American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “You eat all your meals at a clubhouse?” I said. “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner?”

  “The peanut-butter no-bake bars are out of this world,” Charlie said. “And the apple pie, it makes you proud to be an American.”

  “But who cooks? Do you take turns?”

  “No, no, there’s a staff.” His voice was casual—naturally, there was a staff—and I tried to absorb this information quickly and invisibly. Just as I did not think I ought to apologize for having been raised middle-class, I did not think Charlie ought to apologize for or feel self-conscious about his privilege. “Mainly, it’s Ernesto and his wife, Mary,” he was saying. “Just terrific people, one of those couples that fight like cats and dogs but you know they’re crazy for each other. And they always hire a couple of kids from town. One niece of theirs, damned if I can remember her name, but she was—I guess plentifully endowed would be a nice way to put it. This has to have been twenty years ago.

  She’s bending over to set down the French toast every morning, and my eyeballs are popping out of my head. My brothers and I were in pig heaven, let me tell you, until Maj caught wind of what was going on and told Mary she had to buy the niece a better-fitting uniform.” Charlie tapped his fingers against the steering wheel; he was in an exceptionally good mood. “What there used to be on Labor Day weekend,” he said, “and I guess no one wants to put in the time anymore, but there were annual musicals. Walt Thayer would play the piano, Maj and Mrs. deWolfe would write the lyrics, and I swear I believed I’d have a career on Broadway, which practically gave Maj a coronary, as you can imagine.”

  “What were the musicals about?”

  “Just things that had happened during the summer. We’d stay up here for two and a half, three months a year, so there were hijinks galore, and not only among the kids—the adults cut loose, too. Get a few G and T’s in them, and all bets are off. You know those pink flamingos, the lawn ornaments that are popular with white trash?”

  When I had been a freshman in high school, our neighbor Mrs. Falke had acquired a pair and set them in her yard. But I merely said, “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, Billy and Francie Niedleff buy a couple in town and put them in front of our place. After we figure out who did it, Maj wants revenge, so one night under the cover of darkness, she attaches them to the bow of Mr. Niedleff’s sloop. Mrs. Niedleff returns them to our yard a few nights later, and they’re wearing Cubs baseball caps, these little hats she made out of cardboard, because Dad just hates the Cubs. And so on and so forth for the whole summer, until the shenanigans culminate with Dad going into the lav one night, and what does he find standing in the tub but a real live flamingo.” Charlie chuckled. “I tell you, I’m not sure if Dad or the bird was more terrified.”

  “But what did you do with it—you didn’t keep it, did you?”

  “Oh, they took him to the zoo down in Green Bay the next day. He managed to take an epic crap before then, but hey, he was in the bathroom. Can you blame him?”

  Charlie was still chortling when I said, “Maybe we shouldn’t mention our engagement to your family this weekend. Is that all right? We could invite your parents and my mother and grandmother to lunch in

  Madison and tell them all together.”

  Charlie turned toward me, grinning. “Having second thoughts?”

  “It feels more respectful not to tell either family first,” I said. “Plus, it might be too much to say to your parents, ‘This is Alice, and by the way, she’s my fiancée.’ ”

  “You’re not worried they won’t like you, are you?”

  Not entirely honestly, I said, “No.” We were passing tall, skinny white birch trees, and along with my anxiety about the impending introductions, I had started to feel the restlessness that arises when you know you’re nearing water but it hasn’t yet come into view. The drive from Madison was almost four hours, and it was past three o’clock as we turned onto a series of smaller roads eventually leading to a dirt one, which we bumped along for three miles. Then, at last, I saw Lake Michigan through the trees, still distant but blue and sparkly in the sun. Charlie pulled off the road and drove onto a stretch of lushly green grass dotted with sugar maples, evergreens, and irregularly spaced white-shingled buildings of various sizes. I took the largest one to be the clubhouse.

