365 Nights Page 11
Grandmother’s house was always jammed with bodies. To feed my extended family on Christmas Eve required a couple of sets of dishes and silverware, lots of paper cups and paper napkins, a cooler or giant Tupperware bowl of extra ice, and extra card tables to hold the food. We spread a tablecloth over my grandmother’s washer and dryer to make more room for the food. Desserts were stored in the cool air outside, as there wasn’t enough room in the fridge. We simply pulled them inside when the meal was over and people had enough room. Those holiday dinners were chaotic, loud, hot, and wonderful, and all I had ever known.
We played outside, running around in the yard, or stayed in, watching football or sitting around shooting the bull. There was much love and affection at those family gatherings. Close quarters in my grandmother’s house dictated some of it, but we are also just a cheerful and engaged group.
Holidays with my family were a shock to my Midwestern-raised Brad. All that chaos and noise! “And do they always hug everyone like that, every time they see them? I don’t really know their names yet—there are so many of them!” he once commented when we first visited. It could be a strain on your senses (and your personal space) if you weren’t used to it. And since my grandmother did not permit drinking, he couldn’t even take the edge off this claustrophobic lovefest with a nice cold beer or a glass of wine.
At my grandmother’s, we would all stand in a circle weaving between tables and chairs and hold hands for a blessing, and my grandmother inevitably would break down in tears. “Well, Lord, I just thank you for all you have done for this family, and I’m just so thankful for our blessings because I know, Lord, well, Lord, this is probably my last Christmas. Amen.”
She does this every year—announce to the world and to the Good Lord that this is her last. And all heck breaks loose and we all start talking at once to take turns fussing over her and telling her that, of course, this is not going to be her last Christmas, as she is healthy as a horse (and she is, or was) and that she very well may live forever, or at least as long as her sister Ima, who lived to be ninety-nine.
“Well, I am just so happy,” she says with her voice trembling and her little white Aqua-Netted head bobbing up and down. “Because in all these years no one in this family has gotten divorced. ” My grandmother says this nearly every Christmas.
And she’s right. With nearly thirty people in that room loading up plates with an appalling amount of food, none in our extended family are “dee-vorced,” as my grandmother would say. My grandmother is so proud of this, but she is living proof that staying married does not always equate with being happily married. I sometimes think that very surely my grandmother would prefer you to be paralyzingly miserable beyond belief than dee-vorced. “Being unhappy isn’t the worst problem in the world,” she might have said. And that was what people of her generation truly believed.
And while they weren’t dee-vorced, I can’t tell you the last time my grandparents lived together; it must have been during the Nixon administration. They were married for thirty-five years, and after much sorrow and great upheaval, they settled into separate quarters. Never legally divorced, of course, but not really married, it seemed. I have no memory of my grandparents necessarily being affectionate with each other. Though I know that they continued to share meals, a garden, and somewhat of a life that spared them both what they most feared. Those were the times—divorce was unmentionable, unconscionable, and unbelievably not an option. So the family carved out a kind of truth that worked, but it was a tenuous arrangement up until my grandfather died.
My grandfather was warm with his grandchildren. And my grandmother, well, she was always getting food ready. We would spend Christmas Eve at my grandmother’s house, where my grandfather would let himself quietly in through the sliding glass door after walking across her backyard from his house. He would leave the same way, with little fanfare. We knew where to find him if we needed him, which we did. My grandfather was irreverent, eccentric, complex, and on occasion loud. In some ways he was a man born in the wrong place and time, as some people are. In any other time, he would have been the charming, garrulous guest that you wanted to sit beside at a fantastic dinner party. In the rural foothills of North Carolina, he was a beloved father, brother, and son who brought his family tremendous love and occasional strife. My brother and I knew only the love and little of the strife and therefore revered him.
Legend has it (and old pictures prove it) that my grandfather was dark and broodingly handsome, and that my grandmother, who was smart and incredibly responsible, was smitten. My grandparents definitely broke Brad’s Rule of Twos. She was older when they married, a ripe old twenty. She was a good student and my great-aunt Ima paid for her to attend secretarial school in Greensboro with the condition that if she married, she would repay the tuition. So Ima put up the money and my grandmother promptly repaid her not long after she got married—with delight, I’ve been told. My grandfather had nine siblings and my grandmother was the second youngest of sixteen children. For some unfathomable reason, my grandparents lived wedged in between both sets of in-laws and my grandmother cared for all four until they had all died. There were twenty-five sons and daughters who could have taken on the primary burden of caring for elderly parents, but somehow my grandmother bore the brunt of it all. Again, those were the times when nursing homes were unheard of and—like dee-vorce—not taking care of family was unmentionable, unconscionable, and unbelievably not an option.
Who knows if my grandparents had met today whether they would have gotten married. The world was smaller then—you met and married people in close geographic proximity to you. (That’s why some people are so funny looking.) You met people in high school or in college or you married your best friend’s cousin from out of town—which was always a big deal, especially if you lived in a small town that everyone was desperate to leave.
