Sleeping With Cats

by Marge Piercy

  Ira and I have been together part-time since 1976, and full-time and monogamously since 1980. We share the garden, Leapfrog Press—our small publishing company—writing, the love of wine and food, the Cape, politics—but the core of our relationship has always been communication and sex, the exchange of words and the joining of our bodies. Since he was four months old, Oboe has wanted to be with us whenever we make love. I have tried to understand what it means to him, who was altered young. Is it the scents, the hormones released, the animality or sensuality of our naked torsos and limbs entangled? Whatever it is, he stays clear of the action until it is safe, purring loudly, sometimes leaping over us, back and forth. When we are at rest, he crawls between us, blissful. It feels at once somewhat perverse and very natural to have him there. If we shut the door and close him out, he sets up a heartrending wail, not conducive to intimacy. It’s much better to let him in.

  Dinah hated nursing her kittens and had little milk, so I bottle-fed them. Oboe had two mothers, and his relationship with both of us is tender, passionate and erotic. Dinah gave birth to her lifelong companion, her lover, her best friend, her playmate. They curl up together, one ball of silver-gray fur with four sharp ears protruding. Of all the cats, Oboe is closest to me. When I meditate, he sits with me and makes no demands. He is wise in the ways of the house and does not freak as the younger cats do when the carry-on bag comes out. It is only when the big suitcase is taken from the closet that he goes into a sullen depression, head wrapped in his tail, a comma of grief, knowing this means a considerable absence. His name comes from his voice, which even as a kitten was loud, plaintive and carrying, a true wind instrument.

  Max and Malkah are much younger orange tabbies, litter mates acquired from a shelter when they were runty palm-sized kittens with three kinds of parasites, respiratory infections, more fleas than fur, and a hunger so vast they seemed all swollen stomach. Now they are magnificent.

  The Korats, mother and son, did not go out freely until they were eight and nine respectively. They are such gentle friendly cats, I was afraid they would cozy up to an oil truck or a Doberman. Our four acres are in a cul-de-sac at the end of a road surrounded by marsh. The Korats prefer the brick patio by the screened gazebo. On hot days, they ask to go into the gazebo, where it is shady and bugless and there is a view of the slope and into the treetops. Often Ira or I take the laptop out to work there. The gazebo is a lovely thing, octagonal with a pointy shingled roof and an octagonal table within. We look into the cutting garden with its lilies, dahlias, blue lupine and coneflowers with their blown back petals around the bronze center, single old-fashioned hollyhocks and chrysanthemums—full of bloom from June through October. The far end I fill with sunflowers—maroon, golden, bronze, yellow. I recite Blake’s poem “O sunflower, weary of time” to them as I plant.

  Our gardens are not the neat suburban type but combine vegetables grown in the intensive French method—close together in rich organic soil we have created—with flowers, mostly perennials, rosebushes, peach, pear and sour cherry trees, red and black currants, goose-, blue-and raspberries, grapevines, flowering bushes and trees. It is thickly planted. A neighbor once called it The Jungle. I was picking daylilies this July when I disturbed the sleep of a possum. Ira once tripped over a pumpkin-sized snapping turtle snoozing near a leak in the irrigation system. Gardening gives me peace, working with my hands in the dirt. I planted these trees and bushes on an eroding sandy hillside: we made this lush place with our own hands, learning gardening from books and trial and error, creating a living art for ourselves.

  Below the gazebo is the Ram Garden, planted with potatoes or pole beans, named for a bas-relief of a ram that hangs on the shed wall. Margaret Atwood told me years ago I should grow scarlet runner beans to attract hummingbirds. I love to see them darting like jeweled helicopters, and the hawkmoths that stand in the air with blurred wings drinking from the flowers.

