My Kitchen Wars Page 3

  The writing ended halfway down the yellowed page. There was no signature. The unpardonable sin of doubt and despair. Neither Kennedy, Culver, Erskine, nor Harper was equipped, historically or personally, to handle such dark feelings. Certainty was the lifeblood of the Elect, their salvation predestined by God’s Grace in an act of faith as simple and pragmatic as hammering in a nail, as slicing an egg, as juicing an orange. For a good Calvinist, to doubt was as unthinkable as to swear or blaspheme or worship graven images. You didn’t try to make sense of why some were saved and some were not. God’s Will was as implacable as it was mysterious. Just lift the hammer or press down the wires or lower the lever, and don’t gum up the works.

  By the time I read my mother’s letter, however, I’d been to college. I’d been through World War II. I’d lived for a decade under the thumb of my stepmother. I had long ago learned to be afraid of the dark. My grandma’s nightly tuck-in echoed in my head long after she was gone, but the dark was too wide and too deep for the simple rhymes of

  Sleep tight,

  Don’t let the fleas bite,

  Wake up in the morning

  And do what’s right.

  Annihilation by Pressure Cooker

  From the day we moved into the house on Walnut Street until the day I went away to college a decade later, I was trapped. Trapped like a piece of Swiss steak inside my father’s favorite newfangled kitchen instrument, the pressure cooker. I would watch as he pounded the thin strips of raw beef with a wooden mallet, the head of which was scored in a grid on both ends. Wielded vigorously, the mallet reduced the muscled surface of the meat to pulp, as the strips flattened and thinned. Dad put the strips along with some sliced onions and canned tomatoes into the cooker and slipped the lid, with its mysterious top vent, under the lip of the pot so that the seal was tight. He turned up the heat until steam hissed from the open vent, then turned the heat down and narrowed the vent until the steam made a steady whistle, like the peanut whistle at the cement plant.

  The pot attracted me because I was forbidden to use it unless my dad was there. It was a time bomb, a hand grenade, and you had to do everything exactly right or it might explode in your face and kill you, the way fifty years later a friend of mine was killed when she went to make breakfast and the stove blew up, setting her on fire and blackening her body to a cinder. Kitchens could be as risky as battlefields, and in my family the kitchen was a battlefield in our wars against flesh, poverty, and one another.

  The nominal function of the pot was to cut down cooking time, which in the Depression seemed a good idea because it saved on gas. In our house there was no shortage of gas—it was forever trapped inside the plumbing of the Harper bowels and forever seeking release—nor of detailed discussions about its source and duration. If we could have figured a way to bottle it, we’d have been rich, like C. W. Post and W. K. Kellogg and all those other Elishas of Battle Creek who mapped an interior landscape as fraught with peril as any Bunyan’s Pilgrim had to face.

  So for us the pressure cooker’s chief virtue was its ability to render the toughest material soft as cotton wadding. That saved chewing time and energy, as well as wear and tear on the dentures of the old and the vagrant choppers of the young. Our dietary Platonic ideal was water, and the pressure cooker did its bit in reducing solids to liquids. It turned beans to mush in a matter of minutes, squash to slush in a moment or two, spinach to a green puddle in seconds. When the war came on and the manufactories of such pots were retooled to make arms, a prewar cooker was all the more valued because it was thought to conserve vitamins, and vitamins were as vital to a Pilgrim’s mess kit as prayer.

  The first night I ever spent in the house on Walnut Street, I prayed hard, and when that didn’t work, I cried so hard my dad had to bundle me up in a blanket and take me home. Home was not the double-storied square house with two blank eyes and a porched mouth and a long line of cement steps descending to the sidewalk like a lolling tongue. To the left of the mouth, a sign like a cartoonist’s bubble announced: “Elizabeth Blake Harper, D.O.” Home was Grandma and Grandpa H. in a stucco bungalow way across town from Dad and the wife who was not new to him but new to my brother and me.

  If we could have kept our separate bivouacs at either end of town, we might have visited back and forth politely and peaceably. As I grew older, I might even have got used to staying overnight once in a while in the big house and not have to be taken home sobbing. As it was, no single encampment would have been big enough to contain the six of us without war.

