Small Changes (67 page)

She found it easy to love Wanda when they were all working, easy to feel her, easy to express affection; and difficult when they were alone. The more confidence Wanda expressed in her, the more scared Beth was, as if any respect were a burden more terrible than the contempt she was used to. Sooner or later she must fail Wanda, because who was she? Only Beth. She tried to fight that self-fulfilling prophecy of disappointment. She was able to do more and more that she wanted to, and to want to do more yet. But still there were many little worms of self-hatred and doubt and fear nibbling on her. She struggled against those voices of despair. But the struggle never seemed to be over. Each little victory
was a little victory and nothing more. Sometimes she imagined herself giving up. Collapsing. She would fall down and refuse to get up. She would huddle in a catatonic knot and never again would she force herself to do one single thing.

Wanda had told her once about the pillar saints and she thought what a magnificent cop-out. She would run off to a desert. She would sit on the top of a pillar in rain and sun and sleet and never again do anything whatsoever except contemplate the air and the inside of her mind.

She wanted to love Wanda, yes, but safely, without demands, from a distance. She wanted Wanda for her own loud, strong, vigorous dark Madonna. Part of her froze and tucked in when Wanda wanted to make demands back, when Wanda wanted to talk about her aching legs or to worry aloud about her sons or to be sullenly angry and defeated: when Wanda asked her to be her friend.

New Year’s Eve the troupe, now calling itself Traveling Women’s Theater, did a performance at a community center. Afterward, Beth went to Miriam’s party, as she had promised. The house throbbed light and music and every room felt crowded. She found Miriam in the kitchen talking closely with Dorine, by the sink full of empty bottles and glasses.

“With women like you and me, Dorine,” Miriam was saying, shaking back her hair with a wide gesture, “it’s a race between outgrowing your adolescent masochism or having it outgrow you—consume you utterly. It’s awfully lonely after a while being the bighearted earth mother, on tap, loving a man who can’t see any good reason ever to marry you!”

“But I think I have it licked. I don’t need to hurt to feel I’m connected to somebody. I don’t only admire men who piss on me. Really. I’m into my own work and I haven’t that much energy left to embroider things and brood.… Hi, Beth. How did the show work out?”

Together they drifted back toward the living room, where the phonograph was roaring. Just at that moment Laverne, regal in a long bottle-green velvet dress, made an entrance with Tom trailing behind her with a small, inturned smile, watching the reactions to her. She was beautiful and artificial as an orchid from a florist’s refrigerator. Beth found her strange to regard, as if Laverne had become something to hang on the wall or pin to a Christmas tree: all green and gold, with her hair like wood and her eyelids green and her
lips shiny and her face frozen in an expression of simpering disdain aimed at no one. She walked to be admired. Tom ambled along to the side and a little back, almost parodying her progress and watching for admiration.

He had her back. He had her dressed as she should be. He was exacting a tribute from the others and from her, a slow revenge for the year of separation that would not be any the less enjoyable for the fact that she would probably never recognize it. Her glance touched Beth and switched away. A moment later Tom gave her a big smile and his hand dropped heavily on her shoulder, he kissed her before she could dodge away. “How are you doing, Bethie? Long time no see.” He did not wait for an answer. Laverne had paused at Phil, lounging in the doorway with a glass in one hand and the other playing with the fringe on the vest of Sue, a secretary at Logical who was flirting almost desperately with him. Laverne stood until she had drawn his attention. She had just begun to talk to him when Tom took her elbow and led her onward.

Just beyond, Jackson was shaking hands with Neil, both smiling with good will and great malaise. Jackson questioned Neil about his work, older student trying to put the younger professor at ease. Neil seemed to be explaining something at great length. That mutual pretense for Ryan had forced Miriam to invite Jackson and him to come. Beth stood awhile holding a glass and looking for anyone she knew free to talk, anyone at all she could look at, to escape the nakedness of standing alone at a party. An hour earlier she had stood among strangers and acted a baby, acted a bear, acted a secretary, acted an unwed mother. She had roared and wept and flung herself down. She had spoken at length. She had died. Before all those strangers.

