American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  As he sat on the bed, I stayed in the doorway and pointed. “I read that.” The book was Atlas Shrugged.

  “It’s interesting, but it’s too long,” he said.

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t say it was my favorite.”

  He was looking at me, not speaking. Then he patted the space on the bed next to him and said, “Why don’t you come over here?”

  I swallowed and stepped forward. It is important for me to say that I was complicit—I had followed him into the house and up the stairs. None of it was premeditated, but I was complicit. When we were sitting next to each other, I don’t think more than a second or two had passed before his mouth was on mine, his hungry, pushy, wet, sour mouth, moving in a way that seemed too desperate to be called kissing, and no more than a few seconds had passed after that before he set his fingers firmly around my right breast, squeezing and releasing and squeezing again. Although his desire was stronger than mine, and his strength was greater—although he was already shirtless—I was not afraid. What I felt was enormous relief. I’d been trying so hard these past few weeks to prop myself up, to act the way I was supposed to and try to take the first small steps toward compensating for my terrible error, and now I was only submitting. I wasn’t being watched or talked about or gently queried, not condemned or accommodated. I was being asked for something, something wrong, which another person wanted, and I could give it to him.

  He had reached beneath my blouse and under my bra, and because it seemed that the buttons on the blouse might pop otherwise, I unfastened them. When I wore nothing on top, he pushed me down on the mattress, straddled me, and leaned forward to roll his face between my breasts, pressing them against his cheeks and licking my nipples, his stubble rubbing not unpleasantly over my skin, and the more he grabbed and thrashed, the more the grabbing and thrashing seemed to stir rather than satisfy his desire. He pulled off my pants and underwear at the same time—I was wearing blue jeans, and he had to unbutton and unzip them first—and then I was naked except for my socks, which were white with lace trim. He tugged me upward and flipped me over, and when he said, “No, you have to be on your knees,” it was the first time either of us had spoken in several minutes.

  I have never described this to another person, I would never. And in today’s world, where nineteen-year-old girls on reality shows kiss each other for the entertainment of male onlookers, where women on network television climb into hot tubs in string bikinis, the globes of their fake breasts bobbing merrily—in this world, perhaps it wouldn’t seem so shocking. But it was 1963, I was a high school senior, and I had not known this sexual position existed, had never heard the fittingly coarse phrase doggy-style. I wasn’t sure what Pete and I were doing, wasn’t sure it was sex, and then after a few minutes of his pumping, I felt his surge inside me, and I knew it must have been. He pressed his hand against the side of my thigh, prompting me to lie down. When I did, he lay flat on top of me, and I could feel his sticky erection shrink up.

  We stayed like that, both of us facing the mattress: his head over my left shoulder, beside my head; his chest to my back; his flaccid penis in the split of my buttocks; his legs against my legs. His body was heavy and warm, and my mind was blank, and there was only his welcome weight, like a shield that covered me completely.

  Unsurprisingly, it had hurt somewhat, and it had been hasty, and there had not been the physical release for me that there had been for him; I was so naive that I didn’t know there could have been. Also, it had been ill-advised. None of that mattered. Lying on my stomach against the mattress, I could not see his face next to mine, but I could see the fingertips of his hand grazing my shoulder, and I could smell his skin, like sautéed onions and soap. So this was what it was to lie unclothed in the arms of a young man.

  Another minute passed before abruptly, Pete rolled off me. When he rose, the entire back of my body was exposed in his bedroom, beside the lamp, at noon on a Sunday, and I instinctively turned over and pulled up the sheet. He stood naked before me, his dark body hair and impassive expression. “My parents will be home,” he said. “You need to leave.”

  EVEN BY THE time I was back on De Soto Way, it seemed shocking and inexplicable. I’d had sex with Andrew’s brother? Forty minutes before, I’d been a virgin with a condolence note, and then Pete Imhof had been inserting his penis into me from behind and I’d resisted not at all? I’d practically invited it! As I drove into town, I’d have thought I’d imagined the whole scene except for the indisputable leaking between my legs.

