Small Changes (47 page)

“No. I’ll call. How long will you have to wait for the check to clear?”

“Five days ought to do it, one way or the other.”

“I’ll call you early next week then. Do whatever you have to, so he won’t come after me again!”

“I’ll see what we can find to proceed on, little lady, but I can’t work miracles. You’ve left yourself in a weak position, a very weak position indeed.” He held out his hand. “Now the check.…”

“Mama, you never gave me a chance to want anything else but getting married! I wanted to go to college. I wanted to be a lawyer, remember? You thought it was silly.”

“You wanted to marry Jim, you were seeing him right under my nose—your sister Marie told me that. What do you think is going to become of you, the way you’re acting? My own daughter, and you’re turning out worse than Elinor!”

“Mama, that was too young to get married! I want to be myself, Mama, not Mrs. Jim. I want a chance to be me before I die.”

“You were a lucky girl to find Jim, and you’re throwing it away. He’ll still take you back, he told me so himself.”

“I don’t want him back!”

“What kind of a man do you have in Boston, won’t come to see your family?”

“I don’t have a man, Mama. Don’t you ever wish you’d had a chance to do something besides have babies and take care of us and clean the house and do the laundry and make supper?”

“I’ve had as good a life as any woman. I’m not complaining. Your father’s a good man and he’s taken care of us. It’s my children who’ve been a disappointment to me!”

“Can’t you believe I know what I want?”

“You’re too young and silly to know anything. It’s all those television programs and movies, you and your sister Nancy are full of nonsense. Every man has his faults. Jim may drink a little, all men do. He holds down a job—”

“I hold a job too. I’m not afraid to work.”

“Jim will take you back, if you buckle down and swallow your pride and try to make him happy. You listen to me, Elizabeth, this is your mother talking. I just want you to be happy. I don’t know how you’re going to end up, Bethie! Your father won’t hear your name! And you’ll be lying in some alley with your throat cut like those poor girls you read about in the paper. Listen to me, Jim may not be perfect but he’s your husband. If you go running around, he’ll wash his hands of you. Then you’ll find out nobody will want you any more.”

“Mama, I didn’t call for you to read me the riot act. I wanted to tell you I’m okay. How’s Nancy, Mama?”

“All right. She has a boy friend. I keep an eye on her.”

“I’d like to talk to her for a minute.”

“She hasn’t come home from school yet. She doesn’t get home this early.”

“I’ll bet, Beth thought. She knew when the seniors got out. “When will she be home?”

“I don’t want you talking to her. I’m having enough trouble with her already.”

“Do you think I’d corrupt her? Oh, never mind, Mama, listen, I have to go now.” She was struck, hearing both of them, how often people in her family told each other to listen. Listen to me, they kept saying, and nobody ever did.

“You never write! What’s wrong with you? Do you want me worrying?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t write for fear you’ll tell Jim where I am. When this thing is settled, I’ll write.” She hunched in the phone booth, her bladder burning. Something was wrong. Dolores had told her to go to a doctor, but that would have to wait.

“We never had a divorce in our family. Tell me the truth, is there someone else?”

“Good-bye, Mama. I’m sorry you’re unhappy about me. All my life I was unhappy till I ran away.” She had a terrible urge to cry to her mother about her pain, about what Jim had done. Quietly she put the receiver back. She had no heart for arguing. Her mother could not comfort her and was truly scared; her mother was scared that if Beth stepped out of the safe role there could be nothing but disgrace and disaster and death.

Dolores lent Beth forty dollars and she hitchhiked out in
the direction of Chicago. Starting again this time with less money, she went with greater confidence that she would land on her feet. The worst out there was no harder than it was back here, and she would survive.

