American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “We’re from Wisconsin, Charlie,” I said. “This is where we belong.”

  AND THEN SCHOOL had started, that inimitable, unmistakable sound of children crying out and running around before the bell rang in the morning, the checkout cards that I kept on my desk, the careful way the students gripped the pencils to print their names, and the pride of the ones who were just learning cursive. I read Tico and the Golden Wings to the first-graders, and Flowers for Algernon to the sixth-graders—I believed eleven-year-olds, even if they didn’t admit it, still liked to be read aloud to—and the fourth-graders made paper cranes during our origami unit. There were our Monday-morning assemblies, there was recess duty, when I tried to keep the viciousness of the foursquare games in check, and there were lunches in the cafeteria: chili hot dogs and pepperoni pizza and peach halves in syrup, and on alternating Fridays, breakfast for lunch, which the students loved and the teachers hated—French toast, hash browns, sausage links. You’d be finished with this meal at a quarter to twelve, your stomach churning with sugar and starch and cheap meat, and you’d feel like what you most wanted to do was lie down, and then another class would come flying in, frantic about who got to sit in one of the two bean bags during story time, or who was next in line to check out the newest Encyclopedia Brown. Every day, when school let out at three o’clock, I felt exhausted and happy.

  But here was the difference: Whereas for all the years I’d been working, I’d spent vast amounts of time focused on school during the hours it wasn’t in session, I now spent almost none. Once I had stayed in the library until early evening, preparing for the next day, or after the final bell had rung in the afternoon, I’d gone to Rita’s classroom to discuss some student I was concerned about—had Rita also noticed the rash on Eugene Demartino’s arm, or did she think it seemed like Michelle Vink and Tamara Jones were ganging up on Beth Reibel? But with the start of this school year, I hurried to my car when classes were out, and I experienced mild irritation on the days I had bus duty. I felt the press of my other life, my life with Charlie—I wanted to go to the grocery store to buy food for the dinner we’d eat that night, or go home to straighten up my apartment or shave my legs. If it was a day he had neither met with Hank Ucker nor driven to his job in Milwaukee, well, then I just wanted to spend time with him, to lie together on top of the bedspread on my bed with the warm yellow light of a September afternoon filtering through the window, to luxuriate in what was ours and new and exciting while it still was ours and new and exciting. In the library, I remained energetic and patient with the children. Outside of it, there were times when I left my school bag by the front door to my apartment, or sometimes even in my car, and I didn’t open it from the moment I drove away from school until the moment I returned. Instead, I kissed Charlie’s lips and his upper arms, his flat abdomen, all his salty skin, and he moved inside me, over and over; I loved to lie beneath him, to receive him. Now that we were engaged, I finally let him stay the night, or I slept at his place, and he was right that it was awfully nice to wake up together. I gave thanks, not for the first time, that being a librarian meant I had no grading to complete.

  OUR WEDDING WAS on Saturday, October 8, in Milwaukee; it was at eleven in the morning, held in the front hall of the Blackwells’ house, officiated by the Right Reverend Wesley Knull, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee. There was a luncheon afterward, champagne and lemonade, watercress and egg salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off; these were prepared by Miss Ruby and her daughter, a nineteen-year-old named Yvonne.

  When I’d told my mother and grandmother that I was marrying Charlie—I’d taken that trip to Riley without him—my mother had wept with happiness, and my grandmother had, while sitting in a chair, simulated a dance of glee. I had explained later to my mother that the wedding wouldn’t cost much because we’d be using the Blackwells’ house and their household help; if she wanted to write a check for ninety dollars for champagne, that would be more than enough. I’d settled on this figure by coming up with the lowest possible number that I thought would seem plausible to her. I am not sure how much the wedding really cost the Blackwells, but I let them absorb the expense. I also, in a way that I hoped would discourage questions, admitted to my mother that Dena and I had had a falling-out and she would not be invited to the wedding. Nevertheless, I received a gravy boat from her parents.

