Small Changes (56 page)

“Defense, it’s called. The rhetoric of defense, of course, is that human beings are being defended. But the type of weaponry we are discussing is absolutely useless in defending human beings. It would make little difference, I would imagine, to someone on the ground whether he was fried alive because an enemy missile exploded twenty miles to his right hand, or because one of ‘his’ missiles exploded as far overhead. The temperature on the ground would instantly rise several hundred degrees, in either case. Defense is defense of missile silos, not of people or the landscape, which would be eliminated.… But you must admit, the rhetoric with which American politicians address their constituencies about defense spending is amusing.”

“The more you talk, the less I want any part. It makes me sick, truly.”

“This project could be a computer man’s dream, if the nitwits don’t hamper too much. It’s a chance, as Abe was saying loudly in his folksy back-porch manner, to get in on the ground floor of a whole new technology. I must say, I should rather have a top-floor view myself. However I may fault his use of metaphors, I cannot fault what he means. A string of identical large computers linked up to work on the same problems—it’s a system designer’s paradise. In what other context could we seize the chance to do anything as delightful? The economics of the thing are simply ridiculous, staggering. Nothing but defense could siphon off the money for so many king-sized computers lashed together.”

“You thick that, because the system is a large boondoggle actually considered as a weapon, it’s not inhumane to work on it.”

“I think that a scientist can only be a scientist—or perhaps also a lovely woman.” He lifted his snifter to her. “We can never know what those who govern will do with our ideas. Our duty is to the state of the art—the cutting edge of knowledge. Now we have talked and talked and talked—I am a middle-aged man, certainly, and I talk a great deal too much. But not so old I am not ready to stop talking, my dear. Come.”

Then indeed she felt like a whore, for the last thing she felt like doing was being touched by him. There being no question of her pleasure—her mind was frozen, her nerves jammed—she performed.

So she had left Washington scared. Scared she was becoming what Wilhelm had suggested. Scared of losing herself. Scared of falling into a mire of being used, abused, handled, disregarded, degraded. Miriam, twenty-five-year-old bag of sexual tricks and good times for busy gentlemen. Wilhelm disliked Neil, but then she was not sure she did not dislike Wilhelm. She felt chilled to the bone, frozen like winter mud through to her spine. She had indeed followed her curiosity into his elegance and cynicism and learned something, but the face this knowledge wore was the skull. Back to Neil, quickly. She could not read on the plane, she detested chatting with Dick, who sat beside her. Would he say anything to Neil? Unlikely. He could not after all be
sure anything had happened. He could only suspect. She stared at the white masses of cloud and longed to be back with Neil instantly. Right now to fall into his arms and tell him Yes, Yes, Yes, quickly before he changed his mind and turned from her.

Side by side they sat on their new Danish couch, teak and black leather, with the new free-form teak coffee table bought at Harbor Design the week before and just delivered.

“You talked so long on the phone to our keypunch operator, I was afraid there would be nothing left for me,” he teased her.

“How do you like the couch? Does it feel good?”

“Finally we can do a little living in our living room. I’m tired of sitting around the dining-room table all evening. Now perhaps you should do something about the windows? Draperies? Shutters? I don’t care. Something interesting. Just so we haven’t the present option of looking at the people’s TV across the street or the inside of a window blind.”

“We have to start going around to antique-junk shops to find another chair or two. Maybe a leather chair. Or something carved. I think we should have old pieces in the house too. But isn’t this comfortable?”

“I told you—in all my years of sitting in people’s houses on what they call couches, this is the only object I ever rested my behind on that didn’t make it complain.”

Miriam slid over and curled up, her head on his slightly bony shoulder. Neil put his arm around her. So good to know she could approach him without having to take atmospheric readings: that he would like to have her touch him, that he would not likely decide she was impinging or corrupting or undennining him by displaying her affection. “You let me love you—that’s the nicest thing about you.”

“The nicest thing about you is doing it. You’re so funny. Why wouldn’t I permit you to love me? Do you think I’m crazy? I know a good thing when I see one.” His hand slid down her arm to cup her breast.

