In Spite of Everything (22 page)

Virtually everyone on my dad’s side of the family was a painter, and we had nearly all their extant pictures on our walls, just as they had been in my childhood home in Berkeley. There were my grandmother Thomas’s still lifes with fruits and flowers above the sideboard; there were my great-grandfather Harvey’s landscapes encircling the dining room table. My aunt Hannah’s pen-and-ink portrait of Virginia Woolf hung over the comfy leather armchair in the living room, and the chef d’oeuvre—my dad’s oil painting of four abstract apples suspended against a mossy green backdrop—crowned the mantelpiece.

From my mother’s side, there were other things: the silver-plated Victorian lamp from my nana’s farm in Virginia; the cigar box that Batista had given my great-grandfather Dawson (who had been the first ambassador to the Organization of American States), as well as a pair of drawings of gauchos presented to him by the ambassador of Argentina; silk Japanese kimonos collected by my great-great-aunt Emma-Jane, who, as a young widow, had taken a trip to “the Orient” in 1909. In a world where clean lines and contemporary furnishings
ruled, our home was higgledy-piggledy, but it made me feel unreasonably happy, peaceful. “Where did you
get
all this?” an amazed friend once asked. To which, of course, I could only respond in Carlinese: “This is my
stuff
, man.” By which to say, it was home.

But after living there for a few months, I realized that one major thing that I did not know about a home was how to care for one. Indeed, thanks to my matrilineal pedigree of nondomesticity, I knew dead nothing about it. When I came into my own household, at thirty-four, I realized that this was a big deal. It was a little like discovering one day that you have an unseemly tic that you never knew you had—like nervously scratching your armpits when you don’t know what to say or farting when you’re asleep—but that everyone else thinks of as being one of your distinguishing attributes. You feel like (a) How could I have gone so far in life without knowing about this? (b) Why didn’t anyone close to me tell me I had this, knowing that I’m the kind of person who would definitely want to know about it? and (c) What am I going to do about it now, as in right this second?

My first response was to buy Cheryl Mendelson’s
Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House
. People talk about
War and Peace
being a tome.
Home Comforts
is a
tome
. Its nearly thousand pages on setting up and maintaining a clean, well-ordered home begin with one of the most perfect lines of postfeminist nonfiction writing I’ve ever read: “I am a working woman with a secret life: I keep house.” Mendelson, a Ph.D. in philosophy and a lawyer, grew up under the tutelage of her two grandmothers—one Appalachian, the other Italian—who raised her to be a rural housewife, not only instructing her on every last aspect and aim of housekeeping, but also teaching her that the work itself was essential and gratifying. To be clear, it is not a memoir of “my life with two housekeeping grandmas” but a forthright and exhaustive guide to washing, laundering, mending, marketing, list making, cleaning, sewing, repairing, cooking, baking, food label reading, tending, dusting, sorting, tidying, ironing, folding, system making, everything.

I devoured this book. I devoured it as if it were every “just like Mom used to make!” cookie I’d ever seen advertised but on whose inspiration I’d never snacked. With its vivid, earnest descriptions of chores, it was a small, magical world, like
Little House on the Prairie
. Schedules for household tasks! One for each day of the week! Washing on Monday, marketing on Tuesday, minicleaning on Wednesday, odd jobs on Thursday, housecleaning on Saturday morning! Guidelines: Proceed from higher to lower; dry to wet; inside the house to outside; begin with the chores that require waiting times! To learn about those things that make a home ineffably homey—sweet, laundered sheets; ordered, airy rooms; clean bathtubs and fixtures; good meals; books, mended; socks, darned—was like randomly flipping to a psalm for the heck of it and unexpectedly actually finding comfort in it. Order in Homes—it
did
exist! My children would know it, even if I hadn’t.

One of the other things I liked about Cheryl Mendelson was her husband. Edward Mendelson was a professor at my alma mater and academia’s preeminent Auden scholar, not to mention the executor of Auden’s estate. Ed was also a contributing editor at
PC Magazine
because he loved computers and writing about them. The idea that Auden, technology, Cheryl, and Ed were all somehow mixed up in a Laura Ingalls Wilder milieu of old-fashioned housekeeping appealed to me on every possible level.

