American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “You were young.”

  “So were you. And people fuck up. We just do. It started with Adam and Eve, and as far as I can tell, there’s been a steady flow of human error since. Can I make a suggestion? Let’s go inside so I can hold you properly.”

  “Okay, although as long as I’m telling you everything else—Well, my mother just lost a bunch of money in a pyramid scheme, and the reason I didn’t go through with buying the house wasn’t because of the inspection, it was because of that. Oh, and I’m pretty sure my grandmother is a lesbian.”

  To my surprise, Charlie burst out laughing. “Your grand—” He tried to compose himself. “Sorry—it’s just—that old girl back there is a muff diver?”

  “Watch it, Charlie.”

  “You have proof?”

  “She has a . . . a lady friend. The woman who’s the doctor, they’ve been a couple for years. I think my grandmother has gotten too frail to travel to Chicago to see her, but they’re very devoted to each other.”

  “Bully for her.” Charlie seemed genuinely admiring. “Anyone who finds women more attractive than men won’t get an argument from me. What else? This is getting juicy.”

  “I think we’ve covered it,” I said. “No, I guess there’s also the fact that Dena isn’t speaking to me because I’m dating you. I was right that she’s furious.” The more I thought about it, the more it seemed Dena’s behavior had to reflect her frustration with her own life more than with me—her disappointment at not being married or having children. Perhaps she really had pinned her hopes on Charlie before she’d met him, but this seemed unrealistic on her part, and her anger at me felt excessive.

  Charlie waved an arm through the air. “She’ll come around.” He pulled the key from the ignition. “I’m not cutting off the conversation, but let’s continue it inside.”

  Though I don’t know if what he had in mind was sex—it probably was—that’s what happened: We stepped through the door of my apartment and he hugged me tightly, and soon we were grabbing and groping, impatient to shake off all the tension and verbiage. There had been too many words, they’d begun to overlap and run together, and now it was just his body on top of mine, his erection inside me, the jolting rhythm of our hips. You feel like a cavewoman saying it, but if there’s a better way than sex for restoring equanimity between a couple, I don’t know what it is.

  After, he spooned me from behind. He said, “I want to take care of you and protect you and always keep you safe,” and this time I did start to cry, real tears that streamed down my face.

  “I wish you could,” I said. “I wish anyone could do that for anyone else.”

  “Turn around,” he said. I complied, and he said, “I love you, Alice.” With his thumb, he wiped a tear from beneath the outer corner of my eye.

  “I love you, too,” I said, and it seemed such an inadequate expression of my affection and gratitude and relief, of my guilt-inflected excitement at all we had to look forward to. How had this happened? And thank goodness it had.

  “What you told me in the car, I know that’s big stuff,” he said. We were facing each other, and he rubbed my hip beneath the sheet. “But from now on, it’s smooth sailing. It’s all going to be okay.”

  MY GRANDMOTHER CALLED late the next morning while I was rinsing a paintbrush I’d used on Yertle the Turtle’s shell. “Charlie’s terrific,” she said.

  I was stunned. “Are you teasing me?”

  “Well, his politics are appalling, but he’s been suckling too long at the teat of the conservatives. I’m sure you can coax him over to our way of seeing things.”

  “Granny, he’s running for Congress as a Republican.”

  “He doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell, my dear. That old coot Wincek has had a lock on the Sixth District since before you were born. Anyway, I suspect it’s more a rite of passage in the Blackwell family than a bona fide attempt to win on Charlie’s part. Why not let him get it out of his system? But he’s mad for you, there’s no doubt about that.”

  “And you liked him apart from the political stuff?”

  “He’s adorable. Very lively, very well mannered. Oh, he’s a real catch, and your mother agrees. At this very moment, she’s tidying up your trousseau. Speaking of which—should I say I told you so about your mother and Lars, or would you prefer to say it for me?”

  “I think you just did.”

