Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  Of the three directors, Dick was the least academic. He did more managing and less technical work, and his project to run was the anticipated governmental moneymaker with lots of low-level people stuck on it, the anti-missile piece of the action. He was the least respected by the staff, who gossiped about him with malice: his loud jokes, his poor taste, his technical gaffes, his overt pursuit of the dollar, his edginess with those who outclassed him technically, his crude sallies at women, his loudmouth poker playing in which he could bluff nobody, his five-year marriages and huge alimony payments.

  About Neil she listened most carefully. He was the quietest director, the most academic in his orientation. He had his degree, as they said, and had been offered a post at Carnegie he had declined. He published frequently and had the longest bibliography. He did not like to go actively after contracts or to be worried about how to support the ever multiplying staff. Still his name and connections were useful. He had put back some of his salary into stock options. The stories about him were of the absent-minded professor sort—how he’d walk past Miriam without recognizing her. Stories of him stopping his car in the middle of the expressway to whip out a pad and jot down a technical idea.

  Miriam was regarded as brilliant but erratic. People experienced difficulty in working with her because they could not follow her leaps. That irritated Fred and Dick, though not Jaime, who enjoyed bolts from the blue. But Jaime was not working with her any more, being still on Neil’s project. Perhaps there was resentment that she had married Neil. Neil had been the most accessible of the directors. Not in an emotional way—he was always reserved—but available to play tennis and chess and Go, to run out after work for Chinese food. He had never objected to being called up at any time of the night with a hot technical idea. He had always been ready to listen and comment with his precise close reasoning to the matter at hand. Now the easy bachelor was gone. There was a feeling around that Miriam had caught him, cleverly.

  Strange how they assumed that Miriam had got Neil to marry her. Beth assumed the opposite, that Neil had pursued Miriam until she agreed. They did not know how many men had been attracted to Miriam, she thought, angry at their presumption. She could not quite grasp a sense of Neil. He was pleasant enough looking, slender, hazel-eyed with a good warm smile that popped out of his neat curly brown beard. He was rumpled and gentle-seeming. He had a soft agreeable voice and never did she hear him raise it beyond what was minimally necessary to carry over background noise. Although he had a certain shyness, he also had confidence. Both Abe and Dick had something about them that said they needed to prove themselves constantly, though by different means. She sensed that Neil took a certain amount of admiration, of acceptance, for granted. The secretaries all wanted to mother him, to cuddle his untidy forgetfulness. She could imagine Neil backing off into space, sure someone would catch him. Maybe that had captivated Miriam.

  Yes, a funny place, full of fussy and comfort-loving technical types who were selfish in different ways from the businessmen she had worked for. They were jealous and gossipy yet seemed largely invisible to each other as people. Just as they could not see Miriam. Miriam had told Beth that when she first came to Logical she had made up her mind not to bring her scandals and legend as femme fatale with her—but Beth thought she need not have bothered. These men were not sufficiently interested in human relations to care. They seemed to have wives as they had cars or expensive houses or garbage disposals or children. They had huge reserves of contempt for most people—drudges, fools, idiots—including the army of ordinary programers. They were into research. That was pure and fun and beautiful. That was not the kind of job Miriam had tried to get her hired for. There were always what they called teeny-bopper programers in a large inside office doing the boring mechanical programing.

  They did not care as much how she dressed, how she sat at her desk. Only Dick fussed about the businesslike atmosphere. He would lecture the secretaries and the teeny-bopper programers on being neater, more punctual, more subservient in effect—pleasant, he called it. The others mostly did not relate to her sufficiently to care. They came in with their demands and each one thought his own job always the most important and the work of the others garbage. They were always harried. The whole office seemed permanently months behind schedule. Their estimation dates on contracts were set optimistically and never accurate. There was a perpetual air of everything being about to collapse, emanating most intensely from Dick, who kept the closest watch on finances.

