Small Changes (52 page)

After supper Connie went up to dress for her boy friend, while Laura went to deliver an article she had edited. When she returned, Sally, Dorine, and Beth were making popcorn and working on their children’s book. They were trying to make a storybook so that when Fern and David began to read they would learn from books free of stunting roles. Dorine was illustrating their story about a brother and sister named Sky and Maple who lived with their mother and their mother’s sister on a houseboat. Sally, Dorine, and Beth got louder and louder and more and more excited working—it was especially their project. Writing and drawing storybooks for the children had been Dorine’s idea, after she got over the fiasco of the dollhouse. Sally had found a notebook bound like a book to use.

They played the parts and tried them out before they added each scene. They argued fiercely over shoulds and shouldn’ts at each step. Beth could hardly wait till they finished and got to read it to the children.

Thursday Efi, the secretary Beth usually caught a ride back with, had the flu, so Beth left early with Miriam. She kept Miriam company while she was making supper. Connie would pick Beth up on the way back from her school, after a teachers’ meeting.

Miriam was carefully and with obvious pleasure cutting up a chicken, dismembering it with a mean-looking boning knife. Beth watched; any job Miriam might have given her would have been more a favor than assistance, and Miriam
would have interefered in the execution.

“Miriam, Laura’s reading a book about Taoism. It has a story about a cook who never had to sharpen his knife because he cut in the Tao—between the bones.”

“I’m not that good—yet.” Miriam smiled. “Neil says I’m blood-thirsty because I don’t like supermarket meat, all packaged in plastic wrap and labeled, wrong half the time. I’m glad you’re here today. I was kind of low.”

“About work?”

“A bit. And my period started. It was late and I kind of hoped maybe I’d got pregnant in spite of myself.”

“Are you so eager? It’s easy enough.”

“Easy!” Miriam looked appalled. “One chance a month. One poor egg, journeying that distance down the tubes, forcing its way to the womb. It’s lonely, it waits. Poor wallflower, down the drain.”

“Does Neil want you to have a baby?”

“More than me, even.” Miriam’s dark eyes grew wide, thinking of something. “He feels he waited years and years to meet me. He has years of living to catch up on.”

“But if you have a baby you’ll have to quit work.”

“Only for a while. I could afford to go back soon. I make enough to pay for someone to take care of the baby. Maybe then they’ll be done with that damn project. I hate it! Can you imagine what Phil would say to me if he knew what I’m working on? Can you hear me trying to explain how I got stuck helping design systems for anti-missile missiles? Nobody else seems to feel the pinch. They just don’t connect what they do with life in the real world. Even if you bring it up, they make a joke about everybody knowing it won’t work anyhow.”

“Couldn’t you go some place else?”

“Not without making waves. And I doubt if I could get a good research job. The job market’s tight, there are thousands of hot-shot programers on welfare. Oh, let’s not shop talk. We so seldom get a chance to spend time together outside of there, let’s not waste it.”

Miriam sifted flour and herbs together, added lemon and wine, and put on the chicken. Then she washed her hands and tossed the apron over a chair. “Come on, let me show you where I love to sit. What I adore about these old houses are the niches and crannies. Can’t you imagine growing up here playing hide-and-seek?” Miriam led her up the big
trumpeting front staircase with its carved balustrade and strange Moorish decorations. Halfway up where the stairway turned in a U a window seat was set in with worn leather cushions, under a stained-glass window with smaller clear windows on either side.

Lozenges of lavender and amber and bottle-green light fell on Miriam’s legs curled up on the bench. She had kicked off her shoes and sat scratching voluptuously between her toes, grinning at Beth. Her thick hair hung down brushing her legs. “Hey, how are you really, nowadays? Do you like living with just women?”

“I love living there. I’ve got used to not being alone—that was hard at first. But I can shut the door and be alone. The way we’re trying to be together is important to me.”

“Mainly I just didn’t have the time to give to the house,” Miriam said defensively. “I was in therapy, I was working hard at my job. I was very, very glad to have that house to move into from Jackson’s. But there are so many hassles to group living. Instead of just going ahead and eating or buying something, the way I’m used to, we were forever having meetings and jawing about it. It just seemed an enormous waste of time on non-essentials.”

