Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  “Then why don’t you move out? I think there is something wrong in the way you’re friends … in the way you love each other. It’s … oblique and competitive. It hems you in.”

  “Why can’t I move in here? All these rooms. Conspicuous consumption. Or does The Man mean you to fill them up with kiddies?”

  “He wants more.… Phil, don’t start teasing me about moving in. He’d never put up with that and you know it!”

  “Why not? Couldn’t he use me? I could polish his shoes.”

  “Quit it, Phil! I mean it!”

  “Alas. I know you do.”

  If she yelled loud enough, Phil would stop, just as he would not persist in trying to embrace her if she gave him a good push. But it was temporizing, keeping the globes flying through the air and never colliding. Still she could remember the first months with Ariane when she had been ground between the rigid schedule of Ariane and the rigid schedule of Neil, with no time, no space, no energy for herself.

  “Is he ever jealous of me?” Phil asked her.

  “Why would he be? I’ve never given him cause.”

  “Nevertheless, he is. Isn’t he?”

  “Jealous?” She paused, unable to find the word. “He doesn’t get hot angry that way.”

  “No. Just coldly, persistently. Like a head cold.”

  “You just don’t understand each other.”

  “Are you so sure?”

  Not jealous. Possessive. They were not the same. A couple of times Neil did something that upset her, yet she could not confront him. Twice, a week apart, he came to bed quite late, after she had been asleep awhile. Always of course she awoke and spoke to him, asking him how his work had gone. Once ten days ago and once just last night he had responded by moving over and beginning to make love to her. Half asleep, she had forgotten both times to get up for her diaphragm. She suspected Neil of doing it intentionally, to get her pregnant. But she could not make an issue of it. They made love so seldom in comparison to what she would have liked, she could hardly complain. She had taken to going to bed every night now with her diaphragm already in, but that depressed her, made her think of the fact that probably that night they would again not make love. He said that she looked lovely half asleep, tousled and soft. She wondered if she was less threatening then. But she remembered too how he had loved her when she had been carrying Ariane, how tender, how concerned.…

  In her high energy, she finally replastered the upstairs hall. She answered letters from her father’s new wife—they were buying a condominium in Long Beach on the Island; from Allegra, who sent pictures of her new baby; from Neil’s mother with requests for yet more pictures of Ariane; from Sally and Beth. They were on the road with the women’s theater troupe. They wrote postcards from Bangor, Maine, and Attleboro, Vermont. In Bath they were busted for indecency. Later, snowed in, they sent her a letter together.

  Sally wrote:

  You can send us a note at Goddard, we’ll be there in a month. Use the address of that commune. Tell us how you and Ory Ann are and everybody, I wonder about Phil sometimes with Dorine, what is happening? Though I think Dorine knows how to take care of herself.

  Dorine is worse than us at writing, she don’t have time, and I know we are not so good. We have a new children’s play we do that we like a lot, you could call it a kind of fairy tale, it has a lot to do with how we are thinking about when we were children and our own children. The children are all in it as well as us. We are having a good time traveling women like our name although people think we are a pretty queer bunch. I never lived like this from place to place, I see why gipsies like it. Fern at first did not like being on the move so much though Blake could not be better. Fern likes it too by now.

  Beth wrote:

  We are really a group now. Wanda was right when she insisted we would all come to take over things she did in the beginning for all of us. It is an exciting thing to grow together this way, Miriam, I wish you could be here with us. We make many mistakes still. We have an awful tendency to get so into a new thing, to perform it before we are ready.

  In Utica last week we did a terrible show, a bomb. It was a new piece we were still working on. We went ahead and did it anyhow. Why do we do things like that, all of us, when we say we know something isn’t ready and then we do it? It got off to a slow start, like glue. We lost the audience and we could feel that. It seems as if we responded to that by elaborating more, desperately, and slowing the piece down even more and it just got worse and worse! It was awful.

