Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  Then they had all gone for a walk to get ice cream at Brigham’s, where she had mocha and Jackson had butter pecan and Dorine had peppermint stick. Jackson had walked in the middle with his arms around both of them, unusually pliant of him. He made a point of never touching Dorine. Then they came back still happy and said good night to Dorine. At ten-thirty they had gone off to bed and made love until midnight and it was good, it was beautiful to be with him again.

  His chest with the curly hairs rose and fell. Lightly she rested a palm against the skin, feeling the pulse. Beneath her hand his breathing altered. She felt that he was coming up through the layers of sleep. REM sleep: rapid eye movements under the blush of the lids. Dreaming about what? She had a pang of jealousy for the women in his head, more real than any flesh for him. Gradually she was learning how to love him properly. She was not letting her desperation force her into bitter cycles of retreat. She was not being coaxed into overtly trying to squeeze love from him. When he withdrew, she was learning to step back too. Yes, doing better. He would open to her. That promise was always there in the taut lines of his body, in the sad lines of his face, in the sandy wisdom of his eyes. Patience and accommodation. Living out her love day to day.

  The eyes opened, blinked, focused. Caught her in the act of bending over his face. The eyebrows raised. He came alert so quickly. “Well. Are you putting a hex on me?”

  “What makes you think I’d know how?”

  “All women are witches.”

  “All men are pricks.” She sat up and felt for her slippers under the bed.

  “Where do you think you’re off to?” He put out a long arm and pulled her against him. “Was a love spell. Mojo working.”

  “You can’t bluff me. You have a ten o’clock class today. You wouldn’t be tempted by ten naked maids in a row.”

  “Well, school’s still something of a novelty. This aging boy wonder. I’m older than Higgins, my ten o’clock seminar man, and I can see that embarrasses him. He thinks I should be back on the Bowery waiting on the mission line.”

  “I knew the first time I saw you drinking grapefruit juice for breakfast that you liked self-pity in the morning.”

  “Woman, you don’t know what’s good. It takes the sweaters off my teeth.”

  “Have you tried a toothbrush?” She got away from him and hopped across the room. She wouldn’t have minded bicycling over to M.I.T. a bit late. But once on such a cozy morning she had rolled over onto him and he had taken out that missed class on her for two days. He was convinced in his heart he was about to flunk out.

  He skipped breakfast except for his glass of juice and a piece of toast eaten standing, but Dorine padded out in her cotton smock as soon as Jackson left, and they ate granola and blueberries together leisurely.

  “Did Phil come in last night?”

  Dorine dropped her gaze and nodded. “In my room.”

  “Dorine, don’t start that guilty bit on me. Why shouldn’t you take him in if you want to? You don’t think I’m jealous, please, do you?”

  Dorine made an effort to look at Miriam. “He makes me feel funny about it.”

  “Phil?”

  “No! Phil?”

  “Jackson, you mean. You know how uptight he is. You shouldn’t let him get you down. I swear, somewhere inside he doesn’t really approve of sex. It might be considered fun. He doesn’t really approve of anything where the fact is more interesting than the theory.”

  “He says I shouldn’t sleep with anybody while Lennie’s in the hospital.” Dorine stirred her very light, very sweet coffee round and round.

  “He said that? Or you’re just guessing?”

  “He said it all right. With sadness, as if I were really being a shit. He makes me feel … so cheap.”

  “What business is it of his?”

  “It was my fault, I mean, you and Phil had gone off to that rock festival for the weekend. We were alone here and we were talking. I mean, I felt really close to him. I was talking about what happened with John and why it hurt so bad. How I got involved with Lennie and how I got into that trip last spring of really wanting him to marry me and what a shock it was when I finally said so and I learned he’d never even thought of it. I felt Jackson must like me a little bit, I mean, he listens so sympathetically.…”

  She thought but could not say it was the role he liked: he liked listening and nodding and sympathizing a bit, giving advice.

