by Marge Piercy
A vet told me a story of a woman who came into his office with an old cat she wanted to put down. After examining the cat, the vet said he could not find anything wrong with it. It was healthy and he would not euthanize it. The woman insisted. As an argument the woman kept saying, “But he’s old. He can’t jump anymore. I want a kitten. It depresses me to look at him.” Perhaps the woman couldn’t live with herself.
I see my future aging in the elderly cats too, but I do not have the worship of youth that characterizes our time. I cherish my old cats. Oboe sleeps through the night these days, pressed against my side under the covers. Of all the cats, he is my most intimate. We are beings who love and trust one another. That knowledge, that trust cannot be replaced. We have been part of each other.
DIGNITY
Near the end of your life you regard
me with a gaze clear and lucid
saying simply, I am, I will not be.
How foolish to imagine animals
don’t comprehend death. Old
cats study it like a recalcitrant mouse.
You seek out warmth for your bones
close now to the sleek coat
that barely wraps them,
little knobs of spine, the jut
of hip bones, the skull
my fingers lightly caress.
Sometimes in the night you cry:
a deep piteous banner of gone
desire and current sorrow,
the fear that the night is long
and hungry and you pace
among its teeth feeling time
slipping through you cold and
slick. If I rise and fetch you back
to bed, you curl against me purring
able to grasp pleasure by the nape
even inside pain. Your austere
dying opens its rose of ash.
TWENTY
LA VITA NUOVA
Woody offered me a kind of support through my mother’s death I really had not expected of any man I was with. It moved me. He did not take to my father, and my father mostly pretended Woody did not exist. In a few months, my father sold the house and moved into a high-rise in the long-term-care retirement community. His glaucoma was getting steadily worse, without my mother to remind him four times a day to put in his eyedrops.
Boris had been living with us for a year and a half. I talked to the vet about him, saying he seemed to be gaining weight but wasn’t eating that much. The vet made a joke about snacking and did no further examination (Boris was the last cat tended by that vet). When we returned from the city April 1, the day after my birthday, he was dragging his belly, frighteningly distended. We brought him in and he was diagnosed with incurable feline infectious peritonitis. He died on the operating table. We brought him home to bury him.
Jim Beam went crazy. For a month at night he insisted we open every cabinet door, every closet door. He searched for Boris, and he wailed, disconsolate. We did not have Boris long, but he was a lovable reprobate, grateful for a home, grateful for food, for attention, for kindness. We felt his loss and decided to get another cat. We attended cat shows to see what we wanted.
The shows were a world of their own. Unlike dog shows, there are no professional trainers, owners show their animals, and we are not talking big bucks or often any money. While presenting their perfect cats, combed and catered to, the owners are not cowed by contemporary standards of thin beauty. They are often large people who eat gourmet takeout in front of their cages and are mostly interested in cats and one another, arranging matings and gossiping about other breeders and judges.
Woody fell in love with a Korat—cats from southeastern Asia, usually from Thailand, an ancient breed believed to have been developed by Buddhist monks hundreds of years ago. Unlike Siamese, they are cobby: not lean and long but stocky little cats, silver gray with intense green eyes, take-charge dispositions and infinite affection, the ultimate lap cats. They relate strongly to other cats but most passionately to people. The breeder told us they were a traditional wedding present. Intending to breed Korats, we selected a female kitten who took to us at once. We would come back for her when she was old enough to leave her mother.
We decided to marry. We fixed on June 2, 1982, because then our anniversary would be the same day as the anniversary of our first lovemaking, the night we had begun together. We were married by Rabbi Debra Hachen in the apartment in Cambridge we shared with Elise. We wrote part of our ceremony and were married under a chuppah made of a shawl I had given my mother. While we were being married, the turkey we had roasted was waiting in the kitchen. Afterward, when Woody went in to carve it, a gray tail was sticking out. Elise’s kitten Gretta, daughter of a famous Russian Blue bar cat in Provincetown, had eaten her way into the turkey’s cavity and collapsed, her little belly totally full. Imagine being inside the most sumptuous meal you can envision. We removed her, kept our mouths shut and served the turkey. It was a warm day, and we sat on the back porch with twenty guests, drinking champagne.
On June 19, we held a second ceremony on our land in Wellfleet. About eighty people came, from the Midwest, from New York or Boston, from the Cape. We had a local couple opening shellfish on the front terrace. We had roasted another turkey (minus cat this time). Friends brought entrées, salads and desserts. We provided wine and beer. Elise baked a double challah in the shape of a naked embracing couple. The day began beautifully. We held the ceremony below in a clearing. Local artists Gloria Narden and Peter Watts lent us huge flags sewn with moons and cats and ships. It looked like a medieval fair, people everywhere among the gardens, children under the rhododendrons in full flower, pink, lavender, white, yellow and red, children playing house under the overarching weeping beech. After the ceremony, we had planned on dancing.
