Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  Spending half of her waking hours in a state of deep fantasy, she was never as happy as when she saw a new movie or read a book or saw a story on television that she recognized as usable: a hero, a situation, a motif she could borrow. She was always exhausting old motifs. Though in most stories there were good roles for men, for her they were one-shot affairs. She could embroider the heroine’s role but basically the hero overcame difficulties and then you were won or captured or whatever, and that was that. Basically, to get more mileage she had to make up a new role that was more active. Sometimes she could adopt a male role and then import favorite heroes from another fantasy to people the new landscape. For instance in westerns the only satisfactory role was to be a woman outlaw: everything else wore thin too quickly: the rancher’s daughter, the sheriff’s wife, or standing around a smelly saloon in feathers and beads looking like a dyed pigeon in a draft.

  Most plots consisted of a hero going through adventures. Once in a while there was a heroine instead, but her adventures then were men she met and got involved with. Everybody said it was bad for a woman to have affairs with a series of men. Therefore women were supposed to be dull and good. Miriam decided that she would rather be bad and exciting, but she was not sure she would ever get the chance.

  Her favorite self was Tamar De Luria, who was a real witch. Tamar was a student of anthropology who had acquired her powers by helping a tribe of beautiful primitive people on a south sea island fight off the attacks of white colonialists. In thanks they had adopted her into the tribe and taught her all their ancient tribal wisdom. She could pretend to be dead by reducing her breathing and heartbeat below the detectable level. She could hypnotize people, causing them to see things that were not there or to forget things they had seen. Miriam had studied hypnotism out of a book she got from the library. On her second attempt she actually hypnotized Allegra. Lionel cut off her permission to go to the library for a month.

  Tamar could track people and walk so silently she never broke a twig and climb trees like a cat and scamper over buildings and fight as well as a man. Sometimes Tamar could read thoughts. She had that ability or not depending on the plot. When Tamar danced, men fell in love with her. Because of the need to conceal her occult powers, and because she never knew when a message would come from her island saying that her people were in danger again and she must return to save them, she could never marry.

  Whatever Tamar was, she was never afraid. She confronted the men, with their files and their agents and their laws and their detention camps, who had blacklisted her father, and she made them take it all back. She burned their files so that nobody was afraid, the fear that sat in the house, that cold persistent gnawing fear that had yellowed the air of her childhood. It seemed to be equal parts fear of sinking into poverty and fear of the government, fear of the knock on the door, fear of the agent’s report, fear of prison and fear of the neighbors, fear of disappearing, that cold whispery shadow of repression that lay over them for years and years.

  Sometimes Miriam had Tamar die heroically. Sometimes she went back to her island and did a lot of native dancing and rescued her people and hunted wild animals. In the beginning, perhaps when Miriam was twelve or so, Tamar had a great many special powers that Miriam would think about in class: she could kill with a glance and make people think what she wanted them to. As Miriam endured through high school, Tamar shed her powers and acquired a social conscience and a tragic love life. Tamar had numerous affairs, satisfactorily passionate though vague in their physical details. Miriam had been given sex education books by her father. He thought it was important to give children Sex Education the Right Way, which meant dreary books written for teenagers with a whole chapter on Why It Is Right to Wait and a whole chapter on Why Women Are Naturally Monogamous, and no clear colored pictures of penises. She remembered what Mark had looked like as a baby when she used to give him his bath, but she doubted if that was what all the fuss was about.

  When Miriam went to college, Tamar stayed home. During her freshman year at Michigan, Miriam’s head cleared. Perhaps she had been allergic to her family. Anyhow she breathed deeply and her head and voice emerged through the fog. Always she would associate that slight harshness in her voice, that huskiness, with seventeen years of coughing and sniveling.

