Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  She felt scared for a minute. Dating. Back to the fence-walking of high school. She did not find Tom Ryan particularly attractive, a thin small man with reddish hair and a pointed face like a fox. But she was curious what a man who was twenty-five and so educated would be like, and she was grateful too because he often spoke to her. She hesitated, not saying yes or no.

  “Now, I’m not into that dating crap. There’s a good Czech film at the Orson Welles. Wait a minute, I’ll check the schedule. You can meet me there.”

  “Yes,” she said quickly then, in case he might change his mind. Maybe it would not be the same as high school. Maybe men and women could be friends here and do things together and have long good conversations. When it became clear she had never been to the Orson Welles and had in fact been nowhere in Cambridge except M.I.T., he said he would take her this time, because obviously she must not have her passport in order. He explained at length that he usually had a car but tonight it was in the garage being tuned.

  After the movie he said, “Come on, we’ll do the guided-tour bit, the Square, Harvard and environs, walk along the Charles by moonlight, phantom sculling, Georgian brick, etc. You aren’t one of those overdelicate females who can’t walk on their feet, are you? One of those held together with little gold wires and hair lacquer? Good, good, I thought you were put together a little solider. Walking’s good for you—healthy, cheap, what have you.” He gripped her by the elbow, his fingers like clothespins. Propelled her along. She hardly understood half of what he was saying but he would not let her interrupt for questions. The only pause in the swirl of words was when he chuckled at one of his remarks.

  She had never walked much except in the development where she had lived with Jim, and there she had felt thwarted. Then she had walked for escape, in search of another world on the next street where there stretched only identical two-story buildings or a ragweed-grown field. Walking was something she could manage even with her short legs. Along the Cambridge bank of the Charles they marched along, on the grass just getting green between the slow-moving smelly river and the cars whizzing past on Memorial Drive. The night was mild and soft, one of the first sweet nights of the spring.

  “Boston has a low silhouette—like a European city, like Paris or Florence—except for the ugly towers they’re putting up every chance they get. That Prudential monstrosity was the first.”

  “Have you been to Paris?”

  “Of course. Though only as a tourist. I’d like to spend a year working there. I meant to do that before now, only I got married too young and that was stupid. Don’t you think you were stupid to get married so young?” This time he did pause for a reply.

  “Not stupid. I think I was well trained.”

  “But you think it was a mistake, or do you? Or do you think that was just Mr. Wrongo and now you’re looking for Mr. Right to slip it on again?”

  “I don’t want to marry again, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t care for marriage.”

  “It’s two people trying to wear one shoe at the same time.”

  “Or a three-legged race.” The company picnics of her childhood. She had to explain that. He attached a sexual meaning to three-legged.

  He took her to the subway station in Central Square, where he went back toward Harvard Square and she went into Boston. He had not touched her except for that bony grip on her elbow. She had enjoyed the evening and in the next week she thought of him as she did her work.

  When she did see Tom again it was on a day when he was running more data through the computer. Just before five, he came to her. “If you aren’t doing anything exciting for supper, you ought to come home with me. Yes, come on up and see my etchings. I’ll introduce you to my fifty roommates. Even if there aren’t any etchings, I can show you the worst, the totally worst and biggest nudes in all of Greater Boston, green as grass and ugly as a horse’s back end.”

  “Green nudes? Do you mean paintings?”

  “I mean throwings. Why, a chimpanzee with a paintbrush would do better. You coming?” When she nodded he guided her out with his fingers gripping her elbow again. “Him and his girl friend Chlorine. He paints her nude. Though she doesn’t look any worse that way than with her clothes on.”

  “Is her name really Chlorine?”

  “Would I lie to you, Beth my girl?”

  He lived on Pearl Street in a three-story shabby tan house that appeared not quite straight in the lines of the floors, the walls, even the windows, as if the whole building had slipped somehow to the south. In this neighborhood there were mostly two- and three-story wooden houses set right up against the brick sidewalks and close to each other. She climbed the stairs behind him as he chattered on, all the way to the top floor. The door was unlocked. A man sat with his back to them. In khaki pants and a shirt hanging open on his tall wiry body, he bent over a desk made from a door on iron legs. “Hi, Tom.”

