Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  Dorine took her hand. “But we’ll be helping you go away from us. After that, when will we see you? What can we do except send money? When will we ever sit down and eat with you again?”

  “When we win,” Beth said very softly, “we’ll all sit down at the table.”

  Sally had come down to Boston to wait for Wanda to be released, imagining that Beth and she would go down to Alderson together to meet Wanda. Beth had to send her back immediately.

  “I want you to be someplace where twenty-five people see you have nothing to do with this.”

  “But when can we be together again? Fern misses you.”

  “I miss you. As soon as it’s clear how hard Wanda’s parents are going to push trying to find us … If it’s not bad, then you’ll come. Soon, let’s hope.”

  “Fern says she wants to spend half the year with you and the theater and half at Bleak House.”

  “But we won’t be able to do theater, Sally. Maybe never again. But you will. And when things are clear, you’ll come and see us with Fern and Blake and then decide. Maybe we’ll have our family again.”

  “I want to go on adding people. I’d sure like Alan and Tamar with us too. I don’t want to give up anybody, and yet we’re always, always saying good-by to each other and moving our houses.”

  “Well, at least we didn’t break up from the inside this time.”

  “Sure enough, but it hurts just as much.”

  “Not the same. It’s missing, but it’s not feeling wrong.” Still, when Sally kissed her good-by and left, Beth wept and wept.

  She lay on a bed in the back room of Miriam’s house, her hands cold and wet on her belly. She could not seem to get warm although the sun shone outside. It was a warm day for February, the temperature in the high forties, the radio said. She monitored the news, not expecting anything but fearful always of disaster. Miriam had taken her children to Laverne that morning with a story about shopping to do. The shopping had been done already, the bags were in the car. Then Miriam had driven to intercept Wanda. Beth had arrived at the house at three alone. If anything went wrong, if Neil came home early, she would prevent them from coming. They called in regularly from pay phones. She did not answer unless the phone rang once, stopped, then rang again. Then she picked it up but didn’t speak. If Neil came she was to walk out and wait in a shopping plaza.

  She had pulled up to the curb and called to Luis and Johnny. They had come running, Johnny shrieking and Luis looking both ways and trying to appear casual and then at the last moment jumping forward and starting to yell himself as soon as the door shut. They almost deafened her as she drove off and begged them to get down in back and be quiet till they were out of the immediate neighborhood. “Now as soon as we get to Queens, you’re going to hop in the VW bus with Phil and Dorine and change into the clothes there and they’ll tell you everything else to do. From now on, you call me Cindy. Now what’s your name, you there?”

  “Robert!” shouted Luis.

  “What’s your name, hey, you back there?”

  “Mark!” Johnny paused a minute. “Can I have another name? I want to be called Dean.”

  “Well …” Beth said dubiously, “you could be Mark Dean. Dean could be your middle name. Why do you want to be called Dean?”

  “That was his teacher in general science in the fall,” Luis said. “Johnny, I mean Mark, liked him. I had him too. He was okay.”

  Now they were somewhere in Pennsylvania … hopefully. Luis had said to Phil, “I remember you. You used to bring me licorice!” She felt an anxiety so vast and pervasive it sat on her like an ocean of cold black water. How could she imagine she was adequate at inventing a plan that would work? She felt weak and small. When she passed a mirror, she turned away sick. There were many mirrors in this house. All showed a small woman wringing her hands, scampering to and fro bent over, hunched to her belly like a poisoned mouse.

  Her mouth kept filling with saliva. She would choke on her own saliva. Her fault, everything. All would go wrong. She hated this huge house. It made noises to itself. It muttered and creaked and clanked its plumbing. It made footsteps to climb the stairs. It made tapping in its walls. It made someone to be trying the doorknobs. It made closet doors to open and voices to call her name.