  Eating dormitory veal birds and wan garbagey soups and hamburgers extended with potato peelings, the dietitian’s salads of carrots and raisins and celery in raspberry jello, with no one to fuss about how she ate or prey on her sense of guilt, she promptly lost weight. She dropped twenty pounds the first semester and her skin began to clear. All her clothes were too big. She had always favored shapeless sweaters and baggy slacks and extra cardigans over them, to disguise that embarrassing body.

  No longer overweight, her energy level rose. Suddenly she could sit up till two in the morning and still make an eight o’clock class. Because the agility of her new body turned her on she even got involved in fencing and house volleyball for a while. But she remained painfully modest. She never ran around naked in the shower room with the other girls. She had a long pink flowered flannel robe she wore at all times. The girls on her floor pretended to think she had a hideous birthmark. She was only ashamed.

  Through her freshman and sophomore years she worked hard and got straight As and was active in the left-liberal campus groups. Occasionally a friend would fix her up with a boy who was usually shorter and at least as shy. She would try to make conversation and her hands would sweat and turn cold.

  Mark had his bar mitzvah and Allegra had her Sweet Sixteen party, but Miriam’s puberty ritual was getting her braces removed. But by the time Allegra had her party, Miriam in New York for the summer did not care, did not care at all, not even that Lionel had taken up the sitar, because something had finally happened. She resented being sent out to look for work and did not look hard. By now the perennial bad times had eased and she was tired from studying. Allegra was going steady with the president of the high school Sportsmanship Council, and the family put no pressure on her to waste her summer in an office. Miriam worked for a few weeks at a temporary typing job and then spent most of what she had made on contact lenses, without asking.

  She did not care that the lenses made her eyes water and sometimes when she took them out her lids were sore. She didn’t care that she seemed always to be getting dust and cinders in her eyes and weeping. She did not care that once a week she dropped a lens and had to go crawling on her hands and knees about the floor, in the public street, looking for the little saucer of glass. She did not care that they made her sensitive to smoke and grime. She passionately cared that she no longer needed to wear glasses in public, that the last piece of ugly teen-age Miriam was exiled, and that she could see clearly. Being extremely myopic she had never seen well through her thick glasses. They distorted the size and shape of objects. Once she began to get accustomed to the lenses, she walked in a state of wonderment, staring. Since she had normal vision for the first time, she no longer tended to walk with her head bowed, afraid to look up for fear she would look straight at someone she knew without recognizing her. She developed a more stately walk. She stared at everyone. In the Museum of Modern Art on Saturday afternoon she stared at Philip, nonchalantly leaning on a piece of metal sculpture in the courtyard, striking a match off it to light his cigarette, and Philip stared back at her.

  Then he came right to her. “I’ve been waiting for you all afternoon,” he said. “Why are you so late?”

  She began to laugh. “I didn’t remember it was here I was supposed to meet you. I’ve been looking in the wrong place.”

  “This isn’t the right place yet. Come on.” Putting his arm around her, he led her out. It was exactly like a daydream. It was a fantasy, so she knew just how to behave. She did not hesitate, she did not worry that she would not know what to say. She went with him laughing and gazing at him, looking and looking at him while the world changed colors. He was beautiful and that made her want to laugh and touch him.
She did not really believe he existed. Instead all that energy invested in daydreaming all those years had not merely dissipated. That would be bad physics. No, her spent energy had gathered itself and created this being who appeared to be flesh and blood but who was really her condensed wanting of years. She did not doubt she would go to bed with him. She was only afraid he would not ask her before she had to go home for supper, or before it was time for him to disappear and to turn back into an English 31 lyric or a movie poster.

