Small Changes (3 page)

Cars outside were hurrying past from the city to the Finger Lakes or farther to the mountains. An ice cream truck, a Mr. Softie, rode by playing its jingle as the minister spoke to them. She tried to fix her mind on what she had to say. She could not hear the words over the roaring in her ears. Magic words that made things happen or go away, recipes like I Love You, and I’m Sorry, and I Pledge Allegiance, and God Bless Mommy and Daddy, and Will You Marry Me, and Fine, Thank You, and I Do. The way through to Jim. Jim spoke up clearly. He kissed her, but his lips felt hard and closed. Then they were going out. She tried to match his stride. They were supposed to go out slowly, but they weren’t going as they were supposed to.

Rice tossed and ribbons and big signs on the car, shoes and cans dragging. Frankie blew the horn as they went, ta taaa ta ta. Jim was hugging her in the car but again for show. Still the radio had turned on with the ignition to a rock station, and the air felt more alive. They passed a lawn where in those silly two-piece bathing suits hung on little girls three children ran under the sprinkler with a brown woolly dog chasing with them woofing and leaping high and shaking himself. Suppose they could run now under the hose, wet her dress
down to size, pry off the white shoes that gripped her feet and dance together. The worst was over. They were really married. They could not dance under the hose with Dick and Elinor and Marie and Dad, and not even with Nancy, who would say her hair was ruined. But in just a little while all the noise would fade and they would be together as they wanted to be, their own lives. Soon it would begin to be beautiful.

“I’ll be glad to get this thing off,” she said softly to Jim.

“Yes, baby.” He squeezed her hand. Her face heated and she was afraid she blushed because he was grinning at her. You were supposed to hold out, you were supposed to or everyone suffered: then you got caught and you had to get married and Mother lay on her bed having headaches for weeks, like Dick and Elinor. She had to make up for that. This big church wedding was the certificate that the Phails were not ashamed this time, not in a pig’s eye, as her father said, no baby in five months, they had invited the neighbors in to look this time.

The reception was at the V.F.W. Hall. The bar was set up along one wall and Frankie and Jim made a dash for it, Jim yelling, “Charge!” On the other far wall was a buffet arranged with the wedding cake in the middle. “Save the top layer—keep an eye out that nobody cuts into it,” Marie whispered to her. The cake had three tiers. Now she and Jim cut it with a knife that was a wedding present from Jimbo’s Uncle Victor which said A Slice of Life Knife on its pearl handle. “Now you can cut the mustard, ha-ha,” Frankie said. All the wedding presents were piled up. Mother and Dad and Marie were to cart them afterward over to the apartment they had rented, so they’d be there when Beth and Jim got back from their honeymoon a week from Sunday.

The cake tasted just like store-bought sawdust white cake, but she had to eat it because the photographer her father had hired was taking pictures. Spots danced in her eyes. She and Jim had to feed each other pieces. He liked chocolate cake the best and so did she, but the baker said nobody ever had chocolate wedding cake and her mother acted as if there was something dirty-minded in wanting it. So they had what the baker called Lady’s Cake. It had pink rosebuds and green leaves and a chubby bride and groom holding hands under an archway.

The four-piece rock group from her high school had
started to play and she and Jim had to dance together first in front of everybody. They had to waltz. They had never waltzed together. They didn’t do it well because she only came up to the middle of his chest. She felt smothered, not able to see where she was backing to, with the stiff jacket pressing her nose. When they danced to rock music, their different sizes did not matter. They could look at each other and her feet did not always end up planted under his coming down. Finally the waltz ended and they could stop. The musicians too looked relieved.

Except that, when she went to sit down, people kept coming and she had to get up. The champagne was okay, it was like pop only not as sweet. It didn’t bite like the bourbon Jim drank sometimes and it was not sour like beer. Jim and Frankie kept bringing her champagne. She never did get to eat but after a while she did not mind. It was so hot the fans could not seem to move the sluggish air and people kept going outside and standing on the sidewalk with their drinks. There was an enormous press around the bar. She heard Dad talking to Mother about the liquor bill. “We’ve got to get them out of here by five,” her dad said. “How are we ever going to get them to leave? Look at them lap it up.”

