Early Adulthood

War was declared against Japan and Germany a few weeks before the marriage, and by the spring of 1942 I withdrew from college and spent several years as an army wife largely in southern towns—Anniston, Columbia, Raleigh, Jackson—and then in Washington, D.C., and Trenton, New Jersey. My first trip South was to Anniston, Alabama, where, with my head full of antebellum novels, I expected to find women in dainty dimity and white gloves and carrying ruffled parasols. It was a culture shock to find my first landlady in black satin, highly rouged, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, on her way to her job as an "entertainer," as she put it. I was a civilian replacement first at an airbase and then at a prisoner-of-war camp, and a child tender in a municipal day-care center for factory women's children in Jackson, Mississippi. I sold fabric by the yard to poor whites in Alabama and worked for Soviet engineers in Washington, processing lend-lease shipments of petroleum products to the Soviet front. I even delivered a black baby in South Carolina, when I volunteered to find out why my landlady's "girl" did not show up for work and found her alone in advanced labor.

After the war I returned to finish college and moved on to graduate study at Columbia University. Though I did not define it as work at the time, I also spent two painful years trying to salvage a marriage and then adjust to its failure. After several foolish affairs I finally grew up secure enough to form a new and good marriage, at twenty-nine, to a man my own age. This has been a lasting love, with sparks in the mind, shared tastes of palate and politics, a spicy difference in intellectual flair,

a mutual love of hard physical work—a heady brew still potent after thirty-five years. With a degree behind me, I also tasted the pleasure of being paid for what I wanted to do anyway—work with books and ideas and typewriter. Still under the influence of the manual-work ethic from my Lutheran kin, I was dismayed while on a first professional job to calculate what I cost my employer by dividing the number of pages I wrote in a year (600) into my annual salary. The cost per page was so high, in my judgment then, for doing something that yielded so much intrinsic reward that I was convinced my boss Alex Inkeles must have considered me a poor investment.

But the joy of that work paled beside the miracle of birth and the powerful bond of flesh and heart that came with parenthood. Always greedy for experience, I had three births in four years in my middle to late thirties. With the love came the work of parenting, the unrelenting hours that squeezed out thought and spirit, all made particularly taxing because of the superwoman standards I imposed on myself: perfect wife, mother, hostess, gardener, and college teacher, all held together by a fragile scaffold of nursery schools, housekeeper, luck, and physical strength. The price I paid was insomnia and neuritis misdiagnosed as arthritis, and the cure was giving up part-time teaching and taking on a full-time research appointment.