Onions in the Stew
“What about your hair?” Don asked.
“Oh, the Chinese don’t care about our hair, anyway we brought our dishtowels,” Anne said.
“I won’t take you any place in those hideous dishtowels,” I said.
“Oh, Betty, do you have to be so disagreeable all the time,” both girls said, sighing. “You never say a civil word any more.”
So we went to Won Ton’s and while the girls argued about what they were going to have and Don intently studied the Chinese side of the menu, I lapsed into this familiar soothing daydream. It was Anne’s eighteenth birthday and her presents were heaped by her place at the breakfast table, and Don and Joan and I were in the kitchen waiting for her to come downstairs. Then she appeared, my little girl, my own dear little serious-eyed Anne, all soft and sweet and loving, kissed us all, including Joan (this part of the picture was really far-fetched), and said, an amused smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, “Well, Betty and Don, you can start living again. One of us is out of adolescence.” The dream faded as Don announced happily, as he always does, that he thought he’d just have the pressed duck and the waiter said as he always does, “Press dock take two day. Have to odah day befoh.”
It was the night before Anne’s nineteenth (I had adjusted my dream a little—after all there is no point in being just plain ridiculous) birthday, but as I sat on our bed wrapping her presents, a white cashmere cardigan, an album of Bidu Sayao and a triple strand of pearls (Japanese), I had an unhappy presentiment, bordering on certain knowledge that there wasn’t going to be any Santa Claus. The morning of the birthday confirmed it. Anne and Joan had a furious quarrel over who was going to get the car before they even got out of bed. When she finally came shuffling down to breakfast with a bad case of hay fever, Anne tripped over Tudor who was lying in the kitchen doorway and when she kicked him “with only my soft old bedroom slipper” he nipped her ankle and Don heartlessly refused to drive her into Seattle for rabies shots and so she stamped upstairs without opening her presents.
Oh, well, she had graduated from high school and she did have a job in the advertising department of a large department store, even if the only apparent changes wrought by her new adult status were that she wore what she termed “high style” clothes (Don said she could call them what she liked but they looked to him like Halloween costumes), more and heavier perfume and eyeshadow in the daytime. However, she didn’t seem to actively dislike Don and me as much as formerly. She still treated us like lepers, but good old lepers. The faithful non-irritating kind, who are so dumb they don’t know they don’t know anything. Her attitude toward Joan was that of a high caste Hindu forced to associate with an untouchable. Her friends were all models. She went steady with a boy Don referred to as “that sneaky Bradley.”
Joan was a senior in high school. When she wasn’t fighting with Anne over clothes or the car, she was going to sorority meetings which were every night in the week at our house, and going steady. Going steady meant that there were always two pairs of shoes on the mantel and twice as many Coke bottles under the couch. Joan didn’t treat Don and me like anything, because we still weren’t anything—just “she” and “oh him.”
Then it was Joan’s eighteenth birthday and I was sitting on my bed wrapping presents—a pink cashmere cardigan, two new petticoats and a single strand of pearls (Japanese). (Nobody wears triple strands of pearls any more—because they’re corny that’s why.) It was July and Joan had her steady spending the summer with us because she felt so sorry for him because she didn’t love him, I was taking care of my sister Alison’s three- and five-year-old boys because she was expecting a baby and Anne was in Seattle sharing an apartment with another girl and “living my own life at last” which seemed to us lepers to consist of drinking beer and not paying her bills. The morning of Joanie’s birthday was cool and gray with rolls of dark clouds billowing in from the south, like smoke from a locomotive.
Joan was glum when she came downstairs. Before she opened her presents she looked morbidly out the window and sighed, “Rain again. What a horrible summer.” Darsie and Bard, very excited about the birthday and the presents they had “choosed” and wrapped at five-forty-five that morning using one whole roll of Scotch tape and all my meagre supply of self-control, hopped around her saying, “Open your presents, Joanie. Mine smells good. That’s it, there—open it.” Joanie opened her presents one by one, kissing Don, the children, me and Steady who unfortunately had also bought pearls, then she took the cap off a Coke, grabbed a handful of fudge and shuffled sadly off to the living room to exercise her birthday prerogative of no work.
