Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  When she went up to say good-by to Dorine and fix the next time, they were standing together at the window, arms around each other, while Dorine poured out plans for the summer. “The Woods Hole thing is sure, it’s really going to happen! We can be on the Cape till after Labor Day. Si has a boat we can borrow. I’ll be working but it won’t be like work. I’ve never lived near the ocean!”

  “We’ve never really had a vacation,” Phil was saying. “A chance to slow down. We’ll have to find a house. Maybe Jerry and Frankie and some of the others would share one? What kind of a boat?”

  “Maybe I’ll come and see you with the kids,” Miriam said.

  “Oh, you say that but you won’t do it. Why don’t you?” Dorine said.

  “Yes, but leave Mr. Clean at home.” Phil grinned.

  “He wouldn’t come anyhow.… But I will. You’ll see.” Getting in her car, she wondered to herself if she really couldn’t take the kids and visit them. Phil was gone, gone for her. She hadn’t been able to choose him. But there remained, astonishingly, good will.

  Cindy and Marie were living with the boys in a narrow frame house on East 128th Street in Cleveland. They had a little upper back porch they made plans to eat on in the summer, and a back yard they shared with the family downstairs, graduate students with a baby. Since Cindy and Marie were keeping odd hours—they worked a few nights a week cleaning small office buildings—they baby-sat for the Greenes in return for tolerance. Tolerance of their living arrangements, tolerance of the kids’ noise and heavy use of the yard, tolerance of their new dog, a black and white stray whose limp was almost cured, named Dean. Dean was still nervous and yapped at night sounds, but he was fattening and settling. Cindy, who had never before had a dog, was crazy over his woeful eyes and stood up for Mark’s right to sleep with him. Dean made up for all the animals Mark could not have in the city.

  They were short on furniture. Aside from beds, they were stocked with tables and cushions. Robert and Marie were building a couch, so far resembling a vast low table. Marie said they were going to stuff it with Dean’s hair, he shed so much. Mark liked that idea. He kept combing Dean and saving the hair in a matted ball till Cindy persuaded him to stop. For three weeks Dean looked unusually well groomed.

  Their jobs were badly paid female labor not covered by social security or paid vacations or sick leaves, but work that brought them into contact with virtually no one. Dorine was working and sent money. They got by. As soon as the ground thawed, they put in a garden. In February they had pored over the luscious pornography of the seed catalogues, the opulent tomatoes, the rotund squash, the juicy greens. Robert, with his neat handwriting and his passion for drawing maps, made a master plan of the garden in crayons and ink. Orange for carrots, green for spinach, yellow for corn. They wanted to grow everything in a space the size of their livingroom. Now the peas and lettuce had broken ground.

  “It is more work, just four of us,” Cindy complained. She had just hauled the laundry through pouring rain. Marie was cooking and Robert washed vegetables for a salad.

  “We get lonely with no kids,” Robert said. “If we can’t go back to New Hampshire, how come at least we can’t live in a commune? There’s one across the street down two houses, though they aren’t political at all. And they don’t have kids. Just old people.”

  “All of thirty. Rheumatic every one,” Marie said dryly. “As long as my parents have detectives on us, we’ll stay put. Maybe by fall. Can you put up with us old folks till fall?”

  “How’s the soup coming?” Cindy asked.

  “Almost there.” Marie tasted critically. “Salt. Chives.” She pinched from the plant on the sill over the old porcelain sink.

  “I have a meeting tonight at seven-thirty.”

  “Your consciousness-raising group.”

  Cindy did not feel she particularly needed her consciousness raised at that time, but it was a way to meet women and become slowly, cautiously involved here. Marie was spending some time working in a community day-care center.

  “Tonight I work, but tomorrow we have to decide whether we’re going to that meeting at the clime,” Marie said, her dark eyes raising the question they must settle soon.

