Small Changes (19 page)

“If I tell you, who are you going to tell?”

“Why should I? Maybe I’ll want to stay out sometime. But you better make up some cover story, like a girl friend you stay with, and you better let me know where you are in case something happens at night.”

“How is that different from what I said about Mother, Allegra? Okay, say I’m staying with a girl friend. When you call, let the phone ring once, hang up, and dial again. So I’ll answer instead of Phil.”

“Who is he?”

“A friend. My best friend.”

“Oh, sure, you’re staying out till four in the morning with a friend! You must think I’m super-backward.”

“What I’m doing is obvious. But he’s still my friend. I like best to do that with friends.”

“Has he asked you to marry him?”

Miriam grinned. “If you knew him, you’d think that was funny. Marrying Phil—it would be like marrying the Fool in the Tarot pack. Have you seen that?”

“Those cards people tell fortunes with. Thelma in my sorority did a reading for me just before I met Roger. But I’m not going to marry him. He’s only a summer romance. Is that what Phil is? Maybe he won’t ask you because you gave in too quickly.”

“I guess he’d marry me if I had a good reason. It would be pointless. He’d never be a husband. He’d still be my friend.”

“You mean like he hasn’t got a career?”

“Well … no.”

“Oh. Well, I wouldn’t marry Roger either. Mother thinks he’s wonderful, but I don’t want to be a dentist’s wife in Brooklyn. He’s going into practice with his father. If he’d consider moving out to California, for instance, I’d take him more seriously. But I don’t want to live and die in Brooklyn!”

“Allegra, do you ever have sex with any of your boy friends?” Funny stiff question in a stiff household.

“What do you mean? Like going to bed? In-the-bed sex?”

“Fucking.”

“You love ugly words don’t you?” Allegra made a face. “Do you think I’d do it with Roger? What a waste! He hasn’t even made me pet with him yet. Once I almost did it with Stan—it was very, very close. I almost got carried away.”

“Stan? Which one was he?”

“You don’t notice anybody, do you? Imagine not remembering a dynamite guy like Stan! I went out with him all last summer. He was president of the Sportsmanship Council and the veep of our senior class. I’m glad I didn’t get carried away, because we broke up. What does Phil look like? Show me his picture.”

“I don’t have a picture of him.”

“Why not? You can get one taken. Even in the subway, they have those booths.”

“If you’re curious, maybe you can meet him sometime. He’s my height and fair and he has blue eyes—”

“Is he Jewish?”

Miriam shook her head. “Irish.”

“Catholic!”

“Well, he was raised Catholic. He’s violently anti.”

“Oh, Miriam, you’ve done it! No wonder you can’t marry him. I mean even if he asked you. Mother would have a heart attack! He isn’t married already, is he? That would be the limit.”

“No, not married or engaged. And he loves me. And he’s beautiful.”

“Men aren’t beautiful. Unless they’re queer.”

“Oh yes they are. I often find men beautiful. And oftenest of all I find Phil beautiful.”

“Do you love him?” Miriam nodded.

“I don’t know what’s going to become of you.” Allegra stared out of eyes so like her own. “I guess you got carried away because you never had a boy friend before. But it’s really the limit! An Irish Catholic without a career. Does he work?”

“As a janitor. But he’s going to graduate school in the fall.” She hated herself for saying that. Why did she need to persuade Allegra she wasn’t a complete jackass by Allegra’s terms? In a moment she would tell her sister about the poetry prize he had won as an undergraduate, and about the poems he had printed in literary magazines.

“Well, a college professor wouldn’t be too bad. You’re into mathematics. Maybe you could both teach till you have a baby. Dad wouldn’t care half so much as Mother about him not being Jewish. But I wouldn’t tell him about the Catholic part. What’s his last name?”

“Allegra, I’m not going to marry Phil! I don’t want to marry anybody! I don’t want any marriage I’ve ever seen!”

“What do you want? Just to be a teacher?”

“I want to be me!”

“Oh.” Allegra made a face. “Groovy. You’ll get tired enough of that. Nobody wants to be an old maid.”

