My Kitchen Wars

by Betty Fussell

  Our garage sale had been a joke. How much for mended teacups? What price for the Mickey Mouse phone I’d bought for Paul one Christmas, which I valued more than the antique washstand in which we’d housed our first record player? And how could I sell at all the white organdy cocktail-length dress with tulle veil and fake orange-blossom wreath and fingerless lace gloves I’d gotten married in? I couldn’t just chuck them all and begin anew as Paul had done, priding himself on a clean start the way I imagine my Scotch-Irish forebears had done when they chucked a cow and a sheep and took off for Iowa, while their women agonized over leaving behind that one piece of good linen with the tatted edging that worked the past into the present and gave both meaning.

  Yet I knew also that the most cherished object must, sometimes, be sacrificed. Once a year, I’m told, the few remaining Lacandón Indians of the Chiapas rain forest break their god pots and stamp out their hearth fires, as Maya descendants have done for two thousand years, in order to begin the year anew. One of these god pots sits in my living room now on a table crowded with other sacred objects—a ceramic pre-Columbian corn god, a bottle of sand from the Sahara, a silverlined bowl for yak butter offerings from Tibet. The god pot is the most powerful of these Penates because it is the ugliest. Its body is a crudely shaped bowl of clay attached to a head with a square face, open mouth, and protruding lower lip. Its mouth, filled with clay pebbles, mirrors the bowl, which the Lacandón fill with chunks of resinous copal, to burn as incense before they smash the pot.

  The books were hardest to sacrifice. I was packing up my lives, both spent and unspent, when I attacked the shelves to divest them of our five thousand-odd volumes. As much as pots and pans, books were my sandbags, my bulwark against the dark, not just for their contents but for their corporeal selves. For years, we’d simplified moving by using stacked wooden apple crates as bookcases. At moving time, the books were already boxed, and we had only to restack them and repaint. But this was the house where we’d finally discarded our crates for built-in bookcases, because we were never going to move again. They lined our rooms like a double-thick fortress wall.

  It was like fleeing a house on fire. What did you grab to save, and what did you consign to the flames? Hardest to burn were the shelves of Shakespearean criticism from my days and nights at Harvard, desperately catching up. Kittredge, Boas, Brooke, Stauffer, Tillyard, Dowden, Stoll, the names like bells tolling the death of my scholarship. I looked at my penciled underlinings and annotations, the exclamation marks, the expletives, the condescending “good point,” the arrogant “fatuous.” I could smell again, like discharged lightning, the excitement of that time. But I would never read these books again. I was through with the academy.

  Out went the works in Latin and Greek, my copy of the Iliad marred by arrows pointing to adjectives modifying precedent nouns. Out went the works of the greats, which you could always find in the library—Austen, Dickens, Conrad, James, Faulkner, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, acquired one by one in Everyman or Modern Library until you had them all, each a monument of discovery recorded by the date in the upper right-hand corner of the flyleaf. Tucky had gone through the shelves to pick out what she wanted, but where was she going to put books in her one-room apartment in New York? Sam, who at this moment was immersed in modern greats at Oxford, wasn’t there to choose, so we put together a solid arts-and-letters library for when he got back home where there was no home.

  I was dispersing my children’s lives as well as my own. I packed for each a trunk of memorabilia, drawings from kindergarten, misshapen clay ashtrays, essays marked with “A,” Tucky’s peasant dress and cap from Heidelberg at age three, Sam’s first catcher’s glove at six, miniature Steiff animals, Matchbox cars, horse-show ribbons, soccer trophies. But G.I. Joe and his equipage would have to go, and the boxes of neon-haired gremlins. Maybe there was room in Sam’s trunk for one of his hobby-kit Godzilla monsters, as there had to be room in Tucky’s for her tiny hand-drawn books of cartoons held together by straight pins.

