How to Love an American Man (4 page)

“You think maybe that's why I'm still single, Grandma?”

She looks up from her salad. “What's that?”

“Could it be that people like me are more okay with being alone than people in your generation, because we have more to distract us from actually feeling lonely?”

“I imagine that's some part of it. But how can you expect to meet anybody if you've got those things in your ears all the time. You wear that thing at the gym? Oh, what's it called—that little thing that plays music?”

“What, my iPod?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Yes, that's why I got it.”

“Well, there you go. If somebody wants to say hello to you, he's gotta pantomime. Feels silly talking and not knowing if the other person is listening or not.”

I remember walking down the street in Cleveland, where I stayed the year after I graduated from college. My apartment was in Little Italy and a little old man tipped his hat to me in the street. I gasped and smiled to tell him thank-you. Then I stopped in front of him and said, “You know what, sir? I wish every girl my age knew what it felt like to have a man tip his hat to her.”

He winked, placing his hat back over his silvery scalp. Then he thought for a second and said, “You know what, young lady? I wish that too.”

When Grandma and Grandpa and the man in Little Italy were growing up, strangers made an effort to connect and be less of strangers; people expressed their appreciation for the mere existence of one another, and they communicated. It may be no wonder I haven't had a man tip his hat to me since that day—shortly after it happened, I moved to New York and instantly invested in an iPod to experience the city in my own world, the way just about everyone else did.

I tell Grandma the story, thinking it'll make her smile, but instead she turns almost preachy. “Well, of course he tipped his hat to you,” she says. “That's how men back then were raised to treat woman.”

“Okay, but . . .” I push my plate aside. “What did it
mean
?”

She squints her eyes, critical of my overanalytical approach to understanding a simple male gesture. “Well, what would you think? He was acknowledging you, paying respect.”

“Okay, and what should I have done back?”

“Just what you did! You heard what he was trying to say, ‘Hello, and I think you're lovely.' You stopped and thanked him, it was more than enough! It was just a normal, easy exchange.”

But to me it wasn't normal; it was a really special moment in my young womanhood. Its simplicity and sincerity struck me in an instant . . . but maybe that's Grandma's point: I complicate things with all the noise I live inside and my journalistic interpretations of what men do.
He texted, what does it mean? He's not calling, what's he trying to say?
But Grandma's explanation is that it's all right there in the message. So from even
before
the start of a relationship, she says that people my age need to
learn to listen
.

What, Grandma?

Just kidding.

G
RANDMA AND
G
RANDPA
met at the ice cream soda shop downtown one early summer night just after she had graduated and he had been in Germany fighting in World War II for two years. When America won and he returned home for good, he spotted Grandma walking past the ice cream shop on her way to meet her mom after work. He stopped her in the street to say hello. “I remembered him from school,” she says, and giggles. “He was very popular with the girls.”

When she talks about him, she melts from cold as snow to warm and indulgent as hot fudge. A wistfulness enters her gaze, as though 1947 is playing back in a silver screen right over my head. “He called me the next day and asked me out on our first date. When he called, he asked for Florence! He confused my name with my street, Florence Street. My mother almost hung up on him, she thought he had the wrong number.” Grandma says he never would have called her if they hadn't stopped to chat that night. I try to imagine where we'd all be if Grandma had been listening to her iPod.

She takes her time eating her salad like a little bird, and even though it's all I can do to resist looking at the time on my phone, I don't dare. I think of how many rushed lunches I've eaten by myself, then of how many silent dinners she has ahead of her. While sometimes the quiet is nice, too much of it is lonesome and unnatural. When we feed one another it's the nurturing instinct at work, the maternal message to the other person that you wish for them to thrive. I watch Grandma carefully slicing her cucumber, how it takes her so much more effort than it takes me, and the long strain her neck makes for her lips to find her fork. She wipes her mouth fragilely then grins at me, and my heart crashes open with compassion.

Grandma and I each get a cone at the Dairy Queen after lunch. My licks try to keep up with the melting ice cream, and when Grandma laughs at me, I remember the afternoon in Hyde Park in London when Adam and I sat and watched the swans, and then he bought me a vanilla cone at an ice cream truck. He had the vendor stick in a chocolate flake for me for fifty pence extra, and he took one lick and left the rest for me to enjoy.

