Small Changes (6 page)

Her mother and her mother-in-law came over together. Her mother spread herself smack in the middle of a blue sofa. Her mother-in-law sat in Jim’s favorite chair, the recliner. It had three positions but Mrs. Walker sat up straight in it. Beth did not want to sit next to her mother so she sat on the hassock that matched the recliner, which put her down near the floor. They both told her loudly that it was her duty as a wife to have a baby.

“He doesn’t want a baby, either. He’s just insisting on it now because he’s mad at me and he doesn’t want to listen!”

“Don’t spout nonsense,” her mother said. “What should he listen to you about? What do you know? He wants what’s good for the marriage.”

“Jim does too want children. He always has,” Mrs. Walker said. “And you let on that you wanted children too before you got married, so I don’t know where you’re getting all this now.”

They glared at her and each other. Mrs. Walker said her mother had spoiled her. Her mother said she never had. Up until Bethie left home she had been a good girl and minded her mother and kept her room clean and never ran around the way some people’s children did.

Friday she came home from work and made meat loaf. When they sat down at the table, she couldn’t find her pills. She looked all over the table and then under it and then all around the kitchen counter. Finally, afraid already, she asked Jim.

“I poured them down the toilet.” He made a gesture of flushing. “All down.”

She ran into the bedroom to look in her dresser. He followed. “I flushed down next month too. No more pills. Now you’ll have to shape up and do things the right way.”

“Why are you doing this to me? I don’t want a baby! I don’t want one right now!”

“Well, you’re going to. Because you’re my wife and I love you, and you’re supposed to love me. So you’re going to have my baby, and from now on we’re going to have a real marriage.”

Her hands shook as she tried to eat. She could not swallow. She put down her fork and began to cry. He was willing to comfort her. He came and put his arms around her but she pulled away. “Don’t pretend to be sympathetic! Don’t pretend I’m just crying! I’m crying for what you did!”

“Okay, if you want to cry, cry. Look ugly if you want to. I don’t have to sit and look at you.” He went into the living room and turned on the set.

Sitting at the table, after a while she began to eat, chewing the meat loaf a bite at a time. A trapped animal eating a dead animal. She chewed and swallowed. He was willing to trap her. That made him the enemy. Who then was the ally? Only herself. Only the records and books that gave her energy. Only the Turtle Flag she was flying secretly.

That private morale-building was all very well. Turtles laid eggs in the mud and walked away, but she was going to be stuck. Always she liked to think in images, as if that were thinking! She chewed on the meat loaf, cold chunk by chunk. She was a lousy cook, he was right. The cafeteria where she sometimes ate lunch made better meat loaf. She would rather be cooked for than cook, which made her an unsatisfactory wife right there. She must not forget that again, if she was lucky enough to get out of here. Remember the cold meat loaf. From the refrigerator she got the ketchup and doused it liberally. Then it was less obnoxious. Meat, a dead animal that had been alive. She felt as if her life were something slippery she was trying to grab in running water. She could not stop thinking in pictures. She ground her teeth, tasting ketchup and gristle. She must think clearly about a course of action.

Come on, come on, she had been clever enough intriguing to see Jim. But although the weight of her family had pressed her one way, the weight of needing to have Jim, someone she belonged to, love and marriage, had pressed her even harder the other. Then she had been marvelously inventive in ways to get out of the house, in ways to explain where she’d been after work, after school. She had been stubborn enough when she refused to keep it hidden longer, insisting she had the right to see him and marry him. Come on, come on!

Okay, this was the second week of her cycle. If she did not take the pills she might ovulate. So she must not let him take her. She must get through the weekend. Monday she would escape. She could run away.

He did not like to have sex when she was menstruating. The month before last when she had forgotten to take the pill one evening, her period had started early. Could she persuade him that her period was starting tonight? Dipping a finger in the ketchup, she carefully worked her finger into herself, smearing ketchup on her genitals, on her panties. He would not disbelieve unless he could smell the ketchup. But he smoked and his nose was not half as keen as hers. She must take that chance.

