Small Changes (20 page)

The last time he saw his father was at the funeral. His old man was run over by a truck in the Haymarket area where he had got a temporary night watchman’s job at some construction. Amazingly there was an insurance policy to pay for the funeral and a bit over, from some Irish Brotherhood he had belonged to back in the old neighborhood. His mother put on her black dress that she wore to mass on Sunday and went very straight and white. Phil, who was thirteen, strode up to the grave and very deliberately spat in as they were lowering away. His mother slapped him. Nobody else said anything. There was a good feeding at an aunt’s afterward.

When he was fifteen his mother got married again. He should have been happy. She married a solid fat electrician, a steady worker named Jerry Flynn. He had two children to take care of from his wife dying of a mistake in the operating room during the third birth. The pains had come on her early and unexpectedly at a union picnic. Her stomach had not been empty. They had put her out with anesthesia and she had choked to death on her own vomit. The baby had died the first month.

Flynn’s sons were younger than Philip and much healthier. Phil was then five feet eight but so thin his skin looked like Gorgonzola cheese and his bones squeaked and clattered when he ran. He should have been happy. His mother had a beaver coat. She did not sit on a kitchen chair with her bottle of beer staring into it with that look of iron despair. She seemed years younger. She cut her hair and wore bright aprons. She did not have to do other women’s housework any more, and she bubbled around the house cleaning and recleaning and polishing and rubbing and shining. The house was a real house, like in the movies, it was called a colonial on a street in Medford lined with trees, and had two floors
and a stairway and a back yard. Phil had a bedroom to himself which had been the guest room. He felt like a guest.

Phil had a closet of his own full of clothes like the boys in family shows on TV. Like the Others. His new supposed- to be old man took him along with his real kids to football and baseball games. He was supposed to dig all that. They had a yard where the previous wife, No. 1, had planted some flowers on bushes and in beds, before she choked to death. His mother could not relate to all that green stuff but the electrician went out and stood around with the hose in his hand. Phil was supposed to mow the lawn. It made him sneeze. He turned out to be allergic to green stuff. So Tim, the older of the new supposed-to-be brothers, had to go back to mowing.

Phil felt like a ghost in the neat room with its blue walls and filmy curtains hung there by No. 1. He was surly and blank. He did okay in school but he was quick to anger and quick to take to his fists. In spite of his shortness of breath and his fragility, he could beat up most of the guys because of training and practice. He knew how to fight: he had never in his life been able to afford not to know how. They were soft, the boys in his school, and he despised them.

The girls were something else. He discovered he was attractive from them. He liked middle-class girls with their clear skins and their clear voices and their soft clothes. His sex before that had usually been in groups: the gang would get a girl and they would all lay her. Or a bunch would go over to Peggy’s in the afternoon when her mother was at work, and Marilyn might be there too. They would bring some tonic and some ups and downs, it didn’t matter. They took whatever they could buy. It was all something to numb you. It took you up above the lousy stinking world of the school prison and the barracks project and you floated there. It took you back into the funhouse of your head. It took you deep into the caverns of the body. It took you way up and out to ride a sense of power: you were someone after all. Coming into Marilyn was something quick like stepping into the head to take a leak, somebody was always waiting. Nothing ever worked in the world of the project, not the toilets, not the lights, not the doors, not the screens, not the stoves, not the phones, not the heat, nothing. It was all solid crap.

“But I missed something in Medford, I missed something. I didn’t know who I was. I had always had a tight connection to my mother. Maybe she was the only thing I had and I was all she had, but I had her. I didn’t have her any more. God help me, I began to hate her. I began to despise her. I’d make her weep just like my old man. She would tell me again and again she had only got married for me, for my sake, so I’d grow up right and not go to the devil like my dad. I felt evil. I felt mean. I began to believe I was just like my old man and that I only felt alive when I was hurting people. God, how I hated myself then.” His head rested on her breasts, his eyes open toward the ceiling. “It was the old sexual repulsion routine. Sure, my old man had had my mother, but it was obviously abuse. She was pure anyhow and suffering. But here she was sleeping every night with this fat satisfied electrician, that she had chosen of her own free will. She was doting on him.