  “Well, are we inviting all the neighborhood junkies in? Iron bars do not a prison make, nor locks a cage. Would it be hopelessly bourgeois to go down to the locksmith and get a new lock put on the door?”

  “Haven’t you introduced her because you’re afraid to? Or does she maybe not have a name?” He had a slow and patient way of speaking, as if translating from another, internal language. Slowly and gently the words came out and stood awhile, waiting.

  “Jackson, Beth, etc. Be careful not to shake hands with him, Beth, or you’ll get a social disease. How come you’re home tonight?”

  “Because I was fired last week, as I told you, if you ever listened. I’m working on a paper for one of my many incompletes.”

  “Are we disturbing you then?” Tom took two quick steps in the direction of the room beyond.

  “Disturbance is something I always like, along with interruptions and diversions and anything except work. Besides, I’m just typing the paper—if you can call it typing. Lennie hawked all his papers early and got back, so I sent him to the store.”

  “Jackson, you order Lennie around too much. Just because he’s younger.” Soft voice from the doorway. She was only a few inches taller than Beth but fuller-bodied, with bittersweet chocolate hair frizzed around her ears and a heart-shaped plaintive face.

  “Come on, Dorine.” Jackson screwed up his forehead. “But he can’t cook, you know. I cook, Tom here fixes things.”

  “I’ve noticed that,” she said sharply, then looked embarrassed, seeing Beth. “Hello?”

  Jackson introduced them, tilting back in his chair. His age was hard to guess, except that he was older. His eyebrows were raised a little habitually, cutting a sharp line across his forehead. His dark brown hair was long and straight, caught back in a rubber band, and under the overhead bulb a few silver hairs shone. A shadow of dark stubble emphasized the lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes. The lines belonged. Gazing at him in a series of quick, cautious glances, Beth could not help but guess patience, suffering, an honest intelligence. His eyes were a light sandy brown, with the kind of gaze she kept finding herself tangling with involuntarily until she would again drop her own. He was so homely she found him attractive, and instantly suspected that such must be the case with many other women: dangerously homely. She found herself inclined to trust an attractive homely man over an attractive handsome man, especially since she knew she had loved Jim with her eyes.

  “Where’s kitty? Oh, here you are.” Dorine scooped up a dusty gray kitten from the desk. With piercing mews it skittered up her arm, clinging with tiny sharp claws. Kneeling on a daybed covered with a yellow and black Mexican blanket, Dorine caressed the kitten and watched Jackson peck at the keys. “You really don’t know how to type.”

  “Inadequate again. Been at this since noon.”

  “If you want me to, I’ll do a few pages while we’re waiting for Lennie to get back.”

  With no pretense of reluctance, Jackson sprang up. “You’re saving my life. Meantime, I’ll get started on supper.”

  Tom followed Jackson back through the rooms and B
eth trailed after, looking right and left and up and down. The second room was larger but of a staggering disorder. From the central light socket a web of heavy extension cords wound among and under the furniture. Bright green jagged nudes on canvases were stacked against one wall and more leaned against the wall of the corridor beyond. Bookcases up to the ceiling. Records without jackets, cups with dregs of coffee, plates serving as ashtrays. Off a narrow corridor, one bedroom was relatively neat. “That’s my room,” Tom said over his shoulder. “The one that doesn’t stink.” Then a second room with a mattress on the floor and all other space taken up with canvases. Then three steps led down to the kitchen. The kitten chased after them, attacking her feet.

  “You will notice that Dorine washed the dishes this afternoon,” Jackson said, running water into a pot.

  “Is that good for them?” Tom walked past the sink, shaking his head. “Won’t they wear out?”

  “By the by, Laverne called.”

  Tom stopped abruptly. “When?”

  “About five-fifteen.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I just did.”

