Paul was having drinks at the house of our martini chums when, having stayed home to rest, I went into labor. Since this was a first, we had no sense of timing. I called Paul and told him to come as soon as he could. The hospital was but a twenty-minute drive, but our baby was born within half an hour of my arrival, with an encouraging push from the doctor and intense euphoria on my part. Why didn’t everybody have a baby? Why hadn’t we done this before? Euphoria lasted the full five days of my hospital stay, where nurses came and went with this tiny wrinkled tomato that was all mouth and all demand. “Feed me!” I knew the Auden poem.
Although we named her Rosalind, from As You Like It, her nickname was immediate and permanent—Tucky, from the beginning of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, where Baby Tuckoo comes down the path with Moocow. Poor darling Tucky, her parents lived in literature, not life, and the babies in literature were all taken care of by somebody else.
Ambushed by Rack and Tong
Women born into a world of disposable bottles and diapers can look back on the kitchens of our mothers, with their steamers and diaper pails, the way we looked back on the quaint farm kitchens of our grandmothers, who to get a pound of butter had first to milk the cow. But if my grandmother wanted to know how to do something useful in the household, like treat communicable diseases, clean paint and hang paper, blue and starch linens, make rouge paste or powder, remove stains from animal fibers, or care for babies, she could go to a cookbook. By my time, cookbooks had eliminated the care and feeding of babies, along with those other useful instructions. Even though cooking and mothering went together, and even though you used the same method to can and preserve food for grown-ups as you did to sterilize glass bottles and their contents for babies, baby hungers were in one category, grown-up hungers in another.
Still, grown-up hungers notwithstanding, once you had babies, your kitchen became a bottle factory, cloudy with steam and jammed with apparatus. In a chapter on baby care in a 1908 book called Household Discoveries, the author had set the tone for the next fifty years of germ terror that descended on mothers like a mushroom cloud: “There’s death in the dirty bottle.”
Even if you were able to nurse, there were bottles of water and juice to sterilize in the big pot your grandmother would have packed with Mason jars. You also had to have a rack to hold the bottles upright so they didn’t rattle around. Before you could fill the bottles, you had first to boil the water that went into them as formula or juice or just plain water. You had to thoroughly wash with a bottle brush and strong soap the interior of each bottle and turn each rubber nipple inside out to scrub it clean. Then you filled the bottles, filled the pot with cold water two-thirds of the way up the bottles, slapped on the lid, and boiled the works twenty minutes by the clock. You removed the lid and lifted out the bottles with a large pair of tongs, because you had to cool the bottles as quickly as possible in a bath of cool (not cold) water, hoping not to break the glass, in order to get them into the refrigerator pronto. Any delay risked the breeding of germs.
I suppose if I’d grown up canning and preserving food myself, instead of watching my father do it, I wouldn’t have felt so bushwhacked by all the equipment needed to sterilize those ever-multiplying bottles for ever-multiplying babies. But nothing could have prepared us for just how unprepared we were for parenthood. So determined were we that a baby would change nothing that we hadn’t even figured out where to put one. The first week Tucky slept in a blanket-lined drawer. The next week we moved her to a narrow wicker basket that we could squeeze between our desks and the bed.
Breast feeding was a natural sequel to natural childbirth, and I was enchanted by the sensation of my breasts bursting with milk and a hungry mouth sucking at my nipples. But Tucky not only cried when she was hungry, she cried harder when she was fed. In fact, she coiled up tight as a steel spring and screamed before, during, and after feeding, and often in between. At night, our tiny bedroom amplified her shrieks and the shocking sound of Paul yelling, fortissimo, “Shut up!” After that, we squeezed a crib into the space between the oven and the kitchen shelf, so that one of us, at least, could pretend to sleep.
I tried hard to sustain the illusion that nothing had changed. I attempted to read newspapers and literary quarterlies with one hand while I propped Baby Tuckoo at her feeding station with the other, which may be why she would take only a few swallows before she resumed screaming. So I took her off the breast and guiltily put her on the bottle. She no longer cried during feedings, but she cried before and after, in a way that was as distressing as she was inconsolable. We sought recourse in literature, quoting Lear’s “When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools.” For a week or two the noise of the vacuum cleaner seemed to soothe the savage breast. But the only trick that really worked was to put Tucky in the car in her portable bassinet and take her for a drive.
