by Marge Piercy
His parents’ wedding present to us was to pay off the Porsche finally. Robert considered himself a great driver, but he had caused several accidents already, as I learned later. One Sunday when it had been raining and he was driving too fast, he slammed into a tree. Breaking the windshield with my head, I had a concussion and a pelvic injury that manifested itself in an agonizing bladder that flared up on and off for the next year. I also broke a couple of teeth. The concussion fiddled with my short-term memory. For the next few weeks, I would be fine one moment and dizzy the next. Pain in my head and my pelvis came and went. Robert felt guilty, but having suffered as a child, he was convinced others should endure pain silently. He took the painkillers prescribed for me and gave them to a friend of his who liked to get high on them. For the first weeks, it hurt me to have sex, which annoyed him. It was a bad time. I had been writing the first draft of a new novel that was by far the best thing I had done. I had just worked out the ending the day of the accident. I never managed to remember what I had planned, and I was haunted ever after by the conviction that I wrote a poorer ending than I might have.
At the end of August with the Porsche finally fixed, Robert’s company sent him out to San Francisco to work on a project with a large computer firm in Palo Alto. We were told it would take about three months, so we would be back in Boston by December. We moved out, put our things into storage, threw a couple of suitcases into the Porsche and headed west. The Porsche broke down in Fargo and again later on in British Columbia. It never ran well after the accident. Locating a Porsche mechanic each time was a major nuisance.
The first stop I remember vividly is Glacier National Park. I found the rocks magical in their formations and rich colors, red, black, buff and green. It was the first week in September. We took short hikes, saw bears and eagles, then camped. It began to snow. It snowed so hard that the next morning we had to dig our way out of our tent. That night we went to a motel on a Blackfoot Indian reservation and ate in the local restaurant, where I encountered something that has happened many times since: Native Americans assume that I am one of them. When I said I wasn’t, they kept telling me I should not be ashamed of my heritage, and I kept explaining that I look like Jews from Kazan, who have some Tartar in them. Suddenly I understood something that happened to me on the way to Yellowstone when I was ten. When we stopped in Cheyenne, Wyoming, I went to use the bathroom, but the gas station attendant, who did not see my parents, told me, “We don’t want you people using our bathrooms.” I thought he meant Jews. Now suddenly it all made sense. He too thought I was an Indian.
We drove into the Canadian Rockies. The Trans-Canada Highway was two lanes and now it was elk-mating season. First we saw one, then another and then yet another, great confident creatures rippling along balancing their weight of candelabra antlers. Frequently cars and trucks were halted in both directions for a mile or two while a couple of bull elks met in the highway—a convenient empty spot—to bellow at each other and then to achieve thundering collision of bone on bone until one backed down. We went out in a skimobile onto a glacier. I was fascinated with glaciers, both the deep crevasses, the ice caves, the expanse of them and the sense that they were active and moving in their own geological time frame, and the runoff at the bottom of blue-green glacial milk, so cold it made my wrists and ankles ring like glass goblets when I tested those waters. I was smitten with everything I saw.
Driving across the continent in a Porsche loaded with several suitcases, a typewriter and computer paraphernalia, was driving several thousand miles hunched over with my chin bumping my knees. It was a condition of permanent backache, interrupted sporadically by bladder pain from the accident. I was always looking for cranberry juice—an exotic substance in those days which my doctor had told me would help bladder pain. Whenever I found any, I would buy several bottles, but there was little room in the car for even a box of tissues. Still, I was content. I was seeing the world, and I had always been ready to go off traveling at the faintest invitation. I was the navigator, as in my childhood.
