The Nix(85)
Unfortunately, the trickiest deodorant problem a girl has isn’t under her pretty little arms, says a poster for a can of something called Pristeen. The odor problem that men don’t have, says one for Bidette Towelettes. A woman sitting alone in her bedroom, headline above her in bold black letters: There’s something every husband expects from his wife. Or a mother talking to her daughter: Now that you’re married, I can tell you. There’s a womanly offense greater than bad breath or body odor, and the daughter—beautiful, young, face all eager and happy, as if they were talking about movies or memories and not antiseptic germicides—says, It’s so much easier to hear it from you, Mom!
What a terrible thing, this world of married women. Faye imagines that funk from the kitchen sink when the water sits too long, or how the dishrags reek of something like gasoline when they’re crumpled and wet. The secret, envenomed married life—naked, moist, unperfumed—hiding away one’s stink. Women in despair as their husbands hurry madly out the door. Why does she spend evenings alone? She keeps her home immaculate, and looks as pretty as she can, but she neglects that one essential…personal feminine hygiene. That’s an ad for Lysol brand disinfectant, and Faye’s mother has never mentioned any of this. Faye is afraid to look through her mother’s bathroom, afraid of what she’ll find. The pink-and-white bottles and boxes with such awful names, they sound like what the boys study in chemistry class: Zonite, Koromex, Sterizol, Kotex. Words that sound vaguely scientific and smart and modern, but words that don’t really exist. Faye knows. She’s looked them up. There is no dictionary definition for Koromex, nor for any of the others. Words like empty balloons, all those useless Ks and Xs and Zs.
A poster from their Kinney beauty consultant about controlling perspiration. A poster from Cover Girl about hiding blemishes. Another showing girdles and padded bras. No wonder the boys are afraid. The girls are afraid. Deodorizes so thoroughly you know you’re the woman your husband wants you to be. Their home ec teacher is on a crusade, stamping out all manner of bacteria and uncleanliness, making the girls tidy, sweet-smelling, preventing them from becoming, as she says, “dirty cheap people.” She doesn’t call the course “home ec.” She calls it “cotillion.”
Their teacher, Mrs. Olga Schwingle, the wife of the local pharmacist, tries to teach these small-town girls manners and etiquette. She shows them how to be proper ladies, how to take up the habits necessary to join the faraway sophisticated world. To brush their hair each night one hundred times. To brush their teeth fifty times up and down. To chew each bite at least thirty-four times. To stand up straight, don’t lean, don’t hunch, make eye contact, smile when being spoken to. When she says “cotillion” she pronounces it with a French affect: co-ti-YO.
“We must rinse that farm off you!” Mrs. Schwingle says, even to the girls who do not live on farms. “What we need is some elegance.” And she’ll put on a record—chamber music or a waltz—and say, “You girls are so lucky to have me here.”
She teaches them things their mothers know nothing about. What kinds of glasses to serve wine in, or scotch. The difference between a dinner fork and a salad fork. Where all these things belong in a proper place setting. Which direction the blade of the knife should face. How to sit without putting your elbows on the table. How to approach a table, how to leave one. How to gracefully accept a compliment. How to sit when a man pushes the seat in behind you. How to make a good cup of coffee. How to serve it properly. How to set out sugar cubes in adorable little pyramids on fragile-looking painted china the likes of which Faye has never seen in her own home.
Mrs. Schwingle teaches them how to host a dinner party, how to cook for a dinner party, how to make pleasing conversation with dinner guests, how to create the sophisticated dishes she insists the wives on the East Coast are right now making, mostly involving some kind of gelatin, some kind of lettuce trim, some kind of food-within-another-food conceit. Shrimp salad in an avocado ring mold. Pineapple in lime gelatin served with cream cheese. Cabbage suspended in jellied bouillon. Peaches split and filled with blueberries. Canned pear halves covered in shredded yellow cheese. Pineapple boats filled with cocktail sauce. Olive pimento mousse. Chicken salad molded into white warheads. Tuna squares. Lemon salmon towers. Ham-wrapped cantaloupe balls.
These are the new and fabulous dishes that ladies of culture are serving. America has fallen in love with these foods: modern, exciting, unnatural.
Mrs. Schwingle has been to New York City. She has been to Chicago’s Gold Coast. She goes all the way to Dubuque to get her hair done, and when she isn’t buying clothes from the catalogs of East Coast retailers, she shops the boutiques of Des Moines or Joliet or Peoria. When the weather is pleasant she announces “What a wonderful day” and throws open the classroom shutters so dramatically that Faye expects to see cheerful animated birds flying in from outside. She tells them to enjoy the breeze and the scent of lilacs. “They’re in bloom, you know.” They go collect the flowers and place them around the class in small vases. “A lady’s house will always have such touches.”
Today she begins class with her usual exhortation regarding marriage.
“When I was in college becoming a certified professional secretary,” she says, standing powerfully erect, her hands clasped in front of her, “I decided to take classes in biology and chemistry. All my teachers wondered why I would do that. Why go to all that trouble? Why not more typing?”