The Grasinski Girls. Mary Patrice Erdmans

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СКАЧАТЬ skills, linguistic styles, tastes, preferences, and habits) is quite durable.²⁸ These repertoires of cultural and mental routines are taught to us by parents, teachers, and peers, and learned and practiced in institutions—in particular, the educational system. As such, our class backgrounds are encoded in linguistic and cultural practices. I left their language in the truest form possible so as to illustrate their class location and gendered personalities as encoded in the rhythms of their speech, their vocabularies, and their grammar. But they wanted their language changed for the same reason I wanted it preserved—it revealed class identity and education level.

      With their speech kept as it was spoken, it felt as if their words had betrayed them, or that I had betrayed them.²⁹ But for what reason? In the 2001 National Basketball Association playoffs, Allen Iverson of the Philadelphia 76ers referred to something as “the most funnest.” That grammar mistake was repeated in broadcasts numerous times over the following weeks. Why was it so necessary to repeat that phrase? What were they trying to do, show the world that his command of English was not as good as theirs? Was it a racist insinuation? Perhaps the Grasinski Girls thought I was doing the same thing, that I was looking for their class colors in order to insult them. But I don’t show you these women to ridicule them. I reproduce their language in its original (sometimes grammatically incorrect) form because that is how they speak. I wanted to capture their class culture as manifest in their language styles and to be as true as possible to their experiences, and I didn’t think that my professional speech alone could adequately reflect their everyday being.

      Unfortunately, my naive attempts to produce egalitarian relations were derailed because I forced them to play my game—the academic game. Their spoken language is perfectly suitable for kitchen table discussion; it is the book context that makes it appear inadequate. I was trained to write, and that gives me power in this arena. As one sister said, “You write very nice. Of course you do, because that’s what you do. I mean that’s your education and that’s what you do.” Moreover, I can edit my formal language (and edit and edit and edit) and draw on my professional networks to make my written words read better—colleagues, publishers, copy editors all read the manuscript and cleaned up my language. I definitely have more power in this setting to shape my presentation of self than they do.

      Given that I am a professional writer, I could have made them sound “better” than I did. And, given that I was family, maybe I should have. Yet, I thought that they looked damn good the way they were, and that in life, as in this book, they wear too much makeup. But then, they most likely think I don’t wear enough.

      . . .

      In this book, I am interested in what C. Wright Mills calls the intersection of biography and history. I begin with the story of Frances Zulawski. Born in Chicago to Polish immigrant parents, she moved to a Polish farming parish in southwestern Michigan, where her father arranged her marriage. Her fourth child, Helen Frances, born in 1903, married Joseph Grasinski, and together they had seven children—six of whom were girls, the Grasinski Girls. The life grooves that were available to these Roman Catholic working-class American girls of Polish descent who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s started at the altar: marriage to God or marriage to a man. While the feminist frameworks in the 1970s challenged their ways of being in the world, they resisted both the negative patriarchal definitions of women and the feminist devaluation of the choices they made. These women struggled to assert their needs, carve out alternative life routes for their daughters, and retain dignity and pride within the worlds they actively constructed. They carried Christmas trees home on city buses, found open seats in crowded churches, and survived emotionally by developing a thick skin (something the next generation would require Prozac to accomplish).

      Fig. 1. Caroline in front of her home, 1979

      While the Grasinski Girls represent a gender cohort (modified by class and race) and therefore share values and behaviors, the six women are also different, in part because their birth dates span twenty years, but also because of class mobility and educational achievements.

      Caroline Clarice (Caroline), the oldest of the sisters, remains rooted in the family home in the ethnic farming parish that was the ancestral site of Polish immigrant settlement in Michigan. In 1942, at the age of nineteen, she married a Polish-American boy from the community who had just been drafted. Together they had three children. Her husband supported the family comfortably on wages from his skilled, unionized position in a subsidiary to the auto industry. She stayed home and cared for the children until her midfifties, when she took a full-time position cooking school lunches at the local parochial school. Caroline lives with her hands: in the dirt growing hydrangeas and irises, weaving baskets, baking raisin-laced breads, sewing banners for the altar, and making crafts to sell at church bazaars.

      Fig. 2. Gene and Fran, c. 1946

      The next daughter, Genevieve Irene (Gene), died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1962 when she was thirty-six years old. She never married and never had children. Gene was an “A” student in grade school. She entered the convent after the eighth grade, stayed one year, and then returned home and worked as a domestic instead of completing high school. Later, she took secretarial courses and worked for an insurance company. Gene is remembered for having the best wardrobe of the sisters (her paycheck afforded her this), taking pictures of the family, and playing the piano. The older sisters are protective of her memory, and, without her own voice, I had to surrender to many of their edits regarding Gene’s life.

      Frances Ann (Fran) knew Gene the best because she was closest to her in age and they lived together for several years before Fran married a Czech American from Cleveland. Her husband earned an accounting degree (on the GI Bill) and they moved into a middle-class neighborhood where they raised three children. Fran dresses in expensive clothes that are easy to remember: a classically tailored beige short set, off-white pleated skirt and soft cashmere sweater, a jacket of rich burgundy and rust. She gets her hair done once a week and always has a well-cared-for public face—tasteful makeup, fashionable glasses, attractive jewelry. She does not drive and never needed to work (although she was an antique dealer for a while). She has had a comfortable and privileged life centered around her family and the church.

      The only son, Joseph Stanislaus (Joe), was born after Fran. His sudden death at the age of fifty-eight (he died from lung cancer only six months after diagnosis) was one of the Grasinski Girls’ greatest sorrows. His sisters feel “a special kind of love for him.” He was talented musically and artistically, and, like his mother, he was a wanderer. He lived in Arizona and Colorado before returning home to southwestern Michigan. He married and had four children and eventually designed and built a house near the Polish farming community of his childhood. He was a country-and-western singer early in his life and later became a commercial artist; when his company downsized and he was laid off, he reinvented his career, first as a prison warden and then as an auctioneer. Joe had an empathetic personality, a brilliant, flashing smile, and a hearty six-foot-three laugh. His sisters wanted a whole chapter devoted to their brother in this book. I compromised and gave them this paragraph.

      Joe was closest in age to Patricia Marie, who took the name Nadine when she entered the convent. Nadine was a Felician nun for twenty-two years, during which time she earned a master’s degree in home economics. After she left the convent, she kept the name Nadine, and acquired a French surname when she married a former priest. At the age of forty-five she conceived and delivered their only child. They built a winery and bed-and-breakfast near the upper peninsula of Michigan and today live as a modern-day baron and baroness. She challenges this description by noting that they “both work all day” running the business—and they do. She prepares gourmet breakfasts for the guests, and sews items she markets under the label Nadja. One sister describes СКАЧАТЬ