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BRICK 76 explained that she was influenced by Vincent van Gogh, by Paul Cézanne. Her brushstrokes—loose, heavy—recall the solidity of Cézanne’s artwork; her compositions of bunched objects draw from his scattered arrangements of apples and other fruits. But she was doing something different. Here is a meal that has just been prepared. Here is the site of its preparation. Modersohn-Becker didn’t like the kitchen. She wasn’t interested in making food, but still she knew the space intimately. After she became engaged to the artist Otto Modersohn, her family sent her to Berlin for cooking lessons. She learned to cook veal roast. She used her housekeeping book for diary entries. She painted milk soup on the breakfast table, a boiled egg, a white tablecloth with yellow flowers. A few years ago, I asked my mother for my grandmother’s letters. They were given to me in a brown A4 envelope, carefully stacked photocopies of letters she wrote to her eighteen-year-old daughter— my aunt—when her daughter was working as an English-language teaching assistant in the town of Gmunden, in Upper Austria. The letters, which my aunt copied and passed to my mother and her other sister as a family keepsake, begin on Sunday, September 10, 1972, and end on Saturday, January 6, 1973. After a while of tugging the letters in and out, the brown envelope fell apart, and I placed the letters inside a yellow folder instead. I kept the folder on the wooden writing desk opposite the front window in the part of the house I try to use as a study, and morning after early morning, month after month, as the sky pooled black, then grey, maybe briefly blue, as winter morphed to spring, as summer arrived, I leafed through the letters. The neat script, the numbered pages, the gossip, the asides. I read them over and again. The letters were a way for me to see inside the grandmother I had never known. I asked my mother for the letters because my life had become unfamiliar to me. I asked my mother for the letters because I had become a home worker. I was a writer (maybe, tentatively) in that space before dawn and the crowding of the day. I was a teacher, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. when I delivered my classes, and into the night when I prepared my notes and slides. Sometimes, when I did copy-editing work or wrote short articles and reviews for newspapers, I was still the journalist I had been since my mid-twenties. In the mornings, the afternoons, and before bed, inside the three-bedroom house with the noisy black cat and the front porch filled with children’s shoes, I worked to make the home work. The home work that takes up the whole of the time. The other work that happens in the between time. My grandmother’s kitchen was very small. The sink was in front of the door, the cooker in a corner to the right, the table under the window. She organized her weekly dinner menu in advance: some form of meat (mutton, beef, pork), vegetables (boiled carrots, parsnips, turnip), and potatoes (plain, boiled). The meat was ordered every few days from Mr. Condon’s down in the village; the vegetables came regularly; milk was delivered daily by horse and cart. Tea, sugar, biscuits, flour were written on the list for Miss
page 79
RACHEL ANDREWS 77 Anglin in the Glen, and the bill was paid monthly. The family ate dinner around 3:30 p.m., and afterwards, my grandmother stacked everything onto a tray and brought it to the kitchen. She folded the tablecloth, rolled the serviettes into rings, put them in the sideboard. The washing up was slow, laborious: the ware had to be scrubbed, rinsed, dried, put away. She hated rubber gloves and eschewed them, but the flaked powder she used (there was no dish soap) gave her severe dermatitis—my itchings, she called it—on her hands, up her arms, spreading down her spine. After that was her time until tea time. She used to sit in her kitchen in the quiet of the late afternoon, when the sun came from the west, and do the crossword in the Sunday Times. She smoked there, listened to the radio, away from the wrestle of the family. She sang then. Because I am interested in space and the bodies that move in it, I am drawn to Gaston Bachelard. Even the title: The Poetics of Space. I follow him on his journey around the house. I read about drawers, chests, wardrobes. He discusses the significance of doorknobs. He has a chapter on the miniature. Corners are havens for the imagination; nests are spaces of quiet and rest. The book, a meditation on the joy and serenity of the interior, is by now legendary; on first publication, in 1958, it was groundbreaking. That the philosopher would care about domestic space. That he would pay it such close mind. That he would dignify the dull, the insignificant. That he would suggest its importance, its immensity in the shaping of lives. “The house,” he says, “shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” I’m reading Bachelard as he turns to literature, art, poetry. I read him as he quotes Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, van Gogh, Henry David Thoreau. I read him when he writes that “the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world,” and as I read, I am reading into the gaps, the absences. I am reading into the bodies that do not feature in Bachelard’s world, the bodies that fold, the bodies that sweep, the bodies that put away. I am reading into the empty, silent, clean parlour of his memory and dreams, and I am wondering how it would have been had he turned his attention to a different kind of parlour, the parlour that is clean because somebody has cleaned it, the parlour that is empty in brief, grabbed moments before a demand is made by it, in it. I am wondering how it would have been if Bachelard had sometimes read silence as isolation, rest as effort, love as duty, warmth as quiet resentment, reverie as frustration. Bachelard’s book, translated from French, was a sensation worldwide, while Modersohn-Becker’s paintings took so long to become known outside of Germany. Bachelard didn’t write about the kitchen. Modersohn-Becker painted the work of the kitchen. Inside the kitchen, inside the house, there is the labour. There are the bodies that toil. Here is how some of the home work goes on inside the three-bedroom house with the noisy black cat and the front porch filled with children’s shoes.

