RULE No. 3:

LEARN TO BE AMUSED

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One’s best evenings are composed of a good dinner, and nothing else is necessary.

IT WAS NEVER OBVIOUS TO ANYONE THAT JULIA MCWILLIAMS would make anything of herself. Neither the most observant teacher nor an empathic, crystal ball–reading college career counselor predicted any kind of real career for Julia, much less a groundbreaking, world-changing one.

When Julia entered Smith College, Caro’s alma mater, in 1930 at the age of eighteen, she was that wild roommate you love to death but can’t live with because you fear flunking out.* Then as now, there are no dormitories at Smith; rather, every student is assigned to a house with other students from all four grades. Gilley, the housemother at Hubbard House, where Julia lived, kept notes on her charges, and about Julia she wrote, “A grand person generally but she does go berserk every once in a while, and is down on all ‘Suggestions and Regulations.’”

Northampton, Massachusetts, with its refined culture that valued the arts and intellectual pursuits, was a world away from provincial Pasadena, and Julia felt acutely like the huge galumphing Westerner that she was. Once again she was the tallest in her class (of 634); once again she was faced with the stark choice of whether to be a wallflower or a myth. It was a difficult adjustment, but Caro came east over Thanksgiving and took Julia shopping in New York for the requisite preppy wardrobe—crew neck sweaters, tweed skirts, saddle shoes, and pearls—and once she looked the part of a proper Smithie, she was able to devote herself fully to what she loved most, causing trouble.

For Julia, her first two years of college were an extension of high school, with the exception of an added bonus: The local speakeasy was within walking distance of Hubbard House. She spent her time partying and continued to specialize in pranks large and small. Moment to moment, if there was an opportunity to do something unexpected, to change the course of the next five minutes, Julia did it. Her impulse to engage, to get involved, to mix things up, to see what happens when you do x instead of y was compulsive. If there was a chance to lock someone in or out of a room, she would do it. Anything that involved having to climb out a window was right up her alley. When her roommate, Mary, hung a rug between their beds so that she could study, Julia would toss jelly doughnuts over the makeshift wall. I’m sure modern psychiatry has a name for this compulsive need to disrupt, distract, and get a laugh. It made Julie, as her classmates called her, popular. Her professors observed her sparkle and spunk; they appreciated her vivacity, but felt she lacked the ability to persevere. She was not serious.

Caro had been a basketball star at Smith, but Julia lacked both the drive and the aptitude.* Although she did play tennis, hockey, and baseball and ride horses at some nearby stables. She was a solid C student her sophomore year and enjoyed a somewhat outlaw reputation among her friends for failing to care. They had no idea that for Julia’s father, good grades equaled being an intellectual equaled being a communist, and if there was one thing worse than a communist … well, in Pop’s world, there was nothing worse than a communist. A serial killer who voted Republican was better than a Democrat with the Nobel Peace Prize.

None of this really mattered until junior year, when the young women were expected to declare a major, which mostly served notice to those who weren’t dating anyone steadily to buckle down and focus on their husband hunting. Despite the heady academic environment at Smith, most of the students were there to find a proper husband, culled from their male counterparts at Amherst, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia. Girls who landed a guy were rarely motivated to graduate. Getting engaged and dropping out within the same week wasn’t uncommon. And on the slim-to-nonexistent chance a newly minted Mrs. did want a job outside the home, the only real career that promised advancement, a decent salary, and prestige was teaching, which was subject to the so-called marriage ban, a federal law that prohibited the hiring of wives.

Why women who were expected to spend their lives overseeing the help needed to be conversant in Homer and Descartes was never discussed. Even Sophia Smith, who founded the college in 1875 with money inherited from her father—“… with the design to furnish for my own sex means and facilities for education equal to those which are afforded now in our colleges to young men”—never quite addressed what the young women who would benefit from her largesse were actually supposed to do with the education they received there.

First, Julia declared a history major, then decided that maybe she would be a “lady novelist” instead. She was in a more precarious position than most; as popular as she was with her classmates and even her professors who, if not impressed with her scholarship, still admired her “savoir faire,” the young men of the Ivy League just weren’t interested.

One of Smith’s vocational counselors suggested that since marriage was obviously not in the cards for Julia, and since her family was well-off, she would not need to pursue a career, or even have a job, but could devote herself to charity work. Even the brain trust at Smith believed Julia’s sole option was to return home to Pasadena and join the tribe of Ladies Who Lunch.

