Sleeping with Cats (9 page)

I bought books: Frazer's
Golden Bough;
poetry by Whitman and Emily Dickinson, my mentors; T. S. Eliot. An anthology of postwar poets, including Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, and above all important to me, Muriel Rukeyser. But 90 percent of the money I earned, I
saved for college. These are the years when up in that room, I became who I was to be, began to write both poetry and fiction. The world—the intellectual and political and literary world—was opening to me, although it was tremendously difficult for me to sort it out. I remember reading Faulkner before I had the tools to understand what he was doing, and the feeling I had that this writing was a code I must learn to break. Every six months I would try, until finally I suddenly understood, and then he was mine. I had begun reading poetry seriously and passionately with the Romantics—Byron and Shelley and Keats—and had early and never abandoned passions for Whitman and Dickinson. But I had moved on to more contemporary models by my senior year of high school.

I listened to music on the little turntable I had bought, often getting albums out of the library. I was in love with Russian composers, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Scriabin, Rimsky-Korsakov. I also discovered blues and jazz. I was crazy about Duke Ellington. Brutus liked music, making little crooning noises along with it. He did not care for dissonant music. He particularly disliked a symphony of Shostakovich, and if I played it, would insist I open the door and let him out—which actually involved going downstairs with him and letting him outside through the front door or else opening the door to the downstairs and letting him into my parents' part of the house.

I had grown up listening to urban blues, although to me it was just music. As a young child, I had lobbied my parents for a piano—friends of my parents had one I adored. Finally my parents got a battered and stained upright with a lovely tone. I was accepted into the Detroit Conservatory of Music and was a gifted pupil, so my mother was told, but to reach the conservatory, my mother and I had to take a streetcar and two buses. She did it with me for a year—amazing. Then she found a piano teacher who was much cheaper, McGillicuddy. We hated each other. Mutual torture went on for the next four years of my childhood. My finger got crushed in the car door shortly after I started working with him, and thereafter it would unaccountably go numb, giving me an uncertain left hand. Besides, I loved to play with feeling and a lot of pedal. It's not
hard to understand why I drove him mad. He loved exercises, like the
Little Pischna,
technical brilliance. It was a bad match, but he drank and came cheaply. He lived at the Y. Around age eleven, my lessons stopped. My parents sold the piano. I did not have one again until we moved to Ward Avenue. A neighbor was selling a much smaller piano, what was called in the furniture parlance then, a spinet. I was pleased, but probably did not say so. I was so guarded I wouldn't admit to liking chocolate.

I read
The New Yorker
religiously, sure I was becoming sophisticated with every page I turned. I read the listings for theaters and cabarets, as if even the mention of performances I would never see and perhaps would never want to see, could liberate me from Detroit and my parents, with whom I was at war. Although my life was far more proper after we moved, they were annoyed by what I did, read, listened to in the privacy of my room. I was developing tastes that were not theirs, and my mother resented that. She would denounce books I read. I remember her throwing a fit about Aldous Huxley's
Point Counter Point
. She dipped into it and considered it pornographic. I had forged a note in her handwriting to the local library so I could take out adult books. Since I still cut school oftener than other good students, I had become adept at creating notes from my mother. Sometimes I went to the Art Institute of Detroit, a space I had appropriated as a seventh grader, where I felt safe. Sometimes I wandered downtown. Other times I went to the main public library. High school was a time of pervasive massive boredom, boredom as thick as peanut butter, as bland as vegetable shortening. Almost all I learned was on my own, reading books nobody encouraged me to read.

I had more time to think and brood and scribble than ever before in my life or ever again. I thought about family stories and the contrast of my father's and mother's families. I thought the Piercys lacked curiosity, tolerance, sensuality, joie de vivre, warmth. I thought the Bunnins lacked the ability to choose something and stick to it. They were brilliant and flighty. They began well but did not follow through. They were warm but scattered. Love blew them before it like papers in a wind. I would not be like that. I would avoid, I told myself, the defects of both families. But I was painfully aware of my own. I felt myself to be so much less than I
wanted to be that I mocked myself, huddled in my chilly room with my cat. I did not particularly like myself. I thought myself ugly, cowardly, lumpy. I saw myself as someone who imagined great deeds and did nothing but cower.

