Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  Now Rachel was stuck away in a Jewish old folks’ home out in Far Rockaway. Rachel had always despised Lionel for his unformed politics, and she used to call him every name the Committee had. Then she would taunt him for never joining the Party and say they wouldn’t have him, he was a schlump. But when Miriam was growing up, Rachel was the grandma she preferred. Rachel had no money to give them and not much else. She had causes and bills and too many grandchildren and pains in the chest and the head. Miriam had her cheekbones and eyes and complexion. She suspected she also had her temper and her will and her sensuality. Now Rachel was about to outlive Sonia, who had reacted against her and told Miriam all through her childhood how lucky she was to have a real mother instead of a politician for a mother.

  Always Sonia had taken them out to see Rachel in Far Rockaway, but in July Miriam and Allegra went by themselves. Rachel was under sedation in the room she shared with four other old and sick and defeated women. Her head seemed heavy on her thin shoulders and drooped first to one side and then to the other. She told them the Communists were in control of the nursing home and putting arsenic in her food. They were coming to murder her as they had Trotsky with his beautiful lion’s head. Rachel had loved Leon Trotsky with an unstinting full-blooded devotion. She had loved her husband and clucked and fussed over him long after he was wizened. She adored her sons above her daughters, consciously a man’s woman. Now she asked insistently after Mark, who did not bother to come. Her father had been an orthodox Jew who prayed every morning his thanks that God had seen fit to make him a man and not a woman. Rachel had been born a woman, but she made it clear she would not identify with others in that condition unless they shaped up. She could only admire heroes, and heroes were men.

  Miriam doubted the arsenic, but the tranquilizers were bad enough, stupefying Rachel and surrounding her with a querulous cloud they could not pierce. They sat with her for two hours but only sometimes did she recognize them. She kept calling Miriam Masha and Allegra Sonia. “Masha, where’s the baby?” Rachel kept demanding. “Is something wrong with the baby?” When she did recognize them, she scolded them for not bringing Sonia, she begged them to take her to Sonia immediately.

  So Miriam was cast back on herself and her only connection—to Phil. She lay beside him and they tangled their bodies and histories and wove images on the dim low ceiling.

  “Phil. Should I apply to graduate schools in Massachusetts?”

  “Are you thinking of that?”

  “Shouldn’t I be?”

  “Not if you have any brains. But why not? We’ll live together. We can move back to East Cambridge and raise rats for the hospitals.”

  “I don’t have to apply around Boston. We’d still have summers.”

  “Crap. New York is ceasing to be a summer festival. A pile of rotting meat and decaying circuits in the center of a dying empire. Summer of love, my sweet prick! I was solicited yesterday by a kid who must have been all of fifteen. She said she was hungry and I say she was on smack. If it wasn’t for you, do you think I’d be sweltering like Job on his dungheap here? If I can bring myself to play janitor in this hellhole for you, you can damned well move your ass to Boston for me. Princess.”

  9

  To Each According to Her Need

  “Mama, we don’t know how to talk to each other. You always did it for us. You were the soft stuff in between, so we wouldn’t bump, so we wouldn’t rattle or jab. You always said what each of us should buy for the other’s birthday. You’d tell me that Allegra was mad because I made fun of her new haircut, or Mark didn’t want me borrowing his drawing pen. Now we don’t have a common language.”

  Her mother lay in the hospital bed against the left wall, yellower, limper after a third operation. There would be no fourth. In the middle bed was a fat woman with a daughter just a bit younger than Miriam, who sat beside the bed while they whispered and giggled like friends. Miriam saw their closeness as an emblem of what she could not guess how to reach for.

  Against the right wall an elderly woman, Mrs. Katz, was under heavy sedation. She lay mumbling to herself. Often the restraint bar was up on her bed, making it a crib. Miriam never saw anyone talking with her except a nurse giving her pills, taking her temperature, changing the bedpan. She lay under the sheets like a bundle of straw, tiny and inert except for periods of tossing and querulous whining. Perhaps she was dying, perhaps she was not. Miriam heard a doctor bleating jocularly at her, “Why, you have an iron constitution, Mrs. Katz, you’ll live to be a hundred!” Perhaps she was a widow. No one came.