Just colic, said our young pediatrician, recommending ground beef along with applesauce for the first solid food, and cow’s milk instead of formula. But milk was suspect everywhere, because of all the atomic testing that had been going on. Who knew how much deadly and invisible cargo the clouds had dropped across how many meadows, or where? The only nourishment that seemed safe for a baby was food that had been factory-sterilized in jar or can, untouched by human hands.
When it came to the care and feeding of the young, a chasm as big as the war divided the generation of our parents from our own. Mother Fussell’s dictum was: “You’ve got to let them know who’s boss.” When on a visit I made the mistake of leaving Tucky with her for a couple of hours, I returned to find a red-faced Mother Fussell and a screaming tomato in the baby bath. “She’s just as stubborn as my firstborn was,” said Mother Fussell. “Little Edward used to climb right up the curtains to get away from me.” I knew better than to leave any baby alone with Mother Harper. I could see her fingering little Tucky’s neck when she held her, and knew she longed for the chance to give it a good crack.
Dr. Spock was our ammunition against the totalitarianism of our parents. But Spock was only a book, after all, and the squirming, squalling creature in your arms kept you from a leisurely perusal of the index to find out if it was choking to death or having an epileptic fit or just trying to test your will. Anxiety is all I remember feeling for what seems like years at a time. My chronic nightmare was that I had left something at the supermarket and couldn’t remember what. Oh my God, the baby.
The culture at large seemed almost as anxious as I was. Hysteria over nuclear fallout had led people to stock jars and cans and bottled water for themselves and their children, in basements and backyard air-raid shelters built to precise government specifications. The pretense of civil defense against the hydrogen bomb made me as cracking mad as Joe McCarthy did. Who were they kidding?
My Scots-dissenting blood boiled over when even the college succumbed to this idiocy. I happened to be on campus with Tucky one high noon, returning books to the library, when the sirens shrilled, signaling an air-raid drill. Instead of proceeding as directed to the “shelter” in the library basement, I turned and walked out the library doors against the heavy oncoming tide and, as if in a retake of the scene of the baby carriage bumping down the Odessa Steps in Eisenstein’s great film, I pushed my baby carriage down the slope of the long, long hill in what seemed to be slow motion, knowing at every stubborn and determined step what it was to be alone.
Our kitchen now doubled as nursery, the sink as baby bath, the counters as changing table and prep space for all those bottles. This made the care and feeding of baby and adult mouths difficult, so we were happy to move to a dilapidated 1840s farmhouse in rural New Jersey when Paul took a job at Rutgers. Like other Americans in the postwar years, we were drawn to the idea of a house in the country. If it was the pull of nostalgia that built Mr. Blandings’ Dream House, with us it was the pull of history—the further back, the better.
Our new landlord was a New Brunswick dentist who wore Bermuda shorts and black nylon
socks with clocks up the side when he visited us in his role as country squire. He had bought the farmhouse and its clump of outbuildings with a barn and extended shack for the sake of the land on which they sat in once grand but now forlorn isolation, approached through an alley of black walnut trees in which wild guinea fowl roosted at night. The landlord cared nothing about the house and we cared nothing about the dollar potential of the land. It was the classical proportions and the history of the farmhouse that gave us joy and made us eager to restore it to its former beauty. We loved the symmetry of double parlors below, double bedrooms above, each with a working fireplace. We made a deal with the landlord to fix up the place in exchange for lower rent.
In the half floor off the landing, we converted a maid’s room into a nursery for the baby and a narrow ironing room into a study for me. We converted the parlor that adjoined the kitchen into a study for Paul. The matching parlor on the other side was simply for show. We scrubbed and polished, stripped and patched, painted and papered. We hunted out reproduction eighteenth-century fabrics to match our historically accurate wallpapers. With the help of a knowledgeable friend, we’d scurried around the Connecticut countryside buying antique colonial furniture, cheap at the time, to fill up the house in the style to which it had once been accustomed. Within a few months we’d created a colonial American gem.
