My Kitchen Wars
A Memoir
Assault and Battery
Come in, Come in. I’ve just made coffee and it smells, as good coffee should, of bitter chocolate.
Don’t mind the mess. It’s always this way, because a kitchen is in the middle of things, in the middle of life, as I’m living it now, this moment, the detritus of the past heaped like a midden everywhere you look. That squat brown bean pot we got in 1949 for our first kitchen, in a Boston slum, when I didn’t know beans about cooking. That tarnished copper bowl I bought at Dehillerin in Paris in 1960, used heavily for soufflés during my Julia decade, which I haven’t used since for anything at all.
I like food because it’s in the middle of the mess. I like thinking about what I ate yesterday, what I’ll eat tonight, what we’re eating now—this hot crumbly shortbread full of butter and toasted pecans. So delicious. So tangible, sensuous, real. I can hold it in my hand, in my mouth, on my tongue. I can turn it over in my mind. I can count on it. The next bite will bring the same intense pleasure the last bite did, and the same pleasure tomorrow, if there are any bites left.
Do you take milk, and would you like it frothed? This little glass jar has a plunger fitted with a wire-mesh screen, and when I pump it up and down, the hot milk thickens into a blanket of foam. It’s the little things that count, and everything in my kitchen counts heavily. Look at this olive pitter that I use maybe twice a year, this shrimp deveiner which removes that telltale line of gut in a trice, this avocado skinner, ingeniously fiddle-shaped to allow me to separate soft flesh from shell in a single motion. When I try to explain to my grown children, to friends, to myself, why I still live a kitchen life, I begin with the naming of kitchen parts. Well-made implements, well chosen and well used, turn labor into art, routine into joy.
And yet the French got it right when they christened the kitchen arsenal the batterie de cuisine. Hunger, like lust in action, is savage, extreme, rude, cruel. To satisfy it is to do battle, deploying a full range of artillery—crushers, scrapers, beaters, roasters, gougers, grinders, to name but a few of the thousand and two implements that line my walls and cram my drawers—in the daily struggle to turn ingredients into edibles for devouring mouths. Life eats life, and if we are to live, others must die—just as if we are to love, we must die a little ourselves.
I’ve spent most of my life doing kitchen battle, feeding others and myself, torn between the desire to escape and the impulse to entrench myself further. When social revolutions hustled women out of the kitchen and into the boardroom, I seemed to be caught in flagrante, with a pot holder in my hand. I knew that the position of women like myself was of strategic importance in the war between the sexes. But if you could stand the heat, did you have to get out of the kitchen? For even as I chafed at kitchen confinement, cooking had begun its long conquest of me. Food had infiltrated my heart, seduced my brain, and ravished my senses. Peeling the layers of an onion, spooning out the marrow of a beef bone, laying bare the skeleton of a salmon were acts very like the act of sex, ecstatically fusing body and mind.
While cooking is a brutal business, in which knives cut, whisks whip, forks prick, mortars mash, and stoves burn, still it is our most civilized act. Within its cardinal points—pots, a fan, a sink, a stove—my kitchen encompasses earth, air, water, and fire. These are the elements of nature that cooking transforms to make the raw materials of food, and the murderous acts of cooking and eating it, human. Cooking connects every hearth fire to the sun and smokes out whatever gods there be—along with the ghosts of all our kitchens past, and all the people who have fed us with love and hate and fear and comfort, and whom we in turn have fed. A kitchen condenses the universe.
Food, far more than sex, is the great leveler. Just as every king, prophet, warrior, and saint has a mother, so every Napoleon, every Einstein, every Jesus has to eat. Eating is an in-body experience, a lowest common denominator, by nature funny, like the banana peel or the pie-in-the-face of slapstick. The subversive comedy of food is incremental. Little laughs add up to big ones, big enough to poke a hole in our delusions of star-wars domination and bring us down to earth. The gut, like the bum, makes the whole world one.
That’s why I write about food. It keeps me grounded in small pleasures that add up to big ones, that kill time by savoring it, in memory and anticipation. Food conjugates my past and future and keeps me centered in the present, in my body, my animal self. It keeps my gut and brain connected to each other as well as to the realities of the world outside, to all those other forms of being—animal, vegetable, mineral—of which I am a part. Food keeps me humble and reminds me that I’m as kin to a cabbage or a clam as to a Bengal tiger on the prowl.
