by Marge Piercy
I ran, boots on, into the bucking surf
taking you in handfuls, tossing you
into wind, into water, into the elements:
go back, give back. Time is all spent,
the flesh is spent to ashes.
Mother’s were colored like a mosaic,
vivid hues of the inside of conch shells,
pastels, pearls, green, salmon as feathers
of tropical birds. They fit in my cupped hands.
I put her in the rose garden and said kaddish.
Your ashes are old movies, black into grey.
Heavy as iron filings, they sag the box
sides. They fill it to overflowing.
Handful after handful I give to the waves
which seize and churn you over and under.
I am silent as I give you to the cold
winter ocean grey as a ship of war,
the color of your eyes, grey with green
and blue washed in, that so seldom met
my gaze, that looked right through me.
What is to be said? Did you have a religion?
If so, you never spoke of it to me.
I remember you saying No, saying it often
and loud, I remember your saying, Never,
I remember, I won’t have that in my house.
I grew up under the threat of your anger
as peasants occupy the slopes of a volcano
sniffing the wind, repeating old adages,
reading birdflight and always waiting, even
in sleep for the ground to quake and open.
My injustices, my pains, my resentments;
they are numerous, precious as the marbles
I kept in a jar, not so much for playing
as simply rolling in my hands to see
the colors trap the light and swell.
Tossing your ashes in my hands as the waves
drag the sand from under me, trying to topple
me into the turning eddy of far storms,
I want to cast that anger from me, finally
to say, you begot me and although my body
my hair my eyes are my mother’s so that at your
funeral, your brother called me by her name,
I will agree that in the long bones of my legs,
in my knees, in my Welsh mouth that sits oddly
in my Jewish Tartar face, you are imprinted.
I was born the wrong sex to a woman
in her mid-forties who had tried to get pregnant
for five years. A hard birth,
I was her miracle and your disappointment.
Everything followed from that, downhill.
I search now through the ashes of my old pain
to find something to praise, and I find that
withholding love, you made me strive to be worthy,
reaching, always reaching, thinking that when I leaped
high enough you would be watching. You weren’t.
That did not cancel the leaping or the fruit
at last grasped in the hand and gnawed to the pit.
You were the stone on which I built my strength.
Your indifference honed me. Your coldness
toughened my flesh. Your anger stropped me.
I was reading maps for family trips at age
five, navigating from the back seat. Till
I was twenty, I did not know other children
did not direct all turns and plot route numbers.
When Mother feigned helplessness, I was factotum.
Nurse, houseboy, carpenter’s helper, maid,
whatever chinks appeared I filled, responsible
and rebellious with equal passion, equal time,
and thus quite primed to charge like a rocket
out the door trailing sparks at seventeen.
We were illsuited as fox and bull. Once
I stopped following baseball, we could not talk.
I’d ask you how some process was done—open
hearth steel, how generators worked.
Your answers had a clarity I savored.
I did with mother as I had promised her,
I took her from you and brought her home to me,
I buried her as a Jew and mourn her still.
To you I made no promises. You asked none.
Forty-nine years we spoke of nothing real.
For decades I thought someday we would talk
at last. In California I came to you in the mountains
at the dam carrying that fantasy like a picnic
lunch beautifully cooked and packed, but never
to be eaten. Not by you and me.
When I think of the rare good times
I am ten or eleven and we are working together
on some task in silence. In silence I faded into
the cartoon son. Hand me the chisel. I handed.
Bevel the edge smooth. I always got bored.
I’d start asking questions, I’d start asking
why and wherefore and how come and who said so.
I was lonely on the icefield, I was lonely
in the ice caves of your sometime favor.
I kept trying to start a fire or conversation.
Time burns down and the dark rushes in in waves.
I can’t lie. What was between us was history,
not love. I have striven to be just to you,
stranger, first cause, old man, my father,
and now I give you over to salt and silence.
TWENTY-TWO
DIGGING IN FOR THE LONG HAUL
Gone to Soldiers did the best of any of my novels up to then, so that for a time we felt quite affluent. We managed to save some of the money and some we used to put a room on the house—a dining room with skylights and windows on three sides, a pleasant airy room surrounded by garden and trees. We also had the house shingled and added a bay window to the living room, great for starting plants too tender for the hotbed—peppers, eggplants, basil. The cats resent that use. They think the bay window is theirs to loll in, overseeing the gardens.
Oboe was developing into a cat of grave dignity. Unlike his mother, who never wanted to grow up, Oboe couldn’t wait. He became portly, gentlemanly, gentle—except for a tendency to be jealous of Colette, because of her preeminent position as my lap cat. She slept beside me in bed with her head on my pillow. Woody called it a ridiculous sight, but except in the hottest weather, that was her position—her long lean body stretched out against me, her head on my pillow. She liked our working in the garden, whereas Jim Beam usually pretended he did not know us outside—except that he would come when called. Often he was way into the marsh in the evening. Woody or I would call or whistle for him and far far off we would hear him bellowing an answer. He would come crying as he ambled along, although it might take him ten minutes to arrive.
