Small Changes (71 page)

“You invited them for Friday? That’s one of my bread days.”

His eyes took on that little-boy sulk. “Friday is a traditional time to have people over. It’s the weekend. If you must play at being a baker, do it another day next week.”

She remembered believing when she had been getting to know Neil that his unwillingness to shed blood, his contempt for hunting and fishing and fighting, were a refusal to play traditional male roles. She did not think that any more. He disliked violence in words or action; he preferred a quiet tone of authority. After all, losing your temper was a poor tactic for getting your own way, as she had found out time and time again with him. Her emotionality would be used against her.

Phil lost his temper often. He would blow up and at times he used to threaten her with his fist. She remembered how furious she had been that time Phil had actually hit her. It was horrible to be hit. But to struggle with Neil was far more difficult, Neil could get angry, very angry, but never lose his temper, never lose his sense of strategy in the argument, never lose sight of his goal. She felt weary before him often enough, because he never seemed to doubt his habits or his taste or his predilections or his morality: he seemed to feel through and through that what he liked must be right. When she scratched granite, underneath was more granite. Something in his family and his training gave him that advantage over her, that quiet dreadful surety, the conviction of propriety and sense of moral superiority as a weapon. She could feel hurt, she could feel outraged, she could feel furious: but she could never muster that cool daily self-righteousness. It defeated her time and again. She had married
him for his strength, and perhaps that was the source of it.

Friday of the roast venison and evening dinner party: she had marinated the meat as he had told her. As Neil suggested, she had looked up venison in
Larousse Gastronomique
(a Christmas present) and was referred to roebuck. She had no idea what cut of deer she had or how old the deer was, so she tried to adopt a medium strategy among the various ways of preparing lean pieces and tender pieces and tough pieces. Friday was the day they made health bread with four kinds of flour, her personal favorite though Phil preferred their rye.

They got started in plenty of time. Ariane was in an irritable, coddle-me mood, cutting a new tooth, but Phil succeeded in making her laugh a lot. The dough rose well, the second rising was up on time, and the pans went into the oven. The house smelled good. Phil was in a sunny mood and not pushing her at all but singing at the top of his lungs. Ariane was trying to walk that day and falling down a lot and screaming, but every time Phil or she came running and got Ariane moving again before she took her fall seriously. Outside the rain was coming down. The snow was gone and the first green things poking out. Miriam even managed to get time to wash her hair while Phil kept an eye on the first batch baking, and she got Ariane into bed for her afternoon nap so she wouldn’t be cranky when Neil got home and could stay up a bit for the company.

The bread was in both ovens, the second batch baking while the first batch cooled, when Miriam heard an awful thump and then Ariane’s scream. She did not know how she got upstairs, she was so frightened. Ariane lay on the floor beside her crib, twisted so that Miriam was sure she had broken her leg. Miriam ran to her, seized her up. Somehow Ariane had stood in her crib and climbed on the bars and managed to fall out headfirst. This was supposed to be a crib no child could fall out of, but Ariane had climbed up and fallen and struck her head. She had an ugly sore red spot that was going to be a bruise on her forehead and she was weeping and weeping hysterically. Miriam carried her to the bathroom, shouting at Phil to get out of the way, and sponged her baby. By and by it was clear that Ariane was not badly hurt, but there was that ugly bruise and she had been frightened. The falling had scared her as much as the bump, perhaps, and she clung to Miriam.

The oven had a buzzer that went off when the time was up, but in the turmoil they must not have heard it. Finally Phil said, “What’s that?” He might have meant the smell or he might have meant the steady penetrating buzz that had obviously been going for a while, because the whole load of both ovens was burnt. It was not so badly charred it could not be eaten, but it was too burnt to deliver.

They wasted some time berating each other. Finally they realized there was no time to do anything good. The bread had to be delivered in time for the co-op pickups and there was no short cut in bread making and rising. They decided to cut the loaves in half and deliver half a loaf for each loaf ordered, and to give refunds on half the price.