The Flatbush fiat was the world of boxes. Little boxes of pain. In one was old term papers Sonia had saved from her favorite students. In another was clippings about HUAC and frantic letters from Lionel to people who had suddenly stopped being his friends. In another was Sonia’s cut-off brown hair. In another the love letter from the woman her
father had laid at a folk festival. In another were Mark’s baby shoes and his merit badges from Boy Scouts. In another was the white dress Allegra used to wear to parties when she was thirteen and fourteen until once her period started and she stained the dress. She came home weeping hysterically as if she would die. Convinced she would never be able to leave the house again, she took to her bed for three days. In another was the goldfish—the only pet Miriam was allowed as a child, as all other animals were classified as dirty—she had overfed till it died and floated belly up and she had wept with guilt. Nothing touched, nothing rubbed, nothing was connected. She could not learn from anyone else or take comfort from them or give to them. Fear had killed the past and the world was all boxes and cans.

With Phil was the world of changing shapes. Of dreams and images and words flowing and flowing bodies. It was hot in the basement though not as hot as outside. Summer festered in the dirty streets of the Lower East Side. Firecrackers went off all of the time like a barrage, like the real war in the streets. Most of the time they did not wear clothes. The only comfortable place was the bedroom. When they ate and when they quarreled, they sat at the formica table in the kitchen in two tubular chairs: chromium and formica and hard edges and white enamel.

“Your friend Jackson has a talent for discomfort.”

“You wouldn’t understand. Women love lushness. He likes things simple and straight. He’s trained himself to feel as little as possible.”

“Why doesn’t he shut off altogether? Turn on the gas and turn off the world?”

“You can’t stand the idea that there might be one man who prefers being alone. Who prefers his own mind to a lot of complicated relationships and women crawling over his flesh. Men respect the differences of other men, but women want to make every man over into their child. What you can’t devour, you want to destroy.”

And other ravings when he was irritated or depressed, when various of his overly intricate plans for money or dope fell through. They would get dressed to quarrel and move instinctively to the uncomfortable chairs tipping too far forward or back on their chromium tubes. They would face each other across the formica. When they had finished their spat
they would drift into the bedroom again, take off their clothes, and sit or lie or kneel or prop their backs against a wall on the two mattresses that covered the floor. Sometimes they smoked hash or grass and sometimes they drank wine or gin and tonic or beer. One Monday they dropped acid together. One evening they swallowed peyote buttons which carried Phil high into a talking jag and made Miriam painfully, violently sick for three hours of the wet and dry heaves. The hot city stewing in its garbage and sputtering with violence turned them off. They went out mainly to fetch supplies and see an air-conditioned movie.

Sometimes when they talked they lay forehead to forehead. Sometimes they lay side by side staring at the ceiling painted with ripple marks, only their fingers touching. Sometimes he talked with his chin dug into her shoulder and his hands playing with her breasts and as they talked her nipples would harden and he would knead her breasts while a slow timid desire spread in her. Often for hours she was partly turned on with him, as if a state of some excitement were the norm for her body, a background to everything else going on inside and around her. Her level of responsiveness and arousal had risen severalfold over the weeks. He lectured her on her capacity for multiple orgasm. There was a streak of pain in his will to find out how much pleasure she could experience, but she had to trust him in his exploration of her. Their loving would never be simple. She must trust him, for she needed him. Only with him could she loosen her emotions, separate the strands of her desperation. She carried herself like a knot to him, her hand clasped sweating on the book she was toting with her to his apartment, to the hospital, back and forth: what she was supposed to be studying that summer for her fall course, the Theory of Complex Variables.

He liked to be inside her often long before they would actually begin to move and as long afterward as he could keep from sliding out. Their best game was called Home Movies: it was the giving over of chunks of past life from one to the other. Nakedness and proximity made for vivid exchange. In a half-roused state her nervous system seemed more open to his, readier to receive, to form images. Often she imagined afterward that she had actually watched parts of his life and shown him on the screen in his head long sequences from hers.

