Small Changes (17 page)

Your brother Mark got Bs and two Cs this semester, isn’t that wonderful! We are lucky to have such a smart boy as our Mark. He doesn’t write too often but he sends his laundry home every week and I can keep in touch with my loving boy by looking at the stains. Your brother makes such wonderful stains! Each one is special and I know he is thinking of his mother every day.

Remember your loving mother and be a good girl. Your father and your sister Allegra send their love and also Aunt Yette. She is very sick. I am not feeling too good myself. I have pains in my stomach all the time. Your father says it is my imagination and I eat too much. Well, I am getting older and I guess I should not be surprised to have pains in my stomach. Allegra will not eat at all. She is on a diet of grapefruit. She read about it in a magazine. Be sure and eat well
and be careful about eating out. You can never tell in restaurants what they put in the food.

Y
OUR LOVING MAMA

In every letter Sonia complained of her stomach. She was always
krechtzing.
Miriam suspected that her mother would have thought it downright immoral to feel good. Nobody paid much attention, it wasn’t like Mark having an infected wisdom tooth or Lionel getting laryngitis. Then the first week in May she got a phone call from her father, just as she got back to Martha Cooke at ten in the evening.

“Hello there. How’s the girl?”

“Fine, Dad. How are you? How come you’re calling?”

“I’ve been trying to reach you all evening, but they said you weren’t in.”

“Yes, I was studying at the library.” She had been seeing her section man of last semester. He had held out till after finals: a man of principle. She liked the relationship. She went out with other men but saw him only at his apartment. She would go over, he would cook supper, they would sit and talk or listen to music and then they would go to bed. Of course she would have to get up again and go back to the dormitory to sleep. He was writing his doctoral thesis about an abolitionist paper and she learned a great deal about that period. He was mildly radical and reminded her a little of her father: his politics was a kind of intellectual decoration and admiration of others who were more committed, and it would never intentionally affect the course of his life or career. She thought he should perhaps be warned that, like her father, he might find at some point that a wave of repression would grind him too, but what was the point? Her father had retreated into safety and was a worse person for that withdrawal. He had lost the only counter to his self-indulgence.

“I was trying to reach you all evening,” her father repeated and cleared his throat.

“Is something wrong?”

“Don’t get upset. You know how your mother is.”

“What’s wrong now?”

“Well, they don’t exactly know yet. It’s nothing to worry about. But she has to go into the hospital for a visit.”

“Into the
hospital?
What for?”

“Well, they have to take a look inside.”

“Inside what?”

“It’s just a diagnostic procedure. Her small intestine, I think it is.”

“Mama has to have an operation?”

“Don’t overdramatize! You sound like your grandmother. They’re just going in for a look.”

“What kind of a look?”

“To see what’s wrong. Now let’s not get ourselves all worked up. There’s no reason to behave irrationally. She’ll be in the hospital for a week or so while they carry out their diagnostic procedures. That’s the way they do things. She has a good doctor.”

“Should I come home?”

“I don’t see any reason for you to leave school so late in the semester. What time do your classes end?” He mulled it over nervously. “You’ll be coming in June anyhow, she’ll be out of the hospital. But you should write your mother regularly and why don’t you send her a card? Something to cheer her up. Let me give you the address.”

After finals in June when she arrived in Brooklyn, her mother was still in the hospital and what was wrong had been diagnosed as cancer. A cold wave of panic passed over Miriam, leaving her disbelieving. Sonia was not old, she was not quite fifty. She was too young! Rachel didn’t even have cancer, although her husband had died of it. How could Sonia have cancer?

When she came to sit in Sonia’s room in the hospital, her mother was her mother—pale, yellowed, bloated and wasted, but the same
kvetch.
Sonia immediately launched an attack. “What kind of outfit is that? Miriam mine, are you wearing a brassiere or not? Do you want people to see you in the halls looking like a … a gypsy?
Es passt nit!”
Sonia clucked and wrung her hands.

“Mother, all you’ve got to worry about is what clothes I got on? I’m here, never mind the window dressing.”

“It isn’t like you’re a little girl any more, nobody would mind. You’re big as a horse and you want to go around hanging out like a bum!”

