Then, somewhere in the middle of his presentation, we would both notice Toot standing in the hall outside my room,
her head tilted in accusation.
“What do you want, Madelyn?”
“Are you finished with your calls, dear?”
“Yes, Madelyn. I’m finished with my calls. It’s ten o’clock at night!”
“There’s no need to holler, Stanley. I just wanted to know if I could go into the kitchen.”
“I’m not hollering! Jesus H. Christ, I don’t understand why-” But before he could finish, Toot would have retreated
into their bedroom, and Gramps would leave my room with a look of dejection and rage.
Such exchanges became familiar to me, for my grandparents’ arguments followed a well-worn groove, a groove that
originated in the rarely mentioned fact that Toot earned more money than Gramps. She had proved to be a trailblazer of
sorts, the first woman vice-president of a local bank, and although Gramps liked to say that he always encouraged her
in her career, her job had become a source of delicacy and bitterness between them as his commissions paid fewer and
fewer of the family’s bills.
Not that Toot had anticipated her success. Without a college education, she had started out as a secretary to help
defray the costs of my unexpected birth. But she had a quick mind and sound judgment, and the capacity for sustained
work. Slowly she had risen, playing by the rules, until she reached the threshold where competence didn’t suffice.
There she would stay for twenty years, with scarcely a vacation, watching as her male counterparts kept moving up the
corporate ladder, playing a bit loose with information passed on between the ninth hole and the ride to the clubhouse,
becoming wealthy men.
More than once, my mother would tell Toot that the bank shouldn’t get away with such blatant sexism. But Toot
would just pooh-pooh my mother’s remarks, saying that everybody could find a reason to complain about something.
Toot didn’t complain. Every morning, she woke up at five A.M. and changed from the frowsy muu-muus she wore
around the apartment into a tailored suit and high-heeled pumps. Her face powdered, her hips girdled, her thinning hair
bolstered, she would board the six-thirty bus to arrive at her downtown office before anyone else. From time to time,
she would admit a grudging pride in her work and took pleasure in telling us the inside story behind the local financial
news. When I got older, though, she would confide in me that she had never stopped dreaming of a house with a white
picket fence, days spent baking or playing bridge or volunteering at the local library. I was surprised by this admission,
for she rarely mentioned hopes or regrets. It may or may not have been true that she would have preferred the
alternative history she imagined for herself, but I came to understand that her career spanned a time when the work of a
wife outside the home was nothing to brag about, for her or for Gramps-that it represented only lost years, broken
promises. What Toot believed kept her going were the needs of her grandchildren and the stoicism of her ancestors.
“So long as you kids do well, Bar,” she would say more than once, “that’s all that really matters.”
That’s how my grandparents had come to live. They still prepared sashimi for the now-infrequent guests to their
apartment. Gramps still wore Hawaiian shirts to the office, and Toot still insisted on being called Toot. Otherwise,
though, the ambitions they had carried with them to Hawaii had slowly drained away, until regularity-of schedules and
pastimes and the weather-became their principal consolation. They would occasionally grumble about how the
Japanese had taken over the islands, how the Chinese controlled island finance. During the Watergate hearings, my
barré
(Barré)
#1