Small Changes (48 page)

If she loved Karen, it might be different. She liked Karen, but somehow that did not open into loving her. She asked herself if she were afraid. She did not know if that was it or if something cold in Karen held her off. Somehow Karen was more the man in their couple and she was more the woman, and Karen seemed to want it that way. In bed they were equal and that was good, but out of bed they were maybe not quite equal.

Karen easily took a hard line with her, telling her about the world and laying down axioms and criticizing her naïveté, and too easily she slipped into passivity. She felt her identity oozing away. Somehow she did not get the private space she needed. She had not wanted to live in a couple, she had known that, yet somehow she had eased into it. Why could they not have gone to bed without becoming a couple? Yet they had both begun to act that way the next day, and the very feeling they had that the world was against them, that
others would punish them if they knew, cast them out, had made them in their travels close into a tighter knot. Beth thought more often of Boston.

She did not come to know the other women well, for she could not as easily reach out. She did not have as much time to read or think. Some precious strength was leaching away, not in a quick dangerous rush but slowly. Hesitantly she began to talk to Karen. Karen became frightened and jealous. She clutched, she fought. Then gradually Karen let go. They were still together but not so together. Karen began looking around in the house and at her job in the hospital, she went out to gay bars now and then. When the fruit trees began to bloom, Beth hitchhiked east again with another woman who was going to New York.

The house still existed but it took some time to find it, because it was not in the same place. Finally she located Gloria, who was living with her boy friend but knew where the women were. They had got kicked out. They were still in Somerville but had moved to Spring Hill, dropping off high and steep from the hospital into short dead-end streets called terraces, on one of which stood a run-down house with peeling white paint and a broken front porch. Dorine was living there with Sally and baby Fern. After Gloria left, a divorced woman, Connie, and her little boy David had moved in, and so had a woman named Laura. They had an empty bedroom still and they were glad to take Beth in.

Sally had gained weight. Beth thought she looked better, less gaunt and Orphan Annie-like. Her long red hair was braided and she sat down as still as anybody Beth had ever seen. She did not smoke or chew gum or play with her hair or chew her nails, she had no tics or twitches. When she sat, she sat.

The night Beth moved in, she stayed up late with Sally and Dorine. Dorine’s color was better. Her face was sweet and heart-shaped under the frizzy bush of chocolate hair. Her eyes were not so often downcast, at least in the house, and she talked more, with short pauses but as she warmed up, vivaciously.

Sally said, “No, Jackson was putting you on. Miriam lived here for a piece right after you left. She helped me when I had Fern, she was pretty good. She always picks up little Fern and tells her, ‘You know I saw you born, you little squirt!’ ”

“Why did she leave?”

Sally shrugged. “She didn’t take to it.”

Beth puzzled. She was so glad to be back! Dorine and Sally had kept her things in the basement. Now she had her books, her clothes, her scribblings, and the small familiar objects she had not touched since that afternoon she went with Jim.

“She didn’t get that much into the house,” Dorine said quietly. “She made more money than any of us. She was involved with her job. And she was in analysis the whole time she lived here … She went into a funk of deciding she was terribly self-destructive and needed help.… She was very warm with us and fussed over us, you know her way. But … she wouldn’t let us fuss back. Maybe we couldn’t help her. We weren’t that together.… But she couldn’t ask.”

“Did her analyst think she should move out?”

“How can you ever tell what a shrink says? She could always pretend that to spare our feelings.… My parents had me in therapy for two years.… I always used to think how much it was costing, that I better say something interesting. He seemed so bored.”

“However you spell it, it comes out the same,” Sally drawled. “She got herself married.”

“To Jackson?”

“Are you kidding?” Dorine made a wry face. “They never spoke again. He didn’t waste himself trying to get in touch with her.”

“She didn’t marry Phil!”

Sally laughed. “Phil lit off for California. You could of run into him there. No, she married her boss, Neil Stone.”

“What kind of guy is he?”