  It was he who dealt with the bank. They never had enough money on hand to pay more than two months’ worth of salaries, and since often the money for contracts came through late, Logical was usually into the bank for a tidy amount. She picked that up from the secretaries. When Miriam did not join her in the equipment room, often one or more of the secretaries did. They would not come if Miriam was there, seeing her as the boss’s wife. They could not relax or gossip if she was in earshot.

  Then Beth crossed into another universe and went home. The house was solvent nowadays. Connie had her teaching job and some child support. Beth was making decent money, by their standards. Laura got some money from the paper and some from her family. Dorine was in school and had trouble contributing: she just covered her school expenses with what she made modeling. She was supposed to put in eighty dollars a month but usually she could not. Sally never could. The disparities in what they gave had long ago been worked out; they had different levels of education and different handicaps and their earning power differed accordingly. From those who could, more must be asked. They had enough to pay the rent and utilities and eat pretty well and buy gas and insurance for the car and a gallon of California wine once or twice a week and a small amount of grass and soap and basic drugs and toiletries—very basic. They had enough for minor medical expenses. Connie and she were covered on the job and Dorine could use health service at school, but the others and the children were vulnerable to sudden high costs.

  They haggled long over occasional purchases. Toys for the children: no dolls or dolls for both? Were guns an outlet for aggression or the channeling of energy into war games? Did competitive games teach skills or train for a society based on mistrust and cut thy neighbor?

  When Dorine went home for Pesach she brought back a relic of her childhood, a green and white dollhouse of two stories with four rooms of furniture. The dollhouse touched off a battle.

  Laura poked with a stiff forefinger at the little bassinet. “Training in consumerism. Move the furniture, get more, practice housewifing. Redecorate your kitchen.”

  Dorine was sitting bunched up with her pointy chin tucked in her sweater. “That isn’t what it was like. I loved this house! It was … a theater. I had little china animals from an Easter basket—”

  “What about an Easter basket? You just went home for Pesach,” Connie said.

  “My parents bought a little of everything, if you see what I mean. Pesach is with my grandmother. Easter is with the Easter Bunny. We didn’t do the Chanukah trip but we did the Christmas tree.”

  “So they were training you to buy.” Laura banged on the roof. “The most important training for a middle-class woman. How to discriminate between identical products. Brand-name loyalty. Buying as a hobby. Training in how many objects you can want for a house.”

  “Laura, it wasn’t like that. I had these little china animals—dogs and cats and chickens and bunnies. In a way they were more real to me than people. I made up stories about them. That house was a world.”

  “Mrnmmm.” Sally shook her head. “Some little girls play mommy. Me. Right? Some play lady. Some play true love gonna come. He swoops down on his white horse.”

  “But I was wrapped up in the animals. My mother thought there was something wrong—animals on the couch, playing the piano, taking a bath. It bugged her. She bought me people dolls. A pink plastic mommy and daddy and baby. They had no character. I put them in none of my adventures. But I learned to keep them in the dollhouse while I was playing.
The daddy in bed. The mommy at the stove. Then when my mother would ask what I was doing, I’d show her. Then she’d think I was all right and go away. I remember, most games I really enjoyed I had to pretend I was doing something else, because one of them would decide it was queer.”

  “Do you like your childhood, Dorine?” Beth asked. “I hate mine. But since it was me I have to accept it to love myself. Learning to love yourself, you found that at home. But you don’t want to lay that on our children, do you?”

  “But it wasn’t bad for me—it was beautiful.”

  “In a private dream-trip way. Practice for being passive, living in wishes. Dorine, you can love the child you were and love our children too, without wanting to make them the same.”

  By the time they finished the debate Fern and David had found the dollhouse and were playing with it. Probably they were too young. The house survived, scuffed and scribbled over with crayon. But the furniture was reduced to shards of plastic and hunks of squashed metal in a week. They were constantly hearing a small crunch and looking down to see they had just stepped on a tiny pink plastic toilet or little white kitchen table on the stairs, on the bathroom floor, in front of the refrigerator. Dorine wept and wept about the destruction and then she let it all go.