  My father had met the D.O., as my brother and I called her behind her back, through Grandpa H. when he came to visit his son in Riverside and, for future reference, checked out the osteopaths in town. Dr. Blake refused the widower each of the three times he popped the question in as many months, saying she was much too engaged professionally and financially to marry anyone, but he persisted. Years after his death, a bunch of penny postcards wrapped with a rubber band revealed that he’d courted her by postcard before they’d married. It was odd to read his penciled declarations that he missed her, my dad whose nearest approach to emotion was to clear his throat and say, like Popeye, “Blow me down.” Eventually she surrendered, with conditions. They married the year after my mother died.

  I have a few undated notebook pages, scribbled in pencil (of course) in the D.O.’s hand and titled “My Acquaintance with the Harpers.” She gave in, she wrote, only after “all circumstances were considered and favorable agreement and reply made.” Like my father, she chronically wrapped herself in the safety of generalized ambiguities and the passive voice. She itemized her reasons for agreement, the first of thousands of lists, thus:

  Meryl’s commitment

  My commitment

  Our contacts

  Attitudes, wishes, statements of Gpa and Gma

  Reactions to and by Us

  Reactions to and by B & B

  The only topic she filled in was “Meryl’s commitment,” quoting my father directly: “I want first of all to care for the children, then my parents, and then”—her own voice breaks through—“ME.” He did admit, she goes on, that his father would often do things that were “hard to take” and that his mother did have “one little characteristic” but “you will LOVE her.” She concludes this maddeningly obscurant document in the third person: “Thus began their acquaintance with, guess who, Dr. B.!”

  It must have been quite a shock to her to be saddled with a girl of seven and a boy of eleven when Grandma H. became ill and the four of us moved into the house on Walnut Street. Bob and I knew next to nothing of Dr. B. except that we’d moved into the arms of the enemy. We didn’t know that Dad took on a heavy mortgage of the house when the D.O. took him on. The house had belonged to her mother, a widow who’d lost her money and husband in the Crash and now ran a boardinghouse in another part of town. We called her Grandma Blake, and she didn’t like us any better than the D.O. did. Eventually she came to live with us too, in order to die of a prolonged cancer. She spent her days doing crossword puzzles at the dining table and hated being interrupted; from her we learned that children should be neither seen nor heard.

  Bob and I were instructed to call the D.O. “Mother,” but it was hard going. In her late thirties, she was as homely as old maids were supposed to be, with marcelled hair and a bulbous nose and soft wet lips that I hated to kiss. Considering that this was 1934, either Dad and the D.O. were way ahead of their time in dividing up the domestic territory or else these were last desperate measures for them both. In addition to his teaching at the high school, Dad did all the shopping and cooking. This left the D.O. free to get on with her doctoring, which she transferred from an office in town to the house. The problem was, this woman who had never expected to marry or breed, and who had prostrated herself before the altar of osteopathy with the fervor of a novitiate before her abbess, was also put in charge of “the children.”

  The room between the parlor and the dining room became the D.O.’s examining room, equipp
ed with an adjustable treating table next to an enamel table that held ominous instruments like stethoscopes and tongue depressors and blood-pressure pumps. Spinal adjustments were her specialty, and at the first sign of a sniffle or a sore throat, Bob or I would be summoned to the table for a neck crack, first to the right and then to the left, followed by a pull to the head straight on.

  The floor of the dining room was covered with linoleum and the table with oilcloth. The windows were covered with green pull shades and framed with newspaper curtains. When the smudge pots got going in the orange groves, we simply crumpled the curtains up and threw them out. Opposite the windows was Dad’s study, which when not occupied by the dying was a mortuary for pressed wildflowers, pinned butterflies, and formaldehyded frogs.

  At the rear of the dining room were two doors. The swinging door to the left opened into a narrow corridor crammed with a gas water heater, a stove, and a sink lodged beneath a line of cupboards that ended in an enclosed pantry. That was the kitchen. The other door opened onto a screened porch with an icebox at the kitchen end and a toilet at the far end. The conjunction of kitchen and toilet was crucial in a house where outgo was more important than intake.

