Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  “If she’s going to learn to walk, she has to fall sometimes.”

  “Are you going to justify her injury? Are you going to say it’s a good thing for her to fall on her head? Perhaps she’ll fall down the steps next time you’re too busy to keep an eye on her. Have you gone mad?”

  “Neil, you’ll frighten her more by carrying on. I’m sorry she hurt herself. I was scared myself. But she’ll fall many times. She was trying to get out of her crib.”

  “Why weren’t you on hand? What is all this nonsense? Just what do you think you’re doing with this garbage all over the house? This is a sane thing for my wife to be doing?”

  “This is our business! I want to do something! It doesn’t take much time and this is the first time something’s gone wrong.”

  “How many things have to go wrong before you learn? A professor’s wife peddling bread from door to door. I’m tired of the mess and the confusion. Hardwick will be here in an hour and a half, and look!”

  Miriam was surreptitiously signaling to Phil to leave, but Phil was being stubborn. He folded his arms, scowling. “Why are you afraid of him, Miriam? What are you so afraid of? What has he done to you?”

  “Shh, Phil.” She tried to wave him out. “Take the bread!”

  “What does he do to make you so afraid? I demand to know why.”

  “Who are you to demand anything?” Neil turned on him. “What are you? What are you doing here? Why don’t you go home, if you have a home?”

  “Neil! He’s my friend. He’s here because I asked him.”

  “Well, why do you? This isn’t a hotel or an orphanage. I’ve heard things about this man. I’ve heard he was put in jail in California for selling drugs.”

  “Not selling, possession,” Phil drawled. “Do get your facts straight. Jail’s an interesting place to visit, but I don’t think you’d like to live there. Miriam knows that. I think everybody in Boston knows it except you. You’d know it too if you had any curiosity about other human beings.”

  “Everybody in Boston seems to know quite a bit about you. I don’t want to. I don’t want you around my child. I don’t want you around my wife. I don’t want you in my house. I don’t trust you and I don’t see why I should put up with you any longer. You’re nothing but a parasite!”

  “Neil! Stop that. Phil’s my friend!”

  “I’m here because she wants me here.” Phil made that shaggy butting motion of his head. “I’m not going till she wants me gone. I care about her in a way you couldn’t conceive of—you academic prig with your iron sense of property! You cold slimy eel wriggling through the university bottom. You don’t want a woman, you want a fucking domestic staff, housekeeper, butler, nanny, pastry cook, gamekeeper, wine steward. Why don’t you fuck a robot?”

  “Phil, shhh! Both of you!” She waved Phil to leave. “Phil, please leave! Leave, before you make things worse!”

  “They can’t be worse, don’t you see that yet? How much will you take? What’s wrong with you, pigeon? Wake up!”

  But finally, finally, because the bread had to be delivered, Phil walked out with his chin in the air. Then she had to go dashing around the kitchen dumping the dirty bread pans into the pantry out of the way and getting supper started and picking up Ariane’s toys from every place and trying to remember what she had planned for dessert. Neil had gone into his study and slammed the door.

  When the Hardwicks arrived, supper was not yet ready, she was still wearing her pants smeared with dough, and when they finally sat down to the boasted feast the venison was tough and dry. She still could not tell whether she had undercooked it or overcooked it, but it was miserable. Everyone chewed and chewed and chewed the meat. Hardwick and his wife Elaine kept making terrible insincere compliments on the sauce. The meal dragged on while she picked at her plate.

  When the Hardwicks finally left, Neil went up to bed without a word and she followed. She could not face cleaning up yet. She felt exhausted and curiously numb, detached from a body that felt bloated. In the bedroom she looked at Neil sitting on the bed naked clipping his toenails. He did not look at her. The teeth of the mechanism met neatly and the waxing moon of nail fell in an arc. She felt a great reluctance to get into bed, to lie down to whatever was coming. She looked at the calendar on her dresser, she brushed her hair. She could feel him behind her bunched over, gathered into himself. Yet he did not begin the cold rational attack, the listing of her errors. He said only thickly, his voice furred with emotion, as he shut out the light and lay down so that no part of him would touch her, “I don’t want that man in the house.”

