Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  To give presents was to tell a person you thought of him when you were someplace else. Beth enjoyed getting presents, as did Phil. Funny that they did not get along, when they both had certain direct childlike traits she liked. With Jackson, she would have to wait patiently and see if the item appeared in use or was dispatched to the limbo at the bottom of his closet. Then she blessed Phil and Beth for being able to say when they liked something. To ask for what you wanted, to be glad when you got it and sorry or angry when you didn’t: how could she think that was a trait of childhood? Surely not of hers. Nobody in her family had ever been able to say “I want,” “Love me,” “Help me.” Like Jackson. Silent struggle. Did she think that was more real, deep in herself?

  “What sign are you?” Dorine was asking, and she made herself pay attention. “Your birthday was July, right? You’re a Leo. That’s a strong, fiery sign. That’s you all right!”

  “What sign are you?” Miriam asked politely. The subway train came out of the side of Beacon Hill past the Charles Street jail in the fading light, across the wide river. Plunged into the ground under M.I.T.

  “I’m a Libra. Ruled by Venus, we like to make peace. We’re easy to influence, since we see both sides of a question.… You make faces, Miriam, but I’m more like Libra and you’re more like a Leo. Phil’s a Pisces. Each of us resembles our own signs.”

  “We pick out those things that match and drop the rest. When’s your birthday, anyhow?”

  “A week from next Tuesday. I’ll be twenty-two.”

  She had almost let it slip by. She felt a pang of guilt at not caring enough for Dorine. She would get her something nice. And the men: they must do something. She would talk to them.

  The Fall Joint Computer Conference was held in New York and she went, job hunting. Staying with Lionel set her teeth on edge, but she had no choice. He complained to her incessantly about the young, meaning young women, how demanding and intolerant and immoral and spendthrift they all were. She could only suspect his recent romantic efforts had soured. He seemed puzzled and a bit listless. He kept urging her to come oftener to see him, though he asked her next to nothing about her life. It was too sad to confront with her old anger.

  At the Fall Joint not much turned up. It was a poor time to be inexperienced and job hunting. The high point was when she maneuvered shyly up to Wilhelm Graben in the lobby, and he recognized her. After a pause of perhaps sixty seconds, he recognized her and even remembered her name. Graben was absolutely the most brilliant teacher she had ever had and a star in the field. For five minutes he chatted with her and even gave her some advice on her thesis, until they were interrupted. Then he squeezed her hand, saying in the Viennese accent that he never had when he was lecturing on technical matters, “So charming to see you again. Miss Berg, yes? Come down to Washington and I’ll find a niche for you.” That was an empty flourish and she knew it, but still she walked away in a glow of visibility. Even if she couldn’t get a decent job, she was good enough so Wilhelm Graben remembered her.

  The only job offer she got was from a shaky company in New Jersey. The idea of commuting every morning from New York or of living in New Jersey seemed equally depressing. And that would represent giving up on their struggle as a family. That was almost a tempting fantasy for a couple of days, but she could not do it.

  Phil was tending bar. She was trying to decide whether she should work on her last paper for a class, get out her thesis, or read a journal. She wandered out to Jackson, studying at his desk, to get an idea of his plans for the evening. But he sat scowling at the door set on legs, closed on himself. She could work well in total oblivion to anybody on earth. Still she could snap from that work to attend to Phil or Dorine or him. She could break her concentration to let in light and sound and air, then return to work when the other’s need was met, the problem solved or at least acknowledged.

  But standing by his desk, she felt him making her embody the forces of chaos seeking to break through into the neat world of his studying. Standing there trying to find out if he wanted to sleep with her that night, all became tense and ridiculous, yet she could not shatter the web of myth. She was soft to his hard, warm to his cold, moist to his dry, dark to his light: they were total Yin and Yang in the living room. She felt herself becoming Irrationality and Distraction and the Temptress.

  “You’re an inborn Calvinist!” she shrieked at him.

  “Any Calvinist would insist there are no other kind.”

  “Calvinist! Platonist! Spoiled priest! You just want to diddle your ideas. You’re afraid admitting I’m human would wreck your damned hierarchy, your scheme of the universe! Why can’t you work without erecting barriers around yourself?”

