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T 7:45 one Sunday morning I slowly drive my car up a newly paved street lined with young trees and clusters of two-story homes that form a curving line up a hill overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It has the feel of a new housing development; along each street the shrubs are sculpted with the same taste. Streets have names like Starview, Overlook, Bayside, and though the traffic goes back and forth only within the development, there are ten-mile-an-hour signs every half block, as if an informal understanding could not be trusted. Between groups of every six houses, ivy lawns sprawl into large communal spaces, and their mailboxes are clustered under a small, communal mailbox roof. It was a developer s attempt at community.
At this hour the sidewalks, strewn with Sunday newspapers, are empty. Other times of day I see only employees—a Chinese gardener trimming, a Chicano handyman fixing floodlights, two white workmen carrying rolls of carpeting from their truck to a home. Half the units are filled with retired couples, Carol Alston tells me later, and the other half with two-income families. “The elderly don’t talk much to the young, and the working couples are too busy to be neighborly: its the kind of place that could be neighborly, but isn’t.”
Greg Alston answers the door. At thirty-seven, Greg is a boyish, sandy-haired man with gold-rimmed glasses, dressed in well- worn jeans and a T-shirt. Also at the door is Daryl, three, with a dimple-cheeked grin. He has bare feet, and shoes in hand. “Carols still asleep,” Greg tells me, “and Beverly [their three-month-old baby] is about to wake up.” I settle in the living room, again the “family dog,” and listen as the household wakes up. At 7:15 Greg has risen, at 7:30 Daryl, and now, at 8:00, Beverly is up. For a while, only Greg and Daryl were downstairs. Greg was talking to Daryl about tying shoes, Daryl was discussing the finer distinctions between Batdog, Spiderbat, Aquaman, and Aquababy. Soon, Carol has dressed and calls out to me; I help her make the bed. She breastfeeds Beverly and puts her in a swing which is hung near the dining-room table between two sets of poles; the swing is kept in motion by a mechanical bear, whose weight, as it gradually slides down one of the poles, drives the mechanism that moves the swing. As Carol cleans off the dining-room table and does the dishes, she tells me about a wild two-year-old child of friends whom they had taken to Marine World Saturday, and who had thrown a metal car at the baby. She begins making pecan and apple pancakes for breakfast. Greg is repairing a torn water bed downstairs. Each parent has one child.
Carol, thirty-five, is dressed in a jogging suit and sneakers. She has short-cropped hair, no makeup, tiny stud earrings. There is something pleasantly no-nonsense in her look and a come-on — and-join-me quality to her laugh. She and Greg have shared an extremely happy marriage for eleven years.
Carol is not trying to integrate family life with the demands of a fast-track corporate career by being a supermom like NinaTana- gawa. Three years before, she had gotten off a fast-track career as a systems analyst, quit what she calls her “real” job, and begun freelance consulting for twenty-five hours a week. Carol is not clinging to older ideas about women, like Carmen Delacorte. As a child, Carol had always envisioned having a career and, as an adult, she’d always had one. She says she’s always divided the work at home fifty-fifty. “I don’t know if I’d call myself a feminist,” she tells me, as if studying the term from a distance, “but yes, Greg and I have always shared at home, no discussion about it, up until I went part time, of course.”
From the beginning, Greg wanted Carol to work and, in fact, told me he felt “upset” now that she wasn’t working full time, since he missed her income. For seven out of their eleven years together, Carol earned as much as a systems analyst as he earned as a dentist. In fact, she now earned part time almost as much as Greg earned full time. “The more income she makes, the earlier we can retire,” Greg said.
For the past three years, since having Daryl, Carol’s strategy has been to reduce her hours and her emotional involvement at work, and to do most of the second shift because she has been home more. But the couple would share again after next November, she said, when they planned to fulfill an eleven-year dream of escaping the gridlock traffic and the drugs and racial violence of the urban schools to move to a tiny town in the Sierra mountains called Little Creek. There Greg, too, would take up part-time work. The Alstons have always loved boating and camping; in Little Creek they could enjoy the outdoors in an egalitarian version of a Rousseauist retreat from modern life. They are among the lucky few who could afford this. In short, the financial and ideological stage was set for Greg and Carol really to share the work of the home.
