American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  In the den, Charlie sat up, and I took the opportunity to lean in and kiss his cheek. He turned his face and kissed me back on the lips, and as we hugged, a sideways sitting hug, the hostility of our encounter in the front hall evaporated. “If you leave the company, what do you think you might like to do instead?” I asked.

  “Play first base for the Brewers.” He grinned.

  “I know I’ve told you this before, but I’ve always thought you’d be a wonderful high school baseball coach. You’re so knowledgeable, you’d get to be outside, and I’ll bet anything the kids would find your enthusiasm infectious.”

  His grin faded.

  “Seriously,” I said. “High school positions are competitive, obviously, but if you started at the junior high level—we could even see if any spots are open at Biddle—and then you worked your way up, in a few years, you—”

  “Alice, Jesus! Is that really what you think I’m worth?” I glanced down, and he said, “I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, but why don’t you try not to hurt mine? Christ almighty, a high school coach—”

  I said, “Well, I found working in schools very gratifying.”

  “Alice, I went to Princeton. I went to Wharton. I ran for Congress.”

  I remained quiet.

  “It’s not that I don’t have plenty of options. That isn’t the problem,” he said. “Dad would be thrilled to have me join him at the RNC, Ed would love it if I came on board as a policy adviser either here or in Washington. The question is, what would be meaningful to me? What would I find most rewarding?” Please don’t say it, I thought, and he said, “What’s the work I can do now that will create the kind of legacy I’ll be proud of?”

  “I’ll fully support you working in Ed’s district office, but you know how I feel about moving to Washington.”

  “Are you saying you won’t?”

  I sighed. “I won’t do it happily. Washington’s a long way from Riley, and I just think, in this day and age, Ella’s so lucky to have her great-grandmother in her life.”

  “But she’d get to see Maj and Dad all the time—six of one, half dozen of another, right?”

  This was not at all how I saw it, but I said simply, “Your parents are able to travel a lot more easily than my grandmother.” My grandmother no longer left the house on Amity Lane, and my mother had had a stair lift installed so that my grandmother didn’t need to climb to the second floor. Its seat and back were beige Naugahyde, and sometimes while riding it, my grandmother would wave regally as she ascended, as if she were the queen of England. I had actually lobbied to name Ella after my grandmother, while Charlie had wanted to name her after his mother; we compromised by blending their names and, not for the first time, my mother was more or less ignored.

  Charlie took a swallow of whiskey. “I thought my path would be clearer by now, you know? My destiny.” Oh, how I hated this talk—who besides seniors in high school reflected unironically on their destiny?

  “Honey, I don’t know if such a thing as destiny exists, but I’m pretty sure that if it does, you won’t find yours in there.” I pointed to the whiskey bottle.

  Charlie grinned. “How can we be sure before I’ve gotten to the bottom?”

  I didn’t pursue the topic. Instead, I said, “If you want to stay at the company, we’ll figure out a way to make it better, and if you want to move on, I know you’ll find a position you enjoy. You have a good life, and we have a good life together—we have each other and Ella. Will you try to remember that?”

  He was still grinning. “I’m only becoming a high school coach if you become the head cheerleader and you show me your pom-poms.”

  I leaned in and kissed his cheek. “Don’t hold your breath.”

  I WAS IDLING in the after-school pickup line of cars at Biddle, waiting to get Ella, when a woman knocked on the half-open passenger-side window of my Volvo. The woman was crouching down, and I realized it was Ella’s third-grade teacher, Ida Turnau. “Alice, can I talk to you for a sec?” she asked.

  Mrs. Turnau was a petite, pink-skinned woman about my age who had a very kind face. (Although I called her Ida when I spoke to her, I always thought of her, and we referred to her at home, as Mrs. Turnau.) I’d gotten to know her because I’d chaperoned a bunch of the class field trips: At a pizza parlor in Menomonee Falls, the children were allowed in the kitchen to make their own individual pizzas; at Old World Wisconsin, they attended a faux temperance rally and watched a demonstration on flax processing, and I’m afraid to say I seemed to find both events considerably more interesting than Ella and her classmates did.

