Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  “Do you still like working there?”

  “It’s a good place—lots of topnotch people, interesting vibes.” But Miriam’s voice lacked conviction.

  Neil had been off playing his first game of tennis of the season with Dick, who was treasurer and office manager of Logical. He was taller and bulkier than Neil and broken out now in a heavy sweat, even his mustache wet and drooping and his face a dark red. “Ha, I’ll get you next time,” he was shouting as they came in. “Just out of practice. Too much booze.”

  “You should exercise in the winter. We lead sedentary lives,” Neil was saying, kissing Miriam in the kitchen, rumpling her hair, cruising the top of the stove without interrupting his remarks. “Then suddenly one spring day you think you’ll be an athlete. That’s abuse of the body.”

  “Don’t think you haven’t put on a few pounds with home cooking.”

  “Too true,” Neil said amiably. “Still, you know, a good regimen of exercise on a daily basis …” He went upstairs to shower and change. Dick ended up getting invited to supper too.

  Coming into the dining room while Beth and Miriam were setting the table, Dick looked Beth over without subtlety and obviously decided he was not interested. At the table he talked company gossip. Beth, relieved not to be stared at any more, did not mind what they talked about, although Miriam kept making strenuous efforts to get the conversation onto more general subjects.

  Neil was close to Miriam’s height and built on a lean wiry mold. His eyes were greenish brown over a carefully kept dark curly beard, much curlier than the hair on his head. His face was young and mobile. He admired the meal out loud and urged Dick to express his appreciation, eating a little stooped with precise neat motions. “Bread, Dick, you must try some. This is none of your sawdust chemical-laden bread, full of alum and plaster of paris and formaldehyde. This is real bread that Miriam bakes herself.” Everyone ate heartily and a great deal. Beth felt Neil accepted her presence, but without curiosity. “Oh, Miriam doesn’t mind if you stay to supper,” he had said to Dick in her presence. “She’s always bringing people home. We feed half of greater Boston. Our favorite charity is our dinner table.”

  “It’s her Jewish-mother syndrome,” Dick said. “Eat, eat.”

  At the table they talked of a “jaunt to Washington” Dick had just made with Ted somebody, “to try to pry loose some funds for heuristic programing fun and games.” They exchanged stories about a contract monitor who liked Logical and thought they were groovy and creative. She would do what she could to get them the contract, but they had an enemy there too. It seemed that Abe, Logical’s president, had once crossed swords with that enemy’s protégée at a Spring Joint Computer Conference seminar. Dick wanted to include Neil’s name on the proposal they were trying to get funded, that would support Frank and Ted full time, but Neil said that his time was all used up on other contracts. “Unless you can slap me on as a consultant, it won’t work. After all, you can’t charge my evening hours, the government will never believe it.”

  “Not if they’ve seen Miriam, ha-ha.” Dick took more of the curry. “She was our secret weapon to spring on old Logan—remember how she got around Wilhelm Graben, eh? But you put the quietus on that.”

  Miriam gave Dick a quick glare, then smiled politely and hopped up. “Time to get the pie out.” It was apple with lemon and raisins and nuts. Beth had helped cut the apples and watched Miriam roll the dough. Now she followed Miriam into the kitchen. Miriam let the door swing shut behind them.

  “That’s my boss now.” Miriam shrugged. “I can tell you don’t like him.”

  “I guess he’s all right. I mean, he hasn’t said much offensive.”

  “Not much, it’s just his manner.” Miriam laughed. “He’s a pig, but Uve and let live. He’s between marriages. He gets married every five years. They have a kid, then the marriage comes apart. He’s supporting two other households. I have to go to Washington with him next week on the current contract, only for a day, but I’m not looking forward. He wears on my nerves. He’s not capable of treating any woman as an equal but if you’re married, at least the jokes are less gross.”

  “Does Neu like him? They seem to be friends.”

  “They started the company together along with Abe, who put up what capital there was. Neil likes everybody, Beth. When he can’t, he feels guilty.”

