In a community that values contentment over pickiness, you must also be satisfied with your spouse. Calling something not good enough is a kind of betrayal. And you are not simply betraying the person to whom you made that lifetime commitment; you are also, in a way, betraying your community and family. If life is hard for everyone, who are you to have everything you need and still say, “This won’t do anymore”?
For a few years from the end of high school into my early twenties, I struggled with depression. It was minor, but I wasn’t quite happy or carefree, and I felt immense guilt about this, partly because I believed it was my job to be happy. I thought this was everyone’s job, that we all shared a basic human duty to be content with what was on offer from the world. It wasn’t until I left home that I discovered this isn’t a particularly widespread belief.
When I met Kevin, he’d just gotten back from Germany and he could see his home—and mine—through foreign eyes. He was critical of things I’d never thought to question: people who drove places they could easily walk or bike to, people who used plastic bags or ate too much meat. The professors at his large European university didn’t take attendance or even learn students’ names, he said, implying that our small liberal arts college coddled us. Well, maybe it did, I thought, but that same school had chosen to give me a generous scholarship—I couldn’t criticize it, could I? It had never really occurred to me that I was allowed to judge in that way, that you can appreciate something (or even someone) while also recognizing its limitations.
Now I have made a career of doing exactly this: looking at my family stories through foreign eyes, questioning the very relationship that taught me how to see the world critically. I sometimes worry that in rejecting ideas about getting above one’s raising, I’ve gone too far, overindulging my pickiness. I know it is a luxury to have so much choice regarding what I consume, to have time to write, and to live in a beautiful, clean, progressive city. It would take a lot to convince me to give these things up. But I wonder if it would be easier to find a life partner, to really invest in someone and banish my angst about finding the right one, if I had fewer options. Unlike Mamaw, I have the option of being selective and the option of not marrying at all.
Maybe the biggest difference between my life and Mamaw’s is this: choice. I have an abundance of it; she had almost none.
• • •
Papaw died when I was four, just a few weeks after my sister, Casey, was born. The day is one of my earliest, clearest memories—a file in my mind that I can pull up and flip through at will—but his living presence is dusty, more myth than memory.
I remember going to visit him in the house on Jocelyn Avenue where Mamaw lives now. He sat in his armchair. Sometimes, I think, I sat there, too, on his lap. But I don’t remember the feel of his clothes or the sound of his voice. I see a dimly lit room, a faded green velour chair. Or was it brocade? The greenness of the chair is fixed in my mind. I wonder if I saw it in a photograph after he died. I have no memory of him walking or eating or even standing. I picture him not like a real flesh-and-blood man but as an archetype: grandfather. A presence as still as a tintype photograph.
We visited Mamaw in an apartment building down the road. I picture a screen door opening into a small, sunny kitchen with a ’50s-style Formica table. I thought it was strange that they didn’t live together, but no one ever mentioned the separation, so I didn’t either.
One Saturday morning the phone rang—the one in the living room that looked just like a real football. I answered it. My aunt Ginny and cousin Angela were visiting. Mom and Dad were probably busy with Casey, who was just a few weeks old then. I was happy to hear Mamaw’s voice on the line, but she seemed strange. “Can I talk to Daddy, baby?” she said. Was she crying?
Because he was the man of the house or because he was not Papaw’s child, she broke the news of her husband’s death to her son-in-law. I remember Mom crying quietly. I remember Dad and Ginny walking together around the perimeter of our yard, his arm across her shoulders, and I remember thinking that when someone dies it must be appropriate, even customary, to walk laps around the front yard, something I’d never seen anyone do before. It was strange to see my dad with his arm around Ginny the same way he normally reached it across Mom’s shoulders—loving and protective. Death made us quiet and gentle.
