In 1977, my Grandma Pilut wore her hair in a beehive, curls the size of Polish sausages arranged in stiff and flat coils, and when I was fifteen I thought that if I were to take the flat of my hand and press down on the curls – anywhere on her head – the whole edifice would crack, like a potato chip, and then I could press even further down, to feel where the top of her head started and the bottom of her hair ended. It was real hair done up to look like a wig, was how I thought about it. Or it was a wig done up to look as real as possible. Anyway, only her hair was crisp: everything else about Grandma was comfortable. She was a plump, tidy woman, given to aprons and rabbit stew in the winter, cream soda with ice in the summer. All year round, she bustled about her kitchen in the shot-gun house she and Grandpa had owned forever, in the Polish section of Chicago, walking distance to where my Grandpa worked at Crane Company. She wore hose and thick-soled shoes in the winter; in the summer, she wore hose and thick-soled shoes. I never saw her in shorts but once she wore a bathing suit to the beach in Ephraim, the town in Door County where we had a cottage. It was hard to know if I should stare or look away.
When we visited, we’d play “War” with Grandpa, and we helped him make bread, playing with little heaps of dough while he kneaded away on the kitchen table. As a girl, I was fascinated by his ears: they looked over-sized for his head, the lobes and the sworls of cartilage stretched out, like on a clown head or a surrealist painting. He’d once let us look at five, hundred-dollar bills that he’d won; he didn’t say where he’d gotten them, but Grandma was smiling so I guessed it was all okay. We could stand near him when he and Grandma and my parents would play pinochle, but we couldn’t add up the stacks of quarters and nickels and dimes, because that was bad luck.
Every time we’d see him he’d give us silver dollars. They didn’t seem like real money, just like their house didn’t seem like a real house, and Grandma’s hair didn’t seem like real hair. I knew that they’d worked all their lives, but had great difficulty in picturing either of them in a workplace.
Their neighborhood was about as unlike Lake Forest as it could be. South Albany Street was a little gritty, a little loud, not at all like the leafy, wide streets of the suburbs. My grandparents themselves didn’t really fit into a suburb, to be honest, but they were right at home where they were. Like them, their neighborhood was filled with strong smells and odd sights. The buildings were an urban version of a fairy tale: strange features on otherwise ordinary objects, most having to do with doors, it seemed to me: at the house next door, for instance, there were eight steep steps, just off the edge of the front-door walk leading down, down, down to a curiously short door, as if for a very little person. If my brothers and I stood on three bricks, we could see through the small window, right into someone’s apartment! In a basement! Our basement didn’t have cunning little apartments for small people, just a washing machine and a dryer.
On the corner was Bojnowski’s Tavern. My father called it “the Boys-now-go-drinking Tavern.” The door into the tavern was set into the building at an angle, like a grimy gingerbread house, the windows thick and distorting like isinglass, the roof of black tar like licorice. There weren’t any angled doors in Lake Forest, I can assure you. Also in my grandparent’s house was an actual trapdoor – complete with black iron latch that had a little space scooped out of the linoleum so the latch would lie flat. There was a scrap of carpeting over it, and it seemed possible to us that no one, including my grandparents, knew the trapdoor was there. Once we found out that my grandparents were well aware of it, we spent months convincing them to let us open it. The day they did, we discovered that it led into the hallway of another residence! Next door!
It was like a magical kingdom, the south side of Chicago.
Until I was 15, I never spent time with them alone, without my family. Then, when I was fifteen, both my grandparents retired. Although they seemed ageless, I realized that if they had retired, they must be 65. This seemed incongruous to me, because they didn’t seem like they were about to die at all. They’d each worked full time since they’d left school. I wonder now how hard it was for them to retire, but unlike today’s retirees, with “role confusion” or “empty nest” feelings, I suspect they relished it completely. Their retirement, I also realized, might solve one of the vexing problems of my youth. I’d always dreamed of having a job in Ephraim, and by “always” I mean that I’d conceived of this about one year earlier. If they could stay with me at the cottage, I could get a job working at the stable, taking tourists out on trails. I sent out an impassioned letter to the owner, asking him for summer work. True, I didn’t know how to ride, but, I told myself, one step at a time, and so I didn’t mention this fact in the letter. In May, I got a letter, offering me a slot, and when could I start?
