Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  “Miriam.” His voice was gentle. It came close. “Miriam?”

  “I only want to love you, and it’s so hard!”

  His hand on her bowed head stroked back the hair. His arm encircled. Against his shoulder, against his body no longer rigid that supported her, she collapsed and hung and cried.

  “Miriam, Miriam, baby, I don’t know what it is. Why we strike out at each other. You start enveloping me. I feel you reaching out for more territory, pushing my defenses back. Then we’re at war again. Miriam, I don’t want to hurt you. There, it’s all right now. Come here. Like this.”

  By the time the tears stopped—she thought of them happening to her like a storm—they were undressing, they were getting into bed. It was good, yes. But it did no good. Afterward when he got dressed and went off to his classes, she did not bother to put on her clothes but slunk across the hall and into her own bed.

  Phil was visiting his mother in Medford and from there he would go to work. His mother always made him supper. He said she was a lousy cook but would never forgive him if he didn’t eat until he was bloated.

  Miriam stayed alone in her room feeling torn open. What was the use, what was the use? He did not love her, he would never turn and love her. Two wrongs did not make a right, and Phil and Jackson together were hell. And separately, what? Did anything in her life add up to more than a boil, a scab, a sore, a wound? Was Phil still with her at all? That was a joke. When was the last time they had been together in any gentle full way? He was with no one. He was killing himself gradually and making her his accomplice.

  She loved Jackson, she loved him and she wanted to stop. God, it was loving a phantom locked in an iron man, a warm ghost that came and went in a tunnel of ice. She was impaling herself upon him and bleeding out her strength. Phil and his myths of the toothed vagina, the mother devouring her lovers. Well, she could make myths of the barbed penis, the rod of punishment that was bleeding her anemic.

  Jackson would never open to her. He did not want to be together with her. He wanted her around, but at a distance. He wanted to be alone, and sometimes to let her in to visit his loneliness, as he invited her into his room, which remained mostly shut against her.

  Why did she pretend so solidly to be strong in front of Beth and Dorine? Why didn’t she break down and tell them she felt drained and defeated? But how could they help her? How could women help women? In other women she could only see the potential threat that Jackson might turn suddenly to them, and she would die; or sufferers worse off than herself. She must save herself. But how? She lacked the will even to get up and do yesterday’s sinkful of dishes.

  17

  Of Fog and Snow (Phil)

  “I am your death,” said the needle to him. The sweet white snowstorm in the blood, the loving spoonful of oblivion with its lush thunder of numbness would hit him soon.

  “Shit, man …” Jackson was scowling.

  “That’s what it’s called. Two points for the street smarts.” He was lying on Jackson’s bed, partly to irritate him. Jackson hated him to lie on his bed but could never think up a reason to give. Putting Jackson uptight was amusing.

  “I think you’re out of control.”

  “Ha. Ouch. Fuck it. Who’s in control? You and Miriam are two of a kind the way you like to think you know what you’re doing.”

  “What’s it for? That stuff is poison, and you’re getting creepy. Sticking a needle in your arm isn’t even aesthetic.”

  “Yeah? You tell on me to Mama and I’ll knock your teeth out.”

  “You couldn’t knock Orpheus down, wan one. Chinese name, Wan One. But I tell nothing.”

  “Come on, man, last generation I’d have been a damn alcoholic like my old man. I get by on a bit of this, a bit of that. A regular butterfly. Hooked on nothing. I keep moving.”

  “Moving in narrowing circles.”

  “The moralist.” He felt pissed. He had been enjoying shooting up. He liked the paraphernalia. There was a ritual proper to it, like the pipe with opium, like the social booze scene. He liked the white death’s-head imagery of heroin—the ghostly horse, the pale junkie, snow and skeleton inherently poetic. “You’re scared, man. You have your habits and you ride along in your rut. You have tobacco and dope and you won’t touch a stranger.”

  “Unlike you, I get no thrill from spilling my brains on the linoleum.”

  “Aw, never mind.” The wall of thunder. “Forget it.”

