One Saturday afternoon when Fay had gone into San Rafael to shop, and the two girls were over at Edith Keever’s place playing with her children, Charley started talking to me out in the field by the duck pen. He had been running a new pipe to the ducks’ water trough.
“Doesn’t it bother you to do housework?” he asked me.
“No,” I said.
“I don’t think a man should do that kind of stuff,” he said. Later on he said, “I don’t think the girls should see a man doing it either. It gives them the idea a man can be bossed around by a woman.”
To that, I said nothing; I could think of nothing pertinent.
Charley said, “She can’t get me to do her god damn errands.”
“I see,” I said politely.
“A man has to keep his self-respect,” Charley said. “Doing housework robs him of his masculinity.”
I had noticed, almost as soon as I had moved in with them, how touchy Charley was with her. He seemed to resent her asking him to do anything, even to helping her around the garden. One night, when she asked him to open a can or ajar for her –I didn’t see it cleanly, although I came in from my room to watch– he blew up, threw the jar down on the floor, and started calling her names. I noted that in my records, because I could perceive a pattern.
Once a week or so Charley would go off by himself, usually down to the Western Bar, or a bar in Olema that he liked, and get tanked up on beer. That seemed to be his system for getting his resentment of my sister out into the open; otherwise it merely simmered away down inside him, making him quarrelsome and moody. But when he had had a few drinks he could threaten her physically. I never saw him actually hit her, but I could tell by her response, when he came home from the bar, that at such times she was genuinely afraid of him. I don’t think she realized why he drank, that he was releasing stored-up resentment; she thought of it more as a character defect on his part, and possibly a defect common with all men.
Each time he went off drinking she became more businesslike with him. She shafted him with quiet, national upbraiding. Over a period of time she managed to convince him that there was something wrong with him for going out and drinking and coming home and taking a few swings at her; instead of viewing it as a simple means of working off steam she chose to consider it a symptom of some deep pervasive –even dangerous– malformation in him.
Or possibly she only pretended to think that. In any case it was her policy to regard him as a malformed man, one who should be matched, and by talking along this line she made hay from each of his binges. The more he resisted her by going out and getting drunk and coming home and taking a swing at her, the more she built up this picture of him, and it was a picture that when not drunk he, too, had to accept. The household was prevaded by this atmosphere of a calm adult woman and a man who gave in to his animal impulses. She reported to him in great detail what her analyst, Dr. Andrews in San Francisco, said about his binges and his hostility; she used Charley’s money to pay Dr. Andrews to catalog his abnormalities. And of course Charley never heard anything directly from the doctor; he had no way of keeping her from reporting what served her and holding back what did not. The doctor, too, had no way to get at the truth of what she told him; no doubt she only gave him the facts that suited her picture, so that the doctor’s view of Charley was based on what she wanted him to know. By the time she had edited it both going and coming there was little of it outside her control.
Like any slob, Charley grumbled at her going to the doctor and at the same time took as holy writ whatever she reported. Any man who charged twenty dollars an hour had to be good.
Sometimes I asked myself what she was up to, if anything. I had nothing to do in the early afternoons, after I had done the lunch dishes, and I now and then sat around and watched her mold her clay pots or knit or read; she had turned out to be a good-looking woman, although she had little on no bust line, and she had this big modern house, with ten acres and all the rest of it — beyond any doubt she was happy. But she wanted something she lacked. After a month or so I came to the conclusion that she simply wanted Charley to be different from what he was; she had a deeply ingrained image of what a husband should be like –she was always very choosy –and although in some respects he met her requirements, in others he did not. For instance, he had enough money to build this house, and he did most of the things she wanted. And he was reasonably good-looking. But for one thing he was a slob, and there has always been this aristocratic, disapproving, judging tendency in Fay. It showed up strongly in high school when she began to work toward going to college; she took courses in literature and history and felt that the girls who took cooking courses –and the boys who took shop courses– were the riffraff of the world.
Beyond any doubt, Charley didn’t care for what she regarded as the civilized things in life, such as the longhair music she listened to on the hi-fl. I grant that he was a slob. But he was a slob when she married him; he was a slob that day in the roadside grocery store when he mistook the Mozart tune for a hymn. If she knew that, then she was wrong to disapprove of him as if it was some secret trait that he had concealed from her and then sprung on her after they were married. My god, Charley had always been completely honest with her — and he had given her everything in his power. Now, instead of driving his Mercedes, he drove a Buick because she preferred the color schemes and the automatic shift. In his own area, such as with cars, he knew more than she did; she was the barbarian, the slob. But that did not help him, since she did not choose to regard those areas as important. The fact that he could lay a good pipe line to the ducks’ trough did not impress her; only slobs were good at that, and so her point was proved.
And yet she accepted, even used, his language.
I suppose that she was ambivalent about him, that on the one hand she thought of him as rough and masculine, which was vital to her — he qualified as a man sexually. What she wanted was, it seems to me, paradoxical; she wanted him to be a man, but at the sathe time to meet her own standards, and these standards, having been set for herself, were not a man’s standards. On that point –her own sex– she had some confusion, too. She hated to do housework, I think, because it made her feel like a woman, and this was intolerable to her. No wonder Charley loathed doing her chores for her; if it was degrading for her to do them, surely it was worse for him — not because of his feelings about them –at one time he might not have minded– but because of their significance to her. Doing housework proved that a person was a drudge, a domestic, a servant, a maid; she could not bring herself to do them, but she was willing to let her husband do them. She could not, for example, bear to go down to the store and buy her Tampax; it was the sine quo non of proof that she was a woman, and so she got him to do it.
Naturally he came home and hit her.
But I didn’t mind doing the housework, because for me it was a job, not a symbol. I got my meals in return, and a warm house. – . I got something back, and it seemed just to me. Living with them I was much happier and more satisfied than I had ever been at any time in my life, before or since. I liked being with the children and the animals; I liked building fires in the fireplace — I liked the barbecued steaks. Wasn’t it more degrading for me to work for Poity at his tire-regrooving place?
The oddest part was Fay’s feeling that this house belonged to her and that Charley, her husband, was somebody who came in and sat down in a chair and got the chair dirty. He sweated on the furniture. But again this might not have been her actual attitude, but more a pose; she might simply have wanted to keep the idea current that this was primarily her house, and that in the house her laws functioned. Down underneath she may have recognized perfectly well that without Charley and his money there would have been no house — but, like the drinking, a particular theory fitted her needs and so she entertained the theory. She let him know that the house was her sphere… and what did that leave him? An office down at his factory to work in at night, plus the factory itself… and possibly the outdoors surrounding the house, the bare unimproved fields.