Owing to about forty unexpected guests and at least twenty expected ones, the Christmas turkey even though the approximate size and weight of an ostrich, was forgotten and cooked to death. It took Anne and Joan and me, all armed with spatulas, to maneuver it onto the Turkey Squasher’s board in one piece. After we had propped it up here and there and garnished it with parsley, we summoned Don to carry it to the table. He came eagerly, grasped the handles and started proudly for the dining room. His entrance was spoiled somewhat by the fact that the Turkey Squasher would not go through the door frontward and he had to sidle through. Fortunately we had arranged for the turkey to be carved on a serving table by the window. When he had lowered it to its carving position Don called everyone to come and see the wonderful new appliance. When all had assembled, he ground a little handle until the machine and prongs were as high as they would go and well above the turkey’s breast bone. Then he adjusted a flange, took a reading for weather, checked the oil, twirled a knob or two and nothing happened.
“Where are the directions?” he asked me.
“What directions?” I asked. “You mean instructions on carving?”
“I mean the directions that came with this turkey board,” Don said, adding plaintively. “If you were interested you would know.”
“I am interested,” I said. “In fact I’m starving but you threw away the box the board came in. You probably burned them.”
Cleve said, “Say, Mac, there are two wing nuts on this side you haven’t loosened and it looks to me like your carburetor’s dirty.”
Dede’s husband said, “Rev her up, Mac, she’s still on the ground.”
Don said, “Anne and Joan, did you see the directions?”
Joan said, “What do they look like?”
Anne said, “Just keep turning things. It’ll work, Don.”
Don smiled at her gratefully and pressed a little lever. Instantly the whole machine came down on top of the turkey, squashing it flat. Juice and goblets of stuffing sprayed generously over the onlookers and the window. A big hunk of dark meat skidded off the table right into Tudor’s waiting mouth, which surprised him so he could hardly swallow. Anne and Joan began to laugh. Finally everybody, even Don, joined in. For the rest of the Christmas holidays the sight of the turkey carcass, finally in the soup kettle, occasioned great mirth. We still use the Turkey Squasher but only as a carving board, sans the machine.
I remember that when Anne and Joan were quite small one of their favorite expressions was “You want to know somebody I hate?” Well, you want to know somebody I hate? I hate Katherine Reynolds who has no help and invites you to dinner and when you get there she looks beautiful and her house looks beautiful and her husband looks happy and not once does she leave her guests during the cocktail period yet at eight o’clock she summons you to the dining room and there is dinner complete even to hollandaise sauce on the asparagus and Yorkshire pudding around the roast beef and last but worst, if you force her to let you help carry out the plates, you find the sink empty and the kitchen looking as if it had just been painted. There has to be a secret—either she throws her dirty pots and pans down cellar, she has the food sent in from the Olympic Hotel, or she is a hypnotist. My sister Mary is the most well-organized woman I know and entertains constantly, in spite of three adolescents and a doctor husband which is like saying she entertains constantly in spite of advanced arteriosclerosis, but she always has someone in the kitchen. Here on Vashon there ain’t no such animal. What I mean to say is that you don’t have somebody “in the kitchen.” You have another member of the family who shares your table, your problems, and your pleasures and is usually just as unenthusiastic as the family about housework, or you have nobody. In the long haul, I have found it less harassing to make do with a hoer-outer brought in once, twice or thrice a week.
So I am still left with the problem of getting the gravy made without abandoning my part in the colloquy on the real purpose of the United Nations.
“I do everything in the early morning,” Mary says blandly. That is all very well as far as peeling the potatoes, washing the romaine and making the cheese dip is concerned. It would also be fine for hot weather dishes, such as jellied chicken, or cold boiled salmon, if we had any hot weather.
The home economist’s answer to the problem is the one-dish meal, and she hands out recipes for some ghastly hazelnut, sardine, chocolate chip, lima bean, avocado casserole.