That’s why I decline the epic view from the battlements in favor of the view from my kitchen window, fogged by steam from the soup in the pot. When I chop onions and carrots, crush garlic, and hunt out meaty bones for my soup, I’m doing what I’ve done for decades and what women before me have done from the beginning of time, when they used stones instead of knives and ashes instead of pots. There’s comfort in this, in the need, in the craft, in the communion of hands and of hungers. A wooden spoon links me to my grandmother in her apron and to the woman who taught Jacob to stir a mess of pottage. History can turn on a spoon, on a soup.
And so of arms and the woman I sing, while we drink our coffee, you and I. The singer is an “old stove,” as they say in San Francisco of a woman who’s done time at the burners. But the songs of an old stove, no matter how darkly they glitter, are gay.
To Arms with Squeezer and Slicer
My dad’s favorite kitchen implement was the orange squeezer, not the elemental hand squeezer with a serrated cone on which you place half an orange and, pressing hard, turn the orange clockwise, releasing pulp into the container below. His was a 1930s improvement made of dull metal alloy. He put the orange half into a container elevated on a stand, and when he brought the handle down, as if pumping water, a thick metal square squeezed the orange flat so that its juice squirted through an opening. He’d had lots of experience with pump handles, and a pump that squirted orange juice instead of water was better than the Well of Cana that turned water into wine.
Dad loved to squeeze oranges. He never squeezed people or even touched them. Bodies embarrassed him. But oranges he could hold in his hand with impunity. Oranges he loved. That’s why we lived in California, and that’s how it happened that I was born and my mother died in a kitchen in the middle of an orange grove. California was the romance of my dad’s life, and he never got over it.
The pull of the West had long ago drawn my Lowland Scots ancestors, first across the Irish Sea to County Derry and Tyrone, then across the Atlantic Ocean to Pennsylvania, down the Appalachians to Virginia and on to Ohio and Illinois, beyond the Missouri to Colorado, and finally over the Rockies, stopping only when further west meant east. By the late nineteenth century they moved to the galloping rhythm of a St. Andrews Society versifier who’d somehow got stuck in Philadelphia:
To the West, to the West, to the land of the free,
Where the mighty Missouri rolls down to the sea;
Where a man is a man even though he must toil,
And the poorest may gather the fruits of the soil.
They would have been appalled to learn that their descendants were called Scotch-Irish, as if a single one of them would have mingled blood with Papists when they paused in Ireland on their long roll west.
Of all the Scots in the list of begats pasted into our family Bible, the Erskines were the fiercest. Their Calvinism was a straight shot of Knox, with no mediating chaser. My father’s mother, Carrie Hadassah Erskine, was a descendant of Presbyterian Dissenters unto the ninth and tenth generations, including the Reverend Ebenezer Erskine of Stirling, who in 1743 preached his most famous sermon, “Christ considered as the Nail fastened to a sure Place, bearing all the Glory of his Father’s House.” The carpentry metaphor was apt for a people compelled to keep moving their Father’s House from place to place, the better to hammer in Christ the Nail.
If the housing wars of the eighteenth century pitched Christ against Satan, Protestant against Catholic, Calvin against the Pope, the street fights were Presbyters against one another, each lit by the lamp of God. The moment one Scottish gang split from the main division, another rose to fight it. New Licht Burghers battled Old Licht Burghers until both were attacked by New and Old Licht Anti-Burghers. Such were the wars before the truce of the United Secession Church in 1820 produced the oxymoronic United Presbyterians of America.
This was the Church and this the stock that spawned a long line of farming ministers and doctors before my father’s father, Charles Sumner Harper, dissented from the traditional medicine practiced by his father and left the family farm in Kansas to study osteopathy in Des Moines. From there he moved on west to Greeley, Colorado, for the sake of his wife’s health. In a family photo, I see Grandpa H. in his office, a big comfortable man who sits in a wooden rocking chair behind a desk that is bare but for its proud trophy, a telephone. In the companion photo, his wife sits small and erect, with a grin as wide as her sidesaddle, atop her favorite gray workhorse, Minnie, on their nearby farm.
