Small Changes (7 page)

She had a bed and a dresser and a small desk and a wobbly metal table and a hot plate and a small refrigerator and a lavatory for washing dishes and herself. The wee bathroom was equipped with a shower stall and toilet. The only window faced a building six feet away. Mice ran in the walls and nibbled her cereal and crackers. Traffic from the street echoed in the alley.

Nevertheless she loved her room. She loved the mattress with bloodstains and a circular hole and a ravine in the middle. She loved the dripping shower and the hot plate that took fifteen minutes to get warm and never did get too hot
to sit on. She loved the closet with the door that would not shut. She loved the man’s plaid bathrobe that had been hanging there when she moved in and that she wore even though it was too big. At least the robe was woolly and warm, while the room was frigid. She made love to her room by writing mottoes on the wall and by making patchwork curtains out of remnants from the sale tables downtown at Jordan Marsh. Those curtains glowed and kept out the winter wind. Slowly she was filling the room with books. She had discovered secondhand stores where used paperbacks were cheap. On Saturday she liked to go to the bookstores and search the tables for her next week’s reading.

At first she ate from cans, but gradually, wandering on Newbury and Boylston, she discovered health food and natural food stores. The revulsion toward eating flesh from the night of the meat loaf remained. It was part superstition and part morality: she had escaped to her freedom and did not want to steal the life of other warm-blooded creatures. She ate brown rice and whole-grain breads and granola and muesli and cracked wheat and lentils and navy, lima, mung, marrow, kidney, and turtle beans. She learned from a clerk at Erewhon how to sprout beans on a dish. Always she had liked breakfast, cereals and breads and eggs, so now she would eat breakfasts all day long, instead of the fuss her dad had called dinner and Jim supper. Whatever they called it, she had always hated it. Her dad ate rapidly, bent over his plate, but he kept an eye on the kids and told them to mind their manners. It was the time of day he came home and became boss. It was growl time for him, complaint time for Mother, whine and poke and nudge time for the kids. No, every person should eat quietly, without fuss.

She found cheeses she savored: port salut and camembert and boursin. For many years her mother had used frozen vegetables, and she was surprised how good raw vegetables tasted. She discovered yogurt and sour cream and ricotta.

She carried a lunch to work that she could eat gradually, nibbling through the day, and on her lunch hour she audited classes. Much of what went on at M.I.T. was incomprehensible but she had found subjects that interested her. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she sat in on Shakespeare, and Tuesdays and Thursdays she listened to European History from 1640 to 1900. Three mornings a week she came to
campus an hour early for a small class on Cervantes, conducted in Spanish. At first she had trouble following the lectures. The registrar’s office had told her she could not be a student, but she had only to be unobtrusive or, as with Professor Hernandez, to beg permission.

When she returned to the computer center, she passed over an invisible boundary. Students had a way of acting toward each other that she experienced as she walked around campus carrying her books, chatting before class—the way that the few students who recognized her from class spoke to her when she ran into them. But she became an invisible robot when she entered the center. All the troubles with the computer were visitable on her head; the nuisance of misplaced runoff or lost data, suddenly active bugs in the programs and being bumped from the computer, could all be blamed on her because she was no longer a person but a function.

In January she got a less harassed job over in Tech Square, as secretary to a project involving biochemists and a graduate student in computer sciences. Instead of dealing anonymously with hundreds of students who treated her as automatically stupid, she had only to take orders from eight people. Professor Owasa had hired her. She had lied to him about her age and education, taking the chance that he would not bother to check her references. He hadn’t. Yes, the job was less harried and less unpleasant, but gradually she began to feel her isolation.

She sat at the little desk out front of Professor Owasa’s office, off a corridor up in the tall office building. When she walked along the corridors with the brightly colored doors that reminded her of kindergarten blocks, she saw many other rooms in which one or two secretaries sat at desks like hers, secretaries to professors or to projects. In other rooms students sat typing at electric typewriters connected over phone lines to one of the big computers upstairs. Here and there were small lounges. The building was in use twentyfour hours a day, and in some of the offices she saw cots and couches. The atmosphere among the almost entirely male students and faculty tended to be loose and joking, but it was not easy to get to know other secretaries isolated in their offices.

