by Marge Piercy
Estelle had propagandized for lesbian attachments, and indeed, this was a time in the women’s movement when there was pressure to do just that. I went to bed with an old friend of mine who had come to see me, but I was learning that however easy sex was for me, women simply did not fall in love with me, even when I loved them. I think I was no longer a good lover for women, as I had been in adolescence. I had gotten lazy, used to heterosexual sex. I was used to some foreplay, then to it. Women required far more preparation than I was accustomed to. I realized that year that I was heterosexual and bound to stay that way. I did not feel guilty about it. I did not regret it. I simply accepted it and would not again be pressured, coerced or persuaded. I have always had close lesbian friends, but I was no longer tempted to try to make them into my lovers.
Every morning I woke with the sense I was in the wrong place, with the wrong people. I had grown a deep taproot, and away from my home, I withered emotionally. Robert never came out until it was time to fetch me home. In the meantime, Estelle and he quarreled. Far from finding liberation in my absence, they could not get along. Estelle returned to San Francisco, and Robert left for Germany, where he injured his leg. Every so often, he would exacerbate an old injury or incur a new one, usually in his knee. When he came out to Grand Rapids to fetch me in late December, he limped badly. I was deliriously happy to go home, but I sensed a coldness in him. I returned in a state of ecstasy, while he had created a life excluding me.
The cats looked terrible. Arofa’s fur had turned grayish. I fed them and fussed them up and soon they were glossy and happy. Robert had been living on sausages and luncheon meats in Germany, leaving his digestive system a rutted road to the dump. I put us on a healthy diet and tried to get him to exercise.
It was a month before he told me he had seen a woman in early December he had fallen in love with. I had known Rosemarie years before on Viet Report, and when I was on NACLA. Again, Robert and I had been with her in Mexico on the way to Cuba. We had never been friends. I had found Rosemarie supercilious. I was not overjoyed, but there was nothing I could do except wait and see. After Wayne left, I had begun sharing Karen’s little Somerville apartment, but I was imposing on her. With Robert bringing someone into our life with whom my encounters had been less than cordial, I needed a place in the city even more. My women friends were my only support, those on the Cape and in Boston. The coming year, 1976, I would need my friends in order to survive, I would need them badly.
IF THEY COME IN THE NIGHT
Long ago on a night of danger and vigil
a friend said, Why are you happy?
He explained (we lay together
on a hard cold floor) what prison
meant because he had done
time, and I talked of the death
of friends. Why are you happy
then, he asked, close to angry.
I said, I like my life. If I
have to give it back, if they
take it from me, let me only
not feel I wasted any, let me
not feel I forgot to love anyone
I meant to love, that I forgot
to give what I held in my hands,
that I forgot to do some little
piece of the work that wanted
to come through.
Sun and moonshine, starshine,
the muted grey light off the waters
of the bay at night, the white
light of the fog stealing in,
the first spears of the morning
touching a face
I love. We all lose
everything. We lose
ourselves. We are lost.
Only what we manage to do
lasts, what love sculpts from us;
but what I count, my rubies, my
children, are those moments
wide open when I know clearly
who I am, who you are, what we
do, a marigold, an oakleaf, a meteor,
with all my senses hungry and filled
at once like a pitcher with light.
FIFTEEN
THE LAND THAT OWNS ME
The summer from hell was almost upon me. That spring, I became ill. We were still short of money, and I had to take all the gigs that came in, no matter how much traveling was involved, so there was no time to recover. While I was in Cazenovia, New York, in early May at the women’s writing center, I ran a fever and could not shake a bad cough. I was having trouble with my lungs for the first time since I had left New York, and it frightened me.
We were living alone, the two of us, although we had lots of visitors. I realized that we got on best when there were other people around. I was worried about our connection, worried about my health. Cape Cod Women’s Liberation was dead. My consciousness-raising group had stopped meeting, as many of us had left the Cape. We have a lot of turnover. People come, people go, they can’t make a living, they imagine they will make more money in the city or become better known. They lose their rental. They lose their jobs. They break up.
I saw Wayne while doing a couple of gigs in the Midwest in April, and our relationship felt decayed. He would not tell me what was wrong, but after a while, I got it out of him. He was seriously involved with a very young woman but did not want me to meet her. He said the magic had gone out of our love. That is the sort of statement bound to put me in a rage, since I don’t believe in magic in relationships, only in goodwill and hard work. He insisted he wanted the connection to continue. I was willing to give it a try, because he had been one of my only sources of comfort in Grand Rapids.
A young man I had known since he was seventeen and joined the SDS Regional in New York was living in Cambridge. We had been through a lot politically and personally over the years. When he had come up from underground, I was the first person he called. Now he was working in a restaurant. He had a roommate he had told me about, but whom I had not met, Ira Wood, generally called Woody.
