How to Fall in Love with Anyone

by Mandy Len Catron

  In 1944, Mamaw said, the camp was overfull. Some of the houses were divided with one family in the first two rooms and another in the second two. “There was one area where we lived that was called Buzzard’s Roost,” she said. “The miners would meet there at the landing every morning and ride the pulley car up the mountain to the mines.”

  Mamaw lived with her aunt and uncle in Benedict—just down the road from where her dad lived, in Ben Hur—and after only a few days there she looked out the window: “And there I seen a big, tall, handsome, good-looking soldier,” she said.

  So she did what any girl in her position would do: She went and got the water bucket and walked down the path to the spigot. “And I took my good old lazy time doing that, you know? And he came back out on the road in front of his mother’s house. I lingered as long as I could there. And eventually I thought, ‘Well, I ought to get back up to the house.’ But he kept on looking at me, just wandering and smiling, things like that.” I could hear the grin in her voice. Mamaw has never doubted a man’s affections—not even at thirteen.

  “Later on in the day, I had to go to the commissary, so I went down the holler and, don’t you know, he was coming up the holler. And he says”—she deepened her voice here—“ ‘Well, uh, hello there.’ ”

  “And I said, ‘Hello.’ ” She put a little sing into her voice.

  “And he said, ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ ”

  “And I said, ‘It’s a very nice day.’ And then I said, ‘Well, you have a nice day.’ ” It wasn’t exactly Austen-level repartee, but I was hooked.

  Papaw was on leave from “fighting over there in Europe.” It was sometime in 1943. I didn’t point out that her dates didn’t quite align.

  Not much later, Papaw asked Mamaw’s friend Bernice who “that little blond-haired girl was.” And Bernice said it was Pauline and asked if he would like to see her, to which he replied, “Oh yes.”

  “So then I drag on out there and when I saw Bernice she said, ‘You’re going to have a visitor.’ And about seven o’clock there’s a knock on the door. Bernice answers and there stood your papaw.” As she told the story, I was enraptured by her rapture, by her confidence in her life choices.

  Mamaw and Papaw—Pauline and Tip—talked all night, and they spent every remaining day of his furlough together. Papaw was twenty-nine.

  Once he was officially dismissed from the army, two years later, “of course he came home to see me. And I fell head over heels in love with him. Thought he was the most handsome guy I’d ever looked at. Oh, he was so handsome, baby. And he had a gold tooth—right up front—and when he’d smile, I tell you, that tooth would shine like new money.”

  I stifled a giggle. Though he died when I was four, I had seen photos and I could attest to his handsomeness, particularly in uniform. But this gold tooth was a new detail to me.

  Unfortunately, the gold in his mouth was not indicative of the gold in his wallet: “He pulled his billfold out and opened it up and said, ‘I don’t got no money, but I want us to go tomorrow and get married.’ Honey, he had seven dollars in his pocket!” Just remembering this exasperated her. She told me about each person he tried to borrow money from, finally finding a willing lender in his former girlfriend’s father. “Tip asked him if he had any money and he said, ‘A little bit. What do you want it for?’ And Tip said, ‘I want to go get married in the morning.’ ”

  They shared a cab with another couple to Harlan, Kentucky, about thirty miles away. There they could apply for a marriage license, get a blood test, and tie the knot all in the same day. (The blood tests were required to slow the spread of syphilis that was especially common in returning soldiers.)

  “We were there in the courthouse in Harlan, applying for the license, and they asked him how old he was and he said, ‘Thirty-one.’ And they asked me how old I was and I said, ‘Twenty-one,’ and he turned around to me and said, ‘Twenty-one? I didn’t think you were that old.’ And I took my foot and kicked him and I said, ‘You better shut up or you’re going back to Benedict a single man.’ ”

  She was fifteen when they married, seventeen when my aunt Margie, the first of eight, was born.