Apart from the work at home, it is clear to begin with that Greg and Carol shared the life of the home. If a home could talk, the Alstons’ place would say a lot about their closeness and about the importance of children in their lives. Their house is a comfortable, unpretentiously furnished, ranch-style home, designed so that if you close all the doors, the dining room, kitchen, and living room are still visible to each other. A picture over the mantel shows a dreamy child blowing at a balloonlike moon. Beneath it are porcelain ABC blocks, with a German beer stein to the left, and wedding photos of brothers and sisters to the right. Each sitting area throughout the house shows some material indication of the presence of children: a crib in a circle of living-room chairs, a tiny rocker in an alcove, Daryls pictures on the refrigerator, and a hook to hang his Batman cape on. Upstairs, above Carols desk, hangs her framed college diploma, her CPA certificate, her state board of accountancy certificate; and beside these are corresponding documents for Greg, a picture of Daryl, and a picture of Carol and Greg white-water rafting. Hanging in the garage are two home-made “dancer” kayaks. (“We made them with a group of boating friends,” said Carol. “A girlfriend and I made meat loaf and we just kept painting all day.”) Daryls room is a cooperative effort too. Carol had hung a “star chart” on computer paper on Daryls door; he had earned one star beside brush teeth, three beside pick up clothes, and none beside put newspaper in box, CARRY BEVERLYS BAG, ОГ GET UNDRESSED. Greg had designed Daryls walnut built-in crib and ladder, and set up the electric car tracks. Carol had bought the elephant lamp with the party hat on in front and the colored beanie on its rump. Everything seems integrated with everything else.
There is only one sad note in the house: hanging in the hallway is a framed, glass-covered composition of the wedding invitations of four couples, their closest friends. In the middle, as if joining the couples together, is a $20 bill. It captures a moment of whimsy and exuberance, and expresses the idea of a gamble. “We made a bet that whoever got married last had to pay the others twenty dollars,” Carol explained. Then she grew quiet. “Tim and Jane— the ones in the right top—are divorced, and Jim and Emily, on the bottom left, are in trouble.” The Alstons’ move to Little Creek would certainly solve the traffic problem, but perhaps they also felt it would remove them from todays strains on marriages.
Within the couple, either Carol or Greg was often doing something for the other. If Carol was holding Beverly she might ask Greg, “Could you feed the cat the dry food?” When Greg was hammering on a fixture in the bedroom and the phone rang, he said, “Can you get it?” One adult was as likely as the other to answer the phone or chat with a sick neighbor.
They handled the usual tensions at dinnertime in a similar way. Whenever his parents cast out a line of marital communication over the dinner table, Daryl would grab at it. “Michael hasn’t signed the contract yet,” Greg would say to Carol. “The Michael from my school?” Daryl would butt in. “No, a different Michael that Daddy and Mommy know,” Carol would answer. At dinner, it was as often Carol as Greg who answered Daryls questions.
When he was home, Greg spent as much time involved with the household as Carol did; and he tried to maximize his time at home. On the weekends, Greg worked as long as Carol did so that whatever each was doing, they invested the same amount of time in their work. In all, Greg contributed more time to the second shift than Evan Holt, Frank Delacorte, Peter Tanagawa, Robert Myerson, or Ray Judson. Both Carol and Greg felt the arrangement worked well and was fair. Carol did not, after all, work an extra month a year.
On the other hand, in some ways they did not share. Carol cut back her hours of work and changed her philosophy of work after Beverly’s birth, whereas Greg told me that not much changed for him. If real sharing means sharing the daily or weekly tasks, then again, they didn’t really share. Whether she worked full time, time and a half, or half time, Carol was responsible for the daily and weekly chores such as cooking, shopping, and laundry in addition to such nondaily chores as shopping for children’s clothes, sending out Christmas cards, writing family letters, remembering birthdays, caring for house plants, and taking family photos. Greg’s housework list was mainly made up of nondaily chores: household repairs, paying bills, and repairing both their cars.
Carol was not a supermom like Nina Tanagawa. Nor did she passively renegotiate marital roles, as Carmen Delacorte did, by “playing dumb.” Nor did she stage a “sharing showdown,” as did Nancy Holt through her Monday-you-cook, Tuesday-I-cook scheme. But, over a period of time, Carol pursued several other strategies. First, when the demands of work went up, Carol’s production at home went down. For example, Carol explained, “When
I worked full time, we both ate a big lunch at work, and Daryl eats at day care, so I didn’t cook.” Second, Carol cut back her work hours, so that she had more time to do her daily chores. Third, from time to time she renegotiated roles with Greg. These were Carols three strategies, and Greg had a fourth. He evened out the score, it seemed, by seeing how long Carol was taking with the cooking, cleaning, and tending the children, and kept at his woodwork until she stopped. That way, Greg was working “as long as” Carol, only on his projects. These were not hobbies like Evan Holts projects “downstairs.” Greg often checked his projects with Carol, did them in an order she would suggest, or consulted her on the colors, sizes, and shapes of the things that he made. What Greg did profited them both, but it was not sharing the daily chores and did not take the daily pressure off Carol.