American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “Dena, I’m sorry,” I said, “but I already told Kathleen Hicken I can’t come. My mother and grandmother are expecting me.”

  “Go home Sunday,” Dena said. “What’s the difference if it’s summer?”

  “You don’t need me at the party,” I said. “Wear your halter dress, and Charlie Blackwell won’t be able to take his eyes off you.”

  “Listen,” Dena said. “This isn’t negotiable. I’ll pick you up Saturday at five-thirty.”

  “I thought the barbecue started at five.”

  “We’re arriving fashionably late. We’ll toast to you becoming landed gentry.”

  SO FAR, THAT summer had been an especially nice one. The grief I felt about my father’s death was milder after a year and a half, without the rawness of surprise. Plus, I was filled with purpose, and not just in looking for a house; there was also my library project.

  I had graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1968, taught for two years—I taught third-graders, an especially boisterous age—then returned to the university to get my master’s in library science. What I’d realized while teaching was that the part of the school day I loved most was reading period: Charlotte’s Web, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Blueberries for Sal, the kids sitting cross-legged on the floor, their eyes wide, their bodies leaning forward with anticipation. If I could be a librarian, I decided, it would be like reading period lasting forever. After I’d earned my master’s degree in 1972, I went to work at Liess Elementary, and five years later, at the age of thirty-one, I was still there.

  My project that summer was this: I was creating ten large papier-mâché figures of characters from children’s books, among them Eloise; the mother and baby rabbits from The Runaway Bunny; and Mr. Sneeze from the Mr. Men series (I’d used chicken wire to fashion the triangular points of Mr. Sneeze’s oversize head). I’d had the idea the previous fall when I saw a little girl on my street dressed as Pippi Longstocking for Halloween. In the spring, I’d written to publishers asking for permission—I suppose I could have gotten away with not doing so, but the idea of being a librarian who infringed on copyrighted material made me shudder—and in early June, I’d bought the materials. By the time school opened after Labor Day, I planned to have all the characters displayed on the library’s shelves, or, in the case of the Paddle-to-the-Sea figure in his canoe, hanging over the entrance.

  I’d been surprised by the scope of the project—I had thought it would take only a couple weeks—but the longer it lasted, the more absorbed I became. At first I’d worked in my living room, but the characters began taking up so much space, and I didn’t want anyone who might come over (mostly, this meant Dena) to see them before I was finished, so I’d covered the floor of my bedroom and even the bed with butcher paper, then started sleeping on the living room couch. When I was working, I wore a denim skirt and old shirts of my father’s, often dropping globs of the flour and water mixture on myself, and perspiring because I didn’t have an air conditioner.

  Every morning, before it got hot, I’d cut through campus and walk along Lake Mendota, the sun sparkling on the water, the waves lapping lightly at the shore (walks by myself weren’t constitutionals—they were just walks), and then I’d come back and work until lunch, or until long after that if Nadine didn’t have any houses to show me. During my walks, and sometimes in the middle of the night, I’d suddenly have an idea about, say, how to create more realistic eyebrows for Maurice Sendak’s “I don’t care” Pierre (by snipping up a black wig, because when I painted on the eyebrows, they just looked flat). Early in the evening, I’d stop working and make a corn-and-tomato salad, or broil a pork chop, and after dinner, I’d perch on the windowsill of the bedroom and drink a beer and admire my progress. I hadn’t mentioned the project to anyone, and sometimes I worried that the other teachers might find it odd or excessive, but when I thought of the children entering the library on the first day of school, I felt excited.

  NADINE CALLED EARLY Friday afternoon. “The seller counter-offered—you interested in going up to thirty-five and a half?”

  If I were putting down 20 percent, which was what I had told the loan officer at the bank I probably could do, that would mean seventy-one hundred dollars. “Okay,” I said.

  “Jeez Louise, you’re way too easy. Don’t you want to complain just a little?”

  I laughed. “I want the house.”

  “All righty. Stand by.”

