Small Changes (16 page)

Sonia was lonely and Miriam knew it. But it was tricky too. The husky croon urged her to remember how they had conspired in her early childhood, how Sonia had confided in her, how together they had managed and cared for their
family. But Miriam felt that ever since Sonia had handed her her first sanitary napkin with a horrendous list of things she must not do (leave it in the bathroom, get blood on her clothes, flush it down the toilet lest she block the plumbing) they had been at war.

Sonia was overweight, always overweight and ashamed. Lionel was not fat. He told her she had no self-discipline. He was always pointing out women her age who were gorgeous: even while they watched television he would point out actresses and he would tell Sonia this one was forty-six and that one was fifty-two and that one was twice a grandmother.

Miriam felt as if Sonia were secretly angry at her for losing weight. She felt as if her mother were engaged in a campaign to overfeed her, leaving cakes and candy bars out and tempting her to nosh between meals on just a bite of this or that. “You eat all that
chozzerai
at school, and at home nothing’s good enough. You’ll get sick, mark my words, you’ll come down with mononucleosis like your cousin Michael.”

Miriam resented being kept home, she resented feeling guilty when she escaped. She did not want to give up a moment of the precious time running through her fingers, time to be spent with Phil in bed tangling their bodies, through the parks and museums and over the bridges, to be flaunted through all their games and codes and confidences. It was a sweet honeydew melon to be eaten down to the rind. The second week she had got herself a diaphragm she kept at his apartment when she was not carrying it in herself or hiding it in a rolled sock, and she felt safe and glad in her body.

In September Donald the Duck stopped going out to Fire Island every weekend, and they could no longer have the apartment to themselves all the time. She finally met him. He was stout and he waddled and he was meticulous in all of his habits, setting her teeth on edge. Yet a sequence of elegant bony model types came through the apartment to dine with him on gourmet meals he rustled up, as he put it, and to share his bed. On weekends Phil and Miriam had the studio couch and no privacy, but still they made long slow love and told stories and carried on, negating Donald and his elegant partners.

Yet the time ran out. Instead of returning to school early
as usual, she made her departure the last day before registration began. The afternoon before her plane she went into Manhattan, saying she absolutely had to do some last-minute shopping and would be back in a couple of hours, and no, Sonia could not come along because she complained too much about her feet and was slow in the stores.

The afternoon hurt. It seemed covered with fine sticky hairs that secreted a substance sweet and poisonous. Twice they almost quarreled. He had done up her clothing in a neat parcel and rather formally he presented her with four poems he said he had written about her. They did not leave the apartment. It was a Tuesday and Donald the Duck was at work at the credit card corporation where he was a minor executive. They lay naked on the open couch and held each other, but all her best and most intricate efforts could not produce an erection in Phil.

“You don’t want me to go away?”

“No, I don’t want you to go away. I want you to throw over everything for me. I want you to quit school and come live in my closet and we’ll subsist on old rubber bands. I want you to want to, and if you wanted to, I’d be terrified, I’d run like hell.”

“But I do want to. I love you, I love the person I am with you. But how can I explain to my parents about the winter? How will I support you in your old age if I don’t get my degree?”

“Fly away, pigeon, fly away home. Your house is on fire, your books will all burn.”

“What do you want, Philip?”

“I want to be miserable at the top of my lungs. I want to scream and yell and break things. I want to fuck you, and I can’t even do that.”

“But you have so many times and you will again. I’ll come and find you next summer.”

“Are you going to keep yourself pure for me?”

Sideways she looked at him. “Is that a trick question?”

“As many tricks as you can learn. I’m sending you out to try what you’ve studied with me, pigeon. Unless I’m mistaken—and as you know, I am never, never mistaken—back at the school you’ll find it a different scene this year. You will try out what you’ve practiced and write me about your adventures.
I want a letter every two weeks, each more outrageous than the last.”

“Will you write me too? Please?”

“I’ll send you poems, which is better, and I’ll tell you lies, which is worse. I’ll write, Miriam, hastily, badly, wildly, nastily, and unsteadily. Now get the hell out of here. And don’t look back!”

