Onions in the Stew

by Betty Macdonald

  The next morning Elizabeth Gage called me up and told me that she was sorry that I had felt it necessary to give her children a bath. She tried to keep them clean but it was so hard, and she hadn’t wanted the girls’ bangs cut as she was trying to grow them out so they could wear pretty little ribbons and Little Donny had said that they had been in bed most of the time and she was certainly sorry her children had been so much trouble but after all I had asked to take care of them—it certainly had not been her idea. . . .

  I found myself apologizing and explaining earnestly that the only reason I had given Baby a bath was because that was the only way I could stop her crying and the other children had asked to get in the tub, and so on, and so on. Elizabeth Gage listened politely then crisply said goodbye. I never saw the blanket or the pajama tops again.

  Anne and Joan were very dramatic about their rooms and Anne threw all the bedclothes, excluding the mattress only because she couldn’t lift it, out onto the patio and told me to have them “disinfected.” Joan said her room “smelled.”

  I learned from Connie that a Mrs. Anderson and her husband moved in to the cabin next to the Wheatons and for the rest of that summer she got Little Donny and Little Gail and Little P.J. and Baby and finally of course Elizabeth Gage because Everett was drinkin’ because “that cabin Betty made us take is so cramped we all feel like animals.”

  When I saw Elizabeth Gage on the ferry the other day it was the first time in five years. She seemed very glad to see me and, as we drank our coffee and she ate two doughnuts (“I should be reducin’ but I’m so nervous and tired”), she told me that she and Everett have bought an old run-down farm on the west side of the island. They don’t have lights or running water but the children have a pony, and there is a nice dock for Everett’s newer, much bigger boat. They have six children now—Little Mary Louise and Little Alexandra Dean (Baby) and Elizabeth is very pregnant with a seventh. She hopes it will be Little Everett, Jr. All the children had runny noses and most of them had wet panties and hair hanging in their eyes. Elizabeth Gage’s hair still looked like sphagnum moss and she had on maternity jeans, a dirty T-shirt with no brassière, what was almost certainly a corduroy bathrobe and black ballet slippers. She said that Everett is drinkin’ again and meaner than ever. She says she bought all the children life jackets and they always go out on the boat with them. She said bein’ so pregnant she hadn’t had time to stop at the store or she would ask me to lunch, but all they had in the house were graham crackers and honey. What could I do but ask her to lunch and when lunch seemed to be running into dinner I couldn’t push her out, could I? She called Everett and told him to stop off here and he is as handsome as ever but thinner, more nervous and drinks ten times as much.

  When they left at one or two A.M., Elizabeth Gage said, “We don’t have lights or runnin’ water and I still don’t have a washing machine but we do have a telephone. I’ll call you in the morning, honey. It will be just like old times.”

  CHAPTER XV

  ADOLESCENCE, OR PLEASE KEEP IMOGENE UNTIL SHE IS THIRTY

  THE tricky thing to remember about adolescents is that they seem so miserable doing what they are doing that you, their loving and bewildered parents, assume that they would be happier doing something else. They wouldn’t. Adolescents are going to be miserable no matter what they are doing but they would rather be miserable doing the things they choose. This is all so easy for me now that Anne and Joan are twenty-four and twenty-five, charming, intelligent, beautiful, companionable, adult and married. Don and I adore them and can’t see enough of them, even if Don did design a Christmas card showing him on the roof shooting at the stork.

  But during that long pull between fourteen and twenty (they were both married at twenty) it came over us with a flash, well really more like a punch in the stomach accompanied by the splash of tears, that the English are truly more civilized than we are and they know what they are doing when they send Imogene away to school—and by “away” I mean from Rangoon to England or vice versa—at age seven and bring her home reluctantly when she is thirty.

