Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  Sally could not decide what to do. She wanted to go on working with the group, but she did not want to take the children out of the free school they had started. Fern particularly wanted to stay in the school. Sally and Beth took Fern and Blake, cat and kittens, Harriet and the chickens to Bleak House, which had lost two people to the grand jury. Sally decided she would live at Bleak House but spend some time with the theater group. Fern was enthusiastic because she knew the children from school and Tamar was her best friend and there were also two dogs and rabbits at Bleak House. Fern was thin and sinewy at four and a half, with sandy red hair and freckles over freckles. She galloped like a colt, all legs and giggles.

  Beth moved in to stay with Sally and the kids and to brood. She did not want to be responsible for anything or anybody, since she had lost, she had failed her charges. Since the court had taken custody she had not been able to see or to talk with Luis or Johnny. Now they were in Farmingdale with Wanda’s parents. The thought of that tortured. How every day must be to them. But they were hardy and together. The last time she had seen them, being led out with their hair shorn and dressed in new plaid shirts and dark pants, Luis’ a little too small on him and Johnny’s a size too big, Luis had given her the clenched fist salute. Luis, take care, take care!

  At Bleak House she shared a room with Sally as they had in Roxbury. Sally talked far more now, but Beth talked less. She felt wrecked, cast up on an empty shore to harden under the sun and salt. She wanted to be quiet and heal. She wanted to think—but not yet. Instead she had bad dreams of pursuit and flight, attack, more flight. Or worse, she had good dreams and then woke to find them deception. The only time she cried was at night, in the dark, when she woke from dreaming of Wanda—Wanda picking beans between the rows into a sieve and popping a tiny sweet one into Beth’s mouth, Wanda sticking a rose behind her ear and dancing in the kitchen with Luis to Sally’s guitar. In the humid afternoons she would hear the bobwhite calling and remember Johnny imitating them: he loved the birds that said their name, chickadee, bobwhite, towhee, peewee, whippoorwill. Luis and Johnny had never managed to see a whippoorwill, though summer evenings they could hear them madly shrilling. One night the boys and Fern had tried for an hour to find one by its voice and came back lumpy with mosquito bites.… Fern would wind her arms that freckled like Beth’s own around Beth’s neck and tell her not to be sad, that she loved Beth and when she grew up she would go break down the prison walls and bring back Luis and Wanda and Johnny and they would all live at Bleak House together with Harriet and Rudy and Snow and Mother Jones. Beth felt broken. She could not seem to rouse from her lethargy.

  Fern and Tamar talked of Luis and Johnny as if they were in prison like Wanda. At odd times Beth flashed the image of Wanda’s iron-gray father gripping Luis by the upper arm and hauling him off while Wanda’s mother came pittering after, clasping her beaded purse hovering over Johnny’s head as he tried to turn and wave.

  Sally and Alan tried to persuade Beth to work in the free school, but she could not engage herself. Something very tentative was happening between Sally and Alan, not yet sexual, perhaps never to be, that had something to do with how they both related to the children.

  Perhaps Beth would have stayed on and on at Bleak House because she felt broken and it was easy to be there, easy to stay with her own momentum destroyed and her sense of her life deflected. But in October a letter came from Anita. The grand jury in Boston was still sitting and had subpoenaed a new wave of witnesses. By now opposition was beginning to be organized and a massive effort to get out publicity on what was happening and to raise money for defense was going on. Laura had come from New York to help, and Anita asked Beth to do a couple of mailings with them. In the back of Beth’s mind as she went was the hope that somehow Anita would have discovered some legal route to get Luis and Johnny back.

  She worked in the office occupied by the defense committee and slept at Dorine’s Wednesday and Thursday nights. Dorine was very glad to see her, affectionate, eager to help, running over with news and excitement. She had a good fellowship and an interesting job and she was active in a radical caucus of women in life sciences. Phil and Dorine had separate rooms, separate lives, but the mannerisms of a couple who trusted each other. Beth felt ashamed first, that something about the way Phil would rub Dorine’s back, something about the way they discussed choices each had to make, reminded her of herself with Wanda; second, that they made her feel desperately alone. When they went off to Phil’s room, leaving her to the big hard bed Phil had built for Dorine, she felt as if her flesh could sense them making love, exchanging, like the paramecia Dorine had been working with and talking about, information, protoplasm, energy from their days.

