How to Love an American Man (7 page)

I nodded. “I'll catch on.”

“Here, take these.” He slid his sunglasses down his Gabriel Aubry nose and turned them around, placing them softly on my face.

“How nice are you,” I told him. “Thanks.”

Off we sailed into the center of the lake, which he explained was a bit of a nautical vortex because it's man-made and surrounded by woodland. He knew more about this lake in four years of experiencing it than I do after eighteen years growing up here, and with him manning the boat's helm, I saw the lake more exotically and completely differently. He transported me someplace else, the way the memory of my grandpa does when I stare up into a muscular, protective pine tree in the woods.

“It's sort of hot, right?” he said. I looked at him, surprised. “You want to go for a dip?”

Oh, he meant the weather. “Sure—do you?”

“Yeah.” He took off his soft gray T-shirt and handed it to me. I sort of hoped from under his sunglasses that he'd note my review of his body, as I stared at his chest for just a second too long. He didn't seem to catch on. “But we can only go in one at a time, so the other person can balance the boat when we have to get back in.”

“Oh,” I told him, trying not to scrunch my nose. What's the point, if we couldn't swim together? “Okay.” I stretched my neck over the side of the boat as he did so perfect a swan dive that the water made just one soft ripple that quickly diffused to nothing. He treaded quietly for a couple of minutes, panning his gaze reflectively along the coast of the beach as though he planned to paint it later. When he pushed his upper body back on board, the boat didn't even rock. He rubbed water out of his eyes and told me, “Your turn.”

“Okay.” I handed him his sunglasses and peeled off the flowered halter cover-up that I'd bought as my final purchase in Milan. I stood to dive gracefully as he did, but as my foot hit the deck, it slipped so that I fell flailing into the lake. When I came up, gasping for air, spewing water from every orifice and wiping the mess of hair and mascara from my face, I prayed he was laughing his head off. Instead he stared intently into the distance, pretending he hadn't seen a thing.

Why God?

I hurled my arms across the deck of the boat, estimating that a Styrofoam beer cooler would be steadier than this jalopy. As I hoisted myself up, I sensed a draft in a most unmentionable location of my body: the top of my bum has peeked out to greet Chris hello. How polite! How opportune! I could think only one thing: my grandmother would
die
if she saw this.

Meanwhile Chris continued to act obliviously, but the bulging veins in his arms revealed how hard he was attempting to balance the boat and keep it from capsizing. I yanked at the un-cooperative patches of material on my body, trying at the same time to swing one leg onto the deck. By the time I finally managed to get back on board, Chris said he was going to be late for a meeting. He lay on his stomach at the boat's bow, doing the butterfly stroke with his arms to lead us back to land. In a rush, he accompanied me back to my mom's car in his driveway, opening the door and waving to me as he closed it. I got it: we were no longer hugging goodbye, not to mention that we had completely demoted from the kiss he'd pressed on me just three nights ago.

Every time we progressed in connecting with each other, the palpable milestone inevitably would be followed by a humiliating setback . . . and I was getting tired of feeling so
silly
all the time. While I was growing accustomed to being flexible for this doctor, it was getting tougher to know him as a man. Why is he so attentive in some moments, and so distant in others?

What was stranger yet was my reaction to him. For the first time ever in Krissy Crush History, I didn't feel compelled to spill, “The problem is, I
like
you!” I did like him, but I needed to keep it to myself . . . at least until he opened up more, which didn't seem any more likely after that day, our fourth date, than it did on our disastrous second date. My friend Joy is a med student who swears that in matters of health, if an ailment grows more severe instead of better over time, it's usually a good sign to get help. I agree completely, also applying Joy's theory to matters of the heart.

“G
RANDMA
, I
FELT
like I was finally turning a corner in my dating life, like at last I was opening a grown-up chapter with men. But the door just keeps getting shut in my face.”

