by Marge Piercy
Of course he also had exceptional vigor and strength. He is the only cat I ever knew who could catch squirrels when he chose. He would sometimes demand to go up in the attic and hunt them, for he was furious when they came into the house and ran back and forth over his ceilings. Outside he left them alone. He was not a great hunter, for he lacked motivation.
He was certainly a lover. He had a regular mate who bore him litters and litters of kittens, or rather bore them to the long-suffering people in the next block who owned her. She was a pretty solid gray cat, but apparently the tabby gene was dominant. He went with other cats and sometimes brought them home, but he and the gray female had an ongoing affectionate as well as sexual bond. When he was fed on the back porch in hot weather, he would often bring her along to share his food.
He did not much care for car travel. By this time I rarely went to the cottage with my parents. I felt I had outgrown it and prized the time in the house alone. He and I got on quite well. As I had when I was a child and my mother was sick, I would open something we both liked, tuna fish or sardines, and share the can with him. Once when I was little and my mother was sick, she got out of bed to find me and Buttons eating sardines from the same plate. She was scandalized. I could not understand why. I was saving dishes that I would have to wash. Anyhow, Brutus and I were quite content to loll around the house. Of course, I had to go to work.
In my last year of high school, I developed a close friendship with a young woman a year behind me. Let’s call her Henrietta. We were both sixteen, but I had been double-promoted in grade school. Although they lived on a street much like ours, the atmosphere was different. Both her parents worked, and she had a closet full of feminine clothes. She played the piano seriously, also wrote poetry, not very good but I wasn’t about to tell her that. It was hard enough to get her to show me her poems. She had long wavy brown hair almost to her waist. I decided to grow my hair, over my mother’s protests. She thought long hair was messy, unhygienic and reeked of the old country. My grandmother had long hair till the day she died, worn in a braided bun she loosened at night. Then she would sit on the edge of the double bed we shared and let her hair down like Rapunzel. I was in love with her when she did that, but before I was sixteen, it had never occurred to me to let my own hair grow.
My grandmother had died slowly of stomach cancer. At her funeral I had revolted against Orthodox Judaism. I was freshly aware of the situation of women. I found the rabbi a joke. He knew nothing of her character, her life, her escape with her husband who had a price on his head from an unsuccessful attempt at revolution, her clandestine passage to America, her persistence through poverty, but instead turned her into a stereotypical Yiddishe mama with no personality, no past. I hated hypocrisy at sixteen and I saw it everywhere—except in myself, of course, and in Brutus. I wrote poetry of loss, of death and desolation, but I already had learned from the culture you did not write love poems to your grandma, so I invented a dead male lover. It was Hannah I was mourning in this guise. They were called the Lil poems and later I won my first Hopwood contest at college with a short manuscript containing several of them. In reaction to what I saw as hypocrisy, I flirted with Buddhism. I was fascinated by mysticism but was ignorant of Jewish mystics, was repulsed by the Christianity that had been shoved at me at school, and found Buddhism in its sanitized Americanized version clean and sweet and enlightened. I tried chanting, controlled breathing, meditation. I discovered if I let my mind go, I saw visions—often frightening but sometimes ecstatic. I wrote bad poetry about my visions in endless spiral notebooks.
This aspect of my life I shared with absolutely no one, except, of course, Brutus. Henrietta also had a cat, Pooh-bear. I had not been raised on Winnie-the-Pooh, so had no idea where this name came from. Pooh-bear was an altered female cat who never went out. She had a sandbox in the basement instead. She was clean, dainty, well fed and well groomed. When Henrietta played piano, Pooh-bear sat on top like the dog in Peanuts, swishing her tail. Everything in this house was different, from the Constant Comment tea I had never tasted to the pretty clothes and the porcelain cups, the middle-class amenities. It had never before occurred to me that clothes should match. My mother had no idea of that kind of taste. I had a limited number of sweaters, blouses, skirts, jeans, and I put on whatever was clean. The notion of coordinated outfits was as strange to me as it would have been to a Bushman. I had certain favorites from clothes mostly picked up at rummage and yard sales, favored because they were soft or of a color I liked. I had never put intelligence or aesthetic judgment into clothing. I understood this made me a barbarian. My friend told me how special her family was and how special she was, and I agreed. I was a little in love. Everything in her life seemed to me refined and elegant. I felt common and loud and ashamed. Yet I never wavered in my opinion I was a better writer.
I admired everything else about Henrietta. If Pooh-bear had done anything as vulgar as have fleas, they would have been trained fleas and done tricks. Henrietta had a streak of cruelty that caused her to turn on me and make fun of me from time to time, so I never could quite trust her. There was much to make fun of, my house with its roomers, my shabby clothes, my bad teeth. The odd jobs I did, which I was always running off to. Henrietta did not have to work.
Henrietta had another friend, the first out Lesbian I ever met. Kiki viewed me as a rival for Henrietta’s affections. She played the piano masterfully. Henrietta once tricked me into playing Chopin while Kiki hid in the next room, so they could make fun of my playing. Kiki kept telling me I was really a Lesbian and should admit it. I had no idea what I was. My sexuality confused me. But I resented being pushed into a category I had not chosen. I knew one thing for sure: I had to escape home and my mother to have any chance of exploring my own sexuality. I was not attracted to Kiki, because I found her domineering and flamboyant. I’d had enough of that.