  And yet I felt far lighter than I had driving out. Presumably, I had betrayed people—my parents and grandmother, maybe Andrew—but that wasn’t how I felt. It was more like something had been awry, a phone off the hook, a sink of dirty dishes, and what I’d done was to clean it up and set it right.

  At home, I parked the car and entered the house, and when I appeared in the dining room, my mother exclaimed, “There you are!” She was already standing and walking toward me, setting her hands on my shoulders. They were eating Sunday lunch, lamb and green beans and biscuits.

  “We were concerned,” my father said. “We didn’t know where you’d gone.”

  “I had to run an errand.”

  “Next time leave a note,” my father said. “Dorothy, let her sit so she can eat.”

  I longed to go upstairs and take a bath, but that would seem suspicious; I’d already showered that morning. Taking my place at the table, I wondered if Pete’s fluid had seeped through my underwear and stained the back of my jeans.

  “What was your errand?” my grandmother asked.

  There was a long silence. “For school,” I said. Another silence descended—they seemed to do that more often now, or maybe I just noticed them more—and then my mother said, “Alice, the Frick girls sang ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’ today. Such beautiful voices.” No one responded, and my mother added, “Do you know, Cecile told me the girls hope to perform at the state fair next summer.”

  “Fools’ names and fools’ faces often appear in public places,” my father said. Although he repeated this expression frequently—the most recent time had been when Mr. Janaszewski won three rounds of bingo in a row at St. Ann’s, and his photo ran the next day on the front page of The Riley Citizen—performing at the state fair did not strike me as all that unseemly.

  “Well, I don’t think it’s definite,” my mother said.

  I knew I should help out—my mother was trying—but I’d been gripped by a paralyzing awareness of a smell coming from inside me, a sour salty odor I had never been exposed to yet recognized immediately.

  “I went to school with a girl who had a gorgeous voice,” my grandmother said. “Leona Stromberg.”

  My grandmother set her knife and fork side by side on the edge of her plate, though she’d eaten less than half her food. She lit a Pall Mall as she talked. “When she sang, she was so good it gave you goose bumps. One summer, this must have been in ’09 or ’10, the circus came to town. She convinces someone to give her an audition, and what I always heard is they didn’t hire her for her voice as much as her looks, which is a shame. Not that she wasn’t pretty, too, but she had a real gift, and I take it they used her more as a magician’s assistant. In any event, she leaves Milwaukee with the circus—she’s about eighteen—and she travels this way and that, hither and yon. One night the circus is performing in Baltimore, and what happens in the middle of the show but a tiger bites off her nose.”

  “Oh my word,” my mother said.

  “Is this appropriate for the table?” my father asked.

  “We’re all adults.” My grandmother winked at me, something she had not done in a long while. “Now, by this time, I forgot to mention, she’s changed her name. No more Leona Stromberg. Instead, she goes by Mimi Étoile—‘Étoile’ is French for ‘star.’ Parlez-vous Français?” She was looking at me. I shook my head. An image of Pete Imhof appeared in my brain like a flare, and I did my best to ignore him. “Me, neither,” my grandmother said. �
�But back to our heroine. Mimi née Leona has no nose, which means no more performing. You don’t want to remind the audience of the circus’s dark side, after all. Now, you’d think she was out of luck. She doesn’t have savings, she isn’t married, she’s far from home. But the circus owner goes to fire her, and lo and behold they fall in love. Her face is covered with bandages, but that just forces him to listen more attentively to her exquisite voice. He’s years older than she is, in his fifties, but he courts her and makes her his noseless bride. They lived happily ever after, so far as I know.”

  “That’s a very peculiar story,” my father said.

  “Did she keep traveling with the circus?” my mother asked.

  “For a little while, but soon he bought her a house in Denver, and he stayed there, too, when the circus didn’t need him. Eventually, because remember, he was no youngster, he sold the circus and joined Mimi year-round. The weather in Denver is quite temperate, apparently, even though it’s near the mountains.”

  I swallowed my last bite of green beans. “May I be excused?”

