Small Changes (70 page)

But the struggle could not get too close to the front of her attention. Somewhere in her Phil was still Phil and it was natural to touch him, it had always been natural. She never let herself think about being in bed with Phil, but her body remembered him. Old sensual memories drifted up along the nerves, murmurs of old good easy and communicative sex, natural and sensual. It was not to be remembered. Occasionally she dreamed of him, vividly. She enjoyed her sexual dreams: no one could make her guilty about what she felt in sleep.

She must not let them argue openly because she had no reasons except that she was married to Neil and he would not want her to. Neil expected her to be faithful. She had promised to be. That fidelity in that sense was a meaningless concept to her, alien, peculiar, was something she must never
let herself be enticed into discussing aloud. She was afraid to argue with Phil, that she might not be able to defend Neil’s position. But if she gave in to Phil and to her fidelity to herself and him, then she would be guilty before Neil. Neil could always make her feel guilty anyhow, and she would lose some essential ground to resist the heaviest of his pressures.

“I don’t like living with old Jackson any more,” Phil complained, sitting sideways on a chair. “We’re bound in different directions.”

“What direction is he bound in, except around his own dead center?”

“Don’t kid yourself. I find the new motivated scholar on the make a bit of a drag. I’m telling you, he’s going to crawl back on his belly into the middle class through the doors of the Ph.D. and rest there, hard-working and moral at last by his own endeavors. The prodigal son. His parents are pleased that he’s teaching and passed his orals.”

“Why am I not more surprised? He’ll fit in.”

“Maybe because that ties in with why you took him seriously? Besides, being with him pushes me back into my old way of using words, of dealing with people. Sometimes I find myself responding to his bantering and making some kind of put-down joke about Dorine. I know I don’t feel that way, but I do feel like an asshole if I make a point of not wanting to talk about her like that. I feel like I have to defend the relationship. He has a way of looking ironic and raising one eyebrow.… Or the way he jokes about me not going to Finnegan’s. I keep telling myself, You don’t have to measure up. Fuck it with being a man according to Jackson.”

“Then why don’t you move out? I think there is something wrong in the way you’re friends … in the way you love each other. It’s … oblique and competitive. It hems you in.”

“Why can’t I move in here? All these rooms. Conspicuous consumption. Or does The Man mean you to fill them up with kiddies?”

“He wants more.… Phil, don’t start teasing me about moving in. He’d never put up with that and you know it!”

“Why not? Couldn’t he use me? I could polish his shoes.”

“Quit it, Phil! I mean it!”

“Alas. I know you do.”

If she yelled loud enough, Phil would stop, just as he would not persist in trying to embrace her if she gave him a good
push. But it was temporizing, keeping the globes flying through the air and never colliding. Still she could remember the first months with Ariane when she had been ground between the rigid schedule of Ariane and the rigid schedule of Neil, with no time, no space, no energy for herself.

“Is he ever jealous of me?” Phil asked her.

“Why would he be? I’ve never given him cause.”

“Nevertheless, he is. Isn’t he?”

“Jealous?” She paused, unable to find the word. “He doesn’t get hot angry that way.”

“No. Just coldly, persistently. Like a head cold.”

“You just don’t understand each other.”

“Are you so sure?”

Not jealous. Possessive. They were not the same. A couple of times Neil did something that upset her, yet she could not confront him. Twice, a week apart, he came to bed quite late, after she had been asleep awhile. Always of course she awoke and spoke to him, asking him how his work had gone. Once ten days ago and once just last night he had responded by moving over and beginning to make love to her. Half asleep, she had forgotten both times to get up for her diaphragm. She suspected Neil of doing it intentionally, to get her pregnant. But she could not make an issue of it. They made love so seldom in comparison to what she would have liked, she could hardly complain. She had taken to going to bed every night now with her diaphragm already in, but that depressed her, made her think of the fact that probably that night they would again not make love. He said that she looked lovely half asleep, tousled and soft. She wondered if she was less threatening then. But she remembered too how he had loved her when she had been carrying Ariane, how tender, how concerned.…

In her high energy, she finally replastered the upstairs hall. She answered letters from her father’s new wife—they were buying a condominium in Long Beach on the Island; from Allegra, who sent pictures of her new baby; from Neil’s mother with requests for yet more pictures of Ariane; from Sally and Beth. They were on the road with the women’s theater troupe. They wrote postcards from Bangor, Maine, and Attleboro, Vermont. In Bath they were busted for indecency. Later, snowed in, they sent her a letter together.