  The summer Anne and Joan turned fourteen and fifteen and both bolted themselves in the bathroom for hours at a stretch and wore lipstick to bed, Don and I sent away for the catalogue of a fine school in Canada. It had the splendid English approach, we could tell, because the catalogue said, “No need for them to come home for any of the holidays—we will keep them all summer.” Anne and Joan found the catalogue and cried, not because we didn’t want them home in the summer but because the school demanded that all pupils have their hair chopped off even with the ear lobes and wear black oxfords with Cuban heels.

  Frankly I do not know any easy answer to adolescence. About the only thing to do is to try to hang on to your sanity and pray much as you would if you were lost in a blizzard without a compass or were adrift in a leaky canoe and could hear the roar of the falls just ahead.

  While you are hanging on I will reach down into the black pit of my experience and give you a few things to think about, in case they aren’t already glaringly apparent:

  1. Adolescents do not hate their parents. They merely feel absolute contempt, occasionally coated with condescending pity for them, their tiny brains, ridiculous ideas, unfair rules and obvious senility. They all refer to their father as “oh him” and their mother as “she”: “She won’t let me go, naturally. She’s scared to death I might have a little fun for a change.” “Who was that on the phone? Oh him! What did he want, his overcoat again?”

  2. All adolescents are masters of the double- even triple-cross. This does not mean that they will grow up to be either Communists or politicians—it is merely an indication that in adolescence, loyalty is no long-term emotion, and best friends can turn brown quicker than gardenias.

  3. All adolescents “go steady.” Daughters with boys who appear to be oily, weak-chinned and untrustworthy. Sons with girls who appear hard-eyed, brazen and, if not downright immoral, certainly not wholesome sister types. No parent gets anywhere combatting these great romances. How can anyone as stupid as “oh him” evaluate a big wheel like Billy? (A big wheel who lies on the couch more than the dog and has a vocabulary of thirty words.)

  “It just so happens that Billy is left half on the football team and president of SqueeGees, the high school fraternity.”

  What can “she” possibly know about a wonderful girl like Charlene (with her skin-tight skirts, fuchsia lipstick apparently put on with a putty knife, and scintillating conversation of “Gollee, Anne, Johnny may have the mind of a boy but he sure has the body of a man!”). She is just jealous because Charlene was voted sweetheart of the SqueeGee four times” (no wonder).

  The thing that is so difficult for fathers to remember is that very few, if any, of the brilliant lawyers, bankers, doctors, architects or statesmen, a facsimile of which they desire for a son-in-law, ever took out girls when they were in high school. They were too shy and too busy studying to be brilliant lawyers, etc. Big Wheels in high school are, always have been, and undoubtedly always will be the smooth, shifty-eyed, self-confident non-studiers.

  The thing that comes as such a blow to the mothers is the fact that little Conroy is not attracted to Ermingarde Allen, who “has such pretty manners and will be very nice-looking when her skin clears up and after all her mother was my classmate at Bryn Mawr.” Conroy, who is shy and unsure, refers to Ermingarde, who is shy and unsure, as “that pimply creep,” and spends all his time trying to get a date with Carmen Smith who is reputed to let the boys take off her sweater in a parked car. If it is any comfort, isn’t it really better for Conroy to satisfy his curiosity about Carmen Smith at sixteen rather than, say, forty?

  4. All adolescents telephone. This is part of the cohesive quality that makes them all eat in the same beanery, walk in bunches, knot up in hallways, keep in constant touch. United we stand—divided we might learn something. (You will not solve anything by having two telephones. “Wow, two telephones!” Anne and Joan’s friends sa
id, and kept them both busy.)

  5. All adolescents intend to have the family car all of the time. To accomplish this they resort to the gentle nag or water-on-stone method, the smooth lie, or the cold tearful silence. They will always win if you try to reason or appeal. They have the least resistance to the cheerful impersonal “no.”

  6. Adolescents are not careful of their own possessions, but they are absolutely reckless with anything belonging to their parents. Don’s gray flannel slacks, Don’s shoes, my small radio, my toast-colored cashmere sweater, Don’s bathing trunks (about four pairs), my jeans, our sweatshirts, our beach towels, hit the adolescent trail and were never seen again.

