Sleeping With Cats

by Marge Piercy

  Many writers go on about how writing is painful, born of blood and pain, torn from the gut. But the truth is, I very much like to write. I enjoy writing poetry and I enjoy fiction. I get to exorcise my impulse to autobiography in my poems and in what were until now short memoirs. In fiction, I exercise my nosiness. I am as curious as my cats, and indeed that has led to trouble often enough and used up several of my nine lives. I am an avid listener. I am fascinated by other people’s lives, the choices they make and how that works out through time, what they have done and left undone, what they tell me and what they keep secret and silent, what they lie about and what they confess, what they are proud of and what shames them, what they hope for and what they fear. The source of my fiction is the desire to understand people and their choices through time. I am a repository of many people’s stories and secrets. Immersing myself in other lives satisfies me.

  Malkah is the largest of our cats. The vet says she is the largest female he has ever seen, not only rotund but big boned, big framed, the size of a pregnant raccoon. She is apricot and creamy white, impeccably clean, plush. Her face is round, her eyes are moonlike, round and pale greenish yellow. Almost no one else ever sees her. Some friends maintain we have only four cats and pretend to have five. There is something of the odalisque in Malkah, a quality languid and opulent. After a period of her hiding when we first brought her home, I seduced her, gradually, painstakingly, with food, attention, soft words and patience. I have patience for little, but I had it for her. She loves Ira, but she is my cat. I wake sometimes in the night and she is pressed against my side kneading me and purring, purring, an engine of passion.

  Guests seldom see Malkah, unless they sleep over, when they catch a glimpse of her stealing a peek at them or wake in the night to see two enormous round eyes watching. For the first two years, she did not go out. Then one sunny July morning, she sidled to the door, looking into my eyes, asking. She plunges out the way a swimmer will throw her body into cold ocean water: all at once, as if daring herself. Her farthest journey is into the two upper gardens. She has never walked down the drive or seen the two lower gardens. Max is adventurous and roving; Malkah is careful and tied to the house by a mental leash of no more than fifty feet. Even the way she moves is cautious. She is fast when she hunts, but generally, she looks quite hard before she leaps. In spite of her girth, she never knocks things over, because she places her big furry feet so painstakingly.

  In spite of her fearfulness she is the happiest cat I have ever lived with. To eat and to have a home and feel loved is bliss. I understand this, for I am the same way. I inherited from my mother the capacity to take great joy in small things, in the taste of a salad fresh from the garden, the scent of a just plucked rose, Ira’s company, a friend, the pleasure of making a favorite dish or inventing a new soup, a walk. When I am allowed to be happy, I am, like a state of rest I naturally return to—now, that is.

  The youngest cat is Efi. When the vet gave Oboe only a matter of weeks, I became very depressed. Ira bought me a kitten on Valentine’s Day of last year, a chocolate-point Siamese. That very first night this creature, no bigger than a lab rat and, like many Siamese kittens, rather resembling one, crawled boldly into bed and plastered herself against Ira. She is the most confident kitten we ever brought into the house. It took Dinah five months to fully accept Max and Malkah. Efi simply refused to be rejected. They would spit at her, growl, then when they went to sleep, they would wake up with her purring in their arms and think, Oh, obviously I must like her. Two weeks, and fierce Dinah was washing her and permitting Efi to chew on her tail. Oboe regained a strong interest in life.

  Efi believes Malkah is her mother. Malkah believes Efi is her kitten. There is no physical resemblance: Malkah is enormous with medium-long orange fur and everything round, her face, her eyes, her body; Efi is long and lean like Max, muscular, lithe, with extremely short fur. Her body is ivory with chocolate markings, her ears pointy, her tail extremely long, high-set muscular legs and pure large dark blue radiant eyes. But whenever Malkah purrs, Efi comes running. The sound makes her dance with pleasure.

