Sleeping With Cats

by Marge Piercy

  During our early years, we had constant trouble with the well and the pump. The well repair man would arrive and wait for me to descend into the well pit before he would go down. I would catch our resident black rat snake in a paper bag and hold him until they finished the repairs. Then I would return him to his home in the wellhouse. I was notorious as the snake lady, because I have never been afraid of snakes. We had lots of rodents and appreciated the snake’s services. I was very sorry when one day I descended into the well and found him desiccated, electrocuted. After the snake died, we could no longer use the well as a root cellar because mice would eat the cabbages and potatoes.

  By New Year’s Eve, I finished the first draft of the novel Small Changes, which I had been futilely trying to start in New York. I wrote eight hundred pages between returning from Kansas in April and December 31. I celebrated by dancing all night in Provincetown. I was working in a far more disciplined and productive way than since our move from Brookline to Brooklyn.

  The fisherman who lived next door was a complex man who had run radio communications for SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) during voter registration. One of his many girlfriends had a horse and eventually two. I remember a bad thunderstorm when I heard a horrible clatter and her big old white horse Ajax was standing on my porch looking in mournfully. Then the neighbor’s mother died, and he inherited her cat, a gorgeous black Persian named Daphne. Daphne did not like his household. Too many dogs, too much noise, too little attention. She moved in with us. Arofa and Cho-Cho hated her. She did not care for the company of other cats. Finally I put an ad in the paper and several takers fought over her. A local carpenter carried her off on a cushion like the regal queen she was.

  Before we moved to the Cape, I had bought books on macramé, on dyeing with natural products, on collecting, eating and preserving wild food. I imagined taking up crafts to fill the long empty off-season months summer people like us believed the locals stoically endured. By the time we had been living in Wellfleet for six months, I had four meetings a week. We started Cape Cod Women’s Liberation on a picket line outside an exhibit in Provincetown, billed as the top New England artists—sixty of them, including only two women and no Afro-American or Latino artists.

  We came together in an informal group bridging several towns on the Outer Cape. We worked on rape and began to educate the police departments. Abortion was still illegal. There were no specific health facilities for women. Women usually held a variety of ill-paying and unorganized jobs—waitresses, chambermaids, house cleaners. Often they did not know even the few legal resources and recourses available. We held forums on domestic violence. The ex-girlfriend of our builder, Penny, became a close friend and a year later moved in with us. She lived in Robert’s office, a flat-roofed building with a large cellar for wine storage located half a mile from the house. We worked the land, ate and did our political work together.

  Penny was a cat person, and the cats adored her and crawled all over her—even Arofa. She had been a ballet dancer in New York until she was dropped by her partner during an opera—when a prop had been moved. She had a psychology degree, but when I met her, she was running a landscaping crew out of a truck wildly painted with peace and woman power symbols. She was a passionate feminist with a salty side, and like me, she had enjoyed many adventures, had traveled extensively, liked to dance, eat, drink and garden. We concentrated on fruit and vegetable production, but I was also enamored of roses, daylilies and interesting trees. I planted two weeping beeches, but one of them was struck by lightning—a terrifying moment. I had two women friends visiting. The lightning seemed to charge into the room, and the power went out. We found ourselves all three of us kneeling in the middle of the floor, clutching one another, deafened and shuddering.

  Robert had built himself a large office on a stream, near a small pond. Since it was much bigger than he needed for his work, during these years usually somebody else was living there. Robert enjoyed the Cape, enjoyed the gardens, the landscape—he always was very open and attuned to natural beauty—oystering, clamming, little building projects. He played with the cats and gave them first-class attention. Robert and I talked a great deal, about politics, the world, what we were reading. We often had irritable fights—little spats that passed as quickly as clouds overhead. However, we also had fights that were far more serious every couple of months. They were terrible lacerating rending battles that felt every time like the end of the world, or at least the end of the marriage. They usually issued from his feeling stymied in his work or his life, unable to move forward. As in many marriages, the wife becomes the cause of the husband’s frustration—who else is around to blame? It is hard to remember what the fights were about, or if they were about anything in particular and not just the result of an overwhelming malaise and a huge, often suppressed anger flooding out.

  One way of being in the landscape we shared was wanting to know exactly what we were looking at. Knowing starts with naming, although it cannot end there. We collected guides not only to birds but to plants of the seashore, mollusks, butterflies and moths, reptiles and amphibians, trees, shrubs, wildflowers, rocks, animal tracks and scat (for winter identification). It used to annoy some visitors when we stopped cold to study a weed. We would go out for a walk with a knapsack of guides, although after a while, we could identify most of the animals and plants we met. Then we wanted to know their habits, what their presence said about the land, the ecology—how they lived, what they ate, their mating habits. We shared this approach and we had fun.

  Joining the food co-op, we quickly became coordinators. At that time, there were far fewer year-round people on the Lower Cape and fewer stores and businesses open in the winter. Eight hundred people in three towns were members. Every Sunday afternoon we took orders at the Methodist church in the Head Start room. On Wednesday afternoon, bags of oatmeal and whole wheat flour, of carrots and potatoes were given out. We stayed active until the time we started going into Boston every week.