Her invocations of Auden’s
About the House
—a collection of poems that map the architecture of a home and its correlates in the mind, body, and spirit—were especially poignant. My sophomoric reading of
About the House
had been predicated on the idea that the whole thing was symbolic, home included. Indeed, even my understanding of the required undergraduate study of architecture in general—Gothic cathedrals, say, modeled on the body of Christ—had been grounded in my assumption that the purpose of
all
construction was symbolic. Jesus, I really
was
a WASP.

Reading this book, I realized that I honestly had had no real awareness that one could actually find a sense of soul, even transcendence,
at home, in a church—in an indoor place. I was positively blown away when in her section on caring for the kitchen—a chapter rife with notes on glasses, flatware, utensils, bakeware, pots, pans, and the materials used in cookware and their properties—she invoked the Auden poem “Thanksgiving for a Habitat,” which describes the kitchen as “the centre of a dwelling,” a “numinous” place in which “ghosts would feel uneasy.” That is precisely what I wanted to do in our home—no bad ghosts from childhoods past.

But to do it, Mendelson seemed to suggest, would require a certain degree of yielding, of relinquishing unhelpful ideas about division of labor, power, men and women. As in: It’s okay to be a housewife. She mused on what some of the more rigid thinking attending the women’s movement had done to bulldoze the home and the womanly art of caring for it, as well as media’s role in underscoring “degraded images of household work and workers.” Mendelson argued that what had been razed, along with all manner of yellow-wallpapered prisons, was love, comfort, and the sweet sense of belonging. “Unfortunately, what a traditional woman did that made her home warm and alive was not dusting and the laundry,” she wrote. “Her real secret was that she identified herself with her home.”

Holy shit. Could I be that mom, that woman, that wife—that
home
for my family? Suddenly, that idea was, for me, downright countercultural. I was in. Like all recent converts to orthodoxy, I went a little nuts. Part of going nuts was based on a frank acknowledgment that if I didn’t go overboard on the discipline, I’d never get going on it at all. I figured that once the routine was set and became deeply ingrained, it would become a part of me and our home, the way the altar of the church is actually the heart of Jesus, in Catholic churches anyway. But part of it was also that I was just
psyched
. Ever since I was little, I’ve loved messing around with lotions and potions, so the fetishistic, chemical aspects of housecleaning fit perfectly with that penchant. I concocted counter cleaners from distilled white vinegar and lemon oil, wood floor cleaners from apple cider
vinegar and lavender, toilet and tub cleaners from baking soda and peppermint, furniture polish from mineral and nut oils and sandalwood. I made hand and body soaps and laundry detergent. I saved worn-out boxer shorts and crummy T-shirts and ripped them into rags. I created systems for organizing clothes, books, toys. I even made some headway with mail. Mostly, I loved cleaning and scrubbing and washing. Eight months pregnant with our second child, I did not hesitate to get down on my hands and knees with a scrub brush. I loved our little home.

One night, Cal was observing my born-again housekeeping with detached amusement. What was I
doing
? I plopped my pregnant tenement of a self down on the sofa while he watched TV from the armchair nearby. And I thought: Look at
us
, Cal and me. We are sitting in
our
home. Here he is, feet up in a wife-beater undershirt. Here I am, with swelling breasts and massively pregnant, for the
second
time. It’s August. I have just been on the
floor
, cleaning. It struck me that there could be something outrageously delicious about this whole turn of events. I knew it was odd, but after moving into our own home, something primal and sexist shifted in me. Could we be becoming
man
and
wife
?

But I also had another, dissonant feeling: I didn’t know anything about the contents of Cal’s interior. It hit me that since Zanny’s birth, we had been in parallel mode, like toddlers on a marathon playdate. Each of us was engrossed in handling, inspecting, and shepherding the moment at hand and then scuttling on to the next, aware of the other’s presence but not interacting. We had made no provision to appreciate the resonance created by this relentless pageant of activity. Aside from our cursory
Everything is different now
exchange, we hadn’t talked. Period. We had planned, we had executed. We had not ruminated, we had not conjoined. It was surreal. I had been absorbed in a conjugal fantasy, a psychosexual renovation, and Cal was not actually involved in it. There was a good chance that he hadn’t noticed anything except that I was inexplicably cleaning with vinegar. This is exactly what Cal had been worried about that day in
the park, just before I got pregnant the first time. But that could be changed. It could be made into a real moment. Cal always saw the extraordinary.

