How to Love an American Man (3 page)

I look up to my dad for guidance. “Yesterday the nurses said nothing solid from now on, right?”

“Yeah,” he whispers. “Poor fella.” My dad has the heart of a puppy. He puts his hand over Grandpa's. “They said his swallowing reflex is going. Oh God, he's hungry, and he can't eat.” Dad wipes his own eyes with a handkerchief, and Grandpa's eyes now pour a constant steam of tears from the creases, which Grandma's “Stages of Death” booklet says is an indicator that the patient's passing is imminent within hours or two days at most. “Maybe just some fresh ginger ale.”

“I'll go.” I look at Grandpa. “Grandpa.”

“Yeah?”

“How 'bout some ginger ale, does that sound good?”

“Mm-hmm,” he mumbles. “Sounds good.”

“Okay, you stay here with my dad and I'll be right back.”

“You here, Billy?” Grandpa says. (The nurses have explained that he's losing his vision, but he's growing hypersensitive to light.)

“Yeah, Dad, I'm here,” my father says, nearing Grandpa. “Krissy's gonna get you a drink, okay?”

“Yeah,” Grandpa says, although the word is barely distinguishable. “Okay.” As I walk down the hall I hear him say, “Billy?”

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Give me a hug.”

Grandma is back to her old flustered self when she follows me into the bedroom. “George?” she says. “I'll be back shortly, I just have one more hand to play with the boys.”

My gob-smacked gaze meets my father's. Shocked, we both start laughing. Her husband is hours away from his death and she's
playing poker
? Is this what sixty years of marriage do to a woman?

Later that night, after Grandma washes her face and combs her hair, she announces that she'd like a glass of warm milk before bed. “Who is she, the friggin' queen of Sheba?” my mom asks. “Her hands and legs don't work now?” But obedient as a saint, Mom knocks on her mother-in-law's door and passes her a full glass. When Grandma checks to make sure it's lactose-free and latches her door for the night, Mom says, “You know, sometimes I don't know if she needs a hug, noogies, or a smack upside the head.” Then she goes in to hold her father-in-law's hand.

Through the nights after Grandma has gone to bed, the rest of us take our posts. Whoever's seated next to Grandpa at any given moment painfully observes that his breaths are growing more spread out and agitated. His gasps are hollow and cavernous, as though the River Styx is flooding his chest. During the hours when we most crave sleep, he is at his most listless. He shocks us with his new contempt for the nighttime, and frail as he his, it takes my dad, my uncle, and me to stop him from standing up and walking out of the room. When we finally get him settled down and tucked back in, we are too drained to cry . . . even though seeing this man, the hero of our family, in such a troubled state is enough to rip our weeping hearts open.

Three nights pass. With the arrival of first morning light there is a detectable shift in spirit, a raw dichotomy of hope and horror that today, he could go. The smallest crack of light between the blinds delivers Grandpa's cherubic troop of hospice nurses. As they scoot their snowy shoes off on the linoleum foyer floor and drift in a hushed pack to the guest room, there's a stir among us tired watchdogs. The coffeepot starts, the face-washing sink runs, and our vigil reconvenes. We relieve each other effortlessly, in a seamless cycle of sitting, feeding, eating, and waiting. Comforting this beloved dying man is less a chore than it is a pleasure and an honor.

Monday night I volunteer to sit up at Grandpa's side. In an armchair in the corner, I doze between sleeping and waking, the same way he floats between earth and the supernatural. “I have to die today,” he says, plain as day, and I jolt awake. I stand to hover over him, stroking the smooth top of his head. He has to die today. For now, we are the only two who share this news. It makes me want to crawl in the bed with him and bawl. By the glow of the stained-glass night-light, I memorize his features—the mole on his eyelid, the pores across his nose, the precise Cupid's bow curving across his top lip. When he stirs, I whisper to him.

“Grandpa.”

“Wha . . .?” He is too exhausted to pronounce the
t
at the end of the word.

“I have to tell you something. Lay down first though, okay? Come on, there we go. Good job.” I speak to him with steady encouragement. “There. Okay, listen.”

