Sleeping With Cats

by Marge Piercy

  I discovered during college I was attractive to men—lots of men. I was involved with men older than me and younger; with scientists, mathematicians, musicians, composers, a thief, a medical student, a lawyer. I don’t know why this ability to conjure a male companion out of any party or gathering came as such a surprise, since I always had boyfriends since I was four. But I had been told I was ugly, funny looking; and indeed, I looked nothing like blond Miss America. I did not take any of this seriously. I considered it a kind of con job, a matter of acting confident, and everyone would take you at face value as sure of yourself.

  I was not what a 1950s coed was supposed to be. For one thing, I had a sexual past. I had studied Freud and decided he knew little about women’s desires and responses: this at a time when the height of sophistication was to be psychoanalyzed and Freudian categories were widely applied by almost everyone with a college education. I had been having orgasms since I was eleven, so the theory of the clitoral versus the vaginal orgasm did not impress me—it was all pleasure, and the point was to enjoy myself and come however I could. I was ambitious in my work but never thought that made me less female or afflicted with penis envy, and I had no desire to be feminine and passive. Louise was in therapy and always telling me I should be too. My wardrobe was minimal, a problem I solved my senior year by dressing in black—which did not show dirt. I could not afford a winter coat, so I wore an old leather jacket—what male hoods wore, but not young women of good family looking for Mrs. degrees. I affected a tough veneer, which wasn’t all affectation. I had stopped drinking too much, but I smoked unfiltered cigarettes and lit them with kitchen matches brought to life by slicing my thumbnail across. I no longer carried a knife—college had tamed me—but I carried my temper with me and my knowledge of alleys and night.

  The truth was, by my senior year I was running a little scared. Everything around me told me I was not what a woman was supposed to be, and I could not see what would become of me. Louise withdrew from me, partly because she had fallen in love with a recent ex-boyfriend of mine, and partly because she was seeking respectability and I could offer none. My friends were scattering to marriage, to graduate school, to jobs in Detroit or New York. What would become of me? I could not guess and all scenarios seemed depressing. There were no role models for a woman like me.

  THE CRUNCH

  Like the cat the Doberman has trapped,

  like the rabbit in the fox’s jaws

  we feel the splintering of our bones

  and wait for the moment that still may flash,

  the white spaces between pains

  when we can break free.

  It is the moment of damage

  when already the pricing mind

  tries to estimate cost and odds

  while the nerves lean on their sirens

  but the spine sounds a quiet tone

  of command toward a tunnel of moment

  that drills the air toward escape

  or death. I have been caught.

  Biology is destiny for all alive

  but at the instant of tearing

  open or free, the blood shrieks and

  all my mother’s mothers groan.

  SEVEN

  ONE DOES NOT DO THAT

  There are things we all do in our lives that afterward we ask ourselves again and again and again, Why? What was I thinking of? What did I imagine would happen? How could I do it, to him and to me? I invent, I elaborate reasons, but the fact of stupidity remains. Stupidity is a great mystery to me, how I can sometimes do something so counter to reason and evidence that it amazes me when I have a little distance from it. I had no desire to marry, and yet just before I entered graduate school, I married Michel Schiff.

  I thought I was smart because I was avoiding my mother’s mistake of marrying a Gentile, so I would not be living with anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, I married someone so different from me, as she had, so unable to perceive me, let alone understand me, that I was replicating the marriage of the cat and the dog, my parents’ fiasco. It was a romantic vision of Europe, of the left, of France, I was responding to. It was someone who had survived the war against Jews while I was safe except for casual beatings in the school yard or the street.

  Michel was a graduate student in particle physics who could quote poetry. I did not know that every French student memorizes a certain amount of Racine and Corneille, and that he didn’t understand the simplest poem. Once in the second year of our marriage I spent an afternoon trying to get him to “see” Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” He could not grasp the concept of metaphor. To him it could only be literal: “two roads diverge in a yellow wood” is talking about two roads, and so what? My work could mean nothing to him, because it was nonsense. Fiction was more accessible to him but not interesting unless it dealt with something in France he was familiar with, like Les Thibeaults, which he had me read. Strangely enough, he loved Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince and gave it to me as a courting present. Tame me, he wrote in French on the card, as the fox says to the little prince. Absolutely, I thought, but I was much wilder than he and much fiercer in my appetites, and it was me he aimed to tame. I was not unwilling, because I was afraid of who and what I was.

  After I received my degree from Michigan, Michel and I—we had been dating for several months—went to France together and stayed mostly with his family in Paris. They lived in the tenth arrondissement, near the Gare de l’Est and the Gare du Nord. It was a stone working-class section then. When I revisited the neighborhood last year, the building I lived in still stands, although some of the others on that block have been torn down. The neighborhood has begun to gentrify: new apartment buildings, a glossy supermarket, with little businesses, factories and repair shops replaced by travel agencies and boutiques. The neighborhood has green lungs now, patches of tenements torn down and parks planted. The canal at the end of the block has been cleaned up and made into a kind of park.