  She called me back twenty minutes later and said, “Let me be the first to congratulate you on becoming a homeowner.”

  I yelped.

  “Why don’t you come by my office now to sign the papers, and I’d recommend calling the inspector before the end of the day. Can I make one more suggestion?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Buy yourself a bottle of champagne. You’ve got a lot to look forward to.”

  DENA PICKED ME up the next afternoon for the Hickens’ barbecue, but first we drove to McKinley Street. In the car, Dena sang, “ ‘Home, home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play . . . ’ ” When I pointed to where she should park, the house was both different and the same as I remembered—it was more vivid somehow, more real. There was a spruce tree in the yard, and the grass was deep green; the house was a white box, the wooden front-porch floor peeling maroon. There wasn’t a garage, just a driveway that was two concrete lines separated by a strip of grass. The knowledge that all of this would belong to me was overwhelming and exhilarating. I didn’t yet have keys, but Dena insisted on peering into the windows and wandering into the backyard, which sloped.

  “It’s cute, right?” I said.

  Dena nodded vigorously and sang, “ ‘Where seldom is heard a discouraging word / And the skies are not cloudy all day.’ ”

  Although we were late to the barbecue, Charlie Blackwell was later, and Dena and I were already out back, sitting side by side on a picnic bench in the grass, when he emerged from the kitchen at the rear of the house and appeared on the deck holding a six-pack in each hand. He was wearing Docksiders without socks, fraying khaki shorts, a belt with a rectangular silver buckle, and a faded pink button-down shirt that I could tell, even from several yards away, had once been good quality. He held the six-packs up near his ears, shook them—a stupid thing to do with beer, I thought—and called out to the yard at large, “Hello there, boys and girls!”

  About fifteen of us were present, and several men approached him at once, Cliff Hicken slapping him on the back. Charlie opened one of the beers he’d brought, and after he popped the top, some fizzed up and he pressed his mouth against the side of the can and slurped the cascading foam. Then he said something, and when he and the other men burst into laughter, his was the loudest. Under my breath, I said to Dena, “He’s perfect for you.”

  “I don’t have lipstick on my teeth, do I?” She turned to me, baring her incisors.

  “You look great,” I said. She waited ten minutes, so as not to be too obvious, and I watched as she crossed the yard and offered herself up, like a gift, to Charlie Blackwell. The day before, I had been in the public library and looked for mentions of Charlie in news articles—long before the arrival of the Internet, I prided myself on my ability to find information, my golden touch with reference books and microfiche—and although I’d turned up little about Charlie himself beyond his status as a former governor’s son, I’d learned that if he really was running in the district that contained Houghton, as Dena had claimed, he’d be up against an incumbent of forty years.

  When Dena was gone, Rose Trommler, who was sitting on the opposite side of the picnic bench next to Jeanette Werden, said, “Dena Cimino is sure a piece of work.” Cimino was Dena’s surname now; she was no longer a Janaszewski.

  As if I’d misunderstood Rose’s meaning, I nodded and said, “Dena’s the most entertaining person I know. She’s been exactly the same since we were in kindergarten.”

  Rose and I were drinking white wine; Jeanette was six months pregnant and not drinki
ng. Rose leaned forward. “I shouldn’t say this, but doesn’t she sometimes drive you crazy?” Rose and her husband lived next door to the Hickens; we’d been in Kappa Alpha Theta together in college, and she wasn’t a bad person, but she was quite a gossip.

  “No more than I probably drive her crazy,” I said lightly.

  “She’s practically throwing herself at Charlie Blackwell,” Jeanette said. “I wonder if we should warn him.”

  I looked directly at her. “About what?” I asked in a neutral voice, and neither she nor Rose said anything. “I bet he can take care of himself,” I added.

  “Alice, how about you?” Rose dunked a potato chip in a bowl of onion dip. “You must have your eye on someone special.”