  Malkah is a natural mouser and has set out to teach Efi. At first it was a farce. Malkah is a patient hunter. She outwaits mice and never forgets where they are in the walls or under the wallboard radiators. She would sit meditating on mousiness and willing the mouse to appear, for hours if necessary. Finally the mouse would creep out—and then Efi would get so excited, she would hurl herself at the mouse and under the radiator it would go for another two hours. Now they hunt together, with great success.

  Efi grows more affectionate. She climbs in my lap often now and she comes up to me as I sit at my computer and demands to be petted. If I do not pet her, she takes my hand in her paws and pulls gently on it, to remind me of my duty. She begins to express a personality. When you acquire a kitten or the kitten acquires you, you can only guess what kind of being you have brought into your life. Some of the personality is there from the beginning, born in or burned in by genetics and the early days and weeks of life, but much of it flowers as the animal grows and matures. You have brought in a being to share your time and your space, and like a new lover, you cannot be at all sure what you have opened yourself to. Efi is still becoming who she is. She is on my computer monitor right now. We quarrel about her tail passing back and forth like an extralong windshield wiper across my screen.

  She is as beautiful as a Siamese can be. Exquisite. She and Malkah wash each other with a housewifely seriousness, holding on and madly cleaning; they do this daily, as part of their bonding. Efi is constantly learning. That posture with the head tilted, sitting bolt upright like a statue of Bastet, is one of her signature poses. What does that mean, she is always asking. Malkah and Efi play structured games, reaching through the bars of the coffee-table legs to count coup on each other’s paws. With Max, Efi plays rough. I imagine wrestling was invented by someone watching cats play. They throw each other, they pin each other. Efi is as athletic as Max. Their romps are like choreographed scenes from kung fu movies. They race from one end of the house to the other, they hurl themselves down the steps. They collide, they dodge, they feint. They roll over and over. They lunge at each other and tumble. They climb and pounce.

  Tomorrow I will start the first seedlings downstairs in the former darkroom—a mad gardener’s laboratory full of bags of starting medium, sphagnum moss, envelopes dated in black marking pen when the seeds inside are to be started, bird food in twenty-five-pound sacks. Two days ago as we drove into Boston for me to fly off to a gig in Michigan, we noticed the first red blush, almost a mist, among the swamp maples, and the chartreuse of some weeping willows. It begins to begin to imagine being spring. Spring to me is not a matter of temperature, but of what is happening with trees and bushes, birds and skunks.

  I never truly experienced seasons before I moved here, just as I never noticed phases of the moon. Living out to sea on this sandbar, gardening, walking in the woods and by the marshes and along the shores have attuned me to the changes of wind and weather, of sun and moon. It has greatly enriched my poetry. Everything a poet experiences becomes part of that strange irrational cauldron of images cooking always in the back brain. If you truly look at a bird—a red-shouldered hawk, a towhee, a tufted titmouse, and you see how that bird moves and what it eats and how it flies, if you listen to it—then that bird is lodged in you. It is accessible to your imagination and will probably appear someday, an unexpected gift to a poem needing just that bird. Everything that I ingest—history, zoology, botany, anthropology, paleontology, astronomy—becomes part of that lore stored away. Spring moves in me when it is only a faint softening of the soil, a lengthening of the light and a shortening of the shadows, long before I ever noticed change when I lived in cities.

  Now, four days later, it is snowing, thick white blankety stuff muffling everything. I view it with a sharp sense of betrayal and anger, although I know it is ridiculous to be surprised by snow in February in New England. No
netheless, the cats line up and stare through the bay windows and we all are briefly melancholy together that yesterday was only a promise not to be fulfilled for weeks. Because I love spring so fiercely, love even the mud and the messiness of it, I mourn. Yes, it will come, but I have not yet learned to be patient enough, no matter how long I study to be so, no matter that every Rosh Hashona I try to throw away my impatience in tashlich. It is the renewal I long for, the first sharp blades of grass poking up through the mat of last year’s dead straw.

