My Kitchen Wars Read online

  The place where we felt most free was the desert. I could feel my dad come alive and expand with every breath as he shifted gears on the hairpin turns of Box Spring Grade. At the summit we paused to eat our fried egg sandwiches beneath the pines, then dropped down into the breathtaking expanse of the Colorado or Mohave Desert to speed on roads straight as Cahuillan arrows toward the heat mirage shimmering on the horizon. Someone has said that American deserts and the Protestant conscience go together, both of them seared by the eye of God. Dad could recite the Latin and common names of every cactus, wildflower, bush, and tree, lingering in his litany over the vowels of yucca and agave, ocotillo and chia, goosefoot and bladder sage. His desert was a Bibleland of names: Yellow Star Thistle, Virgin’s Bower, Our Lord’s Candle, Joshua Tree. Tumbleweeds would blow across the road like wild free things, and I wanted never to go home.

  At home, though, there were civil pleasures, if you loved to perform as I did. With my waist-length blond hair, I was always cast as an angel in the Christmas pageants that took place not only in front of Calvary’s altar but in Riverside’s municipal auditorium, with a cast of hundreds from all the schools of Riverside. One year a candle held by a fellow angel singed my hair, but Jesus saved and damped the flames.

  I can’t remember a time when I was not performing. Mine was the era of child stars like Shirley Temple and Freddie Bartholomew, and any kid worth his salt knew how to sing and dance. I remember singing “God Bless America” when I was six for Grandpa’s Townsend Club, and not much later competing in an amateur hour, staged before the regular Saturday matinee at the Riverside Fox Theater, by singing all six verses of “My Name Is Solomon Levi.” I had no notion it was about a Jewish secondhand clothes dealer, and I was puzzled why my pigtails and breathy little soprano fell flat.

  Every group, every girls’ club staged a skit, a musical, a pageant, several times a year, and I clamored to be in them all. The entire population of Riverside became players during the annual festival week, De Anza Days, which celebrated the Spanish who’d conquered the Indians before Father Junípero Serra converted them. Everyone but the real Indians, who’d been straitjacketed into the Sherman Institute, dressed in Spanish costume and paraded on horseback or in carriages and danced to mariachi bands playing “La Cucaracha” and “La Paloma.”

  Performing got me out of the house, or at least out of myself. Playing alone in front yard or back, depending on what scenery was wanted, I acted out all the girl parts of all the movies I’d seen with Grandpa. I was Heidi in Switzerland, cavorting with goats and eating cheese, I was Mary Queen of Scots going to her beheading with Hepburn cheekbones high, I was Jeanette MacDonald in the Rockies warbling “When I’m calling you-ooo-ooo” to Nelson Eddy. And when I ran out of movies, I could swell into the grand operas I’d seen at the Riverside Opera House founded by none other than Madame Schumann-Heink, when she retired to the City of Oranges. I could be Humperdinck’s Gretel or Verdi’s Desdemona. Growing up with opera that way, I found it no more far-fetched than a Betty Boop cartoon.

  And then there was the piano. Predestined by genetics and a full set of Kinsella Method music books, I was supposed to carry on my mother’s good works at the pianoforte that stood like a memorial in the parlor. I turned out to be one of those rare pupils who truly loved to practice, because the piano was an escape, but whose finger skills improved with neither age nor experience. My teachers would always say, “Betty plays with a lot of feeling.” It burned me up that the D.O., who played with no emotion whatsoever but who had strong fingers and hands, could play the piano far better than I.

  With stiff fingers, Grandma H. every once in a while would cross her left hand over her right to play “In the Sweet By-and-By.” I’ve forgotten how long in the sour present Grandma and Grandpa stuck it out with the D.O. before they moved out. Dad found a little cottage for them three blocks away, on Almond Street, with just enough yard for Grandpa to grow tomatoes and poinsettias and a few rows of corn, and with just enough kitchen for Grandma to cook applesauce and boil eggs. I stopped wetting my bed around the time they moved out, but I was still the victim of a nervous bladder that too often sent me home in tears at lunchtime to change clothes and squishy wet socks, then back to endure the taunts of schoolmates.