A BRIEF REFLECTION ON THE MERITS OF COLLEGE

Before moving on to Julia’s inopportune early adulthood, let us pause to appreciate how her college education, an excellent one by all standards, did next to nothing to inform her future. Throughout her life Julia adored her alma mater and was a devoted alumna until the day she died, but while she was an undergraduate there, she may as well have been at the University of Southern California, my alma mater and the local party school of choice for many Pasadeneans. There was no reason for Julia to be at Smith, other than that her mother went to Smith. Like so many four-year colleges, Smith was merely a four-year holding tank for Julia, while she matured not at all.

And that was okay.

My intent is not to put anyone out of a job who has made a lucrative career consulting with high school seniors and their energetic parents about how to find the perfect college; how to prepare to take the SATs and ACTs;* how to compose a brilliant, provocative essay;† how to create a standout application;‡ and how to present a top-notch case for admission using every tool in your family’s personal arsenal of awesomeness, but if the life of Julia Child tells us anything, it’s that where you go to college doesn’t matter.

I’m not trying to console you because your kid didn’t get into HYPS* or her first choice, or your beloved alma mater. Nor am I saying it to make you feel better because, gentle reader, you’d dreamed all your life of going to NYU and you wound up at a state college, and now you worry that you’ll never achieve anything. Steven Spielberg attended no famous film school but the California State University Long Beach. Conversely, a friend’s brother-in-law graduated from Harvard and now is a checker at Trader Joe’s.†

What matters is what’s going on with the student, and if you’re young, naive, and “unserious,” as Julia would describe herself years later, and without any real interests, where you wind up is irrelevant. “I only wish to god I were gifted in one line instead of having mediocre splashings in several directions,” wrote Julia in a letter home to Caro near the end of her college career.

“Passing tests doesn’t begin to compare with searching and inquiring and pursuing topics that engage us and excite us,” said the esteemed philosopher and cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky. Julia passed the tests, but all the searching, inquiring, and pursuing was decades down the road.

In June, after commencement, she drove Eulalie home to California, accompanied by her mother, sister, and brother, who’d taken the train across the country to meet her. It was the summer John Dillinger was on the loose. Eulalie’s top speed was forty miles an hour. At home, in balmy Pasadena, Julia played tennis and golf and threw huge parties where she secretly spiked the punch. She enjoyed herself. Still, she was too much the daughter of practical, tough-minded, hardworking John McWilliams. In 1935 she went back East, where she enrolled in the Packard Commercial School to learn “secretarial skills”; after a month the tedium drove her bonkers and she quit. She eventually found herself in New York City, working in the advertising department of W & J Sloane, a home furnishings store. She was good at her job, organized and able to get along with just about anyone. In her small apartment she subsisted on Birds Eye Frozen Food.*

Despite her success at W & J Sloane, Julia struggled in New York. She felt “big and unsophisticated.” She fell in love for the first time with a “literature major” named Tom, who was in New York looking for work. She was smitten; he was only kind of smitten. She was a bull in the china shop of love, falling over herself to assure him of her love and devotion; probably he was her first lover. Eventually, he wound up betraying her by up and marrying a fellow classmate from Smith.

Even the boisterous, seemingly indestructible Julia McWilliams was knocked sideways by love. She wanted to go home. When she gave her notice at work, telling her boss she was moving back to California where she belonged, he sputtered, “But Julia, I can make you the biggest advertising woman in New York!” To which she replied, “I already am.”

In Pasadena, all was not well. Caro had suffered from chronic high blood pressure for years. In the 1930s, high blood pressure was thought to be a natural part of aging; the heart needed to beat harder to squeeze the blood down those aging, narrowing arteries, so it went untreated. But after Julia returned home, the normally spirited Caro started complaining of headaches. One day Pop rushed her to the hospital with a raging fever. The doctors brought down her fever and declared her well, but something wasn’t right. She suffered from dizzy spells and nausea, and her skin had taken on a yellow pallor. Caro’s entire family, both parents and five siblings, had all succumbed to the ravages of high blood pressure, and on July 21, 1937, only a few weeks before Julia turned twenty-five, Caro did, too. Julia was beside her when she died.