  Sonia talked sometimes with the woman in the middle bed, but she was a divorcee and made sarcastic remarks about the doctors that upset Sonia’s sense of decorum. Sonia had seldom been interested in people beyond the family—except for her students. Just as she had loved Miriam best when she was little, she fussed and worried over her favorite students. The slow ones who tried were her special care. But she regarded excessive interest in others as gossip: perhaps it reminded her of Rachel. Sonia expressed contempt for women who could not find enough to concern themselves with in their proper work, their family, and had to worry about neighbors or strangers. Certainly Sonia was shy with adults she did not know, so tended never to get to know them. For years they had feared their neighbors. They had been forced out of one apartment because the neighbors were hostile and called them Reds. Sonia would not go down to get the mail because of threats in the box. Her “girl friends” were from her earlier life, before marriage: the ones who had not moved from Brooklyn, Judy and Gussie and Barbara came in faithfully to see her and brought flowers and best sellers and funny cards. They met together to try to play bridge, but Sonia could not keep up her end of the game.

  Miriam could remember feeling peeved when she would hear her mother on the phone to Judy: her mother would be laughing like herself chatting with a girl friend. That was wrong: not how her mother was supposed to act. Lionel would groan at the mention of their names. “All the interesting people you meet in the world and you still want to get together with those yentas.” Her father used few Yiddish words, for he thought them parochial and clannish, but that one he used. Sonia would wince.

  “I got nothing in common with your friends. I know they all think I’m a nobody.”

  “Ten years a teacher and you say, ‘I got nothing.’ ”

  “Am I in the classroom now?” She would arch her short plump neck in an attempt at dignity. “I know how to talk in front of a class, do I need you to tell me? Am I in front of a class in my own home?”

  “You think it’s more important to teach a stranger’s children than your own. Perhaps you don’t care if they grow up sounding as if they’d never left Flatbush, but I care. You had an education, but no one would know it to hear you. I don’t want my son growing up with a voice like a comedian on the borscht circuit.”

  “So be ashamed of me. Teach my own children to scorn me. Someday they’ll understand what I went through to keep a home together for them!”

  As Miriam sat in the stuffy hospital room with its acrid smells, she thought that swimming in the humid air were all of the words that had ever been spoken in family. All those words like tiny sharks swam through the yellowed air snapping at her, food of anguish, food of bitterness, the seder bitter herbs and dry bread: all the pain she had grown up with and taken for granted as the normal daily bread of living together. Nothing was lost. Nothing could be assimilated. Their words would not dissolve and be forgotten but, like aluminum shreds, like the pop tops of soda containers, would lie where they had been tossed and never decay, but be ready in fifteen years to tear the foot of a passing child. Yet she had always considered that she lived in a happy family. Her parents had always assured her that she was lucky to have both parents living together. All the children had been wanted, had been intentional. Children of broken homes, unwanted children, were to be pitied.

  “What are you talking about, you can’t speak to each other!” Sonia rolled her head back and forth. “Your f
ather tells me you’re staying out late at night and you won’t keep up the house. How can you treat your mother that way? Don’t you think I’d keep the house clean if I could?” Sonia motioned her closer and took her arm caressingly. Sonia had always been the affectionate one, who held, caressed, comforted. Wait till Mama comes home from work and then you can cry.…

  “Mama, I’m doing my share and so is Allegra. We keep our room clean, we make supper every night and do the dishes. But Mark won’t do a thing! He doesn’t even want to make his own bed.”

  “Mark’s a good boy. You’re the oldest daughter and it’s your responsibility to keep up the house.” Sonia let go her arm, arching her flaccid neck against the pillow. “What’s wrong with you? It’s too much to expect you to act like a mensch and do a little work around the house when your mother’s too sick?”