  Sitting down with bowls of potato soup, Cindy and Marie and Robert ate while Mark rattled on about his day, talking non-stop till Marie urged when he paused for breath, “Come on, honey, eat a little too.” After supper, sitting over coffee, they returned to the topic they had been mulling for a week.

  “All right, as a paramedical in the clinic, I might be a little more visible.” Marie waved her hand and Dean, who had not yet been fed, wagged his tail hopefully and came sniffing.

  “More than a little more.” Cindy hunched forward.

  “But I never did anything with health before. And sometimes we have to do what we want. The easiest way to protect ourselves is to do nothing political—and then whatever is the point!”

  Cindy smiled. “Oh, you want to play doctor! And so do I—I’m coming around to it—only let’s not kid ourselves it isn’t risky.”

  Robert said, “Then you won’t have to be cleaning women. I’d rather take care of people than scrub floors any day.”

  Marie took out a quarter. “Robert, flip it to see which of us trains first. Heads or tails?”

  Cindy won the first chance to train to work at the clinic. “Ha! Now we’ll see who gets to wear the white shirt in this house!”

  Miriam had to get the kids fed before she started Neil’s supper, as Jeff was too young to eat fancy food and Ariane would not. Jeff was chubby and placid and ate well. Ariane was suspicious of food. She ate hot dogs, hamburger, broiled chicken, eggs soft-boiled or scrambled, cream soups, tuna fish, cottage cheese, and American processed cheese. She ate asparagus and corn. That was it, except for everything sweet and rotten. Neil and Miriam had fierce arguments about who was responsible for Ariane’s non-eating habits.

  Neil came home as she was giving Jeff his bath. For a while he watched. “You pick him up too much. You’re spoiling him.”

  “Neil, I don’t hug him one bit more than Ariane. You’re getting hypercritical, I mean it! You don’t hug him enough!”

  “You can’t coddle him as you did Ariane. Look how spoiled she is. He can’t grow up being a crybaby.”

  “Ariane is a beautiful child! I want Jeff to be gentle and loving. I want him to know touch and kindness and warmth are good!”

  “You know as well as I do what an overprotective mother, a possessive mother, does to a son.”

  “Do you know what a cold judgmental father does to any child?”

  “I don’t think anyone except you finds me cold and judgmental.… Did you go to Dr. Bachman this week?”

  “If I find any fault with you, as you do with me continuously, then I must be sick in the head—”

  “Continually. You mean continually, not continuously.”

  “I mean if I’m not utterly pleased with everything you think I must be sick. I need adjusting. Off to the plumbers.”

  “Did you see Dr. Bachman?”

  “I see him, but I don’t think he sees me.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” He folded his arms with a sigh. “Let me guess. You now have such insight that you can see more in your psychoanalyst than he can see in you. Doesn’t that strike you as … unlikely?”

  “I’m not going to him. He’s your policeman. He did a job on me once. At that Christmas party, Neil, I saw him with his wife.”

  “She seemed harmless enough. Pleasant. Pretty in a faded sort of way. Or did I miss some deep meaning?”

  “I watched him with her. If that’s what he thinks marriage is, no wonder he can’t help me! Neil, I don’t need him to cluck and hem at me and lead me to green pastures of rumination. I need something useful to do in the world! I need some work, interaction with people, adult conversation, some ideas, some fresh air!”

  “I don’t understand how I’m supposed to be stopping you. I don’t know what you do all day l
ong, but from the way this house has been looking of late, it can’t be much. Is Ariane’s room ready for her yet? They’re getting too old to share a bedroom.”

  “Jeff is fifteen months old! You’re so uptight!”

  “Ask Dr. Bachman about fifteen months, if you can bear to ask, given your late omniscience in everybody else’s field!”

  “Neil! Can’t we stop this? Please!”

  “I don’t recall starting it, Miriam. I don’t think I have hard words with anyone in the course of a day when I must see some hundred students and colleagues and staff. Whereas how many arguments have you got into in the course of the last two weeks?”