  Paul had finally left in October to work for two months at the British War Museum in London, arranging for whatever books, furniture, and pictures he wanted to be moved into an apartment a few blocks from our house on his return. I made sure to be out of the house when he moved. I had no words left to say goodbye to all that, or to him. From New York I’d written, “You’re breaking my heart,” a wimpy cliché that was physically true. How else to explain the deep chest pain that felt as if some connective tissue was tearing or some interior vessel shattering? His reply was an index card left on the kitchen table. “Cheer up: remember, you could have been born hideously deformed.”

  I wrote him five-page letters when he was gone. He wrote brief business notes back, mostly about the house, and love letters to Tucky. “What’s going on here?” she asked. “Is he trying to make me into you or what?”

  “Under no circumstances should your children be told,” Paul’s shrink had told him. “They’re hardly children at twenty-three and twenty-six,” my shrink told me. I insisted that Paul tell Tucky and Sam the truth or else I would.

  “I want to be straight about what happened,” I’d said. “I don’t want any fake scenarios about women’s lib.”

  “You want revenge,” he said.

  “Having gotten hold of the truth, I don’t want to fudge it,” I said.

  “Oh, come on, civilized people know the virtues of concealment, they don’t run around baring the truth.”

  In the end, he took each child to lunch separately in New York and told them he was a pederast and I an adulteress. For a civilized person, it was a brutal way of putting it. Sam cried. Tucky took it on the chin, and exploded later.

  About a month after his return in December, Paul telephoned and asked me over formally, for cocktails. Friends had already told me that we were going to be reconciled. Paul had told them so. His lawyer had told my lawyer so. I was nervous and stiff when he answered the door. He gave me an embarrassed kiss, then sat me on our old sofa with the costly upholstery our cats had loved, poured me a glass of plonk, and set it on the custom-built Parsons coffee table we’d had tortoised, at considerable expense. His one new fixture, which seemed to cover the wall, was an antique American flag displaying an undulating snake: “Don’t Tread on Me.”

  Paul sat opposite me on a chair and ticked off items on a list he held in his hand. One, a tax bill of $1,309.40, due February 1, must be paid on time or the borough would charge interest. Two, living alone in England, he’d found out how much he loved me and how much he hated living alone. Even if we got divorced, he wondered if we might not live together. Three, he’d discovered he was not homosexual. He didn’t want to touch young boys, he just wanted to look at them. Four, he’d done what he’d done to punish me, because I didn’t like his students, because I was jealous of them. It could have been a girl just as easily.

  “But it wasn’t,” I said.

  “Yeah, I am going to look for a therapist,” he said.

  And then he talked about his research in England, the university that was courting him, his new book, his new publisher, his latest magazine piece, his batches of fan mail from the last magazine piece. As I was halfway out the door, he said, “I must ask you sometime how your cookbook is going.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That would be nice.”

  That he hadn’t asked about anything made it easier to say goodbye to the house and the yard and the trees, along with the husband. A year allowed for a long goodbye, and I made the most of it, recording with pen and camera, as in a Book of Days, the seasonal changes inside and out. During the long, tenuous summer, I’d given up on my swamp garden. It was supposed to grow herbs, but the clay was so thick, the ground so wet, the shade so dark that only watercress and slugs had flourished. I set out pans of Budweiser to drown them in or, when I lost patience, ran out with a box of Morton’s to salt them one by one until they shriveled and fell from leaf to ground as blobs of slime. I found I liked slug murder.

  In the fall,
the remaining elms, the tulip tree in front, the maples in back, the dogwoods at the side, the Japanese maple in the rock garden, the young hawthorn given us by a friend for our thirtieth anniversary, had exploded in squibs of red and orange and gold as if they knew this was a final burst. In winter snow lay like a goose-down comforter on the same garden and trees, turning the place into the frosting-roofed gingerbread house I had made one Christmas. I’d glued walls and roof together with stiff caramel and then, in a moment of hubris, set a candle inside so that light would glow through the little mullioned windows, forgetting that heat melts caramel until I saw the house softly implode, putting out the light.

