My Kitchen Wars Read online

  At eighteen we could join the Waves or Wacs or Waafs, although my parents believed, and many of us did too, that only prostitutes and dykes did that. Older women could become Rosie the Riveters; Pat’s mother became a tank designer for the Food Machinery Corporation. But younger girls, girls in their summer dresses and bobby socks and pigtails, could do nothing but stay just as they were, slide down that cellar door, climb up that apple tree, and pretend that bombs were not falling and mortars not blowing men to bits—elsewhere. And for that very reason, I was for the first time truly glad to be a girl.

  From movies of Nazi storm troopers torturing their victims, I knew I could never be a spy, a member of the Resistance, a Freedom Fighter, because I would spill every bean at the first touch of a lit cigarette to the wrist, the first tug of a fingernail from a finger. Nor could I imagine myself hurling a grenade at a pillbox or diving into a foxhole under machine-gun fire. In any scene of bombardment, I was one with the women and children huddled in underground shelters in London, or in a village cellar in Normandy, a tenement in Rome, a rice paddy in the Philippines.

  I knew that who got killed and who didn’t had nothing to do with personal bravery or morality. Victims were hostages to fortune, luck, a bomb’s caprice, death’s whim, God’s Will. I understood in my gut the helplessness of civilians in war, as they listened to the whine of the bomb overhead and more intently to the silence after, until they could breathe with relief because their neighbors had been hit instead of themselves. I laughed as hard as anyone at Hitler jokes, doing raspberries “right in der Führer’s face,” but he was not a caricature to me. I knew what it was to be subject to a tyrant’s whim, even if the domain was as small as a kitchen.

  Still, there was no bridging the gap between civilian and combatant, despite the stories Bob and his buddies told, despite the battle scenes in Life painted by servicemen or photographed by war correspondents, whose black-and-white prints had all the reality of silent-movie stills. It was all too much, too extreme, too remote. Whatever was happening wasn’t happening to us. No photos of dead American servicemen graced the pages of an American newspaper or magazine or the frames of a newsreel until late in the war. We conspired in the myth that although our boys were often missing in action, they didn’t have corpses. They just disappeared into the wild blue yonder to reappear as a star in some Gold Star Mother’s window.

  That’s why what happened to the Reverend James Ezra Egly of our Calvary Presbyterian Church was such a shock. His own sons weren’t old enough to fight, but Pastor Egly had embraced all of Calvary’s boys as his own. He often wept openly as he read aloud letters in which they swore there were no atheists in foxholes. If they swore different, they wouldn’t have bothered to write, because nobody would have believed them. So how did the Reverend Egly come to hang by a rope strung from the top of one of the organ pipes in the church basement, where the caretaker found him one night? It was a sneak attack. Our flock had been betrayed, as our boys had been at Pearl Harbor. The smiling communicant in your pew could be a member of the fifth column. No one was to be trusted. There was no sure Place.

  When it came time to pick a college, I wanted to go as far from Riverside as I could get, so I begged to go to the University of California at Berkeley. My parents opted for Occidental because it was close and it was Presbyterian. Pomona College was our compromise and, fortunately, Pat wanted to go there too. Best of all, Pat had a car, a used Ford pickup truck painted red. Gas and tire rationing didn’t let her use it much, but it spelled hope and freedom and escape, three different words for the same thing. The cooker had finally blown its lid, and I exploded in a jet of steam. As we sped along Route 66 with the wind blowing through our hair, laughing so hard we sometimes had to stop the car, we knew from scalp to toe how great it was even in the midst of war to be young and alive and on the road to nowhere but tomorrow.

  Blitzed by Bottle Caps and Screws

  Iran barefoot lickety-split across the lawn of Harwood Court in my spiffy new red-polka-dot pajamas in the cool night, slipped on the wet grass, skidded on my butt into a camellia bush, and it didn’t matter at all that I’d twisted my ankle and stained my rayon bottom a bright indelible green. There was a heaven after all, and I was in it.