My answer is a large kitchen with a fireplace and comfortable chairs. My next house isn’t going to have a living room, or drawing room or parlor at all. Just an enormous kitchen with two dishwashers, two fireplaces, one for me and one for the guests, several couches, one for me, a big bar, four ovens, twelve burners, perhaps television and a record player, and scattered here and there among the couches and chairs, little vending machines filled with peanuts, popcorn and potato chips.
CHAPTER XIII
WHY DON’T YOU JUST RELAX, BETTY?
WHEN I contemplate my own household and our way of life with fountain pens washed in the Bendix, candy bought for the raccoons, the small fireplace tongs burning up in the cedar tree, my greenhouse devoted to little sailboats, big plastic alligators and suntan oil, twenty-four sheets to the laundry on Mondays, and $183.50 long distance phone bills, I think longingly of a neighbor who always has her cuticle pushed back and buys her ground roundsteak one pound at a time.
“Well, one reason I’m glad we have this house,” Anne said, “is because now I can invite all my friends to visit me.”
Joan said, “Who am I going to invite? I don’t have any friends.”
Don said, “I think before anybody invites anybody we should talk things over.”
Anne said, “Of course I’m not sure any of my friends would care to come way out here?”
Joan said, “Who’ll I invite? I don’t have any friends.”
I said, “Anne and Joan, you can invite your friends, Don can invite his friends, I can invite my friends and if we feel like singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at three in the morning we can.”
Don said, “I think we should talk things over. I think I should be consulted.”
Anne said, “Of course I’m not sure any of my friends . . .”
But as it turned out everybody had friends and relatives and they were all glad to visit, especially in good weather and nobody ever talked things over until the guests had gone and then often in loud voices, and I learned right away that the big difference between island entertaining and any other kind is that on an island guests stay all night or for two weeks or a couple of years. Even the few rare good sports who try to go home usually miss the last ferry or the ferry company hears you are having people to dinner and knocks down the dolphins or stops running the ferries just for the hell of it.
The point being, if you are not an “I always defrost on Wednesday” kind of housekeeper, but still enjoy having people in for dinner, you can stuff that four gallons of half-finished and a little scorched currant jelly under the sink; tuck the large stack of Popular Mechanics, The Farm, and Country Gentlemans, which Don insists on keeping on the kitchen window sill so that he can get at them easily, in with the ironing; toss the beach coats, the dog dishes and my manuscripts in the back hall with the vacuum cleaner; light the candles; put some good music on the record player; mix up a pitcher of very dry martinis and you are ready.
But when people stay all night too, such slap-dash methods will not pass muster and there are the items of the so-revealing morning sunlight, the medicine cabinets, and the jam cupboards in the back hall where we also keep old magazines, the Christmas candles, the coloring books and the weed killer.
Of course, there is the thing about staying up until two or three or four A.M. If we have congenial people and they are having a good time, it is easy to stay up most of the night, especially when it is a houseparty and some of the guests are slightly hysterical at being out of their traps, away from clawing little sticky hands for a change. I like to stay up late t
oo and I like to have a good time, but four o’clock in the morning is not a time to make decisions. Shall I clean up before I go to bed and perhaps not get to bed until dawn or let it go and probably be just as tired in the morning and the house will still look like a saloon.
In the meantime, all the guests have popped off as has Don, who keeps calling hoarsely, “Betty, come to bed. Why don’t you come to bed, Betty?” Another thing, I love children and almost always have some tiny friend with me. Some tiny friend who goes to bed at seven and gets in my bed at six. Oh well, sleep is just a habit, the psychologists say.
There are all kinds of guests. Fun, no-fun, hard, bores, nasty, crazy, alcoholic, religious-fanatic, old pals who have gotten fat and dull, old pals who have gotten rich and dull, old pals who haven’t succeeded and are on the defensive, relatives, babies, foreign friends who know no English dumped on you by Mary, adolescents who play the record player from 7 A.M. to 3 A.M. and paint their toenails while I wash the dishes, bright young friends of Anne and Joan’s who are fun, bright young friends of Anne and Joan’s who are no fun and don’t help, foreign men who light my cigarettes lingeringly and tell me “Youth is so gauche, so raw,” then try to lure Anne or Joan out on the porch, and FBI agents who should open a school.