At Grandma's feet there's a metal platform with two little pedals, like the bottom half of a stationary bike. She slips her feet into the Velcro stirrups to exercise while we chat. “Men aren't always easy to understand.” She begins spinning the wheels, same as I felt I was doing with Chris. Now she's contesting the Mars and Venus thing—our cultural belief that men are content with dinner on the table, a hot wife on their arm, and sex. “The world demands a lot of them, and even though they don't let it show, they have some real needs.”

“Grandma,
I
have needs. I need a guy to laugh when I fall off his sailboat. I need someone to demonstrate his interest in me by kissing me. I don't want to look across the dinner table at someone and wonder if his nose was
really
always that perfect. I'd like somebody who's content with a basket of chicken fingers and a Heineken. You know?”

“Well, sure I know.” She slows her feet to catch her breath. “But if you're really concerned with finding somebody to love, then I'm telling you that you have to stop focusing on yourself.”

“Grandma!” I catch the increasing volume in my voice, in case any of her neighbors are in their yards. “A woman should put her
own needs aside
for a man she cares about?” I'm waiting on her answer.
What year is this?

She raises her eyebrows like it's a no-brainer. “If you love someone, that's what you do. It comes naturally.”

And that's it: after a month of awkward dating—can you even call that
dating
?—it's clear there's almost no way I could ever love Chris. “Okay. Grandma, I'm sorry for getting so fired up about this, but it
stuns
me! So what are some things men need that I should be bouncing off the walls to be?”

“A friend, Krissy. A man needs someone who supports his work. Someone who hugs him and means it when he walks in the door at night.” She stops pedaling and leans toward me. “You want to be with a really good man?”

I stare at her, thinking,
Girl, you're trippin'
.

“You have to have courage. And
patience
. Lots of patience.”

Courage and patience.
I'll give her that. Any girl who wants to date that doctor better be very cool with herself, and incredibly calm with him.

Grandma continues. “You have to get to a place in your own life where you're convinced you're strong enough to manage the challenge. Because you want to know a secret they'll never tell you?”

“Yes.”

“The successful ones are usually the last to wear their hearts on their sleeves.” She shakes her finger at me. “They're used to winning.”

“And,” it starts to dawn on me, “extra sensitive to taking a hit.” I'm starting to get it. The night we'd gone swimming as I packed our makeshift dinner, Chris had been on a stressful phone call in my garage. He punched the tennis ball that my dad hangs from a string so my mom knows where to park her car so hard that he sent the fuzzy yellow sphere flying across the room, knocking half of my dad's tool chest onto the ground. When he couldn't rehang it, he rushed me into the driveway. “We have to go, we're late.” He wanted to do anything he could to take my attention away from his mistake.

“You see? It's why I usually apologized first after every fight with your grandpa.”

“Even when you weren't wrong?”

“Sometimes.”

I moan and drop my head in my hands.

She gets it. “Krissy, you have to understand: strong men have a lot of pride. They won't let you see everything for a long time, until they really need to lean on you, and even then they need you to tell them that it's okay to be vulnerable.” She points at me again, a warning expression on her face. “But
you
have to be strong first.”

Maybe she would know. She spent six decades with my grandpa, who, I have to admit despite the perfection I always perceive he possessed, sounds like he had his moments of being a real handful. Grandma told me recently that he spent most of his twenties and thirties laying the groundwork for his business, traveling all over the country for weeks at a time—
before the age of cell phones
, or even pay phones—wining and dining with his cronies while she stayed home with their five kids. One story has Grandpa at a local bar during a brief visit home when one of his buddies asked him if he wanted to fly to Michigan to see an old colleague.

“Sure,” my grandpa said. “Call me tomorrow, let's get it in the calendar.”

“No,” his buddy said. “I mean tonight.”

“Tonight, pal? Nah, I don't think so.” Get ready for the reason he said he couldn't go: “I don't have any money on me.” (Nice Grandpa, forget the wife and five little faces around the dinner table waiting for you!)

