Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  “I think … I’m dying. I’m very sick, Miriam. Something terrible is happening to me. I’m being carried along. Something terrible like a storm is carrying me. I’m afraid, listen! Something’s gone wrong! I can’t get back.”

  “Sha, Phil, shhh.” She cradled him against her, kneeling, facing him. He was hurling himself to and fro and she had to hold on with all her might. Fear came off him pungent as ammonia. She tried to control her own rising panic. What could be wrong? Sometimes the acid was cut with other drugs, bad drugs, sometimes with strychnine. Perhaps he was poisoned. Perhaps the pains in his belly were from poison and not from bad vibrations or bad visions or tensions. She did not know what to do. She wanted to run out of the room and get help, but she had no idea where to turn. She could not leave him like this: she could not stay. Should she take him to the hospital with her? “Phil, maybe we should get dressed.”

  “Clothes bind the body. No clothes. Close the body’s eyes. Keep-out signs. Can’t get into you, can’t touch you. No more clothes.”

  The hospital would not do. He might start to freak out there. She would not be able to protect him. She could not take him with her. She was briefly furious with herself for considering the possibility: false hope that she could meet all obligations, satisfy everyone, make it all come out well. Do every duty. It was now forty-five minutes since Allegra had called and she was not out the door. She remembered a piece of folklore to the effect that vitamin pills would bring somebody down from a bad trip. She disentangled herself long enough to search the medicine cabinet and the kitchen. She found only vitamin C against colds. She fed that to him and he took it placidly enough with a glass of water, but nothing happened.

  Seven twenty-four. She was sitting cross-legged on the mattress and he was lying with his head on her thigh, weeping occasional fat tears and blowing his nose copiously. “I see it now. Yes. For both of us. How we have to open. Give birth to ourselves, to each other. Then we can love all the way open. Trusting, that’s been hard. Because of my old man. Because of her going and turning into some damn bourgeois housewife after all we went through together. Jackson running off after he promised me. Now you want to leave me. Everybody wants to leave me.”

  If only she could know how far into self-pity he was, how objective the need, how violent the pains. To measure people against each other was distasteful. But there was only one of her, feeling guiltier every minute. Her body made goose pimples when he stroked it. Suppose Sonia was dying right now. Suppose Sonia was already dead. Suppose Sonia was calling for her. Suppose she got dressed and he ran after her naked into East Tenth Street and got hit by a truck. Suppose she never saw him again because he could not forgive her for deserting him on a bad trip.

  He had dropped the acid about two-thirty, three. He could be up for hours. He could be up for the rest of the night. She could not wait. If only she could step outside the time stream and see what would happen and make the wise decision. Each would weigh her decision as weighing her love, but she was only trying to judge their needs. She did not think she actively loved Sonia any longer, but she could remember loving her. She could remember Sonia as the sun that warmed her world from the center, the milky heart, the lap of roundness and comfort. There was still in her the little girl who could not lie to her mommy.

  “Phil, I’ll be right back. Five minutes. I’m only going upstairs. Phil, I’ll be right back.” She got dressed and ran up the dim steps, past the charred railing from the fire the janitor before Jackson had started while drunk, up to 4B.

  “Who is it?” Woman’s voice close to the door, suspicious.

  “I’m a friend of Phil’s. You know, the janitor. He’s sick downstairs. Please come.”

  With a clanking of bolts and turning over of locks the door at last opened on its chain wide enough for an eye at the crack. “Who is it? Who’s there?”

  “I’m a friend of Phil’s. He’s sick downstairs. I have to leave now. Please come down.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He took a pill that’s made him sick. He’s upset.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Just a friend. I’m Miriam.”

  “Oh, the collegiate princess from Flatbush, how do you do?” The woman pulled out the steel rod of the police lock and swung the door open. Miriam had expected her to be middle-aged, the way they talked about her, but she was at the most in her late twenties, probably not even as old as Jackson and three or four years older than Phil. She had been sitting on the fire escape eating peanuts and she still carried the bag, wearing faded shorts on good tanned legs and a white T-shirt. Bleached hair and soft brown eyes and brows plucked thin, her face was anxious with suspicion. A slight limp showed as she followed Miriam down. Phil was lying awry against one wall, his eyes clenched shut and his hand scrabbling at the sheets.