  She tried to tame the house by moving in the Round Earth. She reorganized the public space, the quiet space, the children’s special areas. Through the house she wandered, but always she saw Miriam’s life there. A basket of Neil’s shirts waited to be ironed. On the calendar in the kitchen Miriam’s hand had made notations about people coming to dinner and what was to be served. Shopping lists. Toys, toys, toys. As she had promised Miriam, she had tried to answer the question about alternatives that would appear real to Miriam. She felt that Miriam had been disappointed in the nature of her answer. She had brought Miriam the latest copy of Workforce from Vocations for Social Change, which listed jobs existing in alternate institutions, free clinics, free schools, collectives working on community problems. Maybe Miriam could find someone to work with who could use her skills. If she could not find anything to do immediately, Beth had hoped she would get an idea of possible directions, a new way of thinking about her work.

  She had brought Miriam a list made up by a women’s project of child-care facilities available with annotations on what was known about them. She brought her the Women’s Yellow Pages. Basically she was hoping that lists of alternate possibilities would set Miriam in motion, turn her outward from circling in helplessness. She brought her names of Boston people who tried to create networks of information and connection, who tried to plug people with skills into projects that needed those skills. She brought a list of some communes, not too radical, with both men and women and children in them, that Miriam might visit. She brought addresses of people who helped others find communes or start communes. She brought names and addresses of women’s liberation groups and projects and women’s centers. She brought women’s newspapers and journals and pamphlets and articles.

  Miriam looked at all that paper, pamphlets and lists and directories, and thanked her hollowly. She carried them away and Beth did not see them around. But that afternoon Beth finally found them as she wandered in desperate aimlessness through the house. They were all in the children’s room on a bureau. At least a few of the items looked thumbed.

  She did not know if she had failed Miriam substantially, or whether she had merely failed to excite her curiosity. Maybe slowly Miriam would warm to the approach she was suggesting. Beth could not guess. Perhaps Miriam had not wanted such concrete minute responses but a general answer that would immediately change her life; or a rhetorical answer she could dismiss, that would prove to her that nothing could change, for there was no place else to go.

  Again Miriam called in. They must be close. She paced the downstairs, too excited to wait above, fearful she would miss a last-minute invasion of Neil. Finally she scrambled up to the window seat, where so often she used to sit and talk with Miriam. Knees to her chin, she watched the street, seething with anxiety and scalding hope. No, it was a trap. They were trapping her now. How stupid not to have them speak on the phone. Wanda was back in Alderson. They had caught Dorine and Phil and Miriam. She had ruined everyone’s life. It was all over.

  She heard the car. She ran down as the car pulled into the garage behind the house. She saw only Miriam in it. Only Miriam. But as Beth raced to the back door to open it, Wanda came trotting across the yard with Miriam, Wanda in dark plastic-rimmed glasses and a brown wig. Thin, thin. Came running to her and hurtled through the door, knocking her off balance. Wanda hugged her hard, hard against her, Wanda light but solid in her arms. Soft in spite of her thinness, her wiriness. Hugging each other till it hurt.

  “Now, now, look at you!” Wanda scolded. “Don’t bawl like a baby. Come on, we have to get upstairs. Don’t cry, love. Ah, come on, you’re getting me soaking wet!”

  Wanda began to cry too then. She did not cry often. Beth always thought Wanda’s
tears were rusty. That crying hurt her as much as whatever made her cry. Wanda’s face would wizen up, fold in on itself, then the tears would ooze from her clenched eyes and sobs would shake her. As soon as Wanda started to cry, Beth stopped and began to soothe her. Arms around each other, tottering like ancient and senile ladies, they swayed dangerously up the steps with Miriam pushing on them and clucking and hurrying them along to the back room where they were to hide for the night.

  The layout of the house favored them. The back room was at the top of a straight narrow back stairs. Probably it had been a maid’s room, for it had its own toilet and old-fashioned wash-basin that the Stones had not got around to replacing. It was nominally the guest room, where relatives slept when they visited. Basically it was the lumber room, absorbing everything unnecessary and superfluous and broken.

