by Marge Piercy
My father’s side consisted of an extended family of many Welsh coal miners he barely acknowledged as kin, many of whom I liked. My favorite relatives on that side were my aunt Margaret, a schoolteacher whom the rest of the family felt had married beneath her to a coal miner, my uncle Zimmy. Zimmy hunted, legally and illegally, to supplement the bad meat from the company store with venison, supplying the entire family on occasion. He drank, and he smashed up their car one night after a dance at Monday’s Corners. Margaret died slowly, over a year. At her funeral, he keened for her. The immediate Piercy family was shocked at the open display of grief, but they went on eating his venison.
Going to Pennsylvania a few times a year was a mixed experience. I loved the mountains, the switchbacks in the roads, the rocks cleaved open for highways or railroads, multicolored, stained with water, stained with iron, bearded by shining ice in the winter. I loved the reservoir cut into rock on the end of town, I loved the way the streets dipped down from High Street, the main route then where my aunts lived in a narrow three-story redbrick house on an ample lot. On High Street, I was walking on the backbone of a great animal, whose ribs were the streets curving down. Ebensburg felt superior because it was the county seat and served the surrounding coal towns but was not one—like my aunts and the uncle who lived there, who felt superior to the miners. I was uncomfortable, but the area drew me. All night long, I could hear trucks laboring up the mountain into town. After I saw Fantasia (the only Walt Disney movie I saw, as my mother considered it culture; otherwise we boycotted because my mother called him a fascist and a union breaker), I imagined the trucks as dinosaurs bellowing and groaning as they struggled upward.
I loved going to Horseshoe Curve and watching the long freights strain up and go brakes squealing down. We lived near the railroad tracks in Detroit, but there, trains never went fast. We waved to the brakemen and they threw us fat pieces of chalk perfect for scrawling obscenities on sidewalks and walls. Here the trains seemed more dramatic. The drab company towns with the made-up names—Revloc, Colver—fascinated me: a string of identical little wooden houses, almost shacks, riding the razorback of a mountain and straggling down the steep sides, no color because unpainted or stained with coal dust. Ebensburg was a place my mother and I felt on display, judged, but mountains filled me with sharp ecstasy. I suppose they fed the great hunger for beauty that gnawed at me as a child. As I got older and was still coerced into going, I brought girlfriends with me, to serve as a buffer.
My brother’s first marriage ended in divorce and he joined the marines. On his last furlough, he married Florence, a woman from a working-class family, an office worker, self-supporting but living at home. After Grant was sent overseas, my niece Suzanne was born. I took being an aunt seriously, pondering presents for my niece, much later trying to interest her in college. During the war, my father worked lots of overtime. Detroit was overcrowded and buzzing. He was chosen air-raid warden of our block and went about making sure people observed the blackout regulations. He was always chosen as a leader by other men, for he got on well with them and he was bright, capable and full of jokes. He had the capacity I still lack of remembering jokes he had heard and delivering them well. He was a shop steward in his union. We followed the war closely. Mother told me about what was happening to Jews in Europe—it is foolish to imagine people did not know. It was all over the Yiddish papers, and my grandmother talked about it constantly, worrying about her family back in Lithuania. It was terrifying to me. I was intensely patriotic and did wonders on the scrap-metal drives, the paper drives. I was a hero of trash. Mother half expected the Nazis to arrive any moment and kept saying, “Don’t tell anybody you’re Jewish,” as if everybody couldn’t tell anyhow.
The first cat who was vitally important to me was named by my mother Buttons, a tuxedo cat with great yellow eyes, long-legged and slender. I think he arrived around the time my career as a tomboy ended with the German measles followed by rheumatic fever. I came close to dying. My grandmother came and prayed over me. I remember waking to the smell of burnt herbs. She changed my Hebrew name from Miriam to Marah—bitter—so the angel of death, Malach ha-moves, would pass over me. I remember the sense of burning, burning, and days going by blurred. Afterward, I was not as afraid of death as I had been. It was more mundane to me. Been there, done that, perhaps I felt, because I had been pronounced as dying by the doctor who finally came to the house for five minutes. We never had much to do with doctors. My mother, like Bubbeh, believed in herbs and poultices, tisanes, hot and cold baths—to which Grandma added amulets and lots of praying.