Mom sat on the bed and I stood beside her wondering what I should do. She said, “Papaw died this morning. He had a heart attack,” as if I hadn’t already heard everyone talking about it. She asked if I knew what it meant when someone died. I nodded. I’d seen it in the movies: When someone died, they did not come back. But she reminded me of this anyway. She told me Papaw was in heaven, which I’d also already known, but it still seemed strange imagining him up there. Mostly, I remember wondering why Mamaw had seemed so sad on the phone when she and Papaw didn’t even live together anymore.
After that, we visited Mamaw in the house on Jocelyn Avenue, and no one mentioned the sunny apartment down the road. She propped his photo—a portrait of a young soldier in black and white—on the mantel. As a teenager, I wondered if they really had lived apart, or if I’d imagined it.
• • •
I decided to fly home and spend some time with Mamaw (and my mom and sister), driving around Lee County and learning more about her life. Shortly after we picked her up, we pulled off the highway onto a dusty patch of gravel: the spot where her childhood home used to stand. Here was her dad’s house—she gestured toward a square of cinder blocks flush with the ground—and just over there was her uncle’s. She pointed up the hill to a road now choked with kudzu. Her paper route went thataway, she said. We stood by the road as the occasional car buzzed past, as Mamaw painted a world on top of the one we could see. It was only May and already humid.
We wound along narrow roads to the wooden clapboard house where Papaw grew up, a duplex that was once white but is now dishwater gray. We passed the spot where my mom’s elementary school stood before it burned down. We cruised the main streets of the two largest towns—Pennington Gap and Jonesville—and I thought of how we used to go to the Lee County Tobacco Festival parade, where it seemed the whole town was out to cheer the high school marching band and see the beauty queens cruise past in the backs of old Mustang convertibles. Now there is nothing—not a single window that isn’t empty or broken or boarded up.
We drove to the cemetery where Mamaw’s parents were buried and watched as great gray clouds rolled over the ridges. “I’ve never lived anywhere but Benedict and St. Charles and Ben Hur and Pennington,” Mamaw once told me. Each of these communities is within a fifteen-mile radius, all in a rural, impoverished county at the westernmost point of Virginia. I struggled to conceive of eighty years spent in the same remote mountains. But standing there on the hillside in the low grass, it was easy to see how one could spend a life there, oblivious to the larger world. In every direction there is nothing but an endless repetition of valley and holler, ridge and pasture.
As we passed the graves, Mamaw pointed out all the people she knew, most of whom she’d outlived for half a lifetime. Occasionally a great shaft of sunlight pushed through the clouds and the dense deciduous foliage. There, you are always in the mountains, not on them.
We stopped for lunch at the Ben Hur Cafe, a bar with three-dollar hamburgers and Coors on tap all day long. While Mom and Casey finished eating, Mamaw schooled me in a game of pool. I’d known this would happen from the moment she picked up the cue—which was just as long as she was tall—and casually leaned a hip into it as I racked the balls.
Once we were back in the car, thunderstorms moved in swiftly with a menacing darkness and a metallic scent in the air. We arrived at the veterans’ memorial just as the sky cracked and rain ripped leaves from the trees. Mamaw and Casey stood arm in arm, Casey hoisting a large golf umbrella as Mamaw pointed to a wall of engraved bricks: one for Papaw, one for brother Jimmy, another for brother Charles, a final one for her son, my uncle Steve. VETERAN: ANOTHER WORD
FOR FREEDOM, the large plaque read. I couldn’t quite make sense of the phrase, but I thought I got the sentiment.
As we drove past old Stone Face Rock, I voiced the question that had been lingering on my mind: “Before Papaw died, I remember going to visit you in an apartment off of Main Street.”
“Oh yes, baby,” Mamaw said. “I remember that little place.”
“Why weren’t you living with Papaw?”
She paused, and then said, “Honey, I just couldn’t be around when he was drinking. But that man was as good as he was ever bad.”
She continued nostalgically: “I’d be laying in bed of a morning and my phone would ring and he’d say, ‘Pauline, let’s go for a drive.’ And I’d prop up on my elbow and we’d talk. We just loved spending the day together. We’d go to breakfast at the drive-through and we’d pull over somewhere and eat in the car, just the two of us. And then we’d drive.” Her voice was soft and dreamy.
