Small Changes (61 page)

Now Laura was going to lose her job and Connie was not pleased. Working on the paper had had some prestige connected with it and some money, though little enough. Beth told no one about Miriam’s warning on Logical, but she might be out of a job soon herself. Connie was not about to support them all. Beth felt the house pulling apart. Yet out of the storybook project, the children’s book they had been writing for Fern and David and for Blake too when he got older, something more exciting had emerged. After they finished the first book they began doing little plays together, at first for the children but lately, after the children were in bed, for themselves. They called what they did jamming. They would pick a theme and improvise together.

At least those were the words she picked to describe the process to Connie when she came home from seeing Ross
and found them still up bellowing at each other. Improvisation seemed a cool male image, men who had mastered a set of skills and body of material exercising their competence. What they did was raw and always on the edge of being ridiculous. They did “The Date,” “I have something awful to tell you, I’ve missed my period,” “The Job Interview,” “How Come You Don’t Love Me Any More?”

What they did was funny. To hear a woman saying those things, that each had said a hundred times for real, was funny and painful. Violence seemed always about to break through the scenes. The power relations stood bare. The pregnant woman and her boy friend, the make-artist and the woman trying to please, the boss and the secretary: they were all at war. It was a theater of stark melodrama with lines that were extremely funny. People kept killing each other. The repressed, the unexpressed, the silent violence and pressures pushed through the roles. Sometimes they scared each other.

Sally got into it, Dorine got into it, Beth found herself screaming. Laura got into it too, but she did not seem to experience the loose rush of power, of strong feeling emerging as if from the walls and shaking them, that Beth felt and she was sure Sally and Dorine did too. Who would have believed that Sally could become a suave bored boy friend arranging an abortion on the phone and making his woman feel guilty for causing him trouble? She could mimic voices and accents and gestures. Once she had the scene straight—not the first time they would run through, not the second or third—then suddenly Sally would be into her role and talking in paragraphs. She would be full of words, Sally who could sit placidly for hours with her hands on her belly.

Sally looked younger when she was acting. Beth thought of her as being older, but she was Beth’s age. Dorine got into it too, but she had other structures in her life now. She was becoming clear about what she wanted to do and why, and that gave her a different kind of strength than anybody else in the house. She worked brutally hard, taking a full load of graduate courses and working as a figure model. She was overextended. They all had to fill in for her. She could not quite carry her weight in contributing money, in doing her share of the housework, in fulfilling her share of child care. But she was important to them. Everybody wanted her to manage. Her clarity was comforting. Laura never started arguments with Dorine about her professionalism. When she
left her books scattered about and Beth picked up an advanced organic chemistry text, she might as well have been looking at something in Russian. But the why was clear to her: women had to control their bodies: the technology of fertility and embryology and genetics would be putting more and more control over who would have babies, and when and how and what kind, in the lap of those wonderful people who had brought us Vietnam, the loaf of formaldehyded white bread, the hydrogen bomb, and permanent smog.

Beth felt strongly that she was lacking a similar purpose. She half hoped they would fire her from Logical so that she would have to think what she wanted to do. She needed something useful and good to sit in the center of her life. How could she go on selling eight hours a day pushing buttons to support the rest of her time, even for the house?

When she walked in the double glass doors at Logical, past the receptionists, she felt her body clench. She felt herself flattening to the low profile she must maintain. The organization was bigger, the hierarchy more rigid. Everything went through channels. Gradually decisions had come to be made invisibly, and recently there had been an ugly scene when Dick discovered some of the younger staff swapping information about salaries. At the same time, because of media jokes, everyone imagined that he knew something about the women’s movement and felt free to tease her, because it was known she lived in a women’s commune. They were free to make what they called jokes, but she was not free to answer, because she was a clerical worker. She was supposed to smile and make the little gestures that indicated appeasement, the little gestures half flirtation and half submission.

