by Marge Piercy
owl hunts for flesh like ours.
SEVENTEEN
SOME THINGS WEAR OUT AND SOME THINGS DON’T
Ira and I worked on a play for community theater, because he’d been active as a playwright and an actor in several theater groups in Boston. He had driven a school bus during the antibusing violence and helped protect an Afro-American family whose safety was threatened in a predominantly white neighborhood. The play was begun in crude form when Woody was working with a theater group that broke up. Since there was a demand locally for a play about racial violence, we decided to start over and do a professional job. I had never written a play; a new genre excited me. I discovered that working with live actors with their own agendas was very different from working with characters existing only in my mind and on the page. You could write a character as a sleazy self-pitying lowlife, and the actor could play him as the young James Dean. Still, we liked writing together, and it brought us closer.
One warm day that fall, Woody and I went to a party at a dune shack—what such buildings on the National Seashore are called, although this was a rather elegant one. We knew few people at the party, but most of them knew who I was. One man began talking very loudly in front of me about idiot women’s liberationists and what he wanted to do to them. I stood up and poured my drink in his lap. I told him to charge me for the dry cleaning and we walked out.
It was not the smartest thing I’ve ever done, but I was not sorry. However, we had been brought out to the party by Jeep and neither of us had a notion how to get back. We headed in what we considered the probable direction out of the dunes. Even in late October, there are days on the Cape, sunstruck and bronzed, with the heat of summer but with harder edges and stronger colors. We held hands and staggered up and down the dunes, golden with late afternoon, speckled with patches of reddened wild cranberries and stunted oaks. Happy in spite of being lost, we rested in the occasional patch of shade in the lee of a sand hill. We felt close, and I was grateful that he had backed me up and did not try to make me feel guilty for leaving the party and getting us lost.
Eventually, a couple of hours later, we staggered out onto Route 6 and went in search of our car. When we finally returned to the house, Robert had gone out to supper with a friend. We nibbled leftovers from the refrigerator. Then we made love far more passionately and sensuously than we ever had before. It was a different kind of joining. We both felt immensely moved. I wept. For the first time, we told each other “I love you” and we meant it. We were to have rocky and rough times, but what changed that day never changed back. Afterward, we had a bond that was rooted perhaps in sex but was emotional and mental as well. From that evening on, we were in some primal sense bonded.
I was starting Vida, about a woman who lived underground, a political fugitive. I was strongly engaged by my subject and writing a great deal of poetry. Starting with my fourth collection, Living in the Open, Knopf has published my poetry. I was giving many readings, workshops and occasional lectures. After Woman on the Edge of Time, I was sometimes asked to talk about women’s utopian writing or futurist feminism and address science fiction conferences.
That spring, Woody became involved with Linda, a young unmarried mother with a preschool daughter. She came from Long Island, as Woody did, from a professional family, but she had been living as a hippie on the fringes of the movement. She entered the relationship knowing about me and Robert but never liked the situation. This did not make for a tranquil life. The social climate was gradually changing. Almost no one we knew was having multiple relationships. Serial monogamy had returned. We were constantly having to explain ourselves to people we met. Our habit was becoming a liability.
That summer, Woody drove across country with two friends to work with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. In the meantime, I joined the Feminist Writers Guild. In our Boston branch, I met Elise, who was Woody’s age and remains one of my best friends. Of Italian background, she grew up in Cherry Hill, outside Philadelphia. She had the face of a Raphael Madonna and great stubbornness and loyalty. She was interested in journalism but later decided her real passion was art. She supports herself as a university fund-raiser.
In August, I flew to San Francisco to give readings and a benefit for the Feminist Writers Guild. When I got to the Bay Area, Woody was limping badly. He was dragging himself up the hills of San Francisco, insisting nothing was really wrong. It did not take me long to figure out his injury was serious. A doctor who had been playing basketball with the gang from the Mime Troupe put it down to a strained ligament. When we returned to Cambridge, I made Woody see a doctor. His injury was a ruptured Achilles tendon. He went into the hospital to have it repaired, then lugged around a heavy cast up to his hip for six weeks. He has never regretted that operation. To this day, when he sees someone limping badly, he will remark that it could have been him, if I hadn’t insisted.
Robert met a man his own age who flew his own plane, had dabbled in movies, had a fair amount of money and a much more compliant wife than I ever was. The two of them decided to build a small computer—what would be called a p.c. Robert had a contract from his old company that required him to write software but specifically excluded a hardware component. He decided to ignore that and go ahead. The man loved gadgets and so did Robert. Soon the office was jammed with machines blinking lights and whirring tape, with half unpacked boxes of gear, with the cannibalized remains of failed machines.
The spring of 1978, I received a little shock. I was used to being complimented on the health of my cats when I brought them to the vet. This spring, he muttered and poked and said that Arofa was aging rapidly. She was losing weight. He did not, however, do the blood workup he should have. It occurred to me for the first time that I would not have her forever. I found the thought of losing her almost intolerable. We had become closer and closer. We went for short walks together. She sat beside my typewriter as I worked. She was a small cat and I could type with her tucked comfortably on my lap. She sat at the table with us while we ate. She slept in our bed. Except when I was on the road or in the city, she was always with me. She picked up my moods at once, the most empathic cat I ever had. I could tell her that something pleased or displeased me by placing a hand on her head. Cho-Cho had a more evolved life with cats. She had visitors, she had friends and enemies. Arofa was largely indifferent to other cats.