  “Not all of us possess your ability to read and write standing on your head fucking, bitch. Now let me be.”

  “Ever notice that I insult you with idea names? When you want to insult me, you call me sex names.”

  “I am a traditionalist in my insults. While you stop to invent a weapon that will serve the occasion.”

  “I detect bias in your description, friend.”

  “I am not your friend, I am your lover. But not tonight.”

  “Jackson, how can you be the second, if you aren’t the first? That’s the whole trouble, I think.”

  “That is part of the trouble, you think too much. Talk too much too. Now clear out. If I get this done, I might even get a couple hours’ sleep before I go to work in the morning.”

  He had a teaching fellowship. He liked teaching but would not admit it, pretending to find it intolerably boring. He worked hard on his classes some days and others he went off unprepared and ill-tempered. She could not remain standing by his desk turned into a petitioner, turned into a temptation. She went off furious, slamming the door of her room and hearing it echo in his head as proof of her irrationality and overemotional responses. She wrung her hands and paced, kicking off her shoe & so he would not hear her.

  How could he turn her around so? She had gone to him to get the evening clear. Now she was too angry to work. They both, both of them, wanted her at their total beck and call like an instant houri, but stuck up their backs and went lumpy with stubbornness if she attempted to get any commitment about time or arrangements, so that she might manage the ninety-two things she was also doing. How they turned things around, how they turned her around. Her anger was sour in her mouth.

  When she woke up that taste still coated her mouth. She had overslept. Dorine was gone, Jackson was gone and she was late. In the dirty bathroom mirror misted from her shower and splattered with Phil’s lather from a couple of days before, she looked at her morning face and brooded on her pores. She was twenty-four. Her face, was it not already coarsening? She squeezed brutally the pores in her nose, peered at the fine lines beginning to net her eyes. Soft skin under the lower lid. Twenty-four. At twenty-four Sonia was teaching and had just met Lionel. Now her mother was dead, dead. Would she die young? Sonia had not seemed young. She did not feel young, examining her chin in the filmy mirror. ror. She wanted to weep for herself with no mama and aging already, with pores gaping like the mouths of graves. Aging—she too would age, every day she would age more and more and soon she would be ugly. Maybe defeat ran in the maternal milk, the maternal blood from generation to generation. This day she tasted her defeat and had no stomach for breakfast. Her life seemed to grow more painful and more difficult from week to week, more demanding. She was giving, yes, pouring out blood and milk and energy, loving and trying to help. And in herself she was starving. She was wretched.

  She marched from the bathroom to dress. She was to go on the machine that night with a new program to debug: for hours she would not think about her life. She would not think about anyone, least of all herself. She would exist in her intelligence and those bright spaces of algorithm, her vast game with the machine. She was programing in LISP, a fascinating language. Only work seemed clean and firm this morning, only work gave pleasure. What was this woman-thing of loving and
bleeding? He said she was not a real woman, ah, damn him rotten: he refused to love her. Yet only three nights before, him against her, in her. How he came into her. A wild loose ache remembering. Riding and riding and falling. With him she lost her mind a little whenever it was good. She rode off the end of her control into free-floating, free-falling gyres loosely open. She could not deny him. Love, she called out, love! It must come out all right, it must. They would work it out. She was trying so hard. It had to work out, it had to!

  Phil promised on Tuesday to get Dorine some little thing for her birthday. On Thursday he was still assuring Miriam that he’d do it. Saturday: “Sure, sure, don’t get on my back. I said I’d do it. What’s the fucking hurry?” Monday she bought Dorine a pair of earrings and negligently Phil agreed to give them to Dorine the next day.

  But Jackson would not, would not. “She is not my.… I’m not responsible for her. She isn’t mine.”

  “But it’s her birthday. She lives here.”

  “Did I ask her to? She lives here because of you, don’t you know that? She lives in your shadow, she clings to you.”

  “Jackson, you like so much to play the kind counselor. You listen and listen to her. But it’s yourself you’re paying attention to, your role. It’s yourself you’re caring about.”

