It would be another long Monday, with school right after work. She had been attending the afternoon session at her overcrowded high school this year, which meant that her academic day started at twelve noon and ended at five. She had been lucky to switch to the morning shift at work, and was more than happy to avoid dinnertime duty at the French fry vat. Plus, Michael worked there too, in the evenings, and although she was crazy about him, she was secretly pleased to have conflicting schedules. As long as he worked at night, she would be spared the problem of always having to find excuses for why she couldn’t see him. The truth was, she liked having time to read and study, and was determined to keep her grades up in the hopes of qualifying for a college scholarship. Meanwhile, she put in as many hours as she could, and had already saved up enough to buy the contact lenses that had finally freed her from the glasses she despised but could not see without, and was even able to make a small loan to Violet and Todd who were trying to scrape together a down payment for their first home.
Michael kept complimenting her on how great she looked without glasses, what a turn-on he got from the makeup she had started using to accentuate what he called her “cat eyes,” and how much he liked the hot-looking feathered haircut she had splurged on at Sassy Scissors Salon. Although Iris hated spending money on something as useless and short-lived as a haircut, she had to admit the result looked more fashionable than the home-style cuts her mother used to give her back in the days when she had time for things other than writing papers and attending women’s lib rallies. There was something else that had changed in Michael’s attitude toward her ever since her pot-snatching escapade. He seemed intrigued by the spurt of boldness she had displayed, and judging by the way his petting had become more adventurous, he had evidently decided that Iris was not quite as saintly as she appeared to be. Iris was an avid learner, and she eagerly followed Michael’s experienced lead, allowing his tongue to meander as it may, while one last thought was spent on poor Frank Domino, as she marveled at the miracle of a human organ performing so differently when placed in the mouths of different people.
After the girls’ maiden trip behind the chicken coop, they had decided to share the remainder of the pilfered pot with the boys, who made enthusiastic pronouncements as to its quality and potency, not to mention the added feature of it having been obtained gratis. Frances was not crazy about sharing; she had gone hog-wild right from the start, puffing greedily on the makeshift reefer with the same intensity as she chugged down milk, and wanted to get high all the time. Lily, who complained of a sore throat and stomachache the next morning, said she couldn’t see herself ever wanting to smoke pot again, and Iris only tried it a few more times, just to reinforce her capacity for decadent behavior, both to Michael and herself. She actually preferred the menthol-flavored buzz she got from the Kools she had started bumming from Lynn, which they smoked out by the trash cans at the end of their shift, before Iris pedaled back down the hill toward home, where she would hopefully have the time to shower the fast-food smell from her body before running for the school bus.
22. Lily
Lily flipped the round aluminum cake pan over onto the plate, and tapped the bottom of the pan all around with the butt end of a butter knife. Holding her breath, she lifted the pan off the plate, shimmying it gently, revealing a yellow cake coated with glaze, adorned with three pineapple rings and a large hole where the fourth one was supposed to be.
“Damn!” she said.
“What’s wrong?” Iris asked.
“Stupid pineapple-upside down cake. I don’t know why I even bother trying.”
“I’m sure it will still taste great,” said Iris, peeling the errant pineapple ring and accomplice chunk of cake from the bottom of the pan and pressing them into their intended spot.
“But now it looks like crap, and no one wants to eat an ugly cake. It’s like that green cake I made on St. Patrick’s Day.”
“Nothing could look as bad as that cake.” Iris laughed.
Iris had always been adventurous in the kitchen, enthusiastically cracking open the family’s torn and stained copy of Betty Crocker’s cookbook when it was her turn to make dinner - and sometimes even when it wasn’t. Sometimes, she would get the urge to bake bread, or hot cross buns, or whip up Chicken à la King, just for fun. It was an urge Lily could not fathom.
“Who’s cooking tonight?” was a question loaded with expectation. An answer of “Iris,” brought everyone to the table with enthusiasm, while the answer “Lily,” was often met with groans and jokes of “Where’s the Pepto Bismol?”
Lily simply did not have Iris’ artistic flair, nor her dedication for the exactitude required to beat egg whites until they peaked perfectly or roll out pie crust to a one-quarter inch thickness without having it crack or tear. Lily’s patience often ran out before boiled corn syrup reached the hard ball stage, and she squirmed while stirring white sauce continuously watching for it to become “smooth and bubbly.” Even the terms used to describe the particular stages of a recipe were subjective and vague. What exactly is “golden brown,” or what is meant, precisely, by “smooth and bubbly”? Lily reasoned that if she had to measure out the ingredients with precision, then the recipe should at least be required to cooperate in a predictable, objective manner. Consequently, dishes never turned out exactly as they were supposed to and Lily was ever torn at the conflict between wanting to get it right, and wanting to just get it over with. Iris’ culinary creations were picture-perfect, while Lily’s inspired her to rename almost every dish she attempted, just to discourage judgment and criticism. “It’s not Chicken Fricassee,” she would say. “It’s just chicken and dumplings.”
