Uphill Walkers Page 7
Not that there wasn’t some merit to preserving the moment: After the doldrums of winter, whether one is pagan or religious (or a touch of both), the heart longs for rebirth, to shed that heavy weighed-down feeling, and what is touching about the photos is the sense of optimism. No matter how scrappy and unpromising the lawn itself, we experienced it as green and lush. No matter how goofy the year’s fashions, we thought of ourselves as possessing at that moment a high degree of sophistication. On chilly Easters my mother wore her mink stole or the Persian lamb collar with matching muff or the brown scarf that ended on both sides with a small animal head with shiny eyes. Back then fur was money, not murder.
Over the years the styles we wore varied, from shirtwaists to John Meyer suits to Indian wedding dresses, but one constant was those flower-bedecked extravaganzas on our heads. The Catholic Church used to require that females cover their heads as a sign of respect and of gender mortification. My mother happened to love hats all her life, the result of flyaway hair as well as a face whose bones come to life beneath a brim. Not for her or her daughters those flimsy mantillas or, worse, emergency headgear, paper hankies stuck on the back of the head with a bobby pin. When we were old enough, our hats would be like hers: stately showpieces that moved forward in space with the elegance of a yacht. There are photos of me as a child at Easter wearing the hats of a child, stiff bits of straw not unlike upside-down baskets, but as time went on, we progressed from the pill-boxes of the Kennedy years to the last hat I remember, a turban made of pink chiffon. Of all the poems saved by my mother, I always suspected that her favorite was one written by my sister Jacqueline when she was in the fifth grade and which had as its thematic center that old family passion, Paschal millinery:
I think I like the yellow or green
Or the pink one I have seen.
I want one to go with my dress
Oh! picking out hats is just a mess.
I think I like the one with the rose
I like the one with a daisy who knows
After an hour or more
I decided to keep the one that last year I wore.
Chapter Five
Queen for a Day
GIVEN HER TEMPERAMENT AND HER STYMIED AMBITION, MY MOTHER never should have been a housewife in the fifties, one of the more diabolical decades ever invented, especially for women, with its combination of self-abnegation coupled with bizarre domestic competitions involving canned soup and dried onions and frozen string beans. In her netherworld state, as A Woman Alone, she couldn’t win.
Cooking bored her: dinners at our house were at best sturdy and workmanlike, stout stews to which the addition of salt and pepper was considered a daring intrusion, boiled chicken served with the skin hanging off it in sad puckered folds, and rice topped with canned tomatoes. Our tuna was usually the cheaper, brown variety, dumped, undrained, into a bowl, dressed with a glob or two of mayonnaise, and served on top of recently defrosted Wonder Bread, sometimes sporting freezer burn. The few times we were served milk toast, which is exactly what it sounds like, a piece of toast in a bowl of milk, we rebelled and staged a very short hunger strike. Several times a year we colored outside the lines and got take-out fish and chips from Schmererhorn’s in Holyoke, tasty bundles of heat and grease and protein that mocked our normal fare. To us cheese was cheese, orange and bland. Food was food, neither a joy nor an adventure. Every now and then she challenged herself to undertake something new and ambitious, but seemingly bright ideas like Patriot’s Pudding Jell-O, which was supposed to appear in distinct layers of red, white, and blue but arrived at our table in one bruised shade, never quite measured up.
Our mother’s best dessert was a mixture of oatmeal and shortening and sugar that came out looking brown and mealy.
When we first viewed this concoction, we balked at eating it.
“It looks,” we said, “just like dog food.”
Our mother did not have to beg us to eat, however. As Lizzie always said, “Grab while the grabbing’s good.” Eventually, one of us got hungry enough to sample the dessert, and soon enough we were all digging in, even learning how to make it on our own. In one of those not infrequent, somewhat chilling moments reminiscent of Lord of the Flies, I recall that in order to get a piece of dog food, the child chef made the others bark first. “Come here, little puppies,” one of us would shout, and the rest would all come running.
Dogfood
3½ cups oatmeal
⅔ cup sugar
¼ cup flour
1¼ cups butter
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
Work all together in a bowl. Have a 13×9×2-inch pan buttered and floured. Put mixture into pan and press down firmly. Bake in moderate oven, 325 degrees, for about 30 minutes or until lightly browned. Take out and cool about 10 minutes. Cut into squares.
Oh, she tried to learn the vocabulary of thrift and flirtation, to the degree that she subscribed to a couple of women’s magazines. But after a few tortured minutes spent reading some article or another, she would look up, hurt and puzzled. She didn’t see the thrill of making a romper suit for your toddler out of freshly laundered dish towels for less than a dollar or following recipes for which the secret ingredient was, invariably, marsh-mallows. It plain exhausted her, just reading the articles about planning meals for a week, even a month ahead of time. Sometimes I am drawn to these magazines simply to see the world through the eyes in which she was forced to see it, for their anthropology and their archaeology, to plumb them for their strange customs, especially as regards mating rituals, and for their buried broken bits of Fiesta ware.
