Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  “You’re turning my questions.”

  “No! S’true. Buried anger makes maggots, pigeon. I’ve been swallowing my rage too long and it’s eating me. It’s shit to grow up poor in the supermarket. I carry my childhood in my bad teeth there was never money to get fixed, in my poor bones, in the lines of calcium deposit you can see in X rays for the times when, by god, I got enough for a stretch.”

  “I carry my childhood too. I’ve learned with Jackson how hard I carry it.… Unloved, dreaming of the love that would prove me, vindicate me.… But you wanted to be in school!”

  “I can push the words. I can pretend to be an intellectual. But inside I’m a street kid, and I don’t believe what those smug pricks do is so fucking superior. I hate them because they’re so comfortable. Sweet Jesus, are they comfortable with their tasteful lives and tasteful wives and bright kids and trips yonder and interesting food and interesting books and interesting friends, so comfortable, and they don’t care for five minutes, Miriam, who’s screaming outside. I’m sick to dying of all those cracks about the mindless boobs who watch television and put themselves in hock to buy a new car. What the hell do they think is the choice? They watch the news on TV and feel superior to the people who watch Lucy, and don’t figure they’re both watching situation comedy. They feel so damn nose-in-the-air about the folks in South Boston trying to keep blacks out of their schools, then they send their kids to private schools ’cause they’re so sensitive. They feel contempt for hardhats who won’t let blacks in their unions, and they squawk and scream about Black Studies actually run by blacks. I’m dying of hypocrisy, pigeon, dying of it. I had to throw up. Can’t you understand?”

  “I’m trying. I see your anger. But the gesture seems futile.”

  “Any gesture is futile that isn’t victory. Assassination is futile. But acting my anger makes me less dead.”

  Affection welling up in her. An old strong loving that was a choice, not a destiny, that didn’t engulf her. Feeling meek, she asked, “Do you think I’m the same kind of hypocrite?”

  “No. You’re a real intellectual. You like to push things around in your head. Besides, that’s the point of a girl from even a wishy-washy pink family. You’re trained right. Social conscience may be a weak guilt, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to live with than the downright open contempt I put up with every time one of those Johns opens his trap about those who haven’t made it through to join the club.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Go on tending bar. Write my poems. I’ve been into songs, lately. Hal was giving me lessons and Rick has been showing me some things. They think I’m onto something. One of them you won’t like at all.” He chuckled. “ ‘Litanies to the Deadly Venus.’ ”

  “Oh? Is that supposed to be me?”

  “If the shoe fits …” He turned onto his back. “Aw, I don’t know nothing about nothing. Maybe I’m dead already. I walk in a fog of pain. I fog myself up inside to bear that. I swallow fog in pills. I shoot fog in my arm.”

  She pulled back the Indian cloth of his sleeve. “Damn you, Phil, what’s the use of that?”

  He began to laugh loosely. “Only you could ask a question like that! Why, I’m acting out my self-hatred, what do you think?”

  “Idiot child. What will become of you?” Somehow she had put her arms around him and he was curled up, his body pulled into embryo position, his head coming to rest against her.

  “You’ll take care of me. Or won’t? Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you?”

  “Ya-ta-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta-ta. Want to hear what’s scaring me?”

  “Not me, I hope.”

  “No, nudnik, not you. In me. I went on the pill—”

  “Your belly’s bigger.” He patted her. “Made me swell up. And belch and feel nauseous and bloat.”

  “Your breasts are bigger too. Bury me between them.”

  “As if they weren’t ridiculous before.”

  “I like them. They’re warm. There are too few warm big soft things in this mean world.” She laughed and he put his arms around her. “I like to feel you laugh. You do it from the belly, not the throat or the head. For an intellectual woman, you’re pretty physical. Ha. It must be kind of nice on the pill, no apparatus. Just pop right in.”

  “If you had to take pills that made you swell up like an elephant with elephantiasis, you wouldn’t think it was cute. If your balls got sore and your legs swelled. Besides, I haven’t had my period this time. Nothing happened. I’m scared.”

