by Marge Piercy
After that summer between my freshman and sophomore years, a smoking disaster, I did not visit my parents’ home for more than four days at any time except at Christmas, when I worked for the phone company a split shift mornings and evenings every day. Since I was in the house only for a few hours in the afternoon and took no meals but lunch with them, I could stick it out for ten days, but otherwise, things would explode.
Too much about me made them furious. They were aware that I was sexually active. They mistrusted college and higher education for a woman. My father thought it unseemly I should have more education than he had enjoyed, and my mother thought I would wind up with my throat slit in a gutter. This was one of her favorite images of my probable fate, although when I thought about it, I considered it was much more likely to happen had I stayed in Detroit. Both of them vociferously considered me a bad, bad girl. I preferred to avoid all that. I tried to talk to my mother honestly. That would start out well, but she would wait until I had told her things she could use against me, then she would attack. It was emotionally devastating to both of us. It was better to keep some distance, physical and mental, for her sake and my own. I could not be truthful with her, and I was weary of lying, so it was better to write simple cheerful letters while receiving jeremiads from her. In her letters it always seemed to be raining, it had been raining for days, something ached or felt feverish and my father had recently done something ghastly. Her letters made me sad, but I learned that responding to them was inviting trouble. Any advice I gave angered her. There was always a reason nothing could be altered, nothing could be ameliorated. My insistence there were solutions, options, angered her.
My parents could not abide the choices I made. They could not understand my going to college and then to graduate school. I maintained a scholarship through college, had a better one my last year I could live on. My tuition was fully paid throughout the four years, but until my senior year, I had to work while in school. I also began winning Hopwood awards for my poetry and my fiction, which helped financially. Avery Hopwood was a popular Broadway playwright who wrote farces such as Up in Mabel’s Room. Upon dying, he bequeathed tons of money to the U. of M. to finance prizes for the kind of literary writing he did not do.
I lived in a dormitory my first two years, as was required by the university. It cost too much and I ran up several hundred hours of lateness. We were always supposed to sign in and out and to be back by ten-thirty on weeknights and twelve-thirty on Friday and Saturday nights. I was called before the House Judiciary Committee, and had I gone on living in the dormitory, I would have spent my last two years making up tardiness, mostly from covering events for the Michigan Daily, the school newspaper. We were always in trouble in the dorm because of eating in our room, cooking, hiding liquor, putting up posters considered subversive or nasty—in general, being ordinary rebels.
I worked on the Daily my first two and a half years in college until I was a night editor, but then I quit, finding it was taking time away from the writing I really wanted to do. What I liked best about journalism was interviewing. I was good at it—something I still enjoy when I need to conduct interviews for research on a novel. I loved meeting professors who had done research on schistosomiasis in the Nile Valley or work on the vast Middle English dictionary being compiled at Michigan. Spring vacation of our sophomore year, we piled into a car with Louise’s boyfriend and went to New York. I stayed the first couple of nights in the Bronx, where her boyfriend’s working-class family lived, but after that, I stayed at the Y in Manhattan—I could not impose on them longer. I discovered that, having just turned eighteen, I could drink legally, and lived on hot dogs and beer. Louise’s relationship with her boyfriend was coming apart, and I ended up getting drawn into their fights. He began to dislike me, partly from sympathy with my old lover, who paraded his broken heart around campus for another two years.
I remember our first glimpse after driving all night of the crown of towers in lower Manhattan from the Pulaski Skyway over the marshes of New Jersey. It was love at first sight. I wanted New York, I wanted to be a New Yorker, I wanted to eat New York like a steak, close to raw and hot enough. Everything seemed marvelous. The subways were as wonderful as the museums. From then on, if anybody from Ann Arbor was going to New York for a long weekend, I would throw everything aside and go off with them. I did not long for the Grand Canyon but for the canyons of Midtown. I found everything beautiful and sizzling.
I was not well suited to the regimentation of dormitory life for females. Between the high cost of the dormitory and my difficulties adapting to a controlled life, I had to find another option. Because of our schedules, we often missed meals and improvised supper in our rooms, where we had an illegal hot plate. To this day, there is a stain on the yellow brick wall of the dormitory we lived in, from a stick of butter put out on the window ledge that melted in a sudden thaw. I started exploring other options for housing just a little too late in my sophomore year to get into one of the co-ops run and owned by students. Louise was still my roommate and coconspirator. We moved into one, Stevens House, for the summer, but for the fall, all existing co-ops were full.
So we organized a new one and got the Interco-operative Council to buy an old run-down house, which we spent much of the summer fixing up. Called Osterweil House, it still exists. When I was doing a stint in Ann Arbor in residency for a month a few years ago, I had supper election night at Osterweil. I saw my old room there. It is rather fancier nowadays. What were doubles are now singles, and what were triples are now doubles, but in some ways, the ambiance is similar. We had a cat there we picked up pregnant. She was black and called Eartha Katt. She was a general house animal, although she belonged to some of us more than to others. Eventually we found homes for her and her kittens by prevailing upon guys who lived in apartments and were interested in various of us. I served as the personnel secretary of the ICC that year and took on the dean’s office over the question of whether applicants had to identify their race. I took part in a few mild civil rights actions, protesting a degrading float one of the fraternities mounted at Homecoming; picketing a barbershop that would not cut the hair of Afro-Americans.
