He accepted the fact that he would not get to know any girls this summer; the club recruiters had been right on this point. If he did not belong to the club, he would not meet the local younger set, short of nodding to them at parties. Occasionally, on the beach, he would strike up a conversation with girls he had known in high school, who were working in the plastics factory or clerking in a store; quite a few were married and had a baby. But these proletarian girls had even less allure for him than the girls in pony-tails driving Volkswagens. They were not interested in civil rights, even to argue against them. They simply did not care what happened to the Negro. It was not their fault; they had not had his opportunities. The civil-rights fight, he recognized, was a luxury for most of the whites who engaged in it; his classmates who had gone to Mississippi had had their fares and expenses paid by their families, just as though they were going on field period. If he was free (as he hoped) from prejudice, unlike his contemporaries on the raft, this was owing largely to his parents, who in turn had had “advantages.” He was trying to think clearly this summer, before going abroad, about himself and his country. The native girls on the beach would have been glad, evidently, to “date” him, because he was from “away,” but he could not date a girl who was not interested in civil rights—which meant, in practice, a girl who had not been to Smith or Wellesley or Swarthmore or Antioch or some other upper-middle-class school. If he had gone to Mississippi, it would have been the same; the Negro girls he might have gone around with, like the ones he used to see last winter, would have belonged to a “leader group”—otherwise, they would not be in the civil-rights movement. Their fathers would be mostly ministers and doctors and teachers and musicians, just like his own parents. Sexually, he was pretty much a prisoner of his class, and he wondered if it would have been different had he stayed in Rocky Port High. Maybe he would not be still a virgin. Right now, he was content to stay home nights with his mother, reading and working on his French; he could quite well wait for mid-August to see girls, when he would go to his father on the Cape. And he did not feel he was missing anything if she went out to dinner by herself.
Whenever she went out to dinner, she returned despondent. It was not the people so much (she had found a few she liked), as what she had to eat. Four years ago—she remembered distinctly—a meal had begun with soup or oysters or lobster cocktail or an avocado with Roquefort dressing. Something. But now, it seemed, after large basins of Martinis-on-the-rocks (a drink she considered parvenu, as opposed to the classic Martini), you sat right down to the main course or it was served to you on your lap. Nobody alluded to the vanished first course; it was like a relation that had died and could not be mentioned. “How do you account for that, Peter? Do you suppose it died a lingering death? Or did it happen all of a sudden, like a stroke?” “Probably a mercy killing,” said Peter. “Why don’t you ask somebody, Mother, if you really want to know?” “How can I? Who would I ask? It would have to be someone who still served it, and I seem to be the only one.” “You’d better lay off it yourself, Mother.” “Why?” she said, indignant. “We’ve always had a first course. Why should I change? They have just as much time for cooking as I have, these women. More.” “That’s just the point, Mother,” he groaned.
Peter hated it when she sent him around to borrow muffin tins or cake racks or a flour sifter. Nobody had them; nobody used them any more. “You don’t get the picture, Mother. You’re out of touch. Americans have stopped cooking. You embarrass them.” “Nonsense. In New York, all my friends cook.” “ ‘New York is not America,’ Mother. Old adage.” In the very first days, she had drawn attention to herself by giving Mrs. Curtis a list of things that were missing in their kitchen that she considered essential, underlining the word, such as pie tins and a breadboard. There was practically nothing in the cupboards, she said, but drinking equipment. Their landlady, a Goldwater stalwart, had taken offense; she refused to supply any more kitchen stuff unless his mother restored the historical notice to the house front. The situation was deadlocked. His mother said that a house without a griddle or a strainer, not to mention pie tins and so on, had no claim to an historical placard. She refused to buy the equipment herself, on the ground that the house had been rented “furnished,” except for linen and silver. In the end, Mrs. Curtis, who still liked his mother, took up a collection from people’s attics. The arrival of these items was watched by their red-faced landlady from her house across the street. Peter’s mother considered this a triumph, but to his mind it was a draw.
