The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (22 page)

CHAPTER
10

The “His” and “Hers” of Sharing: Greg and Carol Alston

A
T
7:45 one Sunday morning I slowly drive my car up a newly paved street lined with young trees and clusters of two-story homes that form a curving line up a hill overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It has the feel of a new housing development; along each street the shrubs are sculpted with the same taste. Streets have names like Starview, Overlook, Bayside, and though the traffic goes back and forth only within the development, there are ten-mile-an-hour signs every half block, as if an informal understanding could not be trusted. Between groups of every six houses, ivy lawns sprawl into large communal spaces, and mailboxes are clustered under a small, communal mailbox roof. It was a developer’s attempt at community.

At this hour the empty sidewalks are strewn with Sunday newspapers. Other times of day I see only employees—a Chinese gardener trimming, a Chicano handyman fixing floodlights, two white workmen carrying rolls of carpeting from their truck to a home. Half the units are filled with retired couples, Carol Alston tells me later, and the other half with two-income families. “The elderly don’t talk much to the young, and the working couples are too busy to be neighborly: it’s the kind of place that could be neighborly, but isn’t.”

Greg Alston answers the door. At thirty-seven, Greg is a boyish, sandy-haired man with gold-rimmed glasses, dressed in well-worn jeans and a T-shirt. Also at the door is Daryl, three, with a
dimple-cheeked grin. He has bare feet, and shoes in hand. “Carol’s still asleep,” Greg tells me, “and Beverly [their three-month-old baby] is about to wake up.” I settle in the living room, again the “family dog,” and listen as the household wakes up. At 7:15 Greg has risen, at 7:30 Daryl, and now, at 8:00, Beverly is up. For a while, only Greg and Daryl are downstairs. Greg is talking to Daryl about tying shoes, Daryl is discussing the finer distinctions between Batdog, Spiderbat, Aquaman, and Aquababy. Soon, Carol has dressed and calls out to me; I help her make the bed. She breastfeeds Beverly and puts her in a swing that is hung near the dining-room table between two sets of poles; the swing is kept in motion by a mechanical bear, whose weight, as it gradually slides down one of the poles, drives the mechanism that moves the swing. As Carol cleans off the dining-room table and does the dishes, she tells me about a wild two-year-old child of friends whom they had taken to Marine World Saturday, and who had thrown a metal car at the baby. She begins making pecan and apple pancakes for breakfast. Greg is repairing a torn water bed downstairs. Each parent has one child.

Carol, thirty-five, is dressed in a jogging suit and sneakers. She has short-cropped hair, no makeup, tiny stud earrings. There is something pleasantly no-nonsense in her look and a come-on-and-join-me quality to her laugh. She and Greg have shared an extremely happy marriage for eleven years.

Carol is not trying to integrate family life with the demands of a fast-track corporate career like that of Nina Tanagawa. Three years before, she had quit what she called her “real” job on the fast-track as a systems analyst and begun freelance consulting for twenty-five hours a week. As a child, Carol had always envisioned having a career, and, as an adult, she’d always had one. She says she’s always divided the work at home 50-50. “I don’t know if I’d call myself a feminist,” she tells me, as if studying the term from a distance, “but yes, Greg and I have always shared at home, no discussion about it, up until I went part time, of course.”

From the beginning, Greg wanted Carol to work and, in fact, told me he felt “upset” when she went part time since he missed her income. For seven out of their eleven years together, Carol earned as much as a systems analyst as he earned as a dentist. In fact, she now earned part time almost as much as Greg earned full time. “The more income she makes,” Greg said, “the earlier we can retire.”

For the past three years, since having Daryl, Carol’s strategy has been to reduce her hours and emotional involvement at work, and to do most of the second shift. But the couple would share again after next November, she said, when they planned to fulfill an eleven-year dream of escaping the gridlock traffic and drugs and racial violence of the urban schools to move to a tiny town in the Sierra mountains called Little Creek. There Greg, too, would take up part-time work. The Alstons have always loved boating and camping; in Little Creek they could enjoy the outdoors in a 50-50 version of a Rousseauist retreat from modern life. They are among the lucky few who could afford this. In short, the financial and ideological stage was set for them to really share the work of the home.

