In summer, my father would fish the lake for largemouth bass, for sunfish and perch (pretty high-colored fish that flashed as they were landed to die gasping) and bearded slimy catfish. Catfish were not kosher but my mother cooked them, because my father caught them and liked to eat them. I liked the largemouth bass the best, not only because they tasted good but also because catching them was a bit of a battle. I fished with my father, more to try to please him than because I liked it. I did enjoy casting with the spinning reel, watching the lure arc and dance away. I did not enjoy the mosquitoes or cleaning the fish. I was always cutting my fingers on the fins or slicing open the gallbladder.
In winter he went ice fishing with local guys who had little shacks they lugged out on the lake. They would bring a stove and set that up too on cinder blocks or bricks. Then they would saw a hole in the ice and sit there hour after hour. I liked being way out on the lake which was pretending to be a snowy field, while hiding a mysterious dark world under us, the fish circling, the water weeds growing, the water lilies asleep in the muck down deep under our feet. But I found the actual process of ice fishing boring, and my presence inhibited the guys. I was happy to stay inside the cottage with Fluffy and the potbellied stove, but the disadvantage was that soon my mother would set me some task I found meaningless, the housework that was never even half done, and soon we would be fighting. Better to get away and walk, beating a path through the snow in the winter woods, no matter how cold I got—and sometimes I came near frostbite. I loved the stillness. I got drunk on silence. There was not much silence in my life.
One May, I had my first mystical experience lying on a hillside in a clearing that had probably once been a farm. I experienced total oneness with everything as I rose above my body and then sank back into it. It was ecstatic as nothing I had ever felt before. I swore I would never catch a fish or harm an ant again. The resolution did not last the week, but the feeling of kinship with all living has not left me. I have never since been able to see myself as outside or above nature. That kind of experience of unity has been accessible to me during some periods of my life, particularly since I moved to the Cape. I value such moments but not in the way that some people do; I have never organized my life around them.
I still dream of those woods. Often I am searching for the way in. Sometimes they are compounded with the woods around where I live, whose sand roads and old trails I have walked since I moved here. Once with Ira, I went back to Lake Pardee. Suburban sprawl stretches out from Detroit to encompass that weedy little lake. There is no mystery, no wildlife, no forest. It was insanely depressing. There was no way I could show him what I had experienced, for not a trace of it survived.
My life was intensely compartmentalized. There was school, where I was a brain but not really white and badly dressed compared to other white girls. I hung out sometimes with boys in my neighborhood and then in the gang, and that was weird to the other girls. They all wanted to have a boyfriend, but they didn’t play with boys. Sometimes I still did. I always had boyfriends, although I did not care much for them. They teased too much and always wanted to be poking at me or telling stupid dirty jokes. I had an on-and-off flirtation with the youngest of the family next door. Sometimes we fought. Sometimes he teased me and sometimes I teased him. His feelings were easily hurt. Sometimes he wanted to live in our house. He had a need to try to exert power over me by tying me up. I did not quite trust him and never let him render me helpless. I desperately wanted a best girlfriend, but until I joined the gang, I never got on that well with other girls, not the ones I wanted to, but in the gang, the girls respected me. I followed the same rules they did.
There was the life with the gang and the friends I had made there, feverish connections, passionate, sometimes tormented. With one of my gang girlfriends, I began baby-sitting. We sat for people who worked late—restaurant workers, nurses. I would come home by myself at one or two in the morning, running through the streets. As long as I was baby-sitting and made money, my parents never questioned me. From twelve on, I was always doing something for money, odd jobs until I was sixteen and could get a regular job. Often when we were baby-sitting, we had brief furtive sex.
My mother was always telling me how easy I had it and how little I knew about life, but I knew a great deal more about the neighborhood than she did. I knew some of the prostitutes and what their lives were like; I knew the numbers runners; I knew the gang structure, far less visible in those days of no colors, no guns and minimum graffiti. You could easily make a mistake about turf and pay for it. I knew where the nearest still was, and I had sampled the stuff cooked there, driving up in a car full of gang kids. I knew about hot rods and playing chicken and how dope was hidden in cars. I had seen people cut with knives and razors, beaten to raw meat, but I had never seen anyone shot. I saw how badly girls who were raped were treated by everyone, how they were punished and classified as whores afterward. I fought off three rape attempts, never mentioning them to my parents, for they would have blamed me. The first was the boy at the cottage. One was a guy in the gang, not my boyfriend, whom I had persuaded I would not do it. I bit and kicked the other guy in the balls and ran like hell, yelling that I would tell my boyfriend. The third was a guy who had come to use my girlfriend Kim, but she was with another customer. I was sitting outside in the hall waiting, because we were going to a Humphrey Bogart movie afterward. We shared a crush on him. The guy decided I would do and didn’t want to take a refusal. He was much bigger than me, but I made such a ruckus, he let go. I knew how to call up a violence in myself that could cause males much bigger than me to back off. It was not only that I would readily punch and kick, but I could seem fierce.