It was like expanding from a custard cup into a casserole. The kitchen alone was the size of our entire New London apartment. It had been thoroughly modernized by its previous owners, who had laid down a vinyl brick floor to match the original ballast brick of the large but unusable fireplace at the far end of the room. They had put in a central island with a sink and cupboards beneath, and still there was room for an old pine kitchen table with turned maple legs and the set of spindle-back chairs we’d patiently stripped and refinished, and a playpen and a little canvas swing that fit into the doorframe between the kitchen and the laundry room. Here we could swing Baby Tuckatoo when she woke up crying in the middle of the night. But who was to swing me when I woke up the same way?
The kitchen was meant to be the family room, only we weren’t a family. We were a man carving out a career and a woman with a baby attached, separated by the door between study and kitchen. The door was an apt symbol of how we conceived and misconceived the boundaries between us. Paul kept the door closed. In his study, he was always working or reading, which came to the same thing. On Sundays he read The New York Times behind closed doors while Tucky and I played in the kitchen, she on the floor or in her playpen, banging pots and pans together, I at the kitchen table. That year I translated all of Horace’s odes into English for the hell of it, for the pleasure of it, for the sake of sanity when the walls even in this great big beautiful house began to close in on me.
I couldn’t understand why, now that we had all the space in the world, inside and out, I should feel so restless, so claustrophobic. The rooms had sash windows nearly ceiling to floor that looked out on trees and birds and grass and fields, which dawn rosied in the mornings and sunset reddened in the evenings. One morning at dawn the land was so beautiful and so beckoning that I ran out the front door in my nightgown and whirled around in the dewy grass like Isadora Duncan in her scarves until reality clocked in and I slunk back inside with wet feet. In such surroundings, how was it possible to be miserable? And yet I was.
From the day we brought Tucky home from the hospital, I had not slept a night through. I seemed always to be listening, listening to the man next to me snoring, to the cats meowing, to the baby crying. I envied Paul, who never lost a night’s sleep. Were men born different, with a sleep gene inside their snore machine?
Paul would drive the yellow Beetle to college every morning and I would tuck Tucky into her baby carriage and bump along the dirt drive between the walnut trees, looking for the one neighbor a mile down the country road who had a baby just our size. Her mother was ten years younger than I and we had nothing in common but our babies, but other than crows we were the only things moving in this deserted stretch of fields, and we needed to talk diapers and formula and toilet training just to hear a grown-up voice. After her husband was killed in an airplane crash and she moved away, the only sounds that punctuated the long days were the mewling and puking of Tucky and our kitty cats, the squawk of the guinea hens, and once in a while a knock on the door from Ben.
Ben, an ancient farmer from Pennsylvania Dutch country, came with the house as caretaker. If anything went wrong with our sole source of water, the wooden tower listing between our house and his shack next door, Ben was to fix it. In theory. In practice, he spent his days in an alcoholic stupor, from which he occasionally roused himself to shoot off a round of buckshot at the guinea hens. When we found a large rat in the guest bedroom and were betrayed by the cowardice of our macho black cat, regrettably named Mouse, who arched his back like a paper clip and backed hissing out of the room, we foolishly summoned Ben. He came with his rifle, eager to shoot up the radiator behind which the rat had taken refuge. We talked him out of that and down the stairs and ended up wedging a towel under the bedroom door while we thought of other solutions. We needn’t have bothered, because for the next three days and nights, we heard Rat gnawing his way though first one closet and then the next on his journey back down to his family quarters in the basement.
Paul was thriving professionally, and with his increased salary we could now give dinner parties that suited our love of theatrics. We set up the central island in our farm kitchen for lavish buffets, consisting of platters of cold meats and American cheeses, potato salads, macaroni salads, tomato aspics, pumpernickel and rye breads, cake-mix cakes with ready-mix gloopy frostings, or desserts like canned shredded pineapple with walnuts and whipped cream. We served highballs or sherry with oversized bowls of potato chips and pretzels before dinner, when with a lot of work a merry fire blazed in parlor and study.
