Small Changes (63 page)

As the workshop was breaking up, Wanda answered questions. One of them was from somebody obviously thinking like Beth, but with more nerve. “Yes, I’m starting a new group. Some of us from the old Red Wagon will be the nucleus, and we already have a house in Roxbury where we can live and work. But this new group is going to be larger. We’re going to use a lot more music and dance movement in our theater.”

The group would work together until they had a common identity and a common style and a repertoire. She thought they should have three or four months of hard work before they could start performing. Providing they got started at once.

Beth worked her way to stand as close to Wanda as she could approach. A group of women were asking questions, discussing methods, telling each other and Wanda what their
groups were doing. They were arguing about whether anyone in women’s theater should take on a role like Wanda’s of director, or whether everything should emerge from the collectivity. Wanda’s voice came occasionally through the hedge of backs, sounding tired, sounding weary. She did not defend her position. She sounded too tired to defend herself. Beth waited and waited. Finally as Wanda was getting ready to leave, sticking her head through an old horse blanket of a poncho, Beth said in a voice that fled her throat like a mouse, “I want to be in your group! I want to work with you!”

“Have you worked with any theater groups before?”

“No. Only in the house. We improvise together. I live in a women’s house.”

“Come out to Roxbury tomorrow. You got the address? Good. Do you work?”

“Yes, but I’ll quit.”

Wanda smiled wearily. She looked wan and empty. “Not yet, please. Come and see how we are. See if you want to be with us. We’re just starting. Today, here, we were doing simple exercises. Fun to do and loosens everyone. But we’re going to be trying to make theater that speaks for women. That can pull women out of their solitary cells. I can’t talk any more now, I’m beat. But come if you want to.… Don’t be afraid. I do mean that you’re welcome to come.…”

Dorine and Beth left the conference giddy and floating. They were too wound up to stay for the plenary session, too excited to sit still. They walked across the B.U. bridge, almost skipping along. As they came off the Cambridge end, Beth said, “You know, we should have stayed. There’s a lot of business to be covered today, decisions about day care and health issues.”

“You know we didn’t want to. Neither of us ever say a word at meetings anyhow, if there’s more than ten people. We’re both too excited to listen to anybody.… Hey, you want to stop by Phil’s? You said you wanted to.”

But as they were turning the corner onto Pearl, familiar and shabby with its odd-sized frame houses crowding the street, Beth felt guilty. “Taking our pleasure to them. We’re backsliding.”

“It’s the trouble in the house. You don’t want to go back right now and find Connie and Laura fighting, or Sally and Connie not speaking. It’s close to exploding. The kids feel it the worst.”

“We’re making excuses. I’m giving myself a license for being curious because I think I found something today I really, really want to do. I think she’s great, Dorine. She gives off energy like a little sun.”

“Beth, it
is
the same woman, though I just couldn’t believe it. When you were talking to her at the end, I looked at her close up. She has that big mole on her cheek. I remember that from the night at the precinct, when she was waiting for Joe and I was waiting for Phil—Miriam was on the computer. I remember thinking that she wasn’t very attractive. To show you where my head was at in those days, I thought an important guy like Joe, I’d expect him to have a pretty woman. But Wanda was plain and she looked her age.”

“She looks older because her hair’s got gray in it. She can’t be more than thirty-five. I looked at her hands and throat.… I want to know everything about her.”

“I remember noticing when we were sitting together that she didn’t shave her legs and I remember feeling superior, thinking she was a real slob. Thinking, how did she expect to keep a real righteous man like Joe, being so sloppy. Oh, men. Oh, women!” They were climbing the familiar dim stairway smelling of Orpheus’ signature.

She knew ten minutes after walking in—oh, the room was much as it had been, the cat curled on a chair, nose tucked in his long dusty fur, one yellow eye checking them over, the web of extension cords, the dirty dishes and glasses overflowing with butts and the charred tobacco dumped from Jackson’s pipe—that whatever she felt about Jackson, she felt it still. Phil was thin and quieter. She did not mind him as much as she had. He was easier to ignore, and he was paying attention mostly to Dorine.

Jackson looked … the same. She swore he was wearing the identical faded blue denim shirt. The sad lines etching his cheeks still drew her fingers. Dorine was much bolder. She was talking on, turning to Beth for support. Telling them about the march, as if daring them to say boo, talking about the workshop and the exercises.

