Sleeping with Cats

A tango among the potsherds

in bare feet, soon bloody.

Ah, bitch memory, you tangle

me in your barbed hair.

How can I tell enchantment

from fact, lies from promises?

You sing to me in my own voice

but on key with harmonics

that make my bones quiver.

The familiarity of your face makes

me trust where I should close

my eyes till I see sparks.

You persuade me of scenes I cannot

have witnessed, you sing ballads

of deeds only daydreamed. I am

your fool, your lover, your liar.

D
o I have faith
in my memory? Who doesn't? How can I not trust memory. It is as if I were to develop a mistrust for my right hand or my left foot. Yet I am quite aware that my memory is far from perfect. I frequently forget events and people that my husband, Ira Wood, remembers, and similarly, I remember incidents that have slipped away from him. I rarely remember things incorrectly; mostly I remember clearly or I forget completely.

I have distinct memories of events that happened before I was born or for which I was not present. This comes from having heard the stories told vividly by my mother or my grandmother when I was little and imagining those scenes and the people in them so clearly and intensely that I experience them as my own. I have precise memories of the voice and face of my mother's father, who died ten years before I was born. Stories about him that I heard as a child were so real to me that I created him as a living personage.

I have trouble remembering periods of intense pain. The summer my second marriage was disintegrating around me was a time I so hated every moment that it has almost vanished into the limbo of repressed pain. Sometimes a sound or a smell or a voice will break that seal of willful forgetfulness and out will slither those poisonous days and nights.
Once that has happened with events, I will not again forget. They are filed in a different part of my memory and can be summoned, or will drift up unbidden to torment me. But they are no longer vanquished, vanished.

I am convinced that all those people I write about would remember events and patterns of events quite differently than I do. After all, memory changes. Our pasts constantly change. When a friend betrays us or turns against us, the past is rewritten to prefigure that betrayal, that loss of intimacy and faith. When a love affair ends, we read the causes backward into the quarrels, even the minor disagreements. Those months of the inexplicable allergic sniffles of a friend suddenly become clues once we learn of their cocaine addiction. Someone we had scarcely known becomes an important figure in our lives, and in retrospect, every small meeting or passage together is invested with significance. Remembering is like one of those old-fashioned black-and-white-tile floors: wherever I stand or sit, the tiles converge upon me. So our pasts always seem to lead us directly to our present choices. We turn and make a pattern of the chaos of our lives so that we belong exactly where we are. Everything is a prefiguring of our current loves and antipathies, work and faith. We compose a future that leads from where we believe we are at the moment. When the present changes, past and future change significantly with it.

This is, after all, my perspective on my life, not anyone else's. It is neither true nor false in a large sense, because my truth of events is not the same as that of the others who lived them with me. To create a faithful autobiography would require as many years in the telling as the living of it, with transcriptions of every casual meandering conversation about what kind of soup to have for lunch, the weather, a movie seen last week. It would be filled with dirty bathrooms and clean laundry, bills paid and unpaid, overdue library books, hems to mend. We spend more time doing dishes than we do making love, but which figures prominently in the story of our lives? We choose, therefore, only certain events, certain people, certain points of crisis and joy. It is an extremely stylized map, with most of the byways omitted, even the most interesting and lovely
and dangerous byways, because we are always hastening to arrive where we now think it is important and inevitable that we live.

I try to make myself look good, but I am aware that sometimes my honesty and my attachment to what happened prevent me from presenting myself as the blameless heroine. I usually try to do the best I can from day to day, but my best is often flawed and skewed, and sometimes I try to inflict harm. I aim to be good, but sometimes I am best at being at least mildly wicked. I frequently misjudge situations and people and blunder in where I should avoid. I talk myself into relationships that are good for no one, and certainly not for me. Or if good for me, bad for the other person. As I look at my life, I like the work I have done, but I often dislike how I have behaved with other people. I have intended to be a better friend and lover than I have turned out to be.

I think for the most part as time has gone on, I have become a better person in my most intimate relationships and in my relationships with the natural world and with my cats. I do not think I am any more effective politically than I was thirty years ago—probably less so. I assume leadership more warily. I am a better writer, but I stand behind the earlier novels and poetry. My life has been full of blunders, misprisions, accidents, losses, so no wonder I forget. If I did not forget much, how could I possibly continue? At the end, I will forget everything.

