by Alix Shulman
I began clipping recipes from the Sunday Times. I cooked Mrs. Fielding’s Texas Chili, Boeuf Bourguignon (I & II), Creole Jambalaya, Coq au Vin—all in quantity, as Frank let his single friends know they were welcome for dinner on weekends. We always had a wide range of homemade whiskey, too, since a friend who worked in a Bronx hospital gave us moo-proof lab alcohol by the gallon. We diluted it by half, flavored it with a shot of name-brand booze, poured it into reclaimed bottles, and defied anyone to tell it from the real thing.
I enjoyed those Saturday nights. Frank took visible pride in me then, showing me off and openly admiring my cooking. Not one of those tyrannical husbands to criticize his wife before his friends, he called me endearing names in baby talk and sat beside me on the sofa stroking my neck or my knee over coffee. Even after they fell into shop talk, while I cleared away the dinner dishes, he would send me affectionate glances for everyone to see. Sometimes his aroused affection carried over into bed on Saturday night when, after all the ashtrays were emptied and the paper cups thrown away, after his spectacles were deposited on the night table and my diaphragm retrieved from the drawer, he would roll on top of me to make love and tell me how happy he was to have me for a wife.
Franklin Raybel’s Favorite Chicken Suprême Tarragon
Stuff chicken breasts (skinned, boned, and halved) with tarragon, salt, pepper, parsley, lump of butter; secure with toothpicks; dredge with flour. Brown in butter on both sides. Add chopped shallot or a slice of onion, a whole clove garlic, tarragon, white wine, chicken stock, a soaked dried mushroom. Cover. Cook forty-five minutes, turning once. Remove breasts to a hot platter and keep warm. Reduce sauce and add two tablespoons heavy cream; cook to proper consistency. Add bits of butter at the end. Spoon sauce over breasts, dust with parsley. Serve with green salad and rice.
Cucumbers in Lime Dressing
Marinate an hour or so: sliced (or diced) cucumber in: juice of one lime, sugar, seasonings, diced (or grated) onion. Chill. Serve cold with curries.
My first job after the wedding money gave out was as a bookkeeping machine operator in a Wall Street bank at sixty dollars a week. As Frank forbade me to be a waitress, and I dreaded being a salesgirl, there was little else for a twenty-one-year-old nontypist to do. Without typing I was chronically “overqualified.” Without typing I couldn’t even wangle interviews for the jobs listed in the Help Wanted Female section under College Grad, nor could I apply for the non-typing researcher, editor, or “trainee” jobs for which I supposed I was suited, listed under Help Wanted Male.
My bookkeeping machine (Burroughs F212) was formidable. I named her Trixie. The work was taxing, but I liked the precision of it and, eager to master her, found a certain excitement in striking my balance at the end of each day. Until our debits and credits balanced exactly, until every decimal error had been discovered and rooted out, Mr. Calley, the department supervisor, would not permit his girls to go home. After my last deposit had been entered and the last check deducted, I would extract the subtotals, totals, and grand totals the machine had been storing up all day, push certain magic buttons, let the circuits run, and with suspended breath wait for Trixie to end her calculations and reveal in a small window on her face and printed on the record on her back two numbers which, if I had posted everything correctly all day long, would exactly, digit for digit, match. Even my disappointment when the numbers differed was exhilarating.
At first I was slow in balancing, never passing a day without error. Sometimes it was seven o’clock before I descended into the West Side IRT subway station with my book in hand, and almost eight before I surfaced again near Columbia. But by attending to Trixie, setting myself records to beat and techniques to master, I gradually improved my performance until I was as good on my Burroughs as anyone. And as though the suspense were not intoxicating enough, the clattering of fifty cumbersome calculators all totaling at once in a single room provided me with a sense of solidarity against disaster I had never before felt in New York City.
