by Marge Piercy
I woke in the middle of the night in such pain I thought I had a kidney stone, as Michel once had. It was agony to wait for the end of the week to return to New York. The men in the house turned on me. I was a prima donna, I was attempting to manipulate everyone, I was trying to drag Robert away. I became the villain, while I was immobilized with pain. I could not even straighten up.
Back in the city, I went to an orthopedic surgeon. He put me on complete bed rest and painkillers. For the next weeks, I lay in my bed and my muscles turned to water. Robert withdrew. Friends came once, tried to force or cajole or guilt-trip me out of bed, and then vanished, except for a couple of women friends. Ceci brought me my first television, a small black-and-white set we could rig so that I could see it without sitting up. I became addicted to Star Trek, then already in reruns, and to Dark Shadows, and to the news. After five weeks of this and no improvement, the orthopedic surgeon began to talk about operating on my spine. I got a friend from NACLA to bring me from the Columbia medical library anything she could find on back injuries. I looked at the statistics on improvement after operations and decided to quit my orthopedic surgeon.
I decided after further reading to try an osteopath. I called up one in Philadelphia who had written articles I liked, who sent me to his mentor. He was one of the best doctors I have ever gone to, his wall covered with awards for the treatment of injuries and geriatric problems. He took me off the painkillers, gave me exercises and prescribed walking two miles a day. He had me change my shoes. I have rarely worn high heels since. When I need them for a reading or speaking at a podium, I carry them in my briefcase and put them on just before I mount the stage. I returned to life in pain but mobile.
During this period, we became close friends with Robin Morgan, the feminist who had been a child TV star and was now a good speaker, a theoretician of the movement, and a published poet. She was married to Kenneth Pitchford, who was predominantly gay and a published poet. I was crazy about Robin. She was short and pretty, with enormous brown eyes and a cutting wit and intense intelligence, a streak of dogmatism, a fury of seriousness. They had a “light machine.” This was at the height of psychedelic mishegoss. With various friends we went regularly to the Fillmore East. We listened to rock then, religiously. That’s the right term. We waited for new albums from the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, as if being given The Word. We haggled over which of our favorites was the most politically correct, and we interpreted and reinterpreted lyrics. But we also danced ourselves limp and got stoned and heard revelations in the music. Anyhow, Robin and Kenneth had built a thing that projected moving shapes and lights on a screen. Robert was immediately enamored. We built one too, different but just as crazy. It used old lace tablecloths, a mirrored ball, prisms, a fan, a motor that turned, all sorts of hanging objects, all of this behind a screen. When I think of how many hours we spent in the next five years staring at this thing, it astonishes me. I cannot imagine just sitting and staring at anything today. I scarcely have time to see a movie unless I get it on video and fast-forward through the dull parts. Nobody I know sits around much. We’re all rushed into exhaustion. I can’t say I consider this acceleration an improvement, for I have to run twice as fast to stay in the same place economically. I work twice as hard and three times as rapidly for the same money.
In the newly sprung women’s movement, I moved in a vortex of anger and joy, an intense sense of revelation. Writing an essay, “The Grand Coolie Damn,” was my break with the New Left, although I never turned on it the way some feminists did. I never thought we were all wrong, only that things did go sour. I became active in the new Women’s Center downtown, and out of there I began organizing consciousness-raising groups. I stayed in one of them for the next year and a half. I was involved again in helping women get abortions and in the regular lobbying, busing to Albany to the legislature, although there was so much smoke in those offices, I was not very useful. I spoke at rallies and marched in demonstrations. I am an able rabble-rousing speaker, because I never talk about any subject I don’t care about, passionately.
My new novel, Dance the Eagle to Sleep, went the round of publishers and amassed rapid rejections. It horrified most editors who read it, as violent, radical, too much like the kids demonstrating in the streets who frightened them. One said to me, “Why can’t you write a nice love story set against a backdrop of war?” My agent did not like it either and was not truly behind it. He had preferred my unsold semiautobiographical novel. But after thirty fast rejections, the novel was bought on a lousy two-book contract by Doubleday and went immediately into production. I had two editors, one with power and one with charm. With the charming subeditor, I enjoyed many drunken luncheons. We both liked wine and food and exotic liqueurs. I used to walk home from the offices in the Thirties on the East Side to our apartment on Ninety-eighth and Broadway, because I was too drunk to take the subway and not about to waste money on a cab. I would sober up by the time I got home. None of our group would have appreciated my rolling in drunk.
I had long legs for my height and wore very short miniskirts. My hair went halfway down my back. I looked good, and so when Dance came out, I had a brief time as the flavor of the month in New York publishing, reviews all over the place, including a very enthusiastic one from John Simon in the New York Times and denunciations in right-wing and southern newspapers, my photo in Time, interviews, television. The works. I liked the attention the book was generating but I didn’t like getting obscene phone calls (this was before the days of answering machines). I did not like the jealousy of other writers and friends. I did not like the feeling I had been turned into a commodity. Some idiot producer even wanted me to take a screen test. The fuss felt wrong. I did not know how to handle it. If a photographer asked me to sit on a table, I would do it. I had no idea how provocative some of those photos looked. I was too nervous to object until I saw them in print. Then I cringed and felt ridiculous. In truth, I was still a naive working-class girl without media smarts.