  “I used to be like that. Now I don’t have any trouble at all disliking individuals. Sometimes I can even hate someone.”

  Miriam squeezed her arm. “Strong emotions and now some strong coffee. Everyone at Logical drinks it all day long. My kidneys are starting to go. Did you get your old job back at Tech Square?”

  “Are you kidding? They fired me before I left. No, I have a dreary typing job downtown on Milk Street.”

  “That sounds like a waste of time.”

  “It isn’t a thing you do because you like it, Miriam. It’s a thing you do because you need money. You can get used to anything to make a living. I suppose being a prostitute is that way.”

  Miriam grinned. “How tough you’re getting, just listen to you.”

  Beth shied away, embarrassed. “It’s all service, isn’t it?”

  “Would you be willing to learn to be a programer? I could try to get you in. There’s always a couple of what they call teeny-bopper programing jobs, tedious but I think less so than the typing pool. I’m sure it pays better.”

  “I’m tired of clerical jobs and I don’t see a way to ever get loose. I’ll try anything.”

  “All right, let me see what I can do.” Putting the warm pie, plates, and the coffeepot on a tray, Miriam balanced it on her hip like a waitress and slipped through the swinging door to the dining room. Reluctantly Beth followed.

  20

  The Rhythms of Two Households

  Beth quit her job on Milk Street and went to work at Logical Systems Development. Miriam found she could not get Beth hired as a programer—Neil was too scrupulous in technical matters to intercede—but did get her in as a keypunch operator. Well, the pay was the best yet and less subservience was demanded. Some months before, Logical had moved to new offices in what they called an industrial park on Route 128, in an area of rocky hills and reservoirs and many small computer and electronics companies. Miriam picked her up every day in her red VW. Miriam drove separately from Neil because she went to work earlier and left earlier, to start supper. Neil did not appear before ten. He had an elaborate morning ritual that Miriam described, driving and gesturing.

  Beth sat with hands folded, listening. The rain that fell was warm and the landscape was softening. The first red of buds on maples had eased into pale greens. The rocks were wet, the lawns lush, the trees filmy with buds or sprouting little leaflets, the dogwood and cherries in bloom. Connie was teaching Beth the names of trees, along with driving lessons, when she alternated with Laura. Connie liked to go hiking—that was how she had met her boy friend—and she liked to know what things were called. When Beth walked with Connie she met on the street a towhee, a sugar maple, a Darwin tulip. Other beings crowded the spaces between human habitations.

  When she was with Miriam, the space between things was filled in with human cries and colors of relationships; the needs, the hungers, the plots and plans of people they knew swarmed around them. With Laura, streets were political manifestations: on this block the scars of urban renewal showed, on that a particular corrupt combine owned apartment houses and gouged rents, here was the site of a busing controversy.

  Miriam was telling her how Neil got up: “First the clock radio turns on soft country rock. Then he takes a hot shower and shaves at great length. He has a fancy electric shaver that looks like a racing car. In the meantime I stumble out and peer around and groan and swear and stagger to the kitchen. He appears bright and lively and clear-eyed. I can hardly stand it. But it’s only the beginning. After breakfast, he exercises. I’d think he’d do them before. But no. Afterward. Canadian Air Force exercises. Anyhow I struggle into my clot
hes and go off and he’s still hopping around in his underwear.

  “Then he sits down and drinks more coffee and reads the morning paper and jots down technical ideas. He gets up extra early so he can fool around for an hour and then sit drinking coffee! Myself, I’d get up the last minute and skip breakfast. But, oh well, that’s marriage. Give a little here and there. He cares a lot about that morning schedule. He imagines he couldn’t possibly have good ideas if he changed it around just a little. Technical people are wonderfully superstitious, have you noticed?”

  “I like breakfast too. I like that kind of a meal—no fuss.”