  “Neil, he doesn’t come to see you. He’s my friend. I’m working with him.”

  “I don’t want him in my house. I don’t want him near Ariane! I’m not making a request, I’m telling you!”

  Her throat closed. Some deep new anger in his voice, a gathered violence pushing on her. After a while he added, “If you don’t have sense enough to understand that men of that sort aren’t suitable friends, I’ll make the decision for both of us. I’m telling you this: if he comes in this house again, I’m calling the police! I’ll take Ariane and stay in a hotel with her before I’ll see that man around my daughter.”

  She lay awake all night. She was two months overdue, she was pregnant, she knew it. She could feel that quickening knot. She was embarked again. She felt as if he had said to her, “I require your right arm,” had drawn a knife and performed the amputation. She knew she was bleeding. She knew she was hurt badly. But she could not feel anything except a vague surprise at how things were going in her life.

  She would see Phil sometimes, but out of the house. More lies, and he would be far from the center of her life. They would not work together. She would have no bread business. She would lose him, finally. Phil would not accept being sacrificed to Neil’s anger, he would not forgive. She could not forgive herself for sacrificing him, but she did not see how she could fight Neil and win.

  It was different from what she had expected, so different. If she concentrated, she could remember how she had felt. She had thought Neil was lucky to get her because he was lonely and lacked skills for being close to others, and she would be close to him and help him be in touch with his own feelings and his body. She had thought she was lucky, because now she had made it as a woman, she was loved, she was safe, she was cherished and wanted. She had imagined both of them working in their field in mutual admiration and support. She had imagined that since he loved her, of course he would make some compromises: she would be able to get her way on things that mattered to her, a reasonable proportion of the time.

  It seemed to her that every man she had loved had tried to protect himself from her as if she were a dangerous monster. She lay on the bed like a half-finished meal. She: who was she? Mrs. Neil Stone. Vessel carrying embryo. Miriam Berg was dead. Miriam Berg had many troubles but she had been someone to be, a person anyhow. Mrs. Stone was nobody in particular. She would not be missed, except by Ariane. Phil was right: Neil could replace her by Larousse Gastronomique with pushbuttons.

  Lying beside Neil, she was frightened. She did not feel loving toward him, she would have liked to hurt him. But she did not dare. He had threatened her for the first time with leaving her. That was the first time he had said he would go, he would take Ariane and go. But what scared her most in the thin dark was that he would cease loving her even as laxly as he had been doing. In striving to survive as a person she had angered him, she had injured him in his sense of how things should be, and his withdrawal might last. He created a clear unequivocal moral world of man and wife in which she ran before his judgment like a rabbit.

  As she rested her hands on her belly she had a fantasy that she had loved Phil one afternoon, so that they had conceived this baby. Phil’s baby. It was empty nonsense; yet as a fantasy it was consoling and she cherished it. This baby is dedicated to the one I love, she thought, the one who will never forgive me. Then she thought, I mean me.

  28

&nb
sp; Caught in the Net

  After two months of being on the road, Traveling Women rented a house on twenty-odd acres in New Hampshire, near Berlin. They rented it early enough in the spring to get a garden in. Sometimes they were all there for a day or two, sometimes for weeks. One or two usually stayed home and so did the kids. The garden had to be tended and watered, the kids had had enough of living out of duffel bags. Everyone felt the need for a center. They renamed themselves the Round Earth. They took turns staying home when the troupe was touring.

  Although the farmhouse was drafty and out of repair and nothing worked well for long, Beth loved the house. It had only one bathroom—impossible. There were too many of them. Laura rigged up an outdoor shower at the hose connection. When the weather was warm enough, that relieved some congestion. They dug a pit toilet and built an outhouse over it. They began to construct a sauna bath.

