Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  Thinking Emily but saying, “Mother, they nurse their babies for five years.”

  “I’m sure I never heard of any such thing!”

  “Mom, if there was anything wrong, Dr. Foreman would have said something,” Neil assured her. “He’s a very forward-looking obstetrician.”

  There seemed nothing neutral. Look at the new drapes, Mom, Miriam made them herself. And who hung them? Oh! Oh! Emily was as upset that she took a glass of wine with supper as Neil had been about the joint. The next morning Emily was still there and Miriam prepared to make a bad scene. But before she could work up to it, Emily made a mistake—a gross strategic error. Instead of getting into an argument with Miriam, Emily took on her son.

  Neil was trying to explain the Lamaze method and how he would be helping Miriam through her labor. Emily was so shocked at the idea of him being present throughout in the labor room—it was as if he had said that he used the women’s lavatory in a theater—that she expressed herself loudly. That did it. Miriam could sit back and watch.

  All of that Saturday the argument continued. Neil was determined to extract from his mother an acknowledgment that their way of birth was superior. He was after his initial desultory agreement committed to it. He identified with the Lamaze method more heavily than she did. She remained a little skeptical, saying to herself, Well, if it gets really bad, I can always ask for something. But Neu cared. The ideology appealed to him: birth could be beautiful and natural if only you wanted it to be and mastered the proper techniques. They would give birth according to the rules and together. It was almost scientific. It gave him a role and a purpose. Emily had stomped right over that commitment.

  It was amusing to see that inexorable pressure, the steady bore of argument, the voice not raised but never ceasing and never yielding, the firm and self-righteous insistence, all brought to bear upon some other woman. It was relaxing to see Emily waste her energy trying to change her son rather than his wife. She could simply sit back and mull over the stirrings of her child in her vitals. The next morning indeed Emily left, still insisting as she was firmly hustled out by Neil carrying both suitcases, “You’re just like your father, exactly. Both know-it-alls! Now I’m telling you, you ask your wife. Ask her if she wouldn’t rather have a woman at that time, rather than some man who doesn’t know a thing!”

  It was a full week later, three o’clock on a Tuesday, when she called Logical. Efi said Neil was talking to Abe, could she call back? “No,” she said firmly, enjoying herself. “Put me through now.”

  “Oho,” said Efi. “Good luck. Are you packed?”

  “For a week already.… Hello, Neil? We’re starting, I think.”

  He arrived all arms and legs and nerves and immediately could not find the stopwatch they had agreed to keep in an obvious and convenient spot, which suddenly neither could remember.

  As his plaintive voice came to her cursing softly and begging the watch to appear, she resisted the urge to go. He was always mislaying things. He would find it. She made herself stay put on the couch with one hand resting on the heap of her belly. Yes, definitely a contraction. She could feel the uterus harden as the pain.… the contraction came. She wished she had had supper first, but that was silly. Nobody was hungry during labor, she had been told, and from now on she should take only clear liquids. She remembered the horror story of Phil’s about the first Mrs. Flynn, who had died under anesthetic from eating at a picnic. Miriam had gained fourteen pounds, not bad but not as good as she would have liked. If she had eaten as her body seemed to bid her, she would be as big as the elephant she felt like.

  By the time Neil found the watch—on the dresser beside the bed in case she began in the night—and returned to time her, her contractions were occurring every fourteen minutes and lasted approximately twenty-five seconds. She felt them in the small of the back, although when she touched her belly it firmed each time.

  The show had appeared before she called Neil, and now she had a steady discharge. She had Neil put on a Bach record and they proceeded with the breathing and timing they had been taught. Neil called the doctor and got him at home. When the pains were five minutes apart—slightly later than she had been told but she was in no hurry to enter the hospital—they went. She had cut her own pubic hair close with a nail scissors when the pains began being regular, having had Dr. Foreman write on her record that she would prep herself. She did not relish having her genitals shaved. She wanted to control what she could. Now she was tormented by the itch of forgetting something essential. She felt calm and excited. The contractions seemed larger than her body, not inside her but as if she were inside them.

