My grandmother was “the help.”
Every weekday morning, she would leave our 24-story apartment building on the South Side and go downtown to the Ira A. Jones glassware company in the Merchandise Mart, where she worked as a maid for 30 years. She retired in the early 1980s.
My grandmother wore powder blue or white smocks — she would never wear the white ones after Labor Day — as she dusted and cleaned the showroom and sometimes took inventory of expensive glass and porcelain giftware: Elegantly sculpted swans, whales and elephants; glass-blown candle holders, ashtrays and ornate cocktail glasses; hand-decorated pieces of jewelry.
Whenever an item was chipped or too damaged to sell, her employers allowed her to take it home. Over the years, she amassed many accent pieces, several of which were displayed prominently in her living room, on her tables and in her china cabinet.
My grandmother confused me. She was a tough, stern woman with large hands who wasn’t shy about doling out a spanking. She didn’t seem the type who’d care much about dainty things. But she enjoyed spending her Sunday evenings after church in her living room amid her glass menagerie, watching “The Lawrence Welk Show” and admiring the women in their chiffon ball gowns.
At different times of the day, her living room sparkled like the showroom. Certain pieces refracted sunlight and painted little rainbows along white walls and white furniture entombed in plastic.
The first time I took my best friend Debra to my grandmother’s apartment, she marveled at all the glass trinkets. My grandmother, examining the twinkle in Debra’s eyes, told her — as she’d told me and countless other kids — “You can look, but you’d better not touch.”
Of course, when my grandmother left the room, the first thing Debra did was pick up the porcelain piano that sat on a display shelf. It was missing a leg. Debra smiled broadly. I wasn’t sure if she simply didn’t notice what was missing or didn’t think it detracted from the piano’s beauty.
It wasn’t just the piano that was broken. A glass robin had a chipped wing. A fluted vase couldn’t hold real flowers because water would leak from the notch on the bottom. There was a cracked coaster that gently scratched hard wood.
The truth was, mostly everything was positioned so that the scars and defects were artfully disguised. The tiniest adjustment from my grandmother’s original positioning might reveal too much.
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In addition to the items in her living room, my grandmother had vast stores of glassware that were intact and had been purchased at discount prices.
What couldn’t be displayed sat in original boxes in her storage closet. Whenever a friend or church member got married, she would go into her closet in search of the perfect gift.
I’ll be honest: As a child, I didn’t like my grandmother’s glassware because if I had a birthday party to go to — and if my mother had forgotten to get me a gift to take — she would go down to my grandmother’s apartment and go “shopping” in the storage closet.
My mother would wrap up, say, a piece of jewelry or an ornate dinner bell or a gold-trimmed Christmas ornament. To my horror, I’d watch a 10-year-old kid unwrap my totally inappropriate gift and look at it as though she’d just uncovered a dead fish.
“Who gave me this?” one girl said, turning up her nose.
I shrank into silence.
(To my friend Debra, I gave a gold starfish pin, a cat pulling a Christmas tree pin and a cat pawing at a mouse pin. Debra’s mother still has those gifts.)
But that was a long time ago. I grew to see the beauty in not only my grandmother’s items, but also her attitude about her job. She had been a housewife, and when her husband died, she needed to find work.
She loved having found a place where the people treated her with respect. She enjoyed being able to set up displays in the company’s showroom and at department stores such as Marshall Field’s.
She appreciated that her employers knew how much she loved to travel, and they allowed her to take off on a moment’s notice during the summer when her church toured Europe and Hawaii, among other places. She often took my sister and me with her.
My grandmother also helped put several relatives, including me, through college.
“Lord willing,” as my grandmother would say, she will turn 98 later this month. She’s frailer now, more delicate, and when she moved in with my mother nearly six years ago, much of her glassware was given away.
I now have several pieces that I proudly display in my home. They remind me that she loved what she did for a living. It was honest work. And she never felt diminished by it.
Everyone should be so lucky.