by Marge Piercy
Lureen was devastated. She had carried twins, perfectly formed by then, two little boys. The first fiction I ever wrote was an attempt to recreate her sorrow in a short story. I had not been in my own room for more than a month when I began to write both poetry and fiction. My first poems were about death, of course. I was death obsessed. My room was upstairs at the front of the house. My parents had a bedroom downstairs by the bathroom that I too used. This was a house three times as big as our old one, with a spacious living room, a big dining room, a kitchen with a breakfast nook, three bedrooms plus my little room, two baths (one used only by the roomers) and a big back porch. In the rear stood a two-car garage and a sour cherry tree I loved. In spring I would lie under it, staring at the miracle of blossoms thrusting out of wood. The two-story house was made of yellow brick. All through my childhood brick had represented something fine and stable, for that was what the houses were built with far out from the center city where we lived. We would drive out there around Christmastime to look at all the lights on the houses. I took the bus in that direction—to go to the all-white high school, to go to Rouge Park, several miles distant, where there was a public swimming pool, although I never really learned to swim.
The house was a complete mess, and we had spent two months before we moved in stripping and painting and carting out the filth and the trash of thirty years of the previous owner. My parents got the house at a good price because it had stood vacant for a few years. The only way we could afford it, however, was to take in roomers, which covered the mortgage payments. In front against the cement porch we never used, two tall Norwegian spruces loomed. Their gloom suited me: I thought them dark and romantic. My room stood across a hall from those of the roomers, in a gable overlooking the street. It was tiny and unheated. The roof sloped on both sides, but my father, a good carpenter, took an old dresser and a discarded bookcase and built them into the walls, into the wasted space under the eaves. I had a daybed and a small desk, a radio and a turntable that played through it—both of which I purchased from jobs I did after school. I wrote for a neighborhood newspaper, paid by the inch of copy. When I was sixteen, I began working downtown for Sam’s cut-rate department store. I worked in better dresses, $4.98 and up, where the older “girls” treated me as a pet. They reminded me a little of my aunt Ruth, for they could make a living, operate in the business world, dress well, tease one another about men without seeming to take them too seriously. My senior year, I went to work part-time for the telephone company, as a long-distance operator—a job I continued to do during certain vacations all through college. Christmas meant little to me, so I didn’t mind working it.
I painted the walls pale green. They were imitation rough plaster. In the wall opposite the daybed I slept on was a bas-relief of a sailing ship. The two casement windows were narrow and opened onto the street. I thought casement windows romantic. I adored my room. When I was home, that was where I preferred to be. Fortunately, high school gave homework. No matter how quickly I actually did it, homework provided me with a defense for my retreat.
I appreciated what my father had done for my room, and I tried, briefly, to please him, as I had tried when I was younger, with even less success. I was skinny, dark, opinionated and with strange habits. While I had a tortured love-hate relationship with my mother, my relationship with my father was distant and wounded. I had the impression he disliked me. I could never quite give up trying to communicate with my mother. She should, I felt, have been able to understand if only she would try. I was always explaining things I had learned to her, which must have been a real pain in the ass. I lectured her about race, about mythology, about history. With my father, conversations tended to peter out quickly. We would talk about the Tigers and the weather. I could ask him about some process, how steel was made, how electricity was generated. That about finished it off, except for Brutus. Once he had sauntered into our lives, we could talk about the cat. He was a strong personality.
