Small Changes Read online

  After she washed her face and changed to the blue pants he liked the best, she came in the living room. “Would you like to do something tonight? How about a movie? Or we could drop in to Marie’s or over to your mother’s?”

  They went to see Frankie and Jo. Jo had been Frankie’s girl for three weeks. They talked about going to a movie or maybe going out to The Haven on the highway for dancing. They drank beer and played cards with the television on. Jim told Frankie the story of what he’d done to Beth. Everybody laughed and agreed he’d turned the tables on her. She just needed a little sense knocked into her, Frankie said, and Jo said that she could tell Jimbo was a real man. Frankie said that she was acting like the old Bethie now. She’d been getting too big for her britches but Jimbo had cut her down to size, and he put his arms around her and lifted her way up. Jim said he should watch whose wife he was putting his hands on, but they were all laughing and nobody minded but her. She was worried that Jim was drinking too much so he wouldn’t care about her saying it was her period. But when they got home he was in a good mood and pinched her backside, saying she was his Little Girl again. She kept laughing nervously and trying to remember how she used to respond.

  When it came time to undress, she went through the whole thing about “Oh dear, my period’s starting! Now what should I do? I just had a period!”

  “So what’s the big deal? Once we’re under way you won’t have one for nine months, right?”

  “I don’t know, it seems kind of heavy. I hope nothing’s wrong.”

  “You didn’t take the pill, so it starts. That’s happened before. If you’re worried, call up the doctor Monday, ask him.”

  The weekend crept. Saturday he stuck to her all day, but she was acting submissive and she made a fancy meal in the evening. Even though the chicken came out leathery he seemed satisfied with the effort and relaxed his vigilance a little. By Sunday a light bleeding did begin and she could ease up on the ketchup. Sunday afternoon he had tickets to a football game with Frankie at Syracuse, and he did not even suggest that he wasn’t going. The minute he left she began to plot her course.

  She had forty-two dollars housekeeping money. She must risk going to the bank on Monday right after he dropped her off downtown—she would not go to work. She would head straight for the bank, sign his name as she often did—they knew her by now, she would choose a teller who cashed his pay check for her—and draw out half their money. She would take two hundred dollars. The important thing, she suspected from crime stories, was to get across a state border. She could not go to New York City. If only she could run away to college.… Of the girls in her high school who had gone to college, most had gone nearby to nursing schools or teacher’s colleges. But when all the Spanish students in Syracuse had a fiesta, she had met a girl named Naomi Burns she had liked a whole lot. Naomi had said she was going away to Wellesley to school, outside Boston.… She would go to Boston. She had never been there, but she associated it with schools and music and symphony orchestras and historic sites and books and learning. Maybe there she would meet people like those in books, who lived as if they meant to do something.

  How to get there? Jim kept the car with him. She must take a bus or a plane. She found Greyhound and Trailways in the yellow pages and called them up. She expected them to ask questions, but they just told her the schedule and how much tickets cost.

  With airlines it was more complicated. The first one she called did not go to Boston, nor did the second. But the woman at the second told her to call Allegheny. It cost a great deal to fly, but there was a plane at eleven. She thought she would be less frightened to get on a plane and be in Boston in an hour and a half and disappear into the crowd. If she went by bus he might catch up with her, it took so long. A plane seemed more decisive. She would fly to Boston.

  Packing: she could not carry a suitcase to work. For a moment she was dismayed by how little she could take. Then she mocked herself: she was lucky to get out with her skin. She would wear her raincoat Monday with the lining in. Carefully she sewed her best underwear and panty hose and a blouse and her bathing suit into the lining. She hesitated over the bathing suit, but it was a dark cobalt blue and one of the few things she had really loved, and swimming was the one sport she was good at. In the water, everyone was the same size.

  Into the pockets she packed gloves and scarves and photos of her family and her own baby picture and herself at age ten on the swings in the park and herself with Jim last spring. Into the bottom of her purse she crammed her favorite summer dress—the one she had worn when they left the reception—rolled up in rubber bands with her favorite sweater.

