My Kitchen Wars by Betty Fussell

Author:Betty Fussell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781453218433
Publisher: Open Road Media

At Princeton, apart from visiting writers, men and women were even more segregated than at Harvard or Yale, where women had infiltrated the graduate schools at least. But if we were excluded from the classrooms, we were all the more valued for our sex. In this atmosphere, I capitulated at last. From now on, I’d be sexy. I made my own clothes, because that way I could afford expensive fabrics and make a good show. I cut the tops of my dresses lower and made the waists tighter. I put tissue in the bottom half of my bras to push my cleavage up. I could feel men buzz around me like drones to the honey pot, and I liked that feeling.

I discovered that all I had to do was ask intelligent questions, and men of all ages would find me intelligent. I could wrap my arm in the arm of the distinguished Eric Kahler, a fellow émigré and friend of Thomas Mann, and while we strolled across campus feel his pleasure as he discoursed learnedly on the relation between Klimt and Freud in the Vienna Circle. I could feel the drama theorist Francis Fergusson glow when I sat at his feet by the fireplace in his Victorian parlor and asked questions about Sophocles. I was only half aware that I was adding new weaponry to my arsenal, the weaponry of flattery and adoration and argument, not as an intellectual exercise but as a form of sex.

If I couldn’t use logic professionally, I’d use it for fun. With the lights on, I would engage one or another young male instructor in heated argument over the superiority of Whitman to Milton, say—the more outrageous the thesis, the better, because it required more skill to defend. It was a fencing match, the thrust oblique and the parry direct, designed to challenge, provoke, and parry other thrusts when, lights out, we danced close and closer to old recordings of “Sunrise Serenade” and “How High the Moon.” So blatantly sexual was argument to us that the wife of one instructor, a trained nurse, rose from her chair one night and said, “I know I can’t discuss la-de-da poetry or the works of Emerson, but I can do this … and this … and this,” and she executed a couple of bumps and a grind that put my mental gyrations to shame.

Dancing, we made love standing up and swaying slow, the way we had in high school and college, teased by the same urges and the same prohibitions, only now it was not virginity we were protecting but marriage. In effect, these were licensed petting parties and there were subtle, unspoken rules about what was and was not permitted. Sitting on laps was okay, dancing so close you could feel each other’s body parts was okay. Fondling in public was not, nor was disappearing into bedrooms, but disappearing outside into nature was. Once I sat on our picnic table out back, huddled under a blanket with

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.