Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  “She needs me. Life was getting dull. She fell for me the first time because I made things interesting, I turned her on to her body, the world, her own energy!” He had talked himself out of his depression. His voice was silky and amused. “Now I find her right back in Flatbush, stuck, boxed, sinking into daydreams and routine. A second chance, I’m telling you, born again. Once again she needs me. I’m not fantasizing this time, I’m playing it through step by step.”

  When Beth came in, Wanda seemed to have been waiting for her, for she called her into a room on the ground floor where they often worked. Wanda was wearing a dark red shirt; she seemed in a good mood though a quiet low-key one: banked coals. “Have some glögg. It’s a hot mulled wine drink with spices. Smell. Isn’t that lovely?”

  Beth, still cold from huddling in the car while Phil orated to the stars, drank her first cup gratefully and let Wanda pour her a second. “It’s only hot wine. So you’re upset because you think Phil’s trying to hurt your friend? Frankly, I’ve never really seen Phil hurt anyone. A bit parasitic. Lazy. Full of dreams and role playing and bad poetry. But Dorine says he’s changed. You don’t think so?”

  “I guess I don’t care.” The wine slid down, hot and spicy, warming her through. “I don’t care if he’s supposed to be changed. I don’t believe it.”

  Wanda was resting her hand against her cheek, smiling slightly. Her eyes, deep-set and almost black, rested on Beth affectionately. “Phil used to disappoint women a lot. He charms easily and disappears with ease. Water. He flows away. But he doesn’t do that much damage. I think I’m something of an expert on what kinds of men do the most damage …” She stopped smiling. Her eyes went a little opaque, her gaze fixed past Beth. “Sometimes men do change, Beth, and then your anger is obsolete. People tell me Joe is different. That political defeat and the destruction of the context we all worked in have made him human. Maybe that’s true, though I wouldn’t care to find out close up.”

  “It hurt you bad when he left you?”

  “Yeah.” Wanda grinned crookedly. “Probably would have hurt more in the long run if he’d stayed.… But I’ll tell you how I felt when people first started telling me he’s changed. How nowadays he doesn’t stomp over women with his boots on. How he actually listens to other people’s opinions. He doesn’t think any more he’s organizing a woman by fucking her. He doesn’t insist he was born with the right line.… Well, for years I tried to make him more human. But I was furious when people told me that, I was bitter with fury. I was angry at him for daring to improve. He’d hurt me and our sons, and he had no right, no right to try tö be a good person any more.… Do you feel what I’m saying?” Wanda poured more glögg in her cup.

  Beth sipped the wine, frowning. “Phil never hurt me.”

  “Maybe he sums up things in men that have hurt you.”

  “He talks too much. He turns everything into words and makes it change in words, but nothing changes. He blurs things. Miriam is somebody who can do real things; how can she ever have wanted a man who can’t do anything?”

  “When she could do things herself, what did she need a man to do them for? Why should women always have to love men who seem to be on top?” Wanda chuckled in her throat. “If I lived with a man again, I think I’d like a nice warm unambitious country boy.… Truthfully, when I go to New York, I always see an old friend of mine. He runs a shop where a lot of movement stuff gets printed. He’s a nice middle-aged fat widower with good politics and a good belly laugh, and I love to be with him.…”

  Beth did not particularly relish the idea of Wanda running up to New York to spend time with a fat old printer.

  Wanda was saying, “But with Joe, I wanted him to remain the villain. That he should begin to change after leaving me I couldn’t allow. I wanted to have a good conscience in hating him.… But think what I’m saying. That he should go on the same way hurting other women. That if he wasn’t mine, let him do no good to nobody.… I’ve had to learn to control that resentment.” Wanda was smiling again. Her teeth were wide apart and strong-looking. Her eyes were shining with laughter that Beth thought had been melted in them like spices in the wine. “I’m just going on.… You’re looking sleepy.”

  “It’s the wine … I think I drank too much.…”

  “Come on, stand. Yes.” Wanda pulled her up by the arms. Beth felt herself bouncing loosely to her feet. “Now, over you go!”

