American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  I climbed back into bed, and for the rest of the day, I emerged only when I needed to go to the bathroom; I didn’t even bathe. Beneath the covers, I alternately shivered and sweated, my body aching, and they took my temperature at intervals. “This just needs to run its course,” Dr. Wycomb said. “You’ll feel like yourself in another day or two.”

  “Oh, I bet she’ll be well by tomorrow,” my grandmother said. “Don’t you suppose, Alice?” We were scheduled to take the train back to Riley late the next morning.

  “Let’s not decide now,” Dr. Wycomb said.

  Around eight that night, when my grandmother brought me two aspirin and a fresh glass of water, she said, “I’m sure your parents would rather have you home slightly under the weather than late. If we stay another night here, there’ll be calls back and forth. We’ll have to change the tickets, and your father will get out of sorts.”

  More like there would be explanations required. There’d be shuttling between Dr. Wycomb’s apartment and the Pelham, the pretense of extending a reservation for a room where we’d never slept. This chain of lies enabling my grandmother to press her lips against the lips of another woman, an old woman, a not even attractive woman—and then I couldn’t stand to think about it anymore, the fragment of a moment, that weird disturbing glimpse.

  I said nothing, and my grandmother said, “Get some rest. Our train isn’t until eleven, so we’ll have plenty of time to pack in the morning.”

  After I’d closed my eyes, I heard her stand, and I was not sure whether I was dreaming or actually speaking when I mumbled, “I don’t even know why you brought me.”

  “Brought you where?” my grandmother said, and then I knew I’d spoken aloud. “To Chicago?”

  I rolled over. “What?”

  My grandmother’s expression was shrewd and alert. She watched me for a few seconds. “You were talking in your sleep,” she finally said.

  MY TEMPERATURE RIGHT before we left for the train station was just over a hundred degrees, but the truth was that by the time we passed Dodsonville, which was the stop before Riley, I felt almost normal. My parents greeted us excitedly. “Did you go to the top of a skyscraper?” my mother asked. “Was it wonderful?”

  In the car, my father said to my grandmother, “It was very good of you to take Alice,” and this seemed a type of apology.

  “The house was so quiet without you two,” my mother said. “I even started to read one of Granny’s magazines.”

  My grandmother smiled over at me, and I almost smiled back, but then I remembered and turned my face to look out the window.

  DENA CALLED THE next day. “You need to come over,” she said, and she sounded tearful. “It’s an emergency.”

  “What happened?”

  “Just come.”

  I was standing in the kitchen, and after I hung up the phone, I pulled on my coat and hurried outside. Across the street, I knocked on the Janaszewskis’ front door—their doorbell had been broken since 1958—but I was too cold and concerned to wait, so I turned the knob and let myself in. “Hello?” I called.

  In the living room, Dena’s sisters, Marjorie and Peggy, were squabbling over whose turn it was to play a record. Peggy glanced at me, said, “Dena’s upstairs,” and returned to the disagreement.

  On the second floor, the door to the room Dena and Marjorie shared was open, but the room appeared vacant. Tentatively, I said, “Dena?”

  A hand emerged from beneath one of the twin beds and waved at me. I squatted, then leaned forward so I was on my knees, and lifted the dust ruffle. “What’s wrong?” I said. “Should I come under there?”

  “I’ve ruined my life.” Dena’s voice was loose and watery from crying.

  I rolled over so I, too, was on my back, then I inched beneath the bed. Immediately, I could feel dust in my throat. There also were a few unidentifiable objects—shoes, maybe, and old toys—that I had to push out of the way before I was next to her. “What happened?” I asked.

  She swallowed and then said mournfully, “I shaved my sideburns.”

  “But you don’t have sideburns.”

  “Yeah, now I don’t.”

  I grabbed a fistful of dust ruffle and held it up so daylight would show under the bed. “I can’t see anything,” I said. “You have to come out.” I scooted away, and after a minute, she followed.