  The next night he had a dream. It woke him so he remembered it clearly. He dreamed he was naked with Jackson and they were touching each other’s pricks. But when they went to fuck, they could not agree on who was to get to fuck the other in the ass. They kept arguing and shoving each other. Finally Jackson hit him in the nose and he woke up.

  His head was still hurting from the fight at Finnegan’s. Ugh, not to remember. He grinned at the dream, sitting on the edge of the cot in the front room. Orpheus slept at the foot, stretched out taut as a pulled bow. Once when Phil had had an erotic dream about Jackson he had told him. Jackson had been embarrassed, disgusted. A dream like that was a secret weapon: he would carry it around inside. Because he was not afraid of his own dreams and Jackson was. It was a true dream since they were always jockeying for position. A pleasant muddle of emotions stewed in him: a little excitement. His prick was still distended. A little superior amusement because he could endure to look into himself and Jackson could not. A little anger, because since Jackson refused to look at what he considered meaningless he was free of knowledge about himself that Phil would never be free of.

  The dull pain in his chest brought back Finnegan’s, bad from the beginning. He fingered the bruises. Joe had come in with a black chick, tough and flashy. When he tried to start up a conversation, curious, interested in her, Joe put him down: turned him into anonymous servant-bartender. Joe had told others he was a bad risk and cut him to his face … just because he was into skag a little bit.… Then Joe hadn’t been gone five minutes when his old lady Wanda came in with Luis by the hand and baby Johnny, like a scene out of an old-time melodrama, looking for Joe. Their neighbor had just been busted on a bench warrant and she had their baby too and she was out of milk and no money in the house.

  “Hey, you got any lic-rish for me?” Luis gave him a big golden grin and reached up at the bar. When Phil had been palling around with Joe, he always used to bring Luis licorice shoelaces.

  Wanda was looking him in the eyes, a head shorter but giving him that fierce look, arms akimbo. “You telling me you haven’t seen him today? Phil, you wouldn’t lie to me in this trouble!”

  Then his boss dumped on him for not kicking her out with the kids as soon as she walked in. He wasn’t functioning well. He had to be on top, conscious, sensitive to what was happening all along the bar, who to cut off when and how: the meek wispy slobs drinking their way to the moment of explosion; the tough guys putting it in until they would slobber and cry about life and love; the casual arguments that could end with somebody on the floor; the okay pickups and the whore cruising; the stud pushing too hard on a woman who was trying to get drunk fast. He hadn’t stayed on top, he had started out too tired, too dulled. Jesus, a fight he could hallucinate better than remember, chairs, bottles, a cop coming in. He had been fired on the spot, that much he remembered. Aw shit, he could use a vacation, he was bone-weary. Besides, let them see if they could find somebody who could handle that crowd the way he could, the wild mix of the drunk and the stoned, ups and downs and booze, with half of them perennially sore and ready to jump. Let the boss see if he could find anybody who could handle it night after night. He’d fucked up just one time, and that on top of missing a night the week before when he was strung out. Aw, the hell with it.

  He did not feel sleepy. He went to the window, looked out at the empty night street. Carbon-paper sky with a sliver of moon like a nail paring. Ice on the sill, spikes of ice under the eaves. Padding through the middle room and hall, cautiously he pushed open the door of her room. Padding
like Orpheus, who had followed him rubbing his legs and hoping for a very early breakfast—he stood over the bed. A sense of power came from watching sleepers. People asleep were supposed to look disgusting but they looked helpless. Jackson was snoozing on his belly, the pillow loosely clutched. She lay on her side, back to Jackson and facing Phil. Lightly he stroked her bare shoulder, slipping his hand under the blanket to stroke her breast, distorted against her by her crossed arm.

  Groggily she stirred and after a moment opened her eyes. He motioned for her to be quiet and get up. She went on gaping at him sleepily. He realized that she could not see him: she was too nearsighted without her lenses. He leaned close. “Come. Please,” he mouthed in her ear.