Julia was lost. It was as if at the age of twenty-five she retired. Her youth, which had yielded nothing much in the way of discovery about who she was and what she should be doing, seemed to be behind her. In the fall, after Caro was laid to rest, Dort returned to college at Bennington and John returned to college at Princeton and Julia was left, as the oldest daughter, to “take care” of Pop. As the McWilliamses live-in domestic staff had grown to include a housekeeper, cook, butler, and several gardeners, there was nothing for Julia to do, really, but keep her increasingly difficult father company. I’m being gentle; the man was grief-stricken. The truth is, by all reports, Pop was a nasty-tempered bigot, who grew only more so after Caro and her humanizing influence departed. Conservative doesn’t begin to describe his hatred for anything that resembled change. He despised anyone from the East Coast, Europe and Europeans, Democrats and moderate Republicans, intellectuals, and the brand-new Pasadena Freeway that connected his personal utopia to the corrupt metropolis of Los Angeles. Julia loved her father, and she had grown up tolerating his tirades, but her time living and working alone in New York had changed her in ways that she could not yet quite understand. All she knew was that there was a big world out there.

Pop gave Julia an allowance, and from her mother’s estate she inherited at least $100,000* and a nice wad of IBM stock. Julia was rich, unencumbered, and could do whatever she wanted. This sounds like a recipe for happiness, and yet Julia was not happy.

Every morning the sun rose from behind the San Gabriel Mountains, eased across the southern sky, and then set over the Pacific. Every morning Julia played a few rounds of golf at the exclusive Annandale Country Club with Pop, joined friends for lunch, and played another round of golf or perhaps some tennis. Then she showered, dressed, and repaired to the even more exclusive Midwick Club—whose ultra-right, ultra-rich members included Walt Disney and Will Rogers—where, in the afternoon, she would drink martinis with people she claimed to find entertaining. “All I want is to play golf, piano and simmer, and see people, and summer and live right here,” she wrote in her diary. Later, she would remember these long months as being the only time in her life she felt completely lost and confused.

She spent the next five years this way. Now there was no question that Julia was being left behind. Her friends from Smith who, before, were merely married, now were having children. Mary Case, her college roommate, had a daughter and named her Julia.

I feel so enervated by the reality of this part of Julia Child’s life that I’m having a hard time finishing this section. She roused herself after a few years of golf, martinis, and nightly dinners in which she submitted to Pop’s rants against Democrats and every other child of Satan* and snagged a job writing a fashion column for a short-lived magazine called Coast. Then, she briefly held a job at the West Coast branch of W & J Sloane, from which she was fired. She joined the Junior League, the Junior League, where she starred in various children’s plays (playing, always, the lion, the big scary beast, or the emperor).

How did the woman who became Julia Child suffer through years of such soul-crushing inertia?

YOU DON’T NEED TO HAVE THE LIFE YOU WANT TO ENJOY THE LIFE YOU HAVE

It’s a little hard to feel sorry for Julia, given that by twenty-five she was pretty much set for life. What I find exciting about this is that if Julia’s life was any indication, being set for life turns out to be excruciatingly dull. Evidently, a boatload of money is no substitute for love and a sense of purpose. I would say this is obvious, except that millions of people spend their lives trying to figure out how to get more money, when perhaps time would be better spent trying to figure out what it is that only you were born to do, like revolutionize the concept and practice of cooking in America.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. It would be decades before Janis Joplin immortalized the lyrics “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” but that was pretty much the position that Julia found herself in, turning the bend toward thirty. The one man she’d ever loved had jilted her, her beloved mother was dead, her siblings were far away, she was stuck alone with her impossibly sour father, and she had no genuine interest in anything. All her money did nothing to change this. Julia loved life most when it was busy, frenzied, and unpredictable, and yet without quite knowing how it happened, she’d become one of the Ladies Who Lunch.

Still, as restless and disheartened as she was, she didn’t make an effort to change anything. She “simmered,” waiting for something, she knew not what. She was desperate for a change but somehow knew better than to make a change simply for the sake of it.

In August 1940, at the age of twenty-eight, Julia received a marriage proposal from Harrison Chandler, the scion of the Los Angeles Times. Chandler was handsome, ultra-conservative, and boring. He and Julia traveled in the same country club martini-drinking circles. From the outside he appeared to be the perfect match, and Pop, who rarely took an interest in his daughter’s life except to berate her for her left-leaning politics, was eager for her to say yes. Here was a chance for her to escape her fear of becoming an old maid, confirm her desirability as a woman, please her father, and solidify her upper-crust social standing by becoming part of one of the first families of Southern California.