  A peculiar local custom developed during the ban on swordfish, which was considered dangerous from supposedly high mercury levels. A local fisherman (also in an open relationship; they were common then) would catch a swordfish and bring it to the back room of the bookstore. A calling chain would notify everyone on the list and you would say how many pounds you wanted. A landscape painter would carve up the swordfish, and you would pay a price far below what the market had been when it was legal, and go home with your superfresh steaks. There’s always a lot of barter on the Cape, as locals are often short of money but long on something else.

  Robert was urging me to have outside relationships again. I had not been involved with anyone else in a year and a half, and we had not had sex in a year. I had been content with this arrangement for a long time, since I wanted to examine my habits in close encounters with the opposite sex and I wanted to change my behavior. But I found that chastity did not work for me in the long haul. I found myself writing less poetry and emotionally drying up.

  But beginning to have sex with other men meant worries about pregnancy, and I was tired of constantly fearing it, month after month, the anxiety every time my period was late, the fuss with contraceptives. I was never handy with the diaphragm and more than once it ended up flipping out of my hands sticky with jelly and pasting itself to the bathroom ceiling. I had been in the original group after Puerto Rico on whom various dosages of the pill had been tried out, and I had had to be cauterized for excessive bleeding at one point. I looked for a doctor who would sterilize me. My friend Karen had undergone a new procedure, a laparoscopy (a new surgical procedure that was much simpler and safer than the older operation). It was called “Band-Aid sterilization” because it did not leave a scar. Since Karen and I are close in age, it seemed likely a doctor willing to listen to her would grant my request. And he did. I was scheduled for a laparoscopic in-hospital overnight procedure in a town north of Boston.

  The problematic aspect for me was the anesthetic. In
deed, I awoke in the postop room covered with bruises, with various nurses and aides in a semicircle glaring down at me. Certain kinds of old-fashioned anesthetics have the effect of making me violent when I lose consciousness. Sore as I was—and I had far more aftereffects than I expected, including difficulty with my bladder for a month—there was no scar and I was free. I have never regretted taking charge of my body. I did not want children. I never felt I would be less of a woman, but I feared I would be less of a writer if I reproduced. I didn’t feel anything special about my genetic composition warranted replicating it. When I came home from the hospital giddy on painkillers, I lay in my bed singing at the top of my lungs—with relief, with joy, with the sharp delicious taste of freedom. I could very well understand why other women wanted children, but it was not for me. I had the ability to put everything out of my mind except work, and I did not think that would lead to responsible and loving motherhood. I knew if I had a baby, I would feel trapped and resent my situation.

  I began relationships with a poet, a park ranger and then with an academic who wrote mostly polemics. He was my link for a time to friends who were underground. I had known he was interested while we were both living in New York, but I was committed to chastity. Now I was willing. I found that having other relationships made me far less dependent on Robert, who went off to Germany frequently on software projects, leaving me alone in the country, and whose sexual interest in me was at best intermittent. Having other relationships kept me from being lonely or dependent on him. So did having other people live with us, something that characterized those years. Usually some friend was living in the house or in the office, usually a woman. I was not isolated in my marriage but living in a larger family. Maintaining the group was a priority for me, and a lot of my choices and difficulties arose from the necessity of keeping the group together. In the country that was critically important. I am not a jealous person, nor was Robert. I can live with one other person or with a group, so long as I feel cared for and my needs and boundaries are respected.

  In many ways, being able to operate on my own made it smoother for me socially and politically. I could make friends more easily. When Robert and I had been a normal couple, we stopped seeing many friends of mine he did not like or approve of. He always had far stricter political standards for my friends than for his. His computer pals might work on defense contracts, because they could not avoid that. If friends of mine wrote for the movies or for Playboy, he wouldn’t deal with them and would give me a hard time about seeing them.

  I often had to explain and justify him, for he seemed strange to people we met. I liked going to parties without him—not because I wanted to pick someone up, for he was more apt to do that. I always wanted to check men out thoroughly before committing myself. But his presence cramped my interactions with friends and acquaintances. I had to worry about whether he had someone to talk to, whether he was having a good time. I preferred going to meetings with almost anyone else, because he would say things to provoke attention that got me into trouble politically or which I felt compelled to defend out of loyalty. I provided a reservoir of people with whom he could do things. But on the Cape, most of my friends were feminists for whom he was not a priority.

  Although I had not chosen an open marriage and multiple relationships of my own volition, I easily justified it politically and I took advantage of it. I had a great many people in my life whom I could not have been close to otherwise. I could take chances on risky relationships and flee back into my stable one. I learned a lot that people with more conventional lives never have a shot at. I certainly had far more experience with men than 90 percent of the women I know, and it’s been useful to me as a writer.