  Half asleep, she got out of bed and stumbled after him, catching up her robe from a chair. Silently he shut the door and drew her along toward the front. She resisted. “What’s the matter?”

  “Come with me. Come on, Miriam.” He got his arm around her and drew her along pressing against him.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong.” Brief flash of Finnegan’s and the fight, his boss’s face. “Just come with me.”

  She dragged her feet. “Was up late. Got to get up early. Let me sleep.”

  She was playing inert, hanging back and making herself squishy. He was put off, then interested. Someone only half there. He yanked her along to the bed and began to kiss her. In his embrace she slumped and yawned. “Phil, are you drunk? Let me go back.”

  “No!” He upset her onto the bed and fell over her. Soft yielding body. Normally she was so responsive, it was like making a stranger. He was hard and excited. Like a stranger in bed, a kind of rape. His excitement bore him forward. When he thrust into her, he was surprised that she was not dry, then realized that she had been with Jackson. That excited him more. He should have taken her right in the bed, should have let Jackson wake up to find him fucking her. He could have raped Jackson for that matter, lying there with his ass up. Her body under him hardly stirred. He came with a groan muffled by her hair. Lying in her, he enjoyed still the afterglow, the fantasy acted out. Then he realized she was already asleep under him. Would she remember? Funny if she didn’t. Woke up in his bed with no notion how she got there. It was a joke he had played on both of them.

  But when she did wake up she was ill-tempered. He pulled the covers over his head and let her storm off to work.

  When he got out of bed, he was still feeling set up. Act out your fantasies: that was his motto. Blake’s theory: unacted desires rot the soul. The lineaments of gratified desire. He felt gratified and even willing to face a breakfast and chew it for a change. He was sitting at the table dunking a stale doughnut in coffee Miriam had made and skimming a science fiction novel she had left there, when Jackson came through on his way to the john, turning on the radio to the news as he went.

  “Seen Miriam this morning?” Phil asked slyly.

  “No, she got up before me. What brings you out on the near side of noon?”

  Jackson didn’t know his bed partner had been stolen. Phil studied Jackson’s face for signs of tension. Jackson just looked sleepy. For a moment Phil was disappointed, but knowledge is power. He waited for Jackson to re-emerge.

  “What are you reading that crap for?” Jackson challenged, looking at the slime monsters on the cover.

  “Aw, you believe in high culture. If it had a quote by some jackass like Irving Howe, you’d be willing to read it. What disappoints me is the failure to imagine truly alien beings. The men from Mars or Alpha Centauri are all human in disguise or else they’re in reptilian mode or insect mode or pool-of-slime mold. Just green human beings with purple antennae and four arms.”

  “Is that so illogical? Life has probably evolved every place according to the same chemical laws. Now you figure there are just so many niches to be filled in any ecosystem: something jumps, something runs, something grazes, something gnaws, something preys on the little things that run in the grasses, and so forth. Something that jumps has big jumping muscles. Something that grazes has a mechanism for biting off and digesting tough fibers.”

  “You’re uptight even in your imagination. You need to think there’s some logic to life, that it evolves according to some neat scheme, a proliferating road map of forms with major trunks and minor branchings and a chart that would look nice in four colors.”

  “You find the notion of randomness exciting. You’re one of those people starts talking about random joggings òf atoms and chance mutations and you get a hard-on. You never use concepts for what they mean but for some kind of nervous thrill. Like the Victorians getting their rocks off by going on about ‘Nature red in tooth and claw.’ ”

  “While you’re scared of anything you can’t sit on and control. I don’t have that kind of middle-class separation of mind and body. I groove on what I think, and I feel it in my muscles. On my pulse, like Keats says.”

  “You mean you lead with your prick. Just like you did at nineteen. The longest adolescence on record.”

  Was he going to say something about Phil’s coming birthday? He waited, tensing. But Jackson didn’t go on. “Like you live in your head and you don’t know what’s happening in the provinces. There’s a revolution out there and you don’t know it. Like Louis in Versailles,” Phil said.