So I spoke. I told him how much it meant to me to actually care for our home, and, a little shyly, that in so doing I really wanted to try to be an actual wife and mother. I wanted our kids to be nourished by good food that had been made not just for them but for the whole family. I didn’t want there to be “the children’s table,” with the kids quarantined in their own feral territory. I wanted that home to be one where my children’s friends wanted to come, where they themselves felt wanted. I wanted our family to be friends with neighborhood families who came to that home so that everyone’s children would feel swaddled by their community.
I want for you to be able to be the guy and for me to be the woman. That kind of thing. If you want
. “Susie, I think if it makes you feel good about yourself, then go for it,” he said. “You gots to do what you gots to do.”

As he sat there in the living room watching
CSI
with his back to me in the comfy leather armchair, the anchor ran out of rope. “Well, what about cooking?” I ventured hesitantly. “Do you think I should do some cooking, too—so it’s not all on you?” He scratched and yawned. “I don’t,” he said. “A lot of the thing with cooking is technique, and it’s not worth the time it would take you to get the hang of it—stick with what you’re good at. But do you have to use vinegar?”

I could have pushed it. I could have grabbed the fucking clicker out of his hand, tossed it on the floor, and kissed him. I could have forced the moment to its crisis. But I didn’t. I nodded. I lay back. I watched television. On the screen, the
CSI
team had just uncovered the secret lair of a fetishist. It was furnished with a giant mobile, a stack of enormous diapers, and a crib made for an adult.

N
ot long after that, I went into labor during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. I moaned in the dark: the heat, impenetrable. Mama mammal instincts must have sensed danger because the labor stopped for
twenty-four hours. But then it kicked in again, and after ten hours of wild banshee bellowing, I gave birth to our second daughter, Pru. My merry-eyed little Pru! When I’d first laid eyes on Zanny, I had known that she was the person I’d waited my whole life to meet. When the doctor laid my Pru at my breast, I knew that I’d
already
known her all my life—she was just here now. We nestled into each other on the hospital bed, and I felt strong and happy, even in my sleep. My new baby bunny.

As delighted as I was, I was also profoundly pooped, and I flinched every time movement forced me to summon a limb. I had delivered Pru with nary a drug, and I had gotten pretty ripped up during pushing. I just wanted to sleep. Cal wanted me to come home. Zanny, though she had come to the hospital to meet her new sister just hours after birth, missed me; plus, family wanted to come over and meet the baby. The hospital wouldn’t discharge me for at least twenty-four hours, so he went to petition the nurses. They were firm: We need to keep an eye on the baby, they said, and the mother needs to rest. We should really wait the standard forty-eight hours. “That’s ridiculous,” Cal said. “She can rest at home.”

Almost twenty-four hours to the minute, I went home. The next day, Cal said that family was coming over. I begged him to put it off for at least a few more days. “But I’ve already told them that I’m cooking!” he said. Pru and I lay in bed while Cal cooked for his family on our roof deck.

I
t was via Cal’s reign over the kitchen that our life expanded into the kind of life that I had always hoped for. Laundry is laundry, and clean floors are expected, but food is food. Cal was an excellent cook. He loved to cook for big groups, had grown up cooking for a houseful of approving relatives, had cooked for his fraternity in college for the fun of it. People always loved his food, and he took genuine pleasure in their pleasure. Because cooking was his métier, and I was a chatty Cathy, our home became a magnet for get-togethers.
We shared meals with families: the children tumbling and bumping into one another like puppies, the adults having the kind of iterative conversations one has with young children, stopping every few moments to broker peace negotiations or address a sweet concern. Because he preferred to stay in the kitchen or working the grill—the kind of cook who wants meal-making to be a focused, solitary meditation, not a group activity—my job became that of the gabby, self-deprecating hostess, making guests feel welcome and not guilty for shooting the breeze and allowing a sumptuous meal simply to appear before them.