  Life on the farm was rough and makeshift, but they were learning to do many things new to them. Several of them could work on the truck, they all worked the land, they fixed up the house. Money was in short supply. They still did a mixture of free and paid performances. Sometimes they played outdoors. Sometimes they performed in university auditoriums. Sometimes they passed the hat to the crowd that had collected, sometimes they got a nice cashable check from a bursar’s office, sometimes they were paid in fruit or vegetables or maple syrup, sometimes they got only a place to sleep and a meal.

  They were uneven, but their lows were not as bad as they had been and their highs were much higher. They were still learning how to use their bodies, how to use their voices, how to use their minds, how to pick up the vibrations from an audience and use them to carry the audience further. They were still learning how they felt and how to express it and create with it.

  When Beth got up in the morning, she felt good. She would run outside barefoot or in tennis shoes. She would run outside and stare at the mountains and laugh. It seemed amazing that she should feel so good, that she should live with people she loved and work together with them. That she should be allowed to love Wanda and be with her. The air was clean, the birds came and she remembered Connie, who had always known their names, and wondered what had gone wrong and how David was and if he remembered them. Selling vegetables on the road one day, she made a little money and bought for the children—for Wanda’s boys, really, Johnny and Luis, because they were the only ones old enough to use it—a book of birds with big colored pictures.

  Beth freckled and then finally tanned for the first time. Often they worked outside naked. They were becoming less awkward when they did physical labor, although some of them, Sally for instance, had never been awkward. They raised their vegetables organically and picked berries and made preserves and kept chickens for eggs—Rhode Island Reds with feathers of bronze and stormy characters. She had never considered that chickens were actually birds, like robins and bluejays: they had their lives, they interacted, they had dramas and depressions. They would become broody and have to be snapped out of the blues by being dunked in water. Their rooster really did crow in the mornings and sometimes in the afternoons too. He was beautiful and arrogant. All their chickens were beautiful. They had also a black goat named Harriet. She gave milk which they used as it was and also tried to make into cheese. Their cheese was foul and slimy, but they ate it anyhow and kept trying.

  They had a calico cat who came one day pregnant and now they had three kittens also. There had been a fourth but it was hit on the road by a car that did not even slow down. Mother Jones was the calico, the kittens Snow, Rudy, and Lucy Stone. Even the chickens had names, but Beth could tell only the rooster and one of the hens whose tail hung funny. She called them all Here Chickie, Chickie, If they thought she had food, they came; otherwise they looked at her, head cocked, and went the other way.

  Luis and Johnny were passionate about naming. They were in the process of mapping the world and naming everything. They loved to have long conversations about Mount Heobalbalus and the Valley of Zombies and Boot Hill. Every anthill on the twenty-three acres they had named and scrawled on a map in seven colors of crayon. Luis in particular would get very mad if they refused to use what he considered the right names of places.

  He was the older. He was brown-haired and curly and big-boned. He was handsome, perhaps already a little vain, loved his new (to him) two-wheel grown-up bicycle, was quick-witted and good with tools. At seven he took a certain amount of responsibility for all the rest of the children. Johnny was small and skinny and dark. In the summer his skin tanned so dark Beth did not always like the way people looked at him in the village. He had Wanda’s huge eyes. He was quieter and shyer and Beth’s favorite of all the children. He loved the animals. He cried all day and all night when Nick the kitten was run over. Beth always felt he took everything in and forgot nothing. But spending so much time running in the fields and the woods with the other children, he got rougher and easier as the summer progressed. He lost some of that excessive soulfulness. He seemed to brood less.

  School was awful, something had to be done. They had to set up a free school for the kids. They got into planning that with some of the other communes in the area. The other kids taunted them at school. And they learned so many untruths. They learned less than they did at home and they hated it. They picked up bad habits. But Wanda promised Luis that, by the fall, they would have solved the problem and he would not have to go back to the local school, on the yellow bus.

