Small Changes (73 page)

All the people in Bleak House had been what Wanda called movement heavies. Bleak House was decorated with the paintings by six-year-old Tamar and with pictures of Madame Binh and Chief Joseph, with a Wanted poster on Nelson Rockefeller in Spanish, with an Outlaws of Amerika Weather-poster with the big bright rainbow. All the people in Bleak House thought of themselves as revolutionaries and saw themselves as enlisted for a fight that would last twenty to thirty years. Most of them spent a lot of time trying to make connections among the freaks who had moved to the country, trying to start alternate institutions like food co-ops and free clinics, and trying to build a bridge of communication to the local people.

Wanda was glad that Beth liked the people at Bleak House. She said maybe Beth wouldn’t have two years before: that they had always been good people but then they had been desperate and frantic. Now they were settled in for the long haul. Several had served time and almost everyone considered it a possibility. Yet the manners in the house were gentle and warm, as if they were women and men who had learned to consider each other with care. The babies were the only tyrants. No one could deny them. Beth learned to be with them as friends, men and women, in a slow but finally abundant acceptance, like the tendrils on a grapevine growing.

There were wild grapes at Bleak House and they made conserve together. Alan said they were fox grapes. One afternoon when the grapes were ripening and they were picking them—two days before Round Earth was to leave for the first of their fall tours—Wanda and she made love in the scent and shadow of the vines, their hands and mouths purple and sticky and sweet.

Making love with Wanda was natural. All the hardness had been in letting herself open up, letting herself respond. They were close physically in bed and out—no sharp differences. Wanda had taught her to love with her body, to express with her body, to know with her body. There was no border between nuzzling affectionately and making love. They were loving each other working, they were loving each other making a play, they were loving each other when they were teaching new women stiff and tight and frightened in their bodies, women who thought themselves weak, how to move, how to fall, how to jump, how to shout.

She felt as if sensuality born only in her genitals at that first tentative touch had spread through her. Into her arms, into her chest, into her belly, into her buttocks, into her back, into her thighs, into her neck, into her cheeks and her forehead and her nape and her forearms and her toes and her insteps. With whole bodies they made love. There was no question that they could please each other, no need to ask or wonder who would come when or how.

It was loving. She loved Wanda as Wanda was. She could not imagine Wanda younger or with unlined skin or with her hair all black or her waist tiny as she said it had been before she bore her children. She felt jealous sometimes when she met someone, man or woman, who had known Wanda before. But she fought that. All that living had gone to cure this salty woman to just the right taste for her. Wanda did not close her off from others, did not hold her in a box-shaped intimacy, and she fought herself not to clutch. It was a sureness. She was a tree in strength of love, she dreamed, standing high on a hill in New Hampshire and hung with flowers and fruit at once.

In May, a year after Round Earth had first come to New Hampshire, they visited Boston. Bringing Ariane and a new baby, Miriam came to an afternoon performance. Ariane sat pressed beside her, sulkier and thinner and taller of course, a delicate lovely-looking child who was given to pouting. She
was two years and three months old, almost frightening with her articulate babble.
“No”
was her favorite word that afternoon. Obviously Ariane did not remember any of them and when Sally bent to kiss her, she kicked and began to wail that she wanted to go home!

Miriam was looking distracted with Ariane hauling on her and baby Jeff squirming in her lap. He was a fat beamy infant, lighter than Ariane had been at his age in hair and coloring, with Neil’s hazel eyes. There was no time to talk, with people milling around and old friends to speak to and Ariane tugging on Miriam’s arm, stomping her foot and saying, “Now! I want to go home now!”

The next day Beth went out to Brookline to the big gray house for lunch. Miriam made her a cheese omelette, then sat at the table watching her eat with her head propped on her hands. “Oh, I’m on a diet. I’m always on a diet. Since my last pregnancy. Isn’t he a chubby little darling? I’m glad he was a boy, Beth, I mean it. At least Neil’s off my back now about making babies. One of each kind seems to be adequate. I know it really is better for Ariane to have a sibling—I always felt sorry for only children, except for the moments in my childhood when I wished I was one. But, being the oldest in my family, I think I can get into her feelings and try to make it up to her.”