  Both the master bedroom and the children’s room were to the front of the second story. On the other side of the wide central hall were the bathroom and a narrow hall leading back to the rear stairs. Off that hall was the room that Miriam had been trying to turn into a bedroom for Ariane. Jeff was supposed to keep the room next to them as the younger, and Ariane would get her own room. The walls had been replastered and the ceiling and two walls painted, when Miriam had last bogged down. Across the hall was their hiding place.

  Immediately underneath them was the kitchen. Miriam had covered their floor with spare blankets and towels and rags, to muffle their movements. “But mainly you should just stay in bed. You need the rest. Remember, the floor creaks. When anyone’s in the kitchen, I’ll make enough noise for you to hear, but don’t count on that! You must be quiet. Unless somebody is running water hard, like the bathtub, don’t flush that toilet.”

  Wanda bounced on the bed. “We won’t make any more noise than mice do, but I hope you oiled the springs! God, I’m glad to be out. Beth, Beth! It’s so beautiful outside! You’re so beautiful!”

  “You’ve been in too long and you have no sense. Now come sit in this chair. We have to use some awful stuff on your hair and make it brown.”

  “Brown, huh? How about I have red hair? I always wanted red hair.”

  “You’ll like what you get. First Miriam’s going to cut it. You’re just like your son, who isn’t satisfied with his name but wants a better one: none of you ever are pleased!”

  “See, four years in the women’s movement and I’m dyeing my hair and getting it done. Away with gray! Lord, love, do you think the kids will know us? Are they all right really? Those awful wooden letters they wrote me!”

  “They’re going to call here from a pay phone in the next half hour.”

  “Half an hour, Beth! Are they really all right?”

  “Cindy. You better start practicing. Sometime late tomorrow we’ll be with them.”

  Miriam finished cutting and Beth began mixing the dye. It was beautiful to touch Wanda, but wrong to alter her. She wanted to bury her face in Wanda’s exposed nape but continued carefully working on her stiff hair.

  “You both look so happy,” Miriam watched from the doorway. “But you’ll always be afraid. They can catch you at any time and take the children back. How can you act so happy?”

  “We’ve been criminals since we began to love each other,” Beth said. “We’re always hiding a little.”

  “We’re together,” Wanda said. “We have a freedom more real than the right to walk into any police station and swear out a warrant against our neighbors. The freedom to act and to fight. That’s a lot more than I had this time yesterday. That’s a lot more than I’ve had most of my life.”

  Miriam shook her head. Then she went out, leaving them to their privacy, locked the door and slid the key under. Finally they were together again, even though for the moment Wanda could only sit on the bed’s edge with awful-smelling brown glop foaming over her head and smile. “Give me your hand at least, Beth. Take off those ridiculous gloves, you look like a gynecologist.”

  “Obstetrician. Just gave you two huge boys.” Beth took off the gloves that came with the dye and washed her hands carefully.

  “Are you scared?”

  “Sure. Always. But now I know we can fight. And sometimes, sometimes, win.” She could feel between them the physical shyness of their first attempts to love each other, the shyness of long separation. Awkwardly Wanda lifted her arms, gesturing to Beth to come. She knelt in front of Wanda and took both her hands and held them to her mouth.

  31

  What Shines

  “Before Jeff was born you stayed home with me all the time, didn’t you, Mommy?”

  “How come you ask that, Ariane-poo? I’m with you all the time except three afternoons.”

  “But you were. When it was just me. Then you stayed home all the time.”

  “No, I didn’t. You’ve forgotten, but when you were little, even younger than Jeff is now, I used to take you to a house to play with other children. Just as I do now.”

  “You did?” Ariane regarded her with suspicion. “You really did? You’re putting me on.”

  “Twice a week. Your mother was writing something then for the university.”

  “Aw, go on! You never did!” Ariane slapped at her. “At Chris’s house?”

  “No, this house was in Somerville, not here.”

  “I don’t like Chris. He hit me yesterday.”

  “Did you do something to him? Did he hit you hard?”