I know he's the one who screwed things up by taking the job in Bahrain and not telling me, but I could've given more too. I hadn't shared enough. E-mails and texts—talk is cheap. Would dropping a card to him in the mail have been so hard to manage? Wouldn't an old-fashioned love note have been nice? And why did it take me ten months to go visit after we met—couldn't I have saved some cash over three? He didn't give enough, but maybe I didn't either. I'd been afraid to really connect, fearing that I was dealing with someone who wasn't as great as he appeared or that my beauty and its need to share itself could be rejected. In the end, isn't the result the same? Whether he was good or not, I held back, and now I don't have him. Some time-tested, in-the-flesh contact might have helped things along. If I'd just been wise enough to know that an eighty-nine-cent stamp can be golden, to show him just an ounce of extra caring, to compromise a little more.

On the way home Grandma suggests we take Long Avenue. Even though Brady Street is faster and I'm running late, this time I listen.

Chapter 3
Get Your Own Life Settled

I
MAY NOT REMEMBER
the best ways around town, but everything else about my move back home requires little reacquainting. Mom and Dad's miniature collies greet me out front like old times, making me certain with their excitement and kisses that I have done the right thing by returning home for a while. We got Rocky on my high school senior prom night so that Mom would have extra company around the house after I left for college, and now with his gray hair, I'm usually the only one in the family he's nice to. Our puppy was a surprise last fall, when Mom and Dad called me in Italy to ask me what we should name him. “Something cute and Italian,” Mom said.

“How about Alfonso?”

“Little Alfie, that's your name!” Dad said in the background. “Your big sister will have to wait till she flies home from Italy for Christmas to meet you!” Now that I've moved back home, little Alfonso is a sweet addition to my world. Affection feels good—feels
right
—to any human walking through the front door.

In my brother's teenage bedroom Dad has set up my writing desk so I can look out onto Treasure Lake, the sparkling gem my brother, cousins, and I grew up on. For almost two decades we spent every summer weekend at our Landing—the family's lake-front company house two miles away from my house—when our dads' customers weren't there to occupy it. A decade later the lake is as glistening as ever, and my brother Jeff and my cousins don't miss a beat welcoming me back into the fold. Jeff's the master at mixing Long Islands behind Grandpa's long bar (so we've outgrown Shirley Temples, I guess?), and my cousin Zach mans the boat instead of my Uncle Phil . . . but the overall spirit of
la dolce vita
—the sweet life—still swims, in exactly the way my grandpa wanted to raise us when he bought the house in 1982. I remember his silver-dollar pancake breakfasts after all-family trampoline campouts; how he beamed after building the bocce court and tiny beach out back. Around this lake, on this trampoline, under these grand pine trees, I hear Grandpa reminding me:
This is your safe Landing. This is who you are
.

This is who I am, and no matter how I keep bracing myself for it, the reverse culture shock my New York friends keep warning me about isn't kicking in. I. Love. Home.

I've been back for two weeks when my dear mother is bursting to reintegrate me into her social circles. Mom reminds me (but perhaps more herself) that we're about to see everyone we know at all the summer weddings we have, so together we walk the seven miles around the lake or hit the gym every morning. Then, in what feels like a flurry of grown-up, fluffed-down debutantes, arm in arm with Mom I'm hitting book clubs, country clubs, and baby and bridal showers. I'd forgotten this culture existed; this comfortable world where friends are so loyal that decorating for the wedding of a friend's daughter is as much a bustling community effort as an episode of something Ty Pennington would host. These women's beauty radiates not after spa day, like it did for me in New York, not from the glamarazzi fashion sense I grew to worship in Italy, but in their down-to-earth sharing with each other—and now, with me.

Apparently the buzz phrase around town has become “Oh Krissy, we're gonna fix you up.” I'm amazed at how a girl's home-town dating prospects start to look up after she's been away for a few years. At picnics my mom's pals crowd around me to put their single nephews up for bids, and Grandma's bridge group insist they know the perfect guy for me. The poker crew at my brother's house on Wednesdays have invited me to join them, and while I'm rubbish at cards, their quest to find me a date is encouraging. I went to high school with most of them, good guys with blue-collar jobs and wedding bands. Sometimes, even when I'm surrounded by their spittoons and dirty jokes, I wish I hadn't pursued a career that took me so far on adventure, away from the grown-up procedure these guys live and do so well. Couldn't I have stayed back home all along and set up a simple life with a husband and a baby and a mortgage like my friends did? The contentment in their lives makes me wonder if I got the last decade all wrong.