But we missed our former friends. It was hard to become close to colleagues who were scattered so widely among the surrounding burbs and urbs, each absorbed in his nuclear brood. We leaned heavily on single, eccentric friends of dubious sexuality, who weren’t into marriage or family and would talk and argue far into the night.
To us, talk was argument, and a major form of entertainment. We’d been well trained in our grad school boot camps: attack with a thesis, reconnoiter in defense, and regroup for a counterattack. Roz Tuve would rap your knuckles if you tried to engage her in small talk when she was waiting to pulverize your opinion of Eliot’s essay on the Metaphysical Poets. When the competition wasn’t as tough as Roz, I enjoyed such parlor games, encouraged them, played them all the time with Paul. We argued the contents and discontents of literature from the first cup of coffee in the morning to the last highball at night. We sharpened our teeth on each other’s sloppy propositions or absurd conclusions. But now there was no place to put all the talk we talked, and no place to go with it either.
A group of faculty wives would get together in somebody’s house once a month for sherry parties, which meant the decibels rose fast but not my spirits. We gossiped about the department, our husbands and their jobs, the latest stupidity of some dean or other university bigwig. Serious talk was limited to children and schools and houses. I was not a happy camper, but what could I say? I didn’t want to grow my own tomatoes or bake my own bread or learn how to paper my own walls and fix my own plumbing. I wanted to talk about Shakespeare’s last plays, which I was studying now that I’d finished Horace. I took notes on the plays, I took notes on all the criticism, but what for? For the pleasure of pure knowledge, I would tell myself, the kind of knowledge in the pursuit of Truth that Roz Tuve had talked about.
I’d just had my first scholarly article published, on the Augustinian structure of Eliot’s Four Quartets, in a journal of repute. I’d submitted it to lesser journals earlier under my full Christian name and had been turned down. I switched to my initials and was instantly accepted as B. H. Fussell, a nom de plume that would serve me well for
the next thirty years—who could take seriously anyone named Betty? As chance would have it, Paul had an article in the same journal, on the same poet.
But there was no chance of my applying for even a subsidiary job at Rutgers, which had strict nepotism laws. The formidably intelligent wife of the department chairman, who was a ninny, had been granted dispensation to teach one course at Douglass, the sister college to male Rutgers, but it had taken her a decade to get it. There were no other teaching jobs in the New Brunswick area unless you wanted to teach in the public schools, and I was above that. I wanted Scholarship and Art, not nursemaiding.
Another pregnancy kept me at home in any case. My new doctor practiced in Princeton, where he’d been a football star for the Tigers. He was of the old school, but I was trying hard to persuade him to let me deliver naturally, sans anesthetic. For my insomnia he prescribed a glass of brandy before bed. But brandy made me wide awake and eager to ask people over to party. As the months went on and I grew more and more fatigued, I was beset by crying jags that wouldn’t stop. Could you have postpartum blues, I wondered, a year after partum? I thought of my mother, and wondered whether I’d inherited the breakdown gene.
Matters got worse when a Slav from Camden and his juvenile delinquent son moved in with Ben. Fired from his job at an auto works and kicked out by his wife, the Slav knew nothing about farms, but he too had a back-to-the-land vision of freedom for him and his son—and his newly purchased horse, goats, and a brutish pit bull terrier I called Fang. Ever ready with a literary reference, we called father and son, after Faulkner, the Snopeses. For the Snopeses, to live free meant that their horse could gallop across our lawn, their goats could eat every leaf of our shrubbery in addition to the milk and eggs left by our milkman and the newspaper left by our paper boy, and their dog could gnash his fangs at our cats and any other small critters, like our baby. I complained to the Slav, to Ben, to the landlord, all in vain. This was a free country, wasn’t it? Fences were for city yards, leashes for city dogs. Why didn’t I keep my baby inside?
My Kitchen Wars Page 9