American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “Gimme a clue. How many syllables? Rhymes with—”

  “At the party, Megan Thayer went upstairs and looked at your copies of Penthouse.”

  I cannot say I was entirely surprised when Charlie exploded with laughter. Didn’t I want to be told it was no big deal, that in feeling remorseful, I was being silly? “You think she’s a bull dyke?” he said. “She is built like a linebacker.”

  “Just so you know, I had a very unpleasant conversation with Carolyn this afternoon, and I hope this doesn’t turn into some rumor that gets—”

  He cut me off. “What conversation with Carolyn Thayer isn’t unpleasant? And darlin’, if word gets out that I look at Penthouse, it won’t be a rumor. You know what? I don’t give a rat’s ass. You think half the men in Maronee don’t beat off to girlie magazines?”

  “So if Jadey found out, or Nan—”

  He laughed again. “Their husbands are the ones who introduced me to porn. Calm down, all right? And call the club and tell them we want a table for seven-thirty.”

  I paused and then said, “No. I’m sorry, but no—we have a big weekend ahead of us, and I don’t want to be frantic catching the plane in the morning. I need a quiet night at home so I can get organized.”

  “Lindy, I bought a fucking baseball team today!”

  “Don’t swear at me, Charlie.”

  “Then don’t be such a bitch.”

  I held the receiver away from my ear, as if I’d received an electric shock. How had we devolved to this point? That Charlie was crude wasn’t a surprise, but that he was crude toward me—it had not always been so. I had once believed he had a sweeter and more tender way with me than with anyone else, and it made all his vulgarity almost flattering by contrast. But now I was down in the frat house basement with everyone else, expected to chug beer and laugh at off-color jokes while my back was slapped a little too hard.

  I thought he might be as disturbed as I was by what he’d just said, but when he spoke again, his voice contained not remorse but annoyance—he was annoyed with me. He said, “You enjoy your quiet night at home, all right? And I’ll see if I can’t find some folks more in the mood to celebrate.”

  WHEN THE PHONE rang again, I hoped it would be Charlie, having cooled off, but it was Joe Thayer who said, “I heard from Carolyn about what happened at the party, and I—”

  “Joe, I’m mortified. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I hope you and Carolyn know—”

  I had interrupted him, and now he interrupted me. He said, “I knew you’d be chastising yourself, and I’m sure Carolyn gave you an earful, but Alice, please don’t worry. Take it from me, Caro’s filled with a lot of anger these days. Now, everyone would prefer that this hadn’t happened, you as much as us, but if that’s the worst Megan ever gets exposed to, she’ll be a lucky girl. It just flabbergasts me what’s on television these days—have you seen the program Married with Children?”

  “I’ve heard of it. Joe, thank you for understanding, but I hope you know I really am sorry.”

  “Surely the magazines aren’t yours, Alice.” In Joe’s voice was a note of humor that I realized then had been there all along.

  “Well, no,” I said. “No, that’s not the kind of thing I read.”

  “Don’t forget how long I’ve known your husband,” Joe said. “I remember when he was a kid up in Halcyon doing the old trick with the Indian girl on the Land O’Lakes package.” I couldn’t decide if it was cute or depressing that Charlie had shown this same trick to Ella just a few months before—cutting out the Indian maiden’s knees and placing them at her chest so if you lifted a flap, it appeared she was propping up her own ample breasts. Apparently, even after three decades, some things never got stale.

  “The first thing I thought when Carolyn told me, I have to confess,” Joe was saying, “is, If I had a wife like Alice, I wouldn’t be resorting to those rags. Charlie is a man who doesn’t recognize what he has, and when we hang up, you tell him I said that.”

  Joe’s tone was cheerful, and I tried to match it. I said, “You’re kind.”

  “Much more important for our purposes,” he said, “is that after I saw you at the gas station, I booked a ticket to Princeton for Reunions. I’d been so hung up on how discouraging it would be to go alone, and then I thought, That’s silly. Being among friends could be just what the doctor ordered.”

  “Joe, that’s wonderful. Bully for you. Now do they have you wearing some sort of crazy black-and-orange kimono?”

