Tonight in the kitchen, cleaning up after supper with the boys, I was flicking through the television channels until sight of an old kitchen, circa 1950, in a black and white movie made me put the remote down. Just as intriguing as the old-fashioned kitchen was the sight of this prattling, barmy housewife shuffling around in her chenille robe, showing her modest home to a potential boarder, an extremely perky young woman.
The man of the house, dressed in his suit, came down for breakfast. There wasn’t much to eat in the place.
I was amazed to see the housewife go into the pantry, take off her robe, slip on a housedress over her slip, which she must have slept in, and put on a dowdy pair of shoes. Before running out to the store to fetch orange juice for her husband, she grabbed her hairbrush off the icebox and ran it hastily through her disheveled hair.
“Well,” I whooped to my husband, “that’s one way to be efficient I suppose. Sleep in your slip. Don’t bathe. Keep your clothes in the kitchen and your hairbrush on top of the fridge!”
Little did I know, in the first few minutes of the film, that this somewhat odd morning ritual was not an example of domestic efficiency but rather a sign that the housewife had been leading an extremely sad, empty existence. In her grief over the loss of a puppy, harkening back to the loss of a baby, some twenty years earlier, and in her inability to invest her life with meaning, she no longer cared about her appearance or her home. To go out to a social event, such as the AA meeting she attended with her husband, she made some effort at grooming. To impress company, she cleaned the house and put on a new dress. But on a daily basis, she made no effort, not for her husband, not for herself. Sober, her husband says nothing. Drunk, he lambasts her for cleaning the back of her neck only when visitors are coming.
The movie turned out to be Come Back, Little Sheba, a movie whose title was familiar to me, but one that I had never actually seen. Shirley Booth won the Academy Award for her portrayal of Lola, the housewife. Burt Lancaster played her alcoholic husband. It was quite a powder keg of emotional issues—dealing with regret, loss, grief, surpressed rage, love, and despair at aging--but I was particulary in tune to the domestic manifestations of the issues—which were easy to notice, since the film is shot much like the original stage drama. Ninety percent of the action takes place within the house.
The movie, after a few harrowing twists and turns, ends on a hopeful note. Lola spruces up the place, paints the icebox, gets a hairdo. These are the sorts of things I often tend to disdain, since I get so tired of our society’s over-emphasis on appearance and magazine-like perfection, without any recognition of the work or time involved to achieve these results, nor little heed paid to worthwhile reasons why we should want to achieve them. Magazines are not good at this sort of thing.
What I forget sometimes--and art helps me to remember even if magazines cannot--are the small ways in which pride helps us keep our chins up, or the ways in which external appearance, whether of things or person, if not taken to silly extremes, can help convey happiness and love.
11:01:27 PM 
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