  A mere corridor for a kitchen was okay with us, because my family had taken up arms against food as well as the flesh that required it. In the big house, even the simple pleasures of butter and eggs at Grandma’s knee were gone. We were geared to a new regime where modern technology ruled. Castor oil, a concentrated prune pill, the old reliable pink rubber enema bag with its Vaselined tube, all were outmoded by the porcelain apparatus that took over the bathroom once a week for the adults to flush out their systems. Colonic irrigation was the last word in holy hygiene, the Amen to the benediction sung in unison by the Grape-Nuts, Shredded Wheat, Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes, Graham Crackers, Postum, and Ovaltine that congregated our shelves.

  That all food tasted like dishwater was part of God’s plan. Away with flavor, texture, taste. If all flesh is vanity, so is the food that feeds it. If spirit is all, who needs more than the Word of God? If God took on flesh in the body of Christ, He did so that we might shuck ours. Still, the flesh would not be denied its minute shivers of pleasure, even in the monotone of the bland leading the bland. Softly scrambled eggs were a triumph mixed with even softer scrambled brains. Soft white bread, toasted and resoftened in hot milk sprinkled with butter and sugar, was a treasured Sunday supper. Boiled fresh tongue, which I was allowed to strip of its thick pebbled skin and slice from tender tip to solid cartilaginous root, was delectable because of its velvet texture. Canned salmon, the only kind I knew, was satisfying because its bones were soft enough to chew. The divinity fudge that Grandma made at Christmastime was divine because of its Karo-white softness. And all year round, cornmeal mush, whether layered with ground meat and pitted black olives in a tamale pie or fried in rectangles and slathered with Log Cabin syrup or put in a bowl with a huge cube of butter topped with cinnamon and brown sugar and heavy cream, was everybody’s favorite because it was mushy.

  As any child knows, forbidden pleasures are best, and mine are vivid still. I was supposed to stay out of the dark pantry, so I snuck in when no one was around. I would pick out a box of Jell-O, red cherry over green lime, dip my fingers into the sweetened powder and lick them until the powder was gone. Or I would climb up to find an already opened bag of marshmallows, so that I could sneak one undetected. Or I would unscrew the top of a Welch’s grape jelly jar and dip in the spoon I’d brought with me. Or I would open and sniff a mysterious jar labeled “Slippery Elm,” in which pale bark floated in a strange-smelling liquid.

  We gave no dinner parties. My parents had no friends. The church was our social circle, and though there were church dinners aplenty, to which every family contributed its bread-and-cheese casserole or rice pudding or store-bought rolls, the only festal occasions in our house were Thanksgiving, Christmas, and birthdays. At Thanksgiving and at Christmas, we had turkey. The white meat was bone dry and hard to swallow, so I asked Dad for dark and for extra skin, buttery and crisp and salty, and anyone who didn’t want his was to save it for me. Best of all was the tail, which I would tear off in the kitchen afterward when no one was looking, setting my teeth into the sweet fat and licking my fingers one by one.

  For birthdays we had fried chicken, as opposed to everyday rabbit, which was the cheapest of all meats because rabbits multiplied as quick as you could recite your multiplication tables. If we had roast chicken instead of fried, I got dibs on two parts, the wishbone and any embryonic egg yolks concealed in the chicken’s cavity when it was cut open. A wishbone wish was good, but even better was finding a pair of yolks joined together like Siamese twins, a portent like the navel orange of God’s blessing.

  The D.O. was a Baptist, and while she set the precepts of our diet, Grandpa and Grandma H. did not recognize her doctrinal authority at our table or any other. For Calvinists, the education of children was a sacred charge: “to instruct those born ignorant of godliness in the purpose of eternity.” Every morning after breakfast, Grandpa led the family in morning service. He opened the big family Bible at his place at the head of the table and read appropriate verses for the day. Then we turned our chairs around and knelt at them while he incorporated current events—Governor Landon’s bid for the presidency or California’s need for the Townsend Plan—into the day’s prayers. At the end, we joined him in reciting “Our Father.” We used the old form of the Lord’s Prayer, meaningful to the times: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” My brother would cheat and keep his eyes open, punching me in the ribs to make me squawk, but I closed my eyes tight. I longed to be saved, and until we came to live with the D.O. had never doubted that I was.

