by Marge Piercy
Violence was a daily part of the neighborhood—not the violence of today, drive-by shootings. Hardly anyone had a gun, but many of us had knives or razors. Violence was in the family, between the races, among neighbors. The man next door used to come home on payday tanked to the gills and throw his entire family out of the house, one at a time. He would work his way through them, starting with the youngest, swat them around, rough them up and then hurl them out the grade door so they slammed one at a time against our house so it shook. The youngest son was my on-and-off-again boyfriend, and it made me feel bad to hear him pleading and then crying. We would lie in bed waiting till it was over to sleep, but of course, we never said anything. The father was the breadwinner: a Lithuanian immigrant, he worked as a bus driver. He had the right to beat his wife and his sons. We knew it was coming when we would hear his voice, never otherwise raised, lamenting his brood of bloodsuckers. Then we knew the beatings were about to start. That did not surprise me, since I was frequently beaten.
It was not that my parents were cruel. My father never hit my mother, although he terrorized her with his temper, as she in turn went into blind crazy rages. Once when they were fighting about whether to go to Ebensburg for Thanksgiving, she pulled the tablecloth fully laden with supper off the table, flinging it at the window. My father did hit me, quite often. If he got angry enough, he kicked me, hard. The worst thing was being beaten with a wooden yardstick that leaned against the wall behind two doors that always stood open, where the mangle and the vacuum cleaner were kept. That continued until I took the yardstick and broke it into many pieces.
My father was impatient, and working with him had a dangerous side. He might let go of the ladder when I was climbing, he might drop a hammer on my foot, he might let a table I was helping him move pin me to the wall. It was a tamped-down hostility suddenly leaping out of control: a desire to be free of my mother and of me. A desire to be alone again. On the afternoon of my mother’s memorial, many years later in Florida, we returned through the sweltering humidity to their empty house. My father seemed oddly jolly.
“I want to get a burger and a beer. I always wanted to try Harpoon Louie’s.”
That was the local TGI Friday’s imitation. “You want to go out now?” Woody asked.
“Why not?” My father chuckled. “Now that I’m baching it again.”
That desire to get rid of the burden of the two of us may have been behind his terrifying impatience. I have a crushed misshapen finger, the index finger of my left hand, because I was too slow getting into the car to go to Sears, and he slammed the door on my hand. He might have been a fine uncle, full of jokes and singing off-key and playing cards with enthusiasm and skill, letting his nephews and nieces have a sip of his beer, but he should never have been a father. I understand. I would not be an adequate mother. Having to put up with us was more than he could easily endure.
But he was an honorable man with a strong sense of duty, so he stayed, where another man would simply have taken off. If he had left, we would really have been reduced to poverty. Mother had no ability to earn a living. Not only did he stay, but he also paid monthly for my grandmother’s keep, a woman who meant nothing to him, however important she was to me. That was a lot of money going out every month from what was never an ample salary, but I didn’t hear him complain.
One charming thing he did was recite poetry that he had learned in school. This love of poetry was something my parents gave me. In the Ebensburg school system, every child learned certain poems by heart. “On the day we French stormed Ratisbon / a mile or so away / on a little mound Napoleon stood….” “The boy stood on the burning deck.” Heliked to recite in a loud sonorous voice. I loved those times. It would happen in the evenings, over coffee and cake at the kitchen table. I would ask for the poems I particularly liked. My mother would reel off “The Owl and the Pussycat.” The owl and the pussycat were happy, for once.
My parents were simply obsessed with each other and after my early childhood, in which I pleased my mother, found me more of a nuisance than an asset. I began doing very well in school after my illnesses, but neither of them was interested in grades. My brother had done poorly in school but had been their idea of a proper boy. I seemed incapable of learning when I carried home my dim accomplishments—all A’s, my spelling bee victories—how little such things were valued by my parents. They would much rather have had a healthy flirtatious little girl, a sort of minor-league Shirley Temple. When we were given intelligence tests, I was made to take mine over again. The score was inconceivable. It was embarrassing for my mother and annoying to the school. The principal did not know what to do with me. Since I read way above my grade level, I was sent out of class to tutor the kids who could not read. I rather liked that, and I liked them. Usually they were from African-American families just up from the South to work in the nearby factories. They liked getting out of the classroom and so did I. We were misfits together.
