American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

“I saw the wedding announcement in the paper,” she said. “You should have had the courtesy to tell me the truth.”

  “My decision didn’t have anything to do with getting married,” I said.

  “I don’t know what realtor you two went through, but I’ll say this: I was good enough to work with when you were a single gal on a tight budget, and I know, even if you don’t, that I could have done a first-rate job finding the right house for you and your husband. When you’ve been in the business as long as I have, you’re familiar with lots of areas.”

  “No, no,” I said quickly. “We haven’t bought a house. We’re renting a place in Houghton.”

  “There are public records, Alice. I can go on Monday and find out who brokered the deal and how much you paid.”

  “Honestly,” I said. “We’re renting.”

  Nadine pursed her lips. “The former governor’s son is running for Congress, and you expect me to believe he lives in some crappy little apartment?”

  I DID NOT have another confrontation with Dena, but I am sorry to say this may have been only because I didn’t speak to her again before I moved from the city. The day she’d walked out on our lunch, I hadn’t thought that our friendship was over, her declarations to the contrary; I’d have guessed that she would forgive me. I still believe this may have been the case but that circumstances—geography, really—kept us apart. If I’d had the nerve to go into her store one day after enough time had passed, or if she’d found a serious boyfriend while I was still in Madison, I think we might have been able to pick up where we left off.

  But only once before I moved did I see her, and I lacked the courage to say hello. This was a few months prior to when I ran into Nadine, a dark weekday afternoon in February, and I was coming out of a stationery store on State Street after buying a valentine for Charlie. I saw Dena from across the street, from the back, and my breath caught; I stood there, unmoving, against the brick exterior of the store, until she was all the way up the block. I did not lay eyes on her again for thirty years.

  IN NOVEMBER 1978, Charlie lost the Sixth District congressional election to Alvin Wincek, 58 percent to 42 percent. Charlie had done better than people anticipated, but he still hadn’t come close. I had given notice to Liess’s principal, Lydia Bianchi, the previous spring, and I’d spent the summer and fall riding with Charlie in lawn chairs set in the flatbed of a pickup truck with BLACKWELL FOR CONGRESS signs affixed to the sides. I’d heard him introduce himself to thousands of voters and give the same speech hundreds of times, I’d passed him lozenges when he lost his voice and still kept speaking, I’d held his hand, I’d clapped, I’d eaten onion rings and french fries, I’d clapped again and eaten more onion rings and more french fries, and when Charlie gave his concession speech at the campaign headquarters on election night, we both had cried a little bit, and if our tears were not for exactly the same reasons, they weren’t for entirely different ones, either. We had gone together through something big; what we wanted was much more merged than it had been when we were dating.

  In February, three months after the election, we bought a house in a northern suburb of Milwaukee—Maronee—and moved in on March 31, 1979. I was ten weeks pregnant, which I’d found out at the doctor’s office the day before we closed on the house; once we were in our new home, Charlie would scarcely let me unpack a box. We both were thrilled. We had stopped using any form of birth control a few weeks after our wedding, and given that seventeen months had passed since then and I was almost thirty-three, the arrival of my period had become a discouraging event; with increasing frequency, we’d been discussing the possibility of adoption.

  The house we bought on Maronee Drive had five bedrooms, and it had cost $163,000. If Nadine had been our realtor, she’d have made almost $5,000, but we’d used a guy named Stuey Patrickson who played squash with Charlie’s cousin Jack. We made one bedroom ours, one we designated as a nursery, one was Charlie’s office, one was a guest room, and one was a mini-gym for Charlie where he could lift weights; we even had a large mirror installed along the wall, though more often he worked out at the weight room of the Maronee Country Club, whose golf course was across the street. (The weight room was a grim little affair back then, but it became increasingly fancy as the national interest in exercise grew.) Charlie and I did not discuss the possibility—it didn’t occur to me, and I don’t think it occurred to him, either—that I would also have an office in our new house. The second-floor hallway was spacious, and at one end, near a window, we set a desk where, kept company by my papier-mâché Giving Tree, I paid bills and wrote thank-you notes. I had gotten quite good at writing thankyou notes; after our wedding, we’d received dozens and dozens of gifts from Blackwell family friends whom we hadn’t invited to the ceremony. For years, this was how I kept Milwaukee people straight in my head: the LeGrands, who had given us the toaster oven; the Wendorfs, who had given us the white porcelain serving platter.