  But we worked on that same piece (called “The Day the Mirror Broke”) for a whole week. We had this house to work in and we have really got into it. Now it’s one of our best things and I know when we do it next time it will be fantastic and powerful.

  Sally is playing the guitar a lot these days and she is good! She wrote songs for the children’s play. It is nice too, but I am less involved in it than Sally is. I want so bad for you to see us. I can imagine you with us, dancing and banging on the drums and chanting. I love Wanda and I love the troupe and I wish you were with us.

  I love Wanda a lot. I mean that for real! Do you understand? Don’t think because she is so much older than me that it is like mother and daughter, it isn’t. It isn’t anything like anything. It is just us together inside the looser us together.

  Miriam dreamed and dreamed of something real and external to do. She could not go back to work. Every time that subject came up she had to agree with Neil that Ariane could not be turned over like a puppy dog to some hired person to sit with. She did help Neil with his papers more, but he had regular assistants for the classes and on his project. They regarded her as an intruder. Moreover, Neil wasn’t writing papers about the kind of research she wanted to get into. It was all the big machine stuff she had washed her hands of.

  Whose idea? Phil perhaps thought of it or maybe she did. She could fix the time—she had been making rye bread and Phil decided he wanted to take a turn kneading the dough. Then he found he liked that. It turned him on. So they made a loaf for Phil too. Then Phil had been talking about how great homemade bread was and how healthy it was to eat whole-grain bread. He had been on a long slow suicide trip, but now he was going to live with respect for his body.

  It was true Phil told over his vitamins like a rosary. Once when she was in Cambridge they had stopped at Pearl Street—an afternoon Jackson taught—and on the kitchen table stood rows of Phil’s pills: bottles of vitamin E and vitamin A in long oily amber capsules; bottles of desiccated liver and vitamin C plus bioflavinoids, dolomite mineral, lecithin and yeast tablets and kelp. On the breads, anyhow, they could agree. They both doted on dark breads, rye and graham flours, buckwheat, made with molasses or honey, eggs and wheat germ.

  They decided to bake bread and sell it. It was a daydream at first to figure out the cost and how they would go about distribution. But the more they discussed it the more passionately Miriam wanted to do it. At least she would be doing something. She would make a little money. She would be the bread woman. That was nothing Neil could get upset about. It wouldn’t take her out of the home or away from Ariane. It was healthy and womanly and it even had a good smell associated with it.

  Three times a week they began to bake and distribute bread. Monday was rye bread and Wednesday was graham bread and Friday was mixed-grain bread. Phil and she drove around and got health food stores to agree to handle their bread. Phil had long conferences with people he knew in the food co-ops in Cambridge and got two co-ops to agree to put bread on their lists for a week or two to try it out.

  “We can’t figure on making money at first,” she said with cheerful pragmatism to Phil. “Not till we’ve built up a demand, a market. Then we can increase our quantity till we break even and then pull ahead.”

  The bread business gave a rationale for their being together. They were in business, they were partners. Miriam relaxed a bit. She no longer had such a sense of juggling her life. Phil had been properly plugged in. She did not even let herse
lf get too worried when her period was overdue. It had happened before. Phil and she screamed at each other, they made huge messes, they had catastrophes. But they enjoyed every crisis. They had never before worked together.

  Distributing the bread provided a wonderful excuse for running around and seeing all her old freak friends, the communes, the whole Cambridge scene. Sometimes of course a non-event happened. A couple of times he kissed her before she could remember why not. Basically she always had Ariane between them.

  Every so often the subject of Phil would come up with Neil. There seemed no way she could say to Neil, “Don’t worry about Phil! I love him but I don’t take him seriously.” Phil was the only person beside her baby she could play with. About Neil she brooded as usual. Somehow Neil had become a subject she studied. Sometimes she detested herself for thinking in circles about him. Why couldn’t they live together in some easier, looser manner? Why must she always be “understanding” him? He didn’t spend that effort studying her, he didn’t need to. He knew what he expected of her and only grew worried when she failed to provide it.