My life continued to be stranger and stranger to my parents. When my parents happened to meet my boyfriends, they detested them. My hair was halfway down my back, which they found uncouth. Only peasant women had long hair. Since her teens, my mother had kept hers short. One vacation, she bribed me to go to a salon and have it cut and styled, by paying for some dental work I needed. Having short hair represented being modern to her, not an immigrant like my grandmother. I let it stay short for the rest of that semester, then started growing it out again. I liked it long. I liked the weight and heft of it.
One shameful fact I shared with no one was that I intensely disliked being in my parents’ house. The bathroom stank. They did not flush the toilet often, and my father missed the bowl frequently. My mother did not keep herself clean or wear deodorant. Smells I had never noticed assaulted me, and I was ashamed of my fastidiousness. My parents’ home was full of tchotchkes, miniature wooden shoes from Holland, Michigan, birch bark wigwams and painted cacti, bric-a-brac my mother thought artistic and I found hideous. I had become a snob, and I judged myself harshly. The very education I had fought so hard to acquire was making me forever different from my family and my old friends from the neighborhood. I hated myself for feeling as I did, for gagging when I entered the bathroom, for my difficulty eating what they ate, for having no idea what they were talking about—the TV programs they watched constantly. I spent enormous effort keeping them from guessing my reactions, for if I had hurt my mother’s feelings, I would have hated myself even more. I understood very well what was happening to me—and had no intention of altering my path. If I said to myself mea culpa, I did not hesitate to fly out the door as fast as I could.
Because I won two Hopwood awards my junior year, one in fiction and one in poetry, and because my mentor Robert Haugh had gotten me a bigger
scholarship for my senior year, I did not have to work while going to classes. Now I was freer to choose what I would do. Two friends from the co-op had graduated and were returning to New York. That summer, before my senior year, we sublet an apartment on East Twelfth Street near Second Avenue. While we were apartment hunting, I stayed with a friend in Rockaway Beach. The ocean obsessed me. I quietly left her parents’ home one evening and brought a blanket with me to spend the night by the ocean. I did not think of rapists or muggers or anything but the fascination of this breathing water. I was awakened in the middle of the night by that water lapping over me. Thus did I learn about tides. I got up, wet and disheveled, and marched back to the house and let myself in, as quietly as I had left. I was mortified by my own stupidity and never mentioned it.
When our other friend arrived, her family took exception to staying in what they called the ghetto, the old Jewish neighborhood they considered dangerous and demeaning. I liked that sublet, tiny as it was. I was not appalled by the roaches, as some of my best friends in grade school had lived in roach-infested housing and I was used to them. I liked the Lower East Side. On East Twelfth Street, we settled in—a kitchenette with a magnum wine bottle covered with candle wax, a living room and one bedroom. We alternated sleeping two to the double bed and the third on the couch in the living room. New York was mine, at last. I began work for a temp agency. My typing was extremely fast, so I never had trouble finding secretarial work. I had been doing it on and off for years, as well as working switchboards.
Next door was the Sons and Daughters of Israel Home for the Aged. Our small apartment faced a courtyard where eighteen cats cavorted, and I thought how much quieter the night would be if cats practiced oral sex. I was fascinated by glimpses of our neighbors, as no one seemed to bother with shades. I became a voyeur that summer and invented stories about the two young men who went about half dressed and seemed to spend hours rubbing a towel across the upper part of their backs; the guy who played the guitar with a friend who had an accordion, and another who played the mouth organ. Another man sat at a green kitchen table with his head in his hands staring at a half-empty milk bottle while his wife yelled at him by the hour. I did most of my shopping at a market on Second Avenue with barrels of pickles and olives, of oysters and clams and ropes of smoked fish. Everything fascinated me. New York was my fair.
I learned about espresso and ate my first lobster—I had never seen one. Neither fondness has deserted me. I was taken with things my roommates probably considered beneath their notice: walking endlessly, sometimes driven around by one or another temporary boyfriend, I was fascinated by the care that had been put into the physical plant of the city earlier in the century. It astonished me that people had once cared enough to make attractive bridges, that the walls and grillwork along the Hudson were so beautiful, that minor edifices in the parks were built like little castles. It seemed magical to me, rather romantic, public places important enough to have been ornamented. It never occurred to me I would live anywhere else after college.
My last year with the help of the good scholarship and the money from Hopwoods for fiction and poetry, I moved into a small apartment at the end of town, near the railroad station. It was a funny apartment, the living room and tiny kitchen up on the second floor with the bathroom, but the bedroom off the hall stairway over the garage. The bedroom was light, with windows on three sides, cold but no colder than my own room up in the gable on Ward Avenue. I was writing seriously and needed the privacy and the quiet. Not holding down a job or several meant I had time to spend on my honors thesis on James Joyce and time to write a novel and lots of poetry. I loved living alone, although I was usually involved with one guy or another. The only work I did during my senior year was a little posing for some artists in town. That paid very well then, four times as much per hour as secretarial work.