7

Is Sex More Fun Than Pinochle?

Miriam wrote Phil every two weeks—the compromise between her craving to communicate with him, her massive class schedule, and her fear of seeming too dependent by flooding him with letters. She worked on the letters as carefully as on her problems for class, deleting the many paragraphs of longing and trying craftily to get reassurances from him that nobody else had quite replaced her, striving hard for a tone that would make her interesting. At the same time, she wanted to tell him everything about her life and extract his opinion on how she was conducting herself.

D
EAREST
P
HILIP
,

If you had not given me explicit orders, I would not bother with extracurricular activities here. I miss you. There is no one like you. It is all second rate and drab. But I am doing my best to carry out instructions. I’d still rather be with you in darkest Flatbush than with anybody else in Paris. It would be more interesting.

I am living in Martha Cooke, which is better than my old dorm. It’s for women with high grade point averages and active on campus: elitism pure and simple. Still the accommodations are pleasant, the rules not so tight, and it’s right on campus.

I have discovered something alarming. Being attractive is a con game. Men are so brainwashed in this society, they want to buy any product that comes well recommended. If you convey by how you act that you expect a man to find you irresistible and devastating, nine times out of ten he acts that way too! It’s ridiculous. When I think of the men who looked right through me last year—those same idiots are falling over themselves. It makes me want to belt them in the jaw, frankly. You could see me as I was, and the only difference is that now I’m a good con artist.

Still I enjoy it sometimes. If I could get rid of the sense of conjuring trick, I would enjoy it more. All the time I was growing up I wished every day to be suddenly pretty like my sister Allegra. I think you were always handsome. You were born grinning. But I was lumpy and dreadful, and I was made to feel twice as lumpy. Now you’re my good fairy godmother—now don’t get angry. Neither the adjective nor the noun is appropriate! But the magic is.

It’s other people make one beautiful or ugly. So if you know how to manipulate their reactions, if you do a good
selling
job, they decide you’re beautiful. Women are so dreadfully unhappy when they’re losing, which is 90% of women 90% of the time. My mother always felt that she isn’t attractive enough for my father, I think. That’s easier for me to see now. He’s good-looking in his way, I guess, though he doesn’t turn me on, I mean incest taboos aside. He’s too self-pitying and he takes advantage of her. When I was younger I always took his side because I wanted so badly for him to love me.

I think my mother believes the only reason he’s stayed is because she supported us all—I guess it was only four or five years but it looms large. Because she felt she had to be this terrific housekeeper besides and glamorous too, and she hadn’t the foggiest notion how. He’s had affairs, I guess everybody in the family knows. When he was giving guitar lessons, he got involved with a girl and another time my mother was crying her eyes out because she found a letter
from a woman singer he met at the Philadelphia folk festival.

My mother has always felt inferior and while I was growing up she put that on me. I had to be twice as good at everything, nothing was ever good enough, but at the same time she assumed in her bones that I would be inadequate. They put that on me till you came and cut the webs away.

Well, this is tedious, isn’t it? I just keep thinking now about things I never saw so clearly. To the attack again. I went out for a while with a guy I had a crush on all last year from a math class. He has beautiful long lashes and the look of a wasted Renaissance prince. Alas, he turns out to be a virgin and impotent, or a virgin because impotent. I think about once a month some woman gets him almost to it and fails. I tried, dear Philip, I tried. I have put him back where I found him. It occurred to me that perhaps in his ascetic condition he has a vitamin deficiency or is actually undernourished. He appears lacking in energy. A good Jewish mama would fix him in no time.

While playing my rotten game of tennis with a girl from my house, I picked up my second. He appeared a bit weak in gray matter but equipped with muscles and energy and willingness. Indeed the first time we were alone he jumped me. It was rather like being made love to by a cement mixer. I went through the proper demurrals he seemed to expect and allowed myself to be mauled and carried off—figuratively speaking, as the whole scene took place on a couch. Alas, again: he did not lack enthusiasm but staying power. A four-stroke man. For two weeks I tried to get him past that point. He doesn’t seem to grasp the the idea that intercourse consists of more than putting it in and coming. By the end of my fourteen days of patience I was becoming an irritable bitch. Lack of orgasm makes one nasty, I think, and his conversation lacked content and variety. So I dumped him.