One summer we rented our town house, which we had bought to lessen the domestic shame while the girls were in their last years of school, to five FBI agents with whom we naturally became friends and whom we naturally invited to spend their weekends on Vashon and one of whom Joan later married. Now that was a summer I enjoyed.
They helped, in fact, did all the work, portioning it out in a most businesslike way and not accepting any excuses. They were good cooks, they were bright, they sang, they never got drunk, they liked children, they made the beds (there is a housewifely differentiation here between “made” and “spread up warm over the newspapers”) and they loved the country. As far as I am concerned J. Edgar Hoover can billet his whole staff on me any old time, for as long as he wants.
My idea of heaven would be an enormous house, preferably one with twenty-four bedrooms and twenty-four bathrooms, thousands of guests, mostly FBI agents and foreign men, a great many excellent unobtrusive servants, and no work to do. As my alternative is a house with four bedrooms, a guesthouse, three davenports, a lawn swing, three chaise longues and the floor, thousands of guests, many of them under four years old, and no servants, I often go six months without getting to the beach. Don says that my problem is that I don’t relax. He usually says this to me early in the morning after I have been up until three o’clock anyway and then gotten up again with somebody small who has thrown up in the upper bunk.
I prefer to believe that I am not abnormally tense—that all over the world there are wives who, under similar circumstances, are not relaxing. How could I relax, for instance, when Anne invited her friend “Okay Honey” to spend the summer and that was the year we were building a big kitchen with a fireplace and I was making do in the service room with orange crates for cupboards and no drainboards on the sink? Okay Honey was very small, with enormous blue eyes, long golden brown hair, almost black lipstick, wine-colored fingernails an inch long, and an I.Q. which I estimated to be about twenty. I guess the reason Anne and Joan liked her so much was that she was not pressing with her opinions and she knew so many boys. I say I guess, because, though she was here for over a month, I never heard her say one thing but “Okay, honey.”
Don kept growling, “Who invited her? Why am I never consulted about anything any more?” as Anne and Joan and Okay Honey spent hours covering themselves with sun-tan oil and lying motionless on the chaise longues on the porch, painting their toe- and fingernails, listening to records, pinning up their hair and eating. I used to wonder if Anne and Joan mightn’t have bought Okay Honey in a drugstore. She certainly looked as if she could have come wrapped in cellophane and she was unfamiliar with even the simplest forms of housekeeping, such as putting two pieces of bread in the toaster and pushing down the big hard lever.
Anne and Joan were willing, even eager, to cook for her, serve her, wash and iron her clothes, row her in the boat, light her cigarettes, drive her to the movies, make her bed, but if I asked them to empty the ashtrays or pass the cookies, they roared like wounded bison and said, “Work, work, work, that’s all we ever do around here! I thought this was summer vacation!”
They were also wearing their hair long and limp, their fingernails painted deep maroon, their lips almost black. It was very trying and seemed to be alarmingly permanent. Then one day somebody named Buzz telephoned from Seattle and Okay Honey went to the phone and said, “Okay, honey” and took the next ferry home.
“Buzz is her steady, home on leave from the Navy,” Anne and Joan told me, after they had packed her things and driven her to the ferry.
“Steady!” I laughed loudly. “And just who were all those millions of other Charlies and Phils and Tommies and Donnies—friends of her mother?”
“Do you always have to be so critical of our friends?” Anne said wearily as she settled herself at the kitchen table with a box of Kleenex, a bottle of polish remover and a new bottle of Deep Plum nail polish.
