“Then you put it up right after dinner.”
“Of course.”
“Why?”
“Somebody might come over.”
“Then you put it up again before you go to bed?”
“Of course.”
“So it will be ready for school in the morning?”
“Uh, uh.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to have a permanent?”
“Oh, no, permanents are corny.”
I said, “What about riding back and forth on the ferry with those little wet snails all over your head?”
She said, “Oh, we combed our hair while we were waiting in line.”
“How did it get curled again?” I asked. “The ferry ride only takes twelve minutes.”
“We rolled it up while we were waiting for the ferry to dock.”
“Are you going to take it down again before you get back on the ferry?”
“Of course, you don’t expect us to ride on the ferry with our hair in pin curls do you?” Accompanying scornful laughter.
Of course everybody knows that adolescents, in spite of a repulsively overconfident manner, are basically unsure. We read it in books. It is pointed out to us in lectures. There are even articles about it in the newspapers. But you have to live with an adolescent to realize that in this half-ripe, newly hatched, wet-feathered stage they are not aware they are unsure. They consider themselves wise, tolerant, responsible adults. Adults so mature they have a phobia against anything childish. Thus the pleasant Sunday mornings in our bed came to a sudden end. Instead Anne and Joan rushed down and got the papers, fought over them shrilly for a while, then came into our room, sat on the bed, drank the coffee which we had gotten ourselves, and complained. “Gosh, you look hideous in that nightgown, Betty,” was one form of greeting, followed quickly by, “Raining again!” heavy sigh. “It seems like it has been raining for years and years.” Another heavy sigh. “Do you think Tyrone Power’s going to marry Lana Turner, Mommy?” They were both wearing Don’s pajamas, their hair was of course in pin curls, their faces smeared with calamine lotion, their fingernails were long, ruby-colored and chipped, their eyes sad.
I said, “Let’s get dressed, have breakfast, build a big fire in the fireplace and play charades.”
“Charades? You mean that baby game where you act out words?” Anne said.
“It isn’t a baby game,” I said. “You remember we played it last summer.”
“I don’t want to play,” Joan said. “It’s too much like school work.”
“I wish I had a pink Angora sweater,” Anne said. “Marilyn has two. A pale blue one and a pale pink one.”
“Two?” Joan said. “Are you sure? They’re twenty-five dollars, you know.”
“Marilyn’s rich,” Anne said. “She gets thirty-five dollars a month just to spend on clothes.”
Don said, “I can’t understand why we let the Russians into Berlin.”
Anne said, “Marilyn’s going to spend Christmas in Palm Springs.”
I said, “Palm Springs is the last place I would want to spend Christmas. Who wants hot weather and palm trees for Christmas?”
“I do,” Anne said wistfully. “I’m so sick of rain I could die.”
“Me too,” Joan said. “Marilyn’s going to get her own car when she’s sixteen.”
Don said, “Of course Russia had the world bluffed and our policy of appeasement, uncertainty and double-talk isn’t fooling anybody but ourselves.”
I said, “Possessions don’t bring happiness. Happiness is something you must find in your own self.”
“Well, it would be a lot easier to find if I had a car of my own,” Anne said.
Joan said, “If we had a car of our very own we could drive to California next summer.”
“You could not,” I said.
“Why?” they said together.
“Because I don’t believe in young girls’ driving around the country by themselves. It’s not safe.”
“Well, next summer we’d be fifteen and sixteen.”
“That’s not old enough to take a trip by yourselves.”
“It certainly seems funny to me that we are always old enough to do what you want but never old enough to do anything we want.”
Don said, “Listen to this, ‘Peace is largely beyond the control of purpose. It comes as a gift. The deliberate aim at peace passes into its bastard substitute, anesthesia.’”
I said, “Why don’t you girls get dressed?”
Don said, “You never listen to anything I say.”
I said, “I do too. But it’s hard to concentrate on Russia when the girls are leaving for California in their own car.”