  Mrs. Turnau said, “This is awkward, but I saw on the news last night about the beef recall, and I’m wondering, would it be all right if we avoid serving Blackwell hamburgers at the end-of-the-year party? I hate to do this, and I’m sure the problem will be all taken care of by then, but I just know I’ll have parents asking.” The third-grade party would be held at our house in two weeks.

  “Oh, of course,” I said. I was tempted to repeat what Charlie had told me—it was unlikely that the contamination had been Blackwell Meats’ fault—but there probably wasn’t a point. “Absolutely.”

  “Just so the other parents won’t worry,” Mrs. Turnau said. The line of cars moved forward a few feet, and she added, “I’ll let you go. Nice to see you, Alice.”

  When she was gone, I realized that the car in front of me was the Volvo of Beverly Heit, whose son was a year ahead of Ella. (I’d heard that the teachers at Biddle called the parents the Volvo Mafia, a nick-name in which I personally was complicit. More than once, though, I’d felt the urge, never acted on, to say to Ella’s teachers, I’m one of you! I know I seem like one of them, but really, I’m one of you!) I honked very lightly, and when I could tell Beverly was looking at me in the rearview mirror, I waved. Beverly waved back, then held up her wrist, tapping her watch: This is taking forever. I nodded: I know!

  As a product of public school, and as a former employee at two of them, I had initially felt a slight resistance to enrolling Ella at Biddle. It wasn’t that Charlie and I debated it, because we didn’t. Biddle, which started with a prekindergarten Montessori and ran through the twelfth grade, was where all of Ella’s cousins either went or had gone, where Charlie’s brother John was head of the board of trustees, where Charlie had attended second through eighth grade and Jadey had graduated from in 1967. (Until 1975, the boys’ and girls’ divisions of the school had been on opposite sides of the campus, now divided between the lower and upper schools.) Even though the public schools in Maronee were extremely well funded, and a far cry from those in the city of Milwaukee, Ella’s attendance at Biddle had been a foregone conclusion. Still, I had wondered if the students would be snobby, if the teachers would be overly pleased with themselves. As it turned out, I fell in love with Biddle’s white-wood lower school building with the colonnade in front, with its traditions—in third grade, everyone had a Japanese pen pal (Ella’s was named Kioko Akatsu), and in fourth grade, all the students, including the boys, cross-stitched a bookmark—and with its quietly hippieish leanings: The songs Ella learned in music class and came home singing were “If I Had a Hammer” and “One Tin Soldier” and “Imagine.” I could see how not having to follow a curriculum determined by the state allowed the teachers to be more creative, and I was especially looking forward to when Ella would be in fifth grade, and as part of a unit on colonial America, her class would get to dress up, the boys in tricorn hats and jabots and knickers, the girls in dresses that came with aprons and bonnets, and they’d all prepare a feast of stewed corn and apple cider and venison shot by someone’s father.

  It was another five minutes before my car reached the entrance of the lower school, and as soon as it did, Ella flew into the front seat, her purple backpack falling off one shoulder, a bunch of loose papers in her hand; she thrust them at me before she’d closed her door. “You have to sign the permission slip saying I can go on the Slip ’n Slide even though the party’s at our ho
use,” she said.

  “I have to?” I repeated.

  She turned and smiled at me—Ella had, without question, the best smile of anyone I had ever known, so lively and mischievous and affectionate—and she said, “I meant, will you please, pretty please, my pretty Mother? Did you bring me graham crackers?” Already, she had found the box between our two seats, and she opened it and began chomping, spilling crumbs down the front of her shirt. Mother was a new and ironic term for Ella, not that my nine-year-old daughter had the slightest idea what irony was. But calling me Mother instead of Mommy was something she’d borrowed from her friend Christine, who had worldly and irreverent older sisters. While I wasn’t crazy about it, I found it preferable to Ella calling Charlie and me by our first names, which she’d done for a brief time when she was about four, apparently having picked up on the way we addressed each other.

