How to Love an American Man (2 page)

Cheery and chatty as ever, Grandpa spent the next five nights in the hospital. I kept him company and helped Grandma process the doctors' decisions, delaying my flight back to New York by two nights until my parents could arrive from Pennsylvania to take over. Grandma and Grandpa were a notoriously independent couple, but immediately decided to sell the Florida house to be close to the family year-round. The doctors had discovered that Grandpa's red blood cell count was decreasing rapidly, although they couldn't determine what was causing it.

Three months later when June poked its head, I moved to Italy anyway. The urge to go was growing more desperate as my relationship with Adam continued to flounder on its back over the deep, cold Atlantic; plus, if I was to complete any real digging into my family's background, I wanted to do it while Grandpa was around to bounce the research off of. I wanted to make him proud that I was so invested in understanding his roots. His was the most inspired life of anyone I ever knew, and
I came from him
—I wanted to be able to wrap my head and heart around how truly significant that made my existence.

I found a job as a live-in English-speaking nanny for a family in Milan, which was the ideal location for my pursuits—on Fridays after I finished nannying I could hop on a plane and be in London by dinner; on holidays, a train could rush me to Rome to visit my grandpa's relatives in three hours. From Milan, I could pursue the two men I wanted in my life more than anyone.

The events that took place during my year abroad changed my perception of relationships forever . . . but the biggest change happened right here at home, where I sit in my teenage bedroom as I type this story. When I lost the two men who made me feel beautiful and important, I gave up the world and returned to my family. For the first time, it would be a
woman
who would change the way I looked at myself and at relationships. When I moved back to small-town Pennsylvania, I started learning about love from my grandma.

Grandma's brand of love was different from the books I'd seen experts promoting on
Oprah,
and
way
different from the kind I'd read in
Cosmo
. Forget “Eighty-six ways to blow his mind tonight” or “If he's not calling you, then he's just not that into you.” I sat down over a period of months with Grandma to discuss her sixty-year relationship with my grandpa and learn what I'd been doing wrong when it came to understanding men—and myself.

Grandma's insights transformed my thinking about relationships forever. She taught me to quit chasing romance (you mean like all the way to Europe, Grandma?); to stop hanging my hat on contemporary self-help one-liners (because it's possible he
is
just that into you but not in a good place in his life to enter a relationship—be grateful that he was forthcoming and had the strength of character to not drag you into something slow and painful); and to start practicing kindness toward him and respect toward yourself when you finally meet someone who may be worthwhile. Forget the games or brow-beating, Grandma said; what women and men need from each other are respect and understanding.

My grandma became the unexpected but ideal relationship guru who finally led me to see exactly what real love looks like. Her idea was that in a relationship, a woman has one main responsibility: to love by radiating her unique, inherent beauty. That's it. But as simple as it sounds, and just when I thought I'd returned to my tiny hometown for safety and certainty, I took off on a huge adventure of the heart. Grandma's legacy to me would be a year-long journey together, in which she taught me about all the lessons in love and being a woman that I'd never,
never
been able to grasp before. It was from my grandma and her guided reflection on what it means to be female that I learned the lesson I'd been so recklessly seeking: in order to love any man, a woman has to know herself first.

Chapter 1
Know When to Say
I Love You

“W
HY DO YOU FLY TODAY
?”

I'm buckled into the left window seat of an Alitalia flight, spreading soft white cheese on a roll. I pause apologetically as if to tell the man,
I'm afraid my answer won't be pleasant
. “My grandfather,” I tell him. “He's dying.”

“Ah.” The man smiles politely. I wait for him to extend his compassion for my sorrow, or at least offer me his coffee stirrer, since the Italian stewardesses have disappeared down the aisle. Instead he runs his tongue down the tiny plastic straw, adjusts his glasses, and goes back to reading today's
La Repubblica
.

Mister, did you even hear what I just said?
If I weren't so accustomed to European insensitivity after five months living abroad, I might want to explode. In exactly what time zone did dismissiveness become acceptable? Decency must be hovering somewhere over the Atlantic before the UK, where I last saw Adam, because every time when I
tried
to bond to another individual (particularly a man) in Europe, I've been blown off as defenselessly as an eyelash from a fingertip. It's now the end of January, and there are more mushrooms on a slice of pizza than the number of times I've heard from Adam since I landed in Milan in June.

I spent my summer nannying on the Riviera and in the Alps at remote locations where most Italians have never even heard of the Internet, not to mention needing a digital IV hooked up to their arms like I'd grown so used to in my pursuit of connection (ha!) and career accolades. On the rare occasion I spotted a café with Wi-Fi, my heart sunk when the name “Adam Hunt ” was perpetually absent from my in-box. If he replied to my texts at all, it was to brag that he was “quite drunk! xx” at expensive wine tastings and spending his summer evenings at exclusive clubs in downtown London. I would receive his texts, then scan the gray, collapsing, water-damaged Italian holiday cottage where I'd been trapped for a month, these toddlers killing each other at my feet. Then I'd craft a stabbing reply like,
Again?! Wow, your poor English liver. At Riviera now, so amazing, rode in a Porsche last night—so fast!
Then I'd add an
xo,
one meager attempt to pull us both back to center, back to the affection we'd once both found unmatched comfort in. But I could see it was no use. The more Adam appeared to be forgetting me, the more I strived to prove how effortlessly I too was climbing the European social ladder . . . and the only thing that turned me off more than the way he was acting was the way I was acting. I hated begging for his attention. The xx's and xo's may as well have been invisible, mere formalities evaporating to zero meaning. We'd traveled quickly to becoming lovers and kept the relationship flying for almost a year, and now suddenly we were complete foreigners again. Geographical proximity wasn't bringing us closer—instead, we mysteriously repelled each other.

