by Marge Piercy
I am always wanting to learn things. I would like to refurbish my Greek, unused for thirty years. I have enjoyed the Internet since it existed, long before the ease of the Web. I had to learn klunky protocols, Kermit, X, Z, to get into sites that fascinated me, then all text. I look forward to faster and more powerful computers that enable me to do more and more research and explore more connections. I could not tell you how many friends I communicate with by e-mail—far more than I ever did by regular mail. I love e-mail, the quickness of it, the back-and-forth, the lack of compulsion to fill a page. You have one sentence to say? Fine. You have a whole page? Okay. It’s 6 A.M. and none of your friends are up? Great. You can send them a message they can open at noon or midnight.
Writing is a task ever fresh. Things that once were laborious now are second nature, but there is always another mountain higher and more beautiful, visible only when I have climbed this one. I am always discovering new poets and sometimes new fiction writers to delight in. Discoveries come weekly. There is so much I will never come to learn before I die that I would love to investigate and saturate myself in. I read more poetry than fiction, and a great deal of nonfiction, usually what I am researching for the next or the current novel.
I imagined that writing a memoir would be easy; I was mistaken. It has proved as hard as eating bricks for breakfast. I have been aware of huge segments of my life brushed past or detoured around. Every day I am aware I can see but might not be able to in the future. No day goes by that I am not thankful I live in a beautiful place and have so far been able to make a living without leaving here for longer than a week or two at a time, with rare exceptions when I go broke. This is not easy—living where I want and surviving economically. The Cape is not your best place to earn money.
I have to say honestly I have never regretted staying childless. My privacy, my time for work and our time for intimacy are precious. I feel my life is full enough. There is a lot I regret—opportunities I missed or stomped on, friends I have lost or mislaid or offended, money wasted here and there. There are things I wish I had: more time, a pied-à-terre in Boston or Cambridge, more money. People read me and cherish my work—it is deeply meaningful to many of them, both the fiction and the poetry—but I do not have the kind of reputation that squeezes prizes out of the network that grants them. I would like very much not to have to work so hard, but I see no sign I will be recognized in that way until I am dead. Lots of academics use my work and produce interesting criticism, but they are not the ones who control free money. Therefore I give a great many readings, lectures and speeches, workshops, and hit the road as often as any other traveling salesman. I dream of a slower life, but I don’t see it coming.
Recognizing that more than half my life is over, I try to gain some perspective and wrest some wisdom from my journey. I know I am an intense, rather angular passionate woman, not easy to like, not easy to live with, even for myself. Convictions, causes jostle in me. My appetites are large. I have learned to protect my work time and my privacy fiercely. I have been a better writer than a person, and again and again I made that choice. Writing is my core. I do not regret the security I have sacrificed to serve it.
No day passes that I am not grateful I live with a man who finds me attractive, who loves me, who looks out for me, whom I can trust, whom I can care about passionately and deeply. That means a great deal to me, peace in the center of my domestic life. I did not have it before I lived with Ira. It isn’t that we do not disagree or fight or become irritable with each other. We’re volatile and strong-willed people. But we are each other’s best friend and each other’s proper mate. We continue to interest each other. We make a good unit here on our land with our visitors and fellow residents—deer and birds and raccoons and possums—and our family of cats.
ON GUARD
I want you for my bodyguard,
to curl round each other like two socks
matched and balled in a drawer.
I want you to warm my backside,
two S’s snaked curve to curve
in the down burrow of the bed.
I want you to tuck in my illness,
coddle me with tea and chicken
soup whose steam sweetens the house.
I want you to watch my back
as the knives wink in the thin light
and the whips crack out from shelter.
Guard my body against dust and disuse,
warm me from the inside out,
lie over me, under me, beside me
in the bed as the night’s creek
rushes over our shining bones
and we wake to the morning fresh
and wet, a birch leaf just uncurling.
Guard my body from disdain as age
widens me like a river delta.
Let us guard each other until death,
with teeth, brain and galloping heart,
each other’s rose red warrior.
TWENTY-FOUR
OBOE
Oboe is dying. He has deteriorated so quickly it was upon us before I realized what was happening. Even a week ago, he was responsive, affectionate, interested in everything. He enjoyed the holidays and greeted every person who came into the house. He was eating and drinking normally—for an aged and unwell cat—until last Thursday.
We took him to the vet’s the first week in January—two weeks ago—for his quarterly shot, and while he had lost half a pound, he was in decent shape. But in the last ten days, he shriveled. He is so thin it is hard to touch him, and he seems to find being caressed almost unpleasant. I force a little food into him and vitamins, but he does not want to eat. It takes him five minutes to urinate. He has lost strength in his back legs and cannot jump onto the couch or the sink, where he usually asks for fresh cold water. Most of the time he cannot seem to lift his head. To look at him, to touch him, makes me weep. The other cats are good to him. Each of them has lain with him, washing him, keeping him warm. They seem almost to take turns.