  The fishing expedition had caught a mixed bag: Catholic left, old SDS people, pacifists, women’s movement, Socialist Workers’ Party, gay liberation, Progressive Labor, academic liberals, and some old Peace and Freedom Party members. Many of them were untouched by the struggles of the women’s movement, and would walk into the office, treat Anita, who was heading defense, as the secretary, and persist in addressing all remarks of content to Bruce, a second-year law student who was doing footwork. They would bristle on contact with Laura and Lynn. They stepped on Beth coming and going.

  Friday night she found herself attending a general fundraising party to which half of Cambridge had been invited, at the house of a professor of sociology attached to some institute attached to Harvard. It was a large white house on Sparks Street, surrounded by old maples that had turned orange and scarlet. Severe and shuttered outside, inside it was fancy and jammed with people wearing long glittering dresses and dungarees. It was catered and waited upon, and Beth felt violently uncomfortable.

  Beside herself, twitching with nervousness, wishing she could shut her eyes and wake up back in her bunk at Bleak House, she crept into a corner by the rum fruit punch. Having had no lunch and no supper, she ate canapés on crackers and drank. Holding a glass was something to do. These elegant people chattered and shrieked like macaws. This was the other end of the world from Round Earth, from Bleak House: yet these people had money and therefore she was served up to them to question and stare at, a wild aberrant little lesbian whose lover was in prison. With curiosity they looked her over when they did not overlook her. It pressed in upon Beth what a distance she had traveled beyond what she had been raised to, like a chicken escaped and become a wild bird. Who had ever heard of a wild chicken gone to scavenge in the woods with the partridges and woodcocks and hawks? So she held glass after glass after glass.…

  And woke in the morning light. Woke alone, queasy and stupefied with blood turned to sour milk, remembering nothing. Then after a bit she recognized the cot, though the room seemed strangely larger, lighter. “Jackson! Jackson!”

  He came in wiping his hands on his pants. “How are you feeling?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it. I don’t.”

  “Haven’t you ever been hung over?” He sat on the bed’s edge to stroke her hair back with a hand hot and damp from dishwater.

  “Is that what I have? But I feel sick.”

  “But you were sick. On the street, on the porch, in the hall, on the steps, in the car. There wasn’t enough left in you, fortunately, to throw up at this end of the trip.”

  “How disgusting.” She buried her face in the pillow. “What else did I do?”

  “Do you really not remember? Or do you just want to wallow in it?”

  “Go away. I’ll get dressed and come to the kitchen.” Combed and dressed, she sat eating scrambled eggs. “I can’t understand how I got so drunk!”

  “I can’t understand how anybody who drank conservatively seven glasses of hard booze can wonder … The mind goes out but the body goes on and so do the jaws. And the consequences.”

  “What on earth did I do that you’re sitting there with that smile remembering?”

  “Well, you didn’t hit anyone, though you did kick one man.”

  “Me?”

&nbs
p; “You. You insulted—again conservatively—ten or twelve gentlemen, including particularly your host, whom you compared unfavorably to a bottle of library paste. You said a bottle of library paste had more backbone and more taste.”

  “I said that?” Beth covered her face. “At a fund-raising party I went up to people and randomly insulted them? I couldn’t do that!”

  “There was nothing random about it. You were sitting in a corner by the punch trying to finish it and you looked distraught. Men would come up to you and you’d fix them with a stare and say something deadly.”

  “I can’t believe this.… Did I say anything to you?”

  “Only that I was afraid of you.… And that I shouldn’t make such a fuss about going to bed with you. After all you’d seen me undressed already, on Memorial Day.” He grinned. “Don’t make such gloomy faces. Have a beer, you’ll feel better.”