  Dr. Foreman hadn’t got there yet and she was given her admission exam by a resident on duty, a tell-you-nothing doctor. “What is the dilation?” she asked him and he said in that don’t-worry-little-girl voice, “Oh, you have plenty of time yet.” Then the bag of waters broke.

  The labor went on and on. Sometimes she felt exhausted and just wished the whole damn thing would end and forget the idiot panting and counting and carrying on. Contractions, my ass. It was pain and big pain and it hurt like hell. However, she continued. Partly she was ashamed to act as if she couldn’t handle it, having gone this far. And she wanted to be awake, she wanted that desperately. What was the use in giving birth if she let them deprive her of experiencing it?

  “But, Neil … it does hurt. It hurts. I’m telling you.”

  “You’re fighting me. Go with the contractions. Don’t panic now, Miriam. We’re so close.”

  “I’m not panicking! I’m just telling the truth, damn it. Neil, it hurts.”

  “Contractions aren’t pain. Don’t forget now, don’t tighten up and hurt yourself. Let me help you.”

  It was rhetoric. Pain was pain and calling it contractions didn’t make it hurt any less. Wave upon wave upon wave. She panted and did her relaxations and did what she had been taught and she was angry. She did not scream, she did not cry out, she did not do any of the things she had been taught were shameful and ignorant. She panted instead of screaming. She counted instead of crying. She bit her lips and bit her cheeks and did what she had been taught and went on. On, in the ridiculous little hospital gown designed to rob her of all dignity. On, among the nurses and residents and doctors doing their business and processing her with as little nuisance to them as possible. On between the blank anonymous walls. She remembered Sally’s birth. Perhaps she was not as scared as some of the women around her because at least she had seen birth herself, taken part in the birth of Fern in a roomful of women, singing and rubbing Sally’s belly and kissing her and talking softly. Neil was with her, she held his hand, she held tight to him, but she could feel always his fear that she would not be good enough, that she would not be committed enough, that she would back down from the way they had chosen.

  It went on and it went on and it went on. She still wanted to stay conscious though often, sinking in the pain she sought to go with, she could not remember why. Could remember nothing. Had no notion who or why she was. She felt herself weakening. Her body was big and strong but it was weakening. Yet she went on. To give up, to go under, would be to lose all the advantage of her hours of suffering, ten hours, twelve hours, thirteen hours, fourteen hours, fifteen hours since she had come into the hospital. Her stubbornness was a rock. She sucked the rock in her mouth along with a sponge. She felt she would die rather than let them knock her out. She had her rag of life gripped in her teeth. She wanted to stay in the light. She would not let go.

  It went on and it went on and it went on. Finally, seventeen hours from the time she had checked in, she was taken into the delivery room. She was surprised, lifting her head to look around, that it was a small room. She realized that she had expected a very large room, from operations in television and the movies. The lights were bright but not inordinately. The operating table to which she was moved felt, looked, much like the table in Dr. Foreman’s office where she had been examined frequently enough.

&nbs
p; She experienced a strong urge to sit up, to get off the table and down on the floor. To squat. But they were strapping her down. That felt all wrong. She felt a strong compulsion to get off her back, to squat, but could not. She bore down where she was, although the urge to raise her whole body forward seemed almost as strong as the urge to push, to thrust. It was moving very fast now, it was plummeting heavy as a truck downhill: huge and heavy and out of control. It carried her, no longer worried, no longer afraid, no longer weak. Now, finally, now she pushed. She watched in the mirror overhead except when he was cutting her with the scissors. Then she looked away because it was terrible to see her tender genital flesh sliced through.

  When she looked back, she stared and cried out because the head, the head was blooming there. Huge coming through her. Ridiculous. A dark wet head emerging from the nest of towels and large sheet that swathed her blood-dabbled, strained and still swollen thighs. In the mirror a pile of laundry was giving birth. A person was emerging. Then she was laughing, because it looked ridiculous in the mirror. Oh! For real, at last. The child! “I did it!” she cried out and Dr. Foreman said, “Of course you did.” Foreman was reaching up, pulling, and the shoulder was out. The baby turned its head. She could not tell yet whether Ariane or Jeffrey was coming from her to the light. Red shoulder, slippery, glossy, moving, alive. The baby turned its head toward its shoulder, it was for real, alive, she saw it move! The other shoulder. Gradually, gradually, the baby slipped out of her, oh, beautiful creature thrust into the world glowing and bright.