“I was jealous. I was playing
Hamlet
and grinding my teeth. I was ready to deal out punishment and seek relief on the soft bodies of the girls of Medford. And I’ll tell you, one of the most powerful aphrodisiacs known is a bad reputation in a man. It’s damned lucky I didn’t knock up any of them but, unlike my mother, I believed in contraception. The line ends here.” He smote his chest. “If you ever get some sperm of mine growing in you, I’ll uproot it myself. No babies. I hate them. You hear me?”

“Loud and clear. After all, you are yelling. I have no wish to bear babies into this fucked-up life, I assure you. Sometimes I feel as if my mother’s too much in me already. I feel a dreadful useless connection. And I can’t reach out. I can’t comfort her.”

There was a law in operation that mothers and daughters could not teach each other, could not inherit, could not relate. They must continually react against each other, generation against generation. Out in Far Rockaway Grandma Rachel was freaking out over what she could find out or could not find out about Sonia. She smuggled out a letter accusing Lionel of poisoning Sonia.

Miriam thought she might be able to relate to Rachel. As she had often heard as a little girl, her mother came from a real working-class family with a radical tradition. Lionel was fond of saying that on appropriate occasions. Rachel was a
Trotskyist who had been active in the needleworkers’ union. She had emigrated from Lithuania just before World War I to the Lower East Side.

Sonia, the youngest daughter, had resented a working mother. Sonia had resented the politics and rallies and campaigns and strikes. She had hated the meetings in the living room and the organizers sleeping on the couch and the floor. It made her mad that when there was never enough to eat well, there was always enough to feed somebody else who said he was hungrier. Rachel gave away her own coat, she gave away the last dollar in the house, she gave away her bed to a sick comrade to sleep in. Grandfather had terrible arthritis and had to stop working years before Rachel, but still he was folding leaflets with his cramped claws. He had died of cancer too young for Miriam to remember, except for his hands. Rachel wept and mourned and carried on, and then suddenly there was an old man living with her! At her age! He was eight years younger than Rachel and he had his nose flattened and his face thickened by fights in the streets, on the picket lines. He did not talk as much as Rachel but he looked at her a lot and he teased her. That ended in a political schism in the McCarthy years: a division between those who were more angry at the Communists and more willing to fight them and put the finger on them, and those who were more angry at the capitalists and the government, and would not co-operate. For all Rachel’s contempt for Stalinists, she said that Stalin would die and somebody else would come in and the line would change, but Rockefellers bred Rockefellers and went on forever getting richer. Then Rachel was alone.

Now Rachel was stuck away in a Jewish old folks’ home out in Far Rockaway. Rachel had always despised Lionel for his unformed politics, and she used to call him every name the Committee had. Then she would taunt him for never joining the Party and say they wouldn’t have him, he was a schlump. But when Miriam was growing up, Rachel was the grandma she preferred. Rachel had no money to give them and not much else. She had causes and bills and too many grandchildren and pains in the chest and the head. Miriam had her cheekbones and eyes and complexion. She suspected she also had her temper and her will and her sensuality. Now Rachel was about to outlive Sonia, who had reacted against her and told Miriam all through her childhood how lucky
she was to have a real mother instead of a politician for a mother.

Always Sonia had taken them out to see Rachel in Far Rockaway, but in July Miriam and Allegra went by themselves. Rachel was under sedation in the room she shared with four other old and sick and defeated women. Her head seemed heavy on her thin shoulders and drooped first to one side and then to the other. She told them the Communists were in control of the nursing home and putting arsenic in her food. They were coming to murder her as they had Trotsky with his beautiful lion’s head. Rachel had loved Leon Trotsky with an unstinting full-blooded devotion. She had loved her husband and clucked and fussed over him long after he was wizened. She adored her sons above her daughters, consciously a man’s woman. Now she asked insistently after Mark, who did not bother to come. Her father had been an orthodox Jew who prayed every morning his thanks that God had seen fit to make him a man and not a woman. Rachel had been born a woman, but she made it clear she would not identify with others in that condition unless they shaped up. She could only admire heroes, and heroes were men.

