Onions in the Stew

  It began with the lost wallet. Anne and Joan were each given five dollars a week allowance. This was to cover carfare, school lunches, Saturday movies and occasional shopping trips. One Saturday Anne told me that she had lost her wallet with her “whole allowance in it.” She cried a little when she told me and I felt niggardly and probing when I asked her for details. She was remarkably definite.

  “It was in Frederick and Nelson’s at the hat bar on the first floor at eleven in the morning last Saturday. I put the wallet on the counter right beside me while I tried on a hat and when I looked for it, it was gone. Probably taken by a shoplifter.” While she was telling her story, Anne and Joan both fixed me with large innocent guileless blue eyes. Of course I believed them and gave Anne another five dollars. She snatched it eagerly but I was not suspicious.

  The next Saturday the same thing happened. Almost the same story only this time it was Joan and the Vashon drugstore and the culprit probably “some poor starving farmer who needed the money.”

  I shelled out another five dollars.

  Monday morning Velma, my cleaning woman, brought me Anne’s green wallet which she had found behind the bed. In it were two one-dollar bills and the stubs of four loge seats in the Fifth Avenue Theatre.

  When Anne came home from school I showed her the wallet and the theatre tickets and said sorrowfully, “You lied to me.”

  “I know it,” Anne said cheerfully.

  “Why?” I asked, my voice hoarse with emotion.

  “I don’t know,” Anne said. “I guess I just wanted to see if I could. All the kids lie to their mothers.”

  “Very well,” I said. “You owe me five dollars. You can pay me back two dollars a month. Did you lie to me too, Joan?”

  Joan, who had her mouth full of apple, nodded brightly, vigorously.

  “I’m very very disappointed in you,” I said.

  “Well, my gosh,” Joan said, “Carol’s been lying to her mother for months and months—she never catches on.” She made it sound as if I had taken unfair advantage.

  “Then why does Carol always borrow money from me?” Anne said furiously. “She owes me about a million dollars.”

  I said, “You can pay me back two dollars a month too, Joan.”

  Anne said, “I’m going to get my money back from Carol if I have to choke her to death.”

  A few nights later, at dinner, Anne announced, “Gosh, we had a hard geometry test today.”

  “We had an algebra test,” Joan said, taking a tiny uninteresting sip of her milk.

  “The geometry test was hard but I think I got an awfully good grade,” Anne said, as she pushed her peas into a string of green beads encircling her mashed potatoes.

  “How do you think you did in algebra, Joanie?” I asked.

  “All right, I guess,” Joan said. “I despise Miss Gantron but she’s so senile she can’t think up very hard tests.”

  “What did they have for lunch at school?” I asked conversationally.

  Anne and Joan glanced at each other quickly, then said together, “Spaghetti—macaroni and cheese.”

  “Make up your minds,” I said levelly. “Which was it–spaghetti or macaroni and cheese—surely they wouldn’t have both?”

  “The food at school gets more revolting every day,” Anne said, taking a tiny bite of avocado. “Absolutely tasteless and always cold.”

  “The macaroni and cheese tastes just like Kern-Tone,” Joan said.

  “It’s better than their vegetable soup,” Anne said. “It tastes just like perspiration.”

  I said, “Speaking of perspiration, Aunty Mary saw you coming out of the Paramount Theatre this afternoon.”

  Ruthie said, “Oh, it couldn’t have been us, Mrs. MacDonald. We were all at school. Weren’t we, Jeanie?”

  Jeanie said, “Sure they were, Mrs. MacDonald. Ask Kathy.”

  I said, “I don’t have to ask anybody. I know you weren’t at school and I know you aren’t hungry for dinner because you have spent the day stuffing down popcorn and ice cream and candy and Cokes. Now CLEAR THE TABLE, WASH THE DISHES, DO YOUR STUDYING AND GO TO BED!”

  Later on when Don and I were lying in bed reading and trying to take our minds off adolescence, I heard Ruthie say to Anne, who was of course taking her bath in our bathroom, “Gee, Anne, your mom’s sure sweet. I wouldn’t dare tell my mom I skipped school. She’d kill me.”