The Burmese were social cats. They greeted company and explored them. We would shut Jim Beam out of the downstairs room that is my assistant’s office but occasionally serves as a guest room. He found a way through the vents and ducts, and would suddenly appear in that room in the middle of the night. He was not hostile but interested. He seemed to expect praise for his exploits and was visibly disappointed when a guest threw him out.
There were many things about training cats that we did not know when we got the Burmese. Jim developed the habit of crying in the night, around 3 A.M. It always woke me, but not Woody. I would chase Jim and throw him in the bathroom. It wasn’t until years later I understood that far from discouraging him by chasing, yelling and throwing him in the bathroom, I was inventing a game he played sedulously. When Max cries too early in the morning, I am careful to do nothing exciting or amusing. I ignore him if I can, or hold him under the covers with me. Therefore he seldom wakes me before the alarm goes off. Most mornings he waits to see if I am really getting up before he moves. For Jim Beam, punishment was attention, and he vastly preferred being punished to b
eing ignored. One of his worst habits was picking on Colette when he was bored. The higher the temperature, the more restless and wicked he was. I used to say, we should put Jim Beam in the freezer for an hour. Certainly in the winter, he was a better behaved cat, cuddling with the others, affectionate. In the summer, he was a heller. Some summers, he got into a fight every three weeks. He would no sooner recover from his abscess and antibiotics and being kept in, than he would go out and get into another fight, often with the same damned cat.
Partly it was the invasion of the summer people. Jim maintained a large territory, much larger than any cat I have known since Brutus. Unfortunately, in the summer, it included the houses of people who brought their dogs or cats with them. He never mellowed out and never became less combative while he could swagger around. He was a gorgeous cat. Whenever we took him to the vet’s, other cats would stare at him and preen themselves. He had a circle of male friends as well as enemies. He was always being called on by other cats. When we finally began to let Oboe and Dinah go out, Jim gained a little respect for Oboe, but not much. Oboe was not about to trot off with him into the marsh or hang out with seven other male cats under the full moon on a hillock near the creek, Dunn’s Run. Oboe remained a homebody.
We let go of our pied-à-terre in Cambridge, but still travel to Boston regularly. Those were years when we went frequently to Europe, usually for a combination of publicity for a book publication and research for a novel I was writing. Woody had two novels published, wrote a couple of screenplays under contract and one on spec, began to teach workshops at writers’ conferences. We travel well together. I vastly prefer traveling with him, for he takes the edge off and eases the bleakness and the loneliness of being on the road.
In the late 1980s, twelve of us locals started a havurah—a term for a lay Jewish group that operates without a rabbi for most purposes, sort of do-it-yourself Judaism. We were a motley group in our thirties, forties and fifties, all living on the Cape year-round and trying to find a meaningful way to relate to Judaism. The nearest synagogue in Hyannis was traditional and impossible for a number of us to deal with. We began meeting every other Friday for a potluck and discussions, for holidays. The group grew quickly to fifteen. Several people joined because they wanted some kind of Jewish education for their children and a way for their children to get bar or bat mitzvahed.
Our first public event was a Purim party for children and their adult friends. We expected thirty people and over a hundred showed up. We began doing lay Friday night services once a month in the Chapel in the Pines, a place where folksingers performed. Services varied wildly, because we intentionally did not have a ritual committee. People might not like the services other people put on, but it was the right of every member to produce the kind of service they wanted. Some worked, some didn’t, but it was loose and free and warm. We were a friendly group. It was a group with strong women running it, and it reflected that. It was nonhierarchical. In actuality, it was an anarchist havurah, casual in the extreme and open to all kinds, especially including gays and lesbians and those married to non-Jews. Our many potlucks brought people in who wanted the social occasion, wanted services, but also wanted to feed their kids.
The smaller core group of fifteen met every other Friday night. Soon the larger havurah spawned a discussion group, bar and bat mitzvah preparation tutoring, Hebrew classes that met weekly. I was one of the participants and continued studying Hebrew until our teacher, one of the most important women in the havurah, moved to Maine with her husband, a biologist with the park service. We had reached the intermediate level. I would have gone on forever studying with her; I loved our group and the lessons.
Sometimes rabbis would volunteer to do a service for us, if we would put them up on the Cape. We were a rather special group then. We also began, during the third year of the havurah, bringing in last-year students from the Hebrew Union College to conduct High Holiday services. After having a male student one year, we always requested women thereafter, a special pleasure for a lot of the women who had grown up when only men were rabbis. We called the havurah Am ha-Yam—people of the sea. Several of the people in the havurah made their living from the sea, including a woman who farmed shellfish and a man who lobstered, and our president Helaine, who with her husband ran a seafood-processing and wholesale plant on the pier in Provincetown. We sometimes had services in Provincetown, led by a serious young gay man who had studied for the rabbinate years before.