“Okay.”

I put my lips close to his ear. “I love you, Grandpa.”

He opens his eyes. “I love you too.”

My throat tightens. “I know.”

“Boy, do I love you.”

His eyes close again. I rest my head on the pillow next to him so his cheek hovers so soft against mine, and I can actually sense from him that it's hurting him to put me through this pain. I look up at the colored shadows on the ceiling as endless tears stream past my cheeks, over my jaw, around the back of my neck. Nothing in my life, no struggle or victory or heartbreak, could hold as much significance as this single perfect moment. The person I treasure most in the world loves me back. I'll never have to accept anything less from a man again.

When morning arrives, Father Ed, our parish priest, follows the nurses into Grandpa's room and they call us all in for a prayer. In our sweatsuits and our resolve to see this through to the finish, we gather around the bed smelling like breakfast burritos and dirty hair. The nurses have washed Grandpa down so he's fragrant as an angel, warm soap and aloe and clean linens on the bed. Grandma and Ruth, the head nurse who's also an old friend of our family, take seats at Grandpa's side and when we pray the Our Father in unison, Grandpa finds the strength to take both their hands and kiss their palms. After Father Ed's blessing the nurses exit the room, gripping each of our hands and looking us steady in the eyes. Everyone understands now that he'll pass today. We have only a few hours with Grandpa left.

There is no more poker. There is not much laughing or commotion, only the coming and going of my cousins as they make trips to the convenience store for a break. Grandma finally seems to understand the inevitability of these minutes, and she has committed not to leave Grandpa's side. She asks for music. I carry in the Bose stereo and pop in the only CD they own. It's a live performance of a jazz band they'd taken a bus to see last year, before they knew Grandpa was sick. “Find something he'll recognize, Kris,” Grandma says, and we skip to a song that reminds me of Sinatra, with swooning violins and upbeat brass:

Grandma stands bracing herself over the bar of the bed and staring over Grandpa, and in a fresh alertness he stares back up at her. In the middle of the song when the orchestra swells to crescendo, Grandpa says, “Kiss me, Gloria.” Grandma leans down and they kiss long and tender on the mouth. They are both crying. When Grandma finally pulls away, Grandpa pleads, “Do that again,” and she does. It occurs to me that I have never seen my grandparents kiss before.

When the song ends I play it again. Grandma sits at the edge of her seat stroking her thumb lightly over Grandpa's hand, and I've never seen her so composed. “Peace, George,” she says, and tears roll down the corners of Grandpa's eyes as he sleeps.

A
FTER DINNER
we all cheer when Ruth peeks her head back in the door. She smiles and goes to the bedroom to find Grandma at Grandpa's side. “It'll just be you and me with him for a little while, okay, Gloria? Whaddya say we give the troops a break?”

“Okay then.”

Ruth winks and gently asks us to leave them for a little while. My mom had heard that the dying often won't pass in front of their loved ones, and she leans into me. “I bet you Ruth knows: it's time.”

I nod slowly. Maybe it is.

After half an hour of silence from the back room, Ruth calls in my dad and his siblings. Their stampede is followed shortly by a loud gasp, and my mom and aunts and cousins and I all look around. Ruth enters the kitchen with her lips to her hands, which are folded in a steeple. Her eyes are fixed on the floor. “I think he's gone.”

My cousins and brother and all of our moms exchange expressionless glances again, and slowly we rise out of our chairs. In the back room my dad and his siblings and my grandma are sobbing silently. When my dad's head finds my mom's shoulder, he breaks down. She holds him. “It's better this way, honey,” she says, but her face is red and wet and she's trying to keep from hyperventilating. My aunts all embrace their husbands, and it occurs to me that not only have I never seen my uncles cry before, I have never seen them hug their wives. In this moment I understand that relationships aren't just a blessing, they're a necessity. The trials of the individual are never enough reason not to love.

We each take turns kissing Grandpa's face. He still smells like soap, and he's warm. We move into places around the bed when Father Ed arrives again to pray over his body. Grandma remains at his side, in a trance. After we make the sign of the cross, she finally breaks down, saying, “I love you so, George.”