  Anne said, “Oh, she’s all right, I guess. Do you think Bill really likes me?”

  There was also the music—the loud, blatting, tuneless music that boomed out of the record player from the minute the girls opened their eyes in the morning until they closed them at night. Boops Bigwig, Doggo Conray, Morks Ogle—or whatever their names were—all sounded exactly alike to me and made “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home” indistinguishable from “Paper Moon” or Don’s chain saw. To Boops, Doggo, etc., Anne and Joan and their friends danced the Avalon, a sort of crippled drag performed with the fanny stuck out and a pained expression on the face. They listened to Frank Sinatra, Frankie Laine, Billie Holliday and King Cole. Listening required that they be draped over some piece of furniture surrounded by a litter of Coke bottles, apple cores, candy wrappers, cigarette stubs, cookie crumbs and shoes. Nobody ever wore shoes except outside. Even at formal dances the girls kicked off their shoes and got holes in my nylons.

  And perfume with names such as Aphrodisia, Quick Passion, Come Hither, Lots of Sin—all with a heavy musk base. I am not at all partial to heavy perfume, preferring light flowery scents, but I’m particularly not partial to heavy perfume slopped on by the handful at seven o’clock in the morning when I’m tentatively taking my first sip of coffee. Anne would come downstairs immaculate, pressed and perfect to the last hair but with the husky scent of Quick Passion hovering over her like smoke over a genie. Once or twice I remarked mildly, “Andy, darling, don’t you think that perfume is awfully, uh, well, penetrating for school?” She and Joan, who by that time had also made an appearance quite obviously pinned in many places but drenched in Aphrodisia, exchanged long-suffering looks and sighed heavily. Any further mention of the stench in the kitchen I knew would bring forth a torrent of “You don’t want us to smell nice. You’d like it if we had B.O. or used Lysol perfume. Everything we do is wrong. All you do is criticize.” Keeping as far away from them as I could and drawing heavily on cigarettes, I put their breakfast on the table and thought with pity of the teachers who had to put up with perhaps thirty-five, all smelling like that.

  Of course Anne and Joan treated Don and me as if we were tottering on the edge of senility. We weren’t even thirty-five but if we danced (never exactly a spontaneous outburst of animal spirits on Don’s part) we became the immediate objects of a great deal of humorous comment. “Oh, look at them! Do you mean to say they really used to dance like that? He, he, he, ha, ha, ha, you look so funny!” If I occasionally came back at them and reminded them how funny they looked when they danced they wailed, “You’re so crabby all the time. You’re never any fun any more.”

  I don’t know how or when Anne and Joan learned to drive, but I do know that each one, on the day of her sixteenth birthday, demanded to be taken to town so she could go through the ridiculous routine of a driving test and be given a license to drive her steady’s father’s car and to lend our car to any bonehead friend who wished to back it onto a busy street without looking, run it into a tree, turn a corner without seeing “that dumb truck,” or put it in reverse by mistake when going very fast. After a time I became rather accustomed to answering the phone and having a small quavering voice say, “Mrs. MacDonald, this is Joanne and I’ve had a little trouble with the car, your car I mean, and there’s a policeman who wants to speak to you.”

  Once when we had been up very late listening to “then I said to Ted and Ted said to me” and then were kept awake further by the music of Morks and Doggo and further still by the pattering of big bare feet and shrieks and giggles and the thump of the refrigerator door and finally by my bedsi
de light being switched on and Joan demanding, “Where have you put my down quilt? We’re making up a bed for Evelyn and Ruthie on the porch,” Don remarked with feeling, “What are we running here, a youth hostel? That Ruthie hasn’t been home for two years. How come nobody wants to go anywhere but here? Why should we be the only ones with Coke bottles and shoes on the mantel? Where are the other parents? What are they doing?”

  Yawning, I said, “Probably sitting around in their uncluttered houses saying, ‘What is all this talk about the problems of adolescents? I don’t find them any trouble at all.’”

  Anne burst in and said, “Do you care if Carol smokes?”

  “I don’t care if she bursts into flame,” Don said.

  “Very funny,” Anne said witheringly, “and very old.” Taking our only package of cigarettes she went out, slamming the door.