  Forty-nine guests came: Twenty-nine were Blackwells, twelve were friends of Charlie’s (men he knew from Exeter or Princeton or Wharton) and their wives; two were Hank Ucker and his wife; two were Kathleen and Cliff Hicken, who were the only ones we invited from that extended Madison friend group; and four were my mother, my grandmother, our longtime next-door neighbor Mrs. Falke, and my closest friend from Liess, Rita Alwin; Rita proved to be the only black person present besides Miss Ruby and Yvonne. It could have been a much different wedding, a much larger one, but I didn’t see the need for it; I didn’t yearn to be fussed over. We had no attendants except Liza and Margaret Blackwell, our flower girls, and no dancing, though a harpist played near the buffet. Jadey applied my makeup and styled my hair in an upstairs bedroom before the ceremony, and my dress was a matching skirt and blouse I’d found on the rack at Prange’s a few weeks before: white cotton, a blousy V-necked top with a cinched waist and a calf-length skirt that I wore with my white pumps. (When Priscilla Blackwell peered into the bedroom where I was dressing, she exclaimed, “Isn’t that a sweet little frock! Why, you look like a pioneer preparing to cross the Great Plains.”) I carried a small bouquet of five white lilies; Charlie wore a boutonniere of a single white lily, as did his father; Mrs. Blackwell, my mother, and my grandmother wore corsages.

  I walked alone down the aisle, a space created by the rows of white wooden folding chairs that it turned out we didn’t need to rent because the Blackwells owned nearly two hundred of them, as well as round folding tables; they kept these stacked in their vast unfinished basement, and the help brought them up for parties and fund-raisers. When I saw Charlie waiting for me by the staircase next to Reverend Knull, I did not feel any sort of epochal emotion; I felt a slight embarrassment to be drawing such attention to myself, to the affection Charlie and I had for each other. What was the reason to declare this so publicly? But the reason was convention, and there are worse rationales. It was necessary, I recognized, for everyone else. As I passed the front row, I saw that my mother and grandmother were beaming. The ceremony was short; afterward, the toasts from Charlie’s brothers, a source of worry for me in advance, were crude but in an essentially harmless way.

  At the reception, when Charlie was talking to my mother, I went and sat by my grandmother; Mrs. Falke was using the bathroom, and my grandmother was surveying the room, smoking a cigarette. “It’s a swell family you’ve married into,” she said. We looked at each other, and she added, “They’re lucky to get you.”

  “May I have a sip?” I gestured toward her glass of champagne on the table, and my grandmother nodded. I said, “Mom told me you haven’t been to see Dr. Wycomb for a while, and if it’s because of the hassle of the train, I could drive you to Chicago sometime. One of the next few weekends, even. Things will be pretty quiet for me with the wedding behind us.”

  My grandmother looked startled.

  “Not if you don’t want me to,” I said quickly. “I just thought—”

  “If we showed up at Gladys’s doorstep, I’m afraid she wouldn’t let us in.” My grandmother smiled sadly. “She became cross with me years ago.”

  “Was there—” I hesitated. “Did something happen?” And so we had arrived at the subject I’d studiously avoided for as long as I could, and instead of being gripped by nervousness or distaste, I felt a to-hell with-it sort of nonchalance; I found myself wondering why I’d invested quite so much energy all this time in evasion.

  “Gladys wanted me to move to Chicago,” my grandmother said. “After you went away to school, particularly, she’d say, ‘What’s there for you in Riley?’ She couldn’t understand,
never having had a child or grandchild of her own. She thought I was wasting my twilight years in this square little town when she and I could have a cosmopolitan life together. But I didn’t seriously consider it. Your father wouldn’t have understood, and if I was to choose between Gladys and my own son, it wasn’t much of a choice.”

  I swallowed. “And then you lost touch?”

  “She took up with another friend.” My grandmother’s expression was wry as she inhaled on her cigarette. “A younger lady, if I’m not mistaken. It would be hard not to be younger than me, but I mean a good deal younger than Gladys, too. Cradle-robbing, isn’t that what they call it?”