Anne said, “Don’t you think Joan and I are old enough to drive to California, Don?”
“What about South America?” Don said. “It’s farther away.”
“Who’ll go down and get me a cigarette?” I asked.
“You go,” Anne said.
“You go,” Joan said.
Don said, “Here, smoke one of mine.”
Anne said, “Gosh, I hate Sunday. Nothing to do but damned old homework.”
“Don’t swear,” I said.
“Why not?” Anne said. “You do.”
“You swear all the time,” Joan echoed.
“Let’s get dressed,” I said, getting out of bed.
To be sure they weren’t missing out on any new vital beauty aid, Anne and Joan studied Glamour, Mademoiselle, Charm, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, as well as all the movie magazines. They knew instantly if Burnt Sugar was the latest color in lipstick and they pled and bled until they got it. When they got it they wore it out in about two hours because they put on a new complete makeup when they got home from school (this one was for getting wood), another for eating dinner and of course another before doing the dishes because “somebody might come over.” On occasion they would experiment with different blemish removers.
One night when they both came in to kiss us goodnight coated entirely with some pure white stuff that smelled like creosote and made them look like plaster casts, I said mildly, “Are you sure that is good for your skin?”
Anne, her voice throbbing with bitterness, said, “If it’s deadly poison it’s better than having to go to school with a face that is always just one big running sore.”
“Where are all these running sores?” I asked.
Bending down so that the lamp shone on her face, she said, “Look.”
I looked, but all I could see was one small red lump on her chin. I said as much and she stamped up to bed.
Joan said, “Look at my face. My pores are so enormous I look like a cribbage board.”
I examined her face as well as I could through the white paste and said, “Your skin looks fine to me.”
“Naturally you’d say that,” Joan said. “Because you don’t care. You cook rich foods all the time because you want us to break out and look ugly.”
Don said, “What have you got on your hair?”
“Straightener,” Joan said. “It’s not stylish to have curly hair. Nobody has it any more. It’s corny.”
“White stuff on your face, straightener on your hair, what are you trying to do, pass over?” Don asked.
I thought it was very funny and laughed. Joan flounced upstairs.
Leg shaving began the summer Anne was thirteen and before either of the girls had so much as one picker on their skinny legs. But leg shaving was considered sophisticated and so they scraped their legs almost as often as Don did his chin, and always with his razor.
After a while I got pretty foxy, and when I saw Anne and Joan come limping out of our bathroom, their legs sporting bloody ribbons of toilet paper like tails of kites, I would dash upstairs, wash out Don’s razor and put in a new blade.
Then there were the clothes. So vitally important. Everything long and loose and pitiful. Boys’ coats. Men’s sweaters. Don’s shirts. Boys’ jeans and T-shirts. Wooden shoes, loafers, dirty saddle shoes. Exactly the
right kind of white socks turned down an exact number of inches. The first high heels and the furious outburst in the shoestore—“You’re glad my feet are so big because you know it hurts my feelings!”
No matter what garment I bought Anne and Joan the grass was always greener in somebody else’s closet. They and their schoolmates exchanged clothes constantly. Anne and Joan would leave for school in one outfit, come home in another. It was hard for me to understand this because all the skirts, blouses, sweaters and coats were exactly alike and all made the girls look like figures in faded photographs of long-ago picnics.
Next in importance to clothes were eating and dieting. For weeks everything would be so-so. The girls would come home from school with their accompanying wake of Jeanies, Lindas, Ruthies, Sandys, Bonnies, Chuckies, Normies, Bills and Jims, go directly to the kitchen and the icebox door would begin to thump rhythmically like the tail of a friendly dog, as they devoured everything not marked with a skull and crossbones or frozen. During those intervals any old thing I cooked, stew, spaghetti or deep-fried pot holders, was greeted with “Is that all you made? We’re starving.”
