My Kitchen Wars Page 7
Invasion of the Waring Blenders
I didn’t care a hoot about the boxes of silver that arrived by the carload, Railway Express, containing objects I’d seen only in shopwindows. Thick platters, thin bonbon dishes, water pitchers, sugars and creamers, salt and pepper shakers, pickle dishes lined in glass, jam pots, bud vases, candlesticks, a dozen silver-rimmed glass ashtrays for individual place settings. In my family the good silver was silver plate. This bright new world stamped “sterling” had a romantic glow, but all I could think of was the work it would take to keep it polished. Besides, this loot was from people I’d never met and never would, people obligated to the parents of the groom.
Paul’s mother had supplied me with a list of people she’d wanted invitations sent to—invitations I’d bought at great expense at Saks Fifth Avenue, engraved on cream-colored stock. I wanted to do the thing right. When I married Paul, I was marrying Pasadena, but fortunately none of Paul’s mother’s friends would know that we sold most of the silver to a secondhand shop in Boston as soon as the honeymoon was over. Pasadena was three thousand miles away from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where we got married in Christ Church because of the Revolutionary War bullet hole in its wooden door. I know that history, tangible in a bullet hole, is one reason we’d both fled California for the East. What I can’t explain is why I’ve kept a big box of the remaining silver all these years, unused and tarnished, like fossil relics from the Stone Age.
Besides the lode of silver, we also reaped a set of Revere Ware, a pressure cooker, two copper chafing dishes, a toaster, an electric waffle iron, a wooden salad bowl and matching individual bowls, a wooden salad serving set, a carving set, a coffee percolator, a copper teakettle, and—the only gifts we cared about—not one but two Waring blenders. It was June 1949, and the Waring blender celebrated not just the end of the war, when technical ingenuity could once again be applied to the domestic front, but the end of Prohibition, for this was a machine designed to mix drinks. While Prohibition may have ended in 1933 for some, for others of us the Eighteenth Amendment was the Eleventh Commandment, engraved by the hand of God and enforced by a local, totalitarian Moses. In my family, Grandpa Harper. In Paul’s family, Grandmother Fussell.
When I met Paul, Grandmother Fussell was a mere young thing in her eighties. She’d been widowed for over fifty years, soon after she and her husband came to Pasadena from Philadelphia to improve his lungs. She bore two sons before he died of tuberculosis, and she was left alone to raise them in paths of righteousness. One escaped to become a journalist in Seattle, the other stayed to become a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles and to let his mother rule the roost of a distinctly Victorian henhouse. As a first-grade teacher, Grandmother Fussell had taught generations of Pasadenans to read and write high moral sentiments in verse, an art she practiced personally and explicated professionally as head of the local chapter of the Robert Browning Society. On the domestic front, her domain was the Sunday dinner table, where she terrorized her daughter-in-law and her brood each week after services at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church.
To terrorize Mother Fussell took some doing. Wilma was a short, square-jawed, black-browed woman with a quick sense of humor and an Irish temper to match. Her eyes were so deep blue they were black, and by the time I knew her she was as wide as she was high. We met her at the train station in Boston a week before the wedding, and when I saw this round pot roast of a woman with her hat stuck on square, puffing along the platform in her sensible shoes, I said to Paul, joking, “Hey, that must be your mother now.” “That is my mother,” he said, not joking at all.
When I first visited the family manse in Pasadena, Mother Fussell opened her linen cupboards, her china cupboards, her cabinets of glassware, her chests of silver, with the pleasure of a little girl showing off the furniture in her dollhouse. That’s what mothers did. They bought things with the money given them by their husbands, who were always at the office and never home. They bought things for the house they spent all their time running, with the help of a hopelessly incompetent Lucinda, or Geneva, or Clarissa, and despite children who were always making a mess.
Mother Fussell was a fanatic cleaner and a good sewer, but a terrible cook. She was a carbo-loader who composed meals of mashed potatoes, buttered rolls, and macaroni and cheese to accompany the dried-out roasts and mushy vegetables, all of them penitential acts before the hallelujah of ice cream, cookies, and cake, all three rejoicing together, unless it was ice cream, cookies, and pie. While tobacco and alcohol were outlawed in every form, just as in my house, food of any kind was sanctioned as long as it was sweet. When her Paulie was a teenager, she stuffed him with candies and pastries until he too grew fat. Fat, he would stay home with her instead of chasing after footballs or girls.
