Small Changes (72 page)

Although the farmhouse was drafty and out of repair and nothing worked well for long, Beth loved the house. It had only one bathroom—impossible. There were too many of them. Laura rigged up an outdoor shower at the hose connection. When the weather was warm enough, that relieved some congestion. They dug a pit toilet and built an outhouse over it. They began to construct a sauna bath.

Life on the farm was rough and makeshift, but they were learning to do many things new to them. Several of them could work on the truck, they all worked the land, they
fixed up the house. Money was in short supply. They still did a mixture of free and paid performances. Sometimes they played outdoors. Sometimes they performed in university auditoriums. Sometimes they passed the hat to the crowd that had collected, sometimes they got a nice cashable check from a bursar’s office, sometimes they were paid in fruit or vegetables or maple syrup, sometimes they got only a place to sleep and a meal.

They were uneven, but their lows were not as bad as they had been and their highs were much higher. They were still learning how to use their bodies, how to use their voices, how to use their minds, how to pick up the vibrations from an audience and use them to carry the audience further. They were still learning how they felt and how to express it and create with it.

When Beth got up in the morning, she felt good. She would run outside barefoot or in tennis shoes. She would run outside and stare at the mountains and laugh. It seemed amazing that she should feel so good, that she should live with people she loved and work together with them. That she should be allowed to love Wanda and be with her. The air was clean, the birds came and she remembered Connie, who had always known their names, and wondered what had gone wrong and how David was and if he remembered them. Selling vegetables on the road one day, she made a little money and bought for the children—for Wanda’s boys, really, Johnny and Luis, because they were the only ones old enough to use it—a book of birds with big colored pictures.

Beth freckled and then finally tanned for the first time. Often they worked outside naked. They were becoming less awkward when they did physical labor, although some of them, Sally for instance, had never been awkward. They raised their vegetables organically and picked berries and made preserves and kept chickens for eggs—Rhode Island Reds with feathers of bronze and stormy characters. She had never considered that chickens were actually birds, like robins and bluejays: they had their lives, they interacted, they had dramas and depressions. They would become broody and have to be snapped out of the blues by being dunked in water. Their rooster really did crow in the mornings and sometimes in the afternoons too. He was beautiful and arrogant. All their chickens were beautiful. They had also a black goat named Harriet. She gave milk which they used
as it was and also tried to make into cheese. Their cheese was foul and slimy, but they ate it anyhow and kept trying.

They had a calico cat who came one day pregnant and now they had three kittens also. There had been a fourth but it was hit on the road by a car that did not even slow down. Mother Jones was the calico, the kittens Snow, Rudy, and Lucy Stone. Even the chickens had names, but Beth could tell only the rooster and one of the hens whose tail hung funny. She called them all Here Chickie, Chickie, If they thought she had food, they came; otherwise they looked at her, head cocked, and went the other way.

Luis and Johnny were passionate about naming. They were in the process of mapping the world and naming everything. They loved to have long conversations about Mount Heobalbalus and the Valley of Zombies and Boot Hill. Every anthill on the twenty-three acres they had named and scrawled on a map in seven colors of crayon. Luis in particular would get very mad if they refused to use what he considered the right names of places.

He was the older. He was brown-haired and curly and big-boned. He was handsome, perhaps already a little vain, loved his new (to him) two-wheel grown-up bicycle, was quick-witted and good with tools. At seven he took a certain amount of responsibility for all the rest of the children. Johnny was small and skinny and dark. In the summer his skin tanned so dark Beth did not always like the way people looked at him in the village. He had Wanda’s huge eyes. He was quieter and shyer and Beth’s favorite of all the children. He loved the animals. He cried all day and all night when Nick the kitten was run over. Beth always felt he took everything in and forgot nothing. But spending so much time running in the fields and the woods with the other children, he got rougher and easier as the summer progressed. He lost some of that excessive soulfulness. He seemed to brood less.

School was awful, something had to be done. They had to set up a free school for the kids. They got into planning that with some of the other communes in the area. The other kids taunted them at school. And they learned so many untruths. They learned less than they did at home and they hated it. They picked up bad habits. But Wanda promised Luis that, by the fall, they would have solved the problem and he would not have to go back to the local school, on the yellow bus.