Housewives were urged to prepare special meals for special occasions, the most special being the day your husband brought his boss home for dinner. The suggested menu did not vary from one magazine to another: tenderloin, string beans with canned onion rings, and baked Alaska. These husbands, whose whims were the central engine of a good wife’s life, were supposed to be waved off in the morning while the woman wore “a happy face and a clean, crisp robe.” When he arrived home, lipstick was recommended along with a fresh ribbon in one’s hair, not to mention a trio of daisies clipped to one side. His favorite cocktail should be mixed and waiting. “When you have domestic news of your own, by all means tell it. But keep anecdotes witty, short—and uncomplaining.”
The magazines whipped up a constant froth of paranoia about losing your man, including advice on how to hang on to one: “Your husband’s physical drive is probably stronger than yours. Both parties in a marriage should acknowledge this, he by showing enough attention to arouse her, she at least by an appearance of interest.”
Ladies’ Home Journal once ran an ad for the Great Books:
“The women your husband works with … are you as interesting as they?
“Can you compete when the talk gets around to ideas? Or do you stop short at diapers, pot roasts, and doctor bills?
“It takes so much these days to be a wife and mother. Love, of course, and devotion. Understanding. Courage. Wisdom.
“The willingness to do the many drugdey [sic] little things that keep a family going.
“But, sometimes—just sometimes, don’t you find yourself envying the ‘Gals’ at the office just a little bit?
“Let’s be honest. In the press of everyday affairs, did your mind slip out of gear when you slipped on that plain gold band?”
The ad goes on to pitch 443 masterpieces. A special thrill, it is suggested, would be the opportunity to “check Plato’s ideas on motherhood against Karl Marx” as if your basic housewife with a slew of kids couldn’t come up with her own scintillating thoughts on the subject of motherhood, Plato and Marx aside.
My mother and her women friends met once a month in a group called the P.M. Club, gathering in the evening for coffee and dessert and guest speakers. So eager was she for the stimulation of adult company that she once ignored winter storm warnings to go hear a man with an impenetrable accent discuss heart disease in the H
imalayas.
Our mother’s hankering for a life of the mind was honorable and heartfelt. It took the form of incessant reading. But books can be traitors, creating an even greater sense of restlessness. The impulse to bury yourself in someone else’s story provides a passing pleasure sometimes undercut by a pang. The problem with books is that they often describe lives you wish you could lead. Even if the circumstances aren’t always the best, at least they are heightened. In the same way that an amputee has phantom feeling in the missing limb, books can make you feel you missed out on a phantom fate. In books you could roll bandages for brave soldiers, you could ride on a raft, you could get lost at sea, you could fake your own funeral. In books, if you were orphaned, at least it was in India, by cholera, which has the virtue of a certain exoticism. It was hard to see what was exotic about being stuck in Granby, in a rapidly deteriorating house, with six quarrelsome children, forced to economize with powdered milk.
She staved off leaving the house to earn a living for as long as possible. She had worked before she was married, as a sixth-grade teacher at the Valentine School in Chicopee, enjoying the forested smells of the classroom, the calming piney odor of wooden desks. She resigned from the job after her marriage because only single women were allowed to teach. For some reason, probably a twinge of loss and regret about leaving the children behind at the beginning of the year, she told them a tall tale about an imagined successor, Miss Orange Brown, a nasty hag who ran a hideously tight ship: my mother’s fictions were always inspired by mixed feelings. When she left, she was given a packet of letters, carefully inked on lined paper, from the children, who wished her well as she approached her new life. I was entranced by these letters, mining them for the glimpse they gave of the former Miss Shea at the last edge of girlhood when she was chock-full of glad grace.
Dear Miss Shea,
I have been dreaming all night of you and Dr. Blais. I am very sorry you are leaving us. And I dont no what I will do with out you. I like you very much.
Yours sincerely,
Alfreda Bielanski
Dear Miss Shea,
I am having a good time in your room. I am studying hard because I want to be a avater. I want to fily a filyingfortess. A filyingfortess is the bigest plane in the World.
Your friend,
Robert Gaynor
Dear Miss Shea,
Is it true that Miss Orange Brown said no parties and is she really an old crab apple with a worm whole in it? I know you were only fooling.
I made up a poem about a bride and groom:
Here comes the bride
God bless the groom.
If he doesn’t behave
She’ll hit him with a broom.
I hope you have the best wedding anyone ever had,
Lots of love,
Florence Gibson
P.S. Who is this? Five feet six inches, black hair, hazel eyes, light blue dress, pearl necklace, pearl bracelet, navy-blue shoes, beautiful face and beautiful temper.
Dear Miss Shea,
I wish you would not leave us. Tell Dr. Blais not to marry you.
The boys in our room love you why don’t you marry them?
