Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  Miriam felt closer to Sally than she ever had. When Miriam had lived in the house she had sometimes taken comfort from Sally’s presence, but oftener she had been at a loss for things to talk to her about. One of Sally’s ways of making contact was by caring for someone, taking care—physically, emotionally. Miriam found it hard to accept nurture from another woman. That felt like childhood. After all, being supportive and helpful was a basic way she related to people too: it was as if she and Sally were both coming on along the same beam and thus had never been able to find in the other a reassuring response.

  Now they revived each last detail of Fern’s birth at home, when Miriam had assisted. They discussed Fern and David at length. Miriam was furious with herself for having paid little attention to Fern when she was in the house. Now she was trying to catch up on Fern’s history. Suddenly she found children fascinating. She had liked children, sort of, but found it boring to discuss them. Now that she was to have a baby of her own, all other women’s children assumed a vividness and a particularity altogether new.

  Sally attempted to teach her to sew. Together they had made bright comfortable smocks for the last months of their pregnancy. Miriam’s hands were awkward with the needle. Sewing made her twitchy and she was always pricking herself. In the meantime Fern and David would be running around screaming and giggling and tripping over things. It was amazing how many objects were around they could get hurt on. The house had to be childproofed.

  Of course Beth was off at work during the days. Sometimes she would stop by on Saturday, but in general they saw less of each other. No more lunches, no more conversations on the way to work. Evenings of course Miriam was with Neil, and Neil and Beth had not managed to get to know each other. Once again the hierarchical situation at Logical made that difficult. Neil was never unfriendly to Beth; he simply did not quite see her. He did not mind her being around, but he never seemed to want to know her. He never asked Miriam why she liked Beth so much, thus providing her with an opening.

  Not that they were as close as they had been. Beth lacked enthusiasm about her pregnancy, tending to want to talk about the same old topics. It annoyed Miriam. She felt as if Beth accepted Sally as involved with babies and the kitchen and her own body, but was judgmental against Miriam for exactly the same thing. But then Beth had never been pregnant.

  “Sometimes you make me feel like such a glutton, Bethie,” she said, sitting forward with legs apart to rest her belly. “I want to be a good technical person and creative in my field, I want to be happily married, I want to be a good cook, I want to be a good mother and have lots and lots of babies—I want everything! You’ve pared yourself down. You refuse most experiences. You get the same mileage out of less raw data. It’s very third world.”

  “Thinking in metaphors the way Phil used to! It doesn’t look that way to me. It looks like you’re cutting back. Becoming more withdrawn and private in your life.”

  “But, Bethie, what could be more real than having my own baby?”

  “Alone. Inside a family. Just you and Daddy and baby makes three.”

  “But you’ll come by. Won’t you?”

  “But it won’t be my baby, the way Fern is.”

  “Do you really think of Fern as your baby?”

  “Yes. I feel responsible for her. I help support her. I raise her. She loves and trusts me. It isn’t intense as if I were her only mother, but intensity that way isn’t necessarily good. She has five mothers. I think that’s basically different from having one. Different not just in quantity but in kind.”

  “Is David your child too?” Miriam could not help the teasing tone in her voice.

  “At first I never thought he would be. After all, he lived in a nuclear family for his first three years. I can see differences between David and Fern from that. But he’s opened up. When I came back, he was still on the scared side of learning to live in the house. He’s still more private than Fern, he turns things inward. But he’s unlearning that. He’s much, much more affectionate and less whiny.”

  “His home breaking up must be responsible for some of that whining. How can a little boy understand his father moving out? But do you really think it’s good for him, growing up in a house with only women?”

  “Do you want him to model himself on what male means in this society—John Wayne and the green berets, a stiff upper lip and a successful ulcer? Control and dominate anything that moves you or feel like a ninety-pound weakling if you can’t. He’ll grow up feeling loved and cared for and encouraged to feel, encouraged to learn to do things with his hands and his body and his head.”

