The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (20 page)

If we see in the Holts, the Tanagawas, and the Steins three still-life portraits of strain in two-job couples, each represents a different kind of myth, and underlying tension. The family myth of the Holts misrepresented the
fact
that the wife, Nancy, did the second shift. The Tanagawas misrepresented the
reason
why the wife did it (Peter wasn’t as interested). The Steins misrepresented the facts, again. Officially, Seth wasn’t home; but unofficially Jessica wasn’t either.

All three women felt a tension between their hopes and the realities of their marriages. For all three, this tension was exacerbated by the birth of their first child, and became a crisis with their second. In all three cases, the women ended up doing what got done of the second shift.

But differences appeared in each one’s expression of gratitude. In the Holt family, Evan and Nancy appreciated enough
other
qualities about each other to compensate for their displeasure about the division of labor at home. Except for the issue of Nina’s higher salary, the Tanagawas, too, agreed enough to appraise each
other’s gifts in the same light. But the strain in the Stein marriage more completely inhibited their exchange of credit and thanks. Missing this, they gave less love and moved apart. The most strained marriages I found were generally between two people more centered on career than family, and in dispute over their roles at home. In no other kind of marriage was gratitude so scarce, the terms of its exchange so much the object of dispute, and the marital heartbeat so precariously slow.

CHAPTER
9

An Unsteady Marriage and a Job She Loves: Anita and Ray Judson

R
AY
Judson is a lean black man of twenty-nine who in 1982 earned $30,000 working the early morning shift as a forklift driver, loading and unloading bags of cement in Crockett, California—a two-hour barge trip across the bay from San Francisco. At home in the study of his small suburban home, he relaxed in a large chair, his guitar hanging on the wall behind him. As with other men and women I talked to, I thought I could always tell a little something by how and where a person sat. Ray was in his study, where we wouldn’t be disturbed. He had changed out of his work clothes and was dressed now in a blue silk shirt and slacks. Maybe he had dressed up a bit for the interview. For the six years of their marriage, Ray and Anita had lived in a modest tract home with Ruby, Anita’s pensive ten-year-old daughter by a previous marriage, and their son, Eric, a bright, mischievous boy of two. A third child was on the way. Ray enjoyed talking about people’s motives; in playful respect, his coworkers at the plant called him “shrink-man.” He was looking forward to this interview; perhaps, he confided, it would help him understand his stormy marriage.

The two small tables on either side of the sofa were loaded to the edge with family photographs, magazines, and knickknacks. The living-room walls were covered with posters of Jimi Hendrix album covers, which Ray had recently nailed up, Anita had objected to, and whose fate now hung undecided. The television flickered and
chattered on at low volume—as if to add background excitement, like the tropical aquariums and fireplaces in wealthier living rooms.

If the Steins are more typical of two-job couples in the upper white-collar world, the Judsons tell us more about those in the solid blue-collar one. The lower on the class ladder, the less stable marriage becomes, but divorce has increased at each rung. And so many couples may come to live with the hidden dynamic I found in the Judsons’ marriage—the unsettling effect of being prepared to leave “just in case” while carrying on married life as if everything were fine.

Ray earned $13.50 an hour, while Anita earned $8.00 an hour at a full-time job typing address labels into a computer for a billing agency. This wage difference was typical in the 1980s, but it had a personal importance for Ray. Anita, a short, stocky woman who dressed for our interview in jeans and a bright green T-shirt, wore a friendly but somewhat anxious smile. She lit her cigarette, exhaled slowly, and put the matter this way: “Ray isn’t the antifeminist type. But he has to let you know ‘I’m the
man
of the house.’ Ego is real important to him. He’s got to be respected as a husband and a man. He says, ‘I pay the house note [the mortgage]. I work hard every day.’ And I always stick in ‘I work hard too, you know.’”

When Ray talked about “being a man,” the topic soon came around to money, and when he talked about money, the topic often moved to being “man of the house,” boss. More than Evan Holt, Peter Tanagawa, or Seth Stein—all of whom earned more—Ray talked about money as a passport to manhood, and at home it was a passport to leisure.

Ray liked to grill steaks outside on the portable barbecue. He played with Eric when he felt like it—“an hour or so most evenings,” he said—and he did things like fixing the bathroom shower head when he “had time.” That was his share of the second shift, a share that did not go unchallenged.

The links in Ray’s mind between money, manhood, and leisure were precarious, because they bound Ray’s identity to the fluctuations
of an unpredictable marketplace. So long as the price of the bags of cement hauled by his barge company remained high, Ray’s company, his job, and his sense of manhood were secure. But if the price of cement fell, it could threaten his job and his manhood. Given the history of black people in America, equating money with manhood was doubly dangerous. It was already an exceptional bit of luck that Ray had landed a stable union job that paid $30,000 a year. Now he was pinning his relation to the woman he loved on a tiny opening in the economic system. How long would the company prosper? How long before it automated or went offshore?

The same relation between money and gender identity in no way applied to Anita. She did not base her womanhood on earnings. This was not because she earned less but because, despite the fact that most women in her family worked, there was not quite the equivalent tie between money and womanhood. Money could give her power but it couldn’t make her more “feminine.” She could not, like Ray, convert money into an exemption from work at home, because she didn’t earn as much as Ray, and because her money didn’t carry cultural weight. She was “culturally poorer” because she was a woman.

