How They Met, and Other Stories(48)
Author: David Levithan

I can’t do the things they do. I can invent.

Ramona reaches over and pulls Milo toward her. (You are right there.) She embraces him, she plunges, she will not let go for a minute. (I want this more than words.) She can do it. (I can’t.) Milo and William have a conversation about love and halfway through, Milo interjects: “But, William, you know this is how I feel about you?” (I have daydreams where I see this happening.) He can do it. (I just can’t.) Milo holds Ramona and treasures her. William is surprised, but not displeased. There are happy endings. (When I write them.) There have to be. (When I write.)

I want to write my life. I want to be able to write my life.

You are a second away from saying it.

You have no idea how much I love you.

HOW THEY MET

I think my favorite family stories are the stories of how my grandparents met. To think that these two intersections led to my parents, led to me. That my very existence owes thanks to a piano, a jeep, Hunter College, and the U.S. Army. One of the two stories I’ve been told for as long as I can remember being told stories. The other I recently learned. They amaze me because they prove that a single moment can blossom into almost fifty years of togetherness. They prove that my grandparents were once young and crazy and romantic and yearning. They are finished stories to me now—I knew the ending from the first time I heard them. But at the time…well, at the time it must have been something.

My Papa Louis and Grandma Alice’s story has to begin with the phrase “It was during the war.”

It was during the war. My great-aunt Estelle (my grandfather’s sister) and a friend of my grandmother’s were going to Hunter College. One day they were comparing notes and discovered that both of their siblings were stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia. They decided to do a little matchmaking. Gladys (my grandfather’s other sister) wrote to Lou. Irene (one of my grandmother’s sisters) wrote to Alice. Lou got on the horn to Alice. A date was set.

But Lou wasn’t going to leave everything to chance. He was thirty-three, a paratrooper. He’d been a cop in New York City before the war and had been on a date or two. He decided to make sure everything was on the up and up before going on a blind date. So a couple of days beforehand he borrowed a jeep and did a drive-by lookover. He found out where my grandmother was going to be and (for lack of a better term) checked her out. He liked what he saw. The date was on.

My grandmother was nine years younger than my grandfather. She was a dietician, and outranked my grandfather. When my grandfather called her up, they arranged to meet Friday for lunch. They hit it off, and my grandmother asked my grandfather if he wanted to go to synagogue with her. This would end up being one of the few times my grandfather would go to temple in his life. (The things we do for love.) He said yes. They met. They talked and talked and talked.

Something clicked.

My grandmother told her friends she’d met this crazy guy. Crazy in a good way.

My grandmother must have been pretty crazy, too. Crazy in a good way.

They were both clearly crazy for each other.

They met on Friday.

By Wednesday they were engaged and talking to a rabbi.

Three days later, after my grandfather’s baseball game, they were married.

This is a story we tell all the time. A couple of the details change every now and then, or a character is added (what was the name of the justice who married them?). But the moral of the story is that it worked. They knew, and they were right.

It wasn’t until my Pop-Pop Arnold had heart surgery that I realized I didn’t know how he and my Grandma Grace had met. I asked my mother and she didn’t know, either. She got the story, told it to me, and the next time I saw my grandfather I asked him to tell it again. It’s a different kind of story than “during the war.” But I love it just as much.

My mother’s parents met because they often passed each other in the neighborhood. My grandmother was in a group of girls who would hang out on a certain stoop, chatting. My grandfather was in a group of guys who would walk past on their way to work and say hello. Soon they started talking, group with group, and my grandfather’s friend, Sidney Throne, decided to set Arnold and Grace up.

I don’t know what their first date was, but I do know that they had such a good time that my grandfather traveled to another borough in order to walk her home. They said good night, saw each other a little more, and eventually it came time for my grandmother to bring my grandfather home.

My great-grandmother was not amused. My grandfather was from Detroit. He’d run away to escape the Ford factory and his parents. He was not from a Fine Jewish Family, like my grandmother was. According to my grandfather, the moment my great-grandmother set eyes on him, she thought, Who is this shmegegie?

“She wouldn’t give me a glass of water” is how my grandfather tells it. He was ushered into the living room, where all the chairs had cords over them, like antiques in a museum. The only place that didn’t have a cord was the piano bench. The piano itself was an ugly green Steinway, never used. My grandfather squeezed in among the clunky furniture, made small talk, but was never offered anything polite, not even a glass of water.

This repeated a few times.

Then one day, sitting on the piano bench, my grandfather decided to open the piano. With my great-grandmother out of the room, he started to play for Grace. He had been to Juilliard, you see, and the room was soon filled with music. My great-grandmother stormed in, disbelieving. Then slowly she went over to the window closest to the piano and opened it. Then the next window. Window after window. So the neighbors could hear. So the neighbors could know what kind of visitor they had.

The next time, he got a glass of water.

Is this the whole story? Of course not, in either case. But these are the true-life family fairy tales, and I’m happy to be the one to tell them ever after.

In 1964, in the summer after they graduated from high school, my parents were set up on a blind date. They went to see A Hard Day’s Night.

I am here because of a piano, a jeep, Hunter College, the U.S. Army, the Beatles, and a whole bunch of matchmakers. I am here because of letters written during a war, music played with windows open, a crazy leap.

And love. I am here because of love.

MEMORY DANCE

Wallace liked his cornflakes to be served the same way every morning—with only enough milk to surround (and not dampen) the cereal, perhaps with a piece of fruit thrown in. He was accustomed to having them day after day, a constant in his unextraordinary life.