Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

“I don’t know what’s going to become of you.” Allegra stared out of eyes so like her own. “I guess you got carried away because you never had a boy friend before. But it’s really the limit! An Irish Catholic without a career. Does he work?”

  “As a janitor. But he’s going to graduate school in the fall.” She hated herself for saying that. Why did she need to persuade Allegra she wasn’t a complete jackass by Allegra’s terms? In a moment she would tell her sister about the poetry prize he had won as an undergraduate, and about the poems he had printed in literary magazines.

  “Well, a college professor wouldn’t be too bad. You’re into mathematics. Maybe you could both teach till you have a baby. Dad wouldn’t care half so much as Mother about him not being Jewish. But I wouldn’t tell him about the Catholic part. What’s his last name?”

  “Allegra, I’m not going to marry Phil! I don’t want to marry anybody! I don’t want any marriage I’ve ever seen!”

  “What do you want? Just to be a teacher?”

  “I want to be me!”

  “Oh.” Allegra made a face. “Groovy. You’ll get tired enough of that. Nobody wants to be an old maid.”

  The Flatbush fiat was the world of boxes. Little boxes of pain. In one was old term papers Sonia had saved from her favorite students. In another was clippings about HUAC and frantic letters from Lionel to people who had suddenly stopped being his friends. In another was Sonia’s cut-off brown hair. In another the love letter from the woman her father had laid at a folk festival. In another were Mark’s baby shoes and his merit badges from Boy Scouts. In another was the white dress Allegra used to wear to parties when she was thirteen and fourteen until once her period started and she stained the dress. She came home weeping hysterically as if she would die. Convinced she would never be able to leave the house again, she took to her bed for three days. In another was the goldfish—the only pet Miriam was allowed as a child, as all other animals were classified as dirty—she had overfed till it died and floated belly up and she had wept with guilt. Nothing touched, nothing rubbed, nothing was connected. She could not learn from anyone else or take comfort from them or give to them. Fear had killed the past and the world was all boxes and cans.

  With Phil was the world of changing shapes. Of dreams and images and words flowing and flowing bodies. It was hot in the basement though not as hot as outside. Summer festered in the dirty streets of the Lower East Side. Firecrackers went off all of the time like a barrage, like the real war in the streets. Most of the time they did not wear clothes. The only comfortable place was the bedroom. When they ate and when they quarreled, they sat at the formica table in the kitchen in two tubular chairs: chromium and formica and hard edges and white enamel.

  “Your friend Jackson has a talent for discomfort.”

  “You wouldn’t understand. Women love lushness. He likes things simple and straight. He’s trained himself to feel as little as possible.”

  “Why doesn’t he shut off altogether? Turn on the gas and turn off the world?”

  “You can’t stand the idea that there might be one man who prefers being alone. Who prefers his own mind to a lot of complicated relationships and women crawling over his flesh. Men respect the differences of other men, but women want to make every man over into their child. What you can’t devour, you want to destroy.”

  And other ravings when he was irritated or depressed, when various of his overly intricate plans for money or dope fell through. They would get dressed to quarrel and move instinctively to the uncomfortable chairs tipping too far forward or back on their chromium tubes. They would face each other across the formica. When they had finished their spat they would drift into the bedroom again, take off their clothes, and sit or lie or kneel or prop their backs against a wall on the two mattresses that covered the floor. Sometimes they smoked hash or grass and sometimes they drank wine or gin and tonic or beer. One Monday they dropped acid together. One evening they swallowed peyote buttons which carried Phil high into a talking jag and made Miriam painfully, violently sick for three hours of the wet and dry heaves. The hot city stewing in its garbage and sputtering with violence turned them off. They went out mainly to fetch supplies and see an air-conditioned movie.