I was having brief meaningless affairs since the relationship with Goss, which had ended abruptly and left me burnt, so I stopped. Most of the men who came after me when Goss and I split were movement men trying to recruit me to not only their bed but also their projects. I was a good organizer and I felt like a riderless horse everyone was trying to saddle. Robert had not found me attractive since my back injury. I entered a long period of chastity. I was determined to change how I behaved, to be less passive, less reactive, less pliable, less masochistic, less apt to put everyone else first and myself last. I was determined to remake my sexuality and my way of being in the world. On the whole, I was successful and have been much less likable since. I had no desire to leave Robert, although I rather wished he were more interested in me, but mostly I wanted friendships and peace, a reflective quiet at the core.
I no longer went to fourteen meetings a week but only to four. I began contributing to the women’s movement as much by writing articles, essays, pamphlets and poems as by organizing, although I was still doing that. The cats were happy. I was around a lot, writing and reading and thinking. I contemplated sex roles and women’s position and my own. I was still involved in NACLA as well as the Women’s Center, and was also active in Leviathan, an intellectual and political publication. The women’s movement was electric and gave off sparks. I was seeing myself and the world and all my relationships, all the relationships of my life from my parents on, in a new way. I tried to communicate some of this to my mother. It was the first time I had tried in years to be close to her again. We had moments, but mostly she would not engage. But every day there was new women’s theater, women’s readings, women’s zines, women’s programs, women’s demonstrations and guerrilla theater at bridal bazaars, the Miss America pageant, construction sites; everyday someone proposed a new way to look at some aspect of our lives that turned our perspectives upside down; every day I found something I had thought to be a personal problem was an issue shared by many, many women. I did not put my
self forward as a leader, because I thought this was a chance for many women who had been silent to learn to speak out.
Robert was growing heavy with depression again. The movement in New York had splintered. I had always been a kind of liaison for him to the more political people, working out how he could relate to projects, how they could relate to him. The computer co-op was holding its own, but he was the only one able to find any contracts that could generate money, and he felt he was carrying the whole thing on his back. Infighting and factionalism isolated us. Groups that disagreed on minor points hated one another. An enemy was someone who differed from you about anything. The rhetoric had escalated and there was no longer a feeling of family, of community. Friends were beginning to peel off to Vermont and the West Coast.
The summer of 1970 the computer co-op rented the same house in Truro. I mainly wrote poetry. A lot of the time, we took long hikes, we went bird-watching, we read a great deal. Robert was talking constantly about getting out of New York. The movement, which had felt warm and nurturing, brothers and sisters together, now felt harsh and nasty, militant and crude. The rhetoric had turned into shouting and the infighting intensified. Everyone we knew in New York was in one or another faction, and I refused to align with any. I was one of the last people all sides could still relate to and try to recruit. I hated the factionalism, but I did not hate the people. I saw them as caught in a conflagration of guilt and despair. We had given our lives to the movement, and still the war escalated. In each of us, violent images imploded and we were tormented by our weakness—so our rhetoric turned more and more warlike and militant and dogmatic. We were recapitulating the faction fights of the 1930s we had found pitiful. We of the New Left were no longer talking to anyone except ourselves.
Except for the women’s movement. We were expanding, we were reaching out, we were taking in new women every day. We were in an intense rich period of discovery and the reinvention of every aspect of culture, biological destiny, gender, the family, the workplace—everything from birth till death and in between. I did not experience the dreadful tearing asunder of SDS in the same way as friends, because I was involved in something bursting with life and energy that was teaching me to remake myself stronger—mentally and socially. My health remained unstable. The doctor who had agreed to resume treating me, since I had stopped smoking, told me I would never recover but would proceed into emphysema if I stayed in New York City, because I was inhaling two and a half packs a day just by breathing the dirty city air.
Robert was keenly depressed. The computer co-op had not worked out as he had imagined. He was the only one bringing in income-producing work and he was responsible for a nest full of hungry birds. The movement he had intended to serve was ceasing to exist.
We began to look around Truro, but we could not find anything we could afford. Wellfleet was cheaper. We saw an acre at the end of a subdivision. Before we left the Cape, we bought it and we hired a builder who was recommended to us. I drew plans for a house that Robert vetoed because he thought it too expensive. We used the basic design but made it five feet smaller in all dimensions. I have regretted that choice daily. There was only one house in the subdivision, right next to ours; the builder intended to live here with his girlfriend, Penny, whom we met and liked. We were going to move to Cape Cod. We were once again abruptly changing our lives.