  PHIL (He is talking to Jackson in Jackson’s basement rooms, where he lives because he is janitor of three buildings on East Tenth Street. Phil has just helped Jackson take out the garbage cans and now they are smoking dope together.) So you know I picked her out right away, I mean you couldn’t miss her sailing in like the Russian Navy. That is a woman that is built, I said to myself. She was wearing a shitty college girl outfit consisting of dirty laundry bags, but you just couldn’t miss that body if she was wearing a barrel. Caught her eye right away and it didn’t take thirty seconds to execute the mission. I decided she was ripe for it and I didn’t need to hang around with the tourists for an hour rapping about “kulchur,” though I was prepared as usual, man, to surround us with a dancing cloud of words all the way. And she took it like a winner, she came right along as easy as can be. Along we sailed right out the door and down the sidewalk. Man, I was so scared she’d think twice or be stolen away I hailed a cab. I kept my hands off her in the cab and kept up the steady patter till I got her upstairs. Then I opened a bottle of rosy from the icebox—Donald the Duck, he’s always got some kind of wine on hand, little tins of S. S. Pierce goodies, it’s the place to live, my man. He’s a high-living dude, is Donald the Duck. By this time I’d had a hard on for forty-five minutes or so. I figured, this is it, gold or a ringer, and I sat down beside her on the daybed. So I reached for her and she kind of hung her head, you know, all apologetic and big eyes. She started off saying, “You know I’ve never done this before.”

  I thought, hot damn, why every time you pick up a chick does she have to pretend like it was written into the Constitution that nobody’s ever picked her up before? Sweet Jesus, why can’t one of them say, “Gee, I pick up guys every day and get laid, that’s what it’s all for”? But what she said was that she didn’t exactly know how to kiss and would I please not mind, but I could show her and she would try.

  I almost fell off the couch, it was so beautiful. Then I knew I’d found it, the pot of gold, the end of the rainbow. The poet’s delight! I mean, she wasn’t kidding, she didn’t know one end from the other, but with a body like that who requires expertise? Jackson baby, I’m telling you, this one is out of a convent, a Jewish convent, she just has to be, they don’t send them out on the streets like that any more. She was a stone virgin, but she was willing. I mean, lying there, letting me take her clothes off. It became clear that I wasn’t going to have to seduce her a piece at a time, she wasn’t going to play it out with me by the inch. She had only one question, did I have some means of contraception.…

  No, those were her words. She has a formal way of talking, as if she’d learned everything out of books. She’s the only live human I’ve ever heard refer to the sex organs since we got out of the Army. God, her lying there watching me with those huge brown eyes. I could have wept! You know, Jackson, she’s bright too. She’s a fucking mathematician! Man, she gets straight As. She’s a Jewish princess from Flatbush and a goddamn meal ticket. She’s going to support me in my approaching decline and keep me warm through the long dark night of the soul. Jackson, think of it. There she was newly hatched from her piggy bank. Think of the wrong dudes, the make men, the nincompoops, the optometrists and errand boys and stocking salesmen she could have met that day.

  Now don’t give me the eyebrow. You think it could have been anyone, could have been you. Why not? I’ll tell you why. Sure, you’d have noticed her sailing in. But you would have stood there in a deep study contemplating her, you would have considered her carefully and classified her and analyzed her from across the room. You would have considered the whys and why nots and the ins and the outs and the pros and cons and the whys and wherefores, the economic implications and the eugenic ramifications. You’d have scratched your head and your chest and your left testicle for half an hour. Then by the time you got it together and came sauntering like a hobbled camel across the room, she would have been long gone back to Flatbush on the subway shrugging and reading Henry Miller for kicks. But I am always ready to embrace the possibility—put that in your clay pipe and smoke on it. So if fifty-one in a row are dogs, I have got at last into my long and interesting hands a princess.… Sexually, Jackson, consider it coolly for one moment, if you can leave off drooling. You’re still getting it from the bag in 4B, right? Sexually, a tabula rasa. No experience, no traumas, no shadows, no one has been there before, but also no inhibitions. All that lovely equipment ready to function when you plug in. And she’s mine, Jackson, to mold into a fit companion for one whom J. Singleton Proxmire has called the most promising lyric poet of his age.… All right, the most promising young lyric poet. Did you ever hear of a promising middle-aged poet? Put that in your crapper: The finest slightly senile lyric poet of his generation will speak tonight at the local Y … No, you cannot, you shall not meet her. Not this trip. By and by, amigo, by and by.…