“I don’t think who does what work is non-essential.”

“I don’t know, I felt I was playing the man of the house. At the other extreme, Sally was everybody’s wife and mother.”

“But none of us are the husband.”

“Independence has to rest on financial independence. If she wasn’t in the house, she’d be on welfare. Not working puts her in an artificial position of dependency.”

“Insisting everybody contribute equally is ignoring that we really do come from different places. Connie has a college education. She really can get a better job. Laura has a degree but being gay makes it harder. The rest of us have a poor capacity to earn. Dorine is in school. When she gets through, she’ll make good money. But Sally never finished high school. Nobody in her family did. She had to take care of her brothers and sisters. It’s silly and stupid to pretend we don’t have different class backgrounds. Connie has more earning ability than I do, I have more than Sally, so why not admit that? Sally could kill herself waitressing six days a week and not make what I do taking it easy.”

“Maybe you could send Sally back to school so she’d get her high school diploma. How about night school?”

“But Sally doesn’t want to go to school. She hated school. She felt put down. She doesn’t want to learn to sound middle class. She doesn’t want to work in an office. What’s the human value in trying to make her over to somebody they’d hire?”

“But how will she get along when she doesn’t have all of you?”

“How would any of us get along? She does have us.”

“Maybe if you didn’t all think you had each other, maybe you’d have to look harder for somebody you could love.”

“But I love Sally.”

Miriam gave her that slow smile. “I bet you have a lot more loving in you than Sally can ever use.”

“I don’t want to love somebody that way, Miriam.”

“That way!
You’re such a … a little spinster sometimes. I don’t believe it’s for real! When I think that prick Ryan represents half your sexual experience it depresses me.”

Remembering for the twentieth time that she could not tell Miriam about Karen. She needed an opening wider than Miriam had ever given her. Miriam made so many assumptions. Loving another woman with her body was not one of the doors she left open—if she even saw a door there. “I’m open to many things, many people—maybe even a few things you’re closed to—like the house.”

“Yeah, but … they’re not equal. To really love someone and be loved in return. I feel rich! It’s indecent to be happy. It almost makes me guilty, Beth. Sometimes when I’m happy I remember how miserable I was and I remember all the people I care about who are still getting lacerated, and I feel guilty.”

“When I wake up on Saturday morning in the house, I’m happy too, and when we are all together making our book for the children. I don’t think much of the romantic drama.”

“Neither do I. It’s terrible to be struggling through relationship after relationship and losing and losing, every damn time. But loving somebody who loves you, it’s a daily thing.” Miriam laid warm fingers on her arm. “I want you to be happy too. I want you to have a full life.”

“My mother used to tell me she wanted me to be happy but she meant the way I was supposed to be. When she said she loved me, she meant I was behaving okay. Often she told me she was disappointed in me—usually when something had
touched me. A full life can be full of learning and doing and, maybe, even fighting.”

Wake up! Love! Miriam crooned to her and leaned forward, more seductive than she realized. Smaller physically, shy and awkward and far less sensual, Beth could not imagine reaching out sexually to Miriam. She could not imagine how she would do it. Even the images in her head of sexual initiation all consisted of a male taking a female into his arms. Miriam
could
make love to her, but never would think of it. Nor must she. Not now, not ever. She wanted only to be everyone’s sister.

“Sometimes you make me think of Neil, Bethie. Sometimes people like the both of you who are slow to open up have a lot more to give—as if you’d been keeping it in reserve. Come on, I have to check the chicken and put the rice on.”

Her pace was quickening. Beth kept out of the way as Miriam chopped onions, melted a pat of butter, washed vegetables and tore them up for salad. Then, with supper once more in hand, Miriam went back upstairs two at a time and settled on the window seat to face her. This time Miriam drew up her legs against her chin, leaning her cheek on the window. Beth felt in her a waning of attention. One part of her was leaking through the glass into the street, watching, on the alert for Neil. A part was focused on the supper cooking. Only a part of Miriam remained for her, attentive and affectionate. It was as if she were already gone. She was not sorry to see Connie’s car pull up since they were no longer together: Neil’s approach was too close and Miriam was tuning herself to him in preparation.