Why a memoir now? Well, I am about to turn sixty-five. In common with a lot of baby boomers—the generation after mine but the one I often identify with—I am still surprised that I have aged. I got to have two adolescences, one at the normal time, and a second one in Students for a Democratic Society during the 1960s. I was so used to thinking of myself as young that I still have to correct my inner vision to what I really am chronologically and in my body. It seems like a time to reflect, reexamine, make amends and corrections—a sort of High Holidays of the soul in which I judge what I've done and left undone. I have been a busy actor in my time. People who call me prolific often imagine I do little but write, but I have had my fingers in a great many boiling pots.

In every community there is a cat lady. In the Cape Cod village where I live, there are people who have never read a word I have written and
may not be aware I have written at all, but they know that if they have a cat problem, I am the person to call. They also call me when a cat has been killed or died, for they know I won't mock their grief. This story is about the central relationships in my life and how I survived the bad ones and was strengthened by the good ones. It is primarily about me, but my life has a spine of cats, and it is also about them.

I have been many people in my life. We all change as we take new lovers and partners, as we take on new tasks, new jobs, new interests. Yet there have been constants: my need to write, my drive to write what was meaningful to me and I hope to other people, my desire to love and be loved, my valuing of freedom as close to an absolute, and of course my companions, the cats whose love was there when others failed me or I failed them.

I've lived with cats throughout my life, and I have more cats as time diminishes. My cats are among my friends, different in kind but not in importance from my human friends. Your relationship with a kitten has a maternal component, but once the cat has reached what she considers maturity, long before you think she is adult, she begins to contest your will with her own considerable intent. The bond becomes more nearly a relationship in which each makes accommodations to the other, attempts to learn and to teach, strives to understand and be understood and also to dominate, to rule. The love of a cat is unconditional but always subject to negotiation. You are never entirely in charge.

I was married twice before, but I have been with Ira Wood longer than the first two marriages put together—and far more intimately. Ira is younger than me—a tradition in my mother's family. My mother was older than my father, and her oldest sister had about the same age gap—fourteen years—with her younger husband as I have with Ira. He is four inches taller than me and much stronger. He is solidly built and has a great need for physical exercise. His hair is brown and densely curly. When I met him in 1976, he wore it in a huge Afro, which is its natural condition if left to grow out. Nowadays he keeps it fairly short. He has changeable green eyes and a ruddy complexion. He has always been a very good looking man, but it was his character I fell in love with. He has
a great capacity for love, a giving nature in close relationships, a delicious sense of humor and strong sensuality combined with a bright inquiring mind. Although we both have quick tempers and too much impatience, we are well suited. We feel we are each other's
bashert,
each other's true intended. When we were first involved and again when we decided to marry, many people disapproved or were shocked by the age discrepancy and told me obliquely or with great and unappreciated directness that I was going to get dumped, that a woman cannot marry a man so much younger. I lost friends by my choice, but I gained my best friend.

This memoir focuses on my emotional life, not on my literary or political adventures, or most of my friendships. When I was fifteen, my life changed radically and permanently. In that year, I lost one of my best friends to a heroin overdose; my gentle intelligent cat was poisoned by neighbors because an African-American family was moving into our house; and my grandmother Hannah, to whom I was very close and who was my religious mentor, died of stomach cancer. My family moved to a larger house where I had a room of my own with a door that shut, and I began to write. I withdrew from the street gang I had belonged to and withdrew from my early sexual adventures. In my life, what comes before that point almost belongs to someone else, although there are many continuities. What came afterward is me. I changed, I learned, I developed, I grew, but after those events, I became a poet and a fiction writer and the person I still am. It has, nonetheless, been a long, rough journey from central city Detroit to the edge of this freshwater marsh in Massachusetts.

