by Marge Piercy
If it rained for three weeks in August,
you knew I had caused it by weeping.
If your paper was not accepted, I had
corrupted the judges or led you astray
into beaches, dinner parties and cleaning
the house when you could have been working
an eighteen-hour day. If a woman would not
return the importunate pressure of your hand
on her shoulder, it was because I was watching
or because you believed she thought I
was watching. My watching and my looking away
equally displeased.
Whatever I gave you
was wrong. It did not cost enough;
it cost too much. It was too fancy, for
that week you were a revolutionary
trekking on dry bread salted with sweat
and rhetoric. It was too plain; that week
you were the superb connoisseur whose palate
could be struck like a tuning fork only
by the perfect, to sing its true note.
5.
Wife was a box you kept pushing me down
into like a trunk crammed to overflowing
with off-season clothes, whose lid
you must push on to shut. You sat
on my head. You sat on my belly.
I kept leaking out like laughing
gas and you held your nose
lest I infect you with outrageous joy.
Gradually you lowered all the tents
of our pleasures and stowed them away.
We could not walk together in dunes or
marsh. No talk or travel. You would only fuck
in one position on alternate Thursdays
if the moon was in the right ascendancy.
Oh, Cancer, Cancer, you scuttle and snap.
Go and do with others all the things
you told me we could not afford.
Your anger was a climate I inhabited
like a desert in dry frigid weather
of high thin air and ivory sun,
sand dunes the wind lifted into stinging
clouds that blinded and choked me,
where the only ice was in the blood.
EIGHTEEN
DEATH AND DISINTEGRATION
I had been nervous about the amount of attention Robert was paying to Arofa. Indeed, after he moved out, he made no move to see her or Cho-Cho. Arofa was inconsolable. She looked for him upstairs, downstairs, every day, every night. For three months, she had received more attention from him than she ever had, and now, none. She lost weight. Cho-Cho, a born survivor, adapted. She could tell I was upset and began to sleep curled around my head at night, a purring halo of fur. Arofa went on a hunger strike, shrinking ghost-thin.
It was the dead of winter and the heating in the remodeled bedroom did not work correctly: it was cold. I lay awake frightened in the night. A roaring feminist, I had never conquered my ignorance of finances. Robert discouraged my interest, and his accountant had been outright hostile. When the movie money came in, I tried to talk to the accountant about how to deal with it, but he simply dismissed me. He always addressed me as Mrs. Shapiro, although as our accountant, or Robert’s anyhow, he knew my legal name was Piercy.
I wanted a clean break and a legal divorce. I wanted the house, the land, one of the cars. I wanted the cats. I needn’t have worried about that. I was happy to give him whatever else he wanted, determined to avoid a court battle. I needed a dignified end. I was content he should keep his building and land, the corporation. We fought about bills, of course. He expected me to sell the house, but I refused. I intended to stay on, which seemed to shock him.
Woody had been involved in the Massachusetts artist-in-the-schools program for years. Now he was also working at an upscale restaurant on Beacon Hill. We had taken an apartment together at the corner of Pearl and Putnam, not a fancy neighborhood and a long dangerous trek from the subway on Mass. Avenue, but big, light and cheap. I spent three days a week in the city and four days in the country; he did the opposite. I brought the cats with me. Arofa enjoyed riding in the car. Cho-Cho would produce a deep moaning and bellowing—a sound that always sounded like ERROR! ERROR!—until we passed the exit for the vet. Then she would calm down.
By the end of March, Arofa began to enjoy life. It was early spring, things were coming alive. She began to sun herself and go for walks. She would allow Woody to pet her, would purr for him and even climb in his lap. Her interest in play returned, and she began to boss us around and oversee the household in her old way. Still, she was too thin. They seemed to like the apartment in the city, racing down the long central corridor, sliding on the smooth wood floors like kids on ice. Going back and forth brought Arofa out of her depression, but she was showing her age. She had little appetite and had to be coaxed with delicacies.