But now she was naked Beth with a stiff smile stretching her leather face into a grimace. She was the single most conspicuous person in the room, with no one to talk to. She would stand there, a neon wallflower, and no one would address a word to her but people would saunter back and forth through her bones.

She wished passionately that she were back in the commune, in her room. She could not escape the archway. There was Miriam dancing now with Phil, they were being haughty and languid and menacing. They were flirting and acting out an elaborate seduction. They were doing karate without touch.

Miriam was laughing with her body while her eyes shone and her hair stood on end. She was hot and flushed. Joy radiated from her like steam. She was totally enjoying herself, having forgotten the party and everyone, including Neil. Beth enjoyed watching them. It gave her something to do that explained why she was standing alone.

Then she happened to glance at Neil. He was trying to look amused but not succeeding. He looked irritated, he looked worried, he looked scared. Perhaps he had never seen Miriam dance; it did not fit into their life together. He looked at her as if she had taken leave of her senses and begun throwing dishes around the room. His forehead puckered in a taut seam.

Miriam danced with anyone willing. After a couple of numbers, Phil would go off for a drink and pause to check out Dorine. Sometimes they danced. But Miriam never sat down. She was high on the dancing. She could have been the woman Beth had seen so long ago, dancing at the street fair in Pakistani pants and a top with no back. She imagined Miriam dancing with Traveling Women. Miriam radiated energy, as Wanda did when they were on. Miriam was more beautiful dancing than she ever was still: and Neil did not like it. He saw that she was paying him no attention, that she did not act like his wife and the mother of his child. She was so involved in dancing she had nothing left over to care what she looked like or who watched or whether her hair was flying or she was sweating or whether other people at her own party were enjoying themselves. This was not the sort of party where everybody got going. Mostly these people stood talking and observed the dancers as if they were an exhibition.

“Really, look at her,” Sue said to Efi. “You’d think she could dance with her husband once in a while, for form’s sake.”

But Neil did not dance. He did not know how. The crease on his forehead deepened, he fidgeted with his beard and looked lost and unhappy. Tom was talking with Jackson but his eyes stayed on Laverne dancing with Ted from Logical. Laverne had only three motions but she made sure she looked graceful doing them. Ted danced as if his behind were on a bumpy road and his arms disconnected halfway down. He kept his eyes fixed on Laverne’s belly and grinned without mirth. They made Beth nervous and she turned back
to Tom and Jackson, who had shifted. She could see Jackson’s sad emblematic face turned to the dancers. He too was watching, watching Phil finish his beer and come to claim Miriam.

Miriam paid attention always to the music but she did not pay that much attention to any of her partners except Phil. Beth wondered if anyone could see them and not know they had been lovers for a long, long time. They played. Between them was sensitivity to one another’s intentions, and a humor expressed through both bodies. Parodies were picked up at once and refined. Neil stared and frowned and brooded. She felt coming off him not so much jealousy as fear, fear of the sudden unknown wild woman, dismay, roles confounded.

Several times Beth caught Jackson’s eyes but he did not approach and she could not seem to move. She felt stifled. Not only was she literally choked, with the smoke and pounded by the loud music and loud talk—everyone was shouting and a few people from Logical had noisemakers—but she found herself rooted by the archway. She had nothing to say to these people. She felt awkward and ugly and, yes, sorry for herself pinned like a plain brown moth to the arch. Everywhere men were on the make looking over the women and making their selections for the remainder of the night. Everywhere men and women cooped in constricting marriages were wriggling through the night’s narrow cracks. What had she come for?

Phil and Miriam were swooping back and forth among the other dancers, doing a sort of war dance, when Miriam swung too wide and her outflung arm caught Tom, standing close by. His drink spilled forward on her. The glass fell and broke.

Neil pushed forward at once, grasping her shoulder. “Now look. You’ve spoiled your dress.”

“The cleaner will get it out. I can change. I’m sorry! Let me pick up the glass.”

Dorine ran off to the kitchen. “I’ll get it.”

