Small Changes by Marge Piercy

of him as a man. All too aware. Often she did not speak to him when she wanted to, because the remote kindly quality of his answers made her feel invisible.
    He asked her, “Do you think Tom’s going to move out?”
    “He’s found a place in Brookline that sounds good, but he hasn’t actually seen it yet. Do you mind if he moves?”
    Jackson shrugged. “This is a kind of halfway house. People come in here and stay for a while till they can get it together.From busted marriages and bad trips and exploded communes. They can take it easy here and keep to themselves if they need to, or have company if they need that. Once their heads are together, they move on. At least that’s what I like to think on good mornings.”
    “On bad mornings what do you say?”
    He laughed silently, almost a grimace. “Then I think we all live in narrowing circles, round and round saying our pieces. Like a cartoon I saw during the last Harvard strike. One of the deans had his head up his own asshole saying, ‘Now we’re beginning to see the light.’ ”
    “If Tom moves back to Brookline, he’ll be closer to his kids.”
    “Close to Laverne too.” He puzzled on her, his forehead wrinkling. “You don’t care?”
    “He belongs to that marriage. That’s where he’s … glued together, somehow.”
    “Suppose he goes back to her. You wouldn’t miss him?”
    “We miss each other every day, by about a mile.”
    “What a cool child you pretend to be.” His eyes searched her, sandy and narrowed. “You ought to at least think you’re in love at your age.”
    “I did that once. And got married.”
    “You’re awfully young to be so cynical. To go drifting along with such a measured thing.”
    “Maybe I’m not so young that I don’t prefer to know what I’m doing!”
    His bread popped out of the toaster and he spread grape jelly on it. “The young learn the words early. But wait. You’ll turn on again.” He was smiling at his toast.
    His easy patronizing assurance, you’ll fall back into love, wheel turning, natural as the seasons. How dare he assume that she would do what she did not want, did not accept? Looking up from his plate, Jackson winced as if he had bitten on a stone. For a moment he met her stare with his sandy gaze questioning. Then he pulled an old wallet from his pocket and unzipped the picture compartment, shaking out loose pipe tobacco before handing the photograph across. A small boy stood wobbly-legged, his sunflower face open in a blaze of grin.
    “Who is that? You? No. Your baby brother?”
    “Jerry Magnusson, born Jerry Jackson.”
    “He’s your son?”
    Dryly, “He was.”
    Dorine said from the doorway, “What’s that? I didn’t know you had a kid. I didn’t even know you’d been married. Nobody knows, do they?”
    “Sure. Phil and Miriam do. Phil’s met him many times. The courts are something wonderful, when you get caught in their net.”
    Dorine handed the photo back and went to take a shower. Beth came around the table to look again at the picture.
    Jackson said, “It’s easier for him, having the same name as his brothers. And his new father, oh, he can do a lot for him.” He slammed the wallet and shoved it in his pocket. “You kind of look like him, freckles and coloring. Who the hell knows what he looks like now?” He sprawled back, glaring at nothing.
    Slowly Beth returned to her side of the table. The splatter of Dorine’s shower came through the closed door. She felt a sore sympathy with him that she was too timid to offer, but also a sense of wrong … as if the picture were a license, a degree in suffering. “You used that on me to say you know more about pain than I do.… Okay! … But you don’t know me.… I mean …” Words so flat. Tempest of emotion and thought churned through her and issued in words like a handful of gravel.
    “Whereas you know yourself through and through.” He grinned bleakly.
    “But I can try to live the way … according to