Onions in the Stew

by Betty Macdonald

  “How perfectly disgusting!” Anne said.

  Don said, “I wonder if you’d rinse out a few pairs of my sun-tans.”

  Anne said, “Of course, all my clothes are clean, but I think I’ll wash all my summer clothes again and put them away.”

  Joan said, “Can you wash coats in washing machines? My school coat has mustard and a lot of hamburger juice on it.”

  I said, “Before we get too enthusiastic about washing, let’s see if the wringer works.” I turned off the washing part and turned on the wringer. The rollers began turning smoothly against each other, neatly pressing the water out of a piece of seaweed picked up on the trip.

  “Okay,” I said to Don and the girls. “Everything’s working fine. Bring on your dirty clothes.”

  Then I reached in to get one of the dishtowels and the next thing I knew I was across the room, crumpled against the cement wall, and Anne and Joan were bending over me wailing, “Mommy, Mommy, are you hurt?”, and Don, who understands electricity was saying soothingly from across the room, “Probably sand in the brushes.”

  Don finished the washing though, with Anne and Joan and me crouched in the doorway waiting for him to be electrocuted. Nothing happened except that he took all the buttons off Joan’s blouses with a popping sound like shelling peas. Afterward he took the washing machine all apart, removed some seaweed and the sand from the brushes and a clamshell or two from the tub, oiled it and said he could not understand what had happened as he could find nothing basically wrong. He intimated that it must have been some careless action on my part. However, as long as we had it, that washing machine had those occasional rebellious spells, shooting sparks from the water, grinding things up in the wringer, secreting a red sock in its bowels so it could turn everything pink, even knocking down a devout Christian Scientist who had no fear.

  After Don had finished the washing and we had all had some more coffee and cocoa, we began the unpacking, the melding of our things with the already established, the taking down of the flower prints and trying to find the right spots for our pictures. While I worked I handed down rapid fair decisions on vital questions such as: “Isn’t this my blouse, Mommy, you can tell by the ink stain on the collar, see?”—“It’s my blouse, Betty, you know perfectly well it is. Don’t you remember, it is the one Madge bought but it was too small so she gave it to Alison and you took it because Alison had taken your checked one and you gave it to me?” and “Betty, are you going to let the girls wear all my sweaters?” (That was the year for girls to wear men’s sweaters.) “They have already taken all my sweatshirts.” The last was wailed plaintively at me from the bedroom where Don was rapidly filling up all the drawers with his things. I still keep my underwear, stockings, girdles, gloves, jewelry, diary, nightgowns, and scarves in the two little drawers in my bedside table. My sweaters and shorts share a blanket drawer under one of the bunks with the bathing suits.

  Those pictures in movie magazines of the star’s bedroom with a separate closet for purses and another separate closet for fur coats, make me drool with envy. Not that I would have anything to put in them but it would be so wonderful, when wishing to change purses, not to have to stand on the hamper and fish around in the top closet at the end of the bathtub, where I also keep eight hundred clean flour sacks (remains of chicken-farming days—second attempt—different husband) and suitcases.

  The next problem was getting our food to fit into the medium-sized icebox. All refrigerators seem to be designed for people who buy half a turkey, and as I am the type of shopper who makes butchers call out, “Here comes Betty, Al—better get out that big new side of beef,” I ended up, as I always shall, with a large carton of green vegetables outside on the umbrella table, and the icebox stuffed to the point where I had to sneak the door open and even then the tomatoes delicately balanced on top of the milk bottles bounced into the woodbox. The ham was as big as Tudor and required an unconscionable amount of room.

  “Oh, well,” I said comfortingly to myself as I rammed the refrigerator door shut against it, “we can have ham and eggs for breakfast, cold ham and potato salad for supper, ham sandwiches, ham omelettes, ham and lima beans, split pea soup—we won’t have to buy anything for weeks and weeks!”

  Then we sat down to supper and Don said with disbelief, “Ham? Again?”

  Anne said, “Marilyn’s family always goes to a restaurant on Sunday.”

  Joan said, “Johnny’s mother makes fried chicken every Sunday. She bakes her own bread too.”

