American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  When I’d arrived at Halcyon the previous afternoon, I had felt a fear that the weekend would pass slowly, but the opposite proved true. While I did have a splitting headache at breakfast, the pain had dulled by late morning. I spent most of the day sitting on a blanket on the sidelines of the tennis courts, observing the matches, either watching Charlie play or sitting next to him when he wasn’t playing. He’d work up a vigorous sweat during his sets, then fill a cup of water from the large thermos by the net, pour the cup over his head, and shake his head like a dog. That morning, when he’d come to Itty-Bitty to find me for breakfast, I’d been awake and dressed, waiting for him, and as he’d entered through the screen door, he’d called, “Where’s my favorite lush?” and I’d said, “Charlie, I’m so sorry for my behavior last night,” and he’d said, “Only part you have to apologize for is getting me all horned up and then passing out, but I’ll take a rain check.” He’d leaned in to kiss me, and I’d felt the great relief of dating a man who does not hold a grudge, or at least not toward you (Simon had been the other way). Then he’d said, “Bring your toothbrush to the clubhouse, because Maj already had to call a plumber out this morning for the Alamo toilet, and the guy’s trying to work a miracle as we speak. Right now the lead suspect for who took the huge shit is John.” I nodded neutrally and—forgive me, John, for my lie of omission—said absolutely nothing.

  At the tennis courts, after beating Emily Higginson 7–3, 6–4, Mrs. Blackwell said to me, “I take it a good night’s sleep was just what the doctor ordered.” I was almost certain that she knew I’d had too much to drink, and I wondered if she knew the clogged toilet was my fault as well, but all I did was murmur my assent.

  I had brought a novel to the tennis courts with me—it was Pale Fire, which I’d purchased after Nabokov’s death earlier in the summer—but because of the sun and the conversation, I didn’t end up reading a word. I spent quite a bit of time playing with Jadey and Arthur’s baby, Winnie (as a single woman in my early thirties, I was careful not to coo excessively over other people’s infants, lest it seem like I was telegraphing my desperation; the necessity of this precaution annoyed me, making me want to defiantly announce that I’d always liked babies, since I was a child, but Jadey was the generous kind of mother who acted as if I was doing her a favor by keeping Winnie on my lap). Really, during that day and the next, there were so many conversations and activities and meals, so many changes of clothes, into a swimsuit and out and back in when the suit wasn’t quite dry, back into the water (it was the ideal temperature, cool enough to be refreshing but not chilly, the way Lake Michigan often can be), and then we rode the motorboat to the town a few miles over for ice cream, then back to Halcyon, back into a skirt, up to dinner, and suddenly, I realized I’d acquired a tan on my face and arms. On Sunday morning, an Episcopal priest, Reverend Ayrault, arrived at ten to hold a service for the Blackwell family on the porch of the Alamo, complete with Communion; apparently, he had driven from Green Bay solely for this purpose, and afterward he sat beside Mrs. Blackwell at lunch in the clubhouse. “That’s nice of him to come all the way up here,” I remarked to Charlie, who replied, “Republicans give the good reverend a hard-on.”

  The winners of the Halcyon Open were awarded their trophies on Sunday afternoon, small cheap gold figures perched on wood bases, about to serve a ball; the silver vase would be engraved later but was presented to, in men’s singles, Roger Niedleff, and in men’s doubles, Dwight deWolfe and his brother-in-law, Wyman Lawrence. In women’s singles, Sarah Thayer had won, and in women’s doubles, Priscilla Blackwell and her daughter-in-law Nan. “Roger is such a competitive douche bag,” Charlie grumbled as the winners accepted the trophies, followed by twelve-year-old Nina deWolfe playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on a recorder. Mrs. Blackwell, for her part, gloated magisterially. As we walked back from the tennis courts to the Alamo—a distance of about half a mile—I thought of leaving the next day and felt a flicker of preemptive nostalgia. I was just settling into Halcyon’s rhythms.