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BRICK

76

explained that she was influenced by Vincent van Gogh, by Paul Cézanne. Her brushstrokes—loose, heavy—recall the solidity of Cézanne’s artwork; her compositions of bunched objects draw from his scattered arrangements of apples and other fruits. But she was doing something different. Here is a meal that has just been prepared. Here is the site of its preparation. Modersohn-Becker didn’t like the kitchen. She wasn’t interested in making food, but still she knew the space intimately. After she became engaged to the artist Otto Modersohn, her family sent her to Berlin for cooking lessons. She learned to cook veal roast. She used her housekeeping book for diary entries. She painted milk soup on the breakfast table, a boiled egg, a white tablecloth with yellow flowers.

A few years ago, I asked my mother for my grandmother’s letters. They were given to me in a brown A4 envelope, carefully stacked photocopies of letters she wrote to her eighteen-year-old daughter— my aunt—when her daughter was working as an English-language teaching assistant in the town of Gmunden, in Upper Austria. The letters, which my aunt copied and passed to my mother and her other sister as a family keepsake, begin on Sunday, September 10, 1972, and end on Saturday, January 6, 1973. After a while of tugging the letters in and out, the brown envelope fell apart, and I placed the letters inside a yellow folder instead. I kept the folder on the wooden writing desk opposite the front window in the part of the house I try to use as a study, and morning after early morning, month after month, as the sky pooled black, then grey, maybe briefly blue, as winter morphed to spring, as summer arrived,

I leafed through the letters. The neat script, the numbered pages, the gossip, the asides. I read them over and again. The letters were a way for me to see inside the grandmother I had never known.

I asked my mother for the letters because my life had become unfamiliar to me.

I asked my mother for the letters because I had become a home worker. I was a writer (maybe, tentatively) in that space before dawn and the crowding of the day. I was a teacher, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. when I delivered my classes, and into the night when I prepared my notes and slides. Sometimes, when I did copy-editing work or wrote short articles and reviews for newspapers, I was still the journalist I had been since my mid-twenties. In the mornings, the afternoons, and before bed, inside the three-bedroom house with the noisy black cat and the front porch filled with children’s shoes, I worked to make the home work.

The home work that takes up the whole of the time.

The other work that happens in the between time.

My grandmother’s kitchen was very small. The sink was in front of the door, the cooker in a corner to the right, the table under the window. She organized her weekly dinner menu in advance: some form of meat (mutton, beef, pork), vegetables (boiled carrots, parsnips, turnip), and potatoes (plain, boiled). The meat was ordered every few days from Mr. Condon’s down in the village; the vegetables came regularly; milk was delivered daily by horse and cart. Tea, sugar, biscuits, flour were written on the list for Miss

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