  At best, the body was a shameful thing. From bedwetting I progressed to nosebleeding. Out of nowhere the flow would come, great red blobs staining my ironed dress, so that I’d have to lie down and press my index finger against my upper lip. From nose to menstrual bleeding was an acceleration of bodily shame for which I was somehow responsible, since flesh was the source of sin and suffering and, like Christ, I was flesh and blood. I happened to be a flooder, for a full eight days and with no early warning system. Long before tampons were invented, I learned to wear two or three pads at a time, knowing that if I had no chance to change after an hour or two, the game was up, the flag was out, and shame would show.

  The D.O. had lectured me about how lucky I was to be a modern girl, who could buy disposable aseptic absorbent pads. When she was a girl, women had to tear clean rags into strips and boil them in a pot to use over and over. I didn’t feel lucky; I felt cursed by Eve’s sin. I wasn’t allowed to take a bath during the bleeding time, for fear of infection, and we had no shower. Keeping clean was a problem and keeping clean underwear a bigger problem. On a Sunday afternoon when my folks went off into the countryside to collect specimens for Dad’s collection, I would sneak into the basement, soak my week’s collection of bloodied cotton underpants in cold water in the sink, then boil them in a pot on the little two-burner stove. If it was a bright day, the pants could dry on the clothesline in half an hour. If it rained or the folks came back too soon, I would snatch them off the line and dry them secretly in my bedroom closet. Unlike Christ’s, this blood offered no redemption.

  I wasn’t allowed to ride bikes, which were deemed too dangerous for girls. Nor, at sixteen, was I allowed to drive. I wasn’t allowed to date a boy unless my parents had met him and we went with a chaperone. As a result, I had no dates except for chaperoned school proms and heavily supervised roller-skating parties in the back parking lot at church.

  It was hard enough to see girlfriends. The D.O. disapproved of all my friends on principle. She would never explain why, she would simply say, “I don’t want you to see so much of …” Pat Sides had been my best friend since junior high school. We were a team, Sides and Harper, or, as I insisted, Harper and Sides, and we did everything together at school. We wrote and starred in the assembly skits, acted in the same school plays, edited the yearbook together. But the D.O. disapproved of Pat’s parents, who lived on the other side of town, the better side, when they were not abroad. Pat’s mother was an artist and her father a mining engineer, and they went off to live in exotic parts of the world like Cyprus or Brazil while Pat’s grandmother took care of her in Riverside. When her parents came home, they moved with an artistic crowd who smoked and drank and did not attend church regularly. They were Episcopalians anyway, and Episcopalians were notorious because they smoked and drank. The fingers and lips of Pat’s mother were stained yellow with tobacco.

  I was in torment every time Pat invited me to a movie or to her house for dinner. I couldn’t go anywhere without the D.O.’s permission, so I would rehearse my lines over and over, changing the intonation, screwing up the courage to walk down the stairs and face her. There was no predicting what I’d find—a sullen pout or an angry brow, a cold silence or a hot tirade. “And when do I get to go to the movies? Who ever asks me to go out after I’ve slaved for you week after week? Who ever thinks about me?” I thought about the D.O. all the time, but not in the way she wanted. And there was no way to respond except to run to my room, sit on my bed with its pink dimity spread beneath a framed reproduction of Pinkie, look at myself in the mirror of the vanity table with its matching pink skirt beneath the framed reproduction of Blue Boy, and sob until the well went dry.

  Repetition increased the D.O.’s contempt and my
hopelessness. No matter what I did, I was going to lose. I had fantasies of running away to Aunt Lyda’s, but I was too practical to try it. I had no money and no way to get any, certainly not enough for a bus ticket. I couldn’t get far on the nickel allowance that was mine until high school, when it rose to a dime. Some policeman would bring me back, sheepish with my little hobo stick and handkerchief filled with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and the D.O. would thunder at me and send me to bed.

