Grace and Grit by Lilly Ledbetter Page A

new house in town, I made her stand on the front step to smoke; one reason was that I’d had enough of customers blowing smoke in my face all day at the office, but I also hated the stale smell of cigarette smoke clinging to my upholstered furniture.
    What didn’t make sense was the idea of burying my mother. In her late fifties, she was too young, and I wasn’t ready to stand at her graveside. As difficult as she could be to deal with, the idea of life without Edna gave me a strange sense of vertigo. Now, as I saw what Edna called “liver spots” beginning to appear on the back of my hands, I felt the inevitable limitations of time constricting me as surely as the small wrinkles punctuating my knuckles like parentheses. My aging alarmed me.
    I PLACED the magazine on my desk, planning to take it home and show Charles. Just thinking about the fact that Goodyear was hiring female managers for the first time in the history of the company gave me goose bumps. I rubbed my arms and relished what felt like a door opening when I’d thought for sure, at this point in my life, the doors were only closing.
    Charles seemed surprised when I informed him of my decision to apply for a position at Goodyear. I took a personal day and put in my application anyway. As I sat in the human resources office filling out the endless forms, I read the plaque that hung on the wall in front of me. I mouthed the Vince Lombardi quotation engraved in gold to myself: FOOTBALL IS A LOT LIKE LIFE; IT REQUIRES PERSEVERANCE, SELF-DENIAL, HARD WORK, SACRIFICE, DEDICATION, AND RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY . It made sense to me. If that was what was required to work there, I was ready. A signed picture of coach Bear Bryant hung next to the plaque. I couldn’t wait to tell Charles—when Phillip was born on the same day as “the Bear,” he couldn’t have been more tickled.
    After the long interview, I wondered how many other womenhad applied. The only women I’d seen so far were secretaries in the front offices where I’d submitted my application, but I knew Aunt Robbie had worked there. One time when I was a little girl, I’d asked her what she did. She laughed at first. Then she said she’d started in shipping, where she “cut the tits off tires,” meaning, she finally explained, that she sliced the thin rubber protrusions off. I thought about her wielding a razor with the same hands she used for knitting and tatting. Aunt Robbie had been hired during World War II, when women manned the plant, making jeep tires, rubber soles for shoes, raincoats, and anything else the military needed. Even after the men returned from war, she managed to stay—refusing, she told me, to accept Goodyear’s offer in 1960 to buy her a brand-new house if she’d take early retirement. By then, she and Uncle Howard had built their own nice house with a swimming pool. She worked at Goodyear for twenty-seven years, until heart problems and a back injury forced her to retire.
    Leaving the plant after my interview, I passed photographs of the men from “Mahogany Row” in Akron, Ohio, lining the paneled hallway—the same men whose biographies I had no idea I’d be memorizing soon. I stopped for a minute and took a deep breath, staring at the black-and-white portraits of these men who exuded such a sense of power. I tried to imagine their lives: how it felt to run a corporation, travel the world, and dine at the country club. It was a life about which I could only fantasize. At least I had this chance to make my life better—a chance I’d never believed possible as a child.
    On the way home I stopped to check on my mother. Blocking the doorway, she was dressed in her housecoat, her dentures still sitting in their usual spot on her bathroom sink now that her mouth was too sore for her to wear them. I announced that I’d applied to work as a manager at Goodyear. She didn’t offer to let me in but cut her sharp eyes at me and asked, “Shouldn’t you be doing what a woman’s