COMMUNITY
Loving feels lonely in a violent world,
irrelevant to people burning like last year’s weeds
with bellies distended, with fish throats agape
and flesh melting down to glue.
We can no longer shut out the screaming
that leaks through the ventilation system,
the small bits of bone in the processed bread,
so we are trying to make a community
warm, loose as hair but shaped like a weapon.
Caring, we must use each other to death.
Love is arthritic. Mistrust swells like a prune.
Perhaps we gather so they may dig one big cheap grave.
From the roof of the Pentagon which is our Bastille
the generals armed like Martians watch through binoculars
the campfires of draftcards and barricades on the grass.
All summer helicopters whine over the ghetto.
Casting up jetsam of charred fingers and torn constitutions
the only world breaks on the door of morning.
We have to build our city, our camp
from used razorblades and bumpers and aspirin boxes
in the shadows of the nuclear plant that kills the fish
with Coke bottle lamps flickering
on the chemical night.
FOURTEEN
OPEN TO THE CAPE WINDS
When I first saw the land Robert and I bought in 1970, it was pine woods just beginning to go to climax oak, a hillside of sand and some clay overrun with lowbush blueberries, hawthorn, a few juniper. After the real estate man showed it to us, we returned alone. As we were looking it over, Robert pissed into the bushes, and a red-shouldered hawk rose up furious from where she had been feeding. Since I am enamored of hawks, I took this as a sign. We paid cash for the land, so we had only a $15,500 mortgage on the little house we built.
It was a thing of the times, the exodus from New York. The Cape was close enough to the computer industry in Boston and New York to sit well with Robert. He had pastoral dreams. He imagined cows and chickens and plowing the west forty. So we took Arofa and Cho-Cho and packed up into the unknown. There were only two other houses in the subdivision when we moved on a rainy February day with the help of friends, way at the end of a road. For the cats, it was the move of their dreams. As soon as they had settled in, we began to allow them outside in the daytime.
The new-built house was small, a box half buried in the sand, but the builder had chopped down too many trees, slashed a great furrow in the hill so that it was deeply rutted and washing out with every rain. I began to plant to stabilize the hillside. Today this land is lush and productive with sugar maples, birches, a weeping beech, thickets of roses, black and red currants, raspberry, blueberry and gooseberry, fruit trees, dogwoods, crabapples, wisteria bowers, rampant grapevines and intensive organic vegetable gardens. However, most of the land is pine forest well along into oak. For cats, it was, and is, paradise.
I fell into seed and nursery catalogs, discovering a new addiction I have never recovered from. Indeed, I feel quite virtuous when, reading a catalog with 150 old-fashioned and species roses in it, I order only fourteen. I am like a dieter who eats only one banana split instead of three, and thus feels you should admire her restraint, and is secretly convinced that with such evident self-denial, she will lose weight. Some things I planted that first year—the tiny rhododendrons, the three-inch-high seedlings of white fir, the raggedy forsythia—have flourished. Others like the ring of Austrian pines supposed to be a windbreak perished in the first month. Our soil was poor, but we were composting our garbage and mulching with thatch from the bay.
I took a month’s residency at Kansas to pay off the electrician and the well driller. To spend as little as possible of my earnings, in Lawrence I lived in an autocratic ill-run commune with faculty and students. During those first years on the Cape, I was developing my reading style, learning to put poems across to an audience. I worked with musicians and other poets, trying ways of presenting. I performed with drums, chanting, a saxophone, a xylophone and other musicians who sometimes seemed determined to prove that words are superfluous in the presence of music. Finally I preferred just delivering the poems myself.
When I came back from Kansas, Robert was involved with a hapless waif he was already tired of. I remember Arofa taking me about to her favorite places on the land, showing me her discoveries, intensely excited and purring as she went. She became a fearsome hunter. Arofa killed cleanly, breaking the necks of her prey. She could run down rabbits. However, a sad thing occurred regularly during those days whe
n baby rabbits left their nests. She would carry them home unharmed and soon unafraid, washing them and attempting to treat them as kittens. That made me feel guilty that we had not allowed her a litter before altering her. I would take them out and let them go.
Cho-Cho was far more the stereotypical cat, playing with her prey and mangling them before finally administering the coup de grâce. We could never afford to be sentimental about rodents, as the house attracted field and jumping mice. We were growing vegetables and fruit abundantly, bartering surplus for seafood from the fisherman who moved in next door and for supplies at the health food store. Our builder, after throwing our house together haphazardly, left his girlfriend and married someone else, so he never lived in the house he built beside ours.
For years, when something would go wrong, plumbers would examine our pipes and fittings and fall down laughing. The builder had saved money by doing it himself. This was before strict enforcement of building codes in town. Over the years, we learned many ways that corners had been cut—like installing a used and insufficient pump. Like leaving insulation out of the exterior walls of closets. The house has one interior door only twenty inches wide, so that it is hard to get any piece of furniture or even a large box through it. The wall oven leaked smoke and did not retain heat, as I discovered the first time I tried to bake bread.