I encouraged Robert’s involvement in the small computer project, because it had been a long time—before Estelle left—since he had been engaged by work. I wondered that year if Woody would not be happier with Linda than running between us and never seeming to satisfy anyone—but as I watched her, I doubted it. She used jealousy on him too coldly and calculatingly. If he spent much time with me, she would go to bed with someone, a worker from her child’s day care center, a friend Woody had introduced her to. Woody was prone to jealousy, and he would become obsessed with her adventures—which, of course, increased with his response. She had no interest in his writing and did not encourage it.
Robert went into therapy, claiming his major problem was being unable to express anger. Since we had huge fights, I could not see this as a real problem. It seemed to me he had more trouble expressing positive emotions. I was assuming he still had them. He began to dislike Woody, suggesting I end the relationship. Woody did not take him as seriously as Robert was used to and did not treat him as the alpha male. Before 1976, I would have argued but complied, or at least seen Woody only in Cambridge. But Woody had become my main emotional and my main sexual connection.
For the first time since we had been together, Robert was having trouble meeting women who wanted to get involved with him. He was hanging out with a younger crowd, and the women were not interested in brief affairs with an older married man they did not consider buff or handsome. He was always pursuing someone he met through Woody’s friends, whom he shot pool or hung out with, or someone he met in Science for the People, a group of socially conscious scientists and computer people he had joined. During this period, it was dif
ficult for me to bring women friends to the Cape, because Robert would immediately start bird-dogging them. He blamed me for his lack of success. But the times and mores were changing. Our arrangement required a lot of explaining when I met new friends, and they were often mistrustful, thinking I would therefore go to bed with anyone, including their husbands or boyfriends. I began to find our lifestyle no longer a way into relationships and friendships but an obstacle.
Elise was an exception to the discomfort many women felt in my house. Often women blamed me or felt I was somehow offering them to Robert. I wasn’t, but I didn’t feel I could change him, for if I tried to steer him away or tell him to lighten up, he would turn on me. I was interfering again. I was coming between him and what he wanted. Elise saw the situation for what it was. She was friendly to him but cool. She liked Woody better but did not act in any way hostile to Robert—she was just untouchable.
One good change in my life during this entire period was that my mother reached out to me. I sent her “Crescent moon like a canoe,” a poem about her and my relationship with her. I was afraid it might anger and offend her, and I preferred we deal with it at once. I always sent her my poetry books, and she always read them. She liked my poetry much better than my fiction. To my surprise, she was deeply moved. She said, “I never knew you saw what was happening between your father and me. I never knew you understood.”
From that point on, we talked in a way we hadn’t since I reached puberty.
In his last years at Westinghouse, my father was the supervisor in Detroit—supervising himself, since they had closed the office except for him. Still, it meant higher pay as well as a lot of paperwork, which he did not mind, for he found it clean work—not blue collar. He was the last person in Michigan who could fix certain old machinery in the paper mills, the steel mills that still stood along the Detroit River. My parents spent half the year in Florida and half in Michigan. They sold the Detroit house for exactly what they had paid for it—property values had not risen in the inner city—and moved to the cottage, still in a constant state of rebuilding.
My father did not like moving back and forth. My mother did. She had reluctantly relinquished her friends in Detroit and the income she got from renting out rooms. She did not want to leave Michigan and her many friends at the cottage. She did not like the heat. My father always won, visiting his decisions on her. Like many working-class men, his powerlessness on the job turned into absolute power at home. They moved to Florida and lived in a trailer in a vast treeless wasteland. There was no point going outside, for there was nothing to see but other trailers to the horizon and the broiling sun beating down on baked clay. Nonetheless, this was Florida, the golden land that marked success to an entire generation of the working class.
Finally they bought a small house, one of the tiny Florida ranch houses that lined the streets of a development in Tequesta, rows of similar houses about ten feet apart where seniors without much money retired. When they first moved, you could find unspoiled open land, scrub palmetto, pinewoods, beaches that stretched for miles. My mother could still walk then, and when Robert and I flew down, we all strolled the beach and went to watch bald eagles raising their young in a state park nearby, examined armadillos, identified the birds we were used to seeing up north and exotic ones. I gave my father a book about saltwater fish. During the next year, he went fishing, which had always been his passion.
Gradually they lost interest in their surroundings. My mother gave up trying to grow anything and let my father do as he pleased with the front and back yards. They did enjoy their orange and grapefruit trees, making juice from baskets of fruit that felt like free stuff from the supermarket. He stopped saltwater fishing. I think he found the all-day trips difficult. His bladder was not under control. His glaucoma was intensifying. One trip I brought marijuana down and persuaded him to try it, and it did control his glaucoma while he smoked it. When he ran out, however, he was not about to try to find a drug connection, and I was nervous about having to buy it and carry it on planes. I had noticed in passing where the drug sales occurred locally, but I could not imagine my old father shambling into that parking lot to make a deal.