“Loving is great—everybody should have someone to love him or her. That’s what this country needs.”

“Indeed. I can’t imagine either of us starting a war.”

“I must say, I’m glad you’re overage for fighting one.” He did not know how some men measured out their love like platinum. In a general way he knew about her past involvements,
but he would never quite understand. “Neil, you’re good for me. You can’t comprehend how much you mean to me—”

His hand tightened on her breast. “Before I met you, I was lonely, Miriam. Just as they say fish would have no word for water or birds for air, I never said to myself I was lonely because it was a constant in my life, not a variable. I never learned to reach out, to open up, to be with others. But as soon as you touched me, you opened me up.”

“I want to make you happy. I want to be good for you. Sometimes still I mistrust myself. I think I can’t possibly be what you want for the rest of your life, because you really are a good person, Neil, in a way I’m not.” She curled up closer. “But I’m trying! Trying hard.… Are you happy? Am I succeeding?”

“Of course I’m happy. We’re still learning about each other and how to communicate and how to please. I love you, Miriam, but I’m not capable of saying so in ten different ways. I don’t have that gift of words. I think we’re doing well in our marriage. I know that sometimes I’m awkward. I don’t have practice in knowing what a woman likes.”

“Practice on me. Practice makes perfect.”

“There’s one more thing I think about.… Here we are in our own house. A big house with plenty of room. I’m thirty, you’re twenty-six. We’re not kids. I was so late finding my own woman, we’re behind for our ages. Shouldn’t we start a family? It would get Mother off our backs. I know you don’t like that needling. But they say it’s harder to have a baby later on, harder to conceive, harder to carry and deliver.”

She shrank. A child. Baby lying there in front of them, she tried to see it. But he was right, time was passing in her as well as outside. He wanted a child very much; she had promised him a child. Why not soon? After all, her efforts to get back into doing research that meant something had failed abjectly. Abe could save that six months crap for somebody who hadn’t observed that the company was always short on money, always in debt to the bank, and that there were always favorites who alone got to play their own games, as Wilhelm would have said. By the time she had the baby and took off a few months, they’d be done with the missile contract. She’d get a crack at something good. In the meantime she’d finish
her thesis, get her doctorate, and put herself in a better arguing position, with more leverage.

A baby in her arms. That whole adventure. To feel life in her quickening, to grow large with life. She would be a real woman then, she would be what they had all tried to prove she was not. Jackson with his carping. Becoming a mother, she would contain her mother and no more miss her and no more carry that old guilt. She would prove them all wrong. She would prove that Neil was right to love her and marry her, to take a chance on her. She would validate her womanhood. She would bear her own baby to love as hard as she could.

She saw herself stepping proudly through her pregnancy, ripe as a pear and glowing, full and bountiful as a sheaf of ripe wheat. Suckling her own baby. Her flesh moved. She would have Neil’s child and he would love her even more, they would really be bound together securely, they would be a family. She would be strong for her child, strong in loving.

She could feel Neil waiting: patiently, patiently but with a marked tension. He wanted that from her, he wanted it badly. She would satisfy him. She would be a mother, a good mother, warm and nurturing and protective. Why not? “You’re right, it is time. Okay, let’s go upstairs and make a baby. Maybe we can get it together. It’s about the right time of month, I think. Why not?”

22

In the Fullness of Time

Until the early fifth month she had not been visibly pregnant, she had borne the slight bulge encompassed within the curves of her full body. Thereafter she had begun to show but continued active and enjoying herself until halfway through her eighth month she took a leave of absence from Logical. She was feeling fine and could have gone on working, but she wanted off the project and she wanted to finish her thesis
before the baby was born. The summer had melted away, leaving her little advanced, and she had not managed to get back to it since.

She looked forward to having days in the house to work on her thesis, to shop for baby things, to fix the house up. She felt as if she had not had a real vacation since she was nineteen. Always she had been in school or working or both. Always she had been engaged in making a living, worried about her progress in her work, anxious and responsible. Now she had only to wait: moving inexorably toward an event that was inside her and would happen involuntarily as weather and yet she had chosen that it happen. To meet a person who did not yet exist but was present. The heartbeat under her heart.