“How come you never remarried after he died?” I asked. She was quiet.
“I just always loved your papaw,” she finally said. “And I guess, honey, I still love him.” She added this last part as if it had just occurred to her. She also added that if she had gotten remarried she would’ve lost the military benefits that supported her all these years. But this was only a small side note and she dismissed it quickly.
She chuckled to herself. “He used to say, ‘Aww, honey, if something happens to me, you’ll have some old hairy-legged man before I even get cold in the ground.’ And I’d laugh and say, ‘Of course I would!’ ”
Her marriage was so many things at once: soft and loving, problematic, practical, genuinely rewarding, and stubbornly difficult. Mamaw’s experience reminds me that our views of love—what we want from it, what we think it should feel like—are rooted in the context of our lives. I can’t separate her story from its setting. Hers is the story of a woman and a man, but also a bigger story: of Appalachian Virginia at the end of the coal mining boom.
• • •
A 1996 study called “The Self-Fulfilling Nature of Positive Illusions in Romantic Relationships” found that newlyweds who idealize their partners experience less of a decline in marital satisfaction over the first three years compared to those who have a more realistic view of their spouse.6
When I think of my relationship with Kevin, I think of how hard I worked to see him objectively. I was aware of love’s strong undertow, and it seemed important that others not see me as moony or maudlin. If he was going to have such pull on my emotions, I thought, I should brace myself by noting his flaws. I suspect he did the same. He once said the job of a relationship was to point out weaknesses so you could work to improve them. We were good at pointing out each other’s weaknesses.
Kevin never expressed much angst about our future together. “I wake up every day and want to be with you,” he said to me once. “Isn’t that enough?”
But it wasn’t enough. And I didn’t know how to explain it to him.
In an article in the New York Times called “Love and Death,” the philosopher Todd May argued that romantic love can only flourish when it acknowledges the prospect of death.7 If we lived forever, we could have infinite loves or we could infinitely love the same person, but in either case love would lose its intensity. May cited Bill Murray’s character in the movie Groundhog Day as his case study, pointing out that even though Phil Connors had day after day (even if each day was the same day) to develop his love for Rita (played by Andie MacDowell), he didn’t have a future to animate that love into real passion: “The eternal return of Groundhog Day offered plenty of time. It promised an eternity of it. But it was the wrong kind of time. There was no time to develop a coexistence. There was instead just more of the same.”
Only in the face of death does commitment—in this case I am thinking of marriage—really become meaningful. We have one life, limited in its duration; to really invest in another person is to simultaneously sacrifice all the other potential people or investments of time. Lifetime commitment, however flawed and prone to failure it may be, instills a greater capacity for love than does simply waking up each day and deciding that, yes, you still want to be with someone.
May argued that the intensity of romantic love isn’t merely a moment-to-moment phenomenon. The intensity of love requires a trajectory into an uncertain and finite future.
When I looked into the future, I couldn’t tell if Kevin would be there or not, so I couldn’t invest in our love. When Mamaw was young and married, she and Papaw were so necessarily dependent on one another that she probably spent little time wondering about their future.
Andrew Cherlin noted that “the interesting question is not why so few people are marrying [these days], but rather, why so many people are marrying, or planning to marry, or hoping to marry, when cohabitation and single parenthood are widely acceptable options.” For Mamaw, marriage was a means of gaining independence, financial stability, and status, even if in very small measures, while I’ve been able to achieve these things more or less on my own. Examining her choices when it comes to love, choices that are totally opposite my own, has helped me think through my own anxieties about lifetime commitment: whether it’s something I want and whether I’m likely to find it.
I want to be cautious about romanticizing Mamaw’s life or marriage. But I can see how her story benefits from a retrospective view. In the years after Papaw’s death, she has come to possess all the things she lacked early on: enough money to live comfortably; a three-bedroom bungalow all to herself; time alone to fill as she pleases, growing award-winning roses or watching the Home Shopping Network. And even without a husband, she has spent thirty years with the devoted companionship of good men. Why would she remarry?
