Small Changes (78 page)

“The whole ball of wax sticks together. That’s a Wanda expression. You set your own terms that make the problem insoluble.”

“How did Wanda managed to work in the theater with two boys? I guess they’re old enough to be in school.”

“Everybody took care of the children.”

“I don’t know.… Different women have different ideas about child rearing. I wouldn’t care for Laverne imposing her notions on my children, any more than she would like mine.”

“But, Miriam, you can’t have it both ways! If the kids are solely your responsibility, then all you can do is hire the time of a woman who won’t love them. If others care about them and therefore care for them, you can’t have complete control.”

Miriam looked dubious. “Most people are such pigs about children.”

“I’m going to think about what you asked me. I can’t come up with magic. My answer is going to be dull and practical.… I’m going to bring you things to read and some lists of groups that exist.”

Phil and Dorine volunteered to take the boys to Cleveland. They were meeting in a Greek restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue where the bouzoukia music on the jukebox made background and they talked softly. It was early and uncrowded. Beth would be picking up Luis and Johnny and then turning them over to … Dorine and Phil? She must decide. “I don’t feel good about your doing it,” Beth said to Dorine. “What you’re working on, what you’re doing with your life is important. I don’t want to get you into trouble.”

“I’m not sacrificing myself—I don’t expect to get caught. And, Beth, who doesn’t have something precious in herself that deserves to be protected? Besides, Phil and I function well together. We both drive, we’re used to night driving. I know we can do it. We can’t control the off chance, but we won’t take extra risks. Each of us knows how the other thinks and reacts—which is good when we may be dealing with emergencies.”

“But
you,”
Beth said to Phil. Still tanned from the summer,
he looked healthy. Thin but not gaunt. An edge was gone from him. At the same time she sensed him more directly. She remembered the wall of glass she had felt between him and the world, except for Miriam, long ago in the coffeehouse. She could not quite make sense of the shifts and alterations—appearance? habit? “Why do you want to do this? We’ve … never got along.”

“Disliked each other self-righteously.”

“Well?”

“Dorine wants to, for you. And I always thought Wanda had plenty of guts. But how do you think you’ll understand?”

“I have to trust you.”

Phil grinned. “And I have to trust you worked this thing out well enough so we won’t be caught. You don’t know how much I don’t want to go back inside.”

“You served time.” She tried to feel that with her mind.

“That’s part of it. I used to know those kids, especially Luis. He’s a real fine kid. And nobody with all their marbles would doubt Wanda is one tough mother.” He shrugged. “You take the risk I might fuck up. I take the risk your plan might be full of worms.”

“You keep questioning that. Because a woman can’t possibly plan an action?”

“Don’t call me names without provocation. Anybody not a mental case worries when they take risks. You think if you were a man I’d say, ‘Yassah?’ Come off it.”

“Of course, you’ve always been scrupulously fair with women, all these years, so I ought to believe in your sudden conversion.”

“You don’t think Dorine knows what I’m like?”

“Every woman’s man is an exception,” Dorine said. “I have to say that before Beth does.”

“Are all men bad and all women good? Or are there differences?” He shook his head heavily and then leaned back. Dorine was sitting with her arms folded across her breasts, keeping herself from interfering. “Make up your mind. Trust me or don’t. I don’t have enough self-hatred left in me to take a whole lot of kicking.”

“Why do you want to? Is it for Dorine? Is it because you were in jail? I can’t feel you. And I can’t play with Wanda’s life by spreading a thick coat of good will over everything and saying, ‘It’s so nice you want to do this that I’ll take it like a lollipop.’ ”

“Do you ever know just why anybody does an act? Did you really understand why Wanda went to jail rather than testify?”

“Yes, I do think I finally understand that! Being politically naïve isn’t like being female, it changes.” With what? Having exorcised her anger at Wanda for leaving her for any reason? Taking action herself that carried risk?

“Well, it’s a nice clear action. Suppose some bastards had taken me away from my mother? It could have happened to her just for being poor and alone.”

She stared at him. “Do you think doing time changed you?”

“What kind of question is that? … You’re a thing in their-power. They can beat you, strip you, starve you, take away your letters and your pictures and piss on them and tear them up in front of you. Tell you what to read, deny you paper and pencil, bust you for staring. They can take your health away real slow or break your back in two minutes. ‘Desperate’ just has no meaning till you’re inside. Then nothing ever is the same again. Not touching a woman, not taking a crap or looking at the sky or buying a paperback or smiling in the mirror.… Doing
Time.
While people outside give up on you. Go on and live and forget you and take your woman or your kids away and let them have absolute mastery over you, mastery to death.”