  Charlie and I settled easily into our new life together; the headiness of our courtship passed, but its passage seemed organic rather than lamentable. The rhythms of keeping a house suited me. I had wondered if I would be bored, but there was a lot to do when we moved in, painters and contractors to oversee (we renovated the master bathroom), and I also had a garden to maintain. Every morning after Charlie left for work—he was going to Blackwell Meats four and sometimes five days a week—I’d read for at least an hour, and I had worked long enough to recognize this for the great luxury it was. I admit that early on, I’d sometimes reach the end of a chapter, look up, and be startled by my surroundings; while inside a fictional world, I had forgotten what I’d become, it had slipped my mind that I was a married woman with a house, living with my husband in a suburb of Milwaukee. At these moments, and at others, I’d think of my apartment on Sproule Street, my former students and colleagues, my friendships with Dena and Rita (I had given my mother’s brooch to Rita when I quit my job—though it was pretty, it held such unpleasant associations that I’d never have worn it myself ). While on balance, I didn’t regret the changes that had taken place in my life, I’d feel a small twinge for what was no longer mine.

  Charlie and I were newlyweds, and then, very quickly, we were just another married couple, socializing often with his brothers and other couples who belonged to our country club and our church. Charlie usually played squash or tennis after work and brought me flowers once a week. On Sundays, if Harold and Priscilla were in town, we went to their house for dinner—I learned to call them Harold and Priscilla rather than Mr. and Mrs. Blackwell—and we traveled, sometimes with Jadey and Arthur. In our first five years of marriage, we visited Colorado, California, North Carolina, New York, and New Jersey, and I was only slightly disappointed when Charlie decided for us against accompanying his parents to Hawaii. By then our daughter, Ella, was two and quite a handful to take on a plane.

  In the early years of our marriage, we were very happy—for most of our marriage, we have been happy, though like all couples, we have experienced bumps. This is not necessarily the story the public wishes to hear, that the good times have greatly outweighed the bad, but it is the true story. The longer we have been together, the more far-fetched our compressed courtship has come to seem. Engaged after six weeks! Married after six more! How impulsive, how bold or foolish. Did we know each other at all? But I think we did. In most ways, I believe we’re the same people we were then, though the circumstances of our lives have changed dramatically.

  During that initial congressional run and in later elections, when pundits or journalists underestimated Charlie, I could not be surprised; after all, when we’d first met, I had underestimated him, too.

  PART III

  402 Maronee Drive

  BECAUSE WE HAD theater tickets for seven-thirty, Charlie had promised to be home by six-fifteen, and I’d made a chicken marsala we could eat with Ella before we left. But by six-forty, Charlie still wasn’t back, and our sitter, a college sophomore named Shannon whom Ella adored, had a
rrived. I called Charlie’s office, where his answering machine picked up, his secretary’s voice explaining that he was away or in a meeting. Had he forgotten about the play—it was Chekhov’s The Seagull—and gone to the country club to play squash or lift weights? Had he gone to a baseball game? It was a Wednesday in May, and though we had season tickets to the Marcus Center, we usually went to performances on Friday or Saturday nights.

  I checked the paper, and the Brewers were indeed playing at home; they were playing the Detroit Tigers. That was the likeliest explanation for Charlie’s absence, but just in case, I called the country club, and the operator connected me to the athletic building, where Tony, the seventy-year-old who tended bar in the oak-paneled lounge between the men’s and women’s locker rooms, told me he hadn’t seen Charlie. This still could mean Charlie had entered the squash courts or the weight room through the side door, or it could mean he’d gone to his parents’ house, where he and Arthur liked to watch baseball games together in peace and quiet. Harold and Priscilla had moved to Washington, D.C., in 1986, two years earlier, when Harold was elected chair of the Republican National Committee, but the house was still fully furnished.

