Small Changes (77 page)

Waiting while they checked her name on Wanda’s list, Beth tried to smile, tried to answer the questions politely. If they took a dislike to you, they would keep you waiting half the day. They would not call Wanda till they felt like it. Wanda was a troublemaker, they said, and once when Beth had come she had been turned away because Wanda was in seclusion in Davis Hall. Seclusion was their soft name for solitary. She had been locked in a strip cell for challenging a screw who was hassling another woman.

So she waited and waited, clutching her arms, staring at the wall, watching the door. She might wait two hours and then they would come and tell her Wanda was in Davis Hall again. Hall … like a girl’s boarding school. Then suddenly, coming in behind a guard, Wanda. Thin. Very thin. Sallow. Prisoners did not get outside much. They used to do gardening and farming, but it wasn’t considered ladylike enough, so those jobs weren’t passed out any more.… Wanda’s face broke into a huge grin of pleasure. They were allowed to kiss. They were allowed to kiss each other once at that first sight and once when Beth left. In between it was a matter of who was on guard. And the weather. Today the sun was shining. It was a gorgeous blue and yellow early November day and the prisoners and their visitors were allowed to go outside. All the way down Beth had kept saying under her breath over and over again, ‘Just let it be sunny, just let us be outside together.’

She took Wanda’s hand as they went out. The guard was watching them but did not say anything. It was all a matter of who the guard was or how the guard felt that day.

“You’re so thin!”

“The food is shit, love. I can feel myself slipping toward malnutrition day by day. I can get mad about it. No vitamins, no minerals. Just carbohydrates. The institutional all-starch diet!”

“I was so scared you’d be in solitary again.” She took Wanda’s face in her hands. The guard took a step toward them, making a sign, and quickly she dropped her hands.

“I fight them. I have to, Beth. They turn us into children. The whole place says we are bad wayward children and they’re going to break us real slow. It’s a soft, slow oppression. They’re always telling us to be
nice
…. I was on six o’clock lock for two weeks but that isn’t the end of the world.
I try to play it on the line where I don’t get sent to Davis but I don’t get depressed. We get stagnant. It’s a slow loss of pride, a leakage of self.… If only I could see the kids.… What did Anita say?”

“That we haven’t a chance of getting them back. The courts have never once given custody to lesbian parents, even if you’d never been in prison. We have too many counts against us. Being poor alone would do it She said to forget it … as if we could.”

“That’s what she said to me. I asked her to dig more. See if there wasn’t some way, any way.… I asked her, if we separated, would they give me the kids back.”

“Oh.” Beth felt as if she were going blind in her body. Stone.

“Beth, once I had the kids back, I figured we could go away and that the basic problem was to get Luis and Johnny. Beth, don’t look like that. Anita said it didn’t matter. A lesbian past and a prison record are sufficient. There is no legal way we can get our children back.”

Beth’s gaze went to the horizon. Down in this valley, valley so low. She felt wizened, crushed. She felt a vast weight coming to bear on her. The word “oppression” came to her, not as a movement catch phrase—the oppression of women, the oppression of gay people, third world oppression, working-class oppression—but as the real weight of the system, of the hostile state crunching her under. “Why do they do this to us? We’re so little.”

“The family is the stone of which the state is built,” Wanda said dryly, “or didn’t you believe our own analysis? … Beth, understand, I have to get Luis and Johnny with me. I know what it’s like for them there. I know my father will punish them daily for being my children, for being alive and vital and earthy and strong. He’s going to try to crush us in them. I can’t rest while they’re captive. I just can’t.”

Beth tried to shake out of her numb grief and listen. “But Anita says we can’t get them back.”

“Legally. But I’m going to do it anyhow. To run away with my own children.”

Beth wrung her hands. “Do you wish we’d run away before?”

“We would have been hunted by the F.B.I. A child custody thing just isn’t that big. My parents don’t have the money to track us with private detectives for months and months.…
By ‘us’ I mean me and the kids.”

“You don’t want me along.” Beth grabbed Wanda’s hand. Cold as hers.

“It won’t be easy being a fugitive, even a small fish one. We’ll have to be alert and wary all of the time. We’ll need false I.D. We won’t be able to do theater, maybe for a long time.”

“It won’t be easy?” Beth laughed. “Easier together than not. We can’t let them bust us up. Besides, you need me to arrange everything. What do we do first?”

Other prisoners and visitors sauntered past, a fat black woman about forty with two women who might be her sisters. A guard walked behind them.

