Small Changes by Marge Piercy Read Free Book Online

branch library, it showed a picture of a turtle just like Roxy and said box turtles were easily tamed and made good pets. Round and round the fence Roxy went making a trail in the dust and rolling like a sad tank through the water dish and over the lettuce and grapes they had put down, and around again. Finally she felt so sorry she could not stand it. She bargained with Dick to drive her out to the country to let the turtle go where she had found it in return for the contents of her white piggy bank.
    During the next week she kept thinking of the turtle. She was the turtle going round and round the chicken wire searching for a way out. But she did not want Jim to take her back where he had found her because that was a prison too. She studied herself as turtle. Turtles were not glamorous creatures. They were slow but dogged. Maybe it took them a long while to get someplace, even to figure out where they wanted to go, but then they kept stubbornly at it. They were not beautiful but they carried what they needed. They were not particularly brave and the idea of running from a wildturtle would make a child laugh. Threatened, they had a shell they could draw into and tuck up inside. They were cautious and long-lived. No one could teach a turtle to do tricks. They were quiet and could be mistaken for something not really alive, a rock or a piece of wood. Sometimes they aroused sadism in people. No great power had ever marched out to conquest under the emblem of a turtle.
    Real turtles had an advantage over self-proclaimed ones: a real shell. They could shut out questions. Jim told Marie’s husband that Beth was not acting right. Now she was getting a lot of flak from Marie and her mother. Every day one or the other or both called her and gave her a dressing down. Her mother turned up at work to mutter at her over the scissors and pins. Thursday evening Marie and Gene came over with the kids and told her she ought to have a baby, what was wrong with her now? Somehow everything had got simplified into Jim wanting her to get pregnant. Everyone agreed that was both problem and solution. Her mother told her that every woman was afraid at first, but every woman went through it, that was what God had made them for.
    Both Marie and her mother closed themselves off to her. She would think they were responding, she would try to talk to them. Once she started to cry and her mother touched her on the shoulder and said, “There, there.” But they were the arm of authority. The next moment her mother was calling her a crybaby. They had to press her back in line. She was not behaving as a wife was supposed to. She sensed that she scared them. She touched something in Marie, a sore spot that made Marie nervous, until Marie responded by yelling at her in the same voice she used to scream at her kids. “Now you shape up, Bethie! We’re ashamed of you! Everybody has babies and nobody else makes a fuss!”
    Her mother and her mother-in-law came over together. Her mother spread herself smack in the middle of a blue sofa. Her mother-in-law sat in Jim’s favorite chair, the recliner. It had three positions but Mrs. Walker sat up straight in it. Beth did not want to sit next to her mother so she sat on the hassock that matched the recliner, which put her down near the floor. They both told her loudly that it was her duty as a wife to have a baby.
    “He doesn’t want a baby, either. He’s just insisting on it now because he’s mad at me and he doesn’t want to listen!”
    “Don’t spout nonsense,” her mother said. “What should he listen to you about? What do you know? He wants what’s good for the marriage.”
    “Jim does too want children. He always has,” Mrs. Walker said. “And you let on that you wanted children too before you got married, so I don’t know where you’re getting all this now.”
    They glared at her and each other. Mrs. Walker said her mother had spoiled her. Her mother said she never had. Up until Bethie left home