  “Can I change the station?” she said, and before I could respond, she’d leaned forward and was twisting the radio dial from NPR to 101.8 FM, causing Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name” to erupt into the car. Ella sang loudly along with the chorus: “ ‘Shot through the heart / And you’re to blame . . . ’ ”

  Oh, my daughter, my noisy, happy, strong-willed, irrepressible only child—I adored her. One of the things I had not anticipated about motherhood was how entertaining it would be. I’d known from my experience as a librarian that children were often amusing, sometimes outrageously so, but it was different, it was far more fun, when the amusing child was mine, when I spent hours and hours with her on a daily basis, knew her every expression and intonation, each appetite and anxiety and enthusiasm. Her current obsessions included stickers, hopscotch, nail polish (her Aunt Jadey had a much larger supply than I did), Nutter Butter cookies, and Uno, and her fondest wishes were to acquire a Pekingese, which was out of the question because she was allergic to dogs, and to see the movie Dirty Dancing, which I had told her I wouldn’t allow until she was in seventh grade because it was rated R.

  Not infrequently, I was struck by how savvy Ella was, how much more pop-culturally aware than I had been at her age: She had requested a Jane Fonda exercise tape for Christmas (we hadn’t given it to her because I didn’t want her to become preoccupied with her weight—besides, she already played soccer, squash, and softball); she had encouraged me to “crimp” my hair, saying it would “jazz up” my appearance; and she had asked us at dinner the previous week if it was possible to get AIDS from a toilet seat. Charlie had said, “Not unless you’re using the bathroom at Billy Torks’s house.” This was a reference to Jadey’s interior-designer friend, whom Charlie had met only a few times. I’d shot Charlie a look and said to Ella, “You can’t, but you still should put toilet paper down before you go, because of other germs.”

  In the car, Ella and Bon Jovi were still singing, and I said, “Ladybug, turn it down a bit.”

  She leaned in, her long light brown hair falling forward. Of course my daughter had long hair, coming halfway down her back—I’d been wrong about the one maternal restriction I was sure I’d impose, and even as a very little girl, Ella had protested vehemently when I cut off over an inch or two. Although I’d spent more hours than I cared to think about untangling knots (and once removing grape-flavored gum), I recognized that Ella was very pretty: Along with my blue eyes, she had a dainty upturned nose sprinkled with golden freckles. I was relieved that so far, she appeared largely unaware of her prettiness. When she’d resisted my attempts to cut her hair, it had seemed more an assertion of free will than an act of vanity.

  I knew that Ella was a little spoiled, and possibly more than a little. I suppose part of why I wasn’t good at saying no to her was that she’d inherited her father’s cajoling personality, but another part of it was that we hadn’t succeeded in having more children; I’d never been able to get pregnant after her. We’d considered fertility drugs or IVF—this was in the early days of the procedure—but I was wary, concluding that if my body was rejecting pregnancy, perhaps there was a reason, and I ought not to force the situation. I expressed this belief to Charlie, though what I didn’t express was a deeper sense that to push for a second child might be greedy, more than I deserved. There was a bitter-sweet symmetry in having had one abortion and one child; to try so hard for another might have been to press my luck. I’m sure Charlie was disappointed—an only-child family was, to him, an aberration—but beyond a few conversations, he did not insist, and he found as much joy in Ella as I did.

  I turned left out of the parking lot, still behind Beverly Heit; the Heits lived about half a mile from us, and I’d probably be following her all the way home. “Ladybug, how was school?” I asked.

  “Mrs. Turnau sent Megan to the principal because she wouldn’t quit asking people if they wanted a poop sandwich.”