She said no.

She knew she was lost, knew she was spinning her wheels, knew she couldn’t possibly imagine what the future might hold. She didn’t know if or when things were going to get better. Perhaps to convince herself that her life was going well she wrote in her diary, “I am quite content to be the way I am—and feel quite superior to many a wedded mouse. By God—I can do what I want!” And still, she didn’t do anything to change her circumstances.

With our modern dust mote–size attention spans and belief that the mark of being human is not our pair of opposable thumbs but the ability to be happy all the time, the moment we’re discontented for longer than forty-eight hours, we start casting around to see how we might remedy the situation. We know from our favorite self-help gurus that the only thing that’s permanent in life is change, so why not help life along and engineer those changes ourselves?

Maybe we need a new job, a new apartment, a new boyfriend, a new diet, a new haircut, a new gym, a new book group, or Botox. The next time this occurs to you, rather than resolving to get your act together or your ducks in a row or do something that you imagine your future self will thank you for, do nothing.

Instead, learn to be amused, and find things that give you pleasure. It feels like an old-fashioned concept—to spend time doing things that have no self-improving component, that are done simply for the pleasure of doing them.

Men have an easier time amusing themselves than women do. I’m resisting the urge to qualify this. I don’t know one woman who is as good at messing around as are all the men I know. Men joyously go out to find a pickup game of basketball. They maintain a monthly poker night without losing a wink of sleep. Men watch the game, happily waste endless hours playing Halo and Grand Theft Auto, read comic books, and build model trains. The biggest male workaholic I know still religiously maintains a quarterly weekend wine tasting/hiking date with an old friend. Do you do anything remotely like this? I don’t.

Women, when they aren’t taking care of their families or working, spend their “free” time improving themselves. They go to the gym, shop, get their nails done, or rededicate themselves to eating clean or meditating often. That most of these endeavors are aimed at improving how we look I’m going to let slide for now. My point is that finding ways to amuse ourselves can make our otherwise unsatisfactory lives, satisfactory. If only for now.

What are some amusing things to do? Golf, tennis, horseback riding, Dance Dance Revolution, and anything else where the only reason for doing it is pure enjoyment. Jigsaw puzzles. Karaoke. Nothing too crafty, because that veers into the home improvement arena. Cooking a huge, complicated meal out of Mastering is also a terrific idea.

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I have a few dishes, recipes that are good and that I can reproduce more or less every time I make them. They are:

Like every pretend chef, I’m basically an “assembler.” The French gastronome Brillat-Savarin once punished his cook for serving him a limp, sad piece of sole, enraged that she dared to produce a meal without the faintest understanding of the science behind cooking. That clueless cook, c’est moi.

It’s Easter and I’ve decided to make Julia’s beef bourguignon, the only recipe I make that my mother also made, the same classic dish Julie Powell, as played by Amy Adams, ruined so spectacularly in Julie and Julia by falling asleep on the sofa and leaving it too long in the oven.

Beef bourguignon isn’t really a spring dish, except in northern places like Portland, where it’s still cold and wet well into April. Our corner Whole Foods* doesn’t have small onions; they only stock them for the big winter holidays. When you think of all the types of inedible greens they display so effusively year-round, it doesn’t seem like a lot to expect they would have something as basic as a small onion. I settle for frozen, feeling a flick of irritation because this is what my mother used, back when red onions were considered exotic.

Beef bourguignon was the only Julia dish my mother made that I found acceptable, but I only cook it maybe once a year because doing so makes me so sad that when I’m done I can rarely bring myself to eat it.

During my first semester of college my mother, who was only forty-six, was diagnosed with brain cancer, an astrocytoma with the shape and reach of a starfish. All that summer and fall, before her diagnosis in December, she suffered from crushing headaches and double vision. Her doctors decided it was an underactive thyroid, then hypoglycemia, then the garden variety symptoms of menopause. Her headaches persisted, and now, thinking back, miraculously, so did her elaborate nightly meals. There is no summer longer than the one before college, where your old life has wilted but your new life is yet to bloom. In the afternoons, I watched my mother wash down three aspirin with a swig of Coors before getting something on to simmer. How on earth did she manage this, and why? It’s still a mystery to me. I’m one of those home cooks who comes down with the sniffles and consequently orders takeout for the next week.