  Upside down he held her baby, using a rubber tube in its mouth and nose, and already—they had not even struck the baby if they really did that—her baby was crying.

  “You have a girl, Mrs. Stone.”

  “Ariane!” She was flooded with joy. Her own, her child, her darling, her flesh and blood. “Give her to me.” My daughter.

  “Soon. We’re not done with you yet.”

  “Oh. The placenta.”

  Exhausted and impatient, she lay in a puddle of small sensations. Foreman was mucking about in her, moving the uterus. She could feel herself contracting again. Expulsion of placenta. She no longer cared. She did not bother watching what they were up to but let her eyes close. When she looked again he had the placenta in his hand. He was telling her that her uterus had good tone. They had repaired the incision and were fussing with her baby. She was released and sat up on one elbow and came alert. “Is she all right?”

  “That’s what we’re checking.… She’s fine.”

  The nurse handed her Ariane, wrapped in a blanket. “Her head!”

  “It’ll round out in a day or two. Primiparous molding. The nose will recover too. In a couple of days, Mrs. Stone, she’ll be pretty as a picture.”

  The Stones’ song, “She’s a Rainbow.” Somehow Ariane was all red and blue and yellow and bright and moist. She was shining, already kicking and squirming. With her face screwed up she cried and cried but no tears came. Ariane, Ariane, monkey face, precious monkey face. Gray eyes? No one in her family. She was suddenly scared for an instant, somebody else, from some other year. Must be someone in Neil’s family with gray eyes. Or maybe they were all born that way, like kittens. They were trying to take the baby back. She wanted to savor her triumph but procedures came first, and she had to relinquish Ariane to the nurse and the nursery. She sank back, too tired to argue or question, and was wheeled to the semi-private room she would be sharing with two other women who had just had their babies.

  She was weary and spent. She had expected to feel good afterward. She had expected to be rewarded for doing the birth the right way. The baby out, her body back, joy to the world. But she felt like something a truck had run over. Her breasts hurt, huge and swollen and sore and hot to the touch. She had not expected it all to feel so messy. She could not quite rise to the moment but felt as if she were hanging in dim tepid water not quite able to break through the surface to fresh air. When the nurse got her up she walked, but she did not feel right. Loose and sloppy with the stitches hurting, her body did not fit her. She was sunk in a vast weariness, illuminated by dull aches and occasional burning twinges.

  She was glad to get out of the hospital, but she felt numbed still. Felt alienated from herself, her body, Neil, even Ariane. Least perhaps from Ariane. They were connected through her breasts. Every few hours Ariane cried for her, every few hours her breasts ached to be suckled. They were bound in animal linkage and that bond was the most real thing she could still feel. But she was frightened. She did not feel that she loved her baby. This strange animal in her lap with its smells and its loud cries, the fierce desires that shook it, she was not quite sure what she was doing with it. They belonged to each other through an animal bond but she felt so little else, she was terrified.

  When she looked sideways at Neil, she felt distant and alien from him too. He was not bound to the baby by the chain of feedings and hours, yet she could feel love loosed in him toward Ariane. He hovered over her, crooning and gazing, and very gently with the tips of his fingers caressed her nose, her ears, her fingers. He babbled over her, he loudly rejoiced, he truly found her outrageously beautiful. He demanded of everyone within range that they admire her. But soon he left Miriam in the house that felt too big around her and went to the office where she had used to go. She thought of her old desk. She sat and wept for her baby, for herself, because she was a bad mother. She did not love Ariane, she did not love Neil, and she could not stand herself. She was empty and harried and oozing and spent. Poor Ariane! Poor Miriam! They had all gone off and left her and what was she to do? All but this creature grasping her breast for food. Feeling like the youngest sister punished by the wicked witch in a fairy tale, the youngest sister turned suddenly into a crone for punishment, she clutched her baby and wept in the bedroom chair.