The younger secretaries told her about their sex lives, for
she had become an automatic older woman as a divorcee. Saying she was divorced saved explaining. She imagined Jim would divorce her for desertion eventually. She did not feel secure enough to let him know where she was. The older secretaries worked much harder at their jobs and were nice to her though they thought her peculiar. It was funny to be an older woman. Most of the girls had had more experience with men than she had. But she liked to listen.

At least two of the people who worked on the project were friendly to her and did not treat her as a robot. Tom Ryan, a fourth-year graduate student, had lived in her building briefly in between separating from his wife and moving into an apartment in Cambridge. He was unusually small for a man, barely taller than Beth and slight: but he was twenty-five and close to his doctorate. The other person who spoke to her in a personal way was a big flamboyant woman who was a graduate student in computer sciences.

She could not remember exactly when Miriam Berg had first singled her out to notice. But one day while Beth was eating a fig surreptitiously, Miriam tapped her shoulder. “If you give me one, I won’t report you to the campus cops. Why, you can’t do anything as human as eat on this project.”

So Beth gave Miriam a Calmyrna fig and Miriam ate it. She said figs looked funny when you really took a look at them, they looked like candied balls, didn’t they?

Beth looked at the white fig she had bitten and smiled. “I never looked at balls that carefully. If I ever get a chance, I’ll try to notice.”

Miriam, who had perhaps been seeing if she could be shocked, because that would be like her, smiled more broadly and after that always stopped to chat with her. Sometimes Miriam brought her little gifts of a pear or an apple. Miriam was the only person in the world who knew she was a vegetarian, because no one but Miriam had enough curiosity about her to find out. Miriam reminded her of Dolores—and perhaps that was why she had not been shy with her—with her long black hair and her extravagant full body and Dolores’ way that if you had it you might as well flaunt it. Miriam dressed vividly and moved like a dancer. She was taller than Dolores and her clothes were more exotic. She was halfway to a doctorate and always referred to as brilliant, although with that word often went something disapproving like “bitch”
even from some of the men on their project. She exuded a sexual aura she seemed well aware of, and one she enjoyed as much as any passer-by. She annoyed people. Sometimes the other secretaries on the corridor gossiped about her, but although Beth listened with interest, she learned little except that Miriam was supposed to have too many boy friends at the same time.

In Beth’s classes, when students found out she was not really a student, they seemed to lose interest. From jokes she overheard she knew that the men who worked on the projects in her building thought the women worked there looking for husbands. They looked her over without interest in the corridors, at the coffee machines, but never started a conversation. She began to feel she was going to spend her life traveling the subway between M.I.T. and her room without ever making a friend, that if she disappeared or were run over, no one would even know. Her head bubbled with ideas and the solitary pleasures of her new fresh life, but she had no one to talk them over with. She felt as if her voice were rusting.

Then the first Tuesday in April Tom Ryan asked her out. He had sent her upstairs to pick up his print-out. He was pleased with the results and held out the sheets to her, an accordion-folded pile of perforated paper with writing on it all in numbers and capital letters. “By God, it’s true you can make anything look good with numbers if you keep at it long enough, Beth my girl. If you’re just a bit clever … Aw, the wonders of science.… How would you like to take in a flick tonight?”

She felt scared for a minute. Dating. Back to the fence-walking of high school. She did not find Tom Ryan particularly attractive, a thin small man with reddish hair and a pointed face like a fox. But she was curious what a man who was twenty-five and so educated would be like, and she was grateful too because he often spoke to her. She hesitated, not saying yes or no.

“Now, I’m not into that dating crap. There’s a good Czech film at the Orson Welles. Wait a minute, I’ll check the schedule. You can meet me there.”

