Sleeping with Cats (27 page)

I began relationships with a poet, a park ranger and then with an academic who wrote mostly polemics. He was my link for a time to friends
who were underground. I had known he was interested while we were both living in New York, but I was committed to chastity. Now I was willing. I found that having other relationships made me far less dependent on Robert, who went off to Germany frequently on software projects, leaving me alone in the country, and whose sexual interest in me was at best intermittent. Having other relationships kept me from being lonely or dependent on him. So did having other people live with us, something that characterized those years. Usually some friend was living in the house or in the office, usually a woman. I was not isolated in my marriage but living in a larger family. Maintaining the group was a priority for me, and a lot of my choices and difficulties arose from the necessity of keeping the group together. In the country that was critically important. I am not a jealous person, nor was Robert. I can live with one other person or with a group, so long as I feel cared for and my needs and boundaries are respected.

In many ways, being able to operate on my own made it smoother for me socially and politically. I could make friends more easily. When Robert and I had been a normal couple, we stopped seeing many friends of mine he did not like or approve of. He always had far stricter political standards for my friends than for his. His computer pals might work on defense contracts, because they could not avoid that. If friends of mine wrote for the movies or for
Playboy,
he wouldn't deal with them and would give me a hard time about seeing them.

I often had to explain and justify him, for he seemed strange to people we met. I liked going to parties without him—not because I wanted to pick someone up, for he was more apt to do that. I always wanted to check men out thoroughly before committing myself. But his presence cramped my interactions with friends and acquaintances. I had to worry about whether he had someone to talk to, whether he was having a good time. I preferred going to meetings with almost anyone else, because he would say things to provoke attention that got me into trouble politically or which I felt compelled to defend out of loyalty. I provided a reservoir of people with whom he could do things. But on the Cape, most of my friends were feminists for whom he was not a priority.

Although I had not chosen an open marriage and multiple relationships of my own volition, I easily justified it politically and I took advantage of it. I had a great many people in my life whom I could not have been close to otherwise. I could take chances on risky relationships and flee back into my stable one. I learned a lot that people with more conventional lives never have a shot at. I certainly had far more experience with men than 90 percent of the women I know, and it's been useful to me as a writer.

The relationship with the academic writer was bumpy. I was truthful with him, but he had another woman in New York who did not know about me and I didn't know about her. When I found out, I felt I had betrayed her unintentionally. The relationship blew up and he became hostile. For some years, he would review my novels acidly whenever he had a chance. However, while I was still seeing him—sometimes in New York and sometimes on the Cape—Robert became interested in me again. Our relationship heated up. I began to realize Robert was most sexual with me when somebody else wanted me.

I had many intense friendships with women in the feminist movement but ran into problems with some who resented my work habits, my discipline. From the time I arrived on the Cape, one of the things I chose explicitly was to put my writing first. Everything else in my life waxed and waned, but writing, I discovered during my restructuring, was my real core. Not any relationship. Not any love. Not any person. I had become more selfish and less accessible. I ceased to be the universal mommy of the tribe. I wanted to see people when I was done with my writing for the day, and not in the middle of my work time.

I was working on
Small Changes,
an immense task. Not only was it a long novel, but I felt I was struggling to invent a grammar of gender and sex roles in fiction. I remember many lunches in Cambridge with Nancy Henley, who was working on
She Said/He Said
. At those long lunches we discussed and debated observations about who laughed at whose jokes, how men and women occupied space, who got to touch whom and how, the use of first names, and dozens of daily interactions on the job and in social life.

