American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “I believe this is when Ginger and I will make our graceful exit,” Ed said, but he was smiling as he pushed his chair back. “Maj, Dad, thanks for a tremendous meal, as always.”

  “Stick in the mud, stick in the mud!” Arthur cried.

  “Oh, it’d be most unsuitable for the representative from the Ninth District to get caught smoking weed five short months before he’s up for reelection,” Charlie said. “And in the home of the former governor, no less. Someone call The Washington Post!”

  Wryly, Ed said to Ginger, “Come along, dear, and let’s round up Geoff.”

  As Ginger rose from the table, Nan said, “I’m ready to call it a night as well.” I saw her eye John meaningfully; they both stood, following Ed and Ginger.

  When the four of them had disappeared, Harold cleared his throat, and we all turned toward him. “Allow me a bit of unsolicited advice,” he said. “Nostalgia aside, this is an atrocious idea.” He stood. “Would anyone care to join me in the living room for coffee?”

  The table broke up then, the idea of buying marijuana either through Leroy Sutton or another source seeming to lose momentum—thank goodness, as far as I was concerned—and as the men accompanied Harold into the living room and the women cleared plates, Jadey whispered to me, “Now Maj probably thinks I’m a pig and a druggie.” She did not seem terribly bothered.

  When we all stood, Miss Ruby had magically appeared, along with a man named Bruce who helped serve and clear and acted as a bartender when the Blackwells held larger parties. Though I’d seen Miss Ruby several times over the course of the night, I had been able to greet her only briefly; she’d been busy preparing the meal, and other people had been in the vicinity. It was after the coffee was served, when Priscilla was in the living room, that I found an opportunity alone with Miss Ruby; she was setting silverware in the dishwasher. I said, “Has Mrs. Blackwell spoken to you about the play?”

  Miss Ruby was hardly looking at me. She said, “That’s fine.”

  “I want to apologize if I’ve created an awkward situation for you,” I said.

  We both were silent, and steam rose from the water gushing out of the faucet.

  “Obviously, you didn’t do anything wrong,” I added. “I hope you all are still planning on lunch at our house a week from Monday. We’re very excited about seeing Yvonne’s baby.”

  Miss Ruby raised her eyebrows. “You told Mrs. about it?”

  “I haven’t, and if it’s uncomfortable for you to come, I understand. But I hope you know we’d be delighted to have you. It’d just be Charlie and Ella and me.” I paused. “We’ll assume you’ll be there, but should something come up, give me a call.” Was I making a great mess of things, was I putting Miss Ruby’s job at risk? But it seemed far more offensive to me to capitulate to Priscilla’s whims than to defy them, and besides, she and Harold were returning to Washington in a few days. Bad enough that she should try to control our behavior while she was here, but it was simply absurd for her to attempt it long-distance.

  Before I left the kitchen, I said, “Thank you for dinner. Everything was delicious.”

  ON THE CAR ride home—it was after ten when we left, and I drove—Charlie said, “There’s a rumor going around that you socialized the other night with a Negress.”

  “Charlie, you know I don’t like to make trouble, but for your mother to suggest that it’s wrong to—”

  “Don’t blame me.” He sounded amused. “You and Miss Ruby can prick your fingers and become blood sisters, for all I care. I’m just hoping I get good tickets for the Lindy-Maj showdown.” He took on a sports announcer’s tone. “In this corner, weighing one-thirty and wearing a pink tennis skirt . . . ” Noticing that I hadn’t laughed, he said, “Come on, this is good stuff. So you drove all the way into the core, huh? You’re a brave lady.”

  The core was a derogatory name for Milwaukee’s inner city, and not a term I used. I ignored Charlie, and from the backseat, Ella said, “Mommy, how many days left till we go to Princeton?”

  Ella was excited about the reunion for the spectacle—Charlie had been teaching her the school’s various fight songs and cheers, and I had done my best to describe the orange-and-black outfits, the bands in tents at night, the beauty of the campus (while Ella had gone with us to Charlie’s fifteenth reunion in 1983, she’d been so young she had little memory of it)—and she also was excited because the trip would be an opportunity to see her cousins Harry and Liza. I said, “If today is May twenty-first, and we leave on June third, how many days is that? Do you remember how many days there are in May?”

  “Thirty days hath September . . . ” Ella began. She counted on her fingers. “Fourteen days?”

