Sleeping with Cats (26 page)

Except for the women's movement. We were expanding, we were
reaching out, we were taking in new women every day. We were in an intense rich period of discovery and the reinvention of every aspect of culture, biological destiny, gender, the family, the workplace—everything from birth till death and in between. I did not experience the dreadful tearing asunder of SDS in the same way as friends, because I was involved in something bursting with life and energy that was teaching me to remake myself stronger—mentally and socially. My health remained unstable. The doctor who had agreed to resume treating me, since I had stopped smoking, told me I would never recover but would proceed into emphysema if I stayed in New York City, because I was inhaling two and a half packs a day just by breathing the dirty city air.

Robert was keenly depressed. The computer co-op had not worked out as he had imagined. He was the only one bringing in income-producing work and he was responsible for a nest full of hungry birds. The movement he had intended to serve was ceasing to exist.

We began to look around Truro, but we could not find anything we could afford. Wellfleet was cheaper. We saw an acre at the end of a subdivision. Before we left the Cape, we bought it and we hired a builder who was recommended to us. I drew plans for a house that Robert vetoed because he thought it too expensive. We used the basic design but made it five feet smaller in all dimensions. I have regretted that choice daily. There was only one house in the subdivision, right next to ours; the builder intended to live here with his girlfriend, Penny, whom we met and liked. We were going to move to Cape Cod. We were once again abruptly changing our lives.

Loving feels lonely in a violent world,

irrelevant to people burning like last year's weeds

with bellies distended, with fish throats agape

and flesh melting down to glue.

We can no longer shut out the screaming

that leaks through the ventilation system,

the small bits of bone in the processed bread,

so we are trying to make a community

warm, loose as hair but shaped like a weapon.

Caring, we must use each other to death.

Love is arthritic. Mistrust swells like a prune.

Perhaps we gather so they may dig one big cheap grave.

From the roof of the Pentagon which is our Bastille

the generals armed like Martians watch through binoculars

the campfires of draftcards and barricades on the grass.

All summer helicopters whine over the ghetto.

Casting up jetsam of charred fingers and torn constitutions

the only world breaks on the door of morning.

We have to build our city, our camp

from used razorblades and bumpers and aspirin boxes

in the shadows of the nuclear plant that kills the fish

with Coke bottle lamps flickering

on the chemical night.

W
hen I first saw the land
Robert and I bought in 1970, it was pine woods just beginning to go to climax oak, a hillside of sand and some clay overrun with lowbush blueberries, hawthorn, a few juniper. After the real estate man showed it to us, we returned alone. As we were looking it over, Robert pissed into the bushes, and a red-shouldered hawk rose up furious from where she had been feeding. Since I am enamored of hawks, I took this as a sign. We paid cash for the land, so we had only a $15,500 mortgage on the little house we built.

It was a thing of the times, the exodus from New York. The Cape was close enough to the computer industry in Boston and New York to sit well with Robert. He had pastoral dreams. He imagined cows and chickens and plowing the west forty. So we took Arofa and Cho-Cho and packed up into the unknown. There were only two other houses in the subdivision when we moved on a rainy February day with the help of friends, way at the end of a road. For the cats, it was the move of their dreams. As soon as they had settled in, we began to allow them outside in the daytime.

The new-built house was small, a box half buried in the sand, but the builder had chopped down too many trees, slashed a great furrow in the hill so that it was deeply rutted and washing out with every rain. I began
to plant to stabilize the hillside. Today this land is lush and productive with sugar maples, birches, a weeping beech, thickets of roses, black and red currants, raspberry, blueberry and gooseberry, fruit trees, dogwoods, crabapples, wisteria bowers, rampant grapevines and intensive organic vegetable gardens. However, most of the land is pine forest well along into oak. For cats, it was, and is, paradise.

I fell into seed and nursery catalogs, discovering a new addiction I have never recovered from. Indeed, I feel quite virtuous when, reading a catalog with 150 old-fashioned and species roses in it, I order only fourteen. I am like a dieter who eats only one banana split instead of three, and thus feels you should admire her restraint, and is secretly convinced that with such evident self-denial, she will lose weight. Some things I planted that first year—the tiny rhododendrons, the three-inch-high seedlings of white fir, the raggedy forsythia—have flourished. Others like the ring of Austrian pines supposed to be a windbreak perished in the first month. Our soil was poor, but we were composting our garbage and mulching with thatch from the bay.

I took a month's residency at Kansas to pay off the electrician and the well driller. To spend as little as possible of my earnings, in Lawrence I lived in an autocratic ill-run commune with faculty and students. During those first years on the Cape, I was developing my reading style, learning to put poems across to an audience. I worked with musicians and other poets, trying ways of presenting. I performed with drums, chanting, a saxophone, a xylophone and other musicians who sometimes seemed determined to prove that words are superfluous in the presence of music. Finally I preferred just delivering the poems myself.

