My Kitchen Wars

by Betty Fussell

  With this birth, my doctor insisted on complete control. He put me in the hospital and induced labor the moment I began contractions. For the first time I experienced a labor that was slow and painful and, because he insisted on giving me gas, I was cheated of the explosive moment of birth that was like pushing out the globe of the earth in a geyser of water and glop. But none of that mattered, because here was a baby boy, pink as a little pig, named officially Martin after Martin Luther and unofficially Sam after Samuel Johnson. I said, “No more literary names, please.” Paul said, “Luther was a writer but he wasn’t as good as Johnson.” But when our son was eighteen, he went down to the courthouse at Trenton and officially changed his name to Samuel. He was quite right. He had turned out to be a Sam and not at all a Martin.

  Paul did night duty with Sam, who fortunately was a smiler rather than a screamer and easily placated with bottles of apple juice in between the milk. Unfortunately, there’d been an outbreak of impetigo in the hospital, and when his skin showed signs of it, I’d been ordered to give up nursing for fear of breast infection. It seemed such a waste of all that self-generated nutritious fluid that made me one with the cows and cats and gorillas and elephants. On the other hand, I was free to move around, so I went into New York once a week to take acting classes with Uta Hagen in the Village. I saw theater as a practical diversion, because it was something I could do at night that wouldn’t interfere with daytime responsibilities, and I could do it with amateur community groups so that it couldn’t be considered a profession or a real job or in any way a competitive threat. And since drama had always been my passion, I decided that if I was going to do it, even as an amateur, I should take some lessons and do it right.

  I could have applied that same axiom to motherhood, but I didn’t. I chafed at motherhood, as I chafed at keeping house, because housework, no matter how hard you went at it, didn’t count. Having babies and vacuuming floors was what you did with your left hand while you got on with your real work. Arbeit Macht Frei. But what work would make me free? That remained the question as long as I stayed with Paul, and I couldn’t find an answer because the more strongly the answer was felt, the more it had to remain unspoken. My real work, full-time, was to take care of Paul. Everything else was peripheral. Everything else, including children, came last.

  Tucky was old enough for nursery school, so I would drive her there and hop a train to New York and take a subway down to my old stomping ground in the Village and climb up the stairs in the little studio on Bank Street and join the assortment of students, most of them a decade younger than I was, gathered there to hang on Hagen’s every word. She was born to teach, and I was born to study, and I did my homework on improvs and Method exercises as intensively as I’d gone after Latin or Shakespeare. “Be a teakettle on the stove” was something I could do. “You’re coming home late a little tipsy and you can’t find your keys.” That was also something I could do.

  But what I liked most was learning what other people did, how they revealed their real life through pretense. As did the young Chinese girl who was making a pretend omelette in her kitchen. I watched how she put on her pretend apron, how she broke each pretend egg and separated the white from the yolk by pouring the liquid between the two halves of the shell, and how she wiped her fingers clean on her apron after each egg. I’d never separated eggs that way nor worn an apron in the kitchen, I’d never thought of using an apron as a towel. What a good idea.

  I liked the idea of creating a secret language of associations that could trigger particular emotions on demand. There was the voluptuous Italian girl who was to mime walking to the grocery store and who walked with discomfort and great embarrassment. “What was your association?” Hagen asked. “A tight red dress my mother gave me that I hated,” the girl replied. Who would have thought?

  The problem with this Method was that it led me to construct a parallel world of emotions and to connect them in a parallel plot. “You’re at the breakfast table and you’re angry.” Okay, I’m at home in Riverside and the D.O. has just silenced me with a frown. Bank that image of a frown. “You’re waiting for a train to take you to New York to meet your lover.” I’m in the living room in New Brunswick and apprehensive because I anticipate Paul’s frown. Wait a minute, Paul’s frown is like the D.O.’s, in relation to me. What connects them? Whoops, that’s a separate plot.

