Small Changes (12 page)

She did not know what to say, because she had said it all. She stood awkwardly on one foot and tried a smile. He got angrier. “You think I don’t mean it. Think you can get around me. Think again! It’s forward or backward or get out of the road.” Turning, he pushed off into the crowd. He did not look back. His narrow back seemed to vibrate outrage.

She wandered back toward Dorine, stopping to watch a street theater group doing a play about landlords and high rent, but she felt too unhappy to get interested. Past a table where people were explaining how to set up food co-ops, past two men quarreling loudly about which had ripped off
the other, she felt exhausted before she found Dorine and began telling her what had happened.

“You’ll make it up.” Dorine took her arm. “You know, I think you’re getting a burn.”

Beth nodded. “I can feel it. I guess I ought to go home.”

“Lennie, want to go back? You look so done in.” Dorine patted his cheek.

He shrugged her off but got up. “Yeah, what’s the use. All those tourists making jokes. But how can we get the stuff back without Jackson?”

“Beth can help. It’s not so heavy. Beth, you’ll help?”

Tom was supposed to go to the landlord at three, so she did not think she would run into him. Or maybe she still hoped he would change his mind and come back and let them go on as they had. Besides, Dorine and Lennie really could not manage the paintings without her.

On the way back they did not talk much. It was a long walk. The paintings were heavy and awkward to carry. The twenty blocks felt like an all-day hike. Lennie was grumpy and Dorine was fussing over him. Beth was down too. The relationship with Tom was not much, but it was a lot more than nothing. She felt lonely already. She wondered if she would ever see any of the people she had met through him. Hauling Lennie’s canvases blocks and blocks and blocks felt like a heavy penance for something she had done wrong. After she had done this, surely she would have a right to come by sometimes. But Dorine and Lennie were totally involved in Lennie’s depression.

Lennie was trying to cheer himself up as they finally climbed the stairs. “What the hell, people would always rather buy jewelry or pots, they don’t feel they’re putting their taste on the line the same way. If they pick out a canvas, they’re scared somebody else will look at it and say,
‘Ark
, you’re an idiot.’ It’s exposing yourself.” He pushed the door ajar, thrusting his load in. As Dorine and Beth crowded after into the cool dim room, the two bodies stretched on the bed—Miriam lying on her stomach with her black hair half tangled over Jackson’s chest, he with one arm around her buttocks, the other lying palm up at his own side—jerked convulsively and froze. Lennie made a surprised noise in his throat. As they halted halfway into the room, Jackson yanked his arm free and, arching himself with rough speed,
pulled the sheet from under him and over her, as she was struggling to sit up and cover herself. As Beth backed out the door, she could see vividly Jackson’s lean body with its hard, almost scarified muscles, dark wiry body and pubic hair, the limp condom swinging pendulum-like in the haste of his motion. Jostling, they plummeted downstairs, leaving the rest of the paintings outside the door.

“Damn it!” Lennie struck his forehead. “He’ll never forgive me. Why did it have to be him?”

“People … Hey, stop a minute!”

They looked up. Miriam stuck her head out under the matchstick shade. “Leave your stuff where it is and wait ten minutes. Okay?”

Lennie kept his head down. “We’re sorry. Honest.”

“Don’t worry. Everything’s cool. Come up in ten minutes.” She ducked in under the shade.

“Should we really go back?” Lennie bobbed nervously. “Jackson doesn’t lose his temper often, but when he does …”

“Why not give them a chance to gloss it over?” Beth wanted to see them together. “Besides, what will we do with all your stuff? Take it back to the fair?”

As they sat on the porch steps she kept thinking of how Jackson had immediately covered her, a chivalry of the reflexes more attractive than any amount of door opening or ritual complimenting.

This time Lennie knocked. Miriam opened the door smiling gravely, in her Pakistani pants and top, barefoot still with her hair once again braided. The little hairs on the nape were wet: she smelled of soap. Carrying in a pitcher, Jackson motioned for them to sit on the neatly made bed. “Vodka and orange juice and lots of ice. Get them glasses, Miriam.”