  “Halcyon sweet Halcyon,” he said, and he began honking in rapid spurts. He pointed to the big building. “That’s the Alamo, which is where Maj and Dad and some of the grandkids sleep. They might put you in there, but it’s likelier you’ll be in one of those.” He was pointing at the smaller cottages. “That’s Catfish, and Gin Rummy, and Old Nassau. And you see that one?” He grinned. “Smoked my first joint there, and nearly burned the place to the ground. It’s called Itty-Bitty.” He stuck his head out the window, and I saw that someone had emerged from the biggest house and was approaching us, someone who strongly resembled Charlie except with darker hair. Charlie drove directly toward this person—he was probably going fifteen miles an hour, not fast but not all that slow, either, given the proximity—and the closer Charlie got, the wider this guy’s smile grew. He walked with complete nonchalance, and at the last second, when I was already wincing, Charlie slammed on the brakes, and the guy called out, “You’re so chickenshit, Chas!”

  Charlie parked the car next to a wood-paneled station wagon—there were five cars pulled up near the back of the house—and the other man approached my door, resting his forearms on the roof while peering down at me through my open window. “So you’re the reason none of us have heard from Chasbo in weeks,” he said. “Now I see why.”

  “Back off, perv,” Charlie said, and there was a happiness in his tone I had not heard before, not quite like this. “Alice, meet my brother Arthur.”

  We shook hands through the window. “I admire you,” Arthur said. “Not every woman is willing to go out with a retard.”

  Charlie was out of the car by then, and before I really knew what had happened, he’d tackled Arthur from the side and they were rolling over and over in the grass, tussling and laughing. I opened the car door and stepped out. The smell, that sweet clean smell of northern Wisconsin—it almost made Halcyon seem worthy of its pretentious name. I looked around at the five buildings. I was pretty sure, though Charlie had not explicitly said so, that these structures represented only the Blackwells’ property, their compound, and not the entirety of Halcyon, as I’d thought when the houses had first come into view. With my own recent foray into real estate having taught me to think in such terms, I guessed that the largest house was five thousand square feet; three of the others were about eight or nine hundred square feet each; and the last, Itty-Bitty, couldn’t have been over two hundred. A bed of periwinkles grew around the base of an elm tree, and the grass was such a rich green that I was tempted to take off my shoes. I walked around the side of the big house. Perhaps twenty feet in front of me, a slate sidewalk was embedded in the grass, and beyond the sidewalk, past a sloping grassy descent of about forty yards, was a narrow rocky beach and then the water. A long dock extended into the lake. At the end of the dock, figures lay on towels and sat in folding chairs. Out in the water, there was a raft off which a person in red swim trunks jumped while I watched.

  When I returned to the car, Charlie and Arthur were standing and they walked toward me, panting agreeably. “Tell me, Alice,” Arthur said, “is Chasbo’s impotence still a problem, or did he get that taken care of?”

  “Cured by the same doc who treated your flatulence.” Charlie was grinning. “Super fellow.”

  “Better gaseous than limp,” Arthur said, and Charlie replied, “Keep telling yourself that, ass-blaster.”

  “Alice, be honest,” Arthur said. “Was it Chas’s silver tongue that won you over?”

  Charlie set one arm around Arthur’s shoulders. “Everything I know, I learned from my older brother.”

  They both were grinning the same grin, and Arthur said, “Welcome to Halcyon. You guys want a beer?”

  We o
pened the trunk and carried our things toward the house—“I’m not sure where Maj is putting Alice, but we’ll stash her stuff in the Alamo for now,” Arthur said—and I held my purse and the basil plant (it now seemed officially cornpone, hippie cornpone), and Arthur took the suitcase I’d bought the previous winter from Dena’s shop, which was swirling pink and brown paisley vinyl with pink leather straps. As we reached a screen door at the back of the house, Charlie asked, “Who’s around?”

  “Let’s see . . . Ed and John are out fishing with Joe Thayer, Ginger has a migraine”—Arthur raised his eyebrows dubiously—“Dad and Maj are swimming with the boys and Liza, Jadey, and the baby drove to town to get bug spray—careful, ’cause the mosquitoes are a bitch right now—Uncle Trip is sleeping, and Nan is playing tennis with Margaret. Am I leaving anyone out?”

  “Uncle Trip’s here?” Charlie said.

  Arthur grinned. “Would Labor Day weekend be complete without him?”