“You’re both looking tiptop.” Jackson scratched himself slowly all over his chest. “Life in the nunnery seems good for the body and soul. Isn’t that so, Felipe?”

“I always said I’d like life in a nunnery. It’s the priests I never could stomach.”

“I’m not a nun. Phil knows that already.” Dorine laughed
and Phil pulled a long innocent face.

Jackson looked from one to the other, raising an eyebrow. “And what about you, Beth? Are you a blue nun?”

“Do you mean sad or pornographic? … I don’t know what I think about sex.” She would not look away from his sandy bloodshot gaze, though she felt her face heating slightly. She would not let him make her into a child.

“Why, you’re not to think about it. It’s not a thing that improves with thinking, Beth.”

“You should talk, Jackson,” Phil drawled. “That’s all you do, think about it.”

“Better than talking about it all the time, wouldn’t you say?”

“Aw, go on, back in the Boy Scouts in Sofa, Idaho, they told you if you used it regular it would fall off. It’s you should have been the junkie instead of me. That puts it from your mind for sure. Ride the needle far enough and you don’t know what to do with a woman if she crawls in your bed.”

Jackson let his glance trail over Dorine. “I don’t know, we used to hear it all the time about the sexual revolution. Now, except for the homosexuals who’ve taken to the streets screaming, it seems like everybody else has given it up for macrobiotics or backpacking or freaking on Jesus.”

“It was only a revolution for men.” Dorine looked delighted with something. Somehow she had ended up standing nearer to Phil and farther from Jackson, leaning on the refrigerator sucking his pipe. “It only meant I couldn’t say no without being told I was frigid and not with it.”

“Don’t bring your banners in here. Still, I want to know what Beth was doing out with the lesbians. You strike me as about as much of a bulldyke as my mother.”

Beth found herself standing very straight with anger, and then she saw him smiling inside his face at her reaction. She took a deep breath and signaled with her eyes to Dorine to let her answer. “Not all women are into playing butch and femme. In fact, being with women is one way of getting away from those roles. Second, I don’t have any particular sexual identity—”

“You used to have one in the old days, back with Tom Ryan,” Jackson said, giving her a face of bland inquiry.

“No, I didn’t. The only identity I had was loneliness.”

“Hmm.” His face stopped being funny. “A lot of people could say that about a lot of things that go on. It’s kind of
bald, but that about wraps it up.…” His face went into teasing again. “Still I can’t imagine anything quite so provocative as you standing there looking at me wide-eyed, telling me you just don’t have any sexual identity.”

She hated herself because her heart was pounding, because she would have enjoyed punching him in the nose, and she still found him attractive. She still wanted him to find her attractive. It was entangled with her new and old fears about touching and being touched. She had marched with the gay women and now she was doing the best she could to flirt with Jackson, because she felt pushed to untie at last that knot she was satisfied to have tight inside her. “Doesn’t seem to provoke you to anything besides teasing me.”

“Right on, Bethie.” Phil was slumped in a chair with one hand on Dorine’s on the table. “Call his bluff. If Jackson had a coat of arms, the motto would be
KEEP OFF THE GRASS
.”

“And yours would be a bottle rampant. Your eyes are bigger than your stomach and/or other organs.…”

“Four-thirty.” Dorine stood up. “I cook tonight. I do little enough the rest of the time. I have to shove off. If you want to stay for a while, Beth?”

Beth shook her head no and followed Dorine down the hall. Phil kissed the back of Dorine’s neck, mumbling a question. “Gee, Phil, I’m sorry. We made a rule not to have men sleep over.”

“Jesus, it is a nunnery. No men, like no dogs allowed. Do you think we might rape the children or shit on the floor?”

“Easy, Phil. It’s a rule because there are women in the house more comfortable that way. It’s a safe place. If men treated women reasonably, we wouldn’t have to deal with women so fucked over they’re threatened by any man just being where they live.… If you want I’ll come by Monday, late. I’ll call from the studio where I’m working and let you know.”

“Monday afternoon I’m going over to Miriam’s but, I’ll be back here for supper. Give a call. But that’s some half-àssed rule. Suppose we made a rule, no females? What would we do, fuck in a phone booth? Aw, it’s like being fifteen.” Grumbling, he went off to his room.