“Oh, it’s not so bad since I’m off that stupid secretarial job,” Wanda said in the same voice. “I’m doing tutoring. Helping the Puerto Rican sisters learn the pig’s English. Actually I kind of like it. I get to talk Spanish a lot. Did you see Roberta? She’s been working nine months on one of those big fancy flags. We make those big flags for special orders, and seals with eagles in satin. Nine months of women’s slave labor. Lot of anger gets sewn into one of those banners. Nine months. She could have had a baby, she says. She has one, but she had to sign it away in the spring.”

“Isn’t she kind of old to have a baby?”

“Old?” Wanda looked startled. “She’s eight years younger than me. This is her third time in. Hustling and skag.” Very casually she looked around. “The kids write me sad wooden letters, obviously censored. My father won’t give them my letters.… You’ll have to see Luis anyhow. But exercise care.”

“What’s the first step in our running away?”

“Do you want to be a fugitive?”

“I feel like one anyhow. I want to be together with you. Loving each other, we’re always fugitives.”

“That’s romantic and metaphorically true. Being real fugitives is something else.” But Wanda was sounding cheerful. “Beth, helping the kids escape is one thing. Going with us another.”

“Not so. I’ve crumpled up since you went in. I’m ashamed of myself, how little I’ve done. But I’m awake now. I truly am.”

Driving back to New York, she felt small still but no longer
crushed, no longer helpless. Quick as a mouse and slippery and wary. She must first create new identities for all of them, and find a home in another city. Then she must figure out a way to pick up the kids without Wanda getting caught in the process. She would need help. She would need a whole lot of help. Then she hitchhiked to Boston and began.

She would never have guessed beforehand who would end up in her scheme. Who would want to help. Who would be clear and able. Who would be trustworthy. For several weeks she worked on new identities: Wanda was a widow named Marie; she was divorced and named Cynthia, called Cindy. Luis was Robert; Johnny was Mark. Then she went to Cleveland to prepare the lives they would assume. The grand jury had not subpoenaed any new witnesses and was preparing indictments. Soon it should be finished and Wanda would get out of prison. Beth must be prepared on the day Wanda was released. Once Wanda was known to be out, the children would be watched more carefully.

Briefly she saw Luis twice. It was cloak and daggerish on the flatland of tract houses, but he enjoyed it, like hide-and-seek. And understood. She was coming to have a new respect for Luis, for children generally: that they were people in a fuller sense than she had quite grasped. They could never speak for more than ten minutes.

“Oh, they make us go to church and confession and all that stuff. It’s no worse than school. The teachers here, they sure are cross to kids. It’s full of crap. If I use words like ‘crap’ the old man hits me. What I hate the most is when the old man gets excited at night and starts talking about Joe and Wanda. How they’re rotten dirty, the dregs of the earth. The old lady’s not as bad as he is. She says to us when she tucks us in that she’s sure our mother loves us anyhow.… Do you
believe
it?”

“Is Johnny okay? I don’t know if you should tell him you saw me or not.… What do you think?”

“I’ll see. He cries a lot. He cries for everybody.” Luis looked superior. He had continued to grow and put on weight. “He cries for Wanda and you and Sally and Fern. He cries for his girl friend and Rudy his kitten and Harriet the goat. But I tell him we’re going to break out one of these days.”

“We won’t be able to go back to New Hampshire, Luis. Probably not ever.”

“But we can do lots of things. We’ll be okay. I’m not scared. I’m only scared of having to stay here. He hates us. He’s always making threats about where he’s going to send me, how he’s going to take us away from each other. He’s going to send me away to some school where they’ll make me be a soldier, and keep Johnny at home. Can they draft kids now? Can he do that? The old lady says it costs too much.…”

“Military school? It isn’t getting drafted, don’t be afraid. It’s just an extra strict kind of school. But we’ll get you before he can do that. Promise!”

“When? Will she come for us?”

“No. It will be me and maybe somebody else. If I appeared suddenly one morning when you guys were walking to school and I looked funny—maybe I would have a wig on or my hair dyed? Do you think Johnny would get in the car or would he be scared?”

“Are you kidding? Would we get in the car? Ha! That’s a joke. The hard part is when you come and you talk to me and then you go away.”

“I’ll maybe come once more and tell you to expect us, but maybe not. Maybe we’ll just come with a car one morning. I think it won’t be more than a month now. It’s to be right around the time Wanda gets out. So when you hear them talking about that, you’ll know to be expecting us. Then a friend is going to take you to another city and you’ll have to both wait there with that person for us to get there the next day. But you’ll know we’re on our way, and that first night, you’ll get to talk to us on the telephone so you know for sure we’re on our way. Okay?”

“Got it!” Luis put out his hand to shake hers. He was into being very controlled these days. She wanted to seize him and hug him hard, to let her feelings out and share his. But no doubt he needed his stoicism. As Wanda needed her sense of struggle. She shook his hand and held it as long as she dared.

