Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  “Why would I lose my job if Neil quits? I’m sure nobody remembers by now you got them to hire me.”

  “Of course not. They’re losing the anti-missile missile contract—they’ve been canceled. That means half the staff are going on overhead in a month. So either they find another big contract fast, or they fire lots and lots of people. The directors are battling too—especially Abe versus Dick and the business manager Farley they brought in last year and gave so much stock.”

  “Well, the stock isn’t real anyhow, is it?”

  “Just paper. But something funny is happening. Neil insisted we buy a bunch more. We had a big fight. I thought it was the stupidest thing I ever heard.” Ariane began to scream. Tears raced down her chubby face and she sat on her behind and howled. In empathy, Blake started crying too. Miriam picked her up to check her bottom, grimaced, and took her up to change. Her voice continued.

  “Miriam, I can’t hear you. Tell me when you get back.” Beth remained on the couch.

  David poked her in the side. “You sick?”

  “I had a tooth taken out.”

  “A tooth like this?” he pointed.

  “Way at the back.”

  “Can I see it?”

  Miriam came running past to scoop up Blake, still crying, and carry him upstairs too.

  “I didn’t keep it, David. I’m sorry.”

  “I wouldn’t never, never forget my tooth!”

  “Bethie, come up. I never made the beds and talcum powder’s spilled all over the bathroom!” Miriam added over the railing a minute later, “Better bring Fern and David.”

  Beth collapsed again in the bedroom in an old-fashioned easy chair Miriam was planning to reupholster sometime; it leaked stuffing on the rug. Miriam was making the bed, thanking providence she had remembered. “Such sarcasm, when you forget something. If I had to explain I’d have to go into a song and dance routine about why Fern and David and Blake are here, and that would blow my cover.” Dashing around, she picked up socks that Neil seemed to have thrown here and there, dirty underwear, a used tissue, a bathrobe, a damp towel.

  “You’re stuck with all the housework now, aren’t you?”

  “You said it.”

  She had to follow Miriam into the bathroom where the baby powder had snowed. Miriam said, “Who was playing with this? David, who was squeezing the baby powder?”

  “Connie says that talc may possibly be involved as a cancer-causing agent. It’s closely related to asbestos—”

  “Baby powder? Beth, living causes cancer. Just what I want to know.” Miriam was down on her knees sponging the floor. Her glasses slid forward and she caught them in midair, gasping. “All I need to do is break my glasses today. These frames are too big. I swear my head was bigger when I was carrying.”

  “How come he doesn’t help any more? He used to do the dishes some nights and clean the house with you.”

  “Because I’m home now and, as he says, what else do I do? I can’t figure out how to argue. After all, he’s supporting us now. He does work all day and I have trouble saying what I do. Time melts away. Sometimes I don’t manage to get dressed before noon, though I’m up at seven and running every minute.”

  “Are you going back to work?”

  “I started to tell you about Logical. We had this fight about him buying more of their Monopoly Set stock. He’s always saying we don’t have enough money. Honestly, Beth, I don’t think either of us realized that when I stopped working our income would go down by a third.”

  “Let’s go downstairs. I’m happiest lying on the couch.”

  “Five minutes, Bethie. I never did clean the bathroom this morning and the basin’s full of hair and lather. Fern! That gate stays shut! Now, I mean it, Fern!”

  “You were telling me about Logical, or about money?”

  “I’ve worked since I left home. If I wanted a book or a pair of pants, I bought it. Honest, I find asking for every penny hard to deal with. It’s like being fifteen again and having to ask Daddy for an allowance.”

  “Do you want to go back now?”

  “You look so uncomfortable, come on, we’ll go down. I’ll carry Ariane and you carry Blake. Come on, Fern, come on, David. Mama’s big fat baby girl! She’s so round and squeezable, Bethie, such a pussy cat! She’s just a ball of goodness, isn’t she? … So Neil went and bought a bunch more, when the company’s in trouble. He says he has to support Abe in the battle with Dick. But they’re in trouble and they’re going to get rid of a lot of people. They’re way in debt and the bank’s putting on pressure to come up with a plan. Or they’ll go into bankruptcy. Anyhow, they wouldn’t hire me back now if I came in and begged on bended knees.”

  “Logical’s not the only place to work, you could get another job.”

  “It’s a lousy time to look for work. Fred’s still out of a job, isn’t he? Besides, there has to be something better to do with my skills than design command and control systems. I’ve thought it through, Beth, and I realized something about the whole direction my work has been taking for years.”

  “You sound discouraged. Do you wish you were in another field?”

  “I like working with computers. I think people need computers. What they replace is human drudgery. But I think I was into a kind of software only realizable on very large and therefore expensive machines. A lot of what I did was too theoretical for me to get a sense of what it might be used for. I’d be lying if I said I had a real sense of that. But just by the nature of who has money for that technology, you never get far from the Pentagon, you never get away from the C.I.A. or the intelligence community—what a euphemism! The only things that get that much spent on them are surveillance and war games and running the empire.”

  “So what does that leave you to do?”