  We were assigned scenes from plays and students to rehearse with. I rehearsed a scene from Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in the fourth-floor walk-up of a man who was working in an ad agency until he got his lucky break. His apartment was very like the setting for the play. We were to do the scene where Alison and Jimmy have a big fight in their studio flat while she’s doing his ironing and they end up making love on the floor. Hagen had taught us how to really get into it, how not to indicate emotion but to generate real emotion from the inside out. Triggering anger was easy for both of us. Expressing that anger by grappling with each other and falling down on the floor got easier as we went along. But the transition from fighting to lovemaking was all too natural. I was flattered that my partner wanted to extend the scene with me but refused. That would ruin everything, like my permission to be there at all.

  We began to give dinner parties in the slab house, enticing the Princeton literary set up Route 27 with lavish displays of food and drink. In Germany we’d made friends with a Fulbright couple who lived in Princeton and were part of a circle that sat at the feet of R. P. Blackmur, a poet and critic who was a maverick in the academy—no Ph.D.—and the smartest man I’ve ever met. Like Dr. Johnson, he had absorbed a great deal of the world’s learning and expounded it best in conversation. There was reason to sit at his feet and pay attention to his words. Although he could be ruthlessly cruel, he was also a sage, and I was flattered when he took a shine to Paul and me. He invited us to join not only the elect at the invitation-only Gauss Seminars, which sponsored guest lecturers of renown, but also the super-elect for drinks at his house afterward. This was a world I’d been missing at Rutgers, a world I wanted to join. Paul’s ticket of entrance was his own sharp wit and literary acumen. Mine was as a well-packaged and intelligent sex object who gave good value as a hostess.

  One night when Paul couldn’t go to the Gauss, I went without him, and afterward went on to drinks at Blackmur’s. It was a heady crowd of writers and aesthetes and intellectuals, including Kingsley Amis, Al Alvarez, R. W. B. Lewis, Eric Kahler. Paul had asked me to come home early because he wanted to make love. I said I’d try, but I got home late. Paul was angry. “We had a date,” he said. To me it felt like blackmail. I felt a constant current of hostility from him and, for the first time, thought seriously of packing my bags, bundling up the children, and leaving. But I could already hear him asking, “Where would you go?” I certainly couldn’t run home to Mother. Without a cent of my own, I certainly couldn’t take off for New York or some other city and expect to land a job that would pay for an apartment and care for the kids. No, the thing to do was to have another child.

  When I found I was bleeding all the time, between periods, I consulted my doctor, who said that an embryo was in the womb but wasn’t properly attached, so no doubt it would abort within a month or so. But it hung in there and grew while the lining continued to bleed. It was inconvenient to wear Kotex all the time, but this fetus showed remarkable staying power and, after the fourth month, the doctor thought it had a good chance to come to term. By the sixth month I switched into my well-worn maternity clothes.

  It was Christmastime and our whole family had been invited to a house party of about ten people on a farm in Massachusetts, the childhood home of one of our Princeton friends. We drove up on Christmas Eve through miles of snow, thicker the closer we got to Bedford, to spill into the warmth of the farm kitchen with its old-fashioned woodstove and a table heaped with Christmas goodies and six or seven dogs leaping up to lick us and good friends to greet us. We had a sumptuous meal, because the hostess was a splendid cook and the host kept
running down to the wine cellar for one more dust-covered bottle of her father’s claret.

  I woke in the middle of the night with what I assumed was indigestion from major overindulgence. But the pains went on and on. I lay awake until dawn, when the pains became rhythmic and I realized belatedly that I was in labor. I roused Paul, who roused our host, because there was a blizzard outside and our Beetle would never make it to the nearest hospital. I didn’t have any slippers, so our host ran back into the house and got his own. It took us about an hour to get to the hospital. By now the pain was unlike anything I’d ever felt before, not rhythmic but a bonfire in my gut, burning my insides out.

  I begged the nurses for something, anything, to ease the pain, but they said they could do nothing until the doctor arrived. Where was the doctor? Making his way through the blizzard from his farm, far too early on a Christmas morning. Like my father, I’m usually stoic about pain, and when the going gets tough I get silent. But this time I was screaming. It’s the only time in my life I’ve thought death might be better than more of the same.

