American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  During the whole of dinner, I nodded at what seemed to be the appropriate intervals, I smiled when they smiled and laughed when they laughed, I even answered a question about my own taste in music—“Allison, do you prefer the classical or romantic era?” Rumpus inquired, and I said, “I’ve always enjoyed Mahler’s Fifth”—and at the same time, I became first tipsy and then solidly drunk in a way I had never been in my entire life. The waiters and waitresses, most of whom appeared to be about fourteen years old, refilled our wine-glasses frequently. On my second trip to the bathroom, I left just as coffee was being served with dessert, and the walls shifted as I walked.

  There was a sitting room outside the dining room, and both its walls and those in the halls leading to the bathroom were densely covered with framed photos, the majority of them black-and-white: Halcyon inhabitants holding fish or playing tennis (the latter activity featured action shots and posed ones, with the players crossing their racquets in front of their bodies). One picture was of Mrs. Blackwell gripping the hand of a toddler who might well have been Charlie, standing on the porch of what I believed to be this very building. Mrs. Blackwell had not been beautiful, but she’d been dark-haired and attractive, the skin on her face smooth and unlined, a canny glint in her eye. On my return from the bathroom, I was studying the photo when a woman appeared from nowhere and threw herself into my arms. “I am so excited to meet you!” she cried. She spoke in a drawl that, like Charlie’s, was vaguely southern.

  Even when she’d extracted herself from our nonmutual embrace, she held tightly to my upper arms, looking at me with great enthusiasm. She had white-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, big front teeth, and tanned skin; she was pretty, but in this moment she was also far too physically close. “And I heard about that raunchy poem Arthur wrote, and I am mortified. I was with the baby in Gin Rummy, but if I had been there, I would never have let him do that. You must think we’re the most disgraceful family in the entire world.”

  Then her eyes widened, and I do not exaggerate when I say that she proceeded to shriek. “Oh, you don’t even know who I am! Oh my stars!” She began to laugh, bringing a hand to her chest. “I’m Jadey! Arthur’s wife! I’m Jadey Blackwell! Oh, Alice, you have to forgive my terrible manners!”

  “What a pleasure to meet you.” I could hear the expansiveness in my voice, a decidedly unfamiliar tone. “But your husband forgot there’s an alternate ending for the limerick.” Both the words alternate and limerick had been daunting to pronounce, and I was proud that I had surmounted them. “What he said was ‘And bits of her tits down in Dallas.’ But also, it can go ‘And her anus in Buckingham Palace.’ Did you know you’re married to a plagiarizer?”

  Jadey peered at me more closely, then whispered. “Oh my Lord, are you drunk?” I shook my head, but she was saying, “Oh, I would be, too! Oh, you must be just beside yourself! I can only imagine what this weekend is like for you. They tease you so much, don’t they? My first year of marriage, I was on the brink of tears the whole time, and I had grown up with the Blackwells! Oh, I just hated all of them, and after Arthur made me marry him, I thought to myself, Jadey, are you crazy? You knew that family was a bunch of hooligans!”

  Was Jadey crazy? I had been in her company for about a minute, and already, I felt that I could have answered this question accurately.

  “Stay right here,” she said. “I’m getting Charlie. You poor baby, you’re drunk as a skunk.”

  Because I was indeed drunk, I didn’t mind standing there doing nothing; I gazed up at the silver trophy vase sitting on the mantel above the fireplace—it was about a foot tall—and by the time Charlie emerged from the dining room, Jadey just behind him, I was holding the trophy in my arms, squinting down at it. “Where’s your name?” I asked Charlie, and he seemed both amused and perturbed.

  “Let’s put that back where it belongs, sticky fingers.” He eased the trophy from my hands and returned it to the mantel, then said to Jadey, “Tell Maj you think Alice has whatever the baby is sick with.”

  Jadey made a face. “Colic, Chas?”

  He waved his hand dismissively. “Make something up. I’m taking her back to Itty-Bitty.”