Of necessity Beth observed the children a great deal: Ariane interrupted the conversation freely and frequently, and always Miriam stopped whatever she was doing or saying to listen to her and answer her with full seriousness. Beth felt differences between Ariane and Fern, Ariane and Luis and Johnny, Ariane and Tamar. Receiving a huge share of Miriam’s intelligent and concentrated attention from morning to night, Ariane was far more intellectually and verbally precocious than the commune children, but not as emotionally mature. She was more imaginative, fey, sensitive, and demanding, and far more seductive. She seemed already feminine. The commune children looked more to each other and less to adults, and were at the same time surer of adult attention. Always someone was available, not one of a couple to be seduced from each other, entrapped or forced into granting precious attention. Love did not feel like a scarce commodity or exclusive interaction. The commune children looked grubbier, hardier, scabby and banged up
more. They seemed generally more physical in affection, in exploration, in aggression, in play.

“The way you say ‘He,’ “Beth remarked, “you sound like my mother talking about my father to Marie, my married sister.… Isn’t it funny I always say ‘my married sister’ though Nancy’s married now too.” So am I, she wanted to add. Wanda pressed on her. Beth felt invisible to Miriam because she had not explained her life.

“Oh, you know, marriage is struggle. It’s never what you expect.” Miriam reached out to put an arm around Ariane, who ducked away, grimacing. “You just never anticipate what things you’ll have to give up to keep it together. I think we’ve reached a modus vivendi and have a good strong marriage, finally.”

“You always say that! Every year you say, ‘This is a good marriage, it’s not nearly so bad as last year.’ ”

“Growing up in a tight so-called happy family, he has fixed ideas about how wives are supposed to act, how I’m supposed to show I love him.… He needs, he wants a quiet, controlled, contemplative life and that’s been hard for me to provide, because I’m not naturally that way.…”

“Why should anybody provide somebody else with a life? With Wanda—with the commune—we don’t provide each other a life—”

“With that many people it must be different. I
try
to be helpful. The only interesting work I do is when I help him prepare a presentation or write a paper.”

“Does he give you credit?”

“Are you kidding? Besides, what would it matter if he put my name on? Only the principal author—the guy whose name comes first—gets credit. That’s true even when some graduate student wrote the whole thing. So? What else is new?”

“Don’t you see Phil any more at all?”

“There’s no use my pretending I’m not married part of the time and that I can have my old friends … and Neil really loathed the bread business. He can think up ninety-two reasons not to do anything! He kept saying, ‘Suppose somebody gets sick from your bread, suppose you drop a hair in, suppose you don’t deliver on time and somebody sues!’ He’s a worrier! He’s always thinking what might go wrong. He’s making Ariane that way, and it bothers me. She’s naturally a brave, curious child but she picks up his fears.”

It was hard to get Miriam onto any other subject. “So you don’t see Phil any more? But you do see Dorine?”

“I say hello to him sometimes. He’s living in Dorine’s commune. Neil knows I go to see Dorine, he just doesn’t know Phil’s in the house. Dorine’s my best friend—I lean on her. Who else can I really talk to? Phil and I don’t have much to say.”

“I don’t like Phil, we rub each other wrong. But you were friends for so long. Did you get tired of him?”

Miriam looked at her hands for a long time. “Far from it.”

Ariane interrupted, pulling suddenly at Miriam’s hair, hard. She persisted till Miriam let her climb in her lap.

Beth asked, “Then how could you agree never to see Phil? If Neil decides not to like me, would you never see me? Or Sally?”

“It’s not the same, Bethie, you know it isn’t. I couldn’t fight Neil. I was already pregnant with Jeff! Suppose I’d said, ‘Fuck you, man, I’ll see who I feel like’? All he’d have had to do was say, ‘Fine, bye-bye.’ ”

The fear in Miriam’s voice confused her. She never imagined that Wanda would leave her.

“Bethie, I love him, and besides, he’s the father of my children. It would have been so masochistic to alienate Neil just to keep an old boy friend hanging around.… Though I did make a private protest, for my soul’s sake.”