When I hadn't heard from Adam in three weeks while I was still at the seaside, I finally called him on Skype from a café on my Friday off from the
bambini
. I caught him just as he was leaving work:

“Oh my God, hi. Are you okay, chicken? Are you safe?”

“Yes,” I answered, with reserve. “Adam, I haven't heard from you in almost a month. I've been worried.”

“Ah, baby. I'm sorry, I should've told you.” He paused. “I've taken a job in Bahrain.”

I take a punch in the stomach. I want to double over and vomit.

“Are you there?”

Ah yew theh?
The sweet properness of his accent weakens me yet, and my voice comes out deflated. “I'm here.”

“Are you there, darling?”

“I'm here!” I snap. “Where is Bahrain?”

“In the Middle East, near Saudi Arabia.”

“You're moving to
Saudi Arabia
?”

“I'm moving
near
Saudi Arabia.” He is losing his patience. “I go on the twenty-fifth.”

“The twenty-fifth of September.” Certainly he didn't mean two weeks from now.

“No, August twenty-fifth. Week after next.”

“Good luck, Adam. I don't want to keep you.”

“Wait, chicken, you're okay?”

“Yes, I'm fine. I'll let you go.”

But I couldn't let him go. Everywhere I went, he was still there with me. I remember a hike one day in the Alps a few weeks after that conversation. I walked with the five children I was nannying for what felt like miles along a stream. I stayed behind and chuckled to myself at the grandma-style kerchiefs wrapped around their little toddler heads; how they skipped along in their knee-high woolen socks and hikers. When we decided as a group that we were good and hungry we found a flat spot to picnic, straight across the path from three thin grazing cows. “
Guardate le mucche
!” Alfonso cried, and with all their energy the kids took off to the wood fence to marvel at the cows. As I flew our picnic blanket open and spread it on the grass, it hit me:
Hey, would you look at that, I haven't thought of Adam since we started the hike two hours ago!
And then I wanted to kick myself because, of course, I'd just thought of him. That was the longest period that the concept of him agreed to leave me alone, but then he returned. For months after that he never left again.

W
HEN WE LAND
in Pittsburgh eight hours later, the fool in the seat next to me checks his watch. He leans far across my half of the armrest until I can taste the coffee on his breath. Have I heard what the captain said about the weather? “Snow,” I tell him. He says he's relieved to be here for business and not holiday, then folds up his paper. I look out the window to study how gray the Pennsylvania sky turns this time of year; how night intrudes on the afternoon, so unwelcome to fall so early; and how, in town, traffic has probably already turned the bright snow into gray sludge peppered with gravel.
Grandma will have to mourn in this,
I think, and wonder if it's more helpful when the weather tries to perk up loneliness with its shine or when it chooses to sympathize drearily with a sad mood. It may not matter. In either case I don't believe that my grandma will ever recover after Grandpa is gone.

After sixty years of marriage, he's her life. He's all she has going on. They travel together. When he needs a hearing aid, she gets one too. Every day she knows it's four o'clock when he says, “Hey Glo, feel like making me a martini?” I'm as pained for Grandma to lose him as I am for myself.

A moan escapes me as I reach under my seat for my single carry-on packed with only black clothes for my week's stay, and a one-ounce bottle of expensive balsamic vinegar from my boss to my family.
I might consider appearing as though I actually live in the world's fashion capital when my family sees me
. I smooth on a coat of lip gloss, and the “Unfasten seat belts” bell dings. The man next to me rises and exits without saying goodbye.

In the last two weeks the phone calls from my parents had grown so frequent and frantic that it became very clear they weren't just panicking. It was officially time to book a flight home: Grandpa was about to die. When I enter my grandma's front door into the living room and drop my bag down, I feel naked like in a dream where no one knows how to react to you. Apparently my arrival from Italy is the official signal to my aunts, caught laughing and drinking wine around the dining room table; to my dad and uncles, resembling modern Greek centaurs in their dress shirts and pajama pants and their Wi-Fi and BlackBerries buzzing through the house; to my cousins, lounging with magazines on the couch and playing poker in the kitchen with their hats turned backward: the last of us has just arrived, and from far away. Their vigil is nearing its final hours.