I fantasized obsessively. My daydreams, the stories I told myself, were like knitting I carried with me and took up at any odd moment, riding the bus, doing the endless housework, sitting in class, sitting at supper trying to shut out the quarreling voices of my parents. Meals were fraught. I learned to eat sparely and quickly, to shovel in some food and flee. My mother cooked chicken well as a pot roast, and the same with beef. Vegetables were possibly dangerous. She was convinced a brother of hers had ruined his stomach and died of pneumonia (how these were related I never learned) because he ate too many raw vegetables. She cooked vegetables until they were soupy. Often we ate canned vegetables. I think most people under forty today have reached maturity without the horrid experience of eating canned spinach or canned carrots. Such is true progress.

She also put sugar in or on almost everything: on lettuce, on tomatoes, on cantaloupe and grapefruit. My parents both had keen sweet tooths. Before going to bed every night, they had cake and coffee. I would fly out yammering through the roof if I did that. Most of the sweet things were cakes, pies, cupcakes, cookies my mother baked. If she was an indifferent cook, she was a fine baker. I am the opposite, but I still make an apple cake, a flat European-style coffee cake, that is an imitation of hers.

In daydreams I lived great heroic adventures and tragic romances. How could love end happily? I hardly saw anyone who seemed happy in marriage, and the last thing I wanted was to be married. That seemed to me a kind of death for a woman, in which she lost not only her will and her power but even her name. I was determined never to marry, but I wanted sexual and romantic adventures. I knew from my mother and girlfriends that women were not supposed to think that way, so I felt myself more of an outsider than ever.

Typically, I read hunched on my daybed wearing a bathrobe over my clothes for warmth, with Brutus lying beside me, often under the
bathrobe to be closer, although he did not really fit. He had a soft but melodious purr that seemed to rise and fall in its harmonics. In all those years, he never scratched me, even when I occasionally had to give him medicine, always home prescribed. In later years, my parents actually began to take Brutus to the vet, a change in their lifestyle, which is probably one of the reasons he lived to be twenty-two. He was by far the longest lived of any of their cats, and he was certainly the healthiest.

Of course he also had exceptional vigor and strength. He is the only cat I ever knew who could catch squirrels when he chose. He would sometimes demand to go up in the attic and hunt them, for he was furious when they came into the house and ran back and forth over his ceilings. Outside he left them alone. He was not a great hunter, for he lacked motivation.

He was certainly a lover. He had a regular mate who bore him litters and litters of kittens, or rather bore them to the long-suffering people in the next block who owned her. She was a pretty solid gray cat, but apparently the tabby gene was dominant. He went with other cats and sometimes brought them home, but he and the gray female had an ongoing affectionate as well as sexual bond. When he was fed on the back porch in hot weather, he would often bring her along to share his food.

He did not much care for car travel. By this time I rarely went to the cottage with my parents. I felt I had outgrown it and prized the time in the house alone. He and I got on quite well. As I had when I was a child and my mother was sick, I would open something we both liked, tuna fish or sardines, and share the can with him. Once when I was little and my mother was sick, she got out of bed to find me and Buttons eating sardines from the same plate. She was scandalized. I could not understand why. I was saving dishes that I would have to wash. Anyhow, Brutus and I were quite content to loll around the house. Of course, I had to go to work.

In my last year of high school, I developed a close friendship with a young woman a year behind me. Let's call her Henrietta. We were both sixteen, but I had been double-promoted in grade school. Although they lived on a street much like ours, the atmosphere was different. Both her
parents worked, and she had a closet full of feminine clothes. She played the piano seriously, also wrote poetry, not very good but I wasn't about to tell her that. It was hard enough to get her to show me her poems. She had long wavy brown hair almost to her waist. I decided to grow my hair, over my mother's protests. She thought long hair was messy, unhygienic and reeked of the old country. My grandmother had long hair till the day she died, worn in a braided bun she loosened at night. Then she would sit on the edge of the double bed we shared and let her hair down like Rapunzel. I was in love with her when she did that, but before I was sixteen, it had never occurred to me to let my own hair grow.