“You mean, not out loud to him?”

“Don’t tell anyone! It was stupid. Right after the doctor told me I was pregnant, I went to see Phil while Laverne still had Ariane. I went to bed with him. Just that last time, so he’d know I didn’t feel indifferent. It was something I owed him.”

“Only that once? Did you feel guilty?”

“No.…” Miriam shrugged. Ariane had climbed down and gone to stand at the window. “Just sad. It was so furtive, a drag somehow. Being scared the whole time somebody would come in. Sure enough, the minute we were dressed, in came Jackson. And, Beth, he had a woman with him. A blond who’d been his student. There he was being ironic and distant with her and there she was eating him up with loving eyes. It turned my stomach.… The next time I heard from Phil he was living with Dorine in that commune. He likes that house, he makes furniture, he has another guy to work with. It’s actually handsome furniture. Really, it’s not what I
would ever have imagined for him, but he’s thriving. And he’s involved in something political with other ex-cons.… He said to me once very formally, ‘I’ve made a commitment to Dorine.’ ”

Beth tried and tried to talk about the commune, about Wanda. Miriam was curious and asked questions about how they worked on their plays and how they took care of the children. But Beth felt her shy away when she tried to talk about Wanda.

“She’s so much older than you,” Miriam said, “isn’t it sort of a mother thing? I understand that you admire her, but …”

“No, no! It’s not like that.” Impressions flooded her. She could see Wanda with her hand on her hip saying, “Women are always trying to push each other into the mother role or accusing each other of taking that over. I won’t be the one who has to give and give like a personal soup kitchen and who isn’t allowed any weakness. Most women act as if they’re terrified that some so-called strong woman will make ‘demands’ on them. Then they’ll suddenly be six and in mother’s pocket again. I don’t want a wife, I don’t want to be your angel mother or your demon mother. I just want to be your loving friend. And I think you’re strong enough to carry your share of the load.”

Remembering, Beth still could find nothing to say except, “No, it’s not like that! Women can be more to each other than mother and daughter or client and helper or competitors.”

Going down the street after lunch, she felt angry at herself for being unable to say a thing that was so simple and so important and so beautiful as what Wanda was to her and she to Wanda.

The next morning Beth went down to Goddard extension early where they were holding a workshop, to set up. A while later Sally came flying in and said that something was wrong, she did not know what, but some man had come with an official paper, a subpoena for Wanda, and that Wanda was seeing a lawyer. They would have to do the workshop alone. Beth was scared. Was it the children? Was someone trying to take the boys away? Was someone trying to close their new school? She was too worried about what was happening to spare energy to worry about whether she could handle her share of the workshop without Wanda. She just went and did it. It was learning to fall all over again.

Twenty-three women turned up. A great feeling of energy
and power and joy built up through the warm-ups and the scenes and the organisms. She worked then with a small group, lying on their backs with their heads together in the center, like an open flower. She taught them breathing exercises and how to let out the air and sustain their voices. She had them groaning and bellowing and ululating and singing openmouthed. By the end they were all dancing together, making their own music by beating palms on their bodies.

When she got back to where they were staying and walked in, the air was different: it was like running into a wall. There was a metallic taste of fear that sang in the air, there was the rough frenzied whirring of confusion. Even the house cat was affected and crouched on the highest shelf with his fur on end. Laura was sitting bunched up in a chair, white-faced with tension and so tight Beth could feel her muscles aching when she looked at her. Nobody knew whether Wanda had been arrested or what, but that morning a subpoena had been served on her to appear before a federal grand jury. Anita, a woman from the law commune, had been called and gone to investigate. Anita called back and told them the situation. A grand jury was supposed to be investigating how deserters from the Army got assistance in surviving in the States or getting across the border into Canada. Wanda’s ex-husband Joe, who had been working with G.I.s since the summer before, was probably the target.

“Then it’s okay,” Beth said. “She hasn’t seen him in three years, so they can’t do anything to Wanda. She’ll just tell them that she hasn’t seen him and she doesn’t know anything about what he’s doing, and they’ll let her go.”