It was broken only by a fifteen-minute morning coffee break, when I made eyes at New York out the window, and a precious solitary hour for lunch. At lunchtime I explored the caverns of Wall Street, thrilled that I, Ohio-born and twenty-one, was living among skyscrapers and traditions. I saw where the Stock Exchange had been scarred in the twenties by anarchist bombs; I ate hamburgers with college educations. I heard actors rehearsing in lofts, saw pushcart markets, tasted Indian curries and baklava, listened to choruses singing Bach in Trinity Church at noon. When the weather was fine, I took a sandwich to Battery Park, on the very tip of Manhattan Island. There, watching the ferries and tugs and cruise ships passing in the harbor, I fancied myself a boy joining one of the crews sailing off to Jamaica or Barbados or even the distant source of all mental and sensual goodies, Europe. When the weather was foul, I sat in the lounge and read my book, still hopeful of one day knowing everything. Only at night when I returned to Frank who, having polished off yet another tome toward his degree, was ready to help me out cooking our dinner in time for the news—only then did I know that neither would happen.
Not that Frank was to blame. Hardly. I had no doubt he felt almost as bad as I that I was no longer a student. Hadn’t he married me half for my brains? No, I alone was to blame for being too tired to study at night and too distractable to read anything but fiction on the subway in the morning. And when I wanted to go to the movies in the evening or walk in Central Park on a weekend afternoon, Frank was too much the gentleman to allude to my lapsed ambitions. He intended no invidious comparisons as he said, “Look, I’d really rather stay home and work. I’ve got too much reading to do. But why don’t you go on without me? You’ll relax, and I’ll be able to use the time.” I felt guilty even asking him to interrupt his work, and didn’t blame him for wishing me out of the way. My restlessness was not the easiest thing for a scholar to live with.
So I went off with a neighbor, or a friend from work who lived in the Village and introduced me to pot, or alone. And sometimes, in the huge Grant’s Cafeteria on Broadway, or in the back section of the Thalia Theater, where I sat watching foreign films—sometimes I looked around for Prince Charming, just in case he too happened to be out alone catching a breath of air or taking in a movie.
“Miss Raybel? Or is it Mrs. Raybel?”
“Mrs. Raybel.”
“Mrs. Raybel, it has come to our attention that you are a college graduate,” said the personnel manager, an elderly gentleman dressed by Brooks Brothers.
What could he want? Mr. Calley, the bookkeeping department supervisor, patting me kindly on the rear, had assured me, sending me down here, that I was not to be fired.
“In that case, we are going to offer you a promotion. We are prepared to transfer you to the Foreign Department at a starting salary of seventy-five dollars a week,” he beamed.
“Doing what?” I asked.
“Translating.”
I swallowed my surprise. French, my only foreign language, had always been my worst subject. “Translating what?” I asked.
“Letters, documents, letters of credit.”
I knew I couldn’t manage it, but the raise was substantial. “What languages?” I asked.
“You’ll translate from all the languages into English. French, Spanish, German, Italian. Not Chinese,” he smiled.
I nodded. What difference did it make whether I was unable to translate from one language or many? “My German may need a bit of brushing up,” I offered.
“Oh, don’t worry. You’re a college graduate. You’ll pick it up,” he said. “We have some real foreigners up there to help you out. How’s your typing?”
Real foreigners. Spanish sailors with bearded lips; Italians; German philosopher-refugees. “Pretty good,” I lied, praying to be spared the humiliation of a typing test.
“Fine. You can start on Monday, then. Report to me first thing Monday morning, and I’ll take you up to Foreign and introduce you around.”
“Thank you.”
>
“Good day.”
We shook hands, and I returned to Bookkeeping to say goodbye to the women in the department and try one last time for perfect on Trixie.
At a party over the weekend I became acutely sensitive to the ubiquitous married we:
“We love Indian music.”
“We were shocked to hear about Artie.”
“We thought from the review we would love the new production of Whim, but we walked out at intermission, we found it so bad.”
When Frank used it about me, I shouted before everyone, “Speak for yourself!”