Mornings. Beth woke, Wanda beside her in the jangling old bed. The shade had fallen off again and the sun streamed onto clothes dropped on the braided rug Sally had made. Wanda slept with her hand palm outward, shielding her eyes from the sun. Beth had to pick up that hand and move it to kiss Wanda good morning. Wanda’s hair—coarse black and streaked with white that shone like metal in the sun—tumbled on the pillow. In the strong sun her skin was coarse, the grain of her face very visible. Loving Wanda stretched her like a big bass drum: loving Wanda was fierce and huge and made her feel about to break open like an overripe fruit, as if she loved more than she could contain. She waited for Wanda to open her eyes, deep-set, intense black eyes. Burning in her tanned face.

They were together in the house and separate in the house. The house did not exist to reflect or contain or support them, any more than it did Jane sleeping in the next room with her husband Eric, who was with them for the summer. Sometimes the needs of the troupe and the house let them be closely together, made a common substance of their lives; sometimes the needs of the group pulled them apart.

She had to control her desire to stand over Wanda with teeth bared, trying to keep the world at bay. Wanda had wanted to be loved, Wanda had asked her for intimacy for a long time before they had begun to love each other. But Wanda had been loved before. Once upon a time Joe had loved her in the early years they were together. Wanda had that skill of finding people here and there who would love her eventually. But for herself, Beth was convinced that Wanda was her miracle, and that there was no other possible chance for her to love equally and passionately and with her whole heart, if she had not this small dumpy dark throaty woman to hold. Wanda was her wren, her witch, her fire, her rose, her wilderness, and her nest of sweet repose.

Wanda needed to reach out to others. There was the man in New York she saw when they performed there, the radical printer who lived on Morton Street. Beth hated that street. If she was silly enough to insist on asking, Wanda would say matter-of-factly that yes, she had gone to bed with him. He was an old friend and she liked to be with him.

She wanted to know everything about Wanda. Especially at night before they fell asleep, they would discuss the day’s
problems and interactions. Other times they would exchange some year—their fifteenth, for instance. Wanda had been born in Queens but her family had moved out to Farmingdale on Long Island. Her father was second-generation Italian, a conductor on the Long Island Railroad who wore an American flag pin on his uniform and an
AMERICA LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT
bumper sticker on his Ford. Wanda’s only brother had been blown apart in Korea and had died slowly in an army hospital for three years. Her father had closed himself off from all of them in his grief, turning it at last into a cold angry patriotism that explained his loss and the emptiness of things. Her mother, from a Polish family, cleaned and cleaned and spent a lot of time in church. Wanda had been sent to a parochial grade school, but the public high school. Her mother in particular wanted her to be a schoolteacher. She said it was something Wanda could always fall back on. Her parents mistrusted books but stressed the importance of going to college to get a decent job. Frequently on Sundays they had gone to her brother’s granite slab to leave a potted geranium and avoid each other’s eyes in anguished embarrassment.

As a child Wanda had been very religious. One of the nuns, Sister Mary Theresa, thought she might have a vocation. Wanda had not wanted to go to the public high school. There she had been visible chiefly as a quiet studious girl who would cross the stage on honors day to receive awards for being the girl on the library staff to work the most hours in the semester, or the hall guard with the best attendance record; or to stand and recite in earnest throatiness speeches on Sportsmanship and Making Democracy Work and Citizenship in the Halls. She was always collecting money for starving orphans in Greece or Radio Free Europe (picture of wan children behind barbed wire) or UNICEF or birth defects (picture of deformed child standing on crutches). She sang in the glee club and choral society.

Maybe Wanda’s love for singing led her astray, because when she went away to college and became a teacher the way she was supposed to, she spent a lot of time folk singing. Although she had absorbed rhetoric about individualism and free enterprise and the Crusade against Godless Communism, she did not retain her parents’ racism so well. God must love all little children, including little black children trying to go to school. She got involved in civil rights. Wanda’s first serious
boy friend, at age twenty-one, was a black organizer from St. Louis. She began to teach the fourth grade, but her summers off she spent in the South. Her father threatened to shoot her and to have her put in an insane asylum or in jail. When she went to jail the first time, it was in Birmingham, although in a funny way the trooper who busted her reminded her of her father. Wanda’s two younger sisters, who thought she was crazy, both lived on Long Island.