  When she was sitting upright on the floor, her shoulders against the bed, her face was red and blotchy, her eyes were wet, and her hair, which was lighter brown than mine but styled the same way, was sticking up in the back like a little girl’s. She reached for a mirror that was resting on the carpet shiny side down. I knew this mirror well, having spent a large portion of my life gazing into it, often at the same time as Dena. The reflective part was about the size of an actual face, with a dull pink plastic backing and handle. Holding the mirror up in front of her, Dena turned to the side, her eyes focused grimly on the spot around her ear.

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “Well, first I cut them, but they looked funny, so then I used a razor.”

  I came in closer and rubbed the tip of my index finger over the area in question. “You did a good job. It’s completely smooth. Turn to the other side.” When she did, I touched the skin there, too. “It’s fine,” I said.

  “But think about when it grows back. I’ll have stubble. Alice, I’ll have a five o’clock shadow!”

  “You can just shave again.”

  “Every day for the rest of my life?”

  “Nobody will notice,” I said. “I promise.”

  “Robert thinks hairy girls are like monkeys. You know how Mary Hafliger—”

  “Dena, don’t,” I said. “She can’t help it.” Mary Hafliger, who I was in Spirit Club with, had dark, thick hair on her forearms, and I had heard it discussed among both our male and female classmates.

  “She can too help it,” Dena said. “At the least, she could bleach it.”

  “Mary’s nice,” I said. “Remember those pipe-cleaner Santa Clauses we were selling before Christmas? She glued all their beards on individually, and it took her about a week.”

  Dena grinned. “Yeah, I’ll bet she glued on their beards.” Dena had made good on her preadolescent plan of becoming a cheerleader, and Spirit Club members ranked well below cheerleaders in our school hierarchy. More than once, she had encouraged me to trade up—if I tried out for cheerleading, she would put in a good word for me—but I had no desire to yell and leap in front of other people.

  Dena was still holding the mirror, looking at herself, and, idly, she pursed her lips. Her teariness seemed to have departed. Then she set the mirror back on the carpet and whispered, “I’m only half a virgin.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Close the door.” She gestured toward it, and when I had, Dena said, “I let Robert put it in partway.”

  “You don’t have to do what he says, Dena. He should respect you.”

  “Why do you think he doesn’t?” She smirked.

  On prior occasions, I knew Dena had let Robert place his hand inside her skirt or pants, though not inside her underwear, or at least this was what she’d claimed. These reports from the field had struck me as exciting but very dangerous. As our home ec teacher, Mrs. Anderson, had told us, some men, once aroused, could not control themselves. There was also one’s reputation to consider, and most significantly, there was the risk of pregnancy. Certain girls at Benton County Central High were rumored to have had sex—what people said about Cindy Pawlak was not only that she’d done it but that she’d done it with multiple people, most scandalously with the junior high bus driver, a married man who lived in Houghton—and there were girls, usually country girls, who got pregnant and dropped out of school and then, if they were lucky, got married. Also, there was a girl in the class ahead of ours named Barbara Grob, a cheerleader with blond hair who’d supposedly decided the previous spring to go live with cousins in Eau Claire but everyone
knew she was having a baby at a convent and giving it up for adoption; she’d returned to school looking drawn and heavy and had not attempted to rejoin the cheer squad. And yet, even if sex wasn’t unheard of, I hadn’t expected Dena to really do it; I’d expected her to teeter on the edge, bragging and teasing, without slipping over.

  “Don’t you want to save it for marriage?” I said. This was my plan, and it seemed perfectly reasonable given that we’d likely be married within a few years. In Riley, even girls who went to college often were brides before they graduated, and if you got to twenty-five without a wedding, you were staring down spinsterhood. Ruth Hofstetter, who worked at the fabric store where my mother and I bought material for our clothes, was twenty-eight and had no beau, and whenever we left the store, my mother and I would talk about how sad it was, especially because Ruth was kind and pretty.

  “It’s a little late for that,” Dena said. “There’s hardly a difference between partway and all the way.”