The divorce was finally at hand. According to the agreement by which she had bought her liberty, she was to do the actual divorcing in court. Here she was appearing to cite all kinds of non-existent faults and crimes of Jim against this happy home. The major event was coughing up more money to the lawyers, paying court costs and memorizing what she was to recite.

Dolores let her sleep on her couch. Dolores was still involved with the same boy friend but no longer believed he would marry her. “I’m shopping around, shopping around,” Dolores said.

She had dinner with her family. The evening creaked. Her mother kept talking about how many job openings there
were in Syracuse, and how G.E. was always hiring secretaries and key-punch operators. Her mother talked about how many interesting young men were living in the neighborhood. Her mother kept talking about the empty room going to waste. Yet they hardly looked at her. They asked nothing about her life. Her father told her she was dressed like a hippie, which wasn’t even true. Her mother kept staring at her chest and finally in the kitchen in a stage whisper asked if she were not wearing a brassiere—as if she had ever, ever needed one.

Her mother said how long she’d waited to see her own daughter and started crying. Nancy asked who was she dating and what kind of boys did she meet working at the computer company. Her father said that was a growing industry. There were longer and longer silences. Beth felt herself shrinking. Sunk in her family, afloat in a sour cabbage soup, she was leaking substance and turning mushy. They would disapprove her back to a child again and lock her in her room without supper. At ten-thirty, after several weeks at the dinner table over the sorry chicken that kept sticking in her throat, they spent an ice age in the living room. The television was on and her father’s eyes kept flicking to it. They asked her questions and did not listen to the answers. Anxiety sat on them all.

Finally she escaped to Dolores. The next day she had to go to court. Surprisingly, Jim turned up sitting at the back. He did not have to. Perhaps he was afraid of the process, afraid she or the lawyer would betray him and he would end up tricked into alimony. Anyhow, he sat behind her and watched, hunched up.

Hers was the fourth divorce to come up. Each group of wife and witnesses sat with their lawyer waiting to be called. It was quickly over. The judge asked her one question directly, if Jim had been cruel. She almost muffed the answer. It felt funny to say that in front of him. Afterward, walking out with her lawyer, trying to escape his sticky, pudgy presence, when she saw Jim, she went over to apologize for saying that.

“It’s a joke anyhow,” Jim said. “They don’t care about us. Just their money.” They walked on a bit awkwardly in the direction of the parking lot. “You kept my name, I thought you’d take your own back.”

“What is mine? My father’s? I thought about that. I decided I liked you better than my father. Since I don’t have one of my own, I’d just as soon have yours.”

“I wasn’t complaining. I didn’t think there was anything about me you liked.”

“I don’t hate you, Jim. I just couldn’t stand being married to anybody—not even you.” The lawyer was standing just behind them. She did not want to get into his car.

“You want to have supper? Say good-by that way. It seems funny standing here with him listening. We could go someplace around here—there’s a steak house two blocks over. I don’t know if it’s any good. If you’re not doing anything.”

“I’m not doing anything. I had supper with my family last night, and that was awful. But I don’t eat steaks. We can look at the menu outside and see if there’s anything I can eat.”

“You still don’t eat meat, huh? It’s against your religion.” Jim laughed. They looked at the menu posted on the red and gold window. It was an Italian-American steak house that had eggplant parmigiana so she went in with him. He had a steak with spaghetti on the side and they ordered chianti.

It was sad and funny. She still liked the way he looked. Not that he looked the same: like her, he was two years older and he looked less hard and less buoyant. She could see again the Jim she had seen: not shimmering with fantasies but the man she had been attracted to. Again she could like the foresty gray-green of his eyes and the chiseling of his nose and chin. Again she could like the strength of his arms, of his hands on the table, and not fear them on her.

It was funny, it was sad to sit at the table with him. She was dressed like somebody else for court, even wearing panty hose and a dress. Seldom did she sit at a table in a restaurant drinking wine with a man. She could see herself at eighteen eating pizza with Jimbo near their high school and rubbing knees under the table. Superimposed pictures with the outlines blurring, like a cheap printing job of color on color.