Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  “I don’t know what to believe and not to believe! He says I could go to jail. I never thought they’d fire me and now I’m out of a job!”

  Putting his arm around her, he brushed the snowy hair back from her face. “Calm down, take it slow. You can get another job. I’m in the same boat myself.…” He started to say he’d take her home when he remembered that crazy houseful of women. “Come on back to the apartment. Maybe I can find Miriam’s number and we can have a cup of coffee and talk about it.”

  She pulled back. “I don’t even know how to get a lawyer. I’m going back to the house and call Gloria at M.I.T. and see if she knows where Miriam’s working. Would you tell Miriam to call me as soon as she gets in? Just as soon as she gets in, if I haven’t got to her before then?”

  “She’s no lawyer. Besides, they can’t touch you.” He looked past her at the snow falling on the Common. Cold little bitch, ungiving. Clammed up tight when he tried to be nice. The only reason Miriam liked her was she enjoyed playing Mama to lost sheep. Baaa to this one.

  Off she scurried without saying good-by and he strolled on, spitting elegantly at the base of a tree. Prissy little twat. No warmth in her, like a goddamn porcupine. She could run her own messages. Making a fuss about her little problems, when he was facing jail and out of a job too, and he wasn’t running around flapping his hands and whimpering.

  Then Miriam would go wailing over the phone and trying to find a lawyer and meddling and making a huge fuss. She would go tearing over to the women’s house and they’d all carry on. Miriam was a giving woman, not like that hard little chick, but she liked to feel important fussing over people. The big social-worker act. If he had the bozo’s luck to be married to her, he sure as hell wouldn’t hire detectives to haul her back. Some people didn’t know when they were well off.

  What pissed him off was that she wouldn’t yield anything. He could speak to her nice and easy, he would come floating into the kitchen and start rapping to her and she would not give him the least bit of warmth or support. Like she was scared she might let go of a touch or a smile or a spoonful of honey. She wasn’t that cold with Jackson. Like Dorine, she was worshipful: because he wouldn’t give them the time of day they thought he was a saint. Because Jackson sat and let them tell him their troubles and gave them those grave looks and never, never came on to them or put out a finger to touch them, they thought he cared. Whereas his standards for pussy were high and he couldn’t be bothered. Except in a rare sadistic stretch like in New York with 4B, when he thought he was consorting with the proletariat. Jackson was too much sometimes.

  But Beth made him sore. He was sure she could open up and give a bit of sweetness. Then she’d gone and got Dorine to move into that dykey setup with that crazy hillbilly about to drop her kid. When he thought of Dorine he felt the warmth of her backside in bed. He thought of slipping into her bed. Putting his arms around and feeling her. “Phil?” she would ask in that high sleepy trailing little voice. Like who else would it be? He liked to come into her from the back. Sex with Miriam was good, but it was interaction, he had to please her. He had to figure Dorine enjoyed it; after all, she never complained. But she never said anything and so he never had to worry and it was easy. He liked having her there, in fact, he liked it a lot. Jackson and Beth between them had taken her away. Jackson didn’t have the sense to appreciate Dorine, just a nice warm piece of ass. Jackson didn’t want any woman in the house who wasn’t his and he didn’t want Dorine. She was too easy to appeal to his pride of conquest. Yes, he was pissed at them both. Probably that’s why he’d hauled Miriam out of bed last night. Dorine had been his for more than a year, not quite a relationship but sure a resource, and now the fuckers had messed up a good easy thing.

  He sat on a bench watching girls. Indian woman in a pale pink sari with a brown woolen coat that looked the wrong size over it. Did you unwind them? He wondered if they wore panties. Liked the way she skimmed along but the coat was ridiculous. Across the street he saw a Radcliffe girl he had picked up once but he had not liked her snotty patter and he did not call out. She was talking with a bearded dude who was walking his bike alongside.

  Beth had been Ryan’s girl. That irritated him too. Giving with that bastard and not with him. Sometime he’d like to crack that shell. A thin kid, probably not much fun but easy to pick up and toss on the bed. Fuck her till you got some reaction out of that bony piece.