  Anne said, “Marilyn’s mother certainly is a lot of fun, huh, Joanie?”

  Taking a minute sliver of ham on his fork and staring at it without enthusiasm, Don said, “Isn’t that my yellow sweater you’re wearing, Anne?”

  “You mean this sweater?” asked Anne in absolute amazement. “This yellow one?”

  “Yes, that one,” said Don levelly.

  Carefully cutting off a piece of ham the size of a grain of rice Anne said with elaborate unconcern, “I’m positive this is Uncle Cleve’s sweater. I can tell by the way the cuffs turn back.”

  Joan who was fixing herself an enormous ham sandwich, an operation usually forbidden at the table but now abetted by approving nods and smiles from me, remarked in a pleasant conversational tone, “That’s a lie. I saw you get that sweater out of Don’s drawer over at the apartment yesterday.”

  “What a sneak!” Anne said furiously. “What a nasty little double-crossing sneak. All you ever do is spy and tattle and get-in-good-with-the-company. I just loathe you. . . .”

  “That will do,” I said hopefully.

  “Who took my navy blue sweatshirt?” Don asked. “It is the only one I have that is really big enough for me.”

  “Navy blue? Sweatshirt?” Joan asked innocently.

  “I have just a few things” (twelve drawers—two cupboards—three shelves and he was not nearly unpacked), Don said plaintively, “and I would like to keep them.”

  Her eyes brimming with hurt, Anne said, “I thought this was Uncle Cleve’s sweater but if you’re going to be so terribly disagreeable I’ll take it off right now.” She flounced to her feet and I shouted, “Sit down and eat your ham.”

  Joan said, “Does your navy blue sweatshirt have long sleeves and some white paint on the shoulder?”

  “Yes,” Don said.

  “I haven’t seen it,” Joan said.

  “Well, now who’s a liar?” Anne warbled.

  “More ham, anyone?” I said my voice trembling with emotion. “Please have some more ham!”

  Then came getting the girls ready for school. Joan’s approach to the problem was very simple. She merely asked me forty-two times if I had put three whole sandwiches in her lunch. I said I had and she said what about an apple—I said yes and she said cookies? Yes. She was ready.

  Anne’s preparation involved first going through and despising all her clothes, then choosing the least loathsome things and ironing them, even things as smooth as mirrors. She wouldn’t allow me to iron them—too careless; or Joan—too stupid. She was halfway through her third blouse–first one turned out to be “absolutely filthy”—tiny speck on part that tucked into the skirt—the second—“entirely rotted under arms from perspiration. How I loathe hand-me-downs! How I wish we were rich. How I despise living in the country. Why do we always have to change schools every five minutes” (this was the first change to my knowledge). I showed her that the “entirely rotted” was merely a small wrinkle from being packed. This brought tears to her eyes so I let her alone, and went out to put breakfast on the table. She called to me excitedly. I put down my spatula and went into the living room, steeled to combat rot and filth.

  She was standing by the ironing board, her face sparkling with excitement and delight. “Look, Mommy, isn’t he adorable?” she said pointing at a large buck standing on the porch peering in the window. “Just imagine, a real live deer on our porch. Oh, I love living in the country! It’s so romantic!”

  So we enrolled the children in
school. Joan in the seventh grade of the Vashon Grade School, a comfortable brown-shingled building about three miles from us; and Anne as a freshman in the Vashon High School, a large modern brick edifice about seven miles away. To get the school bus the girls had two choices. If the tide was low they could walk to the Sanders’ (the neighbors with the road) and go up their road. If the tide was high they had to walk the county trail and get on the bus down by the store at the dock. Joan liked her school and seemed to get along very well, only occasionally bringing me tales of hiding the lids to the inkwells, breaking a window in the gym, eating somebody else’s lunch, for which misdemeanors she was, very unfairly, I thought, kept after school, which meant she had to walk the three miles home, usually in the rain. The first time this happened I threatened heatedly to go up to school and do something. Anne and Joan were delighted.

