Sleeping with Cats (11 page)

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.

U
p 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.

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.