  “Sweetheart, there’s butterscotch tapioca,” my mother said.

  “I have a history test tomorrow.” I stood and kept speaking as I backed out of the room, so that that would seem like the reason I was still facing them. “I need to study.”

  In my bedroom, I changed underpants. I didn’t know what to do with the soiled pair—I didn’t want to risk leaving them in the laundry basket in the corner of my room and having my mother find them—so I balled them up and set them in the back of my sock drawer. In the bathroom, before urinating, I wiped a wad of toilet paper between my legs, and the wad came away with a clear, filmy smear. The second time I wiped myself, I wet the toilet paper first. Then I flushed both wads away, as if destroying the evidence could undo the act.

  LATE THE NEXT afternoon, when my father was still at work, my grandmother was in the living room smoking and reading Vogue, and my mother and I were preparing dinner, I walked to the edge of the living room. “Mom wants to know if you want the cheese sauce on your broccoli or on the side.”

  My grandmother looked up. “On the side will be fine.”

  I did n’t move immediately.“ Was that story about Mimi Étoile true?”

  My grandmother regarded me. “If it were,” she said at last, “don’t you think it’d be awfully interesting?”

  THAT WEDNESDAY MORNING, as I ate oatmeal in the kitchen, my mother said, “Spirit Club meets this afternoon, doesn’t it, sweetie?” And though I had not attended a meeting since the accident, I went because of the willed brightness of her tone, the way she thought—it was touching, really—that if we spoke cheerily, it might mean I hadn’t killed Andrew.

  It was an ordinary meeting, with a forty-five-minute argument over whether the GO BENTON KNIGHTS banner for Friday’s football game against Houghton North High should be unfurled at morning assembly or withheld until the actual game; I did not speak at all except to vote yea for opening the banner at assembly. Spirit Club was composed of sixteen girls and one boy, a slim, excitable sophomore named Peter Smyth who was obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor and who would, at any opportunity, impersonate her in her role as a call girl in Butterfield 8.

  The next day, I was leaving the cafeteria after lunch when Mary Hafliger, the Spirit Club president, approached me. “Can I speak with you in private?” she asked.

  I nodded, and we walked from the noisy cafeteria outside to the faculty parking lot. It was a sunny day, and the leaves on the trees at the parking lot’s edge were red and gold.

  “This is hard to tell you,” she said, “but we think you shouldn’t be in Spirit Club anymore.”

  I was stunned and also not surprised at all. I expected censure in general, but I was never prepared for it in the moment.

  I swallowed. “That’s fine.”

  “I knew you would understand,” she said. “It’s just that you make people sad.”

  I thought of having defended Mary’s hairy forearms to Dena the previous spring, and then I wondered, had I made people sad at the meeting the day before? It had consisted of nothing but bickering and, at random intervals, Peter Smyth announcing, “ ‘Mama, face it. I was the slut of all time!’ ”

  But could I really fault Mary? I was Mimi Étoile, I realized suddenly, I was the girl whose nose had been bitten off by a tiger, and now I reminded cheerful people of life’s sorrow. Or no, maybe I wasn’t Mimi, because she had gone on to find her happy ending. Besides, it had only been her nose.

  ____

  THE NEXT TIME was after school that Friday. He was in the rusty red pickup I’d seen at the Imhofs’ farm, and he’d parked near campus and was sitting in the driver’s seat. When I was right beside the pickup, he said in a low voice, “Alice.” I turned, recognized him, said nothing, and climbed in the truck. We didn’t speak until after we’d made a right into his family’s driveway. I was surprised; without consciously knowing I’d thought that far ahead, I’d assumed we’d go somewhere secluded, that we might even use the bed of the truck.

  “But what about your—” I began, and he said, “They’re spending the weekend with my aunt and uncle in Racine.”