  “I want to start at the far end of that spectrum. I want to work on problems that are small-machine, small-system problems. Then maybe what I do won’t necessarily be used to kill people, to burn people, to track people. Maybe it can be used for something at least innocuous, like keeping medical records, keeping track of a library.… But that puts another kink in getting back to work.”

  “Have you talked to Neil about all this?”

  “Logical isn’t into that kind of problem, and none of their customers are. He agrees the missile contract was a terrible mistake for Logical. After a while none of the good people wanted to work on it and they hired more duds to fill it out. They didn’t come in on time, they ran over, they produced a piece of crap technically. But he still considers what he does too theoretical to have a relationship to anything in the real world, and he says I’m being narrowly moralistic. Like the Church persecuting Galileo. That scientists have to be free to pursue their science and can’t try to second-guess what doesn’t belong to the field. He says that, for a woman, naturally that kind of consideration weighs more, and I can’t possibly be thinking of leaving Ariane alone already with some paid woman who wouldn’t love her and would teach her bigoted ideas and wrong attitudes.… And he’s right. I insisted I was going to find someone to care for her a couple of days a week. I interviewed six women. They cost a fortune, and, Bethie, I couldn’t leave Ariane with them! They were … exactly as Neil said. Ariane’s intelligent, Bethie, and sensitive. She could no more stand one of those women all day than I could.”

  “You feel guilty even about bringing her to the house twice a week.” Beth was stretched out. Her jaw ached, she felt weak.

  “Well, I’m responsible for her. When I walk out of the room she starts to scream. She’s so young.”

  “That’s the trouble. Sally isn’t responsible for Fern and David and Blake.”

  “Of course she is. You think she doesn’t care about her children?”

  “I said she isn’t responsible. We all are. She can do whatever she wants this afternoon. I don’t even know where she is.”

  “Bethie, if the house breaks up, then Sally knows who’s really responsible for Fern and Blake.”

 
“The house won’t break up. We’re committed to each other.” But Beth sat up, feeling a chill inside. She knew why Miriam had said that. Things had not been so easy lately, not easy at all.

  The tension had started between Laura and Connie but it had spread out, it had run cracks and fissures into all the relationships. The equilibrium was no longer an easy jouncing but a crazy wild swinging between alienation and total embrace, “This is my family. My only family. I don’t want things to go wrong.” Beth lay on Dorine’s bed. Of course she had come to Dorine. Gradually all of them had begun to depend on Dorine’s strength, to see her as the most stable. Beth did not think Dorine quite understood why yet.

  “Sometimes things do go wrong.” Dorine was sitting at her desk collating pages of a paper. “Don’t start to grasp. That makes you pretend things are better or worse than they really are.”

  “But why can’t we be together again the way we were?”

  “Because the differences are real. But we can try to work them through and maybe we’ll come out closer.…”

  The paper Laura worked on was folding: lack of money, splits in the staff, loss of circulation. There was rumored to be another paper organizing, but Laura did not think she wanted to join it.

  “All journalists, even in the alternate press, develop attitudes. A knowingness that comes from spending your time writing about what other people are doing, and getting the sense you have a lot of savvy because you can see what’s wrong. Anybody can put out a paper, and it’s somebody else’s turn. You can learn the skills in a couple of months. You master them in six. In a year you’re probably as good as you ever will be, collectively. Then you get tired.”

  “That sounds wasteful,” Connie said. Lately, whatever one said, the other had to contradict. It became a point of honor. “Suppose after I taught school for a year I decided I was tired of it and I was going to be a librarian. One of the excuses they give for not hiring women is that we aren’t serious—won’t stick with something.”

  “I read a study once that a teacher taught more in her first two years than she ever did again. I think anybody can teach.”

  “Anybody can stand in front of a class, if that’s what you mean. I don’t call that teaching.”

  “I don’t believe in professionalism. I could teach, you could put out a paper. That is, I could teach if it wasn’t that they don’t hire gay teachers.”

  “Well, you can hardly expect parents to feel enthusiasm for that, especially with adolescents!”

  “Sure, I might rape them all in the women’s John, right?”

  Bump, another confrontation. Again, again, again. A potlatch of energy that used to go into making the house pleasant, into the children and meals and talk shared: now burnt off in set pieces of mutual disapproval. Beth swore that each lay awake at night thinking of ways to insult the other. Things had begun to go wrong between them when Laura brought up at a house meeting having her girl friend Lynn move in with her. Laura was much happier lately, more vocal and outgoing and in general friendlier, which made the constant confrontations all the worse by contrast. She had been going to gay dances and talking a lot with women in gay liberation. For the first time, instead of occasional and generally miserable involvements with straight women, she was seeing other women who defined themselves as gay.

  Connie had been absolutely opposed to Lynn’s moving in. After a couple of days of vague protests about crowding and liking things the way they were, she came out with, “Well, if Lynn moves in, why shouldn’t Ross? I mean, why should you be allowed to have your sex object in the house and I be forbidden mine?”

  “Because she isn’t my sex object—she’s a woman. And if women can’t care for each other, we’re never going to change. You can’t fuck the enemy and fight him.”

