Illustration by Christoph Niemann
The Work You Do, the Person You Are
The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound. I was not like the children in folktales: burdensome mouths to feed.
All I had to do for the
two dollars was clean Her house for a few hours after school. It was a
beautiful house, too, with a plastic-covered sofa and chairs,
wall-to-wall blue-and-white carpeting, a white enamel stove, a washing
machine and a dryer—things that were common in Her neighborhood, absent
in mine. In the middle of the war, She had butter, sugar, steaks, and
seam-up-the-back stockings.
I knew
how to scrub floors on my knees and how to wash clothes in our zinc tub,
but I had never seen a Hoover vacuum cleaner or an iron that wasn’t
heated by fire.
Part
of my pride in working for Her was earning money I could squander: on
movies, candy, paddleballs, jacks, ice-cream cones. But a larger part of
my pride was based on the fact that I gave half my wages to my mother,
which meant that some of my earnings were used for real things—an
insurance-policy payment or what was owed to the milkman or the iceman.
The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound. I was not
like the children in folktales: burdensome mouths to feed, nuisances to
be corrected, problems so severe that they were abandoned to the forest.
I had a status that doing routine chores in my house did not
provide—and it earned me a slow smile, an approving nod from an adult.
Confirmations that I was adultlike, not childlike.
In
those days, the forties, children were not just loved or liked; they
were needed. They could earn money; they could care for children younger
than themselves; they could work the farm, take care of the herd, run
errands, and much more. I suspect that children aren’t needed in that
way now. They are loved, doted on, protected, and helped. Fine, and
yet . . .
Little by little, I got
better at cleaning Her house—good enough to be given more to do, much
more. I was ordered to carry bookcases upstairs and, once, to move a
piano from one side of a room to the other. I fell carrying the
bookcases. And after pushing the piano my arms and legs hurt so badly. I
wanted to refuse, or at least to complain, but I was afraid She would
fire me, and I would lose the freedom the dollar gave me, as well as the
standing I had at home—although both were slowly being eroded. She
began to offer me her clothes, for a price. Impressed by these worn
things, which looked simply gorgeous to a little girl who had only two
dresses to wear to school, I bought a few. Until my mother asked me if I
really wanted to work for castoffs. So I learned to say “No, thank you”
to a faded sweater offered for a quarter of a week’s pay.
Still,
I had trouble summoning the courage to discuss or object to the
increasing demands She made. And I knew that if I told my mother how
unhappy I was she would tell me to quit. Then one day, alone in the
kitchen with my father, I let drop a few whines about the job. I gave
him details, examples of what troubled me, yet although he listened
intently, I saw no sympathy in his eyes. No “Oh, you poor little thing.”
Perhaps he understood that what I wanted was a solution to the job, not
an escape from it. In any case, he put down his cup of coffee and said,
“Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to
work. Get your money. And come on home.”
That was what he said. This was what I heard:
1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.
2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
3. Your real life is with us, your family.
4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.
I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons,
quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of
jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered
the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed
the security of a job above the value of home. ♦
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