It puzzled him, because the statement in which the offending word occurred was unobjectionable; in fact, true. But I felt misrepresented by it anyway. Trapped, suffocating in that abysmal we.
I lasted less than a month in the Foreign Department. A flirtation begun with the man at the next desk (a Wharton graduate on the Executive Training Squad whose assistant I was) ended abruptly when he was transferred to another branch. Once he was gone, I was ashamed of ever having taken up with him, even for a lunchtime diversion.
Nothing was working out. Frank had bought me a five-language commercial dictionary at the University Bookstore, and I studied German by listening to the Threepenny Opera sung in the original German. The singer, Lotte Lenya, the composer’s extraordinary wife, became my new inspiration. I bought all her records. Most of her songs were about a prostitute, Jenny, who refused to be trampled on. “Wenn einer tritt, dann bin ich es”—“if somebody’s to do the stepping, it’ll be me.” After work and the dinner dishes, I would sit listening to her songs, following the record jacket translation of the lyrics, memorizing Lenya’s strange inflections. Sometimes I was moved to tears singing along with her, sometimes to fury. Even Frank peered suspiciously over his glasses when Lenya and I sang the one in which Jenny gets to decide who in the city shall be spared and who shall be killed (a fantasy twice removed, and doubly safe). Kill them all, says Jenny—alle! And when the heads roll, she says Hoppla!
But it was the wrong German for the bank, and even the dictionary was of little use. The job turned out to be a typing job after all, and they were bound to discover I couldn’t type. I wondered if they would fire me before I quit, or if I would just stop going in to work one day. The prospect of being fired was depressing, but there was unemployment to collect if I stuck it out. I didn’t care; it was time to start exploring another section of the city anyway.
When Frank learned that he was to receive the coveted Haversham Ellis History Fellowship for the following year, he broke precedent and called me at the office.
“Hey, that’s great, Frankilee!” I said, using his mother’s diminutive.
“How about celebrating?” he said. “I’ll meet you downtown after work.”
It was an assistantship, far too prestigious for him to turn down. But it hardly paid enough to live on. Come September it would be his turn to work and mine to study according to our master plan, but that was obviously out of the question now.
I maintained a firm silence through both martinis, concentrating on the bartender’s art. For me to be anything but supportive was perverse. I could certainly not be so selfish as to act out my “neurosis” and sabotage what was going to be an exceptional career. Self-destructive, too, since Frank’s success would carry me up with him. If I could not be content with his success, the least I could do was wait, or state my terms. After all, I was still young. (Young!) My turn was coming. There were many dissertation widows at Columbia: none of them complained.
I tried to be gracious as we moved to a booth to map out our future. Publications and professorships, sabbaticals and grants to study abroad. The gates were open. Applying for the right grants with care would get us anywhere Frank chose to go.
“I hope you realize,” I said at last, for the record, “I’m not moving out of New York City for any professorship, except maybe to Europe.” I chastised myself for my failure of enthusiasm, but I no longer cared what Frank thought of me. Bitch? Okay. I could just see myself pouring tea at, say, New England University. Sasha Raybel, faculty wife.
“Don’t worry,” said Frank with his wry condemning smile, “no one would dream of asking you to make any sacrifices.”
Job hunting was the same as the year before, only I was a year older. In the employment agencies where I took typing tests and hopefully filled out forms, there were more pretty girls than I had remembered. Too many; New York, so glamorous and promising, was a tough city.
Every night, returning home jobless, I brushed my hair one hundred strokes and took long hot baths to soak the filth out of my pores. I thought I would never soak clean.
“Face cream?” taunted Frank. “What kind of a job are you looking for?”
I didn’t know what kind. My singular assets were worthless without experience behind them. Besides, they were already slipping. I needed my looks. What was Russell’s Paradox again? What was Plato’s doctrine of the soul? I drifted off into sleep each night trying to remember, except when Frank, claiming his due, left his own books early to join me in bed. If I could, I pretended to be already asleep when he came in, but more often I received his odd hurried thrusts, matching his rhythm and milking him quickly with affected groans and sighs so he would turn over the sooner and let me dream in peace.