“Yes,” she said quickly then, in case he might change his mind. Maybe it would not be the same as high school. Maybe men and women could be friends here and do things together
and have long good conversations. When it became clear she had never been to the Orson Welles and had in fact been nowhere in Cambridge except M.I.T., he said he would take her this time, because obviously she must not have her passport in order. He explained at length that he usually had a car but tonight it was in the garage being tuned.

After the movie he said, “Come on, we’ll do the guided-tour bit, the Square, Harvard and environs, walk along the Charles by moonlight, phantom sculling, Georgian brick, etc. You aren’t one of those overdelicate females who can’t walk on their feet, are you? One of those held together with little gold wires and hair lacquer? Good, good, I thought you were put together a little solider. Walking’s good for you—healthy, cheap, what have you.” He gripped her by the elbow, his fingers like clothespins. Propelled her along. She hardly understood half of what he was saying but he would not let her interrupt for questions. The only pause in the swirl of words was when he chuckled at one of his remarks.

She had never walked much except in the development where she had lived with Jim, and there she had felt thwarted. Then she had walked for escape, in search of another world on the next street where there stretched only identical two-story buildings or a ragweed-grown field. Walking was something she could manage even with her short legs. Along the Cambridge bank of the Charles they marched along, on the grass just getting green between the slow-moving smelly river and the cars whizzing past on Memorial Drive. The night was mild and soft, one of the first sweet nights of the spring.

“Boston has a low silhouette—like a European city, like Paris or Florence—except for the ugly towers they’re putting up every chance they get. That Prudential monstrosity was the first.”

“Have you been to Paris?”

“Of course. Though only as a tourist. I’d like to spend a year working there. I meant to do that before now, only I got married too young and that was stupid. Don’t you think you were stupid to get married so young?” This time he did pause for a reply.

“Not stupid. I think I was well trained.”

“But you think it was a mistake, or do you? Or do you think that was just Mr. Wrongo and now you’re looking for Mr. Right to slip it on again?”

“I don’t want to marry again, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t care for marriage.”

“It’s two people trying to wear one shoe at the same time.”

“Or a three-legged race.” The company picnics of her childhood. She had to explain that. He attached a sexual meaning to three-legged.

He took her to the subway station in Central Square, where he went back toward Harvard Square and she went into Boston. He had not touched her except for that bony grip on her elbow. She had enjoyed the evening and in the next week she thought of him as she did her work.

When she did see Tom again it was on a day when he was running more data through the computer. Just before five, he came to her. “If you aren’t doing anything exciting for supper, you ought to come home with me. Yes, come on up and see my etchings. I’ll introduce you to my fifty roommates. Even if there aren’t any etchings, I can show you the worst, the totally worst and biggest nudes in all of Greater Boston, green as grass and ugly as a horse’s back end.”

“Green nudes? Do you mean paintings?”

“I mean throwings. Why, a chimpanzee with a paintbrush would do better. You coming?” When she nodded he guided her out with his fingers gripping her elbow again. “Him and his girl friend Chlorine. He paints her nude. Though she doesn’t look any worse that way than with her clothes on.”

“Is her name really Chlorine?”

“Would I lie to you, Beth my girl?”

He lived on Pearl Street in a three-story shabby tan house that appeared not quite straight in the lines of the floors, the walls, even the windows, as if the whole building had slipped somehow to the south. In this neighborhood there were mostly two- and three-story wooden houses set right up against the brick sidewalks and close to each other. She climbed the stairs behind him as he chattered on, all the way to the top floor. The door was unlocked. A man sat with his back to them. In khaki pants and a shirt hanging open on his tall wiry body, he bent over a desk made from a door on iron legs. “Hi, Tom.”

“Well, are we inviting all the neighborhood junkies in? Iron bars do not a prison make, nor locks a cage. Would it be hopelessly bourgeois to go down to the locksmith and get a new lock put on the door?”

“Haven’t you introduced her because you’re afraid to? Or does she maybe not have a name?” He had a slow and patient way of speaking, as if translating from another, internal language. Slowly and gently the words came out and stood awhile, waiting.