Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  Wanda got out of jail weighing ninety-four pounds and calling herself a Christian Communist. That was the summer of ’63. Her non-violence died in Mississippi in the summer of ’64, along with Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Wanda could not trace every step of her changes. By the time SNCC expelled its whites, she was already involved in anti-war activity and with Joe. She met Joe at a meeting of the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, where he was representing a Lower East Side organization and she was representing a committee of teachers against the war.

  “You know, I was never much to look at, but I was pretty noisy!” Wanda would laugh, making the bed jangle. “I fell for him like a ton of bricks, Beth. I didn’t even have the dignity to play hard to get. I of course didn’t know I was only the four hundred and fifty-second woman to do that. If we hadn’t been on the same side in a big political battle—the losing side, need I add—I don’t know if I would have seen him again after the first night.”

  They were lying side by side facing, the candle beside the bed throwing the hill of Wanda’s hip on the wall. She lay with one hand tucked under her face. “Joe used to always be organizing women by fucking them, but that wasn’t the scene between us. I guess he liked me at first because—well, he almost admired me. I’d earned some campaign ribbons. I had my credentials—do you see? I was a comrade, so he treated me with a little respect. This of course is before we were married. We weren’t even living together. I was living in Brooklyn where I was teaching, and he was living on Avenue C.”

  “You got married because you got pregnant?”

  “Beth, I didn’t even call myself a Catholic by then. But when I found out I was carrying, I just couldn’t have an abortion. I just couldn’t. Not Joe’s child, not my child. I couldn’t! The thing is, he felt the same way, you know. We’d been seeing each other for a long time by then, but as soon as we got married everything changed, Beth, everything! Then too, that coincided with changes in the movement and a lot more macho prancing and street fighter heroics. Things just got worse and worse. As Puerto Rican militancy developed, that was good for him, he wanted to relate to that, but I’ not Puerto Rican and he’d act as if he were ashamed of me. Then he got a teaching job at Northeastern. Coming to Boston removed me from the political context where I had an identity separate from his. Here I was, Joe’s old lady with the brats, and Joe was out playing wild Latin guerrilla and going to bed with his students, and I was becoming the burden, the nag, the bag. Yeah, the old lady.”

  “Now you’re my old lady.”

  “Not any more than you’re mine. Don’t butch me, you little freckled would-be turtle! Who ever heard of a ticklish turtle?”

  Slowly Beth was learning to be physically affectionate, to be able to comfort and hug and kiss and put her arms around the adults she lived with, as well as the children. Still there were times when her skin prickled and she had to be alone. They had put up a tent out back in the woods that was the alone-place. Probably Beth used it more than anyone else. Living so closely and working so meshed with others abraded her nerves at times so that she would find one day that she was sore with noise and proximity and must withdraw for a day to grow her patience back.

  They had made special friends with a commune in the next town, who were farming seriously. The commune had been started by a couple of former SDS women who had known Wanda, and in fact told Round Earth about the house for rent. There were five women, four men, two babies, and a six-year-old. Round Earth and Bleak House traded food and skills and books and information. They rented tools together and both used them the same day. They bought together things they could not afford separately. They visited back and forth constantly.

  Since Round Earth traveled so much, this was not quite as important to them as to the other commune, but it was important enough. Bleak House was their often captive audience to try out new works from the crude beginnings. The men there were the first men Beth had been real friends with. Everyone in that house had been through a year and a half of fighting their old attitudes and consciously trying to play equal and looser roles. Men who had been involved in such a struggle were different in obvious and in subtle ways. They had different manners and different anxieties. In gross ways the house was unlike other communes: the men cooked too and the women also chopped wood and the men took care of the children and the women climbed up on ladders and worked side by side repairing the roof. One of the men, Alan, did needlepoint for pleasure. He was also accurate with a rifle. He taught Wanda how to shoot. Beth wanted to learn but, for a month, couldn’t get herself around to being able to ask him. Finally she accepted Alan as her teacher—maybe because he was a vegetarian and did not shoot birds or rabbits. Learning to touch and to accept touch from the men at Bleak House was delicate, was gradual. If she had not the constant experiences of the troupe on the road to remind her how oppressive the rest of the society was, sometimes she could have forgotten, traveling between Round Earth and Bleak House.

