Onions in the Stew

by Betty Macdonald

  I, very innocent and not knowing that every used car on every lot in the United States of America is supposed to have belonged to either a sea captain or an old lady who only drove on Sundays, thought the car actually looked like an old lady. Plump and clean and navy blue and responsible.

  Don kicked the tires non-committally.

  “Drive her around the block,” the garageman said generously. “She’s a sweetheart.”

  We drove “sweetheart” around the block. She was quiet and sedate and her clock ticked.

  I said, “Let’s buy her.” The car was definitely a she. Don, who is not given to snap decisions and can take fifteen minutes to answer “Do you want mustard on your bologna sandwich?”, said nothing. He was considering.

  When we got back to the garage the man took us into his little office where he kept parts, waste, cans of oil, copies of the Police Gazette, empty coffee cups and bills of sale. He sat down in an old swivel chair and leaned way back. I sat on a straight chair. Don leaned against a shelf stacked with cans of anti-freeze which was very scarce at that time. The garageman began to talk first. He was very very sad about Don’s car. After a while Don began to talk. He was very very sad about the garageman’s car. Finally, suddenly, when I thought they were both going to cry, they came to terms and in practically no time at all we were wheeling along the highway in “sweetheart” who had only two noticeable flaws. Her trunk was now filled with books and she had no door handles on the inside. When I asked the garageman about the door handles he said, “Golly, I don’t know—probably took off because of children. You know how you’re always readin’ about kids openin’ the door when the car’s goin’ and fallin’ out in front of a truck?” He implied that we were mighty lucky that someone had been kind enough to save us from this tragedy. However, riding in a car without door handles on the inside made me feel like a canned peach peering out of its jar at the landscape.

  We were invited to spend the next weekend on Vashon Island. The Havers, whom we visited, had a charming house right on the beach, the tides were perfect for clamming; and Saturday night as Don and I lay in bed on their porch, listening to the slurp, splash, slurp of the waves against the sea wall, and watching the ferry gliding across the moonlit water, we decided that this was the perfect place. The beach was rich with clams and driftwood. The water was filled with salmon, sole, cod and Spanish mackerel. The soil was so fertile that syringa and alder grew twelve feet a season. The climate was warmer than Seattle, the ferry crossing took only fifteen minutes and it was walking distance from the ferry. The next morning, as we dug clams in the hot sunshine, we told George Haver, “We like this place. This exact spot. We want to live here.”

  George was glad that we liked his beach, but very discouraging about our finding anything to rent. He explained that all the people on that particular beach had been coming over there for thirty-five years and, even though there was no road and they had to walk in by a county trail and bring in all their provisions and possessions by boat or by wife, they were all very attached to their houses and never rented them. We were so downcast by this information that he took us for a boat ride around the point.

  In the course of the ride he said, “As long as you’re disappointed anyway, I’m going to show you a house that will spoil you for any other beach house.”

  He steered the boat to shore, pulled it up on a log and we climbed a small winding path to the house.

  He had told the truth. It was the most attractive house we had seen and it certainly did spoil us for all the sagging built-by-Grandpa-designed-by-the-cat structures we had seen and were to see. Unfortunately, however, the Hendersons, who were living in it and who had bought it from the doctor who had built it, were very happy there.

  “We are going to live here forever,” they told us, smugly.

  The house, built of hewn fir timbers, was snuggled on the lap of the plump green hillside. The roof was hand-split cedar shakes, each shake at least an inch thick. The rain and the salt air had turned it all a soft pewter color. The kitchen, which was small, had knotty pine walls with a bricked-in electric stove and a trash burner across one corner. Against the windows which looked at Puget Sound and Mount Rainier over an enormous window box filled with pink geraniums, was a Flemish blue drop-leaf table and four stools. The drainboard and insides of the cupboards were the same Flemish blue. The floor was pine planks put down with wooden pegs and calked. The living room, which opened from the kitchen by a swinging pine half-door, was about forty feet long, had the same plank floors (four by twelves), an enormous stone fireplace that went up two stories, a small rustic stairway leading to a balcony from which opened three small knotty pine bedrooms and a bath. At the south end of the balcony was the master bedroom. It had a beamed ceiling, pine walls and a fireplace with a copper hood. In all the rooms were hand-braided rugs and lovely pine furniture made by the doctor. There were two patios, one off the kitchen, one in the angle of the ell formed by the master-bedroom wing and the living room. They were made of rounds of cedar with flowering moss in between. Around the south patio was a rockery filled with heather. Above it on a knoll was a gnarled old apple tree. The ground under the apple tree was carpeted with blue ajuga and yellow tulips. Across the front of the house and available to the living room by French doors was a rustic porch overlooking the water and the sandy beach and facing Mount Rainier.