  Beth loved Saturdays. Lying in the bed Sally had found for her under a quilt Sally had made for her, she woke feeling like a beloved child. She had wandered and now she was home. Not that she had felt this way as a child—special, cared for, surrounded by people wanting her there—not often anyhow. In bed she tried to guess from the quality of light through the curtains Miriam had dyed whether the sun was shining, whether the day was cloudy. She listened to the small and sharp noises: to Fern’s bellow of rage, to David’s high yelp of pleasure, to the shower running and the phone ringing and the vacuum cleaner going. Today she must clean the upstairs bathroom and hall.

  In the first house everything had been unstructured. Everybody had resisted making rules. “This isn’t grade school, this isn’t prison.” So the women more thoroughly socialized to notice dirt, more thoroughly trained to sensitivity to the needs of the group, did the work and the women who were freer from that training did little.

  While Beth was off in Chicago, they had gone through three systems. Now they had a new one. Nobody who visited the house liked it—too structured—but they thought it was fine. All jobs fell into categories. There were the shit jobs, the jobs that provided little satisfaction and involved little skill: dishwashing, disposing of garbage and trash, cleaning, laundry, shopping. Then came jobs that required mastering and gave satisfaction: cooking, painting, putting up shelves or doing carpentry, working on the car, sewing. Last there were tasks that required dealing with others: landlord, doctors, insurance agents, the electric company. Each had to do some jobs in every category. That way nobody ended up getting all the jobs that involved creativity, nobody ended up doing all the things that aroused anxiety and required aggression, nobody ended up stuck with the repetitive tasks empty of prestige or reward. They all spent time with the children. There were specific times each was responsible.

  The system was elaborate and visitors scoffed. To run properly it required that every few weeks they sit down and review the categories and tasks ahead. But they found it took less time than when they had solved each day’s problems any which way as they arose: finding that somebody had to go for food and somebody had to cook it, when somebody else had the car already and was stuck because it had no gas because nobody had cashed a check.

  Saturdays she had driving lessons from Laura or Connie. Today Connie was to give her a lesson if Fern’s cold did not get worse. All things were related. Beth got up and began her yoga. Sally and Laura and Beth went Wednesday nights to study yoga.

  Downstairs Sally was kneading rye bread. Fern and David were in the yard making mud pies, while Laura was turning over the soil for a vegetable garden. The neighbor’s yellow dog watched through the fence, wagging his stumpy tail. While Sally put the bread on the refrigerator to rise and sat down to have tea with her, Beth ate breakfast. Sally picked up the spilled caraway seeds from the table one by one with a licked finger. Dorine was off posing. Connie was doing the laundry. After breakfast Beth did her upstairs chores and then went out to help put in the garden. Digging was good to do, though soon her back ached. She was no longer shy with Laura. They put in peas and onions, lettuce and radishes and carrots.

  Laura’s turn to cook: she cooked from the book, carefully, and made good meals. Sally cooked from instinct and made good meals. Connie had learned to make many recipes while she was married, and relied on memory and experience to good effect; but Dorine and Beth cooked with disinterest and rarely did anyone like their meals. Beth had abandoned her vegetarianism. She could not eat rare meat or meat by itself, but she did not want to set herself apart from the other women. She never cooked meat, but she had begun to eat it in mixed dishes. Since they ate a great many soups and stews, egg dishes and vegetable proteins, she could share most of the food.

  Laura made goulash with noodles and green beans. Sally had baked fresh bread and for dessert there was brown betty. Laura said it was a feminist dessert. She made it with wheat germ and granola, currants and apples. Sally said it tasted like Christmas. They figured out she meant because of the currants. Saturday night they always had wine.

