American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “Good,” I said.

  He extended one leg so his sock-encased foot was balanced on my knee. “I sure do love you, Lindy, even if you’re a narrow-minded liberal who thinks I’m a conniving Republican.”

  I set my hand on top of his foot. “Sweetheart, if I were narrow-minded, I wouldn’t love you back.”

  WHEN THE PHONE rang on Friday afternoon, it was one o’clock, and I was scrubbing the tiles in our master-bathroom shower (I had never hired a maid or housekeeper, which I knew Priscilla and my sisters-in-law considered odd, but I actually found it soothing to clean). I pulled the yellow rubber glove off my right hand as I walked into our bedroom, and after I’d lifted the receiver, I heard Lars Enderstraisse say, “Alice, I’m awful sorry to be the one calling you—”

  Immediately, my heart stopped, it hung there unmoving inside my chest, and then, squeaking out the words, I said, “My mother?” and he said, “No, no, not Dorothy. It’s Emilie. I’m afraid she took a spill, and there’s been some internal bleeding, some bleeding in the brain, so we’re over at Lutheran Hospital.” This was the same hospital where I’d been born, the hospital where both Andrew Imhof and I had been taken that horrible night in September 1963.

  “But she’s not—” I paused. “She’s alive?”

  “She isn’t conscious, but I know the doctors are working hard. Your mother’s talking to one of them. Me and her are here outside the ICU, and we’re hoping they’ll let us see—”

  “Granny’s in the ICU?”

  “Being that she’s up there in years, they’re taking every precaution.”

  “I’ll get there as soon as I can,” I said.

  IT HAD HAPPENED late that morning, and not for any obvious reason—she had been walking from the dining room into the living room and had somehow landed on the floor, unconscious—and what the doctors were trying to figure out was whether the bleeding in my grandmother’s brain had caused the fall or the fall had caused the bleeding. My mother had heard a thud, but not even a loud one, “like the mail dropping,” she said, and she’d hurried out and seen my grandmother lying there. My mother tried unsuccessfully to revive her, and then she called an ambulance.

  At the hospital, my mother kept apologizing, as if it were her fault, saying, “I’m just so sorry you had to come rushing out here.”

  “Mom, of course I came.”

  At some point late in the afternoon, Lars walked across the street to a convenience store and bought boxed cookies, which neither my mother nor I ate; he then offered them to the other people in the waiting room. A television sat in one corner, playing soap operas and then talk shows, and though no one seemed to be watching it, it appeared that everyone was too diffident to turn it off. The commercials, with their relentlessly zippy announcers and upbeat jingles, felt like a particular affront.

  On the waitingroom pay phone, I had called Charlie, then I’d called Jadey to see if she could pick up Ella after school, and a few hours later, I’d called Jadey’s house to talk to Ella, to explain what was happening. I’d hoped that hearing my voice would let her know I was fine and so was she, but instead, it was her voice that upset me; I so wanted to be beside Ella, holding her, that I had to blink back tears. In her serious, girlish voice, she said, “Is Granny going to die?” Granny was what Ella called my grandmother, just as I did; she called my mother Grandma, and she referred to Lars (he and my mother had quietly married in 1981) as Papa Lars.

  I said, “I hope not, ladybug.”

  Around five, I called Charlie again at the office. “I’m still here, and there’s no real news,” I said. “Can you go get Ella?”

  “You think Jadey would mind watching her a little while longer? I’m scheduled for a five-thirty squash match with Stuey Patrickson.”

  From the pay phone in the corner, I surveyed the room: a young husband sitting with one hand over his eyes, either resting or weeping; a small child running a truck along the carpet; my mother reading a months-old McCall’s while Lars Enderstraisse sat beside her eating another cookie. (My stepfather was never how I thought of Lars. Not that I disliked him, I actually had developed a great deal of affection for him, and to my surprise, so had my grandmother; she had taught him to play Scrabble, and he’d become particularly knowledgeable about the tricky two-letter words, which meant he was a considerably more challenging opponent to my grandmother than my mother was. But still, I did not think of Lars as a father figure; he was simply my mother’s husband, her companion.)