  “Naked as a jaybird.” With that limp she minced across the mattress on high-heeled sandals to poke him with a foot. “What’s wrong with you? Anything real? Come off it.”

  He sprawled on his back holding the side she had kicked. He stared at her blankly, then cowered. “Kill me. Eat my guts out. Suck my body dry.”

  “Whats’ wrong with him? Some pill he took! Are you sure he isn’t drunk? Sounds like the D.T.s.”

  “He took acid.” When the woman went on looking at her, she continued. “L.S.D., you know.”

  “Oh well, no wonder. That stuff’s illegal. They’re always peddling that crap down on the street. Well, what are we supposed to do with him?”

  “My mother’s in the hospital. I got a phone call. I have to go there—”

  “I’ll bet.” The plucked eyebrows raised. “How many times do you think you can get away with that one? Who gave him this L.S.D.?”

  “Look, she’s been in the hospital all summer. She’s got cancer. My sister called me here an hour and a half ago. I promised I’d leave immediately, but he won’t let me go. I’m scared to leave him alone. Please, just sit with him. Don’t let him harm himself. I’ll come back as soon as I can. I don’t even know if she’s still alive—but if I don’t go now she’ll never forgive me and I’ll hate myself.”

  4B reluctantly agreed, though she kept her face screwed up to indicate she wasn’t taken in by any such stories, and Miriam ran toward Second Avenue to get a cab. The first one that stopped pushed her out, telling her to fuck off when she asked him to go to Brooklyn. The second wouldn’t let her in till he found out where she was going, and when he heard he gunned the motor and charged off, leaving her to catch her balance. The third she jumped in and started screaming hysterically that her mother was dying! The cabbie was furious but he was young and not as experienced at the game as the others, so he agreed to take her to the hospital for an extra two bucks over the meter.

  Everybody was sitting in the hall waiting: her father, Allegra, Mark still in his ball-playing clothes, and even her mother’s friend Judy, who had been there since late afternoon.

  “So you finally got here,” Lionel said. “Well, well. We couldn’t expect you to hurry, of course.”

  “I couldn’t get a cab to take me. I had to come on the subway. How is she?”

  “Bad. Very bad. Who knows? They don’t tell you a thing.”

  About three in the morning the night nurse came by to say that they might as well go home, because Sonia’s condition was not likely to change. She promised they would be called. Early in the morning Sonia regained consciousness briefly. At least the woman in the next bed thought so, although the nurse doubted her. By the time they arrived again she was back under. Miriam went to a pay phone in the lobby to call Philip.

  No answer. But there had to be an answer. Phil had to be there. It was early. She dialed again. Again. Still no answer. Probably the stupid phone wasn’t working. He had to be there. But she believed he had run off. She believed he had disappeared. Something terrible had happened. He had run into the street and been hit by one of the cabs that would not stop for her. The woman from 4B had called the police. He
was in jail. He had hitchhiked off to Mexico to join Jackson in myth.

  She had not even the satisfaction of crisis. Sonia had not died, or, if she had, not technically. It was becoming evident that Sonia might never regain consciousness. She was being kept somewhat alive by machines that had taken over the duties of her failing organs. They digested for her and excreted for her and cleansed her body of its wastes. The nurses tended her vacant body. Sonia might wake up at any moment remembering nothing. Or she might come to and call for her family. Or nothing at all might happen but that the machines would go on changing her fluids and what had been her mother would lie there in the rented bed.

  Lionel had a social engagement in the Bronx that night. He went home first to change. As soon as he was gone, she ran to the subway to go into town. She had to find out what was happening. Probably Phil was too angry at her to answer his phone. She would appear there. She would make him love her again. She would make it all right, somehow, somehow!

