Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  “I don’t think who does what work is non-essential.”

  “I don’t know, I felt I was playing the man of the house. At the other extreme, Sally was everybody’s wife and mother.”

  “But none of us are the husband.”

  “Independence has to rest on financial independence. If she wasn’t in the house, she’d be on welfare. Not working puts her in an artificial position of dependency.”

  “Insisting everybody contribute equally is ignoring that we really do come from different places. Connie has a college education. She really can get a better job. Laura has a degree but being gay makes it harder. The rest of us have a poor capacity to earn. Dorine is in school. When she gets through, she’ll make good money. But Sally never finished high school. Nobody in her family did. She had to take care of her brothers and sisters. It’s silly and stupid to pretend we don’t have different class backgrounds. Connie has more earning ability than I do, I have more than Sally, so why not admit that? Sally could kill herself waitressing six days a week and not make what I do taking it easy.”

  “Maybe you could send Sally back to school so she’d get her high school diploma. How about night school?”

  “But Sally doesn’t want to go to school. She hated school. She felt put down. She doesn’t want to learn to sound middle class. She doesn’t want to work in an office. What’s the human value in trying to make her over to somebody they’d hire?”

  “But how will she get along when she doesn’t have all of you?”

  “How would any of us get along? She does have us.”

  “Maybe if you didn’t all think you had each other, maybe you’d have to look harder for somebody you could love.”

  “But I love Sally.”

  Miriam gave her that slow smile. “I bet you have a lot more loving in you than Sally can ever use.”

  “I don’t want to love somebody that way, Miriam.”

  “That way! You’re such a … a little spinster sometimes. I don’t believe it’s for real! When I think that prick Ryan represents half your sexual experience it depresses me.”

  Remembering for the twentieth time that she could not tell Miriam about Karen. She needed an opening wider than Miriam had ever given her. Miriam made so many assumptions. Loving another woman with her body was not one of the doors she left open—if she even saw a door there. “I’m open to many things, many people—maybe even a few things you’re closed to—like the house.”

  “Yeah, but … they’re not equal. To really love someone and be loved in return. I feel rich! It’s indecent to be happy. It almost makes me guilty, Beth. Sometimes when I’m happy I remember how miserable I was and I remember all the people I care about who are still getting lacerated, and I feel guilty.”

  “When I wake up on Saturday morning in the house, I’m happy too, and when we are all together making our book for the children. I don’t think much of the romantic drama.”

  “Neither do I. It’s terrible to be struggling through relationship after relationship and losing and losing, every damn time. But loving somebody who loves you, it’s a daily thing.” Miriam laid warm fingers on her arm. “I want you to be happy too. I want you to have a full life.”

  “My mother used to tell me she wanted me to be happy but she meant the way I was supposed to be. When she said she loved me, she meant I was behaving okay. Often she told me she was disappointed in me—usually when something had touched me. A full life can be full of learning and doing and, maybe, even fighting.”

  Wake up! Love! Miriam crooned to her and leaned forward, more seductive than she realized. Smaller physically, shy and awkward and far less sensual, Beth could not imagine reaching out sexually to Miriam. She could not imagine how she would do it. Even the images in her head of sexual initiation all consisted of a male taking a female into his arms. Miriam could make love to her, but never would think of it. Nor must she. Not now, not ever. She wanted only to be everyone’s sister.

  “Sometimes you make me think of Neil, Bethie. Sometimes people like the both of you who are slow to open up have a lot more to give—as if you’d been keeping it in reserve. Come on, I have to check the chicken and put the rice on.”

  Her pace was quickening. Beth kept out of the way as Miriam chopped onions, melted a pat of butter, washed vegetables and tore them up for salad. Then, with supper once more in hand, Miriam went back upstairs two at a time and settled on the window seat to face her. This time Miriam drew up her legs against her chin, leaning her cheek on the window. Beth felt in her a waning of attention. One part of her was leaking through the glass into the street, watching, on the alert for Neil. A part was focused on the supper cooking. Only a part of Miriam remained for her, attentive and affectionate. It was as if she were already gone. She was not sorry to see Connie’s car pull up since they were no longer together: Neil’s approach was too close and Miriam was tuning herself to him in preparation.

  The divorce was finally at hand. According to the agreement by which she had bought her liberty, she was to do the actual divorcing in court. Here she was appearing to cite all kinds of non-existent faults and crimes of Jim against this happy home. The major event was coughing up more money to the lawyers, paying court costs and memorizing what she was to recite.

  Dolores let her sleep on her couch. Dolores was still involved with the same boy friend but no longer believed he would marry her. “I’m shopping around, shopping around,” Dolores said.

  She had dinner with her family. The evening creaked. Her mother kept talking about how many job openings there were in Syracuse, and how G.E. was always hiring secretaries and key-punch operators. Her mother talked about how many interesting young men were living in the neighborhood. Her mother kept talking about the empty room going to waste. Yet they hardly looked at her. They asked nothing about her life. Her father told her she was dressed like a hippie, which wasn’t even true. Her mother kept staring at her chest and finally in the kitchen in a stage whisper asked if she were not wearing a brassiere—as if she had ever, ever needed one.