At the same time, all my dreams came from books, and I was full of fantasies and invented tales of escape and high adventure, nothing like the ordinary grimy terrifying daily life of the streets I knew too well. I was a Jew, and thus an outsider. My mother was always saying, Don’t tell anyone. She was terrified that the Nazis would appear and carry us away to a concentration camp. My grandmother was proud of being a Jew. She practiced her religion openly and wore her identity in the world. When my grandma learned that everyone, everyone she had known in Lithuania was dead, she grieved and mourned. I promised her I would always be a Jew, like her.
Kim was already on the streets as a prostitute at fourteen. We read Edgar Allan Poe together. We would lie on her bed reading aloud until we were ready to scream, an excuse to hold each other. Our touching was not only sex but had an element of tenderness, of caring. By fifteen, she already had a drug habit, acquired from her pimp. Reading was as important to her as it was to me, as much an escape. We handed books back and forth and shared our favorite parts out loud. We both got into Walt Whitman when I was fifteen. I dared to love her, because I could share my dreams with her—her and my cat. I was important to her because I was not in the life or on drugs, and still was her good friend.
My parents finally paid off the tiny house. It was the 1950s, my father felt prosperous. We even bought a television set on which my mother and I watched McCarthy and Kefauver hearings and my father watched sports and cowboy shows. They wanted a house in a less grungy neighborhood. The only people who would consider buying our house were Blacks, and my parents sold the house to a Black doctor. As my parents did not go through a bank but collected the monthly small payments themselves, I saw over the years how he improved the house. I was impressed that he was a professional man and had enough money so that when he moved in, he remade the house almost completely and enlarged it. It became something far more spacious and comfortable.
In retaliation, our Lithuanian neighbors—actually my boyfriend—fed Fluffy rat poison on a piece of hamburger. Fluffy died for an entire day. He shook with pain and moaned and writhed as I held him, squatting or lying on the worn linoleum of the kitchen floor. I have never forgotten or forgiven. I have never poisoned anything in my life, not a mouse, not a beetle. Years later, when I was active in civil rights, I knew where
my militancy about race had started, with that sweet affectionate creature dying in acute agony in my arms, hour after hour, because we had sold our house to an Afro-American doctor. I wanted to kill the boy who gave him the poison, but mostly I understood hatred as I never had. I thought race hatred the worst crime imaginable. I was fifteen.
That year I lost my girlfriend Kim to a heroin overdose, but I did not cry over her any harder than over my cat. I understood why she had let her pimp get her hooked: it numbed her. I was never judgmental about sex, for she had to make money. Everybody did. That was just a way unappealing to me. I missed her, and her open and affectionate acceptance of me. Both deaths marked and changed me for the rest of my life, as did the third: my grandmother—my source of Jewish ritual and story, the one person in the family I was quite sure loved me—died of stomach cancer. My fifteenth year was cut in two and so was my life. That was the year of loss and death when everything changed.
CRESCENT MOON LIKE A CANOE
This month you carried me late and heavy
in your belly and finally near Tuesday
midnight you gave me light and life, the season
Kore returns to Demeter, and you suffer
and I cannot save you though I burn with dreams.
Memories the color of old blood,
scraps of velvet gowns, lace, chiffon veils,
your sister’s stage costumes (Ziegfeld
didn’t stint) we fingered together, you
padding in sneakers and wash-worn housedresses.
You grew celery by tucking sliced off
bottoms in the soil. You kept a compost
pile in 1940. Your tomatoes glowed
like traffic signals in the table-sized yard.
Don’t kill spiders, you warned.
In an asbestos box in Detroit where sputtering
factories yellow the air, where sheets
on the line turn ashen, you nurtured
a backyard jungle. Every hungry cat
wanted to enter and every child.
You who had not been allowed to finish
tenth grade but sent to be a frightened
chambermaid, carried home every week
armloads of books from the library
rummaging them late at night, insomniac,
riffling the books like boxes of chocolates
searching for the candied cherries, the nuts,
hunting for the secrets, the formulae,
the knowledge those others learned
that made them shine and never ache.
You were taught to feel stupid; you
were made to feel dirty; you were
forced to feel helpless, you were trained
to feel lost, uprooted, terrified.
You could not love yourself or me.
Dreamer of fables that hid their own
endings, kitchen witch, reader of palms,
you gave me gifts and took them back
but the real ones boil in the blood
and swell in the breasts, furtive, strong.