About three-thirty, it began to rain, so everybody crowded into the house. Strange pairings resulted. Our guests included novelists, poets, nature writers, my agent, academics; and local people, the bookstore owner, the librarian, painters and writers, fishermen, carpenters, an insurance salesman, paramedics. The dancing ended because eighty people were in a small house eating, drinking and trying to hear one another over the music. To move across the room took twenty minutes. It was the third time I had married, but the first time it had been done with ceremony and carried out in beauty and joy. We were making a commitment we meant and still mean.
That evening, we left Penny and Elise in charge and departed on our honeymoon to an unannounced destination. We had reservations at a motel four towns away, on a Sound beach where we walked for hours. In the morning, we came quietly home. I had told my father about the wedding, but he did not respond. He never learned Woody’s name or acknowledged that we were married, although over the next few years, I had occasion to remind him frequently.
The next day we drove to Worcester and picked up our Korat kitten, Dinah. She ran to us, climbed into my arms and purred her way home. We were so excited, Woody was speeding when we were stopped by a state trooper. As he was taking the license and registration, Dinah climbed on the back of Woody’s seat and rubbed against the trooper’s hand. He did not give us a ticket. She was tiny but fearless—as she is to this day.
She was our wedding present to ourselves. At first both the brown cats arched their backs and hissed. They seemed insulted. She stood her ground. Probably because she was so tiny, Cho-Cho was not as hostile as she had been to the Burmese. But Dinah made little progress with Jim Beam or Colette, until Jim got into a fight. We could always tell from his posture when he returned home whether he had won or lost, in his opinion. This time, he had won. However, he had a bitten paw that abscessed, blown up to the size of a tennis ball. He was grounded and bored: a perfect opportunity for seduction. Dinah did not stop until she had him curled up with her.
Jim Beam fell in love with her. He groomed her. Whenever Jim entered the house, Dinah would run to him, fussing over him as a conquering hero. If she didn’t appear, he would search for her. Her favorite way to sleep was
in the center of a ring created by Jim’s long brown body. He could completely surround her, for even when she was full grown, he was twice her size, twice her weight. However, do not imagine that he dominated her. She would take no guff from him. If he got smart with her, was rough or pushy, she would throw him across the room. He never fought back. When she was angry with him, he caved. Their love affair lasted the rest of his life.
Cho-Cho suffered a gradual decline in health. Her vision was going. She had cataracts. She went outside less, and I did not encourage it, as I felt she would have trouble defending herself. I arranged chairs so that she could get on the dining room table and onto my desk. She was diagnosed that year with an inoperable tumor, but it was not causing her pain. Colette and Jim Beam mostly ignored her. Dinah would curl up with her when neither of the brown cats was available. Colette had slowly accepted Dinah, but when she wanted to sit on my lap, she would simply dump Dinah on the floor. If she felt like sharing me, she would graciously do so; but if that didn’t please her, she exercised her rights. She was a proud cat, very conscious of her prerogatives. She had a number of interesting habits. If we went away for longer than a week, Colette would punish us: when we came home, she would pluck a bird out of the air and kill it in front of us. She knew she was not supposed to kill birds, and normally did not. But on those occasions, she not only killed but did it as spectacularly and visibly as possible. Then she would run off and stay out the rest of the day.
She loved scents. She would walk along the herb garden, on a flagstone path between the main garden and the upper garden (named the Rosa Luxemburg but usually referred to as the Rosa) toward the wisteria and a stand of rosebushes. Herbs grow on both sides of the walk. She had her favorite scents—mint, lemon balm, thyme—but when she came to the hyssop she made a face and once or twice I heard her hiss at it. She loved roses. Unlike Arofa, who would sniff a rose and then take a bite, she would simply bury her nose in the flower. She also liked daisies, which do not to me have a sweet scent. She is the only cat I ever had who liked perfume. She would pick her way with incredible care among my perfume bottles and gently rub against them. Sometimes when I would pick her up, she smelled of Chanel No. 5 or Femme.
She could be a complete klutz and knock things sideways and spill her food on the floor and push over the water dish. She could be graceful as a ballet dancer and pick her way through a maze of tiny bottles without upsetting any. I was always conscious of her walking on her toes on her long long legs, which Burmese are not supposed to have. Both Burmese had strong powerful tails. You could grip them by the tail without bothering them. It was a way to get Jim’s attention. If they hit you with their tail, you felt it. Whomp! Colette would use her tail as an instrument of punishment on Dinah, when she was too obstreperous. When Dinah was little, I carried her around in my blouse, buttoned into it. From the beginning, Dinah was possessive of Woody. It is that way to this day.
