My Kitchen Wars Read online

  My Kennedy grandparents went west first, to live with their eldest daughter, Lyda, and her husband, Bert. Bert was a builder and carpenter like his father-in-law, and together they built in the wilds outside Glendale a solid stuccoed house that sits on the top of Nob Hill in Eagle Rock exactly as it did eighty years ago. My parents were living further north, in Palo Alto, where Dad hurried to get his teaching credential at Stanford. But when a second baby boy was born sickly and died, Hazel’s delicate nervous system broke down again, and they moved south so that Hazel could be with her parents. My father landed a job at Polytechnic High School in Riverside, where he would teach botany and biology for the next fifty years.

  In a house crowded with three families, it must have seemed a bright idea for my parents and grandparents to start a chicken ranch together on two and a half acres in Riverside, further east. In the winter of 1926, Grandpa K. threw up a one-room garage meant to be temporary living quarters until he could build a permanent house. But it didn’t take long for the Great Chicken Enterprise to collapse. My grandparents, abandoning chickens, returned to the house on Nob Hill, while my parents and their little boy stayed on at the “ranch.”

  Still, having abandoned the fog of Northern California for the sunshine of the south, my father never looked back. He squeezed fresh orange juice every morning at 6:30 sharp, day in and day out, summer and winter, before morning prayers. In California the miracle of oranges, like the miracle of sunshine, was a tangible daily witness to God’s forgiveness of Adam’s sin, the sin that brought blizzards to Kansas, breakdowns to nervous systems, and adhesions to bowels. The conception of seedless oranges, strung like Christmas balls in dark green groves in the middle of December when the sun shone bright, made Riverside the site of miracles for which my family took responsibility. Hadn’t the rootstock of the navel orange been discovered in the jungles of Brazil by a Presbyterian missionary just like my Uncle Roy?

  Until his death at ninety-one, my father rejoiced in Riverside as a miracle like unto the orange itself. For him the city was an oasis created from a desert wilderness by the magic of progress. In fact, it had been engineered at the turn of the century by a gang of water thieves, who laid the foundation not only for the orange industry but also for the heavier industries generated by World War II, which eventually turned the City of Oranges into Smog City, U.S.A. Like other facts, this was one my father with encrusted red-rimmed eyes denied to his dying day. “Just a little haze,” he’d say of the sulphurous yellow blanket that smothered the town.

  I wonder how he euphemized the gray layer of dust that covered the orange grove I grew up in, on the wrong side of Riverside, in a cluster of shanties hard by the cement plant that some scalawag realtor had named Rivino Orchards. And I wonder how he greeted the news in the fall of 1926 that his wife was once again pregnant, this time with me. When Hazel married, she’d been told she shouldn’t try to bear children because of her bad back, not to mention her delicate psyche. The Harpers blamed Hazel for getting pregnant and the Kennedys blamed Dad, both sides of the family perennially short of funds but never of blame.

  Grandma K. moved back in to look after her daughter. So did thirteen-year-old Leona, Lyda’s eldest daughter. As Leona wrote long after, the place was “hot as Hades, bleak and desolate with grit and dust over everything from the nearby cement works which kept up a high-pitched ‘peanut’ whistle all day long.” Even as a teenager, she said, this godforsaken place had her crawling up the walls. Grandma K. hung a blanket between the bed where she slept with Leona and the bed where Dad and Hazel slept with little Bobby. Another blanket separated the bed quarters from the cooking and eating quarters. Scots cottars would have said this divided the ben from the but—the but the open hearth that sent smoke through a hole in the roof, the ben the bed in a wooden enclosure, with a little door in front for getting in and out.

  I was very nearly born in the but of this hovel, at least as Leona tells it. Nobody else would admit I got born at all, because the subject of birthing was taboo. “The things men do to women, even in marriage,” Grandma K. told her children and grandchildren, “are vile, disgusting, filthy, and sinful.” However necessary for the procreation of the race, birthing babies was as terrible as Adam and Eve’s first discovery of shame.