Then one morning I would decide to get up early and cook something very nice for my growing girls and their long chain of Ruthies, Jeanies and so on, who apparently didn’t care if they slept six in a bed or in the fireplace just so it was every night at our house. “I’ll make French toast,” I said fondly to Tudor as I flitted happily around getting out the real maple syrup and crowding another place on the table each time another gruesome little figure in a torn petticoat, bobby pins and calamine lotion appeared and asked me where the iron was.
When I had a stack of golden French toast about two feet high, ordinarily a mere hors d’oeuvre, I called loudly that breakfast was ready and sat down in my corner with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. After an interval the girls began straggling in, dripping with my perfume and, of course, wearing each other’s clothes.
“Hurry and drink your orange juice,” I said proudly. “I’ve made French toast.”
“I hope you didn’t cook any for me,” Anne said loftily, sitting down at the table and unscrewing the top on a bottle of nail polish. “I’m dieting and all I want is one hard-boiled egg.”
“Why do you always fix orange juice?” Joan said. “Tomato juice only has fifty calories.”
The various Ruthies and Jeanies said to my offers of French toast, “None for me, thanks, Mrs. MacDonald. I’m just going to have black coffee”—or warm water and lemon juice, or a hard-boiled egg.
After they had gone I grimly dumped the lovely golden brown French toast into the raccoons’ pan and decided that this was the last time I would ever get up and cook breakfast for my disagreeable little daughters and their ungrateful little friends.
After school the locusts arrived on schedule, but only the boys ate. The girls sipped tea and smoked. Then came dinner and no matter what I cooked, rare roast beef, brook trout, ground roundsteak broiled, it was never on their diet. Also I could count on either Anne or Joan or both of them saying, “So much! Why do you always cook in such enormous quantities?”
I don’t know what diet they were on, but it was apparently the same one Mary’s daughters and friends are using today, a special high school diet that calls for one plate of fudge, three Cokes and a pound of cheese eaten in private and one small celery stalk and half a grapefruit nibbled at the dinner table. Mother used to infuriate Anne and Joan by quoting:
There was a young lady named Maud
Famed both at home and abroad,
She never was able to eat at the table
But in the back pantry, my God!
Of course you can’t examine adolescence without getting on the subject of sex, the discussion of which occupied a prominent place in our dinner table conversation during those years. Don and I tried to be very frank with Anne and Joan and encouraged them to be very frank with us. We answered their questions with medical terms, as many as we knew, and, we hoped, the correct casualness. The result was that no matter who came to dinner, the conversation was dappled with rather clinical discussions of sex in which Anne and Joan and their friends seemed to be extremely interested. Adolescents enjoy, in fact will go to most any length to get, the center of attention. In our quiet little home this was accomplished rather easily. We sat down to dinner, Don began to carve, I took a bite of salad and Ruthie said, “Did you know that Ellen broke up with Bob?” There was an excited chorus of No! When! Why! Where! Then Anne remarked in a very conversational tone, “It was bound to come, after all they have been having sexual intercourse every five minutes for years.”
Dropping my lettuce into my lap, I said, “Anne MacDonald, what a dreadful thing to say!”
Reaching for another biscuit, Joan said, “Don’t get so worked up, Betty. It’s common knowledge.”
Putting down my salad fork I would launch my standard, worn-to-the-fraying-point lecture on reputations, their preciousness, their gossamer fragility and so on, and so on. The girls waited impatiently but politely for me to finish, then Anne said, speaking patiently, slowly, the way you discourse with mental defectives, “But, Betty, we’re not hurting Ellen’s reputation.”
Ruthie broke in eagerly, “That’s right, Mrs. MacDonald. Yesterday she told the whole botany class about Bob and her.”
Sighing heavily Don said, “Can’t we change the subject?”
Sitting up straight, I began an interesting discourse on the new book I was reading.
I learned after a while, a long while, that if I displayed shock or any other interesting reaction during these discussions they went on and on and on. So I became able finally to toss it off—to say casually, “Please pass the gravy,” right in the middle of the gory details of the story about Murdene Plunkett, who didn’t wear panties to the spring formal. . . .
