The kid working the counter at my local West Village hardware store had an unlit cigarette in his mouth the whole time I picked his brain about the silver-plate wearing off our flatware. This was a year or so after I innocently used the liquid dip-it silver polish after a lifetime of the pasty kind because it was all they’d had in stock. I asked him for a lead-detection kit and he pointed to a shelf behind my head.
The thin dip-it stuff sure was fun and easy to use compared to the hard work of the paste, and at first I didn’t mind the antiquey yellowish cast it gave the silver plate. But over time the forks started coming out of the dishwasher with a bit of verdigris at the tips of the tines, a little harmless copper, I figured (hoped), as I wiped it off. Then, I told the kid, pulling out the sample fork I had packed, the handles grew lighter to the point of being more white than silver, and the parts we put in our mouths developed dark gray patches that weren’t tarnish.
A second disturbing development had occurred at around the same time: our pale gray stoneware dishes started to emerge from the dishwasher stained. I put two and two together: the cutlery had bled metal inside the machine. I spent hours trying to rub out the cabbage roses of rust on the stoneware with baking soda, an ingredient the internet swears by but that just made my fingers simultaneously gritty and slippery and didn’t touch the stains. Through a lot of trial and error I learned that a long, laborious rubbing with saliva and a finger eventually took off the stains, kind of like dead skin off the back of an arm.
I grabbed a lead-detector kit and threw it on the counter, terrified about what it might reveal. Or you could do this, the kid said, tearing off a strip of thermal paper from the register and writing down the name of a metal-refinishing company in Queens. Tell them Tom’s son sent you, he added, like one of Tony Soprano’s guys. When I told him the store should stop selling the corrosive liquid stuff, he shrugged. Then he really messed with me. You know how it goes, he said. One day you’re fine, the next your teeth fall out.
I went home and struck up an email correspondence with the metal-plating guy in Astoria, aware that I’m prone to want to trust people even when, maybe especially when, they have a vested interest in my business. I waited to hear back with answers to my many questions.
The flatware pattern is called Evening Star though it has a swirly flower motif; go figure. It belonged to my step-grandmother and was what we called her Pesadicha set. I was happy to inherit it decades ago. We keep on the counter near the stove in its original big wooden box with the synthetic magenta flannel lining. The top of the box attracts grease that traps dust, and needs its own special polish and hard labor with the heel of my hand; once a year or so I polish it to a gleam.
Middle-brow schlock
My husband, I knew, had never loved the Evening Star, with its hollow knife handles. And yes, you could see it as middle-brow schlock between midcentury modern and museum-quality antiquities, two altars at which his family worshipped. Flatware, they believed, should be clean of line and stainless of steel and come from Scandinavia. I generally agree, but I like the Evening Star and I’m loyal and sentimental and I can’t bear the thought of tossing the utensils that have carried my food to my mouth for forty years. Luckily we’re not reduced to eating with our hands. It so happens that, in the wooden box alongside the suspect Evening Star, we also have a small number of surplus pieces from the stainless set my husband grew up with. We supplemented these with pieces from my 98-year-old mother-in-law’s set; she’s still living in her apartment but is way past her party-throwing days.
Then the metal guy e-mailed me and said it’s brass, not lead, under our failing silver plate, praised be Yahweh, or Community, the name stamped on the back of each piece. He said that modern dishwashers, with their high heat and caustic detergents, aren’t good for silver plate. When I reminded him that it had been fine until I used the liquid polish, he conceded the point. I don’t know why that stuff, which bills itself as a tarnish remover, is still on the market. In big letters on the front of the bottle it lists silver plate right below “for use on.” It also says, making me cringe because I now hate this company, “Women owned.” I read the fine print on the back, too, just to be sure it was safe, but the warnings there are against use on stainless steel, pearls, opals, laminates and countertops, substances that couldn’t produce tarnish if they tried.
I did some research into the history of our set, and was puzzled because sometimes the company name was listed as Community but sometimes as Oneida. I later learned that the two are entwined like the swirl of Evening Star flowers: Community refers to an actual utopian community created in 1848 in Oneida, New York, by a sect whose name—wait for it—is the Christian
Perfectionists.
Soon the estimate came back from Astoria: $3,355 to replate our 58 Evening Star pieces. About four times higher than the value of a complete 60-piece original set: $795. And, I might add, complete sets in perfect condition are readily available. When I wrote back to say thanks but no thanks, I thanked the guy profusely, because he’d answered all my questions promptly and courteously. But he failed to answer my final question: did he have any suggestions about what do with the compromised set? I can’t bear the thought of tossing it in the trash for Sanitation to crush or bury in landfill. Maybe he didn’t notice that question, or maybe he had less incentive now that I wouldn’t be giving him any business.
Who can you trust?
So here I was trusting a random guy in Queens, referred to me by a random guy with a serious attitude at the local hardware store (the name of which I will not mention because I love and depend on this store and don’t want to get anyone in trouble), to reassure me that we haven’t been blithely poisoning ourselves for the past year. Everything feels newly threatening these days. Corrosive forces keep swooping in overnight and ruining the contents of cabinets. You want to rely on certain basic things in this world—your civil servants, your plumbing pipes, your butter knives—which I’m sure is what the good citizens of ancient Rome said to themselves, too.