  Of the kids, she said, “I cooked them three meals a day,” and followed with a list of traditional Appalachian meals: “Soup beans, cornbread, cooked potatoes, fried potatoes, baked potatoes.” She laughed at the inadequacy of the list. Papaw raised a garden, she said. And she canned or froze everything she could. When I asked if she ever felt overwhelmed by having to care for so many kids, she got very serious: “Honey, when I spoke to them, they minded me. When the other ones got big enough to wash the dishes, I’d stand them in a chair in front of the sink.”

  She told me about her dad’s death—he lived for twelve days after getting injured in a mine collapse. And about the other Pauline who lived in Ben Hur (“rich Pauline”), whom Mamaw once punched in the face for trying to steal her paper route. In such a small place, it seemed there was room for only one Pauline. As she talked, her life veered from tragic to comic, sounding more like the plot of a good book than a real person’s experience. But she seemed sure she got the happy ending she deserved.

  With her tyrannical stepmother and handsome soldier prince, Mamaw is only a fairy godmother short of an Appalachian Cinderella.

  But when I asked my mom about how her parents met, there was little magic in her response. “It was mostly circumstance that brought them together. Mom was only thirteen and she was basically the workhorse for the rest of her family,” she explained, suggesting that marriage was Mamaw’s best way out of an unpleasant situation. An aunt told me Papaw got involved with Mamaw “because of her situation,” implying it was compassion or pity that moved him to propose.

  Only Mamaw talked about love.

  • • •

  In the thirty years since Papaw died, Mamaw has never had a romantic relationship with another man (a fact she is proud to announce), though she’s had many suitors. Mamaw once told me about a man who had followed her home from the hospital. She’d been visiting her brother Jimmy and met “a nice older gentleman” in the waiting room. Two days later, he showed up on her front porch. Mamaw seemed unsurprised that this man would bother to follow her for the entire hour-long drive home, and then knock on her door a few days later. And honestly, who wouldn’t be interested in a fit eighty-year-old who has all her own teeth and can swear to never dyeing her hair? (“Coloring” one’s hair, she’s quick to point out, is not the same as dyeing it.)

  “He’s very sweet,” she said of her sort-of stalker. “But he’s just so country. He has this big, bushy ol’ beard and it catches crumbs in it. He’s just not your mamaw’s type.” Though she has never lived in a city, Mamaw herself has never been what you would call country. When she had both hips replaced a decade ago, the doctor requested she retire her favorite gold high-heeled ankle boots and stick to sneakers. The request did not go over well.

  Apparently a few gentle suggestions inspired her admirer to trim the beard and put on a clean pressed shirt. But Mamaw’s mind was already made up.

  When I was growing up, a nice man named Marshall was always around for family dinners and holidays. “He would’ve done anything for me, honey,” Mamaw told me. “If I’d have said, ‘Marshall, bend down and lick that rock,’ he would’ve said, ‘Okay, Pauline.’ But we were only just good friends.”

  After Marshall died, Mamaw spent time with another man, named Raymond. Like Marshall, he seemed devoted to Mamaw. But, as Mamaw and Marshall had, she and Raymond remained nothing more than friends until he died.

  “I just could never find anybody that I wanted to settle down with. Papaw was my first love.” Then she interrupted herself: “No! He wasn’t my first love, honey. Pat was my first love.”

  “Before Papaw?” I asked, surprised.

  Pat and Mamaw dated when she was twelve. He was eighteen. Twelve! I thought. She told me that Pat tried to find her when he got back from the war but she’d already left
Ben Hur by then, so he met a woman named Virginia, married her instead, and moved to Pennsylvania. “Even though he married Virginia,” she whispered, as if Virginia herself might hear, “I was number one.” But when Virginia died and Pat came back from Pennsylvania to find Mamaw, who was also widowed, she didn’t marry him then either. “He told me he would go to his grave loving me,” she said wistfully, ratcheting up the tragedy, “and he did.”

  • • •

  I’ve never heard anyone in my family explicitly question the difference in age between Mamaw and Papaw. For the most part, their age difference has always been presented as an artifact of the past, a relic of the way things were done in a particular place and time. And as far as I can tell, no one in Mamaw’s family seemed concerned about it when she was fifteen.