To make matters worse, cooking and homework had to be done concurrently, and switching back and forth between the meat thermometer and the protractor made both tasks confusing and frustrating. It would be better to just do your trigonometry homework or make chicken with white sauce and peas. And actually, it would be best to do neither.
When Lily placed the cake on the table at the end of the meal, her father looked at it, looked at her, laughed, and said, “Well, how bad can it be? Let’s serve it up.”
Lily nervously watched her father as he shoveled forkfuls of cake into his mouth, washing them down with gulps of steaming hot coffee delivered by her mother, fresh from the drip pot, which was a cross between a coffee pot and a puzzle, its pieces snapping together into a tower so you could pour boiling water directly over a basket of coffee grounds, resulting in the strongest, hottest coffee possible. One word of praise would have eased Lily’s anxiety, but in silence her father pushed the empty dish away, and then lit up a Parliament, the precise and predictable signal of the official end of dinner.
“What’s the matter, Mom?” Lily asked her mother as they filed the dirty dinner dishes into the dishwasher. “You look sad.”
Lily had always been able to tell when something was on her mother’s mind. It may have been due to Lily’s innate hypersensitivity - a trait that was her greatest asset as well as her greatest liability - rendering her helpless to distinguish between her own pain and that of others. Or it may simply have been Lily’s acute awareness of the unrelenting demands of her mother’s life, and the painfully solitary manner with which she bore them.
Lily remembered seeing her mother’s college photo - the broad warm smile, the flowing waves of auburn hair, the reflection of hope and excitement in her eyes. But now, except for the thick mop of hair that still crowned her head, there was little more than a shadow of that college coed remaining. Her face was wrought with worry, her smile was wan, and the light of hope and excitement had been replaced by the smoke of exhausted resignation, like one of the worn out, threadbare washcloths that hung over the edge of the sink, barely held together by the strands of their fabric, waiting to mop up yet another mess.
Since Lily knew when something was weighing heavily on her mother’s mind, she also knew that it was a situation that had been occurring with increasing frequency.
For all of the countless times Lily had asked her mother, “What’s wrong?” she never received a definitive answer, nor any clue about how she might help her mother find her way back to being happy.
“What?” Her mother’s attention slowly returned from the Russian olive tree outside the kitchen window to the dishes she held in her hands.
“What’s the matter?” Lily repeated. “You look sad. Are you thinking about something sad?”
Lily’s mother looked at her, and shifted her gaze up and to the right, as if to review her most recent thoughts.
“I suppose I was,” she said.
“What were you thinking about?” It was one of those questions children asked even though they knew the answer, and the purpose of which was to encourage an adult to admit an uncomfortable truth, such as that Santa Claus wasn’t real or that babies were brought into the world by a means other than the pouch of a stork. They were the truths that seasoned the innocent and aged the wise.
Lily’s mother opened her mouth and inhaled sharply, as if she were going to answer the question, but then she stopped, sighed, and replied dismissively, “I’m just tired.”
“Go watch the news, Mom,” Lily urged, taking the dishes from her mother’s hands. “I’ll finish up in here.”
Cleaning up the kitchen was a chore from which everyone else ran, but that Lily didn’t mind doing, and sometimes even enjoyed. Before dinner the house was chaotic; everyone was hungry and anxious and cranky and rushed. But afterwards, after everyone had eaten their fill and gone their separate ways for the evening, the kitchen was quiet and calm. Lily loved being with the humming refrigerator and the cool stove in their respite, the table cleared of forks and plates and stories and arguments, all the lights turned off except for the small one on the range hood. It was rather like observing a busy street corner in the middle of the night, seeing it stripped of its bustle, realizing that beneath all chaos abide layers of stillness and peace. It comforted Lily to place items back into cupboards, wash the table, sweep the floor, run the dishwasher, as if restoring order to the kitchen could somehow also settle her own restless spirit.
Lily’s parents sat in the living room, just as they did every evening, she in the worn avocado-green recliner in the corner, he in his chair. The chair that only he was allowed to sit in. The chair in the center of the room. His place at the center of the universe.
They exchanged sections of the Times-Union with an incongruous civility.
“Are you done with the local section?”
“May I see the editorials?”
Lily’s mother read the paper to learn about what was going on in the world and stay informed; her father read it to gather ammunition for his nightly rant in which he accused the women’s movement of attempting to destroy America and God.
Lily sat listening at the kitchen table, occasionally stealing glances around the corner, frightened by her father’s growing capacity for verbal cruelty, and maddened by her mother’s refusal to attempt any sort of self-defense.
“Hey - Ms. Steinem,” he said, placing special emphasis on the “Ms.”, drawing out his “s” in mockery of the new title, the use of which was introduced and promoted by everyone he detested in the world. “Listen to this: ‘In the case of General Electric versus Gilbert, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld women’s rights to unemployment benefits during the last three months of pregnancy.’”
