by Marge Piercy
I got involved in Bread and Roses, a feminist group. I began to meet women in Cambridge. In addition to Cape Cod Women’s Liberation, I also was in a consciousness-raising group including women from Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown—a warmer group than the one I had joined in Manhattan. One night as I was leaving a meeting in Provincetown, I saw a kitten fighting with a seagull for a crust of bread. She was losing but had not yet been maimed. I brought her home—she climbed willingly into the car. I had no carrier, so bringing her home loose in the car was risky, but she was exhausted and starving.
She was a tricolored cat—in other words, a calico with the gene for white. She had enormous dark yellow eyes, so I named her Amber. I took her promptly to the vet, where she was wormed. It turned out she was pregnant, six months old and suffering from malnutrition. At that time, a pregnant woman could not get an abortion in Massachusetts—but a cat could. Her fetuses were undersized, and the vet did not think they could survive. She returned to us unpregnant and hungry, always hungry. She ate as much as the other cats combined.
At first, since she was tiny for six months, the other cats treated her as a kitten, played with her and tolerated her well. But as she grew into a sizable cat—bigger than both of them—they began to fight with her. They also ratted on her. She had learned to hunt while living on the streets of Provincetown, and I could not teach her to stop killing birds. Arofa would come crying to me whenever Amber caught a bird. I did not appreciate Amber’s killing, but she was a nice, clean, friendly, affectionate cat who would eat just about anything. Fussy? No way. She ate cat food, she ate human food, she ate beetles and mice and birds. She never got fat, but she got hefty. Indeed, since she would finish anything the other cats left, they tended to eat hastily and thoroughly while Amber was here.
The fighting grew worse. I would be wakened at night by confrontations, yowls and hisses. I would rise to find a ball of varicolored fur churning in the living room. Cho-Cho was more apt to fight than Arofa, who just made hideous noises. Cho-Cho was seriously attacking. I had to find a home for Amber. A friend from my women’s group, a sculptor, helped, and a home was found.
Around the same time as Amber was forced out, Robert decided that Dolores was too demanding and broke off. I was bitterly disappointed. Moreover, it put the quietus on Dolores’s and my friendship, because all she wanted to do when I saw her was talk about how to get him back, and I knew that was hopeless. When he was finished, he was finished. Over the years, I had dealt with dozens of women who couldn’t understand what had gone wrong and I was their only source of information and comfort.
I was somewhat secretive about my life when I met people, as I essentially had two husbands—not a situation widely recommended or apt to be viewed as a great idea in the women’s movement. For me, it worked. They complemented each other. Robert was brighter but less sexual and less interested in me. He was closer to me politically and more mature. He was also far less accessible. Robert was skilled at getting his way with both of us. Wayne admired him, and Robert liked to be admired. Wayne’s traveling with me made being on the road more comfortable. When he traveled with me, Robert was bored. But in any crowd, Wayne would find someone who knew someone he knew, or some connection. He managed to be at ease when he was the only man in a room full of women. He could keep his mouth shut and listen without feeling diminished, and he could talk intelligently. I never had to worry about him in groups. He floated, he enjoyed, and then he would be there afterward when I had talked my soul out and did not know who I was any longer. Not only didn’t he feel abused, but he managed to have a good time, a constant wonder and delight to me. It certainly made it easier to do the kind of gigs required in those years: rooms full of intense political students seething with questions after a reading. Wayne was tall, good-looking, affable, with changeable sea-colored eyes. He had grown up in a working-class family in Flint, larger but similar to mine. He liked to cook, although some of his concoctions were more ambitious than delicious. He had been twenty-two when I met him at Michigan. I was thirty-six.
Wayne fell in love with a used white Thunderbird convertible with red seats. I hated that car. It was big with immense fins, hurt my back and burned gas at a staggering rate. It was a classic car and he cherished it, but he would never put more than a quarter of a tank in, because it was old and might die. Then he would be out the money he had spent on gas. This meant that we often ran empty and spent hours on the side of the road or hiked for miles to bring back a container. To Wayne that T-bird was the epitome of what a car should be, and he felt successful in it. I felt underwhelmed. I liked Volvos, for their comfort and dependability. Our tastes were often in opposition. We got on well most of the time, but I never felt we were deeply mated or suited. Still we understood a great deal about each other, because of where we both came from.
