Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage (21 page)

"It sounds like a brilliant idea, Keo," Felipe said.

"It was Noi's idea," Keo said, and we all turned our attention again to Keo's wife, to pretty Noi, only nineteen years old and so damp-faced from the heat, kneeling awkwardly on the dirt floor, her belly all full of baby.

"You're a genius, Noi!" exclaimed Felipe.

"She
is
a genius!" Keo agreed.

Noi blushed so deeply at this praise that she almost seemed to swoon. She was unable to meet our eyes, but you could tell that she felt the honor even if she could not face it. You could tell that she fully felt how well-regarded she was by her husband. Handsome, young, inventive Keo thought so highly of his wife that he could not help himself from boasting about her to his honored dinner guests! At such a public declaration of her own importance, shy Noi seemed to swell to twice her natural size (and she already
was
twice her natural size, what with that baby due any moment). Honestly, for one sublime instant, the young mother-to-be seemed so elated, so inflated, that I feared she might float away and join her mother up there on the face of the moon.

All of this, as we drove back to our hotel that night, got me thinking about my grandmother and her marriage.

My Grandma Maude--who recently turned ninety-six years old--comes from a long line of people whose comfort levels in life far more closely resembled Keo and Noi's than my own. Grandma Maude's family were immigrants from the north of England who found their way to central Minnesota in covered wagons, and who lived through those first unthinkable winters in rough sod houses. Merely by working themselves almost to death, they acquired land, built small wooden houses, then bigger houses, and gradually increased their livestock and prospered.

My grandmother was born in January 1913, in the middle of a cold prairie winter, at home. She arrived in this world with a potentially life-threatening impairment--a serious cleft-palate deformity that left her with a hole in the roof of her mouth and an uncompleted upper lip. It would be almost April before the railroad tracks thawed enough to allow Maude's father to take the baby to Rochester for her first rudimentary surgery. Until that time, my grandmother's mother and father somehow kept this infant alive despite the fact that she could not nurse. To this day, my grandmother still doesn't know how her parents fed her, but she thinks it may have had something to do with a length of rubber tubing that her father borrowed from the milking barn. My grandmother wishes now, she told me recently, that she had asked her mother for more information about those first few difficult months of her own life, but this was not a family where people either dwelled on sad memories or encouraged painful conversations, and so the subject was never raised.

Though my grandmother is not one to complain, her life was a challenging one by any measure. Of course, the lives of everyone around her were challenging, too, but Maude carried the extra burden of her medical condition, which had left her with lingering speech problems and a visible scar in the middle of her face. Not surprisingly, she was terribly shy. For all these reasons, it was widely assumed that my grandmother would never marry. This assumption never had to be spoken aloud; everyone just knew it.

But even the most unfortunate destinies can sometimes bring peculiar benefits. In my grandmother's case, the benefit was this: She was the only member of her family who received a really decent education. Maude was allowed to dedicate herself to her studies because she really
needed
to be educated, to provide for herself someday as an unmarried woman. So while the boys were all pulled out of school around eighth grade to work in the fields, and while even the girls rarely finished high school (they were often married with a baby before their schooling was completed), Maude was sent to town to board with a local family and to become a diligent student. She excelled in school. She had a special fondness for history and English and hoped to someday become a teacher; she worked cleaning houses to save money for teachers' college. Then the Great Depression hit, and the expense of college grew far out of reach. But Maude kept working, and her earnings transformed her into one of the rarest imaginable creatures of that era in central Minnesota: an autonomous young woman who lived by her own means.

Those years of my grandmother's life, just out of high school, have always fascinated me because her path was so different from everyone else's around her. She had
experiences
out there in the real world rather than settling right into the business of raising a family. Maude's own mother rarely left the family farm except to go into town once a month (and never in the winter) to stock up on staples like flour and sugar and gingham. But after graduating from high school, Maude went to Montana all by herself and worked in a restaurant, serving pie and coffee to cowboys. This was in 1931. She did exotic and unusual things that no woman in her family could even imagine doing. She got herself a haircut and a fancy permanent wave (for two entire dollars) from an actual hairdresser, at an actual train station. She bought herself a flirty, kicky, slim yellow dress from an actual store. She went to movies
.
She read books. She caught a ride back from Montana to Minnesota on the back of a truck driven by some Russian immigrants with a handsome son about her age.

Once home from her Montana adventure, she got a job working as a housekeeper and secretary to a wealthy older woman named Mrs. Parker, who drank and smoked and laughed and enjoyed life immensely. Mrs. Parker, my grandmother informs me, "was not even afraid to curse," and she threw parties in her home that were so extravagant (the best steaks, the best butter, and plenty of booze and cigarettes) that you might never have known a Depression was raging out there in the world. Moreover, Mrs. Parker was generous and liberal, and she often passed her fine clothes along to my grandmother, who was half the older woman's size, so unfortunately she couldn't always take advantage of this literal
largesse
.

My grandmother worked hard and saved her money. I need to emphasize this here:
She had her own savings
. I believe you could comb through several centuries of Maude's ancestors without ever finding a woman who had managed to save money on her own. She was even squirreling away some extra money to pay for an operation that would have rendered her cleft palate scar less noticeable. But to my mind, her youthful independence is best epitomized by one symbol: a gorgeous wine-colored coat with a real fur collar that she bought for herself for twenty dollars in the early 1930s. This was an unprecedented extravagance for a woman from that family. My grandmother's mother was rendered speechless by the notion of squandering such an astronomical amount of money on . . . a coat. Again, I believe you could pick your way through my family's genealogy with tweezers and never find a woman before Maude who'd ever bought something so fine and expensive for herself.