Wasn't ours a lovely love affair
.

I hope I'll be a good wife at someone's side one day, strong and loving and calm. I imagine sitting at Adam Hunt's side, smoothing the hair on his freckled arm, giving him sips of ginger ale through a straw, kissing his mouth one last time.

I can imagine all of it . . . except the kiss. It's been seven months since I've seen him, and no matter how hard I try, I can't quite remember his face.

Chapter 2
Learn to Listen

“W
ELL
, I'
M SURPRISED
you took this way.”

Grandma and I are heading toward the doctor's office, and I've taken Brown Street instead of Arminta. When I was in high school I loved driving this street to work at the nursing home every day. It's curvy and requires attention to cars coming from the other direction, but I loved the challenge of maneuvering it patiently. And—full disclosure—it leads to the spot where my first love and I used to go parking: indeed, this road is full of thrills. I respond to Grandma treading lightly and with patience. “You have to remember, Grandma, I haven't lived around here for ten years. I don't know these streets like I used to. This will take us to the same place, right?”

“I suppose,” she pauses, then adds this: “Grandpa used to take this way just to spite me.” With her tone I'm beginning to think it's no wonder! Not every woman her age has a grown granddaughter who can drop her responsibilities for a whole afternoon to accompany her grandma to the doctor's, who cares what route she takes!

Grandma wants to go home before we head to lunch, although she can't really tell me why. I'm getting used to these stalling tactics—the more time she keeps you doing things for her, the less time she has to spend alone. Since Grandpa died four months ago, loneliness has become her worst enemy.

During my last four months in Italy it had become mine too. Grandpa's last days and his funeral composed a week-long family affair with a bond that I had completely forgotten since I left home a decade ago. When I was sitting around Grandma's dining room table for dinner, I felt
part of a group
again. For years my grandpa's colleagues have joked that it's hard to distinguish our “family” from our “family business,” with wine and food and laughter and business talk characterizing both our company board meetings and the weekend family get-togethers that I knew constantly when I was growing up. Being away from these people for so long, then returning to witness our greatest tragedy together, allowed me to view the family I come from as an outsider looking in. How unique is this family, who at moments disagree about business but almost always agree on what's best for the family and how Grandpa would want us to handle things. I felt that for the last decade I'd been looking into a mirror with a big chunk taken out of the glass, and suddenly my family had moved in to help me put the missing piece back in place. With them behind me, I saw myself as whole.

It was the first week of February when I landed back in Italy after Grandpa's funeral. Every moment that I wasn't tutoring English for the family I was living with, I was in my room, quietly reading or writing in my journal. In the mornings the kids' mother, Isabella, would knock on my door and ask me whether I wanted to join her at the gym or take the train with her to Rome to meet a diplomat. (Isabella's husband manufactured parts for Italian sports cars and was known as one of the most prominent men in Italy. They had to be among the most generous families in the country too.) Usually I formulated some excuse related to the hope that I was
so close!
to finally seeing some success in my fledgling freelance writing career, convincing Isabella that there was some editor in America tapping her foot, waiting for me to hand in an assignment on the best girlfriend-getaway biking routes in Italy.

In tight Armani jeans and a blouse with poet sleeves, Isabella would smile, nod patiently, and say quietly, “Okay. I understand very well.”

She did, but I wished she could explain my self-inflicted solitude to me, because the truth was, I didn't understand it at all. Through the week, I would sit with the blinds shut in my room and shower only at the very last minute before my shift to teach the kids. Finally, when the weekends arrived, I jumped on the metro across town to see Celeste, my best friend from college who, after her own painful breakup, had moved to Milan with me on a last-minute whim. With her fine blond hair and sparkling blue eyes, Celeste was faring swimmingly in the land of Latin love, dating a sexy opera conductor named Giuseppe and even signing her nanny contract for an extra six months. But I couldn't imagine spending another season away from home. I wanted my family.

