How to Love an American Man (14 page)

Instead Grandma ushers me inside, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “You're coming in with a full load and you'll leave with a full load!” she says. “I'm baking bran muffins for your hou—
whoa
,” she says, grabbing the edge of her counter as her focus meets my face. “You look like you haven't slept in days.”

Under her gaze I feel a massive pimple rising from under the skin on my chin. It's going to be one of those mean kind that Celeste once nicknamed a “rude tenant” because they refuse to vacate for weeks after you demand them to, and they always leave a mess.

“Traveling this weekend sure took it out of you, didn't it?”

“Yeah, Grandma.” How do I tell her that I'm dense and as it turns out I don't understand anything she's been trying to show me about men and women. “I need to understand something, and I need you to give it to me straight.” Today I've actually carried a notebook with me, reasoning that if I take down Grandma's love lessons in the scholastic manner in which I approach every other goal in my life, maybe I'll finally learn their real-world application. (Yet I call myself out for employing this science-project lingo. When will I learn to stop hiding my emotions behind my intellect?)

Grandma asks do I want something to drink?

No, thank you.

Can she offer me a snack?

Really, Grandma, that's generous, but I have no appetite.

Would I like a pencil with an eraser?

No, I'll take these notes raw. Nothing will be erased, and I'll be writing every word. I need Grandma to point out for me the difference between compromise and losing yourself in another person. I ask her to shed light on the characteristics behind couples that just . . .
go well
together. I just spent the past weekend trying to muster up interests in someone else's passions, and it wound up hurting us both. When will my longing to bond with another person stop being so lethal—most of all, for me?

I swallow Grandma's words like she's just pulled the lever on an M&M machine, consuming every piece of insight till I'm totally spent and my brain is full. I ask her to be as clear and straightforward as possible so as to shed a candid light on what I'm not getting.

As she has explained to me, Grandpa was, in her words, “looking for his career.” She says by now it should be clear to me that his work goals were his priority.

Okay. I follow.

And she reemphasizes the fact that she had a choice whether she was going to accept that or not. It was a choice she made every day, over and over, and she always chose to choose it. It was an independent decision, and she lived with it, even when she'd accompany him to a meeting, sitting out in the reception room waiting for him because, as she explained, “I wasn't allowed inside.” She wasn't allowed inside the building because she was a woman.

And she has no regrets. All her life she
chose
to be okay with this.

But when she was little, she was born to a single mother and raised by four adults: her mother's sister, her mother's brother, her grandpa, and, least involved, by her own mother. My great-grandma made it very clear through her languid parenting that Grandma's birth was not planned and her existence was to be merely tolerated. She was the result of a relationship that she was always forbidden to talk about—

“Grandma, wait,” I say. “Who forbade you to ask?”

“My mother's sister. The message was, ‘Just don't ask who your father is, you'll upset your mother.' ”

“Ah, okay. Please, go on.”

Grandma opens up about something that I'd always gathered just based on hints she'd dropped: she had a very lonely childhood. She grew up in a big Victorian house full of rather stuffy adults who could hardly be bothered by the existence of this precious little girl in their midst, longing to be adored. Grandma says they always had cats, but the house was so strict that never once did the cats set foot outside. She went to the Catholic school (one that has a minuscule enrollment today, let alone seven decades ago when the entire grade school fit in the same classroom) and didn't have many friends her age because she was very shy (thanks to the lack of confidence being fostered at home).

I remember my great-grandmother. Before she died when I was nine, she always wore her fingernails long and polished with fire-engine red. She wore big, bold jewelry and bright glossy lipstick. She never smiled, and she was always reading. When we'd go to visit her in the high-rise, she'd click her fingernails slowly on the wooden arm of her rocker, as if she were a queen waiting for us to either do something to piss her off or to leave. My dad told me a few years ago that she used to sleep for days on end and that when he puts it all together, he thinks she suffered from severe depression. Whoever Grandma's father was, it seemed like Grandma Leona lost herself when she lost him. She lived her entire life like the ghost of a woman after he left her.

“When I was little,” Grandma raises her voice to drive this point home,
“I wanted six kids.”

“You
did?
”

She dips her head with certainty. “I did. That was my goal. I wanted a lot of kids, and a lot of activity. And I did have six pregnancies, but the one after your dad, you know, I lost. I wanted to make sure that when I grew up, my life wouldn't be lonely and boring like my childhood was.” Her voice drops with her gaze. “I just don't have happy memories of my childhood.”

Got it.

Grandma reminds me that it was just a few weeks ago when she told me that I had to figure out what I wanted for
myself
before I could lock anyone else into my dreams.

Right . . .

So, here's the equation: she knew what she wanted—kids—and Grandpa knew what he wanted—success. And when they united their lives, they were both able to achieve their individual goals. The price that came with it, all those dinners without Grandpa present with the kids, having to wait for him in the reception area of office buildings? “I just accepted all that as a part of my life,” Grandma says. “I was always up for it.”

Then she continues, asking me to promise never to tell anyone whom she's about to refer to. I agree. So she tells me a story about a couple she and Grandpa knew who had a miserable marriage for many years. “Everything had to be just so with her,” Grandma says, referring to the wife. “She always made the decisions for him and he was just so
weak
, but away from her, he could be really talented.”

“In his work, you mean?”

“Yes, in his work. In everything, really. Their families came from different backgrounds, and hers was
very
traditional, and he had to give up the way he did everything to be with her.”

“Such as . . .”

“Such as the way he celebrated the holidays. It always had to be done her family's way, and he never got to be with his side of the family. And at social gatherings, everybody had to wait for her. She was out to show that,” Grandma sticks out her chest, “ ‘Others will have to do what I want.' She was a selfish, self-serving, self-centered woman.” Grandma explains that the gentleman she's talking about had to live for a long time with none of his own needs fulfilled. He ignored the promises and the desires that he'd once held for his life. He lost himself.