  It was the house everybody dreams of finding. But it definitely wasn’t for rent or for sale, so we finished our drinks, patted the dogs and said goodbye to Vashon.

  Then my sister Dede found and rented a small beach house on Quartermaster Harbor at the other end of Vashon Island. For the next few weeks each Saturday morning we would load the car with groceries, the children, Tudor the dog, Mother and her sketching things, bathing suits, sun-tan oil and fifty pounds of ice because the house had that kind of an icebox, and go to Vashon.

  In spite of having to stop the car every fifteen minutes for Tudor to be sick and so often not making it. In spite of my two dear little daughters acting as if we had put leg irons on them and were dragging them to the stocks because we were interrupting their regular Saturday and Sunday plans. In spite of the fact that the ice always leaked on something not improved by ice water, such as cigarettes or Cornflakes. In spite of the fact that the house was really very inconvenient with remarkably uncomfortable beds and a filthy little coal-oil stove that made even the orange juice taste like coal oil—we had a wonderful time. The water was warm for swimming. There were huge silvery piles of driftwood for beach fires. There were the mingled smells of fresh coffee and salt air. And there was sleep refreshing as only a sleep induced by too much sun, too much swimming and too much food, can be.

  Don and I became revitalized and renewed our efforts to find a place on Vashon on the water. We went to see George Haver again and he produced a brother-in-law in the real estate business who was affable, knew and didn’t care that we had no money, was familiar with every inch of Vashon Island and told the truth. He said, “Why don’t you just look at everything for sale or rent?” So we did.

  We looked at houses at the bottom of cliffs. We looked at crumbling houses furnished in sagging wicker and discarded pottery. We discovered that beach houses, no matter how attractive they are on the outside, are usually the catchalls for things not quite up to snuff or down to St. Vincent de Paul. With unrelieved regularity we saw lamp shades of pleated black chiffon over pink, black iron spears supporting faded brocade draperies, mahjong sets, large wicker trays with tassels, framed Maxfield Parrishes, frayed faded American oriental rugs, bulging Morris chairs, mostly with broken back controls, and wine jugs made into lamps. To say nothing of the entire sets of clear green glass dishes—the plates divided into stalls to keep three items of food from touching—the wooden candelabra with imitation gold wax dripped down the sides and the bunches and bunches of gilded cattails mixed with magenta everlasting flowers. Don and I got so that we could tell by the kind of fern in the abalone-shell hanging bask
et whether the rugs would be ragged Wilton or faded oriental.

  Still we kept on. After we had finished Vashon we went to Camano Island. We looked at Manchester on the Olympic Peninsula. We drove to Tacoma and Everett and even went clear up to the San Juan Islands, an archipelago of 172 islands lying between Vancouver Island and the mainland in the Strait of Georgia. The San Juans are about seventy-five miles north of Seattle but we told each other wistfully, “If we do find the place in the San Juans, perhaps we can manage with Mother until the war and our jobs are over.”

  Then one morning I was in a restaurant drinking coffee and dispiritedly leafing through the “For Sale—Waterfront” section of the paper when I saw what appeared to be an advertisement of the Henderson house on Vashon. The ad said: Lodge-type log house, huge stone fireplace, 400’ of sandy beach—for sale $7000 furnished.