  All the people in Bleak House had been what Wanda called movement heavies. Bleak House was decorated with the paintings by six-year-old Tamar and with pictures of Madame Binh and Chief Joseph, with a Wanted poster on Nelson Rockefeller in Spanish, with an Outlaws of Amerika Weather-poster with the big bright rainbow. All the people in Bleak House thought of themselves as revolutionaries and saw themselves as enlisted for a fight that would last twenty to thirty years. Most of them spent a lot of time trying to make connections among the freaks who had moved to the country, trying to start alternate institutions like food co-ops and free clinics, and trying to build a bridge of communication to the local people.

  Wanda was glad that Beth liked the people at Bleak House. She said maybe Beth wouldn’t have two years before: that they had always been good people but then they had been desperate and frantic. Now they were settled in for the long haul. Several had served time and almost everyone considered it a possibility. Yet the manners in the house were gentle and warm, as if they were women and men who had learned to consider each other with care. The babies were the only tyrants. No one could deny them. Beth learned to be with them as friends, men and women, in a slow but finally abundant acceptance, like the tendrils on a grapevine growing.

  There were wild grapes at Bleak House and they made conserve together. Alan said they were fox grapes. One afternoon when the grapes were ripening and they were picking them—two days before Round Earth was to leave for the first of their fall tours—Wanda and she made love in the scent and shadow of the vines, their hands and mouths purple and sticky and sweet.

  Making love with Wanda was natural. All the hardness had been in letting herself open up, letting herself respond. They were close physically in bed and out—no sharp differences. Wanda had taught her to love with her body, to express with her body, to know with her body. There was no border between nuzzling affectionately and making love. They were loving each other working, they were loving each other making a play, they were loving each other when they were teaching new women stiff and tight and frightened in their bodies, women who thought themselves weak, how to move, how to fall, how to jump, how to shout.

  She felt as if sensuality born only in her genitals at that first tentative touch had spread through her. Into her arms, into her chest, into her belly, into her buttocks, into her back, into her thighs, into her neck, into her cheeks and her forehead and her nape and her forearms and her toes and her insteps. With whole bodies they made love. There was no question that they could please each other, no need to ask or wonder who would come when or how.

  It was loving. She loved Wanda as Wanda was. She could not imagine Wanda younger or with unlined skin or with her hair all black or her waist tiny as she said it had been before she bore her children. She felt jealous sometimes when she met someone, man or woman, who had known Wanda before. But she fought that. All that living had gone to cure this salty woman to just the right taste for her. Wanda did not close her off from others, did not hold her in a box-shaped intimacy, and she fought herself n
ot to clutch. It was a sureness. She was a tree in strength of love, she dreamed, standing high on a hill in New Hampshire and hung with flowers and fruit at once.

  In May, a year after Round Earth had first come to New Hampshire, they visited Boston. Bringing Ariane and a new baby, Miriam came to an afternoon performance. Ariane sat pressed beside her, sulkier and thinner and taller of course, a delicate lovely-looking child who was given to pouting. She was two years and three months old, almost frightening with her articulate babble. “No” was her favorite word that afternoon. Obviously Ariane did not remember any of them and when Sally bent to kiss her, she kicked and began to wail that she wanted to go home!

  Miriam was looking distracted with Ariane hauling on her and baby Jeff squirming in her lap. He was a fat beamy infant, lighter than Ariane had been at his age in hair and coloring, with Neil’s hazel eyes. There was no time to talk, with people milling around and old friends to speak to and Ariane tugging on Miriam’s arm, stomping her foot and saying, “Now! I want to go home now!”