In April, Woody and I sat down and decided we would have a monogamous relationship. First, the social climate that encouraged open marriages no longer existed. Second, Woody had a tendency toward jealousy I had no desire to exploit. Third, it was simpler. I considered that we loved strongly enough to satisfy each other emotionally and sexually. In many ways, having an open marriage had worked for me. I had enjoyed other serious and trivial relationships, most of which I have not mentioned. I got to satisfy my curiosity about sex and about people with a wide variety of partners. I had little curiosity left, and a great desire to be loved and calm and finally together with someone who really wanted to be together with me. I wanted to concentrate on writing and on having a pleasant and warm central relationship. If you want fidelity, a retired roué may be your best bet. I’ve never been tempted to cheat on Ira. It has no appeal.
While Robert was in Germany, I began to investigate divorce. I interviewed three lawyers. Having to explain to very straight lawyers what our relationship had been was excruciating. I wrote him that I thought he should be doing this, but he did not have any desire to. Divorce was a priority for me from the night he moved out, but not for him. Then I found a lawyer with a movement background in a law collective who would do the divorce for a reasonable price. She did not seem to think we were sex fiends.
Finally he returned and we could settle down to negotiating. Robert did not want a divorce until he went home with his girlfriend and met her parents and fully understood her situation. He returned from that visit not only agreeing to a divorce, but willing to fly down to the Dominican Republic the next week for a quick one. He wanted the stock, his land and corporation and the liquid assets. He and his accountant insisted I pay the previous year’s taxes as the price of divorce. It cleaned me out, but I had the house and a car and the land.
When you are in a couple, each settles on jobs they find appealing or the least repugnant, and ignores other tasks. I made a lot of mistakes that first year: financial mistakes, mistakes in running the house, mistakes with the car. I was slowly learning, and so was Woody. Arofa was visibly declining. I had to go to Denmark and Norway that fall, and Woody wanted to come. Penny took off from work, which she could ill afford, to take care of the cats. While we were gone, Arofa began to fail. The vet wanted to euthanize her, but Penny refused.
Penny kept her alive by playing tapes of me reading poetry. When I got home, I could see she was dying. She was painfully thin, just bones and her beautiful coat, but she was affectionate, still passionately alive and alert. Essentially she stopped eating. I could get a tiny bit of baby food into her, but that was it. I tried to give her fluids, but she threw up. She could not urinate. The vet said she had uremic poisoning and would die within twenty-four hours. She did not sleep the night of her crisis but all night kept nudging me to pet her.
I could not let her die at the vet’s. She was too bright. She always knew what was up. Her sight went first. Then she could not stand. She needed my touch to know she was not alone. I had coerced friends into giving me some barbiturates, and I fed them to her pounded into water in a mortar
and pestle. The vet said one would put her in a coma, she was so fragile. She took the one and never faltered. She was clinging to consciousness. She would not go down. She would not die. She wanted so passionately to live, it made me weep. Then her hearing began to go. I was terrified I would not be able to comfort her if she could not hear me. She was beginning to cry hoarsely, insistently, as if she knew she was dying and was fighting it. She sounded afraid. I made up a witch’s brew of barbiturates and tranquilizers. She took it gladly, I don’t know why. She died very slowly, purring all the while and holding on to me. Woody was working at the restaurant that night and could not get off. Two friends sat with me. Finally she went into a coma and they left. I carried her to bed with me.
All night long I held her and so did Cho-Cho, washing her. In the morning she was still in the coma. I was terrified she would manage to wake, blind and deaf. I laid my face against her flank, put a pillow over her and smothered her. For forty-eight hours, I had been crying almost constantly. Then I buried her with her leash, name tags, toys. I wrapped her in red velvet for a shroud and put a piece of Chinese embroidery over her. In the spring, I planted a wisteria vine over her. It is huge and vigorous, clambering over its arbor, with fragrant, long drooping blossoms hanging down abundantly in May. It often reblooms.
Cho-Cho kept calling for her, looking for her, although I had shown her the body and she had sniffed it. She could not accept that her lifelong companion was gone. I decided that week I would never have just two cats again. It is much too difficult for the survivor when their whole cat family is just one other. Cho-Cho stopped eating, very uncharacteristic. She would not use her litter box. I fell into Woody when he arrived, and wept until I choked.
