Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  She got no further than the diary she had kept during her junior year. Somehow there had been no time for it her senior year, she was too tired at bedtime to write for half an hour to herself. By then she was oriented toward Jim. But all through the year she had turned from sixteen to seventeen, she had kept a diary. Reading it through, what struck her so sharply that she kept pausing and walking around the room holding it out from herself was how different, how exactly different her memories were from what she had written in the diary.

  She had lied to herself. She had lied by omission and by alteration of the truth, constantly, daily, fervently, with many exclamation points. First of all she had lied always about how and when she met boys. All occasions were described in her diary as formal dates, when she could remember perfectly well that what she was writing about was her and Dolores hanging out someplace until some guys picked them up and they went with them, casually, dragging along. She had lied to the diary just as she lied to her mother. Because mothers had fixed ideas about the world that had nothing to do with the way things really were. No, it was not quite like lying to her mother, because all the boys got mentioned and there were details of kissing So-and-So and details of drag races where she was not supposed to be. She had not truly worried that her mother would read her diary. She might not always feel her mother loved her enough or was sympathetic with her, but she never thought her mother would pry in her dresser.

  No, it was not her mother she was lying for. She remembered months when Dolores and she were twelve, thirteen, too young to go out with boys in any usual dating scene but obsessed with them. They had always been planning parties they were going to give, they had drawn up lists of boys and girls to invite and exclude. But of course it was all pretend, though they never admitted that. The parties came from movies, TV, Archie comics about teen-agers. None of them had family rooms. Where would they have had parties? Where would they have found the money to spend on refreshments? Things were supposed to be a certain way, and in her diary always she tried to pretend that they were. Never did she admit on paper more than kissing. Everything coarse and painful was censored from her life. Her diary was the record of how it was all supposed to be.

  It seemed to her that always from the age when the great pressure began—eleven, twelve, thirteen?—until her wedding day she had been teetering on that verge between how everyone said things were and what really happened that you did not talk about, except a little with Dolores. The magazines said boys liked you, boys fell in love with you, and they wanted to but you waited and then it was beautiful. But it always seemed that a girl needed a boy a lot more than he needed you: your rating depended on him. He might be good at any one of a number of things and that would win him points. But no matter what else a girl did well, no matter what they said once a year on Honors Day, what counted was pleasing boys.

  If your hair didn’t please, you cut it or you curled it or you straightened it, and if your parents let you, you streaked it or dyed it. If your voice didn’t please, you went around trying to talk in your throat. You did exercises supposed to make your breasts grow and your waist shrink, and always you dieted. You shaved your legs and under your arms and bought creams and lotions and medicines to fight pimples. The constant message in the air was that, if you didn’t attract boys, you must change your body, rearrange your head, your personality, your ideas to fit in with what was currently wanted. Or else you were a failure. You were a dog.

  So she had had little to bargain with. If you didn’t satisfy a boy, he would drop you. If you had sex with him, he might drop you anyhow, and then if he talked, you’d have to go on doing it. So you had to work something out, as she had. It was a dangerous game with the prize marriage. And then what?

  So she had won her love-and-marriage, but somehow that too was not the way it was supposed to be. Saturday night she put her old diary away, but she remained at odds with herself. She did not lie to herself in a diary now, no, she carried around daydreams like knitting, like the scarves and sweaters some girls used to carry around in high school and sit in class working on when they were supposed to be listening to the teacher. She carried her daydreaming with her in the car, to work, to bed.

  Sunday morning she was straightening the house while Jim sat in his favorite recliner reading the funnies. She was also on a hill in Spain and the Fascists were closing in and planes had just flown over strafing them. Every one of their guerrilla band was dead except for her beloved and herself. He was dying of a wound in the chest and she too was badly wounded though not in any particular place. As she held his noble head in her lap looking like the photo of Hemingway on the back of the book she was reading, she made a speech about how good and beautiful it was to die under those particular circumstances. “And I regret I have but one life to give for my country and my beloved,” she was saying when Jim’s voice cut through. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Have you flipped out?”

  She looked. It took her a moment to understand. Then she saw that, with the fine gesture of relinquishment with which she had waved away surrender and welcomed death with her beloved, she had emptied the ashtray filled to overflowing with butts and roaches and pistachio shells neatly into the open drawer of the end table, and the playing cards which she had gathered from the table she had tossed into the wastebasket.

  She knew there was something shameful about living so much in a daydream, not only because she was returning to a period she thought she had outgrown in meeting Jim, but because there was something second rate about an imaginary life. Her best thinking was going not into living but into making up lives. All the rest of that Sunday she forced herself to fight daydreaming. Yes, daydreaming was a drug. It kept her quiet, it made the time pass better than being stoned.

  By refusing to let herself dream away that Sunday she remained conscious of it. Conscious of the housework and how weary she was of doing it while he sat and watched her, littering the floor she had just cleaned and then complaining if the litter remained. Tired of spending Sundays at the races with his buddies and their girls. Tired of watching Jim drink himself bloated and silly or bad-tempered. Tired of him climbing on top of her. Tired of the whole mythology of love and marriage, which seemed much of a piece with the rest of her daydreaming. She had never known Jim and he didn’t know her. Perhaps they did not even like each other. “Jim” was a character made up as she used to make over her daily life for her diary.