  It was the fall of 1944, and the whole campus felt like a pajama party, with an unending supply of Ritz crackers and pimiento cheese and bottles of Coke. Every night, in one dorm room or another, we read aloud the dirty parts of Gone with the Wind and passed around the lone bottle opener, as valuable as a Zippo lighter, since all such metal objects, along with Lucky Strike Green, had gone to war. Because Coke contained caffeine and God knows what other stimulants, it had been taboo in my house, where even ginger ale was permitted only for upset stomachs. To be able to open any kind of soft drink with an experienced flip of the wrist was to open the mouths of new worlds. In comparison to the other girls, I was a yokel out of Li’l Abner, and after my prolonged confinement, I burst forth with the force of Kickapoo Joy Juice kept too long in the jug.

  For me, no campus revolution was bigger than the change in what and how I ate. At table I was like a child who knew how to walk but had to learn to run. My friends teased me without mercy when they discovered that I was always the last to clean my plate because I was still Fletcherizing my meat with fifty chews per bite. They would count down in unison: “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, SWALLOW.” I tried to explain that I’d never had meat that you couldn’t cut with a spoon, except at Pat’s, where her grandmother served delicious little lamb chops that you could eat in a single bite. But with practice I improved and became such a speedy chewer in my first semester that I won a contest in the spring by stuffing a whole pie in my mouth before I swallowed.

  For the first time in my life, I drank coffee, black and at every meal, despite Grandpa H.’s warnings that my skin would turn sallow. But I wasn’t ready to defy family prohibitions against tobacco and alcohol. Because of Pat I’d been accepted by the “fast” gang of frosh girls. Most of them smoked and drank beer and, at places where they could use their fake IDs, cocktails. I didn’t know how to do any of those things and didn’t want to learn. Besides, I couldn’t afford cigarettes or booze on my dollar-a-month allowance, which would buy a weekly lime and Coke and no more.

  I waited tables in the college dining rooms and at a local eatery called the Mish and jerked sodas at the Student Coop, but my earnings were a drop in the bucket. Dad had driven a taxi in the summer to pay my tuition, but there was no money for books, let alone extras. Every time I bought a bag of french fries, I worried. Fortunately Claremont weather allowed me to wear sandals and a raincoat through most of the winter, and Pat sometimes let me borrow one of the sweaters Gran had knit her, but I felt shabby. I hated being poor. Blue jeans helped even that score, and nobody fought fiercer than I for the right to wear them.

  Try to imagine a time, dear reader, when college women were not allowed to wear trousers of any kind outside their rooms, and certainly not in their classrooms. These were the days when professors addressed their female students as “Miss.” Our regulation costume was loose sweaters, pleated skirts, bobby socks, and penny loafers for day wear, silk stockings (or leg makeup with a line drawn up the back for a seam) and heels and a dress-up dress for dinner, served by student waiters at candlelit tables in Harwood Court. At dinner each Miss was to be an exemplar of Gracious Living, as defined by our Dean of Women, Miss Gibson, to keep the home fires burning with a civilized flame.

  But having escaped my stepmother’s hearth, I was wildfire, eager to incinerate all rules and regulations that threatened my new freedom. I organized a sit-in, or wear-in, of blue jeans on campus, first outside the classroom and then in the classroom itself. Having won the right to pants, we now insisted on wearing our cotton plaid shirts outside them instead of tucked into a belted waistband. A gang of us often hitchhiked in shirttails and jeans down to Laguna Beach for a day in the sand. It was our patriotic duty to hitchhike, we expla
ined, to save on gas and tires; besides, guys hitchhiked everywhere. I began to be called in regularly to the housemother’s office at Harwood Court to explain our latest subversion of Gracious Living.

  In the middle of a war that stamped women as sexual inferiors as blatantly as it stamped the few men on campus 4-F, we were fighting a battle for sexual equality against a battalion of deans and housemothers and faculty wives wielding parietal rules more appropriate to the time of the Spanish-American War than the second global one. We were supposed to be in our dorms by 10:30 on weeknights and 12:30 on Saturdays. We had to get permission to leave campus overnight, were unenforceably but officially forbidden to consume alcohol at any time, were required to make our beds and keep our rooms clean. Men students had no chores and no rules whatsoever, except that they were not allowed to bring women into their rooms. This kind of sexual discrimination galled us, especially in matters of food and drink.