On Pesach, I was coming over to see my friend. It was a warm sunny day in mid-April, with the leaves just beginning to open and dogs in packs barking and happy, every car with its windows down and its tape deck booming in the music wars that come as the weather lets people outside. Woody remembers seeing me stride down the street dressed very butch, rail thin and wearing leather. I remember seeing a young man standing on the porch of my friend’s tiny rickety wooden house, curly haired, of medium height with intense blue-green eyes. This being 1976, his dark brown hair was worn in a huge Afro. In preparation for a seder, he was ineffectually beating a bowl of egg whites. He introduced himself, and I took the bowl away from him. They were never going to whip up the way he was doing it. It made us both laugh. Somehow, he had known I would do that. I learned much, much later that he had invented this little scene as a way of meeting me. It worked. After that, I had dinner with him a couple of times and spent time both with him and my friend and him alone. I checked him out with mutual friends, but with no urgency. He had great charm and a gentle manner, but he was as young as Wayne. I was too depressed to be interested. Then I got sick on my travels and half forgot him.
The last week in May, Robert was in Germany and Wayne came while I was not yet well enough to manage by myself. The very first night, things reached such intense hostility that I locked myself in my bedroom, hiding there with the cats until the day he was due to go into the city to leave. He wanted me to sign over to him part of the land, so he could live there with his girlfriend, whom I had never met. He felt that since he had lived with Robert and me but owned none of the land, in the spirit of the times it was due him. From the point of view of my own survival, I could not see giving him the lot across the road that he wanted. I viewed that lot as a sort of savings account for an emergency. If I was dead broke, I could sell the land I bought over Robert’s objections. Wayne was getting his Ph.D. and would have a steady job. I was having trouble making enough to hold the house together.
This era was a low point of my personal life. M
y effort to make a close relationship with Estelle had been a failure. Robert was distant from me and in love with a woman I had not liked. Wayne was out of my life. Penny was up in New Hampshire having economic, personal and health problems. Various other friends of mine were up shit creek: one in an abusive relationship, another having a breakdown, another in an automobile accident that left her crippled for months. I was wearing perilously thin emotionally and physically. I had dropped too much weight—not intentionally. I had lost my generally zesty appetite. I was alone a lot and did not bother to cook. The cats had suffered during the fall, while I was in exile, aging a couple of years in those months. They had recovered considerably, but like me, they were not as they had been.
When Wayne’s week with me ended, he dropped me in Cambridge at my old friend’s house shared with Woody, on a dead-end street near the Martin Luther King grade school and the local projects. I was extremely upset after the confrontations with Wayne. I am a giving person in close relationships, so that often it comes as a shock to lovers when I can’t be pushed any further and simply dig in. They keep expecting me to crumble. I don’t. I know the difference between someone treating me as a person and someone using me as a resource. The two-hour ride into Cambridge had verged on nightmare.
Woody, my old friend and I were a good combination, political and talkative and amazingly silly. We would smuggle a bottle of Kahlúa into a local ice cream store and eat makeshift sundaes. We gave dance parties and lavish suppers. We sat stoned through movies and afterward improvised better plots. Their companionship cheered me. Woody offered to come out and keep me company, quasi-taking care of me. Robert was due back in another ten days.
It was only the first week of June but the spring had been warm, sometimes hot. Many roses were in bloom, sour cherries ripe, the gardens overflowing with broccoli, snow peas, salad greens. Although the landscaping was not nearly as beautiful as it is now, it was paradise next to hot weather in Cambridge near the projects. We had always talked easily. Now we were a little awkward, neither of us sure what the other had in mind. All that Woody remembers of supper is the sour cherry soup, a cold soup I learned from my grandmother. We sat up very late in the living room until finally he made a move—I wasn’t about to.
It took us both a long time to realize what we began that evening was a commitment that would grow and fill us. For one thing, I was used to thinking of Robert as the center of my emotional life. Like Wayne, Woody was much younger than me, and as Wayne had grown dissatisfied with what he judged an unequal situation, I rather expected the same from Woody. It took a while for me to perceive him clearly. It was a slow process over the next four years of growing together, of learning to take this at first fragile connection seriously. I did not want another relationship with someone much younger than me. I had been occasionally seeing an older writer who lived in New York, and I was consciously looking for someone nearer my own age.
I was probably less able to consider it important at first, because I felt I was protecting myself from my pain with Robert by hiding with Woody, by enjoying his nature, which was far more emotional and far warmer than Robert’s temperament. I was living primarily in Wellfleet; he was living in Cambridge. We both worked where we lived. Woody did not think he could be that important to me, since I was married to Robert. It took both of us some time to understand what we could have together.
