American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

WE HAD BACK-TO-SCHOOL faculty meetings that Wednesday and Thursday, before Labor Day weekend, and really, we teachers were no different than high school students, sniffing one another out after several months apart, comparing vacations, checking to see who’d gotten thin or tan. During the principal’s welcoming speech in the gym, I sat on the bleachers between Rita and Maggie Stenta, the first-grade teacher who’d had me to her house for sloppy joes and sangria the previous spring. As our principal, Lydia Bianchi, described the new schedule for after-school bus duty, Rita leaned over and whispered, “How’s your boyfriend?”

  Maggie turned. “Are you dating someone?”

  I shook my head as if I didn’t follow or dared not turn my attention from Lydia. Truthfully, I didn’t know quite how to talk about Charlie; I did not want to gush or boast. After three days, we still hadn’t mentioned our engagement to anyone. We wanted to tell our families first, and because we’d be spending Labor Day weekend in Door County with the Blackwells and would return to Riley the following weekend, it seemed nicer to wait and share the news in person. What his family would make of simultaneously meeting me and finding out I was to be their newest in-law, I couldn’t imagine.

  Every year, all the teachers were required to watch the same half-hour filmstrip on head lice—it was a source of much grumbling, and I personally was seeing it for the sixth time—and the film was shown that Thursday in the library after lunch. I was walking back from the cafeteria with Rita and was still in the hall when Steve Engel, a science teacher who was six-five, hit his head on the Paddle-to-the-Sea canoe hanging in the library doorway. “Cool boat,” I heard him say to no one in particular.

  After a bit of shifting, I’d found the right place for all the papiermâché pieces: the Runaway Bunnies and Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne perched on the lower shelves where the youngest children’s books were kept; Ferdinand stood guard over the card catalog; the Giving Tree received a place of honor on my desk. A part of me couldn’t believe I’d finished all ten of them, especially with the happy distraction of Charlie. I had probably spent two hundred hours total on the project—admittedly, most of those hours had been before Charlie—and I did not doubt that some people would have judged that a colossal waste of time.

  When the filmstrip was over, Deborah Kuehl, the ostentatiously organized school nurse who was in charge of showing the film, was explaining the institution of a new no-nits policy. “I can’t believe she does this right after lunch,” Rita muttered. Although Deborah had a brisk manner, she was generous with her medical expertise and didn’t seem to mind when teachers hit her up for advice—she’d peer into your throat and tell you if it looked like strep, or advise you on whether the black fingernail you’d banged in a door needed to be treated for infection.

  When Deborah asked if there were any questions, Rita raised her hand. “I just wanted to say, doesn’t the library look fabulous? Alice made all the animals herself.”

  I could feel the teachers in the rows ahead of and behind us look at me.

  “While that’s very supportive of you, Rita, I was hoping for questions pertaining to the nit policy.” Deborah scanned her audience. No one else raised a hand, and she seemed only a little disappointed. Primly but not ungenerously, she said, “The sculptures are indeed a colorful addition to this space. Bravo, Alice, for your creativity.”

  Rita started clapping, and I murmured, “Rita, please,” but it had already caught on. I knew I was blushing.

  As it happened, when the children returned to school the following week, they seemed to get a kick out of the characters but also to see them for what they were, which was background decoration. The characters did not wear well that year: Even by the end of the first day, one of Ferdinand’s horns had come off, a casualty of a second-grader’s overexcitement, and after the sixth-graders’ library period, I found a mustache drawn above Eloise’s lips (I was pretty sure I knew which two boys had done it). At the conclusion of the school year, I ended up throwing them all out except for the Giving Tree, which I still have; each time I move, I pack it more carefully, as if it is a priceless vase. But I can honestly say I didn’t mind the other characters’ short lives. I enjoyed making them, and if it’s great reverence you’re looking for, or earnest expressions of gratitude—well, then you don’t work with kids.