My mother’s blood pressure was high. I sent her clippings from Prevention magazine, I sent her health foods, whole grain foods and food supplements. Vitamins, minerals, natural remedies to lower blood pressure. Books on controlling blood pressure mentally. She began to call me every Monday night while my father played bridge at the senior center. She would complain about her life, how much she hated Florida, how lonely she was. “He sits in a chair and tells me how to sweep the floor, as if I haven’t been doing it for sixty years, as if he has ever in his life swept a floor.” She had cataracts but dismissed the possibility of an operation. Of course, I sent her endless pamphlets, books, articles about cataracts. My father saw no reason why she should go to an eye doctor, since she didn’t drive. She could still read. Her best friend was a much younger woman, the local librarian. She said the woman reminded her of me; maybe it was the connection with books. All the last years of her life, except when I was out of the country, we talked Monday nights. When I had meetings, I rushed back from them to get a chance to speak with her before my father came home. A few times when I called, she hissed into the phone, he has a cold, he has a toothache, he isn’t going out.
I was happier than I can convey to have a warm connection with her after so many years of confrontation and coldness and suspicion. She had not been able to be physically affectionate with me since I was eleven and began to grow breasts, and probably if we were in the same room, she could not have touched me. Still, the warmth of her voice was wonderful. I wanted to help, I tried, but her typical reaction to any suggestion I would make was: She couldn’t do that. It couldn’t be done that way. It wasn’t possible. She was too old.
What I could do was buy her things she wanted. She developed a passion for shawls, thinking them glamorous. When I was in Florida, I took her to expensive stores she would never enter on her own and bought her the most beautiful shawls I could find. I bought her perfume. I wanted to buy her dresses, but that was too fraught. She was immensely fat, almost totally round, and had been so for years. Then in the late 1970s, she began to shed weight. It was startling. She wasn’t trying. “I’ve just lost my appetite. Nothing tastes good to me.” Every time I saw her, she was thinner. Finally she would let me buy her dresses. However, six months later, she would be a size smaller, and the dresses would hang on her.
I told her things were not going well with Robert. This did not displease her, as she had never liked him. I told her a little about Woody, that we had written a play put on in several theaters, but not that we were involved. I had never explained to her my complicated marriage with Robert. It was not the sort of arrangement she would have believed possible.
Mostly I listened and told her stories that would amuse her, talked about the cats and the garden. A cat, Virgil, lived near them, nominally belonging to a neighbor but spending his time mostly with her. He was a comfort. The next time I was in Florida, I tried to talk my father into having someone come in to clean. The house stank of urine—my father was incontinent—and she could not see well enough to manage. His response was, “What else does she have to do? That’s her job.” I said, “Okay, why can’t she retire?” He said cleaning was her duty. He was openly contemptuous of her. He was down in Florida living the good life in retirement, just like a middle-class man, and she held him back. She didn’t know how to behave. She didn’t play bridge. She was useless.
When Robert and I visited them, we stayed in a hotel on the beach, as the house was difficult to endure. We went down regularly, because Robert’s mother had moved to an expensive high-rise in North Miami Beach, just across the highway from the ocean. Her apartment was all white with some blue touches—blue imitation flowers, a blue flowered pillow. When we first visited, I went for a walk on the beach, where, without realizing it, I got tar on my bare feet and tracked it onto her w
hite rug. She never forgave me. We slept in a daybed with little privacy. Robert always got a backache, but he would not consider staying in a motel; she would be insulted. The view from her balcony was superb, facing an inland waterway wide as a lake. Pelicans flew by at balcony level.
One trip to Florida coincided on our return with the enormous snowstorm of the winter of 1978. We got to Boston just as Logan Airport closed. We circled and circled and then were directed away. We landed along with various other big jets in Bangor, Maine, which shortly closed too. There were Lufthansa jets, Air Canada, British Airways, all the American companies. Three feet of snow fell in Boston. People skied on the streets. Cars were abandoned on all major roads. The governor declared martial law and highways were closed. We were stuck in Bangor, Maine, with suitcases of summer clothes.
All the motels and hotels were full. We were sent out to a bleak motel on the edge of town full of potato jobbers and traveling salesmen. By the third day, there were only two items left on the menu. Robert was bored out of his mind, and I was worried sick about the cats. If there was that much snow, was anyone feeding them? I missed Woody desperately. Our ennui united us in resolve.
I found a couple who lived just the other side of the Cape Cod Canal, and I got on the phone. In Provincetown, where we had departed, the storm surge had cracked the runway—and washed over the vehicles there, including our car. But Hyannis was open. Only four inches of snow had fallen on the Cape. I found a local pilot who would fly us all into Hyannis. On the Cape, the governor’s proclamation was being quietly ignored.
We had wind damage, boughs down and a couple of fallen trees, but little snow. The cats were frantic. We were tremendously glad to be back. The hardship and adventure brought us together, and we were pleasant to each other. We picked up our car, a Volvo, at Provincetown. It had no finish. All the paint had been sandblasted off down to the undercoat. However, it started. I drove it home, following Robert in our other car.
