Small Changes (21 page)

“I got nothing in common with your friends. I know they all think I’m a nobody.”

“Ten years a teacher and you say, ‘I got nothing.’ ”

“Am I in the classroom now?” She would arch her short plump neck in an attempt at dignity. “I know how to talk in front of a class, do I need you to tell me? Am I in front of a class in my own home?”

“You think it’s more important to teach a stranger’s children than your own. Perhaps you don’t care if they grow up sounding as if they’d never left Flatbush, but I care. You had an education, but no one would know it to hear you. I don’t want my son growing up with a voice like a comedian on the borscht circuit.”

“So be ashamed of me. Teach my own children to scorn me. Someday they’ll understand what I went through to keep a home together for them!”

As Miriam sat in the stuffy hospital room with its acrid smells, she thought that swimming in the humid air were all of the words that had ever been spoken in family. All those words like tiny sharks swam through the yellowed air snapping at her, food of anguish, food of bitterness, the seder bitter herbs and dry bread: all the pain she had grown up with and taken for granted as the normal daily bread of living together. Nothing was lost. Nothing could be assimilated. Their words would not dissolve and be forgotten but, like aluminum shreds, like the pop tops of soda containers, would lie where they had been tossed and never decay, but be ready in fifteen years to tear the foot of a passing child. Yet she had always considered that she lived in a happy family. Her parents had always assured her that she was lucky to have both parents living together. All the children had been wanted, had been intentional. Children of broken homes, unwanted children, were to be pitied.

“What are you talking about, you can’t speak to each other!” Sonia rolled her head back and forth. “Your father tells me you’re staying out late at night and you won’t keep up the house. How can you treat your mother that way? Don’t you think I’d keep the house clean if I could?” Sonia motioned her closer and took her arm caressingly. Sonia had always been the affectionate one, who held, caressed, comforted. Wait till Mama comes home from work and then you can cry.…

“Mama, I’m doing my share and so is Allegra. We keep our room clean, we make supper every night and do the
dishes. But Mark won’t do a thing! He doesn’t even want to make his own bed.”

“Mark’s a good boy. You’re the oldest daughter and it’s your responsibility to keep up the house.” Sonia let go her arm, arching her flaccid neck against the pillow. “What’s wrong with you? It’s too much to expect you to act like a
mensch
and do a little work around the house when your mother’s too sick?”

Miriam sat up stiffly. Always drawing love away to punish me! “Why don’t you ask Mark to be a
mensch?
Why don’t you tell him to do his part?” The bitter tang of injustice. She felt twelve: So don’t love me! I’m right anyhow!

“What’s this staying out late at night? What’s going on the minute my back is turned?”

“I have a friend, that’s all. I like to be with him. I don’t like hanging around the flat. I’m not getting along with Mark or Dad. I am getting along with Allegra, by the way, for maybe the first time in my life.”

“You’ve always been jealous of your sister.”

“I admit that. But not any more.”

“Your sister loves you and your father loves you, and if you’re not getting along, it’s because of how you’re acting. Where did you pick up this new way? Where did you get such a swelled head? You’re such a smart aleck you can do anything and you know better.”

Sonia attacked from the bed, and from the bedside table came the whine of the Theory of Complex Variables. She had had discipline, always. At school she was always up to date. All her adventures were fitted into the interstices of a careful schedule. Now this summer she had done nothing but lie in bed and fuck and weep! She could not read that stupid book: it was the single most boring object she had ever encountered. Ten minutes with it and she felt embalmed. Her discipline had eroded.

“I bet that’s some friend! Why doesn’t he come out to the flat and see you, if he’s so friendly?”

“He’s working as a janitor. Besides, I like going into town.”

“I’m beginning to get the picture. Miriam, daughter mine”—Sonia motioned her near to whisper—“is he black?”

“No, but he isn’t Jewish. And I don’t want to marry him. And I don’t want to bring him home to Flatbush. I just want
to see him and talk to him and spend time with him this summer.”

“Is the wool so easy to pull over my eyes? You aren’t staying out late at night talking. One thing leads to another. Pretty soon, you’ll be in trouble deep.”

“Who told you? Was it smart Mark who told you?”