Then Joan was in college living at her sorority house but coming home quite often because she was “starving to death.” College had wrought no appreciable change in anything except her laugh which was now a bleat accompanied by a wide open mouth and tightly squinted eyes. Her best friends all laughed the same way. It seemed to be something they were teaching at the university that year. Don and I thought the new laugh very unattractive and one day I tactlessly said so. Joan blew up like a defective hot water tank. “I can’t do anything right,” she shrieked. “You don’t like my hair, you don’t like my clothes, you don’t like my friends, you don’t like the way I drive. The real trouble of course is that you haven’t any sense of humor and you’re terribly neurotic.” She and her friends slammed out of the house—then slammed back in for two quarts of garlic dill pickles and a large bundle of ham sandwiches they had made earlier.
Stifling a strong unmotherly desire to pick up the refrigerator and hurl it after them, I poured myself a cup of coffee, sat down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette. What was wrong? Where had I failed? Were all adolescents like Anne and Joan? What had happened to our happy home? Who had erected this great big spiky impenetrable wall between us and our children? Would it always be like this? Would things be like this if we hadn’t moved to the country? It was Saturday and I hadn’t vacuumed the living room or thrown out the dead flowers or changed the sheets on the bunkroom beds and I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was to throw myself face down on the brick floor, beat my heels and scream. After two cigarettes I reached down beside me and listlessly picked up the eighty-third book I had bought on Handling the Adolescent. Without any enthusiasm at all I opened it. It would probably be written in the usual, “I’m reaching way down there from clear up here to hand you this crumb” vein and would undoubtedly go on and on and on about the glandular change in the pitiful body of the poor little misunderstood, maladjusted adolescent. I knew all this and I was tired of it. What I wanted was a magic formula, a charm, or a voodoo chant to help me cast out devils and restore my daughters to normal.
Then something caught my eye—something about this doctor’s sympathies being with the parents. I put on my glasses. An hour later I still hadn’t vacuumed or thrown out the dead flowers, but I had certainly cheered up. This Dr. Wilburforce was wonderful! He sounded as if he had had adolescent children. He said that adolescence was a difficult period but entirely normal and his sympathies were with the parents, not the adolescent. He said that there was entirely too much “understanding,” actually excusing of the adolescent, his lack of manners, selfishness, tantrums and so on. He thought that the most intelligent approach to the problem was to understand that the adolescent, just by the nature of the beast, is going to chafe and rebel and he needs something specific to chafe and rebel against. Lay down strict rules of behavior and enforce them. Rebelling against nothing is very frustrating. Demand that the adolescent go along with the family routine. Do not allow him to keep the household in a continual uproar. If he were away at school such actions would not be tolerated. Why are they at home? He said there was entirely too much talk about “giving an adolescent his head.” He said that this was actually merely the shifting of the responsibility from the parent to the child, because anybody knows that giving a sixteen year old his head is like handing him a squash. Instead of giving your child too much freedom, too much money and all the
responsibility for his actions, try giving him limited freedom and money, a strict code of behavior and oceans and gallons and mountains of love. Not the deep-hidden-river I-bore-you-so-I-will-have-to-like-you type of love, but the visible, hug-and-kiss, lavish-compliment, interested-audience kind. Tell your adolescent he is brilliant, handsome, charming, witty and lovable. Tell him every day. Tell him even when you are taking away the keys of the car and would like to kick him. Assure him and reassure him and re-reassure him. Love is the most important element in human relationships. You can never give a child too much love.
I began to hum a little. After a time I heard a car door slam. I jumped up guiltily. I had almost forgotten that Anne and a model friend were coming for the weekend. I put the kettle on for a fresh pot of coffee, brushed some toast crumbs off the table with Dr. Wilburforce and went out to give Anne love.