“Nice enough,” Dorine said. “Quiet, bright. Obviously he’s crazy about her. We all went to the wedding—they had a rabbi but it was pretty hip. Really, it wasn’t a rebound thing. She’d been seeing him for months. They were already living together.”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to get married in analysis?”

“Oh, she isn’t still in, Beth. She never impressed me as one of those people who go to a shrink for eight years.… Maybe the house was good for her, anyhow. Neil strikes me as a nice loving man and a big change for her. Completely unmacho.”

“You liked him? Her boss.” Beth could not imagine liking anybody put over her at work. “Is he a lot older?”

“No, he’s one of those scientist types—like I’m trying to be!” Dorine laughed, for she had gone back to school. “Maybe he’s thirty, at the outside. Doesn’t look more than twenty-six. They were living in his little apartment on Broadway, but now they’ve gone and bought a huge old house in Brookline—I mean literally huge! I think Miriam wants to have children.”

“Awful big,” Sally said. “It used to be a rooming house and it’s just like this old place, every little thing falls down if you look cross-eyed at it.”

“I was over there with the two of them before they moved in, when they were
getting
some walls torn out,” Dorine said. “Neil kept admiring the woodwork and saying it was structurally sound. I kept looking around and thinking, Wow, is this going to be a job. Go on, call her up. I know she’ll be glad to see you.”

They had two bedrooms down and three up. Beth had the smallest, in the back next to the bathroom. The kids, Fern and David, had the room to her right, painted with elephants and giraffes, and Sally and Connie shared the big front bedroom. It faced south, the sunniest in the house. They had hung the windows and lined the ledges with plants. The room was green and yellow and white, full of leaves and plants flowering. Sally and Connie preferred to share that room and have the children together next door. Beth wondered briefly if they were lovers, but they slept in bunk beds and did not act together. She wondered if she had lost some necessary innocence in dealing with women. But when she told Sally about Karen, Sally did not seem particularly surprised. She was mildly curious, more interested in why Beth had felt she had to leave Karen than in how they had become involved.

Beth felt that Sally, like herself, was sexually withdrawn, but that Sally was more at ease in her body. Sally was physically affectionate with Connie’s boy David as well as with her own baby Fern, scooping them up to hug and kiss, tickling and teasing and playing on the floor, crawling around the living room on her knees.

Dorine had one of the downstairs bedrooms and Laura the other. There was nothing over those rooms but a low attic that could be entered through a door midway up the stairs, at the turn; that is, when the door could be pried open. On the other side of the entrance hall was the living room, furnished only with scattered blocks and peg sets and cushions,
and a big old-fashioned kitchen where they ate and tended to sit downstairs. Upstairs everybody spent a lot of time in the room that Connie and Sally shared, because it was so pleasant. The women had been in the house for three months and had done the most urgent repairs. Everyone had fixed up her own room, but otherwise, only the kitchen and the children’s room had received attention.

Borrowing sheets from the general supply, Beth spread out a sleeping bag in the room she painted red and white. Dorine said it looked like the inside of a candy cane, but this was the first time Beth had ever chosen what something was to look like. Miriam had made a lot of tie-dyed curtains when she lived in the house and left them when she moved out. Beth commandeered a pair for each of her windows. At Good Will in Cambridge she got a desk and chair, but a bed would have to wait till she had more money.

Sally did not work. She earned a little cash making clothes for people or on consignment for stores that sold things women in the youth ghetto made. She sewed smocks and long dresses and long skirts and loose blouses, often in a patchwork of pieces fitted carefully. Sally spent a great deal of time getting things for the house cheaply or free. Being the only one who did not regularly bring money in, she made up by what else she brought them. She found Beth a free bed the next week. Laura had given her car, a six-year-old Saab, to the house when she came, and they all moved the bed.

Sally’s resistance was mute, stubborn, and total. She was utterly unco-operative with the economic system. Marvelously inventive in ways to survive without a job, a husband, a family, a name, her life was filled with making and maneuvering. Sally’s mysticism was earthy, centered on cooking and feeding and growing plants and reading palms and her own body. She called herself Sally only: she said she had no last name because no woman had her own last name. Last names were to show possession and for the use of the state.