  “Sit you down, Beth my girl. Watch the master chef perform. I have to make a business call, just a quickie.”

  As Beth sat at the round oak kitchen table, the kitten climbed her leg and rolled over in her lap. Jackson was cooking and paying her no attention. She felt awkward, parked there in a strange kitchen. Only the kitten perceived her, seizing her hand in four dusty gray paws and beginning to gnaw. She finally thought of something she could say. “What do you call this kitten?”

  He did answer her, although he did not turn around. “That depends, that depends. Named Orpheus because we fished him from a sewer.”

  “What was he doing in a sewer?”

  “Drowning.” Jackson paused with spoon lifted high, scratching himself slowly over his bare chest. “How he stank. Incredible for something so small.”

  Still he faced the stove and said nothing more. Minutes crept over her. Something to say, something! “You’re a graduate student?”

  “At B.U. I was out of school for years. I wouldn’t like you to think my hair was turning white in the struggle.”

  “Why did you go back?”

  “A friend talked me into it.” He stirred the pot round and round and said nothing else for five minutes. Then he mumbled, “I was out of my mind. So was she. So was she.”

  At least if she kept asking questions he answered something. “What are you studying?”

  He did turn then and suddenly tousled her hair with his hand. “You’re out of Alice in Wonderland, all those questions. Political science—which is not science and neither holy, Roman, nor an empire.”

  With his gesture and his way of talking mainly for himself he made her feel ridiculously young—as if she had looked out through his sandy eyes and saw herself on a par with the kitten. She held the kitten on her lap and gave up trying to talk to him. Finally Tom Ryan came back muttering to himself, and the third roommate, who was called Lennie, arrived behind a bag of groceries. Lennie was thin and bony, with a dark kinky beard, heavy glasses, and large sad nose, though his hands were well formed. Dorine stuck close to him. Jackson took out shrimp and carried them to the stove. By luck she would be able to eat everything. That was like a blessing on her excursion. It was a new and curious world. The men talked to each other as a kind of playing. Instead of slapping each other and poking and punching the way Jim and Frankie and Dan did, these men poked and tickled and slapped each other with words. Mainly she and Dorine sat on the sidelines and watched the words go by.

  At supper everyone ate buffet style in the middle room. Apparently the first room at the entrance was Jackson’s, and the cot with the Mexican blanket was his bed. “But how can he have any privacy?” she asked Tom quietly.

  “Aw, but now Jackson sleeps alone.” Tom smiled at something.

  But that wasn’t what she meant. Privacy was precious to her. Never until Marie married had she had a room to herself, and even then nobody bothered knocking. The walls had been paper thin and she could always hear every cough and shoe dropped and flush of the toilet.

  Lennie had put a blues record on the turntable. They did not have a phonograph but what they called a system, which had parts: turntable, speakers, amps. The music that emerged was rich. To listen to music that full was sensuous and electrifying: it was swimming music, it could almost be drowning. As they ate, from the open windows mild spring air sifted through the rooms rustling papers and swaying the matchstick bamboo blinds.

  Lennie dug into the pockets of the army surplus jacket he had not removed. “Anyone for anchovies? Or fancy mixed nuts?”

  “Hey, Raskolnikov, we’re going have to bail you out,” Tom warned but reached for the nuts. “Why boost anchovies? They taste like the canned food we give that miserable cat.”

  “Because I love them.” Dorine took the can. “Thank you, sweetie. Why do you call him Raskolnikov?”

  “Because he looks like a wild man hatchet murderer. Ask our dear neighbor downstairs. She faints at the sight of him.”

  “Okay, Napoleon,” Lennie said. “Little and mean and crafty, a general nuisance and generally devious.”

  “Now I may be little, I may be mean, but I’m an Irishman. And no Irishman was ever caught dead at a place named Waterloo. Unless he thought it was a urinal.”

  Jackson looked at Tom sadly. “That, I think, is a joke you shoplifted from Phil.”