  The men ate in Frary Hall, famed for the Orozco fresco that dominated the Spanish mission interior of the dining room by means of a giant male nude, the figure of Prometheus squeezed into an arch and scowling at the fact that his genitalia, like those of Michelangelo’s Sistine Christ, had been excised by a genteel brush. If the men’s hall was grand, so was their food. Team sports were the excuse that allowed male students to get real meat—steak, roasts, chops—instead of the eternal gray casseroles of sludge that were our lot. And they could drink alcohol wherever they chose.

  The only food we shared on equal terms was ice cream, the gift of some hungrily remembering alumnus who bequeathed an eternal supply of ice cream of good quality with a choice of three flavors, vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry, to be offered at every meal but breakfast. So grateful were we for ice cream after sludge that within six months most of us had good reason to wear shirttails outside our hard-to-button jeans. (Flies were buttoned instead of zipped because zippers were made of metal, and that metal too had gone to war.)

  Then as now our regalia was full of paradox. We donned blue jeans, but we also curled our hair and powdered our noses and rubied our lips. When I think of the time I spent, from junior high onward, putting up my hair, I could cry. At the time, though, straight hair was unthinkable. If we were blond, we wore high pompadours like Betty Grable, to match our lipsticked mouths, but the rest of our hair had to fluff in waves. Hair was yet one more female curse, and so each night I sighed and wet the ends of each strand and curled it into a tight circle and pinned it to my scalp next to hundreds of other tightly wound strands.

  No effort was too great to land our man, and what else were we here for? I’d just met and fallen half in love with one of the handsomest men I’ve ever known. He was a pilot in the Army Air Corps whom I’d met on a blind date arranged by an older girl, a junior, who was dating one of his buddies. He was blond, brown-eyed, square-chinned, and as clean-cut nice as he was tall. I spent a weekend once with his pilot buddies and their girls, some of them already married to each other. We drove all night from Claremont across the Mohave Desert to Pearblossom, where the family of one of them had a cabin. The boys slept in one bedroom, the girls in another, and we sat together in front of a big fireplace in the room in between to sing songs like “Don’t Fence Me In.” But what I liked most was sitting on Bruce’s lap in the crowded back seat of the car on the night drive across the desert, resting my head and wavy hair on his chest and pretending to be asleep so that I could hear his heart beat and feel his jaw resting on my head. A sure Place.

  When he was stationed at March Field, he came a few times to Pomona to a dance or for an afternoon’s walk. But after he was sent to Boca Raton, I lost track because he stopped writing letters and my friend said he’d met a girl in Florida. I didn’t know he’d been shot down and killed on his first mission in the Pacific until two or three months after it happened. I wanted to play the heroine of tragic romance but couldn’t, because he’d already left me behind. Still, he was the most beautiful guy I ever saw and he died young.

  The war ended, at least the only one that counted, the one against the Japs, in the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, when I was working for the Riverside Recreation Department’s craft workshop in the basement of the municipal auditorium. Mostly we taught schoolkids how to tool leather and tint photographs and carve linoleum blocks for prints, but once a week our students were German and Italian prisoners of war shipped in from a camp outside town in their gray prison uniforms for a change of scene. They made little effort to tool leather, but they rolled their eyeballs and leered a lot. One day in August, the excitable high school teacher who managed the auditorium called me over to look at the headlines of the newspaper he was reading. “Would you look at that,” he said. “An atom bomb! Do you know what that means?” I didn’t. But no more did I know the meaning of what he’d shown me the day before, with the same kind of moral intensity. “Would you look at that,” he’d said, displaying a circle of white rubber taken from some eighth-grade schoolboy’s wallet left carelessly behind. “Can you imagine! Do you know what that means?” I registered the shock he demanded, but I hadn’t the foggiest.