  Then she took a box that came from the department store where she worked and, folding carefully, managed to get into it two winter dresses, a pair of boots, a pair of shoes, and two pairs of pants. She put rubber bands or string around each item so nothing would bulge. Then she tied up the box and hid it under the bed. That plus whatever she could wear in various layers on Monday would have to do. She felt bad about leaving the records. But she would not have a phonograph. If she could ever afford to buy a record player, then she could buy the records again too. They were too bulky.

  Mainly she worried about not taking her winter coat. It was a strange blue and green check her mother had got on sale, but it was a lot warmer than no winter coat. She paced and worried but could come up with no scheme by which she could smuggle a winter coat past Jim in the morning.

  Again she did her best to make him the supper he seemed to want and again he accepted her efforts as gestures at making up. She was too excited, too apprehensive to eat. She kept up a stream of questions about the game and Frankie. It occurred to her that she was supposed to write a note about why she was leaving. She could not think of anything that she had not already tried to say, and she could not figure out where she could hide it that he might not see it before she was gone. Write a letter? No, it would have a postmark.

  Sitting across from him, she did not hate him but she was gravely aware that he could still keep her, that he could still make her pregnant, that he could call her parents and they would not let her run away. She would forgive him once she was safely gone: she did not think he would forgive her. She was the sinner, the criminal. He had meant well, he said he loved her, though she had grown so mistrustful of that word she did not think she would ever again be able to use it except as she might say, I love to swim, or I love strawberries. I love to eat up Bethie. Bethie is mine. No, she would steal his property from him and belong to no one but herself.

  In the morning he asked what the box was.

  “Oh, a coat Marie bought. It’s too big on her and I’m taking it back for a refund.”

  “I didn’t think they made coats too big for that cow.”

  She coughed the fearful giggle that answered his jokes about her family. He thought he was obligated to make jokes. That was how a husband was supposed to talk about his in-laws.

  When he dropped her off she got out of the car and waved as he drove away. Then she walked rapidly in the direction of the bank, three blocks down. Going past the closed doors of the department stores, she felt that scary excited feeling of cutting class.

  At fifteen after eleven she was sitting in a window seat on a small jet. She had watched the businessmen ahead of her. Unless they were charging tickets, no one asked for identification. She said her name was Naomi Burns. The woman stamped her ticket and wished her a pleasant trip and told her to go to Gate 7. She asked Beth if she had any luggage, and Beth-Naomi gave her the tied-up box. The woman gave her a red stub and said she could reclaim her luggage at Logan Airport.

  At eleven-fifteen the jet made noise and shook itself up as if it were about to explode and then it began running forward and went up into the air, tilting steeply. It was her first time, but she was not frightened. She said to herself that if she died on the airplane it would be better than not being there at all. She stared at the ground. The airport, the university, the highway that led to the
thruway. The day was cloudy and soon she could see nothing but white and could not tell if they were upside down or right side up. She kept swallowing. Then they came above the clouds. Up here the sun shone and the sky was a dark hard clear blue like the bathing suit sewn into the lining of her raincoat, stowed above her in the rack. She clasped her hands and joy pierced her. She was wiry with joy and tingling. How beautiful to be up here! How beautiful was flight and how free (even though it cost money). She was the only flying turtle under the sun.

  3

  Welcome to the Sexual Revolution

  In Boston she was lonely, but her loneliness for the first four or five months was a positive thing, a free space she thrived in. With everything she tasted and tried, she studied herself suspiciously: do you really like this? She must never again choose by what tasted good to somebody else, even what tasted fine to everybody else. “You can’t taste with anybody else’s tongue,” she wrote on the wall.

