American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  WE ALL WERE quiet on the flight to Newark, just as we’d been quiet at the house in the morning and quiet driving to the airport, and the quiet continued as we picked up the rental car and merged onto I-95 South. Charlie seemed to be waiting for a sign from me, and I did not provide it; I barely met his eyes. Ella, too, was unusually watchful, looking tentatively between us. In the kitchen that morning, Charlie had shown Ella the article in the Sentinel about the Capital Group’s purchase of the Brewers, and though his demonstration was subdued, I sensed that it was as much for my benefit as for hers. I didn’t read the article myself.

  Waiting for our plane, I had wondered if we might run into Joe Thayer, but it appeared we were on a different flight. Instead, we saw Norm and Patty Setterlee—Norm was a Princeton graduate from the class of ’48, and he lightly punched Charlie’s bicep and said, “Just promise we’ll never let the White Sox win again.”

  On the plane, with Ella in the seat between us, Charlie had said to me, “I’ve given it some thought, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Jessica Sutton is eligible for a scholarship.”

  Ella looked up from the book she was reading, which was Bunnicula. “What does eligible mean?” When neither Charlie nor I responded, she pulled on my sleeve and said, “Why is Jessica eligible?”

  “It means qualified for,” I said. To Charlie, I said, “That’s what I was trying to explain. She probably would be, but they’ve given out all the financial aid for the upcoming school year.” I tried to sound matter-of-fact—calm and civil, not overheated, as I’d been the night before. If I was seriously thinking of leaving him, there was no reason to be anything but cordial.

  Charlie said, “It’s an admirable thought on your part, there’s no doubt about that, but this isn’t the ideal time for us. I’m unloading a huge chunk of our assets for the purchase of the team, and I want to be prudent in other areas.”

  I said—civilly, I hoped—“Do you know what the tuition for a seventh-grader at Biddle is?”

  “Five grand? Six?”

  My plan had backfired. “Fifty-five hundred,” I said. “But”—calmly, matter-of-factly—“that’s a fraction of the savings you’re using for the Brewers. It’s almost unnoticeable, isn’t it?” Why was I still arguing for this? Even if I could convince him now, if I told Charlie I was leaving, there wasn’t a chance he’d go through with it.

  “We’re not just talking for one year, though,” Charlie said, and he, too, sounded like he was trying his utmost to be conciliatory. “Let’s say she enrolls for the fall, we pony up the fifty-five hundred, and then Nancy Dwyer says, ‘Whoops, clerical error, turns out there isn’t money for her in next year’s budget, either.’ At that point, we’re not going to yank Jessica out, are we? If we signed on, we’d have to assume we were signing on for the next six years.”

  He wasn’t wrong, but still, he could spare what would amount to forty thousand dollars. It wasn’t nothing, but we—he—could do it. Besides, wasn’t part of the incentive of buying the Brewers the likelihood that eventually he and the other investors would make a profit? My impatience swelled; really, this conversation was only an opportunity for him to show his thoughtfulness. He’d ultimately reject the possibility, but he wanted credit for having examined it from all angles.

  “I guess that’s true,” I said, and I went back to my New Yorker.

  In the rental car, we hardly spoke until we were near campus. From the backseat, Ella said, “I’m hungry.”

  I turned. “They’ll have food in the tent, but snack on these.” I pulled a plastic bag of pretzels from my purse.

  “I don’t like pretzels.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since always.”

  “That comes as news to me.”

  Charlie, who was driving, said, “Then I guess you won’t mind if I have a few.” He reached toward my lap, wriggled his hand into the bag, scooped up most of the pretzels at once, and shoved them into his mouth. His cheeks bulged, and crumbs collected on his shirt as he chewed and, his mouth still full, he made the Cookie Monster noise: “Nom, nom, nom.” Ella giggled, and he grinned at her in the rearview mirror. Then he swallowed and glanced at me. “Hope you weren’t saving those, ’cause if you were, I can give ’em back.” He jerked forward and to the right, pretending to vomit: “Blegggggh.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Ella cried—the performance clearly pleased her—and I said, “Will you watch the road?”

  We parked behind the New New Quad and made our way to the twentieth-reunion tent. I had accompanied Charlie to his tenth reunion, in ’78, when we’d been married under a year, and to his fifteenth, in ’83, when Ella was four, and both times my reaction to the campus was similar to the one I had now: that it looked, in its perfection, more like a movie set of a college campus than a real campus; that you initially resisted its charms as you’d resist the advances of a handsome, charismatic man at a party, knowing that he probably flirted with everyone.

