Small Changes Read online

  “She’s going to take them back and get an electric knife and a bathroom scales!” Mother’s warning voice rose to a whine. Elinor wanted to help herself, and Beth would just as soon she did. All that heap of stuff to write letters for, strange silver thingies and glasses that cost too much to use. It had been going on for weeks. “Your Aunt Emma could have done fairer than that! Why, I saw that vase on sale downtown for five ninety-five and I’m going to let her know she can’t pull the wool over my eyes!”

  “What’s that big china contraption Jim’s sister-in-law gave you? She told me it’s an antique soup tureen, but I’ll tell you, cross my heart and hope to die, I think it’s a big old chamber pot!”

  “Isn’t it an eyesore?” Mother forgave Elinor for saying that because she already didn’t like Jim’s relatives. Dad made a practice of liking his in-laws, on principle, because they were family and you always put up with family. Mother made a practice of disliking in-laws on principle, because they were only pretending to be family and they were making comparisons and out to take advantage.

  The day was sunny and hot. Beth was sweating in her gloves by the time they left for church. Mother had spread out a sheet in the back seat of the car and they sat on it very stiff, Dad driving with Nancy and Mother in front, and Marie and Dolores on either side of her in back. She had not seen Jim since yesterday. It was strange that she was not permitted to talk to him, to know how his morning had been. He was supposed to be the one to hold her when she felt frightened, she was supposed to be the one to understand and make him feel all right. “Why can’t men and women see each other before a wedding?”

  “Maybe so the groom won’t take a last look at the bride and change his mind, ha-ha,” her dad said. He was wearing a gray hat that smelled of dry cleaning and she could not see his face.

  The scent of the mock oranges in the church was overpowering. Across the street kids were playing softball. It was crowded in the little room with everyone babbling and Aunt Susie bawling. Someone had been drinking. Gin crept under the mock orange and grass clippings from the church lawn and the smell of camphor heavy from a closet where vestments were stored. An invitation lay on the table and she picked it up. “Mr. and Mrs. Charles L. Phail are pleased … their daughter Elizabeth Ann to James Hayes Walker … June 22, 1968.” She saw herself start down the aisle and trip on her train and go rolling headfirst over and over to end up sprawled on her back, dress piled over her head at the altar. She could not make the picture go away. Again and again she saw herself rolling like a snowball of stiff organza over and over down the aisle to end up sprawled knees apart, legs spread, and dress up over her head in rape position.

  Nancy would love to slip into this gown. In Dad’s and Uncle Bob’s jokes at the family dinner, there had been such a sense of relief at only one more girl to marry off, and that the pretty one.

  Nancy was the pretty one, everybody said, and Marie was the one who wanted to be a nurse and wiped their noses when they were little and helped in the kitchen. Everybody said Marie would be a good mother. Marie was twice a mother and Beth could hear her yelling all day long, “No! No! No! Now shut up your lousy mouth, Joey, or Mother will shut it for you! Will this stupid baby ever stop crying? Now shut your face and keep it shut, or I’m going to cream you, Joey, you hear me? I’m going to wring your neck!” Her voice sounded like a teacher’s. Her mouth was getting pinched. The flat upstairs was too small but what could they find? Gene had been out of work for close to a year before he finally got hired at Carrier.

  She remembered Marie saying to her when she had panicked, two weeks ago, “Now look, Jim’s not perfect, no man is. But you’ll get away from home. Right? Just don’t start having babies before you have a little saved. Have some fun together first. At least you’ll have a place of your own!”

  Yes, Nancy was the pretty one and Dick was to be the success. He did okay as a salesman in an appliance store downtown on Salina, but he was always pushing Elinor around and they kept moving into houses a little farther out of Syracuse than they could afford. Marie had wanted to be a nurse but everyone said she was the Little Mother. Beth was the quiet one. Such a good girl. She was the one who liked school and did well but nobody said she was smart because she was too quiet. She had wanted to go to college. For all of her junior year she had brought home catalogs. Mother’s good little girl. You don’t have to bother to love the good ones.