  Bob had made his escape from Riverside the day he turned eighteen, signing up for the Marines in April 1941. He would come home on leave from boot camp at Camp Pendleton in San Diego and tell us laughingly how he had to scrub the latrines with a toothbrush for fifteen hours a day. I envied him. He got himself a girl, too, and eloped with her to Las Vegas, bringing her around to meet the folks on his way back to camp. He needn’t have bothered. The D.O. puckered her lips and snorted and fumed. Gwen stood on the sidelines in her big picture hat, with an orchid on her tight-fitting powder-blue suit, while the D.O. grumbled that it was a crying shame they’d had to get married and at least they should have gotten married in a church, and good governor, Bob, if you have to smoke, smoke that cigarette outside, not in my house. With my gangly frame, I envied Gwen in her suit and hat and shapely legs in high-heeled white shoes. At last Bob had got a Vargas girl of his very own, just like the ones in the magazines he kept under his mattress until the D.O. found them and threw them out.

  What Gwen remembers from that visit is finding me bent over the treadle sewing machine, sobbing the while, my tears wetting the material and rusting the needle. Crying was a permanent condition, like Dad’s postnasal drip or my year-round hay fever that the D.O. attributed to my not dusting my room. Not long ago I found a little black notebook of the D.O.’s in yet one more box of family junk. It is filled with penciled reminders to herself, listed, as always:

  Bob is bad.

  Betty musn’t cry so much.

  I cried upstairs, downstairs, all around the house. I cried so often nobody paid any attention, including me, and I couldn’t stop because I knew that until I left that house, I was the D.O.’s prisoner and she could bully me as she chose. Tears were the steam bobbing the vent in the pressure cooker lid, lest greasy little pieces of me explode over the kitchen walls.

  It took a movie to make me see what a wimp I was. I saw The Ox-bow Incident with Pat in our senior year, and I couldn’t get over how bravely one of the teenage boys had talked back to his bullying father, until Pat said, “It sure took him long enough.” Talking back was a possibility I’d never entertained. But one day, when the D.O. was complaining about Grandma H., I turned on her in a fury that surprised us both. “Don’t ever talk about my grandmother again. Not ever.” The D.O. reared back as if punched, opened her mouth like a fish, then closed it. I knew and she knew I’d opened a vent she couldn’t close.

  I realize now that the D.O. cowed me because I was cowable. In a house where all emotions but hers were taboo, she had free run of the range, and I feared her tantrums as I feared natural disasters like forest fires and earthquakes. I feared her because whatever happened was my fault.

  In my apartment in New York I once made vinegar, in a two-liter Italian green glass jar designed for that purpose, with a spigot at the bottom and an open mouth at the top covered with cheesecloth held by a rubber band. I was using a purchased “mother,” which had only to be fed with fresh white wine from time to time so that she would form the layers of brown leathery skin on top of the liquid that would turn the wine to vinegar without its going bad. Trouble is, I put the jar in a dark cupboard and forgot about it for a couple of years, and when I remembered to give it a look, the “mother” had grown into a monstrous multilayered slime covered with blue-green mold that entirely filled the jar. Inside the jar, the wine was gone, the “mother” had consumed every drop, but it was hardly the fault of the wine that I had all “mother” and no vinegar.

  In the D.O.’s house the only thing that wasn’t my fault, or Bob’s fault, was the war. We first heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor when we turned on the Zenith in our dining room one sunny December noon after church. What had been happening in Europe had been no concern of ours. Most of the evils in the world could be attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt or John L. Lewis or both, and we knew that Roosevelt had been conspiring to drag us America Firsters, despite the efforts of our hero Lindbergh, into the war in Europe where we had no business at all. But Hawaii was different. Hawaii belonged to us.

  Bob was glad when Pearl Harbor was bombed, because he was eager to ship out for action in the South Pacific. You couldn’t get farther away from Riverside than that. My war was the romance of him coming home on leave in his snappy khaki uniforms with the thick leather belts and polished buttons and his brimmed Marine hat set on the back of his head at a slant to match his grin and cigarette. Now and then he would bring home a buddy unlucky enough to have no place else to go. My parents suffered the tobacco smoke with grim faces, but I couldn’t get enough of their rough talk, their rough khakis, and their horror stories about the evil Japs. Bob would tease me by calling me Torpedo Betty after the Jap twin-engine bombers they nicknamed Big Butt Bettys. But he was more at ease with me now. He’d come into his own on Guadalcanal, where schoolwork and grades didn’t matter and bravado did, where not getting killed was better than the best report card.