  “Close,” I said. “Thirteen.”

  “And that means my class party’s in twelve days?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Daddy?” Ella said.

  Charlie turned to face the backseat.

  “Your epidermis is showing,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah?” Charlie replied. “Well, there’s life on Uranus.”

  Ella giggled. “Well, boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.”

  “I remember my time on Jupiter fondly,” Charlie said. “Your mother thought I was stupid to begin with, but when I came back, I’d even forgotten how to pick my nose.” Then he said, “There’s been a request for the world-famous opera singer Ella Blackwell to perform. The fans are clamoring. Will she disappoint, or will she rise to the occasion? Three, two, one, and hit it, Ella!” He was actually the one who began to sing: “ ‘Ohh, Princeton was Princeton when Eli was a pup . . . .’ ”

  Ella replied in her own high, sweet voice: “ ‘And Princeton will be Princeton when Eli’s days are up . . . ’ ”

  Together, rising in volume, they sang the last two lines, the ones I was not at all sure were appropriate for a nine-year-old: “So any Yalie son of a bitch who thinks he has the brass / Can pucker up his rosy red lips and kiss the Tiger’s ass!’ ”

  This was only one small piece of the Princeton propaganda my husband had pressed upon our daughter. There was also the outfit he’d been sent in advance of the reunion, which all the members of his class would wear for the campus parade and which, so far, Ella had tried on and Charlie hadn’t: an orange warm-up suit with a black stripe running down the side of the pants and the jacket’s zipper, and a floppy white hat with 68 printed in orange and black in a circle above the brim. (The outfit’s theme was supposed to be tennis, or “Over-40 Love.”) Then there was Ella’s favorite cheer, known as a locomotive. At any moment—at dinner, or just as Ella was about to go to bed—Charlie would cry out, “Sixty-eight locomotive,” and then they’d both chant, “Hip! Hip! Rah! Rah! Rah! Tiger! Tiger! Tiger! Sis! Sis! Sis! Boom! Boom! Boom! Bah! Sixty-eight! Sixty-eight! Sixty-eight!” Then they’d yell and clap and even dance; sometimes I found their routine charming and sometimes I found it exasperating. A Princeton reunion reminded me of an academic, institutional version of the Blackwell family, simultaneously impressive and self-regarding, overwhelming and intoxicating and marvelous and repugnant. This time around, I felt a particular concern about how much Charlie would drink; his fifteenth reunion had been the only time I’d seen him consume so much beer he vomited, and that had been in the days when he was drinking considerably less than he did now.

  Charlie switched to a different song: “ ‘Tune every heart and every voice, / Bid every care withdraw—’ ” This was a song I liked, even though it concluded with a gesture that was uncomfortably close to the Nazi salute. But we were in the car, our little family, and I joined in, too: “ ‘Her sons shall give while we shall live / Three cheers for Old Nassau.’ ” And then, because we were a family, because in families you do the same things over and over, we sang the song a second time, a third, a fourth, and by the end of the fifth, we’d arrived home.

  THE BREWERS WERE playing the Toronto Blue Jays that Sunday, and the game started at one-fifteen. The original plan was for Arthur and their son Drew to go with C
harlie and Ella, but Arthur called that morning to say he’d been thinking it could look bad if, this soon after the meat scandal, he and Charlie showed up on TV, enjoying themselves at the ballpark (the Blackwells’ seats were eight rows above the Brewers’ dugout, between third base and home plate). “We were exonerated!” Charlie protested, but apparently, Arthur couldn’t be dissuaded. When Charlie hung up, he said, “I smell John all over this.”

  I’d planned to spend the afternoon preparing for the upcoming week—the next day, I’d return to Riley to help my mother bring my grandmother home from the hospital, and on Tuesday, for a Garden Club luncheon at Sally Gilman’s house, I was responsible for making potato salad for thirty—but I quickly agreed to go in Arthur’s stead. We called Harold to see if he’d like to join us, but their flight back to Washington was at four.