  “I waited so long to register that I’m picking up the outfit on campus, and I can only imagine what it’ll be. Let’s make sure to look for each other at the P-rade, can we do that? I fear you might be the only other sane person there.”

  “Oh, you overestimate my sanity. I’ve been practicing my locomotive.”

  “You know, I could never get Carolyn to learn the cheers,” Joe said. “Do you think I ought to have seen that as a sign?”

  AS SOON AS we’d hung up, the phone rang again, and when I answered, Jadey said, “Did Chas buy the Brewers?”

  I hesitated. “Sort of.”

  “When were you planning to tell me?”

  “It wasn’t final until today, so I just found out myself. You know it’s not only Charlie, right? It’s a whole group of investors, and his contribution—Well, I’m sure it’s less than you’d think.” The irony was that with Jadey’s inherited money, she and Arthur probably would have been in a position to make a far more significant investment. Had it been only chance, Arthur’s decision not to attend the game on that Sunday, that had excluded him from the deal?

  Jadey said, “Are you gonna get us the best box seats ever?”

  I laughed. “The ones we already have aren’t so bad.”

  “Call me the minute you get back from Princeton, okay? I swear it was a hundred and fifty degrees at Arthur’s twentieth, but we still had so much fun. And remember, Chas’ll probably tie one on this weekend, but cut him some slack, because so will everyone else.”

  I thought of telling her about what had happened with Megan Thayer, and maybe also about Charlie calling me a bitch, but Jadey and I would have found ourselves in a forty-five-minute conversation and I had too much to do. Besides, I didn’t want Ella to overhear. “I’ll call you on Monday,” I said.

  ____

  FOR ELLA’S DINNER, I made toast with melted mozzarella cheese—pizza toast, we called it, though there was no tomato sauce involved, and its resemblance to pizza was rather fleeting—and for myself, I reheated a leftover burger from the class party and dipped it in Dijon mustard; if Charlie was hungry when he came home, he could eat a burger, too. Because it wasn’t a school night, I let Ella watch The Cosby Show—she adored the character of Rudy, and Theo was her second favorite—and she lay on our bed in her ridiculous black dress while I packed, walking between her room and ours. I called to her, “I assume you want to bring Bear-Bear.”

  “Don’t pack him yet!” she exclaimed. “I need him for tonight.” Bear-Bear wasn’t a conventional plush toy but more of a rag doll, covered in a patchwork of reddish fabrics. My mother had made him when Ella was born, and he was the only animal who still shared her bed every night.

  A Different World came on after The Cosby Show, and after that Cheers, which I had never let Ella watch, and Charlie still wasn’t home. How many nights would play out like this, how many nights would I let play out? When the phone rang yet again, I assumed once more it would be Charlie, and once more I was surprised. “Mrs. Blackwell?” said a female voice I knew but couldn’t place immediately. The voice was not only female but also young and tentative. “It’s Shannon.”

  “Of course,” I said to our babysitter. “How are you?”

  “Um, I’m sorry to bother you, but—”

  “Is something wrong?” I asked, and Ella looked over from the bed. The phone was cordless, and I carried it into the hall.

  “The reason I’m calling is, um, I just saw Mr. Blackwell.” A spiral of anxiety began to uncoil in
side me; it was like a warm, thin piece of wire. I thought what Shannon would say next was with his car rammed into a telephone pole, and what she actually said was not much more reassuring. She said, “Um, we were at Herman’s?”

  “What’s Herman’s?”

  “It’s a bar.”

  “And you ran into Mr. Blackwell there?”

  “No, I, um, I went there with him. He called I guess a couple hours ago, and he said was I free, could he pick me up because he wanted to talk to me. I thought—I don’t know, I just, um, assumed it was about Ella. And when I was in the car, he said did I want to, um, have a drink.”

  “Where is this Herman’s place?”

  “It’s on Wells, near campus. I guess the reason I’m calling is, um, he had a few drinks, do you know what I mean?”

  The wire spiral inside me exploded; little pieces raced in my bloodstream. So the rammed-into-a-telephone-pole possibility still existed; his date with the babysitter could be in addition to, not instead of, an accident. And campus—she meant Marquette, where she was a sophomore—was four miles from where we lived. I tried to sound calm as I said, “About how many drinks did he have?”