Maybe Mamaw’s love story obscures a different, truer story: the story of how a woman with no money or education worked hard to make a life of her own. I always read her choice to live alone for so long after Papaw’s death as an act of devotion to him, when it seems more likely she was devoted to someone else: herself. If the institution of marriage really is failing, maybe it’s because it is no longer the only—or even the best—model for how to make a happy life.
I don’t know if I’ll ever find meaning through that kind of formalized lifetime commitment, but if I’ve learned anything from Mamaw, it’s that self-reliance can be as powerful as any institution.
girl meets boy
following love’s script
The story of Kevin and me didn’t read like any other story I knew.
The first time Kevin spoke to me was at our college newspaper staff meeting. I was eighteen and I’d just moved from the small Virginia town where I was born to another small Virginia town two hours up the road. And even though I’d gotten a scholarship to attend Roanoke College, a small liberal arts school, I felt so fraudulent in my interactions with upperclassmen that I only spoke when spoken to. This meeting was just one of many situations where I found myself waiting and listening, intent on figuring out who people wanted me to be before showing them anything about who I was.
“Let’s have all the new staffers introduce themselves,” the editor said. When my turn came, I gave my name and my hometown, and a guy across the room looked up and laughed with something that sounded like surprise: That was Kevin.
“Abingdon?” he said. “I know Abingdon.” I don’t know why he said anything at all. Many of our classmates were from the northeast—maybe he was surprised to meet someone who was from the same part of the state that he was. Maybe he was flirting. All I can remember now is that when he looked at me, I felt something flicker. I recognized him from my linguistics class, where he seemed smart and wry and chummy with the professor. I spent the last few weeks of the term wishing he would speak to me again, but he never did.
Our next exchange was a year and a half later. By then I’d become an editor at the paper. It was the first Friday of the new term and everyone was out on the back quad eating burgers and playing Frisbee. When a guy w
ith long hair and a beard sat down across from me, I assumed he was an exchange student. He wore unfashionable nylon shorts and seemed so unlike the other guys on campus, with their cargo khakis and pink polo shirts, that he had to be an outsider. After dinner, it hit me: The guy was Kevin. He’d been studying in Germany, but he was back, handsomer now, and more worldly.
Maybe it was the heady collision of the familiar and the exotic—this person who was somehow both Appalachian and European—that motivated me to do something uncharacteristic. I made up an excuse to talk to him.
“Hi. Kevin, right?” I said, finding him by the cookie table. I remember thinking I was succeeding at playing it cool. “You probably don’t remember me but I’m Mandy—”
“I remember you,” he said calmly, smiling, but I kept going as if he hadn’t spoken at all.
“I’m an editor for the Brackety-Ack and we need a photographer. I’m not sure if you’re still interested, but there’s a meeting on Sunday night. You should come.”
He said he might and wrote his email address on a slip of paper.
As the arts and entertainment editor, I was not responsible for hiring a photographer. But I didn’t care—I had an email address folded and tucked in my pocket like a secret. I thought of it as a document of possibility, a new life I hadn’t yet imagined for myself. As it turned out, I was right.
• • •
Kevin never showed that Sunday night, and whatever effort I’d put into picking out clothes for a meeting I usually attended in sweatpants went unappreciated by the rest of the staff. But it gave me a reason to write to Kevin. He’d meant to come, he replied, but he’d gotten the time wrong. This time, he sent his phone number.
I saw him again a week or so later. I’d been at campus bingo night when Brian—a friend on whom I’d had an unbudging crush—showed up with his new girlfriend. My cheeks burned with that old shame of wanting someone who does not want you. I didn’t want to look at them, but I felt as if everyone was watching me to see if I was looking, which made the not looking that much harder. I finished the game, told my friends I had an upset stomach, and left.
How to Fall in Love with Anyone Page 7