I had various short relationships with men. Everyone who came and stayed with us was put to work on Robert's agricultural projects or my landscaping. We have the A. memorial brick walkway, the B. memorial steps carved into the hill with railroad ties, the C. retaining wall, the D. archway, the E. shed. I would never do that to visitors now, but it was the ethos of the time. You came, you stayed, you moved in if you wished, but you had to contribute labor. People who were not willing to work were considered bad guests and never invited again—or allowed to invite themselves. When you live on Cape Cod, you get used to fielding messages like this: “Hi, this is Jimmy Dildo. Remember, we met in a hallway in 1962? I'm here with my wife and six kiddies, and we can't find a motel room. Can we come and stay with you?” I became accomplished at responding, “Sure, come on over. We can't put you up, but I can give you lunch, and you can help us dig the stumps out of the new area we're clearing. Bring your work clothes.” That got rid of most.

In the fall of 1972, I put in a two-week stint at the University of Michigan, my alma mater, in the Residential College. That was a new experiment, a small liberal arts college within the vast university. I enjoyed that residency far more than the one in Kansas. A number of the faculty were friendly, some knew my work, and the students were bright, open and interested. While there, I was the honored guest at tea in the Hopwood Room—I had won various Hopwoods at Michigan, including a major in poetry—when a young man appeared. He had read
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
and asked if I wanted to go dancing that night. This was so different from the usual fan reaction, I was delighted. While I was in Ann Arbor, I saw a lot of him, but I assumed it was over when I left. During these years, I always spent time with my old writing teacher and mentor Robert Haugh, with Professor Arnold Eastman, who taught Shakespeare and was one of the first “out” faculty I ever met. He had never been my professor, but we had become friends. He was politically savvy and a great wit. I also was extremely fond of Mary Cooley, who ran the Hopwood Room. Even after she retired, I kept in touch and saw her whenever I was near. She had never married but worked all her life, was an avid reader and gardener,
extremely intelligent. I admired her as an independent woman of integrity, who lived alone and seemed to like it.

Not long after my return, the young man, Wayne, appeared at our door. I was flattered and alarmed, but Robert liked him and suggested he stay as long as he liked. The two of them worked well together, constantly carrying out projects like building a shed and putting up fences around the garden to keep rabbits out. Robert had become involved with a woman from my women's group. Dolores had moved from Provincetown to Cambridge because of a part-time teaching position. Around this time we began to go to Boston regularly. Robert was working with his old company and stayed over with Dolores in Cambridge, and she came out every weekend. Wayne got a job and we rented a two-room apartment together in Cambridge. All of us went back and forth regularly. Sometimes I would be four days on the Cape and three in Cambridge; sometimes five days on the Cape and two in Cambridge.

The relationships with Wayne and Dolores worked into our lifestyle and did not threaten the central relationship. In the long run, Robert and I preferred each other's company—in part because we did not have too much of it. Plus we all had fun together. Whatever you wanted to do, you had a ready-made group to do it, whether it was going dancing, taking a hike, playing with a Frisbee at the beach or cards at the dining room table, putting up a bird feeder or a picnic, arguing politics and talking, talking. Dolores wrote poetry and short prose pieces, so we exchanged and critiqued our work together. She was not easy to live with. She thought we were living high because we ate oysters a lot, not understanding that Wayne and Robert had commercial shellfish licenses and harvested them regularly. When she did the dishes, she let the water run for an hour until we had no hot water. My clothes were stored in the closet of the upstairs bedroom, and since she rose late, often I could not get dressed until I had been up for hours. It was all worth it, because I liked her warmth and intelligence. She was easy for me to understand, to communicate with, and I felt we were on the same side. We were intense about many of the same things. We both came
from families without money and were unique in our families for having decided we wanted an education and having got one, regardless of difficulties. We identified with each other; indeed, we were of a similar body type, with long black hair, and sometimes were taken for blood sisters.

I got involved in Bread and Roses, a feminist group. I began to meet women in Cambridge. In addition to Cape Cod Women's Liberation, I also was in a consciousness-raising group including women from Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown—a warmer group than the one I had joined in Manhattan. One night as I was leaving a meeting in Provincetown, I saw a kitten fighting with a seagull for a crust of bread. She was losing but had not yet been maimed. I brought her home—she climbed willingly into the car. I had no carrier, so bringing her home loose in the car was risky, but she was exhausted and starving.

