Small Changes (39 page)

Sunday night Dorine came back with a temperature. “I’m sick of myself,” was all she would say. Other times she said she had caught a bad cold in the November rain. She did not go to work Monday or Tuesday but stayed in bed. Miriam brought her a radio to listen to WBCN and made soup and tea and toast, carrying breakfast and supper in on a tray. Dorine was collapsed, often weeping. Perhaps she was sick in order to be cared for. Although she was not really that weak, she would not read or try to sit up. She wanted to go back to her childhood and have her mother tiptoeing in to feel her forehead with a gentle hand, whispering concern about her for a change, instead of whispering to Dorine’s father secrets and plans from which she was excluded.

Her throat was raw and her voice husky. It was Wednesday night before she wanted to talk about what had happened. “He’s out of the hospital, all right. Got a job already.”

“In New York?”

Dorine nodded. Her heart-shaped face lolled against the heaped pillows. Her hair was matted with sweat. “His aunt got him a job in the display department at Ohrbach’s.”

“He isn’t coming back then? Does he want you to go to New York?”

“For what?” Dorine let her lids shut. “He’s living at home and he’s got a girl already. He used to go out with her sister. The sister’s married and she brought Shirley to the hospital.”

“Is he involved with her already? Are you sure?”

Dorine’s eyes opened slightly. “So, he should wait? He’s changed cities, so he changes women. He says she’s sweet. She’ll pose for him and worry about him. After he moves out
into an apartment, she’ll come and cook and do his wash. What do I care?”

“Dorine, what happened? Was he cold to you?”

“He came over where I was staying with my girl friend. We went to bed. Afterward he talked about Donna, the great love of his life. He isn’t in love with Shirley, he isn’t even pretending. It made me sick. Why should I go to New York? What does it matter, me or Shirley, we’re the same, a piece of ass that takes care. I’m thankful he didn’t marry me! He’d never have noticed the difference.”

Thursday morning again Dorine did not get up to go to work, and when Miriam returned, Dorine was in bed waiting to be taken care of. Miriam began to be a little frightened. She did not say anything to Jackson, and Phil she could not speak to. He was taking so many things she couldn’t even tell what he was on. He had drifted off into a morass where she could not reach him. He was seldom interested in making love, his anger flared out at random gestures, phrases that struck him cross-eyed. Miriam would worry about that tomorrow. For the meantime she had acquired a sick child who would not get up. She called Beth.

Beth came and shut herself up with Dorine. When she came out she said she was going to go ahead and look for a house they could rent: Beth, Sally, Dorine, and Miriam if Miriam wanted, and maybe Gloria from the Computer Center.

“But what has that got to do with it?” Miriam asked plaintively. “Lennie doesn’t live here any more.”

“That’s only part. She despises herself. She plays servant. It has to stop.” Beth stood with her arms crossed. Her hair was wet from the rain that fell for the fifth straight day, damp and lank against her cheeks. In jeans and an old shirt she looked like a little boy.

“Why do you think setting up a convent is going to help her?”

“Just a women’s commune—why does that upset you? If she still wants to see Phil, she can. I don’t think she will. I don’t think she’ll want to see anybody for a while. She has to learn to do things on her own terms.”

“Bethie, what are you getting into? Want her to collapse on you? You want to play housemother to Sally and Dorine?”

“I’m not going to take care of them. You do that more than I do, Miriam. You even play mama with me. But I can’t
be mothered and I won’t play mother. I need them to live with. I want to help raise Sally’s baby. It’s not so farfetched.”

“You’re lonely?”

“Yes. At night, in the mornings, when I’m down.”

Before Beth left she had coffee with Jackson and told him about her idea, asking where she should look for a house. Miriam came and went, making mint tea for Dorine and carrying it on a tray with cinnamon toast. She felt ashamed, how she twinged sometimes when she saw Beth talking with Jackson. She could not help guessing that Jackson must also be drawn to Beth. There was a woman he might love, without all the disadvantages of her life and character. No competition, no history with Phil.

Perhaps she could use her jealousy to refine herself, to confront what she disliked. That night she said to Jackson, “I admire Beth a lot.”

He looked at her blankly. “What?”

She repeated herself. “She knows who she is very clearly.”