  I called Jadey—she and Arthur also lived on Maronee Drive, a mile west of us—and their son Drew, who was fifteen, said, “Mom’s walking Lucky.”

  “Is your dad home yet?” I asked.

  “He’s working late.”

  When I hung up, it was ten to seven, and it would take a solid twenty-five minutes to get downtown. Shannon and Ella sat at the kitchen table, Ella finishing her dinner. I crossed the kitchen and kissed Ella on her forehead. To both of the, I said, “Upstairs at eight-thirty, lights out at eight-forty-five, and no TV.”

  “Mommy, your earrings look like thumbtacks,” Ella said.

  I laughed. The earrings in question were gold, and they did look a little like thumbtacks. I also wore a pale pink suit—a skirt and jacket—and pink Ferragamo pumps. “Make sure to put away Barbie’s tea party,” I said to Ella, then looked at Shannon. “There’s some cooked steak in the fridge if you want to reheat it. We should be home by ten-thirty. I’m stopping by Mr. Blackwell’s parents’ house, because I think that’s where he is, but if he comes here, tell him to meet me downtown.”

  He wasn’t at his parents’, though. At first, pulling into the driveway of their castlelike dwelling, I’d noticed lights in the kitchen and thought I’d found him, but when I approached the side door on foot, I saw through a window that it was Miss Ruby; she was cinching the belt of a tan raincoat.

  She opened the door for me, and I said, “Charlie’s not here, is he?”

  “You try the country club?”

  “I don’t think he’s there, either.” I glanced at my watch. “We’re supposed to go to a play that starts at seven-thirty.”

  Miss Ruby regarded me impassively. Over the years, I had observed the Blackwells competing for her opprobrium—if she scolded Arthur for, say, setting a glass on the living room table without a coaster, he’d treat it as a minor victory—but this was not a competition in which I wanted to participate. If Miss Ruby was grumpy, she was also an unfailingly hard worker, and on more than one holiday, I’d walked into the kitchen to find her scrubbing dishes at eleven P.M., then I’d returned to the house the following morning and found her setting out breakfast fixings by eight o’clock. Just a few years before, I’d learned she had a bedroom off the kitchen, as well as her own adjacent bathroom, but sleeping at the Blackwells’ rather than going home for the night seemed to me more a drawback than a perk of her job.

  It was by this point exactly seven, which meant I’d likely miss the start of the play, which meant why bother? I nodded toward the back door. “You’re headed out, I take it?”

  “Just making sure the house is ready for Mr. and Mrs.”

  I had forgotten that Harold and Priscilla were coming to town for the weekend, and that in fact we all were due for dinner there Saturday night. I made a mental note to call Priscilla and ask what I could bring.

  I gestured to Miss Ruby to walk out in front of me, and almost imperceptibly, she shook her head; I walked out first, and she followed. It was about sixty degrees, the late-May sky darkening, the Blackwells’ lawn canopied by trees thick with new leaves. As we crossed the gravel driveway, I realized my car was the only one parked, and I turned to Miss Ruby. “Can I offer you a ride?”

  “No, ma’am, I take the bus.”

  “Then at least let me drive you to your stop. It’s on Whitting, isn’t it?” A few times, in the late afternoon or early evening, I had driven past her waiting there.

  “You don’t need to,” she said.

  “No, I insist.” I laughed a little. “I’d like to do something worthwhile with my night.” When she climbed in the car, I had the distinct sense that she was humoring me.

  We drove in silence—the NPR show I’d been listening to had come on with the ignition, and I’d switched it off in case it wasn’t to her liking (Charlie referred to the station as National “Pubic” Radio)—and as we were approaching the corner of Montrose Lane and Whitting Avenue, I said, “Would you be interested in going to the theater with me? Our tickets are for The Seagull, and they’ll go to waste otherwise. But please don’t feel like you have to—it’ll be a bit of a rush to get there.” She didn’t respond immediately, and I wondered if I should explain the play’s plot or author, or if it would be presumptuous to assume Miss Ruby hadn’t heard of Chekhov.