Back and forth on her bare feet she went, bringing glasses and then a loaf of Italian bread, plates, bologna and cheese, setting them on his cleared desk while he watched with a sucked-in smile of which only a little escaped. As everyone took a turn in the bathroom she moved gracefully around him in a parody of feminine subservience, a playfully overacted domesticity. She sliced the bologna and bread and cheese and arranged them, wheels within wheels, with mustard and horseradish, before she sat down on the edge of the desk beside Jackson on the desk chair. Dorine and Lennie and
Beth were lined up with their plates and glasses on the bed.

“Beth, Beth. Were you named that, or are you really Elizabeth in soft disguise?” Miriam’s voice was low and rich and a little gritty, teasing.

“I’m named Elizabeth, but nobody’s called me that except in grade school.”

“God is your oath—that’s what it means, you know.”

“She could use an oath if her parents had decided to nickname her Lizzie instead.” Jackson crunched an ice cube between his teeth. As Miriam offered the plate around, he followed her movements with that slight smile. “Miriam’s a little insane over names. What did you tell me yours meant? Rebellion?”

“Or bitter. I’ve seen it explained that way too.”

“Not bittersweet?”

“Not by the books.”

“The books don’t know everything. It’s bitter and sweet.”

“Like you.” She gave him a slow smile that was mostly in her eyes set deep and wide. Bending then, she gathered the dishes. Something Beth was groping for. If Dorine had been serving them, nobody would have noticed, though the actual act would have been the same. By playing servant with that conscious touch, Miriam made it more flattering to Jackson, to them. She wasn’t quite sure what in that disquieted her. Miriam asked, “Did many stop to look at your work, Lennie?”

“To make cracks, sure.”

Jackson stretched his feet halfway across the room, tilting the desk chair back. “People are afraid of the pain in your pictures. They don’t want anything that isn’t easy.”

“Jackson …” Dorine rested her head on Lennie’s shoulder. Jackson and Miriam sat only a few inches apart but had not touched since the others came in. “You know, after all this time of being your roommate, I still don’t know your first name?”

“That’s my only name. Jackson Jackson Jackson.”

“No, it isn’t.” Miriam held her glass to her cheek. “He has a secret first name, like Rumpelstiltskin.”

“What is it?” Dorine sat up. “Ebenezer? Zacharias? Is it a girl’s name that they give boys sometimes like Shirley or Evelyn?”

Miriam shook her head sternly. “It’s a piece of Americana. He’d disappear if I told you—he does anyhow. You have to
love this idiot for years on end to find out his secret name.”

He tapped his finger on the desk beside her hand. “How do you know, woman, that’s really my name?”

Under her low brows she looked at him, the light from the window shading her face under the cheekbones. “It would be like you to fool me. Do you know what I’d do if I found that out?”

His face was a wary mask. “Yes.”

They go so well together, Beth thought, that to see them is to find them immediately a couple, the clear answer to a series of muddled questions. Yet tensions sprang out. Watching them she felt a pang of loneliness and then remembered. “I must go. Tom will be coming back, and I shouldn’t be here.”

“We have to go too. We’ll walk with you.” Miriam padded across the room to her shoes. “Jackson, this time we have to find Phil, immediately.”

His face was wary, his eyes questioning, but he got slowly to his feet. Lennie and Dorine exchanged uneasy glances.

“We have to find Phil, we have to come back here, and we all have to talk.” Miriam faced him, looking into his eyes insistently. “Don’t shut me out and don’t shut him out. You can’t make me choose any more. I can’t stand it. We can’t stay apart, all right, we can’t, but I can’t punish Phil for that. I won’t be the club you use on each other! Never again.”

Slowly Jackson put his hand on her shoulder. He did not smile, no muscle in his face moved. “Phil was my friend long before I met you, long before he met you. Remember that.”

“Stay open, Jackson. Stay open and talk. That’s all I ask.”

“Woman, that isn’t enough?” But he nodded again, opening the door and following her down the stairs, one hand resting lightly on her shoulder. Going after, Beth wondered. What was happening? He was so thoroughly there with her, what could it be he denied that she needed Phil too, that drew hungry shadows down her cheeks from her watching eyes? She wondered if she would ever arrive at watching lovers without some pang of wanting to be loved too, for all of her analysis.