I confided my ambitions only to Buttons, who listened approvingly. Like many cats, he loved to be talked to. I had dressed Whiskers in doll clothes, but I never did that to Buttons. He was my coconspirator. I did not know much about college, but I knew it was where you learned the things you needed in order to understand the world, I knew it was the way out of the neighborhood I wanted to escape. By the time I was twelve, I knew. I listened to my aunt Ruth saying that with a college diploma, she could have been a professional, she could have achieved a high civil service rating. Staying was death. It was drinking too much or doing drugs. Staying was going on the streets as some of my girlfriends soon did, running numbers like the guys, working at dead-end jobs, having babies too young and too many. It meant violence or tedium, dying fast or slow. It meant reform school and then prison. That was all I could see before me if I did not get out.
Buttons had an unusual habit: when I went out into the alley to scavenge or make my way through the neighborhood, often he would walk at my side. He trotted along beside me, giving an occasional chirp or meow of comment. If we met a dog, he climbed something. If I ran into a friend, he dropped back. Those were our secret walks.
Buttons disappeared when I was twelve. We never found his body, although I spent endless afternoons and weekends looking for him, always hoping to find him still alive. There are so many ways a cat living half on the streets and in the alleys could have died. I mourned him violently.
Shortly thereafter, I found a way to have a sense of community, of belonging—by joining a street gang.
THE NEW ERA C. 1946
It was right after the war of my childhood
World War II, and the parks were wide open.
The lights were all turned on, house
lights, street lights, neon like green
and purple blood pumping the city’s heart.
I had grown up in brown out, black out,
my father the air raid warden going house to
house to check that no pencil
of light stabbed out between blackout curtains.
Now it was summer and Detroit was celebrating.
Fireworks burst open their incandescent petals
flaring in arcs down into my wide eyes.
A band was playing “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
Then the lights came on brighter and starker
than day and sprayers began to mist the field.
It was the new miracle DDT in which we danced,
its faint perfumy smell like privet along the sidewalks.
It was comfort in mist, for there would be no more
mosquitoes ever, and now we would always be safe.
Out in Nevada soldiers were bathing in fallout.
People downwind of the tests were drinking
heavy water out of their faucets. Cancer
was the rising sign in the neon painted night.
Little birds fell out of the trees but no one
noticed. We had so many birds then.
In Europe American cigarettes were m
oney.
Here all the kids smoked on street corners.
I used to light kitchen matches with my thumbnail.
My parents threw out their depression ware
and bought Melmac plastic dishes.
They believed in plastic and the promise
that when they got old, they would go
to Florida and live like the middle class.
My brother settled in California with a new
wife and his old discontent. New car,
new refrigerator, Mom and Dad have new hats.
Crouch and cover. Ashes, ashes, all fall down.
THREE
A LIFE IN WORDTIGHT COMPARTMENTS
You must not imagine the gang I joined at age twelve was like the gangs of today. We were not part of a drug distribution system, for that was in underworld hands. Heroin and marijuana and uppers existed in school and in the neighborhood, but we were more interested in alcohol and tobacco. We had no guns. When turf fights existed, they were sporadic and a matter of fists, baseball bats, Sam Browne belts, occasional knives and razors; since no income was involved, they were not pursued long or vigorously. Nobody much wanted our turf, from the gasworks to the railroad tracks. I was stronger by then, no longer fainting. I learned to pick easy locks and I could run like hell. I had quick hands. I was gifted at shoplifting and never caught. My gifts were appreciated in the gang, who forgave me for doing well in school—something I never gave up. I would not allow my grades to falter no matter what I did in the hours afterward, because of my dream of somehow escaping to that place called “college.”