  The first time it had occurred to her to write on the wall beside her bed, she had stood with a marking pen in her hand for twenty minutes, unable to deface the surface. Not that it wasn’t ugly, cracked and crisscrossed with scars and scabbed with plaster and caked with layers of paint. The top layer was scum green, with pink showing through. Her room was in a warren of a building in Back Bay near the subway—not the Back Bay of neat brick row houses but the blocks of large decaying tenements. The subway was a funny one where trolley cars ran in the ground pretending to be a subway train. She took it five mornings a week to connect with a real subway, which in turn took her to M.I.T. where she worked.

  She had a bed and a dresser and a small desk and a wobbly metal table and a hot plate and a small refrigerator and a lavatory for washing dishes and herself. The wee bathroom was equipped with a shower stall and toilet. The only window faced a building six feet away. Mice ran in the walls and nibbled her cereal and crackers. Traffic from the street echoed in the alley.

  Nevertheless she loved her room. She loved the mattress with bloodstains and a circular hole and a ravine in the middle. She loved the dripping shower and the hot plate that took fifteen minutes to get warm and never did get too hot to sit on. She loved the closet with the door that would not shut. She loved the man’s plaid bathrobe that had been hanging there when she moved in and that she wore even though it was too big. At least the robe was woolly and warm, while the room was frigid. She made love to her room by writing mottoes on the wall and by making patchwork curtains out of remnants from the sale tables downtown at Jordan Marsh. Those curtains glowed and kept out the winter wind. Slowly she was filling the room with books. She had discovered secondhand stores where used paperbacks were cheap. On Saturday she liked to go to the bookstores and search the tables for her next week’s reading.

  At first she ate from cans, but gradually, wandering on Newbury and Boylston, she discovered health food and natural food stores. The revulsion toward eating flesh from the night of the meat loaf remained. It was part superstition and part morality: she had escaped to her freedom and did not want to steal the life of other warm-blooded creatures. She ate brown rice and whole-grain breads and granola and muesli and cracked wheat and lentils and navy, lima, mung, marrow, kidney, and turtle beans. She learned from a clerk at Erewhon how to sprout beans on a dish. Always she had liked breakfast, cereals and breads and eggs, so now she would eat breakfasts all day long, instead of the fuss her dad had called dinner and Jim supper. Whatever they called it, she had always hated it. Her dad ate rapidly, bent over his plate, but he kept an eye on the kids and told them to mind their manners. It was the time of day he came home and became boss. It was growl time for him, complaint time for Mother, whine and poke and nudge time for the kids. No, every person should eat quietly, without fuss.

  She found cheeses she savored: port salut and camembert and boursin. For many years her mother had used frozen vegetables, and she was surprised how good raw vegetables tasted. She discovered yogurt and sour cream and ricotta.

  She carried a lunch to work that she could eat gradually, nibbling through the day, and on her lunch hour she audited classes. Much of what went on at M.I.T. was incomprehensible but she had found subjects that interested her. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she sat in on Shakespeare, and Tuesdays and Thursdays she listened to European History from 1640 to 1900. Three mornings a week she came to campus an hour early for a small class on Cervantes, conducted in Spanish. At first she had trouble following the lectures. The registrar’s office had told her she could not be a student, but she had only to be unobtrusive or, as with Professor Hernandez, to beg permission.

  When she returned to the computer center, she passed over an invisible boundary. Students had a way of acting toward each other that she experienced as she walked around campus carrying her books, chatting before class—the way that the few students who recognized her from class spoke to her when she ran into them. But she became an invisible robot when she entered the center. All the troubles with the computer were visitable on her head; the nuisance of misplaced runoff or lost data, suddenly active bugs in the programs and being bumped from the computer, could all be blamed on her because she was no longer a person but a function.

  In January she got a less harassed job over in Tech Square, as secretary to a project involving biochemists and a graduate student in computer sciences. Instead of dealing anonymously with hundreds of students who treated her as automatically stupid, she had only to take orders from eight people. Professor Owasa had hired her. She had lied to him about her age and education, taking the chance that he would not bother to check her references. He hadn’t. Yes, the job was less harried and less unpleasant, but gradually she began to feel her isolation.