When I came back from Kansas, Robert was involved with a hapless waif he was already tired of. I remember Arofa taking me about to her favorite places on the land, showing me her discoveries, intensely excited and purring as she went. She became a fearsome hunter. Arofa killed cleanly, breaking the necks of her prey. She could run down rabbits. However, a sad thing occurred regularly during those days when baby rabbits left their nests. She would carry them home unharmed and soon unafraid, washing them and attempting to treat them as kittens. That
made me feel guilty that we had not allowed her a litter before altering her. I would take them out and let them go.

Cho-Cho was far more the stereotypical cat, playing with her prey and mangling them before finally administering the coup de grâce. We could never afford to be sentimental about rodents, as the house attracted field and jumping mice. We were growing vegetables and fruit abundantly, bartering surplus for seafood from the fisherman who moved in next door and for supplies at the health food store. Our builder, after throwing our house together haphazardly, left his girlfriend and married someone else, so he never lived in the house he built beside ours.

For years, when something would go wrong, plumbers would examine our pipes and fittings and fall down laughing. The builder had saved money by doing it himself. This was before strict enforcement of building codes in town. Over the years, we learned many ways that corners had been cut—like installing a used and insufficient pump. Like leaving insulation out of the exterior walls of closets. The house has one interior door only twenty inches wide, so that it is hard to get any piece of furniture or even a large box through it. The wall oven leaked smoke and did not retain heat, as I discovered the first time I tried to bake bread.

During our early years, we had constant trouble with the well and the pump. The well repair man would arrive and wait for me to descend into the well pit before he would go down. I would catch our resident black rat snake in a paper bag and hold him until they finished the repairs. Then I would return him to his home in the wellhouse. I was notorious as the snake lady, because I have never been afraid of snakes. We had lots of rodents and appreciated the snake's services. I was very sorry when one day I descended into the well and found him desiccated, electrocuted. After the snake died, we could no longer use the well as a root cellar because mice would eat the cabbages and potatoes.

By New Year's Eve, I finished the first draft of the novel
Small Changes,
which I had been futilely trying to start in New York. I wrote eight hundred pages between returning from Kansas in April and
December 31. I celebrated by dancing all night in Provincetown. I was working in a far more disciplined and productive way than since our move from Brookline to Brooklyn.

The fisherman who lived next door was a complex man who had run radio communications for SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) during voter registration. One of his many girlfriends had a horse and eventually two. I remember a bad thunderstorm when I heard a horrible clatter and her big old white horse Ajax was standing on my porch looking in mournfully. Then the neighbor's mother died, and he inherited her cat, a gorgeous black Persian named Daphne. Daphne did not like his household. Too many dogs, too much noise, too little attention. She moved in with us. Arofa and Cho-Cho hated her. She did not care for the company of other cats. Finally I put an ad in the paper and several takers fought over her. A local carpenter carried her off on a cushion like the regal queen she was.

Before we moved to the Cape, I had bought books on macramé, on dyeing with natural products, on collecting, eating and preserving wild food. I imagined taking up crafts to fill the long empty off-season months summer people like us believed the locals stoically endured. By the time we had been living in Wellfleet for six months, I had four meetings a week. We started Cape Cod Women's Liberation on a picket line outside an exhibit in Provincetown, billed as the top New England artists—sixty of them, including only two women and no Afro-American or Latino artists.

We came together in an informal group bridging several towns on the Outer Cape. We worked on rape and began to educate the police departments. Abortion was still illegal. There were no specific health facilities for women. Women usually held a variety of ill-paying and unorganized jobs—waitresses, chambermaids, house cleaners. Often they did not know even the few legal resources and recourses available. We held forums on domestic violence. The ex-girlfriend of our builder, Penny, became a close friend and a year later moved in with us. She lived in Robert's office, a flat-roofed building with a large cellar for wine stor
age located half a mile from the house. We worked the land, ate and did our political work together.

Penny was a cat person, and the cats adored her and crawled all over her—even Arofa. She had been a ballet dancer in New York until she was dropped by her partner during an opera—when a prop had been moved. She had a psychology degree, but when I met her, she was running a landscaping crew out of a truck wildly painted with peace and woman power symbols. She was a passionate feminist with a salty side, and like me, she had enjoyed many adventures, had traveled extensively, liked to dance, eat, drink and garden. We concentrated on fruit and vegetable production, but I was also enamored of roses, daylilies and interesting trees. I planted two weeping beeches, but one of them was struck by lightning—a terrifying moment. I had two women friends visiting. The lightning seemed to charge into the room, and the power went out. We found ourselves all three of us kneeling in the middle of the floor, clutching one another, deafened and shuddering.

