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dreadedcandiru2As I've said before, Elly's habit of stupidly doing what she thinks Marian is doing comes into play when it's time to clean the house. What seems to have happened is that Marian made an honest effort to show her child how to do things properly only to be frustrated by three factors. First, her daughter is a rather tragically dim creature who misinterprets what she sees and who doesn't listen well. Second, we have to deal with the easily wounded stupid pride that convinces her that people who tell her that she's doing things wrong hate her and want her to fail. This leads to the third stupid factor: the stubborn belief that she did actually get it right after all.
This leads to her doing a slipshod travesty of what Marian actually does as a housewife. Elly does loads of clothes because she never bothered assimilating the boring and inefficient tip about separating whites, lights and darks, she makes ironing into this great big production because Marian tried telling her how not to burn herself or the clothes and this leaves her no time to tidy the house properly. It would have been instructive to have John's bad back give out in 1981 in order for him to see the marvel of angry imbecile inefficiency he'd married; the end result of noting that instead of sitting on her ass watching the place fall down around her, she spent all day being a whirling dervish of ineptitude and frustration would have led to his sudden discovery that, hey, maybe he shouldn't have welched on letting her get that degree after all. They can afford a (competent) maid to take care of the house and dock the kids with a (competent) baby sitter because it's worth the extra dough to keep the lunatic moron wife happy. And, hey, it'd sure have been easier on the kids to have a Ruth around. It would have saved them from Elly's war on their having a personality of their own.
This leads to her doing a slipshod travesty of what Marian actually does as a housewife. Elly does loads of clothes because she never bothered assimilating the boring and inefficient tip about separating whites, lights and darks, she makes ironing into this great big production because Marian tried telling her how not to burn herself or the clothes and this leaves her no time to tidy the house properly. It would have been instructive to have John's bad back give out in 1981 in order for him to see the marvel of angry imbecile inefficiency he'd married; the end result of noting that instead of sitting on her ass watching the place fall down around her, she spent all day being a whirling dervish of ineptitude and frustration would have led to his sudden discovery that, hey, maybe he shouldn't have welched on letting her get that degree after all. They can afford a (competent) maid to take care of the house and dock the kids with a (competent) baby sitter because it's worth the extra dough to keep the lunatic moron wife happy. And, hey, it'd sure have been easier on the kids to have a Ruth around. It would have saved them from Elly's war on their having a personality of their own.