  If only Neil would understand that she could not take Phil seriously. Phil could hint around, but he could never support Ariane and her. He wasn’t cut out to be a husband and father. When she was younger she had been able to afford Phil because she was supporting herself. If only Neil would stop bothering about Phil and let her have his friendship and the bread business and a little joy and excitement in her daily life.

  One of the project heads at Tech Square, Hardwick, gave Neil a piece of frozen venison. Hardwick had killed a deer in Maine and had had it in his freezer but had decided they would never finish it.

  Neil was sitting at the dining-room table having the tail end of his Sunday breakfast—café au lait made with the milk heated just to scalding and the French roast fresh ground in the blender and some of her bread and jam. The way he sat was neat. His body was compact and she was always wanting to reach out to him at times like these. He remained physically attractive to her in a cozy immediate sense: she was always wanting to touch him. How often now she reached for Ariane instead, afraid of rebuff.

  “Why can’t we have croissants? That’s a real French breakfast.” His tongue touched his lip. “Lovely buttery croissants.”

  “But you didn’t like the ones I got at the bakery.”

  “They weren’t croissants. Just brioche dough in crescent form.” He sipped the last of his coffee, daubed his carefully kept curly beard with the napkin. Then he smiled at her. Instinctively she leaned forward, still wanting to touch him. “Why don’t you see if you can make them?”

  “Neil, I think they’re an all-day affair. You have to roll out the dough and chill it. Butter it and roll it out and chill it again and again.”

  “You spend all day making those breads.” He visibly withdrew. Hurt? Ruffled?

  “But that’s my business.”

  His voice armored itself in mockery. “You sound like my grandmother, who used to live on the edge of Harrisburg and raise chickens. Don’t you think it’s a little unnecessary? We’re better off than we’ve ever been.” He mocked, but his eyes were sulking.

  She did not want to argue about the bread making. “I can try to find a recipe …” How could he act as if she’d rejected him? Sometimes he really confused her. She cursed her mother-in-law for teaching him love was being cooked for, fussed over, provided for with cleanliness and considerable martyred bustling.

  “Imagine driving up to Maine and dressing yourself in scarlet and tromping around the woods shooting cows and dogs and each other,” Neil was saying. “Hardwick is so sure he’s a hero for executing a deer—as if deer could shoot back! Then he won’t be bothered to eat what he’s killed. Probably his wife doesn’t know the first thing about how to roast something that doesn’t come wrapped in plastic from the supermarket. First we’ll thaw it and age it a bit—let it get high. Or should you do a marinade? Anyhow, Friday night when they’re here we’ll serve it back to them. Poetic justice.”

  “You invited them for Friday? That’s one of my bread days.”

  His eyes took on that little-boy sulk. “Friday is a traditional time to have people over. It’s the weekend. If you must play at being a baker, do it another day next week.”

  She remembered believing when she had been getting to know Neil that his unwillingness to shed blood, his contempt for hunting and fishing and fighting, were a refusal to play traditional male roles. She did not think that any more. He disliked violence in words or action; he preferred a quiet tone of authority. After all, losing your temper was a poor tactic for getting your own way, as she had found out time and time again with him. Her emotionality would be used against her.

  Phil lost his temper often. He would blow up and at times he used to threaten her with his fist. She remembered how furious she had been that time Phil had actually hit her. It was horrible to be hit. But to struggle with Neil was far more difficult, Neil could get angry, very angry, but never lose his temper, never lose his sense of strategy in the argument, never lose sight of his goal. She felt weary before him often enough, because he never seemed to doubt his habits or his taste or his predilections or his morality: he seemed to feel through and through that what he liked must be right. When she scratched granite, underneath was more granite. Something in his family and his training gave him that advantage over her, that quiet dreadful surety, the conviction of propriety and sense of moral superiority as a weapon. She could feel hurt, she could feel outraged, she could feel furious: but she could never muster that cool daily self-righteousness. It defeated her time and again. She had married him for his strength, and perhaps that was the source of it.