  In spring I’d numbered each star crocus, miniature daffodil, hyacinth, and narcissus as their green tips broke through the thawing earth. I knew when the purple clematis, when the white, would suddenly curtain the terrace with blossoms. I could clock the spring by when the tight rolls of pink on the vines covering the arbor relaxed into greening grape leaves. The salmon azaleas always blossomed before the white ones, as the white dogwood always emerged before the pink. The mountain laurel and the rhododendrons, twice replaced after killing frosts, were always last, as if they knew they capped the show.

  These were the changes that soothed, because they were changeless. The changes inside the house were less predictable. For the first time ever I was living in a place where, if you discounted the cats, I was the sole occupant. I had dreaded the thought of living alone because I feared, like Paul, that I’d be lonely. Instead, I found I relished my new privacy. As soon as he was gone, I moved my work into his study. Like Goldilocks, I put my typewriter on his big desk, sat in his big chair, put my feet on his footstool, and spread out my growing manuscripts on his library table. I discovered that the Rhode Island maple four-poster we’d bought as a standard double, a margin of which I’d occupied while Paul sprawled, was a mere three-quarter bed. No wonder we were crowded. Now that it was all mine, I filled it with arms and legs spread from end to end and side to side like Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of proportionate man, the measure of all things.

  I could read all night long if I wanted to, without the light disturbing anybody. I could talk on the bedside phone day or night for as long as I wanted, without fear of annoying anybody. I could eat anything I wanted, without having to prepare something different for someone else, and I could eat anytime I wanted to. I could go into New York without asking permission. I could buy food and clothing without asking for money. I could do cartwheels on the lawn, I could belt out Broadway show tunes without anybody’s eyes rolling in disgust.

  Before I left the house for good, I gave a smashing farewell brunch for seventy-five to honor and cleanse it. I cooked for a couple of weeks, old style, stretching the expandable table to the max with corn breads, creamed haddock, broiled kippers, sausage patties, crisp bacon, herbed frittatas, Austrian coffee cakes, smoked salmon, toasted bialys, and fresh pineapple with strawberries and mint from the herb garden, washed down with champagne and orange juice. The sun was out and the air was clear, as we spilled over the terrace and onto the lawn and under the trees on blankets and chairs. My last pétit déjeuner sur l’herbe. I would never again have the same accumulation of friends in this spot that echoed with all our other parties. And this time, if I got tired of doing the dishes, I could just throw them like Frisbees across the lawn.

  I knew just what to do with my new continent of freedom. I wrote. I’d begun rewriting Mabel for the second time, from scratch, in a rented studio—a room, really—in what had once been the old Fifth Avenue Hotel on the corner of Ninth Street. I’d done a thorough scholarly job of it the first time, but I wanted to write a story for another kind of reader, another kind of person, a person like me. I put a battered desk by the window so that I could look out at the twin towers of the World Trade Center, their beveled edges catching the light as the sun moved east to west, marking time.

  At noon I would stop typing and fetch from the half-fridge tucked into the kitchen closet three slices of garlic salami, five thyme-scented green olives, six cherry tomatoes or sometimes the same number of cucumber slices, well salted. It was a ritual consummation. I would remove the skin from each slice of salami, eat a bite of meat and then an olive, removing the pit, then put a cherry tomato in my mouth whole. The trick was to make things come out even and last long, as if one were eating a three-course meal. The quality was high since my local grocer was Balducci’s, and I had savored each food as perfect of its kind, just as I savored the room, with its desk and bed and window, looking down into the seedy back rooms of Eighth Street in the foreground and up at the inhuman rectangles of The City at the horizon. I was eating New York.

  I’d discovered that the ritual of eating was like the ritual of writing. I wanted to clear my mind of junk, the way I’d cleaned the house and emptied the fridge. I wanted to get down to bare bones, elemental flavors, each word tasted in itself and in combination with other words, what Yeats called the “right mastery of natural things.” I wanted to eat my words, throw caution and footnotes to the winds, away with ibid.s and op. cit.s. I wanted to write the way people I liked to talk to talked, a slumgullion of American slang and Anglo-Saxon meat and Latin potatoes. My mentors in this new discipline were newspaper editors, as exacting in their way as my Harvard professors had been. I had to cast off what I’d learned and begin again if I were to write articles of no more than seven hundred and fifty words. I discovered that you could write the history of the world in five hundred, fifty, or five words if you had to. Even two would do: Adam wept.