  “I couldn’t feel worse.” Inside or outside.

  He opened one for her and one for himself. “Drink it slowly.”

  “Why are you so amused this morning?” She glared at him. “And how come you brought me home after all that?”

  He smiled and smiled. “Why, it’s becoming something of a habit, once a year bringing you home from a party or other disaster.”

  “Wanda is my lover. Do you know that?”

  “You said that too last night, at appropriate intervals. You know, it’s been interesting, watching you. Who’d ever have expected the turns and turnabouts? So you think you’ve found a sexual identity at long last? What a spunky little thing you come on as, all teeth and claws and big brown eyes.”

  “You’re laughing at me. But I think it’s true, what I said … that you are afraid.”

  He rubbed droplets off the bottle with his thumb. “Why should I be?”

  “I wonder myself.”

  “As the aging virgin said when she fell off the cliff backward, hurry up and ask me again.”

  She looked up from her beer and he was watching with a new, even warier smile. With a shiver of surprise and dismay, she came slowly around the table to stand before him. Had she ever expected him to agree? She could not quite remember why she had wanted this to happen. But here she was and Wanda was far away behind walls and bars. This was old but unsettled business.

  Still sitting, almost casually he reached out and touched her cheek, caressed lightly her face, her hair, her nape. His sad, perplexed, and faintly challenging face had finally lost its smile or swallowed it inside. They looked at each other a long moment, their bodies not yet touching, both holding their breath and partly antagonistic. Then with a short dry laugh he reached out and pulled her onto his lap, wrapped her tight in his arms, and kissed her slowly and quite consciously.

  After a while he picked her up and carried her out of the kitchen. “How light you are. Like a child.”

  “I’m not a child.”

  “Don’t I know that? Children don’t turn me on.” Kicking the door open, he carried her to … it was not the mattress. The bed was large and solid-feeling. This room was somehow different. Wooden blinds, blue draperies on the windows. Trying to control her clumsy nerves, she got undressed as he did.

  Lying with him in the new bed, she felt as if hot and cold currents were flowing through her, mixing, separating, clashing. Point Lobos with Karen long ago. Sleeping bag among the cypresses. Drapes on the half-open window flickered to and fro over Orpheus, who sprawled on the sill grooming his sooty fur. She met the cat’s agate stare, a little disconcerted. Watching. And Jackson was watching her, his eye sandy and shallow and thoughtful, opaque as the gaze of a horse. Gentle, the word kept pattering in her head, he was being gentle with her. He was slowly and expertly and carefully turning her on.

  She did not want to allow him that much dispassionate control and worked stubbornly to subvert it. But he was determined and all around her and expert. It was sex like an argument, like a proposition, like an explanation: he wanted only her acquiescence to take her along. The pleasure was an argument.

  As if to leave nothing at all to chance he went down on her until she came before he entered her. It was almost embarrassing, to come with him still so in control, so attentive, so conscious. Yet it was working. When he pushed into her she was alive to him. She was acutely conscious of what she felt and did not any more quite distinguish him from her in the pushing. Slowly it went on and on and on, slowly until she came, violently, and found herself back to herself, marvelously loosened and at ease.

  Then something in him loosened too. More was involved than his moving differently, harder and more rapidly for his climax. The looseness stayed in him as he lay on his back, yawning. He fell asleep for a while, snoring softly. She lay on her side regarding Orpheus, her hands tucked under her face. Like Wanda; she was lying on her side as Wanda often lay. Orpheus stared back for a while. Then he got up, stretched, yawned, and come over to the bed. He hopped up and lay down between them, purring.

  She was surprised at herself. Surprised that she had gone to bed with him while Wanda was in prison. Possibly she was still angry at Wanda for being willing to leave her for any reason. More probably she had been attracted to Jackson for so long that it was a question that would go on asking itself till finally answered. She felt she was learning something new about herself—not perhaps what Jackson thought he was showing her, but something.