  Miriam sat up stiffly. Always drawing love away to punish me! “Why don’t you ask Mark to be a mensch? Why don’t you tell him to do his part?” The bitter tang of injustice. She felt twelve: So don’t love me! I’m right anyhow!

  “What’s this staying out late at night? What’s going on the minute my back is turned?”

  “I have a friend, that’s all. I like to be with him. I don’t like hanging around the flat. I’m not getting along with Mark or Dad. I am getting along with Allegra, by the way, for maybe the first time in my life.”

  “You’ve always been jealous of your sister.”

  “I admit that. But not any more.”

  “Your sister loves you and your father loves you, and if you’re not getting along, it’s because of how you’re acting. Where did you pick up this new way? Where did you get such a swelled head? You’re such a smart aleck you can do anything and you know better.”

  Sonia attacked from the bed, and from the bedside table came the whine of the Theory of Complex Variables. She had had discipline, always. At school she was always up to date. All her adventures were fitted into the interstices of a careful schedule. Now this summer she had done nothing but lie in bed and fuck and weep! She could not read that stupid book: it was the single most boring object she had ever encountered. Ten minutes with it and she felt embalmed. Her discipline had eroded.

  “I bet that’s some friend! Why doesn’t he come out to the flat and see you, if he’s so friendly?”

  “He’s working as a janitor. Besides, I like going into town.”

  “I’m beginning to get the picture. Miriam, daughter mine”—Sonia motioned her near to whisper—“is he black?”

  “No, but he isn’t Jewish. And I don’t want to marry him. And I don’t want to bring him home to Flatbush. I just want to see him and talk to him and spend time with him this summer.”

  “Is the wool so easy to pull over my eyes? You aren’t staying out late at night talking. One thing leads to another. Pretty soon, you’ll be in trouble deep.”

  “Who told you? Was it smart Mark who told you?”

  “What do you care who told me? It’s a thorn in my side lying here that I can’t trust my own daughter when I’m not keeping an eye on her.”

  “Mama, I spend nine months of the year at school. What do you want from me? Only that I not be me. I’m not ashamed of how I look any more. Or that I’m good in math instead of something supposed to be feminine. Or that I’m too tall—too tall for what? I’m not too tall for me!”

  “Just so long as you’re satisfied with bubkes! Why should you care how your mother feels?”

  “Mama, I don’t want them to bother you. It’s a hard summer, we’re worried about you, we don’t get along.”

  “That’s my fault, of course! Blame it on me! You were a good girl when you were growing up, now look at you!”

  “I don’t want you to worry! There’s nothing to get excited about.”

  “Okay, so if it isn’t important, do your sick mother a favor and don’t see this man any more.”

  “I didn’t say seeing him doesn’t matter to me. I said it wasn’t important from your point of view. I’m not going to marry him! He’s my friend, Mama. I just like him enormously.”

  “You know how I feel lying here? Staying out late with some janitor. Who knows what you’re doing? Refusing to clean up so when your father comes home from work he finds a nice house. Not a nest of vipers and daughters running back to the Lower East Side to hang around all hours of the night! I grew up there, I know! How glad we were when we could move to Brooklyn and get away! Thieves, rapists, women selling themselves! How can you go back there?”

  “Mama, I do care that you’re sick! I don’t want you to be unhappy over me! I don’t want you to feel pain! I know that you’re suffering and I want you to feel that I care.”

  “Sha! Keep your voice down. You want them to hear in the next bed? So act like Mother’s good loving daughter!”

  “I want to show you I care but I don’t want to pretend I’m somebody else! Don’t make me lie. I’m not shoving my life in your face. I don’t want to make a fuss. Just let me love you in my own way and be me.”

  “You won’t do me a thing. You won’t cross the street for your mother. Words are cheap. Actions are what count. Actions speak louder than fine words. I hear you saying to me that some janitor you’re ashamed to bring home is more important to you than your mother lying on her bed of pain, suffering day and night and worrying!”