I put the old typewriter my aunt Ruth had given me on the little desk. I had my books, I had my writing. I had girlfriends now like other girls did, middle-class girls who seemed to me quite naive but who were special because of that. If they were naive in some respects—sexually, streetwise—they had vast arcane knowledge about clothing and makeup and body hygiene. They taught me to shave under my arms and use a deodorant. They told me that lipstick was supposed to match what you were wearing, and that you didn’t mix silver-toned jewelry with gold—not that I had much to mix. What I had, boyfriends had given me, probably swiped. They cared about all sorts of things I was indifferent to but knew I was supposed to take an interest in. I began to follow certain white singers whom other girls had crushes on. Basically they tried to show me how to be a proper girl, and if I had wanted to be one, I would have learned more than I did. But I was resistant to sex roles and I wanted something larger and deeper and darker, yearnings I was skilled at keeping mostly out of view. Still, I understood their tutelage was necessary, even to get a scholarship. I was learning to pass. I am not reading this in from contemporary feminism. My writings at the time—1952, 1953—are full of these feelings. I did not feel the way a girl was supposed to. I must be something different.
I was well educated for my age in some respects: I read Freud and Marx, not books about them; I read Hemingway, Dos Passos, Dickens, the Brontës and an enormous amount of poetry. I had zero social graces and no manners, table or otherwise. My parents ate as if the food might disappear any moment, and I gobbled even faster, to get away from the table. I was ill dressed and had no idea how to use makeup. My skin was always good, for my mother trained me to eat fruit and drink water. I was still painfully thin and had little idea how to talk with middle-class boys. The things that aroused my enthusiasm—the novels, the poets, the analytical books that were tools to grasp the world—were not familiar to my peers. My dexterity with a knife and my ability to run like hell were not useful skills for impressing girls in my classes or boys I might date. Actually I hated dating. It was a minefield. I had no better idea how to behave than someone pulled from a tribal culture and dumped in a middle-class muddle. I stumbled through dates, hoping to pass for normal.
I did not play tennis, I did not swim, I did not bowl. I knew how to dance, but mostly the wild dancing of my old neighborhood rather than the social dancing of high school. I could jitterbug but couldn’t fox-trot. I knew a fair amount about baseball from my father, for we had even gone to see the Tigers at Briggs Stadium. Friends dragged me to hockey games (this was the heyday of Gordie Howe), but I understood little about the rules. Basketball and football were alien to me. I did not watch TV because I would have had to stay downstairs with my parents and risk confrontation and questioning. I was enamored of foreign movies and went sometimes with Edith or with one of my other friends. Edith was the daughter of a foreman at Fords, from a Finnish-American family. I saw Les Enfants Terribles—Cocteau—ten times. I remember adoring The Man in the White Suit with Alec Guinness and Kind Hearts and Coronets.
I was an editor of the school paper and joined clubs, the way adolescence was supposed to be. Much of the time, I saw myself playing a role at school but occasionally I lost it and got into arguments. I was an open socialist, thrown out of social studies classes a couple of times. I was pleased not to have to defend myself physically, very pleased. I was leading a far more normal adolescent life with the sense that all of me that counted was underground. That first fall, just as the weather was turning crisp and cold, another cat came to our door.
At first I thought he looked like Fluffy, but his legs were longer, his brown tabby fur a bit darker and with clearer markings, and he had lynx-like tufts in his ears. We thought he was a mature cat. We were wrong. He was only half grown. At his full size, he weighed twenty-two pounds, and not much of that was fat. He became quite simply enormous. In that section of Detroit in all the years my parents lived there and afterward, there were a great many very big dark brown tabby cats with tufts in their ears,
for he populated the neighborhood with his progeny. He maintained a large territory but seldom bore a mark of fighting. He was aloof but not hostile to other cats, and they rarely challenged his benevolent rule. He was simply the dominant animal in his domain.
I named him Noble Brutus, as I was studying Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at the time and I had read Caesar’s Gallic Wars in Latin. I did not like Caesar. I thought Brutus had done a good job on him. I might call my new cat Brutus to my heart’s content, but to my parents, he was Butch. He came to either name. Edith said he would probably come to any name at all and tried that out: “Come on, Felix. Come, Bugs Bunny.” He sat down and stared at her. Then he turned his back and stalked away. He knew his two names.
