Home

Retirement Talk for Boomers, Seniors, and Retirees

Frog Spit

Jackie Spinks

                                                                        Chapter Nine

                        I haven’t given Grandma D a very good press- so I’m going to try to correct that. 

Her house, our first house had a light bulb dangling at the end of a long electric cord, hanging from the ceiling in the center of the kitchen. Alongside the electric cord fluttered a number of fly papers covered with dead flies, entrapped moths and wiggling accessory insects.  Flies were tiny and swift and everywhere and so that first house was always filled with flies and mosquitoes, who managed to dodge the temptation of the fly paper.

              Sometimes it seemed there was more activity going on up on the ceiling than there was on the floor.

              Grandpa D built the house before he died in the flu epidemic of 1918. 

After he died owning the house was about the only thing that kept the family’s head above water.  For income, Grandma D washed clothes for the grand houses up on the hill.  A washerwoman was the lowest form of employment. 

              And so every morning, except Sundays, at twenty minutes past seven, snow or sleet, rain or shine, with temperatures at ten below zero, you could see this five foot, ninety pounds of neat Victorian conscientiousness trudging up the hill from the streetcar to the grand houses where she washed clothes.  And for ten hours a day she would hoist wet linen and cotton table clothes, sheets, blankets, curtains, slipcovers, rugs, and sundry items of dress, some items weighing twenty pounds from one washtub to another.  She scrubbed all the clothes on a scrub board, so the skin on her arms was eaten away by the strong bleach and lye soap used at that time.  Then she rinsed and wrung out all the clothes by hand.  The clothes would get several rinses, bluing was added, than starched, hung out to dry on the clotheslines, then dampened and ironed, some of the clothes being steam ironed with a damp cloth.    It was back-breaking work for a woman, not much bigger than a ten year old child, but it was the only work available for a middle-aged, single woman at that period in our history.

              She’d have Saturday’s, after 4:00 o’clock off work and all day Sunday’s off.  On Saturdays the Great Lady of the house would pay her, but seldom paid her the full amount.  There were no unions—no one to protest to.  All she could do—was endure-- which she did.

              Unlike Granny Brita (after she came to America) Grandma D was shy around important people, and as she did when she met Queen Victoria would curtsy in their presence and never speak unless spoken to, but one day, after weeks of her son’s (Daddy’s) urging, spoke up.  She pooled all her resolve and with her heart palpitating, hands trembling and sweating profusely, she confronted the great lady about her pay.

              “Mrs. Scully, I thought my pay was $6.00, not $4.00.

              “I didn’t like the wash you did last week.”

              “What was wrong with it?”

              For one thing, the sheets had wrinkles in them and there wasn’t enough starch in my husband’s shirt cuffs.”

              “I’m sorry.”

              The reason the sheets weren’t ironed completely flat was that the cook wouldn’t let her heat the flat irons long enough on the stove to get out all the wrinkles.

              And although she cursed herself she was depriving her kids by not snitching on the cook, a higher good sense about the human condition knew Mrs. Scully would come up with another excuse not to give her, her full wages.  And maybe fire her to boot. 

              About the shortage of starch in the shirt cuffs, Grandma D had no explanation. 

              Then remembering the scolding from her son, she persisted, “But what was wrong with the week before last’s washing?”

              “Mary Ellen, I don’t need to give you reasons for why I do something.  If you don’t like working here, you can leave.”

              “I want to work here, but my kids barely have enough to eat.”

              “That’s your problem.”

              “I know.  I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

              “See that you do better next time.  Dismissed.”
              What Grandma D admired most about Mrs. Scully was her hands.  As she told it, they were the most beautiful hands she had ever seen.  Perfectly smooth, not a mark or scratch, with the cuticles pushed back and never a broken nail, all the nails perfectly buffed and manicured.

              Grandma D’s hands, by contrast, were red, raw, scarred, burned and scaling and would bleed at the most inopportune times.  The veins protruded, fingernails gone, some fingers shrunken, some enlarged with knobby knuckles.  In later years she had patches of red and white crusty scabby skin covering her hands and to a lesser degree her arms.  She was so aware of her repulsive looking hands she would keep them hidden as much as possible.  I take great pride in my ugly hands and try to keep them ugly.

