American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  As we walked together back to the dance floor, I felt an immediate and unexpected awareness of how we appeared—a sense that if people looked at us, they might form an impression. What that impression would be was harder to say.

  We found a space in the forest of couples and faced each other. After a second’s hesitation, I set my left hand on his right shoulder, he set his right hand on my lower back, and we clasped our free hands together, held high. I was wearing my gloves.

  “Who’s your date?” I asked.

  “Bess Coleman.” He gestured with his chin, and I saw that Bess was dancing beneath a basketball hoop with Fred Zurbrugg, one of Andrew’s close friends.

  “Are you and Bess . . . ?” Later, I thought that if I’d consciously been interested in Andrew that night, I wouldn’t have been so direct.

  He shook his head. “You’re here with Larry, huh?”

  “Dena set us up, but I’m beginning to wonder about her skills as a matchmaker.”

  Andrew laughed. “Yeah, you’re definitely way too good for Nagel.”

  We both were quiet, and then Andrew said, “Do you remember when your grandma thought I was a girl?”

  “I had no idea you knew!”

  “After she said to my mom, ‘Your daughter sure is pretty,’ it wasn’t very hard to figure out.”

  “She never said that,” I protested.

  “Close.”

  “It was only because—”

  “I know.” He covered both of his eyes—both sets of eyelashes—with his right hand and shook his head. “I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy. My brother says Max Factor should hire me to model mascara, and he doesn’t mean that as a compliment.”

  “I’m sure he’s just jealous,” I said.

  Onstage a member of the band was singing solo: “ ‘Goin’ down to lonesome town / Where the broken hearts stay . . . ’ ”

  “What I said before, I didn’t mean Larry’s a bad guy.” Andrew’s tone had become more serious. “He’s just not who I’d picture you with.”

  I could sense what Dena would say in this situation, what probably a lot of girls would say: Who would you picture me with? But it was so nice to rest in the moment without pushing it further, to feel its possibilities rather than its limitations. Later, I remembered thinking that I knew then Andrew would become my boyfriend, but that it wasn’t as if I were realizing it for the first time. Hadn’t I always known, for my whole life? And therefore, what was the hurry? Experiencing other people was almost a thing we ought to do before we were joined to each other.

  “Have you eaten any of the cupcakes?” I asked.

  “Yeah, they’re pretty good. There’s potato chips over there, too.”

  “I made some of the cupcakes,” I said. “Not the blue ones, but the ones with yellow icing.”

  “I thought that tasted like it came from the kitchen of Alice Lindgren!” he said, and I lightly slapped his arm. “No, it was delicious,” he said. “Really.”

  We both were smiling, and after a beat, he said, “If you want to, you can put your head on my shoulder.”

  I hesitated. “Am I tall enough?” Obviously, this was not my only hesitation.

  “You don’t have to,” he said. “Just if you want to.”

  When I did, we were body to body in a way we hadn’t been before. I could feel the heat of him, the solidity, and a calmness came over me; it made the conversation we’d been having seem like nothing, the words were nothing, they were raindrops or confetti, and holding on to each other was real.

  When the song ended, we stepped apart, and then Bobby Sobczak approached Andrew, and I made my way to Betty Bridges at the refreshment table. Ten minutes had passed when Dena materialized, her cheeks flushed and liquor on her breath. “Were you dancing with Andrew?” she asked, and she sounded not quite accusatory but almost—she was forceful and intensely curious.

  I was under the impression that she’d been outside all this time, which meant someone else must have already told her. “When you all left, I guess he saw me standing by myself,” I said. “He probably felt sorry for me.”

  But I knew that wasn’t true. At one point, near the end of the song, Andrew had inhaled deeply, and I’d been pretty sure he was smelling my hair.