“Guess who.”
It was a voice from the dead. “Roxanne!”
“Right. Glad to see you’re still passing tests.”
“Where are you?”
“At Penn Station. We’ve moved to Fort Dix in New Jersey, and I’m just in for the day. Want some company?”
“Do I! How are you? Do you know how to get here?”
Frank looked up from his book, keeping his finger on the spot of the page where he had left off reading, while I explained who it was.
“Very nice,” he said. “I’ll go to the library after she comes and leave you two girls alone. You probably won’t want me around anyway.”
I ran around emptying ashtrays and straightening up. I wanted it nice for Roxanne. I was ashamed to introduce Frank to her, who had known Alport.
“I brought you some poems from the sticks,” said Roxanne in the doorway as though it hadn’t been years since we’d seen each other. She looked strong and beautiful. She hadn’t aged a day, not even with childbirth. We had both let our hair grow long and abandoned lipstick. I wanted to hug and kiss her, but we didn’t touch.
“Come in. This is Frank.”
She handed me a long envelope and gave a shy hello to Frank. “I’m glad to meet you,” she said. “You probably won’t like my poems, but you’re welcome to read them too.”
“I’d be glad to read them for you. Sasha has spoken of you often. I’m due at the library now, but I’ll be back later. Please excuse me.”
I couldn’t wait till he was out the door, he embarrassed me so. Due at the library!—like an important book.
“Quick. Tell me. Have you left your husband?” I asked Roxanne as soon as he’d left.
“Not yet,” she said, “but I’m preparing my escape.” Her hair fell delicately over her pale cheeks. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. “Once my Sasha starts nursery school I’m going to look for a job. Meanwhile, I’ve made up a résumé and I commit at least one act of attrition a day.”
“Attrition?”
“Sabotage.”
“What kind of sabotage?” I asked, pouring us some coffee. Roxanne smiled her old inward smile that spoke of a certain pain.
“All kinds. There’s no end to what you can do if you just attend to it.”
“What do you mean?”
“First there are the dailies: mismating the socks, scorching the favorite shirt, not hearing him when he talks to me, over-Accenting the scrambled eggs. You wouldn’t believe what a mere first lieutenant can demand to be served for his breakfast, and every course presents a new challenge to the ingenious homemaker.”
She was in marvelous form, though I didn’t believe a word she said. Frank woul
d have called her “shrill.”
“But besides the dailies, there are the specials,” she went on, dissolving sugar in her cup. “Sometimes I read him recipes out loud when the ball game’s on, rub his nose in it. I used to leave dirty diapers in selected spots. And once,” she said, her eyes lighting up, “once when he and his buddies were going fishing, I put a raw egg in his lunchbox instead of a hard-boiled one.”
She spoke with such glee that I began to suspect it was true. “What happened?”
“To me? Nothing. I played innocent. But you should have seen Whit when he came home.”
Later, after lunch, she showed me snapshots of my namesake, a curly-haired blond with Roxanne’s faraway look.
“Why are you still living with him?” I ventured.
“No money,” she said plainly. “Can’t leave till I can come here and get a job. Can’t get a job till I can do something with Sasha. If I left now, I know I’d wind up in Virginia with mother. But don’t worry, I’m preparing. I don’t intend to spend my life stuck on some foul army base. No,” she leaned back on the sofa and looked around our drab quarters, “this is where I want to be. New York. Columbia. Free.”
I felt sorry for her, imagining her alone and divorced. In her shoes, I thought, I would have made do. That was the main reason I intended to have no children. But to have no husband either? Perhaps she could get another husband. It seemed unlikely with a child to raise—what man would put up with someone else’s child? It was a wonder how strong Roxanne was, given her handicaps. I wished I had the guts for such risks. I admired her more than I pitied her.