“No problem, George,” his friend said. “My plane's sitting up at the airport. Come on, we'll be back by dawn.” And sure enough, off they flew to party for the night with a friend in Michigan. My grandma was sitting up in the living room when Grandpa arrived home the next morning, and even today she brags that she lasted all day giving him the silent treatment until bedtime that night. “All day I stayed fuming, and he knew it!” she laughs. “But we never went to bed angry.”

“Grandma, look at me. I've invested so much in my accomplishments and, geez, especially my own self-respect.” I try to imagine always going with Chris's flow. “Do you
honestly
think I could grow to be so caring?”

“What?”
she squawks. “Sure you can! Come on, Krissy, you're braver than that. Just because there's something unfamiliar beneath a man's surface isn't good enough reason to run away from him. You have to believe that it's okay to trust another person.”

I set down my ice cream dish on the glass end table and sit quietly for a minute. “Grandma.” The word comes out defeated, almost in a whisper. “It's too late. Someone new came along, told me he's crazy about me,” my eyes go wide, “
kissed me . . .
and he didn't leave room for any doubt.” What I'm trying to tell her is that I've been on my own in the world for so long . . . I just can't take another thing that's uncertain.

I
MET
T
UCKER
through my mom (go fig). She and her coworkers at a law office in town organized a “Bring Your Kid to Happy Hour” day the week after the Fourth of July. Because all their kids are finally twenty-one and a lot of the office was meeting me for the first time, it turned into a big old shindig at an über-posh establishment known as, what else, Dingers Duck Dock. “I'm so excited for you to meet Tucker,” Mom said. “Not to date him, good God, he's still in college. Just for a buddy. He's so fun. A real cutie too . . . but you're not dating him.”

I was fixing my lipstick in the sun-visor mirror. “Please, Mom, like I'd date a guy who's twenty-two.”

Tucker's mom had told him the same thing: “You have to meet Krissy, but don't even think about hitting on her.” But he sat across the table from me, so adorable, with his sweet eyes and broad shoulders and perpetual smile. We joked across the table all night and he bought me a beer at the bar, but when he asked me to go to karaoke, I had to draw the line.

“You should go!” my mom said, thrilled I was such a hit among her work crowd.

“Mom, he's twenty-two and just a smidge too confident. It's time to call it a night.”

The next week he called me. “My buddies and I are headed to the Ski Lodge near the lake by your house. Want to meet up?”

By this time I hadn't heard from the doc in a couple weeks and was up for letting loose. I hiked up my cleavage and let my curls go wild like I hadn't done since my Adam Hunt days. When I walked into the pub, Tucker approached me nervously and gave me a hug. “Everybody, this is Krissy,” he said, wiping his palms on his jeans and ushering me into a group of cute guys.

“Oh,
you're
the one he can't stop talking about!” one yelled. “Says your mom's hot too.” I put my hands on my hips and let mock shock take over my face, loving the frankness of it all.

That night over Jagerbombs, Tucker said, “When I met you last week, I told my mom you were the most gorgeous woman I'd ever seen.”

He was laying it on thick but I was so hungry for affection I didn't care. That night I took him home, where I set him up in the guest room but spent most of the night with him. He embraced like a man and kissed like a man, and I warmed instantly to his touch. For our first date he borrowed his cousin's shiny pickup truck to take me to another one of our moms' work picnics. We created a buzz among the moms' work crowd, who pinned us as an unexpected but charming item. He was so familiar and easy to know that we spent four days together in a row. I appreciated that underneath his boyish shell lay an open, caring young man whose willingness to voice his needs—one of which seemed to be me—made me feel strong and adored again.

“S
O YOU THINK
there's some serious possibility with this new guy.” Grandma hasn't even asked his name.

“Well, I think so. I mean it's only been a few weeks, but once he finishes school—”

“You mean he's still in school?”

“Uh,” that was the other thing I was meaning to tell her, “yes. Last year of college.”

“And he wants to make serious plans.”

I pause a second, not knowing the right answer. “Yes.”