One afternoon my mom and I were on the phone and she said she'd begun counting down the hours until I arrived back in the States. “Mom,” I told her, “I've been giving a lot of thought to what I'm going to do when I come back.”

“Well,” she said patiently, “what have you come up with?” If you prefer clichés, my mom sort of grew up on the other side of the tracks from my dad, even though they lived just blocks apart in town on Pollock Hill. The Hill's where our three Catholic churches form a topographical triangle, and in those days a family's status and involvement in the community could be discreetly determined by which parish they belonged to. My dad and his four siblings were raised around the corner from St. Catherine's cathedral; Mom and her four siblings sang in the rear choir loft at St. Mike's. Mom says this was always a relief because it kept the people in church from noticing that she wore the same outfit week after week.

Mom started working from the time she was twelve to try to stay in style among her classmates at the public school, and she sometimes talks about the moment in junior high after she and her dad got in a brutal fight and she stared at her own face in the mirror and said, “You're better than this.” Her own mother, whom my brother and I call Nana, insists Mom had a fabulous life growing up on the Hill, but Mom quietly retorts, saying that my dad rescued her from poverty and made it possible for her to make a career as the wife and mom she dreamed of being. Throughout my own upbringing my friends loved and counted on my mom—both to present elaborate finger Jell-O at class parties and to make us all feel loved and safe under her roof. Mom strikes an affirming balance between her unparalleled mother-bear sensitivity and her unmatched sense of humor—always speedy, usually raunchy—that's a sign of her being raised with brothers and her resilience to rise above a pinched childhood.

So there was no need for me to hold back when I tell Mom, “I need a few months back home.”

“Home, home? Like, living with Dad and me?”

“Yes.”

“I think that would be okay.” She cleared her throat, which I translated to be the containment of a cheer.

“I just need time with everybody,” I said, now breaking down and crying like a little kid. Tears had been creeping up on me out of nowhere like this for the last few months in the strangest moments—when I was driving past sunflower fields, in the village square while I sat watching a lump of sugar sink through the foam in a cappuccino, and especially anytime I sat down to write in my journal in the lone hollows of my nanny's quarters. Ever since January twenty-ninth when Grandpa died, there were pages smudged full of watery blue ink with paper that had turned hard and faded with my tears. “It's just weird to try to absorb that Grandpa's gone,” I told my mom. “I feel like I have to see it for myself. You know?”

“Yeah, I do,” she said. “We've had a chance to digest the reality of it, but I wonder sometimes with you being so far away if it's really sunk in for you yet.”

“No, I don't think it's sunk in yet. And every time I call Grandma, she just sounds
so sad
—the grief gets worse instead of better.”

“Tell me about it.”

“The least I could do is try to pitch in and help you all get into a rhythm of taking care of her.” There was a second of silence, and then I realized what I was saying: “Mom, we promised Grandpa.”

“Honey, she's my mother-in-law and I love her, you know that,” my mom says, “but without him, she's becoming a handful.”

I blew my nose in the phone. “Sorry, Mom,” I sniffled. “You mean with the dementia?”

“Not so much that as just needing a lot of attention.”

I pause. “Should I think about . . .
moving in
with her?”

“Oh God! It's a nice idea but honestly, honey, nobody would expect you to give up your life to do that.”

“But I could.”

“Krissy, it's generous. But your dad will have a heart attack if you're not either writing for ten hours a day or looking for work. I mean, okay, I'm exaggerating . . . a little. And anyway, no one under the age of sixty-five is allowed to live in her development. The most you could even stay over there would be four nights.” Mom scoffs, “And she ain't leaving the place, believe me. Grandpa
set her up
there. They take the old ladies on shopping trips, on buses to see plays in Pittsburgh, they have catered neighborhood dinners every week, and I tell you, that community center is
ritzy
. Except for missing Grandpa, your grandmother has it made. Just come home and spend some time with her. I know everybody will be happy to have you here. Especially Dad and I.”

T
WO MONTHS LATER
I'm up to my elbows helping with Grandma—no, literally. I'm holding her arm from the doctor's office to my dad's car, which I'm driving during what psychologists are calling us Boomerang kids' “temporary incubation period” at home.