  As soon as the doctor got there, he gave me a shot that knocked me out. When I came to, I’d been delivered of a six-month fetus, in pieces. Evidently the baby had died at least twenty-four hours earlier in the womb and was starting to decay.

  But the weird thing was, my body was suffused with the same kind of euphoria as if the baby had been born well and whole. Joy of some kind must have shown in my face because Paul asked, “Have they told you?” And I said, “Yes,” and kissed his hand because I loved him and our friends and our children and life. Even though I was exhausted from pain and knew we would have no more babies, I felt all the same strangely blessed to be alive to tell this winter’s tale. Winter was a time for death. Paul had died, he once said, in the deep winter snows of the Vosges Mountains when the rest of his men had been killed, but he’d come back to life to tell the tale. I knew that the wounds of childbirth were nothing in comparison to a soldier’s wounds, but still I felt a connection. It was Virgil’s “the tears of things.” Men suffered one way, women another. But to me there was a kind of peace in surrendering to the rhythms of winter snow and greening spring that quite overrode the deaths men die for honor and women for love.

  Hot Grills

  It began innocently enough, with family picnics, the way Camembert begins with a meadow full of cows. But that was a few years and hundreds of hot dogs later, long after Paul and I bought our first house, a cottage paneled in knotty pine and hidden among blue spruce on Queenston Place, just off Nassau Street in Princeton. It was a dollhouse that wouldn’t have taken five minutes to burn to a cinder, and as long as I lived there I feared fire.

  We picnickers were mostly young academics in our thirties, from Princeton and Rutgers, some with young children, some without, all of us frolicsome. R. P. Blackmur was our rubicund Lord of the Revels, our Bacchus, with vine leaves in his white hair. The respectables of the Princeton English Department scorned him as a mere writer, a poet-critic with no scholarly credentials at all. And of course they scorned anyone from Rutgers, a state university. But we saw ourselves as outsiders because we cared about Art, in contrast to the philistine Establishment.

  Most of the men in our group had been in the service at least briefly, and we all recognized combat as the dividing line between innocence and knowledge, deferring to our vets as we deferred to our sages. For we took combat as the norm, and within the sure Place of the Establishment we fought a guerrilla war as subversives.

  Picnics in the wild were rebellion against the white-glove tea parties given by graying deans and their mousy wives. We were bursting with youth, ambition, and libido, and they were not. Picnics were also a rebellion against the four-walled kitchen lives of us faculty wives, bored with changing diapers, fixing school lunches, arranging cocktail parties, typing our husbands’ manuscripts, shuttling our kiddies to ice hockey or ballet. A picnic got you out of the house, away from the eternal routine of setting the table, washing pots and pans, and making and unmaking the marital bed, which, once it had served its procreative function, left little time for play.

  And we were desperate to play. We had cleaning ladies and babysitters, but none of us had live-in help. Even if we could have afforded it, a servant by any name would have violated the do-it-yourself code that was a battle cry for us who led kitchen lives. We had discovered, by God, that you didn’t have to buy cotton batting in the supermarket, you could make bread from scratch at home. By God, you didn’t have to pay a dollar a jar for a smidgeon of baby food, you could make applesauce from scratch in your blender. By God, you didn’t have to break your budget by eating in a fancy restaurant where the waiters sneered, you could create in your own kitchen a three-star, five-course meal and have money left over for wine. Of course it would take you two weeks of hard work to do it, but as your husband might unkindly remind you, what else did you have to do?

  Curiously, our picnics were not a rebellion against kitchen work. The woman who cooked indoors cooked outdoors as well. I don’t know if blue-collar men were grilling hot dogs and hamburgers in their backyards in the early sixties, but I do know that white-collar academics were not, any more than they were going bowling, hunting, or to the Elks. It was women who toted the bags of charcoal and loaded up the Weber grills and squirted kerosene and watched the flames explode and then subside and the gray ash grow while they manipulated six pounds of ground chuck into thick patties and laid out giant wooden bowls of chopped iceberg lettuce and tomatoes and grated red cabbage slathered with blue cheese dressing and shooed the kids away from the grill as they chased fireflies and each other, while the men stood around and drank. Heavily.

