A Lady and a Scholar

Marriage, of course, opens more than a new world‑-it opens a universe of problems as well.  For a woman these can be divided into three categories: your chores, your chosen, and your children.  Against these odds few school subjects can avail you.  Indeed, it's only as an English student I have had a fighting chance.

Take, for example, the bride's traditional problem, cooking.  The chemistry student has no advantage here.  Of what use is her exactitude, the precision to which she has been trained?  Ambush lurks within her cookbook.  Faced with the insidious "to the right consistency" or the arcane "season to taste," she may well be intimidated into eating dinners out.  Not so an English student.  Warned by T. S. Eliot not to "measure out my life with coffee spoons," I can grope for the condiments and sprinkle unafraid.  Furthermore, modern poetry has justified my confidence in it‑-leftovers are surprisingly rare.

Another unexpected challenge is getting the housework done.  It's not the tasks themselves that waylay you;   they're simple.  The complications come from the housewife's daily dozen‑-eight phone calls and four door rings.  Against these interruptions no debating course can stand.  The unwary speech student may well end up not only with her chores undone but with a six-year subscription to the Ladies Guide to Quilting.  This will join her other cataleptic purchases: two battery operated vacuum cleaners (one for upstairs, one for down), and a reversible feather duster that doubles as a back scratcher.  But an English major is forewarned against such madness.  Counseled by John Donne, I "never send to know for whom the bell tolls."  Door unanswered, I can clear the cobwebs in the cellar.

Of course the laundry does offer more latitude for an education.  I myself have found psychology useful there.  Consider the weekly disappearance of one, just one, sock.  Clearly the washing machine is a passive aggressive.  It may look innocent, but I'm not deceived.  Deep in its oily heart are harbored hidden hostilities.  Also four unmatched sox.  However, as soon as I can get it to express itself, it'll give them all back.

The prognosis for my husband isn't as encouraging.  He suffers the packrat syndrome, a perversion not touched on in abnormal psychology.  Thus I stare unenlightened at his ever growing hoard.  Why the safety pin halves, the thumbtack tops, the two-inch bits of wire?  And what symbolic meaning has the green mitten near them, the one whose mate I threw out months before?  Freud has no answers, I tell you: his forte is dirty linens.  Not so Ralph Waldo Emerson.  "Things are in the saddle and ride all mankind," he comforts me.  Surely it helps to know you're not alone.

Naturally a husband isn't alone either.  In fact, he comes equipped with friends and relatives, all of whom he invites for dinner.  For a math student these can be mealtimes of malaise.  This is particularly true if she's calculated the area of her table.  Then the proof's irrefutable: there's not enough room for both the salad and the rolls.  But where Euclid fails, Robert Browning solves the problem.  Assured by him that "a man's reach should exceed his grasp," I put the bread on the window sill and serve dinner with elan.

No doubt your dinner guests will include your in-laws, and it's certainly best to enjoy them while you may.  Eventually a strange metamorphosis will befall them.  No training in biology can prepare you for this change.  The transformation is induced by children‑-yours‑-and, like them, your in-laws will emit weird coos and cries.  Be braced.  These strange sounds lead inevitably to the hatching of odd presents.

To be fair, some of the gifts will be memorable.  The indelible crayons for our three-year-old were on the walls for years.  But be particularly wary of the thousand piece "Blue and Gray" set.  This your seven-year-old will receive.  He'll play with it for four days; you'll be sweeping its men and guns from the corners long after his high school graduation.

Fortunately I had Oliver Cromwell for consultation.  He had had this problem also.  "...I cannot win with either gifts, honors, offices, or places," he once confided.  Now I find this most encouraging.  After all, I reason, if Cromwell could pull it all together, surely I can cope too.

Grandparents, however, aren't the only problem children create; there's also a sound barrier to be scaled.  Language students in particular will find the plight disheartening.  Not during the first year of parenthood, no.  An imperious wave of their one-year-old's hand (index finger extended) and a well enunciated "dat" do speak their volumes.  But Two-Year-Old is a language never fathomed by man.

Now I took Spanish in high school and French in college.  I'm also familiar with the classics: Latin, Greek, and Yiddish.  For that matter, I can even curse in Hungarian, no mean accomplishment.  But my linguistic ramparts crumbled at the trumpet of "fwon fween."  The call, I eventually determined, was for "strong string"‑-a translation I made just in time to prevent the child's coming undone.

I wasn't so fortunate, however, with "engaah."  Its meaning remained undecoded, nor could I find a Rosetta stone to end the tantrum.  Thus it was Lord Tennyson who provided my defense.  "...Beyond these voices there is peace," he had promised.  And to be sure, an hour alone in my bedroom and I could come out to my son again.  By that time someone else was deciphering his whims.

One further warning though about children: they do cause space warps.  That is, I presume it's space warps.  But whatever its nature, some vast, primeval force is pulling my household goods toward it, nor are they ever seen again.  Hence to a children's chorus of "I didn't take it," I search in vain for spoons, cheese cutters, paring knives, and pliers.  Stationary items are particularly drawn, and I can't determine their vanishing rate even with calculus.  But happily I've been taught to count on Shakespeare.  His reports are most reliable.  Informed by him that "there are more things in heaven and earth," I can sally forth confident of replenishing supplies.

Oddly, I didn't start out to be an English major.  I went to college originally to study astrophysics.  But what loss if I'm not exploring the black holes of space?  I already know what science will find there: six rolls of Scotch tape, fourteen pencils, and two pairs of dull scissors.  And if the cheese cutter has a yellow handle, that's mine too.

Of course there are times when even this knowledge doesn't console me.  It's then I turn to Robert Burns.  I understand his Scottish accent, and he in turn understands me.  But that's not surprising: he knows all about schemes that "gang aft agley...."