Braided Lives (78 page)
Authors: Marge Piercy
For how long?
If you had been dropped from the moon into our bedroom, you could have told it was in the Northeast because of the temperature. In no other part of the country do people have to keep their houses as cold. But our land was beautiful, with the wet snow dragging down the branches of the pitch pines, with the cardinals, the jays, the finches jostling around the feeder outside. Bird food was expensive this winter. As Josh filled the feeders, he announced the cost; but when the next blizzard arrived, he pitied the birds again. The summer people always say, oh, it never snows on the Cape. They read that in a book someplace. We were snowed in at the end of our road, waiting without impatience for the town plow to clear a path to us, while the cats slept in a pile like a patchwork fur quilt, keeping each other warm at the foot of our big bed.
“I get scared. I get very scared,” I told Josh, sitting up in bed.
“But you aren’t trying to be a poet now. You are one.”
“I was writing poems then that everybody ignored. Now I write poems enough people read for them to survive. It feels fragile. The poems have to get printed for people to find them and like them. They have to get distributed. Writing is only the precondititon to the life of the poem, but writing is the only part I control.”
“No matter how much you love me or whatever happens between us, you aren’t going to give up. You’ve written for years. And what would pay the electric bill? Together we just make it.”
“Together we make it just fine. Sometimes,” I added ominously. “When you aren’t being impossible.”
“You’re never impossible, of course.”
“I’m merely difficult. I’ve always been fearful, all my life. I get it from my mother.”
“Are you more scared of the economy or the government?”
“Don’t know if I can differentiate. It sure is cold.”
“Well, sweetie,” said cheerful Josh, “you want them to warm it up with burning witches and women’s clinics or with a nice war?”
“What’s that?” I ran to my office window to look out. The plow blinked its lights like a toy locomotive as it bludgeoned along. I returned to Josh, still sprawled in bed. “I’ll carry the compost out if you’ll take the trash to the dump. You’ll have to dig out the blue car.”
“I’ll get the mail if you’ll call the plumber.”
“Okay. And while you’re in town, get milk. And yogurt. And the papers.” Together we wrangle and bargain our way along. Scared. I am running scared, I am running. The times tighten, harden on us. I am not quite as tough as I used to be, accustomed as I have become to loving, to eating regularly, to drinking wine and having music canned at hand; although in some ways I am stronger. What I want is clear to me as counting. We worry together, singing our fears like the chorus of spring peepers that in a month we hope will cheer our evenings from the marsh. They only want to get laid. We also require that. How dangerous is it to want each other as the temperature drops and friends dry up and blow away? In wanting each other we each want a world in which we and our work can survive, and that’s where the trouble starts.
I have moved into a small but sunny apartment on Second Avenue. I am doing more posing and less typing this fall. I have a new secondhand mattress and some of my old furniture, but the rooms are sparsely furnished. With my notebook under my elbow I lie on the floor nose to nose with Minouska, who is telling me how this is the apartment of her dreams, best of all with its fascinating musky smells of previous tenants. I begin to realize that contrary to the popular belief about cats, Minouska likes to move with me. How many apartments in the slums of how many cities will we share, each one as we settle in, pronounced by her delightful? She will live to spend her old age with me and other companions, human and animal, on our own delightful and hard-worked couple of acres. My familiar, who will die in my arms on the Cape and be buried under the wisteria.
For my totem, the alley cat. All cats really want to live with me: this is one of my quiet secrets. Sensuality speaks to sensuality. We blink. They allow the approach of my hand and their sleek flanks delight me in return. We find each other beautiful and each of us means by the hand as well as the eye. We share too the situation of small predators who easily become prey. I have my equivalent of claws and teeth, and indeed my arched back and loud hiss are my best defenses. When I need to hide my size and weakness, I can look fiercer than I am, but when I cannot talk or threaten or argue my way out of trouble, then I am in a lot of trouble. We are scavengers in the alleys and streets of a society we do not control and scarcely influence. We survive and perish both by taking lovers. Freedom is a daily necessity like water, and we love most loyally and longest those who allow us at least occasionally to vanish and wander the curious night. To them we always return from the eight deaths before the last.
About the Author
M
ARGE
P
IERCY
is the author of seventeen novels including the national bestsellers
Gone to Soldiers, Braided Lives,
and
Woman on the Edge of Time;
eighteen volumes of poetry; and a critically acclaimed memoir,
Sleeping with Cats.
Born in center-city Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan, and the recipient of four honorary doctorates, she has been a key player in many of the major progressive political battles of our time, including the anti-Vietnam War and the women’s movements, and more recently an active participant in the resistance to the Middle Eastern wars. Currently she is involved in trying to shut down the Fukushima clone Pilgrim Nuclear Reactor to save all those who have no way to evacuate Cape Cod.
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