  His family had a flat on the third floor, as I remember, but I slept in one of the narrow old servants’ rooms on the sixth or seventh floor, depending on whether you count in the French manner or the American. The toilet was down the hall, a Turkish toilet as they called them. If I could endure waiting, I would run downstairs, turning on the light and trying to descend before the stairway plunged into darkness from the automatic timer, to use the W.C. in the Schiff apartment. “Turkish” toilets are a hole in the floor with two big footprints. You aim at the hole. Most people seem to miss. The smell made my gorge rise.

  I liked my father-in-law. I think I would have been happier with him than with his son, because he had more joie de vivre and more vigor. I did not please Madame. I made the mistake of addressing her as tu, since she was my putative mother-in-law, and I was severely corrected. I was to address her as vous. She would have liked, I think, to instruct me to do the same with Michel, but as we were having sex, she could not persuade me to do so. However, we had sex only occasionally in Paris. He was too inhibited by his mother’s proximity. I did not take this seriously, although I should have. I was experienced in some ways and naive in others. I had not had much experience living with middle-class people, so it took me a while to decode his mother’s attitude. In my family everybody yelled their criticisms and bellowed their anger. I was not clever at understanding subtle and indirect hostility. Much of it rolled off me, because I was too busy being curious about everything else and because it was all going on in French, which when I was tired became background noise.

  It was a very hot summer in Paris, and many nights we could not sleep. Sometimes we went out together and wandered by the Seine, went to the flower market, went to Les Halles—still the market district then and extremely busy at four in the morning. Everything was new and exciting to me—the stalls, the onion soup, the sausages. I liked to go down to the St.-Martin canal nearby, my escape hatch from tensions in the flat. In the next block, two sets of locks began. The canal was lined with lindens, horse chestnuts, sycamores. I
became friends with a large yellow cat who lived in a restaurant nearby. We would sit together overlooking the canal and watch the barges and the canal boats. I never knew his name, but I called him Jules, because I thought of him as a topaz, a jewel. Michel had various things to do with the government and the educational apparatus, to confirm his status as a graduate student in the sciences abroad and thus deferred from the draft, and to inform all the requisite departments that he was transferring from the University of Michigan physics department to that of the University of Chicago. While he was away, I would wander the neighborhood and visit with Jules. He was the only one in Paris who did not correct my French. The canal and Jules kept me sane, because there was so much that was weird to me and unintelligible—besides the strain of operating in a foreign language. My days sometimes felt a series of disguised traps. I was always doing or saying the wrong thing and being corrected: On ne fait pas cela: One does not do that. That is not done. That is not the way. Watching the guys raise and lower the level in the locks, the white water rushing in and out, the boats edging past each other with perhaps an inch to spare between them, that was entertainment for Jules and for me.

  Paris did dazzle me. It was a pearl gray city such as I had never seen. Detroit felt used; this felt ancient and modern at once. I remember walking into the Louvre for the first time and being so fascinated that I stared at everything except where I was going and fell full length into an ancient mosaic. Michel’s friends for the most part accepted me more readily than his mother did. We met with his friends rather formally. We also dined with various friends of the family—members of that close-knit circle. I met in Paris men and women who had been active in the Resistance and some who had been in the Hagannah to create a Jewish homeland. They were tough and supremely capable and I admired them. Michel’s friends were active as he had been in opposing the war in Algeria. While he was still a student at Physique et Chimie in Paris, he had been arrested by the police and interrogated intensively about his role in the antiwar movement. It had been a painful and terrifying experience he had trouble talking about but which caused him nightmares all the time I was with him. I believe they tortured him, but he could not talk about it. We went to some demonstrations, but he hung back, far more afraid of the police than he had been.

  My room was tiny and the walls were covered not with wallpaper but with some rushlike substance. One night I woke and a huge furry spider the size of a tarantula was walking on my arm. I shrieked, threw it off, put on my robe and rushed downstairs, letting myself into the Schiff apartment, where everyone was sleeping. I sat down in a chair in the dining room. I stayed there the rest of the night, too shaken to return to my room. I dozed off. When I woke, M. Schiff was standing over me asking me why I was there.

  I could not think of the word for spider in French, so I said, “The beast with eight legs has walked upon me in my bed.”

  Soon the whole family was standing about staring at me. To this day, I cannot recall the French word for spider, although I must have looked it up over the years seven or eight times. Madame got up, swept them all before her, and soon we were eating breakfast and pretending nothing had happened, as in fact nothing in particular had.

  For the last forty years I have had a recurring nightmare in which I am on a subway train in the bowels of the earth, twisting squealing climbing descending, squeezing through tunnels far too small for the train. It is a nightmare of claustrophobia and suffocation. It is hot and I cannot breathe. I had interpreted this dream quite Freudianly, as the birth canal. While I have been back to Paris many times in the intervening years, usually on my way someplace else or doing research (Gone to Soldiers; City of Darkness, City of Light), I usually take one of the newer renovated Métros, such as line 1. This time Ira and I went by Métro to my old neighborhood and to several working-class neighborhoods. Suddenly I found myself in my nightmare. These are old narrow tunnels, older trains. They do constantly twist about squealing and groaning. They climb, they crawl down, they creep about deep in the earth. I broke into a cold sweat. Suddenly my sense of being lost and out of my element that summer came back to me. My nightmare was a reliving of that summer with Michel. In Paris Michel changed. I felt caught in a situation I had backed into but which was set up as win or lose.