  I wrote in a kind of stubborn frenzy, hanging myself up on sentences that didn’t go together, mired in words thick as pudding because I didn’t know where I was going or where I’d come from. Given to metaphor more than logic, I sometimes feared there was something wrong with my brain that made the simplest declarative sentence as tricky as a soufflé. My head would dump a garbage bag of ideas in my lap and it would take me forever to select two or three choice bits to make a meal.

  Meanwhile, I lurched from sublet to sublet, looking for a permanent home. I was determined to live in the Village, which I loved for its scale, its village feel. The Village, in fact, was the village I had always wanted when I lived in the suburbs and a loaf of bread meant a ten-minute drive and a twenty-minute hunt for a parking space. But in the city, you could walk down the street and greet by name the vegetable seller, the drugstore lady, the newspaper man, the bagel vendor, the shoe repair couple. They were like the villagers of Provence, only here they came in as many colors and kinds as the goods they sold.

  After several months, I lucked into the attic of a Greek Revival Presbyterian church that, behind the six white Doric pillars of its facade, had been converted into apartments for people like me. The contractor had punctured the church roof with skylights because that was cheaper than punching more windows into the two-foot-thick walls. It was like living in California. Every room was awash in light, and the foot-thick oak beams and massive iron bolts that held up the roof hymned Christ the Nail from wall to wall. To think that I’d traveled three thousand miles and fifty-three years from my birthplace to end up in a Presbyterian church. When I lay in bed and looked up, there was nothing between me and eternity but the pigeons, airplanes, and God.

  An odd thing was happening to my body. I had begun to take on flesh. I had weighed the same, had had roughly the same bony shape, except for pregnancies, since the day we married. Now, unaccountably, my breasts began to grow. This late middle-aged blooming was as unexpected as my first pubescent buds, and it made more than my clothes fit differently. By God, I really was a woman, not a failed man, and there were lots of men out there who liked women because they were different from men. For the first time in my life, I think, I began to like being what I was—a woman.

  I flew to California and drove with my brother Bob to Rivino Orchards to see what was left of our memories. It was the first time either of us had returned to that spot. We drove through a rural slum, where ceme
nt dust sifted thickly onto rows of bungalows with sagging screen porches and rusting car skeletons under scaling eucalyptus trees. The cement plant had nearly consumed the hill behind it, evacuating it in little concrete turds.

  Bob pointed out the intersection where Dad had smashed the wooden wheel of his Model T when he crashed broadside into another car. He found the field near our garage where a bull had once chased us, although there was no sign of the garage. But that wasn’t the main reason we’d come. We wanted to visit Dad at the old-age home at the end of Brockton Avenue away from town, near the house where we’d once lived with our grandparents. Dad had been at the Center for fifteen years, so he’d occupied a number of rooms, but we found his present one, finally, at the end of a hall. Inside were three beds in a row. In the first, a woman lay under the covers howling. In the next, a man sat naked, his feet on the floor, his hands holding so tight to the edge of the bed that his knuckles were white. He didn’t make a sound. In the third bed, Dad lay propped up by pillows. His eyes were closed, the lids gummed shut, their edges red and oozing. His hands on the coverlet were claws of bone. He was ninety then.

  I touched his shoulder and whispered, “Daddy, it’s Betty, Betty and Bob.” Slowly he unglued his eyes a crack, but he did not see me. His eyes were clouded gray as cement and hazy as smog. Was he seeing spring lupine and Indian paintbrush on the Mohave? I held his hand. “Daddy.” He worked his mouth a little, a long slit red as his eyes. A male nurse entered briskly and put some clothes in a closet. I asked if Meryl Harper was one of his patients. He was. “Is he awake, do you think? Is he always like this?” The nurse wasn’t sure because he’d been on duty for only a couple of weeks, but he thought that, yes, he was usually like this. The woman had not once stopped howling.