I decided I would get another cat but not a Siamese. Woody and I pursued an ad in the Boston Globe. There we found heaps of Burmese at the breeder’s, a woman who seemed bored by her cats. It was a big cluttered house with the shades drawn, the dimness punctuated by sets of great yellow eyes staring. All the cats were in piles of rich dark brown fur cuddling one another, except for two exiles: two big sable cats she said were three months old, but I could tell they were six or eight at least. She would not give us papers. From the little she said, years later I pieced together the story after I had been a breeder briefly. A male at stud had escaped from his cage and impregnated his daughter. She did not of course tell us this but only that it had been an accidental breeding.
We went for a walk to decide. Woody had fallen in love with them at once. I knew something was fishy, but they needed us. The other cats were excluding them, including their mother. They clutched each other. The breeder said she intended to have the female put to sleep, as she was not a proper Burmese. Her legs were too long, revealing her Siamese ancestry.
We brought them to the apartment on Pearl Street. Woody named the male Jim Beam, and I named the female Colette. I have always loved Colette’s writing. Jim Beam was immediately interested and friendly, but Colette hid under a chair. I remembered reading that you should never take the runt of a litter, the terrified one, but in size she was no runt. I captured her, held her and licked her like a mother cat. She was astonished and began to purr. From then on, except when she was angry with me, she was my cat. She fell in love that night. It was hardly sanitary, but it conveyed affection and trust in a language she understood.
We brought them back to the Cape the next day. I thought Cho-Cho might be interested, since she had been so lonely. I lacked experience introducing cats to one another, so we just brought in the carrier and let them out. Cho-Cho took one look, one sniff, and howled. She was hostile, she was furious, and she never did warm up. They were friendly enough. Colette in particular tried to seduce Cho-Cho, who was perhaps too old to endure new housemates. Of course, looking back, she had never liked other cats coming in. Not Daphne, not Amber.
However, as soon as the Burmese arrived, she started eating and gained back the weight she had lost. Cho-Cho never became fat, but she recovered her appetite and began using the litter box again. She might not be happy. She might not view the Burmese as an adequate replacement for her lost friend, but they distracted her. They whet her interest in living. She had to know what they were doing every moment. She had to keep an eye on them, she had to boss them around, she had to train them correctly.
It was not that I did not miss Arofa. To this day, I dream about her. I kept seeing her ghost. But I have always believed that if you love a pet, when they die, you find a pet who needs a home, and that is how you show your love. To me, giving love to new cats commemorated her in the only way that mattered.
The next January, my mother asked us to drive down to Florida, as she had things she wanted to give me. “We’ll fly,” I said. “No,” she insisted. “You’ll have too much to carry back.” We drove leisurely, stopping at Assateague and Chincoteague, at Cape Hatteras, at Charleston, at the Georgia Sea Islands. When we got to Tequesta, my mother worried me. She looked handsome but was extremely thin. Her hair had been done. She was wearing a pretty new dress (her only new dress, as I learned), but she seemed troubled. She wanted to talk with us, she wanted desperately to communicate. Woody remembers her bringing out clippings from newspapers to ask us what we thought about this politician, that piece of legislation, events in foreign or domestic policy, a murder case. She could not talk politics with my father, for he had become a Nixon, then a Reagan, Republican. She needed to talk with a hunger that would not be denied.
She gave us some silver plate cutlery, which we still use. She gave us dishes from my childhood. She gave back books of mine I had sent her and photographs. Then one night my father went out, and in great excitement, she called us into her bedroom. She began to pull out of various hiding places, one-dollar, two-dollar, five-dollar bills from umbrellas, from under the rug, from behind drawers, from pockets of clothes put away, from inside picture frames.
“Mother, what is this?”
“It’s for you. I saved it. He doesn’t watch at the checkout counter. I can hide a little most times. It’s all for you!”