  Leona remembers that she woke one morning to hear whispers behind the blanket that shielded Hazel and Dad. Grandma K. was telling my mother to stop fussing and get in the car. Dad had cranked up the Model T and was waiting for her outside the kitchen door. Leona couldn’t imagine what was wrong with Hazel, who was groaning horribly, but Grandma got her out the door and off Dad went. Grandma had just set out pancakes for breakfast when Dad returned, said “It’s a girl,” and asked for a bucket of water and some rags. Leona started out the door to see what was up, but Grandma slammed the door in her face and cried, “Mercy, child, don’t you dare go out there.” Leona had already seen that the back seat of the car was covered with blood, and she was frantic because no one would tell her what terrible thing had happened to her aunt.

  A few days later, Hazel returned with a pink baby in her arms, and whether Dad had actually stopped the car to help deliver the baby or whether he just told Hazel to hang on after it slipped out was never clear. The baby was named Betty, a name favored by Nebraskans then and since, and Ellen, after Grandma K. The baby had blue eyes and straight blond hair, like her father, although when she grew up she was said to be the spitting image of her mother. After the first few weeks, when Hazel and the baby seemed to be doing well, Grandma K. and Leona went home to Eagle Rock.

  It must have been a relief to be whittled down to a mere foursome in the garage, but at the same time the days must have been long and exhausting and lonely for a woman over forty who had devoted herself to the practice of music in an earlier life. There was an upright piano in one corner of the garage, but there could have been little time to play it. Just keeping a new baby, a scrappy boy of four, and a husband in clean and ironed clothes would have been a full-time job in so primitive a house.

  On the day of her death I see her, my fantasy colored by my brother’s memories, wandering over to the piano while Bobby and I, now almost six and not quite two, played with empty spools of thread on the kitchen floor. She might have started a Bach fugue or a Chopin prelude or something merrier, like Saint-Saëns’s Rapsodie d’Auvergne, before slamming the lid of the piano shut. She was often distracted, or so they said, given to nibbling things absentmindedly as she went about the house.

  Next to the sink was an open tin of rat poison. In her distraction, she might have dipped a finger in the tin and put it in her mouth without realizing what it was. She might have. What Bob remembers is her falling to the floor, her mouth foaming, calling out to him to run, run quick and get help. Our nearest neighbor was a good fifteen-minute run for a small boy, and when Bobby got back with the neighbor, the man said she was gone and found a blanket to cover her. I was playing on the floor as if nothing had happened, but Bobby cried, because she had counted on him to get help and he had failed.

  When genealogy became Dad’s obsession in his geriatric years, he made hundreds of photocopies of the family tree, as if that might somehow elaborate its sparse branches. His written account of my mother’s death was typically terse. “Hazel became ill, entered the Community Hospital, and passed away.” In conversation, I don’t remember his ever mentioning her by name. Nor did Grandpa and Grandma Harper, who took on the burden of raising her two small children, first at their Colorado farm and then, when they sold the farm two years later, at Rivino Orchards. It seemed that everyone, whether they wanted to or not, ended up in California.

  Because I was so small and doubtless trouble, Hazel’s sister Edna and her family took care of me that first winter in their house in Sterling, Colorado. I remember nothing except icicles hanging from the eaves and dripping on my head in the sun, an exotic watersport for an orange-grove kid. And all I remember of the summer I spent in Gilchrist, reunited with my brother and Dad, w
as the farmhouse kitchen and its icebox, concealing like Pandora’s box my first full sensual experience of the hidden pleasures of the flesh. Bob remembers the farm as the happiest time in his life, spent outdoors with the farm horse and the chickens and the cows and the dogs. But what I remember is toddling over to the icebox, where the door had been left ajar, and finding within its coolness a big thick cube as golden as an orange and as smooth and velvety as ice cream. I took it out and licked it. It got slippery in my hands, creamed my mouth, melted on my tongue, and ran down my throat. By the time they found me, I had consumed the whole pound of it. It was clear I was destined for a lifelong romance with butter that would rival my father’s love affair with oranges.