“Mama, I look good this way. I don’t need a bra! It feels good not to wear one.”

“What do you care how it feels? That’s disgusting. How can you run around with people looking?”

Her mother with cancer was still her enemy. Her mother thought the best she could hope for was not to be looked at. Don’t draw attention, double-lock the door, don’t speak to strangers. “Mama, leave me alone! Don’t tear me down!”

“If you’re satisfied. None so blind as them that will not see. I wouldn’t let somebody in my classroom looking like that! What should you care what people say behind your back?”

Her reflection hung enormous and bulging on the water pitcher. Listening to her mother, she began to feel fat, huge, oozing flesh. She found herself hunching forward to hide her breasts, fingering her nose for length. “Mama, I do fine! Get off my back!”

“You mean people stare because they can’t understand how your family lets you run around like that. Is that what you learned going away to school? No wonder you don’t have prospects. Even your brother agrees you look like a slob.”

“The feeling is mutual! He doesn’t even clean the tub after himself! He shaves and he leaves his hairs all over the sink!”

“Now look at your sister. She keeps herself neat, I’m not saying she isn’t too thin, she eats like a mousie. But she’s neat and she looks nice and the boys respect her and they ask her out. Did you see her new. boy friend? That’s Dr. Moshman’s son Roger. They got tickets to a musical next week, in the balcony.”

“Mama, I don’t want to go to a musical and sit in the balcony with a dentist’s son with all his teeth capped!”

“Who’d ask you, running around with your bosom flopping and your hair hanging like a hippie? Miriam mine, listen to your mother, you’re not getting younger and opportunity is passing you by every day. Listen to me, make your mother happy before it’s too late! I worry about you, I lie here and worry about you so I can’t sleep. They give me pills but I can’t sleep.”

“Mama, don’t worry about me, because I can take care of myself. I’ll have a profession. I’m the only woman in my department who gets As. Worry about Allegra. If she doesn’t get a husband, if she gets married and divorced—”

“Don’t say such things! Don’t wish such things on your own flesh and blood!”

“What will she do then? Look in the mirror for fifty years?”

“You think you’re so smart because you get a few good grades. You always could get around your teachers.”

Oh, section man who had committed the brave public act of borrowing a car to take her to the airport. He had helped her off on the cheapie midnight flight to LaGuardia with her suitcase, typewriter, and books.

“When you learn to cover up some of that smartness instead of being so pushy with people, you’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Nobody wants to marry a walking encyclopedia!”

“Mama, I don’t want to get married!”

“You want to be like your Aunt Yette? What kind of life is that? Listen to your mother and don’t be so proud. You want to end up living in other people’s houses, on charity?”

She left the hospital feeling swollen and numbed and exhausted. She could not make contact. Sonia could not leave off playing policewoman, could not stop trying frantically to batter her back into line. She could not express her caring to Sonia. They clenched and grappled but nothing real was exchanged.

The next day she went to see Philip. He was living down on East Tenth Street in a basement apartment that belonged to a friend, off to Mexico for the summer. Phil was living in his tiny apartment and doing his job, being janitor to three buildings. He took out the garbage cans, swept the halls, accepted packages and made minor repairs, and once in a while laid the woman in 4B—which Phil insisted was part of the job.

The apartment was peculiar. It was mostly empty. There was a mattress on the floor, the usual kitchen and bathroom equipment, and a formica table and two kitchen chairs. That was all: no chairs or sofas or dressers or end tables or desks. With the white cement walls and the starkness, it made her think of a jail. Phil laughed at that: he said it was nothing like any jail he had ever seen. For one thing, the toilet worked.

Phil shook his head, sitting cross-legged on the mattress. “A hermit’s cell, my child. Vows of poverty and chastity—except for 4B, which is part of the job—that’s Jackson’s style.”

Kneeling before him she put her hands on his shoulders and slowly rubbed against him. “I hope you’re not thinking of taking up his style with his house and his job?”

Yet when they began to make love, Phil was impotent and she could not rouse him. She lay beside him helplessly and all of a sudden she began to cry. “Phil, I know what it is. You sense something wrong in me.”