  “One Irishman is like another. Just like people say about Chinese, they all look alike,” Lennie said.

  “I’ll give you an easy way to tell us apart.” Tom started to grin. “I still have my head. Philip Francis Boyle’s is nailed to the wall of a certain lady collector—”

  “Who am I?” Dorine chirped nervously. Something lurked under the talk. Dorine was trying to get them away safely. “Sonia? Am I Sonia, if he’s Raskolnikov?”

  Jackson came around with a bottle, refilling glasses. “You’re Lady Godiva. For your kind heart, of course.”

  The jagged green nudes. They had bodies you could cut yourself on. Women of broken glass and metal: nothing like Dorine. She was soft and squishy and nervous to be liked, sitting there apologetic for taking up space.

  “Who’s Jackson?” Lennie asked. “Socrates?”

  “I fancy myself a Christ figure.” Jackson posed against the wall with arms outstretched. “For my saintly humility, my absolute Christian poverty, and my patience with all of you sinners.”

  “No, man.” Ryan smiled. He had the look of a fox sometimes, a tame slightly seedy fox, perhaps one born in a zoo. His eyes saw a great deal out of the corners. She was not used to a man who observed people carefully. “I know the parallel. Tannhäuser.”

  “Who?” Jackson looked blank.

  “Jackson lacks culture, don’t you think?” Tom clucked to Lennie, who nodded sadly. “Tannhäuser was a knight who escaped after being held prisoner a long time in the Venusberg.”

  Jackson looked at Tom steadily and his skull seemed to harden and come forward in his face. “Not very original, man. That too is Phil’s baggage. Don’t you get weary of dressing up in other men’s ideas and other men’s wit?”

  Tom looked young and sullen. “You take yourself too seriously. Phil only thought up calling her Venus. The Venusberg is a higher-level joke.”

  “Who am I?” Beth asked. But Jackson was giving Tom that unwavering stare and Tom was acting out being unmoved and Lennie was looking worried. No one heard except Dorine, who smiled at her with a shrug. Almost immediately they broke up into the two couples, leaving Jackson. Fingers on her elbow, Tom led her to his room. “What was that all about?” she asked him.

  “Oh, just a ball breaker Jackson was mixed up with. She left this guy Phil—a drunken would-be poet—for Jackson and then vice versa. You know her—that big loud-mouthed Miriam Berg. See, that was the pun that got to Jackson. To me it’s just a joke. You know how a woman like that makes it. She gets her g
rants flat on her back.… Jackson too, he comes on like Abraham Lincoln. But he’s just a fringe academic character. The coffee shops are full of failures like him, all words and no publications. Pretensions and empty pockets and a résumé full of jobs like janitor and ditchdigger. Don’t let him fool you with the somber gaze and the big words.”

  She understood she was to ask no more questions about Jackson or he would allow his jealousy—of what? Jackson’s presence? style? what Tom would call moral pretensions?—to annoy him into being unpleasant to her.

  He had seized the wine bottle and taken it along, and now he poured more for each of them. He pressed the harsh red wine on her insistently. She had sat down in the only chair, a comfortable leather swivel armchair that seemed a different order of furniture from everything else in the apartment. Well, he had been married. “Did you bring this from your house when you moved?”

  He nodded. “Pretty good chair, isn’t it? But why don’t you come over here with me?”

  She hesitated. He was sitting back on the bed. So far except for gripping her elbow he had not touched her, and she had not sensed desire from him.

  “Come on, you aren’t going to act coy now, are you? I mean, we’re both consenting adults and you don’t expect to be courted, I hope? You know why you’re here. Let’s go to bed.”

  “I don’t know if that’s why I’m here. Maybe that’s why you asked me. But I came along because I’m curious about you and your friends.”

  “Well, how do you expect to get to know me, sitting over there? Come on, don’t play games with me. I can’t take that. You’re interested or you’re not—no music is going to start to play or roses pop out of my ears. I’m not going to force you into anything. You want to or you don’t, and I’ll take you home. It’s your choice.”