  My war was strictly racial and solely against the Japs. The Germans, the French, the Poles, the Brits, none of them appeared on our maps, which looked west across the Pacific to the East. If someone came from the Old World, they came from China or Japan. There were many Japanese in my high school, and when my friends Tomiko Ito and Tommy Hirakowa disappeared from our classrooms overnight, we were told that they’d been removed for their own safety to an unspecified place remote from the coast. There were daily rumors of Japanese invasion somewhere along the Pacific coastline, sometimes by submarine, sometimes by airplane or balloon. We taped our windows with blackout shades in preparation for air attack. Our newspaper printed instructions for “Dimout Dos and Don’ts,” enforced by block wardens, who advised us what to do in case a fire was started by fifth columnists or a demolition bomb fell in our block or a poison gas attack threatened our town. Air-raid sirens warned us when to drop everything and head for the basement with blankets and pillows until the all clear sounded, the same way fire-alarm bells at school had warned us when to hide under our desks during earthquake drills.

  Bob’s was not the soothing nighttime voice of H. V. Kaltenborn on the radio. Bob told of being on night patrol in the jungle when, sensing that an unfamiliar body had fallen into step behind him, he turned suddenly and plunged his bayonet through a Jap dressed in the uniform of a U.S. Marine. He brought home snapshots of his buddies kicking around a Jap head, like a football. He also brought home a first-class case of malaria, because the troops had got to Guadal before Atabrine did, and he spent a week with chills and fever and delirium on the living-room couch, reliving the horror of battle behind closed doors. One day he was at the icebox looking for something cold to drink when the D.O. came up behind him and he whipped around with his hand ready to strike. “For Christ’s sake, Mom, don’t ever sneak up behind me that way,” he said. “I could have killed you.” “Don’t you take the Lord’s name in vain, Robert Leroy Harper,” she said, “or I’ll have you whipped.”

  I was prepared for invasion by Japanese soldiers, whose first act would be to rape and mutilate every white teenage girl they could find. I’d seen the movies. I knew what monsters Japs were, equipped with squinty eyes and bucktoothed grins as they dove their kamikaze planes straight into the decks of our aircraft carriers and into the heart of their Emperor. Long after the war was over, I had a recurrent nightmare that the Japs had invaded Riverside and I had to escape. It was night and I was alone in the house, waking with a start in my pink-and-blue bedroom to hear voices jabbering in the darkness outside. The trick was to run downstairs, through the dining room, out the b
ack porch, down the stairs, through the basement, and into the crawl space without being seen. Maybe my best bet was to run from my bedroom into the bathroom at the end of the hall, crawl through its window onto the half roof of the back porch, let myself down over the edge, and drop from there to the ground. It wasn’t a bad drop, and even if I turned or broke an ankle, I could still drag myself into the crawl space. Even today I can feel my heart pound as I lie squeezed between dirt and joist, watching through a narrow latticed vent in the wall the boots of men running past, shouting in excitement as they hunt me down.

  Everything happened so fast after Uncle Sam went to war. It seemed that one year we were celebrating the first airmail flight in Riverside County and a mere three years later we were cheering on F-4F Wildcat fighters over Guam. One year I was holding back tears because nobody wanted to dance with a wallflower like me at the Soirée Dansante, and the next year I was jitterbugging with pint-sized soldier boys at the USO and was voted pinup girl by the 823rd Antiaircraft Battalion at Camp Haan. One year I’d never been kissed and the next I was fighting off boys in Army khaki or Navy white who were shipping out and had nothing to lose by going too far.

  At my farewell senior assembly in junior high, in a blue dress I’d made on the Singer at home, I sang “There’ll be blue birds ovah the White Cliffs of Dovah” to acknowledge our new Allies. In my first year at high school, we staged war-bond rallies and donned overalls as Victory Girls to harvest onions and grapes in fields that draftees had left shorthanded. At home, we wrote V-mail letters and tended Victory Gardens. We clumped tinfoil into balls and saved bacon fat in cans and colored white oleomargarine butter-yellow and stopped putting sugar in our coffee or gas in our tanks and shut our mouths to prevent loose lips from sinking ships. But as teenage girls we knew that nothing we did really counted, no matter what Uncle Sam said, because we were girls.