My dad, Josias Meryl Harper, was thirty years old and president of the student body at Colorado State Teachers College in Greeley in 1922 when he met the organist, a music professor five years his senior named Ruby Hazel Kennedy. Six feet tall, with a bony face, Roman nose, dimpled chin, and ready smile, Meryl was an attractive man, a hard worker, and as upright as a fence post. His handsome younger brother, Roy, had graduated the year before, but Dad’s studies had been delayed by military service. Roy would go on to find Eden in Brazil, as a Presbyterian missionary, but my father had already found it in California. As a naval recruit during World War I, he had been sent to San Francisco Bay to Goat Island, renamed Treasure, and had spent the war in a hospital bed on Mare Island after abdominal surgery for adhesions went awry. Following a medical discharge and a second bout of surgery, he spent the next two years recuperating on his parents’ farm and vowing to get back to California. In his senior year he married the music professor and at graduation moved to paradise, as he’d vowed, with his bride and their month-old baby boy.
A photo of my mother in the college catalogue shows a round-cheeked woman with a gentle face and smile, thin-rimmed spectacles covering her brown eyes, and a puff of wavy hair that I’m told was auburn as autumn leaves when she was young. Miss Hazel Kennedy, the catalogue explains, laid the foundation for her successful career with a course at the University School of Music in Lincoln, Nebraska, before studying at the National Academy of Music at Carnegie Hall in New York City. She was the only one of my predecessors to reverse direction and go east.
Like the Harpers and Erskines on my father’s side, the Kennedys and Culvers had moved in prairie schooners unremittingly east to west, fighting Indians along the way. My mother’s mother, Ellen Josephine Culver, had the writing itch, and in 1928 she wrote her “Memories of Early Days,” scribbling with a pencil on both sides and in the margins of what are now tattered sheets. From these, I know that her mother, Hannah Carpenter, pushed west from Ohio to the Iowa frontier with the family of a married sister in 1840, when Hannah was seventeen. I know that Hannah got married in her uncle’s log house in a snowstorm three years later, and that she doffed her lace cap with its yards of white satin ribbon to put on flannel and linsey in time to do the chores when they got back to their newlyweds cabin down the Magnolia River. I know that one Sunday after a hard thunderstorm, the couple went for a walk in the sun and killed thirty rattlers before they got home. I know that on a day when the men were cutting grain in one field while the women shocked it in another, the women saw a large group of Indians crossing their field and hid all night in a grain shock because they were afraid the Indians would return to burn the house.
Grandma Kennedy’s father died of typhoid before she was born, but she was told that he’d asked his family to sing “I’m Going Home to Die No More” on the day he passed into the Beyond. As a girl, Grandma K. remembered, she saw off her cousin Cummings and his brothers as they went to answer their country’s call to arms during the Civil War. As the train pulled away, she cried, “Cummings, come back,” but Cummings did not, for he too died of typhoid while guarding rebel soldiers in Illinois. The women of her house cut up linen to make lint for wounded soldiers while the kids played soldiers by killing rebel mice in the granary with bow and arrow. Ellen was so quick with her hands that she caught mice by the tail and hung on to them even though they bit her fingers until blood dripped. “Lew said that if I let them go, I was not a good soldier,” she recalled. “Such was the spirit drilled even into babies.”
She married Parks Ira Kennedy in 1880 and homesteaded in the territory of Nebraska. Parks was a well digger, but he was also a builder and cabinetmaker. He dug the first well and built the first church at one crossroads after another. He was a musical man who played the French horn as sweetly as he sang, and once Christ the Nail was fixed in his Father’s House, he organized the church choir while Ellen, who’d been trained in elocution, set up the Sunday school. In a later age they might have taken to the road as an evangelical duo, she the poet-preacher and he the accompanying choirmaster, to declare war on the wide world of Sin.
Grandma K. lived long enough to celebrate her sixty-sixth wedding anniversary as a passel of grandsons fought World War II. In her century she brought God and civilization to the prairies in the particular alliance of Calvinism with the genteel arts that characterized the homesteaders of her generation and created the powerful matriarchs of Victorian America. Her children remembered her as the head of an ever-expanding commune of one son and six daughters, two hired girls, at least one hired man, and an accumulation of foster boys whom she welcomed after they’d been sent packing at fourteen, according to Swedish farm traditions in America at that time, to make their own way in the new country.
On a sweltering July day in 1904, Grandma K. delivered, as president of the Nebraska branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a Chautauqua lecture entitled “Some Evils Which Threaten Our Girls.”