  I called Mrs. Henderson at the office where she worked and she told me that it was their house. That her husband had been offered a wonderful job in California and they thought he should take it. I asked her why she hadn’t called me and she said, “Oh, I thought of course you had found a house by this time.” I choked back an impulse to say, “Oh, sure and while I was at it I worked out a plan for world peace and a cure for cancer.” Instead, I made arrangements to go over the next weekend. My hands were shaking as I hung up the phone.

  The next Saturday, as Don and I swung along the trail leading from the dock to the Hendersons’ house, carrying our share of the groceries and liquor for the weekend (unwritten law of beach Mrs. Henderson had said, but one obviously repealed the day we moved in) I said excitedly, “Don, I just know we are going to get this house. I feel it was meant to be. Won’t living over here be wonderful for the girls?”

  Don, who is a pure Scot on both sides of his family, is not exactly an optimist. In fact, if I were to be absolutely truthful, and I wouldn’t dare because we are so happily married, I would say that Don is a charter member, perhaps the founder, of that old Scottish brotherhood sworn always to bring bad news home even if it means mounting a rabid camel and riding naked over the Himalayas in winter.

  As we admired the huge virgin firs against the blue sky, breathed deeply of the fresh salty air—Vashon air is really so pure and clean that even coming from Seattle, which is also supposed to have good air, seems like stepping from a coal mine into an oxygen tent—and listened to the shrill happy summer sounds coming from the houses below us on the shore, I said again, “Don’t you have that feeling, Don? That this house was meant for us?”

  Don said, “I’d have more of that feeling if we had any money. There certainly is plenty of erosion along here.”

  But the house was for sale and the Hendersons had gotten it from the doctor who built it with no down payment because the doctor had to go in the Navy, and they were willing, really eager, to sell it to us the same way. We were to pay $150 a month until we had established a down payment, then we would go into the bank and have it refinanced. We were all terribly casual and gay, made more so by the fact that none of us had any money, didn’t want the others to find it out and I kept my hand over Don’s truthful mouth practically all day Sunday.

  We made arrangements to come out the next weekend with two payments (which we intended to borrow) and the house would be ours.

  “You see,” I said to Don as we stood on the upper deck of the ferry on our way home. “It was meant to be.”

  Don pointed at the cars bouncing onto the ferry, each one denting its exhaust pipe because the deckhand hadn’t lowered the ramp far enough, which he still doesn’t, and remarked gloomily, “That ramp isn’t down far enough.”

  CHAPTER III

  TWO MILLION IF BY SEA

  I GUESS that all of us have said at some time or another, “I will never allow things to dominate my life. I will keep my possessions down to a minimum.” If, like me, you have nurtured the idea that you have kept your possessions down to Deargrandmother’s Satsuma tea set and a few first editions, then you should move to an island. Try mixing that minimum with water and see what you get. Deargrandmother’s Satsuma tea set turned out to be three old trunks minus handles, filled with clothes and/or ingots, eight barrels of vases and dishes, stuff out of ten medicine cabinets, assorted boxes of canned goods, records, elk antlers, photographs, pillows, pots and pans, record players, bamboo rakes, skirt hangers, lamp shades, ironing boards and dog beds. My few first editions, supplemented by the contents of the trunk of Don’s car, were mistakenly left to rise in the moving van overnight and when we unloaded them at Vashon they had swelled into eighty-seven cartons filled with lead.

  This was October after an entire summer spent with the fluctuating Hendersons who would sell one weekend, the next greeted us with tears in their eyes and said they couldn’t bear to leave. My sisters Dede and Madge had married and moved into small apartments, Mother was to stay with my sister Mary while her husband was overseas, so I got the washing machine, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Mother’s portrait and the Christmas tree ornaments. There was also a gentlemen’s agreement that I would take my children, Mother’s dog and my cat if Mary would take the assorted turtles, goldfish and canaries belonging to the household. The first step was to move out of our apartment into Mother’s house. This was accomplished easily. We simply kept dumping things in the car and driving them to Mother’s until the apartment was empty. I packed. Don carried and drove. I started out very methodically. “Books—reference” I marked on the outside of a carton. “Sheets—towels” I marked on another. “Silverware” another. When Don attempted to help I said kindly but firmly, “You had better let me do it, dear. I know exactly what I am doing and I want things to be orderly.”