  What I couldn’t have imagined at the time was that the applause after the lice film was the moment of my greatest professional achievement. It was the most public recognition I ever received for being myself rather than an extension of someone else or, even worse, for being a symbol. Thirty-five teachers clapping in an elementary school library is, I realize, a humble triumph, but it touched me. In the years since, I have received great and vulgar quantities of attention, more attention than even the most vain or insecure individual could possibly wish for, and I have never enjoyed it a fraction as much.

  THAT NIGHT, CHARLIE and I were eating dinner at his place, sitting on the living room couch with plates on our laps while the Brewers played the Detroit Tigers, and I said, “If we get married in the spring, what about doing it in the Arboretum? Would it upset your parents if we didn’t have the ceremony in a church?”

  “I knew you were an atheist!” He pointed at me. “Nah, I don’t think they’d mind the outdoor thing, but it’s gotta be much sooner. I need to be settled in Houghton come January.”

  “By yourself, do you mean, or with me?”

  “That’s usually how it works, man and wife under the same roof.” Charlie’s expression was mischievous. He was barefoot, wearing white shorts and a white polo shirt because he hadn’t yet taken a shower after playing tennis with Cliff Hicken that afternoon. “Are you turned on by my virile man scent?” he’d asked when we were standing in the yard grilling hamburgers, and he’d pressed his body against mine and danced a little. Although I’d made a show of holding my nose—it seemed to be what he wanted—I found him cute when he was sweaty; he didn’t smell bad to me at all.

  “But when would the wedding be?” I said. “January is only five months away, Charlie.”

  “A wedding’s nothing but a party where the lady wears a white dress. Hell, we could have it tomorrow.”

  “Your sense of romance is really sweeping me off my feet.”

  “Let’s say October,” he said. “You free in October?”

  I considered it. This was far sooner than I’d imagined, but it was doable. “I don’t see why not.”

  “That’s the spirit. We don’t want some fancy-schmancy deal, anyway, do we? My brothers and their wives all did those country-club receptions with the receiving-line crap. Well, not John, he married Nan, who’s from back east, so they did it at her parents’ place in Bar Harbor. Hey, there’s an idea for you—what about Halcyon? Plenty of room, lots of beds, and you couldn’t ask for a more spectacular setting.”

  “I’ll let you know after I see it tomorrow. But if we do it in October, there might be snow on the ground.”

  Charlie thought about this for a moment, then said, “Damn your practicality.”

  I hesitated. “I’ll finish out the school year, right? Even when we live in Houghton, I’ll just drive back to Madison?”

  Charlie shrugged. “If it’s important to you.”

  “I wouldn’t feel comfortable resigning in the middle of the year. People do it, but Lydia—our principal—hates when it happens.”

  “So long as this is your last year at Liess, do what you like. I’ll need you around next summer, that’s for certain. Being the wife of a candidate is a job in itself, which Maj knows all too well.”

  “I’ll never have to speak in public, will I? I won’t have to give speeches?”

  He grinned. “Is that a condition of marrying me?”

  “Charlie, I can hardly talk at faculty meetings.”

  “Okay, okay, you never have to give a speech.” He was silent for a moment, and when he spoke again, his tone was serious. “I won’t win. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “That’s not very
optimistic.”

  “This isn’t a fake candidacy, I don’t see myself as a straw man. That’s not what I’m saying. I’ll campaign my heart out. But the numbers aren’t there. The focus isn’t on getting elected, not yet. It’s about putting my name out there, letting people know I’m an adult. I’m a serious person with serious ideas about the state of Wisconsin.”

  Looking at him, I had the uneasy thought that I could not imagine saying to someone: I’m a serious person with serious ideas. I couldn’t imagine needing to.

  Slowly, I said, “But won’t a lot of people be putting a lot of time and money—”

  He shook his head. “This is how it works. We’re laying a foundation.”

  “A foundation for what? Are you planning to run for Congress again in two years?”

  “I’m keeping my options open. Probably not in two years, no, but down the line, who knows? Maybe a position with the Republican Party, maybe a Senate run. So much of the political process is nothing but timing.”

  I set down my hamburger. “You sound incredibly cynical.”

  “I didn’t write the rules,” Charlie said.

  “You seem happy to play by them.”

