Not long after this crisis in the Holts’ marriage, there was a dramatic lessening of tension over the issue of the second shift. It was as if the issue was closed. Evan had won. Nancy would do the second shift. Evan expressed vague guilt but beyond that he had nothing to say. Nancy had wearied of continually raising the topic, wearied of the lack of resolution. Now in the exhaustion of defeat, she wanted the struggle to be over too. Evan was “so good” in other ways, why debilitate their marriage by continual quarreling Besides, she told me, “Women always adjust more, don’t they?”
One day, when I asked Nancy to tell me who did which tasks from a long list of household chores, she interrupted me with a broad wave of her hand and said, “I do the upstairs, Evan does the downstairs.” What does that mean? I asked. Matter-of-factly, she explained that the upstairs included the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, two bedrooms, and two baths. The downstairs meant the garage, a place for storage and hobbies—Evans hobbies. She explained this as a “sharing” arrangement, without humor or irony—just as Evan did later. Both said they had agreed it was the best solution to their dispute. Evan would take care of the car, the garage, and Max, the family dog. As Nancy explained, “The dog is all Evans problem. I don’t have to deal with the dbg.” Nancy took care of the rest.
For purposes of accommodating the second shift, then, the Holts’ garage was elevated to the full moral and practical equivalent of the rest of the house. For Nancy and Evan, “upstairs and downstairs,” “inside and outside,” was vaguely described like “half and half,” a fair division of labor based on a natural division of their house.
The Holts presented their upstairs-downstairs agreement as a perfectly equitable solution to a problem they “once had.” This belief is what we might call a “family myth,” even a modest delusional system. Why did they believe it? I think they believed it because they needed to believe it, because it solved a terrible problem. It allowed Nancy to continue thinking of herself as the sort of woman whose husband didn’t abuse her—a self-conception that mattered a great deal to her. And it avoided the hard truth that, in his stolid, passive way, Evan had refused to share. It avoided the truth, too, that in their showdown, Nancy was more afraid of divorce than Evan was. This outer cover to their family life, this family myth, was jointly devised. It was an attempt to agree that there was no conflict over the second shift, no tension between their versions of manhood and womanhood, and that the powerful crisis that had arisen was temporary and minor.
The wish to avoid such a conflict is natural enough. But their avoidance was tacitly supported by the surrounding culture, especially the image of the woman with the flying hair. After all, this admirable woman also proudly does the “upstairs” each day without a husband’s help and without conflict.
After Nancy and Evan reached their upstairs-downstairs agreement, their confrontations ended. They were nearly forgotten. Yet, as she described their daily life months after the agreement, Nancys resentment still seemed alive and well. For example, she said:
Evan and I eventually divided the labor so that I do the upstairs and Evan does the downstairs and the dog. So the dog is my husband’s problem. But when I was getting the dog outside and getting Joey ready for child-care, and cleaning up the mess of feeding the cat, and getting the lunches together, and having my son wipe his nose on my outfit so I would have to change—then I was pissed! I felt that I was doing everything. All Evan was doing was getting up, having coffee, reading the paper, and saying, “Well, I have to go now,” and often forgetting the lunch I’d bothered to make.
She also mentioned that she had fallen into the habit of putting Joey to bed in a certain way: he asked to be swung around by the arms, dropped on the bed, nuzzled and hugged, whispered to in his ear. Joey waited for her attention. He didn’t go to sleep without it. But, increasingly, when Nancy tried it at eight or nine, the ritual didn’t put Joey to sleep. On the contrary, it woke him up. It was then that Joey began to say he could only go to sleep in his parents’ bed, that he began to sleep in their bed and to encroach on their sexual life.
Near the end of my visits, it struck me that Nancy was putting
Joey to bed in an “exciting” way, later and later at night, in order to tell Evan something important: “You win, I’ll go on doing all the work at home, but I’m angry about it and I’ll make you pay.” Evan had won the battle but lost the war. According to the family myth, all was well: the struggle had been resolved by the upstairs — downstairs agreement. But suppressed in one area of their marriage, this struggle lived on in another—as Joeys Problem, and as theirs.