  I didn’t really mind the change of plan; even before Charlie and I had Ella, attending baseball games was probably our best shared activity. I liked how you were part of a crowd, but an orderly crowd—there were seats and rows and sections so that even with tens of thousands of people, it wasn’t chaotic, and if a fan became drunk and unruly, he was usually escorted away. I liked how the park was a setting where you could but didn’t have to carry on a conversation, I liked the people-watching (the fans like us, families with children, and the adolescent or middle-aged couples on dates, the groups of friends in their late twenties or early thirties, the men who came alone, about whom there was something very moving to me, or at least there had been before Charlie became one of those men, at what I felt was my own and Ella’s expense). But I liked the wholesome cheers and the corny traditions and the familiar songs and the basic tastiness of eating a hot dog and drinking a beer on a sunny afternoon or evening. The one part of a baseball game I didn’t like was when a foul ball or a home run flew into the stands and people scrambled over it—when only one person got what so many wanted. But in general, baseball games kept Charlie sufficiently occupied, not bored, while also being calm enough for me. As for Ella, she liked games for her own reasons—her Japanese pen pal was a tremendous fan of the sport, which had increased Ella’s interest in it, and she also loved that the frozen custard came in a small plastic Brewers cap that you could take home—but the important part was that she liked them, that we all did.

  By the fourth inning, the score was 4–1 in the Brewers’ favor, and Charlie seemed to have forgotten that he was freshly peeved with his brothers. This was when Zeke Langenbacher sidled up to us. Zeke was a man about twenty years older than Charlie and me, rumored to be the richest person in Milwaukee and possibly in Wisconsin—he was a high school dropout who’d started as a milk delivery boy and owned his own dairy by the age of twenty-five before diversifying into auto insurance, radio stations, and motels. I had met him a number of times, but I always imagined he wouldn’t remember my name, and I was always pleasantly surprised when he did. He and Charlie occasionally played tennis together—on the court, Zeke was known to be both excellent and quite aggressive—and I think these matches, even losing them, gave Charlie a frisson of pride. “Zeke’s a big fucking deal,” he told me after one. “He’s a captain of industry.”

  After greeting me and being introduced to Ella, Zeke gestured to the empty chair next to Charlie. “Anyone sitting here?”

  Charlie patted the seat. “We were holding it open for you.” Zeke had his own season tickets a few rows in front of ours—County Stadium never had luxury boxes, which to me was part of its charm—and earlier in the game, I’d noticed him down there with two other men.

  Ella was sitting between Charlie and me, and Zeke was on Charlie’s other side, so I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I was surprised that he stayed into the seventh inning, by which point the Brewers had scored three more runs. I took Ella to the bathroom, then waited in line with her for french fries, and we were making our way back to our section when Ella and a little boy about her age collided. Almost half of Ella’s french fries spilled from the paper cup onto the floor, and in a scolding tone, she said to the boy, “Look what you just did!”

  The boy appeared frightened, and I said, “Ella, sweetie, it was an accident. It wasn’t his fault any more than it was yours.” The boy was accompanied by a man, and when I glanced up, anticipating an exchange of apologetic smiles, I saw that the man was Simon Törnkvist. I believe that we mutually considered pretending not to recognize each other—his glasses were different, with larger lenses, and he no longer had a beard, but his floppy blond hair was the same, his drooping left eye—and then I said, “My goodness, it’s a small world, isn’t it?” I set a hand on Ella’s shoulder. “This is my daughter, Ella.”

  “My son, Kyle.”

  “It’s sure a nice day for a ball game,” I said.

  “We live up in Oshkosh now, but we’re here visiting some friends.” Simon’s tone was warmer than I would have anticipated.

  “Isn’t Oshkosh where you’re from?” I said, and he said, “Good memory.”

  Good memory? I thought. We dated for a year!

  “You might be surprised to know I ended up in the education field, too,” he said. “I’m a high school history teacher.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said. It seemed that he was waiting for me to provide a comparable update—I’m still plugging away in the library—and I found that I did not want to share with Simon that I no longer held a job. I realized I’d been wondering if he’d know whom I’d married, or at least know that it was one of the sons of the former governor, and I was glad he appeared to have no idea. How disapproving Simon Törnkvist would probably be, how pathetically bourgeois my life would seem to him. “We’ll let you two get back to the game,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Maybe our families can get together when we’re next down here,” he said, and I smiled, banking on the fact that he’d never be able to track me down.

  “Absolutely.”

  Back at our seats, Zeke Langenbacher was gone, and I said to Charlie, “You’ll never believe who Ella and I just ran into—Simon Törnkvist.”

