The Gifts of Ordinary Women

In 1974, I was a boney-kneed, know-it-all teenager, scared to death I would end up like the women I came from.

My mother was a nurse's aide who came home with bruises on her arms. One grandmother raised 12 children and died in her 50s. Another grandmother spent her life raising chickens, quoting Scripture and making quilts and aprons from worn-out clothes.

Their lives seemed so dead-end empty, full of nothing but cautionary tales for big-dreamer me.

Then I discovered writer Grace Paley, who died last week at 84.

It was the summer before my senior year, and I was strolling through the aisles of the public library, which had become my second home. I used to run my fingers along the dusty spines until I found a book disrupting the flow like a changed mind.

That day, I stumbled onto Grace Paley's short stories, "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute," and soon realized that ordinary women — women such as my mother and grandmothers — lived the most interesting lives.

In "Wants," a woman describes her ex-husband after running into him at the library: "He had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber's snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment. What I mean is, I sat down on the library steps and he went away."

She sounded like my grandmother, who once reminded me to be "all ears and no tongue" as we walked to her quilting bee in the church basement, then took a breath and said she never undressed in front of Grandpa.

"Changed in the closet," she said, guaranteeing I'd be all ears for the rest of her life.

I saw my mother in many of Paley's women, most perfectly in the poem "Here." An old woman is sitting in her garden with a grandson on her lap, watching her husband talk to the meter reader.

Go fetch grandpa, she says, because she is "suddenly exhausted by (her) desire to kiss his sweet explaining lips."

Often, we declare a book worth reading because it inspired us in some way.

But sometimes the best writing is the kind that settles in you like a bad cold, making you restless and achy as you try to figure out what's got you so worked up. Paley would not let me be.

Her women were usually Jewish New Yorkers, but they had so much in common with the women in my small-town, Protestant world. Quite a discovery for this working-class kid, to realize income was the universal language. Life was about who had it and who didn't, and how you ended up at the end was only sometimes up to you.

My mother and my grandmothers didn't want me to end up like them. They just hoped that I'd take a little bit of them with me. I'm still mining the treasures they buried deep within me, and I'm reminded of that every time I read a Paley story.

Spend enough time with a writer's words, and you feel as if you know her. Paley's high regard for ordinary women made me think she was the kind of friend who listened to the very end of your sentence. No looking over your shoulder for better opportunities, no interrupting to save her from the boredom of you.

So much of friendship is what ferments in the quiet spaces. She knew that, it seemed.

Last Friday, after learning that Paley had died, I walked over to my bookshelves and pulled down her 1994 book, "The Collected Stories." I reread her dedication to her friend Sybil Claiborne:

"I visited her fifth-floor apartment on Barrow Street one day in 1957. There before my very eyes were her two husbands disappointed by the eggs. After that we talked and talked for nearly forty years. Then she died. Three days before that, she said slowly, with the delicacy of an unsatisfied person with only a dozen words left, Grace, the real question is — how are we to live our lives?"

To the very end, Grace Paley listened.

All ears and no tongue, Grandma would say.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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