Small Changes (13 page)

BETH
: But you’re beautiful. How could they make you feel that way?

Miriam makes a sour face, pushing her heavy hair back.

DORINE
: You are. Everybody says so.

MIRIAM
: Ever stop to think that’s what makes somebody beautiful—other people? I wasn’t pretty when I was growing up. Let me see your teeth. Come on, both of you. No, you didn’t go through that (
to Beth
) but you did, Dorine. Braces. Right? How long did you wear them?

DORINE
: Centuries. Ugh, I hated them. Into high school. I never smiled except this little simper. I was so homely!

MIRIAM
: Well, I was fat. Fat! I wore braces and I was fat and I had pimples and they put glasses on me when I was nine or ten. So don’t talk to me about beautiful. Inside I am still fat and I wear braces and my nose always runs and I have pimples and the only boy I like in seventh grade calls me Four Eyes. And ugly orthopedic shoes my uncle fitted on me free, because it was all in the family. There wasn’t anything wrong with my feet! But I had to wear those clod-busters because they were free, when all the other girls wore patent leather T-straps and darling red boots. It still makes me mad, I can remember that and still get furious.

BETH
: Is Allegra really more beautiful than you are?

MIRIAM
: Now who am I to ask? At home she was. She photographs better. I come across coarse in photographs. She hasn’t got my coloring, but then nobody thought that was an advantage when I was growing up. Allegra looks—you should excuse me—more like a
shiksa
, more like you, Bethie. She hasn’t got such a big bosom and she hasn’t got such a big nose. She’s more like the size a woman is supposed
to be—she’s five feet six and she has a good figure but it’s within reason, and she can wear clothes off the rack, tailored clothes, anything.

BETH
: I never thought it was, possible to have breasts that were too big. The bigger, the better.

MIRIAM
: Oh, Bethie, that’s not true. Nothing fits you. You go around bowed over and embarrassed for years. I used to spend vast amounts of energy in search for a perfect bra until I stopped wearing them altogether, except under itchy things. What a relief! I always bounced anyway. How my mother used to glare at my boobs. I felt so ashamed. It was as if I’d done it on purpose, it was part of being too fat, too tall, too gross. The worst thing was some guy suddenly deciding to pinch them to see if they were real. In grade school already, by the eighth grade, I was getting that. I don’t know how I ever went out of the house. It was like this terrible embarrassment suddenly hung on the front of me that was in the way and which everybody else looked at before they looked at me—maybe it was all they saw.

BETH
: I’ve always gotten it the other way. I used to have this awful fantasy in high school, when it was clear I was just never going to have much. There I’d be and I would get married and then I’d take off my clothes. Then my husband would look at me and say, ‘Well, is that all?’ Then he’d throw me out.

MIRIAM
: That’s so ugly! Why do we hate ourselves so much? We all go around hating ourselves because we don’t look like the women in the ads.

BETH
: Nancy didn’t look like that either. She’s almost as thin as I am. It’s as if the family game is set up so that, if she wins, I lose. I guess there’s always a favorite. If there’s two kids, each can be one parent’s favorite, but if there’s more, then somebody gets left out.

DORINE
: But at least you feel there’s somebody there. I mean, I get money from them sometimes but I feel as if I was born lonely. I feel sometimes as if I’ll go through life and never belong to anyone.

BETH
: But you aren’t a dog, why do you want to be owned?

MIRIAM
: Mark’s in law school now, but Allegra’s husband hunting. The minute she got to be a senior she started turning over eight cylinders and got engaged to a pre-med student.
His family wasn’t big on him marrying, and the prospects of putting him through four years of medical school were dreary. Now she’s engaged to some guy who works in the personnel department of a company that makes peanut butter. I call him the Peanut Butter Crumb. Every time she sees me she asks me the first thing: Are you getting married yet? Do you have any prospects? You mean you’re still
seeing Philip!
Oy, oy.… Forgive me, Allegra would never say oy. She has our father’s gentility, excuse the pun. He always pressuring us how to talk.

DORINE
: Does your family know about Phil and Jackson?