Mother Fussell had put on weight at eighteen with her first baby, when her long black hair was still tied with a white bow, and she took off the bow but not the weight. Sixty years later she died of a diabetic heart attack, hating her oversize clothes, her sensible shoes, the body that had betrayed her with its addiction to foods that were her comfort. A year after she died, Father Fussell married a widow, a friend of them both, who was slim as a willow wand and wore pretty high-heeled pumps. In his rise to riches during the Depression, Father Fussell had outgrown his young bride, socially and intellectually. Her childlike forthrightness and emotional bluntness, often a source of comedy, could also have been a trial to a lawyer known for his discretion.
Paul was more like his mother than he knew, and he expected other women to be just like her, only smarter. When we announced our engagement in the spring, he gave me a drawerful of socks to darn and a number of buttonless shirts to mend. His first step in planning the wedding was to draw up a list of household equipment: 2 bath towels, 2 hand towels, 2 washcloths, 2 pair sheets, 3 blankets, 2 pillows, 1 bedspread. Marriage was about having a house and furnishing it.
Mother Fussell donated money for china and silver. We flouted her taste but not her aim, buying stoneware from Bonniers instead of flower-patterned Haviland from B. Altman’s, and choosing handcrafted silver from Shreve, Crump and Low in Boston instead of a stamped national brand like Rogers. We took pride in our independence, but we didn’t say to hell with all that and take off for Europe. Such a move was as unthinkable as to live together without getting married, which I’d suggested but Paul nixed. Only bohemians did that.
After the wedding, we’d held a small reception at the house of Paul’s brother, Ed, who’d just finished his doctorate at Harvard before returning West. We’d decided to serve a temperance fruit punch for the sake of Mother Fussell, but Ed added a bottle of vodka for the sake of the rest of us. The day was unseasonably hot, and Mother Fussell drank glass after glass of “this delicious punch” and flirted with the minister until she sat on her glasses and squashed them and had to be helped back to her hotel. It was in this state that Paul was finally able to persuade her not to accompany us on our honeymoon.
If you could be almost virgins, any more than you could be almost pregnant, we were. Although we’d tentatively explored each other’s bodies during the months before our marriage when we spent a few furtive weekends in hotels in New York or Boston, perjuring ourselves when we signed the register as man and wife, our shared emotion had been terror that the house dick would knock down the hotel door and expose us. Sex out of wedlock was a crime in Irish Catholic Massachusetts. So was sex within wedlock if procreation was not the aim. In Massachusetts, even condoms were illegal. In New York, venery was more venal, and by convincing a doctor I was about to get married, I got fitted for a diaphragm. The diaphragm, like the Waring blender, was an apparatus with talismanic power because it seemed not just to redeem the forbidden but to wallow in it.
Paul was as inexperienced as I, vet though he was. While his platoon mates had frequented brothels in Strasbourg and Paris, he’d read Henry James. We hid our ignorance behind nicknames and cleverness and literature. In our love letters, Phil Phallus wept tears of longing fo
r Vera Vulva and, summoning Shakespeare, wanted “a hole to put his lolly in.” Paul was Nicor, the little water monster in England’s epic Beowulf. I was Nanny, the heroine of English nursery rhymes, whose sole function was to comfort Nicor.
Our honeymoon is forever associated for me with water monsters of another kind. We’d rented for the summer a cottage on Cape Cod. It sat by itself on a point of land surrounded on two sides by tidal waters that cut their way through a splendid beach in their rush to the sea. Our eager real estate agent had assured us that we could step out our front door and take a swim at will. She failed to mention that the water was chockablock with weird creatures we’d never seen before. They looked like frying pans with tails for handles, and they scuttled back and forth silently but with speed, looking to mount a mate. To step into the water was to risk being surrounded by horseshoe crabs, diligently copulating.