  Come with me into the weathered gray cedar-shingled house. The front door leads into the dining room with windows on three sides, always bird activity at the feeders, a room stuck out into the garden. Right now in late September, you see eight ironstone platters of tomatoes: yellow, red, orange, pink, purple, striped. Fat ones big as babies’ heads, luscious pink breasts, oblong, some cat-faced, plum tomatoes, cherry tomatoes. Behind the tomatoes are mounds of big red Cinderella pumpkins, Rouge Vif d’Estampes you see in the fall in Paris for sale in florist shops as well as in markets, for their beauty. A basket of maroon cabbages. Buff butternut squash, striped squash, orange and green winter squashes crowd every available surface. Does anyone live here or is this an indoor farmers’ market? Tomatoes are our joy and currency. I give my agent one present a year: every August we express her a box of our tomatoes, which she claims are better than any she can buy in New York. We send out tomatoes to small-press pals, we barter them for lobster, clams, oysters and fish with a shellfish farmer and a lobsterman. We give tomatoes plus other vegetables to friends with a theater background who let us stay with them in Manhattan.

  I began to can after my mother died, three kinds of sauce (simple, Italian, and hot) and whole plum tomatoes. She canned constantly through the warm months into fall, putting up far more than I do. Ball jars of peaches gleamed like amber in the sunlight streaming through the kitchen window. Jars of pickled young green beans with one clove of garlic, elegant fingers. Sour cherries. Half pears. Elderberry jelly. We used to go to the farmers’ market for her to buy bushels of fruit, while I admired the live chickens and mounds of rutabagas and sugar beets. Canning is a way of embodying the best of my mother in myself, to hold on to her, for I lost her younger than most of my friends lose their parents—she gave birth to me around forty-four. She had no birth certificate, so her age was approximate. We were close until puberty, and then came a long rocky contentious period; then the last ten years of her life, we were close again. I still mourn her. In some ways, she was my muse. By teaching me close observation, developing my memory and playing word games with me, she made me a poet.

  In the same way, when I light Shabbat candles and say the blessings, I am embodying my grandmother Hannah, who gave me my religious education and taught me storytelling by her rich example. Both those women live in me and my work, at the same time that I never cease to miss them in the flesh. Sometimes when I am preparing holiday food, I see myself as a version of the Pet Milk cans of my childhood, the can with the cow inside the can with the cow, ad infinitum. I am a woman with my mother inside, inside her my grandmother, her mother, reaching beyond memory, all of us making the same ritual gesture. It comforts me. I have lost so many people that I need ways to remember and cherish my dead.

  Or you might look at all those tomatoes and squash and simply say, I was the child of penury and now I revel in abundance, too many tomatoes, too many clothes in the closet, too much in the freezer, a calendar too full and a life too busy. Ira jokes that when he dies, his tombstone will read HE STILL HAD STUFF TO DO. We always do. I love silence but I fear emptiness.

  We are a tight-knit family of two humans and five cats who live far out to sea on the land we have made fertile among our gardens and our woods. This is our chosen home. It has taken me a long time to arrive here and dig in. These are my wanderings in search of a place where I could write and be myself and have what I consider necessary and what is not perhaps necessary but makes life good enough to endure the hard times. A place and time to write is a necessity, and love is a luxury, but I have spent a great many years searching for both. I am a stray cat who has finally found a good home.

  SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON AT FOUR O’CLOCK

  Full in the hand, heavy

  with ripeness, perfume spreading

  its fan: moments now resemble

  sweet russet pears glowing

  on the bough, peaches warm

  from the afternoon sun, amber

  and juicy, flesh that can

  make you drunk.

  There is a turn in things

  t
hat makes the heart catch.

  We are ripening, all the hard

  green grasping, the stony will

  swelling into sweetness, the acid

  and sugar in balance, the sun

  stored as energy that is pleasure

  and pleasure that is energy.

  Whatever happens, whatever,

  we say, and hold hard and let

  go and go on. In the perfect

  moment the future coils,

  a tree inside a pit. Take,

  eat, we are each other’s

  perfection, the wine of our

  mouths is sweet and heavy.

  Soon enough comes the vinegar.

  The fruit is ripe for the taking

  and we take. There is

  no other wisdom.

  TWO

  IN THE BEGINNING

  The cats of my childhood came out of the alley. Alleys ran up the center of our blocks, as they often do in the Midwest, so that to a child, each house faced two ways. For me, the most important direction was the alley. I was an alley child, as my cats were alley cats.