  Mornings. Beth woke, Wanda beside her in the jangling old bed. The shade had fallen off again and the sun streamed onto clothes dropped on the braided rug Sally had made. Wanda slept with her hand palm outward, shielding her eyes from the sun. Beth had to pick up that hand and move it to kiss Wanda good morning. Wanda’s hair—coarse black and streaked with white that shone like metal in the sun—tumbled on the pillow. In the strong sun her skin was coarse, the grain of her face very visible. Loving Wanda stretched her like a big bass drum: loving Wanda was fierce and huge and made her feel about to break open like an overripe fruit, as if she loved more than she could contain. She waited for Wanda to open her eyes, deep-set, intense black eyes. Burning in her tanned face.

  They were together in the house and separate in the house. The house did not exist to reflect or contain or support them, any more than it did Jane sleeping in the next room with her husband Eric, who was with them for the summer. Sometimes the needs of the troupe and the house let them be closely together, made a common substance of their lives; sometimes the needs of the group pulled them apart.

  She had to control her desire to stand over Wanda with teeth bared, trying to keep the world at bay. Wanda had wanted to be loved, Wanda had asked her for intimacy for a long time before they had begun to love each other. But Wanda had been loved before. Once upon a time Joe had loved her in the early years they were together. Wanda had that skill of finding people here and there who would love her eventually. But for herself, Beth was convinced that Wanda was her miracle, and that there was no other possible chance for her to love equally and passionately and with her whole heart, if she had not this small dumpy dark throaty woman to hold. Wanda was her wren, her witch, her fire, her rose, her wilderness, and her nest of sweet repose.

  Wanda needed to reach out to others. There was the man in New York she saw when they performed there, the radical printer who lived on Morton Street. Beth hated that street. If she was silly enough to insist on asking, Wanda would say matter-of-factly that yes, she had gone to bed with him. He was an old friend and she liked to be with him.

  She wanted to know everything about Wanda. Especially at night before they fell asleep, they would discuss the day’s problems and interactions. Other times they would exchange some year—their fifteenth, for instance. Wanda had been born in Queens but her family had moved out to Farmingdale on Long Island. Her father was second-generation Italian, a conductor on the Long Island Railroad who wore an American flag pin on his uniform and an AMERICA LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT bumper sticker on his Ford
. Wanda’s only brother had been blown apart in Korea and had died slowly in an army hospital for three years. Her father had closed himself off from all of them in his grief, turning it at last into a cold angry patriotism that explained his loss and the emptiness of things. Her mother, from a Polish family, cleaned and cleaned and spent a lot of time in church. Wanda had been sent to a parochial grade school, but the public high school. Her mother in particular wanted her to be a schoolteacher. She said it was something Wanda could always fall back on. Her parents mistrusted books but stressed the importance of going to college to get a decent job. Frequently on Sundays they had gone to her brother’s granite slab to leave a potted geranium and avoid each other’s eyes in anguished embarrassment.

  As a child Wanda had been very religious. One of the nuns, Sister Mary Theresa, thought she might have a vocation. Wanda had not wanted to go to the public high school. There she had been visible chiefly as a quiet studious girl who would cross the stage on honors day to receive awards for being the girl on the library staff to work the most hours in the semester, or the hall guard with the best attendance record; or to stand and recite in earnest throatiness speeches on Sportsmanship and Making Democracy Work and Citizenship in the Halls. She was always collecting money for starving orphans in Greece or Radio Free Europe (picture of wan children behind barbed wire) or UNICEF or birth defects (picture of deformed child standing on crutches). She sang in the glee club and choral society.

  Maybe Wanda’s love for singing led her astray, because when she went away to college and became a teacher the way she was supposed to, she spent a lot of time folk singing. Although she had absorbed rhetoric about individualism and free enterprise and the Crusade against Godless Communism, she did not retain her parents’ racism so well. God must love all little children, including little black children trying to go to school. She got involved in civil rights. Wanda’s first serious boy friend, at age twenty-one, was a black organizer from St. Louis. She began to teach the fourth grade, but her summers off she spent in the South. Her father threatened to shoot her and to have her put in an insane asylum or in jail. When she went to jail the first time, it was in Birmingham, although in a funny way the trooper who busted her reminded her of her father. Wanda’s two younger sisters, who thought she was crazy, both lived on Long Island.