19

A Little Strange and a Little Familiar

Beth did not return to Boston as soon as she had imagined when she left Syracuse. At first she was afraid, and then she had to make money to pay of! Jim and the lawyer and the divorce. That meant staying put at a secretarial job in the sales department of a company that installed air conditioners for offices and public buildings. It meant learning the small devious means of sabotage clerical workers adopt at jobs they hate. She began to realize why certain women at the computer center and later at Tech Square had never been able to do their tasks correctly. She became dumber every day. Visibly she tried, she smiled and fluttered and tried. An assumption was built into the structure, into the roles, that she was stupid, and that left space.

At her old job she had done whatever she was given as well as she could. She had thought it necessary to work well: it was behavior carried over from school, where she had been trained to try hard and earn good grades. She had acted as if that job was like being in school. Looking back, she knew it made no difference. They would have fired her as quickly if she had been the fastest typist in the East, and no more quickly if she had been as dumb as she was supposed to be. All these offices had a certain number of slots for women. The private secretaries did far more than they were paid for and identified with the men they served, wrote speeches, bought presents, propped up egos. But in the typing pool she got in more trouble for standing out in any way than for losing letters, misfiling invoices, standardly misspelling words, or taking half the afternoon to type one letter. The men who could have you fired would do so more quickly if they noticed
you did not shave your legs than if you broke the Xerox machine.

Lunch hour offered no relief. In the little luncheonettes and cafeterias where secretaries went, they were expected to eat quickly and clear out. The restaurants where people were allowed to take longer for lunch were too expensive without an expense account. She hardly ever saw women together in them. Generally she brought her lunch. On nice days she could walk over to Michigan Avenue and sit on a bench, if nobody harassed her. What the women in her office did was to wander in the Loop window-shopping or drifting through the department stores. Essentially there was nothing to do except buy. On their lunch hours, they might spend what they made the rest of the day.

The pressure to dress in a certain way was high on this job. She learned the game of secondhand stores and the game of accessories, but she resented having to think about it. The receptionist, Karen, who sat out front alone, spent far more than she made on clothes, in styles the others had perhaps seen in magazines or on television, but she was always the first they would see in real life wearing such clothes. Karen had overdue accounts at three department stores and a couple of specialty shops on Michigan Avenue. She managed by sleeping with some of the executives and their clients.

The girls spoke of her as lucky, as having the best job. On most breaks Karen would sit on the bench in the women’s John doing her nails and ignoring the conversation. Other times she joined in and told them funny stories about their bosses, but never if the private secretary of that boss was present. She knew girls in the pool would not tell on her. She boasted she never ate lunch if she didn’t have a date, in order to stay thin. The family doctor had put her on amphetamines in high school to lose weight and they had burned her out, but she had kicked them finally. Now she just starved herself. She had to drink with the clients and that, she said, went straight to flab.

At Thanksgiving, Karen took an overdose of sleeping pills, almost died, and remained in the hospital a couple of weeks. She was let go from her job. Every couple of days Beth went to see her. No one else did. Karen said she had been involved with the manager who had got her her job, that he had promised he was going to get a divorce and marry her. But lately,
when she pressed him, he had said he would never leave his wife for a whore.

By the time Karen got out of the hospital Beth had paid back Jim and the lawyer’s fees and saved what the divorce was supposed to cost. She was free to quit and leave Chicago. Karen asked her again and again to travel with her to California. Karen did not want to go alone. Beth felt hesitant about going straight back to Boston. When she first came to Chicago she had called Miriam collect. Jackson had answered and refused the call, saying Miriam didn’t live there any more. Beth did not know what that meant. After she had been working awhile and had some money, she went to a pay phone and called the women’s house. An operator told her that number had been disconnected. Once again, after brooding over it long enough to work herself up, she called Miriam’s old number. Jackson answered. He said Miriam had moved out to the women’s house and he claimed to know nothing else, nothing at all. He was testy. She asked for Phil, and Jackson said shortly that he didn’t live there any more either. That was that. She did not even know where to address a letter. Were any pieces left to be picked up? Any friends waiting? She might be rushing back to nothing at all. She had never traveled, she had never been West. She told Karen she would hitchhike to California with her.