She could smell the sweetish odor of grass, but nobody offered her any. It was hard to really dance inside the marshmallow. Jimbo had said this group wasn’t really good, but they were very loud and that helped.

Dick looked as if he might be drunk. He kept saying that his baby sister had got married, although of course Nancy was his baby sister. Nancy looked more grown up than Beth did, everyone said so, because she was good at putting on make-up. Nancy’s cross in life was that Dad wouldn’t let her bleach her hair. She was dancing with Frankie too close and Marie and her mother were arguing about whether to go say anything. Then Marie had to go off to the women’s lounge to breast-feed the baby and Mother made Nancy come and say hello to some aged second cousin, which she did for thirty seconds. Chuckie, Dick’s five-year-old, was throwing up by the band from too much ice cream and maybe a little champagne.

Then Elinor was clutching her by the arm saying, “You wait and see if you think it makes so damn much difference! You wait and see! I know how they’ve always thought of me.
Some families have a heart, they accept you and make you feel at home, but your mother has never let me forget a thing. But just you wait and see how much fucking difference it makes when you come down to it!”

Frankie asked her to dance and she kept dancing with him for a while, it was so good to get away from all the people she had to make a stiff smile for and say oh, thank you for whatever it was. Then Mother came and hissed in her ear that she shouldn’t let Frankie pinch her that way. But she hadn’t felt anything through the dress. She didn’t much like him kissing her, he tasted like alcohol. Men kept kissing her all afternoon, especially uncles. When her new Uncle Victor was slobbering on her she thought, suppose she suddenly bit him, and then she began to laugh. The champagne went up as bubbles into her head and made her laugh a lot.

Dick was yelling at Elinor about Chuckie when a big fat old walrus of a man she had never seen before passed out and had to be carried away. Under the stairway, Nancy was kissing Tom. Tom used to go with her but now went steady with Trudy, and Trudy ran upstairs crying. Her mother came and told Beth it was time for her to go up and change. Jim was dancing with Dolores, who had succeeded in making another alteration in her bridesmaid’s dress so that now most of her breasts showed. Marie was still feeding Lucille in the lounge, with Frankie’s mother fallen asleep beside her with her mouth open, but Dolores and Jim were finally pried apart. Dolores came to help her out of the marshmallow. By this time Beth was damp with the heat and felt dizzy and clammy under the layers and layers.

At last she was unpeeled and Dolores and Nancy and Trudy, who had stopped crying, stood around making jokes about brides getting undressed all the time, as if she hadn’t petted enough times with Jim, and Dolores anyhow knew that. Mother and Marie had tried to make her get a suit, but she had picked a little print dress without sleeves that felt soft and looked like flowers that had run a bit, flowers that were not color-fast in a light rain. Then they all kissed her good-by and Mother sniffed and pretended to cry and everybody came to kiss her for yet another beery, smelly, balony time, taste of foods she hadn’t got to eat, chicken salad and ham and mayonnaise, and the guests went right on drinking and outside on the sidewalk Frankie and Tom were getting ready to fight
each other and Uncle Vic was blowing and yelling. Then they got into Jim’s car at last and drove away.

They drove toward New Hampshire, toward the White Mountains, which sounded cool but turned out to be too far. They were both tired by sunset so they stopped at a motel in Vermont. Because there were no doubles left they had to take a room with two double beds, which cost more than they had figured on. They ate supper at a restaurant up the highway where drinks were served. Jim had pork chops and a couple of shots of Jim Beam, and she had chicken and a whiskey sour. By the time they finished she was sleepy but Jim was waking up. She had two cups of coffee. When they drove back to the motel she was almost too tired to be nervous. After all, it would be just like always, only better.

“You know, Little Girl, I was stoned.” Jim unbuttoned his shirt sitting on the bed. “Couldn’t go through that otherwise without freaking out, no way. But Frankie and I had a joint right outside and I just floated through. I didn’t get your old lady mad at me even once—a world’s record.”