That’s what we were doing inside, discovering each other’s bodies in an orgy of exploration. I fingered the scarred indentations on Paul’s back and leg where the mortar had hit. I couldn’t get over how smooth his chest was, how hairy his legs. “Let me look at you,” he’d say, telling me how beautiful I was, even as I kept trying to cover myself with a sheet. We numbered each other’s moles and warts, ribs and vertebrae—we were both very thin—surprised at our sameness as well as our differences, and making a game of our fears. We played all day and all night and all next day, until guests began to come. Friends, professors, acquaintances dropped by, anyone we’d ever known and lots we’d never seen before, since we’d been fool enough to mention that we had a large number of beds in our honeymoon cottage by the sea.
Fortunately, some of these people introduced me to yet another water monster. I was skeptical about eating lobsters, which seemed to me as grotesquely armed as a horseshoe crab, but I was assured that the crustacean concealed meat while the arthropod did not. One of our college pals, who’d been East longer than we, demonstrated by filling a large tin wash bucket with water and laying in a bed of seaweed. He was a war vet who’d been through Iwo Jima and knew how to distinguish man from beast, and how to kill either, when necessary. He popped some lobsters in the pot, clapped a lid on top, and held it down with both hands as they bucked and reared in a vain attempt to escape. He cracked open a red claw for me and extracted in one piece the tender flesh with vestigial thumb, exactly the shape of its carapace. The buttery, delicate succulence of that flesh, and the hurdle of getting at it, was as erotic to me as any porn flick.
In those days no one thought of saving shells for stock. We filled garbage bags with lobster carcasses and took them to the city dump for the gulls to clean up. That’s before I’d learned either to cook or to plan ahead. We were living gloriously, day by day, in the moment. One of my friends, a poet who was also honeymooning with her groom and had dropped in to stay a while, summed up the moment on a night when we’d all gone skinny-dipping in the moonlit waves and were trying to find our clothes. She was a large girl and she sat down naked on the sand with wet black seaweed hair. “I ope my legs to the sea,” she said, opening her arms and legs wide enough to take in all the lobsters and horseshoe crabs, not to mention the clams and mussels and oysters and flounder and haddock and cod in the whole Atlantic and in all the earth’s seas.
For a moment, we belonged to the elements. The rest of the time, Paul studied for his orals. By the end of the summer, he had to read and absorb all the works listed in chronological order in a booklet that staggered me in its scope—all of English language and literature, from Anglo-Saxon dental fricatives to Edwardian galloping dactyls (anything more recent didn’t count as literature because it hadn’t stood the test of time). Orals were a source of genuine terror among graduate students. A close friend of Paul’s had failed and, in disgrace, was studying to try them again.
Just what I was supposed to do while Paul studied was unclear. If the Victorian America we’d both grown up in and not yet out of had defined our feelings about sex, the war had solidified our feelings about gender, a word none of us used. We spoke of men and women, not of male and female. A woman’s job was to take care of her man. Somehow I hadn’t counted on just how categorical were the imperatives of marriage, but I soon found out.
The flash point was a salad dressing. Salad dressings that you made yourself instead of shaking them out of a bottle were a big deal then. So were salads made of any other lettuce than wedges of iceberg green. Most of us didn’t know there were other kinds. But I’d learned to make salad dressing in the blender, and one day on our honeymoon, on impulse I threw some salted peanuts into the oil and vinegar whirring in the machine. Although this was long before I’d ever heard of an Indonesian saté, I figured peanuts would make a good thickener. Paul was outraged.
“You don’t put peanuts in salad dressing.”
“Why not?”
“Salad dressing is one thing, peanuts are another.”
Again I was warned. I’d married a pigeonholer and a basic pair of pigeonholes became the ground of our running argument for the next thirty years: men were one thing, women another. Their positions in the Great Chain of Being had been fixed by God for all eternity. Read Milton, for chrissake. “He for God only, she for God in him.” No Waring blender, or any other modern technological advance, was going to join together what God had put asunder.