  At that moment, as Arthur opened the screen door and Charlie and I followed him inside, I may as well have been listening to them speak Portuguese—very few of the names meant anything to me, and it seemed that a tremendous amount of time would have to pass before they did. But I was wrong, and even by the end of the weekend, I could have decoded the summary haltingly but accurately: Ed was the oldest brother, the congressman; Ginger was his wife, prone to migraines or to faking them, depending on whom you believed (either way, there seemed to be a consensus among all the Blackwells besides Ed that Ginger was joyless and rigid, and thus she served, perhaps as they intended, as a cautionary tale for me); the boys were their sons, Harry, age ten, Tommy, age eight, and Geoff, age four; also falling under the heading of “the boys” was Arthur’s son, Drew, age three; Jadey was Arthur’s wife, and the baby was their eleven-month-old daughter, Winnie; John was the second oldest brother, the husband of Nan; Liza, age nine, was John and Nan’s older daughter, and Margaret, age seven, was their younger daughter; Uncle Trip was nobody’s uncle but had been the third roommate in the triple shared by Harold Blackwell and Hugh deWolfe at Princeton University in the fall of 1939 and the spring of 1940; and finally, Dad was Harold Blackwell, and Maj was Priscilla Blackwell. Joe Thayer, with whom Ed and John were out fishing (the Blackwells owned five boats: a cutter, a motorboat, two Whitehall row-boats, and a canoe), was, at thirty-six, the oldest child of Walt and Sarah Thayer—the Thayers were another Halcyon family—and was a lawyer in Milwaukee. Joe was also a man whom, eleven years later, at night on the campus of Princeton, I’d find myself kissing on the lips. But this was the least of what I didn’t know that afternoon.

  We’d entered the big house—the Alamo—through a pantry that led to the kitchen. Both the existence of the kitchen and its lack of fanciness surprised me. The refrigerator was white with rounded corners (it looked to be from the forties and hummed loudly). There was a large gas range with four burners, and an oak table with a greasy finish was pushed against the wall, its other sides flanked by chairs with thin navy blue cushions. On the wall hung a clock with a cream face, black minute and second hands, and a Schlitz logo in the center. What was striking was how full the room seemed—it was stocked like any kitchen for a large family, onions and potatoes in a wire basket hanging from the ceiling, a spice rack next to the stove, boxes of cereal stacked atop the refrigerator, and an open bag of potato chips sitting on the table. I gestured toward the chips. “I thought you ate all your meals at the clubhouse.”

  “Alice, man cannot live on breakfast, lunch, and dinner alone,” Arthur said.

  “Only thing the Blackwells are better at than eating is drinking,” Charlie said. “Speaking of—” He opened the refrigerator and withdrew three cans of beer, passing one each to Arthur and me. After Charlie had snapped the tab on his, he took a long swallow, and when he was finished, he said, “Christ, is it good to be here.”

  Arthur turned to me. “I assume Chas has gone through the whole plumbing spiel with you.”

  I looked at Charlie. “Oops,” he said, but he was smiling. To Arthur, he said, “I was afraid she wouldn’t come.”

  “I offer a math lesson,” Arthur said. “There are now—Chas, is it seventeen Blackwells here? Eighteen? And there’s one bathroom, and I don’t just mean in this house, I mean in all the houses. Well, Maj and Dad have a half-bath, but that’s off limits to everyone but them. What I’m trying to say is, efficiency is appreciated.”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  “The pipes aren’t the greatest, so flush early and often,” Charlie said.

  “If you take a massive crap, let a wire hanger be your friend.” Arthur turned his hand sideways and made a slicing gesture.

  He didn’t shock me; to be fair, I didn’t know if he was trying, or if he was just being himself. Arthur struck me as childish, but I didn’t mind childishness—it wasn’t by accident that I worked at a school—and besides, meeting Charlie’s family, I wanted to be a good sport. I said, “Is this the same bathroom where your father came upon the flamingo?”

  “You told her about that?” Arthur laughed, shaking his head. “Classic, absolutely classic. You should have heard that thing honking and growling. Who even knew flamingos made noise? Let me give you the grand tour.”

