Small Change – Excerpt
She was thirty, a pale beautiful woman with long blond hair and high cheekbones, small eyes, sensuous mouth, an air of serenity and loftiness—superiority—and under that, nervousness, insecurity, disappointment. She was tired. There was the young child who woke several times a night. There was Danny who painted till two in the morning, then slid in beside her and coaxed her awake. There was her own passivity. She was always willing, even though she had to get up early, and always resentful, but never out loud. She complied. In conversation she was direct and Danny often took part, but in bed, apparently, she said nothing. She felt him slide against her, his hand between her legs, its motion the reverse of a woman wiping herself, back to front instead of front to back. She smelled paint—the air of the poorly ventilated attic where he worked—and felt his energetic weariness and responded with a weary energy of her own.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t call her by any name (during the day he called her Moe more often than Maureen). He reached across her and with practised efficiency found the Vaseline in the bedside drawer.
I met her one afternoon on the sidewalk outside the neighbourhood grocery store. It was sunny and it must have been warm—a Saturday in early June. Our section of New York was poor and Italian, and we looked very different from the dark women around us. The friendship began with that shorthand—shortcut to each other—an understanding that goes without saying. I had a small child too.
A week later, at her invitation, I walked the three blocks to her house and knocked on the front door. She opened a side door and called my name. “Beth,” she said, “this way.”
She was dressed in a loose and colourful quilted top and linen pants. She looked composed and bohemian and from another class.
Inside there was very little furniture: a sofa, a chest, a rug, Danny’s paintings on the wall. He was there. A small man with Fred Astaire’s face and an ingratiating smile. Once he started to talk, she splashed into the conversation, commenting on everything he said and making it convoluted out of what I supposed was a desire to be included. Only later did I realize how much she insisted on being the centre of attention, and how successfully she became the centre of mine.
We used to take our kids to the only playground within walking distance. It was part of a schoolyard that marked the border between our neighbourhood and the next. The pavement shimmered with broken glass, the kids were wild and unattended. We pushed our two on the swings and kepteach other company. She said she would be so mad if Danny got AIDS, and I thought about her choice of words—“so mad”—struck by the understatement.
I learned about sex from her the way girls learn about sex from each other. In this case the information came not in whispered conversations behind a hedge, but more directly and personally than anything I might have imagined at the age of twelve. In those days the hedge was high and green and the soil below it dark, a setting at once private, natural, and fenced off. This time everything was in the open. I was the audience, the friend with stroller, the mild-mannered wide-eyed listener who learned that breastfeeding brought her to the point of orgasm, that childbirth had made her vagina sloppy and loose, that anal sex hurt so much she would sit on the toilet afterwards, bracing herself against the stabs of pain.
We were in the playground (that sour, overused, wrongly used, hardly playful patch of pavement) and she said she was sore and told me why. When I protested on her behalf she said, “But I might have wanted it. I don’t know. I think I did want it in some way.”