You gave me hands that can pick up
a wild bird so that the bird relaxes,
turns, and stares. I have handled
fifty stunned and injured birds and killed
only two through clumsiness, with your touch.
You taught me to see the scale on the bird
leg, the old woman’s scalp pink as a rose
under the fluff, the golden flecks in the iris
of your eye, the silver underside of leaves
blown back. I am your poet, mother.
You did not want the daughter you got.
You wanted a girl to flirt as you did
and marry as you had and chew the same
sour coughed up cud, yet you wanted too
to birth a witch, a revenger, a sword
of hearts who would do all the things
you feared. Don’t do it, they’ll kill
you, you’re bad, you said, slapping me down
hard but always you whispered, I could have!
Only rebellion flashes like lightning.
I wanted to take you with me, you don’t
remember. We fought like snakes, biting
hard at each other’s spine to snap free.
You burned my paper armor, rifled my diaries,
snuffed my panties looking for smudge of sex,
So I took off and never came back. You can’t
imagine how I still long to save you,
to carry you off, who can’t trust me
to make coffee, but your life and mine pass
in different centuries, under altered suns.
I see your blood soaking into the linoleum,
I see you twisted, a mop some giant hand
is wringing out. Pain in the careless joke
and shouted insult and knotted fist. Pain like knives
and forks set out on the domestic table.
You look to men for salvation and every year
finds you more helpless. Do I battle
for other women, myself included,
because I cannot give you anything
you want? I cannot midwife you free.
In my childhood bed we float, your sweet
husky voice singing about the crescent
moon, with two horns sharp and bright we would
climb into like a boat and row away
and see, you sang, where the pretty moon goes.
In the land where the moon hides, mothers
and daughters hold each other tenderly.
There is no male law at five o’clock.
Our sameness and our difference do not clash
metal on metal but we celebrate and learn.
My muse, your voice on the phone wavers with tears.
The life you gave me burns its acetylene
of buried anger, unused talents, rotted wishes,
the compost of discontent, flaring into words
strong for other women under your waning moon.
FOUR
BRUTUS THE GREAT
At fifteen, abruptly, one section of my life closed with a great thud that reverberated through me with our move, the death of my grandmother, the murder of my cat and the drug-overdose death of my friend Kim, the withdrawal from the old neighborhood. I felt isolated. The neighborhood into which we carried our battered old furniture was solid working-class, almost middle-class, with neat lawns and single-family homes. There were no gangs, no street-corner boys, no action in the alleys or the hallways of decrepit apartments: only houses side by side, and trees. Zoning was loose in those days, and my mother got away with running a rooming house. She could not put a sign outside but placed ads in the papers.
I left street life. I swore off sex. Now I had a real room of my own, upstairs away from my parents with a door that shut. I shared the upstairs with roomers, usually hapless hopeless traveling salesmen who were separated, divorced or whom no one had the bad sense to marry. They filled their rooms with girlie magazines, how-to-succeed books, paperback detective stories, an occasional photo of family or some pretty girl you knew was not theirs. I collected their discarded pink and white and blue forms, requisitions, sales reports, and began writing poems and stories on the back of them. My mother knew everything about them within two weeks of their arrival, their adventures and traumas and problems. One drank, and she worried he would set fire to his room. One had come home early to find his wife in bed with his brother-in-law. Another had lost his plumbing business to his own ineptitude and now was on the road, trying to sell space heaters. Another had gambled his life away on the horses. I had little to do with them. The exception was the sole time my mother took in a couple.
The woman, only two years older than me, was pregnant. I spent a lot of time with Lureen because she seemed lost and in a way she reminded me of Kim. There was something wistful and victimized about both of them, and I was a sucker for a hard-luck case. Like Afro-American friends I h
ad back in the old neighborhood, she played the numbers according to dreams and a dream book she had, or from some incident of the day, a license plate she saw at an intersection, a telephone number that stuck in her head from a radio jingle. She was convinced she would hit and their money problems would be over. Her husband worked at a dry-cleaning plant, long hours, low pay.
Six months into a difficult pregnancy, one Sunday Lureen came home from some beery picnic with friends and miscarried, almost in my arms. She had really wanted children but had no prenatal care. We simply didn’t go to doctors. The hospital had been a threat in my childhood: if you don’t stop getting sick, I’m going to send you to the hospital, my mother would say. My teeth were rotting in my mouth, mostly from poor diet, so I chewed aspirin to control the pain. We never went to the dentist; it did not occur to me as an option. My mother had gone once when I was eleven and had all her teeth pulled. She returned disheveled and bleeding, in great pain. With poor people, they just pulled your teeth. When I finally was forced to go to a dentist after I went to work for the telephone company, he pulled three of my teeth. I was sixteen.