A great willingness and some idea of how to connect with men doesn’t seem to give one a satisfactory sex life. Let alone establishing Relationships. The Renaissance
Prince was totally non-verbal except when discussing Abelian groups and the Four-Stroke Man was great on basketball and television and how he kept in shape with Tiger’s Milk.

I am trying to seduce my section man in political science, which I am taking to fulfill my social science requirement. He is about your age and, although not as attractive, has some wit. I think he might actually talk. He is wary and suspects a trap. (Bulbs flash, the dean’s man and the campus police jump out from under the desk, catching him with his hand on my breast). However, I think he is susceptible, and tracking him is more fun than my last two non-events.

I actually like him. He has progressive ideas and doesn’t seem to think women are for putting down. I think I will not try again unless I like somebody, because otherwise there is not enough to pass the time. I never had the feeling that the Renaissance Prince or the Four-Stroke Man were capable of dealing with me at one and the same time as sex object and as human being. If I talked too much they got upset, because that turned them off. It reminded them too heavily there was a person there, me, and not just a body. If you don’t like somebody and he doesn’t like you, then if the sex doesn’t work out, as it frequently seems not to, the whole evening is blown. Then I get the feeling I’d be better off back at the dorm working on a problem.

One of my professors, the one in topology, is brilliant if a little hard to follow. He puts stuff up on the blackboard so fast I know that someday he will go right off the end and fall on the floor and continue scribbling without pause. I like him the best of anybody but he’s married and totally abstracted. I don’t think he needs me in his life when he has topology, a more interesting mistress when you come down to it, love, and I wish you were here to come down to it. I am obeying you but would rather be with you. Send me poems and a less facetious letter next time. You write all metaphors and no facts. I cannot tell what you are talking about half the time. I am sure you were right to quit that new job if you didn’t like
it, but what is an
S-M
bar? Please have mercy on my mathematical mind and tell me things straight, with a glossary maybe.

LOVE!
    

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

YOUR
M
IRIAM
    

8

Mothers and Daughters

Sonia’s letters tended to be dreary. Typically they began with a complaint about the weather: it was always raining or sleeting or sweltering. Miriam once wrote an imitation for Phil of a Sonia letter:

Monday, 11
A.M.

It is a cold rainy day and the streets are flooding and the sewers backing up and your father has just tracked mud all over the clean kitchen which I just spent the morning cleaning down on my hands and knees. The scrub brush broke and so I had to clean the floor with my toothbrush. It took me four hours.

I will have to buy a new scrub brush and I just don’t know where the money will come from. In addition we must re-cover the living-room couch and your sister Allegra needs a new Dior original dress to wear to her class picnic this Sunday, and your father needs a new sitar, gold plated this time. He says it is very important to have a gold-plated sitar to have a good tone, and you know that your father is very particular about his tone! Therefore I am having to cut down your allowance this month, I know you will understand our situation.

I can hardly write this letter, my hand is so sore and red and raw and bleeding from the knuckles because of having to get down on my hands and knees and spend four hours cleaning the kitchen floor with a toothbrush because your sister Allegra used the scrub brush to splatter-paint her wall. She says all of the other girls in her club at school splatter-paint their walls. It is a very exclusive club, all the other girls are the children of doctors. Haven’t you met anybody at school yet? Don’t you go out? Perhaps you should join a sorority. There are good Jewish sororities nowadays. If it is not too expensive. Perhaps that way you could meet a nice young man. Remember you are not getting any younger, daughter mine, and Opportunity is passing you by. Never again will you have such good opportunities to meet nice young men as right now, today, while you are attending a good college. Remember not to stay up too late at night studying, you don’t want to get skinny and unhealthy and catch a cold. You are very susceptible to colds, remember your chest and do not stay out when it is wet and cold like today.