He had an equable nature, affectionate but strong willed. He would not do what he did not want to do. He wanted to sit in our laps, but soon, he was much too big. When my father lay on the couch, he would climb on his chest, covering it completely. Otherwise he sat beside me or overflowed a hassock. Sometimes he wanted to be out at night, busy with his courting and caterwauling. Mostly he wanted to spend the night inside. In this house I had far more privacy, and the front and side doors were far from my parents’ bedroom. I could easily let him in and take him upstairs. He was better than the high setting on the heating pad in that cold room. He would get under the covers and stretch out next to me. As he came into his full size, he warmed most of my torso as I curled around him. I slept with him until I went away to college.
In the old neighborhood, I knew who lived in every house, their financial situation, their family troubles, their religion, their ethnicity, their virtues and vices. In this new neighborhood, I knew none of the neighbors. Gradually, around the time I left for college, Mother began to gather a coterie of women who came in through the kitchen door to talk, to gossip, to consult. By the time Father dragged her from the neighborhood many years later, she had wide acquaintance there. During the early years in the house, however, she was busy with the roomers and with making the yard and house her own. My mother never visited neighborhood friends. She made them come to her.
When I worked at Sam’s cut-rate department store, I brought a sandwich from home or bought a hot dog and ate it standing, gulped down with Vernor’s ginger ale, the Detroit spicy specialty, so I could spend the bulk of my lunch hour in the downtown branch library. Edith and I bought a dress together that we thought very adult: navy taffeta that rustled invitingly and was cut out in a diamond pattern on the neck and shoulders. We imagined it daring. We passed that dress back and forth for the next three years, for parties. Finally I gave it to her, since the color suited her better and my notion of sophistication had changed by then.
I bought books: Frazer’s Golden Bough; poetry by Whitman and Emily Dickinson, my mentors; T. S. Eliot. An anthology of postwar poets, including Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, and above all important to me, Muriel Rukeyser. But 90 percent of the money I earned, I saved for college. These are the years when up in that room, I became who I was to be, began to write both poetry and fiction. The world—the intellectual and political and literary world—was opening to me, although it was tremendously difficult for me to sort it out. I remember reading Faulkner before I had the tools to understand what he was doing, and the feeling I had that this writing was a code I must learn to break. Every six months I would try, until finally I suddenly understood, and then he was mine. I had begun reading poetry seriously and passionately with the Romantics—Byron and Shelley and Keats—and had early and never abandoned passions for Whitman and Dickinson. But I had moved on to more contemporary models by my senior year of high school.
I listened to music on the little turntable I had bought, often getting albums out of the library. I was in love with Russian composers, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Scriabin, Rimsky-Korsakov. I also discovered blues and jazz. I was crazy about Duke Ellington. Brutus liked music, making little crooning noises along with it. He did not care for dissonant music. He particularly disliked a symphony of Shostakovich, and if I played it, would insist I open the door and let him out—which actually involved going downstairs with him and letting him outside through the front door or else opening the door to the downstairs and letting him into my parents’ part of the house.
I had grown up listening to urban blues, although to me it was just music. As a young child, I had lobbied my parents for a piano—friends of my parents had one I adored. Finally my parents got a battered and stained upright with a lovely tone. I was accepted into the Detroit Conservatory of Music and was a gifted pupil, so my mother was told, but to reach the conservatory, my mother and I had to take a streetcar and two buses. She did it with me for a year—amazing. Then she found a piano teacher who was much cheaper, McGillicuddy. We hated each other. Mutual torture went on for the next four years of my childhood. My finger got crushed in the car door shortly after I started working with him, and thereafter it would unaccountably go numb, giving me an uncertain left hand. Besides, I loved to play with feeling and a lot of pedal. It’s not hard to understand why I drove him mad. He loved exercises, like the Little Pischna, technical brilliance. It was a bad match, but he drank and came cheaply. He lived at the Y. Around age eleven, my lessons stopped. My parents sold the piano. I did not have one again until we moved to Ward Avenue. A neighbor was selling a much smaller piano, what was called in the furniture parlance then, a spinet. I was pleased, but probably did not say so. I was so guarded I wouldn’t admit to liking chocolate.