  “A what?” I said.

  “A poop sandwich. Oh, I love this song!” “So Emotional” had come on the radio—a few months back, Ella had bought the new Whitney Houston cassette, the first music she’d ever purchased with her own money—and she leaned forward, turning it up. I reached out and turned off the radio altogether.

  “Mommy!”

  “Ella, you need to be respectful when someone is talking to you.” I glanced over at her. “Now, what on earth is a poop sandwich?”

  Ella shrugged. Megan was Megan Thayer, the daughter of Joe and Carolyn, who were another Halcyon family. They had separated in the winter, and I’d heard from Jadey that Carolyn had recently filed for divorce; the rumor was that Carolyn had come into some family money and felt freed to end the marriage. Charlie and I weren’t extremely close to either Carolyn or Joe, but we ended up seeing a fair amount of Halcyon people in Milwaukee because, like us, they belonged to the Maronee Country Club, I was in Garden Club and Junior League with the wives, and our children all attended the same school. This meant that on a regular basis, Charlie and I would share a blanket with Carolyn and Joe at one of Ella and Megan’s soccer games, or chat with them at a fundraiser. When the news had broken that they were splitting up, I’d had the impression that most people were shocked, but I really wasn’t. Joe was a gentle, slightly dull man thought by many women in Maronee to be quite handsome in a classic way: He was tall and slim, with a long, dignified nose and a full head of gray hair with a wave in front. Meanwhile, Carolyn was a complicated and not particularly happy-seeming woman. The famous story about her was that once when they were hosting a dinner party, she’d brought out the main course, a duck cassoulet, and one of the guests, a fellow named Jerry Greinert who was a good friend of theirs, had said jokingly, “Not that again,” and Carolyn had proceeded to throw the serving dish on the floor, turn around, and storm out of the house.

  “Can I turn the music back on?” Ella said.

  “Not yet. Do people pick on Megan?”

  “If you would like to know the answer to that, then you can only find out when I turn on the radio.”

  “Be nice to her,” I said. “When you and Christine are playing at recess, see if she wants to join you.” Although Megan and Ella knew each other well—there were only forty-four students in the third grade, plus they spent a good deal of the summer mere houses apart—they had never been real friends. Megan was a tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired girl, a strong athlete, but she had that overly watchful, overly eager quality that’s off-putting to adults and children alike; the previous summer, in Halcyon, she had asked me whether Ella would be having a slumber party for her next birthday, and if so, whether she, Megan, would be invited.

  I said to Ella, “But if Megan offers you a poop sandwich, tell her no.”

  With great exasperation, Ella said, “Mother, I already told her no.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Good. But still be nice to her. You have such a big heart, ladybug.”

  “Can I turn on the radio?”

  We were a mile from our house. “Not too loud,” I said.

  DESPITE THE ONGOING investigation by the USDA, it still wasn’t clear how the meat in Indianapol
is had come to be contaminated. That evening, Charlie got home from work at a reasonable hour, and out of either habit or defiance he lit the grill. (He still insisted on using a charcoal one for flavor.) I had planned a quick walk with Jadey, and after I called her, we met halfway between our houses and cut onto the golf course’s cart path. On the weekend, this route had its risks—about five months before, by the seventh hole, a ball had hit Lily Jones in the shoulder—but I loved the green grass, the groves of pine trees, the spring sky at dusk. Golf balls aside, it was all incredibly calming.

  Jadey was wearing white sweatpants, a red T-shirt, and a white sweatband that held back her blond hair; we both had shorter hair now, about chin-length, though hers was more layered than mine. We had just passed the duck pond when she said, “So I’ve figured out how to get back at Arthur. First I’ll lose weight, then I’ll have an affair. Want to go on a diet with me?”

  “I hope you’re kidding.”

  She lifted her left arm and pinched a bunch of flesh beneath her bicep. “Arthur’s right. I mean, who’d want to commit adultery with that?”