  “Think you’re knocked up?”

  “Not really. But I don’t like my body playing tricks. I can’t help worrying.”

  “Tell you what we’re gonna do. I’ve got a book on hypnosis. After I leave here today, I’ll brush up. I tried it a couple of times and I’m pretty good. It takes real charisma, real projection. But I can do it. I’ll hypnotize you into your period.”

  “I hypnotized Allegra once, when I was a kid.… Why do you think it happened? Jackson is suspicious. Thinks I’m trying to pin a baby on him. It’s so ugly. I start suspecting my own body of dark female plots. It makes me feel divided against myself. Is my own body really saying it wants to be pregnant?”

  “Maybe it’s saying it’s scared to be pregnant. Or it doesn’t like the taste of the pills. Or it misses me, coming in and out and saying hello.” Under her sweater his hand reached up. “Haven’t you missed me?”

  “Now what are you trying to hypnotize me into, Philip?”

  Gently he put her hand against his jeans. He held her hand there and she did not pull it away. It would have felt, oh, silly, melodramatic to pull loose. She could not remember exactly what was supposed to be wrong about being with Phil. In her was a deep exasperated fatigue with Jackson’s rules and prohibitions and jealousy. How could she not be affectionate with Phil? Was she supposed to be suddenly installed with an On and Off button?

  “Feel, Miriam, for you. I’m alive again. Aw, let me in, what the hell. Who’s to know, besides us?”

  She could sense her body preparing. She wanted to feel him again. She wanted to hold him: he was Phil, her friend and her love. She wanted to play with him again, she wanted to be with him. She could not want to refuse. “It doesn’t matter, Philip sparrow. Jackson and I have been on a bad trip and it’s better over and done with.”

  “That was why he sent you away that morning. Because you couldn’t have said good-by to me face to face.”

  She was not sure of that, remembering the fearful joy, the total submission she had felt. But she was done sacrificing Philip to abstractions or to anyone. “I’m filled with mistrust for myself.”

  They were wriggling out of their clothes and into bed. The room was chilly and she pulled up the quilt over them.

  “Because of not refusing me?”

  “No. This part I trust. It’s what’s been struggling with him I mistrust.”

  “Home free. George Herbert up the flagpole, this is my mystical experience.”

  “I thought you’d been having problems. Tricky Dick doesn’t know it.”

  “The only problem I have is just getting solved. I mean, aside from being kicked out of school and likely to end up in jail.”

  That evening she went to see Jackson, not less desperate but clearer in her mind. When she met his gaze, she waited to see if guilt would surface. No. She felt only calmer, as if being with Phil had drawn her at least part way off that iron hook she had been impaled on. “I brought you a small thingie.” She gave him a pipe she had bought several weeks before. “I was waiting for an occasion, but why shouldn’t this be it? I like the shape of it. It’s comely in its heaviness and that made me think of you. Use it or throw it away, in good health.”

  “Beware the Greeks when they come carrying gifts?” He hefted the gnarled pipe.

  “The Greek was your other girl friend. I’m the Jew. We’re always bringing bribes. We want to be liked.”

  “Like breeds like. Do you still think you’re carrying another littl
e present in there?” He looked hard at her belly.

  “Jackson, I’m also the girl friend who learns from experience. I got hurt the other day. I’m not going to repeat that mistake.”

  He sat down in the kitchen chair and stared impassively. “What does that mean, for instance?”

  “What it says. I’m willing to agree it’s none of your business.”

  “Oh.” He put the new pipe down on the table and leaned back. “Let’s parse that one. None of my business? None of my business? None of my business?”

  A slimy despair filled her and she sat down in a chair, hard. She tried again to find the clarity she had brought. “Whatever in fact you meant when you responded that way.”

  “I meant I was not to be caught quite so easily.”

  “Jackson, we’ve got to stop! These are awful games we play! I don’t like the person I’m becoming with you!”

  Some of the guarded tension dissolved from his face and it seemed as if he really looked back at her. “I don’t know what it is. I just don’t know. Before you come, I want you to be here. I miss you when you’re gone. I miss the vitality, the life in you. Then as soon as you walk in the door something snaps shut. Something closes down. I start defending myself.”