  7. All adolescent girls would prefer to live in a bathroom.

  8. All adolescent boys would prefer to live in a car.

  Examining in retrospect that first long wet difficult winter when daylight was only on weekends and keeping warm was the motivating force, I am overcome by how wonderful Anne and Joan were. How co-operative and uncomplaining and hard working and dear. Of course, viewing things in retrospect does blunt corners and point up bright places, but they were such little girls to be getting wood, cooking dinner, making beds and smiling, and I repeat again they were such little girls and they did smile. I wondered if they were happy living on an island and leaving for school in the dark. After all, they were used to my large family and our hordes of friends, I told Don.

  He said cheerfully, “Look at the Brontës, Saki, Ruskin, Lincoln. All great people who thrived on isolation.”

  I said, “When I was a little girl I always came home to a house smelling of gingerbread and filled with people.”

  Don said, “I always came home to a house smelling of funerals and filled with Methodists. I think Anne and Joan are lucky.”

  I said, “Perhaps we should have waited until they were older before moving to the country.”

  He said, “Living in the city doesn’t solve everything. Think of all the city children who are alone because their parents are in Palm Springs or down at the Athletic Club getting pie-eyed or in New York attending the National Convention of the Juvenile Delinquency Prevention Society. Anyway there weren’t any houses for rent in the city. Remember?”

  One stormy night Don met on the ferry and brought home to dinner a widower who lived by himself on the other side of the island. Anne, home from school with one of her fleeting unlocalized ailments, had stuffed and baked a salmon and made an apple pie. The man couldn’t get over it. “That little girl, that wonderful little girl!” he said over and over again as he passed his plate for more salmon and watched Anne swishing competently around making boiled coffee and cutting the cheese.

  Joanie said, “I’m wonderful too, aren’t I, Mommy? I rowed out and bought the salmon from the fishing boat and I carried up a root so big Don can’t get it in the fireplace.”

  “You don’t know how fortunate you are,” the old widower told Don and me, with tears in his eyes. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Anne and Joan glowed like little fireflies and in his honor after dinner, when they were doing the dishes, kept their fighting down to quiet slaps, hissed insults and one broken saucer.

  Sunday morning the girls always climbed in our bed, Don lit the fire in the fireplace and we took turns going down and getting coffee, orange juice and the Sunday papers. After we had read the papers, accompanied by a great deal of shoving and spilling and jerking of the covers Anne and I got up and cooked a big Sunday breakfast. Kippered herring and scrambled eggs or clam fritters and bacon or shad roe or eggs scrambled with Olympia oysters no larger than a thumbnail. While Anne and I cooked, Joan and Don got wood and built the fires. We never bothered with Sunday dinner, preferring soup and sandwiches whenever we got hungry.

  Sunday afternoons we took walks, gathered bark, wrote and acted out plays, popped corn, made fudge, sang into the recording machine, read aloud, helped with homework, took trips in the rowboat with the outboard motor, cleared land, fed the deer and played with the kittens. In spite of my occasional misgivings, we were a very happy, enthusiastic family and I was delighted that Anne and Joan had accepted Don so easily as my husband and their friend.

  Then Satan, in the form of adolescence, entered the Garden of Eden and turned it overnight into a jungle. A jungle filled with half-grown, always hungry, noisy, emotional, quarrelsome, rude, boisterous, snarling animals.

  The first manifestation was the hair. Anne had bright copper-colored curly hair which she wore shining clean and hanging shoulder length. Joan had pale blond curly hair which she wore shining clean, if I caught her, and hanging shoulder length. One early evening Anne began rolling her pretty hair into small wet snails, about six hairs to a snail, secured tightly with bobby pins crisscrossed like swords.

  I said, “What are you doing to your hair?”

  Sighing heavily she said, through a mouth filled with bobby pins, “Oh, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” I said.