  But Ariane turned away, swinging back and forth, back and forth from the handle of the refrigerator. She was slender and fragile with dark brown wavy hair well past her frail shoulders. Her hair was one of Ariane’s many vanities. Lately she had become a petulantly, guilefully feminine child: reminding Miriam somewhat painfully of Allegra. She was no longer fierce and pouncing, though her will was as strong as ever. But in competing with baby brother, she struggled for Neil’s love. She craved being admired. She was studying how to make guests pay attention. Evening after evening as she fought the nightly battle to stay downstairs, to delay bedtime as long as possible, she became a more outrageous flirt. She climbed into laps, she kissed strangers, she told stories at the top of her lungs, she sang popular songs and did dances imitated from television in the middle of the living room.

  “Mommy, what’s pride?”

  “That’s feeling good about something you’ve done. For instance, I feel pride that I organized the play group.”

  “Mommy, Chris’s mother says pride is a sin.”

  “Mmm. Laverne says things like that. That’s all right, love, we don’t want everybody to be just like us.”

  “How come you call her that? Isn’t she Chris’s mother?”

  “Of course, and Tom’s and Bonnie’s too. But she has a name of her own. Just as I’m not only Ariane’s mother and Jeff’s mother—”

  “Yes, you are! Yes, you are!” Ariane swung back and forth on the handle of the refrigerator until the door swung open.

  “Shut it, Ariane. Come back, Ariane, and shut it. You opened it. Please.”

  Very slowly and elegantly Ariane shut the door. “Is it a sin to have the play group?”

  “I wish you would get off of this sin thing. The only thing I’d call a sin is hurting somebody.… People have different ideas. People think and like different things. Differences make the world go round.”

  “Daddy says it’s the sun.”

  “What? … Oh, the earth goes around the sun. Do you understand what he’s talking about?”

  Ariane nodded solemnly, making circles with her hands—imitating something Neil had done? “Buzz, buzz, buzz.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. I’m a busy bee going around.”

  He was what people called good with his children. He did try hard to teach them things, but he got annoyed if they were not interested. He grew more involved in the course of his exposition than in their reactions. His disappointment was crushing. Ariane was already learning to pretend to understand. The rewards for that were better than for actually trying
to follow and asking questions that showed she didn’t understand. Quickly she was learning to perform.

  Some of the time freed by the play group Miriam spent trying to read back into her field. Trying to develop some expertise in information retrieval systems on small computers. But even her old proficiencies were proving useful. Dorine was at the point where Miriam could help. To a limited extent they were working together.

  Miriam was also teaching a course at a free school in Cambridge. Called Computer Jargon and Manipulation, it was intended to demystify the uses and abuses of computers. She was enjoying it immensely. But then her eight students could not call her bluff. Neil was always asking what she told and explaining how she had it slightly wrong. She was teaching them what they needed to use machines and get around them, and that sufficed. Of course she was not paid, but at least she was doing something. She was also compiling a private list of computer access codes—the codes by which anyone with simple equipment like a teletype could dial into time-shared computers and borrow a little of that expensive time. She did not know why she was making the list, but she had the feeling that by and by she might find a human use for such keys to the mint.

  The next afternoon when she had dropped Ariane and Jeff at Laverne’s she drove the old Saab—it had been Neil’s but he had replaced it with a new sportier one—to Dorine’s commune in Allsten off Commonwealth. She had used to come here ostensibly to visit Dorine, but really to keep some touch with Phil. Now she came to see Dorine. They worked hard for two hours. Then Miriam took a moment to ask obliquely, “I gave you some money. Did it get through?”

  “I saw them. They’re doing okay, though they’re a little lonely there. But you know them, they won’t be isolated long. They’re living sparsely but their spirits are good.”

  “I liked having them in the house. It made me feel strong.”

  “Well, hold on to that a little. You are strong.”

  They got a lot done and Miriam forgot to watch the clock. She was downstairs calling Laverne to say she would be twenty minutes late when Phil came in from work. He greeted her with a big grin, they exchanged a couple of sentences, and she saw him take the stairs two at a time to find Dorine.… She preferred being gone before he came, for she felt a little sad when she saw them together. Between her and Phil were no vibes at all. But then she wasn’t in a period when she felt like creating vibrations with anybody.