  “I find your colleagues hard to take, now I don’t sit back and keep my mouth shut. God, that fascist talking about population control!”

  “If I could interrupt, I wonder if you managed to get supper tonight?”

  “I thought we’d eat at seven-thirty.”

  “I have to be back at Tech Square.”

  “A project meeting? You didn’t tell me.”

  “I have a new assistant, who’s of some use for a change. Helen’s no genius, but she’s willing to work. I have a quarterly report due to NSA next Friday. We’ll have to work double sessions the rest of this week. That ought to wrap it up and then we’ll get Greta to run it through the typewriter.”

  Ariane begged to sit at table with them for the grown-up meal, since they were eating early. Not that she would eat. Neil said she might if she minded her manners. So Ariane sat at the dining-room table perched on the phone directory and an atlas, playing grande dame at three and a half a lot better than Miriam could at thirty-one.

  Neil winked at Ariane. Delighted, she winked back. Then every time he turned in her direction she winked and giggled until he became annoyed. “That’s enough, Ariane. Don’t you know what enough means?”

  “It’s not enough! Daddy! Look at me!”

  Finally she threw her spoon into the tureen of cream and mustard sauce, splashing the table. Neil ordered her out and Miriam had to take her from the table crying. It was not that Neil was truly strict with the children. He never hit them. He believed in a happy permissive childhood, but he grew irritated if they trespassed too heavily on his routines. Then he pushed back, and Ariane in particular would grow hysterical at the rejection. She clung to Miriam, sobbing.

  When Miriam came down, Neil had finished supper and her own chops were congealing in the cold sauce. A momentary nausea made her carry the plate into the kitchen, but a thrifty impulse sent the food into the refrigerator instead of the garbage can. Neil was whistling as he collected his briefcase. He was cheerful again but his cheerfulness passed over and did not warm her. They had quarreled without making it up. After he had gone out and she watched his new blue Saab dart off, she remained in the dark of the stairwell looking out at the street corner, the big maples with their new leaves tossing in the wind under the streetlight.

  It was completely worse now that she didn’t break down. The mechanism of quarrels and reconciliations had been based on her compulsion to come to him afterward; her inability to stand being shut out in the arctic cold beyond his love. He withdrew and she came after, to submit, and then they could be gathered together again. But she could not do it any more. She judged herself by new standards as Ariane grew older: she must set an example, she must be a good human being, for her daughter if not for herself. She could not teach what she could not at least weakly exemplify. Being Neil’s aching concubine always ready to cry for forgiveness did not quite fit in, with the children growing able to watch them together.

  For her the tear of the quarrel had to be knit in lovemaking. After their worst quarrels they had made love most passionately. But now Neil often said he was tired. He said if she worked all day she would not have so much extra energy at night. She said that when she had had a job they had both had the energy to make love. He said his project was more serious than Logical and took more out of him. So things went around and were no more resolved.

  There must be a new way through to each other. To cut through his defenses and confront him. Somehow to touch him again.

  Alone. She imagined being alone. A bogeyman nightmare. She saw herself waking alone in the night with nobody to hold her, nobody to care. Dr. Bachman had loved to hear her dreams of anxiety those three times she had let herself be shamed into going back.

  She had been looking up at a big beautiful Christmas tree hung with shiny globes. Dr. Bachman asked her to remember back into her childhood. But they had never had a Christmas tree. This was too perfect to be a real tree. In each round ornament she saw the room reflected and herself. A red world with a red Miriam, a green world with a green Miriam, a silver Miriam world, a gold Miriam world, long worlds of elongated giraffe Miriams, fat flattened Miriams, Miriams with gyroscopes revolving in their bellies, tinsel Miriams, shimmery translucent Miriams. She had reached up to choose, understanding she must pick, must pluck. Then it had fallen on her. The tree of selves had fallen forward, catching fire, burning her. She had wakened in terror.