His mother’s kitchen-shower included a number of items she had not asked for; e.g., a butter churn, a preserving kettle, and an old wooden ice-cream freezer with a rusty crank. His mother lit up. She was going to make ice cream at once, in their back yard, for Mrs. Curtis’ grandchildren; Peter could crank. She found rock salt in the hardware store. The owner was curious as to what she planned to do with it; folks here used it, winters, to melt the ice on their sidewalks. She explained. That night, she had a note from the landlady, protesting the use of rock salt in her garden—which was just a flagged terrace without a blade of grass to be damaged, as his mother pointed out in her reply.
The contest between the two had become a sort of sporting event, watched by the community with a certain impartiality of which Peter felt his mother was not wholly aware. The liberals were for his mother, because she was a novelty in the Rocky Port summer scene and was furnishing amusement at no cost except to herself. The Old Guard was for the landlady, because his mother was an interloper who played an outlandish instrument under the stage name of “Brown,” though it was known on good authority that she had been born Rosie Bronsky on the Lower East Side. But on the issues, it ought to have been the other way around. His mother’s sympathizers, Peter noticed, were not rushing to follow her example, and among the landlady’s supporters there were probably a few old ladies who could still wield a rolling-pin. Be that as it might, his mother was the only avowed reactionary in cooking in Rocky Port, and this was bound, Peter feared, to make her unpopular even among her chums in the end.
She made a share-cropping deal with Mrs. Curtis, to harvest her currants. She and Peter were going to pick the currants, make jelly out of them, and give Mrs. Curtis half. Four years ago, his mother had bought jelly glasses in the grocery store. Now, the storekeeper shook his gray head emphatically. “Don’t get any call for them.” It was the bean-pot motif, developed. With jelly glasses, naturally, paraffin had gone. And Mason jars with rubbers. “Haven’t had a call for them in years, ma’am. Don’t know as they make ’em any more. Guess you notice changes.” “Yes, I do,” said Peter’s mother coldly. “It’s not his fault,” Peter whispered, excruciated.
She was going to make jelly, she said, gritting her teeth, if she had to buy store jelly and dump it down the sink, to use the jars. The thought of this waste sickened Peter; he would rather have gone scavenging in the town dump for old mayonnaise containers. Fortunately, jelly glasses and paraffin were found at the county seat—the glasses covered with dust and cobwebs like some vintage wine.
Then she decided to make watermelon pickle, saving up the rinds in huge quantities in the kitchen, using every available pan and cover to keep the flies off. Peter, who had never heard of this delicacy, could not believe the result was going to be worth the trouble. She bought screw-top jars and procured the magic ingredient—calcium oxide—from a druggist ten miles off. “Mind if I ask what you want it for, lady?” the druggist said. Peter’s mother’ froze. “Why? Is it poison?” “No, ’tain’t that. I was just wondering. Haven’t had a call—” “I know,” she said. “I’m going to make watermelon pickle.” The druggist smacked his lips. “That’s a real old-timer. Hadn’t thought of that …” “I’ll give you a jar,” said Peter’s mother, with her usual impulsiveness, moved to spread the gospel.
The fisherman they used to go to had moved to Florida, and she could not find fish anywhere that was not filleted, though a number of quaint shingled fish shops with sawdust on
the floor had opened in the area, selling “real New England clam chowder” in cans, bottled Tartar sauce, lobsters, cooked, to take home, lobster meat, and canned Chalet Suzanne lobster bisque; in the supermarkets, the fish was frozen. The only fresh fish on the whole coast seemed to be pale, boneless, skinless flounder, “ready to fry.” “There are other fish in the sea,” she commented. “What happens to them?” The clerk in the fish shop was offended. “Couldn’t tell you that, ma’am.” “Am I wrong,” she demanded, “to want a whole fresh fish—with head and bones—on the seashore? Is that asking too much?” “Don’t get any call—” Peter’s mother put her hands to her ears.