A woman Robert had been involved with in New York, now living in San Francisco, offered to join his company and move in. Estelle was a complication. I was not in favor of her coming, as I felt with her living in the office, the balance of my relationship with Robert would tip, and we would become less close. Robert was adamant, so I made the best of it and tried to befriend Estelle. I apparently succeeded, and she began to work with Cape Cod Women’s Liberation. There was always tension between Wayne and Estelle, as if they were siblings fighting, but much of the time we all got along and had fun, whether hiking in the White Mountains, dancing in Provincetown, or discovering a forty-fifth way to cook oysters. I was very taken with her. We could do so many personal and political things together. This was especially important to me after Penny moved up to New Hampshire with a new lover, and since the loss of Dolores. Estelle and I were girlfriends. I loved that. We were a good family. Robert was happy, and our lives seemed full and rich with human connection.
Differences slowly appeared. Robert had withdrawn from me sexually and sometimes emotionally during short and long periods, but he never stopped telling me he loved me, writing occasional apologetic notes or poems to me, making it clear that I was at the center of his life. Gradually while Estelle lived in his office, this altered. I would notice that he often turned to her first with news, with ideas. She persuaded him to refrain from being affectionate with me when she was around. She objected to us acting as a couple in her presence, or indeed expressing any intimacy. The money I brought in was increasingly important to our group. Gradually I was becoming the major financial support. Wayne made a working-class wage laying cable while Robert was often between paying projects, and that meant Estelle was also at liberty. One difficulty was that Robert and Wayne hated reporters coming to interview me and resented any publicity, which cut way back on what I could do for my books.
Our land was not as beautiful as it is now, as Robert and Wayne liked to view it as a little farm. When something broke, they tossed it over the fence of the main garden till we had a dump there, including old TV antennas, broken glass doors and empty oil cans. But we’ve never grown as good fruit as we did then. Tree fruit requires fussing. Robert took a particular interest in growing peaches, apples and pears, and during that time, we had abundant tree fruit.
Cape Cod Women’s Liberation was brought down by Rolling Rock beer. We held a fund-raising dance at town hall in Provincetown. One member of the committee offered to arrange for refreshments. She ordered many cases of Rolling Rock beer. Unfortunately for us, she greatly overestimated how much beer women would drink. Less than a quarter was consumed. We then discovered it was not returnable. We were broke and had to close our women’s center and cancel a speaker. Recriminations made meetings unbearable. That beer sat in the basement of Robert’s office rusting for a year until we finally sold it off cheap and under the table to a local bar. But the debt to the beer company bankrupted the group, and it folded. It was a fine dance, though. I used to throw dance parties at Robert’s office, which had a big central room with hardwood floors. People danced a lot then. I miss that.
I paid Wayne’s tuition at Cambridge-Goddard i
n political science, but that did not turn into anything that seized his attention. The relationship began to fray. He was twenty-five by now and discontent with my commitment to him. He felt that he was always second to Robert, which was true. He was young, my Judaism put him off, and we had little power struggles that were wearying.
Estelle was colder than Dolores but far more pragmatic. You could turn her loose in the kitchen or garden without inciting catastrophe. However, a lot went on under the surface, resentments I often missed until the consequences emerged. Still, we had fun. We took crazy excursions to see how a commercial dairy farm really operated (disgusting) and to a state fair. We went on hikes and picnics, to the beach and to conferences and meetings and meetings and meetings. We shared all household tasks, which rendered them far less boring and monotonous. Cleaning day was a game.