  Princeton was an outpost of Cheever territory, where you could drink your way across town from party to party in one long moveable feast. While the women tended the grill, the men tended the thermoses of iced martinis and wrestled with the corkscrews that opened the wine and dispensed the brandy and cigars that finished off the meal. Drinking was men’s work, and the men went at it manfully. The women drank too, of course, and not just to keep up with the men. Drinking was vital to our picnics, loosening tongues and lips and hearts and kidneys. Men could turn their backs and pee openly in the bushes. Women had to choose their coverts more carefully. But the unspoken rule was that you could do things on a picnic that you couldn’t or wouldn’t do in a parlor. Such license was sanctified by a host of pastoral forms, literary and cinematic: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Smiles of a Summer Night, Women in Love, Daphnis and Chloë, Roman de la Rose, As You Like It, Les Règles du Jeu. Food and wine on a greensward or under a grape arbor or even in a backyard were by nature a provocation to lust. Or at least to serious flirtation.

  These days we drank, when the cocktail thermos was drained, iced Chablis or an inexpensive Médoc in stemmed glasses. The men had begun to drop the names of wines as easily as the names of obscure Metaphysical Poets, but no matter what the quality of the vintage, the results were the same. Prescriptions for hangovers were as lengthy as the drinking that had caused them. The only thing that interrupted hangover talk was being hangover horny.

  Actually, being horny was the reason for our picnics, drink merely the excuse. We had learned during wartime, first the hot and then the cold one, to seize the day. If the Jerries didn’t get you, the atom bomb would. Today was it, and we wanted to gather all the rosebuds we could find, now. The night after we moved to Princeton, Paul and I hired a babysitter and drove to our first dinner party in nearby Kingston. The party was still booming at 1 a.m. when our sitter’s mother called, reminding us quite firmly that we’d promised to be back by midnight. Rather than break up the party, we simply shifted it to our house, and at three in the morning we were swinging in the children’s swings in the backyard and building castles in their sandbox and making far too much noise.

  Sex was in the air and on our lips and in the pressure of our bodies when we kissed each other hello and goodbye, a social custom that had infiltrated America’s
upper bourgeoisie in the fifties and lingered on, putting a full-mouthed American twist on the Continental habit of kissing both cheeks in greeting. Women rubbed cheeks so as not to leave lipstick behind, but women and men rubbed bodies together like Boy Scouts starting a fire, and the prolonged good-night kiss that began as ritual courtesy might end as rendezvous. Or not. It was an era good for kissing and flirting without anything happening at all.

  Except, of course, it did. It had to, the way the Cold War eventually had to hot up after the prolonged foreplay of threats and counterthreats, simulated and real. With Ike and Khrushchev flashing their missiles, Russia was bound to fire off a Sputnik and a Lunik just as we were bound to counter with a Jupiter and an Apollo. Nationally we believed we were in control of our fears, just as privately we believed we were in control of our lusts. Self-delusion clotted the air like sex, and it took but a small charge to blow it sky-high.

  Our Princeton pals had already been primed by a quartet of Brits, writers and their wives, who’d revived the days just after the war when a crew of bacchants had danced across the quad—John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell. But the Eisenhower years had lulled the Establishment into a false sense of security, so when Lucky Jim arrived at Princeton in the person of Kingsley Amis, few were prepared. Kingsley cut a swath a mile wide through the faculty wives, literally laying them low with his charm, celebrity, curly blond hair, and bad-boy antics. He’d propositioned me once in the bathroom of our house in Piscataway while I washed out baby Sam’s diaper. “Not quite my idea of a romantic setting,” I said. “Oh,” he said, as if surprised, “would you prefer a bed?”