Sleeping With Cats

by Marge Piercy

  The next crisis was his income taxes. I had to go down and straighten that out with an accountant. He had forgotten all about taxes, and his records were a mess. By now my father was not managing. His clothes were dirty, since when he threw them on the floor, they did not wash, iron or fold themselves any longer. He was drinking too much and not eating enough. Meals were provided in the dining room, but he had to know what time it was and get himself down there. The local bank where he established a living trust hired a caretaker four hours every day, a southern woman who made sly cracks about Jews and treated him like a wayward child. In some ways, that’s exactly what he was.

  The next time I was called, my father’s pension check was the problem. No one knew where the pension checks he had listed as half his income were going. He was confused, his mind kiting back to 1937 and 1942 with reasonable acuity, but out of sync with the present. He had no idea who I was by now. He called me “Bert,” my mother’s name, and tried to order me around. He laughed dryly and often at jokes comprehensible only to himself. He moved in an awkward shuffle.

  We loaded him into the back of a rented car and drove to every bank in three counties. It took two days. Woody managed to persuade Westinghouse to tell us where the check was being deposited, but that bank no longer existed. Finally we found the bank that had eaten the earlier bank, where we located an account where his pension checks were going. I had to get a power of attorney to move everything over. Then I stuck the document in a drawer.

  His surviving younger brother came down with his wife to take care of him, but that only lasted three weeks. They wanted me to move in. He thought, during the rare moments when he knew me, that I should keep house for him. His sister Grace offered to stay, but he refused. I argued with him, since I thought she would be good for him. She had given up a chance to marry fifty years before to care for her aged father, who was reputed to be just as cranky and hard to get along with as my father. “No,” he said vehemently. “She’s no fun. She doesn’t even drink.”

  I had never been close to my father, and I was not about to move to Florida. Woody was an artist in residence in the Barnstable school system; I had sold my next novel subject to satisfactory revisions and set up readings and workshops every other week. My father could not get out of the contract with the retirement community, so there was no question of moving him north. He hated the facility by now. He had a few cronies he played poker with, but otherwise, he did not fit in. Having an account with Merrill Lynch did not turn him into an acceptable middle-class retiree. He was loud, dirty and opinionated. He was a working-class man who had labored at hard dangerous jobs around machinery all his life. He was used to drinking, playing cards and hanging out with guys like himself, but men in the retirement community had been accountants, middle-level management, teachers. He never understood social class, although my mother had grasped it very well. She knew she would not be acceptable in the retirement community, but my father never imagined a problem. The office frequently harassed me about him. He did not dress well, his apartment was filthy, his behavior was inappropriate. I can be difficult for bureaucrats to deal with.

  The next call came after he had gone outside at 2 A.M. without putting on his pants, wandering in the parking lot looking for lunch. They stuck him in the psychiatric ward of a local hospital. I called my friend Ruth Ann Robson, fiction writer and poet, who was working as a lawyer in Belle Glade. Ever since she had been a student of mine at Nashville, we have kept in touch. She did the paperwork to get him out. However, the facility insisted he go into their equivalent of a nursing home, a building in the center of the complex where they kept people who could no longer care for themselves. I demanded that they preserve his apartment for him, that this be viewed as temporary. In the meantime, there he was with people much worse off than he was, babbling, drooling, parked medicated in the dreary rooms and drearier corridors waiting to die.

  By this time, the office people knew I was trouble and that I had a crack lawyer. I had to activate the power of attorney. I took over his checkbooks, straightened out his taxes, paid his bills and tried to rationalize everything. For the next months, I did his paperwork. We got him out of the nursing home and back into his apartment. He said he would die if he stayed in that place, and I believed him.

  Then began a period in which not the facility but my father was calling up, often well after midnight. His glaucoma had progressed to the frightening point where he could not tell day from night. I got him a clock with very big numbers. I bought him a tape recorder so he could communicate with me by tapes, back and forth. He seemed to like that. However, that did not stop him from calling at 3 A.M. to our Cape Cod house, waking both of us, to shout, “You stole my pencils!” “You took money from the drawer!” After a month of this, we got our first answering machine.

  The basic problem was that he felt he had lost control. He was a man for whom the feeling of being in control, even if he was powerless in much of his life, was very important. Feeling superior to his wife was part of his basic identity. He truly never noticed all the work she did until she was missing and no one did it. Then he had this puzzled air, as to why the food didn’t appear on the table the way he liked it, why he didn’t remember to take his medication no matter how many large timers I sent him, why the dishes stayed dirty in the sink, the floor was sticky and his clothes were no longer clean or pressed.

  My mother had ironed everything. She ironed dishtowels and bath towels, sheets and pillowcases, his handkerchiefs and his underwear. Now nothing was right. He was angry but no one quailed. If he yelled at me, I backed away and let him seethe. He kept the TV on from dawn until midnight for company, because he could no longer make friends. He had depended on a certain context. In Detroit, on the job, he was a big man. He was important in his union. He was the only worker who could fix the old machinery nobody else could figure out. He was the guy who made jokes at the poker table and knew the good fishing spots. He had left his importance and his social network behind in Detroit and at the lake. In Florida, he was just an old geezer. My mother had been right about not moving to Florida, and she had been right about the retirement community complex. He was angry and kept saying, “This was supposed to be fun.”