  THAT AUGUST, MY grandmother returned to Chicago to visit Gladys Wycomb, and my father, mother, and I packed our suitcases and ourselves into our sedan—it was a turquoise 1956 Chevy Bel Air, with a silver hood ornament shaped like a paper airplane—and we drove north through Wisconsin to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to visit the Mackinac Bridge, aka the Mighty Mac. As we approached the St. Ignace side, my father, who’d driven the entire way up to this point, pulled over and switched places with my mother so he’d be free to look around as we crossed the bridge. It went on and on, over rough blue water, and on the other side, my mother turned around and we drove back, heading north. It was a toll bridge costing fifty cents, which wasn’t much, but still, it was an uncharacteristic indulgence on my father’s part. We parked on the shores of St. Ignace, my mother and I wearing jackets even though it was summer, and my father shook his head happily. “Imagine all the concrete, steel, and cables running for five miles over water,” he said. “That’s a remarkable feat of engineering.”

  The sky beyond the bridge held curvy cirrus clouds, and in the air you could feel fall’s approach. Back in Riley, it was still hot.

  “Shall we stroll for a bit?” my father asked.

  We walked along an esplanade. At intervals, coin-operated binoculars sat atop poles, and my father paused at several of them, though I couldn’t really see how the view would change much from one to the next. “Before they built the bridge, it used to take people an hour to get across by ferry,” he said. “But sometimes there was such backup you’d have to wait ten or twelve hours before there was room for your car.”

  I nodded, while inside I was thinking of the announcement I’d make. Granny is having an affair with Dr. Wycomb, I would say. Briefly, I had believed she wouldn’t return to Chicago now that I knew her secret. Or maybe she didn’t realize I knew. But she had to, otherwise she’d have demanded more explanation for my sullenness.

  “Can you imagine having the patience to wait twelve hours?” my mother was saying.

  Should I have guessed about my grandmother? I had read The Well of Loneliness at the age of fourteen, pulling it down from her shelf and returning it with slight confusion at the idea of two women falling in love, but not enough to ask her about it. Anyhow, that book had been set decades ago, and in England. For my own grandmother, the grandmother living in my house, who used the same bar of soap in the bathroom that I did, whose jewelry and high heels I’d dressed up in as a little girl—for her to be in a homosexual relationship didn’t make sense. She’d been married, she’d had a child! And even if it was true, why hadn’t she been more careful to prevent me from becoming party to her secret? She was making me choose between her and my parents, and what sort of choice was that? In a way, I had always loved her more deeply, I had loved her most, but I had thought she and I were conspiring to conceal this hurtful fact.

  We were passing another set of binoculars, and my father stooped and peered into them. When he rejoined us, he took my mother’s hand, and I could sense the buoyancy of his enthusiasm.

  For the next three nights, we stayed in a motel in St. Ignace, all of us in one room. The motel was called Three Breezes and had a pool in which my father swam laps, though my mother and I found it too cold. On the day we hiked the sand dunes of Lake Michigan, I thought, I will tell them in fifteen minutes. In another fifteen minutes. When we’re back in the car. The day after that, we took the ferry to Mackinac Island, where we rode in a horse-drawn carriage, ate fudge, and had lunch at a restaurant in the Grand Hotel. “Maybe you’ll come back someday for your honeymoon,” my mother said, and she squeezed my knee beneath the table. They are having an affair, I thought, and Dr. Wycomb is giving her lavish presents, and maybe she’s even giving her money.
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  During our last dinner in St. Ignace, my parents drank two bottles of wine between them, and later, my father convinced my mother to swim with him in the motel pool, the sky dark but the pool lit up. From the room, I could hear them giggling. I went to sleep, and the next morning, I opened my eyes and thought, They already know. I listened to them sleeping in the bed across from mine, my mother’s deep breathing and my father’s quiet snores, as if even when asleep, he was trying to be polite. They already know, I thought, and if they don’t, it’s because they’ve chosen not to. Surely that accounted for my father’s initial resistance to my accompanying my grandmother to Chicago the previous winter. I would say nothing, I realized, because it wasn’t necessary, it wasn’t my place. I was glad then that I had not previously been able to express the words.

  And really, what has stayed with me from that vacation as much as my own suspicious, petty agonizing is my father on the esplanade just after our arrival. The wind blew his hair, and he was fidgety with delight, straining to explain to my mother and me exactly why the Mighty Mac was so impressive. I wondered at the time—I wonder still—if that was the happiest my father had ever been.