  The relationship with the academic writer was bumpy. I was truthful with him, but he had another woman in New York who did not know about me and I didn’t know about her. When I found out, I felt I had betrayed her unintentionally. The relationship blew up and he became hostile. For some years, he would review my novels acidly whenever he had a chance. However, while I was still seeing him—sometimes in New York and sometimes on the Cape—Robert became interested in me again. Our relationship heated up. I began to realize Robert was most sexual with me when somebody else wanted me.

  I had many intense friendships with women in the feminist movement but ran into problems with some who resented my work habits, my discipline. From the time I arrived on the Cape, one of the things I chose explicitly was to put my writing first. Everything else in my life waxed and waned, but writing, I discovered during my restructuring, was my real core. Not any relationship. Not any love. Not any person. I had become more selfish and less accessible. I ceased to be the universal mommy of the tribe. I wanted to see people when I was done with my writing for the day, and not in the middle of my work time.

  I was working on Small Changes, an immense task. Not only was it a long novel, but I felt I was struggling to invent a grammar of gender and sex roles in fiction. I remember many lunches in Cambridge with Nancy Henley, who was working on She Said/He Said. At those long lunches we discussed and debated observations about who laughed at whose jokes, how men and women occupied space, who got to touch whom and how, the use of first names, and dozens of daily interactions on the job and in social life.

  I had various short relationships with men. Everyone who came and stayed with us was put to work on Robert’s agricultural projects or my landscaping. We have the A. memorial brick walkway, the B. memorial steps carved into the hill with railroad ties, the C. retaining wall, the D. archway, the E. shed. I would never do that to visitors now, but it was the ethos of the time. You came, you stayed, you moved in if you wished, but you had to contribute labor. People who were not willing to work were considered bad guests and never invited again—or allowed to invite themselves. When you live on Cape Cod, you get used to fielding messages like this: “Hi, this is Jimmy Dildo. Remember, we met in a hallway in 1962? I’m here with my wife and six kiddies, and we can’t find a motel room. Can we come and stay with you?” I became accomplished at responding, “Sure, come on over. We can’t put you up, but I can give you lunch, and you can help us dig the stumps out of the new area we’re clearing. Bring your work clothes.” That got rid of most.

  In the fall of 1972, I put in a two-week stint at the University of Michigan, my alma mater, in the Residential College. That was a new experiment, a small liberal arts college within the vast university. I enjoyed that residency far more than the one in Kansas. A number of the faculty were friendly, some knew my work, and the students were bright, open and interested. While there, I was the honored guest at tea in the Hopwood Room—I had won various Hopwoods at Michigan, including a major in poetry—when a young man appeared. He had read Dance the Eagle to Sleep and asked if I wanted to go dancing that night. This was so different from the usual fan reaction, I was delighted. While I was in Ann Arbor, I saw a lot of him, but I assumed it was over when I left. During these years, I always spent time with my old writing teacher and mentor Robert Haugh, with Professor Arnold Eastman, who taught Shakespeare and was one of the first “out” faculty I ever met. He had never been my professor, but we had become friends. He was politically savvy and a great wit. I also was extremely fond of Mary Cooley, who ran the Hopwood Room. Even after she retired, I kept in touch and saw her whenever I was near. She had never married but worked all her life, was an avid reader and gardener, extremely intelligent. I admired her as an independent woman of integrity, who lived alone and seemed to like it.

  Not long after my return, the young man, Wayne, appeared at our door. I was flattered and alarmed, but Robert liked him and suggested he stay as long as he liked. The two of them worked well together, constantly carrying out projects like building a shed and putting up fences around the garden to keep rabbits out. Robert had become involved with a woman from my women’s group. Dolores had moved from Provincetown to Cambridge because of a part-time teaching position. Around this time we began to go to Boston regularly. Robert was wor
king with his old company and stayed over with Dolores in Cambridge, and she came out every weekend. Wayne got a job and we rented a two-room apartment together in Cambridge. All of us went back and forth regularly. Sometimes I would be four days on the Cape and three in Cambridge; sometimes five days on the Cape and two in Cambridge.

  The relationships with Wayne and Dolores worked into our lifestyle and did not threaten the central relationship. In the long run, Robert and I preferred each other’s company—in part because we did not have too much of it. Plus we all had fun together. Whatever you wanted to do, you had a ready-made group to do it, whether it was going dancing, taking a hike, playing with a Frisbee at the beach or cards at the dining room table, putting up a bird feeder or a picnic, arguing politics and talking, talking. Dolores wrote poetry and short prose pieces, so we exchanged and critiqued our work together. She was not easy to live with. She thought we were living high because we ate oysters a lot, not understanding that Wayne and Robert had commercial shellfish licenses and harvested them regularly. When she did the dishes, she let the water run for an hour until we had no hot water. My clothes were stored in the closet of the upstairs bedroom, and since she rose late, often I could not get dressed until I had been up for hours. It was all worth it, because I liked her warmth and intelligence. She was easy for me to understand, to communicate with, and I felt we were on the same side. We were intense about many of the same things. We both came from families without money and were unique in our families for having decided we wanted an education and having got one, regardless of difficulties. We identified with each other; indeed, we were of a similar body type, with long black hair, and sometimes were taken for blood sisters.