Sally wrote:

You can send us a note at Goddard, we’ll be there in a month. Use the address of that commune. Tell us how you and Ory Ann are and everybody, I wonder about Phil sometimes with Dorine, what is happening? Though I think Dorine knows how to take care of herself.

Dorine is worse than us at writing, she don’t have time, and I know we are not so good. We have a new children’s play we do that we like a lot, you could call it a kind of fairy tale, it has a lot to do with how we are thinking about when we were children and our own children. The children are all in it as well as us. We are having a good time traveling women like our name although people think we are a pretty queer bunch. I never lived like this from place to place, I see why gipsies like it. Fern at first did not like being on the move so much though Blake could not be better. Fern likes it too by now.

Beth wrote:

We are really a group now. Wanda was right when she insisted we would all come to take over things she did in the beginning for all of us. It is an exciting thing to grow together this way, Miriam, I wish you could be here with us. We make many mistakes still. We have an awful tendency to get so into a new thing, to perform it before we are ready.

In Utica last week we did a terrible show, a bomb. It was a new piece we were still working on. We went ahead and did it anyhow. Why do we do things like that, all of us, when we say we know something isn’t ready and then we do it? It got off to a slow start, like glue. We lost the audience and we could feel that. It seems as if we responded to that by elaborating more, desperately, and slowing the piece down even more and it just got worse and worse! It was awful.

But we worked on that same piece (called “The Day the Mirror Broke”) for a whole week. We had this house to work in and we have really got into it. Now it’s one of our best things and I
know
when we do it next time it will be fantastic and powerful.

Sally is playing the guitar a lot these days and she is good! She wrote songs for the children’s play. It is nice too, but I am less involved in it than Sally is. I want so bad
for you to see us. I can imagine you with us, dancing and banging on the drums and chanting. I love Wanda and I love the troupe and I wish you were with us.

I love Wanda a lot. I mean that for real! Do you understand? Don’t think because she is so much older than me that it is like mother and daughter, it isn’t. It isn’t anything like anything. It is just us together inside the looser us together.

Miriam dreamed and dreamed of something real and external to do. She could not go back to work. Every time that subject came up she had to agree with Neil that Ariane could not be turned over like a puppy dog to some hired person to sit with. She did help Neil with his papers more, but he had regular assistants for the classes and on his project. They regarded her as an intruder. Moreover, Neil wasn’t writing papers about the kind of research she wanted to get into. It was all the big machine stuff she had washed her hands of.

Whose idea? Phil perhaps thought of it or maybe she did. She could fix the time—she had been making rye bread and Phil decided he wanted to take a turn kneading the dough. Then he found he liked that. It turned him on. So they made a loaf for Phil too. Then Phil had been talking about how great homemade bread was and how healthy it was to eat whole-grain bread. He had been on a long slow suicide trip, but now he was going to live with respect for his body.

It was true Phil told over his vitamins like a rosary. Once when she was in Cambridge they had stopped at Pearl Street—an afternoon Jackson taught—and on the kitchen table stood rows of Phil’s pills: bottles of vitamin E and vitamin A in long oily amber capsules; bottles of desiccated liver and vitamin C plus bioflavinoids, dolomite mineral, lecithin and yeast tablets and kelp. On the breads, anyhow, they could agree. They both doted on dark breads, rye and graham flours, buckwheat, made with molasses or honey, eggs and wheat germ.

They decided to bake bread and sell it. It was a daydream at first to figure out the cost and how they would go about distribution. But the more they discussed it the more passionately Miriam wanted to do it. At least she would be doing something. She would make a little money. She would be the bread woman. That was nothing Neil could get upset
about. It wouldn’t take her out of the home or away from Ariane. It was healthy and womanly and it even had a good smell associated with it.