Wanda got out of jail weighing ninety-four pounds and calling herself a Christian Communist. That was the summer of ’63. Her non-violence died in Mississippi in the summer of ’64, along with Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Wanda could not trace every step of her changes. By the time SNCC expelled its whites, she was already involved in anti-war activity and with Joe. She met Joe at a meeting of the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, where he was representing a Lower East Side organization and she was representing a committee of teachers against the war.

“You know, I was never much to look at, but I was pretty noisy!” Wanda would laugh, making the bed jangle. “I fell for him like a ton of bricks, Beth. I didn’t even have the dignity to play hard to get. I of course didn’t know I was only the four hundred and fifty-second woman to do that. If we hadn’t been on the same side in a big political battle—the losing side, need I add—I don’t know if I would have seen him again after the first night.”

They were lying side by side facing, the candle beside the bed throwing the hill of Wanda’s hip on the wall. She lay with one hand tucked under her face. “Joe used to always be organizing women by fucking them, but that wasn’t the scene between us. I guess he liked me at first because—well, he almost admired me. I’d earned some campaign ribbons. I had my credentials—do you see? I was a comrade, so he treated me with a little respect. This of course is before we were married. We weren’t even living together. I was living in Brooklyn where I was teaching, and he was living on Avenue C.”

“You got married because you got pregnant?”

“Beth, I didn’t even call myself a Catholic by then. But when I found out I was carrying, I just couldn’t have an abortion. I just couldn’t. Not Joe’s child, not my child. I couldn’t! The thing is, he felt the same way, you know. We’d been seeing each other for a long time by then, but as soon
as we got married everything changed, Beth, everything! Then too, that coincided with changes in the movement and a lot more macho prancing and street fighter heroics. Things just got worse and worse. As Puerto Rican militancy developed, that was good for him, he wanted to relate to that, but I’ not Puerto Rican and he’d act as if he were ashamed of me. Then he got a teaching job at Northeastern. Coming to Boston removed me from the political context where I had an identity separate from his. Here I was, Joe’s old lady with the brats, and Joe was out playing wild Latin guerrilla and going to bed with his students, and I was becoming the burden, the nag, the bag. Yeah, the old lady.”

“Now you’re my old lady.”

“Not any more than you’re mine. Don’t butch me, you little freckled would-be turtle! Who ever heard of a ticklish turtle?”

Slowly Beth was learning to be physically affectionate, to be able to comfort and hug and kiss and put her arms around the adults she lived with, as well as the children. Still there were times when her skin prickled and she had to be alone. They had put up a tent out back in the woods that was the alone-place. Probably Beth used it more than anyone else. Living so closely and working so meshed with others abraded her nerves at times so that she would find one day that she was sore with noise and proximity and must withdraw for a day to grow her patience back.

They had made special friends with a commune in the next town, who were farming seriously. The commune had been started by a couple of former SDS women who had known Wanda, and in fact told Round Earth about the house for rent. There were five women, four men, two babies, and a six-year-old. Round Earth and Bleak House traded food and skills and books and information. They rented tools together and both used them the same day. They bought together things they could not afford separately. They visited back and forth constantly.

Since Round Earth traveled so much, this was not quite as important to them as to the other commune, but it was important enough. Bleak House was their often captive audience to try out new works from the crude beginnings. The men there were the first men Beth had been real friends with. Everyone in that house had been through a year and a half of fighting their old attitudes and consciously trying to play
equal and looser roles. Men who had been involved in such a struggle were different in obvious and in subtle ways. They had different manners and different anxieties. In gross ways the house was unlike other communes: the men cooked too and the women also chopped wood and the men took care of the children and the women climbed up on ladders and worked side by side repairing the roof. One of the men, Alan, did needlepoint for pleasure. He was also accurate with a rifle. He taught Wanda how to shoot. Beth wanted to learn but, for a month, couldn’t get herself around to being able to ask him. Finally she accepted Alan as her teacher—maybe because he was a vegetarian and did not shoot birds or rabbits. Learning to touch and to accept touch from the men at Bleak House was delicate, was gradual. If she had not the constant experiences of the troupe on the road to remind her how oppressive the rest of the society was, sometimes she could have forgotten, traveling between Round Earth and Bleak House.