Did you ever see a lovelier picture than that produced by Dame Nature, on a winter’s morning when plain, hill and dell are covered with a mantle of snow, glittering with diamonds or shimmering with pearls, as the changing sunbeams flash their golden lights over that spotless landscape? Did it not make you think of the world arrayed as a Bride to meet the Bridegroom? It is a scene to remind us of the purity of maidenhood before the evils of this life have left their stains and shadows upon its snowy whiteness. Alas! How very soon the contamination begins.
She must have valued the manuscript, because it too came down to me, page after worm-eaten page, detailing the evils of alcohol, tobacco, the dance hall—“an open door to the brothel”—and sensational novels which “give the agents of Satan a chance to do missionary work for the lower regions.”
A decade earlier, Grandma K. herself had been contaminated, by consumption, which gave her a certain cachet and, long after she recovered, allowed her to retreat to her bed when convenient. By the time the two youngest girls were born, her eldest were well trained to look after them, and they remained a close-knit clan. Hazel was the fourth girl, and the rebel among them, the tomboy who’d join the boys in swinging down from the hayloft on a rope. Hazel was the ambitious one, the adventurous one, who went by herself on the Union Pacific Railroad to New York, where she’d gotten a scholarship to study at Dr. Wilbert Webster White’s Bible Teacher’s Training College while furthering her piano study at Carnegie Hall. Hazel was the professional one, in a family of accomplished amateur musicians. Hazel was also the fragile one, who overburdened her strength and overloaded her circuits, suffering a back injury in New York which triggered a nervous breakdown and recuperation in a rest home in New Jersey before she was sent home to Nebraska.
There were further breakdowns, and further interruptions to her studies while she worked for money to continue, but Hazel finally achieved her goal of teaching piano when she joined the music faculty at Colorado State Teachers College. She rented a big two-story house in Greeley and brought her sister Charlotte to live with her, along with several other female students who needed room and board. She brought her parents, too, who’d been homesteading in tiny Briggsdale, Colorado. The Kennedys probably met the Harpers in the First Presbyterian Church of Greeley, but neither family would have predicted that they’d both end up in Southern California, a mere forty miles apart, bonded by a pair of grandchildren.
My Kennedy grandparents went west first, to live with their eldest daughter, Lyda, and her husband, Bert. Bert was a builder and carpenter like his father-in-law, and together they built in the wilds outside Glendale a solid stuccoed house that sits on the top of Nob Hill in Eagle Rock exactly as it did eighty years ago. My parents were living further north, in Palo Alto, where Dad hurried to get his teaching credential at Stanford. But when a second baby boy was born sickly and died, Hazel’s delicate nervous system broke down again, and they moved south so that Hazel could be with her parents. My father landed a job at Polytechnic High School in Riverside, where he would teach botany and biology for the next fifty years.
In a house crowded with three families, it must have seemed a bright idea for my parents and grandparents to start a chicken ranch together on two and a half acres in Riverside, further east. In the winter of 1926, Grandpa K. threw up a one-room garage meant to be temporary living quarters until he could build a permanent house. But it didn’t take long for the Great Chicken Enterprise to collapse. My grandparents, abandoning chickens, returned to the house on Nob Hill, while my parents and their little boy stayed on at the “ranch.”
Still, having abandoned the fog of Northern California for the sunshine of the south, my father never looked back. He squeezed fresh orange juice every morning at 6:30 sharp, day in and day out, summer and winter, before morning prayers. In California the miracle of oranges, like the miracle of sunshine, was a tangible daily witness to God’s forgiveness of Adam’s sin, the sin that brought blizzards to Kansas, breakdowns to nervous systems, and adhesions to bowels. The conception of seedless oranges, strung like Christmas balls in dark green groves in the middle of December when the sun shone bright, made Riverside the site of miracles for which my family took responsibility. Hadn’t the rootstock of the navel orange been discovered in the jungles of Brazil by a Presbyterian missionary just like my Uncle Roy?
Until his death at ninety-one, my father rejoiced in Riverside as a miracle like unto the orange itself. For him the city was an oasis created from a desert wilderness by the magic of progress. In fact, it had been engineered at the turn of the century by a gang of water thieves, who laid the foundation not only for the orange industry but also for the heavier industries generated by World War II, which eventually turned the City of Oranges into Smog City, U.S.A. Like other facts, this was one my father with encrusted red-rimmed eyes denied to his dying day. “Just a little haze,” he’d say of the sulphurous yellow blanket that smothered the town.