In the room next door the people had the TV on loud and the laugh track kept clattering through the walls. She told herself the noise was protective. She liked the motel. Oh, it was ugly and plastic but it was a room that didn’t belong to anybody. For one night it belonged to her and Jim together. At last they were out of sight of everybody. It was beautiful that there were rooms people could rent to be alone. Here they were in a town whose name she had not even noticed, in a room for the two of them.

He said they should go to bed. “I mean, who wants to watch TV, what’s the point, right, Little Girl? You get ready.”

She went off to the bathroom and did not know if she should put on the black nightgown Dolores had given her. Always they had been together in Jim’s car, or on the couch at Dolores’ when her parents were out, or at Marie’s when she would baby-sit and Jim would sneak up. They had done what she thought of as everything except that ultimate dangerous, culminating act. But they had never been all the way undressed. Somebody might return home early or come along and shine a light on them. It wasn’t as if her body were strange to him but it felt brazen to walk out there naked, as if she were expecting something. Finally she put on the
nightgown and brushed her hair till it lost its strange frozen shape. Then she came out barefoot with her arms folded and paused beside the bed. “Jim, love, here I am.”

It was over in fifteen minutes, the whole thing. Then he lay on his side breathing softly in sleep and she was lying there with a new hole torn in her, oozing softly into the mattress. She was stretched there still wound up as if whatever she was waiting for had not yet happened. She felt much less satisfied than she had after one of those fumbling longdrawn-out sessions on the couch or the back seat of his Chevy. It was accomplished. That was it, the whole thing. They had made love finally, but where was the love they had made?

2

Marriage Is a Matter of Give and Take

The days were long but blurred except for weekends when she and Jim could be together. Often they went shopping or to the stock-car races, especially if Dan was driving. Usually they went out with Frankie and the girl he was seeing that month. She was thrown together with Frankie’s girl friends. Some she liked and some she didn’t, but she had to get along with all of them while becoming attached to none: because in three weeks he would be through with that one. Then the suddenly dropped girl would be calling her to cry and wonder what she had done.

She looked at Jim at the table, in the shower, lying beside him in bed, studying him and her feelings, trying to understand what this was, this marriage, this loving. A pain bloomed in her flesh sometimes when she looked at him, a beautiful frightening jagged pain of loving. Why? Because of his straight nose and his gray eyes and the way one brow slanted higher than the other and the turn at the corner of his mouth?

What did such a sweet pain mean? For a year she had schemed, lied to her mother and father, used an elaborate code on the phone like a heroine in a spy movie, all to be with him. Now here they were married, month after month. She had loved him and been sure she knew him; every day it hit her how little they knew each other. Yet they seemed to go on exactly the same.

Every day she had to go to work too early. She wished she could arrive at nine-thirty when she had to punch in, but Jim had to be at work by nine and he wanted the car with him. Where they were living in East Syracuse, there really was no other way to get downtown to Edwards, where she worked. So every day she had half an hour, forty-five minutes to kill before work. The downtown had been urban-renewed and there were benches, especially in the square in front of St. Mary’s and the County Courthouse, where sometimes she could read for a while without being pestered. Or she wandered past the parking lots paved over rubble and looked at the fancy new yellow stucco townhouses, the high-rise apartments, and wondered what it would be like if they lived near things she might want to do, instead of so far out. By the museum a playground had an elephant slide, and even at that hour children were crawling through the elephant’s belly and sliding down his trunk. Watching, she felt a peculiar nostalgia; not for her own childhood certainly. For children she would have?

She did not like selling in Daytime Dresses where a nervous manager was always breathing down her neck, telling her to fold boxes or work on stock if she lacked a customer. She hated being checker at the fitting rooms, pulling clothes out of women’s hands and counting to make sure nothing was stolen.

In March, after she had been married and working full time for nine months, she was transferred to Notions, on the ground floor. Notions tended to be quiet and mostly she just had to show customers where hangers or sewing supplies were located. All day long music engulfed her. Records were in the middle of Men’s Wear, just through the archway. In June she began to notice the music more. The person who put on the records now was a college boy pretending to be his brother just graduated from high school. If the store had known he was twenty and in college, they would not have
hired him. He called her Mrs. Walker and seemed to think that was funny. She called him Larry. He told her she was a child bride, that she had been married at age thirteen and would have ten children by the time she was thirty.