  There had to be more than this! They were not really together. This could not be what they had wanted. She must get through to him. She could not let his annoyance smash her to silence but for once she had to touch him, to make him hear her out.

  He wrinkled his forehead at her over the kitchen table. “What is it now? You don’t like living here? This apartment?”

  “I don’t care where we live, honest. This is okay.”

  “What do you want then? Do you know what you’re talking about?”

  “Us. How we are to each other. What we want in our lives.”

  “You want to have a kid? Is that what it is?”

  From the terror that touched her she knew that, whatever she wanted, that wasn’t it. Why so afraid? Just a couple of months before she had imagined that very soon they would have a baby. She had brooded over names. Because then she would be trapped. Because then she could not leave.

  Till that moment at the table she did not even know she had imagined leaving. Getting away. Escaping. From what? Him? Her family? The box. It was all the box. There had to be something more to living, there had to be, or there was no point.

  She felt the undertow. What he was saying to her, her own trained obedient self said too: that she could not specify what she wanted. How could she want something if she couldn’t even give it a name? All right, but if she had been so confined she had never seen the sun, the sky, she would still know there must be something beyond four walls.

  “I want us to talk to each other! I want us to know each other! I want us to be … more peopl
e. To grow!”

  The upshot of talking to Jim was that he had sex with her insistently and often and much of the time now his eyes watched her as she moved about the kitchen and the bedroom.

  Staying together as they were meant that they would have children and buy a house and buy things to put in it. It meant never growing up. It meant never finding out what she wanted. It meant never entering into the heart of feeling except secretly through music, through the drug of daydream, for Jim through booze and drugs. She had never been on her own. She had learned none of the small skills by which people got around in the world. But everybody started ignorant. She was making excuses from the timidity she had been studying all her life, believing that she could not do anything, that she was not worth anything. Mittens pinned to her coat in grade school, Jim not liking her to drive their car, Mrs. James H. Walker, that strange opaque name she was supposed to sign, the softness of her hands and the weakness of her wrists, that had never learned to do anything useful.

  Jim watched her. His gray eyes were wary and full of suspicion. He asked questions about phone calls and where she went and why and for how long. In bed he tried being violent, kissing her till her teeth ached and clutching her breasts so hard that in the morning there were bruises. Then he tried being gentle. He caressed her with his fingertips. He tried kissing her vagina. Through all the experiments he watched. Because he watched she tightened. She was aware of him waiting and she could not respond. Her body felt like a watch ticking. She wished that he had tried some of his experiments earlier, but now with those suspicious eyes and his anger banked and gathering interest, she could not breathe in bed with him. Her body mistrusted. She had to resume making the passionate moans she had learned.

  She felt caught in the gray web of his gaze. His anger was muted but growing. She was something that was not working as it was supposed to. He was still trying to fix it. Soon he would lose his patience. Then would he return it or break it? One night as she was trying to fall asleep beside him she remembered something from the summer when she was ten. One Saturday at a company picnic that G.E. had every year with sack races and three-legged races and egg tosses and horseshoes and Softball, there in the path Nancy and she had found a box turtle. He had a beautiful shell, divided into sort of shingles above and polished wood on the bottom. They brought him back and made a home for him in the yard. They put up a chicken-wire fence and built a house of broken bricks. All day the turtle went round and round the chicken wire, butting his head against the fence and standing up awkwardly on edge and flopping over backward trying to escape. In a book on reptiles she had taken from the branch library, it showed a picture of a turtle just like Roxy and said box turtles were easily tamed and made good pets. Round and round the fence Roxy went making a trail in the dust and rolling like a sad tank through the water dish and over the lettuce and grapes they had put down, and around again. Finally she felt so sorry she could not stand it. She bargained with Dick to drive her out to the country to let the turtle go where she had found it in return for the contents of her white piggy bank.

  During the next week she kept thinking of the turtle. She was the turtle going round and round the chicken wire searching for a way out. But she did not want Jim to take her back where he had found her because that was a prison too. She studied herself as turtle. Turtles were not glamorous creatures. They were slow but dogged. Maybe it took them a long while to get someplace, even to figure out where they wanted to go, but then they kept stubbornly at it. They were not beautiful but they carried what they needed. They were not particularly brave and the idea of running from a wild turtle would make a child laugh. Threatened, they had a shell they could draw into and tuck up inside. They were cautious and long-lived. No one could teach a turtle to do tricks. They were quiet and could be mistaken for something not really alive, a rock or a piece of wood. Sometimes they aroused sadism in people. No great power had ever marched out to conquest under the emblem of a turtle.