I had gotten to know Denise Levertov during this period and, much more intensely, Adrienne Rich. I knew many women in the arts in the Boston area and on the Cape. One great advantage of friendship with Denise and even more with Adrienne was the ability to talk about our writing in a real and intelligent way, without being accused of having a male attitude toward work. A problem with women friends on the Cape was their habit of dropping by. I had instituted a policy when I left New York of not letting people do this. I wanted them to call. This was before I had an answering machine, so I answered the phone. But I had no difficulty saying, this is not a good time. Not this morning. How about at three-thirty this afternoon? How about this evening? The other reason I did not let people drop in was because of my friends in the underground and our mutual fear that they would be discovered visiting me if people came idly by. Many of my friends had moved to the Cape to live an easier, more laid-back life and did not appreciate my writing schedule.
Thanksgiving 1974 brought trouble. We always had a crowd for Thanksgiving and I roasted a goose. That year, we had twelve, including two young boys. Wayne had given me for my birthday the year before a large aquarium and some tropical fish. I was not enamored of tropical fish. I’m no good with pets I can’t have a relationship with. They died frequently. They ate their young, like Joyce’s Ireland. I found them not so much soothing as depressing, but I learned to do the best I could to enjoy them, because when a lover gives you an expensive present, you have to like it. At Thanksgiving, the two boys were constantly asking Robert if they could feed the fish. They were nice kids, just excited about any animals—they were good with cats, dogs, turtles. Robert took out some frozen brine shrimp to feed the fish and used an electric knife to cut it. The knife slipped and almost severed the little finger of his left hand, his dominant hand.
I called the rescue squad, which is a miracle here. In the meantime, the oldest boy, who had learned first aid at school, did exactly the right thing with a tourniquet. Blood was spurting all over the place and Robert was going into shock. I wrapped him up and they took him to a local doctor, who looked at his hand and said quite honestly, “I can’t do anything with this. Take him to the hospital.” The hospital is in Hyannis—fifty minutes away. He went off in the ambulance and I followed in a car with Estelle. They could sew up the wound and roughly reattach the finger, but the nerve damage was extensive, so he could not write or manipulate objects with his dominant hand. It was months before Robert completed a series of operations with a doctor in Boston—called oddly enough Nailbuff—a specialist in digits. It was a long and frightening process. His hand was in various casts, various contraptions from operation to operation. By late May his wounds healed and he regained control. He could do everything he could do before, but he was bitter about the accident and the wasted time. It became my fault, because the boys were the children of a woman from my group.
In 1975, we entered a period of financial drought. Estelle and Robert had run out of paying contracts. He was scheduled to go to Germany (the ongoing project of many years with Tole and the German mathematician Petrie) in November, but nothing was bringing in money. Wayne was out of work too. Estelle also decided that I was in the way of her developing a meaningful relationship with Robert. I received an offer from Grand Valley College of the University of Michigan system to teach for the fall quarter there—a group of schools near Grand Rapids. Robert and Estelle urged me to take the offer, to make money and to give them the opportunity to resolve their underlying tensions, both work and emotional. At the same time, Wayne talked his family into sending him back to school for a Ph.D. at Michigan State University in East Lansing. He had decided he would never get anywhere without a Ph.D. and was tired of life as a semiskilled worker. I encouraged him. We parted amiably, and he continued to visit on vacations. I thought if Robert and Estelle worked things out, we could go on being a family without Wayne. I was aware Robert and I were happiest in a group situation, and I was less needy. I would do just about anything to hold what remained of our family together.
Through the last year, Estelle had been pressuring me to have a relationship with a woman. She kept trying to be a matchmaker. This was a time when many men were trying relationships with men and women were trying to love each other. A number of people I knew changed over permanently, but many tried it out and then switched back. A rare few found that they were bisexual. I have two friends who genuinely seem indifferent to the sex of lovers.
I was naive and blind about Estelle. I liked her and I assumed she liked me just as much, but I learned the next year that she had talked behind my back. Although exploring affairs with women, she was primarily interested in Robert, but not if he was still involved with me. I did not see any of this until later. I was passionately engaged in my writing, my political activity, and inclined to float along, assuming everybody was happy and doing just fine. I can be pretty stupid about things happening under the surface when I’m busy and fascinated by work.