  Its buildings were Tudor or Victorian Gothic, brick and marble and ashlar blocks, with many-paned Palladian windows, with crockets and finials and coats of ivy (I had not realized prior to my visit in ’78 that the ivy in the Ivy League was literal). There were towers and turrets and arches you walked under, arches that were shaded enchantingly, that smelled like learning and promise. There were the grassy quads bisected diagonally by walkways, and at the front of campus there was Nassau Hall, the first structure you saw upon entering FitzRandolph Gate, built of sandstone, grand and upright and sprawling; on either side of its front steps, bronze tigers whose coats were silvery-green from age and exposure sat guard. And then there were the students, the graduating seniors and also the underclassmen who’d stayed on to work at Reunions—among them our nephew Harry and our niece Liza—who were smart and sporty and privileged. Being at Princeton felt unfair in the way our lives in Milwaukee sometimes felt unfair, unfair in our favor. I could see Ella eyeing these nineteen- and twenty-year-olds, and I knew they were creating formative ideas for her of what it was to be a college student when, in fact, a student at Princeton University was as representative of a larger type as a thoroughbred racehorse or a Stradivarius violin.

  The twentieth-reunion tent was in Holder Courtyard. Like the other reunion tents constructed at various locales around campus, it was massive—perhaps thirty by forty feet of white canvas supported by three interior poles—and at its entrance were black wooden signs with the class years in orange, and orange lightbulbs over the numbers: on top 1968, and below 1966, 1967, 1969, 1970. The tent held a wooden dance floor, a raised stage for the bands that would play that night and the next, a long buffet table covered in an orange paper tablecloth (I spotted some not terribly appetizing-looking turkey sandwiches as well as some cookies that were more tempting), and many round tables surrounded by folding chairs where, already, men in orange warm-up suits and floppy white hats sat drinking beer and laughing loudly. Besides the main tent, there were smaller tents where Bud and Bud Lite were free and on tap, along with water, all served up by student bartenders—at present, by a tanned, good-natured young man wearing an orange bandanna. Charlie had graduated from Princeton before it went coed, and a certain manly feeling pervaded the setting, despite the presence of wives in black-and-orange silk scarves, black or orange blouses or wraparound skirts, wives carrying purses made of woven orange grosgrain ribbons or, in one case, a wooden handbag, like a miniature picnic basket, on one side of which was painted Nassau Hall; I also saw two separate gold tiger pins with emeralds for eyes. The children wore university paraphernalia, and face-painting occurred in a corner of the tent, kids’ cheeks being adorned with black and orange stripes and whiskers.

  We walked to the registration booth, where a very pretty girl who had a long blond ponytail and wore an orange T-shirt gave us our room assignment in a dorm called Campbell (I’d previously sent in the reservation form—staying in a dorm would be much more fun for Ella, I thought, than staying at the Nassau Inn). She then directed us towar
d the pickup line for linens, which was overseen by another girl, also pretty, who was hanging out a first-floor window of Holder, distributing sheets and towels.

  Already Charlie had said hello to perhaps twenty men, some of whom I recognized, some on their own and some accompanied by their wives. There were many warm exclamations, bear hugs, backslaps, mild bawdiness: “You’re shitting me, right?” said a fellow named Dennis Goshen, grabbing the bottom hem of Charlie’s jacket. “You still fit into this thing?” Since we’d left Milwaukee, Charlie had had on the socalled beer jacket from the year he graduated: a cotton jacket featuring an illustration of a tiger lying passed out atop an hourglass, its feet splayed, its curving tail forming a 6 and the top and bottom of the hourglass forming the 8; a mug of beer was slipping from its paw.

  In greeting, Charlie’s classmates would lean in and kiss me on the cheek, and to Ella, they’d make a pseudo-outrageous proclamation about Charlie. Tapping Charlie’s shoulder with a pointer finger, Toby McKee said, “Spring of ’68, for nothing but a cold six-pack, this guy got me to type his entire thesis. A hundred and twenty pages, and I even corrected his lousy spelling!” Or, courtesy of Kip Spencer: “Don’t even get me started on the time your old man talked me into stealing the clapper from the bell on top of Nassau Hall!”