  “Because you don’t know anything about style and anyway you want me to look ugly.”

  “Your hair looks lovely just the way it is,” I said unwisely.

  “I knew you’d take that attitude,” Anne said, beginning to cry. “I knew you’d get furious if I tried to fix my hair the way everybody is wearing it.”

  Joan said, “That’s right, Mommy, everybody puts their hair up in pin curls. They all think we look like hags.”

  “And bags.”

  “And scrags.”

  “I’m not furious,” I said, getting a little furious. “But I don’t see much point in curling curly hair.”

  “You don’t see any point in anything!” Anne sobbed. “You don’t know anything about anything! You even like to live on this Godforsaken island.”

  Joan said, “Say, Laurie told me that Helen told him that Bobby likes you.”

  “When?” Anne said, sucking the tears back into her eye sockets and brightening up.

  “Yesterday,” Joan said. “I forgot to tell you.”

  “You stinker,” hissed Anne. “And now I promised Jimmy I’d go to the Friday dance with him. I could kill you.”

  “Go ahead,” Joan said calmly, “but if I’m dead I won’t be able to tell you what else Laurie said.”

  “What?” Anne said.

  “Say ‘cross my heart I’m not going to kill you,’” Joan said.

  “Don’t be silly,” Anne said.

  Joan said, “All right then, promise you’ll help me with my theme.”

  “I promise.”

  “Well,” Joan said, “Laurie said that Helen said that Bobby is going to ask you to the Seaview Boys School football dance. What are you going to wear?”

  “Something ugly and childish and old,” Anne said bitterly. “And all the other girls are rich and will smoke and have on strapless formals.”

  “Karen Hendricks isn’t rich,” Joan said, “and she goes steady with the president of the sophomore class.”

  “Yes, but she doesn’t live on a corny old island,” Anne said.

  “If I had red hair and a bust I wouldn’t care where I lived,” Joan said wistfully. “Say, the subject of my theme has to be Why I Want to Go to College.”

  “Ugh, what a repulsive title,” Anne said.

  “You promised you’d help me.”

  “I know,” Anne said, “but it will have to be all lies.”

  “I’ll get my notebook,” Joan said.

  “Wait,” Anne said. “I have to finish pinning up my hair. I’ll do yours too, if you want,” she added generously.

  “Oh, boy,” Joan said rapturously.

  From then on Anne and Joan and all their little female friends spent at least one third of their lives rolling their hair into the small snail curls. Over the snails they tied bandannas of different kinds—one year dishtowels, one year men’s bandannas, one year woolen scarves, one year enormous silk squares. The strange thing was that except for special occasions such as the Friday night dances, SqueeGee formals and Junior
Proms, we never ever saw these curls unfurled. Their hair was pinned up when they left for school, it was pinned up again the minute they got home.

  Saturday before last, my sister Mary’s middle daughter, Sally, who is sixteen, came to see me, bringing three of her school friends. I flinched when I saw their hair, wound into little snails, each snail secured with the crisscrossed bobby pins. I decided to ask Sally, who is not my daughter and therefore doesn’t feel called upon to give me the “diamond drill eye” or to turn all my simple questions into personal affronts, why adolescents keep their hair pinned up all the time. Stepping softly, I said, “Sally, would you answer a question for me?” Instantly she and her three friends exchanged looks and moved closer together.

  She said suspiciously, “What do you want to know?”

  I said, “Why do you keep your lovely blond hair pinned up all the time? In the past two years I’ve only seen it combed out twice.”

  She said, “Well, it comes out of curl.”

  “When?” I asked.

  “At school,” she said. “I comb it out as soon as I get to school in the morning.”

  “And you put it up again the minute you get home?”

  “Of course,” Sally said. “Somebody might come over.”

  “What if somebody doesn’t?”

  “Then it’s all ready for dinner.”

  “Do you comb it out before dinner?”

  “Daddy won’t let us come to the table in pin curls. He’s so darn crabby I think he must be going through the menopause.”