  After supper Connie went up to dress for her boy friend, while Laura went to deliver an article she had edited. When she returned, Sally, Dorine, and Beth were making popcorn and working on their children’s book. They were trying to make a storybook so that when Fern and David began to read they would learn from books free of stunting roles. Dorine was illustrating their story about a brother and sister named Sky and Maple who lived with their mother and their mother’s sister on a houseboat. Sally, Dorine, and Beth got louder and louder and more and more excited working—it was especially their project. Writing and drawing storybooks for the children had been Dorine’s idea, after she got over the fiasco of the dollhouse. Sally had found a notebook bound like a book to use.

  They played the parts and tried them out before they added each scene. They argued fiercely over shoulds and shouldn’ts at each step. Beth could hardly wait till they finished and got to read it to the children.

  Thursday Efi, the secretary Beth usually caught a ride back with, had the flu, so Beth left early with Miriam. She kept Miriam company while she was making supper. Connie would pick Beth up on the way back from her school, after a teachers’ meeting.

  Miriam was carefully and with obvious pleasure cutting up a chicken, dismembering it with a mean-looking boning knife. Beth watched; any job Miriam might have given her would have been more a favor than assistance, and Miriam would have interefered in the execution.

  “Miriam, Laura’s reading a book about Taoism. It has a story about a cook who never had to sharpen his knife because he cut in the Tao—between the bones.”

  “I’m not that good—yet.” Miriam smiled. “Neil says I’m blood-thirsty because I don’t like supermarket meat, all packaged in plastic wrap and labeled, wrong half the time. I’m glad you’re here today. I was kind of low.”

  “About work?”

  “A bit. And my period started. It was late and I kind of hoped maybe I’d got pregnant in spite of myself.”

  “Are you so eager? It’s easy enough.”

  “Easy!” Miriam looked appalled. “One chance a month. One poor egg, journeying that distance down the tubes, forcing its way to the womb. It’s lonely, it waits. Poor wallflower, down the drain.”

  “Does Neil want you to have a baby?”

  “More than me, even.” Miriam’s dark eyes grew wide, thinking of something. “He feels he waited years and years to meet me. He has years of living to catch up on.”

  “But if you have a baby you’ll have to quit work.”

  “Only for a while. I could afford to go back soon. I make enough to pay for someone to take care of the baby. Maybe then they’ll be done with
that damn project. I hate it! Can you imagine what Phil would say to me if he knew what I’m working on? Can you hear me trying to explain how I got stuck helping design systems for anti-missile missiles? Nobody else seems to feel the pinch. They just don’t connect what they do with life in the real world. Even if you bring it up, they make a joke about everybody knowing it won’t work anyhow.”

  “Couldn’t you go some place else?”

  “Not without making waves. And I doubt if I could get a good research job. The job market’s tight, there are thousands of hot-shot programers on welfare. Oh, let’s not shop talk. We so seldom get a chance to spend time together outside of there, let’s not waste it.”

  Miriam sifted flour and herbs together, added lemon and wine, and put on the chicken. Then she washed her hands and tossed the apron over a chair. “Come on, let me show you where I love to sit. What I adore about these old houses are the niches and crannies. Can’t you imagine growing up here playing hide-and-seek?” Miriam led her up the big trumpeting front staircase with its carved balustrade and strange Moorish decorations. Halfway up where the stairway turned in a U a window seat was set in with worn leather cushions, under a stained-glass window with smaller clear windows on either side.

  Lozenges of lavender and amber and bottle-green light fell on Miriam’s legs curled up on the bench. She had kicked off her shoes and sat scratching voluptuously between her toes, grinning at Beth. Her thick hair hung down brushing her legs. “Hey, how are you really, nowadays? Do you like living with just women?”

  “I love living there. I’ve got used to not being alone—that was hard at first. But I can shut the door and be alone. The way we’re trying to be together is important to me.”

  “Mainly I just didn’t have the time to give to the house,” Miriam said defensively. “I was in therapy, I was working hard at my job. I was very, very glad to have that house to move into from Jackson’s. But there are so many hassles to group living. Instead of just going ahead and eating or buying something, the way I’m used to, we were forever having meetings and jawing about it. It just seemed an enormous waste of time on non-essentials.”