  “Freedom starts in the head, Phil—something you’ve never begun to learn.”

  “Man, you wouldn’t say that if you were facing six months in the can, I can tell you that.” Trial hanging over him, lawyer suggesting he cop a plea. Maybe he should look for a lawyer who’d do a more political defense: or would that get him longer? At the last minute he decided to go with Jackson toward the Square. He didn’t feel like hanging around an empty apartment. A light wet snow was falling. Slithery feel of the wet flakes on his face raw from shaving, a damp cool caress. Flakes caught in his lashes. He wanted nothing, he felt empty and saintly and almost ecstatic in his emptiness. Fine to be up for a change on the bristly side of noon. He felt cut loose and floating. Yes, to want nothing, to need nothing, to be open and empty to every touch and smell and taste, every impulse shooting through the clean air. He had been fired into freedom.

  Flakes melted on his outstretched hands. He took off the lined gloves Miriam had given him and balled them in the pocket of his pea jacket. He liked his pea jacket, the flatness of the wool, its smell, its navy color. He might have been a sailor. Now he could feel the snow lighting faintly on the back of his hands. Drifting along.

  “How long do you think that girls’ dormitory is going to last?” Jackson was asking. “I hear them every so often trying to get Miriam to join the campfire girls. Fat chance. If there’s a dykey bone in her, it’s buried pretty deep.”

  “They’ll be yowling and hissing and tearing each other’s hair the first time a man walks in. Let them eat cock!”

  Jackson went on talking but he did not listen. He nodded and said hmm from time to time. He liked walking beside Jackson along Mass Avenue past the hip stores, he felt good and close to Jackson now. The tenseness had blown off in the clean air and they moved together inside their friendship like a private sun shining, so many towns, so many scenes, always counting on each other. As Jackson talked on about classes and students and tests, he smiled and gave him a poke in the ribs. Good old Jackson, he would not have him one jot different.

  After they parted he turned off into the Common, feeling that empty alertness in him like a perfect box he was carrying. Ready for anything: encounter, confrontation, adventure. The morning carried him bobbing and light on its surface. As he drifted he studied the bark of trees: trees rooted deep down in the earth, solid to his ephemeral passing, wood to his ghost. Lightly his fingers caressed the ridges.

  For a while he stood looking at the snow so lightly coming to rest on the ground and feeling the cold settle on his skin. Then he felt someone’s eyes. A girl was trotting toward him: Beth, Miriam’s girl friend. He thought of pretending he didn’t see her, but she was hea
ded right for him, her lips already parted to speak. Plume of breath. Fluffy snow on fluffy light brown hair.

  “Phil? Listen, I just called and Miriam’s not home. Do you know her number at work?”

  He shook his head. “Logical something or other.”

  “You don’t remember the name?” Breathless, her eyes wide and pleading on him. Usually she was cool, withdrawn.

  “Not offhand. I’m thinking. How come you’re not at work?” He made a typing gesture.

  “I got fired.”

  “Yeah? Guess what, me too. For what? Dropping your gum in the big machine?”

  “Falsification of records. Oh, it’s a mess. A detective came around and then they fired me. Jim—my husband—” She stopped and winced. “My husband! He hired detectives, him and my family—”

  “Thought you were divorced?” Small-boned rabbit quivering in the cold. Wouldn’t feel like much in bed. A mouthful. Snap. Both of them waifs of the storm, fired, in trouble with the pigs.

  She made a wry face. “I pretended to be. I just ran away.”

  “But they can’t fire you for being married.”

  Her hands flapped. “I gave them a false age, I pretended to be older and divorced, I pretended I had two years of college. Oh, it’s stupid. I’ve been doing the job for a year. The detective came and saw me. I’m scared, I don’t know what they can do to me! He said I committed fraud and that I stole the money—I drew it out of the bank and signed Jim’s name. He says I’m a minor and legally the ward of my husband. I don’t know which end is up, I’m really scared.…”

  “Look, they can’t make you live with somebody if you don’t want to. Don’t let them get to you.”