  “Alice?” Charlie said, and I said, “I’d prefer for you to pick up Ella now. I don’t want her to feel unsettled.”

  “Is she upset?”

  “Well, I’m leaning toward staying at my mom’s tonight. We haven’t been allowed to see Granny, and I’m reluctant to come back to Milwaukee when everything is up in the air.”

  “You don’t even have a toothbrush, do you?” he said.

  “I can buy one.”

  “If you come home, you can jump in the car if you need to get back to Riley. It’s, what, thirty-five minutes?”

  The way Charlie drove, perhaps, but not the way I did. Besides, I knew that Charlie’s eagerness to have me return to Milwaukee stemmed less from a particular wish to see me than from—it persisted—his fear of the dark; my husband was afraid to spend the night in our house without me. Depending on the circumstances, I found this phobia either cute or irritating. “How about this?” I said. “I’ll call Jadey, and you and Ella can stay there.”

  “Remember how that fucking dog of theirs barked and slobbered in my face all night last time?”

  “Charlie, my grandmother is in the intensive-care unit. Your options are to stay at home, go to Arthur and Jadey’s, or you’re welcome to drive out here with Ella and stay at my mom’s. Why don’t I give you a few minutes to make a decision, and I’ll call back?”

  He was quiet, and then he said, “No, you’re right, you’re right. I’ll get Ella now, and if you wouldn’t mind calling Jadey, I can cancel with Stuey. How’re your mom and Lars?”

  “They’re fine.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m fine, too,” I said, though at this moment, being asked, I felt a sadness overtake me.

  Then Charlie said, “I know you think I hate spending the night apart because of not wanting to be in the house alone, but it’s also because I miss you, Lindy.”

  “Do you and Ella want to come out here?” I realized this was unlikely. On his first visit to my family’s house in Riley, Charlie had managed to conceal what I believe in retrospect was astonishment at how small the place was. In the years since, he’d become significantly less diplomatic. He’d say, “Sharing a bathroom with Lars is cruel and unusual punishment.” Even on the holidays we spent there, we almost never stayed the night, and Charlie regularly lobbied for my mother, grandmother, and Lars to come to his parents’ house for Easter or Christmas; they’d done so a few times early in our marriage, and I don’t think any of them had felt particularly comfortable. I was pretty sure that neither Priscilla nor Harold Blackwell knew Lars had been a postal employee—he had retired in 1980—and while I wouldn’t have denied it, I’d never made a point of telling them. The irony was that marrying Lars had no doubt made my mother far more financially secure. Since the episode with Pete Imhof, she had never mentioned money to me, and she and Lars had even gone on trips together to Myrtle Beach and Albuquerque.

  “Honestly, it’d probably be better if we go to Jadey and Arthur’s,” Charlie was saying. “Ella and I would be underfoot at your mom’s. Call me if you need anything, and call either way before you go to bed.”

  “Ella is supposed to go to Christine’s house tomorrow, so make sure she’s ready to be picked up by ten. Also, have her take her vitamin after breakfast.”

  “You’ll be back in time for dinner at Maj and Dad’s, won’t you?”

  I hesitated. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  I could tell that Charlie was restraining himself from saying how i
mportant my attendance was, which it really wasn’t except for the fact that the Blackwells took particular pride in their all-hands-on-deck dinners.

  I said, “Charlie, I’m sure your family will understand.”

  AT SIX THAT evening, the ICU’s last visiting hour, my mother and I were finally buzzed through the double doors to see my grandmother. Because only two people at a time were permitted, Lars remained in the waiting room.

  She still was not conscious. She lay beneath a sheet in a white hospital gown with a pattern of small teal and navy snowflakes, and she was hooked up to several monitors, one of them beeping. A tube was taped to the crook of her arm, and two more emerged from her nostrils. “She’s so little,” my mother murmured. I had been thinking exactly the same thing. Against the backdrop of the oversize bed, my grandmother looked heartbreakingly old and heartbreakingly tiny.

  I walked toward her, saying in a cheerful voice, “Hi, Granny. It’s Alice and Mom—”

  “It’s Dorothy,” my mother cut in. “Granny, boy, are we happy to see you. You gave us quite a scare today.”