She was always being criticized because she did not smile enough. Her face felt frozen at Logical. She was expected to duck her chin or twist her shoulders and give that little laugh when she spoke, that little laugh that says, “Why it’s only little ole me speaking.” She had become so conscious of that little laugh that her throat would shut on it. She sat very still when they spoke to her, she thought of how calm Sally sat: she tried to wait them out. But she was too angry to be good at placidity.

Some of the younger technical people were too stoned to care. The directors did not understand this. The directors were of another generation and did not know the younger technical staff they had hired. The best young programer now
that Miriam was gone, hired for her job, was Bill, and in the ten months he had been working there she had never seen him straight. He was a complete computer freak. He lived and breathed and ate and slept computers. Never in a million years would he question what his work was for, as Miriam had begun to. He never goaded her and he did not care whether she smiled at him or looked cross-wise. He brought his programs in and he might stand looking into inner space for ten minutes, he might even chat, but if she answered he never heard what she said the way she meant it anyhow. He was easy to get on with because he was totally out of contact: no friction possible.

To see him with Abe or Dick was high comedy. Neither of them understood Bill was stoned. He wrote good code and they valued him and he did not bug them about salary raises. He did not appear to notice anything, not office politics or infighting, and he never pestered them about stock options. They saw him as absent-minded from seriousness.

The network of dealing among the younger employees remained invisible to the directors. She bought for the house at Logical where the grass, the hash, the occasional tab of mescalin or acid were of higher quality and better price than in Cambridge. There was traffic too in the drugs the women’s house would not touch, coke and quaaludes and barbiturates and speed. The secretaries bought with the technical people except Efi, who grew marijuana at home under purple lights. Everybody was a customer except the directors and the business manager. Even Neil was a customer, although he did not know it, because Miriam bought with the women’s commune. Now that the baby was born Neil expected her to have grass in the house along with wine and scotch and ginger ale and beer. He did not ask Miriam where she got the stuff as long as it was satisfactory.

Beth had not come to like Neil any better. She saw him as Miriam’s owner and disliked being in the house when he arrived, sniffing the air, perhaps cruising the stove, asking for Ariane and immediately beginning to dote and worry and cuddle her. “Oh, Ted’s on his way. I told him to eat with us. We have to work tonight on a proposal for NSA. Why don’t you put on a dress?”

“I doubt if I have a clean dress. Why didn’t you warn me before I put supper on? Are you prepared to do a loaves
and fishes miracle with four lamb chops?”

“I tried to call, but the phone was busy. Which I guess is why you don’t have a dress to put on and Ariane isn’t cleaned up. What you find to chatter about for hours to those women …

“I was talking to Dr. Miller about Ariane’s sore throat, if you want to know!”

He jerked around. Felt Ariane’s forehead, cooed at her to open her mouth for him. “What sore throat? Where did she get a sore throat? Did you take her temperature?”

“How do I know where she got it? In the supermarket.”

“Have you been taking her over to those children again? They always have colds. I’ve never seen that little girl, Feather, whatever her name is, when her nose wasn’t dripping.”

They were no longer polite, that was it. He did not use the same soft voice to Miriam he used to the technical staff. And he looked at his child the way he had used to look at his wife.

“Oh, he gets irritated with me,” Miriam said, giving Ariane orange goo out of a jar as she sat giggling and banging in her high chair. Gouts of orange were splattered over Miriam’s arms and spotted on her cheekbone and dabbed on her worn shirt. It was an old tie-dyed T-shirt, faded but pleasant, where the new stains came to rest with the old without rancor. “He comes home tired and he wants to relax, he wants sympathy and attention. He wants Ariane clean and bubbly and ready to be played with. I’ve been cooped up all day with the baby, and I want to talk, I want to use my head and my tongue. So we’re already at war, with our different needs. I’ve become too emotionally dependent on him, I know it. I get two afternoons a week at your house and maybe Sally gets here once. Except for Saturdays I hardly see you. He’s knocking himself out trying to save Logical and getting ready for his seminar this fall. If it wasn’t for Laverne around the corner, I’d disintegrate from talking only baby talk. I never imagined I’d be friends with Tom Ryan’s wife, but I couldn’t do without her!”