I read The New Yorker religiously, sure I was becoming sophisticated with every page I turned. I read the listings for theaters and cabarets, as if even the mention of performances I would never see and perhaps would never want to see, could liberate me from Detroit and my parents, with whom I was at war. Although my life was far more proper after we moved, they were annoyed by what I did, read, listened to in the privacy of my room. I was developing tastes that were not theirs, and my mother resented that. She would denounce books I read. I remember her throwing a fit about Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point. She dipped into it and considered it pornographic. I had forged a note in her handwriting to the local library so I could take out adult books. Since I still cut school oftener than other good students, I had become adept at creating notes from my mother. Sometimes I went to the Art Institute of Detroit, a space I had appropriated as a seventh grader, where I felt safe. Sometimes I wandered downtown. Other times I went to the main public library. High school was a time of pervasive massive boredom, boredom as thick as peanut butter, as bland as vegetable shortening. Almost all I learned was on my own, reading books nobody encouraged me to read.
I had more time to think and brood and scribble than ever before in my life or ever again. I thought about family stories and the contrast of my father’s and mother’s families. I thought the Piercys lacked curiosity, tolerance, sensuality, joie de vivre, warmth. I thought the Bunnins lacked the ability to choose something and stick to it. They were brilliant and flighty. They began well but did not follow through. They were warm but scattered. Love blew them before it like papers in a wind. I would not be like that. I would avoid, I told myself, the defects of both families. But I was painfully aware of my own. I felt myself to be so much less than I wanted to be that I mocked myself, huddled in my chilly room with my cat. I did not particularly like myself. I thought myself ugly, cowardly, lumpy. I saw myself as someone who imagined great deeds and did nothing but cower.
I fantasized obsessively. My daydreams, the stories I told myself, were like knitting I carried with me and took up at any odd moment, riding the bus, doing the endless housework, sitting in class, sitting at supper trying to shut out the quarreling voices of my parents. Meals were fraught. I learned to eat sparely and quickly, to shovel in some food and flee. My mother cooked chicken well as a pot roast, and the same with beef. Vegetables were possibly dangerous. She was convinced a brother of hers had ruined his stomach and died of pneumonia (how these were related I never learned) because he ate too many raw vegeta
bles. She cooked vegetables until they were soupy. Often we ate canned vegetables. I think most people under forty today have reached maturity without the horrid experience of eating canned spinach or canned carrots. Such is true progress.
She also put sugar in or on almost everything: on lettuce, on tomatoes, on cantaloupe and grapefruit. My parents both had keen sweet tooths. Before going to bed every night, they had cake and coffee. I would fly out yammering through the roof if I did that. Most of the sweet things were cakes, pies, cupcakes, cookies my mother baked. If she was an indifferent cook, she was a fine baker. I am the opposite, but I still make an apple cake, a flat European-style coffee cake, that is an imitation of hers.
In daydreams I lived great heroic adventures and tragic romances. How could love end happily? I hardly saw anyone who seemed happy in marriage, and the last thing I wanted was to be married. That seemed to me a kind of death for a woman, in which she lost not only her will and her power but even her name. I was determined never to marry, but I wanted sexual and romantic adventures. I knew from my mother and girlfriends that women were not supposed to think that way, so I felt myself more of an outsider than ever.
Typically, I read hunched on my daybed wearing a bathrobe over my clothes for warmth, with Brutus lying beside me, often under the bathrobe to be closer, although he did not really fit. He had a soft but melodious purr that seemed to rise and fall in its harmonics. In all those years, he never scratched me, even when I occasionally had to give him medicine, always home prescribed. In later years, my parents actually began to take Brutus to the vet, a change in their lifestyle, which is probably one of the reasons he lived to be twenty-two. He was by far the longest lived of any of their cats, and he was certainly the healthiest.