They laughed together at the way I dressed and spoke. My childhood had been totally different from that of middle-class girls, although I did not share my wilder adventures or my sexual exploits. The only being with whom I talked with total honesty was my cat: and the poems I hid from my mother, who went through my room frequently looking for just such signs of my inner life. Much of my energy went into protecting my thoughts, my desires, my work, my plans from her. During those years I developed a handwriting so illegible it protected me from her—and unfortunately, from everyone else who tries to read it. Sometimes I can’t read it myself. It wasn’t until I went away to college that I had a friend with whom I could be honest about myself. Until then, friendship was a log over a pit of alligators. I wanted to reveal myself, to blurt myself out. But I could not. Even much of what was visible was unacceptable; how revolting my inner life would have been. Like many adolescents, I thought of myself as a monster. I had other friends on the school paper. One was a Jehovah’s Witness who tried to convert me. Such a marginal religion fascinated me, who had grown up only one of two Jews—the other Black—in my neighborhood. I went to services with her, and my mother accompanied me, willing to go anyplace where other women were pleasant to her. However, we were not about to get seriously involved.
Another friend, Edith, was naive but energetic. I learned a little Finnish as I hung out with her, and she was one of the only friends to whom I showed my writing. She was far less judgmental than my other friends but easily shocked. Although at times I enjoyed pushing writing or opinions at her that were bound to overwhelm her sense of how things were, mostly I respected her innocence. She and her brothers were not allowed to have pets. Her mother considered them unsanitary and a waste of food. Therefore Edith made a great fuss over Brutus. We were both bound for Ann Arbor together, but her mother did not want her to room with me, for she mistrusted me.
I had another friend from the school paper, Louise. I liked her but thought her silly, the stereotypical ditzy blonde. Her hair was almost white and her eyes a pale but startlingly clear blue. In college I would room with her by my second semester, after discovering we h
ad elements of our past in common and that we were both more experienced and tougher than we appeared. She was to become as close to me as anyone in my life ever has been, but I would never have guessed that from the role she played in high school. Later she would be beautiful, but then she was too frantic, too nervous to be more than pretty, with tight curls around her face that did not go with her delicate features.
All through my senior year, I was counting time toward my flight. It wasn’t that I became detached or uninvolved with the people around me, but that I endured the boredom of high school, the war with my parents, the sense of being invisible—all as a temporary condition soon to be erased by my departure. I was walking through the maze of what was expected of me while putting my best effort into trying to understand what I read and trying to write. My fiction suffered from being a strange uncouth hybrid of Faulknerian characters and situations, and plots from the girls’ novels my friends were reading. I burned that first novel in the fireplace a few years ago, when it occurred to me I could die at any moment in a highway accident or an airplane crash, and someone else might actually read the ghastly thing. I scattered its ashes in the woods. Somebody may read my old love letters or my angry letters, bad enough, but to permit anyone to read that gangling adolescent mix of baroque storytelling and simplistic notions of dialogue and romance, was unendurable to any dignity I still possess. Still, some of the poems I wrote then do not embarrass me. I included a few in Early Grrrl. My poetry developed earlier and quicker than my fiction. I grappled with dialogue. I would write “I mize well do it,” and only after some weeks figure out that while that was what I heard, what was meant would be written as “I might as well do it.” I figured out on my own that long semitranscribed conversations about what to have for lunch were realistic but boring. Writing dialogue was not transcribing what people really said. These were important lessons.
Once in a while, I went out with a boy from school or the neighborhood, but none of them interested me. I went out with them because I was supposed to. That at least pleased my mother, although she felt I did not treat them well. Once I went out with a jazz musician, a trumpet player I met downtown. I realized very quickly I was out past my depth and retreated. I am sure if any benign older man or woman had appeared and offered to seduce me and carry me away into a better or at least more interesting world, I would have accepted in ten seconds. I would have fallen into bed or gone off with anyone who spoke kindly and patted my head. Fortunately—I suppose—no one did. In some ways I knew a great deal and in other respects I was an idiot—a fool like the one on the tarot card who walks off a precipice whistling to herself.
Brutus developed a friendship with the dog next door, two-thirds his size. They would play together—chasing each other around his yard. Then they would lie in the sun. Normally he ran dogs off if they came on his lawn or his property, but he liked that dog. After the dog died, many years later, he developed a close bond with the young woman who had owned it. He used to visit her. When my father retired and my parents moved to Florida, he—at twenty years old—decided he didn’t want to go and instead adopted that woman and lived out his life with her. I have never had a cat who did not want to go off with me wherever I went, but my parents had been going down to Florida for months at a time, and he stayed with her when they were absent. He was a great survivor, Brutus was.