  “Um—” She paused. “Um, five, maybe? Or six? We were only there for like an hour. Sorry, Mrs. Blackwell, but I just thought you should know.”

  “No, I appreciate your calling. When he left the bar, did he say if he was coming home?”

  “I don’t know, sorry. He said he bought the Brewers, so that’s cool, I guess.” She laughed in a small, awkward way.

  “Did he—” I could hardly speak the words, but it would be unfair to make her speak them, even more unfair to force her to keep his secret. “Did he come on to you?” I asked, and my voice sounded strangled.

  Quickly, she said, “No, no, he was just chatting. He was talking about baseball and stuff. He was in a good mood, and then he dropped me off back here.”

  He’d had five or six drinks in an hour, then gotten behind the wheel with Ella’s babysitter beside him and driven her home?

  “Shannon, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. Mr. Blackwell acted very inappropriately, and you handled the situation exactly right.”

  “I wasn’t, like, scared. I mean, I know Mr. Blackwell. I just hope he gets home okay.”

  Even as she said it, I heard him in the driveway, the engine and then seven or eight honks in a row. He sometimes did this, an announcement of his arrival.

  “I promise it won’t happen again,” I said.

  WHEN I REPLACED the telephone receiver in its cradle, my heart was beating rapidly.

  “Who was that?” Ella asked, and I said, “A friend of Mommy’s you don’t know.” A detergent commercial flashed on-screen, and downstairs, Charlie entered the house and then he was ascending the steps, singing. He was singing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”

  “When Johnny comes marching home again

  Hurrah! Hurrah!

  We’ll give him a hearty welcome then

  Hurrah! Hurrah!

  The men will cheer and the boys will shout

  The ladies they will all turn out

  And we’ll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home.”

  He knew only the first verse, so he started it again as he entered the bedroom, leaning in to kiss me—my bitchiness had apparently been forgiven—and Ella leaped off the bed and proceeded to tackle him. He lifted her and turned her upside down, and when her dress fell over her head, he tickled her bare belly. She shrieked and writhed, clawing at him, and beneath the fabric, she, too, was attempting to sing: “ ‘The ladies they will all turn out . . . ’ ”

  Charlie made the last line operatic, elongating it, and then he tossed Ella on the bed, and she scrambled around until her dress was righted and immediately attempted to climb back up him. When this didn’t work, she raised her arms, saying, “Lift me,” and Charlie said, “You’re breakin’ my back, Ellarina. What do you weigh now, a million pounds?” He pushed her onto the bed again, tickling her, saying, “Someone’s sure been eating a lot of hot-fudge sundaes! Someone’s been chowing down on extra-large pizzas!” She laughed so hard that tears streamed out of her eyes, laughed a gaspy, screaming, red-faced laughter that even as a child, I had never been seized by. Under my anger toward Charlie, I felt impressed in a distant way I’d felt many times before—it was undeniably a talent to be able to change a house from sparsely inhabited and sedate to loud and raucous just by entering it, to be your own party, your own parade. And they were so happy, my husband and my daughter, that I couldn’t reprimand him; I only watched as they goofed around. Charlie said, “Hey, Ella, you want to hear what I bought today?”

  “A hot-air balloon!” she shouted.

  “Even better.” Charlie grinned. He actually didn’t seem that drunk; cheerful, yes, but perfectly coherent. “I bought the Brewers baseball team,” he said. “You ready to go to lots and lots of ball games?”

  “Yay!” Ella cried.

  Charlie looked at me. “Nice to see that someone appreciates it.”

  “Can Kioko Akatsu come?” Ella asked.

  “Honey, Kioko would have to take a twelve-hour plane flight to get here,” I said.

  Ella began clapping and then held Charlie’s hands with her own, trying to make him clap. In her imitation of an adult man, she intonated, “I am the best baseball player who ever lived. You are the stupidest person in the world.”

  Charlie broke his hands free of her hold and pressed them against the sides of her head. “I am the champion of Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” he said. “You are the suckers with nine-to-five office jobs.”

  WHEN I CLIMBED into bed, it was a quarter to twelve, and Charlie was lying on his back with his eyes shut. I sensed he wasn’t asleep, though, and I said, “I think we should pay for Jessica Sutton to go to Biddle.”