  “That bit about his bloating and gas, and at the dining room table—it’s clearly not Lars’s debonair manner that’s attracted her, but we shouldn’t judge her for wanting to enjoy herself.”

  “Granny, you baited him.”

  She laughed. “Well, maybe a little.”

  “I’m glad you approve of Charlie,” I said. Even, I thought, if it’s not reciprocated.

  “Alice, you hold on to that young man.” My grandmother sounded positively ecstatic. “You’ve found a keeper.”

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, which was the one before school started, I drove my papier-mâché characters to the library. It took two trips to fit them all in my Capri, delicately stacked atop one another. Though no one had seen them besides Charlie, I felt nearly certain that they had turned out the way I’d wanted. Even Babar’s head stayed upright once I’d secured it to a hook behind him.

  While I was situating Eloise on a shelf, I heard a deep voice say, “Those are real nice, Alice.”

  “Big Glenn!” This was what we all, teachers and students alike, called Liess’s janitor, who was an extremely tall black man in his early seventies; he’d worked at the school for over fifty years. I hurried over and hugged him. “Did you and Henrietta have a good summer?” I had never actually met Big Glenn’s wife, though there was a famous pineapple upside-down cake she made that Big Glenn dropped off in the faculty lounge every May, some morning before the end of the school year. It was usually decimated by eight-twenty A.M. as if its consumption were a competitive activity.

  “It’s sure been peaceful not having the hellions around.” Big Glenn smiled.

  “You mean the teachers or the students?” He laughed, and I said, “I bet you missed us all.”

  He stepped forward, his voice lowered. “Don’t go repeating this, but I hear Sandy’s husband is real sick.”

  I winced. “Again?” Sandy Borgos taught second grade and was a friendly woman twice my age who knitted during faculty meetings and wore, whenever possible, a beige shawl that she’d made herself. Her husband had been diagnosed with throat cancer two years earlier, though the last I’d heard, he’d been in remission.

  “It’s in God’s hands now,” Big Glenn said. “You know about Carolyn, anyone tell you that?” Big Glenn was, among other things, an extremely well-informed source of school gossip.

  I shook my head. Carolyn Krawiec worked in the kindergarten and was seven or eight years younger than I was; she’d been at Liess just a short time, and I hardly knew her.

  “Not coming back this year,” Big Glenn said. “Took up with a new beau and followed him to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.” He arched his eyebrows meaningfully. This was always part of the transaction—the eschewal of explicit disapproval in favor of coded glances.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Must be the real thing.” Big Glenn’s tone was highly dubious, and I felt a wave of defensiveness. Maybe it was the real thing.

  “How long ago did she tell Lydia?” Lydia Bianchi was our fifty-five-year-old principal and a woman of whom I was quite fond. She was married but had no children, which led to speculation among her employees—that is to say, us—over whether her childlessness had been a choice or a private disappointment.

  “Not more than a week or two,” Big Glenn said. “The gentleman is in the pharmaceuticals field, comes up to Madison on a regular basis, so you might think they could have seen each other like that.” He shrugged. “I must have forgot the passions of young love.”

  “Have they hired her replacement?”

  “You interested?”

  “No way—I’m staying ri
ght here in the library.” This was when, somewhere inside, I knew that the opposite was true. I would leave. I would go away. If Charlie and I stayed together, if things progressed between us in ways I had not specified to anyone, including myself, since that conversation with Dena at the sandwich place, then my days as a teacher were probably numbered.

  Standing there chatting with Big Glenn, I could feel the present moment rushing from me. I would leave soon, I realized, and when I did, in my absence, the other teachers would talk about me, too.