  “I thought, well, he can’t find me completely ugly, to listen to me all evening practically. So when it was kind of late I asked him if he wanted to sleep with me. I didn’t make a big thing of it. I just thought he might just as soon … he’d spent all that time …” Dorine trailed off. “I wasn’t trying to poach on you. But he made me feel like a rotten potato.”

  “Dorine, don’t let him get you down that way.”

  “He put down this quiet line about how Lennie is a friend of his and Lennie is in the hospital. I wouldn’t have felt half so lousy if he’d just said, ‘No, you don’t turn me on,’ But Lennie’s been in the hospital since June, and I don’t know if he’s going to pick up with me again when he gets out. He keeps telling me he got hepatitis because he wasn’t taking care of himself, as if I had failed him. He’s grumpy when he’s sick, and he just isn’t that interested in talking to me when I hitchhike to New York. When I walked in he said, ‘Oh, it’s you.’ His mother was there, and he hadn’t even told her who I am.”

  “Being with Phil is between you and Phil. Jackson has nothing to say about it.”

  “But he watches me. Honest, sometimes I feel I have to sneak around. I feel his eyes on me. He makes such heavy judgments. He’s always making judgments and telling us where we come short.”

  “He does that.” Miriam poured more coffee for both of them. “Back when we were together before, when I broke up with Phil—”

  “That was before I knew you.”

  “Yeah. Before Phil moved into Going-to-the-Sun—”

  “For me, that place should have been named Going-to Hell-Fast. I’m glad you got me out of there, honest. No matter how heavy Jackson weighs on me, I think a lot of him. I like living here. It’s better with Phil, here. He’s like a baby sometimes, and sometimes he just lashes out when he’s had too much or he’s upset.… But he can be sweet too. I know I should probably move out.”

  “I like having another woman in the house. They gang up on me. I’d go out of my mind with both of them if you weren’t here to talk to. Besides, this place would stink, literally stink. The walls could fall in before either of them would wash a dish.”

  “Well, I’m good for something anyhow.” Weakly Dorine laughed.

  Miriam was lying beside Phil, on her side, tracing her finger slowly down his spine caressing each vertebra. “Where did you sleep last night?”

  “Going-to-the-Sun, It was late and I was wasted, I just couldn’t make it all the way over here.”

  When she had given up her room as a sign of commitment to the new order and their emergence as a family, Phil had talked of doing the same. But he did not like to break things off. He could not bring himself to tell the guys at Going-to-the-Sun that he was moving out on them. So he never did.

  “You’ll always keep one foot planted there, won’t you? Makes me think you don’t expect this to work.”

  “I expect nothing to work, ever. Everything human is an error. But I like having two homes. It’s a hell of a lot better than having none.”

  “I wish we had a bigger apartment. Then we could each have a room.”

  “I think old Jackson wants Dorine to vacate so he can have his room. I don’t think he expects Lennie to come back when he gets out of the hospital.”

  “I want Dorine here. I just wish we all lived in a bigger place. Sometimes I wish we had a house and a yard.”

  “Wow, baby, we can move out to suburbia. How about a nice split level with a family room in Wakefield? Or a colonial-age farmhouse with landscaping in Lexington or Concord?”

 
“They’d like us fine, wouldn’t they?”

  “We have enough trouble getting the rent together. Hey, get a job, get a job.”

  “I’m trying. I have nine tenths of the course work out of the way and the basic stuff run on my thesis. I just have to write it. But those programing factories turn me off. I don’t want a dead-end job. They’re so damned openly prejudiced in those corporations, the first thing they ask me is when I’m getting married.”

  “Why, you should smile sweetly, bat your big brown eyes, and explain you are already in a group marriage.”

  “Then they’d just ask when am I going to have a baby. Philip, love, I just don’t know what to do. I wasn’t that great a mathematician. Nothing besides computers has turned me on the same way. You can’t decide to be talented in some field, you have to have the knack. You couldn’t decide tomorrow morning that you’re bored with writing songs, so you’re going to compose string quartets instead.”

  “Maybe I will, a man of my vast and wasting talents. I could work at not composing string quartets just as hard as I work at not writing poems.”