  “Not really.” I smiled to show that I didn’t mind. The irony was, I honestly didn’t mind, or not in the way they imagined. In my least charitable moments, I’d think about these women, It’s not that I couldn’t have married your husbands; it’s that I didn’t want to. But it was a rare married woman who was able to believe that a single woman had any choice in the matter of her own singleness. I shifted on the bench. “Jeanette, am I right that you and Frank were in Sheboygan for the Fourth of July? That must have been wonderful.”

  “Well, the way Frank’s mother scolded Katie and Danny, you’d think she’d never been around children before.” Jeanette shook her head. “Just a broken record of ‘Put that down, quit running around,’ when why were we there but for them to run around? And Frank was one of six growing up, but he claims she was even-tempered back then.”

  “That’s hard,” I said.

  “Oh, but you’re lucky having the company of other adults, Jeanette,” Rose said. “When Wade and I took the kids up to La Crosse, he spent so much time fishing, I felt like a widow. I said to him, ‘Wade, if you’re not careful, your son won’t remember his daddy’s face.’ ”

  Jeanette chuckled, and so did I, to be pleasant, though the remark made me think of my mother and grandmother—actual widows—and of how much I’d have preferred to be at the house in Riley with them instead of sitting with these two women. Or I’d rather have been working on my papier-mâché characters—I was halfway through Babar (the tricky part was his trunk) and hadn’t started on Yertle the Turtle—or I’d rather have been sitting alone with a pen and a pad of paper, figuring out plans for my house.

  “Alice, am I right that you haven’t had a serious beau since that tall fellow?” Rose said. “Remind me of his—”

  “Simon.” Again, I tried to smile agreeably, and then I did it, I gave her what I was sure she wanted—some admission of failure on my part—because I hoped it would get her to drop the subject. “I guess I’m in a dry spell,” I said.

  “Frank has a real good-looking coworker at the DA’s office,” Jeanette said.

  “Jeanette, that’s not nice to set up Alice with a felon,” Rose said.

  Jeanette swatted her. “You know that isn’t what I mean. He’s another lawyer, and he owns a super place over in Orchard Ridge. You wouldn’t mind an iguana, would you?”

  “I’m not sure if I’m the reptile type.” I stood. “I’m just getting a bit more wine. Do either of you need anything?”

  “When you come back, remind me to tell you about the new principal at Katie’s school,” Jeanette said. “He’s a big, tall fellow, and he has the shortest little Chinese wife.”

  I nodded several times and held up my empty glass, as if to offer proof that I wasn’t walking away because I found them intolerable.

  On the deck, I passed Dena and Charlie Blackwell just as Dena set her fingertips on his forearm. Good for her, I thought. Once inside the house, I used the first-floor powder room, and on my way out, I almost collided with Tanya, the older of the Hickens’ two daughters.

  She held up a hardcover book. “Will you read this to me?” It was Madeline’s Rescue, the one where Madeline falls in the Seine and is saved by a dog.

  I looked around. There were a few adults in the kitchen, including Kathleen Hicken, Tanya’s mother, but we were out of their view, and I doubted anyone would notice my absence. “Sure,” I said.

  We sat on the living room couch, Tanya next to me. She was a fair-haired little girl with a bob and large brown eyes. “Do you know my name?” I asked. “I’m Miss Alice. And you’re Tanya, aren’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “And how old are you?” I asked.

  “Five and one quarter.”

  “Five and one quarter! Does that mean your birthday is in April?”

  “It’s April twenty-third,” she said. “Lisa’s birthday is January fourth, but she’s only two years old.” Lisa was the Hickens’ other daughter.

  “My birthday’s in April, too,” I said. “It’s on the sixth, seventeen days before yours.” I opened the book and began reading: “ ‘In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines—’ ” I paused. Tanya had squirmed closer to me, as if hopeful that she might be able to climb inside the book. It was an impulse I understood well. “I bet you know what comes next,” I said, and I repeated, “ ‘In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines—’ ”

  “—‘Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines,’ ” Tanya said.