  But now she would be loved. Now it would be safe to love. Here was the real beginning. Now she would have her life. She would be loved for herself and would love Jim without being afraid things would turn ugly and jagged and painful. This day was the narrow gate through to Jimbo and she must go on to the thumping music. She must stand while they twitched at her veil and pinched her hair, while they pulled at the skirt, while they flapped the train. Inside the marshmallow she endured their tweaking and tugging. Now Marie was shaking the train like a scatter rug so it would float properly and the music was booming into the processional and Nancy was parading back and forth looking haughty with a sly smile.

  Here comes the bride, big, fat and wide.

  Look how she wiggles, from side to side.

  Here comes the groom, lean as a broom.

  He would wiggle too, if he only had the room!

  That’s what they used to sing when they were children, and sometimes they would stick pillows under their dresses to make themselves pregnant. Like Dick’s wife Elinor. To have to get married. If there were other words to that music, she had never heard them. Going to be given away. Her father grinned bleakly, tugging at his bow tie. Take two, they’re small: ad from an adoption agency in the bus she used to take to work after school. But love came after this. After.

  She had been taught to count going down the aisle, trying hard not to feel how everyone was looking. The air was thick hot pudding. Her hands were damp. Her scalp felt sticky under the headpiece. She could make up a ceremony prettier than this in half an hour, but nobody had asked her and she understood prettiness had nothing to do with it. They were giving her away. When she wanted to go to college—she had wanted badly to be a lawyer, like Portia in the play, like Perry Mason, and everybody thought that was funny—they had told her there was no money. But they had spent enough money on this day for two years of studying. She must not think about that. She would be married to Jim, and that was the important thing.

  Jim looked like somebody else. His face was red and his long hair was cut to just brushing his shoulders and he was dressed in a rented outfit of striped baggy trousers. Frankie, who worked with him at the garage, was got up the same way. She looked for Jim’s eyes. His eyes were gray with a green tint that made her think of stones and water and ferns that grew in the woods. Once they had driven all the way to Watkins Glen with his brother Dan and his wife. Jim had a beautiful smile like a huge daisy but now he was not smiling. She could not find her way into his eyes. After all, he could not open to her any more than she could to him: they would run out the door together from all this strange nonsense.

  Dad was wearing his best suit—he had two, best and second best—tight as Mother’s rose taffeta. They looked like salami and little sausage, sweating and breathing heavily in the heat. Now her father was giving her away when he’d never had that much to say to her. Dick was the apple of his eye, and, sometimes he said, his biggest disappointment. Nancy was his favorite among the girls. Mostly he just called them The Girls, including their mother. But Nancy was the one he let sit on his lap and teased till she giggled and sometimes till she cried, and the one he threatened the most. He was scared Nancy would go bad, he said often enough. The bouquet in her hands was wilting: her nervousness was shriveling it.

  Cars outside were hurrying past from the city to the Finger Lakes or farther to the mountains. An ice cream truck, a Mr. Softie, rode by playing its jingle as the minister spoke to them. She tried to fix her mind on what she had to say. She could not hear the words over the roaring in her ears. Magic words that made things happen or go
away, recipes like I Love You, and I’m Sorry, and I Pledge Allegiance, and God Bless Mommy and Daddy, and Will You Marry Me, and Fine, Thank You, and I Do. The way through to Jim. Jim spoke up clearly. He kissed her, but his lips felt hard and closed. Then they were going out. She tried to match his stride. They were supposed to go out slowly, but they weren’t going as they were supposed to.

  Rice tossed and ribbons and big signs on the car, shoes and cans dragging. Frankie blew the horn as they went, ta taaa ta ta. Jim was hugging her in the car but again for show. Still the radio had turned on with the ignition to a rock station, and the air felt more alive. They passed a lawn where in those silly two-piece bathing suits hung on little girls three children ran under the sprinkler with a brown woolly dog chasing with them woofing and leaping high and shaking himself. Suppose they could run now under the hose, wet her dress down to size, pry off the white shoes that gripped her feet and dance together. The worst was over. They were really married. They could not dance under the hose with Dick and Elinor and Marie and Dad, and not even with Nancy, who would say her hair was ruined. But in just a little while all the noise would fade and they would be together as they wanted to be, their own lives. Soon it would begin to be beautiful.