  “You’re always pumping some poison into your beautiful body.”

  “Now don’t start with the ‘Mother Mary, come to save us’ bit.”

  “How come you didn’t come home last night? I was waiting.”

  “You didn’t wait long the night before.”

  “Oh, Phil … were you mad?” She wrapped herself around him, nuzzling. “Sometimes Jackson just doesn’t pay attention to turns, and I never know if you’re coming home or not after Finnegan’s.” Jackson had his ways of inveigling, not letting her catch him in a direct request that might break the gentle drift toward bed. “If you’d give me a call …”

  He rolled free of her, resting his head on cupped hands, elbows spread on the pillow. “I am not going to call for an appointment. You want to be a call girl?”

  “You’re both so damned touchy about arrangements!”

  “Who wants to get it up on schedule? The next performance of Phil and Miriam will be held at eleven-thirty sharply. Please be on ti-yum.”

  “It isn’t a matter of making appointments. It’s just a matter of my knowing that you want to see me.”

  “Well, I want to see you when I want to. Isn’t that what wanting means? I am not going to get a goddamned ticket punched, like eating in a dormitory. If loving isn’t spontaneous, then the last thicket of real man has been bulldozed at last. We get up by alarm clocks and we eat by the clock and we get relieved at work and piss by the clock. I am not going to be had like a pill.”

  “The two of you want everything so flipping spontaneous and then you get insulted if I can’t second-guess you.”

  “That’s loving, pigeon. You have to have a feel for me. You can’t do it by contract.”

  “Philip …” She touched his chest, tanned that beautiful rawhide color he got, his skin so much darker than his hair. He went out a lot on Hal’s boat. He was good with the boat, he had an affinity for wind and the sea. He sensed how to tack with his body as well as his mind, while Hal was still remembering the rules. People watching him said, “Oh well, growing up in Boston, he must have learned how to handle boats as a boy”; whereas he had learned only how to handle a knife and a woman and a needle. “Don’t you think I am loving you?”

  “Getting there. Getting there.”

  His skin tasted of salt. Salty, smoky, leathery taste from the sea, the sun, the day on the water. His eyes were the color of the sea as it had been today, with the waves making clean whitecaps tumbling over. Now they were fluttering shut and he was hardening under her lips and her Angers played over his belly and flanks. Body she knew so well, better than her own. Knew how to sense and to please, as if she had grown up curved into his side. When people fell in love, how could they want to trade in the people they had loved for those they were learning to love? She had let Jackson make her break off with Phil, like hacking off an arm. She must work to love Phil better, to insert herself between what he really wanted and his destructive energies, his self-hatred, his bitter ironies turning to bite them.

  They made love slowly. When he felt himself about to come, he would stop her with a hand on her buttocks and she would wait and then slowly resume. He had not always the energy for that. But they both wanted to last together this evening. He had this night off and it was not yet completely dark outside.

  “I wish we could get out of the city,” she said beside him. Now the dark was complete and thick, the night still warm. “I want us to have a house at the ocean. Will I ever get a job and some money?”

  “What’s all this about houses and money?”

  “Phil, wouldn’t you like to get out of the city for a while?” She stroked his fine hair.

  “Out of the city? Nothing but grass and cows. Now what would I say to a cow?”

  “But you like the sea.”

  “I guess I would like to lie out on the sand someplace—maybe the Cape or Nantucket. Sand is the cleanest stuff—nothing like dirt.”

  “By next summer, providing I get a job, maybe we can swing it.”

  “Too tame.” He was playing with her hair, twisting it on his fingers. “Why don’t I ever get to go any place? Only places I’ve ever been are New York and out to L.A. and Tijuana. Only time I ever got out of the States was to Vietnam, gee, thanks a whole lot. I want to drink in sidewalk cafés in Paris. I want to swill beer at the Oktoberfest. I want to go diving with Japanese fisherwomen. I want to get laid by Eskimos. I want to bargain for hash in Marrakech, while liquid-eyed adolescents pray for my cock. And what do I do? Walk the dusty streets of Cambridge from Finnegan’s to Harvard Square, intersection of a thousand private drives. A poet needs experience. All I get is a day older.”

