Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  “Good-bye, Mama. I’m sorry you’re unhappy about me. All my life I was unhappy till I ran away.” She had a terrible urge to cry to her mother about her pain, about what Jim had done. Quietly she put the receiver back. She had no heart for arguing. Her mother could not comfort her and was truly scared; her mother was scared that if Beth stepped out of the safe role there could be nothing but disgrace and disaster and death.

  Dolores lent Beth forty dollars and she hitchhiked out in the direction of Chicago. Starting again this time with less money, she went with greater confidence that she would land on her feet. The worst out there was no harder than it was back here, and she would survive.

  19

  A Little Strange and a Little Familiar

  Beth did not return to Boston as soon as she had imagined when she left Syracuse. At first she was afraid, and then she had to make money to pay of! Jim and the lawyer and the divorce. That meant staying put at a secretarial job in the sales department of a company that installed air conditioners for offices and public buildings. It meant learning the small devious means of sabotage clerical workers adopt at jobs they hate. She began to realize why certain women at the computer center and later at Tech Square had never been able to do their tasks correctly. She became dumber every day. Visibly she tried, she smiled and fluttered and tried. An assumption was built into the structure, into the roles, that she was stupid, and that left space.

  At her old job she had done whatever she was given as well as she could. She had thought it necessary to work well: it was behavior carried over from school, where she had been trained to try hard and earn good grades. She had acted as if that job was like being in school. Looking back, she knew it made no difference. They would have fired her as quickly if she had been the fastest typist in the East, and no more quickly if she had been as dumb as she was supposed to be. All these offices had a certain number of slots for women. The private secretaries did far more than they were paid for and identified with the men they served, wrote speeches, bought presents, propped up egos. But in the typing pool she got in more trouble for standing out in any way than for losing letters, misfiling invoices, standardly misspelling words, or taking half the afternoon to type one letter. The men who could have you fired would do so more quickly if they noticed you did not shave your legs than if you broke the Xerox machine.

  Lunch hour offered no relief. In the little luncheonettes and cafeterias where secretaries went, they were expected to eat quickly and clear out. The restaurants where people were allowed to take longer for lunch were too expensive without an expense account. She hardly ever saw women together in them. Generally she brought her lunch. On nice days she could walk over to Michigan Avenue and sit on a bench, if nobody harassed her. What the women in her office did was to wander in the Loop window-shopping or drifting through the department stores. Essentially there was nothing to do except buy. On their lunch hours, they might spend what they made the rest of the day.

  The pressure to dress in a certain way was high on this job. She learned the game of secondhand stores and the game of accessories, but she resented having to think about it. The receptionist, Karen, who sat out front alone, spent far more than she made on clothes, in styles the others had perhaps seen in magazines or on television, but she was always the first they would see in real life wearing such clothes. Karen had overdue accounts at three department stores and a couple of specialty shops on Michigan Avenue. She managed by sleeping with some of the executives and their clients.

  The girls spoke of her as lucky, as having the best job. On most breaks Karen would sit on the bench in the women’s John doing her nails and ignoring the conversation. Other times she joined in and told them funny stories about their bosses, but never if the private secretary of that boss was present. She knew girls in the pool would not tell on her. She boasted she never ate lunch if she didn’t have a date, in order to stay thin. The family doctor had put her on amphetamines in high school to lose weight and they had burned her out, but she had kicked them finally. Now she just starved herself. She had to drink with the clients and that, she said, went straight to flab.

  At Thanksgiving, Karen took an overdose of sleeping pills, almost died, and remained in the hospital a couple of weeks. She was let go from her job. Every couple of days Beth went to see her. No one else did. Karen said she had been involved with the manager who had got her her job, that he had promised he was going to get a divorce and marry her. But lately, when she pressed him, he had said he would never leave his wife for a whore.