I was turned from a sturdy child to a pale blue neurasthenic and anemic creature who fainted easily and was often ill with minor complaints like tonsillitis and sinusitis and chronic sore throats—no doubt exacerbated by my father’s nonstop smoking. Until that point I had little interest in school beyond the trouble I caused with my big mouth, and I was pleasing to my mother and close to her. I was born the wrong sex to please my father, but I was acceptable until disease turned me into an unattractive and sickly thing. I began to read a great deal, although my eyes had been weakened by German measles. Soon I was put into glasses, which annoyed my parents. An unattractive girl child was a liability. Now I was too weird to make friends easily, and after I began to do well in school, I was double-promoted and younger than anyone in my class.
For the next years till I went to summer school and graduated in order to cut one more semester off my prison sentence, I hated school. I liked some teachers, I liked some classes, but the entire experience of going to a ghetto grade school with its emphasis on discipline and ignoring what violence could not be contained, with the bored teachers and the even more bored students putting in their time, with the stench of urine and the yellowing dirty halls and busted lockers, old books, old desks, and the contempt of the teachers for us and themselves—for decades afterward, when I dreamt of imprisonment, it was always my grade school I saw. I lived in a state of high tension and fear, never knowing when just being who I was would get me into trouble. I was in fight after fight. I was poor at defending myself at first, because I tended to faint. But I learned to fight. I had to. When I had protectors, they were Black. Most of the time I had to depend on my ability to duck, to punch, to survive. But I was small, slight, and while I was fast, I had little physical strength. Eventually I learned to carry a knife and to act fierce. The combination was a bluff that usually worked.
The tough kids, the riffraff of the neighborhood, the kids from poor or broken families, the foster children taken in for money from the state, these were my friends. Some streets, some families, were much more middle class; the girls from those families were my tormentors. They dressed prettily and the teachers preferred them to all the lumpen rest of us. I would be the storyteller; they would be the princesses in school plays. After my illness, I did better than I was supposed to in school, so I was seated with them. Of course I wanted them to like me and was easily fooled, but they were unremittingly nasty as only self-righteously vicious little girls can be. I was their preferred victim until I escaped into high school and never spoke to them again.
I can still close my eyes and taste that prevailing fear, mixed with boredom, mixed with disgust and shame. Years later, when I was under surveillance by the FBI and the Red Squad in New York, I knew that same underlying ground of fear and tension, and sometimes it made me feel like a child again. When I think of certain years of my childhood, I seldom call up innocence or joy or a sense of safety: it is that whining rumble of fear like the sound of traffic as you lie awake in a high-rise that I remember.
I had for the next few years two comforts, two pleasures: escape into reading and other worlds, other times, other bodies; and my cat Buttons. He was very much mine and gave me the only strong affection I experienced besides my grandmother’s. My grandmother did not mind that my eyes had become weak and myopic and I must wear glasses. My grandmother thought I was beautiful. My grandmother thought I was brilliant. W
hatever was wrong with me, Grandmother could produce someone she had known who had had the same complaint and had done something wonderful. However, Grandma was only around in the summer, and Buttons was with me almost all of the time—when he was not wandering or in fights or lying injured someplace. I cannot count all the times I searched for him and found him with his leg swollen up by an abscess, or all the times he came limping home. I spent hours combing the alleys for him, and sometimes I found him and sometimes he dragged back on his own. One of the great frustrations of my childhood was that I was not permitted to sleep with him. He was not allowed on my bed, although when I was alone with him in the house, we both understood that rule was in abeyance. I was an emotional child with few outlets for my affection, inclined to be weepy and self-involved. I did not grow out of the copious tears until I was twenty-one or so. I became less engrossed with myself as I became more interested in the external world and more able to explore it.