  Suddenly he felt cold in his belly. Bad karma. Bad thoughts. He sat very still, hoping it would go away. First time in months and months he had remembered it, always each time hoping he would never remember it again.

  That fall day it had been foggy since the middle of the afternoon; nudging each other in social studies and pointing to the fog creeping in as if they cared, for something to look at. What was fog to him then? He liked it because it slithered in, because it felt sneaky. It was a white night in the day. It made things strange. He felt invisible in the fog in a good way, slouching like a private eye.

  The guys he hung out with then, they were not a gang but they had pretensions. Whose idea? Anybody’s? The idea belonged to the streets. Pissed on all day in school, they were going to be men that night. The fog magnified sounds. In the dark you could hear for a long way but it was hard to tell where sounds came from. They were standing in an alley in a block of stores, half of them vacant and all closed by seven. The bus stop was down by the corner. It was around eight. He remembered hearing a churchbell beating dully in the thickened air. It didn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular.

  The first woman was with a man. “She’s too old anyhow,” Mike grumbled. Then two women together carrying shopping bags. The boys stepped out of the alley to get a look when they heard the voices. Mike said again they were too old. When the women saw them, they stopped and crossed over to the other side.

  John said Mike was scared. Phil said he agreed with Mike, what was the use if they were dogs. Kevin said they were scared and what mattered was doing it. When they heard light footsteps next, Mike said this was it, no matter, and sent Kevin and Phil to stand across the street and the other two waited in the alley out of sight. It was a girl alone.

  She fought hard but there were four of them. It was easy to subdue her and force her back into the alley. He remembered she had been carrying her schoolbooks in a cloth bag and she was carrying in it too a loaf of sliced bakery bread that spilled out; the paper tore and the smell of caraway and rye bread rose as the slices were trampled. Her glasses broke right away. She had large brown eyes. All he could remember of her face were her staring brown eyes that squinted with pain and welled tears and sometimes shut tight against what was happening. Mike gagged her with his handkerchief when they got her down on the pavement so he never did really see her face. Her hair was in a net pinned back. Probably she worked behind a counter, maybe she worked in the bakery that had made the bread, and had to put up her hair after school in the net. She had been hurrying home and had not bothered yet to take it off. The net tore quickly and her light brown hair, soft and light like Beth’s, tumbled out and got wet and dark, stained from the pavement.

  He was very excited at first. When he took his prick out like the others did, he was hard already. She was still struggling. At first he had held her from behind before they got her down and the idea of the power of it had made him feel high. It was still exciting to see her lying there and know they could do anything to her. John was tearing her clothes open like a daydream, like the things he always imagined doing. He wanted to get in her right away, but they had shot craps for the order before and he was third.

  Mike said she was too hard to hold and fuck at the same time. John slapped her around but she was still fighting so Phil held her down on one side and Kevin on the other—they were third and fourth. John was feeling her breasts and then he started pinching them so she groaned through the gag and tears ran from her eyes. Then Mike said enough playing around, it was his turn first. He got on and cursed and told them to hold her l
egs farther apart but after a while he finally got in and came almost immediately. He said it was great and he was going to take a turn again after the rest.

  It was John’s turn and he got on and started twisting her arm and slapping her. It was kind of ugly. Phil didn’t like to watch but he was helping to hold her down. She was getting messed up. John came but he still wanted to be fooling around. Mike said John had to get off, it was Phil’s turn. John took over holding her down.

  She was bleeding, either because she’d been a virgin or because it was her period or just because they’d hurt her inside. Her mouth too was bleeding into the gag and her eyes were staring at him with horror. A gold chain around her neck was twisted to one side, cutting in. He found he didn’t have an erection any more. Her body felt rigid with fear. When he prodded himself against her, she felt cold and oozy and he thought he could feel her pain.