  “Never mind,” I said to Don, “someday they will marry and leave home.”

  “Are you sure?” Don said, as he sadly sorted over the butts on his ashtray, finally selecting a pretty long one. He examined it critically for a minute or two then, with a sigh, struck a match and lit it.

  CHAPTER XVI

  ONIONS IN THE STEW

  I DON’T know why I ever entertained such a ridiculous idea, but it was undoubtedly the fruit of misery and desperation—could even have been nature’s way of keeping me from becoming an alcoholic or cutting a main artery or taking any other coward’s way out. As I remember, the dream came to light first, the time I was called to school to learn that Anne, who had almost finished three years of high school, had accumulated exactly six and one third credits in required subjects. All the others were cooking, sewing, basket weaving, leather punching, mural painting and so on. I didn’t even know they had so many courses for those “better with their hands,” as the principal explained kindly. I told him again about Anne’s very high I.Q. and he said without enthusiasm, “Yes, I’ve checked with her junior high school principal, but the problem is that unless you want her to graduate with a certificate instead of a diploma she will have to buckle down.” That night after dinner when we were having a discussion of Anne’s buckling down and Anne wasn’t, Joan said finally, “Oh, why don’t you just send her to Opportunity School” (a local school for the retarded) “that’s where she belongs.”

  Anne said calmly, “I hate school. I’ve always hated school. I always will hate school. You’ll never change me, so you might as well not upset yourself trying.”

  “But, Andy,” I said, “you won’t be able to get into any college unless you take science and languages and math.”

  “College!” Anne laughed derisively. “I wouldn’t go to college if you slashed my wrists and beat me with a steel cable and cut off my allowance. I loathe school and I loathe all teachers.”

  “The feeling appears to be mutual,” Don remarked dryly from behind Time magazine.

  I said, “But, Andy, you don’t know how different college is from high school. In college you’re treated as an adult and the professors are brilliant and stimulating and you realize for the first time the importance of knowledge—the reason for studying.”

  Yawning elaborately, then inspecting her long red nails, Anne said, “I’m sorry, Betty, but you are just wasting your time. Anyway you seem to forget that I’ve seen some college students. Look at Evelyn Olwell. She’s a sophomore in college and she thinks Villa Lobos is a sport like handball. And Martha Jones—she’s a junior in college and last summer she told me her mother was ‘alternating’ her dress. And Catherine Morton—she’s never read a book—not a single one—her family doesn’t even own a book and her mother and father are both college graduates.”

  After a time we reached a sort of agreement, or hard-eyed, shouted compromise. Anne would change her courses, go to summer school and graduate with a diploma, but whether or not she went to college would be her decision.

  I had the dream next when Joan, who for two or three Sundays had been singing at a local USO, suddenly decided that she was going to leave school and sing with a band. The first inkling Don and I had of this splendid plan was when we went in to check on Anne and Joan who were in town weekend baby-sitting with the two small children of a friend of ours. It was Sunday afternoon and we dropped by to see what time they expected the parents and what time they wanted us to pick them up.

  I remember the nice feeling of pride I had as I ran up the steps of the Morrisons’ house. “Anne and Joan solicited this baby-sitting job all by themselves,” I told Don, who was morosely inspecting a broken downspout. “And I think it shows encouraging signs of maturity for them to take care of two little children and stay in a house all by themselves from Friday afternoon to Sunday night.”

  Stepping up on the porch railing so he could take a look at the eaves trough, Don said, “We’ll probably get a blast from Jim and Mary when they get the grocery bill.”

  “The trouble with you is that you don’t want to see any improvement in the girls,” I said crossly.

  “Not at all,” Don said, his chin on the roof. “I just like to face facts. I’d better tell Jim this eaves trough is rotten.”

  I rang the doorbell. There was no answer, but I thought I detected giggling and scuffling from somewhere in the house. Then Anne came to the door, wearing a dishtowel tied low over her forehead like an Arab’s headdress. She was flushed and nervous. “How come you’re so early?” she asked, ungraciously barring the door.

  “We came to visit,” I said cheerfully. “To see how you are getting along.”