Buttons was reasonably friendly with other cats and sometimes brought them home, including, once, a young female kitten I was permitted to keep for a short while but who then disappeared. My mother gave me a fanciful story, but I imagine they dumped her someplace enough blocks away so she could not come back. My mother did not hold with female cats, whom she considered immoral. It was from my mother I learned that you can teach a cat that it is permitted and in fact encouraged to hunt rodents, but that birds are forbidden, because my mother fed the birds in our tiny yard—fed them stale bread, leftover cereal, spaghetti, as well as growing sunflowers for them. She kept a compost pile, managing to grow great vegetables in a plot the size of your average dining room table and she understood that birds ate insects. None of our cats ever took a bird more than once.
My father liked Buttons and sometimes gave him a small saucer of beer. I can’t imagine this was good for the cat, but he liked it. He would weave around chair legs and then go to sleep and snore. My father was kind to animals. I wrote silly stories about Buttons, his exploits, his heroism, modeled on the dog and horse stories I consumed. I was extremely fond of animal stories: first of all, unlike stories about humans, females were as powerful as males. Lassie might be as heroic as Lad. Second, animals were not anti-Semitic, and I was beaten up regularly at school. Anti-Semitism was a word I learned very early.
My parents were ill suited. Mother had been married to the father of my brother Grant when she met Robert Douglas Piercy, a bachelor. Mother was seven years older than my father—we think. The three oldest girls in her family did not have birth certificates. My mother talked to ha Shem (God) all the time, personally, vehemently. My father considered all religion superstition, although he would attend the Presbyterian Church in Ebensburg when he was there and make us accompany him and his sisters. He did not believe in a deity, but he strongly believed in societal roles and how things were supposed to be. He considered the world mechanical and predetermined by the nature of its laws. Society was a machine. The universe was a bigger machine. Both required that everything stay in its proper place. His views were grim and rather puritanical.
He was a Roosevelt Democrat who later became a Nixon Republican. My mother was always at least liberal and usually radical. She had strong class politics, and in spite of her helplessness and dependence on my father, there was a streak of feminism in her. For instance, she admired women who kept their own names. She was keenly aware of the disadvantages of gender as it is constructed in this society, but also fatalistic. If I did not stay within the strict gender roles with which she was familiar, I would be punished, I would be killed. My father really considered women inferior in all respects. Unlike my father, who read only the paper and an occasional story in the Saturday Evening Post, Mother devoured books. With little education, she had no framework in which to retain what she read and little sense of how to read critically. All statements had the same validity to her, and she was often impressed by writers who struck me as charlatans. She was hungry for knowledge, but little in her environment encouraged her intellectual curiosity or fed it—except for the random books she carried home from Gabriel Richard public library. Sometimes we took the Livernois bus there. Sometimes my father would give us a ride. Mother never learned to drive. Every week we went to the library, that repository of dreams, ambitions, alternate lives, shimmering possibilities, hard and false information, history, belief, story. Every week I brought home receptacles containing hints that my life might be different, wider than my mother’s.
What she wanted for me was a clean pink-collar job. To her, the ultimate in refinement and ambition was to work in an office, and the top of the pile of women was the boss’s secretary. College was unreal. Her only images came from musicals, to which she was addicted. No one in our family had experienced higher education. When I enrolled in college prep in high school, instead of the commercial course, I did so without her knowledge or blessing. When she realized halfway through my freshman year what I had done, she was furious. I soothed her by taking typing courses. I am to this day a rapid typist, more than a hundred words a minute. My father’s only reaction was that he wasn’t going to pay for college: indeed, he didn’t.