  Some of my earliest memories are artificial, based on photos in the family album, myself eight months old on a blanket at the beach near Traverse City, Michigan, near the tip of the little finger of Michigan’s palm. I have rich and splendid memories of things that happened in 1912 and 1926, from seeing in my imagination scenes described with such color and emotion by my mother Bert, my grandmother Hannah and my aunt Ruth. Therefore as I begin to unpack this load of rags and riches, caveat emptor. I come from a long line of storytelling women. I have a vivid childhood memory of standing in the back alley with my brother Grant and looking up at tall buildings—in an alley lined with garages in a neighborhood where the tallest building was two stories. It is very early childhood and I am so small, all buildings are tall to me.

  I remember peeing in my bed and how good it felt while it was warm under me and how nasty it felt when it grew cold. I remember the sense that the sounds my parents made were powerful and made things happen and if I made sounds, things I wanted would happen, though crying sometimes worked. The words that were only shaped noise to me felt dense as objects. I remember the sense of my parents locked in war and myself caught in the middle, torn, tormented, guilty. They were always at war, and I was one of their battlegrounds. My father had desperately wanted a son, and although he occasionally tried to turn me into one, I was never satisfactory. He related more fully to my half brother, Grant, son of my mother’s previous marriage, but Grant was already a teenager and usually in trouble. In the culture of our neighborhood, that was acceptable for a male child, although my parents balked at his sexual involvements.

  The hospital I was born in, at the corner of Grand River and Livernois, had failed and become a bank in the middle of a row of used-car dealers by the time I was old enough to look at it. All that stays with me from the first tiny apartment upstairs in a two-story wooden house divided into four furnished apartments: I am lying on my back and I hear pigeons cooing. I clap my hands and my mother leans over me with her flower face. All through my life if I stop and listen to pigeons, I enjoy a sense of well-being. It soothes me, which carries over to the sound of mourning doves I hear often in these woods, especially in the spring. I slept in my parents’ room, as I was to do until my brother left home. Grant was thirteen years older.

  We lived at first in a Jewish neighborhood, familiar to me all through my childhood because when my grandmother came to live with us each summer, my mother and I would take the streetcar there to buy kosher meat, gefilte fish, rugolach, bagels and bialys, smoked fish and other treats—when there was enough money. When there wasn’t, Grandma had to live on canned fish or vegetable soups, for she was Orthodox. Shortly after my parents moved to Detroit from Cleveland, where they met, my father was laid off for two years. My parents doubled up with another couple, Lucy and Lon, up from Appalachia. What little we had, we shared.

  When I was three, my father was rehired and we moved into a house my parents bought, where we would live until I was fifteen. It was a tiny house with asbestos siding that had been foreclosed on by the bank. My parents would be paying it off for the next ten years. It was in a working-class neighborhood largely Irish, Polish Catholic, and African-American. My parents had a bad Depression and it was not over, although my father was back at work. My mother was a housewife. I will not say she did not work, because she worked incessantly. My mother had been taken out of school in the middle of the tenth grade and sent to work as a chambermaid. My father had finished high school and gone to a technical night school, which had given him some sort of credential as an engineer, although he did not have a college diploma. He worked for Westinghouse installing and repairing heavy machinery. He worked for them at least fifty years, never promoted until the end when he was the last person left in the Detroit office; then they gave him an honorary title: supervisor—of himself.

  Lucy and Lon moved out as tenant farmers to a small holding near the River Rouge Ford Plant. Every Sunday we drove to see them. I could see and smell the red smoke across the marshes. My mother would bring cakes or home-canned goods to Lucy and Lon. In exchange, they would kill a chicken for us to take home. I remember Lucy swinging the chicken and then chopping the head off, and how much blood gushed out. Through much of my early childhood, until World War II brought prosperity to Detroit, that was the only meat we could afford. I remember plucking the chickens and scorching the stumps of the feathers. Perhaps that made it easier to pluck out the quill ends. Out of the mysterious opened belly of the chicken came eggs, some with shells and some without, down to the tiniest little yellow and red worlds. My mother made a wonderful soup with the unborn eggs. Then she usually made the chicken as a pot roast with vegetables such as carrots, potatoes, celery: a dish I still make, with many variations. My mother was not a good cook, but she had her successes—most of which I have learned by trial and error to duplicate.