Of course I’ll never forget the summer I took care of my sister Alison’s three- and five-year-old boys because she was expecting a new baby, and Joanie invited her steady to stay with us because she was so sorry for him because she didn’t love him; I invited a dear friend who was an alcoholic but didn’t feel that she was quite ready for psychiatry; a couple whom I had met somewhere in the Southwest and carelessly asked to “come and see us any time—we have plenty of room” took me at my word and dropped in for the month of August; my Norwegian cleaning woman’s husband had a heart attack; and Anne, who was leading her own life in town being a model, kept bringing home for the weekends and recuperation another model who looked like a Madonna but whose husband was everlastingly blacking her eyes and knocking her against “our new twenty-seven inch T.V. set” because she was so attractive to other men.
The weather was fair and by that I mean gray and cold, but I forced everyone to eat supper on the beach every night—paper plates, no dishes. Things might have worked out after a fashion if my alcoholic friend had not been deeply suspicious of the woman from Arizona, who had one of the first chic short haircuts, and if the woman from Arizona had just once gotten up before three in the afternoon. Her husband was disgustingly hearty and arose and went swimming in the icy Sound at five-thirty A.M. and was lathering around in the kitchen ready for a big breakfast at six.
When the woman from Arizona did finally appear, she demanded that I sit with her while she ate her breakfast, which I was glad to do because it was sitting. However, we would no more than get settled at the table and she, with a few raspberry seeds between her teeth, would be outlining in detail the biography of Ivan Fegenscu she was readying herself to write, when my alcoholic friend, by this time on her eighteenth bourbon on rocks, would weave out and hiss in my ear, “Wash out lil’ lady, tha’s the ole build-up”; or Don would telephone from the dock in Seattle (sometimes he can’t wait to bring the bad news all the way home) that we were $598 overdrawn and he had forgotten the meat; or one of Alison’s little boys would come sloshing up from the beach to tell me that he had fallen out of the rowboat in his last clean clothes; or in a low throbbing voice Joan would plead with me to do something about her steady who was contemplating suicide in the porch swing; or my sister Mary would call up and tell me that she was on her way out with Mrs. Ellis and her three children or “Arenthau Salavochic and his adorable wife, actually a count and countess but working for the Ellises just to learn American ways and they don’t speak a word of English but you will love them and they want to meet you more than anything in the world and I am bringing a salmon and what else do you need?” As I write this the thought occurs that it is a very strange thing that the ferry has never broken down bringing people—only when it is supposed to be taking them away.
Then of course there was
the Saturday afternoon when Don and the girls and I came staggering along the beach with our loads of groceries and a male voice yelled “Yoohoo!” at us from the roof of our house and it was Don’s old buddy, the very same old buddy who, refusing to believe that “ole Don” had finally taken the step, spent our weekend honeymoon in Don’s apartment with us.
Although he did not come down off the roof, we drew closer to home and finally could see clearly that Old Buddy’s face was suspiciously flushed and that he was crawling around loosening the shakes in none too steady a fashion. I sent Don out to “talk” to him while the girls and I put the groceries away. Mary and some Navy people were expected on the next ferry and I still had a great deal of rapid stuffing and tidying and flower arranging to do and I didn’t intend to be hampered by Old Buddy.
I set Anne to making clam and cream cheese dip and Joan to filling little dishes with nuts and sunflower seeds and olives. When I had finished my tidying I opened the back door and called to Don to start the fire. Don didn’t answer, but Buddy peered at me over the edge of the roof on the steep water side and said, “Heigh-ho!” I slammed back into the house and into Don who was making two drinks.
“You’ve got to get him out of here,” I said, wiping the soda water out of my eyes.
“Why?” Don asked mildly. “He’s up on the roof out of the way.”
“I don’t think you’re funny,” I said. “Mary and those Navy people are coming on the next ferry and anyway think of the girls.”
“Yes, think of us,” the girls said.
“Why don’t you all relax?” Don said. “Everything will work out. Let’s all be sweet.”
He went out the door carrying the two drinks.
Leaving Anne and Joan with the hors d’oeuvres I dashed upstairs, washed my face, put on my tight black slacks and a white sweater and was splashing on perfume when from my open bedroom window I heard Mary and the Navy people crunching along in the sand, and then from overhead I heard Buddy calling out to them “Heigh-ho!”