  “Besides, you’re going to tell me Sally says she’s carrying a boy.”

  “I guess David’s superimportant to me because he’s the one male being I do love.”

  “I tell you, this big and unwieldy, I can’t imagine doing it again. But I’m sure I’ll change my mind. They say you forget. Discomfort is so undramatic to remember.”

  Beth rested her head against the glass of the tinted window—they were in the alcove on the stairs. “I hate Aldous Huxley! I don’t care if he’s dead, I hate him!”

  Miriam sat up straighter. “What on earth is that about?”

  “I read Brave New World. Connie gave it to me because I was saying women had to create a technology of birth—so we wouldn’t have to carry babies inside. Everybody jumped on me—even Laura! Well, that book did it. It was a new idea then—that was when feminist ideas were still strong, before the counter-revolution was really on top. He got in and creamed the idea before it could have a chance. He made it be associated with horrible people and a disgusting society where sex was a commodity. And it’s remained a nightmare joke ever since.”

  “But, Bethie, discomfort isn’t a disaster. Learning to ski is uncomfortable, so is learning to swim. You imagine pregnancy is awful, but it’s satisfying too. I can’t imagine giving up bearing my own babies.”

  “But you have no choice. I’m not talking Brave New World. I mean that women could choose whether to carry their babies or to have the embryo produced in a controlled environment. That would eliminate most birth defects. They’d be caught early and another egg fertilized.”

  “Let’s talk about something else.” Miriam touched her belly.

  “Like store-bought bread. People like you and Sally who like to bake bread could. But women who can’t bear babies and who plain don’t want to wouldn’t have to carry them inside.”

  Miriam laughed. “Imagine! Where did baby brother come from, Mommy? Oh, we bought him at the department store.”

  “I’m thinking of something like a community incubator. No more miscarriages, no more premature births—”

  “Bethie, change the subject. I’m serious. I’m starting to feel nauseated.”

  “I’m sorry.” Beth’s light eyes regarded her with surprise and disappointment. The incubator was an idea she was absorbed in.

  Ah, if only Beth would meet a good man! She had tried bringing Beth together with every unattached man she could think of. The only one she seemed to get on with was Jaime. Every so often they went to a movie, to the zoo once with Fern and David. But she could not fool herself that anything more was going to happen. She liked Jaime, she loved Beth, but she felt impatient. How could anyone settle for so little?

  With Sally she felt differently. After all, Sally had a child of her own and another on the way. That was half a life. She could understand why Sally lived in the women’s house. Her relationships with men had been brutal and abusive. Nothing much had changed since Sally was fifteen, when she had been raped by a boy she knew who gave her a ride into town.

  The father of Fern had been a member of Going-to-the-Sun when they were into blue-grass music. That was big around Boston always, no matter what other fads came and went. He had found a status symbol in having a real hillbilly girl friend for a while. She was a decorative accessory to the group. In fact she could play acoustic guitar as well as any of them, though she would never sing for embarrass
ment if her boy friend was around.

  Sally played for her sometimes, as difficult as she found it with her belly. Sally thought it sad that Connie didn’t know any lullabies. She sang to both children. She thought it needful as changing diapers. Sally had brought over some good grass and they smoked some together. They were feeling relaxed. Sally wasn’t yet big enough to be bothered and Miriam was feeling a little better since her baby had descended from just under her breastbone into the middle abdomen. It pressed more on her bladder but less on her stomach. She found it easier to balance herself.

  At one point they went to look in the big bedroom mirror side by side, undoing their smocks. “Look now, it isn’t fair,” Miriam complained. “My nipples are so dark, and yours aren’t. Look at that dark stripe down my belly. The doctor said it would fade some but never completely. How come you don’t have a stripe?”

  “I don’t know. See my stretch marks? They’re getting pink. Maybe because I’m a redhead and you’re dark.”

  “I hope my breasts go down after I finish nursing.”