  EVERYONE ALWAYS SAID there weren’t tornadoes in Madison because of the lakes. The city is an isthmus, a term children who grow up in Madison know from an early age. And while Wisconsin wasn’t hit by tornadoes with the regularity of towns in the states south and west of us, we tended to have a few watches a year and perhaps one warning and one real storm. In Riley, when I was a girl, we’d have tornado drills every spring. If we were in class, we filed out and sat Indian-style on the floor in the hall, knee to knee with the students beside us, all of us facing the wall, our heads down and our hands crossed over the crowns of our skulls. If we were outside—the drills happened sometimes at recess, which felt like a great waste—a teacher would lead us to a dip in the grassy hill behind the elementary school, and we’d lie flat on our bellies and join hands, forming an irregular circle or a human flower, our bodies the petals pointing out. In high school, we joked about the absurdity: That was supposed to save us? I pictured a net of children blown aloft, straining to hold on to one another.

  The tornado watch that happened in late August 1977 was on a Sunday afternoon, and the night before, Charlie and I had gone to a party at the house of a couple he knew named the Garhoffs. I was pretty sure people had been smoking marijuana in the upstairs bathroom, which surprised me—I’d been to parties where there was pot, but the Garhoffs had children who were asleep on the same floor. We left a little after midnight, Charlie came to my apartment for an hour, and he tried to persuade me to let him stay over. “Like in Houghton” was his new argument. “And see, the flames of hell haven’t licked us yet.”

  I declined. I knew that the next morning, he was going with Hank Ucker to a church service in Lomira, followed by a pancake breakfast. I, meanwhile, was greatly looking forward to cleaning my apartment—there were dishes in the sink, several loads of laundry, unpaid bills, everything that you happily neglect in the early stage of a relationship.

  On Sunday, I tended to this tidying up for several hours while the sky turned from blue to dark gray. By two P.M., the temperature had dropped at least fifteen degrees since sunrise, and I shut my kitchen and bedroom windows and turned on the radio. A tornado was approaching Lacrosse, apparently, heading southwest, and it wasn’t yet clear if it would hit Madison. I called Charlie, and when he answered, I said, “I’m glad you’re home safely.”

  “I am never eating another pancake. God almighty, Lindy, those little old ladies refuse to take no for an answer.”

  “Have you looked outside lately?” I was standing in front of the kitchen sink, which faced the backyard and the rear of the house behind mine. “Even the birds aren’t chirping.”

  “You’re not worried, are you?”

  I could hear his television, and I said, “Are you watching baseball?”

  “The Brew Crew is trouncing the White Sox, thank you very much. Victory tastes even sweeter after our last two losses.”

  “Would it be annoying if we stay on the phone?” I said. “We don’t need to talk.”

  “Why don’t you come over? Or want me to come there?”

  “Do you remember that my TV is black and white?”

  “Then you come here, and I’ll let you rub my tummy.”

  “I’d rather not drive right now, in case—” I began to say, and outside a pounding rain abruptly started. Then I realized it was not rain but hail.

  “Mike Caldwell’s the next at bat,” Charlie said. “I had my doubts about him, but he’s playing a decent game. Steve Brye, on the other hand—” This was when there was a flash of lightning followed by a terrific crack of thunder, and then the sirens went off, that menacing wail.

  “I’m going down to the basement, and you should, too,” I said. “Please, Charlie, don’t keep watching the game.”

  “You know everything’s fine, don’t you?” His voice was calm and kind.

  “Charlie, turn off the TV.”