  Jadey set her hands on the slopes where my shoulders became my neck; the effect of her standing like this was halfway between a babushka pinching your cheeks and a lover moving in for a kiss. “Alice, we are going to be best friends,” she said. She dropped her voice. “Ginger and Nan are no fun. They mean well, but they’re worrywarts. But I heard about you”—she was talking louder again, and more quickly—“and I just knew right away. I said to myself, ‘Alice sounds like my kind of girl.’ ”

  What had Jadey heard about me? And when—that day or earlier?—and from whom?

  “You seem like a very special person,” I said, and Charlie burst into laughter. To Jadey, he said, “She’s never like this. Seriously, I’ve never seen this before.”

  “She’s adorable,” Jadey said, and she held the clubhouse door for us as we stepped outside. “Don’t let her fall, Chas.”

  The slate sidewalk was lit only by the stars and the half-moon, and the distance we needed to go seemed significantly greater than it had on the way there. Charlie had one arm across my back and the other hand holding my elbow. “Steady there, party girl,” he said. “Was Rump Higginson that bad a dinner companion?”

  We were passing the family compound closest to the clubhouse—this one, I’d learned a few hours before, belonged to the Thayers—and I said, “Everyone here is so rich.”

  Charlie laughed but not all that heartily. After a beat, he asked, “You like that?”

  “Rich people are bizarre!” I exclaimed. (This was a remark Charlie quoted back to me many times in the years to come.) “I love you, Charlie, but all this fuss about tennis and Princeton and the Biltmore Hotel—if you were the foreman at Fassbinder’s, sometimes I think that would be easier.”

  “You mean Fassbinder’s the cheese factory?”

  “They make butter, too,” I said. “Want to go swimming?”

  “I’m not sure that’s the best idea.”

  “You’re supposed to be the fun one.” I poked him in the ribs. “Good-time Charlie. Are you scared now? Remember when you told me you’re scared of the dark?”

  “I’m doing my best to keep it together for my blotto girlfriend.”

  “I know you’re scared of the dark, because I wrote it down in my dossier. My Charlie Van Wyck Blackwell dossier.” I pronounced each of his names lavishly. “And now I can’t protect you because I’m”—I thought of Jadey—“drunk as a skunk.”

  “That you are,” Charlie said. “What I’m trying to figure out is if you’re a good drunk or a bad one.”

  “If you let me go swimming,” I said, “we’ll be naked, and you can put your penis inside me in the water.”

  “Oh, man!” Charlie said. “Okay, I’ve decided you should become an alcoholic. You’re an excellent drunk.”

  “It’s my first time,” I said.

  “Sorry, but it’s a little late for me to believe that one.”

  “No, no,” I said. “My first time being drunk.”

  “Well, you seem like a pro.”

  “No, honestly—I can tell you don’t believe me, but I’m telling the truth.”

  When we reached the Blackwell compound, he said, “The problem is, I don’t know how long till the others get back, and if we’re splashing around in the lake after Jadey told Maj you were sick—”

  “I don’t think you’re afraid of the dark.” I tapped the end of Charlie’s nose with my fingertip. “You’re afraid of your mother.”

  He laughed. “You would be, too.” I suspect Charlie’s own fondness for drinking, his lifetime spent around it, made him especially tolerant of the drunkenness of others. “I’d love to take you up on the whole penis-inside-you offer,” he said, “but how about if we go in Itty-Bitty?”

  “Let’s do it here.” I slipped from his arms and lay on the grass. We were in front of the
Alamo; Miss Ruby may still have been inside, or she may already have gone for the night to the dormlike building behind the clubhouse where she and the other Halcyon families’ maids slept, but either way, I had forgotten about her. The grass was cool, the blades slightly sticky.

  “God almighty, woman,” Charlie said. “Who are you?” He scooped me up and half-carried, half-dragged me across the lawn toward Itty-Bitty. All its lights were off, and he settled me on the bottom bunk before flicking the switch. “I gotta take a whiz,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  I knew he didn’t walk back to the Alamo to use the bathroom but stayed somewhere very nearby because I could hear him urinating as I lay in bed. I giggled a little, I thought of teasing him when he returned, I thought of how his penis would feel in my hand. But this was the last thing I thought, because abruptly I fell asleep. As Charlie told me the following day, by the time he reentered Itty-Bitty, I was snoring obliviously.