MIRIAM
: Not Jackson. But Phil, He was the scandal of my college years. I used to come running into New York every vacation to see him and my family would start screaming and yelling and carrying on. Oh, how they hated him!

DORINE
: My parents know I’m living with Lennie. They don’t make a fuss, they like to be modern and up to date and that jazz. But every so often my mother will say something really nasty. How she can get under my skin.

BETH
: You started going out with Phil in college? How old were you?

MIRIAM
: Nineteen. We never really went out. It wasn’t that way.

BETH
: I don’t understand about him. What way was it?

MIRIAM
: Oh! (
She shrugs, running her hand through her heavy hair, tugging on it. Then she smiles widely and sweetly, shaking her head.
) It was all the doors in the world opening at once!

TWO
The Book of Miriam

6

You Ain’t Pretty
So You Might as Well Be Smart

The first home Miriam remembered was her grandmother’s apartment, long, wandering, and rent-controlled in a vast building on West End Avenue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Everything appeared at least as old as Grandma, and the furniture was large and Germanic and stiff. Grandma Berg and Grandfather Berg, who was in the shirt-making trade, and Aunt Yette, who was not exactly her aunt, all lived there.

Before, her parents had lived in Canarsie. Then her father had gone to the Army to fight the Nazis to protect the Jews. The Russians had pushed from one side and her father from the other, and then the Nazis had to let the Jews not yet burned up go free, as in the song her father sang about Moses. When her father came back after winning, she was born and Mark was born. But then the troubles came and her father got blacklisted and fired, and they had all moved in with the Bergs. Nobody thought her father was a hero any more except her mother, Sonia, and her. Grandma Berg said it was all Sonia’s fault, but even when Miriam was little she knew her mother was not political. Rachel, her other grandma, yelled at Sonia that she had false consciousness and a petty bourgeois mentality. Her mother and father always said that you could not argue politics with Rachel, because she was a Trot.

So when Miriam first remembered, they lived with the Bergs and went out on Sunday to see Grandma Rachel. When Sonia complained how oppressive it was to live at Grandma Berg’s, Rachel would always tell her she could move back home, even now that Allegra was born too. But Grandma Rachel had a boy friend even though she was an old woman,
and Sonia thought that was not right. They fought about everything. Fighting with Grandma Rachel was different from fighting with Grandma Berg. Grandma Rachel would start yelling and wailing and sometimes she would throw a cup on the floor or pound on the wall. She made a lot of noise when she was mad and sometimes she cried.

When Grandma Berg was angry, it was something cold. It was something in the food and in the walls and in the air. It meant whispering and trying not to make noise and it meant that little smile of hers and iron poking through her voice. It meant discussions instead of fights, quiet shiftings of forces, invisible maneuvers. Grandma Berg did not believe in politics: she said in America you had to do like an American. She said, Look, did the Communists save the Jews in Germany? No, your Stalin signed a pact to deliver them to the butcher. Here you work hard and you can have what you want.

Miriam had shared a room at times with Aunt Yette, and at times with her parents. Her warmest memories were of the piano which she was sometimes allowed to bang on, and of a hall that led from the dining room back into the wing with the bedrooms. Miriam had loved to shut all the doors that led off, the door to Aunt Yette’s room, the door to her grandparents’ room, the door to her parents’ room where baby Mark slept, the door to the bathroom (there was another off Grandma’s bedroom) and the doors to the linen closet and dining room. Then she would dance, singing to herself and whirling round and round in the wonderful dark till she keeled over. The hall smelled of lavender. In an herb shop that sold spices and ingredients used in European baking, Grandma Berg bought camomile and
lindenbluten
for tea, and lavender to strew among the sheets and pillowcases and blankets. She said it made them smell clean and kept moths away. Her mother would make faces when she had to shake the dried flowers out of the linens.