Her appearance set me back just a little. From the tone of his book I was quite sure that Dr. Wilburforce had been speaking of ordinary adolescents. Girls in sweaters and skirts and saddle shoes. Anne was wearing a charcoal-gray costume, spats, a black-and-white-checked man’s cap and about twenty pounds of pearls. I could smell her perfume clear from the kitchen door to the wild cherry tree. The model, who had such little hips I didn’t see how she was going to sit on them, was all in black and heavy gold jewelry. I was pretty sure I was going to catch hell about my blue jeans (Vashon grocery store) and white blouse (Sears, Roebuck). “Really, Betty, you are getting older—you do have other clothes,” and so on, and so on, and so on. I could feel the old familiar defensive wariness take over as I kissed Anne and said, “I’m just going to make fresh coffee.”
Anne said, “It’s wonderful to be home. It smells so good over here on the island.”
The model said, “No wonder you rave about this house so much, it’s dreamy.”
Putting down her suitcase, taking off her man’s cap and getting out a long black cigarette holder into which she carefully inserted one of my cigarettes, Anne said, “I love it here on the island. Being here gives me a different perspective. The right things are important over here.” She smiled at me and then said briskly, to hide her moment of weakness, “Here, you sit down and I’ll make the coffee.”
I did sit down, with a thump of astonishment, opposite the model who smiled at me with her lips pulled out at the corners and her teeth all touching each other. She was very very pretty with the impersonal perfection of a Swedish crystal pitcher. I said, “You are certainly pretty, Renée.”
She said, “Thanks, but I don’t think black does much for me. I like black, I think it’s real chic, but white’s really my color.”
Anne, who was pouring the coffee, said, “As soon as we drink our coffee, let’s put on our jeans.”
Renée said, “I didn’t bring jeans, honey, I can’t get them small enough around the waist, my waist is only nineteen inches, but I brought my leopard skin slacks. Gee, they’re dreamy. Shall I go put them on now?”
“Yes, do,” Anne said, winking at me. “They sound terribly smart.”
After Renée had taken her suitcase upstairs, Anne said, “I realize that Renée’s brain is the size of a proton, but I feel sorry for her—she’s really very sweet and her husband beats her to a pulp practically every half hour. She is always coming to work in dark glasses to cover a black eye or in high collars to cover finger marks on her neck.”
“Why does he beat her—is he insane?”
“Oh, no, just jealous and a drunk. Last week he blacked both her eyes and cracked a couple of ribs so she moved in with Janet and me. As she brought at least $150,000 worth of clothes, her husband may have some reason for his jealousy. Anyway she lets me borrow anything I want and she’s a wonderful cook.”
As we drank our coffee Anne asked me about Joan and I told her and even though I was all braced and ready for the usual “Why won’t you realize Joan and I are grown up, why do you always nag?” it wasn’t forthcoming. Instead, Anne said, “Poor Mommy. Never mind, she’ll grow out of it. I did and nobody in the entire universe was ever such a revolting adolescent.” I guess I must have lost consciousness for a moment or two because, when I came to, Anne and Renée in her leopard skin slacks were saying, “We’ve got to do something about your hair, Betty. The way you’re wearing it isn’t smart at all.” They both had their hair peeled back from their faces and pinned with huge gold barrettes. I wore my hair in a medium bob with bangs. After surveying me for a while from all angles through squinted eyes and a cloud of cigarette smoke, they decided I should wear my hair skinned up into a sort of whale spout on top of my head, secured with the red elastic band from the stalk of celery on the drain-board. When they had finished with me and I was very wet around the shoulders and felt as though my eyebrows were up by my hairline, Anne said, “Now, you look smart.” Renée said, “God, you’re a doll, Mrs. MacDonald.”
I went into the lavatory off the kitchen and looked in the spattered mirror of the medicine cabinet. I finally decided that the light must be wrong. When I came back into the kitchen, Anne said, “You don’t like it, I can tell.” She laughed, took off the elastic and combed my hair back into its normal do. Sunday night, as I kissed Anne goodbye, I realized that her adolescence really was over, that she was an adult. What is more important I felt I had a new friend. One who was witty, intelligent, loving, beautiful and liked me. My little Anne, my serious-eyed little girl whom I had mourned and longed to bring back, was gone as surely as yesterday’s rainbow, but I was really happier with my new friend. The heavy perfume, high style clothes, eyeshadow in the daytime that had been major irritations in my little girl, were now just the small lovable eccentricities of a friend.