Apart from
work
at home, Greg and Carol shared the
life
of the home. If a home could talk, the Alstons’ place would say a lot about their closeness and the importance of their children to them. Theirs is a comfortable, unpretentiously furnished, ranch-style home, designed so that if you close all the doors, Greg in the kitchen can see Carol in the dining room or living room. A picture over the mantel shows a dreamy child blowing at a balloonlike moon. Beneath it are porcelain ABC blocks, a German beer stein, and wedding photos of brothers and sisters. Each sitting area throughout the house shows some material indication of the presence of children: a crib in a circle of living-room chairs, a tiny rocker in an alcove, Daryl’s pictures taped to the refrigerator, and a hook to hang his Batman cape on. Upstairs, above Carol’s desk, hangs her framed college diploma, her CPA certificate, her state board of accountancy certificate; and
beside these are corresponding documents for Greg, a picture of Daryl, and a photo of Carol and Greg white-water rafting. Hanging in the garage are two homemade “dancer” kayaks. (“We made them with a group of boating friends,” said Carol. “A girlfriend and I made meat loaf and we just kept painting all day.”) Daryl’s room is a cooperative effort too. Carol had hung a “star chart” on computer paper on Daryl’s door; he had earned one star beside
BRUSH TEETH
, three beside
PICK UP CLOTHES
, and none beside
PUT NEWSPAPER IN BOX, CARRY BEVERLY’S BAG
, or
GET UNDRESSED.
Greg had designed Daryl’s walnut built-in crib and ladder, and set up the electric car tracks. Carol had bought the elephant lamp with the party hat between its ears and the colored beanie on its rump. Everything seems integrated with everything else.

There is only one sad note: hanging in the hallway is a framed, glass-covered composition of the wedding invitations of four couples, their closest friends. In the middle, as if joining the couples together, is a $20 bill. It captures a moment of whimsy and exuberance, and expresses the idea of a gamble. “We made a bet that whoever got married last had to pay the others twenty dollars,” Carol explained. Then she grew quiet. “Tim and Jane—the ones in the right top—are divorced, and Jim and Emily, on the bottom left, are in trouble.” The Alstons’ move to Little Creek would certainly solve the traffic problem, but perhaps they also hoped it would remove them from today’s strains on marriage.

Either member of the couple was often doing something for the other. If Carol was holding Beverly she might ask Greg, “Could you feed the cat the dry food?” When Greg was hammering on a fixture in the bedroom and the phone rang, he said, “Can you get it?” One adult was as likely as the other to answer the phone or chat with a neighbor.

They handled the usual tensions at dinnertime in a similar way. Whenever his parents cast out a line of marital communication over the dinner table, Daryl would grab it. “Michael hasn’t signed the contract yet,” Greg would say to Carol. “The Michael from my school?” Daryl would butt in. “No, a different Michael
that Daddy and Mommy know,” Carol would answer. At dinner, it was as often Carol as Greg who answered Daryl’s questions.

When he was home, Greg spent as much time involved with the household as Carol did; and he tried to maximize his time at home. On the weekends, whatever each was doing, they invested the same amount of time in their work. In all, Greg contributed more time to the second shift than Evan Holt, Frank Delacorte, Peter Tanagawa, Robert Myerson, or Ray Judson. Both Carol and Greg felt the arrangement worked well.

On the other hand, in some ways they did not share. Carol cut back her hours of work and changed her philosophy of work after Beverly’s birth, whereas Greg told me that not much changed for him. If real sharing means sharing the
daily
or
weekly
tasks, then again, they didn’t really share. Whether she worked full time, time and a half, or half time, Carol was responsible for the daily and weekly chores such as cooking, shopping, and laundry in addition to such nondaily chores as shopping for children’s clothes, remembering birthdays, caring for house plants, and taking family photos. Greg’s housework list was mainly made up of nondaily chores: household repairs, paying bills, and repairing both cars.