  23

  Motherhood Is a Woman’s Creativity

  Beth was stretched on the Danish couch, her cheek still numb with novocaine. She was off work because she had had to have a wisdom tooth out. “No, I don’t want anything,” she mumbled.

  “The effort required to take care of children rises exponentially, not arithmetically,” Miriam was saying firmly. “That’s why when Neil starts on me about ‘Let’s have another real quick’ I want to bang my head on the wall. Fuck Dr. Foreman and his pontifications. Fern! Put that down. Come on, give it to me, that’s a sweetheart. Now what schlemiel left a pocket knife in the living room?”

  Beth turned on her side. “Do you really mind having the kids Mondays and Wednesdays?”

  “Sure, but I love having time to myself Tuesdays and Thursdays. I only wish I could stay here and work—it’s so quiet. But that time Neil called and I was working here and Ariane was at the commune, that did it. Almost blew the whole thing.”

  “He doesn’t like her to come over to our house, does he?”

  “He had an extra-careful middle-class upbringing. His mother irons sheets and towels. He thinks the commune is dirty. I think he has fantasies about what goes on there. I avoid the subject. I mean, he can hardly say, ‘Don’t visit your friends with Ariane,’ but he can raise hell if I leave her there and come back here, and he catches me.”

  Miriam now talked about Neil as if she were talking about the weather or the government, Beth thought. Neil was not a father like her father, she had to give him that. He was affectionate and warm with Ariane, he worried about her constantly. When he could get away with it, he would send one of the secretaries into Boston to get a specific creative plaything he had seen. He had bought a camera and photographed her smiling, sitting, crawling, crying, pouting.

  “Besides, Bethie, your room is my haven. As soon as I walk in and shut the door I start feeling like me.”

  “But it’s noisy, huh?”

  “There’s no way to keep Ariane from knowing I’m in the house. Still, I like your room. It’s Pavlovian. When I walk in and see the candy cane walls, I start to be able to think.”

  “I like to know you’ve been
using it.” Sometimes Miriam left her little presents, a drawing, a cookie, a piece of fruit. Miriam could no longer give presents freely, for she had neither the time nor the resources, but she made do with what was around. Beth liked coming home from work to find a trace of Miriam, whether it was a rose plucked from the red rambler on the fence here or a long black hair unknowingly lost.

  “Beth, poor baby, why don’t you take another demerol? You look as if you’re in misery.”

  “Anyhow, the novocaine’s wearing off. It makes me scared I’ll bite my tongue. At least I’m off work for a day and they can’t dock me.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s reached the point where you’d rather have teeth pulled than go to work out there.” Miriam disentangled Blake from a bunched-up rug. Sally’s baby was an avid crawler already.

  “Close to it. I suppose I should be grateful they retrained me instead of firing me when they switched over to the new system—”

  “Don’t waste your breath. A new girl takes a long time to train, not in the job itself, but in picking up a certain understanding so that you can catch an error now and then.”

  “I find data preparation boring. Oh, it’s easier and quieter sitting at the keyboard and looking at the terminal like a miniature TV. I feed the machine directly over a high-speed line. I can see that it’s more efficient using the tape cassettes than it ever was using cards. I edit right on the little screen. But before at least I had some variety. The company’s grown so fast, I don’t know half the men who hand me stuff now.”

  Miriam knelt to get David’s ball from under the couch and to persuade Fern to give back Ariane’s raggedy rabbit, its ear wet from chewing. Then she looked out the window toward the street, a gesture she usually made frequently as the afternoon moved toward five, five-thirty … but it was only three-thirty.

  “Are you expecting Neil early?”

  “No, what made you—oh, because I looked. Guilt. Listen, keep this to yourself, promise?” Miriam waited for a nod. “Maybe you should be thinking what you’d do if you lost your job. Neil keeps telling me not to worry. This fall he’s teaching a seminar at M.I.T.—reflecting prestige back to Logical. But I know he’s dickering for a position there. Don’t ask me to pretend I feel enthusiasm. That’s part of the reason I’m killing myself to finish my thesis before they come down on me with a nepotism rule.”