I had met Merrill and Nancy Jacobs once before. They had come to the college to visit their granddaughter, my friend and fellow sophomore Katie, and had taken a group of us out to dinner. Eating my free cheeseburger and avoiding eye contact as much as possible, I found that Merrill was very hard of hearing even with his hearing aids (if he remembered to wear them, as his wife mentioned) and that he liked to laugh. The combination of these two traits consistently drew the attention of the patrons surrounding us away from their beer and onion rings toward our corner table at the Irish-style restaurant. Grandpa Merrill also liked to talk at only a half-decibel lower than his laugh on subjects most usually related to whatever he thought the rest of the party was discussing. It took me five minutes every time he started talking to find a connection between his story and the conversation. Most of the time, a connection didn’t exist.
Nancy Jacobs was well dressed and polite and much softer spoken than her husband, but that didn’t stop her from scolding him for how loud he talked. Her voice would rise in pitch and frustration as she repeated for the fourth time that she didn’t think that was the question Katie had just asked. He would usually ignore her and keep laughing between every five words of the story he thought we wanted him to tell.
I didn’t think much about what it would be like to live with them for three days. When Katie asked me and another friend, JoAnna, to travel to their house with her for our four day October break, I was more curious about Missouri.
“What’s in Nixa, Missouri?”
“Well, it’s near Branson.”
“What’s in Branson?”
“Lots of podunk shows. Pretty much the one word that defines everything is corny.”
The image that came to my mind when she said “shows” featured the feathered headdresses and high-kicking legs in the pictures I had seen of shows in Las Vegas. I knew Katie would give me her famous “I don’t have time to explain things” look if I admitted my ignorance, so I kept my curiosity mostly contained.
“Your grandparents live there?”
“Yeah. They moved there from Palm Springs. We don’t really know why. They just spend the summer there, though. The winters are too cold so they move back to California in the fall.”
“Why don’t they just stay in California?”
“No clue.”
Katie didn’t seem perplexed by her grandmother and step-grandfather and their strange habits, but that wasn’t a surprise. Katie always handled strangeness with her model-like smile and confident stride in brightly colored J. Crew heels. In her world, everything could be handled by forging ahead. In my world, everything awkward was somehow my fault. I stuffed fries into my mouth when Nancy scolded Merrill so that no one could accuse me of eavesdropping or worse, participating. At least JoAnna would be coming on the trip as well. If a person existed who found the world to be a more uncomfortable place than I did, it would be her.
The next time I met the Jacobs was at one thirty in the morning at their retirement complex in Nixa, Missouri. The fault for arriving at such a late hour partly fell on JoAnna, who insisted on driving the speed limit in the right lane. When Katie drove I prayed that JoAnna didn’t accidentally glance at the speedometer. Despite the delay, Merrill and Nancy were still awake.
“You girls want some chicken?” Merrill asked.
“We ate dinner already, Grandpa,” Katie said.
He didn’t hear. We ate chicken while he stood in the kitchen and told us how they got their water filter, a huge plastic contraption with black rocks in the bottom, from Switzerland. I was distracted by the Mr. and Mrs. Claus figurines that sat next to the ceramic puppets and sugar canisters on top of the cabinets.
As we each sat on a uniquely upholstered couch, JoAnna and Katie chatted with Merrill and I tried to absorb the décor. Carved wooden puppets and a wooden goose dangled from the kitchen light like a macabre display of sentenced criminals. Fifteen dollar framed art replicas, from black and white to impressionist, covered every wall surface, many somewhere below eye level. Each of the four couches in the living room looked as if it had come from a different decade, a faded pink floral placed beside a dusty rust orange. And the crown jewel of it all: a six foot tall wooden folding screen hand-painted to portray a white farm goose, placed strategically in the corner behind the television.
When Merrill finally released us, obeying Nancy’s pleas on our behalf, I found that my air mattress faced a large painting of Christ being crucified. JoAnna let her mouth gape almost as wide as she had the day I burped in front of our very attractive friend John, the day that she told me she would make a lady out of me eventually. The three of us laughed ourselves to sleep at the miraculous feat of Merrill and Nancy in making even the face of the dying Jesus something ridiculously comical.
The next morning, I awoke early to hear Merrill exclaim to Nancy that he couldn’t believe how long young people liked to sleep. Katie and JoAnna, who usually sleep till late afternoon if given the chance, were woken soon after by Merrill’s booming “Rise and shine!” outside our door. Of course, they pretended not to hear and simply pulled the covers over their heads for another forty-five minutes. I blew dry my hair while I watched Katie fall out of bed and squint at herself in the mirror. By some miracle, both JoAnna and Katie managed to finish getting ready at the same time I completed my hour-long preparation. In the midst of my concern that they would sleep forever and make me start conversation with Merrill and Nancy on my own, I had forgotten that I could always rely on them for a breakfast date even if I had to wake them up to go with me.
The schedule for that morning was a visit to the Messianic church the couple attended about once every two months when they felt compelled and when Merrill remembered that he owned a prayer shawl, which he forgot to wear on this particular morning.