Ray’s childhood seemed to give earning power several meanings for him. For one thing, his father never held a steady job and had little authority at home. When Ray was two years old, his father left him in the care of his mother; when he was four, his mother moved away, and left him in the care of his aunt, a kind but strict and highly religious woman, who raised him along with the last two of her own seven children. After going to live with his aunt, he did not see his mother regularly until fifteen years later. Ray did not remember his father, and felt he had taken this loss in stride. But when his mother left, he remembers missing her for a very long time. If the emotional drive behind a view of manhood has roots in childhood, then perhaps this loss of his mother offers a clue to what might lie behind his insistence that the first shift come first for him, and the second shift come first for his wife.
Important people can leave unless you find powerful ways of keeping them with you. Perhaps by focusing on what he had that she needed—his salary—he could hold enough power over Anita to keep her from leaving too. Something about Anita’s skittishness, her feistiness, did remind him of his mother, he said, and something of her motherliness reminded him of his aunt. Ray was a “transitional” man, then, but unlike many other such men, he openly used money to bolster his claims at home, and certain past losses added emotional fuel to it.

As I interviewed Anita, she was standing at the kitchen table, chopping carrots, potatoes, turnips, and meat to make a stew large enough to last several meals. She interrupted herself from time to time to tend Eric or take a quick pull on her cigarette. What she seemed to want to talk about was her volatile marriage to Ray and her recently diagnosed stomach ulcer. (She had not told Ray about the ulcer for fear that he would force her to quit her job.)

Anita’s childhood had been as difficult as Ray’s, and as important to her later notion of womanhood. Her father, a North Carolina farmer, had been crippled by polio at the age of twenty-two, two years after he married her mother, and four years before the Salk vaccine was broadly available. After bearing him three daughters, Anita’s mother became pregnant with a fourth child by a man who helped around the farm—a fact she revealed in great anguish to Anita only years later. When Anita’s father discovered the truth about this fourth pregnancy, he became violently upset and ordered Anita’s mother to leave with the children. As Anita recalled: “My father wasn’t moving out of that house. He said he was going to stay there and die. He felt like he was nothing. In the end he starved himself to death.”

Alone now with her four children, Anita’s mother worked at two jobs as a domestic, one mornings, and one evenings. Seven years later, she remarried a construction worker with six children of his own, and she continued to work as a domestic. On the evening of Anita’s own first marriage, she remembers her mother’s advice: “You’re a woman now. You’ve got to think about yourself, your work. Always keep your
own
bank account. If you have a man around, you don’t know if he’s going to jump up and leave and you’ll be stuck with four or five kids.” That was Anita’s cautionary tale. She felt her mother’s life had hardened her toward men and even children:

When she was nineteen, Anita married a musician in New Orleans and after a year she had her daughter, Ruby. While her husband worked during the day and played his trombone four nights a week and on weekends, Anita stayed home with the baby. Feeling both dependent and neglected, she went back to work as a secretary, really for the adult company as much as the money. Then, without consulting her, Anita’s husband decided to quit his daytime job in order to return to music school. This struck a certain raw nerve. Not being consulted or warned, not being supported, felt a lot like being abandoned. Her response was quick: she took the baby and left.

Five months later she returned to her husband, but could not stay with him long because, as she put it, “I couldn’t forgive him for being so irresponsible.” She sued for divorce, and only after a legal battle for custody of Ruby was resolved in her favor did she
and her ex-husband really discuss what had gone wrong. As Anita described it to me, her husband had said, “I didn’t know it was my music that broke us up.” She had replied: “No, it really wasn’t. It was just that you were ambitious and I wasn’t there to help you out. I was just young and wanted you to be there all the time.” As she told me: “That was the thing—he wasn’t there when I needed him. He was probably the man, the father, I never knew. He was the first man I was ever together with, you know, who filled that emptiness.”

Four years after her divorce, Anita met Ray. She was deeply touched by the way he talked to her. He seemed to understand why it might be hard for her to trust a man. She said: “Ray told me that he thought I was very tough and strong, but that I had a sensitive spot. Sometimes I tell him, ‘I can do without you,’ but deep down inside there’s a feeling that has to break out. I do need him. Ray has helped me get to that feeling.”

In their own ways, Ray and Anita were trying to heal each other. Ray saw a long racial history behind these personal hurts. He said: “Since the time of slavery, black men have always had a hard time holding on to their women. It’s said, ‘The black man spills his seed and moves on.’ I don’t want that to happen to me!
No way!
” But it was difficult for Ray and Anita to act on their insights in daily life. Sometimes they drew back from each other in distrust. Sometimes when they quarreled Ray drank too much and fights got physical. Anita’s mother, now in her early fifties, lived right next door. She took Anita’s side in these quarrels and offered shelter against male unreliability.

Her mother’s life and her own inspired in Anita certain contradictory feelings about work. On one hand, she wanted to be economically self-sufficient: after all, your man can always leave. She had also grown up within a long tradition of wage-earning women; her mother, both grandmothers, most of her aunts, and all her female cousins worked. To be a woman was to work. That was the tradition, maybe not for white middle-class women, but certainly for her and for everyone she knew. At the same time her
pragmatism sometimes obscured a wistful desire to be taken care of by Ray.