  There’d be inquiries into our lives in Milwaukee, and eventually, I realized Charlie was prompting them, asking his classmates if they were still practicing medicine in Stamford, or still at that ad agency in New York. When they turned the question around, Charlie would say, “Matter of fact, I’ve got a new gig—just went in with a group of fellows to buy the Milwaukee Brewers.”

  “The baseball team?” a classmate might say in response. “Not bad!” Or “Holy smokes!” Or, in the case of a guy named Richard Gibbons, “Oh, man, I’m so fucking jealous!” Then Richard glanced at Ella and mouthed to me, Sorry. The more enthusiastic the reaction Charlie had elicited, the more modest he’d become. He’d say, “I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time” or “If you look at the ups and downs of our last few seasons, you know I’ve got my work cut out for me.” Only one person called him on his false modesty. Theo Sheldon said, “Come off it, Blackwell, you’ll be in pig heaven! When you’re out there playing catch with Paul Molitor, you think of schmucks like me filing briefs, and that ought to alleviate your pain.” I wondered again if Charlie had arranged the baseball deal in time to crow about it here, but it was hard to imagine he’d had that much control; it truly seemed, as events in Charlie’s life often did, to be serendipitous.

  We went to drop our suitcases in the dorm room, which was actually a suite and perfectly serviceable except that the bathroom was a floor below us, and though we’d been gone only a few minutes, the tent seemed twice as crowded on our return. I helped Ella get food. Kip Spencer and his wife, Abigail, had a daughter Ella’s age named Becky, and the girls soon paired off and were racing around. They reappeared with their faces painted, then they appeared again with the paint smudged, and by that point they were part of a gang of ten or more children, and Ella seemed to be having a ball.

  I was surprised to be able to relax, settling in to the afternoon. All around me the men in their ridiculous orange-and-black garb seemed to be getting drunk and jolly, Charlie himself was in high spirits, and the other wives and I would exchange indulgent smiles. By four P.M., the idea of ending my marriage seemed less a definite plan than a fragment of a dream. The tension between Charlie and me had dissolved, and though I was on the periphery of most conversations, this had never been a dynamic I minded; I’d always liked to be around loud, laughing, friendly people. When the men broke into a locomotive, or when they referred to Princeton as “the best damn place of all,” which was a line from a school song, they seemed terribly sweet to me. And Charlie was solicitous in a way he rarely was anymore, asking whenever he went to get a refill of beer if I’d like one, too. (Everybody drank out of plastic cups whose tiger icon was different, depending on which tent you were in.)

  Dinner was a pleasantly mediocre buffet in the tent, chicken and scalloped potatoes and salad and brownies, and then a Motown band got started, and they were terrific: seven black men in matching pale blue suits and one black woman in a white tank dress who sang “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “(Love Is Like a) Heat Wave” and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.”

  The kids were the first to start dancing, Ella and Becky and the other children, mostly arhythmically but quite happily, punching the air and jumping up and down, and soon the adults had joined in. Charlie was a wonderful dancer; I hadn’t discovered this until a few months into our marriage, when we attended his brother John’s thirty-fifth birthday party, a black-tie gathering at the country club. It wasn’t that Charlie was necessarily the best dancer in any setting, though he was good. But what made him so much fun to watch and to dance with was how uninhibited he was, how thoroughly he seemed to enjoy himself, how he was both confident and extremely silly at the same time. For “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” he shimmied several feet away, turned his back to me, bumped out his rear end, looked grinningly over his shoulder, and hopped backward, one hop for each line—“Ain’t no mountain high enough / Ain’t no valley low enough / Ain’t no river wide enough.” He soon was sweating profusely, and then he was dancing with Pam Sheldon, the wife of his classmate Theo, and I was dancing with Theo, and then Charlie was dancing with Theo, and Pam and I were standing there laughing. Around his peers, it was striking to me how fit and young-looking Charlie still was—many of them were bald or heavy or just seemed worn out beneath their cheer, but Charlie was as handsome as when we’d married. Really, his appearance had hardly changed.