“She’s a nice kid,” he said without interest. “Young and naïve. Phil was quoting Dylan Thomas the other day, and it came out she thought he was talking about two guys: Dill and Thomas. Like dill pickles, I suppose.” Jackson smiled tolerantly.

“She hasn’t had an education.” Miriam sat up very straight. “She sits in on courses, you know.”

“She’s a bit young and bugeyed. Just needs a few more times around the track.”

“I thought you liked her.”

“Sure. She’s a nice kid. I guess she has a bit of a crush on me.

Miriam shut up. She should have been relieved. Her jealousy faded into light ashes and blew away. It should be a relief to feel nothing where pain had been. Why wasn’t it good? That he could not see Beth at all—she did not think he was covering up, he would perhaps have been willing to let her taste her jealousy longer if he had known—disquieted her. What did Jackson see when he looked at her, Miriam, if he saw so little of Beth? A silly question, yet she could not grasp how he could look right through Beth and see nothing.

Dorine was packing. Phil took notice. But he said nothing to Dorine. To Miriam he said, “Well, Jackson can finally
take his room back and stop being a bloody martyr about sleeping on that cot. That’s a lot more comfortable than the bed of nails I camp on.” Meaning the sofa in the room with the hi-fi, where in fact Phil never did sleep, since if Jackson was with Miriam, Phil invariably crawled in with Dorine.

No, it was Beth he picked the fight with, when she came to help Dorine finish packing. Dorine had signed the lease. All the others had some gross liability in the eyes of the landlord. Phil had been making jokes about Beth using Dorine to get the house, and Dorine as landlady and janitor extraordinary. But he went at Beth as soon as he could confront her, not about Dorine but about a bombing at Tech Square. A bomb had gone off in the women’s John, wrecking some plumbing and files in the office next door and damaging the ceiling.

“Well, I thought it was kind of stupid,” Beth said, lowering her head.

“Oh?” Phil smiled broadly, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. “How would you have done it intelligently? That should prove interesting to hear.”

Beth swallowed visibly. Her adam’s apple swelled. “Well, first, they didn’t make it clear why they did it.…”

“I think that would be clear enough. Is there anybody left alive who doesn’t know why our people bomb university buildings?”

“I should think a lot of the secretaries didn’t understand. Now there’s no toilet. We have to go downstairs.”

“Oh, pardon me. The secretaries have to go pee downstairs, so of course it was stupid to bomb the computer complex. It’s terrible how some of the boys who are drafted disturb the secretaries in the draft centers, too.”

“They don’t understand why it was done. We don’t know what happens inside the computer. We don’t know what that stuff is. You have to make things clear to people. The workers in a place never know more than their little piece.” Beth sounded muffled and frantic. Miriam could see it was hard for her to argue. She could not quite look at Phil. She would glance quickly at him and then duck her chin again. Her throat sounded constricted.

“The workers who make napalm don’t know what they’re doing, so it’s dreadful rude to fuss about it, picketing and boycotting and all. Your logic is marvelous, dear. I bet the
other secretaries think the same way, if that’s what you call it.”

“It isn’t enough to be big conspirators.” Beth’s voice was shaking with anger. “If you don’t explain to people the meaning of what you’re doing, it’s just to make you feel better.”

“You, you? Darling, I didn’t blow it up, I beg your pardon.”

“Whoever did! It was a bad time. I’ve been trying to talk to them about how we really are workers and we ought to relate to each other and help each other, and not to who we work for …”

“That’s what people always say, have you ever noticed? That’s Jackson’s line, the theoretical radical for whom any action in the real world is always incorrect. There’s always somebody to criticize and say, ‘If you hadn’t rushed into it prematurely, if you’d gone on talking about it another six months, one year, two years,’ as if people could win any battles sitting talking to each other.”

“Phil, she didn’t say anything like that. She was saying that if an act is supposed to mean something, that meaning had better be made clear. After all, it’s hard to see how blowing up the women’s John has clear strategic value.”

“If that’s what she meant, why didn’t she say that? Big Mama Berg is taking over. Let her say what she means, if she means anything at all.”

Beth had taken advantage of Miriam’s intervention to flee to Dorine’s room. Miriam followed. Beth was sitting on the bed’s edge with her head on Dorine’s shoulder, while fat tears slid down her nose. Dorine was wearing her sheepskin coat ready to leave.