  “Wait till you breast-feed. It feels heavenly.”

  “Do you think they’ll go down? I must be a size E. I feel grotesque.”

  “Oh, they’ll go down. Nobody stays that big.”

  They closed up their dresses and shuffled downstairs, Miriam stopping to rest a moment at the window seat. She was short of breath. Then they continued to the kitchen. Miriam had decided she was sick of pink and blue, and they were cooking their baby blankets in a big pot of red dye.

  “The stuff in the stores is so ugly.” Miriam stirred the cauldron round and round with a big wooden spoon already dyed red. “All covered with cutesy hideous humanoid birds and bunnies. Why not yellow and blue and green and orange and purple? Beautiful colors, subtle prints. Who decides that everything surrounding a baby in the first years be unmitigated crap?”

  “That’s what comes out, you’ll see.” Sally leaned on the sink giggling. “Yellow crap, brown crap, white crap, black crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, CRAP!”

  “Miriammmmm? Miriammmm?” Neil home early. He hardly ever arrived before Sally left. Usually she drove Sally home by four, but it was getting hard to fit behind the wheel. Today Connie was to pick up Sally on her way home from Newton.

  With a little groove furrowed between his brows, he came into the kitchen sniffing. “Isn’t that grass? Who’s been smoking grass?”

  “Oh, we have, love.” Miriam went to kiss him. “I think there’s a little left on the table, you want some?”

  He jumped back from her. “Are you crazy?”

  “What?” She stopped short. “Something wrong? You’re home early. Did something go wrong at work?”

  “Something’s got to be wrong with you. What do you think you’re doing, smoking grass when you’re nine months pregnant!”

  “Neil, I drink a glass of wine at supper, too. I wouldn’t get drunk and I wouldn’t get high. But what’s the fuss with a little grass? It’s not going to do anything to baby it doesn’t do to me. Just turn him or her on a little.”

  “How could you do it? You must be out of your mind! You ask the doctor, go on, you call the doctor and ask him what you’re doing to our child.”

  “Neil, you’ve got to be kidding. I’m not going to say anything to him. He might be cool, he might not. What’s wrong with you? All of a sudden you sound like Straightman. Don’t you smoke dope? You’re scaring me, I mean it, and not for the baby.”

  She had never seen him so angry: it was the first time she had got him really angry. He did not threaten her; after that initial bellow he did not raise his voice. He simply continued repeating his point again and again and again, stubbornly, monotonously, inexorably until she had a splitting headache. She was furious with herself for crying when she was right. She was furious with him for suddenly coming at her all fierce and patriarchal, as if he had become somebody else. Here she was married to him and he was acting like a stranger. Worse, he was yelling at her in front of Sally, who thought men were brutes. Sally would go back to the house and tell the women—tell Beth, who hadn’t got to know Neil; Connie, who obviously thought she was getting softening of the brain, so involved in babies when Connie was just building an independent life again; and Laura, who considered it Victorian to deal with men at all. Sally would tell them how Neil pushed her around. How he wouldn’t let her—wouldn’t let her—smoke grass when she wanted to.

  “Neil, I haven’t become a baby just because I’m carrying one. I’m an adult woman, your wife—not a child!”

  “Then act like my wife. You’re carrying my child, remember that. My child!” He heard himself and paused for a moment, to speak more softly. “I don’t want our child born feeble-minded. I don’t want him crazy with birth defects, chromosome damage. We work together learning natural childbirth to produce a healthy baby without anesthetic damage, and you go using drugs!”

  “Neil, you’ve gone out of your mind! There’s more stuff can damage your chromosomes in a loaf of store-bought white bread than in all the grass from here to Algiers, you know it.”

  “We don’t either of us know, and I don’t want you taking risks with our baby. After you have the baby, smoke as much as you want.”