  Her mother said how long she’d waited to see her own daughter and started crying. Nancy asked who was she dating and what kind of boys did she meet working at the computer company. Her father said that was a growing industry. There were longer and longer silences. Beth felt herself shrinking. Sunk in her family, afloat in a sour cabbage soup, she was leaking substance and turning mushy. They would disapprove her back to a child again and lock her in her room without supper. At ten-thirty, after several weeks at the dinner table over the sorry chicken that kept sticking in her throat, they spent an ice age in the living room. The television was on and her father’s eyes kept flicking to it. They asked her questions and did not listen to the answers. Anxiety sat on them all.

  Finally she escaped to Dolores. The next day she had to go to court. Surprisingly, Jim turned up sitting at the back. He did not have to. Perhaps he was afraid of the process, afraid she or the lawyer would betray him and he would end up tricked into alimony. Anyhow, he sat behind her and watched, hunched up.

  Hers was the fourth divorce to come up. Each group of wife and witnesses sat with their lawyer waiting to be called. It was quickly over. The judge asked her one question directly, if Jim had been cruel. She almost muffed the answer. It felt funny to say that in front of him. Afterward, walking out with her lawyer, trying to escape his sticky, pudgy presence, when she saw Jim, she went over to apologize for saying that.

  “It’s a joke anyhow,” Jim said. “They don’t care about us. Just their money.” They walked on a bit awkwardly in the direction of the parking lot. “You kept my name, I thought you’d take your own back.”

  “What is mine? My father’s? I thought about that. I decided I liked you better than my father. Since I don’t have one of my own, I’d just as soon have yours.”

  “I wasn’t complaining. I didn’t think there was anything about me you liked.”

  “I don’t hate you, Jim. I just couldn’t stand being married to an
ybody—not even you.” The lawyer was standing just behind them. She did not want to get into his car.

  “You want to have supper? Say good-by that way. It seems funny standing here with him listening. We could go someplace around here—there’s a steak house two blocks over. I don’t know if it’s any good. If you’re not doing anything.”

  “I’m not doing anything. I had supper with my family last night, and that was awful. But I don’t eat steaks. We can look at the menu outside and see if there’s anything I can eat.”

  “You still don’t eat meat, huh? It’s against your religion.” Jim laughed. They looked at the menu posted on the red and gold window. It was an Italian-American steak house that had eggplant parmigiana so she went in with him. He had a steak with spaghetti on the side and they ordered chianti.

  It was sad and funny. She still liked the way he looked. Not that he looked the same: like her, he was two years older and he looked less hard and less buoyant. She could see again the Jim she had seen: not shimmering with fantasies but the man she had been attracted to. Again she could like the foresty gray-green of his eyes and the chiseling of his nose and chin. Again she could like the strength of his arms, of his hands on the table, and not fear them on her.

  It was funny, it was sad to sit at the table with him. She was dressed like somebody else for court, even wearing panty hose and a dress. Seldom did she sit at a table in a restaurant drinking wine with a man. She could see herself at eighteen eating pizza with Jimbo near their high school and rubbing knees under the table. Superimposed pictures with the outlines blurring, like a cheap printing job of color on color.

  “Gonna get married again?” he asked her.

  She shook her head no. “I didn’t like marriage, Jim. I don’t like keeping house for someone.”

  “What’d you do? Go back and live with those women?”

  “Yes. There are five of us now and two kids.”

  “And no men?”

  She smiled. “One little boy aged four.”

  “You ought to make him into a real sissy,” Jim said, without much edge. “I figure you’ll marry one of those professors if you hang around the colleges there. Besides, where did you say you were working?”

  “A computer company.” She saw something then. Something leapt in her head and she sat up straight. She saw something hurting in him that she must stop, because the hurting was mistaken. “Jim, I didn’t leave you because … I mean, I wasn’t trying to turn you in on … a professional. I think you think … that what I want is a man with a college degree.”

  “Sure. You always were smart. Better than me in school. You always went in for books. That’s the way it goes.”

  “No, listen, that’s not it. I see what you think—that I don’t want a man who works in a garage. I must want a man who works in an office. Who makes more money and comes home with his hands clean. But that’s not it. Really.”

  “You think I don’t get sick trying to get ahead? I don’t want to be stuck like my old man doing the same job on the line for forty years until I drop dead. But they make it hard. They make it hard to get a start.”

  “I’m in the same place, Jim. I can’t get a good job. The thing I have I got through a woman friend. I don’t want any husband. I don’t want to live in a family. I like living in a commune. I want to live my own life and do the things I want to.”

  “You think I’m such a dope I can’t understand. But I can see the world’s changing. But you see how far you get, how much you can really get away with.” He ate his steak for a while. Then he got into a fantasy trip about how he was going to start his own garage. He was going to set up a high class garage and repair foreign cars, sports cars. That’s where the money was, those guys with cars that had to be tuned all the time. He went on about how his uncle was going to finance him.