Karen had turned on her old life. She cut her blond hair and let it begin to grow out brown. She dressed in jeans and army surplus. Beth thought that Karen could not help being beautiful no matter how she dressed, but in army surplus other people often did not notice. Karen had a face Beth thought of as Midwestern and Scandinavian. Karen laughed. “I’m Scottish and German. And Midwestern is an insult! It means I look like a cow!” Karen came from Green Bay where her father had a desk job in a dairy, and she had gone to college for three years at Wisconsin. “I don’t know, I felt that the life in Chicago was corrupt but that was what it was all about. I thought the other girls were fools not to use their looks to get something. But now I think I was just worse used. He never came to see me once in the hospital!”

Beth thought Karen attractive with her high forehead and milky skin and fine features that seemed all gentle curves. But she generally liked the way her friends looked, that seemed to go with liking somebody. She certainly felt closer to Karen as she was now than with green eyelids and fountains of
bleached hair and know-it-all manner and bizarre clothing that made her body a neon sign.

Aside from the flatness, the Midwest did not seem that strange to Beth spread out under the shield of snow. The first place that seemed exotic was Albuquerque, where they decided to blow the money to rent a motel room and hang around for a week. The second night they were staying there, sharing a bed, after they turned the lights out Karen put an arm around her. She was surprised and kissed Karen good night, but Karen did not stop kissing her then. Beth was frightened, more of the idea of what was happening than of the fact. Karen was gentle. She sensed Karen would not persist if she drew away. But how could she insult or refuse her? She was Karen’s only friend, her only connection: perhaps that was why Karen wanted to have sex with her.

When they got up in the morning, they had become strangely and immediately a couple. Beth pondered that. They had been friends, they had been traveling together. She thought of her Boston friends as much closer to her. But by that act in bed they became a couple. This was the thing that Jim had accused her of, and now she was doing it. Now he would say she was a lesbian. “Dyke” was his word.

The sex with Karen was the first consistently pleasurable sex she had ever known. Soon she found out how passive she was, how inexperienced in consciously satisfying a lover. Karen could not take her pleasure and climb off. She had to please Karen actively. That made her feel self-conscious, awkward. Then she came to experience it as more natural than just being acted upon. If she were more active with a man, if it were mutual, it might be better as it was with Karen: but she was not sure. Anyhow, the sex with Karen was something they did together, and while she could not abandon herself to it as Karen could, for the first time she could initiate, she could
make
love.

Thinking about it, sometimes sitting in a car that had picked them up and looking out at the vast landscapes of desert and mountains and irrigated fields while Karen made conversation to the driver or did a stint of driving, the label-thing would attack her. She would think, Well, now I am a lesbian. She would think she had to do something about her new identity. It became a whole complication, whether she should tell people or not tell, act out that she was with Karen or pretend they were not a couple.

They wandered until they came to San Francisco and there they stopped. In the Mission they found a house, mostly women although there was one man who was with one of the women and another man half living there. Karen made clear to the house that they were a couple. Several of the women had been in consciousness-raising groups and were not inclined to get upset over women loving women, and the house agreed that a couple of gay women would be good for them. Karen said they were being Uberai, but it would do till they found something better.

San Francisco was beautiful as no place Beth had ever lived. On weekends Karen and she took long walks. They would pick out some hill from the map and walk around there. Those were good times. It felt like spring, although the people who lived there said it was winter. They said spring was when the fruit trees bloomed. Beth did not like the house as well as her own commune, and it made her miss her friends. It was more like Going-to-the-Sun, where Dorine used to live, a house where people slept and came and went and ate together and things somehow got done by somebody. Because this was a women’s house, the food was okay and the house got cleaned and the men had to do an equal share. But the people did not get far into each other and did not make a common life. Nor did she and Karen move into larger relationships. They were a couple and Beth began to find that constricting.