Well, one thing had been saved for her out of the day. If Miriam did become involved with Jackson once again, she could continue to come here and visit. Miriam would justify her presence as somehow Dorine could not. And then she would come to know Miriam at last too.

5

Women’s Soft Voices on a Summer Day

S
CENE:
The Cambridge apartment. The room that had been Tom Ryan’s is now Miriam’s. On the double bed is an old patchwork comforter made by Miriam’s mother’s mother, Rachel. Phil is at work tending bar: he has two part-time bartending jobs at the moment, Oggy’s and Finnegan’s Wake. Jackson is off with Terry and Rick from Going-to-the-Sun commune, and nobody knows where they are or when he will reappear. Lennie is out hawking papers. It is Saturday afternoon. Miriam has just trimmed Beth’s hair, cut Donne’s, and had her own mane thinned and evened by Dorine. Now all three lie on the bed in a wilted row. The air over them is another feather bed.

MIRIAM
: Well, you guess wrong. I have a brother Mark, younger by a year, and a sister Allegra, younger by three. Not only wasn’t I an only child, I got stuck being a mother a lot.

DORINE
: Oh, I bet you dug playing mother.

MIRIAM
: Sure, playing it. But not having to do it day in and day out. When I was little my mother always had to work. My father was blacklisted for a long time and he couldn’t get a job. He was a folk singer and he’d signed his name to a lot of things.

BETH
: But at least you must have admired him.

MIRIAM
: When I was little, oh sure. He had us all conned. I mean, don’t get the idea he was a Communist. He was an opportunist, he just wanted to be a big-name folk singer. I’ll always wonder to what extent he was martyred to his associations, and to what extent he just thought it fine that my mother should teach and support him. But don’t imagine that meant he hung around the house taking care of us and doing
the housework, oh no! I was raised to think he was a hero. When he was home he was always composing awful songs about civil rights that must have made the blacks embarrassed, or he was practicing. The only real radical in the family is my grandmother, who made this quilt, and she’s crazy now.

DORINE
: Being an only child isn’t such a bed of roses. You think, sure, an only child gets spoiled. But some people have one kid because that one was an accident. Okay, they’re going to live with that accident. How would you like to feel like a fucking accident? You’re only there because she didn’t put the diaphragm in right one time, and they were too scared to get an abortion or maybe they didn’t know where to go.

MIRIAM
: Bethie, are you an only child?

BETH
: Two sisters, younger and older, and a brother. The big event in our family was when my brother had to get married, because Elinor was pregnant four months. My older sister Marie was eased into that mother routine. We always got on. I think mainly I resented my youngest sister, Nancy.

DORINE
: You know, my parents used to call me The Kid. ‘What are we going to do about The Kid?’ they’d ask each other. They’d be talking about going to a movie or out for a bite to eat, as they always called it. Or going on a little vacation. They called all their jaunts Little Vacations. Little Vacations and Bites to Eat and Smart Little Dresses and Another Wee Drinkie.

BETH
: I think I always resented Nancy. She was pretty from the time she was a baby. The youngest and the prettiest and she always got everything, it seemed to me.

MIRIAM
: Oh, you too. My sister Allegra. I mean, take the name. You know how come I have such a lumpy old-fashioned Jewish name as Miriam? Because my father named me after his mother’s mother, so Grandma Berg would give them some money. In other words, friends, he sold me out. Times weren’t so tight when the other kids were born, so they got groovy names, Mark and Allegra.

DORINE
: I never thought Dorine was such a hot name either. It sounds as if I should be working in a dime store. You can’t believe how angry I used to get with Tom calling me Chlorine all the time, as if my own name wasn’t bad enough.

BETH
: But you never acted as if you were mad. I didn’t
know it bothered you—I mean, I never thought it was nice of him.

DORINE
: Well, what was I supposed to do? Slug him? I mean, what can you do? When men start teasing you that way, if you let on it hurts, they only do it more.

BETH
: I’ve never seen you get angry.

DORINE
: Sure I get angry!… I guess I get depressed more.

MIRIAM
: It’s not just a matter of names. Allegra was pretty all ways. Maybe every family in this society that has more than one daughter, they pick one girl to love and make her a baby doll, and the others are just raised to be lowered, made to feel inferior all of the time.