  Joan said, “Yes, and you just tell Miss Harwood that the doctor said I have to chew gum.”

  Anne said, “Be sure and wear your gray suit and explain to her that we are from the city.”

  Don told me not to be hasty and produced from his past several valiant incidents having to do with his plowing through blizzards on cardboard soles carrying mush sandwiches, he was so eager to get an education.

  Because of my job or weakness or both, I never did get up to school until the night of the Christmas entertainment, which was absolutely charming with Joanie singing a solo and a wonderful simplicity of spirit which could be found only in a country school. Even I didn’t have enough of the Hun in me to inject an old complaint into such an atmosphere. So on occasion, as long as she attended Vashon Grade School and as long as she indulged in climbing out of windows and throwing chalk, and so on, Joan was kept after school and had to walk home. Actually, now that I think about it, it was a very healthy punishment.

  Anne immediately loathed her school because: a. It was a school. b. “They sing hymns at noon instead of dancing.” c. “All the teachers are missionaries.” d. It was in the country. So, many evenings when I came home from work, I would learn that Anne had stayed home with some mysterious ailment. Aching toenails—non-focusing eyes—pains in her heels. On such evenings I would be greeted with a sparkling, clean house, stuffed pork chops and hot apple pie for dinner, all the ironing done, the beds made. The temptation to keep this little homebody home was almost overpowering. But my conscience told me that I must force her to continue with book learning, especially in view of the fact that she was reputed to have a terrific I.Q. 170 or -2—all she apparently wanted was to learn to card wool and make biscuits. Even when I stopped work the following February, I had only a little better luck getting Anne all the way to school. If I did get her on board the school bus, with her books and the assurance that her hot lunch was paid for (sandwiches from home were so vulgar), I had no guarantee that she wouldn’t go into a decline on the way to school and have to spend the day lying on a couch in the nurse’s room. Also she either did no work or work they couldn’t understand. How well I remember the day I was summoned to school and presented, via trembling hand, one of Anne’s compositions entitled, “I Don’t Believe in God and Neither Does My Uncle Frank.”

  Joan’s way was so much easier. Explaining her A’s and B’s, she said, “Well, all you have to do is to get a man teacher and be nice to him and then he makes you a checker and checkers don’t have to take tests.”

  As soon as we had the children in school and were reasonably sure they knew where to catch the bus according to the tides, Don and I went back to work. Don had to catch (and that is the right word) the five-fifteen ferry in order to be at Boeing’s Renton plant, about twenty miles from the dock, at six-thirty.

  Our schedule then was: up at four-thirty (I fear if I have five husbands I’ll always manage to find one that gets up at some ungodly hour)—Don make fire in the trash burner—turn on oven to defrost the kitchen—Betty make coffee and Don’s lunch (“Try to always use that homemade mayonnaise that melts and makes the sandwiches like wet washrags,” Don said bitterly). I usually set the table and laid out everything the night before. After he had dressed, Don unhurriedly drank his coffee and orange juice, ate his poached eggs, and leisurely lit a cigarette. After the third drag, he would suddenly stare unbelievingly at the clock, leap out of his chair, grab his raincoat, hurl himself through the door into the rain and blackness. I would pour myself a cup of coffee and heave a sigh of relief just as Don, having forgotten to put new batteries in his flashlight or to take his lunch, would come bursting in again. While he did either or both of these things, I went out on the porch and tried to check by sound, whether the tide was in or out. If it was out we were glad because he could go by the beach. If it was in he had to take a tiny slippery overgrown footpath through the woods to the Sanders’. He was gone again. The clock said one minute of five. Don allowed sixteen minutes to run up the beach, get in his car, start the motor and drive the mile and a half to the ferry. He always made it unless the car wouldn’t start, there was a log across the road, the ferry left early or he was out of gas.