  Allegra watched Miriam’s troubles with an ironic eye. Lying on the rug between their beds doing exercises for her abdominal muscles designed to make her gentle tummy vanish, Allegra panted, “You needn’t have got … into all that hot water … with Mama. She has no way of figuring out what goes on unless some little bird tells her.”

  “I was sure it wasn’t you.”

  “Why should I? It only makes trouble for me. She gets on that questioning shtik. ‘What are you doing with Roger? Are you letting him take advantage of you?’ As if he’d know how! I can’t wait till I start school in September. I expect to meet a new type of man. But it’s really your fault. If you don’t rub Mark the wrong way, he never pays attention to us. You think he wasn’t hocking me to iron his shirts? I just took one and burned a hole in it. I was so apologetic! He won’t ask me again! You don’t know how to get out of things, big sister. It’s easy if you do it right.”

  “I never thought of that.” Miriam felt large and unwieldly beside Allegra.

  “You feel superior because you don’t think of things like that. As if it’s moral to do things head on. It’s just messy. Daddy would never make a fuss about dating some guy. I mean, he hardly pays-that much attention unless you shove it in his face. He only wants to go on his way, and we shouldn’t be a drag. We’ve always been her kids, and only his when he felt like it. You know what I mean?”

  Miriam nodded. “Sure. Father’s Day and Thanksgiving. When you were dressed up extra cute. When Mark won a prize or had his bar mitzvah. When he wants us to listen to some song and admire him.”

  “It hurts to admire? So of course he wasn’t going to keep anything from her about us. I mean, it’s her business. So you had to stay out of his path. I don’t want to get stuck with the housework either. I don’t see why we can’t have a woman come in once a week like everybody else. But the way to get that is to demonstrate how hard we’re trying but it’s too much.”

  Miriam began to laugh. “But, Allegra, I can’t maneuver that way. It takes a kind of energy I lack. I blunder ahead.”

  “Big sister, you sure do!” Allegra smiled at her. “Don’t fret. She’s out of it, stuck in the hospital, and Dad lacks the taste for grand family confrontations. He’ll make rules but he won’t enforce. Now just take it easy for a while, would you?”

  Labor Day came and Labor Day went, but Jackson did not return. Although Phil wanted to cut out for Boston to find a place to live, he was wedged into the basement until relieved. Jackson had promised to be back Labor Day at the latest, but no word had come after a postcard from Oaxaca dated August 1 which was a long joke about dope.

  “He’s probably
rotting in a Mexican calaboose on a drug charge, and I’ll spend my remaining years baby-sitting a rotting building. Just because for once in my life good old J. Singleton Proxmire is lined up to be my meal ticket. Just because I get a break finally, my old buddy has to sit on his ass too stoned to observe the date.”

  Sometimes Phil turned paranoid and suspected that Jackson was purposefully blocking him. “He’s jealous because I got my shit together. I got my letters of recommendation marshaled, I got my transcripts patched, I got my benefactor lined up. He didn’t think I could get up early enough in the morning to make the appointment, but I did it. While he’s still fucking around playing old Jack Kerouac games. You know, he had Advantages, Jackson did. His father’s a big-shot businessman in some small-change town out in the Great American Desert. Sofa, Nebraska, or Chaise Longue, Idaho. After a little time in the war, instead of advancing steadily up the escalator, he turned around and started backward. Now he’s doing me in, his best friend. Doing me dirty. I should have known he wouldn’t get back on time. Secretly, deep down inside, he doesn’t believe time exists outside, that there’s really an independent world with clocks that run while he isn’t looking. He probably isn’t convinced I exist when he isn’t with me, so why the hell should he sweat it getting his ass back here and taking over his own stupid job and his cellblock just because he solemnly promised me on June 21 he’d be here?”

  Phil got some tabs of acid called Electric Lady which were supposed to be the best stuff since Sunshine. They were red and long. He kept them in a little round carved wooden box shaped like an egg that came apart at the waist. Whenever Phil opened it, the spicy odor of sandalwood escaped. He had saved one for each of them to drop that Monday, but she felt too nervous, too tense in her body.