  “Do you think you’ll marry Robert?”

  “I might.”

  “Dena, if you marry someone else, he’ll figure it out when you don’t bleed on your wedding night.”

  She scoffed. “Not everyone bleeds.” She picked up the mirror again and looked into it. “You don’t know anything.”

  I HAD BEEN avoiding my grandmother, but one afternoon in early February, my mother was at the grocery store when I came home from school, and my grandmother was sitting in the living room, smoking and reading a novel by Wilkie Collins. I hung my book bag by the door and went into the kitchen to make a snack, and my grandmother followed me. As I pulled honey from the cupboard—I was planning to spread it on toast—she said, “You’ve been awfully moody since we returned from Chicago. Is there anything about the trip you’d like to discuss?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No more questions about Dr. Wycomb?”

  I shook my head.

  The room was silent, and then my grandmother said, “I won’t claim I’ve never in my life done anything I’m ashamed of, but I haven’t done anything for a good while. If not everyone would agree with the decisions I’ve made, that’s fine. What other people think has never made a situation right or wrong.”

  In this moment, I detested my grandmother. She was such a hypocrite, I thought—pretending to be bold and frank as she distorted the truth and implicated me in her distortions. Standing with my back to the stove, I glared at her.

  “People are complicated,” she continued, “and the ones who aren’t are boring.”

  “Then maybe I’m boring.”

  We looked at each other, and in a genuinely sad voice, she said, “Maybe you are.”

  ROBERT BEIKE AND Dena had officially been boyfriend and girlfriend for several months by the time the junior-senior prom rolled around that May, and Dena had decided in March that Larry Nagel ought to ask me. A few weeks before prom, this had come to pass; when I emerged from the chemistry classroom late one morning, he was standing in the hallway, his arms folded. We made eye contact, and I was pretty sure I knew why he was there. I’d been walking beside my friend Betty Bridges, and I murmured to her, “Go ahead and I’ll catch up.”

  When she was gone, Larry said in a not particularly warm tone, “Are you going to prom?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Want to go together?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay,” he said, and his tone remained flat. “See you around.” He then headed up the hall, which happened to be the same direction I was going, but since it didn’t seem to occur to him that we might travel together, or continue the conversation, I held back, letting him disappear. To be fair, I couldn’t expect him to be shocked or thrilled that I’d accepted when the entire scenario had been choreographed by Dena. Had I been shocked or thrilled that he’d asked? But I hoped I’d see more flashes of the sweetly impulsive boy who’d kissed me on the stoop, and in a way, his usual coolness made his capacity for sweetness even sweeter. Surely at some point on the night of prom, there’d be further evidence of it.

  My mother sewed my dress from a pattern I found in Mademoiselle—it was green, with a sweetheart neckline and tulle skirt—and I planned to wear it with white gloves that went above my elbows and made me feel, in both good and bad ways, like the queen of England. A few hours before prom, I discovered a paper bag on my bureau containing a green headband that was an almost identical shade to the dress. I bounded downstairs with the headband in my hand. In the kitchen, my mother was putting a casserole in the oven. “Thank you so much,” I said. “It matches perfectly.”

  She smiled. “I hope you have a wonderful time.” She closed the oven door, and impulsively, I hugged her—I felt closer to her now that I steered clear of my grandmother. Because of my position in Spirit Club, I’d been responsible for bringing two hundred cupcakes to school that morning, which would serve as prom refreshments. The night before, my mother had stayed up with me until midnight, applying yellow frosting.

  A little later, as my parents and grandmother were finishing dinner, I came downstairs, still barefoot but with the gloves and headband on, to model the dress. When I entered the dining room, they applauded. “Curtsy,” my grandmother commanded, and because it was more when we were alone together that things between us seemed strained—in the presence of my parents, their obliviousness negated the tension—I complied. Really, how could I not? It was a spring night; next door, Mr. Noffke was mowing his lawn, and the smell of cut grass wafted through our dining room windows.