If you ask my grandmother today about that purchase, her eyes will still flutter in absolute pleasure. That wine-colored coat with the real fur collar was the most beautiful thing Maude had ever owned in her life--indeed, it was the most beautiful thing she would ever own in her life--and she can still remember the sensuous feeling of the fur brushing against her neck and chin.

Later that year, probably while wearing that same fetching coat, Maude met a young farmer named Carl Olson, whose brother was courting her sister, and Carl--my grandfather--fell in love with her. Carl was not a romantic man, not a poetic man, and certainly not a rich man. (Her small savings account dwarfed his assets.) But he was a staggeringly handsome man and a hard worker. All the Olson brothers were known to be handsome and hardworking. My grandmother fell for him. Soon enough, much to everyone's surprise, Maude Edna Morcomb was
married
.

Now, the conclusion I always drew from this story whenever I contemplated it in the past was that her marriage marked the end of any autonomy for Maude Edna Morcomb. Her life after that was pretty much unremitting hardship and hard work until maybe 1975. Not that she was any stranger to work, but things got very tough very fast. She moved out of Mrs. Parker's fine home (no more steaks, no more parties, no more
plumbing
) and onto my grandfather's family's farm. Carl's people were severe Swedish immigrants, and the young couple had to live in a small farmhouse with my grandfather's younger brother and their father. Maude was the only woman on the farm, so she cooked and cleaned for all three men--and often fed the farmhands as well. When electricity finally came to town through Roosevelt's Rural Electrification Administration program, her father-in-law would spring for only the lowest wattage lightbulbs, and these were seldom turned on.

Maude raised her first five--of seven--babies in that house. My mother was born in that house. The first three of those babies were raised in one single room, under one single lightbulb, just as Keo and Noi's children will be raised. (Her father-in-law and brother-in-law each got a room to himself.) When Maude and Carl's oldest son Lee was born, they paid the doctor with a veal calf. There was no money. There was never money. Maude's savings--the money she'd been collecting for her reconstructive surgery--had long since been absorbed into the farm. When her oldest daughter, my Aunt Marie, was born, my grandmother cut up her cherished wine-colored coat with the real fur collar and used that material to sew a Christmas outfit for the new baby girl.

And that has always been, in my mind, the operative metaphor for what marriage does to my people. By "my people" I mean the women in my family
,
specifically the women on my mother's side--my heritage and my inheritance. Because what my grandmother did with her fine coat (the loveliest thing she would ever own) is what all the women of that generation (and before) did for their families and their husbands and their children. They cut up the finest and proudest parts of themselves and gave it all away. They repatterned what was theirs and shaped it for others. They went without. They were the last ones to eat at supper, and they were the first ones to get up every morning, warming the cold kitchen for another day spent caring for everyone else. This was the only thing they knew how to do. This was their guiding verb and their defining principle in life:
They gave
.

The story of the wine-colored coat with the real fur collar has always made me cry. And if I were to tell you that this story has not shaped forever my feelings about marriage, or that it has not forged within me a small, quiet sorrow about what the matrimonial institution can take away from good women, I would be lying to you.

But I would also be lying to you--or at least withholding critical information--if I did not reveal this unexpected coda to the story: A few months before Felipe and I were sentenced to marry by the Homeland Security Department, I went out to Minnesota to visit my grandmother. I sat down with her while she worked on a quilting square, and she told me stories. Then I asked her a question I'd never asked before: "What was the happiest time of your life?"

In my heart, I believed I already knew the answer. It was back in the early 1930s, when she was living with Mrs. Parker, walking around in a slim yellow dress and a barbershop hairdo and a tailor-fitted wine-colored coat. That had to be the answer, right? But here's the trouble with grandmothers. With all that they give away to others, they still insist on maintaining their own opinions about their own lives. Because what Grandma Maude actually said was "The happiest time in my life were those first few years of marriage to your grandfather, when we were living together on the Olson family farm."

Let me remind you: They had
nothing
. Maude was a virtual house slave to three grown men (gruff Swedish farmers, no less, who were usually irritated with each other) and she was forced to cram her babies and their sodden cloth diapers into one cold and badly lit room. She became progressively sicker and weaker with each pregnancy. The Depression raged outside their door. Her father-in-law refused to run plumbing into the house. And so on, and so on . . .

"Grandma," I said, taking her arthritic hands in mine, "how
could
that have been the happiest time of your life?"

"It was," she said. "I was happy because I had a family of my own. I had a husband. I had children. I had never dared to dream that I would be allowed to have any of those things in my life."

As much as her words surprised me, I believed her. But just because I believed her did not mean that I understood her
.
I did not, in fact, begin to understand my grandmother's reply about her life's greatest happiness until the night, months later, that I ate dinner in Laos with Keo and Noi. Sitting there on the dirt floor, watching Noi shift uncomfortably around her pregnant belly, I had naturally begun to formulate all sorts of assumptions about her life as well. I pitied Noi for the difficulties she faced by marrying so young, and I worried about how she would raise her baby in a home already overtaken by a herd of bullfrogs. But when Keo boasted to us about how clever his young wife was (what with all those big ideas about greenhouses!) and when I saw the joy pass over the face of this young woman (a woman so shy that she had barely met our eyes the entire night), I suddenly encountered my grandmother. I suddenly
knew
my grandmother, as reflected in Noi, in a way I had never known her before. I knew how my grandmother must have looked as a young wife and mother: proud, vital, appreciated. Why was Maude so happy in 1936? She was happy for the same reason that Noi was happy in 2006--because she knew that she was indispensable to somebody else's life. She was happy because she had a partner, and because they were building something together, and because she believed deeply in what they were building, and because it amazed her to be included in such an undertaking.