I had many fantasies about teaching. This was, after all, part of the larger University of Michigan system. I had enjoyed my stint in the Residential College. I worked hard on the design of my courses, listed in both the English department and Women’s Studies. I was teaching a poetry workshop, supposedly advanced; a mixed prose forms class, everything from journals to fiction; and a lit course—Towards the Evolution of Women’s Culture. I rented an apartment in a house owned by one of the Women’s Studies faculty, who found me a student roommate. Estelle drove me out and got me settled. I was living in Grand Rapids and commuting about forty-five minutes to the campus in Grand Valley.
It was an unmitigated disaster. I was lonely, even though Wayne began coming to visit me when he could. I also saw another poet in a casual way and I made a friend of an anthropologist, a woman who had been born and brought up on the U.P.—the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. But I don’t transplant well. I travel well enough, but when I am away from home for too long, I am miserable. This had not been true when I was younger, when I would pick up and go almost anywhere at almost any time for almost any reason and stay until whenever. I discovered to my shock that I had really put down roots on the Cape. I loved the land I lived on. I loved our crooked jerry-built tiny house, a box half buried in the sand of its hill. I missed Robert. I missed my garden, I missed my cats, I missed my office and my friends. My life was back there and I was in exile.
The apartment was flea ridden to the point where I would be kept awake at night by fleas biting me. My body was covered with small red welts that itched into torture. After several futile attempts to murder fleas, I flew home for Columbus Day weekend, demanding my landlady fumigate. She finally did.
I had not been back on campus more than a week when my lit class exploded. I was teaching a book a week: Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Three Lives by Gertrude Stein. I would lecture on Monday, have them discuss the work on Wednesday, and on Friday we would do something interesting like act out a play of Stein’s. I was having a marvelous time. I loved the work I was teaching, I had something to say about every writer we took up, and I wanted the class to enjoy and want to read more. The class revolted. They accused me of being male
identified because I was asking them to read and think and analyze what they read—to read critically. Confused, I asked them what they did in their other classes. “We discuss our feelings.” “Then I’d expect you’d have plenty of opportunity to use up your feelings in other classes, and you can read and think about other people’s work in this one.” “You’re oppressing us!”
I asked for the support of other women faculty, but they sided with the students. Feelings were what was important. Nowadays, women’s studies is a rigorous academic discipline that still relates to the personal, but in that time and place, the split appearing between activists who wanted to change society and lifestyle women who wanted a pleasant enclave was emerging right on my head. I did not enjoy the class after that. I put in my time and covered things instead of illuminating them.
It was the height of New Age stuff, some of which I could relate to and some of which I found silly. My mother was a talented palm reader. It seemed to me what she read was really the person sitting there. I had learned about the tarot from my intense study of Yeats. The tarot came easily to me because many of the symbols felt like a rich storehouse of heretical Western European imagery. For a few years, I would do readings. I took barter. One painter would iron three items of clothing for a reading. An artist in glass and metalwork made me a beautiful lion of Judah on a chain superimposed on a Mogen David. Another young woman bartered fish her boyfriend caught.
But I could not get into astrology. I think people like either astronomy or astrology. When every day at Grand Valley I was asked what sign I was born under, I would say, under the sign of the flying red horse, meaning the corner Mobil station, or under the sign of Ford Motor Company, whose factories were nearby. At lunch in the faculty cafeteria, the school astrologer would pass from table to table. I did not fit in well. It seemed to me few of the women in feminist circles were political in any sense I could recognize. They lived in more or less stable lesbian couples and spent a lot of time on home improvement and interior decorating. My roommate was obsessed with her boyfriend and passed hours playing the same Joni Mitchell album over and over till I wished repeating phonographs had never been invented. I did not adore Grand Rapids. I could not get used to seeing a sign for a bookstore, walking in and discovering only Christian tracts. This was not my Michigan.