  He wanted his checkbook back, and I gave it to him. I knew it would get screwed up, but I didn’t think that mattered as much as his retaining some sense of control. From a distance, I oversaw what was happening and made sure the money stretched. The bank, which had control of his living trust, insisted on adding another person to cover four more hours of caring for him. It was a man who abused my father, so we fired him. It was strange to be spending so much time and money making sure my father survived, because we did not become closer. Communication never improved. Unlike my mother, he never read anything I wrote. He still couldn’t remember who Woody was—or pretended not to. We could not tell how much of a fog he was in. Sometimes I could make him laugh. If we took him to a restaurant for steaks and drinks, he would tell us stories about the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. But we could never make any further contact with him in a personal way.

  We grew to hate Florida during those years. Woody’s family was living in Columbia, South Carolina. His father worked as a manager in the textile business, running around all over the South. Sometimes we were able to arrange to see them. Other people we knew loved to go south in the winter; we dreaded it. I was not much of a daughter. I dealt with crises, I got my father out of trouble and I managed his finances and tried to find solutions to his problems, but without love. There was duty on my side and anger on his. I would taste guilt that I felt so little for him, but I could not fake it. I still missed my mother, and I had a core of resentment about how he had behaved to her, especially around her stroke. In the retirement community facility, they imagined I adored my father, because I fought them to accede to his wishes. Nonsense. I wasn’t going to put up with him, so they were going to have to. An old organizer, I organized his situation. I found myself cold, but I was truthfu
l with Woody: I could not pretend to feel what I didn’t. My father was no hypocrite, never expressing affection toward me either.

  In the fall of 1985, we received a phone call from the facility. My father had been eliminating on the floor, and when they took him to the nursing facility, they found a bad sore on his leg. He was rushed to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with a staph infection. I was still trying to get information when the hospital told me he had died. I think he simply decided to, dreading the nursing home again. In the hospital, he turned his face to the wall and died.

  I brought his ashes north and threw them in the sea, which he had loved. I recognized he had strengthened me in my childhood with his disregard, made me more competitive, forced me to do whatever I feared, climbing ladders, scrambling over rocks. I could not please him, but trying made me brighter, more persistent. He taught me a respect for logic. He probably gave me my sense of humor. Where other girls grew soft to please, he hardened me with his temper.

  Through all this time, I was writing fiction and poetry, giving thirty to forty readings a year, workshops, occasional speeches and lectures. Some years before we married and for a couple of years afterward, I served as a Governor Dukakis appointee to the Massachusetts Endowment for the Humanities. After my second term expired, he appointed me to the Cultural Council. I liked that work better than dealing with academics and academic issues. I saw my role as fighting for money for literature, always the stepchild of funding. Music, film, video, drama, the graphic arts get the lion’s share. I also saw myself as representing women, minorities, and the smaller art groups that did not have the clout of the Boston Symphony or the Museum of Fine Arts. I did a lot of committee work and I think I was effective; certainly I was the only writer on the council board. I became close to Ann Hawley, the director during those years. I was vitally involved until 1991, when the incoming Weld administration appointee got rid of me. I was in the middle of a series of painful eye operations and unable to attend meetings. They insisted I appear or resign.

  During these years, several of us started a local chapter of NOW. Through the 1980s, that was my important local political work. We had a program on the public radio station and I ran a legislative update network. We worked on campaigns that were important to women, like Gerry Studds’s reelection to the House of Representatives. We brought in speakers for public meetings.

  In 1983, Dinah began to go into heat regularly. In the misguided notion that it was going to be a cinch, we decided to breed Korats. On April 1, Woody drove her to Worcester, to get laid. Woody left Dinah with the stud, spent the night in Cambridge at Elise’s, and the next day picked her up. Dinah’s pregnancy went smoothly enough, although she was small and disliked lugging a belly around. Much nonsense is written about how cats are great natural mothers: some are, some aren’t. Dinah hated motherhood. Giving birth terrified her. With the first kitten half born, she started racing around the house, panicked. I put on plastic gloves and delivered the kitten, after turning it. It was a breach birth. I had to deliver the second kitten also. The third, the only female, and the fourth came out normally.

  For the first twenty-four hours after the traumatic birth scene, Dinah was an ideal mother. She nursed her little blobs of life. By the second day, she was bored. It was not possible for any cat or person to lie down to read or sleep or sit still without Dinah sneaking up and leaving the kittens with them and racing away pell-mell. We had fierce confrontations about nursing. She didn’t like it. I insisted on it, remaining with her while she nursed, although I began fairly early to supplement her milk with kitten milk replacement formula.

  Two of the kittens flourished, but two began to fail. I kept them alive by feeding them kitten formula every two hours. However, I had to go off to a conference. While I was gone, two kittens died. Woody tried, but he frankly had no aptitude for nursing. We had not named the kittens but identified them, as Dinah’s breeder suggested, with nail polish. Purple foot and red foot died. Female and orange foot flourished. When they reached seven weeks, we named the female Morgan. The male was named for his reedy insistent voice, Oboe.