  Once they were married, she told me, they moved into an empty house in Benedict, on the hill up above her aunt and uncle. A few weeks later, while they were lying on the bed, she heard someone walk up the front stairs and knock on the door.

  “Hey, girl,” a voice said when she opened the door. There stood her dad and Lily. “Hear I’ve got a new son-in-law,” her father said. “I came up to meet him and see how youns were doing.”

  “We’re doing all right, Daddy,” Mamaw said. She introduced her new husband, a man only a few years younger than her father, and that was that.

  When I asked her about their age gap, she said simply, “Honey, I loved him more than anything. Age didn’t matter.” I could tell that it never occurred to her to notice. When I asked why she had so many kids, she laughed. “We didn’t have a TV. We had to keep ourselves busy somehow.”

  Because I am so deeply invested in this story, it is difficult for me to cast myself as an impartial observer, and yet the facts of her situation feel uncomfortable to me. She was too young to be a wife. A thirty-one-year-old man should’ve known that. How could she have trusted herself to make that kind of commitment at fifteen? And why Tip? Why didn’t she wait for Pat to come back? One obvious answer to these questions is that marriage gave her a way out of a temporary situation and into something more permanent. It gave her some independence—and plenty of other girls in that region married around the same age. But this seems too simple. Mamaw has never been particularly impulsive or naive or in thrall to convention. She may have been young, but she was also strong-willed and mature.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if she had gotten something right about love that the rest of us had gotten wrong. She took so much pleasure in telling her story; it was easy to recall this tall, handsome soldier decades after his death, a lifetime from when they met. Her voice never hinted at regret. In terms of leading a happy life, hers seemed like an enviable strategy.

  But there is a gap between the story she tells and what I imagine to be true: that she was a teenage runaway who settled down with a much older man in search of stability and structure, and later a mother who had few resources and almost no autonomy in a marriage shadowed by war and shaped by poverty—and likely filled with more struggle and pain than Mamaw lets on.

  • • •

  After hearing about Mamaw, a friend suggested I watch Coal Miner’s Daughter, a 1980 biopic about the life of the country singer Loretta Lynn. I’d heard about the movie for years, but had never bothered to actually watch it. My dad had joked that the movie was written about my mom, but I was surprised to see how closely Lynn’s early life resembled Mamaw’s—the part prior to her becoming a famous country musician, that is. Lynn was born in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, another coal mining camp. She was the second of eight kids, and, like Mamaw, she married a returning soldier when she was fifteen. They had four kids in just five years. About her marriage, Lynn wrote: “I married Doo when I wasn’t but a child, and he was my life from that day on. . . . He thought I was something special, more special than anyone else in the world, and never let me forget it.”1

  For all his love for his wife, Doolittle Lynn was also an alcoholic and a philanderer. There are stories of physical violence initiated by both husband and wife.

  Thematically, Loretta Lynn’s songs reflect her life with titles like “You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man),” “One’s on the Way,” and “Don’t Come Home A’Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind).” I like how totally frank she is, how her music manages to mythologize her life without shying away from the hardest parts. She reminds me that the details of Mamaw’s life that feel so foreign to me—her young marriage, the fistfight with “rich Pauline,” the sheer labor involved in running a home—are in fact common to that place and time.

  Marriage is always more than a love story; it’s also a socioeconomic institution. And, as Marina Adshade points out in her book Dollars and Sex: How Economics Influences Sex and Love, “the institution has varied significantly from place to place, from community to community and, importantly, over time.”2 My hopes for marriage have little in common with the hopes of a girl born in the Great Depression and raised in the coalfields.

  In her book Marriage: A History, the historian Stephanie Coontz points out that marriage has only relatively recently become so inextricably connected with love.3 For most of human history, the institution was used to manage resources, unite families, and amass wealth; few would consider making a social or political alliance based on something as precarious as romantic love. When conservatives pine for “traditional family values,” they are in fact nostalgic for a brief and relatively recent moment in the long history of marriage.