I encouraged Anne and Joan to read from the time they first learned how. Our library is large and varied, and beyond casual suggestions I made no attempt to monitor their selections. One rainy school morning Anne asked me for a piece of wrapping paper. I asked her why she wanted it, merely to determine the kind and size, and she said she wanted to wrap up a book so it wouldn’t get wet. I offered to wrap the book for her and she handed me Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I said, trying very hard to speak casually, “Why are you taking this book to school, Andy?”
“Because I’m going to give a book report on it,” she said just as casually as she adjusted her bandanna.
“Have you read it?” I asked.
“Part of it,” she said. “It’s awfully dull, but D. H. Lawrence is supposed to be a good writer, isn’t he?”
I tactfully substituted The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, as a little more suitable for high school English, just as dull and a lot easier to carry in the rain.
Of course the girls eventually came across and read Ulysses quite openly on the couch in the living room, but they didn’t attempt to do a book report on it. They adored Gone with the Wind, but they thought Kitty Foyle was corny. They loved A Farewell to Arms but couldn’t decide about The Grapes of Wrath because of “that absolutely disgusting ending.” They loved Tortilla Flat, but were not enthusiastic about Invitation to the Waltz or Alice Adams, two of my favorites. Their favorites were Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës (Anne read Wuthering Heights five times one winter) E. B. White and Thurber. They read The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, The Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Time, Life, as many movie magazines as they could get hold of, and all the magazines exploiting charm, glamour, beauty and so on.
They loved all movies except the ones depicting Hollywood’s conception of college life. They were wildly enthusiastic about any stage play or musical, but only Anne and I enjoyed the symphony or concerts.
Anne and Joan and their friends talked a great deal about sophistication, tight strapless black evening dresses and long cigarette holders, but when boys appeared they screamed like gulls, laughed like hyenas and pushed one another and the boys rudely. One day
I came into the living room and found Anne lifting a chair with two great big boys in it. I was horrified and that night I gave the girls lectures #10874598734 on Being a Lady—Nice Manners—Charm—Womanliness. They listened with half-closed cobra eyes until I had finished, then yawned and stretched rudely, shoved and pushed each other up the stairs, and locked themselves in our bathroom. The thing that troubled me the most was that none of Anne and Joan’s friends was as rude as they were. All the Ruthies and Jeanies, etc., said please and thank you, stood up when I came in the room and wrote their bread-and-butter letters. I wondered what magic their mothers used and when, as they were at our house most of the time.
Then one day Don and I were at a cocktail party and a strange man came up to us and said, “So you’re the parents of Anne and Joan. They go skiing with us quite often, you know, and Mrs. Alexander and I think they are the most charming girls we have ever met. They are also very witty and very bright but, right at this point, it is their manners that impress us the most. You see, Carol,” (I realized all of a sudden that this was one of the mysterious parents of Carol, quiet, exquisitely mannered Carol, who had been with us off and on, mostly on, for over a year) “ever since she entered adolescence has apparently been taking a behavior course from Al Capone.” Of course we told him about Carol and how beautifully she behaved at our house and he went on and on about Anne and Joan, and then he said, “I can’t keep this to myself,” and rushed off and got Mrs. Alexander, and we went over the whole thing again. We all left the party looking years and years younger.
Anne and Joan had always been to my prejudiced maternal eyes, normally truthful children. Joan told me when she broke the windshield of the Alcotts’ car. Anne told me when she spilled nail polish on my new bedspread. Joan told me when she cut off her eyelashes. Anne told me when she drank the cherry wine. They both told me when they took the candy out of the ten-cent store. Perhaps they each told me what the other did, but anyway I got the truth one way or another, most of the time.
Then came adolescence and the birth of the wilful, deliberate, bold-faced lie. The lie, told, I finally decided, to test parents out, to see what kind of fools they really were.