  Real turtles had an advantage over self-proclaimed ones: a real shell. They could shut out questions. Jim told Marie’s husband that Beth was not acting right. Now she was getting a lot of flak from Marie and her mother. Every day one or the other or both called her and gave her a dressing down. Her mother turned up at work to mutter at her over the scissors and pins. Thursday evening Marie and Gene came over with the kids and told her she ought to have a baby, what was wrong with her now? Somehow everything had got simplified into Jim wanting her to get pregnant. Everyone agreed that was both problem and solution. Her mother told her that every woman was afraid at first, but every woman went through it, that was what God had made them for.

  Both Marie and her mother closed themselves off to her. She would think they were responding, she would try to talk to them. Once she started to cry and her mother touched her on the shoulder and said, “There, there.” But they were the arm of authority. The next moment her mother was calling her a crybaby. They had to press her back in line. She was not behaving as a wife was supposed to. She sensed that she scared them. She touched something in Marie, a sore spot that made Marie nervous, until Marie responded by yelling at her in the same voice she used to scream at her kids. “Now you shape up, Bethie! We’re ashamed of you! Everybody has babies and nobody else makes a fuss!”

  Her mother and her mother-in-law came over together. Her mother spread herself smack in the middle of a blue sofa. Her mother-in-law sat in Jim’s favorite chair, the recliner. It had three positions but Mrs. Walker sat up straight in it. Beth did not want to sit next to her mother so she sat on the hassock that matched the recliner, which put her down near the floor. They both told her loudly that it was her duty as a wife to have a baby.

  “He doesn’t want a baby, either. He’s just insisting on it now because he’s mad at me and he doesn’t want to listen!”

  “Don’t spout nonsense,” her mother said. “What should he listen to you about? What do you know? He wants what’s good for the marriage.”

  “Jim does too want children. He always has,” Mrs. Walker said. “And you let on that you wanted children too before you got married, so I don’t know where you’re getting all this now.”

  They glared at her and each other. Mrs. Walker said her mother had spoiled her. Her mother said she never had. Up until Bethie left home she had been a good girl and minded her mother and kept her room clean and never ran around the way some people’s children did.

  Friday she came home from work and made meat loaf. When they sat down at the table, she couldn’t find her pills. She looked all over the table and then under it and then all around the kitchen counter. Finally, afraid already, she asked Jim.

  “I poured them down the toilet.” He made a gesture of flushing. “All down.”

  She ran into the bedroom to look in her dresser. He followed. “I flushed down next month too. No more pills. Now you’ll have to shape up and do things the right way.”

  “Why are you doing this to me? I don’t want a baby! I don’t want one right now!”

  “Well, you’re going to. Because you’re my wife and I love you, and you’re supposed to love me. So you’re going to have my baby, and from now on we’re going to have a real marriage.”

  Her hands shook as she tried to eat. She could not swallow. She put down her fork and began to cry. He was willing to comfort her. He came and put his arms around her but she pulled away. “Don’t pretend to be sympathetic! Don’t pretend I’m just crying! I’m crying for what you did!”

  “Okay, if you want to cry, cry. Look ugly if you want to. I don’t have to sit and look at you.” He went into the living room and turned on the set.

  Sitting at the table, after a while she began to eat, chewing the meat loaf a bite at a time. A trapped animal eating a dead animal. She chewed and swallowed. He was willing to trap her. That made him the enemy. Who then was the ally? Only herself. Only the records and books that gave her energy. Only the Turtle Flag she was flying secretly.

  That private morale-buildi
ng was all very well. Turtles laid eggs in the mud and walked away, but she was going to be stuck. Always she liked to think in images, as if that were thinking! She chewed on the meat loaf, cold chunk by chunk. She was a lousy cook, he was right. The cafeteria where she sometimes ate lunch made better meat loaf. She would rather be cooked for than cook, which made her an unsatisfactory wife right there. She must not forget that again, if she was lucky enough to get out of here. Remember the cold meat loaf. From the refrigerator she got the ketchup and doused it liberally. Then it was less obnoxious. Meat, a dead animal that had been alive. She felt as if her life were something slippery she was trying to grab in running water. She could not stop thinking in pictures. She ground her teeth, tasting ketchup and gristle. She must think clearly about a course of action.

  Come on, come on, she had been clever enough intriguing to see Jim. But although the weight of her family had pressed her one way, the weight of needing to have Jim, someone she belonged to, love and marriage, had pressed her even harder the other. Then she had been marvelously inventive in ways to get out of the house, in ways to explain where she’d been after work, after school. She had been stubborn enough when she refused to keep it hidden longer, insisting she had the right to see him and marry him. Come on, come on!

  Okay, this was the second week of her cycle. If she did not take the pills she might ovulate. So she must not let him take her. She must get through the weekend. Monday she would escape. She could run away.

  He did not like to have sex when she was menstruating. The month before last when she had forgotten to take the pill one evening, her period had started early. Could she persuade him that her period was starting tonight? Dipping a finger in the ketchup, she carefully worked her finger into herself, smearing ketchup on her genitals, on her panties. He would not disbelieve unless he could smell the ketchup. But he smoked and his nose was not half as keen as hers. She must take that chance.