“What do you care who told me? It’s a thorn in my side lying here that I can’t trust my own daughter when I’m not keeping an eye on her.”

“Mama, I spend nine months of the year at school. What do you want from me? Only that I not be me. I’m not ashamed of how I look any more. Or that I’m good in math instead of something supposed to be feminine. Or that I’m too tall—too tall for what? I’m not too tall for me!”

“Just so long as you’re satisfied with
bubkes!
Why should you care how your mother feels?”

“Mama, I don’t want them to bother you. It’s a hard summer, we’re worried about you, we don’t get along.”

“That’s my fault, of course! Blame it on me! You were a good girl when you were growing up, now look at you!”

“I don’t want you to worry! There’s nothing to get excited about.”

“Okay, so if it isn’t important, do your sick mother a favor and don’t see this man any more.”

“I didn’t say seeing him doesn’t matter to me. I said it wasn’t important from your point of view. I’m not going to marry him! He’s my friend, Mama. I just like him enormously.”

“You know how I feel lying here? Staying out late with some janitor. Who knows what you’re doing? Refusing to clean up so when your father comes home from work he finds a nice house. Not a nest of vipers and daughters running back to the Lower East Side to hang around all hours of the night! I grew up there, I know! How glad we were when we could move to Brooklyn and get away! Thieves, rapists, women selling themselves! How can you go back there?”

“Mama, I do care that you’re sick! I don’t want you to be unhappy over me! I don’t want you to feel pain! I know that you’re suffering and I want you to feel that I care.”

“Sha! Keep your voice down. You want them to hear in the next bed? So act like Mother’s good loving daughter!”

“I want to show you I care but I don’t want to pretend I’m somebody else! Don’t make me lie. I’m not shoving my life in your face. I don’t want to make a fuss. Just let me love you in my own way and be me.”

“You won’t do me a thing. You won’t cross the street for your mother. Words are cheap. Actions are what count. Actions speak louder than fine words. I hear you saying to me that some janitor you’re ashamed to bring home is more important to you than your mother lying on her bed of pain, suffering day and night and worrying!”

Allegra watched Miriam’s troubles with an ironic eye. Lying on the rug between their beds doing exercises for her abdominal muscles designed to make her gentle tummy vanish, Allegra panted, “You needn’t have got … into all that hot water … with Mama. She has no way of figuring out what goes on unless some little bird tells her.”

“I was sure it wasn’t you.”

“Why should I? It only makes trouble for me. She gets on that questioning
shtik.
‘What are you doing with Roger? Are you letting him take advantage of you?’ As if he’d know how! I can’t wait till I start school in September. I expect to meet a new type of man. But it’s really your fault. If you don’t rub Mark the wrong way, he never pays attention to us. You think he wasn’t hocking me to iron his shirts? I just took one and burned a hole in it. I was so apologetic! He won’t ask me again! You don’t know how to get out of things, big sister. It’s easy if you do it right.”

“I never thought of that.” Miriam felt large and unwieldly beside Allegra.

“You feel superior because you don’t think of things like that. As if it’s moral to do things head on. It’s just messy. Daddy would never make a fuss about dating some guy. I mean, he hardly pays-that much attention unless you shove it in his face. He only wants to go on his way, and we shouldn’t be a drag. We’ve always been her kids, and only his when he felt like it. You know what I mean?”

Miriam nodded. “Sure. Father’s Day and Thanksgiving. When you were dressed up extra cute. When Mark won a prize or had his bar mitzvah. When he wants us to listen to some song and admire him.”

“It hurts to admire? So of course he wasn’t going to keep
anything from her about us. I mean, it’s her
business.
So you had to stay out of his path. I don’t want to get stuck with the housework either. I don’t see why we can’t have a woman come in once a week like everybody else. But the way to get that is to demonstrate how hard we’re trying but it’s too much.”

Miriam began to laugh. “But, Allegra, I can’t maneuver that way. It takes a kind of energy I lack. I blunder ahead.”

“Big sister, you sure do!” Allegra smiled at her. “Don’t fret. She’s out of it, stuck in the hospital, and Dad lacks the taste for grand family confrontations. He’ll make rules but he won’t enforce. Now just take it easy for a while, would you?”

