1. Cleaning my room
2. Writing
3. Filing my fingernails into perfect squares
Hinged to Forgetfulness Like a Door
Richard Brautigan
Hinged to forgetfulness
like a door,
she slowly closed out of
sight,
and she was the woman I loved,
but too many times she slept like
a mechanical deer in my caresses,
and I ached in the metal silence
of her dreams.
In early August, I was at the beach for a week when I started reading my grandfather's letters to my grandmother.
Late one night early in the week, my aunt and I went out to the shed with flashlights to find the small cedar chest full of letters. I took the chest into my bedroom at the beach, which, for the past six summers, has always felt empty without my grandmother, Nan, sleeping in the twin bed next to mine. I started reading.
"Dear Diz," began the first letter to Nan, whose full first name was Isobel. It was signed "Wayne." My grandfather's name was William -- Bill, or Wild Bill, depending on who's telling what story. My mom told me, "Oh, that's just what they called your grandfather!" As though that explains everything.
The letters are, on the whole, boring compared to the romanticized expectations that my entire family had. My grandfather wrote to Nan at least two or three times a week during five years, beginning when they first started dating, through his time in the army and in battle during World War II, and through their first year of marriage. I've only read up through the first year of their courtship; right now, he's frozen in time at an Army training camp on Cape Cod.
My grandfather grew up on a farm in Haverhill, MA with a big, poor Irish family (my mother tells me his mother's brogue was so thick you could barely understand her) while my grandmother lived with her Lithuanian parents in Lawrence, MA, where they worked in the mills. The early letters focus mostly on scheduling: my grandfather writes the time and the place where Nan can plan to meet him on the following Saturday. It's about 10 miles between Haverhill and Lawrence, two towns that are now connected by I-495, and it's hard to really understand how they could have felt worlds apart.
But they were. My grandfather, then 20 years old, lived on the farm with his parents, worked for a coal delivery service, and did not own or have access to a car. Nan was 21, still unmarried, and back from nearly a year spent at a sanatorium recovering from the tuberculosis that left her with only one lung. She owned her own car: a gift from her father for her 21st birthday. That car took her as far as the 1939 New York World's Fair and as close as the dances at the Polish National Hall that she and her friends went to every weekend. In one of my grandfather's early letters, he writes that things are "getting too serious." He can no longer accept rides from her in her car. It's not right, he says, for a girl to be driving a boy all over kingdom come; people would think he's a "punk," a "heel."
_____
As I read, I started to feel a connection with the grandfather who died when I was barely six. In 1939, my lovestruck grandfather saw Nan exactly as I always saw her: brassy, hilarious, adventure-seeking, kind and welcoming, the best cook, the best host, and the easiest person to talk to. In each of his early letters -- before the start of the war -- he writes about how much fun he has with her and seems constantly and pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to be with her. Knowing how my grandfather saw her adds a dimension to my grandmother that I never could have experience: Diz as a young woman, starting down the path to marriage and family, against the odds and advice from doctors.
That week in August, I gave mini reports on the letters to my family. None of them want to read the letters, so I briefed them on all the good parts: juicy, funny, sad, and unbelievable. My aunt, one night, said that she just feels good knowing that her parents were in love -- a very different kind of love that comes before war, children, illness, and all the other stuff that's part of the second half of "for better or for worse."
As for me? The letters, at first, made me feel frustrated...like I was born in the wrong time (as many things have been known to do). Imagine if finding someone was as easy as going to the same Saturday night dance, week after week, until someone new just shows up. And then, he'll write you letters just telling you simply how you make him feel ("You're the best sweetheart") and when he'll meet you Saturday night -- 8:30 p.m. at the bus stop on Essex Street.
But then I remembered that things like war and hunger and 10 miles of distance before the interstate system probably made my grandparents wish they were born in a simpler time.
_____
So, I guess the bottom line, for me, is this: I've always had this assumption that the marriages of our grandparents' era weren't the equal partnerships that we're all seeking. I'm sure my grandmother changed more diapers than my grandfather and my grandfather had more financial control over the household than my grandmother. But in those letters, they were the best of friends, partners in crime and adventure. And if that was possible in 1939, then maybe I'm not so crazy for holding out for the same thing.