  Butter, chickens, eggs. These were the staples of Grandma H.’s kitchen, in California as in Colorado. Wherever we moved, we kept chickens, and our eggs were always fresh. Eggs were an excuse for a bowlful of butter. Grandma H. boiled eggs two ways, soft or hard, and she served them in a bowl, two at a time. If they were soft, you stirred them with your spoon into the butter to make a kind of soup. If they were hard, she would slice them in her Presto 4-Way egg slicer, an efficient guillotine, the eight thin wires strung across its hinged top dropping neatly into the slots in its molded bottom. With her Erskine sense of humor, she’d pretend to crack an egg on my head while actually cracking it on the table, shell it quickly, then slice it in perfect Platonic circles, all white at each end, with white rims diminishing around bigger and bigger yellow centers toward the middle. Circles were useful for potato salad, but I preferred dice to circles, so that I could mash the white and yellow into a large blob of softened butter with my fork to make mashed butter flecked with egg. To make dice, Grandma would turn the sliced egg sideways in the hollow and drop the wires again to slice the other way. So simple a mechanism, so profound an effect.

  When I think of Grandma and Grandpa H. at Rivino Orchards, I am always sitting in one or other of their laps, eating something. Grandma would sit me in her aproned lap while she quartered an apple with a dull table knife, cut out the core, then scraped the raw crisp flesh with the back of the knife to make instant applesauce, which she fed me from the knife’s tip. Grandpa, whom Bobby and I called Bunco, would sit me on his overalled knees, open a jar of homemade jelly, usually apple or grape, and feed it to me “raw,” with a spoon. Once while I was sitting on Bunco’s lap in the yard outside the garage, a wasp flew by and stung me on the eyelid. My wail was an expression not only of pain but of outrage at betrayal. In a perilous world, Bunco’s lap was supposed to be a sure Place, like Christ the Nail.

  There were advantages to being raised by Fundamentalists for whom the Bible was a guidebook to history, geography, astronomy, archaeology, and genealogy. Grandma H., like all the women in my family, had been a schoolteacher, and at her knee when I was three or four I learned to recite both the multiplication table and the names of all the books of the Bible. The fact that Leviticus came before Numbers and Zechariah followed Haggai had to me the same logic as the eights coming before the nines or the fours following the threes. I learned the alphabet in a similar syncretism: A is for Abraham, B is for Bethlehem, C is for Christ. I knew verses and Psalms by heart long before I could read, and the story of the boy Samuel waking at night—“Here am I, Lord, send me”—was more real to me than the story of Peter Rabbit, hiding from Mr. McGregor in a flowerpot.

  The topography of the Bible, overlaid with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, mapped my real town and its surroundings. The Valley of the Shadow of Death was a real place, beyond the Mohave Desert, named Death Valley. The Slough of Despond was a place to the south of the actual Chocolate Mountains beyond Hemet, the Salton Sea. The hill where Christ was crucified, Golgotha, was Riverside’s Mount Rubidoux, which we climbed at dawn every Easter with hundreds of others to witness, at the foot of the Cross planted there by a hotel entrepreneur, the miraculous Resurrection of Our Savior. In Riverside we were saved, glory hallelujah, by the annual rusting and renewing of Christ the Nail.

  These were my years of safety, secure in salvation. Jesus loved me; Grandpa and Grandma and the Bible and my Sunday school teachers and the minister at Calvary Presbyterian Church all told me so. My missionary Uncle Roy, home on furlough, baptized me himself. A scrapbook labeled “Betty’s” in Grandma H.’s handwriting shows that I was accepted into the Church on Easter Sunday 1935 after I’d attended confirmation classes, “On Confession of Faith, Having Been Baptized,” and having tasted my first sanctified cracker and grape juice at Good Friday communion service. A poem pasted in the scrapbook told me just how safe I was.

  God made the Dark for children

  And birdies in their nest.

  All in the Dark He watches

  And guards us while we rest.

  There were a few loose twigs in the nest, however, a few rockabye babies in treetops that came tumbling down in the wind. My pet rooster, for one. I have a snapshot of me, plump as a piglet, pulling him in my little red Flyer wagon around the dirt yard beneath the orange trees. Chicken Little, I called him, because it was the only chicken name I knew. One summer, after Bobby and I had spent a couple of weeks visiting Aunt Lyda and Uncle Bert, I returned to the yard and called for Chicken Little, but no cock came. He had disappeared without a trace. Only years later did my grandparents confess that they’d taken advantage of my absence to put him in the Sunday pot. They laughed when they told it, but old as I was, and I must have been in my teens, I was shocked.

