Three years ago, my mother sent me a text that read, “Gramma Gert: 3, Jake: 0” — the joke being that her 80-year-old mother, Gert, was getting married for a third time while I, at 28, was still single. But the odder twist — too strange to joke about, perhaps — was that Gert’s soon-to-be-husband was her former brother-in-law, Bill.
Uncle Bill, who had been married to Gert’s sister, was also heading into his third marriage, at 79. Their previous spouses had died, three from cancer and one from a heart attack.
My family has always been thick and messy, spread like soft cheese across two counties in the most rural part of Pennsylvania. And more and more, our family tree was beginning to seem a little Faulknerian.
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Not long ago, when Gert’s minivan pulled into my parent’s driveway with Uncle Bill at the wheel, my mother was blessedly ignorant. “Isn’t that nice?” she said. “Bill has been driving my mother around all winter.”
The news of their courtship dropped a few weeks later, when the two were spotting walking down Main Street holding hands. The engagement came a few weeks later: a wedding planned for June.
I didn’t know how to respond to my mother’s text. Was she disturbed that her mother was marrying her uncle? I considered telling her that inter-familial marriages were once very common, even the stuff of the old nobility. And anyway, at their age the relationship was probably more akin to roommates than romantic partners.
But that’s not what I said because what I actually say to my mother and what I should say to my mother are rarely the same. And she had started something with the barb about my reluctance to wed, so, I replied with a barb of my own: “U think it’s because she’s knocked up?”
My grandmother and Bill married that June under a white tent that hosted the reception too, a thoroughly country affair with food fit for a Methodist potluck. Gert wore a pale blue silk dress and Bill wore a matching bow tie. It was sticky hot and the crowd was edgy, ready to spring into action if one of the newlyweds went down in the heat.
During the ceremony I bounced one of my nieces on my knee and my girlfriend, Annie, bounced the other. We had been together seven years and were 28. While I called Annie my girlfriend, she called me her partner, which exemplified the trouble between us.
To my family, it was strange that Annie and I weren’t married and almost as strange that we didn’t have children. My grandmother, I knew, started having children as a teenager. So had my sister and many of our cousins. Most of my mother’s siblings were grandparents by 45, if not sooner. While Annie and I were very much behind schedule, everyone seemed optimistic. Annie was smart and great with children. She had grown up on a farm and played the fiddle — an idealized country girl who could keep me in line.
If my family thought Annie and I were odd for being unmarried and childless at 28, my friends in Morgantown thought the opposite — that we were odd for even being in a long-term relationship at all. In my graduate student circles, few people were coupled-up, and even fewer had been together as long as Annie and I had. Out at bars, I’d listen as my friends laughed about Tinder or swapped stories about blurry hookups, whereas Annie and I recently had used Google Calendar to schedule times to have sex.
The idea of marriage was embarrassing. But it wasn’t that I wanted to be single and free. I just wanted to appear that way. I didn’t want to seem hickish, prudish, and tied down — the traits I saw in many members of my family. Getting away from home had meant getting away from living like I was at home. But still, so young, I had chosen to couple up.
You can’t take the country out of the boy, I guess.
Holding each others’ liver-spotted hands, Gert and Bill said “I do” in a way that didn’t seem even a little rote. The pastor said, “While we take the photos, I’ll let you sort out what to call each other.”
The attendees laughed, but after the joke faded, I noticed my mother looking around thoughtfully, working to understand the new backstitch in the family thread.
The most awkward part of a wedding is usually the intersection of two families, a feeling that should have been largely absent from Gert and Bill’s. But, for me, another neurosis replaced it: Everybody in my hometown suddenly felt related, tangled vines of my kin ensnaring the landscape, squeezing until the hills rose up higher, so high you couldn’t see out.
It’s limiting in a place like that, where “Who are you?” and “Who is your family?” are the same question. In a way, it feels a lot like being partnered at a young age. It’s hard to be yourself.
This was a lesson I was just beginning to learn. Annie and I had spent so much time together that I didn’t know quite who I was without her. My life had been our life. Meeting new people in graduate school, I would hear myself beginning sentences with “we” instead of “I.”
“Who is we?” people would say.
Who indeed?
For their first dance, Gert and Bill did a polka. While they bounced, unsteady and arthritic, Annie wept small tears. My sister, tipsy from the airplane bottles of liquor she had brought in her purse, said, “Do you see the way he looks at her? Just like he’s always going to take care of her.”
There was something about the idea that irked me. Is this why people get married? To have someone to take care of them? I wondered if some people just couldn’t be alone, not realizing that I was the hypothetical person in my mind.
Annie and I stayed together for two more years after Gert and Bill’s wedding, our relationship steadily degrading despite our efforts to salvage it. The reasons we split are too numerous and boring to list, but in any event, my post-Annie life felt surprisingly terrifying and vast.
Alone for the first time in my adult life, I struggled. My credit was bad and certain maddening bureaucracies — the cable bill, the car inspection, the groceries — had been entirely Annie’s responsibility.
If I sound pathetic, I was. The work of living had always been divided between Annie and me. After the love ended and we stopped even liking each other much, we cared for each other by taking care of things for each other. Caring had filled the spaces that romantic love left when it evaporated. But it wasn’t enough.
It made me think of my sister’s comments at the wedding. So I went to visit my grandmother and Bill. They had decided to start fresh, selling their houses and buying one together. It piqued my interest. If they could start over at 80, why couldn’t I at 30?
They seemed warm, if a little nervous, to entertain me for an afternoon, as if they were still learning their relationship dynamics around houseguests. On the living-room wall hung photos of their first and second marriages. It made me wonder if there were earlier photos of them together, back when they were the spouses of each other’s siblings. It made me wonder if there had been attraction between them then, or any inkling that life is long and impossible to predict.
In the basement, Bill showed me his man cave filled with camouflaged furniture, ceramic lamps made to resemble leaping deer and a case full of rifles passed through his family and my own. In the craft room, Gert had a card table covered in family documents and photographs. She was compiling ephemera from our family and Bill’s into a huge book, interweaving the two families’ histories in the way that their marriage interwove the present.
Bill was as excited about the scrapbook as Gert was. He showed me a picture of my grandfather I had never seen, looking wry and ironic sitting on a donkey.
“Your grandfather,” Bill said. “He was a real hell of a guy.”
My grandmother ran her hand across Bill’s back. It wasn’t a gesture of comfort — there was something romantic about it. It was the way Annie had touched me for years after we met, and then not again for years afterward. It occurred to me how exciting it must have been for Gert to feel those electric pangs of love again.
In that moment, I saw my grandmother and Bill not as old people seeking each others’ comfort or as old people at all, really. I saw them as newlyweds, love-struck and hopeful. I thought about how they both had lost love twice before and how they entered into this new love, at 80, knowing they would lose it again. And all at once, they seemed brave.