  “You probably want to rest, so we won’t stay long,” I said. “But the doctor said you’re stable now, which is wonderful news.” It was impossible to know if she could hear us; the overwhelming likelihood was that she couldn’t. “I don’t know if you remember, but you fell this morning, so you’re in the hospital. Now you’re recovering”—this was my own wishful diagnosis, not the doctor’s; he had used no word more encouraging than stable—“and the doctors and nurses are taking very good care of you.” This also was optimistic inference; I didn’t have much idea of what had transpired behind the closed double doors. Dr. Furnish, who was the attending physician, had explained a few minutes before to Lars, my mother, and me that my grandmother had had what was called a lobar intracerebral hemorrhage and they’d given her several blood transfusions so far but were hesitant to perform surgery, given her age and general frailness; he also warned that she might have brain damage. Dr. Furnish was not particularly warm, but he did seem competent. As he spoke, I took notes on the back of a receipt I’d found in my purse.

  “Granny, I don’t think the waiting room here would be much to your liking,” my mother said. “The chairs are covered in an orange fabric you’d find very tacky.”

  “And Lars bought stale-looking cookies, which Mom and I were smart enough not to eat, but everyone else gobbled them up.” I tried to sound jaunty and humorous.

  “Emilie, you have to get better and come home in time for the season finale of Murder, She Wrote,” my mother said.

  I added, “But if you get me out of dinner at Priscilla and Harold Blackwell’s tomorrow night, I’ll be in your debt.”

  “Alice!” my mother said.

  “I’m teasing,” I said. “Granny knows that.”

  We continued in this fashion, half talking to my grandmother and half talking to each other for the allotted thirty minutes, and the only response we got was the beeping of the monitor. As soon as we walked out the double doors leading back to the waiting room, my mother pulled a tissue from her pocket and dabbed at her eyes. “I know Granny’s had a long life, and it’s not for me to question God’s plan,” she said. “But, Alice, I’m not ready.”

  AND THEN, MIRACULOUSLY, my grandmother was awake. I called the hospital around seven the next morning, as soon as I’d gotten out of the shower, and they said she’d regained consciousness during the night. She was dozing again, a nurse said, and although she’d be woozy from the sedatives, she’d almost definitely be able to talk to us when we went in at nine o’clock.

  My mother stopped in the gift shop on the lobby level to buy a balloon—flowers weren’t allowed in the ICU—and so I entered my grandmother’s room alone. Her eyes were closed, but when I said, “Knock, knock,” she opened them immediately. “Granny, welcome back!” I said. “We missed you!” When I was beside her bed, I leaned in and kissed her cheek.

  She blinked a few times, then said, “They’ve been feeding me very spicy chicken, and it’s made my throat dry.”

  Did she even realize who I was? I said, “Can I give you some water?” A white plastic pitcher sat on the table beside her bed, and next to it was an avocado-colored plastic cup with a straw in it. I brought the straw to my grandmother’s lips, and when she sucked on it, a tiny clear trickle dribbled out of the corner of her mouth. Though she was receiving fluids through an IV, I was certain my grandmother had eaten nothing, spicy chicken or otherwise, since her arrival at the hospital.

  When she’d finished drinking and leaned her head back on the pillow, she said, “They’re gambling on the roof, you know.”

  I hesitated. “Who?”

  She nodded sagely. “They are.”

  I held my hand over my heart. “It’s Alice, Granny. You’re in the hospital, but you’re getting better, and I’ve come to visit you.”

  She made an appalled expression. “Do you think I don’t know who you are? I’m not senile.” She pointed at me. “Why are you wearing Dorothy’s blouse? It makes you look frumpy.”

  I smiled. “I unexpectedly spent the night in Riley, so Mom let me borrow this.”

  “You should wear clothes more suited to your age.”

  “Granny, how do you feel? Be sure to let me know if you need to rest.”

  She didn’t respond right away but looked around the room and then said, “I’ve been thinking of your father.”

  I felt a flare of anxiety. Although I wasn’t at all sure I believed in heaven, it was hard not to imagine that by thinking of, she may have meant communing with or even being beckoned by. All I said, though, was “Oh?”