  She could not fit together her memories of his apartment that afternoon with what it was like on later visits, when she actually looked around. Her images of that afternoon were too vivid to correct with observation. So forever the walls that afternoon were a pale gold, although on all other visits they were white. She did not look around or pick up the books lying on the coffee table or look at the records by the phonograph. She looked at him. His eyes were the sea. Ultramarine, aquamarine, cold and breaking light, startling against the tan of his face. No one in her family had blue eyes. They seemed to her unnatural set in the flesh, but beautiful. They were changeable too, now blue, now green, glinting like metal. There was texture in his face, gold wires of stubble, old shaving nicks, a scar at the hairline where his falling hair hid it. He said it was from a fight.

  The worst moment was when he went to kiss her and she realized he would figure out she was not as experienced as she was pretending to be. She was also afraid he would think she was plain incompetent. So she decided to confess right away, before he decided she was an idiot. She was astonished then to realize he did not believe her.

  “Why would I make that up? You confuse me.”

  “Oh, to make it special.”

  “But how could it not be special to me? I’m not proud of never having anything to do with men. I have to start somewhere.”

  “Pigeon, pigeon.” He put his arms around her again. “You’ve picked the right place to start, believe me.”

  It was not as complicated as she would have thought, holding and touching, as it would have looked watching the coil of bodies from across the room. She was soon as excited as when she made up the vague but passionate stories, and soon more excited than she had ever been. The nuisance was the clothing, which made it hard to touch, and though it occurred to her quickly that it would be better to take off her clothes, she kept quiet and waited with what patience she could muster for him to undress her. He did that finally, stopping to kiss her as he uncovered her, and she felt that he seemed pleased. She asked him about contraception and he said he had a condom. Everything seemed to go smoothly until he was lying on her and pushing against her. He tried for a while and he stopped and explored more carefully with his finger.

  “You really are a virgin.”

  She sat up, exasperated. “I warned you! You can’t just give up now!”

  “I’ve lost it,” he said. It took her awhile to understand he meant that his penis was no longer erect. “Oh, my incredible great baby,” he moaned, “You’re so beautiful! I can’t make it, I just can’t stand it!” He laughed and wept at once. Tears rolled out of his eyes as she held him against her breasts. Un
derstanding that he still was not displeased with her, she held him and rocked him and stroked his skin. It was wonderful that she was allowed to touch him, that she was given this male body to hold. He was nowhere as pasty white as her breasts and loins but had a coating of tan every place, though his arms and back and chest and face were bronzed. In height they were exactly matched, so that their bodies fit together face to face, or face to back. His buttocks were small and hard compared to hers, and hair grew abundantly on his chest and belly. He was muttering words she could not make out into her breasts. Cautiously her fingers trailed over the limp little organ drooping against him. “Touch me,” he murmured. He took her hand and closed it over his and showed her how to caress him. Slowly the little worm began to fatten but still it curved and hung on itself until she learned how to take it in her mouth.

  She had read a great many stories about women losing their virginities, and she had expected to be somewhat frightened. There seemed always an element of brutality, being torn, thrust open, rent apart. But it became clear to her that her defloration would not be even slightly scary. She was more in charge of it than was Philip. He taught her what to do with her hands and her mouth, but it cost considerable effort and patience to get him to the size and hardness required to enter her. Eventually, however, she heaved and he pushed and they battered their way into penetration. By that time Phil no longer had a condom, so he withdrew to put it on and promptly lost his erection again.

  “Look, you’re bleeding like a stuck pig, darling. Let’s call it off for the day. Tomorrow we’ll continue your lessons, same time, same place. You’re a darling, you’re a real find, you’re a rare and living beauty, Miriam. Will you come back to me tomorrow, from Flatbush and Dreary Farther Brooklyn?”