  The next day Beth went out to Brookline to the big gray house for lunch. Miriam made her a cheese omelette, then sat at the table watching her eat with her head propped on her hands. “Oh, I’m on a diet. I’m always on a diet. Since my last pregnancy. Isn’t he a chubby little darling? I’m glad he was a boy, Beth, I mean it. At least Neil’s off my back now about making babies. One of each kind seems to be adequate. I know it really is better for Ariane to have a sibling—I always felt sorry for only children, except for the moments in my childhood when I wished I was one. But, being the oldest in my family, I think I can get into her feelings and try to make it up to her.”

  Of necessity Beth observed the children a great deal: Ariane interrupted the conversation freely and frequently, and always Miriam stopped whatever she was doing or saying to listen to her and answer her with full seriousness. Beth felt differences between Ariane and Fern, Ariane and Luis and Johnny, Ariane and Tamar. Receiving a huge share of Miriam’s intelligent and concentrated attention from morning to night, Ariane was far more intellectually and verbally precocious than the commune children, but not as emotionally mature. She was more imaginative, fey, sensitive, and demanding, and far more seductive. She seemed already feminine. The commune children looked more to each other and less to adults, and were at the same time surer of adult attention. Always someone was available, not one of a couple to be seduced from each other, entrapped or forced into granting precious attention. Love did not feel like a scarce commodity or exclusive interaction. The commune children looked grubbier, hardier, scabby and banged up more. They seemed generally more physical in affection, in exploration, in aggression, in play.

  “The way you say ‘He,’ “Beth remarked, “you sound like my mother talking about my father to Marie, my married sister.… Isn’t it funny I always say ‘my married sister’ though Nancy’s married now too.” So am I, she wanted to add. Wanda pressed on her. Beth felt invisible to Miriam because she had not explained her life.

  “Oh, you know, marriage is struggle. It’s never what you expect.” Miriam reached out to put an arm around Ariane, who ducked away, grimacing. “You just never anticipate what things you’ll have to give up to keep it together. I think we’ve reached a modus vivendi and have a good strong marriage, finally.”

  “You always say that! Every year you say, ‘This is a good marriage, it’s not nearly so bad as last year.’ ”

  “Growing up in a tight so-called happy family, he has fixed ideas about how wives are supposed to act, how I’m supposed to show I love him.… He needs, he wants a quiet, controlled, contemplative life and that’s been hard for me to provide, because I’m not naturally that way.…”

  “Why should anybody provide somebody else with a life? With Wanda—with the commune—we don’t provide each other a life—”

  “With that many people it must be different. I try to be helpful. The only interesting work I do is when I help him prepare a presentation or write a paper.”

  “Does he give you credit?”

  “Are you kidding? Besides, what would it matter if he put my name on? Only the principal author—the guy whose name comes first—gets credit. That’s true even when some graduate student wrote the whole thing. So? What else is new?”

  “Don’t you see Phil any more at all?”

  “There’s no use my pretending I’m not married part of the time and that I can have my old friends … and Neil really loathed the bread business. He can think up ninety-two reasons not to do anything! He kept saying, ‘Suppose somebody gets sick from your bread, suppose you drop a hair in, suppose you don’t deliver on time and somebody sues!’ He’s a worrier! He’s always thinking what might go wrong. He’s making Ariane that way, and it bothers me. She’s naturally a brave, curious child but she picks up his fears.”

  It was hard to get Miriam onto any other subject. “So you don’t see Phil any more? But you do see Dorine?”

  “I say hello to him sometimes. He’s living in Dorine’s commune. Neil knows I go to see Dorine, he just doesn’t know Phil’s in the house. Dorine’s my best friend—I lean on her. Who else can I really talk to? Phil and I don’t have much to say.”

  “I don’t like Phil, we rub each other wrong. But you were friends for so long. Did you get tired of him?”

  Miriam looked at her hands for a long time. “Far from it.”