My mother was sensual, highly sexual. My father had been passionate in the early days of the relationship, but once he had reduced her to housewife, he had contempt for her and indeed for all women. He gradually lost sexual and romantic interest, which made her bitterly unhappy. My childhood was lived in the trenches of their war. My mother liked food flavored with onions and herbs. My father liked things simple—the stuff he was used to eating in diners and restaurants as a bachelor. “I’m a meat and potatoes man.” My father’s pleasures were playing poker or other card games, drinking beer or whiskey, tinkering with his car, going fishing, fiddling around in the basement with power tools he relished. My mother loved music, romantic movies, books, gardening, gossiping and managing the affairs of the neighbors. She had liked to dance, to get dressed up and go out. He was dogmatically realistic; she was mystical and overdramatic. She raised flowers—chrysanthemums, irises, old-fashioned roses, black-eyed Susans—and vegetables and herbs; he wanted only grass. The small front and back yards were war zones. He would run the lawnmower through her flower beds. She would dig up his sod and plant beans.
The backyard, when they were not fighting about it, was heaven to me. From the time I was little, I loved to lie in the grass, looking into the spears of the iris bed where huge spiders lived, looking at the tiny cities of broken bricks with which my mother tried to defend her beds from his mower. I saw them as pueblos, whose pictures I had studied in the encyclopedia my mother bought at a yard sale. I caught caterpillars and attempted to raise butterflies in jars. My mother had read a book about organic gardening, so she had a compost pile about two feet by three feet in which she put everything that could decay and then used the soil to raise vegetables. It was right beside the lilac bush I loved. From the time I was six, the little space between the lilac bush and the alley fence was my own garden, where I could plant whatever I could, always mint and nasturtiums. In school in spring they sold seeds through special catalogs, and I would order the seeds my mother wanted and also some I could choose. The smell of lilacs recalls to me the best aspects of my mother. I still love seed catalogs, and every year, I order far too many packets of seeds, for the joy of them. Hollyhocks grew along the alley fence, outside, and my friends and I played with them, making hollyhock ladies dance on buckets of water, making heads from buds and impaling them on the open blossoms that became skirts. One girlfriend who lived kitty-corner across the alley was the daughter of a cop. I especially liked her because when we played dress-up, she wanted to be the rescued princess and I could do the rescuing. She was obsessed with what went on at burlesque shows, which her father regularly attended and her mother reviled. They were confused in her mind with whorehouses. We could locate those houses in the neighborhood, beside the streetwalkers we also knew. As I grew older, some of my friends joined their ranks.
Mother was
a storyteller, as Grandma was, but even when they told the same stories, the emphasis, the characters, sometimes even the outcomes were different. I have often said that I learned about viewpoint long before I wrote my first novel from listening to the different ways my mother and my grandmother saw the same people, the same events. If it was a family tale, then Aunt Ruth would also have a version. Mother’s stories were more dramatic and sensational; Grandma’s were moralistic or spiritual. Her best stories came from the rich pack of folklore of the women of the shtetl, a world of brutal violence and powerful magic. The story of the golem that I used in He, She and It, I first heard from my grandmother. Ruth’s versions of family stories emphasized the facts, what really happened, how she figured it out. They were little detective stories. Mother had tales about everyone in the neighborhood, for if they had secrets, she would know them sooner or later. Women came into her kitchen to consult her, to drink her coffee and eat her apple cake, to weep and sometimes giggle like me and my friends, and tell stories that made the hair stand up on my arms, when I could manage to keep quiet and overhear. Sometimes she read their palms. All this coming and going was in my father’s absence and never could be mentioned when he could hear it. He had forbidden her to read palms; it was one of our many secrets. Don’t tell your father was a refrain of my childhood, along with the threat I’ll tell your father if you do that. One of our weapons against his domination and his temper was to withhold information—little excursions we might have taken downtown, a dress she bought on sale and hid away, the visits of neighbors, the stories she told me of her previous boyfriends and husbands, the secrets of the neighborhood added to ours.