Free Sleeping with Cats by Marge Piercy

for me. But I was a small person.
    My parents bought a cottage of their own, an hour out of Detroit. It was a tiny lot on a weedy little lake called Pardee. I thought this a made-up peculiar-sounding name, but nobody could tell me what it was named for. The cottage was run-down, had a leaking roof and no inside plumbing, only a pump in the yard. It was not winterized. There were holes in the walls. In short it was a complete mess and very cheap. My father began rebuilding it and continued to do so until they sold it thirty years later. It was an ongoing fix-it project never intended to be completed, a toy for him. He did all the work himself, and sometimes he was successful and sometimes it was a disaster. The first plumbing job he did exploded shit and hot water simultaneously.
    At first, I loved going out there. Fluffy often accompanied us. Purple martins occupied a white birdhouse, a miniature colonial up on a high pole on the lot next door (the lots were extremely narrow and the houses almost touched), and used to dive-bomb him, so he preferred the screened-in porch to the actual outside. I sometimes slept on that porch and sometimes in a tiny room whose partitions did not go all the way up to the ceiling. The cottage was heated by an old potbellied wood-burning stove, which I loved to feed. My father’s first project was to add a bathroom on the back, put in a water heater, and then bring running water into the kitchen. I think there was almost no fix-it job beyond him. He enjoyedmastering plumbing and carpentry and tiling. In my adult life, I have often expected more from the men I’ve been with than comes easily to them in the way of the ability to repair and fix up, because of my father.
    Our back fence at the cottage gave onto the land of an immigrant everybody called The Russian, who grew black walnuts. A canal he had dug to give himself more privacy—perhaps I should call it a moat—separated our land (and that of ten other people) from his. Frogs twanged from the canal and snapping turtles raised their snouts like U-boat periscopes. He lived in a year-round house he had built of logs. My father never had anything to do with him, but my mother, who knew a few Russian phrases, charmed him. He was always inviting us to come over to collect walnuts. The pulp stained our hands, and I went to school with brown palms. Mother flirted with him, as she did with most men. It was her standard tool for getting what she hoped for, second nature. She had a well-honed contempt for women who couldn’t or wouldn’t flirt—like my aunt Ruth and like me. Her flirting embarrassed me until I would turn my back and pretend I could not hear her. I was an awkward mopey creature still painfully skinny but with visible breasts, a source of terrible embarrassment to me, with whacked-off black hair and a permanent slump, wearing too-big plastic glasses and clothes that never quite fit, since few of them had been bought for me. My aunt Ruth was one source of my clothes. We were close to the same size, but my breasts were already bigger, so nothing buttoned completely.
    When I was twelve, I began reading my way through the mysteries in the Gabriel Richard branch library because Aunt Ruth read them, and what she did was glamorous. For the next year and a half I must have read 90 percent of the mysteries in that library. Then, abruptly, I stopped. I was bored. The last ones I really loved were Dorothy Sayers’s. Rereading them in adulthood, I still liked them, although the class attitudes made me gag. I began reading biographies. Perhaps I was looking for role models, for lives to try on mentally. When I turned fourteen, I began to read real novels—Dickens, Hemingway, the Brontë sisters, as well as a lot of 1930s through 1950s fiction.
    Strange the things I remember vividly. A tree stood to one side of thesand road at the cottage. We called it fish head tree because local fishermen, if they had caught a