Grandma emerges from the scatter of family and clinches tightly around me. I lean down so she doesn't strain and I pat her back gently, the way a new mother hopes to ease a restless baby to sleep. I can't fathom how to console a woman who is but days away from losing her husband of six decades—not hearing from Adam for a few months all but destroyed me—so I just hold her. Her skin smells floral like Oil of Olay, and her hearing aid hums in my ear. When we separate, she braces my shoulders and smiles through her tears. Then she clears her throat and smooths herself over. “I'm very happy you've made it,” she says, as though she's addressing members of Parliament. “He was asking for you.”

“I'll go to him. Grandma,” I thumb my kiss off her cheek, “Are you doing okay?”

She nods hastily. “Yes,” she says, and sniffles.
I'm trying
. She doesn't notice when I reach for her hand to walk back to the hall, so I just follow her to the guest room where they've set up Grandpa's hospital bed, along the way studying her immaculate brown curls and her tiny frame. She's not showing any signs of dementia yet, although I examine her for a change in appearance the way I did when my friend Lynne in New York told me she was six weeks pregnant.

Grandma and Grandpa announced to the family two weeks ago, right before he took permanently to the bed, that two years ago Grandma had been diagnosed with early dementia. They decided last month, when the doctors determined that Grand-pa's lung cancer was terminal, that it was a good time to loop us all in. They had been sick together and fulfilled a solemn pact to keep the information strictly between them for as long as possible. To my grandparents, suffering is not a noble condition. The capacity to fulfill a promise to another person, on the other hand, is. Will I ever trust someone so unshakably?

My parents and aunts and uncles crowd the doorway as Grandma pioneers her way straight to Grandpa's side and waves me in next to her. “George?” she calls. “Krissy's here.”

Not a muscle moves.

“Huunn,” she sings. This is the first I've ever heard her call him anything other than George; suddenly she's lighthearted and congenial in a way I've never seen her. “Sit down, Kris.”

I sink carefully into the desk chair with wheels that sits at the rail of Grandpa's bed. They've propped an ottoman underneath the chair. It's upholstered with bright tapestry and regal bolts, like it was designed to sit at the foot of a queen's throne. I presume it's for Grandma, and I don't feel familiar enough with this situation yet to rest my feet there in comfort. I have to go through the initiation into this horrible setting that all the rest of the family knows as their new reality.

“Hun, there's a granddaughter standing here. She just arrived from Italy and wants to say hello.” She urges me. “Go ahead.”

I search for something normal to say. “Hi, Grandpa.” I can't force out anything else. As I scan his body, I observe that everything from his ribs down is tucked in tight between the sheets. I focus on Grandpa's skinny hand and run a single finger down his tendons, defined as the prongs of a fork.
My God, where has he disappeared to?
He's lost twenty pounds and gained thirty years since three weeks ago when we hugged goodbye at New Year's. The muscles in my throat strain open, and a tear races down my cheek and lands fat on my hand. I want to collapse and wail.

“We'll leave you two alone.” Grandma and the rest of the gang, watching from the doorway, disappear down the hall.

I scan Grandpa, his gaunt cheeks and olive skin washed out to a surrendering gray. I admire his stillness, his vulnerability. Here he is, yet again, even more tender than I'd ever perceived him before. Suddenly his eyes open, and widen, and he lets out a relieved sigh.
You're here
! he wants to say.

“Hi,” I coo softly, as though he's a waking baby. I scoot to the edge of the chair, and he smiles. “I'm here.” He sighs again, then smiles, then rests his head slowly back into the pillow. My throat, this pressure. I pull the St. Christopher medal that I always wear to travel from around my neck and loop it around the bar of his bed. Certainly this voyage he's on is much more demanding than mine just was.

Laughter explodes from the living room, punctuated by Grandma's girlish giggle. Our family has turned this bedside vigil into a cocktail-slumber party. I understand why. Grandpa wants us to take care of Grandma and help her carry on as uninterrupted as possible. The two of them have made all the arrangements; they've signed the wills and bought this house we're sitting in now, a one-story bungalow with a sun porch and emergency pull cords so that in case Grandma falls, she can call for help to the nursing home across the road, the one where I worked the nighttime switchboard all through high school.

With the business that my grandpa founded, his mark is impressed all around this small town. My grandmother will never be able to escape the thought of her husband after he's gone. He built a wing with a computer lab onto the Catholic high school from where the last of my cousins will graduate in a few months. Grandma will pass that building every day on her way downtown. Grandpa was usually her partner at Mass; I wonder how she'll bear the solemnity of church without him. Our factory sits proud in the middle of the industrial park, the
GASBARRE PRODUCTS, INC
. sign shining brightly at all hours, starring the masculine green logo that Grandpa designed. I can't even hear an English accent without pining for Adam—how will my grandma be able to continue without Grandpa after he's passed?

For four long days the family operates in shifts around the clock to sit with Grandpa. For his sake, I'm glad he wakes only every so often, because we'd be driving him mad with our hanging around by now—the man always valued his space. Early each morning, my mom and my aunts, my grandparents' three daughters-in-law, arrive after a good night's sleep fresh-faced and velour-suited, with huge breakfast casseroles and Perkins pancake takeout. They pour fizzy mimosas and brew hot coffee, and soon the aromas of bacon and syrup fill the air so strong that they travel back to the bedroom. “I'm hungry,” Grandpa says.