  “What do you think you do? You think you care for her?”

  “Not as much as I should. But I’m trying to.”

  “Bullshit! Did I give you a birthday present?”

  “Yes. Oh, love, of course, I haven’t forgotten.”

  “Then you have nothing to complain about. Dorine is not mine. I’m not going to act like an ass to make her feel like the birthday kid.”

  She made Dorine a cake. It was the first cake she had ever made from scratch, a chocolate cake with coconut icing. It took two hours to make and every mixing bowl in the kitchen, but she had fun. The cake was lopsided and the icing ran down onto the plate, but it tasted terrific. It tasted much better than she could remember Sonia’s cakes tasting. It was just about the best chocolate cake she had ever had. She’d taken the recipe from the Globe and made up the frosting from what she remembered her mother or her grandma doing.

  Dorine liked the sweater, and the earrings that were from Phil, and the whole cake got eaten. Every last slice. Jackson ate about half of it himself. “Chocolate cake is the only ideal cake,” he said. “All other cakes would be chocolate cakes if they could.”

  After Dorine had shut her door, they both followed Miriam into her room.

  “Well, well, and that were a noice cake, weren’t it?” Phil sprawled on the bed, speaking with a fake British accent he affected when he particularly wanted to send her against the wall. “A bit dear, though. All that grinning and bowing and scraping we had to go through.”

  “Does it hurt you to be nice for an evening? Does it hurt that much?”

  “The lady says we aren’t nice,” Jackson said loftily. “The lady is very, very nice. She wants us to work very hard to be nice so we may be worthy of the lady.”

  “Now look, you wouldn’t do what I wanted anyhow, so why don’t we forget it? I made the cake ’cause I wanted to. I didn’t notice you refusing to eat it.”

  “See, I said it was an expensive cake,” Phil drawled. “Want me to go screw her now, for a present too?”

  “I see you mean to make it expensive to me, that you were both civil for a couple of hours.”

  “My man Jackson, what’s civil mean?”

  “The opposite of militant. It’s a kind of service, the civil service. You pass a test to get in and you die to get out. Like marriage, I think.”

  “Thank your lucky stars, Jackson my man, because the lady could have made a bigger cake and asked us to hide in the filling. To step out kicking and singing ‘The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You’ or other old favorites of sister acts.”

  “You have a pretty good act going on top of my head.” She leaned on her dresser facing them, Jackson sitting with his palms together upright in her desk chair, Phil sprawled on the bed. Phil was on speed or something that overwound him. His eyes glittered, his fingers jumped. Jackson had his maskface on, his hands in an attitude of prayer.

  “Whereas you prefer to do a juggling act.” Jackson took out his pipe, tamping it on the arm of her chair.

  “She aspires to a trained dog act,” Phil said. “Poodles are easy to train, I hear.”

  “You want to just use her as you each see fit. Housemaid. Shoulder. Footstool. I’m not supposed to see and I’m not supposed to care, as long as you treat me a shade better!”

  “The lady throws knives,” Jackson remarked. “This is a versatile lady. And she doesn’t feel appreciated!”

  “It’s not trained dogs, it’s trained seals. They’re the ones who applaud when you throw them a chocolate cake. They make nice fur coats too. Do you think you’d make a nice fur coat, Jackson?”

  “We both know you would not, Boyle, because you’re too thin-skinned.”

  “I don’t know, dahling. I’ve been told I tan rather nicely.” Phil was now into his equally obnoxious queen parody. “You just think you’d make a better coat because you’re so wonderfully hairy! With a bath mat fore and aft, you brute. Think you’re Kong himself.”

  “Look, the lady has turned her back on our act. Do you think we offended her? Something coarse we did or said?”

  “Never!” Phil lifted one buttock and farted.

  “Not us.” Jackson made himself belch cavernously.

  She would not turn. She leaned on her dresser, close to tears but too angry. A couple of rumpled scarves lay there, her extra lenses, a mirror, and lens fluid. A bottle of hand lotion and big hairpins. Her comb colored like a tortoise shell and a brush with wooden handle. The hand lotion promised that it would restore youthful softness to hands damaged by sun, wind, or detergents. Which reminded her that the dishes were not done and she could hardly expect Dorine to wash them after her own birthday celebration.

