Small Changes by Marge Piercy

Author:Marge Piercy [Piercy, Marge]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-307-78854-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-19T16:00:00+00:00

THREE

Both in Turn

18

That Which God Has Joined

Because events happened fast Beth had little time to think. She fell back on passive resistance, which worked poorly with Jim and the detective actively pushing and pulling on her, threatening and causing things to move faster than she could figure out the direction. When Jim showed up at the commune, she panicked. She did not want him in her life. She had a panicked, choking fear that if the detective and Jim marched around on her life, the fragile beginnings of independence and self and relationships that she had made, there would be nothing left. She did not want them to know her life. The more they threatened, the more she wanted to conceal. In her confusion and fear she agreed to go with them—anything to get them out.

Then the detective flew to Syracuse, leaving her to drive back with Jim in his car. During that seven-hour drive she repeatedly imagined, every time she used a toilet in a service plaza, running away. Always when she emerged he was grimly standing in wait. Every time she tried to start a conversation with him he grew angry and began to drive so erratically she got scared and shut up. Turning the radio loud, he drove staring straight ahead. Dreading Syracuse, nevertheless after a few hours she could not imagine a tighter hell than being cooped up with him clenching his jaws and driving, driving while the radio sang about love and sweet dreams and easy sex. The Stones sang of women who were under their thumb, while other groups beseeched girls to give their favors, be true, stop hanging on or go away. They all sounded like bad jokes to her. She remembered in the early days of her marriage rock music had seemed to promise her life and space and energy. Now it felt like her enemy, reinforcing in Jim images of how men and women were supposed to be.

The Massachusetts Pike turned into the New York Thruway and it was all the same nightmare of white road advancing before them and blurring to the sides. Two days before Christmas: the trarrle was heavy. That morning it had snowed, but the expressways were clear until outside Albany. After dark the wind rose and snow came blowing at them. He did not slow and she was attacked by fearful images of collision. Out of rage he would smash them both into a viaduct.

They ate in a service plaza. He had a hot turkey platter and she had vegetable soup and a cheese sandwich. Chewing the tasteless cheese, she remembered the pill fight. Cold fingers closed on her throat. To have sex with him would be ugly but she was not sure what would happen. When she went to the women’s room, she removed the pills from the container in her purse and worked them into the lining of her coat. Then she threw the container away.

Standing at the washbasin and scooping her hand for water, she took a pill and glared into the mirror.

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