“Well, don’t stand there dripping.” Neil urged her out of the room ahead of him. “Running to and fro, bouncing around like a child. How much have you had to drink tonight? Didn’t you see how people were staring?” His voice was low but it had an edge that would cut paper cleanly.

“I was just having a good time.… The dress isn’t ruined … I’ll change.… It’s only a glass, Neil.”

Dorine knelt picking up the pieces and mopping at the spilled liquor. Neil was still pressing Miriam through the crowd to the stairway, his hand in the small of her back. “You act like a child allowed to stay up late. Hurling yourself around and trying to make everyone look at you. Really, when you drink too much you become an exhibitionist!” Up the stairs they went and out of the party. Neil no longer looked sour. Miriam looked upset, confused, but Neil looked relieved. His forehead lost its seam of tension. Beth did not think that Miriam would dance any more that night. Upstairs he went to select the dress she would put on, and when Miriam came down again Beth suspected she would be feeling in the wrong. She would be ashamed. Already as Miriam climbed the steps the swing was gone from her walk. Embarrassed, she hurried out of sight, just ahead of Neil.

“Did you see that?” Phil asked her. “Papa spank. Jesus.”

Jackson turned abruptly from Jaime, who was showing him a wire puzzle, and headed out of the living room. Beth watched him go to the study where the coats were piled and then she went after him. “You don’t have to speak to me tonight,” she said at his elbow. He jumped, turned and saw her. “Just so long as you take me along.”

He cleared his throat. “A bargain. Can you find your coat?”

In a clumsy rush to avoid speaking, for she did not know what to say, forcing herself upon him in panic and despair, Beth stuffed her arms any which way into her jacket and muffled herself in her scarf and pulled on her gloves and trotted after Jackson. He stiffly held the door wide and they went out without saying good-by to anyone. Striking across the lawn of unbroken snow to the corner, his step was long and loping. The boom of the music drifted muted from the windows that laid out piers of light on the snow.

“I hope you don’t mind walking,” he said gruffly. “No choice. Unless you can fly like the little bird you sometimes imitate? … Now why did I go there? Why? Don’t tell me. In fact, don’t talk. At midnight I turn into a scarecrow.”

As they passed under the street light Beth looked sideways. What on earth was she doing with him, tall, unspeaking, his head bowed into his collar for warmth, his hands jammed in the pockets of his stained worn trench coat which was all the coat she had ever seen him wear, spring, winter or fall? It was cold and they had a long walk ahead. She was glad for her jacket, her only luxury: it was a quilted nylon navy
blue jacket, lightweight and warm in the sharpest wind, filled with down: a blue padded jacket that always made her feel irrationally but pleasantly like a Chinese peasant.

Another block and another through streets of black shadow and white snow, in cold like a frequency too high to be heard that attacked her nerves. She felt like giving him up. But where would she go and how would she get there? As they were crossing the Charles, the church bells and sirens and car horns announced the end of the year, the beginning of the new. He did not pause or look at her.

With sharp assertion she put her arm suddenly through his. Startled, he tightened the stance of his arm. But she could think of nothing to say. Without a word he was taking her back to Pearl Street and that, after all, had to be what she intended in leaving with him: although she could never tell him that she had had nothing so much in mind as to escape the party where she had no small talk, no ready flirtation, nothing to do except watch and experience a growing discomfort. It was the commerce of sexual selection and manipulation, prancing and infighting, that made the whole room menace her, shouting this was how things were, ugly, eternally ugly, and never could they be changed. She could not tell him that she had not so much intended to pick him up as to change what she was stuck staring at. As they turned onto Pearl Street, she dragged on his arm. He looked down then and cleared his throat. “Want to come up? For coffee?”

To get warm. “It’s so cold tonight.” The small victory of forcing speech out of him sapped her defiance and she was glad to follow the bleak stained tails of his trench coat upstairs. He walked into the apartment snapping on every light, past the neat cot with the Mexican blanket, past the doors of his room and Phil’s. Now slowly he went before her down the step to the kitchen. On the table a chessboard stood with a partially played game. He looked it over cursorily before stowing it on top of the refrigerator. Then he put on a pot for instant coffee.

“Who do you play chess with now?”