Woody and I had a bumpy time at the beginning of our marriage. Working off Cape meant a lot of commuting. He had never had a garden, and the first year, everything went to weeds and rot. However, he missed the wonderful fresh tomatoes. That inspired him to pay attention to growing vegetables. He also wanted to be able to use the outside as space for summer entertaining. Everything outside the house tended to occur in the woods behind it—where we held our ceremony. The house was set into the hill, at the crown. We had made a clearing in a flat place about halfway down to the marsh, where there was a natural circle of pines. As an outdoor room, it had two disadvantages. It was within auditory range of the next house. It was too near the marsh, so on mosquitoey years, that clearing swarmed with them. We began to move recreational space to the south side of the house. Just removing the accumulated junk took a week. Then we began to make plans, developing the gardens gradually over the next ten years. The last addition was a screened-in octagonal gazebo, the brick terrace in front of it, and the cut flower gardens between it and the ram garden.
Two writers living together is considered difficult, but we have both found it better than being with people who don’t understand. I have been intimate with people who resented my writing, were jealous of it, were offended by it, tried to ignore it. Woody is a harsh critic of my work, and sometimes when he is particularly cutting, it creates considerable tension. But in the long run I find his criticism invaluable. He understands what I need. One of the first things he did after our wedding was to redo my office, building a large sturdy new desk ten feet long, insisting I pick out a very good chair, and encouraging me to invest in personal computers.
It isn’t always easy living together. In fact, often it is damned hard. We are both volatile, both strong willed. Sometimes we each see the other as imposing his or her will. We are both sensitive and used to rejection and may perceive it where it doesn’t exist. But we remain truly committed. We are lovers now as much as we were in 1976 when we began. We still find each other interesting companions. Woody, raised in the suburban middle class, is more socially skilled and polite and respecting of social glue. I am more abrasive, more political. The opinions of others mean far more to him than they ever can to me. I don’t worry much socially. If there’s a silence at a dinner party, it doesn’t bother me. Someone will speak up eventually, I’m sure; he isn’t. He finds me more arrogant than he likes; I find him moodier. But we are a pair. I never have to watch my back when he’s in the room. He’s on my side with the same conviction and loyalty as I am on his. I never take that for granted. Nor do I take for granted being loved or being desired: I tried too long for a good central relationship.
THE CHUPPAH
The chuppah stands on four poles.
The home has its four corners.
The chuppah stands on four poles.
The marriage stands on four legs.
Four points loose the winds
that blow on the walls of the house,
the south wind that brings the warm rain,
the east wind that brings the cold rain,
the north wind that brings the cold sun
and the snow, the long west wind
bringing the weather off the far plains.
Here we live open to the seasons.
Here the winds caress and cuff us
contrary and fierce as bears.
Here the winds are caught and snarling
in the pines, a cat in a net clawing
breaking twigs to fight loose.
Here the winds brush your face
soft in the morning as feathers
that float down from a dove’s breast.
Here the moon sails up out of the ocean
dripping like a just washed apple.
Here the sun wakes us like a baby.
Therefore the chuppah has no sides.
It is not a box.
It is not a coffin.
It is not a dead end.
Therefore the chuppah has no walls.
We have made a home together
open to the weather of our time.
We are mills that turn in the winds of struggle
converting fierce energy into bread.
The canopy is the cloth of our table
where we share fruit and vegetables
of our labor, where our care for the earth
comes back and we take its body in ours.
The canopy is the cover of our bed
where our bodies open their portals wide,
where we eat and drink the blood
of our love, where the skin shines red
as a swallowed sunrise and we burn
in one furnace of joy molten as steel
and the dream is flesh and flower.
O my love O my love we dance
under the chuppah standing over us
like an animal on its four legs,
like a table on which we set our love
as a feast, like a tent
under which we work
not safe but no longer solitary
in t
he searing heat of our time.
TWENTY-ONE
ALL RIVERS WIND AT LAST TO THE SEA
Cho-Cho insisted on going out one summer day, and I thought there was no harm in her enjoying the sun. She disappeared. We called her, we searched far into the marsh, all over the surrounding land, but that night she did not come back, not the next day, not the next night. I wrote a poem about her walking into the marsh to die. Then on the third day, we heard a hoarse cry in the distance. When we went to investigate, we found Cho-Cho, dehydrated and exhausted. She never went outside again.
She began to find climbing stairs too difficult. She lived, essentially, on a chair in the dining room and had to be taken to her litter box several times a day. Accidents happened. She ate, slept, purred and seemed still to enjoy, but she had no mobility. She was blind. She could no longer keep herself clean and had to endure being bathed. In early summer the next year, it became clear that she was in pain. The cancer had metastasized. She was the first cat I ever had killed by a vet, and it was a difficult decision. In truth, I waited too long, for her and for us. Her quality of life toward the end was not much better than that of a turnip. I was sentimental and reluctant—and foolish.
My father had been living in the retirement community for a year and a half when phone calls started from their business office. The first had to do with his account there being overdrawn. He had told them his Social Security checks would be automatically deposited, but they were not arriving. That was the first cavalry charge down to Florida. I had practice pushing Social Security around on behalf of my mother when she had lacked a birth certificate. I was reasonably good at threading bureaucracies. We ran down my father’s check, deposited in a bank in West Palm Beach. He turned out to have small bank accounts in different banks miles apart—a hangover from the Depression, so that if one bank failed, another might survive.