  Ever since we finally got cable, years after friends in the city would gush about shows invisible on the Lower Cape, I have been addicted to the Weather Channel. I certainly had little interest in weather when I was younger, but it seems to come with middle age. Besides, I have the excuse that I travel a great deal and have to keep an eye on what it will be like where I am going.

  The cats too take weather personally, viewing wind as animate. Out here on our sandbar, wind is a potent player. Hurricanes are the extreme danger, but nor’easters can be rough. We lose power several times a year, usually for a few hours but sometimes longer—for days, after a hurricane or an ice storm. As I write this, a wet snow is plastering everything, shrouding the gardens and hiding the paths. Only Max is outside, picking his way along. Sometimes Malkah plays in the snow, digging at it with her huge plush paws and tossing it up, but this morning, she has not ventured out but lies with her paw across Efi as they curl spoon-fashion. They have relinquished the hope of spring.

  WINTER PROMISES

  Tomatoes rosy as perfect baby’s buttocks,

  eggplants glossy as waxed fenders,

  purple neon flawless glistening

  peppers, pole beans fecund and fast

  growing as Jack’s Viagra-sped stalk,

  big as truck tire zinnias that mildew

  will never wilt, roses weighing down

  a bush never touched by black spot,

  brave little fruit trees shouldering up

  their spotless ornaments of glass fruit:

  I lie on the couch under a blanket

  of seed catalogs ordering far

  too much. Sleet slides down

  the windows, a wind edged

  with ice knifes through every crack.

  Lie to me, sweet garden-mongers:

  I want to believe every promise,

  to trust in five pound tomatoes

  and dahlias brighter than the sun

  that was eaten by frost last week.

  SIX

  MY LIFE AS A 1950S COED

  Up until I left home, I was not free in any sense. My life like those of most children of that time was constrained, confined, coerced. I could only get what I wanted by lying and subterfuge. Once I left my parents’ house in 1953 when I was seventeen, I was on my own. I am from this point on responsible for my own errors. I made a lot of them.

  My first semester, I roomed with two girls from Grand Rapids with whom I had absolutely nothing in common. However, I began to know Louise much better than in high school, and we formed a close, intense bond. In January, I moved into her room. We were both poor, rebellious, experienced sexually and accomplished in school. We had been in gangs. We had ambitions that felt exotic and dangerous to our parents. I fictionalized this relationship in Braided Lives. For the next year, we shared a triple with another woman from a working-class background. She always felt we were closer to each other than to her, as indeed we were, but rooming together helped all of us survive in an environment for which we were not prepared and in which we were not fully respected.

  Coeds of that era had chests of cashmere sweaters under the bed, sweater sets, proper little suits and sheath dresses, pearls and circle pins. We had a couple of skirts apiece, two pairs of jeans, some nylon or woolen sweaters and not much else in our closets. We stocked up in thrift shops and wore the same clothes, especially Louise and I—exactly the same size except for brassieres. We were small and quick and nasty. The sexual mores of the dormitory were that you could do anything with your boyfriend except “it.” You did not do “it” unless you were engaged with a diamond big enough to license the act, or finally married: the days of the Mrs. degree. That was not what the three of us had in mind.

  I wanted to learn everything at once, to master every discipline in the catalog. Like an addict, I craved knowledge: I had to know whatever I could cram into my brain, and I was a fast study. I probably believed that the more I knew, the less likely it was that I would be shunted back to my old neighborhood with its choices of early violent death or early brain death. I did not want to be pregnant at nineteen and never have a chance to write, explore the world, know other cultures.

  Louise was attracted to Jews, which was probably one reason she befriended me. Her first boyfriend at college was Jewish and so was the man she eventually married. Louise made few friendships. She had a certain contempt for other women and was sometimes sarcastic, sometimes jealous of my other relationships. In college I found myself no less odd than I ever had been, but able to find others with writing ambitions, left politics—misfits and rebels and intellectuals. I had many close friendships and many of the intermediate level and several hundred talking acquaintances. I was the youngest chosen to give a public reading that spring with a group of poets, many of them graduate students, some Korean War vets. For a freshman, I already had high visibility. I also acquired my first male lover, a poet a year older than me, also from Detroit, from a German Jewish family I could scarcely identify as Jewish, their mores and attitudes and temperature level were so different from my own family’s.