When we finally got to San Francisco, we rented a two-room furnished apartment on North Point Street from an amateur landlord who looked like Commander Schweppes and lied constantly: a furnished apartment in which we camped in our sleeping bags among rolled-up rugs that were stored there and without any furniture for the first week. You must not imagine that neighborhood as it is now. The Cannery was not a mall but a tomato cannery. The Chocolate Factory contained no boutiques but made chocolate. Another cannery processed fish. A train ran up the center of North Point until the corner by our apartment and then switched to the street behind. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I would waken, sure a train was bearing down on me. Depending on the wind, the neighborhood smelled of chocolate, fish or tomato sauce. It was mixed racially and economically, Japanese, Chinese, Latino people, a few Afro-Americans and a fair-sized gay contingent. North Beach, the next neighborhood, was still predominantly Italian, and we ate a lot of panettone and cannoli. Up on Russian Hill, there were some expensive houses and apartments. Fisherman’s Wharf was still a fishing wharf, although tourists came. We bought cooked crabs there, little shrimp and fish to panfry. Cost Plus was just one warehouse where we found cheap tchotchkes as presents and household furnishings. The washing machine was up on our roof. I would hang my clothes, looking at Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge. Never before or since have I done the laundry as often or as sedulously as I did on North Point Street. I was infatuated with San Francisco. I made love to the city by walking.
Robert worked six days a week in Palo Alto. He was swallowed up by the project and I was free to write and to wander around. I soon began working as an artist’s model, and I made friends with painters, poets, jazz musicians, writers—would-bes like myself. I had a whole set of separate friends and a life of my own. A Black jazz musician who lived up on Russian Hill in a room in a rambling falling-apart house where several musicians stayed would drop in on me and talk in a slow circling way about his life. It was from him I learned about Watts, where he grew up. He said L.A. was a city built on a sewer, and the sewer was going to explode. The shit, he said, is just going to bury them. Sometimes he would come with his saxophone and play for me.
Soon my Greek friend Sophia was sent out with her son to join Robert, but she could do much of the work in the apartment she rented—so we ran around the city together, guiltlessly. We made friends with keepers in the big cat house at the zoo, who had their own literary zine. John, who was short, black-haired with a pointy beard, was the friendliest. He wrote Beat poetry and loved the tigers. The lions, he said, were just too tame. There was no challenge. They would fuck at the drop of a hat and you became pals with them easily. The tigers were different. They were pussycats until adolescence and then he could not turn his back on them. They were moody and quick to attack. He admired their unwillingness to adjust to captivity. The leopards were harder to understand and read. He often could guess when a tiger was going to give him a hard time, but the leopards could fool him.
We had friends in the coffeehouses of North Beach. It felt as if everybody we fell into conversation with in a bar or at the Marina or in a bakery turned out to be poets or painters or dancers or actors or musicians. San Francisco had powerful energy. When I was not posing for artists, I wrote five to six hours a day. Afterward, friends came by to visit me or I walked miles or went off with Sophia on some adventure while her son was in school. I climbed every stairway on Russian Hill, on Telegraph Hill. I had the ambition of climbing every stairway in the city. Soon I knew almost as many people as I had in college. I was accepted by some other writers and no longer invisible.
In the evenings, when Robert came home, if he wasn’t too tired, we tried restaurants (I was learning to cook, but the kitchen was elementary, just a corner of the living room), visited our favorite bars, listened to jazz, went to poetry readings and foreign films and the occasional opening of some artist we knew through the less successful ones who were friends
. Usually Robert worked Saturdays, but sometimes he had weekends off or even a long weekend, when we did all the tourist stops: Yosemite, the redwoods, wine country, Monterey. We went into the hills sometimes for birding, for Robert was an avid life-list man, and had taught me to take an interest. I remember an afternoon in the coastal mountains watching vultures. Sometimes we would go as far as Castroville to bring home a bag of cheap artichokes, which I learned to cook four ways.
