My Grandmother's Hair

Ground work

Ground work

Foundation: Groundwork. An underlying basis for something, the lowest weight-bearing part of a building, the action of founding an institution or organization.

–Oxford Dictionary

 

HOMES

 

My family home

We settled into a street-side basement apartment at College and Beverley, which we later dubbed “Fertility Manor,” and quickly became accustomed to the screech of the street car stopping outside our window and the clang of the paper box morning and evening. Charles was articling for the bar and I was happily writing publicity for Trinity College. We entertained friends at a bridge table set for four, sitting on two lovely antique chairs we had received as wedding presents, mixed in with used furniture from The Crippled Civilians (now called Goodwill). I was already a decent cook and knew how to stretch a dollar to the last penny, and quickly found the Kensington Market, then mostly Jewish. Friday before sundown was the time to shop; prices were slashed, since few of the shops had refrigerated storage and everything had to be sold before the Sabbath. I explored the network of narrow roads and alleyways, produce spilling out of doorways helter-skelter onto sidewalks, racks of pants and shirts and dresses, boards on milk crates laden with everything from pots and pans, hardware, home-baking, preserves and pickles, hand knit clothing in season. There were foods I didn’t recognize or had never eaten, like egg plants, weird looking cabbages, and dozens of cheeses; huge carp swimming in tanks, chickens waiting for ritual slaughter: “Always use the feet when you make soup, makes it richer.”

I discovered a shopping ritual. My first day in the market I found a store I liked and bought what I needed there, but the woman serving me kept giving me odd looks and I wondered why; was I strangely dressed? Young and showing my inexperience in the choices I made? not Jewish and so an object of curiosity? Carrying my purchases I wandered around the rest of the market and saw women going from store to store, inspecting the goods for sale, feeling a grapefruit, poking a lettuce, turning potatoes and squash over to examine the undersides. Animated conversations made it clear that questions and bargaining were expected. I had never done anything like that before and felt completely out of my depth, but I learned. Those women taught me, taking my first attempts seriously. I was a young woman learning the domestic ropes and respected for that.

But I was so naïve in other ways that when I felt sick a few months later I thought I had a persistent flu! My friend down the hall, similarly afflicted, clued me in. (My mother’s only reference to sex, after marriage of course, was to recommend a book. Bodies were never.… How could I know about birth control, “natural” or otherwise? No such articles ever appeared in magazines.) Everyone congratulated us, but I was I was so sick I had to leave the job I was just getting good at, with an income we needed and with broader horizons so much more appealing than staying at home, alone all day with a baby. Fortunately, I fell in love with Meg when she was born in July, 1953, when I was 23.

I walked the market warren wheeling six-weeks-old Meg in her big, grandparent-gifted carriage on our first shopping trip together. At store after store, the owner left her doorway to peer admiringly at the round little face, comment on how healthy she looked, on the quality of her clothes, and the carriage – (that’s what grandparents did, equip the baby). They were eager for information that I found myself wanting to tell: about the birth and breast feeding: details that my parents and friends didn’t really want to hear – the messy, earthy, body stuff. When I had finished my shopping rounds on that first trip, the bottom of the carriage, where Meg’s feet didn’t yet reach, was filled with gifts: fruit, a cabbage, pieces of cheese, homemade jam and chili sauce, mittens for the winter. I felt a well-earned pride I hadn’t fully known ’til then.