Sonia hated living with Grandma and Grandfather and Aunt Yette. Sonia was always saying, whispering as they did in their room even though the walls were thick, that she would rather live as a family in a flophouse than to stay any longer with her in-laws. She kept talking about Grandma taking a pound of flesh from her every day, though it seemed clear to Miriam as she was plodding through her childhood
that what had been given up to Grandma Berg was her. Miriam was always understood to be her favorite grandchild: not in the sense that Mark was, of course, because he was the son, the name-bearer, the carrier of light. In fact Miriam had disliked the word “future” since she was little and had always imagined it stamped with Mark’s face. The only time people ever talked about the future in her household or later when they were visiting the West End apartment was when they were arguing about Mark’s schooling. Mark had a future before him; Allegra and she had only prospects, which meant husbands.

Even Sonia’s mother, Grandma Rachel Abrams, twice a widow, said that Grandma Berg was a
berrieh.
She managed for everybody. That wasn’t all Rachel said Grandma Berg was, of course. They looked down their noses at each other. “We’ll never feel like
mishpockeh
,” said Rachel. Grandma Berg did not use Yiddish in her daily conversations, reserving it for communication with Yette. Nobody knew what she spoke with Grandfather Berg. Their relationship was formal. He worked and worked and worked and worked. He had a small business always on the verge of disaster, and he was perhaps the most harried human being Miriam had ever watched. What money could be leached out of that business had gone into the education of the children and into insurance and burial plots. Lionel, Miriam’s father, was always convinced there was more and always trying to get some of it.

Grandma Berg did not quite trust Allegra’s prettiness. She was always telling Sonia and Lionel that they had spoiled her. She never recovered from her austere amusement at the name. “You wanted a fast girl, Lionel? Let us give thanks you didn’t call her Largo or Fortissimo. Never did I think, all those years paying for music lessons, you wouldn’t make a living and you’d visit such names on the children.” But Miriam was what she called a good girl: lumpy, overweight (a good eater), pale, with a big nose and a perennial head cold. It seemed to Miriam she had been born with her sinuses swollen. All through grade school she had coughed and wheezed and sniveled, with infected tonsils and raw throat and the constant steady drip of snot. She often felt there could be nothing else inside her. In how many processed forests she had wiped her leaky nose: a mountain of papermâché could have been built of her used tissues: a monument
the size of the Statue of Liberty to a deep and persistent discomfort. She was always sick, right up until she left home.

Grandma was blunter than Mother, but the message was the same. “You’re not pretty, Miriam mine, so you better be smart. But not too smart. Don’t get your head swelled.” Little fuss was made over her grades, though they were always better than Mark’s. Big, awkward, shy, she felt like something acquired at a rummage sale, one of those awful coats her mother got from resale shops.

“Aunt Yette
would
take her to Gimbel’s and buy her a yellow dress. Lionel, what am I going to do? Yette didn’t give me the sales slip, and they’ll expect to see it on her. It looks like she’s wearing a whole circus tent!” Her mother would look her up and down and sideways in the yellow dress, wringing her hands, and her father would laugh and say, patting Sonia’s shoulder, that they should count themselves lucky it didn’t have purple polka dots and green lace trim too. They should be thankful it didn’t also have a neon sign that went on and off saying Buy Bonds for Israel.

By that time her father had a job. He was teaching music in a high school in Canarsie. He had given up trying to make a record, but he was still writing his songs and sending them to
Sing Out
and
Broadside
, hoping they would print one. For several months he took up electric guitar until the neighbors made the landlord threaten to evict them. He was a man with more charm than she had ever needed in her father: he could always charm her, but so often he was laughing at her. She could still remember one time when some younger faculty from his high school were over and they were commenting on how pretty Allegra was. Her father had replied with that smile that meant he was anticipating saying something witty, “Well, she’s the youngest of three: practice makes perfect!”

At one time in her childhood she had determined to conquer her father with music and she had practiced and practiced, but the harder she tried and the more she sweated over her Chopin waltzes, the more irritable he became, the oftener he winced and stalked out. She was terrible. “That’s a waltz, Miriam, a waltz. You know, a dance, a light beautiful dance. So why do you play it as a lament for the zombie’s return? You must have a natural sense of lack of rhythm!”