  Ariane interrupted, pulling suddenly at Miriam’s hair, hard. She persisted till Miriam let her climb in her lap.

  Beth asked, “Then how could you agree never to see Phil? If Neil decides not to like me, would you never see me? Or Sally?”

  “It’s not the same, Bethie, you know it isn’t. I couldn’t fight Neil. I was already pregnant with Jeff! Suppose I’d said, ‘Fuck you, man, I’ll see who I feel like’? All he’d have had to do was say, ‘Fine, bye-bye.’ ”

  The fear in Miriam’s voice confused her. She never imagined that Wanda would leave her.

  “Bethie, I love him, and besides, he’s the father of my children. It would have been so masochistic to alienate Neil just to keep an old boy friend hanging around.… Though I did make a private protest, for my soul’s sake.”

  “You mean, not out loud to him?”

  “Don’t tell anyone! It was stupid. Right after the doctor told me I was pregnant, I went to see Phil while Laverne still had Ariane. I went to bed with him. Just that last time, so he’d know I didn’t feel indifferent. It was something I owed him.”

  “Only that once? Did you feel guilty?”

  “No.…” Miriam shrugged. Ariane had climbed down and gone to stand at the window. “Just sad. It was so furtive, a drag somehow. Being scared the whole time somebody would come in. Sure enough, the minute we were dressed, in came Jackson. And, Beth, he had a woman with him. A blond who’d been his student. There he was being ironic and distant with her and there she was eating him up with loving eyes. It turned my stomach.… The next time I heard from Phil he was living with Dorine in that commune. He likes that house, he makes furniture, he has another guy to work with. It’s actually handsome furniture. Really, it’s not what I would ever have imagined for him, but he’s thriving. And he’s involved in something political with other ex-cons.… He said to me once very formally, ‘I’ve made a commitment to Dorine.’ ”

  Beth tried and tried to talk about the commune, about Wanda. Miriam was curious and asked questions about how they worked on their plays and how they took care of the children. But Beth felt her shy away when she tried to talk about Wanda.

  “She’s so much older than you,” Miriam said, “isn’t it sort of a mother thing? I understand that you admire her, but …”

  “No, no! It’s not like that.” Impressions flooded her. She could see Wanda with her hand on her hip saying, “Women are always trying to push each other into the mother role or accusing each other of taking that over. I won’t be the one who has to give and give like a personal soup kitchen and who isn’t allowed any weakness. Most women
act as if they’re terrified that some so-called strong woman will make ‘demands’ on them. Then they’ll suddenly be six and in mother’s pocket again. I don’t want a wife, I don’t want to be your angel mother or your demon mother. I just want to be your loving friend. And I think you’re strong enough to carry your share of the load.”

  Remembering, Beth still could find nothing to say except, “No, it’s not like that! Women can be more to each other than mother and daughter or client and helper or competitors.”

  Going down the street after lunch, she felt angry at herself for being unable to say a thing that was so simple and so important and so beautiful as what Wanda was to her and she to Wanda.

  The next morning Beth went down to Goddard extension early where they were holding a workshop, to set up. A while later Sally came flying in and said that something was wrong, she did not know what, but some man had come with an official paper, a subpoena for Wanda, and that Wanda was seeing a lawyer. They would have to do the workshop alone. Beth was scared. Was it the children? Was someone trying to take the boys away? Was someone trying to close their new school? She was too worried about what was happening to spare energy to worry about whether she could handle her share of the workshop without Wanda. She just went and did it. It was learning to fall all over again.

  Twenty-three women turned up. A great feeling of energy and power and joy built up through the warm-ups and the scenes and the organisms. She worked then with a small group, lying on their backs with their heads together in the center, like an open flower. She taught them breathing exercises and how to let out the air and sustain their voices. She had them groaning and bellowing and ululating and singing openmouthed. By the end they were all dancing together, making their own music by beating palms on their bodies.