My parents never gave up issuing propaganda for returning to their house, returning to Detroit, getting a nice pink-collar job. They kept expecting me to come to my senses and behave as they expected girls to. They were utterly horrified when I went off to France with Michel, a French Jew who was studying particle physics at Michigan with Donald Glaser, who had not yet won his Nobel Prize for the bubble chamber, but soon would. I knew Glaser because he was dating a friend of mine, and it was through him I met Michel. My parents had never been out of the country except to Canada across the Detroit River, and they thought of Europe as barbaric and dangerous. To my mother, it was the place they burned Jews. Why would I voluntarily go there?
I had a fierce and fraught relationship with the university. I majored in English honors, but I had a smorgasbord of minors: zoology, anthropology, Romance languages and philosophy. I was accepted into philosophy honors too, but then I got caught. Students were not permitted to be enrolled in two honors programs at the same time. I could not see why, but I relinquished philosophy, although I kept taking courses. I was least appreciated in my own department, because I was opinionated and my opinions were not the fashionable sort: I was not an imitation English gentleman carrying a black umbrella and trying to emulate Eliot, although I learned much prosody from his work. I hated Ezra Pound, who was at the zenith of his influence. I loved Yeats and began to study the tarot, not a popular approach to him in the English department. I still adored Whitman and Dickinson, a decidedly minority taste. When I discovered the Beats a bit later, everybody including my best friends thought I had lost my mind. Within a year of its publication, I was carrying around Ginsberg’s Howl and trying to press it on friends.
I would have been just as much an outcast in philosophy, because I was passionate about existentialism. I was reading Sartre and de Beauvoir and Camus. I tried to look like Juliette Greco, whom I had admired in movies and magazine spreads on existentialism. I even tried to write in the nearest equivalent of a café, the Student Union, but I found it distracting. Besides, my handwriting is too bad for me to write longhand. I was, during those years, always trying to figure out who and what I was with the help of the books I read and sometimes films I saw. I was always trying on roles and characters and poses, to see if they fit. My tastes were neither fashionable nor traditional. Usually answering a question honestly about what I liked or admired was sufficient to start an argument. In spite of everything, I had a pretty good time in college. I was far freer than I had ever been and much more engaged. I had many friends, and in spite of my outsider status, I made excellent grades, Phi Beta Kappa as a junior. By my senior year, I was writing steadily and sometimes well.
I coedited the school literary magazine my last year, having served on the staff since I came to Michigan. My coeditor was Eric, a close friend who was in philosophy honors. In that era, an enormous amount of reading was required. We read several books a week, long poems, long novels, complete books of essays. I read all that and more. I wanted to consume everything. I am the only person I know besides specialists who has read The Dunciad. I actually liked Alexander Pope, although I knew no other student who did. There was a group of us would-be writers around Generation, the literary magazine. We exchanged work with one another and continued to do so for the next few years: Victor and Padma Perrera, David Newman, among them. Nadine, who was passionate about writing fiction and with whom I exchanged work for some years after Michigan, stayed with me briefly, but most of that year I lived alone and liked it.
Fighting the dean’s office about race was only one activity; we were also collecting clothing, food and goods for voter registration in the South—yes, even way back then. Since the execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953, repression had been very real for people in my family and those I knew who had been active in Detroit. I remember talking with Pete Seeger in the back of a car, because he did not want to use the telephone. I organized a concert for him. The administration did not like it, but they chose not to forbid it. What we did then politically was weak, mild, ineffective, but we were not completely passive.
Until my senior year of college, I drank too much. People l
iked to get me drunk because words would flow out of me in intricate monologues they found amusing and original. My senior year, I intentionally stopped and have seldom been drunk since. My prevailing vices in college were falling passionately in love, imitating books I read; and talking. I had too many friends, I had too many people who told me their lives, I wasted too much time blabbing about myself. I was somebody people came to when they had to talk, when they were in trouble, when they were confused, when they felt desperate. This was one of the things about me that Louise despised. She felt it was promiscuous. It certainly did use up hours and hours. I was accessible emotionally to almost everyone. “I feel your pain.” Well, I did, quite physically. Anyone could capture my attention and my empathy. I was vulnerable to anyone’s needs. I dispensed advice like a soda machine. I took any man’s or woman’s troubles instantly to heart. I practically had a line out the door at my room in the co-op. I would feel like a dentist saying, Next. They would glower at one another sometimes, waiting for my solitary attention.
I would walk into a room and instantly feel the emotions of people there. If someone was in pain, I had to do something. Eventually I had to become harder in order to survive. I was so accessible and vulnerable that anyone could have a piece of me for the asking. I was an emotional free lunch.
That summer in New York, I had attempted to take charge of my feelings. Many men passed through my life, and I liked them. I was fond of some, very loving, but I was not besotted. That was a great improvement. I also attempted not to be quite as accessible, and my roommates disliked that change, although my relationship with both of them survived the summer. I was haunted at twenty by the sense that I was talking my life away instead of writing. I thought of myself as almost middle-aged, for I expected to die young, as my mother had always told me I would. She said it was in my palm.