I wish I had the strength to call the vet, but I don’t yet. I cherish a ridiculous hope that he will rally. He has seemed to fail before. But I know from all the time I have spent with cats that he is too far gone to recover. He has no reservoir of energy. He is running on empty, and he knows it. He is withdrawing into death. I want him to fight, but he has been fighting for all this time and so far winning. Now I think he has lost the war. We all will. I see in his end the vision of my own.
The hard part to know is when to take him to the vet. I wanted him to live as long as he was enjoying his life, and until just a week ago, he was. He loved his mother and his harem and Max. Most of all he loved us, especially me. To be with me was his bliss and his right: to be with me when I write, to be with us when we make love, to sleep with us at night, pressed to my side. He never stayed out overnight, never caught a bird, never ran away from me, never scratched me. He has a strong and definite personality, but it is of a courtly and passionate gentleman.
He was born in my bed, and I helped feed him as a kitten when Dinah lacked enough milk. He was mine from the time he opened his eyes, when he was a shapeless blob of kitten. He has slept with me all his life, always in the bed that was his too. There is a special empathic link between us, as there was with Arofa, as there was with Colette. He is the only male cat with whom I have ever had that close and tight a connection, since Fluffy. He accepted the other cats who came into the house, protected and taught them. He was the best top cat I can imagine.
You always wonder when you contemplate taking a cat to be euthanized, if you are being selfish. Is it because I have not had a night’s sleep in a week? Am I being callous? Ira is no help in making the decision, as he wants to deny Oboe’s condition. He is not the one who gets up every hour in the night when Oboe cries and carries him into the bathroom so he can try to drink water and try to urinate. We are both overwound emotionally and on short fuses. This is an impossibly rough decision.
It is snowing hard, big flakes but little wind.
We had a dry warm fall, right up to New Year’s. Then the second week of January, the jet stream moved and Arctic air blew in with high winds, intense cold, and snow. The snow is deep on our land and the air feels serrated, tearing at the nose, at the lungs.
This morning we took Oboe to the vet to die. He was still conscious, but he could no longer stand. He got up six times last night, went to the water bowl, sat over it with his head drooping, drank some water, tried to urinate, tried for ten minutes at a time. He began to cry last night. He had been stoical, but now the pain was too much. I held him all evening and all night. I told him it would be over today, I promised him there would be no more pain. I told him what a wonderful cat he had been and how much we all loved him, and how I knew he had enjoyed his life. I don’t think there has ever been a cat more doted on, more adored, better pleased with his life and his position in the world.
On the way there, I did not put him in a carrier but held him on my lap. It was still snowing and the roads were difficult, so we used the truck with its four-wheel drive. He crawled into my coat. He was incredibly light, all sharp jutting bones, and he found it hard to rest in a comfortable position.
On the vet’s table he lay down as if exhausted on the towel I had brought so the metal table would not chill him. The vet did the injection quickly and smoothly and he was dead within a minute—no noise, no jerking, just silence. His eyes stayed open. I have been crying for a week and my sinuses are inflamed. How ridiculous that grief can be measured in used tissues. I have gone through a whole box.
The temperature has dropped to five degrees several times, so the ground is frozen a foot down. It happens that when the vet first told us Oboe could die any moment two years and four months ago, I had Ira dig a grave. Many times since, he has suggested filling it in, but I was unwilling. I felt, with all the weight of superstition, that if we filled it in he would die. Now that he is dead, we did our best to bury him in the frozen earth eight inches deep in snow with more falling on us. We put in potting soil from the shed, what dirt we could break loose. It is a very makeshift grave, so we put a plank and cinder blocks on top to keep coyotes from digging him up. We will finish the job when there is a thaw. I believe he is deep enough to be safe from scavengers.
I decided we should bring his body in while we were working on the grave, so that the other cats would not think he had simply disappeared. I put him on a towel on the bed and uncovered his still beautiful head. Even in death, his face kept its sweet soulful quality. His mother sniffed him and understood. Dinah cried and cried all over the house and now is in a sleep of exhaustion. When I came back in to get his body for burial, Malkah was standing over him, keening. She will not get up on my bed now. Max didn’t see and Efi didn’t understand.
There is an emptiness in the house. It is going to be a hard transition for all of us. It is the dead of winter when I always feel my mortality. This is a time when nature feels alien and dangerous. Whenever I think of him in the cold dirt, I weep. And feel myself losing body heat. In the death of every creature we have loved, we taste our own.
It is the first morning without him. Every morning of his life that we were home, even these last mornings when he was almost too weak to lift his head, he would crawl onto my lap while I drank my morning cappuccino. I would pet him and he would purr extravagantly. It was our morning routine, Dinah on Woody and Oboe on me. This morning there was Dinah, but no Oboe.