Three times a week they began to bake and distribute bread. Monday was rye bread and Wednesday was graham bread and Friday was mixed-grain bread. Phil and she drove around and got health food stores to agree to handle their bread. Phil had long conferences with people he knew in the food co-ops in Cambridge and got two co-ops to agree to put bread on their lists for a week or two to try it out.

“We can’t figure on making money at first,” she said with cheerful pragmatism to Phil. “Not till we’ve built up a demand, a market. Then we can increase our quantity till we break even and then pull ahead.”

The bread business gave a rationale for their being together. They were in business, they were partners. Miriam relaxed a bit. She no longer had such a sense of juggling her life. Phil had been properly plugged in. She did not even let herself get too worried when her period was overdue. It had happened before. Phil and she screamed at each other, they made huge messes, they had catastrophes. But they enjoyed every crisis. They had never before worked together.

Distributing the bread provided a wonderful excuse for running around and seeing all her old freak friends, the communes, the whole Cambridge scene. Sometimes of course a non-event happened. A couple of times he kissed her before she could remember why not. Basically she always had Ariane between them.

Every so often the subject of Phil would come up with Neil. There seemed no way she could say to Neil, “Don’t worry about Phil! I love him but I don’t take him seriously.” Phil was the only person beside her baby she could play with. About Neil she brooded as usual. Somehow Neil had become a subject she studied. Sometimes she detested herself for thinking in circles about him. Why couldn’t they live together in some easier, looser manner? Why must she always be “understanding” him? He didn’t spend that effort studying her, he didn’t need to. He knew what he expected of her and only grew worried when she failed to provide it.

If only Neil would understand that she could not take Phil seriously. Phil could hint around, but he could never support Ariane and her. He wasn’t cut out to be a husband and father. When she was younger she had been able to
afford Phil because she was supporting herself. If only Neil would stop bothering about Phil and let her have his friendship and the bread business and a little joy and excitement in her daily life.

One of the project heads at Tech Square, Hardwick, gave Neil a piece of frozen venison. Hardwick had killed a deer in Maine and had had it in his freezer but had decided they would never finish it.

Neil was sitting at the dining-room table having the tail end of his Sunday breakfast—café au lait made with the milk heated just to scalding and the French roast fresh ground in the blender and some of her bread and jam. The way he sat was neat. His body was compact and she was always wanting to reach out to him at times like these. He remained physically attractive to her in a cozy immediate sense: she was always wanting to touch him. How often now she reached for Ariane instead, afraid of rebuff.

“Why can’t we have croissants? That’s a real French breakfast.” His tongue touched his lip. “Lovely buttery croissants.”

“But you didn’t like the ones I got at the bakery.”

“They weren’t croissants. Just brioche dough in crescent form.” He sipped the last of his coffee, daubed his carefully kept curly beard with the napkin. Then he smiled at her. Instinctively she leaned forward, still wanting to touch him. “Why don’t you see if you can make them?”

“Neil, I think they’re an all-day affair. You have to roll out the dough and chill it. Butter it and roll it out and chill it again and again.”

“You spend all day making those breads.” He visibly withdrew. Hurt? Ruffled?

“But that’s my business.”

His voice armored itself in mockery. “You sound like my grandmother, who used to live on the edge of Harrisburg and raise chickens. Don’t you think it’s a little unnecessary? We’re better off than we’ve ever been.” He mocked, but his eyes were sulking.

She did not want to argue about the bread making. “I can try to find a recipe …” How could he act as if she’d rejected him? Sometimes he really confused her. She cursed her mother-in-law for teaching him love was being cooked
for, fussed over, provided for with cleanliness and considerable martyred bustling.

“Imagine driving up to Maine and dressing yourself in scarlet and tromping around the woods shooting cows and dogs and each other,” Neil was saying. “Hardwick is so sure he’s a hero for executing a deer—as if deer could shoot back! Then he won’t be bothered to eat what he’s killed. Probably his wife doesn’t know the first thing about how to roast something that doesn’t come wrapped in plastic from the supermarket. First we’ll thaw it and age it a bit—let it get high. Or should you do a marinade? Anyhow, Friday night when they’re here we’ll serve it back to them. Poetic justice.”