“Fuck it. Last week we broke even for the first time!” Phil got on the phone to make sure their solution was okay with the co-op co-ordinators. They were behind schedule and she started cutting and bagging for delivery. Neil came home to the kitchen full of burnt bread, smelling like a fire, with dirty bread pans covering every flat surface, the burnt loaves only half carried out by Phil, who had just got off the phone. As soon as she saw her daddy, Ariane burst into tears and started wailing tragically. “What have you done to her!” he shouted at both of them. He got the idea she had been burnt in a kitchen catastrophe and he was not to be disabused of that until Miriam had told him three times step by step what had happened.

“Oh, this is lovely, this is charming, this is just what I need!” Neil did not raise his voice. Slowly he paced the kitchen, cutting deliberately in the path of Phil, still toting bags of burnt bread to the garbage, and Miriam, who was finishing bagging the half loaves. “What kind of madhouse is this? It stinks! It’s filthy! I come home and find my child wounded. What’s going on here?”

“Neil, please. Accidents happen. She isn’t badly hurt—”

“Are you a doctor? How do you know? She was terrified.”

“If she’s going to learn to walk, she has to fall sometimes.”

“Are you going to justify her injury? Are you going to say it’s a good thing for her to fall on her head? Perhaps she’ll fall down the steps next time you’re too busy to keep an eye on her. Have you gone mad?”

“Neil, you’ll frighten her more by carrying on. I’m sorry she hurt herself. I was scared myself. But she’ll fall many times. She was trying to get out of her crib.”

“Why weren’t you on hand? What is all this nonsense? Just what do you think you’re doing with this garbage all over the house? This is a sane thing for my wife to be doing?”

“This is our business! I want to do something! It doesn’t take much time and this is the first time something’s gone wrong.”

“How many things have to go wrong before you learn? A professor’s wife peddling bread from door to door. I’m tired of the mess and the confusion. Hardwick will be here in an hour and a half, and look!”

Miriam was surreptitiously signaling to Phil to leave, but Phil was being stubborn. He folded his arms, scowling. “Why are you afraid of him, Miriam? What are you so afraid of? What has he done to you?”

“Shh, Phil.” She tried to wave him out. “Take the bread!”

“What does he do to make you so afraid? I demand to know why.”

“Who are you to demand anything?” Neil turned on him. “What are you? What are you doing here? Why don’t you go home, if you have a home?”

“Neil! He’s my friend. He’s here because I asked him.”

“Well, why do you? This isn’t a hotel or an orphanage. I’ve heard things about this man. I’ve heard he was put in jail in California for selling drugs.”

“Not selling, possession,” Phil drawled. “Do get your facts straight. Jail’s an interesting place to visit, but I don’t think you’d like to live there. Miriam knows that. I think everybody in Boston knows it except you. You’d know it too if you had any curiosity about other human beings.”

“Everybody in Boston seems to know quite a bit about you. I don’t want to. I don’t want you around my child. I don’t want you around my wife. I don’t want you in my house. I don’t trust you and I don’t see why I should put up with you any longer. You’re nothing but a parasite!”

“Neil! Stop that. Phil’s my friend!”

“I’m here because she wants me here.” Phil made that shaggy butting motion of his head. “I’m not going till she wants me gone. I care about her in a way you couldn’t conceive of—you academic prig with your iron sense of property! You cold slimy eel wriggling through the university bottom. You don’t want a woman, you want a fucking domestic staff, housekeeper, butler, nanny, pastry cook, gamekeeper, wine steward. Why don’t you fuck a robot?”

“Phil, shhh! Both of you!” She waved Phil to leave. “Phil,
please leave! Leave, before you make things worse!”

“They can’t be worse, don’t you see that yet? How much will you take? What’s wrong with you, pigeon? Wake up!”

But finally, finally, because the bread had to be delivered, Phil walked out with his chin in the air. Then she had to go dashing around the kitchen dumping the dirty bread pans into the pantry out of the way and getting supper started and picking up Ariane’s toys from every place and trying to remember what she had planned for dessert. Neil had gone into his study and slammed the door.

When the Hardwicks arrived, supper was not yet ready, she was still wearing her pants smeared with dough, and when they finally sat down to the boasted feast the venison was tough and dry. She still could not tell whether she had undercooked it or overcooked it, but it was miserable. Everyone chewed and chewed and chewed the meat. Hardwick and his wife Elaine kept making terrible insincere compliments on the sauce. The meal dragged on while she picked at her plate.

