Sleeping with Cats (25 page)

After I had been off cigarettes for a while, it became apparent my body's reaction to being poisoned with tobacco was to become allergic. At that time in history, it was like being allergic to air. Ninety percent of my friends smoked. All public places and meetings were full of tobacco smoke. I became extremely unpopular extremely fast. My allergy made me a pariah, seen as a puritan extremist, trying to force my antismoking bias on other people who were just having a good time.

Robert left his company and started a computer co-op in a ground-floor apartment two blocks from ours, on West End, begun with tremendous enthusiasm and idealism. They were to do socially beneficial work,
making their technology available to those who needed it, and to take only as many innocuous paying jobs as they decided they needed to live on, minimally. “People in MIA will be making an explicit choice when they spend money, when they consume. To consume is to recognize that some time will have to be used to pay for that consumption and that time will not be available for those projects really worth doing.” Unfortunately, although a couple of the people who worked for the co-op in a low-level way were used to scrabbling by on movement minimum pay, like Peter, the people who could actually do the computer programming and systems analysis were not about to live that way—certainly Robert wasn't. I enjoyed the comforts of the middle-class life, although when I was traveling for the antiwar or the women's movement, I could sleep on floors, under desks or tables, like everyone else.

That summer, the computer co-op rented a house in Truro for August. The experience was a revelation. I had fallen in love with the Cape when I was visiting with Goss just before Cuba, but a whole month there felt like paradise. Besides everyone in the house we had rented, we were also friends with a house of gay men. My smoking allergy annoyed everybody, but we were outside most of the time.

The house the computer co-op rented was made of whitewashed cinder block and sat on a hill among pitch pines, fragrant and runty. To this day, the cry of a seaside sparrow will call up to me the intense sensations of that August and the next. I had never been out of the city in the summer since those one-week vacations with my parents on little lakes in Michigan. The cats were taken on walks and even allowed outside when it became clear they would not wander. We were about half a mile from the ocean via a series of paths. The beach was a nude one—before the rich summer citizens of Truro put pressure on the National Park Service, one beach in Truro and one in Wellfleet had been nude since time out of memory. Things had been tense and factional in the city. It was bliss to get away. Every day we took long walks exploring sand roads. Every day I worked on my novel. I got more done that month than I had since I returned from Cuba. I finished the novel
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
.

Everyone else went back to the city, but Robert and I did not want to
leave. We had to clear out of our house, but some people in the gay house had left, and we were invited to stay in an empty room upstairs for ten days. That week, a hurricane passed out to sea. Tall breakers crashed in. Everyone was stoned much of the time and basically treated the beach as a living room. We all went out on a sandbar to eat a picnic supper while watching the sunset over the bay. The surge of cold water from high winds that sprang up cut us off. I have never been much of a swimmer. I can barely stay afloat. The water rushed into the Pamet River and it quickly became deep. The current was swift and difficult to make way against. The water was numbingly cold. Well after the others had landed and strolled off, I finally managed to make it across, but I wrenched my back muscles badly. If I had drowned, no one would have noticed. My back injury from the old demonstration was exacerbated. Exhausted, I crawled into bed.

I woke in the middle of the night in such pain I thought I had a kidney stone, as Michel once had. It was agony to wait for the end of the week to return to New York. The men in the house turned on me. I was a prima donna, I was attempting to manipulate everyone, I was trying to drag Robert away. I became the villain, while I was immobilized with pain. I could not even straighten up.

Back in the city, I went to an orthopedic surgeon. He put me on complete bed rest and painkillers. For the next weeks, I lay in my bed and my muscles turned to water. Robert withdrew. Friends came once, tried to force or cajole or guilt-trip me out of bed, and then vanished, except for a couple of women friends. Ceci brought me my first television, a small black-and-white set we could rig so that I could see it without sitting up. I became addicted to
Star Trek,
then already in reruns, and to
Dark Shadows,
and to the news. After five weeks of this and no improvement, the orthopedic surgeon began to talk about operating on my spine. I got a friend from NACLA to bring me from the Columbia medical library anything she could find on back injuries. I looked at the statistics on improvement after operations and decided to quit my orthopedic surgeon.

I decided after further reading to try an osteopath. I called up one in Philadelphia who had written articles I liked, who sent me to his mentor.
He was one of the best doctors I have ever gone to, his wall covered with awards for the treatment of injuries and geriatric problems. He took me off the painkillers, gave me exercises and prescribed walking two miles a day. He had me change my shoes. I have rarely worn high heels since. When I need them for a reading or speaking at a podium, I carry them in my briefcase and put them on just before I mount the stage. I returned to life in pain but mobile.

During this period, we became close friends with Robin Morgan, the feminist who had been a child TV star and was now a good speaker, a theoretician of the movement, and a published poet. She was married to Kenneth Pitchford, who was predominantly gay and a published poet. I was crazy about Robin. She was short and pretty, with enormous brown eyes and a cutting wit and intense intelligence, a streak of dogmatism, a fury of seriousness. They had a “light machine.” This was at the height of psychedelic mishegoss. With various friends we went regularly to the Fillmore East. We listened to rock then, religiously. That's the right term. We waited for new albums from the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, as if being given The Word. We haggled over which of our favorites was the most politically correct, and we interpreted and reinterpreted lyrics. But we also danced ourselves limp and got stoned and heard revelations in the music. Anyhow, Robin and Kenneth had built a thing that projected moving shapes and lights on a screen. Robert was immediately enamored. We built one too, different but just as crazy. It used old lace tablecloths, a mirrored ball, prisms, a fan, a motor that turned, all sorts of hanging objects, all of this behind a screen. When I think of how many hours we spent in the next five years staring at this thing, it astonishes me. I cannot imagine just sitting and staring at anything today. I scarcely have time to see a movie unless I get it on video and fast-forward through the dull parts. Nobody I know sits around much. We're all rushed into exhaustion. I can't say I consider this acceleration an improvement, for I have to run twice as fast to stay in the same place economically. I work twice as hard and three times as rapidly for the same money.