She read nothing. She did not listen to the radio or watch the small television Connie had brought with her. She doubted all information from out there. She trusted words little. More than anyone else in the house she touched. Yet there was little sexual in her touch: it was a form of caring and direct knowledge.

Once Beth heard Laura ask Sally, “Where do you come from?”

“Out of a woman’s body.” Sally smiled. “Just like Fern and you.”

Her voice was not from Boston. It was from Tennessee. Both children hung on her when she let them.

Connie had been divorced by her husband; that is, she had agreed to the divorce and carried it out. “Was I supposed to keep him on a chain? He’d left anyhow.” Connie smoked all the time and Beth could not have shared a room with her, she would have got sick. Connie was thin and avid-looking with large nervous eyes and glasses she took on and off and on and off. She taught seventh grade in Newton. She had wanted to be a writer, she had wanted to work on a magazine, she had wanted to do anything except be a teacher. She had a boy friend who was also a teacher and divorced, who taught high school social studies. He was active in recycling. He came over on a bicycle and told them they should not have a car. Beth had trouble accepting that because she was just learning to drive, and driving was independence. He was always cornering one of them in the kitchen and telling them they should wash and flatten tin cans and keep each kind of bottle separate. When he caught her, Beth always invited him to do anything he pleased with their garbage.

Dorine had returned to school part time to study biology. She had a theory that the next assault on people was going to be biological, that the power structure was going to do something hideous with genetics to breed a passive, idiot population of consumers, and that women had to take over biology before it was turned completely into a weapon. Dorine’s room sprouted women’s posters all over the walls. She told Beth for seven months she had been in a consciousness-raising group that had recently broken up, feeling they had gone as far as they could together. Several of them were working in a free clinic now. “Besides, this whole house is a continuous C-R group, you know?”

Everyone was aware of Dorine’s tendency to become common maidservant, to do silently the tasks that others put off or forgot. Dorine herself would say out loud, “I’m doing it again, aren’t I?” when she automatically began picking up after the children or clearing the table while the others were still chatting.

“Oh, my relationships with men …” Dorine sat at the
head of her bed with her legs drawn up, hugging them. Beth sat cross-legged at the foot. “I don’t know that I can say they’re better. They’re shorter. Yeah, you might say that now I have short miserable affairs instead of long miserable affairs. Sometimes I can see what’s coming down in a couple of weeks and break it off, instead of letting it go on and on like a terminal disease, until the man gets nauseated and ends it. I suppose that’s some kind of change.” She made a face. “Nothing I would give a party to celebrate.”

Laura was new to Beth, but at first she did not feel so. At first Laura was always reminding her of Karen because of wearing army surplus and acting loud and blunt and dogmatic. Laura told people very quickly that she was bisexual. She told that to Beth when they first sat down at the breakfast table together. Beth found herself shrinking, as if Laura might suddenly reach out and dominate her as Karen had.

Laura did not become Karen more as the days passed, but rather Beth began to see Laura. She was aggressive in her speech. She talked loudly, she asked questions and contradicted the answers. Even upstairs Beth could hear her marching in the front door. She would let the door bang open and shout, “Hey, I’m home!” or “Back from the wars!” or “God, what a shitty day!” at the top of her lungs. “Where the fuck is everybody? What’s happening? Let’s get it on!”

Beth noticed slowly that Laura made noise as much to give herself living space as to attack anybody. She was quick to take offense, quick to withdraw, quick to sense insult. She was perhaps the shyest woman in the house when it came to speaking of herself except in comical or mock heroic stories, and when it came to asking for anything at all.

Laura had worked on a suburban paper: she had essentially written it and put it out. But when the paper went from weekly to daily, the owners brought in a new editor to put over her, because there could not be a woman editor. She was expected to go on doing the same job at the same wages, while he polished his editorials and lunched with business leaders. She had quit. Now she was working for an underground paper. She fought all the time with the men on the staff, but sometimes she won an inch, two inches. At least she could let her sexual identity and her politics hang out, she said, but often she was depressed about her battling role.