We specialized in petty theft—stuff found in unlocked garages and cars, what we could get by shoplifting, opening basements, stealing bikes and running mild scams. We played “scavenger hunt,” working up the side of a block, asking for a buffalo nickel. Almost every house would give us one. With a couple of dollars, we felt rich. A package of cigarettes was a quarter. We were just street kids working the blocks we could reach on foot. We climbed on the roof of the White Castle, a local fast-food chain, and blocked the chimney or threw garbage down it. We stole hubcaps and, a couple of times, shirts left out on a line. We got older brothers to buy beer, which we’d drink till somebody puked. We all needed money for cigarettes. I smoked Lucky Strikes. Mostly we stole stuff we could use, but if we found something like a good saw or electric drill, we could sell it to an older kid who acted as agent for a fence. He would give us a dollar for something his boss could sell. We knew about marijuana and heroin, but none of us touched it—yet. We did get our hands on white lightning from a local still in a garage. It was cheap, strong and merciless and burned the lining off my throat. I did not enjoy it but drank it out of pride, not to seem afraid.
Another skill I acquired around this time was lying. When I was younger, I was truthful with my mother. She could empty me out like a pocket and I would tell her everything. She would have been a terrific interrogator, as she could play either soft cop or tough cop. Her skills at reading body language were intense. As I entered puberty, she began frantically to police me. She went through my things, she violated my privacy daily. After all, my room was hardly private. It held her sewing machine; it was the route to the attic and storage. I returned her hostility and became master of the quick and easy lie. She never knew where I had been, although she imagined she did. I created lies within lies, tangles of obfuscation in which all of the invention I would later put into my novels was developed and perfected in keeping my mother at bay. I still have an overdeveloped and paranoid sense of privacy. I become hostile if someone, even Ira, picks up objects on my desk or dresser and appears to be looking through them. I am nosy about other people, but I hate being questioned myself.
As I said, my mother was forty-four when she had me, so when I began to menstruate, she must have been well into menopause. Certainly her response to my first period was close to anger. She went down to the corner drugstore, returned with a box of menstrual pads and a sanitary belt. “Go in the bathroom, shut the door and put it on,” she yelled. Obviously I had done something wrong. I managed as best I could. I had no idea how to attach the pad to the belt, so I hung a string of safety pins from the belt down to the end of the pad and put the belt around my waist. This was extremely uncomfortable and prone to stick out in back or front in a embarrassing way. A year later, my aunt Ruth saw me putting on a menstrual pad and showed me how to loop it through the sharp end of the belt and wear the belt and pad properly.
When I had my period, Mother would not let me near wine she was making or dough that was rising, and I had to take my pads out to the alley and burn them. At first I had to ask for each pad, as if I might use too many. I took to stealing them by the box from the drugstore and then I did not have to ask. I was an accomplished shoplifter from twelve on through college. It was how I got the things I did not have the money to pay for. I stole my first brassiere. I needed a bra from the time I was twelve, but my mother would not let me wear one, saying I wasn’t old enough. I began walking all hunched over. I stole one and hid it, so when I went out, I could slip into a bathroom and put it on. Finally in high school, she bought me a couple of bras. At the same time, she presented me with my first girdle. Since I weighed ninety pounds, this was superfluous by any rational standard, but not by the mores of the 1950s. If you might jiggle, you needed a girdle. I hated it. It was a white rubber contraption with garters hanging down. I could see only one advantage in growing up: being able, I imagined, to control my own destiny and make my own choices.
Another cat walked into the backyard, a long-haired tabby someone had taken the trouble to have altered. I was picking lilacs from the bush by the tiny compost pile. A strange tabby stood at the alley gate and stared at me expectantly. He did not meow, he did not do anything except look straight at me. I walked slowly to the gate, expecting him to run away. Instead he held his ground. I opened the gate and he stepped intelligently out of the way, then strolled onto the cement walkway that led from the alley gate to the grade door of the house. He walked to the door and I followed. He waited to be let in. “Mother!” I called. He was gravely polite with her, allowing both of us to pet him. He was very hungry but ate carefully, without getting food on the floor.