I wonder how he euphemized the gray layer of dust that covered the orange grove I grew up in, on the wrong side of Riverside, in a cluster of shanties hard by the cement plant that some scalawag realtor had named Rivino Orchards. And I wonder how he greeted the news in the fall of 1926 that his wife was once again pregnant, this time with me. When Hazel married, she’d been told she shouldn’t try to bear children because of her bad back, not to mention her delicate psyche. The Harpers blamed Hazel for getting pregnant and the Kennedys blamed Dad, both sides of the family perennially short of funds but never of blame.
Grandma K. moved back in to look after her daughter. So did thirteen-year-old Leona, Lyda’s eldest daughter. As Leona wrote long after, the place was “hot as Hades, bleak and desolate with grit and dust over everything from the nearby cement works which kept up a high-pitched ‘peanut’ whistle all day long.” Even as a teenager, she said, this godforsaken place had her crawling up the walls. Grandma K. hung a blanket between the bed where she slept with Leona and the bed where Dad and Hazel slept with little Bobby. Another blanket separated the bed quarters from the cooking and eating quarters. Scots cottars would have said this divided the ben from the but—the but the open hearth that sent smoke through a hole in the roof, the ben the bed in a wooden enclosure, with a little door in front for getting in and out.
I was very nearly born in the but of this hovel, at least as Leona tells it. Nobody else would admit I got born at all, because the subject of birthing was taboo. “The things men do to women, even in marriage,” Grandma K. told her children and grandchildren, “are vile, disgusting, filthy, and sinful.” However necessary for the procreation of the race, birthing babies was as terrible as Adam and Eve’s first discovery of shame.
Leona remembers that she woke one morning to hear whispers behind the blanket that shielded Hazel and Dad. Grandma K. was telling my mother to stop fussing and get in the car. Dad had cranked up the Model T and was waiting for her outside the kitchen door. Leona couldn’t imagine what was wrong with Hazel, who was groaning horribly, but Grandma got her out the door and off Dad went. Grandma had just set out pancakes for breakfast when Dad returned, said “It’s a girl,” and asked for a bucket of water and some rags. Leona started out the door to see what was up, but Grandma slammed the door in her face and cried, “Mercy, child, don’t you dare go out there.” Leona had already seen that the back seat of the car was covered with blood, and she was frantic because no one would tell her what terrible thing had happened to her aunt.
A few days later, Hazel returned with a pink baby in her arms, and whether Dad had actually stopped the car to help deliver the baby or whether he just told Hazel to hang on after it slipped out was never clear. The baby was named Betty, a name favored by Nebraskans then and since, and Ellen, after Grandma K. The baby had blue eyes and straight blond hair, like her father, although when she grew up she was said to be the spitting image of her mother. After the first few weeks, when Hazel and the baby seemed to be doing well, Grandma K. and Leona went home to Eagle Rock.
It must have been a relief to be whittled down to a mere foursome in the garage, but at the same time the days must have been long and exhausting and lonely for a woman over forty who had devoted herself to the practice of music in an earlier life. There was an upright piano in one corner of the garage, but there could have been little time to play it. Just keeping a new baby, a scrappy boy of four, and a husband in clean and ironed clothes would have been a full-time job in so primitive a house.
On the day of her death I see her, my fantasy colored by my brother’s memories, wandering over to the piano while Bobby and I, now almost six and not quite two, played with empty spools of thread on the kitchen floor. She might have started a Bach fugue or a Chopin prelude or something merrier, like Saint-Saëns’s Rapsodie d’Auvergne, before slamming the lid of the piano shut. She was often distracted, or so they said, given to nibbling things absentmindedly as she went about the house.
Next to the sink was an open tin of rat poison. In her distraction, she might have dipped a finger in the tin and put it in her mouth without realizing what it was. She might have. What Bob remembers is her falling to the floor, her mouth foaming, calling out to him to run, run quick and get help. Our nearest neighbor was a good fifteen-minute run for a small boy, and when Bobby got back with the neighbor, the man said she was gone and found a blanket to cover her. I was playing on the floor as if nothing had happened, but Bobby cried, because she had counted on him to get help and he had failed.