So that summer, my grandparents retired, and I started my first job. They brought along their best friends, Helen and Johnny, who stayed for a week in June, came back in July, and again in August. We went out to eat a lot. They were all retired – “Us girls, too!” Grandma and Helen would insist. “No extra cooking,” they proclaimed. It was dinner at Johnny’s Cottage Restaurant in Sister Bay most nights. “My name’s Johnny too, no relation,” Johnny-Grandpa’s-friend would say to the hostess every time – every time – they walked in and asked for a table for five. On Saturday nights we’d splurge and eat at the Sister Bay Bowl, then home to pinochle (for everyone except me) and beer (for the men). Me, I’d sit for a bit, maybe tend to my boots or laundry, then go right to sleep.
Even though I was exhausted, I started to get to know them as people. Grandma was given to sayings translated directly from Polish; Grandpa liked to laugh. He liked doing chores, and Grandma re-organized the kitchen. I think it was a pretty good deal for my grandparents, actually. I got myself up and dressed, did my own laundry, kept after my own boots, cleaning off the manure and mud outside on the deck and rubbing oil on them once a week. The job was a steady six days a week, and though this seemed to surprise my Grandpa, it didn’t bother me much.
My days were long, but beautiful, and I got along fine with the other hands. I’d ride out on Jessie or Prince at the lead, keeping to a sedate walk through the Wisconsin summer, the alfalfa almost sickening in its sweetness, heavy in the air, the dust thick on the trail. It was a different kind of work than Grandpa had done, but he understood how tired I was when he came to get me. He’d let me choose the radio station, and didn’t mind if I wanted to read instead of play cribbage or go to a gift shop with Grandma. “Leave the girl alone, she’s tired,” he’d declare and Grandma would nod. She understood too, about being tired from a job, having worked at “the ‘lectric company” for decades.
My grandfather had worked at Crane Company all his life, in the brass foundry, and his kind of physical labor had damaged his eyes, crippled his left foot, and taken some hearing. He was strong, but bent in odd places. The calluses on his hands meant he could handle bread pans straight out of the oven, without mitts. This fascinated and horrified me every time I’d see him do it: it seemed slightly devilish, slightly surreal. He’d gotten to a level of skill few other foundry workers achieved, pouring so little scrap that he would be asked to come back in a year to teach the men better pouring techniques. Furthermore, he had the heart and brains of a born politician.
For a few decades, as union shop leader, he had managed to keep all the different ethnicities working in relative peace. In the 60s and 70s of the hot Chicago summers and the windy winters, of Martin Luther King Jr and the marches on Selma, of JFK’s assassination, keeping the lid on the hostility was no small achievement. I discovered, talking to him in the car rides back and forth, that he was a calm man, not given to unfair judgments or too obvious favorites. In fact, someone in Chicago had once recruited him to run for a real political position, but my Grandma had told him that if he got involved in politics she would leave him. When I asked why Grandma said that, he wouldn’t answer. Eventually I asked my mother, who said, “Remember, at that time, Al Capone was alive and well in Cicero, and he really scared people in Chicago, Grandma included. People died. People disappeared.”
But then he was asked to be the shop foreman, and after some discussion, Grandma relented on her threats as far as political efforts went. I asked him one day: why’d they want you, Grandpa?
He told me the “guys” needed someone who could read and write, someone who could understand the law. And unlike most of the men he’d worked with, he read all the time, although he’d not gone past eleventh grade. The priests at St. Rita’s had expelled him, at age 16, for not ratting out a friend about something the nuns wanted to know about. Even though he didn’t have a high school diploma, he was well known as “a reader.” In their neighborhood, this was said in a slightly hushed voice, whether from careful pride or a certain horrified distrust I could never be sure.
He liked history and liked card games. He was welcome at every house on his block; he was a good guy. He wasn’t in debt any more than necessary, didn’t fool around on my grandmother even if he drank too much (her declaration) and snored at night (obvious to anyone who’d slept under the same roof with him). He didn’t go far in school but he had talents that schools don’t teach.
As a Pole, he was Catholic, of course, but he also practiced birth control. My mom told me that in his top dresser drawer was a box of “French sleeves” which he’d bought, in a single visit, from the local pharmacy. My mother said she’d looked once after being told never to go into the top drawer, and there were hundreds of them, as far as she can recall, although, being only nine, and Catholic to boot, she had no idea what they were. But she remembers that he always said the priests could tell him how many children he should have when the priests had to raise them and put shoes on their feet. This, in his time, was blasphemous talk.