  I was no less shocked at twenty when I learned that the cause of my mother’s death was not necessarily the “accidental poisoning” my family had claimed. I’d never thought to question it. For me, my mother had existed only in photographs, in heaps of snapshots jumbled together in cardboard shirt boxes. I studied them endlessly as if the images were real as the heaven where she’d gone to live in her Father’s House and where, Grandma H. assured me when pressed, I would join her and live happily ever after.

  One day after I’d graduated from college, I was at my typewriter in the dining room filling out a job application when I asked Dad for some insurance document the form required. On the document he gave me was a note that at Hazel’s death her life insurance money had been denied because the cause of her death was “unresolved.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. Dad blushed, as if I’d asked him where babies come from. He cleared his throat several times, a chronic habit that intensified when he was embarrassed. “Well, there was some question at the time about whether it was fully accidental, given her past history of health problems, but of course you know how insurance companies are.”

  It was a thunderbolt, as sulphurous as the day outside was bright and clear. Was that the shame that had kept her name unspoken, her memory erased? Was that why the Kennedys never spoke of my father without an edge? She had killed herself, my saintly mother, looking down on me from heaven, the one sure Place. That was how she ended her kitchen wars. They must have been beyond bearing to leave behind a baby girl and a little boy who needed her then, and all their lives. I sensed a despair I tried to imagine but could not, except in bits and pieces, refracted in the constant anxiety of my father and grandparents over the state of my health. “You’re such a nervous child,” they’d say reprovingly, “just like your mother,” warning me every time I jiggled my foot against succumbing to St. Vitus’ dance.

  Not until twenty more years had passed did I come upon anything to illuminate her despair. Grandma H. had kept a letter of Hazel’s until she herself died, at eighty-three, leaving instructions to my stepmother to pass it on to Bob and me “when we were old enough.” I don’t know what caused my stepmother to release it. Perhaps she thought, not without reason, that she might outlive us all and could bury it with her yet.

  The letter, never mailed, was written in pencil (didn’t anybody in my family have a pen?) in Hazel’s round, open hand on the day before she died—April 12, 1929. It was addressed to her parents, whom Hazel had just returned from visiting in Eagle Rock, al
ong with Lyda and another sister, who’d come down from Bakersfield with her baby daughter. The sentences ran on with the same girlish rush of the letters Hazel had written home on her trip East in 1912, when she enthused over the noble domes of the nation’s capital or the towers of Gotham.

  Dear loved ones all.

  I was so homesick to see you all and so happy to have the privilege again and I just thought I would find a way to show that I do appreciate all of you, what you have been and are and do etc etc—but words seem slow in coming and thoughts slower so the time passed so quickly and I realized I had been receiving benefits all the time while I contributed almost nothing to your joy and comfort. The times together are so short and too soon gone forever one wants to fill them full to overflowing.…

  I just didn’t have any visit with father, much to my regret, and very little with mother it seems but oh I do know that nobody ever had parents who wanted to do more for their children. You gave us the right ideals and aspirations and wore yourselves out trying to help us attain them and I have been mean to ever criticize in anything.…

  Oh my dear ones I do love you in spite of my stupidity. There is nothing I would not be willing to do for you if I could see clearly the way and what God wants me to do. If one could erase his mistakes as easily as he makes them he could forget them more easily. God has shown me His goodness so much thru my own family, my husband, children, friends and strangers, I should never doubt His power to renew life and strength. In my teens I received several wrong complexes, being very impressionable which I can see now were brooded over too much instead of being righted as they might have been had I confided fully and relieved my mind of little fears. I know a Christian should always be calm and serene. I feel I cannot call myself a Christian when I don’t feel that God is leading me by the hand. I would rather have that confidence, knowing that He has not cast me off, than anything. Because of the crazy ideas I had at times which destroyed the faith of my own little son and little children who have seen me that way, I feel that I have committed the unpardonable sin. My very fear of injuring some one has largely made my life negative instead of constructive as I desire.