When genealogy became Dad’s obsession in his geriatric years, he made hundreds of photocopies of the family tree, as if that might somehow elaborate its sparse branches. His written account of my mother’s death was typically terse. “Hazel became ill, entered the Community Hospital, and passed away.” In conversation, I don’t remember his ever mentioning her by name. Nor did Grandpa and Grandma Harper, who took on the burden of raising her two small children, first at their Colorado farm and then, when they sold the farm two years later, at Rivino Orchards. It seemed that everyone, whether they wanted to or not, ended up in California.
Because I was so small and doubtless trouble, Hazel’s sister Edna and her family took care of me that first winter in their house in Sterling, Colorado. I remember nothing except icicles hanging from the eaves and dripping on my head in the sun, an exotic watersport for an orange-grove kid. And all I remember of the summer I spent in Gilchrist, reunited with my brother and Dad, was the farmhouse kitchen and its icebox, concealing like Pandora’s box my first full sensual experience of the hidden pleasures of the flesh. Bob remembers the farm as the happiest time in his life, spent outdoors with the farm horse and the chickens and the cows and the dogs. But what I remember is toddling over to the icebox, where the door had been left ajar, and finding within its coolness a big thick cube as golden as an orange and as smooth and velvety as ice cream. I took it out and licked it. It got slippery in my hands, creamed my mouth, melted on my tongue, and ran down my throat. By the time they found me, I had consumed the whole pound of it. It was clear I was destined for a lifelong romance with butter that would rival my father’s love affair with oranges.
Butter, chickens, eggs. These were the staples of Grandma H.’s kitchen, in California as in Colorado. Wherever we moved, we kept chickens, and our eggs were always fresh. Eggs were an excuse for a bowlful of butter. Grandma H. boiled eggs two ways, soft or hard, and she served them in a bowl, two at a time. If they were soft, you stirred them with your spoon into the butter to make a kind of soup. If they were hard, she would slice them in her Presto 4-Way egg slicer, an efficient guillotine, the eight thin wires strung across its hinged top dropping neatly into the slots in its molded bottom. With her Erskine sense of humor, she’d pretend to crack an egg on my head while actually cracking it on the table, shell it quickly, then slice it in perfect Platonic circles, all white at each end, with white rims diminishing around bigger and bigger yellow centers toward the middle. Circles were useful for potato salad, but I preferred dice to circles, so that I could mash the white and yellow into a large blob of softened butter with my fork to make mashed butter flecked with egg. To make dice, Grandma would turn the sliced egg sideways in the hollow and drop the wires again to slice the other way. So simple a mechanism, so profound an effect.
When I think of Grandma and Grandpa H. at Rivino Orchards, I am always sitting in one or other of their laps, eating something. Grandma would sit me in her aproned lap while she quartered an apple with a dull table knife, cut out the core, then scraped the raw crisp flesh with the back of the knife to make instant applesauce, which she fed me from the knife’s tip. Grandpa, whom Bobby and I called Bunco, would sit me on his overalled knees, open a jar of homemade jelly, usually apple or grape, and feed it to me “raw,” with a spoon. Once while I was sitting on Bunco’s lap in the yard outside the garage, a wasp flew by and stung me on the eyelid. My wail was an expression not only of pain but of outrage at betrayal. In a perilous world, Bunco’s lap was supposed to be a sure Place, like Christ the Nail.
There were advantages to being raised by Fundamentalists for whom the Bible was a guidebook to history, geography, astronomy, archaeology, and genealogy. Grandma H., like all the women in my family, had been a schoolteacher, and at her knee when I was three or four I learned to recite both the multiplication table and the names of all the books of the Bible. The fact that Leviticus came before Numbers and Zechariah followed Haggai had to me the same logic as the eights coming before the nines or the fours following the threes. I learned the alphabet in a similar syncretism: A is for Abraham, B is for Bethlehem, C is for Christ. I knew verses and Psalms by heart long before I could read, and the story of the boy Samuel waking at night—“Here am I, Lord, send me”—was more real to me than the story of Peter Rabbit, hiding from Mr. McGregor in a flowerpot.
The topography of the Bible, overlaid with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, mapped my real town and its surroundings. The Valley of the Shadow of Death was a real place, beyond the Mohave Desert, named Death Valley. The Slough of Despond was a place to the south of the actual Chocolate Mountains beyond Hemet, the Salton Sea. The hill where Christ was crucified, Golgotha, was Riverside’s Mount Rubidoux, which we climbed at dawn every Easter with hundreds of others to witness, at the foot of the Cross planted there by a hotel entrepreneur, the miraculous Resurrection of Our Savior. In Riverside we were saved, glory hallelujah, by the annual rusting and renewing of Christ the Nail.