  We were nearing the Alamo when Jadey caught up with us and set her hand on my forearm. “Come wash your hair with me in the lake. I’ve got twenty minutes before the baby wakes up and all holy hell breaks loose.” She jogged toward Gin Rummy, the cottage she and Arthur and their children were staying in, and I glanced quizzically at Charlie.

  “You heard her,” he said. “Shake a leg.”

  “She washes her hair in the lake?”

  “It’s to avoid waiting in line for the bathroom.”

  In fact, the impression I got a few minutes later as Jadey and I stood in the water near the dock, her plastic shampoo bottle set on the top step of the wooden ladder, was that she washed her hair in the lake mostly because she thought washing her hair in the lake was fun. She held her hands up to her head, massaging, until her scalp was covered in white lather. “Remember doing this at summer camp?” she said.

  I laughed noncommittally, having never attended summer camp.

  “I’ve been meaning to say, that’s the cutest swimsuit,” she added. “Is it from Marshall Field’s?”

  “It’s from a store in Madison owned by a friend of mine.” Jadey’s swimsuit was a Lilly bikini, and mine was red with white stripes. I was not yet aware that Jadey was a superb shopper—she had a sixth sense about when something was about to go on sale or, conversely, when it was worth paying full price because if you waited, it would disappear. It had occurred to me already that Jadey and Dena would have quite liked each other, or else the opposite—as with Charlie and my grandmother, their personalities might have overlapped in just the wrong ways.

  “You’re lucky your boobs are still so perky,” Jadey was saying. “Are you thirty yet?”

  “Thirty-one,” I said.

  “Well, that’s no fair! I just turned twenty-seven.”

  “Look at my crow’s-feet, though.” I brought my face closer to hers and angled my right eye to the side.

  “Is Charlie like Arthur about wanting you to wear sexy underwear? Arthur tells me to buy these getups that would make a prostitute blush. And I say to him, ‘Until you have been through the hell of childbirth yourself, you cannot fathom what has happened to my body. You need to give me five years’ peace before I’m halfway ready to be a tart again.’ ”

  I laughed, although I was conscious that voices carried on the lake. Furthermore, fifty yards away, one of the Higginsons was swimming laps perpendicular to their dock; I didn’t recognize which Higginson it was, but when we’d arrived, he’d paused midstroke to give us a wave.

  Jadey and I were standing in water up to our chests, the lake dark blue now, and the sun in the western sky was heavy and yellow. Jadey let herself fall backward, dunking her shoulders and head, and when she reappeared, the shampoo was washed out; the wetness made her blond hair almost gold. She arched onto her back, kicking her feet to stay afloat. “How’s Maj treating you? She can be rough, right?”

  I raised one finger to indicate a pause, then held my nose as I sank underwater. When I broke the surface, Jadey said, “She wanted a girl, is what they say, but she just kept having boys and finally—”

  “Shhh!” I couldn’t stand it—not the information, which I was curious about, but the sense that other people, perhaps Mrs. Blackwell herself, might be overhearing the discussion.

  Jadey laughed. “You really are a librarian.”

  “No,” I was whispering, and I gestured toward the house. “I’m afraid they can—”

  “Gotcha.” Jadey nodded, lowering her voice. “That’s the theory, anyway, why she doesn’t like girls—because she feels rejected by them. Do I sound like Sigmund Freud?” She was smiling in a self-deprecating way, and I wondered whether she had picked up the Blackwells’ habit of alternate teasing and self-mockery or whether she’d had the habit all along. She’d told me earlier that her parents were friends of the Blackwells, that she’d met Arthur when she was an eighth-grader and he was a senior in high school, though they hadn’t started dating
until she was in college. She’d also told me—I’d asked—that Jadey was a nickname given at birth by her mother; her real name had been Jane Davenport Aigner, and of course she’d taken Blackwell as a surname when she married Arthur.

  “Don’t be afraid of Maj, is my point,” Jadey said. “Her bark is worse than her bite.”