  Even after my father went back to work, times were hard and there was little surplus. Sometimes it was difficult to make the house payments, and my mother would take me with her when she went to the bank to stave them off. My mother’s only tool in the battle with bureaucracy and men with power was flirtation. She was an accomplished and persuasive flirt, a tiny woman with an extravagant hourglass figure, intense dark brown eyes and short curly black hair. She had a way of walking, a way of moving, a way of sitting that drew men’s eyes to her. She moved like the dancer two of her sisters had been. Half the men we dealt with were convinced she was crazy about them, but she mostly felt contempt. They were marks. She had a job to do and she did it. She was obsessed with my father, not with any of these men about whom she had a rich vocabulary of Yiddish insults which she muttered to me after each encounter.

  I shared my parents’ bedroom until my brother was forced by my parents to marry his girlfriend Isabelle. Our parents came home unexpectedly and caught Grant and Isabelle having sex on the couch while they were baby-sitting me. The marriage did not last, but I inherited my brother’s room—not really a room but a hallway. This was the space my grandmother shared with me every summer. Isabelle, Grant’s first wife, was a redhead with creamy skin. I remember he played the guitar then. I adored him. He was warm and emotional where my father was cold and withdrawn and judgmental. I adored my father too when I was little, but I think by the time I was seven, I had learned I could not please him. My brother would get bored if I asked too much of him, but while he was paying attention, he was affectionate and funny and endearing. He looked like me. Everyone we touched looked like us, nieces, nephews, cousins. We all have dark hair and dark dark brown Oriental eyes, a stocky build.

  It’s hard to excavate my childhood. On one hand, I have vivid sensual and emotional memories. I know I was fearful of death. Perhaps it was my favorite aunt on my father’s side dying young from complications after an auto accident on an icy mountain road near Monday’s Corners—my uncle Zimmy, a coal miner, driving and pre
sumably drunk, after a dance. Perhaps it was the death of the first cat I remember, Whiskers. For whatever reason, I was terrified that my mother would suddenly die, or that my grandmother, when she slept with me, would stop breathing. Perhaps it was my mother’s melodramatic streak, for she would assume a pose and say, “You’ll be sorry you did that when I’m dead!” “When I’m dead and gone, you’ll remember how wicked you were to me!” “When you’ve put me in my grave, you’ll understand what it is to be a motherless child, alone in the mean world without anybody to take care of you!”

  My room was painted “robin’s egg blue”—a name that impressed me because I did know what color the eggs of the neighborhood robins were, as sometimes cowbirds would push them from the nests and I would find them broken on the ground.

  Until age nine or ten, I found this tiny house and yard rich and wonderful. I was fascinated by the mirror that hung near the front door, which I have to this day, one of the few relics of my childhood. It has an owl’s head on top, the ornate frame made of once-gilded plaster. On a shelf stood a strange teapot from my great-grandmother back in Lithuania, the pattern long faded into the grayish curve of the sides. When my father broke it in a temper tantrum years later, I was furious, for I had always presumed it would be mine someday. I found the space under the front porch mysterious, sandy and hung with spiderwebs. I loved the front porch, screened in by my father, with its creaky glider I could lie on and stare up at the boards of the dark green ceiling. That was one piece of furniture my cat was allowed on, so we curled up there together.

  We always had a car. My father’s manhood meshed strongly with automobiles, and even if we were eating only oatmeal or beans and potatoes, the car always had gas. After the war, he bought a new car every two years. There was no money to go to the dentist when mother or I had a toothache. I went to school in hand-me-downs, sometimes with Aunt Ruth’s initials shaming me on my blouses; but a new car was as important to him as the fact that we owned our tiny ramshackle house. To him it meant that we were middle class. We weren’t, but never mind. There was a lawn out front the size of a nine-by-twelve rug, but it had grass growing on it, and that too was a badge of his station in life. These things were very important to my parents. To my father being able to regard himself as middle class was necessary because he had been raised with those pretensions—for his family had to differentiate themselves from the coal miners around them—and to my mother, it was important because she had not been so raised. Her childhood and adolescence had been spent in vicious poverty, too many children and too little of everything else.