  She walked out between them to the kitchen and began gathering the dishes. As she had expected, they slowly followed and quickly melted away when they saw what she was doing. She was still angry as she ran the water and the first thing she did was break a glass that slipped out of her hands in the sink. She had to feel in the soapy water for the jagged pieces.

  All she wanted them to do was to be kind to Dorine. But they transformed that into some disgusting process of genteel manipulation. How could any woman resist feeling guilty when accused by even one man she loved? She was miserable. The way they united to punish her made her feel helpless. She could not defend herself, she could not explain. When they went into one of their routines she only wanted to run from them.

  It was unfair. She was trying to get on better with women. Living with two men who constantly pushed and pulled on her, she felt a sharp need for women she could talk to about her life. It healed her guilt at not pleasing her men utterly, gave her a frame of reference drawn from other women’s experiences. But her growing friendships with women got in the way of maintaining friendships with men. She had more trouble getting along with the men from Going-to-the-Sun. Before, she had compartmentalized her reactions. In one pigeonhole was how they treated her, in another was how they acted with men, and off by itself was how they treated other women. Then she had used to judge them as they judged each other, by how they treated other men, and of course how they acted to her. She remembered agreeing with Phil that John was a kind person: he was kind to Phil, certainly. He was kind to men and dogs and children, he was even pleasant with what he’d call strong women, though he never got involved with them. Other women he used up like a case of beer and then turned mean. Now she could not separate those judgments. She could not say any longer that John was kind. Even with Phil and Jackson she found it harder and harder to ignore the way they behaved with the women she liked.

  She felt that this night they hated her, and she felt hateful. Her anger was a sharp taste in her mouth, hot and bitter as horseradish. It was
hard not to want to blame Dorine for getting her into trouble with her men, yet Dorine had done nothing. It had been her idea. And her conscience pushed her to try to treat Dorine better and secure better treatment for her from them. She felt defeated and wronged and wrong, and still to blame, still to blame standing with all the day’s dishes to do and her index finger bleeding into the dishwater, as seemed fitting. She hoped she would bleed all over every dish.

  16

  You Are What You Eat

  “So now you’ll have to get up every morning for work too,” Dorine said across the breakfast table. “Regular old five-daya-week grind. That should be a bringdown.”

  Out of politeness Miriam agreed. It would have been unfair to Dorine to insist that she did not dread going to work, that the long hunt for a reasonable job had depressed her far more. She was curious about Logical Systems Development, Inc., where she had at last landed a research job. “It’s not one of those corporations run like a programing factory. It seemed pretty informal. Besides, how can any job hang you up if you stay loose about it? Nothing’s permanent.”

  “But you’re planning to get there on time. I see you looking at your watch.”

  “I’m new. I figure I’m lucky to get the job.”

  “So what’s the difference whether you get there at ninethirty because you’re afraid to lose your job, or if you get there at nine because you have to punch in?”

  “But did you notice the initials? L.S.D. I figured, what the hell, I’d make a crack about it. The guy interviewing me said they named it that for a joke, they had to give it a corporate name. They’re all more research types than business types.”

  The Logical office shared a small building on Prospect with dentists. Indeed, she could hear the whirring of a drill through the wall by her desk. After sharing a cubbyhole with three other students, the offices seemed luxurious with carpeting underfoot and a big desk of her own in an office she shared with only one man; it was even furnished with a blackboard. The inner partitions in the space that Logical rented were made of wallboard and did not mute the flow of sound, but she was used to cramped quarters and a high noise level. The walls were a strange color that Jaime, a young man she worked with, called “spleen green.” The carpeting gave her little shocks whenever she touched a metal doorknob. Her office mate, Fred Weathering, thought the office overcrowded. He muttered that when he was hired they had told him Logical would be moving out to Route 128 and a new building. She hoped they would not move. Now she could bicycle to work, and when the weather got even worse she would hitchhike.