“Shut the door,” Beth hissed. “Shhh. I’m ashamed to react this way! Oh, I wish I was better with words!”

“Phil can talk circles around an auctioneer. I never get the better of him in an argument.”

“But you can stand up to him! I put so much effort into breaking through the wall of fear, of doubt of myself, what comes out is an anticlimax. I’m such an idiot.” She sat up and blew her nose.

“At least you try,” Dorine said. “I don’t even do that.”

“Why
do you get so frightened in a little argument?”

Beth blew her nose again. “It’s crossing taboos. You know, asserting myself, contradicting somebody. Even to argue with
somebody means you’re saying you’re right and they’re wrong.”

“Not necessarily. Phil argues for the fun of it. He’ll take a position just to contradict somebody else.”

“But don’t you see, that’s the thing that makes it hard—that it’s naked competition. A contest. Well, I wasn’t brought up to put myself forward in open competition. I try, I kick myself in the behind until I open my mouth.”

Beth and Dorine giggled together, Dorine saying, “How do you kick yourself in your own ass?”

Beth said, “Well, it’s easier when you always have your foot in your mouth.” They got up and began checking the room for objects Dorine had forgotten to pack, slippers beside the mattress, a drawing of her Lennie had done when they were first together tacked to the closet door.

“I wonder why I can argue, then? If it’s upbringing? I come from just as male-centered a home as you do.” Miriam drifted in their wake, feeling sorry for herself. Why did Dorine have to move out? She hadn’t ever wanted Beth to take Dorine away, only to get her on her feet again.

“Oh, you believe in it, like they do,” Beth said.

“Believe in what?” Miriam was holding herself. Leaving her, leaving her. People were always leaving her.

“Words!” Dorine spoke with surprising firmness. “All those words. That theorizing. You think it means something, just like they do. You can do it too.”

“I wish I could,” Beth said. “I want to be better with words. I want to be able to answer them back. But I don’t believe that’s how you do anything. I only want to use words as weapons because I’m tired of being beaten with them. Tired of being pushed around because I don’t know how to push back.”

“You’re wrong if you think I take the conversations in this house seriously. Most of it is just playing around.”

“I don’t think so,” Beth said slowly. “It’s more. I think it’s a way of putting things in their place and people in their place and keeping them there.”

“Oh, Bethie. They argue with each other all the time. It’s jaw exercise. It’s Indian wrestling.”

“In a society where people were ranked for Indian wrestling, people would practice it a lot. They’re making a pecking order.”

“Bethie, how come you argue with me so well? Aren’t those words you’re using?”

“I’m not afraid of you. You’re my friend.”

“How can you be afraid of
Phil?
You confuse verbal violence with something real. And don’t you think Jackson is your friend?”

“If I’m not his equal, how can I be his friend? He treats Orpheus as more of an equal than me.”

That night Jackson moved his stuff into the room that Dorine had been using. The room could not immediately regain its air of neglect, for Dorine had circumspectly cleaned it, but it took on that Spartan grimness of all Jackson’s dwelling places. The mattress, devoid of sunflower spread, sagged. The walls without prints or posters stood bleak and grimy. Without curtains the window gaped on the wall of the house next door. Still for a week or so the room mingled their odors before the scent of her perfume, her bath powder and her sweat faded into Jackson’s pipe and grass and socks and harsher sweat, the damp wool of his socks drying on the radiator and his boots wet from snow cooking beside it.

Phil had gone through weeks of excited castle building while Hal was cutting his first album that included Phil’s “Hudson Blues”:

The Hudson River

runs deep but wide.

That’s Jersey’s smoking

on the other side…

He could taste the money he was going to make. He would get free of tending bar, life would be easier, looser, less haggard. He would get off the bottle, he would only dope for the goodness of it, no more deadening escape.

The record came out and faded into the record stores. It crept along. Everybody assumed that Phil in fact must be making a mint, but Phil received what amounted to one twenty-fifth of a cent out of the total royalties allotted to songwriters who couldn’t command bigger fees: perhaps a more minute amount than his or her mind could grasp. It had come so far to something like $347. Phil had spent more
than that celebrating the wealth that was to come to liberate him.