THE FIFTY-YEAR RESENTMENT (PERSONAL ESSAY)

I had been going down to Florida to see my grandparents every year since they moved sometime in my early teens. But on the visit when I was 16 something changed. I had come down for their 50th wedding anniversary party the week before. Something odd was happening. My grandmother began to treat me like a fellow adult. It made me awfully nervous.

You'd have to know my grandmother. She lived, as far as I could tell, in a perfect world of polished furniture, home-cooked meals that looked like they were from the magazines, and an orderly routine she followed each and every day to get her chores done. She left her top bureau drawer open once and I saw that she had what looked like hundreds of colors of threads all lined up by color. I used to open her linen closet and just stick my nose in it and smell the peace and tranquility of a domestic order and cleanliness unknown at my home. She was a true domestic goddess and we all bowed down to her, my grandfather included. He knew his place. He did what was expected of him when it was expected and not before or after. He came to the table when meals were ready. He walked the dog immediately after.

Everything in my grandmother's house had a place and a function and followed accordingly. My grandmother's beliefs about God and the universe when spoken of seemed to have a heavenly order that was quite similar to the order of her home. Nice girls behaved appropriately and God smiled on them. Bad girls made a mess and made God unhappy.

I was nervous just drying her dishes that I wouldn't do the job good enough. I was afraid some dirt I was unaware of would come out of my palms and infect her sanitary, scalded dishes. I didn't like vacuuming for her because my vacuum lines weren't straight enough. I never worried about this stuff at home, because I barely did any chores at home. At my grandmother's I felt like I was pretending to be some cleaner, more wholesome version of myself that I never really could aspire to being.

My grandfather and I rarely spoke. He drank his beer quietly and watched the news. Most of what he had to say when he did speak were things to worry about: "Don't put your face too close to the dog's, don't slip on the wet floor, watch out for the ashtray". He had come to the U.S. from Sweden when he was just 18, learned English and made a good living for his family even during the Depression.

My grandmother had married him when she was only 16. He was older. I knew she had been pregnant with my eldest aunt when they married. She was Austrian and spoke only German when they were dating. How did they ever court without any mutual language? I'll never know.

My grandmother never complained about her life being hard or boring or anything like that. She was a good Christian woman who counted her blessings. I mostly only saw her cry when she was happy or moved by something sentimental.

She was the strongest woman I ever knew.

One day we pulled into the garage of their house and she put a hand on my arm to let me know to wait to get out of the car. I sat back down in the seat. She looked straight ahead and started talking. She said that when she and my grandfather were about to be married, he had done something to her that she just could never forget nor forgive.

He had taken out another girl, a girl my grandmother knew, and drove her right by the boarding house where my grandfather stayed and my grandmother worked as a maid. He knew, she said, that my grandmother would see them driving by together. She had felt betrayed. His intention may have been to make her jealous, but she took it as much more. She understood him to be saying that he could have any girl, and that he didn't have to be settling for a pregnant Austrian maid that didn't even speak his language or know much about the world. He could do so much better. She spoke of these things she felt him saying to her on that day more than 50 years ago as though they had happened yesterday. I was sure now that was why she was really crying at her 50th anniversary party the previous week.

I asked if she had ever brought this old resentment up to him. She looked like she came out of a reverie as she turned to me, and I realized I knew nothing of my grandmother's ways. "No," was all she said.

In my youth, I wanted to convince her to bring it up now, to talk to him about it, and yet I knew I was only 16 and this woman had had more than 50 years to think about this resentment and what to do with it.

She seemed smaller to me as she climbed out of the car, wearier. For once I saw the determination behind the woman that kept her going. "It's a good life if you don't weaken," was the family motto she often repeated, and spoke now.