  I was besotted with him, to the point of helpless adoration. He was large, he was broody, he had intense dark eyes and great sexual appetite. He had read widely, had the classical background I lacked, wrote poetry already getting some attention and was the type of sorrowing narcissist every piece of romantic crap I had ever consumed trained me to desire and immolate myself on. O Heathcliff! O James Dean! O kamikaze love. I was obsessed. I considered it the fulfillment of my wildest fantasies that he should be attracted to me and want me. He was possessive, jealous of every friend I had. I was foolish enough to tell him about my sexual adventures. From then on he feared all contact I had with other women. It hurt so much, it had to be great love. He got his way mostly by reducing me to incoherent tears. He was jealous of my closeness with Louise, but I would not let him interfere. She was too important to me. She was the first person who had ever come to know me as I was, and with whom I could be honest. We shared not only a common background, but also ideas, politics, passions, tastes in music and literature. I trusted her absolutely.

  He had been reading D. H. Lawrence, so we fought constantly about contraception, which he viewed as unnatural. He was always swearing that he would not come inside me. His family considered me unworthy of him, and he kept trying to decide if I was good enough or if they were right. He was constantly testing me, making me perform, till I began to rebel. He would demand I stop reading Dylan Thomas or Yeats; that I renounce this or that friend. I got pregnant that summer, and since I had no money and no access to an abortionist, and no intention of having a baby at eighteen and quitting college, I had to abort myself. I have written about this summer in Braided Lives, in all its agony. My mother and I were already fighting about her accurate suspicions that I was having sex with him, when she and I realized I was pregnant. She tried to make me marry him, but I succeeded in persuading her that I would not do so in any circumstances. I knew by then he was bad for me, that he would destroy me in the name of possession and his idea of love. I convinced my mother that if she tried to force me into marriage, as she and my father had made my brother marry Isabelle, I would walk out and she would never see me again.

  She told me what to do, then turned away. She kept saying I would not have the strength to do what I must. I tried all the folklore of the time, mustard baths, harsh douches, jumping off the porch, quinine pills. Finally I succeeded by opening my womb, but I almost bled to death. The pain of
forcing it open caused me to black out. I came to on the floor with blood gushing out of me. My mother gave me ice and I went to bed; but when my father was expected, she had me get up and pretend to be normal so he would not guess. I could barely sit up, so I said I had a bad toothache. That was common enough to pass. I did not tell my lover I had aborted myself, but only that I had miscarried. I lost so much blood and was so weak, it would have been impossible to keep from him that something was wrong, and I had no intention of having sex with him. I feared he would enter me again without protection. I lost fifteen pounds and was pale blue under my mass of black hair. I must have looked peculiar. By the time I had gone through the pain of aborting myself, I was out of love with him. I had almost died, and that had permanently cured me of extreme romantic fantasies and the desire to immolate myself on any hard object.

  But after that I had more respect for myself, because I knew I had the guts to do what I decided, no matter how painful and dangerous. I had been emotionally bullied and devastated during that first real affair. I would never again be so completely vulnerable and helpless in a relationship. For about a year, I could not write poetry. I had been persuaded that since I did not write in imitation of Ezra Pound, what I wrote was worthless. It was too emotional, not in syllabics, too simple, too female. I wrote only fiction for the next year, which he had not criticized because he did not take it seriously. In my junior year, I began writing poetry again and have never stopped.

  The sexual part of the relationship had been easy and pleasurable once we drilled through my iron hymen, but the emotional part had been hell. I would never again accept another person’s opinions as holy writ, no matter how attractive I found him or how much I liked going to bed with him. From then on, I preserved a certain independence of judgment and decision, no matter how delightful I found a man’s company. This has never changed.