  “I’ll be glad to get this thing off,” she said softly to Jim.

  “Yes, baby.” He squeezed her hand. Her face heated and she was afraid she blushed because he was grinning at her. You were supposed to hold out, you were supposed to or everyone suffered: then you got caught and you had to get married and Mother lay on her bed having headaches for weeks, like Dick and Elinor. She had to make up for that. This big church wedding was the certificate that the Phails were not ashamed this time, not in a pig’s eye, as her father said, no baby in five months, they had invited the neighbors in to look this time.

  The reception was at the V.F.W. Hall. The bar was set up along one wall and Frankie and Jim made a dash for it, Jim yelling, “Charge!” On the other far wall was a buffet arranged with the wedding cake in the middle. “Save the top layer—keep an eye out that nobody cuts into it,” Marie whispered to her. The cake had three tiers. Now she and Jim cut it with a knife that was a wedding present from Jimbo’s Uncle Victor which said A Slice of Life Knife on its pearl handle. “Now you can cut the mustard, ha-ha,” Frankie said. All the wedding presents were piled up. Mother and Dad and Marie were to cart them afterward over to the apartment they had rented, so they’d be there when Beth and Jim got back from their honeymoon a week from Sunday.

  The cake tasted just like store-bought sawdust white cake, but she had to eat it because the photographer her father had hired was taking pictures. Spots danced in her eyes. She and Jim had to feed each other pieces. He liked chocolate cake the best and so did she, but the baker said nobody ever had chocolate wedding cake and her mother acted as if there was something dirty-minded in wanting it. So they had what the baker called Lady’s Cake. It had pink rosebuds and green leaves and a chubby bride and groom holding hands under an archway.

  The four-piece rock group from her high school had started to play and she and Jim had to dance together first in front of everybody. They had to waltz. They had never waltzed together. They didn’t do it well because she only came up to the middle of his chest. She felt smothered, not able to see where she was backing to, with the stiff jacket pressing her nose. When they danced to rock music, their different sizes did not matter. They could look at each other and her feet did not always end up planted under his coming down. Finally the waltz ended and they could stop. The musicians too looked relieved.

  Except that, when she went to sit down, people kept coming and she had to get up. The champagne was okay, it was like pop only not as sweet. It didn’t bite like the bourbon Jim drank sometimes and it was not sour like beer. Jim and Frankie kept bringing her champagne. She never did get to eat but after a while she did not mind. It was so hot the fans could not seem to move the sluggish air and people kept going outside and standing on the sidewalk with their drinks. There was an enormous press around the bar. She heard Dad talking to Mother about the liquor bill. “We’ve got to get them out of here by five,” her dad said. “How are we ever going to get them to leave? Look at them lap it up.”

  She could smell the sweetish odor of grass, but nobody offered her any. It was hard to really dance inside the marshmallow. Jimbo had said this group wasn’t really good, but they were very loud and that helped.

  Dick looked as if he might be drunk. He kept saying that his baby sister had got married, although of course Nancy was his baby sister. Nancy looked more grown up than Beth did, everyone said so, because she was good at putting on make-up. Nancy’s cross in life was that Dad wouldn’t let her bleach her hair. She was dancing with Frankie too close and Marie and her mother were arguing about whether to go say anything. Then Marie had to go off to the women’s lounge to breast-feed the baby and Mother made Nancy come and say hello to some aged second cousin, which she did for thirty seconds. Chuckie, Dick’s five-year-old, was throwing up by the band from too much ice cream and maybe a little champagne.

  Then Elinor was clutching her by the arm saying, “You wait and see if you think it makes so damn much difference! You wait and see! I know how they’ve always thought of me. Some families have a heart, they accept you and make you feel at home, but your mother has never let me forget a thing. But just you wait and see how much fucking difference it makes when you come down to it!”

  Frankie asked her to dance and she kept dancing with him for a while, it was so good to get away from all the people she had to make a stiff smile for and say oh, thank you for whatever it was. Then Mother came and hissed in her ear that she shouldn’t let Frankie pinch her that way. But she hadn’t felt anything through the dress. She didn’t much like him kissing her, he tasted like alcohol. Men kept kissing her all afternoon, especially uncles. When her new Uncle Victor was slobbering on her she thought, suppose she suddenly bit him, and then she began to laugh. The champagne went up as bubbles into her head and made her laugh a lot.