She could not get a fowl from the butcher—only roasters and fryers and chicken-in-parts. “Folks here don’t make soup like they used to. Don’t have the time for it. Guess we’re kind of spoiled,” the butcher summed up, with a complacent gray grin, twiddling his thumbs in his apron. “You are,” she retorted.
“Maybe you’re spoiled, Mother. Only a few rich people with cooks can afford the kind of food you like.” “I like!” she exclaimed. “What about you, Peter? Anyway, the things you can’t find here are the cheap things. Like smelts and cod. A fowl is cheaper than a roasting chicken, and you get soup, from it too. Then you can make something with the leftovers the next day. Why, the cook we had in Umbria could get three meals for four people out of a hen. I admire that. Economy is a contact with reality, Peter. I love reality. I hope you always will too.” Her light voice trembled with seriousness. She meant what she said, deeply, but he could not help trying to calculate how much she had spent on gasoline scouring the countryside for jelly glasses.
Anyway, it was not just food, she said. What about buttons? She could not find buttons for Peter’s shirts at the village notions store, which was full of New England souvenir items, such as whaling ships in bottles. “Button man hasn’t been through in a coon’s age,” said the stout woman behind the counter. “Don’t you think you ought to stock buttons?” Peter’s mother said earnestly, putting it on a moral plane. “Supposing I didn’t have a car to drive to the nearest town to get them? Or I couldn’t afford the bus fare? What would I do?” “Search me,” said the woman.
Peter was worried. He wished his stepfather would come home. People in the stores had begun to stare, nudgingly, at his mother, and not because she was pretty or famous. She was looking older this summer, and most people in the stores did not know or care that she was the Rosamund Brown. It might have been different if she had ever played on television. He offered to do the marketing for her, to take her out of the public eye. Then he saw for himself what she meant. It was unnerving to cross out item after item on the lists that she gave him—not available. And he made a discovery of his own that shocked him: he was unable to buy plain yoghurt, one of his favorite foods. He could choose between prune and strawberry. The clerk in the Portuguese market, which he patronized in preference to the Yankee market when he did the shopping himself, explained to him that plain yoghurt was a “slow mover.” That, in two words, was the trouble. He and his mother were wedded to slow movers.
“Is a country store just a distribution point?” she exclaimed. “In that case, it would be better to have socialism. State stores, like in Poland and Hungary.” Peter frowned. His mother, ever since she had played behind the Iron Curtain, sounded as if she was getting soft on Communism. In politics, he took after his father, who was still a mainstay of the anti-Communist left. “We still have political freedom,” he reminded her. “I wonder,” she replied, “what political freedom means here now. Take this election, Peter. Hasn’t it come down to a choice between prune and strawberry?”
Peter laughed hoarsely. She was right in a way. “Still, Mother, you do think it’s important that Goldwater should be defeated?” She sighed. “I suppose so. Still, I’d like to be able to vote for Norman Thomas, the way we did in the old days. Or Darlington Hoopes! Now the Socialists aren’t even on the ballot.” Peter nodded. The good old days! He remembered starting second grade festooned with Darlington Hoopes buttons that he had made his mother procure for him at Socialist Party headquarters in Boston—she had not been able to find them in Holyoke. But he did not encourage her political nostalgia. In November, she might write in Norman Thomas and throw away her vote. Since he was too young to vote himself, he had to trust her to do it for him. It seemed to him that the issues were more important these days than when the Socialists had been running.
Sometimes she divined ahead of time, when she was making her list, that some product like buckwheat flour was going to be unobtainable and she would leave it to Peter to choose between Aunt Jemima and nothing. But sometimes she was rocked back on her heels. He came home one morning to tell her that salt codfish in those wooden boxes with the sliding covers was not to be found—what should he do? “Did you ask, Peter?” “I looked. It isn’t there.” “Impossible!” She struck a violent blow on the harpsichord. “I’ll go myself. Probably they’ve changed the packaging. When will you get over being so shy, Peter?” He loped along beside her down the main street. She waited her turn at the check-out counter and put the question. A peculiar expression crossed the Yankee storekeeper’s face—something between a twinge of guilt and a smirk of satisfaction. Peter’s mother closed her eyes. “Don’t tell me.” “Yep! They ain’t making that any more. That is ‘a thing of the past,’ ma’am.” He rubbed his hands on his apron. “I can sell you frozen codfish cakes, ready to fry—very tasty. Of course, you pay a mite more; you have to expect that” “It’s not the same,” she said, her voice quivering. She leaned over the counter, staring at the grocer like his mercantile conscience. “You realize it’s not the same, don’t you?” “Oh, I wouldn’t say that, ma’am. No, I wouldn’t say that. You put on some ketchup and you won’t notice a mite of difference.”