These were my years of safety, secure in salvation. Jesus loved me; Grandpa and Grandma and the Bible and my Sunday school teachers and the minister at Calvary Presbyterian Church all told me so. My missionary Uncle Roy, home on furlough, baptized me himself. A scrapbook labeled “Betty’s” in Grandma H.’s handwriting shows that I was accepted into the Church on Easter Sunday 1935 after I’d attended confirmation classes, “On Confession of Faith, Having Been Baptized,” and having tasted my first sanctified cracker and grape juice at Good Friday communion service. A poem pasted in the scrapbook told me just how safe I was.
God made the Dark for children
And birdies in their nest.
All in the Dark He watches
And guards us while we rest.
There were a few loose twigs in the nest, however, a few rockabye babies in treetops that came tumbling down in the wind. My pet rooster, for one. I have a snapshot of me, plump as a piglet, pulling him in my little red Flyer wagon around the dirt yard beneath the orange trees. Chicken Little, I called him, because it was the only chicken name I knew. One summer, after Bobby and I had spent a couple of weeks visiting Aunt Lyda and Uncle Bert, I returned to the yard and called for Chicken Little, but no cock came. He had disappeared without a trace. Only years later did my grandparents confess that they’d taken advantage of my absence to put him in the Sunday pot. They laughed when they told it, but old as I was, and I must have been in my teens, I was shocked.
I was no less shocked at twenty when I learned that the cause of my mother’s death was not necessarily the “accidental poisoning” my family had claimed. I’d never thought to question it. For me, my mother had existed only in photographs, in heaps of snapshots jumbled together in cardboard shirt boxes. I studied them endlessly as if the images were real as the heaven where she’d gone to live in her Father’s House and where, Grandma H. assured me when pressed, I would join her and live happily ever after.
One day after I’d graduated from college, I was at my typewriter in the dining room filling out a job application when I asked Dad for some insurance document the form required. On the document he gave me was a note that at Hazel’s death her life insurance money had been denied because the cause of her death was “unresolved.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. Dad blushed, as if I’d asked him where babies come from. He cleared his throat several times, a chronic habit that intensified when he was embarrassed. “Well, there was some question at the time about whether it was fully accidental, given her past history of health problems, but of course you know how insurance companies are.”
It was a thunderbolt, as sulphurous as the day outside was bright and clear. Was that the shame that had kept her name unspoken, her memory erased? Was that why the Kennedys never spoke of my father without an edge? She had killed herself, my saintly mother, looking down on me from heaven, the one sure Place. That was how she ended her kitchen wars. They must have been beyond bearing to leave behind a baby girl and a little boy who needed her then, and all their lives. I sensed a despair I tried to imagine but could not, except in bits and pieces, refracted in the constant anxiety of my father and grandparents over the state of my health. “You’re such a nervous child,” they’d say reprovingly, “just like your mother,” warning me every time I jiggled my foot against succumbing to St. Vitus’ dance.
Not until twenty more years had passed did I come upon anything to illuminate her despair. Grandma H. had kept a letter of Hazel’s until she herself died, at eighty-three, leaving instructions to my stepmother to pass it on to Bob and me “when we were old enough.” I don’t know what caused my stepmother to release it. Perhaps she thought, not without reason, that she might outlive us all and could bury it with her yet.
The letter, never mailed, was written in pencil (didn’t anybody in my family have a pen?) in Hazel’s round, open hand on the day before she died—April 12, 1929. It was addressed to her parents, whom Hazel had just returned from visiting in Eagle Rock, along with Lyda and another sister, who’d come down from Bakersfield with her baby daughter. The sentences ran on with the same girlish rush of the letters Hazel had written home on her trip East in 1912, when she enthused over the noble domes of the nation’s capital or the towers of Gotham.
Dear loved ones all.