  “ ‘They left the house at half past nine / In two straight lines, in rain or shine. / The smallest one was—’ ”

  “—‘Madeline,’ ” Tanya cried.

  I turned the page, which featured an illustration of Madeline falling over the bridge. “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “She doesn’t drown,” Tanya told me reassuringly.

  We kept reading, and when we got to the next page, Tanya added, “They name the dog Genevieve.”

  She continued to inject these comments, either editorial or explanatory—“The fat lady is mean,” “Genevieve has puppies”—and when we’d gotten to the end, she said, “Will you read it again?”

  I glanced at my watch. “All right, and then I should go back out and talk to the grown-ups. Your daddy’s grilling the meat for dinner, isn’t he?”

  “I’m having fish sticks with tartar sauce.”

  “Doesn’t that sound fancy,” I said.

  As if comforting me, helping me to not be intimidated, Tanya said, “No, tartar sauce is like mayonnaise,” and I decided that I liked her even more.

  We had neared the end of our second run-through of Madeline’s Rescue when Charlie Blackwell appeared in the archway of the living room. I looked up, made eye contact with him, smiled, and continued reading. It didn’t seem that what Tanya and I were doing required explanation, and besides, I believed that the secret of interacting with children—or it appeared to be a secret, based on the behavior of some parents—was that all you did was talk to them in a normal way. You didn’t let yourself be distracted by someone else, you didn’t perform above their heads, using them as a prop, nor did you coddle and indulge them. You paid attention, but not inordinately.

  He didn’t leave, though. I could feel him standing there watching us, and when we got to the last page, he set down his beer can and applauded. This applause concealed the sound of Tanya farting, which I was glad for, because she seemed self-aware enough, despite her age, that farting in front of a tall, unfamiliar man might have embarrassed her. “I have to go potty,” she murmured, and slid off the couch, darting around Charlie Blackwell in the threshold.

  “I scare her off?” He had a bit of a drawl, not the flat Wisconsin accent but something at once twangier and more educated.

  “I think she had somewhere to go,” I said.

  “Then I guess you just lost your excuse for hiding out.” He took a sip of beer and grinned.

  “I’m not hiding out. We were reading a story.”

  “Is that right?” He was undeniably handsome, but his bearing was cocky in a way I didn’t like: He was just over six feet, athletic-looking, and a little sunburned, with thick, dry, wavy light brown hair of the sort that wouldn’t move if he shook his head. He also had mischievous eyebrows and a hawk nose wit
h wide nostrils, as if he was flaring them at all times. This lent him an air of impatience that I imagined enhanced his stature in the view of some people—implying that he had other, more interesting places to go, that his attention to you would be limited.

  “Sometimes I find that the company of children compares favorably to the company of adults,” I said wryly.

  “Touché.” He didn’t seem at all offended—he still was grinning—but I immediately felt remorseful because I knew I’d been rude.

  “Or maybe it’s that I don’t always have much to say around adults,” I said.

  “Not having much to say doesn’t stop most people.” His expression was impish. “Not me, anyway.”

  His self-mockery caught me off guard, and I smiled. As I stood, planning to return to the backyard, I said, “I should introduce myself. I’m Alice Lindgren.”

  “Oh, I know who you are. You think I’d forget the name of a girl who refuses to go on a date with me?”

  “I didn’t—” I paused, flustered. “That was years ago. I was involved with someone. It wasn’t personal.”

  “I thought maybe you’d heard some terrible rumor. Or, better yet, some terrible truth.” He grinned; clearly, he was accustomed to being considered charming.

  “If there are terrible truths about you circulating, you might want to take care of them before running for office.” I could have played it cool and pretended I didn’t know who he was, but I didn’t see the point. Everyone at the barbecue knew who he was, whether or not we’d met him before. And he knew we knew; otherwise, he’d have introduced himself when I had.

  “Before I run for office, huh?” he said. “Word travels fast.”