Phil was seven. He was living with his mother in the chunky red brick barracks of public housing, a whole area that felt as if it stood behind barbed wire with guard towers at the corners. When his mother tried to get on welfare, they told her she could not get relief unless she gave them all the information they needed to trace her husband, because first it must be proved before the law that he could not support them. So the law caught his father, gone for years, and brought that loud-mouthed, hard-drinking loser home again to the wife he probably hardly remembered marrying. He could go to jail or live with his family. He said all day long that it was close to half a dozen of one and six of the other, but he couldn’t get booze in jail so he chose living with his loving wife and loving son instead.

One afternoon Phil was sent with some change to the store across the street from Roosevelt Towers to get a loaf of Wonder Bread and some frozen fish sticks and tonic—that’s what he had grown up calling soda. He was supposed to get orange but the store was out, so after great deliberation, not wanting to disappoint his mom or himself, he chose root beer. He went back across the street and around the long way so he wouldn’t go past the benches where the kid who called himself Shitkicker had his gang. They would get him down and take the tonic and break open the bread and stomp on it. The project was called Roosevelt Towers but only the big building in back was a tower, the rest were long blocks three stories tall with benches and cement and a little grass in between.

When he came running up the dark stairs the door of their apartment was funny. It was hanging wide and awry. That scared him. When things got broken they stayed broken. They would get robbed of the money in his mom’s purse and the little radio. He began to call, “Mom! Mom!” He heard her groaning and she half sat up and tried to tell him with her hand not to come in. She was lying on the floor with her dress ripped open and he was scared to see that her breasts were hanging out, and that her jaw was funny. She could not talk. Blood ran down her face onto the torn rag of her dress. Her cheeks were swollen and her jaw was stuck on at a queer angle and she was holding a piece of tooth in her hand, as if maybe it could be put back in. The room was knocked
every which way too. His old man was gone, with all the money in the house.

The would not send an ambulance to the housing project for a woman with a broken jaw so they had to go on the bus. They were hours and hours in the fracture clinic before she could go home with him. All night long she had groaned with pain. He had felt frightened of this strange woman who no longer had his mother’s face and who was wired together and could not talk clearly, and he had shrunk from her when she reached out to him.

The caseworker brought a policeman who was jolly about it and said, “Now come on, these people are always fighting, it’s just a man taking a hard hand to his wife. Now do you really want to swear out a complaint, Mrs. Boyle?” She was scared to death of the police and she stammered and turned away. The next time the old man was hauled home, he disappeared more quietly. That was the good time. He just took off.

His mother decided that welfare was too expensive and she would just have to leave Phil alone days after school and get some work. She got a job cleaning for a woman in Brookline and another two days for a family on Clarendon, in Back Bay. She would leave him the money to go to the store and get Hostess Cupcakes for lunch. But they could not really make ends meet and by and by it turned out she was pregnant. The caseworker told his mother she could get a divorce from his father on the grounds of cruelty and desertion but his mother could not get a divorce because of the Church, just as she was afraid to do anything about the baby coming that nobody wanted. Nobody except God. He was ten by then and had a big lip and he called it God’s baby that she was carrying. That made her wail and carry on.

So his old man, who didn’t have the brains to leave Boston, was once again summoned to the bar of justice and united with his family. The old man seemed a bit scared this time. He was in other trouble too. He started working as a scab painter and brought home money for a while. In fact they were about to get kicked out of public housing because the old man was making too high a wage, when the old man beat up his mother again for whining too much about the pains in her back and giving too much lip. She began to bleed on the kitchen floor and the old man took off again. Phil was lying
thrown against the bedroom wall through the whole scene with his shoulder dislocated, and this time they got to the hospital in time for her to lose the baby in the emergency ward while they were waiting for the nurse to dig out their records.

Finally his mother had sense enough to give false information after that, and apparently the old man did not immediately return to his favorite bars and old cronies. He might have thought he had killed Phil’s mother that time and was lying low. Or he might have thought nothing at all.