  “He was very devoted to Dorothy,” my grandmother said. “I had the opportunity to observe your parents’ marriage closely over a number of years, and I saw how fond of each other they were.” She peered at me. “What’s your husband’s name?”

  I swallowed. “Charlie. Charlie Blackwell.”

  “That’s right, the governor’s son. You two are very devoted to each other as well.”

  I tried to smile. “Well, I hope so.”

  She regarded me shrewdly. “That sounded tepid.”

  “No, I didn’t mean—I just—Lately, he’s been drinking more than I think he should,” I finally managed to say.

  She made a pooh-poohing gesture, or tried to, though because of the IV inside her elbow, she didn’t have full mobility. “Don’t keep a tight leash on him, my dear. That always backfires.”

  “Oh, I don’t—if anything, the opposite.”

  “You’re not strict with him?”

  I shook my head.

  “Maybe that’s the problem, then, that he’d like you to be stricter.”

  I hesitated—was this really the time or place to unburden myself?—but my grandmother had always enjoyed talking about people, and she did seem genuinely engaged. “This will sound ridiculous to you, but I think he’s having some kind of midlife crisis. His twentieth college reunion is in a couple weeks, and he’s obviously worried about not measuring up to his classmates.”

  “He went to Harvard University,” my grandmother said, and her tone was strange—it was as if she were boasting to me about someone other than my own husband.

  “You’re right that he went to school on the East Coast, but it was Princeton. Anyway, I guess he had the idea that he’d have accomplished more by now. He comes from a line of successful men, his grandfather and father, and I’m sure you remember his brother Ed is a congressman.” I wasn’t at all sure she remembered, though she did nod as I spoke. “But I just don’t think Charlie is meant to be a business titan or a politician. Not that I mind—I didn’t marry him assuming he would be. He’s so funny and lively, he has loads of friends, he’s a terrific father, and I just—I don’t understand why that’s not enough, why our life isn’t enough. It’s enough for me, and I don’t understand why it isn’t enough for him.”

  “His ambitions exceed his talent.”

  I tried not to take offense.
“I don’t know if I’d go that far. He’s very smart. And maybe it’s me, it’s that he finds me boring—” It was actually painful to remember the afternoon when Charlie and I had first said we loved each other—it had been the same day he’d met my mother and grandmother and Lars—and to remember how he’d prefaced it by saying he thought he’d always find me interesting. The reason it was painful was that I wondered with increasing frequency if it had remained true. What a wonderful compliment that had been, how unexpected, how recognized I had felt. I wasn’t just a cute brunette to Charlie; he understood that I was a person who thought about things, who read and had opinions, even if I held them quietly, and all of these were qualities that made him value me. But did he ever wish, in retrospect, that he’d married someone more exciting, someone whose idea of a pleasant Saturday night wasn’t eating dinner with our nine-year-old daughter and then reading forty pages of Eudora Welty before bed? Even the absence of real acrimony in our marriage, maybe that was disappointing—no opportunities for shouting or slamming doors, none of the delicious ugliness of rage, no fraught sexy reunions.

  My grandmother said, “Everyone is boring some of the time. The most fascinating person I ever knew was a woman named Gladys Wycomb. Did I ever introduce you to my friend Gladys?”

  I nodded.

  “She was the eighth woman in the state of Wisconsin to earn her medical degree, truly a brilliant gal. But I’d go to visit her, and sure enough, within a few days, we’d both be reading a book at the dinner table. It didn’t bother me a whit. What greater happiness is there than the privilege of being bored together?”

  “I agree, but I’m not sure that Charlie would.”

  “Does he know you have doubts about him?”

  “It’s not me doubting him, it’s him having doubts about his job and the path he’s taken in life, which—” I broke off. Wasn’t I lying, however inadvertently? It was me doubting him. I glanced at the floor, which was covered in white linoleum tiles. When I looked up again, I said, “I know you were impressed with Charlie when you first met, but are you still?” What was I doing asking this of my drugged grandmother, as if she were some sort of medium of marital wisdom? Or was I bold enough only because she was drugged? Even with Jadey, I was not quite this frank.