Marriage is now a choice, while back in the not-so-distant past, marriage might have been based on property, money, alliances, and other things unromantic; there was a time when women had little to no say in who their husband was going to be. The husband was chosen by one’s family, father, village elder, etc. In fact, it’s only been in the last several decades that women in industrialized societies have had the choice about whom they want to marry, and even if they want to marry. So being married to a spouse who didn’t light your fire, well, that wasn’t so strange back then. It was kind of like a game show gone bad . . . “And behind Curtain Number 2 . . . we have Earle! He’s five feet five inches tall with a tractor, a twenty-acre plot of land, a domineering mother, and a small lean-to house with indoor plumbing. Earle’s interests are priming tobacco, cleaning guns, going to church . . . and being able to feed himself and his mother until the next planting season. Let’s give it up for Earle!” And I would think it fairly common back then that your husband might not trip your trigger in bed, since you didn’t really pick him after all. So it was a doubly whammy— you were expected to be intimate with someone you probably didn’t even choose. Fast forward to today—a lot of wives don’t want to be intimate with the person they did choose. At least this is what I hear from girlfriends and on daytime television and often read in women’s magazines. So now that we have the power to choose our own mates, things get all mucked up anyway.
My grandparents had a few family heirlooms to pass down to their children. There is a bedroom suite. There is my grand-mother’s high school class ring from 1936. There is an antique dish cabinet and some hand-quilted blankets. Some wonderful family photos. A few trinkets here and there that qualify as keepsakes only to our family, such as tiny hand-crocheted tree ornaments shaped like snowflakes, and a clay water pitcher with blue and red flowers. But families also pass down history— stories of bravery, hardship, and tragedy—as well as commonsense knowledge that helps sustain families: how to make butter and jam, how to birth a baby, when to plant things, when to put up the vegetables, how to make maxipads out of old sheets, how to build a barn, and so on. We’d like
to think that these lessons and tales outlast our own short lives.
However, nobody in my big, loud, loving family passed down wisdom or commonsense advice about marriage, except to stay married no matter what the cost. No one discussed intimacy within the relationship. I am sure there are very few women, if any, in my age group who were counseled to marry someone with whom they are and would continue to be sexually compatible. For example, it would have been helpful to hear: “You know, darlin’, you should really look for a guy who has the same sexual pace as you—it would really go a long way in smoothing out some of those longer-term issues about sex.” But if they had, it means my girlfriends and I would have been shopping for a man who rarely, if ever, wanted to have sex after two kids and the age of forty. And how were we to know?
In fact, the triumvirate of marital woes (sex, money, and religion) isn’t even acknowledged by most parents seeking to impart wisdom to their daughters. My family’s advice did hit one out of three: “Marry a nice Christian boy and it will all work out.” And what exactly does that mean anyway? I remember sitting down with Brad to talk about religion when we were newly engaged. Interestingly, it was Christmastime. A Baptist and an Episcopalian were coming together, and we could not be further apart on the Protestant continuum (but considering his first fiancée was Jewish, I didn’t think we were that far apart). I mean, if you go to church—any church—it in some part signifies belief in God, right? So I asked him about it one night.
“Um, there’s something we need to talk about,” I said to Brad. “I mean, I know you believe in God, but I just need to hear that you really believe in God. Before we get married, I need to hear some statement of belief.”
“Yeah, I believe,” he responded.
I pushed. “What exactly do you believe?”
“What do you mean?” he asked. And he really meant it. This was before I knew that part of being Episcopalian for many was the grand vagueness of God—He could be different things to different people. And part of being Baptist, as many know, was the grand, unerring specificity of God.
So it turned out that we were more far apart than I thought. I was growing agitated. I mean, what’s so hard about articulating what you believe? I blurted out, in my Baptist way, “Honey, I need to know if you believe that Jesus Christ is your Lord and personal Savior.”
Huh? I had no idea where that came from. It was like in that exact moment I was channeling my grandmother, the one who doesn’t believe in drinking or dee-vorce. I had alarmed him and surprised myself. And I don’t blame him. I mean, if you aren’t used to this kind of vernacular, it can sound strange. There I was, thinking I was marrying an “unbeliever,” and he was thinking I was some kind of zealot. Apparently there was a wider gulf than expected—while Jesus should have been the common denominator among Christians, even Jesus is open to interpretation for Episcopalians. Brad did acknowledge he believed, at least in the abstract. Now it’s all okay—we’ve bridged the gap and we’re Methodist.
While I was surprised about negotiating religion in such a forthright way, I was expecting a certain amount of give-and-take when it came to merging his family and mine. Actually, I thought it would be a lot of take—me taking every opportunity to be with my family and not his. Which isn’t fair, really. Brad has a perfectly nice family. But nobody can really appreciate the thinly veiled comment that you “marry the whole family” until you are married and you realize that you’re now related to a whole new set of crackpots, and you don’t find them nearly as interesting or tolerable as the bunch of crackpots that you are related to by blood. And at the very least, all the crackpots from your family like everything the same way you do. It’s like when you’re twelve, and you go to a sleepover at your best friend’s house, and everything is different. The house smells strange, their habits are different, and they put onions in their scrambled eggs. And although you’re having fun, you’re so relieved to go back to your own familiar home and scrambled eggs with cheese.