“Are your grandparents Jewish?” I whispered to Katie on the way there, slammed up next to her in the back seat in yet another fast turn by Grandpa Merrill.
“Well, his dad was Jewish but he was raised Catholic. He goes on a Jewish kick every once and a while. We don’t really know what to make of it.” I assumed that meant her family couldn’t figure out Merrill and Nancy much more after knowing them for years than I could after knowing them for less than twenty-four hours. It didn’t surprise me.
Hearing Katie’s answer, JoAnna shot me a carsick smile behind Katie’s back, but she quickly turned wide eyes back to the front windshield when Merrill stopped a few inches shy of rear-ending the car in front of us.
We arrived safely despite JoAnna’s misgivings. Already flustered by the looks I received as we entered the sanctuary without head coverings, I watched carefully to see if the Jacobs knew what was going on during the service. I got lost in the Hebrew songs and calls for prayer at the altar and hoped that I would find in them some clue about what amount of participation was appropriate for Gentile visitors. Grandpa Merrill stood with a smile on his face the whole three hours. Grandma Nancy sat and tapped her foot to the beat of the songs. I am convinced they had no more of a clue than I did.
When the service that started at eleven concluded at two in the afternoon, the Jacobs drove us to the heart of Branson’s tourist industry. My carsickness from Merrill’s stop and go almost kept me from appreciating my first glimpse, plastered on the huge highway billboards advertising famous gospel quartets and comedians and country music stars. Only by eating a whole rotisserie chicken at Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede Show did I manage to calm my heaving stomach.
Though Dolly Parton had only been a vaguely familiar name to me before traveling to Missouri, my knowledge of the country music world expanded as JoAnna, the Texan, explained bits and pieces through mouthfuls of chicken. Apparently Dolly spent the money she earned as a singer on platinum blonde hair dye, plastic surgery, and the Dixie Stampede, which preserved the history of the West with musical dinner show flair. For the first time since Katie invited me on the trip, I felt as if I understood what she meant by “podunk shows.” Funnier even than the piglet races or the ostrich riding was Merrill’s roaring laughter as he provided a running commentary on the show for Katie. JoAnna and I choked on our giggles as we tried to drown out his cheers for our side of the mock Civil War rodeo competition, which happened to be the South, with hearty hurrahs of our own. We failed.
When we announced that we wanted to rent a movie to take up the rest of the night, Nancy and Merrill argued about which video store to stop by on the way home.
“I don’t care where we go as long as it has a bathroom,” Katie said.
“Oh, do you have to go pee pee?” Nancy asked helpfully.
Merrill proceeded to tell us all how he had a wonderful bladder, how he had always had a wonderful bladder, how it had never failed him. He didn’t hear the restrained laughter from the back seat. I wondered if the shade of purple in JoAnna’s face continued to deepen from lack of oxygen or embarrassment or both. Her blond bun bounced on the back of her head as her shoulders shook.
“Ladies, as you get older you have to go more often. In five years we’ll be wearing diapers. You’ll see when you get there but we won’t be around to see it.” Merrill had adapted the tone of an old sage imparting wisdom to the young.
Even Katie, the girl who would make a great First Lady, struggled to recover the conversation. “Yeah, I have a small bladder.”
“Geez, I have a great bladder,” Merrill restated, “I just have an ungrateful prostate.”
I thought JoAnna was going to explode. Katie rocked back and forth in her seat. I had to loosen my seat belt.
Nancy gasped. “You would tell a bum on the street about your prostate!”
“Geez, Nancy! Just trying to tell a story.”
Merrill, genuinely hurt, continued to reiterate his point. Katie nearly lost control before we arrived at the video store as all of us tried to keep Merrill from hearing us suck in air between silent stomach spasms.
By the next day’s trip to Silver Dollar City, I had come to expect anything from Grandpa Merrill. He jogged all the way to the ticket counter, ready for the day in his argyle sweater, jogging pants, and white New Balance tennis shoes. Nancy followed slowly, telling him to slow down with a tone that revealed she knew he couldn’t hear her and wouldn’t slow down if he could.
Silver Dollar City didn’t disappoint any more than the Dixie Stampede when it came to my first experience of Branson culture. While Katie and JoAnna tested the theme park’s roller coasters, I wandered between the cabin-style shops and food stalls that lined the twisting and steeply sloped walkways. My brand name jeans and sweatshirt stuck out among the camouflage cargo pants, hunter-orange hats, and t-shirts with barely clothed women and phrases like “Nothing Butt Bass” printed across the back. The accents were almost as thick as the smells of funnel cake, ribs, and smoke from the fires of the artisans that plied their country trades for the curious eyes of children. Despite the “city slicker” label I felt being stuck on my forehead by sideways glances, I experienced the rare sensation (for me) of being comfortable with my own strangeness. Being considered strange in a theme park populated by strangeness felt more like being accepted than scorned.