  When she buzzed him there was no response. She let herself in with her key. Boxes tied up on the kitchen table, “Phil! Phil!”

  A man came out of the John zipping up his pants. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I could say the same, but I won’t. You’re Jackson.”

  He was taller than Phil and thin but more solidly built, darker and grizzled. He was homely and glaring at her, doing up his belt. A loose washed-out blue work shirt hung open. “I suppose you’re his girl. That was a hell of a trick, running out on him in the middle of a bad trip.”

  “You make a lot of assumptions. Where is he?”

  “What do you care?” He rubbed his head vacantly. He seemed idiotic, drawling his words and scratching himself all over his hairy chest while he gaped at her.

  “What I care is nothing to you. Where is Phil?”

  “Where did you expect him to go?”

  “Do you always play stupid games?”

  “He thought a lot of you. You let him down.”

  “Go fuck yourself, you stupid prig! What do you know what happened, you creep! Were you here? No, you were farting around Mexico, leaving me to take care of him alone on a bad trip—caused by his anxiety over going to Boston and his so-called friend who didn’t get back when he promised to! My mother is in the hospital dying of cancer and I had to go there, you creepy, self-righteous, tight-assed schmuck!”

  “Your mother?”

  “Why do you suppose I had to leave? I left him with that woman in 4B you fuck. She was supposed to stay with him. Now I want to know where is he and what happened.”

  “He’s in Bellevue.”

  “Oh, no. What’s he doing there?”

  “Under psychiatric observation. Your friend—”

  “Yours, if you mean 4B, you—”

  “I wouldn’t leave a sick kitten with her. Anyhow, she freaked when he started running around. He tried to slash his wrists, though I don’t think he tried hard.”

  “Why didn’t you get back on time?”

  “Who said it was like catching a plane? School doesn’t start for two weeks. Anyhow, I’m fired. I’m out of a job and Phil’s in the hospital, and if it isn’t your fault, who can I blame? In situations of this sort, someone is traditionally a scapegoat. We could use Wendy—that’s 4B.”

  “I’m sure she did what she could—how was she supposed to know what to do? Did you ever give her lessons?”

  “Why didn’t you give him some B vitamins?”

  “Why didn’t you fly a kite? What are you being so smartassed about, with him in the hospital now too?”

  “It’s not the first time nor, I expect, the last. I was growing tired of being a janitor anyhow. I’m too tall for basement work, and the damp was starting to mold my books. And maybe me. It’s as well to clear out”

  “How can you stand around here scratching yourself like a senile monkey? How do we get him out?”

  He began to laugh. “Maybe you are something else. Maybe.”

  “Just shut your face about me. I have enough troubles. Now take me where he is.”

  “We can’t get in to see him today. However, tomorrow. How would you like to take a senile monkey home with you?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Never saner. I’m kicked out. I’m fired as of two days ago. Looking for a place to sleep.”

  “Not with my family. You wouldn’t appreciate, they wouldn’t appreciate. Enough trouble. What happened to that guy Phil used to live with, Donald Duck?”

  Jackson shrugged. “Possible. Let me call. If I end up there, we can go see Phil tomorrow.”

  “I don’t want to hang around. I’m going back to the hospital. Here, this is my home number. I’ll go in with you tomorrow.”

  He took the slip of paper and tried to hold her gaze, seeming about to speak, but she did not wait to hear. She left at once for the subway. It was a hot day, like summer again, in the nineties. The streets were crowded, people jammed on the sidewalks, men lounging at the corners and in the doorways and on the stoops. Every five steps some guy tried to pinch her, invited her to suck his prick, made loud wet noises with his lips, talked about her as pussy and tried to block her way. She had to walk faster and faster and by the time she dived hostile and jittery into the smarmy murk of the subway she had broken into a heavy sweat. She could not decide whether she should go back home or to the hospital, but having a reservoir of guilt that never seemed to run dry, she decided on the hospital.

  They finally extracted Phil from Bellevue, looking starved and pallid. “That’s a hellhole. But what a drug traffic. If all I wanted to do was get high, I’d never have to leave.”