  “I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of her.” I really wasn’t. Here in Halcyon, I was on her turf, but the more general notion I kept returning to was that there was something Mrs. Blackwell could bestow, some sort of approval, that did not fundamentally matter to me. It would have mattered to Dena. But all I wanted was adequately pleasant relations. I didn’t need to be close to Mrs. Blackwell, didn’t need to be one of her favorites. If she disliked me, it would be unsettling, but as long as she thought I was fine, that was enough. And over the course of the weekend, I’d had the sense that she was warming to me—late the previous afternoon, before the cocktail hour, she had walked past Charlie and me as we played Scrabble on the porch of the Alamo and had said, “Give him hell, Alice.”

  Jadey began doing backstroke, thrusting one arm and then the other over her head, and I watched, impressed. I was not a strong swimmer. Although my father had taught me at Pine Lake in Riley, I couldn’t do much more than dog-paddle, and I could not have emulated Jadey’s backstroke or the smooth, confident slice of that Higginson family member’s freestyle.

  Jadey flipped forward, coming back toward me. “You’re lucky that you’re older,” she said. “No offense. Just, you know, I was twenty-one when I married Arthur, and I was so easily intimidated. If Maj said boo to me, I’d be crying in the corner. Plus, Arthur used to—” At this point, unmistakably, we heard a baby’s wail. Jadey rolled her eyes. “Never have children,” she said, but already, she was swimming toward the ladder.

  “Jadey,” I said, and she looked over her shoulder. “Thank you for being so nice about Friday night.”

  ON SUNDAY EVENING, during the cocktail hour (if there was a day of the week the Blackwells abstained from drinking, I never saw it), I found myself for the first time talking one-on-one to Charlie’s brother Ed. Though we had been in the same general space several times in the past few days, I had hardly spoken to him directly. I’d felt aware of not wanting to seek him out just because he was the congressman—not that I secretly did want to seek him out, but I most certainly didn’t want to seem like I was. But he was the one who approached me on the porch, saying, “I hope you haven’t found us overwhelming.” (Of course, they took pride in their overwhelmingness, as all families that are both large and happy do.)

  “No, I’ve had a wonderful time,” I said.

  “I hear you’re an elementary school librarian. I confess that I don’t read as much as I’d like, but I do think teaching is a wonderful profession for women.”

  “I imagine your sons are very strong students.” I wasn’t just trying to ingratiate myself—I’d noticed that Harry, Tommy, and Geoff were all articulate for their ages, and energetic but not wild.

  “They’re good boys,” Ed said. “Ginger has her hands full, but there’s never a dull moment.” With his thinning hair, Ed bore the strongest resemblance to their father, I realized as he spoke. He also was the only Blackwell who was even slightly pudgy, and he wore glasses. “I’ll tell you that raising three sons makes me appreciate Maj even more in retrospect—I don’t know how she managed four.”

  “Do you find it difficult going back and forth between Milwaukee and Washington?” So I’d taken the conversation in this direction after all; I hoped it was not a gauche error.

  Ed shook his head. “It’s really a privilege,” he said. “To serve this country, Alice, what an honor. And my boys know it. When their daddy’s not around to tuck them in at night, it isn’t easy, but they’re proud that he’s out there protecting the interests of the people of Wisconsin.” As I listened to Ed, it struck me that his use of words that he obviously had used many times did not automatically make them untrue—weren’t they true if he believed them? That was my first thought; my second was Please, please don’t let Charlie win the election.

  As if sensing my psychic betrayal of him, Charlie materialized beside us. “Eddie, you in for poker at ten? Gil deWolfe just called.”

  “Alice, how do you feel about consorting with a gambling man?” Ed pulled his glasses down to the tip of his nose and looked over them with mock seriousness. “Is this something you approve of?”

  “The only poker Alice plays is strip poker,” Charlie said, and I said, “Charlie!”

  Ed laughed, pointing at his brother. “You’ve got to guard your wallet with this one, or he’ll rob you blind. Now, what’s this about?” Ed’s middle son, Tommy, had approached, in tears, and he announced mournfully, “Drew is hogging the Slinky.”

  Ed shrugged at Charlie and me. “Duty calls.”

  “You don’t mind if I head over to the deWolfes’ for a couple hours after dinner, do you?” Charlie said.

  I shook my head. “I need to pack anyway.”

  “Eager to make your escape?”

