My Inheritance, a Typewriter

            My Grandma always mentioned getting the typewriter working again.  Every time I climbed on top of the loft bed in the office that used to be my uncle’s bedroom to play around with the keys, she would say that it would work if only she could find a ribbon for it.  She would then go on to talk about her time in school and how she had to take a test when she wanted to be a secretary.  In order to be even considered for a job, she had to be able to type a certain number of words per minute.  She could have gone to college, she did well in high school and even won a scholarship, but her family was not wealthy.  Besides, college was boring, more school.  Joining the workforce, being a secretary in Manhattan was glamorous, much better than the other two options afforded female professionals in those days, a nurse (gross, blood) or a teacher (gross, children).

            I know now that while the numbers were fairly limited, there were jobs afforded to women in the 1950s other than just teacher, nurse, or secretary.  Had she gone to college, my grandmother could have been a journalist—she loved to write and was good at it—or she could have worked in a department store.  Tall and thin, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine her in a cute little shop girl outfit, hawking perfume and jewelry to wealthy tourists and upper west siders.  But if she ever wanted to pursue a different profession, my Grandma never mentioned it.  She loved being a secretary for all its faults, bosses who demanded a kiss at company parties, executives who’s hands wandered far below the small of your back, it was just something to deal with, a story used to commiserate with female friends and then, much later, to horrify your teenage granddaughter.

            “Some things I can’t even tell you,” she said once, “when you’re older.”  I was probably around seventeen when she said that, and I made a mental note of the line.  I didn’t know what she meant by older, but I assumed that it would happen eventually.  Unsurprisingly in the type of essay such as this, eventually never happened.  She died, suddenly and unexpectedly, almost exactly a year after my Grandfather, the love of her life.  I never expected her to die at the relatively young age of seventy-six.  Anyone who saw her thought that she was at least two decades younger than she was, and she was often mistaken for my mother.  She exercised daily and kept a more active social calendar than me, trips to Europe, Broadway plays, Arthur Avenue dinners, you name it, she did it. 

However, there was a definite change after my grandfather died.  Always dramatic, my Grandma became downright maudlin.  She could be hard to be around.  A few months after he passed, I slept over her house with the stipulation that she promise not to cry because I couldn’t take the constant tears.  She kept to her word, and we had a very nice time.  Between the two of us, we drank almost a full bottle of white wine—which makes the lack of tears that much more impressive—and then watched the second season of Master of None.  It would have been the perfect night for her to tell me the rest of her secrets about her life as a secretary, but I didn’t ask.  We were having too good of a time in the present, and I didn’t want to bring up the past.

            Death lingers.  Long after the formalities, the wake and funeral (a bizarre mix of Christian and Jewish traditions that certainly made my grandma smile), we are still dealing with tidying up the estate.  She still lived in the house my mom and her siblings grew up in, and used every nook and cranny to store memories of not only her life, but also that of her parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.  I come from a long line of picture takers, and now we find ourselves struggling under the weight of hundreds of photo albums and almost no idea what to do with them.  Most things I could take or leave— jewelry’s nice, but I rarely wear it, and my room’s already bursting with stuff as it is—but I felt very strongly about wanting the typewriter.  It didn’t even belong to my grandmother.  It was her Aunt Betty’s, who died when I was a baby, her mind already long lost to Alzheimer’s, but I press down on those keys, and I am back on the loft while she’s down below at her desk.  We don’t even need to be talking.  I’m busy pretending to be Kit Kittredge, the American Girl Doll she got me for Christmas one year—I liked the doll but was far more interested in the books about the girl who wrote in her attic bedroom on her old typewriter about her childhood in the Great Depression—and she’s sending emails or playing solitaire.  I don’t know if it’s a memory rooted in reality, but it’s a memory nonetheless and it’s a connection to a person who’s absence still leaves a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. 

            As soon as I got the typewriter back to my house, I set out to get it to work.  She said it needed a ribbon, so I ordered one on Amazon, along with a bottle of liquid bearings typewriter oil that promised to help fix sticky keys.  I watched YouTube videos so that I could follow along as old men threaded ribbons and demonstrated how to clean faulty mechanisms.  I even found a pdf copy of the user manual for the model typewriter that I had.  After several hours (and several q-tips), I finally got the damn thing working.  The ribbon doesn’t move like it should and the “u” still sticks, but it types, and I have the error-riddled first attempts to prove it. 

            To be completely honest, the whole process has been a little underwhelming.  There’s a reason why I’m typing this on my mac and not the typewriter.  My twenty-first century fingers are not used to the effort it takes to press down on each key in order to get a good strike against the page.  If anything, I’m now much more impressed by her story of acing the word per minute test than I was the first time I heard it.  I also didn’t realize how heavily I rely on the backspace key when I do type, and thus far everything I have attempted looks like it was written by a barely literate seven-year-old.  At first I was frustrated, I should be getting more enjoyment out of this, I thought, this should mean something, what would Kit Kittredge say?  But then I reminded myself that I was being ridiculous.  I can’t be the only person in history ever to be frustrated by a typewriter.  If I was, I’d still be using one.

There’s probably some lesson in all this about how antiques remind us to slow down and take our time with projects, a concept that modern amenities have all but eliminated, but that’s not my real take away here.  I thought that getting the typewriter working would make me feel something and maybe even strengthen the connection between me and my grandmother, but it doesn’t mean anything now that she’s not here to see it.  Even if she were alive when I got this thing working, it wouldn’t matter.  It would be fun for about five minutes and then we’d move onto something else.  I’ve internalized the typewriter to be a token of the good times I spent over at my grandparent’s house: Wednesday afternoons when they would pick us up from school and we would eat dinner over, times when my “sick” brother and I would convince our grandfather to take us to Blockbuster to rent a movie, eating my grandmother’s specialty, Ronzoni elbow macaroni.  Whether or not it functions as it should, it will always function as a link to the past and in that regard it works perfectly. 

The Typewriter, along with several dirty Q-Tips (Q-Tips, please sponsor me)