“That’s what I’ve been looking for.” He spoke quite remotely. Turning on his side he lay with head propped up staring at her. His eyes were cold and watchful, ice blue.

“My mother has cancer …” She said that much and then her throat closed tight and she wept and wept. His eyelids sank and his face relaxed. Then he opened his eyes again and held her against him. He stroked her hair and her tears ran over his shoulder and into the pillow. She could not speak, she could hardly breathe. Her throat was closed and she gasped for breath and still the tears ran out of her like blood to soak the pillow.

She became aware his impotence had vanished when still lying beside her he guided his penis gently between her labia and slowly began to slide into her. She tried to say no, but she could not speak. She shook her head wildly and tried to push him back, but he held her with the full strength of his hands and arms until he was buried in her with his legs scissored about hers.

“Don’t, Miriam, don’t do a guilt trip. I have to unwind you. Let me bring you out. Don’t push, don’t fight me. Just lie still and let me draw you out.” Slowly he moved in her and she would not move and did not want to feel. “Us being together doesn’t make her pain worse. I’m real too, pigeon, and loving you is real. Don’t deny me with your body. Don’t ever close yourself against me.” She realized she was breathing again, the knot was dissolving in her, the ragged pain in her chest was easing its constriction. “Don’t you dare feel guilty, I won’t let you put that on us. Feel guilty only if you deny me. Loosen, loosen. Give yourself back to me.”

Why the resistance in her? Because she had not been able to love Sonia for years and Sonia had not been able to love her, she should not love him. Because inside her was a core memory of loving and being loved in the mama-center, the lap, the baby milk and warmth. It seemed a sin to loosen to a man, Philip, to let her love open to him, to have sex in the
region of death and pain; to love now felt obscene and impious. To feel toward Philip was to deny her mother and her mother in her flesh: her mother, somehow in her Miriambody as well as her own sick Sonia-body. Her mother was in her flesh scolding and whispering she must reject him even as shamefully she loosened and warmed to him. “Come on, Miriam, come over to me, open to me, come back to me, come …

Afterward she asked him if sensing in her the struggle over her mother’s sickness was what had made him unable to take her at first.

“Maybe.” He shrugged. “Maybe it was more smelling the other men.”

“The other men? You mean at school? But you told me to!”

“Sure. You would have anyhow. There is more dignity in telling you to do that which you would do anyhow.”

“But, Philip! You told me to! I wouldn’t have. I think I had relationships as much to have something to write you about as for anything in them. I wanted to please you!”

“Nevertheless I have burned with the green fire of jealousy. Aw, don’t stare at me with big bruised eyes. All that was interesting and productive of poems. And that’s what lasts.”

The bedroom was stark, nothing but the mattress and Phil’s suitcase. But one morning Phil saw a perfectly good mattress thrown out on the street, and together they moved it into the bedroom beside the other so that the whole small room was carpeted with mattress and became a room-sized bed to roll on. It was dim, with the only light filtering from an airshaft in which rumbled toilets flushing and electric razors and songs and curses and radios and babies. The grimy light made the room feel under water. They painted the walls with sea creatures, with fish and squids and mermaids and strands of filmy seaweed. Phil said they could paint it over white before Jackson returned. Back in the utility part of the basement they found leftover paint in partly used cans. What they tired of they blanked out and replaced. Sea horses and whales and huge clams and a purple lobster walking on its tail. A woman fucking an octopus. Whales in the act. One day at the Aquarium in Coney Island they watched two white pilot whales engaged in hours of flirting foreplay and graceful afterplay and brief turning bouts of energetic fucking. “Their whole bodies are erogenous zones,” Phil muttered. “I want
reincarnation as a whale. To whom should I apply, do you think?”

“Moby Dick. Now I understand that name!”

But the days of wandering and games playing were few. She needed him, she needed him dreadfully. Afternoons they stayed home, smoking hash in his water pipe and lying naked on the bed and painting on the walls. Often he read to her his own and other poems and they lay forehead to forehead dreaming and touching and talking. She began to understand that he had feared losing her when she began to have sex with other men. For all his boasting, often he could not make it. He had feared she would discover that not all men required to be coaxed to erection and that she would not return to him; or worse, she would return with scorn, with pity, with secret contempt.