  “Dammit, Alice—” He put his hamburger down, too, and moved his plate to the coffee table in front of the couch. The table was shoddy white Formica, and he’d told me with evident pride that he’d gotten it off the sidewalk a few months before, when his neighbors had set it out with their trash. “I thought you were going to support me. Isn’t that what you said in the car, or did I misunderstand?”

  “Don’t you ever just want a regular life? I don’t see why it’s so much better to be a public figure than a private citizen.”

  “For one thing, this is about service, not ego. Some people are in it to satisfy their own narcissism, sure, but not the Blackwells. Alice, if you’re trying to talk me out of running, we have a serious problem.”

  “You gave me the impression that this was a onetime thing.”

  “Meaning you also thought I’d lose. Here you pretend to be aghast at me wasting money on a campaign when you’ve been counting on the other guy winning.”

  We both were quiet. “Let’s not argue,” I said.

  He balled up his napkin and tossed it across the room toward the fireplace. When I stole a look at his profile, I saw that his expression was churlish.

  “Do you want me to leave?” I asked.

  “That might not be a bad idea.”

  I stood and carried my plate into the kitchen, and my hands were shaking. Were we still engaged? Were we still a couple, even? If we hadn’t told anyone we were getting married, we wouldn’t need to tell anyone we weren’t. Perhaps there had been something vaporous about our relationship all along, something unreal. We could end things and there’d be nothing to explain. If anyone asked, I could simply say that it had fizzled.

  Driving back to my own apartment, I thought that maybe it was for the best. Was I really so keen to trade my independence for a boosterish supporting role? Why would I want to sign on for a lifetime of listening to speeches like the one I’d heard him give at the Lions Club in Waupun? Putting aside the question of whether I agreed with his political platform, those types of speeches were just boring. Their repetition and their wheedling undertone and their righteous scorn and their phony clarity—they were so false and silly exactly as they pretended to be honest and important. And Charlie expected me not merely to tolerate his participation in this culture but to be excited about it? Yet would I ever expect him to come sit in the library and listen to me read Bread and Jam for Frances?

  These thoughts roiled in my brain for over two hours—I was lying in bed, above the covers, reading Humboldt’s Gift—and then I looked up from the middle of a paragraph on page 402, my certainty disintegrated all at once, and I was left with a feeling of heavy, insistent badness. What Charlie and I had been quarreling about seemed abstract and insubstantial. I could hardly remember the words either of us had used, and I just wanted to be sitting next to him, lying beneath him, my arms around him and his arms around me. He was the opposite of vaporous; everything else was vapor, and he was solid and central. The possibility that we might have broken up was devastating; it was unbearable.

  I willed myself not to give in to the temptation to call him—it would be better to wait until the next morning. It was presumptuous to think his anger was on the same time line mine was, to imagine that he’d already have forgiven me, too. And yet if I could call him, if I could make things all right, the relief would be so great that perhaps it was a risk worth taking. In the bathroom, I washed my face and brushed my teeth, and then I tweezed my eyebrows a bit, just to occupy myself. I went back into the bedroom and changed into my sleeveless cotton nightgown. It was ten-twenty, I saw, and I decided that I wouldn’t call him before eleven o’clock. I wouldn’t even make a definite plan to call him until then; I would leave open the possibility, and if I could restrain myself, I would, but if I couldn’t, at eleven I’d think through what I wanted to say.

  I lay on my side, with the light on and the window open, and a warm breeze blew in. I tried not to cry. Who cared if I had to sit through speeches about taxes for the next fifty years? Perhaps I could learn to hold a novel in my purse at such an angle that no one would observe me reading it. No, it wouldn’t be a narrowing, a stricture, to become Charlie’s wife; whenever I was with him, my life felt dense with possibilities, fuller and noisier and far more fun. I had never been a person who believed life was an adventure. To me, it was more a series of obligations, some of which could be quite rewarding and some of which you just gritted your teeth for. But now I saw the case for larks and mischief. Here I was being offered my own personal tour guide in the country of good fortune, and I was stalling as I had once stalled with Andrew Imhof. What was wrong with me?