  She sat at the little desk out front of Professor Owasa’s office, off a corridor up in the tall office building. When she walked along the corridors with the brightly colored doors that reminded her of kindergarten blocks, she saw many other rooms in which one or two secretaries sat at desks like hers, secretaries to professors or to projects. In other rooms students sat typing at electric typewriters connected over phone lines to one of the big computers upstairs. Here and there were small lounges. The building was in use twentyfour hours a day, and in some of the offices she saw cots and couches. The atmosphere among the almost entirely male students and faculty tended to be loose and joking, but it was not easy to get to know other secretaries isolated in their offices.

  The younger secretaries told her about their sex lives, for she had become an automatic older woman as a divorcee. Saying she was divorced saved explaining. She imagined Jim would divorce her for desertion eventually. She did not feel secure enough to let him know where she was. The older secretaries worked much harder at their jobs and were nice to her though they thought her peculiar. It was funny to be an older woman. Most of the girls had had more experience with men than she had. But she liked to listen.

  At least two of the people who worked on the project were friendly to her and did not treat her as a robot. Tom Ryan, a fourth-year graduate student, had lived in her building briefly in between separating from his wife and moving into an apartment in Cambridge. He was unusually small for a man, barely taller than Beth and slight: but he was twenty-five and close to his doctorate. The other person who spoke to her in a personal way was a big flamboyant woman who was a graduate student in computer sciences.

  She could not remember exactly when Miriam Berg had first singled her out to notice. But one day while Beth was eating a fig surreptitiously, Miriam tapped her shoulder. “If you give me one, I won’t report you to the campus cops. Why, you can’t do anything as human as eat on this project.”

  So Beth gave Miriam a Calmyrna fig and Miriam ate it. She said figs looked funny when you really took a look at them, they looked like candied balls, didn’t they?

  Beth looked at the white fig she had bitten and smiled. “I never looked at balls that carefully. If I ever get a chance, I’ll try to notice.”

  Miriam, who had perhaps been
seeing if she could be shocked, because that would be like her, smiled more broadly and after that always stopped to chat with her. Sometimes Miriam brought her little gifts of a pear or an apple. Miriam was the only person in the world who knew she was a vegetarian, because no one but Miriam had enough curiosity about her to find out. Miriam reminded her of Dolores—and perhaps that was why she had not been shy with her—with her long black hair and her extravagant full body and Dolores’ way that if you had it you might as well flaunt it. Miriam dressed vividly and moved like a dancer. She was taller than Dolores and her clothes were more exotic. She was halfway to a doctorate and always referred to as brilliant, although with that word often went something disapproving like “bitch” even from some of the men on their project. She exuded a sexual aura she seemed well aware of, and one she enjoyed as much as any passer-by. She annoyed people. Sometimes the other secretaries on the corridor gossiped about her, but although Beth listened with interest, she learned little except that Miriam was supposed to have too many boy friends at the same time.

  In Beth’s classes, when students found out she was not really a student, they seemed to lose interest. From jokes she overheard she knew that the men who worked on the projects in her building thought the women worked there looking for husbands. They looked her over without interest in the corridors, at the coffee machines, but never started a conversation. She began to feel she was going to spend her life traveling the subway between M.I.T. and her room without ever making a friend, that if she disappeared or were run over, no one would even know. Her head bubbled with ideas and the solitary pleasures of her new fresh life, but she had no one to talk them over with. She felt as if her voice were rusting.

  Then the first Tuesday in April Tom Ryan asked her out. He had sent her upstairs to pick up his print-out. He was pleased with the results and held out the sheets to her, an accordion-folded pile of perforated paper with writing on it all in numbers and capital letters. “By God, it’s true you can make anything look good with numbers if you keep at it long enough, Beth my girl. If you’re just a bit clever … Aw, the wonders of science.… How would you like to take in a flick tonight?”