Miriam doubted the arsenic, but the tranquilizers were bad enough, stupefying Rachel and surrounding her with a querulous cloud they could not pierce. They sat with her for two hours but only sometimes did she recognize them. She kept calling Miriam Masha and Allegra Sonia. “Masha, where’s the baby?” Rachel kept demanding. “Is something wrong with the baby?” When she did recognize them, she scolded them for not bringing Sonia, she begged them to take her to Sonia immediately.

So Miriam was cast back on herself and her only connection—to Phil. She lay beside him and they tangled their bodies and histories and wove images on the dim low ceiling.

“Phil. Should I apply to graduate schools in Massachusetts?”

“Are you thinking of that?”

“Shouldn’t I be?”

“Not if you have any brains. But why not? We’ll live together. We can move back to East Cambridge and raise rats for the hospitals.”

“I don’t have to apply around Boston. We’d still have summers.”

“Crap. New York is ceasing to be a summer festival. A pile of rotting meat and decaying circuits in the center of a dying empire. Summer of love, my sweet prick! I was solicited yesterday by a kid who must have been all of fifteen. She said she was hungry and I say she was on smack. If it wasn’t for you, do you think I’d be sweltering like Job on his dungheap here? If I can bring myself to play janitor in this hellhole for you, you can damned well move your ass to Boston for me.
Princess.
”

9

To Each According to Her Need

“Mama, we don’t know how to talk to each other. You always did it for us. You were the soft stuff in between, so we wouldn’t bump, so we wouldn’t rattle or jab. You always said what each of us should buy for the other’s birthday. You’d tell me that Allegra was mad because I made fun of her new haircut, or Mark didn’t want me borrowing his drawing pen. Now we don’t have a common language.”

Her mother lay in the hospital bed against the left wall, yellower, limper after a third operation. There would be no fourth. In the middle bed was a fat woman with a daughter just a bit younger than Miriam, who sat beside the bed while they whispered and giggled like friends. Miriam saw their closeness as an emblem of what she could not guess how to reach for.

Against the right wall an elderly woman, Mrs. Katz, was under heavy sedation. She lay mumbling to herself. Often the
restraint bar was up on her bed, making it a crib. Miriam never saw anyone talking with her except a nurse giving her pills, taking her temperature, changing the bedpan. She lay under the sheets like a bundle of straw, tiny and inert except for periods of tossing and querulous whining. Perhaps she was dying, perhaps she was not. Miriam heard a doctor bleating jocularly at her, “Why, you have an iron constitution, Mrs. Katz, you’ll live to be a hundred!” Perhaps she was a widow. No one came.

Sonia talked sometimes with the woman in the middle bed, but she was a divorcee and made sarcastic remarks about the doctors that upset Sonia’s sense of decorum. Sonia had seldom been interested in people beyond the family—except for her students. Just as she had loved Miriam best when she was little, she fussed and worried over her favorite students. The slow ones who tried were her special care. But she regarded excessive interest in others as gossip: perhaps it reminded her of Rachel. Sonia expressed contempt for women who could not find enough to concern themselves with in their proper work, their family, and had to worry about neighbors or strangers. Certainly Sonia was shy with adults she did not know, so tended never to get to know them. For years they had feared their neighbors. They had been forced out of one apartment because the neighbors were hostile and called them Reds. Sonia would not go down to get the mail because of threats in the box. Her “girl friends” were from her earlier life, before marriage: the ones who had not moved from Brooklyn, Judy and Gussie and Barbara came in faithfully to see her and brought flowers and best sellers and funny cards. They met together to try to play bridge, but Sonia could not keep up her end of the game.

Miriam could remember feeling peeved when she would hear her mother on the phone to Judy: her mother would be laughing like herself chatting with a girl friend. That was wrong: not how her mother was supposed to act. Lionel would groan at the mention of their names. “All the interesting people you meet in the world and you still want to get together with those
yentas.”
Her father used few Yiddish words, for he thought them parochial and clannish, but that one he used. Sonia would wince.