  God, who looked just like my grandfather but with long white hair instead of the Kewpie-doll wisps that covered Grandpa’s baldness, was listening and God was looking. God had X-ray vision and supersonic ears. He could see and hear every thought, every feeling, every pulse of every creature’s mind and heart. Even though I’d been baptized and catechized, harmonized in choirs and sermonized in Sunday School and Daily Vacation Bible School, Sunday Morning Service and Sunday Evening Service, Wednesday Night Prayer Service and Young People’s Christian Endeavor, still, God knew and I knew that I was damned.

  I had to keep this knowledge secret from my grandparents, who foolishly believed that I’d be gathered in rejoicing with all the other sheaves. The D.O. knew better. When I said my nightly prayers, asking God to bless Grandpa and Grandma and Daddy and Mother and Brother, God knew I was asking Him to bless my real mother, not the D.O., and God knew that I was committing a sin by that lie. I knew that my stepmother hated us even as she tried not to and even though hate was a sin. I knew that the story of Hansel and Gretel was the story of Bobby and Betty, and I knew that the wicked stepmother and the wicked witch were one and the same, and that the D.O. would gladly have lost us in the forest or popped us in the oven if she could. Only she couldn’t. She was stuck with us and we with her in the same cooker, and none of us knew how to turn it off before it exploded.

  On Mother’s Day at Calvary Church each year, children were given a red rose to pin on their clothes if their mother was alive and a white rose if she was dead. Bob and I wore our white roses like badges of honor, flaunting the fact of our “real” mother in the face of our fake one. If only the pair of us had presented a united front, we might at least have comforted each other, but we’d been polarized by gender from the start, the good girl and the bad boy. Grandpa H., who took me on his knee, took a razor strop to Bob to beat the rebellion out of him. Bob hated school as much as I loved it. He hated his younger sister, who got away with things he got blamed for. Once, in revenge, he wound his new electric train engine so thoroughly into my pigtails that they had to be cut into a Dutch bob. Once, also in revenge, I poured perfume over his head and it got in his eyes, and he threatened to tell unless I coughed up my nickel allowance to buy him off. He spent and I saved, so there was always
a hoarded nickel to con me out of on one pretext or another.

  We got on best during summer vacation, when Dad took us and my grandparents for a month to Long Beach and left the D.O. behind to do her doctoring. We rented a cheap little cottage in a row of them near a beautiful long stretch of public sand that was later wiped out in a hurricane. On Saturday nights we went to the Long Beach Pike and got soft ice cream from a machine that slipped a silky white ribbon into each cone. I would beg to go on the roller coaster, which extended spectacularly over the ocean from the pier, and Grandpa would tuck me in the seat beside him, pull down the bar in front of us, and remove his glasses so they wouldn’t blow off in that first screeching, stomach-dropping descent. He took me on the Ferris Wheel, the Octopus, the Dodgem, the Loop-the-Loop, only one per visit because I got only one nickel and had to choose.

  The best thing about summer vacation at Long Beach was that we were on vacation from the kitchen. We always ate Sunday noon dinner out. We went to a cafeteria, because that’s where you got the best food for the least money, and you got to pick it out yourself without the embarrassment of waiters or other servitors. Once in a great while we would drive to L.A. to a Clifton’s Cafeteria, which was an Ur-Disneyland of neon palm trees and real waterfalls and the Chapel of Gethsemane and a life-sized replica of Christ and the Apostles sitting down to a Last Supper of pot roast and mashed potatoes with a well in the middle for gravy, all for $1.95 and your money back if you weren’t satisfied.

  Or we joined one of the ongoing church picnics at Bixby Park. Long Beach was a gathering place for Bible Belt migrants, who used food to renew the ties that bind. Our numbers were such that picnic tables were organized by state—Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois—hundreds of tables set up in the shade at noontime, and when we sang the Doxology it could be heard above the waves.