  Beth found herself on the mat. She lay a minute in surprise. She did not hurt. “What happened?”

  “I threw you and you fell correctly. Beautifully. You didn’t think what to do, so you did it. Now, again.” Wanda pulled Beth to her feet and they turned around each other. Once again Wanda threw her and she found herself on the mat, lying on her back and laughing weakly, in contented silliness. Again and again and again Wanda threw her until she learned to feel the falling, to feel herself doing what she had been taught but had never before done. The glögg sweated out of her. She felt clear.

  “Enough. I think you won’t forget.” Quickly, lightly, Wanda leaned forward and kissed her. “Go to bed.”

  Beth walked into her room. Sally was sitting on her bed repairing a stuffed monkey that was leaking fluff from the base of its tail. Beth walked in and, spinning around once with a grin of joy, let herself fall. Correctly. Then she lay on the floor and grinned at Sally.

  “I’m a fallen woman at last! I know how to fall!”

  Sally beamed at her and went on sewing the monkey’s tail back on.

  26

  Mohammed Comes to the Mountain

  and Finds It Stone

  “Don’t try to make me somebody up there,” Wanda said with quiet anger. “On some higher level. I’m older than you, yes. I have a few things to teach you that you want to learn, though most of it is in you already. But I’m not existing on some easier, calmer level. If I’m older, I’m also more spent. I have less reserves, less to spare. I’m a woman the same as you are, and it isn’t easier for me to fight and to survive and to get things done than it is for you! It makes me angry when you pretend it’s different for me.”

  “But you know so much more. You never wonder who you are, I know you don’t!”

  “Beth, it’s recently I stopped being only Joe’s woman and mother of my kids. That’s all I was for years, and don’t forget it. Joe, my kids, and radical politics were my life, in that order. I wasn’t on my own list of priorities.”

  “But now you do know! You do! I feel you’re pretending. Because I know you’re stronger than me.”

  “You mean I’m louder. How do you know I’m stronger, Beth? Because you haven’t seen me break yet?”

  “You don’t get this angry at the others …

  Wanda shrugged with a tired smile. “Think I ask more than you can give?”

  Beth was embarrassed. “It takes me a long time to do what I have to, sometimes. Like learning to fall.”

  “Think how much slower I am. You’re twenty-three. I’m thirty-seven. In a year you won’t have any more to learn from me and you’ll be able to take over a great deal of what I do.”

  “Me? I couldn’t.… I’d feel paralyzed.”

  “You’re learning to move and express and think in motion. I’m telling you, in a year. Oh, don’t look terror-stricken. The group will be functioning by then, everyone will be doing what I do now. I couldn’t stand it if I thought I’d have to hold everything together forever. I need more time for my boys. This way can’t last, I couldn’t sustain it. It wears me. Then I get to feeling sorry for myself and I want to be coddled and cuddled and fussed over. Here you are wanting me to feel like a strong woman from a circus all the time. In many ways you’re stronger than I am, Beth, you just don’t know it yet.”

  “I don’t believe that! I’m learning to do things I never imagined I could begin to do. I find working with the group beautiful. I think the theater we’re making is a powerful force, that makes women’s truths visible and moving. But I don’t have the … imagination, the power yo
u have. I learn to do what I’m taught and sometimes I get an idea. That’s all.”

  “What has imagination to do with strength? My imagination makes me afraid in the dark. It makes me constantly fantasize ten thousand ways I could lose my boys.”

  “Are you afraid in the dark? I mean really.”

  Wanda grinned crookedly. “Yes, Beth. Really and truly. Those few evenings I’m here alone, every sound turns into a burglar, a prowler. I never can sleep in a house alone. I just lie awake seeing the shadows turn into monsters. I’ve been that way ever since I was a child, and I’m still that way.… I remember nights when Joe didn’t come home and I’d lie there seething. Then when I’d finally hear him, I’d pretend to be sleeping. So he wouldn’t be mad.”