  In the house, I followed Pete up the stairs; I felt purposeful and not nervous. The first round was like before, both of us on our hands and knees, him behind me. But after we collapsed onto the mattress, we eventually ended up turning over, so we were on our backs next to each other, then he was on his side facing me; because he was taller, his mouth was near the top of my head. This repositioning all took a long time, and we spoke very little. We still were lying like that when he began running his fingers back and forth across the concave dip between my hip bones, his hand dropping progressively lower after each round-trip. When he got where he’d been going, I flinched, which wasn’t the same as not wanting to be touched. He stilled his hand, but he didn’t lift it away, and he didn’t say anything. He was waiting, perhaps, for me to protest. When I didn’t, he proceeded. I shut my eyes. At first my gasps were shallow and quiet, but they grew deeper and louder, and this might have been mortifying if I were still me, if the world still existed, but I wasn’t and it didn’t. I’d open my eyes and see an off-white ceiling, the tops of brown-and-yellow-plaid curtains, and then I’d close my eyes and go back into the roiling blackness of outer space, comets, and asteroids, and then I’d open my eyes again—ceiling, curtains—and the difference was as great as if I’d been sitting at my desk in homeroom one moment and then I’d turned around and found the Great Wall of China stretched out before me. It was not clear whether he rolled onto me or I pulled him, but at some point he was in me again, we were face-to-face, grinding and colliding, and I was gripping his buttocks, and it happened at the same time for both of us, I raised my legs and curled them around his back to pull him as close to me as possible, to make him be as far inside. In retrospect, this whole time period with Pete is so clouded with sorrow and regret that I try not to think of it; sometimes still, it can make me wince. And yet I confess to slight amusement that what happened for us that day in his bedroom, the synchronicity of timing, has never once happened in decades of marriage to a man I love dearly.

  Lying there with Pete Imhof, his weight on me as our breathing and our heartbeats slowed, I thought how there was nothing else, nothing on any topic that any person could say. This was the only thing more powerful than grief.

  DENA HAD REALIZED that Andrew’s death was an act of God. She told me this while I sat on her bed watching her apply makeup before meeting people at Tatty’s on Saturday night. Several times, she had invited me to go, but I’d declined, and she’d said, “You have to quit thinking about him. Andrew was an angel taken from us too soon, but it’s not for us to ask why.”

  Because she’d been having trouble sleeping, she told me, her mother had arranged for her to meet with their priest, and Father Krauss had helped her see that it was all part of God’s plan. “You should talk to your pastor,” she said.

  I said nothing, a
nd then she said, “You’re looking at my sideburn stubble, aren’t you?”

  “I wasn’t looking at anything.”

  “Nancy said I should just grow them out, but how many months will that take? Three?”

  I hadn’t told Dena about Andrew’s brother, and I couldn’t. It was not a juicy tidbit, not even a moral quandary for us to debate; it was unspeakable.

  “Your sideburns look fine,” I said.

  WHEN MY FAMILY walked to Calvary Lutheran that Sunday, I drove back to the Imhofs’ farm. I knocked on the door, and Pete took so long to answer that I decided he wasn’t home, but I knocked once more anyway, for thoroughness. The previous night, the temperature had dropped to the low forties, and I wore a coat.

  When he opened the door, he said, “That was stupid of you to come out here. What if my parents were home?”

  “You said they went to Racine.”

  “I didn’t say when they were coming back.”

  “Should I leave?”

  He gave me a surly look. “If you’re already here, you might as well come inside.” He turned and headed back toward the kitchen, and as I had both times before, I followed him.

  In addition to scrambling what had to be five or six eggs, he was frying sausage and toasting two pieces of bread, and as I watched, he poured himself a glass of orange juice. When he’d assembled all the food on a plate, he sat at the kitchen table, so I sat, too. I took off my coat, folding it and setting it on the chair next to me. Neither of us spoke until Pete had finished his food. He leaned back, folded his arms, and looked at me.

  “Should we go upstairs?” I asked. Although it was a forward question, it seemed so obvious this was the next step that to say anything else would have been disingenuous. Besides, once we were in his bed, undressed and entangled, I knew the dull hostility of his mood would recede.

  But he ignored my suggestion and said, “What are your hopes and dreams, Alice? Think you’ll stay in Riley forever?”