  It wasn’t like he thought it would be, it wasn’t like the daydreams where the woman yields and likes it and it’s groovy. It was like four of them beating up on her. It was like his old man breaking his mother’s jaw. He felt scared. He felt they could kill her. It would all be the same. They could break her legs and leave her in the street. They could slit her throat. It would be the same. He couldn’t get it up. He felt cold all the way through and scared.

  “She doesn’t turn me on,” he said. Then was the part he couldn’t think about. He still couldn’t bear it. They were all jeering at him, it got worse and worse. Kevin took his turn and then Mike held him from behind like they’d held her, and John masturbated him trying to get him hard so he would take her too. But nothing would happen. Then John said he was going to serve him right because he was just a woman too, he wasn’t a man like they were, he was a cunt.

  John took out his prick again and told Mike to turn Phil around and hold him. Then Phil went crazy and started fighting them all. God, he was scared. He had a knife but so did Mike, and John could take him, he knew it. He felt if they did that thing to him he would die. He fought berserk. He was kicking and punching and praying, he was crazy with fear.

  Then the only lucky thing happened. A car turned into the alley. The minute the headlights came around the corner, they left the girl there on the ground and they all ran like crazy. It wasn’t the pigs, it was only a car. They heard the brakes squeal and the guy shouting, but they ran out into the street and they got away easy. They never heard anything about it.

  There was nothing in the papers, no police ever came around asking questions. For a long time he would think he saw the girl on the street and be really scared. Obviously she never reported it to the police: how could she? She was still in high school. If she ever told anybody she had been raped, that would blow her reputation forever, she’d be treated like a whore. Then his mother got married and they moved out to Medford where he had felt out of place but where he had stopped worrying about meeting that girl with the staring brown eyes.

  Not a thing he liked to remember. He thought of it as unreal, not part of his life, except for what had almost happened. Jesus, that would have done him in. Still he was glad he hadn’t taken his turn with her. It had nothing to do with sex. Each of them could have got laid that night if they’d wanted that. It had been a ritual, it was feeling powerful and being men together. And he hadn’t made it. It was more like shooting pigeons with Kevin’s air rifle than like fucking. More like waiting after a game to beat up some middle-class kid when they played Boston Latin. That was why he had thought, standing in the alley with his limp cock dangling, that they could kill her just as easily, because that would have proved they were men even louder. He never had told anybody. Oh, he’d told Jackson a long time ago. But he’d made the girl sexy and made it more of a stag movie scene. He had started out to tell it to Jackson straight, but it had turned in his mouth to something else. He always hoped it was buried for good. He did not like to remember how vulnerable and painful it had been to be a kid.

  Funny how he had not been able to tell Jackson. He had started out feeling Jackson was the one person who might listen. Maybe one of the ways Jackson maintained a kind of dominance over his friends, his buddies, was that father confessor act. He had told Jackson how frightened the girl was. He had been able to tell Jackson about how he was excited at first and then scared and turned off. But when he started to tell the rest, it came out that he had not wanted to and the others had been angry. There was something about the way Jackson was listening, saying with a laugh at one point that he had never raped anyone except his wife Sissy, and grinning, that made the story come out with him being fastidious instead of scared shitless. Suddenly he felt Jackson’s all-American suburban background there and thought, aw, your ass, they don’t go out and jump some girl in the street when they want a gang bang, those ex-Boy Scouts, they hire some broad and call it a smoker or they get some guy’s date drunk at the fraternity. It’s all legal, it’s social. If he had told Jackson how they nearly made a pansy of him, it would have given Jackson more points finally.

  He could have told Miriam about the impotence. She did not make that big a fuss: good if he could get it up, if he couldn’t, next time he would. But if he told her about the rape, she would identify with the girl. She would immediately see herself seventeen coming home on a fall evening from the library. She would say, “Do you imagine if that had happened I’d have gone with you two years later in the museum?” She would never understand that he still did not know, could not tell if he felt guiltier for having taken part in the assault or for not having been able to take part in the rape. He still could not know. Part of him mocked the idea of manhood that consisted of torturing a girl in an alley and part of him judged with his peers that he was less a man for not being able to get it up when they could. Part of him still thought he had failed.