  “Oh, you remind me of Miriam. She makes such a fuss about things she does badly. Like she used to make a big thing of not being able to cook. But it’s all nonsense, because when she decided she wanted to, she could. She acts out her clumsiness to disarm people, so they won’t hate her for all the things she does well. You’re playing that game. You’re saying, ‘Forgive me for being creative, see, I’m scared of the dark and being alone.’ ”

  “I’m saying, ‘Because I do something well, don’t expect me to do everything well.’ Don’t think I’m not scared. Believe me, I find all this hard. I’m still lonely and somewhere inside it’s cold.”

  “You have your kids, you have all of us and the troupe.”

  “By my age, you don’t take much for granted because it’s here today. I have fewer options, Beth. It’d be hard for me to get a job. I have no place to go back to. Every choice I’ve made to fight for change has cut off a few more choices and escapes.”

  After Wanda left, Beth felt she had failed her. Had been lacking in response. She sat on at the table with her chin dug into her chest. It was so much easier for her to respond to Women than to another woman. She did not know whether she was more afraid she could not respond to Wanda or that she could. She did not even know how to tell if Wanda wanted her to open up as a friend or as a lover, or if there was a difference.

  She found it easy to love Wanda when they were all working, easy to feel her, easy to express affection; and difficult when they were alone. The more confidence Wanda expressed in her, the more scared Beth was, as if any respect were a burden more terrible than the contempt she was used to. Sooner or later she must fail Wanda, because who was she? Only Beth. She tried to fight that self-fulfilling prophecy of disappointment. She was able to do more and more that she wanted to, and to want to do more yet. But still there were many little worms of self-hatred and doubt and fear nibbling on her. She struggled against those voices of despair. But the struggle never seemed to be over. Each little victory was a little victory and nothing more. Sometimes she imagined herself giving up. Collapsing. She would fall down and refuse to get up. She would huddle in a catatonic knot and never again would she force herself to do one single thing.

  Wanda had told her once about the pillar saints and she thought what a magnificent cop-out. She would run off to a desert. She would sit on the top of a pillar in rain and sun and sleet and never again do anything whatsoever except contemplate the air and the inside of her mind.

  She wanted to love Wanda, yes, but safely, without demands, from a distance. She wanted Wanda for her own loud, strong, vigorous dark Madonna. Part of her froze and tucked in when Wanda wanted to make demands back, when Wanda wanted to talk about her aching legs or to worry aloud about her sons or to be sullenly angry and defeated: when Wanda asked her to be her friend.

  New Year’s Eve the troupe, now calling itself Traveling Women’s Theater, did a performance at a community center. Afterward, Beth went to Miriam’s party, as she had promised. The house throbbed light and music and every room felt crowded. She found Miriam in the kitchen talking closely with Dorine, by the sink full of empty bottles and glasses.

  “With women like you and me, Dorine,” Miriam was saying, shaking back her hair with a wide gesture, “it’s a race between outgrowing your adolescent masochism or having it outgrow you—consume you utterly. It’s awfully lonely after a while being the bighearted earth mother, on tap, loving a man who can’t see any good reason ever to marry you!”

  “But I think I have it licked. I don’t need to hurt to feel I’m connected to somebody. I don’t only admire men who piss on me. Really. I’m into my own work and I haven’t that much energy left to embroider things and brood.… Hi, Beth. How did the show work out?”

  Together they drifted back toward the living room, where the phonograph was roaring. Just at that moment Laverne, regal in a long bottle-green velvet dress, made an entrance with Tom trailing behind her with a small, inturned smile, watching the reactions to her. She was beautiful and artificial as an orchid from a florist’s refrigerator. Beth found her strange to regard, as if Laverne had become something to hang on the wall or pin to a Christmas tree: all green and gold, with her hair like wood and her eyelids green and her lips shiny and her face frozen in an expression of simpering disdain aimed at no one. She walked to be admired. Tom ambled along to the side and a little back, almost parodying her progress and watching for admiration.