  IT TOOK LONGER, but we drove home via the southern route: once more across the Mighty Mac (this time I was allowed to take the wheel), then down through the lower part of Michigan, curving southwest through the edge of Indiana and northwest into Illinois, where, at a train station in Bolingbrook, thirty miles outside Chicago, we picked up my grandmother. She and I sat together in the backseat, but she seemed to have given up on me months before and was reading Anna Karenina. “That’s the second time, isn’t it?” my mother asked, and my grandmother said a little tartly, “It’s the fourth.”

  Then we were back in Wisconsin, a place that in late summer is thrillingly beautiful. When I was young, this was knowledge shared by everyone around me; as an adult, I’ve never stopped being surprised by how few of the people with whom I interact have any true sense of the states between Pennsylvania and Colorado. Some of these people have even spent weeks or months working in such states, but unless they’re midwesterners, too, to them the region is nothing but polling numbers and caucuses, towns or cities where they stay in hotels whose bedspreads are glossy maroon and brown on the outside and pilly on the inside, whose continental breakfasts are packaged doughnuts and cereal from a dispenser, whose fitness centers are a single stationary bike and a broken treadmill. These people eat dinner at Perkins, and then they complain about the quality of the restaurants.

  Admittedly, the area possesses a dowdiness I personally have always found comforting, but to think of Wisconsin specifically or the Midwest as a whole as anything other than beautiful is to ignore the extraordinary power of the land. The lushness of the grass and trees in August, the roll of the hills (far less of the Midwest is flat than outsiders seem to imagine), that rich smell of soil, the evening sunlight over a field of wheat, or the crickets chirping at dusk on a residential street: All of it, it has always made me feel at peace. There is room to breathe, there is a realness of place. The seasons are extreme, but they pass and return, pass and return, and the world seems far steadier than it does from the vantage point of a coastal city.

  Certainly picturesque towns can be found in New England or California or the Pacific Northwest, but I can’t shake the sense that they’re too picturesque. On the East Coast, especially, these places—Princeton, New Jersey, say, or Farmington, Connecticut—seem to me aggressively quaint, unbecomingly smug, and even xenophobic, downright paranoid in their wariness of those who might somehow infringe upon the local charm. I suspect this wariness is tied to the high cost of real estate, the fear that there might not be enough space or money and what there is of both must be clung to and defended. The West Coast, I think, has a similar self-regard—all that talk of proximity to the ocean and the mountains—and a beauty that I can’t help seeing as show-offy. But the Midwest: It is quietly lovely, not preening with the need to have its attributes remarked on. It is the place I am calmest and most myself.

  THE WEEKEND BEFORE my senior year of high school, I emerged from Jurec Brothers’ butcher shop late in the afternoon on Saturday, carrying a pound of ground beef my mother had asked me to pick up, when I heard the salutatory honk of a nearby car horn. I turned my head to see a mint-green Ford Thunderbird with a white roof; leaning out the passenger window, tanned and smiling, was Andrew Imhof. I waved as I stepped off the curb, moving between two parked cars. When I was closer, I could see that beyond Andrew, driving, was his brother, Pete; the car was a two-seater.

  “Welcome back,” Andrew said.

  “How’d you know I was gone?”

  “After you weren’t at Pine Lake the other night, I thought you might be sick, but Dena said—not that Dena and I are—I just ran into her there—”

  “Not that he’s feeding at her trough again,” Pete said. “He wants to make that perfectly clear.” Pete leaned over the steering wheel and grinned sarcastically. He was four years older; after high school, he’d gone on to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and presumably, he’d graduated the previous June. He and Andrew didn’t look much alike: They had the same hazel eyes, but Pete didn’t have Andrew’s impossible eyelashes, and where Andrew was lean and fair, Pete was meaty and had darker hair. He looked like an adult man, and not a terribly appealing one.

  Andrew rolled his eyes good-naturedly in the direction of his brother and said to me, “Ignore him. You were in Michigan, huh?”

  “My dad wanted to see the Mackinac Bridge, and then we went to Mackinac Island. They don’t have any cars there, only carriages.”