  “Oh, he isn’t fussy about breakfast—not much! A couple of fresh eggs sunny side up cooked in butter to the exact point of being cooked through but not overcooked. An English muffin toasted pale brown and some Swiss preserves, say black cherry.”

  “Married people eat too much.”

  “Beth, you’re a puritan!” Miriam parked and hauled out of the back seat the Greek bag she used for a briefcase. “Well, here we go through the looking glass, nu?”

  Neil had his office in the part of the suite called the executive wing—although the “suite” consisted of a large square divided by walls stapled to the floor. Abe, Dick, and Neil had offices apart from the others in the new setup, with Efi as their secretary. Two other secretaries sat by the entrance for everybody else to share. The directors’ offices were furnished with large walnut desks and sofas and Danish chairs and big blackboards of real slate. Dick was the force behind the changes. He felt their mode had lacked style. Miriam had an office by herself now too, but it was an inside office, windowless, the size of a bathroom. Miriam called it the air-conditioned womb.

  Beth was put to work in the largest of the inside rooms, where the equipment lived. It housed the keypunch, where she sat and typed as if on the typewriter, but the punch made holes in cards. She also used a verifier, on which she typed but no holes appeared, while the verifier checked that the Hollerith codes had been correctly punched on the cards. Then there was a line printer with a hopper where she fed the cards in, a 407 that printed out the listings again.

  She started with handwritten data or programs from the technical people and put them on cards; then the 407 turned it back to print-out again. She also worked an interpreter, a duplicator, and a sorter on occasion, all simple machines that did one thing and usually only one to the decks. Also in the big room was a Xerox machine and a computer terminal used over telephone lines to a time-shared computer in Boston.

  The work was boring, but when she was not busy she could read. One of the worst things about the Milk Street job was something it had in common with her Chicago job: that when she had nothing to do, she was not allowed to carry out an activity of her own but must look busy. It was necessary above all, not that at every moment she must actually do anything, but that she must always be seen as appropriate. She could never sit and read at her desk. However, she could make notes to herself because that was typing. Here at least no one objected if she read occasionally. She could salvage some of that empty time. Lunch was no problem as she brought it and ate at her desk. Miriam was expected to go out with the technical staff, but every so often she would bring along leftovers and sit and gossip with Beth in the equipment room. Sometimes Miriam would eat only an apple.

  “I’m gaining weight. You don’t know, but I used to be fat. All through grade school and high school. Then for years I never put on an ounce. I thought I’d got rid of that problem forever. But now, I’d just about got plump before I caught it—I mean, I wasn’t even watching my weight! Maybe it’s getting older? You’re always so thin, Bethie—it’s the way you eat, a little fruit, a nut or two, like a bird.”

  “Why don’t you eat less if you’re worried?”

  “How can I cook a gorgeous supper and not eat? I love to eat.”

  “Anyhow, you’re not fat.”

  “But I could be. That’s what scares me. Like my mother.”

  “Mine too. She’s short like me and about as wide as she is tall.”

  “What is it, you get married and then you get fat?”

  “I don’t see what other pleasure she has, if you leave out the TV.”

  “My mother, you should have eaten her food, Bethie, you wouldn’t talk about pleasure.”

  “I never thought whether my mother was a good cook.” Beth sucked on the pit of a date. “Food was food, it was what Mother made. How much can anybody do with hamburger and hot dogs and meat loaf?”

  “My mother, she had a no-fail method of killing meat dead. She’d start cooking it in the morning and leave it simmering on the back burner all day. I grew up thinking all meat was gray.”

  “Did she come to your wedding? You never talk about her.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “You did tell me! How could I forget? Nobody close to me ever died.”

  “That was something really chewed over in therapy. I felt dreadfully guilty. I was so involved with Phil then. He was the sun and the moon to me, Bethie. Yet my mother made me feel guilty for wanting to be with him, and I couldn’t get close to her. I had lots of old garbage to unload. My feeling my father rejected me. Trying to prove I was attractive with man after man. That hook of trying to make a man love you because you love him, the way I did with Jackson—”

  “Did you want to get married with Jackson? Or was that just with Neil?”