  Sometimes when they talked they lay forehead to forehead. Sometimes they lay side by side staring at the ceiling painted with ripple marks, only their fingers touching. Sometimes he talked with his chin dug into her shoulder and his hands playing with her breasts and as they talked her nipples would harden and he would knead her breasts while a slow timid desire spread in her. Often for hours she was partly turned on with him, as if a state of some excitement were the norm for her body, a background to everything else going on inside and around her. Her level of responsiveness and arousal had risen severalfold over the weeks. He lectured her on her capacity for multiple orgasm. There was a streak of pain in his will to find out how much pleasure she could experience, but she had to trust him in his exploration of her. Their loving would never be simple. She must trust him, for she needed him. Only with him could she loosen her emotions, separate the strands of her desperation. She carried herself like a knot to him, her hand clasped sweating on the book she was toting with her to his apartment, to the hospital, back and forth: what she was supposed to be studying that summer for her fall course, the Theory of Complex Variables.

  He liked to be inside her often long before they would actually begin to move and as long afterward as he could keep from sliding out. Their best game was called Home Movies: it was the giving over of chunks of past life from one to the other. Nakedness and proximity made for vivid exchange. In a half-roused state her nervous system seemed more open to his, readier to receive, to form images. Often she imagined afterward that she had actually watched parts of his life and shown him on the screen in his head long sequences from hers.

  Phil was seven. He was living with his mother in the chunky red brick barracks of public housing, a whole area that felt as if it stood behind barbed wire with guard towers at the corners. When his mother tried to get on welfare, they told her she could not get relief unless she gave them all the information they needed to trace her husband, because first it must be proved before the law that he could not support them. So the law caught his father, gone for years, and brought that loud-mouthed, hard-drinking loser home again to the wife he probably hardly remembered marrying. He could go to jail or live with his family. He said all day long that it was close to half a dozen of one and six of the other, but he couldn’t get booze in jail so he chose living with his loving wife and loving son instead.

  One afternoon Phil was sent with some change to the store across the street from Roosevelt Towers to get a loaf of Wonder Bread and some frozen fish sticks and tonic—that’s what he had grown up calling soda. He was supposed to get orange but the store was out, so after great deliberation, not wanting to disappoint his mom or himself, he chose root beer. He went back across the street and around the long way so he wouldn’t go past the benches where the kid who called himself Shitkicker had his gang. They would get him down and take the tonic and break open the bread and stomp on it. The project was called Roosevelt Towers but only the big building in back was a tower, the rest were long blocks three stories tall with benches and cement and a little grass in between.

  When he came running up the dark stairs the door of their apartment was funny. It was hanging wide and awry. That scared him. When things got broken they stayed broken. They would get robbed of the money in his mom’s purse and the little radio. He began to call, “Mom! Mom!” He heard her groaning and she half sat up and tried to tell him with her hand not to come in. She was lying on the floor with her dress ripped open and he was scared to see that her breasts were hanging out, and that her jaw was funny. She could not talk. Blood ran down her face onto the torn rag of her dress. Her cheeks were swollen and her jaw was stuck on at a queer angle and she was holding a piece of tooth in her hand, as if maybe it could be put back in. The room was knocked every which w
ay too. His old man was gone, with all the money in the house.

  The would not send an ambulance to the housing project for a woman with a broken jaw so they had to go on the bus. They were hours and hours in the fracture clinic before she could go home with him. All night long she had groaned with pain. He had felt frightened of this strange woman who no longer had his mother’s face and who was wired together and could not talk clearly, and he had shrunk from her when she reached out to him.

  The caseworker brought a policeman who was jolly about it and said, “Now come on, these people are always fighting, it’s just a man taking a hard hand to his wife. Now do you really want to swear out a complaint, Mrs. Boyle?” She was scared to death of the police and she stammered and turned away. The next time the old man was hauled home, he disappeared more quietly. That was the good time. He just took off.