  His eyes opened, then scrunched into a squint. He sounded confused rather than confrontational when he said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I can’t stand the idea of her being at Stevens. I called Nancy Dwyer in the admissions office to see if it’s too late for Jessica to start in the fall, and it sounds like they can fit her in to the seventh grade, but they’ve already allotted all the financial aid.”

  “That just reminded me.” He rolled onto his side. “Guess who I saw tonight?”

  “If you don’t mind, I’d like to focus on the conversation we’re having.”

  “Just guess.” He grinned.

  Coldly, I said, “I know who you saw, and I don’t think it’s funny at all.”

  “You have no idea!” He still was jovial, pleased with himself.

  “Charlie, Shannon called me as soon as you dropped her off, and she seemed very rattled, which I can’t blame her for. Do you have any idea how you must have come across? You’re twice her age, you’re her employer. I don’t know that we can ever ask her to sit for us again, and even if we do, I doubt she’ll say yes. I wouldn’t if I were her.”

  “You’re nuts—she had a great time. She’s a solid person, real salt-of-the-earth. Did you know her dad’s a plumber?”

  I was sitting up, leaning against the headboard of our bed, and I folded my arms in front of me. It was hard to know how to respond, hard to explain something so blazingly obvious. I took a deep breath. “She’s our sitter,” I said. “You’re forty-two years old, and you took her to a bar.”

  “But it’s okay for you to take Miss Ruby to a play?” He smirked, and I understood: I’d been set up. He’d orchestrated his evening for the sole purpose of asking me this question. It was the reason he had picked Shannon, of all people—not because he’d enjoy her company but to teach me a lesson. And it was the same reason that since Shannon’s call, I had felt deeply troubled without feeling romantically threatened or betrayed as a wife. Charlie just wasn’t a philanderer. A flirt, yes, with men as well as women, but I couldn’t picture him embarking on a real affair, the subterfuge and logistical complications. Though he might mock or humiliate me, he would not be unfait
hful.

  I said, “You know what the difference is.”

  He shrugged. “Housekeeper, babysitter—seems pretty similar to me.”

  Our eyes met, and I wanted to slap his face or shove his chest. Instead, I pushed back the covers and stood. “What’s wrong with you? Can’t you see this isn’t a joke? And Shannon told me how much you drank—what if you’d been pulled over? What if you’d crashed your car and gotten yourself killed, or if you’d killed someone else?”

  He rolled onto his back again, this time leaning on his elbows. Slowly, calmly, he said, “Alice, I’m not real sure you’re in a position to be lecturing me on driving.”

  It was amazing—in the last few weeks, each time I thought Charlie had said the worst thing he possibly could, a few days would pass and he’d outdo himself. Furiously, I strode around the foot of the bed, and when I’d reached his nightstand, I yanked open the lower drawer, pulled out the issues of Penthouse, and flung them at him one after the other. “You’re awful!” I said, and I had a dim knowledge that I was shouting, and that Ella was asleep a few doors down, but I felt power-less to quiet myself. “You’re a spoiled brat, and you have no regard for anyone except yourself! You think that life is so amusing, so easy, and the only reason that’s true is that you’re insulated by being rich. You’ve always had people doing the dirty work for you, getting you in to schools, offering you a job at the family company, offering you a base-ball team, for God’s sake, and now you have me to smooth over all your odd, offensive behavior. But I’m tired of it, Charlie, do you understand? I’ve had enough. Just because you never get in trouble, it doesn’t mean you haven’t done anything wrong.”

  There were no magazines left. Charlie was shielding his face with his hands, a gesture of self-protection, and in the space between his fingers, his expression was surprised but still not entirely serious. It seemed he was holding out hope that I was kidding. I turned on my heel, walking toward the door.

  “Lindy—” he said. “Jesus, will you calm down—”

  I went to the guest room and shut the door behind me, and I was shaking. How could Charlie and I possibly remain married? And then I heard footsteps in the hall, and I was glad he had come to fight it out, it seemed somehow adult of him, or at least this was what I thought until I heard a tiny voice say, “Mommy?” When I opened the door, Ella began to cry.