My relationship with him was not as intense as that with the two previous cats, because I was already partly gone—ready to get out and away. I had been applying to colleges and trying for scholarships without my parents’ knowledge or cooperation. When I got a full tuition scholarship to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, they were not pleased and started arguing that if I insisted on college, I should live at home and go to Wayne, in Detroit. I had no intention of doing that, and I had been saving money since I was twelve.
After I left home, when I visited, Brutus never came back to my bed. He did not forgive me for going away, although he knew me and was still affectionate. I was no longer his; he was no longer mine. I had thought I would take him back after college, but it became clear he did not care to go with me. He was now my parents’ cat. My father was able to give Brutus more affection than I ever saw him lavish on any person—including his sisters and brothers, Grant, his nephews and nieces, myself and especially my mother. For many years, they were good companions. Butch followed my father into the garage when he was working on carpentry or on his car. My father talked to him. I think Brutus was his idea of how a creature should be: big, strong, manly, quiet, dignified and mostly undemanding.
The one thing Brutus did that annoyed my father was that occasionally he would piss on the television set. It was the only object in the house he sprayed, but I viewed that action as social criticism. The TV was a rival for my father’s attention, so the cat marked it as his own. He intensely disliked the gunfire noises when my father was watching his favorite westerns or cop shows.
Brutus was in his way a strong personality, a match for my father in dignity and stubbornness. I did not begrudge him Brutus, but I was surprised. My father was never otherwise as likable as when he was with his own and only cat. It made me think that if I had been born a particular type of boy, a good athlete, say, or a whiz with machinery or cars, he might even have loved me.
THE GOOD OLD DAYS AT HOME SWEET HOME
On Monday my mother washed.
It was the way of the world,
all those lines of sheets flapping
in the narrow yards of the neighborhood,
the pulleys stretching out second
and third floor windows.
Down in the dank steamy basement,
wash tubs vast and grey, the wringer
sliding between the washer
and each tub. At least every
year she or I caught
a hand in it.
Tuesday my mother ironed.
One iron was the mangle.
She sat at it feeding in towels,
sheets, pillow cases.
The hand ironing began
with my father’s underwear.
She ironed his shorts.
She ironed his socks.
She ironed his undershirts.
Then came the shirts,
a half hour to each, the starch
boiling on the stove.
I forgot blueing. I forgot
the props that held up the line
clattering down. I forgot
chasing the pigeons that shat
on her billowing housedresses.
I forgot clothespins in the teeth.
Tuesday my mother ironed my
father’s underwear. Wednesday
she mended, darned socks on
a wooden egg. Shined shoes.
Thursday she scrubbed floors.
Put down newspapers to keep
them clean. Friday she
vacuumed, dusted, polished
scraped, waxed, pummeled.
How did you become a feminist
interviewers always ask
as if to say, when did this
rare virus attack your brain?
It could have been Sunday
when she washed the windows,
Thursday when she burned
the trash, bought groceries
hauling the heavy bags home.
It could have been any day
she did again and again what
time and dust obliterated
at once until stroke broke
her open. I think it was Tuesday
when she ironed my father’s shorts.
FIVE
INTERLUDE IN THE PRESENT: THE FEBRUARY LESSON
Of the cats we have now, Max is the golden prince, a long lean red mackerel tabby with aquamarine eyes and a patrician nose. His color is changeable, golden under the sun and deep orange under artificial light. Max has perfect tabby markings like the striations on a sandbar at low tide. His mew is tiny and seems to belong to the ki
tten he was. He is the most outdoor of all our cats. He could not be kept in any enclosure or on a leash. He turned himself into water and slid out. A thirteen-pound cat, he can slip through cracks. He is extremely affectionate—on his terms. When we annoy him, he swats us the same way he cuffs Efi the kitten when she bothers him. He views us as helpless in the important things.
All the cats have various nicknames: Max’s is Mr. Pitiful, as in the old Wilson Pickett song. His whole body inscribes an arc of sorrow or dejection. When he is hungry, his spine, his posture, his magnificent full white whiskers, his tail all speak starvation and neglect. When he comes in soaked with rain, he runs to me, cries his distress once, twice, and then throws himself down at my feet and stays there making an occasional exclamation point over himself until I get a towel and properly dry him. Every morning Max and Oboe go out with eagerness and some apprehension: is everything in place out there, have any strange cats pissed on their bushes, what scents reveal adventures during the night, passing coyotes, strange dogs, raccoons on the porch.
When I was younger, I would travel anyplace, anytime, in the same way that I would pursue casual sexual adventures. Now like the cats, I am rooted. For me the ideal vacation is not to go off to the Caribbean or London, but to stay and immerse myself in my chosen life. I remember the first extensive tour I went on in 1973, ten California schools in two weeks, two hundred dollars a reading. At that time I was living in a group marriage. My youngest partner wanted to go to graduate school. We needed money for his tuition. Two weeks in California, up and down the coast, what could be more fun? Two weeks of sleeping on couches, floors, eating fast food, being driven from Chico to Fresno to Sacramento to Irvine to San Diego by strangers, sleepless and babbling. I got home exhausted, with no lining left on my stomach. I enjoy performing, but I dislike planes and motel rooms. When I am on the road too long, I grow morose and irritable. I complain as pitifully as Max.