  Oh, it was incredible! Shortly Connie arrived and Sally, who had already put on her coat and gone into the hall to escape them, ran out without saying good-bye. The argument did not miss a beat. Supper burned on the stove which they stood squared off, and only the fumes of lamb chops charring broke through their trance or anger.

  The argument went on. She could eat no supper. The food disgusted her. He sat there methodically spearing his chop and slicing the meat into neat squares, talking between bites. He would not cease battering at her and denying her quiet until she started sobbing and panting hysterically.

  “You’re a pig!” she screamed between sobs. “You’re trying to make me sick! You don’t care how upset you make me, so long as you get your way! You hate me! You have to hate me to treat me this way!”

  “You disgust me. Look at you. Stoned out of your mind and blubbering! You’re not fit to have a baby.”

  “I hate you! I hate you! I wish I’d never met you! What am I supposed to do, nine months pregnant with your child, and you treat me like this, chained to a self-righteous fink.”

  “Act like a woman instead of an adolescent idiot, for a change.” He flung down his napkin and went off to his study, slamming the door on her.

  Tears ran down her face until it was swollen and sore. Then she would pause for a while and sob dryly. Then the tears would resume. Above all she hated him for his ability to walk out. When they were quarreling, she could never tear herself loose from him, she could never leave him and walk off. She could not shut him out of her that way. She knew, and was tortured by knowing, he sat in his study working. He had banished her from his consciousness. It was so mean! She could not for one moment cease remembering that they had quarreled and that he had revealed he no longer loved her. He had withdrawn. Her misery felt vast and static as a lake of frozen lava. What would she do with the baby? What would she do with herself? What would become of them alone? He had pretended to love her and now he was abandoning her, with her looks shot, her belly huge, and her job gone.

  Finally she could not stand it any more and she ran into the study where indeed he was reading a journal and began screaming at him. This time he did not give way to his rage but instead coolly he bored at her. Pressed and pressured until, sobbing again, she broke and agreed, promised she would not smoke. It was maddening to think as she lay in bed unable to sleep that she simply could not tell him that she had been occasionally smoking dope all through her pregnancy, having checked with women she knew that it was fine. Like wine and booze, a little was fine and a lot was bad. Avoid the hard drugs and tobacco. Avoid processed foods. She felt humiliated, as if she had put herself into a totally vulnerable position, and now he could begin to insist on his whims and his prejudices.

  A week befor
e she was due, Neil’s mother arrived, announced only by her phone call from Logan Airport. Before Neil left to pick her up, Miriam made a stand in the hall. “If she’s around I will not be able to have the necessary concentration to go through the Lamaze method in the way we’re trained to do together. Now I’ll be nice, but tomorrow you pack her on another plane. Suppose I start labor early? She goes back tomorrow, I mean it!”

  After Neil left and she remained in the kitchen, she was ashamed. All the old mother-in-law jokes: how humiliating to act in type. Her mother-in-law might not be the world’s most intelligent woman but she was well-meaning. Still, they grated. Emily had kept writing her, “hadn’t she stopped working yet!” Making it sound almost obscene. Actually she had quit early and could have worked another three weeks or more, and she knew it. She had twinges of guilt. She hadn’t set a good example. As the only woman with a choice position on the technical staff, she should have worked right up till she went into labor, so they could not use that excuse on the next woman who applied.

  The first thing Emily said when she got through the door with her two suitcases—two—was, “What, you’re still not wearing a maternity brassiere? You’re going to injure yourself for life!”

  “Mother,” Miriam began. How the word caught in her throat. It meant Sonia. But Emily insisted. “I am used to doing without. My muscles are developed. I can support myself, even if I am as big as a barn.”

  “What does the doctor say about that?”

  “The doctor has never said anything. I presume he’s accustomed by now to patients who don’t wear bras, as he must have become accustomed over the years to patients who don’t wear corsets.”

  “Well, you ask him if you won’t end up deformed. Haven’t you seen pictures of savages, women with their bosoms hanging down to their knees?”