We drove down to Los Angeles with Sophia and her little boy. He had been promised Disney as a bribe for being pulled out of his school and hauled off to San Francisco for an indefinite and ever-expanding period of time. In Anaheim, it ashed, to our surprise, as it rains or snows other places. We stayed in a motel and called my brother, whom I had not seen in fourteen years. I’d received letters from him perhaps three times. He had divorced again, leaving his third wife and their two sons, whom I never did meet. Now he was with Lilly, a Chicana widow who had a house in the hills and four children, mostly adolescents, from her marriage. I was struck by her resemblance to our mother. We did not hit it off. Grant appeared with a thermos of premixed martinis and took us on a tour of Forest Lawn, which he thought extremely tasteful. He informed us there were no Blacks in Los Angeles. He was no longer working a dubious real estate business around Salton Lake—that polluted puddle of agricultural chemical runoff in the desert—but was a minor executive at Northrup. We also spent a day with my aunt Ruth, my youngest and favorite aunt, and her new husband, Eddie. That was easy for us—we clicked, we understood each other.
Robert and I developed a serious interest in wine. We tended to be systematic about any new interest, and we began reading about and sampling California and European wines, as well as methodical tasting at wineries. Robert started a cellar book, taking off the labels and writing notes on each wine we drank. We bought our first dishes, a black and white brush-stroke pattern that we found in a Japanese hardware store in Japantown. I was still smoking then, not yet having paid the price for the habit, so we were able to go to bars. The Buena Vista, now a tourist hangout, was then just a neighborhood bar featuring Irish coffee. I knew a pornographer who used his writing to support his passion for Japanese pots. He had a list of synonyms over the typewriter: tits, boobs, peaches, pears, tomatoes, jugs, etc. It was all according to a formula: the first sex scene starts on page five or six, then a threesome, then an orgy, and so on. He amused himself by working into the pages between the obligatory sex events (the lesbian, the sadomasochistic) satires on scenes he knew, and one of his recent books featured all the regulars from the Buena Vista. The San Remo was another neighborhood bar where we passed time.
Sophia and I used to sit in the sand at the little beach at the foot of Russian Hill, watching the freighters and tankers, the pleasure boats and the occasional cruise ship or liner. If it was too cold to sit in the sand by the Maritime Museum, we occupied places on the wide cement steps that looked to be bleachers but to observe what unlikely sporting event we never learned. A race of seals, who visited the docks often? The sea lions that populate the area today I never remember seeing there. I loved that disparate neighborhood.
I was utterly infatuated with San Francisco. I had never experienced anything like the light, the pastel houses marching up the steep hills, the grid pattern imposed on the rugged landscape. I was never looking straight ahead as in the Midwest, but I was forever looking up or down or into a far vista. I loved to watch the fog sweep in under the Golden Gate Bridge, the best view being from the roof where I hung my laundry. There was a lightness to the architecture, not just the carpenter Gothic one-story houses that seemed wooden jokes, enough froufrou on them to furnish out a three-story mansion, but the pastels of the buildings. Even the common use of gray on wood or stucco was a pale pastel gray, rather than the stone gray of Paris. The greenery felt to me at once manicured and lush—often trimmed to fit a narrow space but overflowing and ready to fill any vacant spot of ground.
Unlike the months in Cambridge, when everything I remember is with Robert, in San Francisco, most of my memories are with friends, artists I was modeling for, acquaintances I made as I explored the city. I saw far more of Sophia than of Robert. This was my first taste of middle-class life: enough to eat, wine to drink, a reasonably furnished clean apartment. I had never lived in such a place. It was tiny but modern, with plumbing that worked, no bugs, floors that did not sag or have holes in them, electricity that seemed to function very well indeed. I had an American Express credit card: I had never had a credit card. It seemed magical. Soon I had a couple of charge accounts at department stores.
I did not rush out and begin buying things madly, but we had come intending to stay only two or three months, and we ended up living there almost a year. We both needed clothes. I wore the first coat I ever bought new, an intense blue wool. If I wanted a book or a pair of gloves, I could buy them. I cannot overstate how incredible this felt, how luxurious, how delightful. I did not become a clotheshorse or a mad consumer, but I enjoyed my enablement. I did not mind the work I was doing, for ten dollars an hour seemed to me great pay and I was vain about my body. Modesty had eluded me. At that age, I was quite ready to drop my clothes and show off. It was, after all, the thing about me that had been most admired. I had plenty of time to write, and I did.