  “I’m sorry, Granny. I’m sorry that—” I paused. That I was childish about what you wanted in the world. That I was unable to accept a thing that caused no harm, that I acted as if it were shameful because someone somewhere gave me the impression that it was and not because I bothered to consider the situation for myself. “I’m sorry it turned out like that,” I said.

  “Well, it’s scarcely recent history.” She lifted her champagne flute toward me. “Find me something stiffer to drink, would you? Don’t Republicans like old-fashioneds?”

  “I’m sure I can get somebody to fix one.”

  As I stood, my grandmother said, “Your new mother-in-law seems like a crafty broad.”

  “I don’t think she approves of me.”

  My grandmother tapped her cigarette against an ashtray. “You must be doing something right.”

  AFTERWARD, AS WE pulled out of the driveway, Charlie smacked his hand against his forehead and said sarcastically, “Oh, shit—we forgot to do the dollar dance!” In Riley, if not in Madison, I had attended many weddings where dollar dances occurred; Charlie, I suspected, had never attended one.

  We were to stay overnight in a bed-and-breakfast in Waukesha, a Victorian house painted blue-gray. “It looks haunted,” Charlie said as we turned up the gravel driveway.

  I was the one who had chosen it, based on a recommendation from another teacher, and I replied, “Then you should have picked out someplace else.”

  “Are you always so grumpy when you get married?” he asked, and we grinned at each other across the front seat.

  Around three in the morning, I woke to find Charlie shaking me. “I’ve gotta take a leak,” he said.

  I shooed him away. “I’m sleeping.”

  “Come with me, will you?” The bathroom was outside our room and down the hall about twenty feet. He leaned across me and switched on the light on my nightstand. “Just come. One minute. I’ll be fast.”

  I was covering my eyes with the inside of my elbow. “Turn it off,” I said.

  “Come on.” His tone was both cajoling and whiny. “This place gives me the creeps.”

  I lifted my arm. “You seriously want me to go with you to the bathroom?”

  “Lindy, you’ve known since the night we met that I’m afraid of the dark. There was no false advertising.”

  I shook my head, but, just the tiniest bit, I was smiling. In the hall, a night-light stuck into a plug gave off a weak glow, but neither of us could find the main light switch. I walked in front, and when a floor-board creaked, Charlie whispered, “You hear that?” and I whispered back, “Calm down. This house is probably a hundred years old.”

  In the bathroom, I perched on a low radiator against the wall while he stood over the toilet. After he was finished, he turned and kissed me on the lips. “I knew I married the right woman.”

  “Wash your hands and let’s go back to bed,” I said.

  WHEN I FELL asleep again, I dreamed, as I had not for many years, of Andrew Imhof. We were in some sort of large, vague, crowded room—the poorly lit auditorium of a school, possibly—and we did not speak or even make eye contact, but I was acutely conscious of every place he moved; really, he was all I paid attention to, though I was pretending otherwise. Then, abruptly, he was gone, and I was deeply disappointed. I had been planning to approach him, I’d known he wanted me to, but I’d put it off so long I’d missed my chance. When I awakened, it was half past six, and our room in the B and B was just getting light; we were sleeping on a high, canopied bed, beneath a patchwork quilt so heavy I had broken into a sweat. The feeling of disappointment stayed with me—that what I wanted was the boy in the dream. Without turning my head to look at Charlie, I knew. Not this. That. Andrew. To be with Andrew would have been utterly natural; everything had been set in place, and I’d needed only to give in. And that feeling of being adored by a handsome boy, that feeling of being seventeen, of life being about to happen—how was it all so long ago, how had my path gone this way instead? My sense of disappointment wasn’t because I’d had to escort Charlie to the bathroom—that was practically endearing. It was because of everything else: I was now married (married ) to an aspiring politician from a smug and ribald family, I had a mother-in-law who didn’t like me, my husband was a man who basically (I rarely, even in the privacy of my own head, admitted this) did not hold a job. I’d been meant to grow old in Riley; I’d never been meant for ribaldry or riches.