  AROUND FOUR A.M., when the darkness of true night had faded into a pre-sunrise gray, I awakened with a clenching in my stomach and knew I desperately had to use the toilet. It would have been better if I needed to vomit, because that was potentially something you could do outside; this was not. Yet for several minutes more, I lay in agony on the bottom bunk, the prospect of darting across the lawn to the Alamo and then of sitting on the toilet, making rude noises in a house where everyone else was asleep, just a little worse than remaining in discomfort in bed. Before making an early-morning lavatory journey such as this, did one first change into real clothes? Was there some sort of protocol established, and was I expected to guess what it was? When I could stand it no longer, I rose from the bed, realized to my surprise that I was wearing not my nightgown but my dress from the night before—it smelled of food and alcohol—and hurried outside barefoot, the grass cool and dewy. I had feared that the house would be locked, which it wasn’t. (I later learned that it was never locked, not even during the winter, when no one came up from month to month; it was only looked in on by a local caretaker. “If vandals want to get in, I’d rather have them use a door than a window,” Mrs. Blackwell said wryly, as if she were being a very good sport. It was rarely possible, especially in the early days, for me to guess Mrs. Blackwell’s reaction to a particular situation, but no matter what that reaction was, when mine did not match hers, I was left with the feeling that this was the case because I came from a different class. Or at least I knew she would chalk up any disagreement to this discrepancy, and she’d believe it so heartily that it might as well have been true.)

  I slipped inside through a back door—not the one off the kitchen, but another one off the hallway leading to the bathroom. As I had expected, the house was completely silent. I shut the bathroom door, knowing this time to push the books against it, and then I sat down, and it felt as if a snake were uncoiling in my stomach—it was uncoiling very quickly—and still I couldn’t release it. I wanted to, but I was incapable because I was so anxious about the sounds I’d make. I leaned forward, hugging my sides, trying not to whimper. They’re all asleep, I told myself, but I was immobilized, and then the snake reared up, baring its fangs and forked tongue, and everything inside me gushed out, a prolonged and mortifying splatter. Recalling the warnings about the fragility of the plumbing, I immediately yanked the flushing chain. But I wasn’t finished—I knew I wasn’t—and the water in the bowl had not yet resettled when another grotesque gush surged from inside me. How humiliating that I had drunk so much, and also how foolish. (Never since that episode have I had more than two drinks in a single evening.) My belly was empty now, blissfully empty, but still sour and shaky. I wiped myself, then flushed the toilet a second time, and when I stood, when the water had climbed back up the bowl, I saw that mere flushing was not going to suffice; brown smudges clung to the porcelain. Ought I stick my hand in there? I was accustomed to cleaning up after children; it was usually just urine, but the younger ones had accidents regularly, or someone would throw up, and if Big Glenn was otherwise occupied, I’d sprinkle the sawdust on the carpet myself rather than waiting for him. I flushed a third time, and when the water swirled down, I reached in with a wad of toilet paper and wiped at the most egregious clumps and streaks before the water could rise. Then I dropped the toilet paper, flushed a fourth time—was Priscilla Blackwell at this very moment listening to me wreak havoc on her plumbing?—and washed my hands. The soap was a light blue oval, cracked in many places and rubbed down to the thinness of a guitar pick; as I moved my palms against it, it broke in two, and I thought—it came to me so naturally, such a casual reaction—I hate it here.