When the Hardwicks finally left, Neil went up to bed without a word and she followed. She could not face cleaning up yet. She felt exhausted and curiously numb, detached from a body that felt bloated. In the bedroom she looked at Neil sitting on the bed naked clipping his toenails. He did not look at her. The teeth of the mechanism met neatly and the waxing moon of nail fell in an arc. She felt a great reluctance to get into bed, to lie down to whatever was coming. She looked at the calendar on her dresser, she brushed her hair. She could feel him behind her bunched over, gathered into himself. Yet he did not begin the cold rational attack, the listing of her errors. He said only thickly, his voice furred with emotion, as he shut out the light and lay down so that no part of him would touch her, “I don’t want that man in the house.”

“Neil, he doesn’t come to see you. He’s my friend. I’m working with him.”

“I don’t want him in my house. I don’t want him near Ariane! I’m not making a request, I’m telling you!”

Her throat closed. Some deep new anger in his voice, a gathered violence pushing on her. After a while he added, “If you don’t have sense enough to understand that men of that sort aren’t suitable friends, I’ll make the decision for both of us. I’m telling you this: if he comes in this house
again, I’m calling the police! I’ll take Ariane and stay in a hotel with her before I’ll see that man around my daughter.”

She lay awake all night. She was two months overdue, she was pregnant, she knew it. She could feel that quickening knot. She was embarked again. She felt as if he had said to her, “I require your right arm,” had drawn a knife and performed the amputation. She knew she was bleeding. She knew she was hurt badly. But she could not feel anything except a vague surprise at how things were going in her life.

She would see Phil sometimes, but out of the house. More lies, and he would be far from the center of her life. They would not work together. She would have no bread business. She would lose him, finally. Phil would not accept being sacrificed to Neil’s anger, he would not forgive. She could not forgive herself for sacrificing him, but she did not see how she could fight Neil and win.

It was different from what she had expected, so different. If she concentrated, she could remember how she had felt. She had thought Neil was lucky to get her because he was lonely and lacked skills for being close to others, and she would be close to him and help him be in touch with his own feelings and his body. She had thought she was lucky, because now she had made it as a woman, she was loved, she was safe, she was cherished and wanted. She had imagined both of them working in their field in mutual admiration and support. She had imagined that since he loved her, of course he would make some compromises: she would be able to get her way on things that mattered to her, a reasonable proportion of the time.

It seemed to her that every man she had loved had tried to protect himself from her as if she were a dangerous monster. She lay on the bed like a half-finished meal. She: who was she? Mrs. Neil Stone. Vessel carrying embryo. Miriam Berg was dead. Miriam Berg had many troubles but she had been someone to be, a person anyhow. Mrs. Stone was nobody in particular. She would not be missed, except by Ariane. Phil was right: Neil could replace her by
Larousse Gastronomique
with pushbuttons.

Lying beside Neil, she was frightened. She did not feel loving toward him, she would have liked to hurt him. But she did not dare. He had threatened her for the first time with leaving her. That was the first time he had said he would go, he would take Ariane and go. But what scared her
most in the thin dark was that he would cease loving her even as laxly as he had been doing. In striving to survive as a person she had angered him, she had injured him in his sense of how things should be, and his withdrawal might last. He created a clear unequivocal moral world of man and wife in which she ran before his judgment like a rabbit.

As she rested her hands on her belly she had a fantasy that she had loved Phil one afternoon, so that they had conceived this baby. Phil’s baby. It was empty nonsense; yet as a fantasy it was consoling and she cherished it. This baby is dedicated to the one I love, she thought, the one who will never forgive me. Then she thought, I mean me.

28

Caught in the Net

After two months of being on the road, Traveling Women rented a house on twenty-odd acres in New Hampshire, near Berlin. They rented it early enough in the spring to get a garden in. Sometimes they were all there for a day or two, sometimes for weeks. One or two usually stayed home and so did the kids. The garden had to be tended and watered, the kids had had enough of living out of duffel bags. Everyone felt the need for a center. They renamed themselves the Round Earth. They took turns staying home when the troupe was touring.