  His cool clear high was blown. That little bitch Beth had brought him down. His ass was frozen to the bench. Stiffly he rose and strolled toward the square. Miriam, he wanted her now: to fall into bed and talk. He wanted to feel cared for. He didn’t feel like fucking, he felt like being held and cherished. But she was at work, every damn day now, never around when he needed her.

  Walking stiffly, like an old man: his ass still numb. Old. Thirty creeping up on him: two months and he’d be over that magic line. Like a lousy trick, a bad joke: he was still Phil the kid. How could he be arriving already at thirty? James Wright poem with the punch line, “You have wasted your life.”

  So he started looking. It was rule one that you could always find a woman. Men were off at jobs in the daytime but women were around waiting. He cruised the square but didn’t see anything he fancied. He didn’t want a Cliffee, he didn’t want to have to come on and impress, and he didn’t want someone strung out from a missed connection. A young housewife was the ticket, someone who’d appreciate him.

  There was a bike standing outside a tobacco store, fancy humidor tobacconist. Not locked. Quickly he got on and rode off. Aw, fine. The pavement was wet but not too bad. Over the bridge and into Allston. Past all the new Harvard stuff. He could remember the little houses here, nice sprawly working-class neighborhood with lots of trees and back yards and toward the end, when they were fighting the crunch from Harvard, big signs in front of every house about Save Our Homes. Long gone. Off down North Harvard Street strung with ratty-looking Christmas decorations in the direction of Brookline. Pedaling along, he found it a good English bike with lots of gears and nice handling in the slush. The warmth came back into his body and he felt alive. A fine edge. He left it outside a shop and walked on toward Coolidge Corner. Somewhere along here someone would cuddle him. Scent of bagels from a bakery, onion, garlic. Food smells from a delicatessen. He wanted a nice lunch.

  Through the plate-glass window of a laundromat he saw Laverne Ryan, sitting disconsolately watching the dryer churn clothes past her gaze while her toddler kicked in his stroller. He looked her over, trying to decide. Her hair was pinned up and she was chewing gum. He could remember the elegant Laverne skinny as
a clothespin but dressed to the nines. She was looking not exactly bedraggled but a little haggard. Still she was Ryan’s woman, even if separated, and that counted. He owed Ryan a few small favors, indeed he did. Ryan wanted her back and he definitely would not want Phil messing with her. Besides, she looked like she needed the company.

  “Laverne, what are you doing around here? It’s fantastic to see you. Thought you’d moved?”

  “No, still in the old apartment. It really is a bargain and moving’s such a drag, and Bonnie’s in nursery school here. What on earth are you doing in Brookline?” Surreptitiously she spat the gum into her hand, faking a polite cough, and he saw her stick it under the bench.

  “Oh, I had a reading last night around B.U. Party afterward. You might say I just got up.” He remembered she had been susceptible to the Great Poet come-on.

  “Oh, a poetry reading? That’s wonderful. I wish I’d heard, I’d love to have come. Though it’s hard for me to get sitters. You don’t look like you were up all night partying. I mean, you look … fine.”

  “So do you, so do you.” He sat beside her on the bench, extending his arm along the back. She looked better close up, color in her face now. He lit a cigarette for her and she still had that neat little flip of her wrist. Hollow cheeks and soft blue eyes all attention to him. Her lips slightly pouted: pretty good. She was getting it on for him. “So you’re on your own now? Won’t pretend I’m sorry. You’re too good-looking a woman for Tom Ryan, the old goat, you know that?”

  She laughed lightly, giving him a dip of the lashes. “Oh? Who am I for then?”

  “I should be so lucky to guess. I’ve been watching you a long time, a poor lonesome waif with his nose pressed up against the window. Longing for a kind look, a sweet word.”

  “Phil, you’re something else. You’ve never been lonesome in your life for five minutes!”