My grandmother had died slowly of stomach cancer. At her funeral I had revolted against Orthodox Judaism. I was freshly aware of the situation of women. I found the rabbi a joke. He knew nothing of her character, her life, her escape with her husband who had a price on his head from an unsuccessful attempt at revolution, her clandestine passage to America, her persistence through poverty, but instead turned her into a stereotypical Yiddishe mama with no personality, no past. I hated hypocrisy at sixteen and I saw it everywhere—except in myself, of course, and in Brutus. I wrote poetry of loss, of death and desolation, but I already had learned from the culture you did not write love poems to your grandma, so I invented a dead male lover. It was Hannah I was mourning in this guise. They were called the Lil poems and later I won my first Hopwood contest at college with a short manuscript containing several of them. In reaction to what I saw as hypocrisy, I flirted with Buddhism. I was fascinated by mysticism but was ignorant of Jewish mystics, was repulsed by the Christianity that had been shoved at me at school, and found Buddhism in its sanitized Americanized version clean and sweet and enlightened. I tried chanting, controlled breathing, meditation. I discovered if I let my mind go, I saw visions—often frightening but sometimes ecstatic. I wrote bad poetry about my visions in endless spiral notebooks.

This aspect of my life I shared with absolutely no one, except, of course, Brutus. Henrietta also had a cat, Pooh-bear. I had not been raised on Winnie-the-Pooh, so had no idea where this name came from. Pooh-
bear was an altered female cat who never went out. She had a sandbox in the basement instead. She was clean, dainty, well fed and well groomed. When Henrietta played piano, Pooh-bear sat on top like the dog in
Peanuts,
swishing her tail. Everything in this house was different, from the Constant Comment tea I had never tasted to the pretty clothes and the porcelain cups, the middle-class amenities. It had never before occurred to me that clothes should match. My mother had no idea of that kind of taste. I had a limited number of sweaters, blouses, skirts, jeans, and I put on whatever was clean. The notion of coordinated outfits was as strange to me as it would have been to a Bushman. I had certain favorites from clothes mostly picked up at rummage and yard sales, favored because they were soft or of a color I liked. I had never put intelligence or aesthetic judgment into clothing. I understood this made me a barbarian. My friend told me how special her family was and how special she was, and I agreed. I was a little in love. Everything in her life seemed to me refined and elegant. I felt common and loud and ashamed. Yet I never wavered in my opinion I was a better writer.

I admired everything else about Henrietta. If Pooh-bear had done anything as vulgar as have fleas, they would have been trained fleas and done tricks. Henrietta had a streak of cruelty that caused her to turn on me and make fun of me from time to time, so I never could quite trust her. There was much to make fun of, my house with its roomers, my shabby clothes, my bad teeth. The odd jobs I did, which I was always running off to. Henrietta did not have to work.

Henrietta had another friend, the first out Lesbian I ever met. Kiki viewed me as a rival for Henrietta's affections. She played the piano masterfully. Henrietta once tricked me into playing Chopin while Kiki hid in the next room, so they could make fun of my playing. Kiki kept telling me I was really a Lesbian and should admit it. I had no idea what I was. My sexuality confused me. But I resented being pushed into a category I had not chosen. I knew one thing for sure: I had to escape home and my mother to have any chance of exploring my own sexuality. I was not attracted to Kiki, because I found her domineering and flamboyant. I'd had enough of that.

They laughed together at the way I dressed and spoke. My childhood had been totally different from that of middle-class girls, although I did not share my wilder adventures or my sexual exploits. The only being with whom I talked with total honesty was my cat: and the poems I hid from my mother, who went through my room frequently looking for just such signs of my inner life. Much of my energy went into protecting my thoughts, my desires, my work, my plans from her. During those years I developed a handwriting so illegible it protected me from her—and unfortunately, from everyone else who tries to read it. Sometimes I can't read it myself. It wasn't until I went away to college that I had a friend with whom I could be honest about myself. Until then, friendship was a log over a pit of alligators. I wanted to reveal myself, to blurt myself out. But I could not. Even much of what was visible was unacceptable; how revolting my inner life would have been. Like many adolescents, I thought of myself as a monster. I had other friends on the school paper. One was a Jehovah's Witness who tried to convert me. Such a marginal religion fascinated me, who had grown up only one of two Jews—the other Black—in my neighborhood. I went to services with her, and my mother accompanied me, willing to go anyplace where other women were pleasant to her. However, we were not about to get seriously involved.