Beth asked Miriam if she would do a small errand. To her astonishment, Miriam insisted on taking a much bigger part. She would meet Laura and Wanda on the Connecticut Turnpike where Laura would bring Wanda from Alderson on the day of her release, and she would bring Wanda to Beth at Miriam’s house, where they would hide overnight and disguise
themselves. Miriam entered passionately into the planning. “Suppose they were my children? Of course she has to get them back!” Miriam brushed the heavy hair back from her eyes, frowning. “For once I don’t mind the risk, Beth. I want to do it! Maybe I even need to do it!”

“But Neil wouldn’t go along. Why do you want to take risks for us?”

“You think I always lie to myself. Sure, I’ve done a lot of that for years now. But oh, Beth, after a while the pain gets through. The pain gets through! I have so little self-respect left I need to prove to myself I’m still here. I can’t even love my children right if I’m a dishrag.”

“Are you very unhappy?”

“I was much unhappier with Phil and Jackson. Now … it’s just nothing. It’s being dull and bored and servile. I feel as if my life is over.”

“Wanda’s eight years older than you. She began another life when she was thirty-five.”

“Come on, you call it the women’s movement, but what do you have for an ordinary woman? I’m not twenty-one, I’m not attractive. No one looks twice and I don’t care. I love my two children and I see them growing and changing and I see the world closing in on Ariane already. I see it. How nervous she is to please. But what have you got for me? I love my kids and I don’t burn banks down or run around the streets with picket signs.”

“You’re beginning to understand how trying to be a good woman has oppressed you. It isn’t me who’s making you feel the weight that’s crushing you.”

“Yeah, sure. I feel it. You call it oppression, I call it pain!”

“Pain is individual. Internal. You think it’s your problem, your fault. You still see it as private. If you were in a group with other women, you’d find out that what you think of as your private problems are common as Social Security numbers and fillings. You didn’t mess up, you didn’t fail. You don’t have to feel guilty. You can fight it!”

“So help me, then. Face it, Beth, I’m no kid. I’m the mother of two children. I wouldn’t let them go for my life to live over again. They’re the world to me, Ariane and Jeffrey. They’re far more mine than they are Neil’s, for all he wanted them so much. He’s so proud of himself spending time with them on Sunday afternoon.”

“You keep saying you’re not young. So maybe you won’t catch another man. Is that it?”

“What have you got to replace it? Come on. I’m not about to start having relationships with women. Maybe that works for you. Okay, I’ll believe it on faith. It’s like a joke to me. I can’t be turned on by another woman. Maybe I’m too old to change. Maybe it’s been too easy for me to make it with men. What am I supposed to do then? You think I’m going to run off to Vermont and join a traveling circus? Beth, I can’t. It isn’t in me. Maybe I could have at nineteen. But my kids are real people too. And they’re damned sure what they want, from day to day. Loud and clear.”

Beth paced around the table. “I can’t give you a one, two, three answer. I hear what you’re saying, and I know it’s real. But I can’t present you with a replacement for Neil. He’s security, he’s your income, he’s your love, he’s your insurance policy, he’s your government, he’s your sex life, he’s your society in one.”

“You can say, go to work. Okay, by now I’m scared. I’ve lost my confidence by attrition, that beautiful technical arrogance. I haven’t stood on my own two feet and presented a technical idea in years! I haven’t even spoken in public. I’ve lost my cool. There’s a depression in my field. Route 128 is a disaster area—companies folding, thousands out of work.” Miriam shook her hair back, sighing. “And what does it mean, I quit because I didn’t want to hire my brain to the military. Now I’ll go back and take the same kind of job. Who am I kidding? I do less damage darning socks.” Miriam was getting excited. Words gushed from her. Beth had the feeling that Miriam had been brooding and studying her situation for months but had never spoken a word. Her voice rose, thickening, and the words spouted. “And suppose I get some job, by the time I pay child care, what do I have left? Even if I get something from Neil. I gave him grounds for divorce once myself. I wonder if a smart lawyer like Neil would hire couldn’t make a lot out of Phil.… I wonder … Anyhow, suppose by some miracle I get enough child support to pay for day care. How can I celebrate turning my children over to enforced baby sitting? Most women who do it can’t get any other kind of work. It’s lousy for the kids. And I’d come home at night tired. What would I have to give them?” Miriam sat down as if exhausted, then bounced up again. “I hate to sound like a bragging, pushy mama, but
Ariane is … brilliant! She has an incredible mind. She’s full of insights. Did you look at those montages she’s doing? She goes part time to a really free creative nursery, but the tuition is high.…”