  “I’m becoming a shrew. It’s like I was given something beautiful ever so briefly. I was promised something. I was promised you, the man I can love with all my heart and soul. I was promised and given it just long enough to make me want it, and then it was taken away. So I get into this schlemiel’s game of trying to get it back. Oh, Jackson, it’s an ugly game, and I quit it!” Her eyes were burning and she carefully did not blink them for fear tears would fall. Carefully she snuffed in her nose to keep control. If she cried, he might comfort her, and then they would start the cycle again.

  “I don’t know what it is, that I can’t be with you. I want to be with you. You can’t know how I want to be with you.”

  “No, I can’t. I think you more want to be sure of not getting hurt. I think you want to punish your ex-wife for what you feel she did to you. Jackson, I know you could love me and you don’t, and that’s what hurts.”

  “If you’d be patient and not push me. Just sit back and let it happen.”

  “But my life enters too. I wasn’t a loved child, and I have those mechanisms of the woman who gets hooked on trying to make someone love her. You become the father I was never pretty enough to please. You become the mother who never found my best good enough. You become the piggy bank that I put the dime in and I’m going to shake you and shake you till I get it back.” She laughed wryly. Philip would never say that was a laugh that came from the belly. That was a laugh from the head.

  “It makes me feel manipulated. After all, I came after you. If you didn’t ride me so hard, don’t you see that I’d come through?”

  “Through what? Into what? We have to make it together or it doesn’t count. All this performing in front of a statue of the other is beside the point.” Here she was waving her hands around. He sat still, rocking back on the tilted chair. Occasionally his fingers drummed on the table. “Don’t you think the way we started out has something to do with the bad smell?”

  “Sure. I stole you from Phil. How can I not expect that Phil will steal you back? Or somebody else?”

  “You didn’t ‘steal’ me from Phil, because Phil didn’t ‘have’ me in the sense you mean. I’m sick of this having. I can’t hack it. It doesn’t work. You insist on possessing me, and then you get scared I’ll possess you back. I can’t survive. But what you don’t see is, neither really can you win.”

  “You want out.” He looked at her levelly, rubbing his chin. He had not shaved. His cheek was stubbled.

  “I am out, Jackson. I can’t stay in here.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Seeing Phil?”

  “Of course I am. He’s in trouble. And how can I not see him? He isn’t exactly invisible.”

  “What can I say?” He made a business of filling his pipe, his old clay pipe.

  “A lot. I can say lots to you too. But we don’t listen to each other, we don’t get closer. Jackson, I’m not trying to break off with you tonight.”

  “No, you’re just doing it.” He tamped the tobacco down methodically, struck a kitchen match on the bottom of the table, sucked flame into the bowl.

  “I’m just saying, here I am, myself again. I can’t stand the way we’ve been. That woman is awful. I don’t want to be her pushing on you. I love you, I want you to know that.”

  “Sure. In your own comfortable way.”

  “If you don’t want it, sugar, you don’t have to have it! I don’t want to turn mean. I want you to love me. But you can’t. I’m not going to stop caring for you, but I’m not going to hang around here trying to get a response out of you as if my worth as a human being depended on it.”

  “You’re just going to go back to Phil and the old life.”

  “My life. Yes, I’m resuming my life. If you want me, you know where to find me. I hope you do, because I want you. I really want you.”

  His hands flexed with anger on the table. The knuckles made white peaks of contained anger. “Don’t hold your breath. If you’re leaving, you might as well leave.”

  She got slowly to her feet. She wanted to kiss him, she wanted to touch him. She wanted to pull them both back from this jagged edge. His eyes burned in his taut face. She did not dare. “So long.”

  He would not answer. She turned, fumbled into her red poncho, turned back. Still she watched him for a sign, any sign. Then she walked through the long hall past the bedrooms and out, shutting the door quietly.