“You think the effects were all bad? You never spoke to me for real before. Talking to communicate, not to manipulate. You always tried to make me give you something.”

“How the hell do you presume that’s jail and not Dorine? This woman is strong. And stubborn. We’ve been struggling and struggling with each other. Jesus, there are more direct ways to change your habits!”

“Beth, he’s done a lot of his changing here.” Dorine turned to Phil. “I think you came back with less … structures … but you might have rebuilt them into something harder.” Dorine unclasped her hands from that protective, restraining clutch across her breasts.

“We’re all so divided and put down, it has a funny side,” Beth said softly. “Your ex-con, poor-child oppression. My female, lesbian oppression. I guess we might try to pull together instead of across the table.”

Phil poured them all more retsina. Beth found she was sitting back. Her muscles felt sore, as if she had been holding
up a weight. Why were they all suddenly easier? Beth knew she was going to agree that they would take Luis and Johnny to Cleveland. With the confrontation relaxed, Dorine began to interact with both of them. Beth watched Dorine and Phil together. Then she decided to bring that up out loud. “Do you think of yourselves as a couple?”

“Well, yeah,” Phil said. “Loosely. In the context of the house.”

“The center of my life is what I do. But I don’t have to be quite so inhuman about it now. I don’t need to prove to myself any longer that I can study, that I can work, that I can do research. I’m over the first and second humps—”

“There are no camels with these humps,” Phil said. “We’re done proving to each other what we don’t need, and now we can enjoy what time we get. Sometimes we’re in different cycles and we can’t bring it together. She’s more into her head, I’m more into my hands. I need to make real objects, useful objects. Beds people lie on, fuck in. Babies’ cradles. Chairs. Desks. Tables. But we’re both back from the extremes of that dichotomy too.”

“What does that word mean? I don’t follow you.”

Dorine said, “For so long I hadn’t used my mind except to invent rationalizations and brood on my sorrows. When I began to work, I became superrational and super-controlled. I didn’t want to enjoy my body. I was scared of being captured by the old passivity.”

“Yeah, remember that first year? Sex measured out like holy water. I was like to die.”

“Now I don’t need to blot out everybody to be able to work.”

“Aw now, my head trip was never control, I should hardly need to say—”

“Ha,” Dorine said, wrinkling her nose. “You tried in your devious way. You were just too stoned to be good at getting power.”

“Listen, growing up where I did, the way you felt like a man was by hurting, by beating, by putting down. Well, I identified with my mother too much to make it that way. Now, there were two models I saw, the champion, the hustler. The champion fights to win. The hustler wants to win too, but in such a way that it looks accidental. He doesn’t cream an opponent, he cons a mark.”

“Women have a soft spot for hustlers, that’s why you did
so well.” Dorine smiled sideways at him. “Because the hustler isn’t alien. All women hustle. Women watch faces, voices, gestures, moods. The person who has to survive through cunning. Flattery, charm, manipulation …” Reminiscently she turned to Beth. “One of the things that used to hook me on our first rotten go-round was that I felt that Phil needed me, needed my sympathy, my caring.”

“But I hustled women too. Aw, I hustled in the Army, I swear I hustled Jackson out of his marriage, I hustled into graduate school …”

“To listen to him tell it, you’d think he had it made!” Dorine said.

“Well, I was never a grade A hustler because my fantasies took over. They interfered with my ability to scan. The structures I built in my head got more and more real and what I tripped over in the street less and less important. Drugs helped. They helped a lot. They numbed me to the pain of losing and losing.”

Beth said, “I couldn’t learn to hustle. So I was a victim, a loser. But that isn’t the whole universe! We can get outside of roles, finally! We can!”

“Mother Mary, I’m trying.” Phil grinned. “But what a long slow tortuous winding it is.”

“Jackson plays the sage but he’s really a champion type, isn’t he?” Beth said, remembering, remembering. “He has to win.”

“We don’t see each other much. I can’t stand the smell of modest success. And I don’t wrestle with him in the old way, I don’t secretly want to be him.… But don’t you have to win too? I’m counting on that.”

“In the plural. That makes a difference. I can’t define a victory that would be just for me … except the immediate one of getting my family together.”

“Being with Phil makes me more, not less, Bethie. Try to see. We have separate problems and we have to solve them, each of us, but sometimes we keep each other warm and sometimes we help each other to survive, to see, to try. Now we can ask each other for things we want, at least sometimes. You know?”

Beth looked from Dorine to Phil. “Maybe it’s the retsina. But I feel as if you want me to bless you. I’m only me. What you want, you do. I only want you to help me to get my love and our children together.”

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.