It was a lot of work. Our potlucks grew popular and began to attract hundreds of Jews from all over the Cape, including summer people who extended their vacations for our High Holiday services. We had a real community and a willingness to improvise and create some kind of spiritual connection. I led rituals myself. There are scenes I will always remember, like a young dyke from Provincetown carrying the Torah and weeping, because she had always felt excluded. On the other end of the pleasure spectrum, I remember when Helaine decided we of the core group should make gefilte fish for two hundred at Pesach instead of buying it. I was enthusiastic, because I had fond memories of my grandmother making it. Well, we each got a pail of smelly ground-up carp shipped from a Hassidic supplier in New York. The process took all day and our kitchen stank and so did we. I could not eat the resulting slop and did without gefilte fish that Passover. The Perels brought Sephardic traditions into the havurah to mix with the Ashkenazi expectations of most members, broadening but annoying to people comfortable only with their expected rituals. It was a time I felt tremendously and joyfully involved in Judaism.
I was diagnosed around this time with glaucoma and cataracts. Heredity wins a round: cataracts from my mother and grandmother; glaucoma from my father. I went to a doctor with all the best credentials and affiliations, who essentially played with my eyes for the next three years, telling me nothing could be done for me except to take various eyedrops, always in increasing amounts and with vastly increasing discomfort. I tried many New Age remedies on the side, an osteopath who said the pressure was caused by the misalignment of bones in the skull, herbs, poultices, daily periods of visualization. My pressure kept rising and my sight diminishing. I was going perceptibly blind, and it terrified me. Finally my gynecologist, one of my heroes (he is on those antichoice hit lists), insisted I go to his ophthalmologist, who recommended an immediate operation, sending me to a glaucoma surgeon.
I will always remember that summer of pain and near blindness, when every normal activity was almost impossible. Without meditation, I don’t know how I would have survived. I remember trying to walk by following the white of Woody’s socks before me, stumbling through the woods, tripping over branches and roots and smacking into boughs still attached. I remember falling innumerable times. I must have been covered with bruises, but I could not see them. There was a laser “procedure” in both eyes that left me in agonizing pain. Eye doctors do not tend to prescribe painkillers. Mostly it is a field that attracts doctors who would dearly like to remove your eyes, take them away and work on them in private, and not have to deal with the rest of you at all. Then I had a major eye operation on my left eye. During eye operations, you are conscious. You are drugged and everything is blurry, but your eyes are open and you are quite, quite conscious. You can talk. I usually do so, at least occasionally.
Then came the period of office “procedures”—minor operations. The doctor would inject various drugs into my eye with a long needle and sometimes use a laser. It was painful. It was very painful afterward. It was painful in between these three-times-a-week procedures. Mondays the procedure was done in Hyannis, and my friend Ann would drive me. Wednesdays, Woody took me to Boston, and my friend Denya did it Fridays. Much of my life was used up going back and forth to be tortured, then lying on the couch in between using eyedrops and whimpering. I stepped on the cats constantly, because I could not see them. The drugs blurred the vision in my good eye. But I still managed to write. We bought a great big monitor, though I could barely see the keyboard. Fortunately, I am a
touch typist. All summer into the fall, I was not to bend over, to lift anything, to lie other than flat on my back with my head propped up. I shocked my surgeon by asking whether Woody and I could have sex. He said no one had ever asked that before, but it had to be missionary position and I was not to be “overactive.”
I had never been stung by a bee or a wasp before that summer, but during those months, I was stung five times. Going into the garden to pick herbs or vegetables, I would inadvertently close my hand on one of the social insects. I can’t imagine how I cooked—slowly and with little imagination I suppose.
I woke one morning—it was the first day of my period—and I was numb from the chin down. I had no sensation in my body. Woody thought exercise would help, so we went for a walk, but things got worse. My heart was pounding furiously. I could not eat. I could barely swallow. I could only tell I had to urinate when liquid came out of me. I tried calling my surgeon, but he denied what was happening to me had any relation to what he was doing to me or any medication I was taking. Woody called a friend of his who worked in an emergency room, and he said it definitely sounded like a drug reaction to him. Finally I went to see my own doctor, Janet Whelan, in Provincetown.
One wonderful thing about Janet is that she doesn’t fake it. She will tell you honestly when she has no idea what’s wrong. She also talked to the glaucoma surgeon, who insisted that the eye was a self-enclosed system. Then she had me make a list of everything I was putting into my body and correlated it with the information from him about what he was injecting me with. Finally she worked it out. I had atropine poisoning. By this time, my heart rate and my blood pressure were almost off the scale and I could not feel my body at all.
She started me on fluids and drinking as much water as I could get down. I was to go off atropine immediately and stay off. Slowly, slowly through the next eight hours, my heart rate lessened, my blood pressure dropped and feeling returned from the chin down. It was extremely gradual, but I was no longer terrified. Woody freaked out that day and ran off to the ocean, unable to endure what appeared to be my total disintegration. He had little experience dealing with illness or incapacity, and my near disaster frightened him.