  “I don’t know that I’m dressed right,” she finally said, and I looked over, worried that she would have on the black dress that was her uniform—I wouldn’t blame her for not wanting to go to a play in a maid’s uniform—but I saw that beneath her raincoat, she was wearing red slacks and a black sweater.

  “No, you’re fine,” I said. “I’m a little overdressed, to tell the truth. Have you been to the Marcus Center?”

  “Jessica went with her school to hear the Christmas carols.” Jessica was Miss Ruby’s granddaughter, the daughter of Yvonne, and I knew both of them lived with Miss Ruby; Jessica’s father was not in the picture. Yvonne had actually helped at a few parties Charlie and I gave early in our marriage, while she was in nursing school, and now she worked downtown in the ER at St. Mary’s. Yvonne was a sunnier woman than her mother, and I’d always liked her, and Ella was crazy about Jessica, who was a few years older. On the days Miss Ruby brought her granddaughter to the Blackwells’ house, if Jessica was out of school but Yvonne had to work, the two little girls would spend hours playing with Barbies in Priscilla’s kitchen. It struck me then that I hadn’t seen either Jessica or Yvonne for quite a while, not since before Harold and Priscilla had left for Washington. I said, “Is Jessica still at Harrison Elementary?”

  “Yes, ma’am, she is.” A bit uncertainly, Miss Ruby added, “I suppose I could go to that play.”

  I was shocked and delighted, but I intentionally remained low-key. I said, “Wonderful,” and then, as I accelerated, “Jessica was always so bright. Am I right in thinking she’s about to finish fifth grade?”

  “She’s in the sixth grade with Mr. Armstrong,” Miss Ruby said. “Straight A’s on her report card, vice president of the student council, and she’s a leader in the youth group at Lord’s Baptist.”

  “That’s fabulous,” I said. “Where will she go for junior high?”

  “She’ll be at Stevens.”

  I made a conscious effort not to react negatively. Stevens was, without a doubt, the worst junior high school in Milwaukee. We lived in the suburbs, and Ella went to private school, to Biddle Academy, but you didn’t have to be a faithful reader of The Milwaukee Sentinel to know what dire straits the city’s public schools were in, and Stevens was in the direst: The year before, a gun that a seventh-grader had brought to school somehow went off between classes, and within the last month, two ninth-graders had been expelled for selling crack. (Ninth-graders! And for God’s sake, crack. It reminded me why I’d taught younger kids, though I couldn’t have f
athomed anything like that in the seventies.) “What’s Jessica’s favorite subject?” I asked.

  “I guess it’s English, but she’s good at everything.” Miss Ruby pointed. “You want to save time, you should take Howland Boulevard.”

  “That’s great she’s doing so well,” I said. “How’s Yvonne?”

  “Not getting any sleep since the baby came. He sure does like to be held.”

  “Oh my goodness, I didn’t realize Yvonne had had a baby. When was this?”

  “Antoine Michael,” Miss Ruby said. “Turns two months old on the first of June.”

  “Miss Ruby, that’s so exciting. I would love to see him.” I had thought my fondness for babies might be a thing I got out of my system after I had one myself, but it had never passed. I still was fascinated by their tiny fingernails and noses and earlobes, the perfect softness of their skin—they seemed magical, from another planet. When Ella became a toddler and then a child, I loved every new stage, she was always funny and charming and of course infuriating, but I admit that I mourned a little when she was no longer a newborn; that transition had been the hardest. “Maybe Ella and I could swing by some afternoon,” I said, and when Miss Ruby didn’t respond, I added, “Or let’s find a time for your family to come to our house. Would lunch a week from Sunday work? Or”—I didn’t know what time the Suttons finished church, so perhaps Sunday wasn’t ideal—“what about Monday? Next Monday is Memorial Day, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose we could come.”

  “Oh, Ella will be thrilled. Now, is Yvonne—is the baby’s father—”

  “Clyde, he lives with us, too. He and Yvonne got married back last summer.”

  “Miss Ruby, I had no idea so much was going on in your life! How did Yvonne and Clyde meet?”

  “He’s at the hospital, too, down in the cafeteria.” Miss Ruby chuckled. “Sold Yvonne her pie and coffee, if that doesn’t beat all.”