Small Changes (38 page)

“Never!” Phil lifted one buttock and farted.

“Not us.” Jackson made himself belch cavernously.

She would not turn. She leaned on her dresser, close to tears but too angry. A couple of rumpled scarves lay there, her extra lenses, a mirror, and lens fluid. A bottle of hand lotion and big hairpins. Her comb colored like a tortoise shell and a brush with wooden handle. The hand lotion promised
that it would restore youthful softness to hands damaged by sun, wind, or detergents. Which reminded her that the dishes were not done and she could hardly expect Dorine to wash them after her own birthday celebration.

She walked out between them to the kitchen and began gathering the dishes. As she had expected, they slowly followed and quickly melted away when they saw what she was doing. She was still angry as she ran the water and the first thing she did was break a glass that slipped out of her hands in the sink. She had to feel in the soapy water for the jagged pieces.

All she wanted them to do was to be kind to Dorine. But they transformed that into some disgusting process of genteel manipulation. How could any woman resist feeling guilty when accused by even one man she loved? She was miserable. The way they united to punish her made her feel helpless. She could not defend herself, she could not explain. When they went into one of their routines she only wanted to run from them.

It was unfair. She was trying to get on better with women. Living with two men who constantly pushed and pulled on her, she felt a sharp need for women she could talk to about her life. It healed her guilt at not pleasing her men utterly, gave her a frame of reference drawn from other women’s experiences. But her growing friendships with women got in the way of maintaining friendships with men. She had more trouble getting along with the men from Going-to-the-Sun. Before, she had compartmentalized her reactions. In one pigeonhole was how they treated her, in another was how they acted with men, and off by itself was how they treated other women. Then she had used to judge them as they judged each other, by how they treated other men, and of course how they acted to her. She remembered agreeing with Phil that John was a kind person: he was kind to Phil, certainly. He was kind to men and dogs and children, he was even pleasant with what he’d call strong women, though he never got involved with them. Other women he used up like a case of beer and then turned mean. Now she could not separate those judgments. She could not say any longer that John was kind. Even with Phil and Jackson she found it harder and harder to ignore the way they behaved with the women she liked.

She felt that this night they hated her, and she felt hateful. Her anger was a sharp taste in her mouth, hot and bitter as horseradish. It was hard not to want to blame Dorine for getting her into trouble with her men, yet Dorine had done nothing. It had been her idea. And her conscience pushed her to try to treat Dorine better and secure better treatment for her from them. She felt defeated and wronged and wrong, and still to blame, still to blame standing with all the day’s dishes to do and her index finger bleeding into the dishwater, as seemed fitting. She hoped she would bleed all over every dish.

16

You Are What You Eat

“So now you’ll have to get up every morning for work too,” Dorine said across the breakfast table. “Regular old five-daya-week grind. That should be a bringdown.”

Out of politeness Miriam agreed. It would have been unfair to Dorine to insist that she did not dread going to work, that the long hunt for a reasonable job had depressed her far more. She was curious about Logical Systems Development, Inc., where she had at last landed a research job. “It’s not one of those corporations run like a programing factory. It seemed pretty informal. Besides, how can any job hang you up if you stay loose about it? Nothing’s permanent.”

“But you’re planning to get there on time. I see you looking at your watch.”

“I’m new. I figure I’m lucky to get the job.”

“So what’s the difference whether you get there at ninethirty because you’re afraid to lose your job, or if you get there at nine because you have to punch in?”

“But did you notice the initials? L.S.D. I figured, what the hell, I’d make a crack about it. The guy interviewing me said they named it that for a joke, they had to give it a corporate
name. They’re all more research types than business types.”

The Logical office shared a small building on Prospect with dentists. Indeed, she could hear the whirring of a drill through the wall by her desk. After sharing a cubbyhole with three other students, the offices seemed luxurious with carpeting underfoot and a big desk of her own in an office she shared with only one man; it was even furnished with a blackboard. The inner partitions in the space that Logical rented were made of wallboard and did not mute the flow of sound, but she was used to cramped quarters and a high noise level. The walls were a strange color that Jaime, a young man she worked with, called “spleen green.” The carpeting gave her little shocks whenever she touched a metal doorknob. Her office mate, Fred Weathering, thought the office overcrowded. He muttered that when he was hired they had told him Logical would be moving out to Route 128 and a new building. She hoped they would not move. Now she could bicycle to work, and when the weather got even worse she would hitchhike.

Her office mate was balding around a scraggly brown beard that fell into two wispy points. He was married and had two children with a third on the way, and was just moving his family from a house in a tract in Woburn to a bigger house in a more expensive development in Lincoln. His desk bristled with photographs of his children.

Just about everyone had long hair or a beard or both, although some of them wore tweedy jackets and some of them dressed in leather and some wore jeans. Only the president, Abe Tyler, was confined to mere sideburns, although the secretaries were sleek and soignée and wore make-up, and the only other woman in the place who had a technical job dressed like the secretaries, department store snappy. Miriam was a bit outstanding in that setting. She was grateful for having been hired and determined not to develop the legend that had tagged her at school. When Fred asked where she lived, she said she shared an apartment with friends.

Although the technical staff looked hairy enough to have had the usual experiences of being hassled in the streets, threatened by police, pushed around, she could tell from their incessant talk that their life styles were pretty much suburban, with an overlay of hip clothes and dope and rock music. Most of them were married, most of them had
children, most of them were buying homes and furnishing them way beyond their incomes. They spent warily, the worn copies of
Consumer Reports
circulating, but they were always buying something. They spent hours each day wandering with coffee cups through each other’s offices—Chemex coffee made fresh by the secretaries every two hours—to trade puzzles and games and gossip as often as real work problems.