“Yes,” replied Lily’s mother, without looking up from her paper. “I read that earlier. It’s an indication that they are not insisting on treating pregnancy as a disability. It’s very interesting.”
“It’s very interesting,” mocked Lily’s father. “I’ll tell you what’s interesting. What’s interesting is that any self-respecting man in his right mind would allow his pregnant wife to work in the first place.”
“You don’t see housewives laid up in bed every time they have a baby on the way. I always kept on cooking and cleaning and taking care of the other children right up until my water broke. Pregnancy isn’t an illness, Carlo.”
“You weren’t working. You were home cooking and cleaning and taking care of the babies because that’s exactly where you belonged - that’s where all married women belong: at home, with their children, taking care of the household.”
“And taking care of their husbands, who get to go out into the workplace and earn a living - whether they are expecting a new baby or not.”
“That’s right!” Lily’s father shouted, as he crushed the newspaper into his lap. “Because that’s the way God intended it.” He glared at his wife, as if to challenge her to question the will of God.
Not one to pass on a dare, Lily’s mother replied, “You mean that’s the way men intended it.”
Lily’s father looked at her in disgusted disbelief, the downturned corners of his mouth contorting his face, as though he were on the verge of vomiting. His lit cigarette dangled from his lips, the long ash teetering precariously.
“You really do have rocks in your head, you know that?” He returned to the paper, snapping it back open in front of him. “Radical feminists. Her husband probably had to put a bag over her head just to get her pregnant.” He snickered at his own joke, took a long draw on his Parliament and with the force of his anger held in his fingertips he crushed it out, pounding the butt into the ashtray, with such violence that the entire house seemed to shake.
“Hey, Iris - are you awake?”
“I am now,” Iris drowsily replied.
“Sorry,” said Lily. “American Woman” by The Guess Who played on the radio. Lily reached over and turned it down.
Iris lifted herself into a half-seated position, and rubbed the blur of new sleep from her eyes. “What’s the matter?”
“I just wanted to ask you... what do you think about all the stuff Mom is doing - you know, women’s liberation and everything?”
Iris tilted her head to one side and looked up toward the ceiling, as if she had never considered the issue until that moment, or perhaps had, and was retrieving the answer to a question that she had stored away because she never really expected anyone to ask for her opinion. “I dunno. In class Ms. Shue told us that society is going to be unbalanced for a while, until everyone gets used to new ideas about the role of women.”
“But what do you think about it?”
“Well, I kind of get it. Ms. Shue says that women don’t have equal opportunities and it’s pioneers like Mom who are paving the way. I’m glad things are changing, but, well, I kind of wish Mom would stop sometimes. Just be our mother, and not make such a big deal about it.”
“Yeah. Me too. I guess. I mean, I think it’s good, but sometimes I wish someone else’s mother could be the one paving the way, you know? I am just so sick of the yelling, and the way Dad picks on her all the time.”
“Plus,” said Iris, fluffing up her pillow and turning over onto her stomach. “I don’t see William or Charles or Ricci taking any turns cooking dinner. We’re women, too, me and you, you know?”
“It just seems so hopeless. Mom is never going to go back to the way she was. And Dad is never going to get used to her this way.”
“So, they’ll keep fighting. The good news is that we won’t be here to listen to it much longer.”
“I still have almost two years before I can move away to college. I don’t think I can take two more years of this, but there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I just don’t have a choice. The thought of that makes me nuts. Makes me feel trapped. I just wish I could run away.”
“I know what you mean. Sometimes I close my eyes, and pretend when I open them again, it will be five years from now and this will all be over, a part of my past. But it could be worse,” said Iris. “We could be Mom. Or Dad. They have to put up with it for the rest of their lives.”
“I am never gonna get stuck like they are.” said Lily. “I’m not going to get married until I’m old - like at least twenty-seven. I want to go out and experience life first.”
“So, you
think you’ll go to New York City and become an actress?”
“Maybe.” Lily imagined herself striding confidently down Broadway, slipping in through the stage door at two in the afternoon, getting into makeup and costume for an evening performance. “Or Hollywood. I haven’t decided if I want to be on stage or in the movies.”
“I think you should just sing. Be on the radio.”
“I know! I’ll be on stage, in the movies and on the radio!” she laughed. “Why should I have to choose?”
“If you end up in California, I’ll come and visit you every summer, and you can visit me every Christmas.”
“No!” Lily protested. “You have to come with me. We can get a house together, and we’ll have wild parties on the weekends, and everyone will want to come over. And we’ll have bonfires on the beach, and roast those coconut bread cubes like we used to do in Girls Scouts, remember?”
“Sounds like you’ve got the whole thing all planned out already.”
“I do,” replied Lily. “It is going to be so cool...”
“You’re going to be very busy,” Iris’ voice began to drift. “You’d better get some sleep.”
The Complete Series Page 36