Jackson followed them to the door, hands in his pockets. “Good to see you, Dorine. And Beth. Any time you want to come by and discuss your sexual identity …” He was smiling, half coming on, half putting her down. “I think if we looked
for a while we might find you one.”

“Do you think so?” She was shaking with anger. She stomped out the door and then turned in the hall. “You think you can stick your notions on my head like a paper hat that has to fit!”

He leaned on the doorway grinning. “I think I could have some fun seeing what fits.” He bussed her on the forehead, then ducked in, pulling the door shut. Inside she could hear him chuckling.

She sat down on a step clenching her fists. Dorine hauled her up by the elbow. “My, my. I’m immune to him, that’s my goodie of the day. I don’t give a hoot about him. But you’re not in that state, are you?”

“He thinks I’m a child. He thinks he can tease me and get back home safe. He makes me feel like a … nincompoop. I will call his bluff! I will!”

“Shh! Beth.” Dorine took her hand. “You don’t win arguments with a man in bed. You be careful. You get mixed up with him and raked over the coals the way Miriam was and I’m not going to stand for it! I’ll kill him if he messes you up. Now you forget him.”

“But I don’t feel attracted to any other man I know. I have to find out.”

“What’s wrong with celibacy? You’ve been doing fine. What do you want to go messing around with him for?”

“You tell me. I’m only half grown, only half there. All right, maybe I’m gay, maybe I’m straight, maybe I’m bisexual. Maybe he’s a way I could find out what everybody else seems to think I just have to know.”

“Beth, be careful. I couldn’t stand for you to get hurt. And him! He just shouldn’t be given a chance to mess up any more good women.”

“You’re giving Phil another chance.”

“But Phil’s not the same. And neither am I. What I’m trying with him isn’t what I ever had with a man before. I like Phil, somehow I do, I still do. He knows how to play. Except when I’m with him or sometimes in the house, I never play.”

“Well, I’m not the same person as Miriam either.”

“Beth … you know you’ve admired Miriam a whole lot. This wouldn’t have a little bit of competitiveness in it?”

“I’d never have gone near him in a million years when she was involved with him.… I don’t know, maybe he seems to count more because of her. How can I tell? … For once
I want to choose what happens with a man. I don’t want to live with him, Dorine, I don’t love him. But I find him so attractive I feel like a fool.”

“That doesn’t sound good to me.”

“Don’t worry, Dorine. Not about me. First Wanda and the theater group and then him, I feel as if I’m coming unstuck inside. Everything is breaking loose in me and bumping around. I’ll never be able to sleep again. I can’t even stand still. I don’t know, Dorine, whatever it all is, at least it’s exciting.”

25

How to Fall Is as Important as
How to Get Up

One Saturday in early November, Connie moved out, taking with her everything she had brought or bought down to the toys that had seemed to be all the children’s, and of course she took David. That was essentially the end, because none of them had the heart to look for someone else. The quarrels were too fresh, the force centrifugal, and they were all broke.

Connie married her boy friend and moved to an apartment complex in Waltham. That was the last they saw of her, except for arguments over who owed what on the phone, the gas, the electric bills. She developed a last-minute conviction that she was being taken for more than her share and wrote nasty notes. It sat badly in Beth’s mind. Connie said she did not want them to see David any more. What David thought of all that they would never know.

Dorine decided she could not go with Sally and Laura and Beth into the women’s theater house. Through a woman sculptor Dorine worked for she got into a mixed commune of some graduate students, a sociologist, two city planners, a couple of artists. There were no children. It was a well-built comfortable house and Dorine called it less protective
than their old Somerville house but interesting, and she felt lucky to move in.

With Sally and Laura, Beth moved into the three-story rambling Roxbury house that had been a parish house and was already extensively changed—“remodeled” was too bourgeois a term for what had been done to it. It was strange but livable, and there were already eleven women and four children there. With their two, that made half a dozen and felt sometimes like a herd. Two of the kids were Wanda’s, boys four and six. With so many children, so many women, so much activity—the exercises, the practicing, other children running in and out, constant work going on—the house could never be as closed as Beth’s old commune.