  “Living room draperies” I wrote on a neat newspaper bundle. “Candles, vases, bric-a-brac” I marked a carton. Then somehow I began running out of enough of the same thing to fill a box—also out of boxes and newspapers—also out of strength. By the end of the day I was rolling a jar of mayonnaise, a heel of salami and a half-filled bottle of Guerlain’s Blue Hour perfume in my tweed skirt and not even stamping the bundle “Perishable.”

  Next came getting the things to Vashon, which was easy too. Alison’s husband borrowed a moving van, someone else solicited an unemployed musician to drive it, Don and the children and I loaded it and the car and we were off. One last sentimental look at the old brown house revealed that we had left Mother’s portrait, the skis, and Tudor the dog, who didn’t care for cars and kept oozing in one side and out the other. The rearranging to get these things in took just the right amount of time for us to miss the ferry and wait an hour on the dock. Also, just as we turned onto the West Seattle Viaduct, Tudor reared up, put his paws on Don’s shoulders and threw up down the back of his blue cashmere sweater. Don groaned and looked accusingly at me. He couldn’t do much else because the traffic is always very heavy on the viaduct and a sudden stop or swerve might mean being squashed by a Standard Oil truck, and I for one certainly didn’t want gasoline all over my clean jeans, I told the girls gaily. Crowded in the front seat with Don and me were the two girls, the portrait, the elk antlers, and a lot of strained silence. When we got to the dock at last, I carefully maneuvered the sweater and T-shirt over Don’s head and substituted the red sweatshirt still warm from Mrs. Miniver, the cat. Tudor watched the operation reproachfully, the girls giggled behind their hands and Don’s expression, to put the kindliest interpretation upon it, was rage suffused with despair spread thinly over a boiling caldron of desire to commit wificide and dogicide.

  Things weren’t really going too badly, however, we kept saying loudly, hollowly. We had intended to get the ten-o’clock ferry, but, as is usually the case with expeditions of this kind, we weren’t even packed by ten. The ferry we had just missed was the two-thirty. Of course everybody was starving and the little store on the dock had only a gum-ball machine and a few O’Henry bars so stale the chocolate had turned to silver and the peanuts tasted like peach pits, but we ate them with gusto, even Tudor who the girls fel
t should be rewarded.

  “For what?” Don asked grimly.

  Harris, the musician, was sleeping in the van so we didn’t bother him.

  The day was lovely—hazy with a sun like a marigold. The tide was going out and the wet sand by the dock steamed faintly and gave off a nice seaweedy smell. “Wood will certainly be no problem anyway,” I said cheerfully, pointing out logs in huge jackstraw heaps along the shores on either side of the dock.

  “I like wood that is already sawed,” Don said, unenthusiastically.

  “Over at Marilyn’s summer home we gathered bark,” Anne said. “Even when it is soaking wet it burns keen.”

  “Remember those creosote logs we got at Dede’s?” Joan said. “There’s a nice little fat one. They weigh a lot but they certainly make a hot fire. Let’s get it, Don.”

  Don said sternly, “One of the first laws of the beach is that anything on your property belongs to you. The man who lives in that green house is probably counting on that nice fat little log for his fire tonight.”

  “Darn!” Joan said. “It’s just the right size.”

  “If there are creosotes on this side there are probably some on the other,” Don said.

  “But the tide will be high on our side,” Joan said.

  So Don explained about the tides and he apparently knew what he was talking about because he used words such as “lunar,” “barometric pressure,” “coastal configuration” and “tidal bore,” but I only half listened as I am very well satisfied with my conception of the tide situation, which is that every twelve hours somebody, perhaps the man in the moon, pulls the plug and lets out some of the ocean. After a while he turns on the faucet and fills it up again. If he is in a hurry we have a tidal wave.

  The wash from an aircraft carrier suddenly began pounding the shore. Because the tide was out, the waves slapped the flat beach with a tremendous noise like giant handclapping. The splintery old dock trembled and Tudor barked. Anne and Joan laughed and shouted and the day lost a little of its grimness and took on more of a holiday aspect.