Robert had built himself a large office on a stream, near a small pond. Since it was much bigger than he needed for his work, during these years usually somebody else was living there. Robert enjoyed the Cape, enjoyed the gardens, the landscape—he always was very open and attuned to natural beauty—oystering, clamming, little building projects. He played with the cats and gave them first-class attention. Robert and I talked a great deal, about politics, the world, what we were reading. We often had irritable fights—little spats that passed as quickly as clouds overhead. However, we also had fights that were far more serious every couple of months. They were terrible lacerating rending battles that felt every time like the end of the world, or at least the end of the marriage. They usually issued from his feeling stymied in his work or his life, unable to move forward. As in many marriages, the wife becomes the cause of the husband's frustration—who else is around to blame? It is hard to remember what the fights were about, or if they were about anything in particular and not just the result of an overwhelming malaise and a huge, often suppressed anger flooding out.

One way of being in the landscape we shared was wanting to know
exactly what we were looking at. Knowing starts with naming, although it cannot end there. We collected guides not only to birds but to plants of the seashore, mollusks, butterflies and moths, reptiles and amphibians, trees, shrubs, wildflowers, rocks, animal tracks and scat (for winter identification). It used to annoy some visitors when we stopped cold to study a weed. We would go out for a walk with a knapsack of guides, although after a while, we could identify most of the animals and plants we met. Then we wanted to know their habits, what their presence said about the land, the ecology—how they lived, what they ate, their mating habits. We shared this approach and we had fun.

Joining the food co-op, we quickly became coordinators. At that time, there were far fewer year-round people on the Lower Cape and fewer stores and businesses open in the winter. Eight hundred people in three towns were members. Every Sunday afternoon we took orders at the Methodist church in the Head Start room. On Wednesday afternoon, bags of oatmeal and whole wheat flour, of carrots and potatoes were given out. We stayed active until the time we started going into Boston every week.

A peculiar local custom developed during the ban on swordfish, which was considered dangerous from supposedly high mercury levels. A local fisherman (also in an open relationship; they were common then) would catch a swordfish and bring it to the back room of the bookstore. A calling chain would notify everyone on the list and you would say how many pounds you wanted. A landscape painter would carve up the swordfish, and you would pay a price far below what the market had been when it was legal, and go home with your superfresh steaks. There's always a lot of barter on the Cape, as locals are often short of money but long on something else.

Robert was urging me to have outside relationships again. I had not been involved with anyone else in a year and a half, and we had not had sex in a year. I had been content with this arrangement for a long time, since I wanted to examine my habits in close encounters with the opposite sex and I wanted to change my behavior. But I found that chastity did not work for me in the long haul. I found myself writing less poetry and emotionally drying up.

But beginning to have sex with other men meant worries about pregnancy, and I was tired of constantly fearing it, month after month, the anxiety every time my period was late, the fuss with contraceptives. I was never handy with the diaphragm and more than once it ended up flipping out of my hands sticky with jelly and pasting itself to the bathroom ceiling. I had been in the original group after Puerto Rico on whom various dosages of the pill had been tried out, and I had had to be cauterized for excessive bleeding at one point. I looked for a doctor who would sterilize me. My friend Karen had undergone a new procedure, a laparoscopy (a new surgical procedure that was much simpler and safer than the older operation). It was called “Band-Aid sterilization” because it did not leave a scar. Since Karen and I are close in age, it seemed likely a doctor willing to listen to her would grant my request. And he did. I was scheduled for a laparoscopic in-hospital overnight procedure in a town north of Boston.

The problematic aspect for me was the anesthetic. Indeed, I awoke in the postop room covered with bruises, with various nurses and aides in a semicircle glaring down at me. Certain kinds of old-fashioned anesthetics have the effect of making me violent when I lose consciousness. Sore as I was—and I had far more aftereffects than I expected, including difficulty with my bladder for a month—there was no scar and I was free. I have never regretted taking charge of my body. I did not want children. I never felt I would be less of a woman, but I feared I would be less of a writer if I reproduced. I didn't feel anything special about my genetic composition warranted replicating it. When I came home from the hospital giddy on painkillers, I lay in my bed singing at the top of my lungs—with relief, with joy, with the sharp delicious taste of freedom. I could very well understand why other women wanted children, but it was not for me. I had the ability to put everything out of my mind except work, and I did not think that would lead to responsible and loving motherhood. I knew if I had a baby, I would feel trapped and resent my situation.