What had drawn her to Logical was that it was not a businessman’s company at all. It had been started by and belonged to research types. Abe Tyler and Dick Babcock and Neil Stone had got together two years before to create a place where they could do the kind of work they were interested in without a lot of pressure from business-oriented types: a place where they could function in a good loose creative environment for the development of their science. Logical was an exciting company with a lot of good people who’d been drawn by their names—they were all of some reputation, especially Tyler, although of the directors only Stone had his doctorate. The relaxed atmosphere and the chance to do work that was far out technically attracted people too.

She would be working on a dynamite project that would be into pattern recognition and heuristic programing techniques, in the direction of artificial intelligence. It dovetailed beautifully with what she had been doing on her thesis. It was as far as possible from the dead-end programing jobs she had been offered. It was a chance to do something new and interesting that might even advance the state of the art. And she was to be paid for it a daydream salary, starting at ten thousand dollars a year. On that kind of money she should save half of it. Then she could quit or take a leave of absence and travel. She could make true all those imaginings with Phil. They could have a place at the shore the very next summer where everything would be clean and golden and baked by the sun, and Phil would look healthy again. He would be out of the city, away from Finnegan’s, away from dealers, away from the bad scenes where he talked himself out instead of writing.

The compiler they were building with its sophisticated language would be a tool for people in the sciences who wanted to use computers but did not understand them, who would never have the time to waste learning an alien discipline. This sort of compiler would make it possible for a person to describe
problems to a computer without being terribly precise, and the machine could work out the best way of proceeding. Whenever she thought of the possibilities inherent in the project, she felt excited, she had the feeling of being on the brink of something vital. It was a good sense, a high tight feeling in her chest. She had been right to wait for something meaningful; she was justified.

Fred was working on the same project and so was Jaime Lesander, a delicate-looking boy—she thought of him as a boy although in fact he must be a year or so older than she was. He looked like a perennial undergraduate with porcelain features under a frizzle of dark blond hair. He was gentle and whimsical and she liked him. He and Fred played Go. Jaime always won but he was willing to play because he kept hoping that Fred’s game would improve. He brought Fred books in strange English, including a book of aphorisms translated literally from the Japanese.

Their boss, if that was the right word since he was generally less authoritarian than Fred, was Neil Stone. It was the custom for everyone to call him Neil, never Mr. Stone. He wore a close curly dark brown beard. His eyes were hazel with a lot of green in them—or perhaps the walls did that. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and rumpled sports shirts that seemed too large. Every morning he came in looking brisk and neat. It was one of his endearing characteristics that within an hour of beginning serious work his tie was awry, his shirttails out, his shoelaces untied, his fly unzipped, his cuff button fallen off. When he had to go off to negotiate a contract or represent the company, Abe’s secretary Efi gave him an inspection and grooming. He was slender, wiry, of medium height. He was soft-spoken and moved quietly. Sometimes he would walk into her office and be standing there watching her before she was aware.

Once she heard Fred on the phone to his wife call someone The Cat, and she knew at once it was Neil. That made her smile. He was clean, quiet, graceful and quick as a cat. She even thought she saw a bit of the cat about his eyes, tilted slightly. He was still ruddy from the summer. His nose was long and aquiline; she wondered if he was Jewish. He had that nose Mark glared at in the mirror, her mother’s nose. A shade more marked than her own. He was all in all a pleasant-looking man, in spite of his untidiness and the air he had of
being about to lose a shoe or his pants. She especially liked when he smiled suddenly and his even white teeth showed in his beard. He had a good smile. His face crinkled up, his eyes danced, and his teeth gleamed.

Only his hands were nervous. Often while he was talking his hands would tap, tap with a pencil, with a piece of chalk, with a ruler on the desk. Or they would walk over each other like long-legged spiders. He was very controlled, his low voice, his measured graceful movements, his explanations famous for their precision. If he said there were six points to be covered he never stopped with five. There was an elegance to his presentations that pleased her aesthetically: he was a good man at the board. Logical had a weekly seminar and his were always heavily attended. She enjoyed their Monday meetings to discuss the project. He was very controlled, except for that nervous vitality leaking out through his thin restless hands.

“The truth is,” she told Beth, “far from it being a drag, I’m happier at work than any place else.”

“Things aren’t better at home, uh?”

“Not better. It isn’t what I wanted for us. I thought I’d be able to have a good relationship with each of them. But that isn’t happening. They’re sharing me. I don’t know … I suppose it takes a long time to work out a good relationship with anybody and longer with three or four than two.”

“But it’s not getting better?”

“Maybe I’m too demanding. They both think so. I don’t know what to think any more. I’m the medium but they’re the message—that’s what it feels like.”

“Change your mind about living in a house with me and some other women?”

“Beth, what do you want that for? You’re in a women’s liberation group now, right? Isn’t that enough support?”

“It’s okay, but it’s just a consciousness-raising group that meets once a week. They’re students. They have different problems than I do, and it’s no use pretending I don’t feel that. They have families taking care of them, they have boy friends, and they’ll have professions. None of them are alone the way I am. They just plain can command more money, more help. Some of them give lip service to feeling close to women who work, and then they come out with things about organizing secretaries and say things that show they think
secretaries are stupid and naïve.… No, I don’t feel I get that much help from them. I get frightened sometimes, I feel as if I’m fighting the whole world and I must be wrong because everything, everything in the streets and the books and the media, all says I’m wrong. I need a warm place tool”

One evening in middle November when Dorine called the hospital, she was told that Lennie had been released. Upset, Dorine spent several hours speculating why he hadn’t let her know before she got up the nerve to call his mother’s apartment. Lennie was there and she told him she’d hitch down to see him the next weekend.