  But her life must seem as much a fantasy to him, her ambitions as tenuous. Maybe he’d get his garage. That was likelier than that this society would let her live as she wanted and find real work to do and a permanent commune. It was blind to feel superior to Jim’s daydreams when her own were so fragile.

  When they were leaving, he touched her more than necessary, helping her on with her coat. His hands fell on her shoulders. Again she could read his feeling, that he was wanting her a bit, wistfully, wishfully, nostalgically. He was wanting her to come back with him wherever he was living. He said he’d given up the old apartment. Briefly she felt it with her body. She was no longer afraid of him and she remembered now when she had loved him, she could let herself remember it with more than her head again. But she did not love him. She did not want to lie with her body. She did not want to borrow him to prove to herself that she was capable of sexual response her world called normal.

  Instead as they came out onto the street and she waved to a passing cab, she waited till the cab had stopped. Then quickly she put her hands on his shoulders and rose up to kiss him. “Take good care of yourself,” she said, still hugging him, and then hopped into the cab and shut the door.

  21

  I’m Good and I’ll Prove It

  Miriam was making black bean soup on a turkey-carcass base. The big old kitchen was steamy with good smells. The turkey had been roasted for Neil’s parents on the weekend. She could not persuade herself that she liked them, but they could be worse. They lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and the trip was too long for them to make often, as they had not the habit of flying. His father was an optometrist, Sherwin Stone; his mother, Emily, kept house. There had been four boys and his mother often confused them in her memories and in conversation: would call Neil Simon, his next older brother. Neil was the youngest and his mother made a big show of doting on him. Yet she was always saying, “But you used to love lima beans,” and he was always correcting her, “No, that’s Si, Mother. I never ate lima beans.” Whatever it was Emily doted on so loudly, so sentimentally, it wasn’t the man she was married to. Whenever Emily made such a mistake, she would be flustered and upset, while Neil would say in his calm voice that she should not worry. Sometimes a muscle in his cheek would kick.

  With his father Neil had long conversations about the computer business, especially about Logical. His father thought being director of a company was serious business. He was always trying to impress upon Neil that being a director was a burden under which he should stoop at least a little: appear to ruminate decisions. Always his father would ask him eagerly when the stock would go public. Neil had some stock from the beginning and some from options he had exercised since. She could not see why he bothered buying pieces of paper with no value, but that seemed part of the charade of being a corporation, along with having a lawyer write up directors’ meetings that never occurred and keeping a corporate seal in Efi’s drawer. Always Neil would answer that the corporation was operating on a shoestring, in debt to the bank, and if for some mad reason they ever did go public, he certainly would not advise his father to invest in them. His father, thin and gray—gray in skin and gray in hair—would take off his glasses, of which he always had at least one spare in his vest pocket, and polish them carefully, frowning.

  Neil talked little about his family. He told her he remembered mainly trivia from his childhood except that it had been, he thought, normal and relatively happy. She had a grudge. She felt his long years of finding it hard to relate to others off the technical level, the training in being out of touch with his own feelings and not knowing them till they knocked him down—meeting his own emotions suddenly like a car bearing down on him in the street—was the fault of some powerful and pervasive atmosphere of repression in his family. Obviously there was a steady unremitting pressure to succeed.

  Emily was pleased that she was Jewish and almost a Ph.D. Almost, almost. Neil’s project had had a plausible relationship to her thesis, now moidering. Lucky she was working for a company and not a university. Nepotism rules would have forced her out of her own department immediately. At least in Logical she could remain in the company. Still Emily co
uld not see why she should bother to get her degree, now that she was married.… She would work again on it, she would find time in the summer, when things were slower at Logical with people going off on vacation and taking off early and sneaking long weekends. She would use that ebb to steal the time to finish her thesis.

  Yet she felt oppressed by Emily. Little jokes that offended her. Little references to the coming grandson to carry on the name. As if “Stone” were a name anybody had carried very long or very far. Miriam Stone, that should finish those awful old jabs about Venus Berg forever. But of course nobody around her even knew about that. Except Beth. But Beth ran over things like that, a clear stream that stayed clear.

  Mother by surrogate, suggesting similar pressures from her mother yet not her mother, not her face, her voice, her hands. Touched that old wound. But she had been good, playing her role all weekend. Neil seemed pleased. He knew the amenities came hard for her. He did not require that she want to please his parents but only that she do it. She walked through the empty conversations and the necessary vacuous hours of all sitting uncomfortably trying to think of something to say and she walked through them all without bumping too hard into anything, while her head ached and her eyes burned with boredom. At last it all ended and they were once again alone together and everything returned to being simple.

  The soup steamed and lazily she toweled her hair dry, shook it back on her shoulders, stretched, and stirred the pot. Saturday afternoon. Neil was off playing tennis with Dick, as usual. Neil thought it important to keep in shape. His slender neat compact body. A good body, under control and responsive. They made love a lot. That had been a pleasant surprise. When she began to feel attracted to Neil, she had felt that was because he was a good man, a man who might be loyal to her and kind and gentle, a man who would value her. She had talked a great deal with her therapist about exactly why she was interested in Neil, as opposed to the qualities that had drawn her to Phil and Jackson and dozens of others. They were good values this time, rational values.