  He had her back. He had her dressed as she should be. He was exacting a tribute from the others and from her, a slow revenge for the year of separation that would not be any the less enjoyable for the fact that she would probably never recognize it. Her glance touched Beth and switched away. A moment later Tom gave her a big smile and his hand dropped heavily on her shoulder, he kissed her before she could dodge away. “How are you doing, Bethie? Long time no see.” He did not wait for an answer. Laverne had paused at Phil, lounging in the doorway with a glass in one hand and the other playing with the fringe on the vest of Sue, a secretary at Logical who was flirting almost desperately with him. Laverne stood until she had drawn his attention. She had just begun to talk to him when Tom took her elbow and led her onward.

  Just beyond, Jackson was shaking hands with Neil, both smiling with good will and great malaise. Jackson questioned Neil about his work, older student trying to put the younger professor at ease. Neil seemed to be explaining something at great length. That mutual pretense for Ryan had forced Miriam to invite Jackson and him to come. Beth stood awhile holding a glass and looking for anyone she knew free to talk, anyone at all she could look at, to escape the nakedness of standing alone at a party. An hour earlier she had stood among strangers and acted a baby, acted a bear, acted a secretary, acted an unwed mother. She had roared and wept and flung herself down. She had spoken at length. She had died. Before all those strangers.

  But now she was naked Beth with a stiff smile stretching her leather face into a grimace. She was the single most conspicuous person in the room, with no one to talk to. She would stand there, a neon wallflower, and no one would address a word to her but people would saunter back and forth through her bones.

  She wished passionately that she were back in the commune, in her room. She could not escape the archway. There was Miriam dancing now with Phil, they were being haughty and languid and menacing. They were flirting and acting out an elaborate seduction. They were doing karate without touch.

  Miriam was laughing with her body while her eyes shone and her hair stood on end. She was hot and flushed. Joy radiated from her like steam. She was totally enjoying herself, having forgotten the party and everyone, including Neil. Beth enjoyed watching them. It gave her something to do that explained why she was standing alone.

  Then she happened to glance at Neil. He was trying to look amused but not succeeding. He looked irritated, he looked worried, he looked scared. Perhaps he had never seen Miriam dance; it did not fit into their life together. He looked at her as if she had taken leave of her senses and begun throwing dishes around the room. His forehead puckered in a taut seam.

  Miriam danced with anyone willing. After a couple of numbers, Phil would go off for a drink and pause to check out Dorine. Sometimes they danced. But Miriam never sat down. S
he was high on the dancing. She could have been the woman Beth had seen so long ago, dancing at the street fair in Pakistani pants and a top with no back. She imagined Miriam dancing with Traveling Women. Miriam radiated energy, as Wanda did when they were on. Miriam was more beautiful dancing than she ever was still: and Neil did not like it. He saw that she was paying him no attention, that she did not act like his wife and the mother of his child. She was so involved in dancing she had nothing left over to care what she looked like or who watched or whether her hair was flying or she was sweating or whether other people at her own party were enjoying themselves. This was not the sort of party where everybody got going. Mostly these people stood talking and observed the dancers as if they were an exhibition.

  “Really, look at her,” Sue said to Efi. “You’d think she could dance with her husband once in a while, for form’s sake.”

  But Neil did not dance. He did not know how. The crease on his forehead deepened, he fidgeted with his beard and looked lost and unhappy. Tom was talking with Jackson but his eyes stayed on Laverne dancing with Ted from Logical. Laverne had only three motions but she made sure she looked graceful doing them. Ted danced as if his behind were on a bumpy road and his arms disconnected halfway down. He kept his eyes fixed on Laverne’s belly and grinned without mirth. They made Beth nervous and she turned back to Tom and Jackson, who had shifted. She could see Jackson’s sad emblematic face turned to the dancers. He too was watching, watching Phil finish his beer and come to claim Miriam.

  Miriam paid attention always to the music but she did not pay that much attention to any of her partners except Phil. Beth wondered if anyone could see them and not know they had been lovers for a long, long time. They played. Between them was sensitivity to one another’s intentions, and a humor expressed through both bodies. Parodies were picked up at once and refined. Neil stared and frowned and brooded. She felt coming off him not so much jealousy as fear, fear of the sudden unknown wild woman, dismay, roles confounded.