How to Love an American Man (11 page)

Can I feel
certain
he even remembers which airport he's going to?

But his logistics aren't all I'm concerned about . . . because there's also Chris's wellness. I want to know he'll be comfortable on the plane, that he'll have a few days' rest before he has to start operating, that the people there will be kind and helpful. I get that this is only a paycheck for me, that to him I'm probably just someone whose skills he needs right now . . . but if I don't care about how he fares out in the world, who will?

The next day back in Pennsylvania, I smoosh the button on the alarm and sleep in, snuggling in bliss for the first day in weeks that's not full of bustling phone calls and appointments. I pull Chris's sweater in closer from the pillow next to me and hold the soft cashmere to my face. I don't know why I thought sleeping with it like a teddy bear was any less weird than just
wearing
it . . . but I'm disappointed that already his scent is fading.

Mom and Dad are working, the dogs snooze without care, and the sun peers in and casts light across the room. With a lazy cup of coffee, I sit down to tackle some follow-up notes, paying Chris's cell phone bill and finalizing the ad we're running in the local paper so his patients know he won't be back until just before Thanksgiving. Then I call Grandma. “You up for some company?”

She says that sounds nice.

I clean myself up and head into town. It's been since just after Grandpa's birthday that we last sat down together, which guarantees she'll be full of a month's worth of stories. I stop to grab chicken and french-fry salads—a hometown legend—at my favorite restaurant. The smell of the hot food in plastic containers pushes out the last of the smell of Chris, his sweater sitting in the backseat to go to the cleaners. I crack the window.

When I pull into Grandma's driveway her garage door is open with the car running inside. She stands next to it fumbling with a piece of paper and an envelope. The focus it takes her to complete this one small task alarms me somewhat, but more, I can't help but want to help. She jumps when I say, “Grandma, are you okay? Why is your car running?”

“Oh! Goodness, Kris. I didn't even hear you arrive.” I wonder if her hearing aid's off, but when I embrace her, it sings high in my ear. It's impossible that she didn't hear my arrival . . . the real problem appears to be that her ability to multitask is fading. “Hey, what you got there?”

“I brought us chicken salads from Luigi's. Grandma, your car. Did you mean to leave it running?”

She turns slowly. “No,” she says, dazed, “I don't think so.”

“I'll jump in and turn it off.” I set down the bag of salads. When I reach the driver's side door, it's locked. For her sake I stay calm, but this is very odd. “Grandma, it's locked. It's locked, and it's running with the keys in the ignition.”

“Oh dear,” she says, still puzzled. Instantly, I worry about what would've happened if I hadn't shown up and she'd have gone in the house and closed the garage door. “Grandma,” I say, conscious about holding my voice steady, “do you have a spare set of keys?”

“Well, oh goodness, when I think about it, I want to say your dad has them. Or maybe your Uncle Phil . . .”

I take off into the house, opening Grandpa's desk drawers in the office that separates the garage from the kitchen. In the middle drawer there's a remote key. I run to the garage doorway and point it at Grandma's car. It clicks. Grandma spins as I run past her to the driver's side of the car and turn off the ignition.
Jesus
, I want to say to her.
Do you do this all the time?
“Grandma, has this happened before?”

“Maybe a couple times,” she says. “You didn't get me ranch, did you? I'm still having a terrible time with dairy.”

Are you kidding me?
I try to keep my patience with her, wondering why she's thinking about salad dressing when she's just put her life in serious danger. I almost want to blame her, to shout at her, but I have to consider that it's her dementia at work. “No,” I tell her, “I got you sweet and sour. Isn't that what you always order?” We travel into the house together, Grandpa's pulley on the screen door falling with our entrance. “Grandma, did you want to close the garage door?”

“Oh yes, thanks. It's the left button—or is it the right one? No, I could swear it's the left . . .” until finally she decides that she won't know unless she can see the garage door controls herself. “It was the left, I can never keep that straight. Have a seat at the table, you want a drink?”