  I nearly leaped from the bed, I hurried into the kitchen, I’d lifted the receiver and begun dialing and then my buzzer rang, and when I flew downstairs and opened the front door, we made eye contact, and without either of us saying anything, we were hugging tightly, and he said, “If you don’t want me to run again after this, I won’t. Hell, I don’t even need to run now,” and I said, “Of course you should.”

  “I promise I won’t try to brainwash you,” he said. “You can vote for Fidel Castro and I won’t bat an eye.”

  Although I hadn’t been crying, when I laughed, it was the kind of deep, gaspy laughter that follows tears.

  “Can we decide there won’t be ugliness between us?” He was looking down at me, and he set his palms on my cheeks. “Because I can’t stand it, I really can’t.”

  I still was giggly with nervous relief. “Charlie, I’m so sorry.”

  “Obviously, we’re still getting to know each other,” he said. “No doubt some folks will say we rushed this. But I’ve never felt more sure of anything. Getting to know you better, the idea of spending all the coming weeks and years together—there’s nothing I look forward to more.”

  “Charlie, I do know you’ve been raised for this life, and I think it’s honorable. You believe in making the world better, and I admire that.” As I said it, it became true. There was a skepticism that I surrendered in this moment, and the surrender was long-lasting; it was practically permanent. There is such a thing as lively debate, and Charlie and I weren’t cut out for it—so limited was our appetite for rancor that any taste of it was acrid. We could agree, or we could avoid discussion, and I was good at both; by generation, gender, and geography, and above all, by temperament, I was good at agreement and good at avoidance.

  If I were to tell the story of my life (I have repeatedly declined the opportunity), and if I were being honest (I would not be, of course—one never is), I would probably feel tempted to say that standing that night just inside my apartment, me in my nightgown and Charlie in jeans and a red shirt, I made a choice: I chose our relationship over my political convictions, love over ideology. But again, this would be false honesty; it would once more c
ontribute to a narrative arc that is satisfying rather than accurate. My convictions were internal—I’d rarely seen the point in expressing them aloud, and if I had, my entire political outlook could have been summarized by the statement that I felt bad for poor people and was glad abortion had become legal. And so I didn’t choose anything in this moment. I had met Charlie a matter of weeks before, and already the idea of living without him made me feel like a fish flopping on the sand. To go from being a Democrat to a Republican, or at least to pretend, through smiling obfuscation, that I had—this was a small price to pay for the water washing back over me, allowing me to breathe.

  Charlie was grinning.

  “What?” I said.

  “I just realized.” His nostrils flared a little. “We get to have our first makeup sex.”

  I HAD BOUGHT a basil plant in a small terra-cotta pot to give as a hostess present to Charlie’s mother, but we were less than halfway to Halcyon when I began to question my selection. This second-guessing occurred right around the time I came to understand that Halcyon, Wisconsin, was not, as I had previously assumed based on Charlie’s passing references, a town. Rather, Halcyon was a row of houses along a seven-hundred-acre eastern stretch of the peninsula that was Door County, and in order to own one of the houses, you had to belong to the Halcyon Club. Apparently, you became a member by being born into one of five families: the Niedleffs, the Higginsons, the deWolfes, the Thayers, and the Blackwells. Charlie’s first kiss, he explained cheerfully, had been with Christy Niedleff, when he was twelve and she was fourteen; Sarah Thayer, the matriarch of the Thayer family, was the sister of Hugh deWolfe, the patriarch of the deWolfes; Hugh deWolfe and Harold Blackwell, Charlie’s father, had been roommates at Princeton; Emily Higginson was the godmother of Charlie’s brother Ed; and those were about all the intramural details I managed to retain, though there were many, many more, and Charlie shared them with increasing zest the closer we got to our destination. The families had purchased the land together in 1943, he said; they each had their own house, their own dock, and everyone took their meals at a jointly owned and maintained club. Oh, and that weekend was the Halcyon Open, the long-standing tennis competition for which a silver trophy vase sat on the mantel in the clubhouse and on whose surface the men’s singles and doubles champions’ names were engraved each year. Charlie had won singles in 1965, 1966, and 1974, and he and his brother Arthur had won doubles in 1969.