  By the time Karen got out of the hospital Beth had paid back Jim and the lawyer’s fees and saved what the divorce was supposed to cost. She was free to quit and leave Chicago. Karen asked her again and again to travel with her to California. Karen did not want to go alone. Beth felt hesitant about going straight back to Boston. When she first came to Chicago she had called Miriam collect. Jackson had answered and refused the call, saying Miriam didn’t live there any more. Beth did not know what that meant. After she had been working awhile and had some money, she went to a pay phone and called the women’s house. An operator told her that number had been disconnected. Once again, after brooding over it long enough to work herself up, she called Miriam’s old number. Jackson answered. He said Miriam had moved out to the women’s house and he claimed to know nothing else, nothing at all. He was testy. She asked for Phil, and Jackson said shortly that he didn’t live there any more either. That was that. She did not even know where to address a letter. Were any pieces left to be picked up? Any friends waiting? She might be rushing back to nothing at all. She had never traveled, she had never been West. She told Karen she would hitchhike to California with her.

  Karen had turned on her old life. She cut her blond hair and let it begin to grow out brown. She dressed in jeans and army surplus. Beth thought that Karen could not help being beautiful no matter how she dressed, but in army surplus other people often did not notice. Karen had a face Beth thought of as Midwestern and Scandinavian. Karen laughed. “I’m Scottish and German. And Midwestern is an insult! It means I look like a cow!” Karen came from Green Bay where her father had a desk job in a dairy, and she had gone to college for three years at Wisconsin. “I don’t know, I felt that the life in Chicago was corrupt but that was what it was all about. I thought the other girls were fools not to use their looks to get something. But now I think I was just worse used. He never came to see me once in the hospital!”

  Beth thought Karen attractive with her high forehead and milky skin and fine features that seemed all gentle curves. But she generally liked the way her friends looked, that seemed to go with liking somebody. She certainly felt closer to Karen as she was now than with green eyelids and fountains of bleached hair and know-it-all manner and bizarre clothing that made her body a neon sign.

  Aside from the flatness, the Midwest did not seem that strange to Beth spread out under the shield of snow. The first place that seemed exotic was Albuquerque, where they decided to blow the money to rent a motel room and hang around for a week. The second night they were staying there, sharing a bed, after they turned the lights out Karen put an arm around her. She was surprised and kissed Karen good night, but Karen did not stop kissing her then. Beth was frightened, more of the idea of what was happening than of the fact. Karen was gentle. She sensed Karen would not persist if she drew away. But how could she insult or refuse her? She was Karen’s only friend, her only connection: perhaps that was why Karen wanted to have sex with her.

  When they got up in the morning, they had become strangely and immediately a couple. Beth pondered that. They had been friends, they had been traveling together. She thought of her Boston friends as much closer to her. But by that act in bed they became a couple. This was the thing that Jim had accused her of, and now she was doing it. Now he would say she was a lesbian. “Dyke” was his word.

  The sex with Karen was the first consistently pleasurable sex she had ever known. Soon she found out how passive she was, how i
nexperienced in consciously satisfying a lover. Karen could not take her pleasure and climb off. She had to please Karen actively. That made her feel self-conscious, awkward. Then she came to experience it as more natural than just being acted upon. If she were more active with a man, if it were mutual, it might be better as it was with Karen: but she was not sure. Anyhow, the sex with Karen was something they did together, and while she could not abandon herself to it as Karen could, for the first time she could initiate, she could make love.

  Thinking about it, sometimes sitting in a car that had picked them up and looking out at the vast landscapes of desert and mountains and irrigated fields while Karen made conversation to the driver or did a stint of driving, the label-thing would attack her. She would think, Well, now I am a lesbian. She would think she had to do something about her new identity. It became a whole complication, whether she should tell people or not tell, act out that she was with Karen or pretend they were not a couple.