  The vets returned in a trickle, then a wave. At Pomona we girls had been running the campus, occupying the posts of leadership, staging the shows, editing the newspaper, practically managing the football team. Overnight we were displaced by all those guys we’d been waiting for by not sitting under the apple tree with anybody else but them. Overnight we were busted, not from officer to private, but to comfort woman.

  There were obvious wounded. Guys with one real leg and one false, guys with scarred faces and arms, guys with dark glasses where their eyes had been. There were a great many wounded whose bodies were intact but whose psyches were damaged in ways we knew nothing about. I had a blind date with one of the first vets back, set up by a senior whose Army vet fiancé knew his friend dug blondes. But I came down with flu and had to cancel, which I thought bad luck until I learned that the blonde he got instead of me he’d tried to rape. The weekend after that, he drove his car up to Mount Baldy, got roaring drunk, and cruised off a cliff on the way down. Later, they found a suicide note in his dorm.

  While we had marked time, time had marked them, marked even the men who hadn’t seen combat, who’d had to fight boredom instead of bayonets. No one escaped guilt. Men were guilty if they hadn’t fought overseas, they were guilty if they’d fought and survived. And girls were guiltiest of all, for not being in the flesh what the men imagined they had left behind, those movie-perfect images of purity and innocence that were counterparts of their own lost selves. We tried hard to comfort them for all their losses. We put their heads in our laps and stroked their hair and let them cry. We listened to their war stories and their tales of comic snafus and their broken laments and never once dreamed of asking for equal time. We were not equal. We had done nothing. We had nothing to tell.

  And like men from the beginning of time, these soldier men wanted us virgin pure but ready for carnal knowledge. I had a year’s grace, because in my sophomore year I was pursued and pinned, fraternity style, to a vet who was the equivalent of a Christian Endeavor youth leader. He neither smoked nor drank nor swore, but came out of the Army as squeaky clean as he went in. Before the war, he’d worked as one of the army of cartoonists at Disney Studios, and now he sold us signed copies of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck suitable for framing. At parties where other vets were tanking up and falling down, he ostentatiously drank milk by the quart. Despite the ridicule of my pals, I was happy to join him in milk drinking. I was less happy to join him in any heavy-duty activity below the neck.

  Like other vets, he was horny. Unlike other vets, he was patient. My gang lived that year in an old-fashioned three-story frame house with a front and side porch and a live-in housemother. Just before curfew, which had been extended to 11:30 on weeknights, the dark porches would be clogged with couples gone surreally silent, girls pushed up against the walls as if the guys were using them to keep the building from collapse. The lights
snapped on at 11:25 sharp, to reveal faces with hair askew, lipstick smeared, men slipping into the shadows, girls staggering through the front door and up the stairs to collapse on beds in fits of giggles and exhaustion.

  We wore fluffy angora sweaters in pastel colors that year and wondered why guys couldn’t keep their hands off us, off them—the rounded nippled breasts—searching for them under sweaters, under bras, with palms and fingers and lips. They searched us as we necked on grassy lawns and sandy beaches and chintz settees and in the front and back seats of cars. On a sunny afternoon my vet and I necked in the empty bleachers of the Greek theater in the middle of the scrub area of oaks and cactus we called the Wash, and for the first time I let him take my sweater off and then my bra. When he wanted to undo my skirt I made him stop, but I let him take my hand and put it on the lump in his trouser front. He wanted to feel me up, but I didn’t want to feel him. I didn’t want equal time. I was terrified of sex.

  When my vet’s patience finally ran out, after he’d driven me all the way to Riverside because Grandpa H. had just died, and we necked in the moonlight at Fairmount Park and I still wouldn’t go all the way, he took back his pin and I stopped drinking milk. The preferred beverages were Acme beer in quart bottles (for parties a wooden keg) and demijohns of Gallo wine that you opened by screwing off the caps and poured into paper cups with ice and soda water, so that you could get through large quantities of it without vomiting. At first I liked the wine and soda better than the beer because beer was bitter and made you burp. But I knew as little about wine as I knew about sex, and after a wine party with Pat and a group of vets, I lay on my back on my bed with the whole room gyrating and a voice from outer space saying over and over, “I am not drunk.”