  “You mean Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme?” This was the nickname that Charlie had made up for Simon years earlier, based on my brief descriptions. The two of them had never met, but Charlie had somehow gotten the impression that Simon was a long-haired guitar-strumming antiwar protestor; really, this said less about Charlie’s idea of Simon than his idea of me. “He was with his son,” I said, and Ella said, “He made me spill my fries!”

  “Not all of them, by the looks of it,” Charlie said, and reached out to take several. Indignantly, Ella hit his forearm.

  “I thought old Parsley didn’t want kids,” Charlie said. “Isn’t that why you broke up?”

  It was my turn to feel surprised, pleasantly so, by someone else’s ability to remember the past. “I guess people change,” I said. I was aware that perhaps I should take Kyle’s mere existence as an insult, and who knew whether Simon had other children? He probably did. But in fact, I felt an almost giddy gratitude that I was married to Charlie instead of Simon. How stiff and unaffectionate Simon had been when we were dating, how tedious, really, and I’d realized it only afterward; Charlie, even with his many flaws, was infinitely preferable. I reached over Ella to rub the back of Charlie’s neck. “What did Zeke Langenbacher have to say?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Just shooting the breeze.”

  The Brewers won 7–1, and we all were contentedly sun-saturated and tired driving home. As we pulled into the driveway, I glanced in the backseat. “Ladybug, I want you to pick up your toys by dinner-time.”

  “In case you’re wondering where Barbie is, she’s buck-naked and spread-eagle on the floor in the den,” Charlie said. “Looks like she had a rough night.”

  “Charlie.” I frowned at him.

  “What does spread-eagle mean?” Ella asked.

  “I’m just telling the truth,” Charlie said.

  To Ella, I said, “It means spread out. Why don’t you put some clothe
s on her so she doesn’t get cold?”

  The phone was ringing as we entered the house, and my first impulse was to let the machine get it, but then I decided to answer because I thought it might be Jadey wanting to go for a walk.

  “Hello?” I said. There was no immediate reply, then I heard the sound of a person sniffling, a sniffle I recognized, and my mother said, “Oh, Alice, I hate to have to tell you, but Granny has passed away.”

  I HAD NEVER bought Ella black clothing before. In fact, I’d told her it wasn’t appropriate for little girls, a line she accusingly repeated back to me as I sat on a bench in the dressing room at Miss n’ Master, Maronee’s overpriced children’s clothing boutique, and she wriggled into a gauzy black dress with ruffled sleeves and a sash across the mid-section. She peered at herself in the mirror and said with unexpected pleasure, “I look like the girl from The Addams Family. For Granny’s funeral, will you do my hair in braids?”

  “Try this one.” From a hanger, I removed a navy blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar. When Ella had pulled it over her head, she frowned at her reflection, and I said, “That’s adorable. Why don’t you like it?”

  “I like the other one.”

  It was four o’clock on Thursday, four days since I’d received the call from my mother, and the funeral would be at eleven the next morning. I sighed. “Fine, we’ll get the black one.”

  “Can I wear it for Christmas?”

  “Christmas is in seven months, sweetheart.”

  “Can I wear it at Princeton?”

  “We’ll discuss it later. Turn around and let me unzip you.”

  At the cash register, Ella announced to the middle-aged woman ringing up the dress, “It’s for my great-grandmother’s funeral because she died of blood in her head.”

  The woman looked startled. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.

  IT WAS A strange thing to be in Riley without my grandmother. In the past, I’d been there when she was in Chicago with Gladys Wycomb, or I’d arrived for a visit when she was napping, but those times I had felt the force of her even in her absence, and now she was nowhere at all. Or who was I to say, what did I really know about the mysteries of the afterlife, and maybe she was right next to me, watching as I turned around to greet the people sitting in the pews behind the front one at Calvary Lutheran Church. A constricting band of sadness, like a belt that was too tight, was ever-present, but I also felt the tug toward social pleasantries that always surprised me at funerals—how the focused, mournful moments were the exception, the moments when you truly thought of the person who had died instead of being dimly aware of yourself in a church, part of a crowd, reciting prayers or talking to others. Perhaps sixty people had shown up for the service, primarily our neighbors as well as Ernie LeClef, who was now manager of Riley’s branch of Wisconsin State Bank & Trust, and this turnout was higher than I’d expected, given that my grandmother had few close friends and had outlasted most of her peers and a fair number of people a generation younger, including, of course, my father.