  13

  Stills from a Year

  Almost, she could hang out her front window on Raymond Street and call to Phil as her grandma used to call to her neighbor Mrs. Ganzman, out her kitchen window over the lines on the pulley where Rachel hung out her wash and the bedding to air. How Lionel had laughed at that: Grandma Rachel hooting out the window about her company, about her bowels, about her arthritis. “No, my daughter’s boy is here! Sonia’s boy!” Tsatskeleh der mama. Not for Miriam the child lump did anybody yell.

  Phil was living across Raymond Street and down three houses, in a triple-decker wooden house that a commune was renting. He had a room on the third floor up under the eaves like her little studio apartment. Everyone called it Going-to-the-Sun House, although it didn’t so much look as if it were going to the sun as slowly down in ruin. It had been a rooming house before, and the present occupants were not a together commune.

  Going-to-the-Sun was a mountain peak in Glacier, where Hal had worked one summer, and Going-to-the-Sun was the name of a country music group he had formed with Terry and Rick. Now Hal had moved out and was trying to make it as a single, doing some of his own stuff and some of Phil’s songs and songs his manager picked out. Terry and Rick were still in the house, trying to get up a new group that would hold together longer than a couple of performances. But everybody still called the house Going-to-the-Sun.

  People in the house boasted about Hal and felt ripped off by him. Phil was caught between. Hal was doing his songs and seemed on the verge of getting a record contract. Phil dreamed of getting rich soon with Hal recording his songs, and then he could retire from the bar. But while he saw Hal sometimes he was always hanging around with Terry and Rick, and they resented Hal’s leaving the group.

  To have Phil nearby but in the commune worked fine. She need not worry about him the way she used to. It was not the solidest commune in Cambridge, but the people took care of each other minimally. They could handle a bad trip or a depression or a drunken messed-up Philip appearing in the middle of the night. If things were extra bad, Dorine or Rick would get her.

  Three of four nights a week she ate there: it was a convenience. She had no time to cook. The food was minimal too, but better than the places she ate out. She was thinner than she ever had been, overcommitted, overextended, always on the run, never enough sleep or time to catch up on her laundry or t
o finish the novel she had borrowed from Phil in the summer. Time she lacked but not energy. She had come out of the sad passage with Jackson with a wound of being unloved when it really counted, but with a rebirth of strength and curiosity and the will to open herself to people, to ideas, to sensations, to relationships. Work was the center and the center held.

  Phil had a beautiful bed in his room, with a head and foot of iron arabesques they had painted with blue enamel. A tiedyed canopy hung over it and beside it sandalwood incense curled feathery smoke upward. Phil loved the scent of sandalwood, he said it smelled like Keats’s poetry. Cuddled up with him, she was saying, “People are content to know so little of what they handle, it amazes me.”

  “What do you care how a radio works, so long as it plays music?” He was lying on his side with her pressed to his back.

  “Nobody knows yet what a computer can really do, you know that? Nobody has any idea how much of the programming it could take over. That whole artificial intelligence thing really turns me on. But take even a person, for example.”

  “Which one should I take for starters?”

  “I get the feeling so strong sometimes that I’ll never get a chance to bump against my limits. How many people could I love at once, and really love each one? How many children would I have if I had all I wanted? How much could I learn if I put all my energy into some new field for six months, say? How fast could I learn Greek or Russian? Could I suddenly become a painter?”

  “You’re just saying, pigeon, that you get only one life to live, something I’ve been noticing for a long while. You shoot your wad and that’s it. You’re depressing me. I think you’re growing and I’m shrinking, every day.”

  “Don’t start that, Phil, I beg you. Things are going better for you now—aren’t they?”

  “Maybe. Seems like I just tread water.”

  She held him closer. “Philip darling, I wouldn’t let you drown.” He was at a disadvantage in survival techniques. Not in a knock-down, drag-out fight—he had a bruise still from a fight with a nasty drunk in Finnegan’s: he was supposed to throw the bums out as well as mix drinks and play psychiatrist and regulate the sexual traffic:—but ill equipped to take care of himself year in and year out. She wished there was a way she could politely say to him that she was perfectly willing to be his social security.