“You said you wanted to run back to your house for an umbrella, Grandma?” The June sun shines blissfully through the windshield. “Then do you want to get takeout, or eat in the restaurant?”

“We'll eat it there.” I can hear her thinking:
It'll keep me out for a bit.

I don't mention that I'm on a story deadline or that I have a dentist's appointment in two hours. She needs help and company, and for now, I'm the only one in the family who's able to offer both on a nearly full-time schedule. I'm silently growing worried that my writing is falling behind, and I'm getting the same vibe from my dad, who used to send me inspirational quotes in Italy, à la my Grandpa:
You can do anything you want to do
and
Writing is your passion. Make it work.
If only I had time
to
work.

“Oh!” Grandma says as we come up on the pharmacy in the row of shops downtown. “Stop here! I have a question for the pharmacist.”

As the bell jingles to announce our entrance, the gentlemen behind the counter look up, then disperse. Suddenly I'm certain that every medical professional within an hour radius wants to duck and cover when they see my grandma enter their doors.

“More acid reflux, Gloria?” the stocky pharmacist grumbles.

“The doctor said it's a side effect of the antidepressants, but it's
really
upsetting my digestion.”

“You're out of refills on the antacid.”

“Well, see, that's just what I was coming to ask you about . . .” Her voice trails off and the pharmacist glazes over, and when I try to translate her stutters and mumbles to him, she cuts me off. I leave to go browse the mouthwash aisle.

Twenty minutes later we are in the car, no antacid, no patience, no lunch. “You know what, Grandma? I think we're gonna be okay without that umbrella. What do you say we go straight to Ruby Tuesday's, I'm starving.”

She pauses, pissed off. “That'll be fine.”

Grandma's head spins when the hostess asks her where we'd like to be seated. She looks left, right, left, right, until finally I say, “We'd love a window seat, if you've got one.”

“And somewhere close to the salad bar, just keep me away from that cheese.”

“And close to the salad bar, please.” I smile in peacekeeping fashion, trying to play down Grandma's high maintenance. My God, just how did my grandpa do it for sixty years, and
why
? She's a handful, she's ungrateful, she can't make a decision, and for the woman who used to be the waspiest, most rigid person I know, her new favorite topic of discussion is her gastrointestinal discomfort. I'm realizing that in all the years I've known her, in all the late nights over rigatoni and wine, it was my grandpa who did all the talking. It should have occurred to me before, as he was always the more gregarious and open of the two.

Grandma burps and slams her hand on the table in frustration before excusing herself and covering her mouth with her napkin. “This
belching
!” she says. It's the first time I've ever seen her practice less than perfect manners.

“You know, Grandma, have you considered that the problems you're having with your esophagus could be due to the simple fact that you're talking more now than you ever have before?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, Grandpa was the one really known for all the storytelling and gabbing. And around the house you two knew the other was there, but you didn't actually
talk
a whole lot, like a lot of longtime married people. So now, not only does it just so happen that you're talking more, but you're finding it
necessary
to talk to work through the sadness and longing you're feeling for him right now. When you think about it, you've never talked this much in your life!”

She looks up dumbstruck from her broccoli soup, which she decided to take a chance on. “You know, I've never thought of it that way before.”

Grandma can't be left alone. When she tells me this, she doesn't mean it in a high-drama, I'm-not-sure-what-I'll-do-to-myself kind of way; it's just that every day the minutes crawl by and she's so lonely she cries. Eating by herself is the worst, she says, and I think of the first time I challenged myself to have dinner at a restaurant alone, in the summer during college. It was at the Olive Garden, and I waitressed there, so I knew my waiter but figured it still counted. There was no one actually seated across the table from me, and I conquered it. When I worked in New York it was a luxury to grab a salad or a coffee alone and read a book during lunch. As long as I had something to occupy me, being alone didn't make me feel uncomfortable or vulnerable. Usually I actually liked it. But for Grandma and people her age, meals are for sharing. Eating dinner without anyone to watch the news with feels like a cruel punishment.