  “We’re getting along all right,” Anne said, trying to shut the door.

  “Where’s Joanie?” I asked.

  “Oh, she’s around,” Anne said evasively.

  “What do you mean,” I said firmly, moving her out of the way and going into the house.

  “She’s upstairs.”

  “Joanie,” I called loudly. “It’s Mommy. Where are you?”

  “I’m up here,” answered a muffled voice.

  “You’d better not yell,” Anne said. “The baby’s asleep. Come out in the kitchen and I’ll make you a cup of coffee.”

  Patty, the Morrisons’ four year old, came down the stairs, slowly one step at a time. The front of her dress was quite wet.

  We all went out to the kitchen. Patty settled herself in a chair by the kitchen table with crayons and a coloring book. Carefully choosing a white crayon she announced companionably, “This is just the color Joanie’s hair is going to be when she finishes bleaching it!”

  “You be quiet,” Anne hissed at her.

  “Why?” asked Patty, whose shoes were on the wrong feet.

  “Because you promised,” Anne said.

  “I promised not to tell about your hair,” Patty said. “I didn’t promise about Joan’s.”

  I got up, walked over to Anne and jerked the dishtowel off her hair. She stood paralyzed, the coffee pot in one hand, the can of coffee in the other. Her hair exploded from under the dishtowel like a deep old rose chrysanthemum.

  “Anne MacDonald,” I shrieked. “What have you done?”

  She began to cry, using the dishtowel as a handkerchief. Through her tears and the dishtowel, she said finally, “Well, Joan thought that her hair would look better platinum if she was going to sing with a band and so she bought a bottle of triple-strength peroxide and we both tried it and if you think I look awful just wait till you see Joan.”

  Then Joan appeared pale and trembling. Her head was swathed in a bathtowel. I told her the jig was up and jerked off the towel. Her normally ash-blond hair was the bright egg-yolk yellow of highway signs.

  “We don’t know what to do?” Anne sobbed. “We can’t go to school like this.”

  “You could have your heads shaved,” Don suggested helpfully.

  “Or you can let it grow out,” I added heartlessly. “It will take at least six months.”

  “It’s all Joan’s fault,” Anne said. “She’s the one that wanted to sing with a band.”

  “You’re
a double-crosser,” Joan yelled. “You’re the very one that told me to bleach my hair.”

  “But you bought the peroxide,” Anne screamed.

  “Only because you didn’t have any money,” Joan shrieked.

  Don and I tiptoed out. The girls were so busy fighting they didn’t even notice. When we got out to the car we found Patty with us. She said, “I’m going for a ride with you.”

  I said, “No, dear, you’re going to stay with Anne and Joan. Run in the house and tell them we’ll pick them up at six o’clock.” We waited until we heard the front door close.

  When we retrieved the girls about six, Anne’s hair was a pinkish brown and Joan’s a yellowish brown. “Don’t we look keen?” Joan asked cheerfully as she squeezed past me into the back seat.

  “Watch what you’re doing with that suitcase,” I said irritably as she dragged it past my ear and clunked it down on Anne’s foot.

  “Ouch,” Anne shrieked. “You clumsy dope!”

  “Don’t call me a dope,” Joan said calmly. “Remember I’m the one that figured out how to fix our hair.”

  “What did you do?” I asked, turning around and taking a closer look at their dusty rose and ochre heads.

  “I went up to the drugstore and bought a bottle of light brown dye,” Joan said proudly. “I dyed Anne’s hair and she did mine. Don’t we look keen?”

  I said, “You don’t look keen, but you don’t look quite as awful as you did.”

  Joan said, “Gosh, you’re crabby. I’ll certainly be glad when I leave home. Everybody in this family is a big crab.”

  “Where are you going and when?” Don asked.

  “Joe Charteris told me that if I quit school I could travel with his band and I’m going to,” Joan said.

  I said firmly, loudly, “You’re not going anywhere and you are not going to sing at that USO any more.”

  “Okay,” Joan said cheerfully, “but you don’t have to get so worked up. Let’s get Chinese food.”

  “Oh, please, Mommy,” Anne said. “Let’s go to Won Ton’s.”