  “With Neil. He wanted to get married for three months, but you know me—I was scared.”

  “So what changed your mind?”

  “Oh, I’d been grappling with those fears in therapy—that I wasn’t worthy. That Neil couldn’t really love me, but would withdraw. Like my mother, I’d love a man and he’d use me. Then I went down to Washington for a few days—that was when I was being shifted off Neil’s project onto Dick’s.”

  “They’d taken you off Neil’s project before you got married?”

  “I gather Abe had indicated that it made him uncomfortable. I was very involved with the work, they were my ideas too we were working on. But Neil agreed it was inappropriate. You know, he has all that elaborate set of professional ethics about what you do and what you don’t do in the company and at meetings and in the journals. So they stuck me on the ABM project.”

  “Do you like working with Dick? I mean, how can you stand it?”

  “Has he been after you, Bethie? Tell me if he bothers you, and I’ll drop a word to Neil.”

  “He doesn’t find me attractive and I plan to keep it that way.” Beth made a face. “What happened in Washington?”

  Miriam looked startled. “Oh, you mean changing my mind. We were separated for a couple of days and that gave me time to think about life without him. When I got back I just knew I wanted him—that I was willing.”

  “You missed him that much on the trip?”

  “Well, like on the plane, I had time to think. I saw my life very clearly and I knew. I hear the boys coming back.”

  Jaime’s high laugh in the hall, sharp, barking. Ha-HA! rising. He had yellow ringlets and a soft petulant droop to him. Beth liked him but he could not be communicated with past the level of a set of games that formed his contact with people. With Fred he played Go, with Neil, chess. He would drop by with a puzzle of wire or wooden blocks in his pocket that would then migrate through the company. The rest of the week as she was passing an office she would see somebody bent over it.

  When he came in to drop off his programs to be coded on decks, he would play secret agent. He would be passing along vital secrets. Or he would play Bogart as detective. She sometimes had an urge to touch him that surprised her, to touch his arm or pat his cheek. If she would make it part of the fantasy she could touch him, but then it would not matter. There was no real way to touch Jaime, any more than there was a way to talk to him about their lives.

  He cared a great deal for how he looked, for his pastel shirts with intricate and exotic patterns, for the fit of his pants, for the leather of his boots, but not with
an eye to pleasing anybody else. He told her he thought everyone in Logical dressed like slobs … yes, like cretins! Dress was part of his aesthetic. That was his favorite word. “That’s a very aesthetic solution!” he would say in admiration. Beth noted that most of the men had a way of indicating that judgment—pretty, elegant—their term of admiration for work that pleased them technically.

  This was different from other offices she had worked in. The manners were casual, and self-indulgence was somehow assumed: that everyone wanted to be comfortable, that everyone had a certain right to play—every one of the technical people, that was. They were always talking about games. She found it hard to tell when they were talking about the projects of the company as everything tended to be discussed in the terminology of games and model building.

  Several of the men had liked the old building in Cambridge better, where they had all appeared equal in the same shabby offices. Now the hierarchy was marked. They did not like that. Men who’d been hired since took the layout for granted. They thought the old-timers silly: Logical was a better place to work than most and why shouldn’t Abe with the biggest reputation have the biggest office? Wasn’t he president? He was building up a good technical staff, garnering prestige. Regularly people wrote papers and presented them at conferences and meetings. Though Abe was president, he had not ceased to do technical work and regularly co-authored papers.

  Those who were not completely into the willful-child-games-playing-forever model—the more ambitious—thought they’d like to be in Abe’s shoes, making lots of money, owning a prestigious little company, and still doing good technical work. Abe did not have his degree (by which they meant the Ph.D., she learned after questions Jaime found comical) but he had good connections with Harvard and was involved in a seminar there. He was reputed to be finagling for a degree granted on work he had already done.