  Lynn had not moved in. The matter had simply been dropped, but it had left bad feelings. Perhaps the first roughness between Connie and Laura began because Laura truly adored David. She liked to roughhouse with him, she loved even his moodiness, she enjoyed the extra effort it took to open him up. She would get down on the floor with him and growl like a grizzly bear and roar like a lion. Sometimes he got hysterical with laughter or started jumping up and down. His energy burned in his face. He loved Laura. He loved her back passionately. He grew furious with her too and threw toys at her and hit her, as he never did his mother or any of them. Because when he wanted Laura’s attention he wanted it: he did not forgive her for being busy or distracted or depressed. If he had four mothers he had only one Laura, his super playmate, his heroine. Connie would frown and say, “You’re getting him too excited, Laura. He gets so overwound when you play with him, he can’t go to sleep. He gets cranky and starts to bawl.”

  “There are worse things than crying. He knows what he likes, don’t you, David—you dig Goliath. David-Ha-Ha, David the Big Cheese, David the King-Kang-Kong.”

  Connie’s boy friend Ross disliked Laura on principle and indeed when Laura heard his voice she immediately got as loud and vulgar as possible. If she went into the room she enticed him into an argument on the politics of ecology. Laura could argue rings around Ross because she chose the subjects she was going to goad him into attacking or defending, and she knew much more than he did about the politics of the several suburbs from working on the paper. So she had the satisfaction of making him angry, and he had the satisfaction of making Connie uncomfortable about living in the house with a LESBIAN. He played upon her inherent uneasiness: was she being a good mother, was she fulfilling her duty, was she providing the right environment? Or would David grow up to be a drug addict rapist hood because of Laura and the commune? Laura described it that way, and it was cruel but not exaggerated. In truth Connie also feared that her husband would find out about Laura at some point and take the children from her in court. She clipped cases she read about women who had lost custody of their children for doing abortion referrals or living in communes the judge found distasteful.

  Now Laura was going to lose her job and Connie was not pleased. Working on the paper had had some prestige connected with it and some money, though little enough. Beth told no one about Miriam’s warning on Logical, but she might be out of a job soon herself. Connie was not about to support them all. Beth felt the house pulling apart. Yet out of the storybook project, the children’s book they had been writing for Fern and David and for Blake too when he got older, something more exciting had emerged. After they finished the first book they began doing little plays together, at first for the children but lately, after the children were in bed, for themselves. They called what they did jamming. They would pick a theme and improvise together.

  At least those were the words she picked to describe the process to Connie when she came home from seeing Ross and found them still up bellowing at each other. Improvisation seemed a cool male image, men who had mastered a set of skills and body of material exercising their competence. What they did was raw and always on the edge of being ridiculous. They did “The Date,” “I have something awful to tell you, I’ve missed my period,” “The Job Interview,” “How Come You Don’t Love Me Any More?”

  What they did was funny. To hear a woman saying those things, that each had said a hundred times for real, was funny and painful. Violence seemed always about to break through the scenes. The power relations stood bare. The pregnant woman and her boy friend, the make-artist and the woman trying to please, the boss and the secretary: they were all at war. It was a theater of stark melodrama with lines that were extremely funny. People kept killing each other. The repressed, the unexpressed, the silent violence and pressures pushed through the roles. Sometimes they scared each other.

  Sally got into it, Dorine got into it, Beth found herself screaming. Laura got into it too, but she did not seem to experience the loose rush of power, of strong feeling emerging as if from the walls and shaking them, that Beth felt and she was sure Sally and Dorine did too. Who would have believed that Sally could become a suave bored boy friend arranging an abortion on the
phone and making his woman feel guilty for causing him trouble? She could mimic voices and accents and gestures. Once she had the scene straight—not the first time they would run through, not the second or third—then suddenly Sally would be into her role and talking in paragraphs. She would be full of words, Sally who could sit placidly for hours with her hands on her belly.

  Sally looked younger when she was acting. Beth thought of her as being older, but she was Beth’s age. Dorine got into it too, but she had other structures in her life now. She was becoming clear about what she wanted to do and why, and that gave her a different kind of strength than anybody else in the house. She worked brutally hard, taking a full load of graduate courses and working as a figure model. She was overextended. They all had to fill in for her. She could not quite carry her weight in contributing money, in doing her share of the housework, in fulfilling her share of child care. But she was important to them. Everybody wanted her to manage. Her clarity was comforting. Laura never started arguments with Dorine about her professionalism. When she left her books scattered about and Beth picked up an advanced organic chemistry text, she might as well have been looking at something in Russian. But the why was clear to her: women had to control their bodies: the technology of fertility and embryology and genetics would be putting more and more control over who would have babies, and when and how and what kind, in the lap of those wonderful people who had brought us Vietnam, the loaf of formaldehyded white bread, the hydrogen bomb, and permanent smog.

  Beth felt strongly that she was lacking a similar purpose. She half hoped they would fire her from Logical so that she would have to think what she wanted to do. She needed something useful and good to sit in the center of her life. How could she go on selling eight hours a day pushing buttons to support the rest of her time, even for the house?