  “Where goeth the horses, so goeth the shit,” Pete said. “Am I right?”

  “Pretend he’s not there,” Andrew said.

  “It sounds like a lot of people were at Pine Lake,” I said. “Dena told me it was the most fun she’d had all summer.”

  “Really?” Andrew looked amused. “It was mostly just Bobby challenging anyone who’d listen to a chicken fight. The real party will be next weekend at Fred’s, have you heard about that? If it gets below seventy-five degrees, we’re making a bonfire.”

  Pete leaned forward again. “And Andrew promises he’ll roast you a nice big wiener. This has been a fascinating conversation, but I’ve got places to go, little brother. You and Alice want to wrap things up?”

  Andrew shook his head again, and Pete revved the engine. “Sorry,” Andrew said to me. “See you on Tuesday at school. Hey, pretty cool we’ll finally be seniors, huh?”

  I smiled. “The great class of ’64.”

  The mint-green Thunderbird pulled away, and as I walked home carrying the ground beef for my mother, an unexpected energy seized me, spurred by a jumble of fresh thoughts: how good Andrew looked, tanned from the summer sun; how weird it was that Pete Imhof knew my name; how excited I felt for the start of school, for new classes and the perks of being the oldest students; and how much I hoped it fell below seventy-five degrees on Saturday so they’d build the bonfire at Fred’s party and I could stand next to it, braced by that wall of heat against my body, watching the leap of the flames, being reminded, as I always was by fires, that they were alive and so was I.

  WHEN I SAW Andrew over the next few days, sitting a couple rows ahead of me in the bleachers at the assembly that first morning back, or pulling books out of his locker in a crowded hall between classes, there was little chance of us talking, or even making eye contact, and I didn’t try. I was always with Dena or another friend, or he was with guys from football, and I felt like what I had to say to him, I could say only when we were alone. It wasn’t even that I knew what I wanted to say, but surely, if we found ourselves with no one else around, I’d be able to come up with something.

  All that week, I had the sense that we were making our way toward each other—even when we passed outside the science classrooms, headed in opposite directions, I had this sense—and I was not surprised on Thursday afternoon when, half an hour after the final bell of
the day had rung, I walked out of the library and saw him coming from the gym, dressed for football practice in a jersey and those shortened pants, holding his helmet in his right hand. Looking back, I find it hard to trust my memory of this episode, hard to believe I’m not infusing it with meaning it didn’t contain at the time. It was a sunny afternoon (as it turned out, the temperature would not fall below seventy-five degrees that Saturday, or for another few weeks), and the cicadas were buzzing and the trees and grass were green, and we were walking toward each other, he was squinting against the sun, we both were smiling, and I loved him, I loved him completely, and I knew that he loved me back. I could feel it. That moment—inside it, I could anticipate the thing I most wanted and I could be beyond it, it had happened already, and I was ensconced in the rich reassurance of knowing it was certain and definite.

  Or maybe this is only what I think now. But it was all we ever had! Approaching each other, him from the gym, me from the library—this was when I walked down the aisle and he was waiting, this was when we made love, it was every anniversary, every reunion in an airport or train station, every reconciliation after a quarrel. This was the whole of our lives together.

  It seemed like the natural thing to do when we were in front of each other would have been to embrace, but we didn’t. It is a great regret, though not, certainly, my greatest. We stood there with the roiling energy of not hugging between us, and he said, “Sorry about my brother the other day,” gesturing over his shoulder as if perhaps Pete were nearby. “I hope he didn’t offend you.”

  “No, he’s funny, but you two seem very different.”

  “Wait, I’m not funny?”

  “No, you’re funny, too,” I said. “You’re both funny.”

  “That’s very diplomatic—I appreciate it. You coming to the game tomorrow?”

  “I’ll be selling popcorn.” Working at the refreshment stand was one of my Spirit Club duties. “I heard you’re starting this year,” I said.

  “Well, I waited long enough.” He laughed a little in a self-effacing rather than bitter way. “No one would mistake me for Pete, that’s for sure.”