  Another time she had dreamed she was sitting in Finnegan’s and Phil was supposed to meet her there. Then someone had come and told her that Phil had gone to California and was not coming. He had run away from her. She sat there in Finnegan’s terrified, alone with all the people screaming and laughing to each other. All looking at her sideways, because she was sitting alone wearing her old bathrobe. She kept saying to herself over and over, “But he promised to meet me, he promised to love me, he promised!” Now there was no one.

  How had she used to live alone? Of course she had the children. Silly to think that way. Neil did still love her. He was angry at her and knew no way to release that anger directly, so it stayed inside converted into that quiet cutting hostility, that carping, that insistence on her conforming to his family’s standards. She must cut through his layers of expectations and self-righteousness and open him up to her again. She had reached him once. Why couldn’t she get through now?

  She had to try, with all her energy! Holding herself by the elbows in the stairwell, she watched the maples dashing in the wind. A sound like water rushing. A dark sure energy rose in her. He would love her again, he had to! She was a good woman, she had had his children, and they were beautiful, they were precious, they were the flowers of life itself.

  She could feel them asleep now above her, baby Jeff pulsing like a luminous starfish in his crib, the life in him measured and steady, beaming. He had been a colicky baby, he had driven her mad. But once that was over he had blossomed into a plump succulent morsel, a fat placid teddy bear. Even his first teething had not really broken that wonderful loving calm. His first word, after “mommy,” had been “good.” He had reached out and touched her face and said what she was still convinced was the word “good.” Now of course he babbled constantly. He stood early and beamed on the world. Early he learned to walk on his sturdy legs. Only he would not give up his bottle at night. He still insisted on sucking. She imagined Jeff pulsing steadily in his crib like a warm orange star.

  Ariane was that blue-white star that shone blindingly and then flickered almost out. She was the more intense. She had nightmares and visions and tantrums. She drank in the tensions and terrors of the house through all her pores and crystallized them into her fear of the dark, her fear of loud noises, of thunder and the subway, her fear of large dogs and trucks. When something attacked her sensitive nerves, there was no way to comfort her. Her panic was total. She needed love and love and love. She needed it and sometimes all the loving Miriam could give her was inadequate and faded into the vast maw of her fear and was swallowed up without giving light. Other times Ariane gave out joy like a fountain. So sensitive to nuances, so sharp in her senses. She painted beautifully and made montages with scissors and paste. She sang songs she made up in a clear piercing voice like a warbler.

  They had come out of her and they were. Different, new, strange, barbaric and then civilized beyond her. Creatures not her, yet
hers.

  She tried, she tried hard with them. Now she had to get some time away to remain alive, but she was still trying hard. Neil must know that inside. There were bad seasons and mean seasons and seasons of ice and cold, of parching heat. But there was so much life beating in her, she felt as if she too must shine on the dark there in the stairwell to any being with eyes to see the shining she saw in her children. She would not pulsate a full rich orange, she would not coruscate blinding white and blue, but she would emit a dim warm red glow—not so bright as she had used to, perhaps, but steady and a bit brighter than it had been in a few seasons. She felt strong in her love, stronger in her self, stronger in the connections she had somehow preserved through attrition. She felt in herself Wanda’s strength for her children; maybe not the greater strength it would take to put herself first, but the strength to fight for them, by all means. So she was not alone, but connected to them, and connected still to Beth and Wanda, not only through the money she secreted from household expenses for them but in her daily thoughts, her sense of them as a counterexample to defeat. Connected to Dorine, connected still in a muted, never to be complete way to Phil. Connected to Sally, who wrote her halting but faithful one-page letters. Her students at the free school. Whoever she was preparing her access codes and information retrieval expertise for. Out of such connections she could weave no security, no protection against her worst fears. But of such connections were wrought an end to the slow relentless dying back she had known, and the slow undramatic refounding, single thought by small decision by petty act, of a life: her life. That life shone too, dimly but with considerable heat, banked coals in the dark.