I was so homesick to see you all and so happy to have the privilege again and I just thought I would find a way to show that I do appreciate all of you, what you have been and are and do etc etc—but words seem slow in coming and thoughts slower so the time passed so quickly and I realized I had been receiving benefits all the time while I contributed almost nothing to your joy and comfort. The times together are so short and too soon gone forever one wants to fill them full to overflowing.…
I just didn’t have any visit with father, much to my regret, and very little with mother it seems but oh I do know that nobody ever had parents who wanted to do more for their children. You gave us the right ideals and aspirations and wore yourselves out trying to help us attain them and I have been mean to ever criticize in anything.…
Oh my dear ones I do love you in spite of my stupidity. There is nothing I would not be willing to do for you if I could see clearly the way and what God wants me to do. If one could erase his mistakes as easily as he makes them he could forget them more easily. God has shown me His goodness so much thru my own family, my husband, children, friends and strangers, I should never doubt His power to renew life and strength. In my teens I received several wrong complexes, being very impressionable which I can see now were brooded over too much instead of being righted as they might have been had I confided fully and relieved my mind of little fears. I know a Christian should always be calm and serene. I feel I cannot call myself a Christian when I don’t feel that God is leading me by the hand. I would rather have that confidence, knowing that He has not cast me off, than anything. Because of the crazy ideas I had at times which destroyed the faith of my own little son and little children who have seen me that way, I feel that I have committed the unpardonable sin. My very fear of injuring some one has largely made my life negative instead of constructive as I desire.
The writing ended halfway down the yellowed page. There was no signature. The unpardonable sin of doubt and despair. Neither Kennedy, Culver, Erskine, nor Harper was equipped, historically or personally, to handle such dark feelings. Certainty was the lifeblood of the Elect, their salvation predestined by God’s Grace in an act of faith as simple and pragmatic as hammering in a nail, as slicing an egg, as juicing an orange. For a good Calvinist, to doubt was as unthinkable as to swear or blaspheme or worship graven images. You didn’t try to make sense of why some were saved and some were not. God’s Will was as implacable as it was mysterious. Just lift the hammer or press down the wires or lower the lever, and don’t gum up the works.
By the time I read my mother’s letter, however, I’d been to college. I’d been through World War II. I’d lived for a decade under the thumb of my stepmother. I had long ago learned to be afraid of the dark. My grandma’s nightly tuck-in echoed in my head long after she was gone, but the dark was too wide and too deep for the simple rhymes of
Sleep tight,
Don’t let the fleas bite,
Wake up in the morning
And do what’s right.
Annihilation by Pressure Cooker
From the day we moved into the house on Walnut Street until the day I went away to college a decade later, I was trapped. Trapped like a piece of Swiss steak inside my father’s favorite newfangled kitchen instrument, the pressure cooker. I would watch as he pounded the thin strips of raw beef with a wooden mallet, the head of which was scored in a grid on both ends. Wielded vigorously, the mallet reduced the muscled surface of the meat to pulp, as the strips flattened and thinned. Dad put the strips along with some sliced onions and canned tomatoes into the cooker and slipped the lid, with its mysterious top vent, under the lip of the pot so that the seal was tight. He turned up the heat until steam hissed from the open vent, then turned the heat down and narrowed the vent until the steam made a steady whistle, like the peanut whistle at the cement plant.
The pot attracted me because I was forbidden to use it unless my dad was there. It was a time bomb, a hand grenade, and you had to do everything exactly right or it might explode in your face and kill you, the way fifty years later a friend of mine was killed when she went to make breakfast and the stove blew up, setting her on fire and blackening her body to a cinder. Kitchens could be as risky as battlefields, and in my family the kitchen was a battlefield in our wars against flesh, poverty, and one another.
The nominal function of the pot was to cut down cooking time, which in the Depression seemed a good idea because it saved on gas. In our house there was no shortage of gas—it was forever trapped inside the plumbing of the Harper bowels and forever seeking release—nor of detailed discussions about its source and duration. If we could have figured a way to bottle it, we’d have been rich, like C. W. Post and W. K. Kellogg and all those other Elishas of Battle Creek who mapped an interior landscape as fraught with peril as any Bunyan’s Pilgrim had to face.
So for us the pressure cooker’s chief virtue was its ability to render the toughest material soft as cotton wadding. That saved chewing time and energy, as well as wear and tear on the dentures of the old and the vagrant choppers of the young. Our dietary Platonic ideal was water, and the pressure cooker did its bit in reducing solids to liquids. It turned beans to mush in a matter of minutes, squash to slush in a moment or two, spinach to a green puddle in seconds. When the war came on and the manufactories of such pots were retooled to make arms, a prewar cooker was all the more valued because it was thought to conserve vitamins, and vitamins were as vital to a Pilgrim’s mess kit as prayer.