They were able to remove part of her tumor, but only part. The prognosis was dire. My mother, according to her surgeon, woke up, looked him straight in the eye, and “asked all the hard questions.” She was given six months to live, but only managed three.

By February she had completed her prescribed rounds of radiation and chemotherapy. My parents had been steadfast in shielding me from the horror of it all. I was a mere seventeen. I’d gone away to USC, my father’s alma mater, pledged a sorority, and was dutifully having the time of my life. They insisted.

My birthday is March 2, and suddenly, uncharacteristically, my father called and summoned me home. Both he and my mother wanted me to come home on the Sunday before my birthday for dinner.

Of course I would be happy to come home for my birthday. Home meant presents, cake, and my choice of fancy dinner. In the naive way of children to whom nothing bad has ever happened, I assumed that if my mom was cooking me birthday dinner, then she was better and was going to be okay. She couldn’t talk very well after her brain surgery, so my dad had taken my birthday dinner request.

The fanciest special-occasion food I knew was steak and baked potatoes with sour cream and chives, and that’s what I asked for. Also, a green salad with Bob’s Big Boy Bleu Cheese dressing. I knew there would also be some kind of store-bought cake from the grocery store.

But that Sunday, the moment I walked in the door, I took one whiff and knew we weren’t having steak. It was that smell I knew so well: the buttery, floury, slightly blood-infused smell of browning beef on a too-warm day. In Southern California a March birthday is sometimes an early summer birthday, and the dining room windows were open, and sun filtered through the dark pink bougainvillea that grew thick on the trellis over the patio. My mother was setting our places at the big dining room table, one utensil at a time. She wore her usual capris and a bright floral top, and an orange turban to hide what she called her “bald chicken head.” She shuffled in with a fork, set it on the table, shuffled back into the kitchen, rooted around in the silverware drawer, then shuffled back into the dining room with a knife.

I felt the sense of injustice rising up in me. It wasn’t fair! They’d called and asked what I wanted and I’d said steak and there was no steak. Instead, my mother was cooking beef bourguignon. I didn’t even dislike beef bourguignon, but it was not steak. All these years later I can still summon the deep rage I felt that day, like any expert method actor you care to name. No steak. No baked potato with sour cream and chives. No green salad with Bob’s Big Boy Bleu Cheese dressing. And also, no cake. And soon, no mother; the person I loved most in the world was leaving me.

I followed her into the kitchen. We didn’t talk. We never talked anymore. She leaned against the counter, her redhead’s pale complexion mottled and her face slack and puffy from her meds, removing each piece of beef from the pan with the focus and precision of someone defusing a bomb.

I think she made a few simple things before she died a week later, but Julia’s beef bourguignon was the last thing she made for me.

When I made the dish last Easter, I rushed through the browning of the stew meat, ruining my favorite hoodie with splattered oil. I also wound up with an extra plate of sautéed carrots and onions. I spent my late teens and most of my young adulthood furious that my mother solicited my opinion about what I wanted for my birthday dinner, and then didn’t cook it. Then I moved into a phase where I realized I was really angry not at her menu planning but at her for dying and leaving me alone, for that is how I thought of being left with my well-meaning silent father. Now that I have lived past the age at which she died and have a daughter older than I was when she got sick, I can only imagine the sheer terror she must have felt at the thought of dying, and of leaving me to make my way in the world without her.

Then, in a further iteration, over the course of the long Easter afternoon while I stood in front of the stove turning and basting the beef at a slow simmer, I found myself admiring her courage. Her days were numbered and she knew it, and she was going to spend her last days at the stove making something that gave her pleasure.

What is it about beef bourguignon? Really, it’s just beef stew braised in red wine, an ancient peasant dish from Burgundy that married up. Auguste Escoffier, the father of modern French haute cuisine, described the basic recipe followed by most of us; Julia modified it; Judith Jones, Julia’s editor at Knopf, mastered it, as did my mother, as did Julie Powell, as did I. How many of us are simply home cooks, how many lost daughters? How many, like me, shove food in the oven and then run out the door and down the block, in an effort to get as far away from the kitchen as possible?