I've recently vowed to give a chance to whoever comes my way—some small-town romantic straightforwardness would be welcome, no matter what kind of package it comes in. (I am still so emotionally browbeaten after going splitsville in Europe that when truckers beep on the Pennsylvania interstate, I wave back, then shrug at my mom: “Hey, you know what they say, a compliment's a compliment.”)

However, there is a particular bachelor who sounds extraordinarily . . . provocative. His superlative description always overshadows the other candidates, suddenly making them look limp and unexciting, like week-old imported vegetables. Anytime a woman in the community says, “Krissy, these guys sound fine but you really
have
to meet Dr. Christopher,” the other ladies wilt and shrink away, suggesting to me that the royal flush of all local males has just been dealt. Apparently the most important trait this doctor possesses is his semblance to the hero in a European romance novel—dark hair that sweeps to his collar, eyes blue-crystal like the sea, a smile big and shining with the power to comfort the most unfortunate of trauma patients or de-pants even the most resolvedly celibate female.

Grandma's heard that this Dr. Christopher is well respected among the hospital auxiliary, and my mom met him at a charity fashion show when he first moved to town. “You should've seen how some of those grown women pounced to touch the fur coat he modeled. I was embarrassed just watching,” Mom said. The thought of a man in fur weirds me out until Mom explains that the event was a fund-raiser benefiting the community's free medical clinic for people who can't afford health care. The doctor is known to volunteer there regularly.

This information begins to make me curious.

According to the women in town, Dr. Christopher's talent as a surgeon runs a close second to his looks. At a hospital charity auction, Mrs. Chapman—notoriously one of the most polished women in town—tells me Dr. Christopher practices “facial-aesthetic medicine.” With sparkles in her eyes (and the arms of her Prada bifocals, notably), Mrs. Chapman explains that Dr. Christopher's specialization is more glamorous than oral surgery but less phony than plastic. She says he's rumored to hold world-class credentials out the wazoo and a bedside manner that heals wounds but breaks hearts. Mrs. Chapman looks up over her specs and points a manicured finger at me from around a lipsticked glass of chardonnay. “What Dr. Oz does to fight aging and Dr. Drew does for relationships, Dr. Christopher can do for your face.” She winks, then gusts on to another conversation, and it dawns on me that her lips look really damn good for sixty-five years old.

Mrs. Chapman's not the doctor's only pining patient. One night at dinner with Grandma my cousin Tricia tells me that when Dr. Christopher put her under for her wisdom teeth, she told him she wanted to marry his hair. From what she remembers, he simply chuckled quietly and asked his assistants to make sure she stayed comfortable. Tricia says he's like Grandpa the way he's so intelligent that he doesn't know how handsome he is. Grandma leans in intently, hoping we'll say more to keep the thought of Grandpa present.

But if I'm supposed to be sold on the Doc Hollywood of DuBois, Pennsylvania, all these ladies' claims just make me skeptical. Essentially this guy's a small-town cosmetic surgeon who makes females swoon: how much heart can he really have? Then just when I start to crinkle my nose in doubt, my mom throws down the spirituality card. Apparently the doctor attends church every week (although no one seems to know where, and there are mom fist-bumps all around when Mom's best friend asks where we think
a
god would go to find
the
God. Mom eloquently adds that she'd very much like to be a witness to his steeple). Plus, Dr. Christopher is a known yoga practitioner. (“Krissy,
you
do yoga!” my mom exclaims. “And you go to church, how perfect is this!”) He reportedly balances his physical health with great care given to his emotional side, which finally begins to sway me. Could this really be the perfect man?

Still, I confess: with all the buzz I hear about this guy, how is he not married? Is he gay? Commitmentphobic? A total player? The mystery begins to follow me everywhere, and I find myself hoping to run into him in the organic aisle at the grocery store or the gym. I decide I can't judge until I meet him. So, by the time my mom's fourth friend mentions “Dr. Christopher,” I agree to
think
about looking him up.