After she washed her face and changed to the blue pants he liked the best, she came in the living room. “Would you like to do something tonight? How about a movie? Or we could drop in to Marie’s or over to your mother’s?”

They went to see Frankie and Jo. Jo had been Frankie’s girl for three weeks. They talked about going to a movie or maybe going out to The Haven on the highway for dancing. They drank beer and played cards with the television on. Jim told Frankie the story of what he’d done to Beth. Everybody laughed and agreed he’d turned the tables on her. She just needed a little sense knocked into her, Frankie said, and Jo said that she could tell Jimbo was a real man. Frankie said that she was acting like the old Bethie now. She’d been getting too big for her britches but Jimbo had cut her down to size, and he put his arms around her and lifted her way up. Jim said he should watch whose wife he was putting his hands on, but they were all laughing and nobody minded but her. She was worried that Jim was drinking too much so he wouldn’t care about her saying it was her period. But when they got home he was in a good mood and pinched her backside, saying she was his Little Girl again. She kept laughing nervously and trying to remember how she used to respond.

When it came time to undress, she went through the whole thing about “Oh dear, my period’s starting! Now what should I do? I just had a period!”

“So what’s the big deal? Once we’re under way you won’t have one for nine months, right?”

“I don’t know, it seems kind of heavy. I hope nothing’s wrong.”

“You didn’t take the pill, so it starts. That’s happened before. If you’re worried, call up the doctor Monday, ask him.”

The weekend crept. Saturday he stuck to her all day, but she was acting submissive and she made a fancy meal in the evening. Even though the chicken came out leathery he seemed satisfied with the effort and relaxed his vigilance a little. By Sunday a light bleeding did begin and she could ease up on the ketchup. Sunday afternoon he had tickets to a football game with Frankie at Syracuse, and he did not even suggest that he wasn’t going. The minute he left she began to plot her course.

She had forty-two dollars housekeeping money. She must risk going to the bank on Monday right after he dropped her off downtown—she would not go to work. She would head straight for the bank, sign his name as she often did—they knew her by now, she would choose a teller who cashed
his pay check for her—and draw out half their money. She would take two hundred dollars. The important thing, she suspected from crime stories, was to get across a state border. She could not go to New York City. If only she could run away to college.… Of the girls in her high school who had gone to college, most had gone nearby to nursing schools or teacher’s colleges. But when all the Spanish students in Syracuse had a fiesta, she had met a girl named Naomi Burns she had liked a whole lot. Naomi had said she was going away to Wellesley to school, outside Boston.… She would go to Boston. She had never been there, but she associated it with schools and music and symphony orchestras and historic sites and books and learning. Maybe there she would meet people like those in books, who lived as if they meant to do something.

How to get there? Jim kept the car with him. She must take a bus or a plane. She found Greyhound and Trailways in the yellow pages and called them up. She expected them to ask questions, but they just told her the schedule and how much tickets cost.

With airlines it was more complicated. The first one she called did not go to Boston, nor did the second. But the woman at the second told her to call Allegheny. It cost a great deal to fly, but there was a plane at eleven. She thought she would be less frightened to get on a plane and be in Boston in an hour and a half and disappear into the crowd. If she went by bus he might catch up with her, it took so long. A plane seemed more decisive. She would fly to Boston.

Packing: she could not carry a suitcase to work. For a moment she was dismayed by how little she could take. Then she mocked herself: she was lucky to get out with her skin. She would wear her raincoat Monday with the lining in. Carefully she sewed her best underwear and panty hose and a blouse and her bathing suit into the lining. She hesitated over the bathing suit, but it was a dark cobalt blue and one of the few things she had really loved, and swimming was the one sport she was good at. In the water, everyone was the same size.

Into the pockets she packed gloves and scarves and photos of her family and her own baby picture and herself at age ten on the swings in the park and herself with Jim last spring. Into the bottom of her purse she crammed her favorite
summer dress—the one she had worn when they left the reception—rolled up in rubber bands with her favorite sweater.