  As if I were headed to the beach, I grabbed a towel and a book (it was Humboldt’s Gift), and a flashlight as well, and I hurried from my apartment. The door to the basement was behind the stairs in the first-floor hall. There was one other apartment in the house, a first-floor unit belonging to a doctoral student named Ja-hoon Choi, and though I’d waited out tornadoes with him a few times before, his car wasn’t in the driveway, so I didn’t think he was home. The basement staircase was rickety and wooden, with air between the steps, and there was a bare lightbulb whose string I yanked on when I reached the bottom. Our landlord kept old sailing equipment here, and some outdoor furniture, but for the most part, the space was empty. I unfolded a lawn chair with metal arms and a plaid polyester seat, but it was so rusty and cobwebby that I folded it right back up. Then I just stood there holding the towel, Humboldt’s Gift, and the flashlight. In the last few minutes, it had become hard to suppress thoughts about the unreliability of luck. I will not be the one it happens to—this is what we all believe, what we must believe to make our way in the world each day. Someone else. Not me. But every once in a while it is you, or someone close enough that it might as well be you. People to whom a terrible thing has never happened trust fate, the notion that what’s meant to be will be; the rest of us know better. I pictured a tree crashing through Charlie’s living room window, Charlie himself being lifted from the couch, trapped in the spinning air, violently deposited on the street or a roof. It’s a phenomenon that seems comic to those who don’t live in tornado-prone areas—the flying cow or refrigerator—and even to those of us who live in tornado states, it can be funny during calm times. But it was hailing outside, it was as dark as night, and anxiety clutched me. It can’t happen twice to a person I love, I thought, but I was not able to convince myself.

  Then, over the dropping hail and the squeal of the sirens, I heard a pounding that I eventually realized was coming from the first floor. I did nothing, and then I darted up the steps, expecting to see Ja-hoon Choi through the window in the front door. Instead, I saw Charlie.

  I opened the door, saying, “Charlie! My God!” He sauntered in, sopping wet, and I threw my arms around him and said, “You shouldn’t have driven over!” When we kissed, his lips were slick.

  I pulled him back toward the basement, and when we were safely down there, he gestured at the towel I’d been holding all this time. “That for me?” He rubbed it over his head, and after he pulled it away, he surveyed the basement. “Nice ambience.”

  “I can’t believe you’re here.”

  “There’s fallen branches on Williamson, but I bet you anything the tornado bypasses us. This is just a thunderstorm.” Even as he said it, the sirens stopped. “See?” He grinned. “God agrees with me.”

  “Still, it can’t have been safe to—”

  He put his hand over my mouth, cutting me off. “I thought of something on the way here, but you have to stop scolding me. If I move my hand, will you stop?”

  I nodded, and he withdrew his hand.

  “I decided we should get married,” he said. “No more of this running-through-the-rain shit. We should live in the same place, sleep in the same bed at night, wake up together in the morning, and whenever there’s a tornado, I can take care of you and watch baseball at the same time.”

  We regarded each other. Uncertainly, I said, “You mean—Is this—Are you proposing?”

  “It sure feels like it.” He grinned, but a little nervously.

  I said, “Okay.” And then I beamed.

  When Charlie took hold of me, he embraced me so tightly my feet left the gr
ound—literally, I mean, not figuratively. And here we were in the basement, the grimy basement: My life was changing, and we stood in the dankest of places. I was still myself, I didn’t feel catapulted into a different existence, the room was not aglow. It was only later that this moment would take on its proper burnish. While it was happening, everything felt new and strange and exciting and tenuous, which was the opposite of how it would feel later: weighty and familiar and reassuring. It would in retrospect appear to be a stop on a narrative path that was inevitable, but this is only because most events, most paths, feel inevitable in retrospect.

  And so I had lost Dena, and in exchange I had gotten marriage; I’d traded friendship for romance, companionship for a husband. Was this not a reasonable bargain, one most people would make? I’d no longer be that allegedly eccentric, allegedly pitiable never married woman; my very existence would not pose a question that others felt compelled to try answering.

  But what amazed me was that I would marry a man I loved; my choices had not turned out to be settling or remaining single. The generic relief of being coupled off was something I could have found by marrying Wade Trommler in 1967, or another man since. The remarkable part was that I’d be getting much more. Charlie was sweet and funny and energetic, he was incredibly attractive—his wrists with light brown hair on the back, his preppy shirts, his grin, and his charisma—and I had waited until the age of thirty-one, I’d sometimes felt like the last one standing, and then I had found somebody who was not perfect but was perfect enough, perfect for me. I was not to be punished, after all. I was to be rewarded, though it was hard to say for what.

  It had been six weeks since we’d met.