Yours sincerely,
Norma Bauch
Our mother expressed her reluctance to plunge back into the world of full-time work with excuses ranging from, “If your father had lived, I would not have to go out and grub for a living” to a genuine desire to be home for all of us, especially Michael. She was fortunate to have a calling card in the form of a college degree, but the prospects still were bleak and ill paid. Extension universities pitched home courses to women in how to be an accountant, secretary, income tax specialist, or stenotype operator, one less appealing than the other. The newspapers were filled with free advice: “Before you begin your job search, you will need to prepare a résumé. A résumé is called a vita, a data sheet, or a brief. Awards, offices held, volunteer work, and such should be listed only if they are directly related to the type of job you are seeking.” She waited until Michael was in the third grade to venture back into the ranks of the employed by working as a substitute teacher, and before she set forth that first day, she struggled with how to position her new hat in the hallway mirror, muttering, “Nothing is sitting right today.” We were appalled that she had mismanaged her life on such a scale that she had degenerated into that most reviled of creatures, a sub. How could she make herself the possible target of any scoundrel who happened to have a spitball at his disposal? She thought about other professions, for instance, being a weather girl, for which her main qualification was that she had a barometer that she would bang on with almost sledgehammery vigor to see if a storm was coming on. But most weather girls were young, blond, single, small waisted, and ditzy, so her chances hovered at zero. She couldn’t be an airlines stewardess; the ads required that applicants be between the ages of 20 and 26, the heights of 5′2″ and 5′8″, and single.
“Maybe I could be a hostess at a swank restaurant,” she would say, and then she would pretend to be one: “Good evening, come this way, please,” while handing out imaginary menus. I knew the kind of establishment she was dreaming of from pictures in magazines in which men are forever placing engagement rings on the hands of sleek, straight-backed women. “Ordering restaurants,” we children called them, “restaurants with the lights out.” It would have clean, sparkling wine glasses and stiff white linen tablecloths on all the tables, and everyone would talk in whispers and eat slowly. No one would flick peas in someone else’s face to get his or her attention, and no one would yell “shortstops” the way we did, meaning that you could fling some food onto your plate from the bowl you were supposed to be passing. The meal would begin with individually owned fruit cups and end with elaborate desserts named after that famous French dictator. But there was no chance of that in Granby, where the highlight of the social season was the Grange Fair, in which we would guess the weight of pigs and give cows citations. Our local eateries included the Granby Cafe, famous for its stuffed cabbage, and that other joint with its one-note-Charley, all-turkey menu (croquettes, soup, pies).
I had the idea that maybe, given her expertise on obituaries and thanks to our great-grandfather, who had perhaps passed on his undertaker genes, our mother could have been a gifted greeter at a funeral home. From her nightly reading of the papers, she already had a store of ready-made patter: “At least it was a heart attack, and not like what happened to that poor man in North Dakota …”—her voice sounded thin and stricken. Or: “I always said yo-yos could be dangerous.” But that kind of job, she would sigh, usually went to men because they were presumed to possess greater dignity. We wondered if we should say a novena; maybe there was a special saint for getting work, just as there appeared to be a car raffle saint and a saint of perfect pies every time. We believed that good things happened not so much because you lifted yourself up by your bootstraps, the Protestant explanation, but when luck and prayer collided in the heavens.
We girls did have one game plan that we hoped someday to get off the ground. Maybe we could get her to appear on our favorite TV show, Queen for a Day.
Nicknamed the Cinderella Show because of the way it churned out rags-to-riches reversals on a daily basis, it was an orgy of stories, roses, tiaras, and tears emceed by a low-voiced male announcer who, jabbing an arm, pointing a finger, began with this question: “Would you like to be queen for a day?” A variant on the sob sister articles that used to guarantee a female byline in newspapers, it presented five women who, wringing their hands and dabbing their eyes at suitable intervals, engaged in a verbal competition as to who had the saddest tale. The audience made the final judgment by applauding, and this applause was quantified by a crude device that measured vibrations, known by its pseudoscientific name, the clapometer. We would pile on top of each other on the sofa, the four girls: me with a book, Jacqueline and Christina applying nail polish, Maureen unobtrusive and silent, along for the ride. Raymond by that time was always off in his own o
rbit, isolated from the rest of us by age and temperament. If Michael joined us, we got him to be quiet and sit still by telling him to hold his breath and clench a handful of smoke from our mother’s cigarettes in his fists as long as possible and maybe it would turn into a friendly elf.
“Maddy, write a letter,” I would be urged by my sisters. “See if they want Mom on the show.”
As far as I know there is only one complete Queen for a Day episode still in existence. It is excruciating to look at, the abasement of the women as they spar for material favor. In it, the first contestant is a “pretty married lady” who really admires her father-in-law and his ability to fix things. She’d like to get him some power tools.
Then, a break to promote a skillet that performs nine different kitchen operations. Despite the middle-aged, domestic nature of the prizes, we oohed and aahed along with the studio audience.
Next, a housewife from Indiana, hoping to get a clothes washer and a dryer for her large brood.
Another break, in which a woman in a corset swivels her torso, advertising a “comfortable, but effective foundation, tightly boned for more control.” Ads that hinted at female anatomy always prompted an overblown reaction on our part. “Gross,” we would say, clutching our middles. “Help! I can’t breathe.”
Next, someone who lives in a trailer wants a house and some food: “We sleep on the floor, and we’d give anything to get out of it.” Another woman hopes to get a “secret meeting with my real mother because I was three days old when she had me adopted out,” and someone else dearly desires “a bicycle for my boy.”