  I had intended to sell Oboe and keep Morgan, but the kittens made it clear they felt differently. Morgan did not want to be in a house with so many other cats. Oboe was his mother’s favorite and already bonded to me. When Morgan was twelve weeks old, the son of a local contractor came to the house to meet her, and there was instant attraction. We bartered her for having the driveway graveled. Oboe stayed. When Dinah came into heat again, we took her to the vet and had her altered. She purred all the way there and all the way back, as if she understood. Now, whenever she begins to gain weight, she puts herself on a diet. She seems to believe if she gains too much weight, she will have kittens again. However, she managed to give birth to her lifelong playmate, platonic lover, best friend. They are still inseparable.

  At Christmastime, the power went out in the house. When we got an electrician, he found that the power lines to the house had been damaged by the builders when Woody’s room was added. The line needed replacing. Now, the electrician knew about Korats. He wanted one. He presented us with a bill, said it had to be paid for the work to proceed and power (and heat and water) to be restored, but he would take Oboe as full payment. We found the money. It was a tight time, but not that tight.

  Colette was angry at me for letting Dinah have kittens. She remained aloof for the rest of the year, from June through December. She stayed out several nights during the summer, no longer my shadow. She did not forgive me until January, when we had to leave the Cape.

  I am not sure when I actually began to write Gone to Soldiers. However, it was such a long novel that we ran out of money while I was still working on third draft. Then I was offered the Elliston Chair as poet in residence at the University of Cincinnati, where over the years I had given readings several times. The teaching duties ran from the beginning of January to the beginning of April. I accepted with the condition that the housing provided accommodate Woody and the four cats, whose pictures I sent along. I wasn’t going to leave the cats alone for months as I had Arofa and Cho-Cho. The university agreed. We were given a loft in a predominantly Afro-American partially gentrified area called Over the Rhine.

  The cats yowled their way across country, two to a carrying case. Once in the loft, Jim Beam fell into a state of despair. We had been afraid he would spray everything and try to get out. He didn’t want to go outside in Cincinnati, and he had no desire whatsoever to mark this space as his territory. He loved his land passionately and wanted to be nowhere else. The other cats were far more adaptable. Colette was pleased to be with us. Immediately she began to forgive me and reclaimed my lap. Colette, Dinah and Oboe loved the big space of the loft, where they played constantly. We were around a great deal, giving them more attention than they got at home. After all, there was little to do beside work. We had no garden to tend, no house to take care of, few friends to see. For all the cats except Jim, it was a delightful time. This was not a neighborhood you would stroll around in. The block across from us had been torn down in urban renewal never renewed. The one house standing had a chain-link fence around it and a German shepherd kept outside in wintry weather, who barked all night. BARKED ALL NIGHT. That winter Woody and I discovered earplugs.

  We were bored. Every morning, Jim Beam sang a baritone solo, entitled “How Beautiful Is Wellfleet with Its Marshes, Pines and Delicious Saltwater Grass-Fed Mice.” Woody counted the days to departure, usually wrong. For two weeks, there were twenty-seven days left. At home our hours were fifty minutes long and each day held only twenty-two of them. Here the days were twenty-eight hours long and every week had at least eight.

  Sometimes it felt like a time warp, and we were caught in 1955. The city administration was busy banning things and censoring art. The abortion clinic was bombed. Even the academics told Kentucky jokes, saying to me, They are our Polacks, and The best thing that ever came out of Kentucky was an empty bus. Yet the nicest people I met wer
e from Kentucky, and it surely was prettier across the bridges over the Ohio. We lived near downtown where after 5 P.M., boulevards wide as the deck of aircraft carriers were witness to three cars in the distance. We could have picnicked in the middle of any of them. The river itself was impressive, muttering as it carried along hillsides it had torn off. We watched the Ohio in flood carrying whole trees, bits of roofing, boats and buildings it nibbled on. The river was coppery with mud and slashed along.

  We made a few friends, but mostly we went to malls for amusement—and Woody sees malls as a preview of hell. We walked to the farmers’ market in the middle of the ghetto every week to buy fruits and vegetables, observing that they certainly knew 147 ways to use a pig. Finally I completed a fourth draft of Gone to Soldiers and submitted it to my agent. It was a very long novel, and I did not have any idea if she could sell it. When spring came, we returned to Wellfleet, gratefully. In spite of the date, we hit a bad snowstorm on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It was terrifying, huge trucks all around us and the road slippery, the visibility nil, the cats howling. We were pulling a trailer, which slewed us crookedly from left to right. If Woody were a less good driver, we would have died, but we arrived home alive and happy, two humans and four cats. Jim Beam charged out of the car and ran in circles, tail straight up like a flag. I was grateful too that I was with a man who was just as glad to be home as I was. Our confluences still thrill me.

  BURIAL BY SALT

  The day after Thanksgiving I took you to the sea.

  The sky was low and scudding. The wind was stiff.

  The sea broke over itself in seething froth

  like whipped up eggwhites, blowing to settle

  in slowly popping masses at my feet.