  “We will travel, love. I’ve never been any place. I haven’t even been to L.A. and Tijuana.”

  “Hey, gringo, you want to buy my Seester? What would you do in Tijuana? We couldn’t even smuggle dope in your brassiere since you don’t wear a brassiere. That’s what I did with Barbara, the bitch I was traveling with. Yes, I want to take off for Trinidad or Lima or Rio, pronto.”

  “On what I’m making this summer, how about a ticket to Worcester on a Trailways bus?”

  “How about you get me a beer?”

  “Phil, promise me one thing, a little thing.”

  “Anything that does not change the power balance of our electrical triangle. That’s an instrument for a rock band, you know, electrical triangle?”

  “That’s the point. We aren’t a triangle. There are four of us living here.”

  “What? Oh, Dorine. Our lady of marshmallows.”

  “You lean on her when you want to, don’t you feel just a little chintzy putting her down? I like Dorine.”

  “Am I objecting? I get along with her. I don’t mind.”

  “You don’t mind her in bed either.”

  “So? Examine the ass on her sometimes if you need an explanation. John used to call her Bottom Round.”

  “She does all the work here and nobody ever says thanks, even, let alone helping her.”

  “Help her if you want to. She likes playing wifey.”

  “Phil, listen to me. I think you like her better than you let on—it’s a status thing. Jackson wouldn’t deign to sleep with her, so you pretend you don’t care. She’s warm and she’s good to you and you like that. Why not be a little nicer to her sometimes, then? Let her know you notice she’s alive too.”

  “Why don’t you come down on him? He’s the one making the frost to float in the air. I used to fall by her bed in Going-to-the-Sun, and I fall by here. Okay by me, okay by her. It’s Jackson who tries to get her to feel that’s Significant.”

  “I do try to talk to him.”

  “Sure you do. You find it easy to dump on me. You’re scared to come down on him. I’m going to start throwing my weight around here and get a few rights for me for a change.”

  “That’s something to look forward to, isn’t it?”
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br />   15

  The Champion versus the Hustler

  “The hustler is a victim too,” Jackson was drawling. “He eventually gets hustled by others.”

  “So is the champion defeated. Nobody wins all the time. The hustler accepts that, but the champion doesn’t.”

  They had just been shooting pool, which she had come to learn meant they entered one of their routines. She saw them together as never previously. Sometimes she appreciated the grace, the wit. Other times she felt subtly handled and thwarted and set aside. Other times she felt grossly put down, processed by them. Never in the good times or the bad times of their living together did she feel that she or Dorine was with them as they were with each other. If Phil was not demanding her attention or Jackson subtly commandeering her sexual energies, if one or the other was not trying to monopolize her before the other’s gaze, they were playing together before her, in back of her, off where she could not quite grasp the issue or its outcome.

  “Who’s winning for, if there is no public? The hustler has only himself for an audience. The champion wants to win, the hustler to survive. You can’t tell me those goals are equivalent,” Jackson said.

  “It’s a question of butchery versus art. A question of hidden strength. If you’re so insecure you can only enjoy your victory if it’s public, there you are. But with the hustler, the style is as important as the outcome. It’s the setting up of a relationship with the mark. The third time is more meaningful than the first.…”

  They went on that way, yet Phil cared as much about beating Jackson at pool or whatever the game of the week was, as did Jackson did about beating him. Perhaps if she had had more brothers or been closer to Mark … Mark’s relationship to Lionel had been bumpy. Lionel gave his favor to Mark and withdrew it for reasons of mood that only sometimes intersected with something Mark had done right or wrong. It was a household of shifting alliances. Mark and Allegra would combine against her, when she played heavy Mama. Mark and she would bully Allegra and refuse to take her along. Allegra and she would make common cause against Mark, who hogged the bathroom and left it dirty.