  “Phil.” She rested her hand on his shoulder. “Do you understand what happened? About my mother?”

  “Still alive, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, and so are you, no?”

  “Phil’s card in the poets’ union requires this sort of thing once a year,” Jackson said on Phil’s right side.

  “What happened is that you betrayed me. Yes. You two met, without my permission. Over my drugged and tied-down body. In secret. In the farthest realms of my paranoid imaginings, you met and signed a devil’s pact against me.”

  “Phil, I wouldn’t even say we got on.”

  “She called me a senile monkey,” Jackson drawled. “A tight-assed self-righteous creep. She insults with energy but lacks your style.”

  “Maybe she sees through you. You are both forgiven.” He made a sign of the cross. “Forgiving is a pious hoax. Who ever forgives for something they haven’t forgotten? Every time you remember a thing that hurt you, you charge that account a little more. Dig this: we’ll go around with wee laser guns. When we mean to forgive somebody we’ll put the laser gun to our skulls and blow out that memory: gone. Forgiveness will enter the world. Until then, I forget nothing.”

  She saw them off to Boston together, in a rented car loaded with their few boxes and suitcases. They both traveled light. Their massed possessions did not quite fill the trunk and back seat. On the sidewalk outside Donald’s apartment on West Eighty-second, she stood and waved while they careened off through the maze of double-parked cars. Jackson was driving, Phil had his feet on the dashboard and his head hanging out waving back to her. Bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye. She found herself sniveling as she walked away.

  In the next ten days she finally got into the Theory of Complex Variables. She carried it to the hospital where she sat beside her mother’s body for several hours a day. A woman with a tumor in her throat lay in the middle bed now, though the old woman Mrs. Katz was still penned in her crib.

  Miriam’s eyes would glide off the dismal pages to her mother’s slack yellowed face, to her hand lying limp with the wedding ring thin and gold and worn almost smooth from a filigree pattern, cutting into the finger. Sonia’s face looked bitter in abandonment. She imagined entering her mother’s head telepathically to communicate—what? Mother, I love you, let me live … differently? The better afternoons were those with Allegra sitting there too, both
of them feeling strongly their mother’s daughters and talking quietly. Remembering. Merging their childhoods.

  When school reopened, Lionel decided they should go. Allegra said to her, “Besides, he’s tired of having us around. We’re noisy. Suppose he got stuck with us living here with him forever—two unmarried daughters. He’d plotz.”

  Allegra and Miriam kissed good-by with affection for the first time. Allegra was going to a small liberal arts college in upstate New York near Cornell but rather less demanding. They agreed not to write unless they had something to tell.

  Back to Ann Arbor Miriam went, to her comfortable room in the elite murmur of Martha Cooke with its blind statues and the nervous click of pills like worry beads, the hilly streets of tall oaks and maples just beginning to turn salmon and orange and gold and flame, the white wooden houses with big front porches and towers perched at the corners. She went back to her quiet affair with her ex-section man with its once- or twice-a-week meals and to bed with music and reasonable conversation and a certain amount of history of the Civil War era freely taught. She plunged into her classes and found the Theory of Complex Variables every bit as hideously stony and arid as it had seemed when she was sweating her palm print into the book all summer. For the first time she was not only doing less than well in a math class but loathing every minute. However, Theory of Discrete Systems was delighting her. She began to consider changing the direction of her studies to something involving computers.

  Lionel kept saying how little money there was, and how he could not send her anything to live on above the dormitory. She cast around for a way to combine curiosity about computers with making some cash. She found a job building mathematical models of enzyme systems on a computer for a professor in bio-chemistry. It was all right. It was even interesting. She enjoyed that kind of playing. But working fifteen to twenty hours a week for him and taking a full load of classes left her little time for exploring her fellow humans. That would have to wait awhile. She was subdued and depressed still. She was surer than ever that she was going to move into computer science when, midway through November, Sonia officially died, and she flew back to Brooklyn for the funeral.