When she spoke, she called it “the baby.” She did not want to assign a sex. If the child was a boy, he was to be named Jeffrey Thorne: Jeffrey after Neil’s grandfather, Thorne after Abe’s middle name. If the child was a girl she would be Ariane, after a name Miriam had read in a book. She wanted her daughter to have a pretty name, like the one she had always envied Allegra. Neil liked the idea of carrying on family traditions. He had in fact asked her if she didn’t want to call their daughter Sonia. She had shuddered. Ariane—she loved that name. It was Greek, Cretan. It was a weaver-woman. Ar, to rhyme with far. Ar-ee-ahn. She had asked Neil’s secretary, Efi, who came from a Greek-speaking family, how to pronounce it.

The house was too large for one person wandering through. At times it spooked her. Her fears would gather in corners and mutter. The fear of punishment: that her child would be born with something wrong. She tried not to think of that, but whenever she saw a blind woman begging downtown in front of Filene’s, a woman in the subway with a strange livid birthmark on her face, a man missing an arm, that fear would grip her belly. Sonia had told her some people believed that thinking bad thoughts could harm the child. Sonia said she had listened to symphonic music a great deal while she was pregnant in order that her children would love music and please their father. Only Allegra could carry a tune. Those torturous music lessons, glacial afternoons chained to the piano. Mark had been forced to study the violin and always he had made it squeal like a mating cat.

Yet before she had taken lessons she had wanted to bang on
Aunt Yette’s piano. Once in a great while Aunt Yette would play Brahms or Chopin. Aunt Yette made many mistakes, for her hands were arthritic. Yette would never play when Lionel was around, for he would mock her old-fashioned style. Grandma said Aunt Yette played with feeling. Lionel liked no one’s playing but his own, although the piano was not his favorite instrument: it forced him to turn away from his audience.

How sour she was toward him. Everybody said she would mellow toward her own childhood after she had a baby, that she would understand her own parents. Reconciliation, too late for Sonia. Miriam had always thought she understood Lionel too well. Sonia had been more mysterious in the terrible pressure of her love and suffering, her loneliness in the midst of a loud unregarding family. Miriam carried with her unborn child her buried mother, whose forgiveness she would earn in motherhood.

“You’re awfully moralistic about your father,” Neil told her. He liked Lionel: they got on. They found each other fair-minded and agreeable. Lionel had come to visit with a girl friend, although he called this one his fiancée, Mrs. Fran Gutmacher, the widow of a doctor whose children were grown. She was carefully kept and corseted and rather shy, beaming and clinging. “You don’t judge anybody else by the standards you use on him.”

At first Neu had not really understood what he was getting into when she decided on the Lamaze method. But she had been sure she could get him involved. The idea of being knocked out while some doctor pulled out her baby was disgusting. Several wives of Logical personnel had had their babies by natural childbirth, and each recommended her own doctor. Dr. Foreman was not only willing to deliver by natural childbirth, but indeed set up his procedures on that assumption.

Sometimes she was afraid. Sonia had brought her up on stories of the pain of childbirth. Sonia had told her it was the worst pain in the world. Nothing else hurt that much. They were in the kitchen helping Mama make chicken soup. Allegra was cutting the carrots. She was chopping onions. Why had she always got stuck chopping onions? She was crying. “When you get older, then you’ll cry for real,” Sonia was saying darkly. “The reason why mamas love their babies is because they suffer so much to bring them into the world.”

But the literature and Dr. Foreman assured her that fear
caused pain. If she were not afraid of the natural process of birth there would be no pain. She would not be passively delivered but would actively give birth. Neil and she together would bear their child. Until she was taken into the delivery room he would be with her. He was not allowed to be present during birth, which seemed bizarre to her. Why should he be with her during the labor, long and tedious and surely mostly a drag, and then miss the climax? They were trained to speak of everything in the plural—“when we go into labor”—then he was robbed of the actual moment.