Labor Day came and Labor Day went, but Jackson did not return. Although Phil wanted to cut out for Boston to find a place to live, he was wedged into the basement until relieved. Jackson had promised to be back Labor Day at the latest, but no word had come after a postcard from Oaxaca dated August 1 which was a long joke about dope.

“He’s probably rotting in a Mexican calaboose on a drug charge, and I’ll spend my remaining years baby-sitting a rotting building. Just because for once in my life good old J. Singleton Proxmire is lined up to be my meal ticket. Just because I get a break finally, my old buddy has to sit on his ass too stoned to observe the date.”

Sometimes Phil turned paranoid and suspected that Jackson was purposefully blocking him. “He’s jealous because I got my shit together. I got my letters of recommendation marshaled, I got my transcripts patched, I got my benefactor lined up. He didn’t think I could get up early enough in the morning to make the appointment, but I did it. While he’s still fucking around playing old Jack Kerouac games. You know, he had Advantages, Jackson did. His father’s a big-shot businessman in some small-change town out in the Great American Desert. Sofa, Nebraska, or Chaise Longue, Idaho. After a little time in the war, instead of advancing steadily up the escalator, he turned around and started backward. Now he’s doing me in, his best friend. Doing me dirty. I should have known he wouldn’t get back on time. Secretly, deep down inside, he doesn’t believe time exists outside, that there’s really an independent world with clocks that run while he isn’t looking. He probably isn’t convinced I exist
when he isn’t with me, so why the hell should he sweat it getting his ass back here and taking over his own stupid job and his cellblock just because he solemnly promised me on June 21 he’d be here?”

Phil got some tabs of acid called Electric Lady which were supposed to be the best stuff since Sunshine. They were red and long. He kept them in a little round carved wooden box shaped like an egg that came apart at the waist. Whenever Phil opened it, the spicy odor of sandalwood escaped. He had saved one for each of them to drop that Monday, but she felt too nervous, too tense in her body.

She was annoyed at him for wanting to trip: she had been looking forward to being with him after a weekend when she had not got away from her family. Acid was something else than being together, really together. She had little time left. Why was he bitterly impatient to be off to Boston? Her family was screaming about him night and day. When she managed to come to him, she could not stay long. Sonia was drugged all of the time, incoherent and sometimes unconscious. The third operation had accomplished nothing. The cancer had reached too many organs. Sonia was getting cobalt treatments with side effects as bad as the disease. She was losing her hair and control over her body.

Miriam wanted to be held and comforted and listened to. She wanted a concentrated message of mutual strength and reaffirmation that she was who she thought she was and Phil was her friend and her love. But he wanted to run back into his psyche and escape the anxiety of plans falling like plaster from the damp ceiling.

She did not drop the acid with him but sat sullenly on the mattress cross-legged drinking cream soda and eating macaroni salad from a deli and an orange section by section, sorry for herself for all she wanted from him that she wasn’t getting.

“Jackson would describe your state as excessive attraction to particular forms.” Phil spoke coldly. He was disappointed in her too and waiting for the first rush of the acid to take him.

“That particular form is my mother. I seem to recall that your own had considerable power to upset you.”

“I would not deny that I am excessively attached to
particular forms. That extravagant attention, for example, I pay to your skin. Fetishism.”

“Since I live in that skin, you don’t expect me to agree? Excessive as measured against what? The lady in 4B?”

“That’s no lady, that’s my tenant. Even positing that the physiological pressure produces a natural urge to put a prick in something, why the frenzy about where? The saint would put it in anywheres, a tree, a chicken, an old woman—”

“Pardon my Jewish ignorance, but I’d expect a saint wouldn’t put it in anywheres at all.”

“I mean a saint with balls. He’d give his sperm to the universe.”

“And expect it to thank him? Deposit twenty spermatozoa for the next three minutes, pul-lease.”

“Tell you a story. It’s beginning. Coming on. Story I read in Jackson’s book. About this Buddhist monk. To wean himself from excessive attachment to the things of this world, he contemplated day by day the rotting, the putrefaction of a corpse of a beautiful woman he’d been attracted to. Saw her go from beauty into shit.”