“What do you talk about? She seems kind of pathetic.”

“Oh, relationships. Our marriages, our children. She has three kids, including a baby, six months. The dependency thing. I don’t think she’s solved it either, but at least she knows what I’m fighting.” Miriam pushed her glasses back. At some point they had dropped and the frames cracked.
Now they were held together at the bridge with tape.

“But you’re getting your thesis done. Doesn’t that help?”

“But it’s taking me forever to type it. If I were still at Logical, I’d just give it to one of the secretaries …”

Yes, Beth thought, the staff did things like that.

“It’s as if Ariane can’t stand to see me at the typewriter, it’s a signal for her to start screaming. I can hardly believe I’m close to done.”

“Then what will you do?”

“Bethie, I can’t think past the point of my degree. The house is always a mess, I haven’t cooked anything new in months. I see the red dress I started making in the ninth month sitting upstairs. I never read a book. It’s a miracle if I look at the paper. Neil asks me what I do all day, and it seems to me I chase my tail and that’s about it.”

“My life begins when I get home from work.”

“They’re not having much luck getting new contracts. Things are tight in the industry, companies going bankrupt.”

“I almost hope they fire me.”

“Why? What will you do?”

Beth shrugged. “I’ve been thinking lately maybe I’d like to do women’s theater.”

“You want to be an actress? You’re putting me on.”

“Don’t sound so shocked. I think maybe I want to do women’s theater with a group. That’s different.”

“You astonish me. I never thought you wanted to get up on a stage! You have a hidden side.” Miriam was smiling.

“I want to act out things women need to express. You’d have to see what we’ve been doing. Miriam, would you come?”

“I’d love to!”

“Tomorrow night? Please.”

“I’d have to get a baby sitter.” Miriam looked dubious. “You never imagine how many things you won’t be able to do.”

“I think I do imagine.”

“But don’t you ever want to have your own baby?” Miriam hugged Ariane up out of the chair and nuzzled her, while Ariane chewed on her hair. Ariane was a fat curly child with black eyes and Miriam’s skin. She was a child everyone wanted to pick up and squeeze. Two months older than Blake, she was much fatter and bigger and noisier. Miriam said, “She has the character of a jolly little Napoleon. A will of
iron and lungs to go with it. She always wins. My father says she looks just like I did at her age, but I’ve seen photographs. I was a big baby, but sallow, rather melancholy. Just what I’d like—a child I could push around. But this tigress! She doesn’t even sleep much. I think she uses solar energy.”

“How come she has so many toys?” Both looked around. As far as she could see through the rooms and hall, toys were scattered, dolls, plush animals, square pegs to be pounded into holes, pull-toys, rings and stakes, busy-boxes, things on wheels. Ariane had more toys than the three children at the commune, perhaps six times as many. The house was going under in a breaking wave of scattered toys, and every time Beth came, something new was underfoot.

“Oh, Neil’s always bringing her a treat.” Miriam spoke apologetically. “She does have an awful lot, doesn’t she? Her grandparents buy her toys too, so does Jaime. Even my father, who remarried by the way. The widow of a doctor. I tell you, after a few years of dating the kind of women he kept telling my mother she ought to be, he’s gone and married another version of her. Another woman who adores him and thinks he’s a wonder, and what is she? But this one has money.… And my sister Allegra, who married into peanut butter, has a baby now. We keep sending each other pictures. That’s just a bad joke about the peanut butter. Everybody’s married.”

“My sister Nancy too. She ran away and married a guy who just got out of the Army. Knew him for two weeks. I don’t care, it can be everybody, everybody in the world. Except me.”

“Don’t play innocent with me.” Laura had her elbows planted on the kitchen table. “You told us about Karen. Why not come out of the closet? The first step in our liberation is being able to love each other, to give each other that love and support and tenderness we’ve given men. Men don’t have to be gentle and nurturing because they can find a woman to do it for them. But all women are starved for tenderness. Come out of the closet and you’ll feel stronger, you’ll respect yourself.”