My mother named him Fluffy. He was an exceptionally mild and sweet-tempered cat, although he would sit on the fence and tease the dog next door, who could not reach him. I would wait till my parents went to sleep and then sneak down to the basement (where he unlike Buttons was permitted to sleep) and carry him up to my bed. I don’t think I slept much those years, as I had to sneak him out in the morning. Like Malkah he enormously appreciated having a home and was demonstrative with all of us. He wanted to be a lap cat. He quietly and inexorably worked on my parents with his charm and his patience and his persistence until he was allowed to sleep inside, until he was taken on vacation with us, until he had at least some of the privileges he strongly desired. He had little interest in the life of the alley and would eat almost anything presented to him, including cantaloupe and tomato sauce. He would try anything you offered him, out of politeness if not hunger.
The neighborhood in Detroit was Black and white by blocks, like a crazy checkerboard. I had always gotten along with the Black kids in my grade school; in fact some of them protected me from the white kids. Being one of the only Jews in the neighborhood, I was not white and I was not Black, but something in between. Jews were not whites and were kept out of most neighborhoods in Detroit by covenants, as were the Blacks. My first boyfriend in grade school (I had a couple earlier) was Black, but that earned me a beating and got him into trouble too. He took his mother’s brooch to give me. That didn’t help either of us. But his sister Josephine looked out for me. She knew I had really cared for Joey. I was casually prejudiced but at the same time recognized I had more in common with the two brightest Black girls in my class, who had also been double-promoted with me and who were hard and fast, than I did with any of the doll-like white girls the teachers li
ked. My white friends were all kids up from Appalachia or tough girls placed in foster families.
Cats were my usual pets, but I had others: turtles bought from the dime store that promptly died; tadpoles or frogs from science class in school that I would keep in the house for a week or so and then get my parents to picnic someplace where I could free them; a garter snake a boy named Floyd gave me. I thought it much better than presents other boyfriends gave me, silly jewelry from the dime store or half a bag of candy. I named it Slinky and got books from the library about how to care for it. My mother disliked that snake intensely. Her neighborhood ladies did not want to come into the house. One day I came home from school to find that Slinky had disappeared. I tore the house apart looking for him. I was consumed with guilt, imagining him dying of starvation or thirst in some ventilation duct. It was not until ten years later, my mother told me she had taken him out to a vacant lot and let him go—which was probably the kindest thing to do, but I wasted a lot of time and guilt looking for him. I brought home all the amphibians because I had a crush on my general science teacher, Mrs. Williams. I loved her cool rationality combined with enthusiasm for her subject. I thought I might be a scientist, if I were not to be a successful thief.
One tremendous pleasure of my childhood from the time I was perhaps four years old into adolescence was travel. I mentioned the regular trips to Cleveland and Ebensburg. My father was sent by Westinghouse all over the state to repair machinery—in steel mills, paper mills, foundries. In summer, Mother and I accompanied him. Sometimes in the spring or fall, I would skip school and we would go. I remember my mother and me hanging around parks in Port Huron, in Lansing, in Kalamazoo. I was particularly fond of the Winona Hotel in Bay City, which was fronted by a big old-fashioned verandah with vines where I could often find Isabella woolly bear caterpillars. I thought of them as the pussycats of the caterpillar family. Also in the dining room they had a relish tray that went around before the meal was served. I was impressed by that—as I was by anything that gave me a choice. Radishes, cottage cheese, scallions, olives—that was luxury. Travel seemed to me a wonderful freedom from daily life, and I think it was so to my mother, as she was often playful. We would find something free or cheap to occupy our stolen time, perhaps a small ratty zoo, a museum of coins or local history, a park, a fountain, a river. This was her escape from housework.