The following summer Joan got a job as a saleslady in an exclusive dress shop. The sorority laugh was gone, but she began wearing high style clothes and the haunted look of the bill-ower. However, she was a tiny bit of fun sometimes and, anyway, Don and I had Anne to help us understand her. In January Anne was married—not to Sneaky Bradley—and during the hectic preparations for the wedding, Joan suddenly emerged as an easygoing witty slapdash affectionate sympathetic adult. Now they are both married and each has three babies. They are loving wives, marvelous mothers, divine cooks and excellent housekeepers. Don and I are very proud of them, but, more important, they like us. Their husbands like us. We are friends. Sometimes we are such good friends I get all six of the babies—the oldest is four—but I love it and it is awfully good for my figure. You see, I wear the high style clothes now. Maternity clothes are about the lowest style there is.
Some lines from Vachel Lindsay keep coming back to me:
Gone were the skull-faced witch men lean . . . .
‘Twas a land transfigured, ‘twas a new creation . . . .
And on through the blackwoods clearing flew: “Mumbo-Jumbo is dead in the jungle,
Never again will he hoo-doo you. Never again will he hoodoo you.”
Though Anne and Joan are grown up and Don and I are in our forties and grandparents six times over, Vashon Island hasn’t changed a great deal. There are a few more Halvorsen Houses, a few roadside signs (supposedly not allowed), quite a few Cadillacs and foreign cars in town on Saturdays, the movie theatre has changed hands three or four times, the Falcon’s Nest burned down, there were two houses for rent on this beach this summer, there is talk of a floating bridge to the mainland, the telephone service is a tiny bit better even though we still have fourteen people on our line, and the electricity rates are much higher with only about five minutes between the first bill and the shutoff notice. Ordinary living—eating, sleeping, keeping warm—is somewhat easier than it used to be, but still has little in common with urban life. We continue to have summers that can be distinguished from winter only by looking at the calendar.
Life is always a struggle, but on an island you at least have a feeling of having entered into personal, physical combat with it. Today for instance. Every once in a while I put on my old beach coat and slog down the path to look at our se
a wall being so mercilessly hammered by the waves, many of them unfairly armed with logs which they use like battering rams. I can’t do anything but pick up an occasional clam tossed into the geraniums near the greenhouse, watch the spray being flung fifty feet into the air and move the picnic table and benches a little farther back from the edge. But if the sea wall does come through this storm unscathed, and I’m sure it will, I will experience a great feeling of personal accomplishment, of having won another round in our battle with the elements. This is not just a peculiarity of mine. Don has it, too, and I have heard other island-dwellers speak of “bringing her through another winter” as if they had stood in front of their houses and personally defended them from the rain, the logs, the forests and the waves.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why people, even ones who have had their houses pushed into the Sound by slides, remain here on Vashon, to take the same chance again. Of course another reason is the feeling we islanders have that living in a hot apartment taking vitamin pills instead of sunshine is pitifully like a broiler chicken in a battery. There is also our dismay at the tenor of city life where parties are business obligations and most of the people on the street look as if they were wearing shoulder holsters. Then of course we island-dwellers get our papers a day late and when we snap open our morning Post-Intelligencers the droughts, killings, floods, lynchings, rapes, dope smuggling to teen-agers, and avalanches are a day old. A day-old avalanche is still an avalanche but it isn’t as bad as a fresh one—at least we Vashon islanders are already a little used to it. Even communism can’t hold its own on Vashon because practically everything over here is subversive, i.e., “having a tendency to overthrow, upset or destroy.” Puget Sound spends every winter trying to batter down our sea walls and reclaim the land. The rain tries to push us down where the Sound can get at us easier. Old logs lie hidden like unexploded bombs on the hills above us waiting for enough rain so they can come charging down and flick our houses off the beach like ashes off a cigarette. The ferry crews go on strike. The ferries run aground, leave five minutes early or knock down the dolphins. Even our rats, brought in years ago by a grocery boat, have become so dedicated to the cause of overthrowing, upsetting and destroying that when gnawing from within seems to be getting them nowhere, instead of being sensible and writing a book or going to the FBI with a list of all the other rats who have been gnawing with them, they crawl into the walls and die.