              About once every three months, Mrs. Scully, in spite of her strong laissez faire beliefs that it was up to everyone to look out for themselves, and if Grandma had no way of demanding her full pay, too bad for her, as it was a “survival of the fittest,” world and she didn’t make it that way; would break down and graciously give Grandma D her full pay and on these occasions, all the kids in the family would not only get a dinner that filled them up, but get all day suckers (candy.)  An interesting footnote to Granny D.  Her grandparents had been members of the Scottish aristocracy and her father had been the “black sheep” son and been “disowned.”  She never once, in her entire life,  made any mention about how far she’d fallen.

                                                                  **********

Then Daddy got older and made some money boxing and bought the house from Grandma D and she went to live with her daughter. In Grandma’s shanty we had a wood stove with several flat irons always setting to the rear and waiting to go to work, plus a stack of tubs on the back porch, where Grandma D did free lance washing for a while and next to the stove a wood box that was my job to keep filled with chopped wood and kindling.

              For a long time we  had only cold water, so water to wash dishes, clothes and take bathes, as well as odds and ends like shaving and mopping was heated on the stove.  Our electricity was one outlet in the living room for the radio.

              Besides the stove our place was furnished with a wooden kitchen table, three feet by four feet, with mismatching chairs, and a cupboard alongside one wall with a sink in the center.

              The living room end of the house had a Montgomery Wards burgundy colored horsehair davenport, a big rounded top radio, that played mostly static, a pot-bellied coal stove, a floor lamp and family portraits for decoration.

              Almost every year a door-to-door salesman from one of the local portrait studios knocked on the door and informed Mama she had won a coupon for a free family portrait.

              So We’d all get gussied up on one of those rare Saturdays when Daddy didn’t work and we’d slouch down town to the studio, listen to a long sales pitch as to why we should buy more than the one photo besides the free one (Mama’s sales resistance could have compared favorably to a corporate mahout’s) then the disgruntled photographer would arrange us in various positions crawl under his drapery and snap a picture of us.  These family portraits, hung on the wall side by side like little soldiers.  They posed as our family’s interior decoration.

              When we got the photo back, we’d give each other a critical evaluation.

              “You look like you were sleeping.”

           “Why didn’t you notice those cowlicks?  It looks like horns sticking up there on your head.”

           “They were down when we left home.”

           “Why did you smile like that?  It makes you look like Public Enemy #1.”

           “Oh, look how your tooth stands out.  It makes you look like you have fangs.”  And so it went back and forth with Brother and myself.

           But regardless of how we looked these photos were framed and joined the others on the wall of that first house.  We’d advert our eyes when we passed the photo that made us look like we had horns or fangs

           Nobody worried about muddy shoes or sitting on the couch in work clothes in this first house.  It was, as Bette Davis would say, “A dump.”  It was the smallest, most dilapidated, unpainted, sinking-foundation house on the block. 

           And it was a time in our medium sized town when a family’s merit was gauged by the quality, expense and upkeep of their homes.  And our house stuck out like a boil on the rump of our neighborhood, which was comprised of neat, middle-class houses.

           But Daddy wasn’t boxing and even if he could have gotten a fight, he’d lost his agility and although every evening he shadow-boxed all around the house, socking at walls and the family mirror, he knew it had ebbed and he’d get wiped out in any fight.  During our worst times he suggested to Mama, he should go back into the ring.  She told him she’d divorce him if he did.  She had faith things would improve.

           But in that old run-down house we all found a sanctuary.  For Daddy, it was from hunting for work.  For my brother and me it was from the daily insults of school and the streets which were endlessly subtle humiliations from the richer kids on the block.  It wasn’t like there was anything you could put your finger on—no gang wars that I knew of, maybe a couple of football caribous locking horns over a female in estrus, but nothing concrete, just kids who could form tight circles and yak excitedly and if you tried to join them be ignored.     Status was everything.  You had it or you didn’t.  Like your reputation, it was a valuable jewel set in the ring of your life.  Amongst these hierarchies of after-school sidewalk stars, my brother and I were nothing, as valuable as frog spit. But once home we were safe from put-downs.

           Daddy wanted to toughen Brother up and teach him how to box, but Mama put her foot down.  Her son wasn’t going to be a broken-down punchy fighter at thirty, he was going to be a college-educated professional man.  On a few occasions, when Mama wasn’t around, I observed Daddy showing brother how to parry and punch.  But Brother never earned that heraldic emblem of arrival, the school letter sweater.  And I, of course, lacked those cashmere sweaters all the “in” girls had.

           This peer exile brought us home broken-hearted, but  it was at home in the evenings we healed from the wounds of the world, by  listening to “The Lone Ranger,” and “Inner Sanctum.”  Grandma D’s house was a warm enclosure, as warm as her giving heart.