Mostly in trying to describe how it felt to have crept into the middle class I want you to understand that I felt free. Poverty is immensely constricting. If you feel a pain, the first thing that comes to mind is how much is it going to cost. There is no information available about options. If you go to a clinic, you lose an entire day waiting around, and often nothing happens. You never see the same doctor twice. So probably you don’t do anything about the pain except take a cheap painkiller or get drunk. Dentistry options are worse, more demeaning, more painful.
If you need something, you do without something else. You are always trading off getting a winter coat against new boots or against paying an electric bill or eating sufficiently for a while. Nothing is ever simple and nothing is ever quick, except random violence. What you want, you will probably not get. If you do get it, it will be secondhand or cracked or an inferior rip-off that falls apart. The first twenty-five years of my life were unremittingly boxed in poverty. I liked being middle-class, I appreciated being middle-class, although I did not necessarily expect that it would last.
The apartment had a garage on the ground floor, but since it was rented out, Robert kept the Porsche on the street. One night a car slammed into the Porsche at the curb, smashing it up. Robert had it repaired, but he did not like the way it handled, so he sold it. He bought a Peugeot, in reaction. He had endured two accidents with the Porsche, and each had been expensive. He felt this family car, the Peugeot, was more appropriate. It was rather sedate, although it had a sunroof—which leaked whenever it rained, as it does rather a lot in San Francisco. I took driving lessons, so I could help drive back across country. I never became much of a driver. Learning to drive on the hills of San Francisco was a quixotic endeavor with a teacher from Texas who would keep saying when I made a mistake, “Your husband isn’t going to like that,” but I did finally get my license by some miracle of bureaucratic largesse.
My father stopped to see us on his way up to Redding, where he was working on a Westinghouse dam project for a couple of months. Near the end of his time in Redding, Mother flew out to Grant and Lilly in L.A., who then drove up to San Francisco with her. They stayed only briefly, but my mother and then both my parents remained for a week. I had not been around them much in a few years. I was struck by their relationship, how little interest they took one in the other. They seldom looked at each other. My father put down my mother and she was irritated by him. They had the habit of talking to me or to Robert at once about two different subjects, as if they had become so practiced at not hearing the other, they genuinely did not know when their spouse was speaking.
The apartment house was entered by unlocking a grill—like a gate that fille
d the space—instead of the sort of door I was used to in the East. It was built around a narrow open courtyard, apartments to the back and front. Ours faced the street, with the bedroom window on the courtyard. Next to the apartment house was a vacant lot where I noticed local people scavenging with baskets or bags, so I went exploring. Wild fennel grew in abundance. I took to gathering it and using it in my freshman cooking. Soon after we moved in, we began to be visited by a male Siamese who lived upstairs with a hairdresser. He would sometimes crawl in our screenless window that opened onto a fire escape, but mostly he would come to the door that opened to the courtyard stairs. He liked to climb in my lap while I wrote at the typewriter. He ate most any leftovers and always seemed to be hungry. He was, I would guess, two or three years old. He was a very passionate and demonstrative cat.
He started to show up at all hours. He was not in love with his owner but fell in love with us, as cats do. He was a seal point, lean, athletic in appearance and extremely affectionate. His owner called him some fake Chinese name like Foo Chow but we called him Oscar because he had demonstrated his fondness for King Oscar sardines when he came in the window during lunch. His wanting to be with us had nothing to do with feeding him, since usually I didn’t, but his owner accused me of luring him away with tuna fish. The truth was, he just wanted affection and attention. Oscar had an unusually deep baritone. Further, the courtyard amplified his voice when his wishes were not granted. If he could not enter via the window, then he stood and bellowed in the hall until we let him in. His need to be with me was desperate.