  At five-thirty I’d fix the girls’ breakfast—at least set their places at the table and get out the bread and the toaster and the peanut butter and the cocoa—then I’d go through the icy living room, down a dank passageway to the dark, cold little service room where the shower was. This location of the shower, so handy for swimmers, had seemed adorable to me in the summer. In the winter it seemed like something overlooked by the Marquis de Sade. After I’d checked the floor, the bathmat and the inside of the shower curtain for slugs, spiders, centipedes and wood lice, I would turn on the shower full force hot and let it heat up the room while I ran up and made our bed. About this time I was not spilling over with wild enthusiasm for life on an island. Fortunately, five minutes under the hot shower restored my spirits to normal, or is it?

  At six-thirty I awakened the girls, refereed their morning quarrels over underwear, skirts, sweaters, bobby pins, ironing, socks, who did the most work the day before and who was my favorite child, decided with Anne, who was and is a wonderful cook, what we would have for dinner, reminded Joanie, who wasn’t but is now a wonderful cook, to be sure and bring up wood when she got home from school and checked them both for lunch money and my perfume.

  Then I kissed them, grabbed my flashlight and left. It was always seven o’clock and my ferry left at seven-twenty and I should have left at six-fifty and now I would have to run the last quarter of a mile. I wore loafers and woolen socks over my silk stockings, carried my office shoes along with my lunch, purse, current book and grocery list in a large green felt bag.

  The county trail connecting our beach with the rest of the world, begins at a cluster of mailboxes down by the dock, meanders along the steep southeast face of the island about fifty feet above the shore, and ends at our house. Years ago when the passenger boat used to stop at the dock just south of us, the trail began there and went north, probably ending about where it begins today. Now all that is left of this part of the county trail is a slender overgrown path through the woods—a path that leads over huge fallen logs, through head-high nettles, into a stream and right up the face of a blue clay bluff. From the ferry dock to Dolphin Point the present county trail is quite respectable, with occasional rustic bridges over steep ravines, wooden flumes to carry off winter torrents, even small scattered pockets of gravel, all evidence that the trail has at some time or other been given at least a cursory glance by the county. From Dolphin Point to our house, it is little more than a cow path, narrow, garlanded with wild blackberry, syringa, elderberry, salmonberry and wild cucumber. In the spring and summer it is treacherous with the nettles which seem to spring up even while they are being slashed, and crowd the sensitive traveler from both sides. In the fall the trail is slippery and lacy with spiderwebs stretched trustingly every night from elderberry to syringa about face high. I used to try to catch these spiderwebs by swinging my green felt bag ahead of me as I walked, but if it was dark when I left the house (and it usually was) I ofte
n missed and ran the rest of the way to the ferry clawing wildly at an invisible veil complete, I was afraid, with a dot that was alive.

  When I reached the “big tree,” an old growth fir almost twelve feet in diameter, and about a quarter of a mile from the dock, I could see whether the ferry was in, really in or going out again.

  It was from the “big tree” that I always had to start running.

  According to a testimonial I read recently by a man who had lost thirty-six pounds eating nothing but steak (typical male reducing diet—wife no doubt expected to accomplish similar results on soup meat and mineral oil mayonnaise), during the final twenty minutes of a half-hour walk, while the stomach is empty, one pint of bile is drained and this greatly retards hardening of the arteries. Just feel my arteries, they are like velvet.

  This boisterous early morning activity also started my blood circulating, churning, really, and by the time I got to work I was not only bileless, I was boiling hot and it was very disheartening to step into an office heated to eighty degrees, blue with cigar smoke and filled with bloodless co-workers who shrank away from even the tiny draught of the swinging door and threatened to go straight to the “big boss” if I didn’t “close that transom right now!”

  Why did I put up with so many hardships? Why didn’t I quit? Because when we bought the house we had counted on our both working for at least six months. Also there was a war and all able-bodied Americans were supposed to work. Also we needed the money. This brings me to an interesting observation on false pride. Why is admitting that you work because you need the money a shameful thing, like snoring? Has age anything to do with this? Has it anything to do with inflation? It seems to me that every day I run into another “false pride” who says about her job, “I’m not really working” (little laugh) “I just got bored staying home and I love people. I think people are so interesting and one sees so many people in my work. Honestly, Betty, you could write a book about the people I see, though of course we do get an awfully nice class of people but actually even poor people are interesting. I just love to study people.”