Carol was not a supermom like Nina Tanagawa. Nor did she passively renegotiate marital roles, as Carmen Delacorte did “playing dumb.” Nor did she stage a “sharing showdown” as did Nancy Holt through her Monday-you-cook, Tuesday-I-cook scheme. But, over a period of time, Carol pursued several other strategies. First, when the demands of work went up, her production at home went down. As she explained, “When I worked full time, we both ate a big lunch at work, and Daryl eats at day care, so I didn’t cook.” Carol also cut back at work, and from time to time renegotiated roles with Greg. These were her three strategies, and Greg had a fourth. He evened out the score, it seemed, by seeing how long Carol was taking with the cooking, cleaning, and tending the children, and kept at his woodworking until she stopped. That way, Greg was working “as long as” Carol, only on his projects. These were not hobbies like Evan Holt’s projects “downstairs.”
Greg often checked his projects with Carol, did them in an order she would suggest, or consulted her on the colors, sizes, and shapes of the things that he made. What Greg did profited them both, but it was not sharing the daily chores and did not take the pressure off Carol.

Compared to Carol, Greg did less with the children and more with the house. He was the handyman. He looked at the mantelpiece with a carpenter’s eye; he thought about repairs on the septic tank in the backyard of the house in Little Creek. Carol was the parent who noticed a developing hole in Daryl’s trousers. At one point, as Greg pulled out the vacuum cleaner, he quipped, “Carol’s just a woman. She hasn’t vacuumed for so long, she’d have to relearn. A man better handle this.” But, in fact, 80 percent of his tasks that day put him on the male side of the gender line.

Too, Carol was more child-centered than Greg when she was with the children. For example, when each parent stopped occasionally during the day to talk with me, usually Daryl was there, trying to join in (he loved talking into my tape recorder) or to get his parent’s attention. Carol would give Daryl time. (“Yes, Daryl, I think that Superman can fly higher than Batman. What do you think?”) But Greg would tell Daryl, “Daddy has to talk with Arlie,” or “If you don’t stop making that noise, you’ll have to go to your room,” or “Go see Mommy.”

Carol’s breast-feeding of Beverly gave her a natural advantage in forming a close bond with the baby. Some fathers of nursing infants gently rock them, burp them, change them, and do everything they can until the baby drinks from a bottle, at which point the male disadvantage disappears. Other men seem to avoid their infants, focusing on older children, if they have them, until the baby is weaned. Greg took a middle path. He focused his attention
on Daryl. It was he who usually helped Daryl put his pajamas on, had a “peeing contest” with him in the toilet (Daryl loved that), and tucked him warmly in bed.

Greg would take care of Beverly when Carol needed him to; but he held her like a football, and when she cried, he sometimes tossed her in the air, which made her cry more. Now when Greg picked her up, half the time she was calm and half the time fussy. The family explanation for this was that “Beverly doesn’t like men.” As Carol told me flatly, “Beverly fusses when men pick her up, except for her grandfather.” But the only men who picked Beverly up were Greg and her grandfather.

Was this constitutional with three-month-old Beverly? Or was it “natural” male ineptitude on the part of Greg? I was wondering this when a telling episode occurred: Beverly was in her rocker in a pink dress and booties. Carol was cooking. After a while, Beverly began to fuss, then cry. Greg unbuckled her from the bear swing and held her, but she still cried. He sat with her at the dining-room table, trying to read over a dentistry magazine. She wailed. Greg called out, “Mom, come!” and explained to me again that “Beverly doesn’t like men.” I recalled a certain way I used to comfort my sons, bobbing slowly up and down as well as forward and back (we called it the “camel walk”), asked if I could try, demonstrated it, and she calmed down. Greg replied, “Oh, I know about that one. It works fine. But I don’t want to have to get up. See, when Carol teaches night class Tuesdays, I have her all night and I don’t want her getting used to it.” To relieve Carol, Greg very often took care of Beverly “anyway.” But however unconsciously, he seemed to resist the extra effort of taking care of three-month-old Beverly in a way she liked.