Enter my own spirituality. During a sweltering June Mass that requires the summer-is-a-week-away fanning of the hymnal, I reverently place my forehead in my hands and pray that if I look this man up, God will never make me suffer a pain as severe as getting dumped in a foreign country again. When church is dismissed I visit Grandpa's headstone, which, despite his status in my perception, blends in normally among the other stones. He wanted simple, and we wanted distinguished and elegant, so it's a polished charcoal color that stands about two feet high and three and a half feet long and reads
GASBARRE
on the back in strong-looking serif font and on the front:

GEORGE PHILIP GASBARRE, SR.
SEPTEMBER 9, 1925—JANUARY 28, 2008
WORLD WAR II

I hate reading his date of death, a date that's already passed—more proof that he's gone. Next to Grandpa's plot is Grand-ma's:

GLORIA DELORES GASBARRE

(ELLINGER)

DECEMBER 11, 1928

What would it be like to be alive and see your own name already etched on a grave? Grandma's never mentioned it.

After I make sure no one's around, I tell him, just above a whisper, “My heart got broken in Italy, Grandpa. The English guy, remember him?” This feels silly, but it could help. “And then I lost you.” A blessed breeze flaps the American flag to his right. “But I believe that there are guys out there who are good, and exciting, right? Like you. Can you help me find one?” I crouch down on my knees and feel the grass tentatively with my hands, both amazed and nervous that his body lies right underneath where I'm touching. “There's one in particular, he lives
here
of all places, and, it's so funny”—I laugh down at the ground, the notion really is so ridiculous—“but everyone, including Grandma, seems to think our spirits are destined for each other or something.” I look back at Grandpa's stone as though I'm staring him in the face. “And I've just decided I'm going to contact him.” I hesitate. “There's nothing wrong with a new friend, right, Grandpa?” I kiss his stone and run my hand over its letters.

This is the second time I've made this request to my grand father—when he was sleeping, the day before he died, I asked him to send me my husband. “We've talked about this before. I know you hear me.” I stand to brush grass off the hem of my sundress. “Thanks, Grandpa. Love you.”

Late that week, Mrs. Chapman had called our house to say she dropped off Dr. Christopher's card and tucked it discreetly in the standing fern on my mom's front porch. I'd intersected the message before Mom had a chance to get to it—there was no need for anyone to get carried away with excitement, which would've turned me off completely. But now, when I get home from church and the cemetery, I finally fish it out, making a pact with myself that if I never get a response, I will let the whole thing go. If the e-mail doesn't bring our paths to intersect, then I'm simply not meant to meet this person.

I title the subject “New friend in DuBois” and craft three friendly paragraphs, cleverly smudging over the awkwardness of my left-field self-introduction with a warm, easy-breezy tone. I tell the doctor that it seems he's built a really respected reputation for himself in the four years since he moved here. His work sounds fascinating, I type, and I only wish we'd cross paths. “Depending on your availability,” I say, “it might be fun to get together for lunch or drinks one of these days.” This is my eloquent way of saying, “Based on what I've heard about you, there's not an Eskimo pie's chance in hell you could possibly be single, but just in case everybody's right and you are, then it might be real swell to get together.”

I read the note three times, noting the importance of sounding self-assured but not overly confident; ladylike but not desperate. (This is ultradelicate territory, and even offering my phone number at this early stage could be perceived as too forward.) In the end the message reads cordially, and I have left my intent wide open: I could be a business acquaintance, a charming new friend, or an eligible bachelorette with attractive dating potential. I hold my breath and look up at my bedroom ceiling.
Am I really doing this?
I release the e-mail like a dove in the wind, anticipating never to hear anything back.

The whole family meets that afternoon for a barbecue at the Landing. In the buffet line I put my lips close to Grandma's ear. “Remember when we were talking about the doctor the other night with Tricia?”

“Yes?” Her eyes turn to me, as wide as the deviled egg on her plate.

“I e-mailed him today.”

“Doh!” She nearly drops her hamburger, and her eyes light up like I haven't seen them since the night she cooked spaghetti with Grandpa in the Florida kitchen, a year and a half ago, before he was sick. She whispers, “Please let me know what happens!” We join the others around the outdoor bar and Grandma shoots me clandestine winks between birdlike bites of her burger.

That night after I've washed my face and brushed my teeth, I log on to my laptop in bed.
Certainly he doesn't check e-mail on a Sunday night, he's probably having dinner with friends or sex with the girlfriend who has to exist.
My heart jumps when I open my in-box. He replied!