  Dick was yelling at Elinor about Chuckie when a big fat old walrus of a man she had never seen before passed out and had to be carried away. Under the stairway, Nancy was kissing Tom. Tom used to go with her but now went steady with Trudy, and Trudy ran upstairs crying. Her mother came and told Beth it was time for her to go up and change. Jim was dancing with Dolores, who had succeeded in making another alteration in her bridesmaid’s dress so that now most of her breasts showed. Marie was still feeding Lucille in the lounge, with Frankie’s mother fallen asleep beside her with her mouth open, but Dolores and Jim were finally pried apart. Dolores came to help her out of the marshmallow. By this time Beth was damp with the heat and felt dizzy and clammy under the layers and layers.

  At last she was unpeeled and Dolores and Nancy and Trudy, who had stopped crying, stood around making jokes about brides getting undressed all the time, as if she hadn’t petted enough times with Jim, and Dolores anyhow knew that. Mother and Marie had tried to make her get a suit, but she had picked a little print dress without sleeves that felt soft and looked like flowers that had run a bit, flowers that were not color-fast in a light rain. Then they all kissed her good-by and Mother sniffed and pretended to cry and everybody came to kiss her for yet another beery, smelly, balony time, taste of foods she hadn’t got to eat, chicken salad and ham and mayonnaise, and the guests went right on drinking and outside on the sidewalk Frankie and Tom were getting ready to fight each other and Uncle Vic was blowing and yelling. Then they got into Jim’s car at last and drove away.

  They drove toward New Hampshire, toward the White Mountains, which sounded cool but turned out to be too far. They were both tired by sunset so they stopped at a motel in Vermont. Because there were no doubles left they had to take a room with two double beds, which cost more than they had figured on. They ate supper at a restaurant up the highway where drinks were served. Jim had pork chops and a couple of shots of Jim Beam, and she had chicken and a whiskey sour. By th
e time they finished she was sleepy but Jim was waking up. She had two cups of coffee. When they drove back to the motel she was almost too tired to be nervous. After all, it would be just like always, only better.

  “You know, Little Girl, I was stoned.” Jim unbuttoned his shirt sitting on the bed. “Couldn’t go through that otherwise without freaking out, no way. But Frankie and I had a joint right outside and I just floated through. I didn’t get your old lady mad at me even once—a world’s record.”

  In the room next door the people had the TV on loud and the laugh track kept clattering through the walls. She told herself the noise was protective. She liked the motel. Oh, it was ugly and plastic but it was a room that didn’t belong to anybody. For one night it belonged to her and Jim together. At last they were out of sight of everybody. It was beautiful that there were rooms people could rent to be alone. Here they were in a town whose name she had not even noticed, in a room for the two of them.

  He said they should go to bed. “I mean, who wants to watch TV, what’s the point, right, Little Girl? You get ready.”

  She went off to the bathroom and did not know if she should put on the black nightgown Dolores had given her. Always they had been together in Jim’s car, or on the couch at Dolores’ when her parents were out, or at Marie’s when she would baby-sit and Jim would sneak up. They had done what she thought of as everything except that ultimate dangerous, culminating act. But they had never been all the way undressed. Somebody might return home early or come along and shine a light on them. It wasn’t as if her body were strange to him but it felt brazen to walk out there naked, as if she were expecting something. Finally she put on the nightgown and brushed her hair till it lost its strange frozen shape. Then she came out barefoot with her arms folded and paused beside the bed. “Jim, love, here I am.”

  It was over in fifteen minutes, the whole thing. Then he lay on his side breathing softly in sleep and she was lying there with a new hole torn in her, oozing softly into the mattress. She was stretched there still wound up as if whatever she was waiting for had not yet happened. She felt much less satisfied than she had after one of those fumbling longdrawn-out sessions on the couch or the back seat of his Chevy. It was accomplished. That was it, the whole thing. They had made love finally, but where was the love they had made?