When Brad first introduced me to my future mother-in-law, I thought it would be easy to win her over, but I was wrong. I would impart a wee bit of Southern charm, dotted with lot of polite “ma’ams” and exclamations of “You don’t say!” But as we both started to dig a little deeper, I sensed this wasn’t a sure thing. And this threw me off, because I generally do well on first impressions (it’s those second and third impressions where it all goes downhill for me). So I found out that she likes to watch those ten-part series about the Civil War on PBS whereas I . . . well, I know who won the Civil War. She likes to read biographies on Thomas Jefferson and then discuss how Monticello was an intersection of architecture and horticulture unrivaled even today. Me? I only read fiction—preferably modern. She likes to finish the crossword puzzle every day. Me? I like Sudoku, the easy ones.
While she would never admit it and I can never be sure, I think she was a little unimpressed when she learned that I had gone to a public university. I mean, it’s possible to see someone actually shudder, right? Despite the fact that UNC Chapel Hill is an outstanding and very competitive institution, and while there I attended one of the top five journalism programs in the country and later managed to get a job at a top public relations firm in New York City and actually pay my bills (well, most of them).
She attended a private college: Vassar. Her father, Yale. One brother is a doctor and the other a lawyer. Her sister also went to Vassar and works at Harvard, and she married a guy who heads up the graduate physics department there. I mean, these are some seriously freaky smart people. I was way out of my league and far away from my homespun Christmases at Grand-ma’s house. But I will tell you that despite being so genetically gifted, many smart people have not a lick of common sense to even come out of the rain (present relatives who live in Boston and teach or work at Harvard excluded, of course).
I will tell you that while dining with the Harvard contingent one evening in Boston, and hearing about Brad’s uncle’s research into a fifth dimension (and no, this is not the coming of the age of Aquarius), I was the only one who knew what a Möbius strip was (present smarty pants who head up or work in the physics department at Harvard not included). So for one infinitesimal (that means tiny) moment, I felt a sense of smugness only really weirdly bright people can feel. It was new and it was fleeting . . . and I liked it. I chose to believe that these blue-blooded Northerners were appropriately impressed that this red-blooded Southerner schooled in the halls of a public institution knew about the Möbius strip, which by the way appears to be a two-dimensional object that is really only a surface with one side and one boundary component. Ladies and gentleman, your tax dollars at work.
But my shining moment of being fully embraced as a member of this freaky smart family did not last. I knew I was in a losing battle the year Brad’s mom brought some pictures to share of the Harvard Family Christmas. In one photograph, the Mensa Gene Pool had gathered in the kitchen baking (because isn’t baking really all about physics?), preparing their annual holiday cake, or something like that. Said cake was, and I’m serious as a heart attack, shaped like Albert Einstein’s head. They used coconut for the hair and mustache, and I recall they had written E = MC2 with licorice at the bottom of the cake. It really did look like ol’ Al, and the entire clan thought it was hysterically funny and wonderful—so much so that they gathered for a family photo around that kooky coconut cake and e-mailed it to the rest of the family, who also thought it was hysterically funny and wonderful. Wow. Please note that my aunt makes a killer coconut cake that requires much labor, four cake pans, and poking holes in the top of it with a wooden spoon handle so all that divine coconut icing stuff can seep down into it. One year she did liken it to a bunny at Easter, but that was it. Yes, I was a square peg in a perfectly round and brilliant hole.
But I like my mother-in-law, I really do. And I know that she likes me, as I am the mother of two of her favorite grandchildren. It took some time for us to get used to one another. But she is so head over heels in love with my
kids that she is blinded to my many and deep flaws. Nothing else seems to matter except that I brought forth to her these two wonderful children.
You will not be surprised to know that there are never more than six or eight people (mostly adults, so it’s pretty easy to make the cut for the adult table) at Brad’s family gatherings. We eat politely at a dining room table formally decorated with nice linen, fine china, sparkling crystal, and sterling silver. There is some sort of roasted meat, a starchy casserole, a vegetable dish, and some very appropriate bread of some sort. There is wine (yippee) and a pie (usually store bought, which is so wrong !). Everyone participates in the same scintillating and high-brow conversation at the same time, and no one is yelling or laughing too loud or asking for an extra helping of pinto beans in a coffee cup (sprinkle some butter and cornbread on the top, if you don’t mind). You can’t get lost in the shuffle in this small crowd, and you certainly have to pull your own weight in conversation.
Brad could not be more at home at this table, and I could not be more homesick. And while there are not tons of divorced people in his family, there are some. Brad’s parents, for example. In fact, Brad’s parents chose Christmastime to tell him and his two siblings they were getting a divorce. He was nine. While they all knew it wasn’t Ozzie and Harriet around the Muller household, it still came as a shock. All three children reacted as you would expect—tears, disbelief, uncertainty. Yet somehow this experience never took the joy out of Christmas for my husband. He clung to memories of jumping on his grandparents’ bed. Emptying stockings on Christmas morning. The big family breakfast. The mountain of presents that seemed to take hours to open. Somehow, he managed to hang on to some semblance of his holiday spirit. Maybe that’s why he is the Christmas Tree Stud.