My water order turns into a complicated task. No, it's fine without ice; yes, a small glass is fine. I'm happy to get it myself, I insist, but no, no, she says she's got it, I should sit and relax.

“So, how was New York?”

I need to go along with her casualness and have my dad and uncles deal with this memory thing later. I'm learning that I can try to help with Grandma's emotional issues, but her physical health—her memory—is a challenge that's totally beyond me. “It was busy, Grandma. He drives me crazy.”

She shrugs and asks, “Did you get to see any friends?”

“No, there wasn't time.”

“Well, you were there for work, I suppose.” She picks at the fries on her salad with her fingers, which seems out of character. I pass her a napkin. “You glad you can focus on your work again?”

“Yes, very glad. I had to ask three different editors for deadline extensions. I never do that.” I stop slicing my chicken to look square at Grandma. “You know what I want to tell him, Grandma?”

“Hm?” She's fiddling with the melting shredded cheese.

“ ‘Get a wife.' ”

Nothing I say seems to cheer her up today; she is clearly and completely distracted. “Grandma,” I continue at my salad, “what's new with you?”

“Well . . .” She sets down her fork and sighs. “I might as well come out with it: I got rid of Grandpa's shirts.”

Suddenly my salad is too much; I'm completely nauseated. “Wow.” Grandpa's shirts, his old work shirts? Why would she do that so soon? My nana has buried three husbands, and for years afterward she would wear their shirts around the house just to keep the thought of them alive . . . and, if she's lucky, their smell. Nana has always said that smelling a man's clothes as soon as he's gone is the most heartbreaking feeling in the world, but that after some time has passed it's often the only thing that brings any comfort. It's the only sign of them that's really left. She said that you can leave a man's closet door closed for a decade and when you finally open it back up, it's like nuzzling your nose in his neck. “What made you do that?” I ask Grandma.
And so soon.
It's all I can do to hold down my anger.

She's angry too. For the first time in the half hour that I've been with her, she's making sense and her thoughts flow fluidly. She's mad at him, she says. She's mad at him for leaving her with so much to take care of on her own. For sixty years she tended to his every need while he worked, even though he was the much better cook and even though at moments she felt she was running their whole lives by herself. She says one time she was running my dad to electric drum practice (to which I can only interject, “Wait, my dad played the
electric drums
?”), and the other four kids were carrying on in the living room, and for some reason they always had parakeets for pets, which Grandma thinks was something they picked up from the Italians, but anyway the bird, his name was Johnny, somehow he got loose from his cage just as she was heading out the door with Dad and his electric drum kit, and one of my uncles decided to get smart and slam the sliding glass door behind Dad to scare him and
wham!
, Johnny the bird got squashed in the door and fell dead to the ground, leaving five little kids in hysterics and one of them late for drum practice to boot.

(The story is horrifying, but I am trying so hard not to laugh.)

Grandpa was never home, Grandma says, and yet he was always needing her. She'd spend entire days picking up after the kids and then he'd get home from work and take off his dirty shirt to put a clean one on for dinner. She says she'd track behind him picking up the first one—“He'd actually drop it on the floor!”—that smelled like a day's work and was often smudged with grease from the machines he built or stuffed in the pockets with napkins covered in mechanical sketches. How did he think things always just landed back in his closet clean? “That reminds me,” she said. “The tax receipt for my donation today is in my purse.”

Oh, and then the dinners, she continues, don't even get her started. (I'm not.) How many nights did she host colleagues and customers or get dressed up at conferences and carry on small talk with executives and their wives, all for Grandpa and his business? “And when I'd want to have friends over, he'd cringe, and I'd tell him, ‘George, all the meetings and dinners I go to for you, you can put up with one night with my friends.' ”

Grandma says she spent her whole life looking up to him, looking out for him, looking after him . . . and what does he do? He leaves her by herself. “Today I looked up at the ceiling and I told him,” she points up, “ ‘This is all your fault, you know! If you're looking down on me, then you can see what you did when you left me!' ”

I take a deep breath and think about my response carefully. “Grandma,” I start, “when Grandpa was dying, do you remember how unhappy he was? How much pain he was in?”