  Certainly I had been quite competitive in my college years; how not? I competed for scholarships, I competed for better scholarships and fellowships; I competed in class, in exams, I competed in the Hopwood contests, whose prizes were prestige but also money I desperately needed. Now I competed to win Michel. It was almost instinctive. It was almost suicidal. On some level I must have known that. Yet I could not give up. I was caught in the net of his family, and my only reason for being there seemed to be to marry him.

  Back at Michigan, he had courted me, quite formally. I was the prize. I was used to being pursued by young (and sometimes older) men and pretty much took it for granted. I had not thought much about going off to Europe with him. He had talked about marriage, but so had other boyfriends, and I had not seriously contemplated marrying any of them. I had gone to New York with friends, I had gone to Chicago with friends. I loved to travel, and the idea of going to France with him seemed great. I had a good fellowship waiting for me at Northwestern, so I could afford to blow my Major Hopwood award money on a trip to Europe. Staying with Michel’s family simply cut costs. I had no idea how it would affect me. I thought of it almost as a student exchange, rather than a process of being integrated into his family and redone into something acceptable.

  Of course having me in Paris with his family meant that Michel was looking at me far more critically than he had in Michigan. It was a question of whether I measured up to his mother’s standards. It was a question of whether he would commit himself. Probably if he had remained certain he wanted to marry me, I would have gotten cold feet and we would never have married. But his very hesitation hooked me. I would never be stupid in that way again. If someone was not sure, I would get out of the way. But it seemed to be a contest, and Michel was now the prize—not me—and I must win. Certainly I cared for him, but that somehow wasn’t the point. I found him very attractive. He was slender, of medium height with dark brown eyes and hair, a winning wistful smile and considerable charm and integrity. But the need to justify myself by winning got in the way of my ability to see past his charm and be clear about what marriage to him would actually entail.

  His parents went off on vacation with his brother to Normandy and we had the apartment to ourselves. There was no refrigerator, but there was a maid. They lived in a very different style from anyone I had known. Meals were rather formal and very good. I ate my first artichoke there (and my second and my thirtieth) and had veal for the first time and mussels. They did not keep kosher and did not even light candles on Shabbat. Their circle was Jewish, but they seemed to have ceased practicing any of the rituals decades before. They did not observe the holidays. Michel knew far less Yiddish than I did. I had greater capacity to understand than to speak it, as my grandmother had spoken Yiddish to me as a child and I had answered her in English. Why? I have no idea. That’s how it was, and I have discovered it was that way in a great many American Jewish families. The Schiff parents never spoke Yiddish. They communicated in German when discussing something important. Michel spoke English very well, with only a delicious trace of accent. He spoke German and he was learning Italian. I can still hear a resonant male voice speaking on the Asimil record he used: L’italiano non es difficile por un francese.

  I played French housewife, shopping every morning for our midday and evening meals, which were, however, prepared by the maid, Simone. I had trouble communicating with her at first, but we got better at it. She did not want me in the kitchen, although I was determined to learn something about cooking. She shooed me out. I would have to learn from cookbooks, later on.

  We left Paris after three weeks and went first to the Loire Valley. We had so little money that we stayed in fleabag hotels with bedbugs and pr
ostitutes; where they were available, we stayed in youth hostels. Some of them were clean and some were filthy and bug infested. We took trains, buses and hitchhiked. We lived mostly on bread and butter and chocolate, with an occasional piece of fruit.

  We went up on the Massif Central. I had a desire to see Le Puy, which was as strange as I had anticipated. It was high in the mountains at the end of a train line. In those days on the French railroads, there were not only first and second classes, but third class, and in this case, fourth class. We changed at Clermont-Ferrand to a crude mountain train that had benches around the rims of the cars and a stove in the center. People brought on dogs, sheep and a goat as we climbed higher into the mountains. Finally we arrived in a town studded with great pillars of black volcanic rock. It seemed as if every woman in Le Puy was making lace and trying to sell it. Some of the basalt pillars had chapels on them. Some had sacred statues.

  We were pointed to a sort of hostel in an old orphanage, which stank too badly even for us. We ended up lying on the ground on a mountain above the town. We had traveled all night and we slept where we were with the rising sun beginning to beat down on us. I woke with a high fever, burning up with sunstroke. We had no ice. I had taken a Red Cross emergency course at some point, so I knew what was wrong with me and that I was in danger. We found a creek and I simply climbed in and sat there, lowering my body temperature until my brain was no longer boiling in my skull. Now I always wear a hat or a scarf, for I have had sunstroke twice. My black hair heats up like a stove top.

  We took a bus down to the Rhône, even wilder than the train. It bounded and bounced down the narrow mountain road, squealing around the turns. Everybody who got on seemed to have produce or an animal in tow. Dogs, sheep and many goats, rabbits, chickens, a rooster, even a calf. We went hurtling down the mountainside much too fast for the road and pitched high in the air with every rock and pothole. I was too young and foolhardy to be scared. I thought it all marvelous.