Then she took a box that came from the department store where she worked and, folding carefully, managed to get into it two winter dresses, a pair of boots, a pair of shoes, and two pairs of pants. She put rubber bands or string around each item so nothing would bulge. Then she tied up the box and hid it under the bed. That plus whatever she could wear in various layers on Monday would have to do. She felt bad about leaving the records. But she would not have a phonograph. If she could ever afford to buy a record player, then she could buy the records again too. They were too bulky.

Mainly she worried about not taking her winter coat. It was a strange blue and green check her mother had got on sale, but it was a lot warmer than no winter coat. She paced and worried but could come up with no scheme by which she could smuggle a winter coat past Jim in the morning.

Again she did her best to make him the supper he seemed to want and again he accepted her efforts as gestures at making up. She was too excited, too apprehensive to eat. She kept up a stream of questions about the game and Frankie. It occurred to her that she was supposed to write a note about why she was leaving. She could not think of anything that she had not already tried to say, and she could not figure out where she could hide it that he might not see it before she was gone. Write a letter? No, it would have a postmark.

Sitting across from him, she did not hate him but she was gravely aware that he could still keep her, that he could still make her pregnant, that he could call her parents and they would not let her run away. She would forgive him once she was safely gone: she did not think he would forgive her. She was the sinner, the criminal. He had meant well, he said he loved her, though she had grown so mistrustful of that word she did not think she would ever again be able to use it except as she might say, I love to swim, or I love strawberries. I love to eat up Bethie. Bethie is mine. No, she would steal his property from him and belong to no one but herself.

In the morning he asked what the box was.

“Oh, a coat Marie bought. It’s too big on her and I’m taking it back for a refund.”

“I didn’t think they made coats too big for that cow.”

She coughed the fearful giggle that answered his jokes about her family. He thought he was obligated to make jokes. That was how a husband was supposed to talk about his in-laws.

When he dropped her off she got out of the car and waved as he drove away. Then she walked rapidly in the direction of the bank, three blocks down. Going past the closed doors of the department stores, she felt that scary excited feeling of cutting class.

At fifteen after eleven she was sitting in a window seat on a small jet. She had watched the businessmen ahead of her. Unless they were charging tickets, no one asked for identification. She said her name was Naomi Burns. The woman stamped her ticket and wished her a pleasant trip and told her to go to Gate 7. She asked Beth if she had any luggage, and Beth-Naomi gave her the tied-up box. The woman gave her a red stub and said she could reclaim her luggage at Logan Airport.

At eleven-fifteen the jet made noise and shook itself up as if it were about to explode and then it began running forward and went up into the air, tilting steeply. It was her first time, but she was not frightened. She said to herself that if she died on the airplane it would be better than not being there at all. She stared at the ground. The airport, the university, the highway that led to the thruway. The day was cloudy and soon she could see nothing but white and could not tell if they were upside down or right side up. She kept swallowing. Then they came above the clouds. Up here the sun shone and the sky was a dark hard clear blue like the bathing suit sewn into the lining of her raincoat, stowed above her in the rack. She clasped her hands and joy pierced her. She was wiry with joy and tingling. How beautiful to be up here! How beautiful was flight and how free (even though it cost money). She was the only flying turtle under the sun.

3

Welcome to the Sexual Revolution

In Boston she was lonely, but her loneliness for the first four or five months was a positive thing, a free space she thrived in. With everything she tasted and tried, she studied herself suspiciously: do you really like this? She must never again choose by what tasted good to somebody else, even what tasted fine to everybody else. “You can’t taste with anybody else’s tongue,” she wrote on the wall.

The first time it had occurred to her to write on the wall beside her bed, she had stood with a marking pen in her hand for twenty minutes, unable to deface the surface. Not that it wasn’t ugly, cracked and crisscrossed with scars and scabbed with plaster and caked with layers of paint. The top layer was scum green, with pink showing through. Her room was in a warren of a building in Back Bay near the subway—not the Back Bay of neat brick row houses but the blocks of large decaying tenements. The subway was a funny one where trolley cars ran in the ground pretending to be a subway train. She took it five mornings a week to connect with a real subway, which in turn took her to M.I.T. where she worked.