She sits quiet.

“It made you sad too, remember? And you told him to go. You told him you wanted him to go, because you knew that was the best thing for him. You have to remember that. You loved him that much that for him to have peace, you'd have given up anything. Even him.” She's crying now. “He wasn't happy anymore, you knew that. Remember how pissed off and frustrated he was after he got sick? He was too tired to work. He'd sleep in all morning and then he'd finally wake up before noon, and just getting dressed made him tired again. He spent the whole day wanting to be able to do something constructive. His mind just wouldn't shut off, do you remember him saying that? He kept doing this,” I imitate the motion Grandpa made of a wheel turning fast in his head, “and saying, ‘I can't make it stop!' It was driving him crazy.”

She nods slowly, concentrating on her hands, which are folded in her lap.

“Grandma,” I lean in, “it's
normal
for you to feel angry. You did so much for him. And you supported him
absolutely unconditionally
, like I have never seen any other woman do for any man, ever.” She continues to sit silently. “You can be proud of that.”

“I think I was in denial in those final days.”

“You probably were.”

“I just couldn't imagine that after sixty years, he was about to disappear.”

“It was impossible to comprehend, Grandma. I felt the same way.” I talk to Grandma the same way I coach a friend through a breakup:
These feelings are real because all that love happened. You have to honor your grief process after losing that relationship.
When I wrote the eulogy for Grandpa's funeral, I remember referring to my grandma's devotion to him as “pure” and saying that she was a holy woman. She is. She heard a calling to spend her life serving, and nobly, she responded. It shouldn't surprise anyone that she feels lost and lonely without him. “Grandma, tell me something.”

She pulls a tissue out of the cuff of her sweater and looks at me with puffy eyes. “Yes?”

“Grandpa's business didn't actually take off until he was forty-seven, right?”

“Yes.”

“Am I remembering correctly that before that, the business in St. Louis went under?”

“Yes, it did. Marie and Phil were in college, and your dad and Uncle Paul were about fifteen and seventeen, and Junior was nearing ten, and we put them in the U-Haul with all of our belongings—well, actually, not all of our belongings, we had to throw a lot out because there just wasn't enough room.”

“Dad lost all his baseball cards, right?”

“Yes, years worth of baseball cards he'd collected, they were all gone. He was devastated, but,” she shrugs, opening up her hands, “that's the way it was. We all had to give something up.”

“And how was Grandpa? How did he act in that period?” Grandpa was notoriously proud—how did he deal with his failure?

“He was very quiet in that time. I remember after we packed up the boys in the U-Haul, I climbed in the front seat next to him and said, ‘Well, where we going?' And he looked at me, then looked down and said, ‘I don't know.' ”

“Oh,
Grandma
.” I put my head in my hands. That defeat would've
destroyed
my grandpa.

“We lost everything, we had nowhere to go. The day I got married I'd told my mother that I would never come back to her. I had no siblings, and we felt we definitely couldn't go to Grandpa's family.” She reflects out loud. “Most of them had been waiting for years for him to fail.”

Did she try to comfort him? Did she stay out of his way? “So when all that was happening, how did you relate to Grandpa?”

“I did what I had to do. That's all there was to it. The only thing we could do was start the car and pull out.”

“No looking back.”

She shakes her head. “Nope.”

When they got on the road, they decided to drive to Grand-pa's siblings in Rochester, New York, after all. They had no other options. They stayed there a few months, enough for Grandpa to reestablish his contacts in Pennsylvania and return here.

“Then when your dad and uncles finished school and got involved, well, you know the story. Everything turned around for the better.” Reminiscing has turned Grandma's mood around for the better too, and now she's laughing. “Then their only worry was that I didn't get involved in the business! But,” she adds, “sometimes they did need me to come in and answer the phones.” When Grandpa first launched the company with his sons, they worked out of the garage of a gas station because it was the only floor space they could afford. Dad and his brothers were all hands on deck, taking turns as the receptionist, concepting for machines, and sometimes going outside and pumping gas for customers. Everybody had to pitch in.