Finally Rosemarie arrived, chipper and hostile. I was, according to Rosemarie, the image of a suburban housewife, trudging about the house in slippers (which I wore only while getting breakfast for everyone), my hair braided. She saw me as overweight, although I was actually painfully thin, but my breasts were big—and hers were not. She wrote all this down and gave it to Robert, who took it all very seriously. A woman he was sexually obsessed with criticizing me made me far less valuable. I needed repair. I was inadequate, since I did not please her—or him, it would seem. This had happened before with male friends of his, whose disapproval would make him question my worth, but it had never happened with a woman. Usually I had a decent relationship with his girlfriends, if not a close one. This was the first time a much younger woman had looked at me as an older discardable woman. It was a shock.
She was melted wax with him, sexually masochistic. He saw her as far more feminine than I was, far more submissive. That excited him. He spent almost all his time with her, and when he bothered to come home, he brought her with him. I had to find a place in the city I could go to regularly, so I located a commune where I could have a room up on the third floor cheaply, a three-story wooden house between two hospitals, just a few houses from the Somerville line. I learned I could actually write there. It was a safe place.
I had trouble believing what was happening. I found Robert cruel; I found Rosemarie abusive. I was used to a certain rhetoric about sisterhood and to women trying to look out for one another, at least pretending to. I experienced her contempt whenever I was near her. She moved to the office after the first few days, so that they could have more privacy. I was pleased to have her out of the house. I wished I could have her out of my life. He would repeat what she said, vicious criticism, scathing remarks, as if half expecting me to agree with them. I was sloppy, I was obsessed with food, I was self-important about my writing, which wasn’t politically correct or important. I took up all available space. I was demanding and possessive. I was really just a housewife with intellectual pretensions, self-centered and whiny, who did not treat Robert and his feelings with the respect they deserved. I was preventing him from growing. In spite of the multitude of other relationships Robert had enjoyed over the years, I always felt he was on my side, that he had my welfare in mind. Suddenly I found that to be an illusion. In previous configurations, we had fun together. We traveled, ate, worked and played as a family, no matter what tensions might exist. It had been an advantage to have a group. Now we were not a family. We were a civil war.
I wondered if I were going crazy. I had been writing Woman on the Edge of Time, with many scenes in a mental institution. It came out that spring. Now I wondered if I had lost my sanity, because I was confused by the reality of my life and relationships. I was having trouble believing what I was enduring. I was tearing apart inside. My pain made me feel broken, demented. I was like a dog that snaps at her wounds as she runs. It is hard for me to convey how strongly I had believed in my connection with Robert, how much I felt that relationship to be part of me. Now part of me was torn away. I was bleeding myself anemic. So much of my life had been built around his needs, his wishes, his experiments—for I had been more than grateful to be given the years it had taken me to start making a living as a writer—that the fact he might no longer wish to be with me was a big shock. I have trouble remembering details because I went around in a fog of pain.
Basically, my friends persuaded me I hadn’t gone mad and that I should hold my ground. When I talked about moving into Cambridge, my friends calmed me and advised me to wait out what they thought was his momentary obsession. Almost everyone was convinced Robert would snap out of it. Rosemarie wasn’t exactly popular. She acted superior and seemed cold, although she was neither with Robert. Of course, my friends were also loyal, so they disliked her. Robert denied he was doing anything unusual—didn’t I want him to have real commitments instead of brief meaningless affairs—but he imitated her attitude and behavior toward me. He was besotted with her and largely ignored me. I felt like a chambermaid. I was the menial household servant providing meals and clean laundry—including her sheets—and I was sick of the role. I went on strike. I stopped cooking, cleaning, picking up and let the garden go.
I was running to the city regularly, staying in my commune, hanging out with my new lover, Woody, and my old friend, hanging out with women friends. Robert did not object to the amount of time I was spending in Boston. They took over the house while I was gone. I guessed it would please both of them if I simply disappeared. I returned to the Cape feeling as if I no longer belonged there. It was not only that
Robert was in love with Rosemarie and sexually besotted with her: I had gone through that many times. It was that he was dismissive of me, contemptuous. If Rosemarie disliked me, it had to be my fault. There had to be something wrong with me. To me it was painfully obvious she wanted to be his only relationship. She was not interested in multiple relationships, no matter what rhetoric she might spout. She saw him, reasonably enough, as husband material. She was an academic from a well-off family, thin, blond and sure of herself. She had been married once before, and obviously, she wished to be so again. I realized that open relationships could not work unless every party to them was committed to the group.
When I returned from Boston, Robert was off with Rosemarie in his office. I walked around the land, the birch and maple and white firs I had planted, the gardens we had created, the rhododendrons and roses and daylilies, the raspberries and grapevines that had only begun to bear, and suddenly instead of feeling crazy or broken, I got angry. There were signs of her presence, her hegemony everyplace in the house. I packed her things into two boxes and put them on the porch. That evening, I had a fierce desire to burn down the house. It seemed a fitting gesture. I went so far as to collect Arofa and Cho-Cho and put them in the downstairs bedroom with their carrying case and food and water dishes, ready to be brought out to the car. I started to go through my things to decide what I would take.