“He lived his whole life that way?”

“Oh, not his whole life,” she says, and suddenly it's as though she's got something up her sleeve. “Eventually he got fed up with her badgering and then it turned the opposite way, where he always tried to keep so much from her. As long as she didn't know anything he was doing, they got along fine. Your grandpa never would have married a person like that.”

Then what kind of a woman was Grandpa looking to marry? Or more pointedly, what should we all be looking for in a partner? I also wonder whether the old saying “Timing is everything” is a cliché, or if there's really something to it. In my experience there have been moments when it's seemed as though I'd found
the perfect person
, but we reached a fork in the road and painfully parted ways (or at least
I
was pained, thankyouverymuch, Adam Hunt). Could it simply be that the timing was off? I ask Grandma how she knew that all the circumstances between her and Grandpa were lined up for her to commit to him forever.

“I liked him in school,” she says, “but he claims he did not know me . . . which shows you the two different levels we were on. If we'd gotten together in high school, it wouldn't have worked out. The point of a relationship is for two people to grow together. Your grandpa needed a few years to mature and figure out what he wanted to make of himself.”

“And all that happened when he was in the ser vice.”

“I would say so, yes. When I saw him at the ice cream store on that Saturday night that I've told you about, he and the guys were holding windows up in the front.” Which explains where the term
hanging out
comes from—before the days of air-conditioning, when young people wanted to socialize, they'd open up the windows and doors in whichever establishment they chose to congregate and stick their heads outside to chat with friends and passersby.

Grandma says Grandpa sort of captured her that night. He was the same handsome, charismatic boy she knew from school, but he actually picked up on how unique she was. “See, Kris, you want someone on your same intellectual, emotional level.” She explains that when the right partner comes along for me, no, we won't have serious conversations
all
the time, but when we do, I have to feel that he bears an impeccable capacity for hearing me—not just the words I speak, but the desires in life that radiate from inside me. He'll see all that, and he'll choose it. My hopes won't be a threat or a turnoff; he won't make me feel too high-maintenance or complex. In turn I'll prioritize his goals as if they were as important as my own—and sometimes even more important than mine. And, this will bring me some of the greatest fulfillment I'll ever experience.

When I think about what Grandma's saying, I realize that this is exactly what was missing with Tucker.

“And this next part is the most important thing I'm gonna tell you.”

“Okay.”

“I know I cared about what Grandpa was doing when he was away from me—”

“You mean you were suspicious he was spending time with other women?” I've wondered at times how Grandma dealt with all his traveling . . . didn't she have her suspicions?

She squeals, “No, no!”

Okay, guess not.

“I'm saying I cared about what he was doing when he was away from me, which, as I've told you, was often. So when we found a moment, we'd check in with each other. Then as long as everything was okay, we both went back to our work.” The bottom line? “You live your life, and he lives his.”

Wow, I actually really like that.

She continues, as one by one she places muffins into a plastic container for me to tote home. “Look here, for example: the muffins on the bottom have dates and walnuts—they're for your mother. The plain ones are for your dad, he's hated nuts since he was a baby. When your mom makes my muffin recipe, does she put walnuts in all of them?”

“No. She sticks a plain batch in the oven for Dad, then adds berries or walnuts to whatever's left of the batter for herself.”

“Right, so you see? She and your dad don't always have the same opinions of things, but they don't force their likes on one another.”

“But they share the same values,” I muse, getting her point, “which is why they're both eating bran muffins in the first place—to be healthy.” I think of the fresh fish Chris got me craving, versus the chicken wings drowning in grease that Tucker had eaten the other night. It's growing clear why I feel like I connect so much more with someone like Chris, someone who enjoys growing and trying new things; a man who loves reading books and finding work in different countries and brainstorming ways to help others form themselves into the people they were made to be. Football and pickup trucks just don't inspire me that way . . . and that's essentially a microcosm of why Tucker and I broke up last night.

Grandma places the last of the muffins inside the plastic container and seals the lid. “Remember, plain on bottom, dates and walnuts on top.”

“Okay.” The concentration that's occupying my face isn't about that, though. I'm still trying to process everything we've just discussed.

My hard face makes Grandma giggle, startling me from picking up my purse from her foyer floor. “It's easy, my dear,” she says, coming over for a hug and saying into my ear: “Your role is to be an individual,” I pull away and look in her eyes, “and to let your partner be one too.”

In the car going home I try to repeat Grandma's lesson, but in Italian.
“Il tuo lavoro è essere la persona che vuoi, e lesche il tuo fidanzato essere una persona anche
.
”
It's preschool-level translation, but the trills and rolls off my tongue thrill me. I hadn't realized how much I missed speaking Italian until the dinner the other night when the restaurant owner and I chatted in front of Tucker. With my hands going and my voice rising and falling with the delicious drama of the words, I carry on a one-sided conversation with my great-grandma Angeladea (which translates beautifully to “angel of God”), figuring she's the only person I know who can hear my Italian in heaven.
“Nonna,”
I ask her,
“per favore, com'è hai capito che il mio biznonno era il giusto signore per te?”
How did you know my great-grandpa was the right man for you?

Grandma Angela was Grandma's mother-in-law, and in the early years of Grandma's marriage, Grandma Glo says that Angela didn't take to her. Grandma says she doesn't know why, but I think maybe it's because Angela liked women with a lot of backbone. When I was little my great-grandma once instructed me in her thick Italian accent not to have a baby until I finished college, and whatever I do, to marry a man who's nice to me. It's widely considered that my grandpa got his independent manner of thinking and his degree of likability from his mother, and there are two stories about Grandma Angela that I love to play over in my head.