In the newly sprung women's movement, I moved in a vortex of anger and joy, an intense sense of revelation. Writing an essay, “The Grand
Coolie Damn,” was my break with the New Left, although I never turned on it the way some feminists did. I never thought we were all wrong, only that things did go sour. I became active in the new Women's Center downtown, and out of there I began organizing consciousness-raising groups. I stayed in one of them for the next year and a half. I was involved again in helping women get abortions and in the regular lobbying, busing to Albany to the legislature, although there was so much smoke in those offices, I was not very useful. I spoke at rallies and marched in demonstrations. I am an able rabble-rousing speaker, because I never talk about any subject I don't care about, passionately.

My new novel,
Dance the Eagle to Sleep,
went the round of publishers and amassed rapid rejections. It horrified most editors who read it, as violent, radical, too much like the kids demonstrating in the streets who frightened them. One said to me, “Why can't you write a nice love story set against a backdrop of war?” My agent did not like it either and was not truly behind it. He had preferred my unsold semiautobiographical novel. But after thirty fast rejections, the novel was bought on a lousy two-book contract by Doubleday and went immediately into production. I had two editors, one with power and one with charm. With the charming subeditor, I enjoyed many drunken luncheons. We both liked wine and food and exotic liqueurs. I used to walk home from the offices in the Thirties on the East Side to our apartment on Ninety-eighth and Broadway, because I was too drunk to take the subway and not about to waste money on a cab. I would sober up by the time I got home. None of our group would have appreciated my rolling in drunk.

I had long legs for my height and wore very short miniskirts. My hair went halfway down my back. I looked good, and so when
Dance
came out, I had a brief time as the flavor of the month in New York publishing, reviews all over the place, including a very enthusiastic one from John Simon in the
New York Times
and denunciations in right-wing and southern newspapers, my photo in
Time,
interviews, television. The works. I liked the attention the book was generating but I didn't like getting obscene phone calls (this was before the days of answering machines). I did not like the jealousy of other writers and friends. I did
not like the feeling I had been turned into a commodity. Some idiot producer even wanted me to take a screen test. The fuss felt wrong. I did not know how to handle it. If a photographer asked me to sit on a table, I would do it. I had no idea how provocative some of those photos looked. I was too nervous to object until I saw them in print. Then I cringed and felt ridiculous. In truth, I was still a naive working-class girl without media smarts.

I was having brief meaningless affairs since the relationship with Goss, which had ended abruptly and left me burnt, so I stopped. Most of the men who came after me when Goss and I split were movement men trying to recruit me to not only their bed but also their projects. I was a good organizer and I felt like a riderless horse everyone was trying to saddle. Robert had not found me attractive since my back injury. I entered a long period of chastity. I was determined to change how I behaved, to be less passive, less reactive, less pliable, less masochistic, less apt to put everyone else first and myself last. I was determined to remake my sexuality and my way of being in the world. On the whole, I was successful and have been much less likable since. I had no desire to leave Robert, although I rather wished he were more interested in me, but mostly I wanted friendships and peace, a reflective quiet at the core.

I no longer went to fourteen meetings a week but only to four. I began contributing to the women's movement as much by writing articles, essays, pamphlets and poems as by organizing, although I was still doing that. The cats were happy. I was around a lot, writing and reading and thinking. I contemplated sex roles and women's position and my own. I was still involved in NACLA as well as the Women's Center, and was also active in
Leviathan,
an intellectual and political publication. The women's movement was electric and gave off sparks. I was seeing myself and the world and all my relationships, all the relationships of my life from my parents on, in a new way. I tried to communicate some of this to my mother. It was the first time I had tried in years to be close to her again. We had moments, but mostly she would not engage. But every day there was new women's theater, women's readings, women's zines, women's programs, women's demonstrations and guerrilla theater at
bridal bazaars, the Miss America pageant, construction sites; everyday someone proposed a new way to look at some aspect of our lives that turned our perspectives upside down; every day I found something I had thought to be a personal problem was an issue shared by many, many women. I did not put myself forward as a leader, because I thought this was a chance for many women who had been silent to learn to speak out.

Robert was growing heavy with depression again. The movement in New York had splintered. I had always been a kind of liaison for him to the more political people, working out how he could relate to projects, how they could relate to him. The computer co-op was holding its own, but he was the only one able to find any contracts that could generate money, and he felt he was carrying the whole thing on his back. Infighting and factionalism isolated us. Groups that disagreed on minor points hated one another. An enemy was someone who differed from you about anything. The rhetoric had escalated and there was no longer a feeling of family, of community. Friends were beginning to peel off to Vermont and the West Coast.

The summer of 1970 the computer co-op rented the same house in Truro. I mainly wrote poetry. A lot of the time, we took long hikes, we went bird-watching, we read a great deal. Robert was talking constantly about getting out of New York. The movement, which had felt warm and nurturing, brothers and sisters together, now felt harsh and nasty, militant and crude. The rhetoric had turned into shouting and the infighting intensified. Everyone we knew in New York was in one or another faction, and I refused to align with any. I was one of the last people all sides could still relate to and try to recruit. I hated the factionalism, but I did not hate the people. I saw them as caught in a conflagration of guilt and despair. We had given our lives to the movement, and still the war escalated. In each of us, violent images imploded and we were tormented by our weakness—so our rhetoric turned more and more warlike and militant and dogmatic. We were recapitulating the faction fights of the 1930s we had found pitiful. We of the New Left were no longer talking to anyone except ourselves.