  The three of us walked from the kitchen into the living room, an enormous open space that contained, against its north wall, the largest fireplace I had ever seen—it was a fireplace I could have stood inside. On the walls above it were mounted animal trophies: High up were a moose and several deer (at least two with six-point antlers), and lower down were trout and salmon, pheasant and wild turkey and a ruffed grouse. In one corner was what I might have taken for the showpiece of the collection—a stuffed black bear standing upright at roughly eight feet, its mouth frozen open in a ferocious growl, a heart-shaped patch of white fur on its chest—except that the beast had been stripped of its gravitas by the placement of a cowboy hat on its head. I wondered, didn’t the bear frighten the younger grandchildren?

  The furniture in the living room was mismatched and faded, dominated by two white bamboo couches with cushions I suspected had once been red but were now a washed-out dark pink; both couches held a smattering of aquatic-themed throw pillows featuring lighthouses, sailboats, and shells. On a shelf beneath the large bamboo coffee table, board games were stacked in boxes that were also faded and, in some cases, coming apart (I glimpsed Scrabble, Monopoly, and Candy Land, as well as a few jigsaw puzzles). On the front wall, jalousie windows ran vertically from waist height to the ceiling and horizontally from one end of the room to the other. Many of the panes were open, and they revealed a screened-in front porch crowded with wicker furniture on a vast straw rug. At the far end, between the walls, there was strung a hammock in which—it took me a second to notice—a middle-aged man appeared to sleep soundly. Beyond the porch was Lake Michigan.

  “Bedrooms are this way.” Arthur guided us into a short hallway leading to two smaller rooms. The first had another straw rug, a low king-size bed covered in a white spread, two bedside tables stacked high with hardcover books and papers, and a mirrored dressing table whose light blue paint was chipping. The second room had a double bed on a mint-colored iron frame and a not-new-looking television set propped on the dresser. It wasn’t until I saw the two bedrooms on the other side of the house, both of which contained several single beds and were spare except for the clutter of children’s toys and small articles of abandoned clothing, that I realized the first bedroom must have belonged to Charlie’s parents.

  “If it’s all right, I’ll use the famous bathroom now,” I said.

  “That away.” Charlie cocked his head, and as I walked in the direction he was gesturing, Arthur called after me, “Flush early and often.”

  I found myself in a hallway where old-looking coats and flannel shirts hung on hooks, and carelessly stacked items of household paraphernalia sat above them on a high ledge: a Frisbee and snowshoes, a plastic kite, a copy of the Milwaukee White Pages, a dusty one-gallon me
tal can of gray wall paint.

  Affixed to the outside of the bathroom door was a porcelain oval that said W.C. in fancy script. But this was disingenuous—it was no closet, I realized as I pushed open the door to find a room the size of my family’s dining room in Riley. In here were a washer and dryer; a clawfoot tub; an old toilet with a black plastic seat, a chain you pulled for flushing, and a tank situated above the user’s head; a small white porcelain sink; a low wooden table near the sink on which sat four mugs with two or three toothbrushes in each of them; a bookshelf with mostly paperback pot-boilers but also a few hardcovers—The Confessions of Nat Turner, a large green copy of Leon Uris’s Trinity; and a window blocked by a not entirely opaque white cotton voile curtain through which I could see parked cars and hear not just the breeze in the backyard but also the distant cries of the swimmers and sunbathers on the dock. I shut the door and was lifting my skirt—to meet Charlie’s family, I had chosen to wear a yellow knit dress with a collar, short sleeves, and a tie belt, along with my blue Dr. Scholl’s sandals—when I realized that the door had opened on its own. After a second attempt at closing it, I figured out that it didn’t stay put; no lock clicked into place, and the soft wood of the door slid away from the soft wood of the frame. Of course it did. I felt a brief rise of distress (one bathroom for eighteen people! for the next three nights!), but I swallowed it back, pulling Trinity and The Confessions of Nat Turner from the bookshelf and stacking them on the floor against the door—for all I knew, that was what they were there for. For good measure, I reached behind the curtain and shut the window; there was no screen.