Nancy and Merrill decided to attend a musical show of a cowboy-style romance, giving us girls a chance to grab some of the food we had been smelling all afternoon and sit for a while in a picnic area labeled “The Camp.” Katie and I watched the leaves from the reddening trees fall around our table as we chewed thoughtfully on greasy cheeseburgers and waited for JoAnna to come back with whatever we had seen steaming in the large open skillet a couple of cabins away.
“Your grandparents are hysterical,” I said through my mouthful.
Katie agreed with a nod. “It’s funny, though. Grandma Nancy never used to be this nice. It’s strange to see her this way. She’s different now after the stroke.”
“You’re saying she was mean before she had a stroke? I didn’t even know she had a stroke.”
“Yeah, she used to be pretty feisty. She was sharp and rude to people. She never used to move that slow either. I suppose it saved her marriage with Grandpa Merrill, which is good. It made her less independent.”
I knew that Nancy’s marriage to Merrill had not been her first because Katie’s last name was McCullough, not Jacobs. Still, the thought of a seventy-eight-year-old couple getting a divorce made me set down my burger.
“She was married a couple times before Merrill, you know,” Katie continued. “My dad told me that she worked on an army base as a teenager and that her first husband beat her. Her second husband, my dad’s dad, was twenty years older than her. And Grandpa was married once before too, I think.”
I sucked on the red spoon straw of my frozen lemonade for a few moments before I broke the thoughtful silence. “That’s weird to think about, you know? Even with my own grandparents, it seems like I can’t imagine them as having a life before they were old. And I’ve even heard stories of their childhoods and early married life and stuff like that. With other people’s grandparents it’s even harder to think of them that way. All I see is this little piece. All I know is that….they’re old.”
Both my grandpas were still married to the love of their teenage years and worked in the same businesses until they retired. Both my grandmas still cooked the recipes their mothers passed down to them on white index cards in cursive handwriting. In my family, old age was simply a continuation of the life one had chosen to live, the only difference from middle age being arthritis and whiter hair. I hadn’t thought much about being old because it always looked like a gentle slope to a quiet end on a path that had been traveled since the day a person turned forty. I hadn’t considered that the thirty years between ages forty and seventy could bring more changes than I would like to think about.
Katie nodded again as JoAnna joined us. “It’s true. Grandpa Merrill started telling me this story once about some girl he was in love with in college. Her parents wouldn’t let him marry her because she was Catholic. It’s just weird. I can’t imagine him as a guy our age.”
I continued to consider the idea even when the solemn mood collapsed with JoAnna’s attempt to eat an over-filled fajita. I took a picture of her with sour cream all over her face and she retaliated by stealing one of me while I took a pucker-faced draw on my lemonade. She let out a high pitched squeal when I told her that her Mexican food-covered face was going on the internet the hour we got back to campus. I wondered if she would scream in the same horrified way or even care about who took pictures of her after she turned forty. I wondered if I would still enjoy being the agent of awkwardness if invited to her fiftieth birthday party. I wondered if we would still be friends at sixty.
“What do you think we’ll be like when we’re old?” I asked.
The question initially brought a fresh bout of laughter as it always had when it had been raised before, each of us picturing JoAnna as an old history teacher in a long jean skirt, Katie as a white-haired daredevil missionary pilot, and me as a decrepit old writer holed up in some dark library with my butterfly collection. But the laughter quickly faded. The night before we had discussed the reality that within two summers all of us would be starting different lives as adults, probably in different states and possibly with husbands. Though still a long way off, it suddenly felt like we would be wearing argyle sweaters with jogging pants and talking about our bladders before we even realized that we had graduated college. Before, growing old had seemed as ridiculous as the thought of the man-sized goose behind the television or Merrill as a young man or Nancy with several husbands. Now we remembered that life would happen to each of us and we had no idea what that might mean.
After all, even Nancy and Merrill had once been the same age as us.
I couldn’t stand the following silence. Like always, I refused to let them dwell on serious things even though I knew I would continue to do so long after our conversation. “I bet when your granddaughter and her college friends come to stay at my house, they won’t believe any of the stories you tell them about all the fun we had when we were their age,” I say to JoAnna. “I’ll just be some crazy old lady to them.”
We laughed again, but the smiles were sadder than before.
Katie headed for the trashcan with her mustard-stained burger wrapper. “Let’s go see if Grandma and Grandpa want some funnel cake.”
On the drive back to Nancy and Merrill’s house we laughed about the guy we had seen in the parking lot of Silver Dollar City on the way to our car. He had glasses, a red cowboy hat, red Nikes, and overalls that said “follow me to the north pole” on the bib. His car, parked close to ours, was a red pickup truck that featured a bumper sticker proclaiming “My other vehicle is my sleigh” and a license plate that read “SANTA-1.” The somber mood left over from our lunch conversation had dissipated as we snuck pictures of the overalls and laughed until we had to lean on each other to remain standing.
Passing a skunk on the way home, Nancy complained about the smell and Merrill started in on a story about a guy who was found in his car on the side of the road. Of course no one knew how his story related to skunks so we just laughed until we were gasping, wheezing sounds that he couldn’t hear as he kept on talking and laughing at his own story.
I sent Katie a text. “Think about us as old people. Try not to pee your pants.”
