman who had only a first name, Colette. The night before she had started it, and now she forgot everything in it—until she heard his car and leapt up, suddenly guilty.

  That was the small miracle of that night, to discover that pain could be obliterated. Some of the records were as good if she concentrated on them. That gave her a measure of detachment when they had bad scenes, to think that she could sponge them at least briefly from her mind with something more real. How could a book be more real than a marriage?

  Often now she found herself daydreaming while she was sweeping or waiting in the laundry room of the building across the street, or ironing or chopping vegetables. She had used to daydream, yes, in early and middle adolescence. But for three years she had lived in direct emotional weather, thinking about boys she went out with, thinking about boys she wanted to go out with, fingering her last encounters with Jim and imagining the next.

  Now, as Jim’s old lady, sometimes she was taken along and sometimes she was left home. Football games he tended to go to alone with Frankie or Dan because of the cost of the tickets and because they liked to drink. That Saturday she was home alone and started to sort a box of stuff her mother had dropped by, odds and ends from cleaning out her old room. Lots of photos of Dolores and herself in their bathing suits trying to look worldly wise, in back yards with their arms around each other, squinting against the glare of the Finger Lakes.