In Boston, the blender sat enthroned in the kitchen of our apartment in a tenement on Huntington Avenue. Our landlord was in prison, along with ex-Mayor Curley, for having attempted to burn down our building for the fire insurance. Drunks slept in the stairwell, and we sometimes had to climb over them to get to our door. Our own sleep was often disrupted by screams and the crash of shattering glass in neighboring tenements. The previous occupants of our apartment had painted all the walls and ceilings black, which we thought sophisticated, so we painted the odd pieces of cheap furniture we’d collected the same color, highlighting the stacked pine boxes we’d made into bookcases by painting them Harvard crimson. We were trying hard to be modern, just as I was trying hard to learn to cook some fodder more interesting to my new husband than hot dogs and bacon and eggs. The GI Bill was paying for his graduate school and we had a very small budget for food. But to make a thrifty casserole, to make your way around a kitchen, you had to know something more than how to open a bottle or can.
I’d known all along that my job at Knopf was temporary, although my boss had wanted to train me in the art of book production. He’d been disappointed and a little angry when I called him from a phone booth in the Whaler’s Bar on Lexington Avenue and told him I was taking the afternoon off because I’d just got engaged. But Paul knew, and I knew, that the husband’s job was to make money and to pay for the food, clothing, and shelter of the One Who Didn’t. The wife’s job was to prepare the food, mend the clothing, and tidy up the house of the One Who Did. Other duties of a housewife were to be pretty but not recklessly beautiful, to be attentive but never boring, to be intelligent but not to have a mind of her own, to be entertaining but never to upstage her husband, to be educated but for no practical or professional purpose, to be available for sex when wanted but not to want it on her own.
In comparison to the scrubby jobs I’d had before, this one seemed made in heaven. True, I was paid nothing, but after all, I hated to clean, didn’t know how to cook, and was learning sex by on-the-job training, so you could say I was no bargain. At last I could learn to be a Lady and to have Nice Things—Mary Pickford’s words when she began to make money in the movies after having worked the vaudeville stages of Canada and America since age five. To be released from the daily scramble of earning pennies to buy peanut butter sandwiches and moldy hot dogs, from the continual restitching of worn-out garments because you never had money to buy new, from the chronic headache of debts you could never repay, from the petty thrift of always taking a subway and never a taxi, from the automatic reflex of finding on a menu the cheapest dish, this was liberation. And I thanked God and Paul for it.
I’
d been given a loose-leaf notebook of recipes as a wedding present from the wife of one of Paul’s friends, an ex-Marine major. She’d typed them up in down-to-earth prose, as if telling me over a kitchen table how to get by until I had time to work out things for myself. It was as good a present as the blender. Her Simple Macaroni and Cheese fueled countless fifteen-hour days of study, once I’d weaned Paul from canned Franco-American spaghetti. I learned to make her Spaghetti Sauce from Scratch, with tomato paste and canned tomatoes and one clove of garlic (left whole and removed later), along with cinnamon, cloves, and celery seed. I learned to assemble the ingredients for Tuna Casserole with Lipton’s Onion Soup. Lipton assisted many items in our menu, especially the ubiquitous and always praised Clam Dip served with Ritz crackers. Dips themselves were strictly postwar and a welcome sign that cocktails would be served.
Our first cocktail party in the black hole was also my coming-out party with Paul’s fellow graduate students, most of them married and most of them Ed’s friends first. We decided to serve sherry to simplify things. Besides, you could get high on sherry fast. In addition to Clam Dip, we put on the dog with Hellfire Cheese, cream cheese spiked daringly with mustard, Worcestershire, and Tabasco. I’d bought a bright blue satin cocktail dress for the occasion. I launched myself into the crowded waters, promptly spilling a large glass of sherry down my front. Unfortunately the satin was too cheap to survive the baptism. The fabric didn’t quite dissolve, but it came out a different shade of blue as it dried, like the sleeve that had once disappeared into Paul’s mouth as a baby when his mother was cutting out a dress to sew. It was a story she told well, how she searched for the sleeve in vain until she spied a sliver of fabric in the corner of little Paulie’s mouth and drew out, like a magician from his hat, an entire sleeve of rose chiffon. People wondered, when she wore her new dress, why one sleeve was rose and one was palest pink.