  When he woke, he reached out and pulled her over on top of him. “How’s the sexual identity this morning?”

  “More varied. Are you always so sure of yours?”

  “Feel.” He gave Orpheus a nudge. “What do you think you’re doing in bed? Think I’m going to cut you in for a piece of the action, you old tomcat? Out! Go find your own pussy.”

  She laughed and her hand slid lower. “See, now I have you by the balls. I do remember that man saying that’s all every woman really wants. Was that the one I kicked?”

  “Yes, in the shin. You said that would do as well.”

  “You found all that attractive!” She stared at him, straddled. “You do. Isn’t that perverse?”

  “It amuses me. By and by we can have a discussion about how awful that is.”

  On top she could come more easily. They were both looser, more passionate, more spontaneous. She forgot to watch whether he was watching and he lost his ironic control and writhed under her and grabbed her behind and moaned.

  After she had taken a bath, at lunch of sardines and tomatoes in the kitchen, she said to him, “The apartment is different. Isn’t anyone living here with you?”

  “Years of roomies have worn me down. Besides, with rent control this place is a bargain and I’m not quite so hard up. I’ve got a job teaching at the U. of Mass. in Boston. I’ll never get rich but it’s a far cry from washing dishes or sweeping floors or getting a graduate student stipend a family of gerbils would starve on. My wants are few. I eat a little better, I can afford to have the place to myself—that’s the major luxury—I feed Orpheus chicken livers, I buy a better tobacco mixture and better booze. I bought a piece of furniture or two. That’s it.”

  “What strange journeys lives are. You started in the middle class, you dropped out, and now you’re slowly returning.”

  “My father would call this a slum. He’d think I was living in squalor, and the difference between last year and this wouldn’t be visible to him.”

  “But that difference is visible to you. And tangible.”

  “Beth, virtue isn’t pain. You’d learned that by now, I thought”

  “Too true. I think I’ve reacted so far to my old masochism, I don’t even respect sacrifice when it’s vital, maybe.… Okay, like you, I live kind of ascetic. I truly don’t need a lot of fat between me and things, padding, waste.”

  “Neither do I, by and large. I’ve simply replaced the few things I want by others better in their type—instead of an old mattress, a real bed. I haven’t expanded those things that I do want.”

  “I have.” She picked at the sliced tomato. “I really
have. There are human things I need I didn’t used to. To hold and be held, to feel myself doing good work, to feel myself with others that I love, to be able to say out loud what I think and feel …”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Call the defense committee and find out what’s on today. I have to hang around Boston another few days to help.”

  “Stay here. Why not?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “Sure.”

  “It would amuse you?”

  “It would amuse me. Better, it would please me.”

  “You’ve stopped carrying a torch for Miriam, is that it?”

  “Well, you can hardly dream about a portly housewife with a couple of kids. I wouldn’t know what to do with her. Once while Phil was still sponging on me, I saw her here. That was before his Christ the Carpenter routine—”

  “You don’t think his life is better now?”

  “That woman has turned him into a house husband. He’s besotted. Anyhow, a couple of months ago I saw Miriam buying a shirt for her hubby in one of those overpriced shoppies in Harvard Square. I say hi, she says hi. Nothing. No fire in her. She’s just a busy lady with a shopping list and a crying brat on her arm.”

  “You don’t like children and you don’t like grown-up women.”

  “Right now, I like you. I like a little steel, a little fire, a little ice. Something that bends but doesn’t break. Something that fights back so you know someone’s there and not just a puddle of warm glue. I don’t get it off with glue.”

  “Jackson, you are so incredibly arrogant, sitting there telling me what you like and what you don’t! Well, now, I like chocolate but I don’t like vanilla, and tutti-frutti’s fine, but you can keep the lemon sherbet. I’m a human person, you pig!”

  He laughed deep in his chest. “Exactly. Now the girls I’ve been silly enough to mix with in the last year or two, they might expose some energy in class. But as soon as you take them to bed, all resistance collapses. They become marshmallows.”