  “I like your family, Charlie,” I said. “They’ve been really hospitable this weekend—well, besides the limerick, but I’ve gotten over that.”

  “You know what? I like you. And I think you look very pretty right now.” Charlie leaned in and kissed me on the lips. It was a quick peck, but right away I heard someone cry out, “Look at the lovebirds!” Then John, who was nearby, said, “Good Christ, can you two not keep your hands off each other?”

  I stepped back, though we truly hadn’t been touching at all inappropriately. The porch grew quiet, and from the other end of it, Uncle Trip called, “Chasbo, now that Alice has seen the kind of stock you come from, think she’ll stick around?”

  “Hope so,” Charlie said, and—I could feel the Blackwells’ eyes on me—I smiled stiffly. Do not cower. These weren’t the words Jadey had used, but that had been the message.

  John said, “Alice, if you’re not careful, it looks to me like Chas here might pop the question.”

  There was a silence, a short one, and before someone could fill it with an off-color joke, I said, “Actually—” My voice was hoarse, and I cleared my throat in as genteel a way as I could manage. “Actually, Charlie has already asked me to marry him, and I’ve accepted.”

  I might have imagined this part, but I think I heard a gasp—a woman’s gasp, which I’m pretty sure was Ginger’s. Charlie set his hand on the small of my back, and then Harold, who was standing by the hammock, said, “Golly, that’s tremendous. That’s just super news. We couldn’t be happier for both of you.” Soon all the Blackwells were talking at once. “No shit?” Arthur was saying, and he and John were manfully hugging Charlie, and Ed returned to kiss my cheek, and Arthur gave me a noogie and cried, “Welcome to the fam-damily, Al!” Harold leaned around Charlie to pat my hand, then Jadey enveloped me, shouting, “I knew it! I knew it! I told you we’d be best friends, and now it’s even better, because we’ll be sisters!”

  I disentangled myself from Jadey’s arms when I saw Mrs. Blackwell approaching; I smoothed my hair. The rest of them—they faded around me. That I was not afraid of Mrs. Blackwell was more or less true, at least in the abstract. But it was also true that when she turned her attention to me, I always felt, and not in a positive way, as if we were the only ones in the room and total vigilance were required.

  She did not hug or kiss me, she didn’t touch me at all. She seemed both amused and dubious as she looked at me for a long moment before speaking. Finally, she said, “What a clever girl you are.”

  IN THE CAR driving back to Madison, Charlie said, “I’m not angry. I’m really not. In a perfect world, would it have been better if we’d told Maj and Dad first, without everyone else around? Sure, but what’s done is done.”

  “Do you know that your mother is displeased, or do you just think she is?”

  “Maj likes to be deferred to.” Charlie grinned. “Like all women. Listen, you were the one who wanted
to wait and tell our parents together, but everybody was going to find out eventually, so I don’t see the big difference.” He reached across the seat and squeezed my hand. “If Maj is unhappy about anything, it’s how the news broke. She’s not unhappy with you.”

  “I’ve never had trouble getting along with people,” I said. “If she’d prefer a daughter-in-law from a more socially connected family, I don’t fault her. That’s what she’s accustomed to. But I think she’ll get used to me, and I don’t want you to worry about having to run interference.”

  A minute had passed when Charlie said, looking straight ahead out the windshield, “Just so you know, I’d choose you over them.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

  “We could run away to—Where have you always wanted to run away to? In my fantasies, it’s Mexico, but I’d probably just get giardia. California might be a safer bet.”

  “I’m not that concerned,” I said.

  “A little shack on the beach,” Charlie said. “We’ll sleep in a ham-mock, live off the conch that I spear, and you’ll wear a coconut bra.”

  What if I’d said yes? Not to the cartoon version but to a real one, a move to another state. Lives that we carved out for ourselves rather than inheriting, distance and space. What would we—would Charlie—have had to prove, away from his family? Could what has happened in the years since have been prevented, could I have prevented it by merely capitulating? Did Charlie have more foresight than I gave him credit for? Perhaps the future appeared with greater clarity to him than it did to me. Or perhaps he was simply bluffing.