  They wandered until they came to San Francisco and there they stopped. In the Mission they found a house, mostly women although there was one man who was with one of the women and another man half living there. Karen made clear to the house that they were a couple. Several of the women had been in consciousness-raising groups and were not inclined to get upset over women loving women, and the house agreed that a couple of gay women would be good for them. Karen said they were being Uberai, but it would do till they found something better.

  San Francisco was beautiful as no place Beth had ever lived. On weekends Karen and she took long walks. They would pick out some hill from the map and walk around there. Those were good times. It felt like spring, although the people who lived there said it was winter. They said spring was when the fruit trees bloomed. Beth did not like the house as well as her own commune, and it made her miss her friends. It was more like Going-to-the-Sun, where Dorine used to live, a house where people slept and came and went and ate together and things somehow got done by somebody. Because this was a women’s house, the food was okay and the house got cleaned and the men had to do an equal share. But the people did not get far into each other and did not make a common life. Nor did she and Karen move into larger relationships. They were a couple and Beth began to find that constricting.

  If she loved Karen, it might be different. She liked Karen, but somehow that did not open into loving her. She asked herself if she were afraid. She did not know if that was it or if something cold in Karen held her off. Somehow Karen was more the man in their couple and she was more the woman, and Karen seemed to want it that way. In bed they were equal and that was good, but out of bed they were maybe not quite equal.

  Karen easily took a hard line with her, telling her about the world and laying down axioms and criticizing her naïveté, and too easily she slipped into passivity. She felt her identity oozing away. Somehow she did not get the private space she needed. She had not wanted to live in a couple, she had known that, yet somehow she had eased into it. Why could they not have gone to bed without becoming a couple? Yet they had both begun to act that way the next day, and the very feeling they had that the world was against them, that others would punish them if they knew, cast them out, had made them in their travels close into a tighter knot. Beth thought more often of Boston.

  She did not come to know the other women well, for she could not as easily reach out. She did not have as much time to read or think. Some precious strength was leaching away, not in a quick dangerous rush but slowly. Hesitantly she began to talk to Karen. Karen became frightened and jealous. She clutched, she fought. Then gradually Karen let go. They were still together but not so together. Karen began looking around in the house and at her job in the hospital, she went out to gay bars now and then. When the fruit trees began to bloom, Beth hitchhiked east again with another woman who was going to New York.

  The house still existed but it took some time to find it, because it was not in the same place. Finally she located Gloria, who was living with her boy friend but knew where the women were. They had got kicked out. They were still in Somerville but had moved to Spring Hill, dropping off high and steep from the hospital into short dead-end streets called terraces, on one of which stood a run-down house with peeling white paint and a broken front porch. Dorine was living there with Sally and baby Fern. After Gloria left, a divorced woman, Connie, and her little boy David had moved in, and so had a woman named Laura. They had an empty bedroom still and they were glad to take Beth in.

  Sally had gained weight. Beth thought she looked better, less gaunt and Orphan Annie-like. Her long red hair was braided and she sat down as still as anybody Beth had ever seen. She did not smoke or chew gum or play with her hair or chew her nails, she had no tics or twitches. When she sat, she sat.

  The night Beth moved in, she stayed up late with Sally and Dorine. Dorine’s color was better. Her face was sweet and heart-shaped under the frizzy bush of chocolate hair. Her eyes were not so often downcast, at least in the house, and she talked more, with short pauses but as she warmed up, vivaciously.

  Sally said, “No, Jackson was putting you on. Miriam lived here for a piece right after you left. She helped me when I had Fern, she was pretty good. She always picks up little Fern and tells her, ‘You know I saw you born, you little squirt!’ ”

  “Why did she leave?”

  Sally shrugged. “She didn’t take to it.”

  Beth puzzled. She was so glad to be back! Dorine and Sally had kept her things in the basement. Now she had her books, her clothes, her scribblings, and the small familiar objects she had not touched since that afternoon she went with Jim.

