Grandma Eckman and I were sitting in the dining room of the senior residence where she lived in her later years. It was a hot, sunny summer afternoon. While she started her story with the protestation that she believed in marriage, she was telling me about her friend Betty who believed that the opportunity for her to sin was ever present. She prayed with great conviction not to be tempted.
“Not to be tempted?” I repeated quizzically.
Grandma sighed a big sigh. The telling would be exhausting, but she continued anyway:
“You see, Betty’s husband had this idea that she would leave him at the slightest provocation. They had neighbor, another farmer. He wasn’t married and lived about a half mile down the road in a farmhouse surrounded by trees. But Betty’s husband insisted that when she walked from the house to the barn, on that side of the house, she would turn her head in the other direction, like this, so she wouldn’t see her neighbor.”
Grandma Eckman demonstrated by twisting her body a little to the left in her chair, away from me, and holding up her hand on she side of her face, as if to shield her gaze from me. I stared incredulously, and when she dropped the pose, she scowled at me.
“This man was serious. He thought one look at the neighbor was all it would take for Betty to run a half mile across the field to him.”
“Unbelievable!” I gasped.
“Well, my darling, Betty believed it.”
My grandmother’s story finally sunk in.
“And,” Grandma Eckman continued, “she prayed every day that she wouldn’t be tempted away from her husband and children. He put the fear of God in her, that one.”
“Was he really that horrible?” I inquired.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, a little cagey. “He was nice enough to me and all their friends. None of us ever would have known if Betty didn’t tell us. “
Then she went silent. I was waiting for more, so after a few moments, I asked, “What happened?”
“That’s it. That’s the story,” she replied. In those days, that’s what a lot of women did. Men, too. They just lived married like they were supposed to. “
“Gosh.” She lost me a little bit.
Then Grandma Eckman looked me right in the eye. For a moment, I thought I caught a twinkle.
“Except for me. That was not the kind of marriage I would have stayed in. And so I didn’t.”
“Wait!” I urged. “Betty. Was she you?”
For a moment I thought that she was going to slap me. It was as if I insulted her. But then she relaxed.
“No, my darling,” she said finally. “Like I said, I would never have stayed in a bad marriage. I believed that marriage was supposed to be a good thing, not a trap.”
And that was all she told me that day. She was tired, and I thought it was time for me to go. I walked her back to her room. Her roommate was gone. She offered her cheek, and I kissed it.
“I’ll see you later,” I said.
“You better,” she answered, as she sat down in her chair.
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