She was a tricolored cat—in other words, a calico with the gene for white. She had enormous dark yellow eyes, so I named her Amber. I took her promptly to the vet, where she was wormed. It turned out she was pregnant, six months old and suffering from malnutrition. At that time, a pregnant woman could not get an abortion in Massachusetts—but a cat could. Her fetuses were undersized, and the vet did not think they could survive. She returned to us unpregnant and hungry, always hungry. She ate as much as the other cats combined.

At first, since she was tiny for six months, the other cats treated her as a kitten, played with her and tolerated her well. But as she grew into a sizable cat—bigger than both of them—they began to fight with her. They also ratted on her. She had learned to hunt while living on the streets of Provincetown, and I could not teach her to stop killing birds. Arofa would come crying to me whenever Amber caught a bird. I did not appreciate Amber's killing, but she was a nice, clean, friendly, affectionate cat who would eat just about anything. Fussy? No way. She ate cat food, she ate human food, she ate beetles and mice and birds. She never got fat, but she got hefty. Indeed, since she would finish anything the other cats left, they tended to eat hastily and thoroughly while Amber was here.

The fighting grew worse. I would be wakened at night by confrontations, yowls and hisses. I would rise to find a ball of varicolored fur churning in the living room. Cho-Cho was more apt to fight than Arofa, who just made hideous noises. Cho-Cho was seriously attacking. I had to find a home for Amber. A friend from my women's group, a sculptor, helped, and a home was found.

Around the same time as Amber was forced out, Robert decided that Dolores was too demanding and broke off. I was bitterly disappointed. Moreover, it put the quietus on Dolores's and my friendship, because all she wanted to do when I saw her was talk about how to get him back, and I knew that was hopeless. When he was finished, he was finished. Over the years, I had dealt with dozens of women who couldn't understand what had gone wrong and I was their only source of information and comfort.

I was somewhat secretive about my life when I met people, as I essentially had two husbands—not a situation widely recommended or apt to be viewed as a great idea in the women's movement. For me, it worked. They complemented each other. Robert was brighter but less sexual and less interested in me. He was closer to me politically and more mature. He was also far less accessible. Robert was skilled at getting his way with both of us. Wayne admired him, and Robert liked to be admired. Wayne's traveling with me made being on the road more comfortable. When he traveled with me, Robert was bored. But in any crowd, Wayne would find someone who knew someone he knew, or some connection. He managed to be at ease when he was the only man in a room full of women. He could keep his mouth shut and listen without feeling diminished, and he could talk intelligently. I never had to worry about him in groups. He floated, he enjoyed, and then he would be there afterward when I had talked my soul out and did not know who I was any longer. Not only didn't he feel abused, but he managed to have a good time, a constant wonder and delight to me. It certainly made it easier to do the kind of gigs required in those years: rooms full of intense political students seething with questions after a reading. Wayne was tall, good-looking, affable, with changeable sea-colored eyes. He had grown up in a
working-class family in Flint, larger but similar to mine. He liked to cook, although some of his concoctions were more ambitious than delicious. He had been twenty-two when I met him at Michigan. I was thirty-six.

Wayne fell in love with a used white Thunderbird convertible with red seats. I hated that car. It was big with immense fins, hurt my back and burned gas at a staggering rate. It was a classic car and he cherished it, but he would never put more than a quarter of a tank in, because it was old and might die. Then he would be out the money he had spent on gas. This meant that we often ran empty and spent hours on the side of the road or hiked for miles to bring back a container. To Wayne that T-bird was the epitome of what a car should be, and he felt successful in it. I felt underwhelmed. I liked Volvos, for their comfort and dependability. Our tastes were often in opposition. We got on well most of the time, but I never felt we were deeply mated or suited. Still we understood a great deal about each other, because of where we both came from.