The cats settle into a new pattern. We wait to see if Max will assume the top cat position he never wanted. He is like someone elevated to the presidency who never had the ambition. He liked being ruled by Oboe. He always accepted that occasional slap humbly. Oboe, one-third his size, was his peerless leader. We watch the cats to see the new configuration as they adjust to the loss of the one who was everybody’s favorite—except Efi, who loved him but loves Malkah more.
Now it is two months after Oboe’s death. Max is definitely top cat. He has endured his first serious fight. He marks his territory and defends it. He is even more affectionate than before, but also frets more. He is a worrier as well as a warrior. He cannot remain the sole male cat in the house, so we will get a kitten sometime late this spring. No one fills Oboe’s place in the morning or in my days and nights. No one can. Malkah is bolder and comes to bed confidently every night, sleeping plastered to my side. We all go on, and in a few months, a new kitten will come and distract us all and a new configuration will form. I am going to plant a burning bush over Oboe this week. It is a bush that is beautiful in all seasons, as was he.
Cats continue to teach me a lot of what is important in my life, and also, how short it is, how we need to express our love to those for whom we feel it, daily, nightly, in every way we can. With everyone we love, we have only a limited time, so we must learn to celebrate it body and soul. They have taught me how precious every moment we can enjoy can be with whatever we love, because it all passes and so do we. Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment. All that remains of my mother is what I remember and what I have written for and about her. Eventually that is all that will remain of Ira and of me. Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we loved survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life’s work, Remember. Remember us. Remember me.
About the Author
MARGE PIERCY is the author of fifteen novels, including Gone to Soldiers, The Longings of Women, and Woman on the Edge of Time, as well as fifteen books of poetry, including The Art of Blessing the Day, The Moon Is Always Female, and Circles on the Water. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband, Ira Wood, the novelist and publisher of Leapfrog Press.
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Praise for SLEEPING WITH CATS
“Here’s somebody with the guts to go into the deepest core of herself, her time, her history, and risk more than anybody else has so far, just out of a love for the truth and the need to tell it.”
—Thomas Pynchon
“Marge Piercy holds up a mirror to modern life.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A special book.”
—Booklist
“Charming.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The personal and the political recollected with honesty and passion.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Marge Piercy is shameless; that is, she is that rarity, a free person. Her freedom enables her to write about her brilliant, fascinating life with honesty and gusto. She is magnificent on the subject of cats. I loved this memoir.”
—Marilyn French, author of The Women’s Room
“Already one of our finest novelists and poets, Piercy now emerges as a master of the memoir.”
—Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
“A touching and engaging memoir of a life boldly crammed with poetry and novels, lovers and friends, radical politics and feminism, and the cats who’ve shared it all.”
—Katha Pollitt, author of Subject to Debate
“Marge Piercy is a tough, loving, complicated ball of energy and combative intelligence who has lived a hundred lives with great passion, a fierce social conscience, and a lyrical drive to express the world in words. In the end, Marge seems to have discovered a peaceable kingdom that is wonderful and inspiring to behold—I couldn’t put her adventure down.”
—John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War
“I would love this book for the poems alone—they are Marge Piercy at her most telling. The author is a fearless and exciting woman who has written a book that, for all its insight and its beauty, is also a page-turner.”
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Tribe of Tiger
“Tough, smart, funny, honest, Sleeping with Cats is a revelation. The book movingly charts the evolution of a writer’s voice and identity, in spite
of numerous attempts to silence that voice and erase that identity. Most uniquely of all, this story is also a story of cats. The cats teach the author, and the author teaches us, teaching of time and struggle and writing and remembrance. ‘Remember. Remember us. Remember me,’ says Marge Piercy. You will remember Sleeping with Cats.”
—Martin Espada, author of Poetry Like Bread
“‘There were no role models for women like me,’ Piercy confesses in her gripping memoir. Even back in the ’50s, she clung to the idea that the men in her life must treat her as an equal. She lost many men that way—but finally found true love. For feminists my age and younger, who still have so few role models, this book is a blessing, a much-needed road map through the land of enlightened commitment.”
—Pagan Kennedy, author of The Exes
“Sleeping with Cats is worth reading simply for the language, for the occasional one-line zingers that, like her best poems, stay in the mind long afterwards.”
—Women’s Review of Books
ALSO BY MARGE PIERCY
POETRY
Early Grrrl
The Art of Blessing the Day
What Are Big Girls Made Of?
Mars and Her Children
Available Light
My Mother’s Body
Stone, Paper, Knife
Circles on the Water
The Moon Is Always Female
The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing
Living in the Open
To Be of Use
4-Telling (with Bob Hershon, Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie)