  Charlie stirred then, pulling me to him, and when I finally looked at his face, the dream began to dissipate. I rolled toward him, feeling the tops of his feet with the bottoms of my toes, feeling the hair on his calves against the skin of my own legs, and his bony knees—they almost hurt me sometimes, when his legs were bent—and I pressed my torso to his, I huddled beneath his chest and shoulders. I recognized the smell of his skin, and he was handsome; he was not as handsome as Andrew Imhof had been, because Andrew had been a teenager, perfect and golden, but surely, had Andrew lived, he would no longer be handsome the way he’d been then. If what I had with Charlie did not feel as ripe with promise as what I’d had with Andrew—well, of course it didn’t. That earlier promise had hinged on never being realized. Charlie and I already knew each other far better than Andrew and I ever had. If Charlie couldn’t name the bakery on Commerce Street, or give the reason why Grady’s Tavern had caught fire in 1956, if he didn’t fully understand where I came from, he understood who I was now—he knew how well done I liked my steak, knew the color of my toothbrush, the expression I made when I realized I’d forgotten to roll up my car windows before it rained. And if I’d been meant to stay in Riley, wouldn’t I have? Charlie wasn’t the reason I’d moved to Madison—I was the one who’d chosen to go over a decade earlier, and I’d rarely doubted my choice.

  There then occurred the first and only paranormal incident of my marriage. Charlie shifted in his sleep, opened his eyes, looked at me, and, without preamble, said, “You have to forgive yourself for killing that boy.” (He was the first one who had ever said killing—though I had used the word plenty in my own thoughts, no one had used it with me. Years later, that was how people put it in articles and especially on the Internet, but Charlie was the first.) “For your own sake but for mine, too,” he was saying, and his voice was hoarse from sleep yet also certain and insistent. “If you don’t forgive yourself, you’re making that accident too important, you’re making him too important.” Charlie paused. “And I want to be the love of your life.”

  I was so surprised that I don’t recall what I said—probably nothing more than “Okay”—and we fell back to sleep, Charlie first. When we awoke over an hour later, we did not refer to the exchange. We chatted idly, Charlie tried to persuade me to have sex—“We need to consummate this thing pronto”—but I didn’t want to until we got home that afternoon because the walls of the B and B were so thin we’d heard the owner sneeze the night before. For breakfast, we went downstairs to eat biscuits and cherry jam. The bewilderment my dream had left behind, that jarring sorrow—they were gone, and now that we were up and dressed, walking around, now that it was an ordinary day, I could see the dream’s utter irrationality. I did love Charlie; I was extravagantly lucky.

  But the dream came back—the truth is that it has come back and come back and come back. For the entirety of my marriage, I would estimate I have dreame
d of Andrew Imhof every two or three weeks, almost always as he appeared to me the night of my wedding: present but elusive. He stands nearby, we do not speak, and I am filled with exquisite longing. When I wake, the longing takes more time to fade than the dream itself.

  But the dream is also, I have thought, a kind of gift: It allows me to remember Andrew without the memory being overwhelmed by my own sense of guilt. Perhaps Charlie’s exculpation had some effect, along with the passage of time. By my wedding night, it had been so many years. I was scarcely the same person I’d been that September evening in high school, and because it was no longer me, exactly, who had crashed the car, I could forgive the girl it had been as I would have been willing, much sooner, to forgive a classmate who’d been driving.

  And so the dream was the first time that I experienced our separation not as Andrew’s loss but purely as mine. Not as I am so very sorry for the thing I did to you. But as Come back to me. Come back to me because fourteen years have passed, but still I miss you terribly.

  IT WAS THE following spring, in early May, when I ran into my former realtor Nadine Patora. It was a Saturday morning, Charlie was off with Hank dashing from a 4-H dairy conference in Kimberly to a nursing home in Menasha to a diner in Manitowoc, and I was picking through a bin of apples at the farmers’ market when I felt the weight of someone staring. I glanced up. Nadine stood directly across the table from me. Unsure what to do, I smiled at her.

  “I hear you got married.” She nodded at my wedding ring, which was a plain gold band.

  I realized I had never written her a note apologizing for backing out of the purchase of the house. I had intended to, but during my courtship with Charlie, I’d forgotten. “Nadine, I’m really sorry about what—”