Late that night we sat in the hotel room counting the money. It was just over $1,200 in nothing larger than a five. I have a poem about that night called “The Annuity.” It looked as if we had robbed a candy store, the piles of worn, faded, crumpled dollar bills.
Woody was a little appalled by my mother’s extravagant behavior, her sulking, her tantrums, her passionate insistence on talking, but he also saw her as thwarted, almost a child deprived. She liked him. He was the only man in my life she had ever met that she genuinely liked. “Marry him,” she kept telling me, staring up into my face with that intense insistence, although her eyes because of the cataracts were no longer dark and piercing but a milky brown.
“I just got divorced,” I said. “Enough is enough.”
“Marry him!” she insisted.
“I’ll see,” I said. “There’s no hurry.”
“I want to see you married to him.”
What a change from her previous attitude toward my marriages, but I was aghast that I had been married twice already and discouraged about how things with Robert had ended up. We were not even friends. I was friends with various ex-lovers, but not with him. We had no connection.
She also gave me a box of Christmas ornaments, although I protested I never had a Christmas tree. She said I should have one for her. I planned to put the box in the new hall closet and give it to some friend who observed Christmas. Robert had insisted on presents, but we never put up a tree or sent cards. My mother had grown up feeling deprived of what Christian children around her enjoyed. Not having Christmas was part of being poor to her. She loved anything festive, cheerful, colorful, gaudy. She never felt dressed up if she didn’t wear bright colors and perhaps some sequins. It was their lights and color she liked about Christmas trees. “They’re trees dressed up,” she said.
We drove home much more quickly, still not sure what my mother had wanted to give us that was so important we had to drive down for
it. I decided she had just wanted to see Woody, and that the $1,200 had cost her such effort to put together, it felt like something that would need a truck to carry back north.
The cats had been at Elise’s Cambridge apartment, where Jim had revealed some of his willful and wicked character by terrorizing her cat Zoe. Elise had shut Jim Beam into a spare bedroom. We were annoyed, protective of our darling. She just didn’t understand him, we thought, but she had seen the bully in him long before we recognized it. Both Burmese were growing into large sleek dark brown muscular cats. A friend once saw Jim slipping through the undergrowth and shouted, “What’s that!” He said the first thing he thought of was a panther.
We had not intended to let them outside, but they chose otherwise. Jim knocked out the screen and led the way. We tried putting them on leashes. He would simply wriggle free in ninety seconds. Colette was not much slower. They wanted to be indoor/outdoor cats, and so they were.
Slowly we decided to let go of the apartment in the city. One summer we sublet it and became instant landlords. We tried sharing it: another disaster. Our young roommate looked on us as parents who should take care of him. He could not imagine that a woman had anything to do but cater to him. Also, rents in Cambridge were skyrocketing. Woody moved out here, and we rented a room from Elise for our time in the city. She had an apartment on a pleasant tree-lined street near Central Square in Cambridge.
Colette went into heat. She was fierce. She backed Woody into a corner and would not let him out. We got her altered at once, but we were too sentimental about Jim. Some idiot assistant at the vet’s said he was so beautiful, we shouldn’t have him altered until he was full grown. Well, he soon discovered sex. He pushed out the screen and went gallivanting. He was seen two miles away on the other side of Route 6. We tried to keep him in. When we left a friend here while we were doing readings, she was so terrorized by him, she hid in Woody’s study with the door locked.
He began his lifelong campaign of marking territory. While we had him, half our house smelled of piss. We couldn’t leave a shirt on the floor. We finally got him altered, but too late to abrade his macho personality, now fully formed. The vet bills he ran up fighting with other cats ran into the thousands over the years. He had his moments. He always met us at the foot of the drive. He was strongly affectionate with Woody, especially. He was Woody’s cat. They played games together of dominance and submission that Jim Beam craved. He needed Woody to dominate him, just as he needed to dominate every cat for miles. Perhaps he should have had therapy, but frankly I doubt there was a cat therapist closer than Manhattan. He was a magnificent hunter, but his sister was better. Jim Beam was so strong, he did not feel soft when you picked him up. He was all steel muscles. I could not hold him when he did not want to be confined.