  Over the past century, attitudes toward marriage have shifted significantly along with broader cultural and economic forces. Love and companionship are important parts of marital satisfaction, but they have not always been the most important parts, says the sociologist Andrew Cherlin in “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage”: “Through the 1950s, wives and husbands tended to derive satisfaction from [. . .] playing marital roles well: being good providers, good homemakers, and responsible parents.”4 In this era, that of what Cherlin terms the “companionate marriage,” skills were specialized along gender lines. The breadwinner/homemaker divisions of labor enabled maximum productivity in a time of large families, before the proliferation of the birth control pill and the electric washing machine. In Mamaw’s case, her having learned the skills necessary to run a home by age eleven and being young and fit enough to meet the physical demands of that kind of labor, and to bear children, probably made her a particularly appealing candidate for marriage.

  By my mom’s generation, women were moving out of the home and into the workforce. With the arrival of women’s financial independence, the American marriage evolved into what the psychologist Eli Finkel calls the “self-expressive” marriage. In a 2014 New York Times article, Finkel argued that over the past two centuries our hopes for marriage have slowly ascended Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.5 According to pioneering psychologist Abraham Maslow, our species’ most basic needs (food, shelter, safety) must be met before we can pursue more sophisticated emotional or social desires like prestige and creative fulfillment. Initially, marriage provided a way for people to secure resources and fulfill those basic needs. Later, the companionate marriage redefined the institution as one that met higher needs such as belonging, love, and self-esteem. Now, in the twenty-first century, we don’t just want reliable co-parents and monogamous sex; we want our partners to support our self-expression and foster our personal growth—the things at the very top of Maslow’s hierarchy. Increasingly, we see marriage as an important tool in constructing a fulfilling life.

  According to Coontz, when you look throughout history and across cultures, our extraordinarily high expectations about love, marriage, and sex are “extremely rare.”

  Finkel points out that the big demands placed on marriage by modern Western society (someone who will take the kids while you go to Saturday morning pottery class and have a lively discussion about the latest Malcolm Gladwell book and be an attentive and surprising sexual partner) are rarely fulfilled, leaving today’s spouse
s often disappointed. As a result, we have to invest a lot more time and energy in our relationships if we expect to get so much out of them.

  Both Coontz and Cherlin point out the surprising side effect of the “self-expressive” marriage: As our expectations have peaked, marriage rates are on the decline. “The adoption of these unprecedented goals for marriage had unanticipated and revolutionary consequences that have since come to threaten the stability of the entire institution,” writes Coontz.

  • • •

  In Appalachia there’s a phrase for anyone whose hopes for life are a little too high: “getting above your raising.” It’s so distinctly connected with that region that I can only pronounce it as “gettin’ above your raisin’,” confusing friends who seem to think I’m talking about dried fruit. Don’t go gettin’ above your raisin’, your grandma might say in an attempt to admonish you, to take you down a peg.

  This attitude has a practical function in a place where people have, for generations, been relatively poor and culturally maligned. We are a clannish people, suspicious of snobbery or too much ambition. There is a widespread sense of distrust toward outsiders—of new people and new ideas. Maybe this isn’t surprising when you consider the long history of interlopers coming in to “fix” the region’s problems.

  Being content with what you have when you have, say, eight children living on one salary and no indoor plumbing is what makes a hard life bearable. Not reaching or wishing for more makes it just a little easier to do what’s required to keep folks healthy and fed. Mom once told me that, though she knew, objectively, that they were poor, it never felt that way, because there were no wealthy people to compare themselves to. As I was growing up, my petty complaints about doing yard work or hopeful pleas for a candy bar were always met with a reminder of just how much we had—and how much worse things could be. I know all parents say this, but it’s pretty convincing coming from someone who grew up using an outhouse. I had so much, I often thought, who was I to be unhappy? Who was I to feel dissatisfied in a relationship with someone I loved?