“Give up the fight, Mother.” The news that tapioca, except in instant form, was “a thing of the past” too made him feel old, a weary Rip Van Winkle returned from a drive-in bowling alley. In this sinister summer of race riots, church-burnings, civil-rights workers vanishing in Mississippi, in New York, a cop, off duty, shooting to kill at a Negro kid, the fact that tapioca, his old love, had kicked the bucket ought not to matter. Yet if he said that to his mother, she felt he was abandoning her.
It disturbed him to see her so irritated by everything. He had always thought of her as equable. He could not accuse her of being a superficial person, but it was at least arguable, he thought, that she was reading too much into the minutiae. She acted as if the difference between sliced bread and unsliced was the difference between wrong and right. He wondered if she was getting near the menopause. For the first time in her life that Peter could remember, she had begun—what an irony!—to have cooking failures. Not when they were alone, but when they had company. And being what she was, she had to apologize. “Just serve it, Mother. Don’t say anything. They’ll never know.” Glumly, he watched her trying to turn her battle with Rocky Port into a game, laughing at her misadventures and writing with amusement about them to his stepfather—letters she sometimes let Peter read. It sounded funny when you read about it. Yet he feared that—also for the first time in her life—she did not see herself as others saw her.
For himself, he invented a different game—taking the Goldwater stickers off people’s cars. He worked at night, selecting his target before dark came. He burned the trophies in the fireplace when his mother was out; if he told her what he was doing, she would be bound to boast about it, and he would find himself fleeing from Rocky Port with a price on his head—intimidating voters, which he hoped he was doing, was a federal crime. His most daring exploit was getting the huge streamer off the bumper of their landlady’s Buick, which she kept parked under a street light directly across the way. He needed a confederate to engage her on the telephone in the back hall while he did the job. She slept in the downstairs front bedroom, with a shotgun, supposedly, by her side. “Hell, son,” said the admiral. “I’d have done the same thing at your age.
Down South, I was a Republican before I could shave, which was like being a card-carrying Communist. Now, with this race business, I’m kind of leaning toward Goldwater myself. Guess I’m part of the white backlash.” He agreed to act as a decoy, however, and to get his wife to invite Peter’s mother to a lecture, to keep her out of the way. He and Peter set their watches together and worked out a code for Peter to signal with a flashlight when the deed was done. Failing Goldwater stickers, Peter removed “Ausable Chasm” and “Desert of Maine” from the bumpers of passing tourists.
These puerile activities gave direction, of a sort, to his summer and led him to make friends with the admiral, who had lost a son in the war. He was the only older WASP Peter knew, except his mother, who still had some pioneer spirit. The old man was disgruntled with the modern world, and Peter could almost forgive him, in view of his Tennessee origins, for being prejudiced against Negroes (which the admiral denied), because he was prejudiced against so many other groups and persons, regardless of race, creed, or color—e.g., social workers, J. Edgar Hoover, and the CIA. Peter was hoping to influence him, before the summer was over, to stay at home, come November, rather than vote for Goldwater; he was one of the mass of “Undecideds” who were a headache to pollsters and political scientists. Peter could sympathize with a pollster who got the admiral in his sampling. He himself had just about decided to class him as a visceral fascist when he learned that the old man and his wife and Mrs. Curtis constituted the local chapter of a Ban-the-Bomb organization.
Birds of America Page 7