  This was the sort of thought I never had, and even in the moment, I felt an immediate reassessment. My upset stomach was no more the Blackwells’ fault than a summer storm would have been! (Oh, but how they loved their one toilet, how they loved their faded furniture and mossy, rickety dock, their chipped saucers and tarnished picture frames and hard mattresses. They loved this false, selective form of roughing it, and their own ease with its conventions, and a visitor’s potential unease. In the house I’d grown up in, we, too, had had one bathroom, but it had never occurred to anyone in my family to take pride in this fact. It did not surprise me at all—by then I understood—when, just a few weeks later, I accompanied Charlie to the Blackwells’ house in Milwaukee, their primary residence, which dwarfed even the Alamo; the Milwaukee house was, I suspect, closer to twelve thousand feet, a fieldstone behemoth with a slate roof. It sprawled horizontally, with multiple peaks and chimneys, banks of windows, sections that jutted forward or hung back; the combination of the stones and the sheer size evoked a castle. The front lawn was as green and meticulously mowed as a golf course, the garage held four cars—this usually meant, with household help and visitors and members of the younger generations, that three or four cars were still parked outside in the gravel driveway—and in the back was a pool that they kept at a punitive sixty degrees; Charlie referred to it as “scrotum-shriveling.” Inside were hardwood floors and vast Oriental rugs, chandeliers, floor-length draperies, massive furniture, oil paintings of fruit still lifes and skulls, and in the dining room, covering an entire wall, a mural of an English hunting scene: lords and ladies, fields and trees, dogs and birds. Also, there were seven bathrooms. So of course—of course the deprivations of Halcyon tickled them. They loved them as suburban children love sleeping in a tent in their own backyard. But I filed this not-quite-knowledge about the Blackwells, this sub-awareness, in the same place I’d filed my ideas about Charlie marrying me because I lent him credibility: the basement of my mind. It is, I think, a tendency of coastal urbanites more than those of us from the Midwest to believe you need to bring all your impressions to the fore, to dwell on the unpleasant feelings those close to you provoke—to decide these feelings matter, that they are a subject worthy of discussion, perhaps with a therapist, and that you might ride your own ideas toward a resolution, or at the very least spend time comparing them with your peers, who undoubtedly harbor similar sentiments.)

  No. I did not hate it here, I did not blame Charlie’s family for my upset stomach or for anything else. Hate was such a melodramatic emotion, so blustery and silly. If the Blackwells incited in me a certain skepticism, I was scarcely the first person to have reservations about her prospective in-laws, or about the wealthy.

  I reshelved the books and opened the bathroom door slowly, to minimize creaking. As I let myself out the door to the outside, I heard a person coughing, but I had no idea which bedroom the sound came from. I retraced my steps across the wet grass, and just before I entered Itty-Bitty, I glanced to my right, and the lake was flat and gray, a darker gray than the sky, so somber and severe and lovely that my breath caught. No, it was not pretentiousness and affectation that drew the Blackwells here—how unfair of me to presume such a thing. Rather, it was that they recognized the beauty of Halcyon and could afford it. Wouldn’t my own parents, had they the same luxuries of time and money, have liked to spend a few months each summer in
a place like this?

  Or maybe, standing on the steps of Itty-Bitty, I was just more forgiving of the Blackwells because I was tired and wanted to go back to bed. Perhaps it was simple fatigue that made me inclined to surrender to rather than try to extricate myself from the future Charlie and I had begun to plan.

  AT BREAKFAST IN the clubhouse a few hours later, Arthur said to me from across the table, “Alice, the word of the day is legs. Please spread the word.” Jadey, who was sitting next to him holding the baby, slapped Arthur playfully and said, “She hasn’t even had her coffee yet.” Jadey made no mention of our interaction the night before, for which I was grateful, though I did detect in her expression a discreet merriment.

  Breakfast, I discovered, was a more haphazard affair than dinner, with people appearing and departing at various times, and if you wanted toast or an English muffin or cold cereal, you fixed it yourself from the buffet set out on a long table; only if you wanted eggs or bacon or waffles did you order from the waiter, a pale and skinny teenage boy with an enormous Adam’s apple.

  Some of the children were already in bathing suits, and several of the adults, in anticipation of the day’s competition, were in their tennis whites, the women in pleated skirts so short they would have bordered on the obscene were it not clear that they had been approved at some point in the distant past. Priscilla Blackwell wore one of these minuscule skirts, and very low socks with pink pompoms on the back of the ankle. (It was 1988 before the Halcyon Board of Overseers—which had its own charter and held as a requirement of membership that you first be male and second be elected, so that two men from each family served for five years at a time—decreed that it was permissible to wear non-white apparel on the Halcyon tennis courts. The dissenters in this decision, foremost among them seventy-six-year-old Billy Niedleff and his middle son, Thaddeus, then forty, continued to grumble about the decline in standards for the next decade.)