  Then, to my astonishment, my father stood, extended his hand, and said, “May I have this dance?”

  “Oh, let me put on music!” My mother hurried into the living room to turn on the radio, and big-band music—it sounded like Glenn Miller—became audible.

  My father raised our arms so they made an arch above my head, and he twirled me beneath it. Over the music, my mother said, “Alice, the dress really flatters your figure.”

  My father held me lightly, prompting me to turn and sway, and he said, “Stand up straight. Even short fellows prefer girls with good posture because it’s a sign of confidence.”

  I set my shoulders back and lifted my chin.

  “Dip her!” my grandmother called, and my mother immediately said, “Don’t hurt your back, Phillip.”

  As the saxophones on the radio soared, I felt myself swooshing down, and I heard my mother and grandmother clapping again. It may just have been the blood that had rushed to my head when I was near the floor, or the emotion of the music, but in this moment I loved my family, including my grandmother, so greatly that I felt I might weep. They were so kindhearted and good to me, I was so lucky, and even then I sensed luck’s fragility.

  When I was upright again, my father said softly, so my grandmother and mother couldn’t hear, “You’re a very pretty girl. Don’t let your date take advantage of you tonight.”

  ROBERT AND LARRY and Dena and I ate dinner at Tatty’s. This was Riley tradition, to get all dressed up in your finery and then go have a greasy hamburger, and, remembering stories of girls who ended up in tears well before they got to prom, their silk dresses splattered with ketchup or relish, I took care to fold my white gloves into my purse and spread three separate napkins across my lap. Robert had driven us, and sitting in the backseat next to Larry, I’d first felt my optimism for the night dimming when Larry made one perfunctory attempt to affix my corsage to my dress and then held out the pale pink rose and said, “Can you just do this yourself?” From Tatty’s, we drove to school, where the gym was hot and loud and crowded, which seemed to me exactly how it ought to be. The yellow and blue streamers crisscrossed above our heads, and the yellow-and-blue-frosted cupcakes were being consumed enthusiastically—I scanned to see how mine were faring, though with all of them lined up on tables against the wall, I couldn’t tell my own apart from anyone else’s—and a cover band from Madison called the Little Brothers, four men in tuxedos, were standing onstage playing “Who Put the Bomp.�
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  “Hey, Alice,” Robert said.

  I looked at him.

  He grinned lasciviously. “Larry’s really excited to dance with you.”

  Both Dena and Larry laughed, and I felt a lurching panic that Dena had, via Robert, made some promise to Larry about my physical availability for the evening. Dena and Robert had by then had sex six times—once for each month of dating, as she explained, although half the times were retroactive. She told me she didn’t want to do it too frequently because then it wouldn’t be as special. Also, she said that his knowing he might or might not get it made Robert dote on her more; the week before, he’d bought her a stuffed white poodle that came with its own miniature fake-gold bone.

  When Larry and I started dancing, he did not, to my relief, immediately try groping me. In fact, he was a good dancer, a better dancer than I was, and we stayed out there as one song ended and another began, and then another and another. The songs were all fast, and in the middle of “The Watusi,” he shouted into my ear, “Robert has some—” He mimed drinking from a flask. “We’re meeting in the parking lot.”

  “But there’re teachers everywhere.”

  “No one will see us in Robert’s car.”

  “I need to check on my cupcakes.”

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  As he walked away, I saw that Dena and Robert, who had been dancing close to us, were already near the doors of the gym. I headed to the refreshment table, where Betty Bridges was helping scoop punch, and I was still several feet away when I felt a hand on my forearm. I turned, and Andrew Imhof was standing beside me. “Would you like to dance?”

  “Sure.” Then I recognized the first notes of Ricky Nelson’s “Lonesome Town” and I said, “Oh, but it’s a slow song.”

  He smiled. “Does that matter?”

  “No, I guess not,” I said, but I wondered, was it bad manners to slow-dance with someone other than your date?