Ira and I and our five cats—Dinah, Oboe, Max, Malkah and the kitten Efi—live on four acres on Cape Cod, miles out to sea. Why do I live in a village? I was born in the smoking amphetamine heart of Detroit and lived in many cities—Chicago, San Francisco, Brooklyn, Paris, Boston, Manhattan. I've traveled a lot, and being a poet means doing gigs all over. I find I can write here with fewer interruptions and fewer temptations to fuss about my “career” than was possible in New York. We are two hours from Boston and drive back and forth frequently to see friends, do readings or hear them, use libraries, buy wine, shop, attend concerts or plays.
We refuse to let ourselves blink at the commute, because we can enjoy city pleasures and country quiet and beauty.

Two of our cats are elderly. As I write this, Dinah is seventeen and a half and her son Oboe is sixteen and some months. Dinah is the smallest cat, and the feistiest. Korats are gray, cobby cats with deep green eyes and a silken silvery gray coat. Her earlier dulcet voice has changed, peremptory, almost fierce with a sharp husky insistence that pierces walls. She cries her desires like a hawk. She has always been able to throw the much bigger male cats across the room when she is annoyed, and she takes no guff. She gets stepped on all too frequently because she lies down in the center of the hall or doorway and will not move. She is six pounds of intense willpower, healthy for her age and sometimes playful. She is obsessively jealous of Ira. Her son Oboe, however, is allowed any attention. With all the other cats, she counts the strokes they get.

I sometimes call my husband Woody, his nickname, and sometimes Ira and sometimes Wood. He calls me Marge or Piercy about equally, as well as other names I will not mention. He has multiple names for the cats. Dinah is Dweeze or Dweezelle. Sometimes Munchkin or Moochie. He is a giver of nicknames.

Dinah fell in love with Ira when she was ten weeks old, and he remains her passion. It is morning. Ira gets up first and makes cappuccino downstairs. When I am home alone or he is ill and I make the coffee, it takes me an hour. Until I have coffee, I can't do anything, including make coffee, so it is a farce. Afterward ground coffee and water and milk are spilled all over the kitchen. I do 90 percent of the cooking, but not in the morning. Me in the kitchen when I am half asleep is an accident in the making. I do not rise with full coordination. I rise bleary and shambling, Frankenstein's monster imperfectly fitted together.

When Ira goes downstairs, Dinah must go with him talking in her high raspy voice, oversee his making coffee, and then she must jump up on the high ledge in the bathroom to observe his first piss. What this means to her we have no idea, but she is insistent on her privileges. If something is missing from the order of the morning, she plants herself in the middle of the kitchen floor and tells us loudly that we are out of line and must
shape up. We have our cappuccino in bed and Dinah lies on Ira's chest, purring. Ira often says he has never been loved as completely as she loves him, which I presume includes me. Oboe, her son, curls in my lap, purring just as loudly. Efi, the young Siamese, climbs the padded raggedy cat tree in the corner and waits. While I am making the bed, Ira will play with her. If he doesn't, she wails her disappointment.

Routines, habits, rituals bind life together for most people, but no one can understand the pleasure or the comfort of them, looking on from outside. Such routines appear silly or time wasting. Yet like the cats, I am pleased by some appearance of the ordinary in a life that is overly hectic. I wake alone in motel rooms too often not to appreciate the accustomed round of the morning. We have created these habits, all of us together, so they are shaped to our contours.

Dinah's son Oboe, born in my bed, is a natural mediator. He has fought when necessary, but he has never been injured in a catfight and mostly he prefers to make friends with other cats. His major mode of fighting, when forced to it, consists of blowing his fur out so that he looks twice his normal size and making horrendous huge terrifying noises. I doubt if he has ever bitten another cat, and he has certainly never been bitten. He is a lover, gentle with us and his own cats, ruling more by persuasion than force. He has a heart-shaped face, soulful and intense, his green eyes large and luminous.

Two years ago, he was given a death sentence by our veterinarian, and he may well die while I am engaged in this book. I had Ira dig a grave last fall, in case Oboe should die when the ground is frozen; I try to avoid walking near that area. He is stoical about his illness and deeply embarrassed when kidney disease keeps him from reaching his box in time. Nonetheless, he is where he wants to be, with the people and cats he loves, among whom he is the universal favorite. Whatever he does has prestige. Efi, the baby Siamese, throws her arms around him and goes to sleep hugging him. Sometimes she washes him so vigorously, he is wet afterward.