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Engineering a Dinner. Moreover, Phyllis McGinley brings to her own domestic performance an energy, confidence and zeal that eliminates all need for a man in an apron. The housewife dominates the poet—and the house. "I always do my writing in the little strings of time I have. I wrote when I had time, and that's all there is to it. I can remember cooking dinner, and I'd be stirring the stew, and I'd be working on some rhyme. You can't cook a great dinner that way, but you can scrub a floor or make a bed. I did what I could when I could, but I put my children and family first."
It is not by chance that the diningroom table seats ten; to Phyllis, ten is exactly the right number for a sitdown party, which she plots with an engineer's care: "The house has to be pretty and full of flowers, and for a short time everything must seem to be under a glass bell. I always have place cards and figure out who should sit next to whom. I go into such a state of shock that by the time dinner is ready I've forgotten." Even when there are no guests to plan for, she plans anyway, laying down explicit instructions for the household cook: "The one boast I have is that Bill has never in his whole married life, even when I was sick, had to have a delicatessen dinner."
Assorted accidents—or accident proneness, anyway—have beset her life. Her right arm has been in a sling since April, when she broke her shoulder in a fall from a hotel bed (she was reaching for the Venetian blind and misjudged the distance). The mishap added injury to injury: years ago she dislocated her spine in a tumble on her own kitchen floor—freshly waxed, of course. It still gives her trouble. It also gave her something in common with a U.S. Senator named John F. Kennedy, whom she met on a visit to Washington in 1955. Both were delighted to find a fellow sufferer. "We got off in a corner," she remembers, "and felt each other's corsets."
"My Lifeline." This same forthright, down-to-earth assurance colors her opinions and her activities in all spheres. Her views tend to be firm, and firmly pronounced:
> "I've always said that writers make the best wives. They're romantic, understanding, and have to stay home."
> "Bill and I have a maxim that if you see a marvelous buy, something you're going to adore for the rest of your life, even if you can't afford it, buy it."
> "It would never occur to us to go to bed without reading for an hour. When I'm reading a book, I can't put it down until I finish it. When Bill has a good book, he can't bear to finish it, so he reads several books at once."
> "The phone is my lifeline! It has literally saved me hours of every day! I don't think I could have been so prolific as I have been without the telephone. I got so I'd even call up to buy my clothes. I don't have time to go shopping. The whole 26 years I lived in Larchmont I