  Friday of the roast venison and evening dinner party: she had marinated the meat as he had told her. As Neil suggested, she had looked up venison in Larousse Gastronomique (a Christmas present) and was referred to roebuck. She had no idea what cut of deer she had or how old the deer was, so she tried to adopt a medium strategy among the various ways of preparing lean pieces and tender pieces and tough pieces. Friday was the day they made health bread with four kinds of flour, her personal favorite though Phil preferred their rye.

  They got started in plenty of time. Ariane was in an irritable, coddle-me mood, cutting a new tooth, but Phil succeeded in making her laugh a lot. The dough rose well, the second rising was up on time, and the pans went into the oven. The house smelled good. Phil was in a sunny mood and not pushing her at all but singing at the top of his lungs. Ariane was trying to walk that day and falling down a lot and screaming, but every time Phil or she came running and got Ariane moving again before she took her fall seriously. Outside the rain was coming down. The snow was gone and the first green things poking out. Miriam even managed to get time to wash her hair while Phil kept an eye on the first batch baking, and she got Ariane into bed for her afternoon nap so she wouldn’t be cranky when Neil got home and could stay up a bit for the company.

  The bread was in both ovens, the second batch baking while the first batch cooled, when Miriam heard an awful thump and then Ariane’s scream. She did not know how she got upstairs, she was so frightened. Ariane lay on the floor beside her crib, twisted so that Miriam was sure she had broken her leg. Miriam ran to her, seized her up. Somehow Ariane had stood in her crib and climbed on the bars and managed to fall out headfirst. This was supposed to be a crib no child could fall out of, but Ariane had climbed up and fallen and struck her head. She had an ugly sore red spot that was going to be a bruise on her forehead and she was weeping and weeping hysterically. Miriam carried her to the bathroom, shouting at Phil to get out of the way, and sponged her baby. By and by it was clear that Ariane was not badly hurt, but there was that ugly bruise and she had been frightened. The falling had scared her as much as the bump, perhaps, and she clung to Miriam.

  The oven had a buzzer that went off when the time was up, but in the turmoil they must not have heard it. Finally Phil said, “What’s that?” He might have meant the
smell or he might have meant the steady penetrating buzz that had obviously been going for a while, because the whole load of both ovens was burnt. It was not so badly charred it could not be eaten, but it was too burnt to deliver.

  They wasted some time berating each other. Finally they realized there was no time to do anything good. The bread had to be delivered in time for the co-op pickups and there was no short cut in bread making and rising. They decided to cut the loaves in half and deliver half a loaf for each loaf ordered, and to give refunds on half the price.

  “Fuck it. Last week we broke even for the first time!” Phil got on the phone to make sure their solution was okay with the co-op co-ordinators. They were behind schedule and she started cutting and bagging for delivery. Neil came home to the kitchen full of burnt bread, smelling like a fire, with dirty bread pans covering every flat surface, the burnt loaves only half carried out by Phil, who had just got off the phone. As soon as she saw her daddy, Ariane burst into tears and started wailing tragically. “What have you done to her!” he shouted at both of them. He got the idea she had been burnt in a kitchen catastrophe and he was not to be disabused of that until Miriam had told him three times step by step what had happened.

  “Oh, this is lovely, this is charming, this is just what I need!” Neil did not raise his voice. Slowly he paced the kitchen, cutting deliberately in the path of Phil, still toting bags of burnt bread to the garbage, and Miriam, who was finishing bagging the half loaves. “What kind of madhouse is this? It stinks! It’s filthy! I come home and find my child wounded. What’s going on here?”

  “Neil, please. Accidents happen. She isn’t badly hurt—”

  “Are you a doctor? How do you know? She was terrified.”