  His mother decided that welfare was too expensive and she would just have to leave Phil alone days after school and get some work. She got a job cleaning for a woman in Brookline and another two days for a family on Clarendon, in Back Bay. She would leave him the money to go to the store and get Hostess Cupcakes for lunch. But they could not really make ends meet and by and by it turned out she was pregnant. The caseworker told his mother she could get a divorce from his father on the grounds of cruelty and desertion but his mother could not get a divorce because of the Church, just as she was afraid to do anything about the baby coming that nobody wanted. Nobody except God. He was ten by then and had a big lip and he called it God’s baby that she was carrying. That made her wail and carry on.

  So his old man, who didn’t have the brains to leave Boston, was once again summoned to the bar of justice and united with his family. The old man seemed a bit scared this time. He was in other trouble too. He started working as a scab painter and brought home money for a while. In fact they were about to get kicked out of public housing because the old man was making too high a wage, when the old man beat up his mother again for whining too much about the pains in her back and giving too much lip. She began to bleed on the kitchen floor and the old man took off again. Phil was lying thrown against the bedroom wall through the whole scene with his shoulder dislocated, and this time they got to the hospital in time for her to lose the baby in the emergency ward while they were waiting for the nurse to dig out their records.

  Finally his mother had sense enough to give false information after that, and apparently the old man did not immediately return to his favorite bars and old cronies. He might have thought he had killed Phil’s mother that time and was lying low. Or he might have thought nothing at all.

  The last time he saw his father was at the funeral. His old man was run over by a truck in the Haymarket area where he had got a temporary night watchman’s job at some construction. Amazingly there was an insurance policy to pay for the funeral and a bit over, from some Irish Brotherhood he had belonged to back in the old neighborhood. His mother put on her black dress that she wore to mass on Sunday and went very straight and white. Phil, who was thirteen, strode up to the grave and very deliberately spat in as they were lowering away. His mother slapped him. Nobody else said anything. There was a good feeding at an aunt’s afterward.

  When he was fifteen his mother got married again. He should have been happy. She married a solid fat electrician, a steady worker named Jerry Flynn. He had two children to take care of from his wife dying of a mistake in the operating room during the third birth. The pains had come on her early and unexpectedly at a union picnic. Her stomach had not been empty. They had put her out with anesthesia and she had choked to death on her own vomit. The baby had died the first month.

  Flynn’s sons were younger than Philip and much healthier. Phil was then five feet eight but so thin his skin looked like Gorgonzola cheese and his bones squeaked and clattered when he ran. He should have been happy. His mother had a beaver coat. She did not sit on a kitchen chair with her bottle of beer staring into it with that look of iron despair. She seemed years younger. She cut her hair and wore bright aprons. She did not have to do other women’s housework any more, and she bubbled around the house cleaning and recleaning and polishing and rubbing and shining. The house was a real house, like in the movies, it was called a colonial on a street in Medford lined with trees, and had two floors and a stairway and a back yard. Phil had a bedroom to himself which had been the guest room. He felt like a guest.

  Phil had a closet of his own full of clothes like the boys in family shows on TV. Like the Others. His new supposed- to be old man took him along with his real kids to football and baseball games. He was supposed to dig all that. They had a yard where the previous wife, No. 1, had planted some flowers on bushes and in beds, before she choked to death. His mother could not relate to all that green stuff but the electrician went out and stood around with the hose in his hand. Phil was supposed to mow the lawn. It made him sneeze. He turned out to be allergic to green stuff. So Tim, the older of the new supposed-to-be brothers, had to go back to mowing.

  Phil felt like a ghost in the neat room with its blue walls and filmy curtains hung there by No. 1. He was surly and blank. He did okay in school but he was quick to anger and quick to take to his fists. In spite of his shortness of breath and his fragility, he could beat up most of the guys because of training and practice. He knew how to fight: he had never in his life been able to afford not to know how. They were soft, the boys in his school, and he despised them.