  “She didn’t get that much into the house,” Dorine said quietly. “She made more money than any of us. She was involved with her job. And she was in analysis the whole time she lived here … She went into a funk of deciding she was terribly self-destructive and needed help.… She was very warm with us and fussed over us, you know her way. But … she wouldn’t let us fuss back. Maybe we couldn’t help her. We weren’t that together.… But she couldn’t ask.”

  “Did her analyst think she should move out?”

  “How can you ever tell what a shrink says? She could always pretend that to spare our feelings.… My parents had me in therapy for two years.… I always used to think how much it was costing, that I better say something interesting. He seemed so bored.”

  “However you spell it, it comes out the same,” Sally drawled. “She got herself married.”

  “To Jackson?”

  “Are you kidding?” Dorine made a wry face. “They never spoke again. He didn’t waste himself trying to get in touch with her.”

  “She didn’t marry Phil!”

  Sally laughed. “Phil lit off for California. You could of run into him there. No, she married her boss, Neil Stone.”

  “What kind of guy is he?”

  “Nice enough,” Dorine said. “Quiet, bright. Obviously he’s crazy about her. We all went to the wedding—they had a rabbi but it was pretty hip. Really, it wasn’t a rebound thing. She’d been seeing him for months. They were already living together.”

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to get married in analysis?”

  “Oh, she isn’t still in, Beth. She never impressed me as one of those people who go to a shrink for eight years.… Maybe the house was good for her, anyhow. Neil strikes me as a nice loving man and a big change for her. Completely unmacho.”

  “You liked him? Her boss.” Beth could not imagine liking anybody put over her at work. “Is he a lot older?”

  “No, he’s one of those scientist types—like I’m trying to be!” Dorine laughed, for she had gone back to school. “Maybe he’s thirty, at the outside. Doesn’t look more than twenty-six. They were living in his little apartment on Broadway, but now they’ve gone and bought a huge old house in Brookline—I mean literally huge! I think Miriam wants to have children.”

  “Awful big,” Sally said. “It used to be a rooming house and it’s just like this old pl
ace, every little thing falls down if you look cross-eyed at it.”

  “I was over there with the two of them before they moved in, when they were getting some walls torn out,” Dorine said. “Neil kept admiring the woodwork and saying it was structurally sound. I kept looking around and thinking, Wow, is this going to be a job. Go on, call her up. I know she’ll be glad to see you.”

  They had two bedrooms down and three up. Beth had the smallest, in the back next to the bathroom. The kids, Fern and David, had the room to her right, painted with elephants and giraffes, and Sally and Connie shared the big front bedroom. It faced south, the sunniest in the house. They had hung the windows and lined the ledges with plants. The room was green and yellow and white, full of leaves and plants flowering. Sally and Connie preferred to share that room and have the children together next door. Beth wondered briefly if they were lovers, but they slept in bunk beds and did not act together. She wondered if she had lost some necessary innocence in dealing with women. But when she told Sally about Karen, Sally did not seem particularly surprised. She was mildly curious, more interested in why Beth had felt she had to leave Karen than in how they had become involved.

  Beth felt that Sally, like herself, was sexually withdrawn, but that Sally was more at ease in her body. Sally was physically affectionate with Connie’s boy David as well as with her own baby Fern, scooping them up to hug and kiss, tickling and teasing and playing on the floor, crawling around the living room on her knees.

  Dorine had one of the downstairs bedrooms and Laura the other. There was nothing over those rooms but a low attic that could be entered through a door midway up the stairs, at the turn; that is, when the door could be pried open. On the other side of the entrance hall was the living room, furnished only with scattered blocks and peg sets and cushions, and a big old-fashioned kitchen where they ate and tended to sit downstairs. Upstairs everybody spent a lot of time in the room that Connie and Sally shared, because it was so pleasant. The women had been in the house for three months and had done the most urgent repairs. Everyone had fixed up her own room, but otherwise, only the kitchen and the children’s room had received attention.