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The next time I saw my grandmother, we both had aged significantly. She was eighty-six and I was about to turn nineteen, but so much had happened to cause me to grow up. I’d begun running away from home around the time Grandpa passed away and I was learning to recognize that I’d been abused in various ways over the years. I forced myself to grow up rather quickly and landed in a lot of really bad situations as a result. Looking for a moment of peace and comfort somewhere I knew I would feel safe, I sought out my grandmother. I moved to Arkansas.
She was still going to the Red Barn to go dancing all the time and had become quite the regular, though she never danced. She always told me that a lady would dance with the man who brought her, and since her husband had passed away, she had no right to dance with anyone at all.
“Did you love him, Grandma?” I asked her, point-blank. I didn’t mean it to sound the way it did, but I didn’t know how else to get the words out. We were sitting there at the Red Barn surrounded by total strangers while a band played and other folks danced to the music. It was a jovial moment, shattered by what should have been an innocent question.
“I learned to love him,” she replied after a moment of pondering. “But he wasn’t the first love of my life.”
“There was someone before Grandpa?”
“Only one,” she replied, looking somewhat lost in thought. “And none after.”
“I see,” I looked at the floor, terrified that she might see right through my eyes and know everything I’d been told about him having been unfaithful to her. She always knew me well enough to read me no matter what I had on my mind. I should have known that day would be no different.
“Someone told you,” she confronted me.
“Told me what?”
“Someone told you about your grandpa.” She tilted my chin up from the floor and looked me in the eyes. “And your mama don’t know, so I know it wasn’t her, and you’re never going to tell her.” It wasn’t a question. She was demanding that I never tell my mother the truth about her own father. “But someone told you, and I want to clear a few things up.” She stopped pushing up on my chin when our eyes locked.
“Like what?”
“Like where your mama’s name came from. He didn’t name her after some other woman. I named her. I’d picked out two names for her, and when the nurses came to ask me what her name was going to be, I only got the first one out of my mouth before the nurse ran off to write it down. So, I picked out some names, but a nurse actually named your mama. She was going to be called either Sarah Elizabeth for my mother or Rebecca Jane for my best friend from when I was nine years old. The nurse only heard the first one and the rest is history. I didn’t know at the time that your grandpa was having an affair with a woman named Elizabeth.”
“So it was true then?”
“Yeah, but that was a different time, and we were different people. Don’t be mad at him for it. I never have been.”
“But how could you not be mad at him, Grandma? I mean, he cheated on you!”
“Because when we got married, we knew what it was. I didn’t love him, and he didn’t love me. We just didn’t want to be alone, and he needed help with his kids. So it made sense. It was a business arrangement. I wanted kids, and he wanted a wife who wouldn’t complain. We both got what we wanted.”
“But why couldn’t you have love too?” I was dumbfounded to hear my strong, powerful, brave grandmother talk about such things as infidelity in such a light way. How could she not be mad at the man she’d been married to for more than half of her life? Why didn’t he love her enough to be faithful to her? He married her.He should have been faithful to her, I thought.
“Because I’d already had love, and I’d lost it a long time ago. I didn’t ever want that again.”
“But I don’t understand,” I whimpered. “Love is supposed to be magical and wonderful and forever!” I started to tear up. How could my grandmother live most of her life without having been loved by her husband? How could she think that she’d never love anyone herself? It didn’t make sense. She was the most loving person I knew. How could she have lived that kind of life?
“I know you don’t understand, and maybe someday I’ll tell you about what love meant to me, and what it did to me but for now, I’ll just tell you the truth about your grandpa, okay?”
“Okay,” I nodded, trying desperately to disconnect this emotionless marriage from the person I knew my grandmother to be.
“He was too small and frail to be in the military, and he saw that as his only way out of town. He tried to join so he could fight in the first World War, but they wouldn’t let him, so he got stuck at home with his wife and kids. He took odd jobs trying to do whatever he could to make ends meet and pay the bills, all while she kept having more babies, and they had more mouths to feed. When I was seventeen, we had the stock market crash, and the Great Depression hit. It was hard enough on most folk, but for folks like your grandpa and his wife, things were worse than that. They already couldn’t afford to feed their kids, and now there weren't enough jobs to go around and not enough food for sure.
“That poor woman didn’t kill herself because she was scared or lost everything she owned, like so many other people were doing. There was a lot of suicide back then. But no, she killed herself because she was watching her babies starve to death in front of her eyes. They’d lost five to the Spanish Flu in 1918 already. Now they were dying just because they were poor. That does things to a person. It did something to your grandpa, too. Your Uncle Roy was the one that found her dead after she blew her own head off. I think that’s why he’s always hated me so much. He loved his mama and he couldn’t ever see me as being a replacement for her. And he saw how her death broke his daddy, so he couldn’t ever give up on him either.
“Death does funny things to a person. It changes who they are. They don’t turn out to be the people they might have been otherwise. Your grandpa did the best he could, but when she killed herself in 1938, their youngest child was only four, and your grandpa was struggling. He had his oldest daughter, June, taking care of the youngest kids, but then she got Scarlet Fever and died, too.
“Your grandpa was a broken man by the time we met, and I was an old maid. I didn’t think I’d ever get married and I thought I was okay with that. But then he asked and I figured it might be my last shot at ever getting married so I said I would. He knew I didn’t love him. I knew that he didn’t love me, either. But we both got something out of it. We were both just a little less broken. And if I hadn’t married your grandpa, I wouldn’t have had your mama, and then she wouldn’t have had you. So to me, it will always be worth it. You understand?”
“Yes,” I lied, still confused as to how a marriage could be based on something other than fairytale romance and love.
“No, you don’t, and that’s okay. Maybe someday you will, though. And then again, maybe not. I can only hope you never have to know what it’s like to live in a marriage like that. It’s not the kind of life you should have. You’re young and beautiful. Maybe you’ll meet the love of your life, and he won’t break your heart. Maybe you’ll have the most beautiful life you could ever imagine. It’s what I hoped for your mama. It’s what I hope for you.”
“I love you, Grandma,” I told her then, tears in my eyes. I didn’t know what else to say.
“I hope you still love your grandpa, too,” she leaned back a bit to look me in the eye.
I sat there for several long moments, thinking of all she’d told to me, and trying to comprehend the pain of loss he must’ve felt during all those hard years. Though it didn’t excuse what he did to my grandmother with his unfaithfulness, it did explain why he lived so quietly all his life, why Uncle Roy didn’t like my grandmother, and why Grandpa didn’t seem to mind losing his memory to dementia. I reached for her.
“I still love Grandpa too,” I sighed and hugged her tightly, still uncertain about why I would still love a man who wasn’t good to her.