  The girls were something else. He discovered he was attractive from them. He liked middle-class girls with their clear skins and their clear voices and their soft clothes. His sex before that had usually been in groups: the gang would get a girl and they would all lay her. Or a bunch would go over to Peggy’s in the afternoon when her mother was at work, and Marilyn might be there too. They would bring some tonic and some ups and downs, it didn’t matter. They took whatever they could buy. It was all something to numb you. It took you up above the lousy stinking world of the school prison and the barracks project and you floated there. It took you back into the funhouse of your head. It took you deep into the caverns of the body. It took you way up and out to ride a sense of power: you were someone after all. Coming into Marilyn was something quick like stepping into the head to take a leak, somebody was always waiting. Nothing ever worked in the world of the project, not the toilets, not the lights, not the doors, not the screens, not the stoves, not the phones, not the heat, nothing. It was all solid crap.

  “But I missed something in Medford, I missed something. I didn’t know who I was. I had always had a tight connection to my mother. Maybe she was the only thing I had and I was all she had, but I had her. I didn’t have her any more. God help me, I began to hate her. I began to despise her. I’d make her weep just like my old man. She would tell me again and again she had only got married for me, for my sake, so I’d grow up right and not go to the devil like my dad. I felt evil. I felt mean. I began to believe I was just like my old man and that I only felt alive when I was hurting people. God, how I hated myself then.” His head rested on her breasts, his eyes open toward the ceiling. “It was the old sexual repulsion routine. Sure, my old man had had my mother, but it was obviously abuse. She was pure anyhow and suffering. But here she was sleeping every night with this fat satisfied electrician, that she had chosen of her own free will. She was doting on him.

  “I was jealous. I was playing Hamlet and grinding my teeth. I was ready to deal out punishment and seek relief on the soft bodies of the girls of Medford. And I’ll tell you, one of the most powerful aphrodisiacs known is a bad reputation in a man. It’s damned lucky I didn’t knock up any of them but, unlike my mother, I believed in contraception. The line ends here.” He smote his chest. “If you ever get some sperm of mine growing in you, I’ll uproot it myself. No babies. I hate them. You hear me?”

  “Loud and clear. After all, you are yelling. I have no wish to bear babies into this fucked-up life, I assure you. Sometimes I feel as if my mother’s too much in me
already. I feel a dreadful useless connection. And I can’t reach out. I can’t comfort her.”

  There was a law in operation that mothers and daughters could not teach each other, could not inherit, could not relate. They must continually react against each other, generation against generation. Out in Far Rockaway Grandma Rachel was freaking out over what she could find out or could not find out about Sonia. She smuggled out a letter accusing Lionel of poisoning Sonia.

  Miriam thought she might be able to relate to Rachel. As she had often heard as a little girl, her mother came from a real working-class family with a radical tradition. Lionel was fond of saying that on appropriate occasions. Rachel was a Trotskyist who had been active in the needleworkers’ union. She had emigrated from Lithuania just before World War I to the Lower East Side.

  Sonia, the youngest daughter, had resented a working mother. Sonia had resented the politics and rallies and campaigns and strikes. She had hated the meetings in the living room and the organizers sleeping on the couch and the floor. It made her mad that when there was never enough to eat well, there was always enough to feed somebody else who said he was hungrier. Rachel gave away her own coat, she gave away the last dollar in the house, she gave away her bed to a sick comrade to sleep in. Grandfather had terrible arthritis and had to stop working years before Rachel, but still he was folding leaflets with his cramped claws. He had died of cancer too young for Miriam to remember, except for his hands. Rachel wept and mourned and carried on, and then suddenly there was an old man living with her! At her age! He was eight years younger than Rachel and he had his nose flattened and his face thickened by fights in the streets, on the picket lines. He did not talk as much as Rachel but he looked at her a lot and he teased her. That ended in a political schism in the McCarthy years: a division between those who were more angry at the Communists and more willing to fight them and put the finger on them, and those who were more angry at the capitalists and the government, and would not co-operate. For all Rachel’s contempt for Stalinists, she said that Stalin would die and somebody else would come in and the line would change, but Rockefellers bred Rockefellers and went on forever getting richer. Then Rachel was alone.