The gentleman is kindly, matter-of-fact. He is not scared of a dead mother’s lightning bolts. I stand on the other side of the glass cabinet, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, nervous as a thief at a pawn shop. Not because I stole this sterling and silverplate, but because I inherited it. As a sacred trust, glowing with aspirations to fineness.
My Irish great-grandmother paid for her passage to America by working as a maid for a wealthy family, and she memorized their lace-curtain ways and taught them to her daughter, who taught her daughters, one of whom tried to teach me. In each generation, there was more taste than money, so beautiful objects were acquired thoughtfully, and with sacrifice.
But I do not want to polish sterling. And when I bring out the fine china and crystal, our friends seem more alarmed than delighted.
This was my mother’s world. She loved beauty, and she was expected to entertain—a la Mad Men—clients and colleagues from my dad’s ad agency. I appreciate an exquisitely set table, but our life is not choreographed to need one. Few lives are, anymore. I tried, hard, to find someone who would want, and use, her pale pink Lenox china, the cups delicately curved, the gold rims pristine on all ten place settings…and nobody bit. The care with which my mom sudsed that china after holiday dinners! She had chosen it with such giddy hope, a future bride picking out her pattern. Her life’s pattern.
Then my dad went and died on her, and the pattern broke. Entertaining was reduced to family holidays and small parties, which were indeed lovely—but fragile. When I married, I found myself choosing sturdier, friendlier stuff. Hoping for a life to match.
I kept her dishes, though, carefully stacked in a dining room cabinet. The silver service—is that what you call it? The coffee, tea, creamer, sugar bowl, tray that nobody uses anymore? It sat in the basement, the intricate ornament blackening with tarnish and the smooth silver turning a weird golden brown. Decades passed. My hair is now silver too, parts of it a weird golden brown, and my New Year’s resolutions to entertain more often tarnish every time. These cherished objects need to belong to someone who will cherish them, and since no one seems to want them, I have decided to melt them the hell down and use the money for real life.
Can you hear the bravado? This was not an easy decision. These shiny albatrosses have squatted in my life forever. When I look at them, I am flooded by sweet memories—and a lingering burn of inadequacy. Should I take all that to my grave? I think not. Some possessions need to be deserved: you have to live up to them, or they will haunt you. This is why we drape the exercise bike with damp clothes; keep the pricey, impulsive kitchen gadgets in the back of the lowest cupboard; slip a garment bag over the little black velvet dress so seldom squeezed into, breathless, husband nearly breaking the zipper. We are hiding from their accusations.
Here in this nice place, crassly named Midwest Money but genteel in its manner, a trusted South City establishment where you can turn your past into cash with no questions asked, I am startled to feel so vulnerable. As though I am pawning a wedding ring in desperation. Shaking off shame, I slide the silver epergne toward the gentleman who is about to appraise its worth. But wait: “epergne” is not right. Epergnes are like a cluster of ballerinas waving their arms outward, extending little dishes toward the guests. This piece is fat and gorgeous but self-contained, an opera singer who already knows how good she is. “Chafing dish”? Just the opposite: above its ornate, well-turned legs hides a glass bowl for ice, so the cocktail shrimp stays chilled and one’s guests go home alive. Surely a container this elaborate has a fancy name? The best AI can come up with is “chilled serving bowl or dip chiller.” AI did not have a great-grandmother who cleaned a fancy lady’s dresses.
I am not sure which would appall my mother more: “dip chiller” to name her receptacle for those delicate, extravagant shrimp, or me asking an artificial intelligence to remind me what she taught me. She loved that piece, whatever it is called. But I think we used it twice, three times at most, in the two decades I lived at home. As an adult entrusted with it, I had no idea what to serve. We are not cocktail shrimp people. Once I filled it with flowers and ivy and set it in the middle of the table. My mom came to dinner, saw the centerpiece, and smiled wanly. To her, these objects represented a life of fineness and elegance and hospitality. I look at them and see that nasty bottle of grayish-purple silver polish squirting its liquid with a sigh, the soft cloth instantly stained, the tarnish a reminder that nothing lasts. Shine dulls. Elegance changes shape and fades away. My mother dies and takes her hopes with her.
The man eyes everything I have tumbled onto his counter. For all that gorgeous heavy silverplate, piece after piece, carefully designed and wrought? $28 total. For the box of dainty sterling I lugged upstairs twice in thirty years? A cool thousand, plus.
Value is the ficklest of the attributes. It was more steadfast, I suspect, in my mother’s lifetime. She bought less but made sure to buy what was “good,” meaning it would last forever and (here I wince) be passed down to the next generation. Fads did not abruptly inflate or deflate an object’s worth. Gorgeous pieces were not so readily melted down. People did not return wedding presents for the cash or demand cash in the first place or register for hiking gear or a trip to the Caribbean.
We are fluid, casual, transactional. Always poised to buy new, more, or different, and reluctant to be burdened by anything requiring extra time or effort. Are we lazy because we live on screens, or just overwhelmed by everything that comes at us every hour of every day? Our lives have lost their various social patterns—all those clubs and leagues and parties that once defined people. Slouched on separate sofas, we stream private amusements. Our aspirations often boil down to money and safety, rather than hospitality and refinement.
For me, the loss of sociability parallels the advances of tech: I deplore the ways it is shaping us, but I would never go back. Card catalogs were fun to rifle through on a rainy afternoon, but compared to instant information drawn from all over the world? Tea poured from that S-curved silver spout tasted better, somehow. Pouring, I felt a hostess’s largesse; sipping, I felt ladylike (what does that even mean anymore?) and civilized. A slower, more gracious time—yet one had to sip fast. In minutes, the tea in those shallow porcelain cups had turned cold, an opaque film skimming its surface.
Life moves on, and the tradeoffs accumulate. Freed from someone else’s past, I can turn what my mother taught me into a sturdier elegance, one that needs no polishing. Still, I am left unnerved. The cash slid across the glass counter will be gone as soon as the next bill is paid. My mother’s choices lasted almost two lifetimes.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.