As far as talk went, he knew how to talk to people, how to get them to agree, to see common ground. He rarely took offense, rarely gave offense. He was a good winner and a better loser, had a wide smile, the look of a Tatar in pictures taken as a young man, the look of a baker when I knew him, but at all times in his life he was a man who knew how to use silence, and smiles, and nods, to good effect.
After three weeks of my working six day-weeks, he asked me if that was my permanent schedule. I nodded. That was the deal; I had never thought to question it. Was I tired on the sixth day? You bet. Was I resting on the seventh? You double bet. Was I quite ready to be back at work on the next day after my day off? I hadn’t thought about it much. If I was scheduled, I showed up. I wanted my job, and therefore I did what was asked. This partly because I knew that with the slightest provocation, I might well be fired. I’d wanted this job more than anything I could remember wanting in my life, and asking for two days off in a row didn’t seem worth it.
When I think back, I laugh: I didn’t know how to ride a horse, which the owner hadn’t known when he hired me. I’m sure it had never occurred to him that someone who had no notion of how to ride would ask for a job at a stable, taking out rides. After I’d shown up on time for a few days, the owner had left for a two-week vacation.
During those two weeks, I learned how to ride. I got thrown, run away with, and stepped on; nipped, bruised, and kicked. I couldn’t always get the bits in the mouths of a few of the horses, and could hardly throw the saddles onto the backs of the tallest horses. Prince was over 16 hands high, calm but so very big! Princess, small but impossible to bridle; King, also over 16 hands, undisciplined, rarely ridden; and Duke, cranky, and unpredictable. Brent, the senior stable hand, named most of the horses there. I thought he lacked imagination. I regularly got lost on the trails, didn’t know how to fix fences, couldn’t get some of the horses to canter. My palms bled during the first week and I got sun-burned. But gradually, my riding got better, I got used to the physical demands of the job, and I eased into the rhythms of the stable. Keeping the trails straight got easier once I named them: Root Beer’s Escape Route. Short Trail. Long Trail. Jessie’s Short Cut. The Trail Where the Girl Scouts Got Lost, although I never told anyone about that name. Turns out I didn’t have much imagination either when it came to names. By the time the owner got back from his vacation, the other hands could tell that I wasn’t a complainer, wasn’t going to stop showing up or call in sick no matter how bruised my body (or ego) was. They held their tongues. I kept my job. All in all, I didn’t feel I was in any position to negotiate about days, and if it were up to me, nothing would have been said.
Grandpa, however, thought different.
One Monday morning, he told me to wait by the Buick; he’d got some business to discuss with the owner. I was tired, dusty, thirsty. I went to the soda machine and bought a root beer, leaned against the trunk. Watched the buzzards glide on the thermals. Thought of nothing. Tiredness will do that to your mind. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but it was quiet and friendly. Mostly I heard my Grandpa’s voice. Then, without explaining, he walked to the car and we got in, and drove back home.
A week later, the owner brought all the hands together and said he was instituting a new rule: everyone would work five day weeks. A new schedule would be posted. Only Brent, who was 23, would work six days, and only if he wanted.
We were stunned and no one said anything except Brent, who said, “I will be god-damned,” so softly that only his wife, standing next to him, and me, on the other side, heard him. Then we were dismissed.
Eventually, through round-about conversations with me, with the owner, and with each other, they came to realize that this was because of my Grandpa.
At the end of the summer, I asked what he’d said. It couldn’t have been much: the whole thing had taken about ten minutes. Grandpa said, well, sometimes you’ve got to appeal to someone’s sense of fairness. I frowned. He sighed, went into a little more detail: he’d been working in America all his life and it was the best country in the world, because, in America, people had a life; people had the sense that this life was sweet, and in this country, a boss couldn’t make a man sacrifice the whole of his life to his job. A man could take his kids to the fair, go out and play some pinochle, come home late, sleep in a bit, and still have a day of worship and rest, with rabbit stew and sausage for dinner. Grandpa figured that if grown men needed two day weekends, young girls probably did too. He’d wondered about what the owner thought about this. Did he ever think about it? Did he ever think it should be changed?
This is what he said, according to Grandpa. I never asked about it again. Just kept doing my job. Grandpa, for his part, kept driving me back and forth. At the end of the summer, on my last day, we closed down an hour or two early. Played “Luchenback, Texas” on the gift shop radio, turned up loud so we could hear. Drank some PBRs. Called it a day. No one brought up the work week.
But I heard that when the next foal was born, a little roan colt, they named him Grandpa.