  Around nine-thirty, to Ella’s delight, our nephew Harry and our niece Liza showed up, Harry in the beer jacket for that year’s graduating class, and they both were festive and, I suspected, inebriated, Harry more so than Liza. Liza and Charlie danced while Harry and Ella danced, then Harry danced with me—like his uncle, Harry was deft on his feet (I’d have to tell Ed and Ginger that forcing him to attend dancing school had paid off ), and he was flirtatious in the meaningless, endearing way that rich, handsome, self-assured twenty-two-year-old men can be. He would be spending the summer in Alaska, the bulk of it working at a hatchery (this was something else I hadn’t been exposed to before marrying into the Blackwell family, the inclination to travel great distances and invest substantial amounts of money in order to do strenuous and possibly grubby work that subsequently would make for excellent storytelling: my nephew Tommy, Harry’s brother, had spent a summer in high school in a program that built roads in Greece; Liza had volunteered at an orphanage in Honduras; and several of them had participated in Outward Bound or NOLS trips). After the hatchery, Harry would be met by his two brothers and Ed, and the four of them would go on a two-week chartered fishing expedition in northern Alaska; on their return, Harry would start a job as a researcher at Merrill Lynch in Manhattan. Given all this, of course the world looked to my nephew like a joyful and inviting place, of course he was drunk and happy on the eve of his Princeton graduation.

  After Harry and Liza moved on, I was surprised to look at my watch and see that it was after eleven. I scanned the tent for Ella—she and a little boy were doing their nine-year-olds’ approximation of a tango—and I told Charlie I was taking her to the dorm to go to bed. I felt a little negligent that it was as late as it was and tried to absolve myself by recalling that in Wisconsin, it would be an hour earlier.

  “After you get her settled, come back out.” Charlie almost had to yell to make himself audible above the music. “It’s completely safe, you know that, right?”

  I shook my head. “I’d rather not leave her alone, but stay out and enjoy yourself.” I was sure this was what he’d do anyway, without my encouragement, but I wanted to be generous toward him for a change, to give his pleasure my blessings. I’d heard some of the men talking about heading over to the eating clubs—Charlie had belonged to one called Cottage
—and I was just as happy to miss this portion of the evening. The eating clubs seemed to me like nothing more than pretentious fraternities (as the place where upperclassmen ate their meals and held parties, they occupied a row of mansions on Prospect Avenue, and to join, a student “bickered,” a process that appeared negligibly different from rushing), but the clubs inspired such passionate feelings that surely I was missing something. As an undergraduate, Charlie had served as Cottage’s bicker chair, and all this time later, the only bill in which he took real interest—he’d make a point of asking if I’d paid it—was the club’s annual dues, then eighty-five dollars. Cottage had started admitting women in 1986, following a lawsuit filed by a female student, and while Charlie was disdainful of this woman’s “strident feminism,” he didn’t seem to mind that Cottage had gone coed.

  Standing beneath the twentieth-reunion tent while the band played “Dancing in the Street,” Charlie said, “You sure you don’t want to come back out? It’ll be more fun with you around.”

  It was such a kind, plain statement that I felt my breath catch. I did not see myself as fun anymore, certainly not from Charlie’s perspective. I stepped forward and kissed him on the lips. “I wish I could. Don’t forget to pace yourself—there’ll be a lot going on tomorrow, too.”

  He gave a salute. “Bring Ella over here to say good night.”

  Eventually, after I’d pried Ella from her new friends and she’d kissed Charlie on the cheek, we walked back to the dorm. As we went down a flight of stairs and under an arch, she said dreamily, “I love Princeton.”

  THE P-RADE—the heart and soul of Reunions—started around two on Saturday. Thousands of us had lined up by class year on Cannon Green, and as we waited, there was much rowdiness, much drinking of beer (Princetonians are the only people I’ve ever encountered who can drink as much as Wisconsonians and still remain agreeable and upright), and classmates were constantly running into one another and exchanging excited greetings. It was a sunny day in the high seventies—the weather was always of great interest beforehand, whether it would be brutally hot or torrentially rainy—and by the time the parade finally started, the energy of the crowd was uncontainable. Leading the parade were members of the class of ’63, who were celebrating their twenty-fifth reunion—the year considered to be a pinnacle of sorts, though really, I thought, these men were only forty-seven! I looked for Joe Thayer; amid the chaos of bodies and noise and sunshine, I didn’t find him. Next came the oldest graduate who’d made it back—in this case, a gentleman named Edwin Parrish, from the class of 1910—who had the honor of holding a particular silver cane; Mr. Parrish rode in a golf cart driven by a current student, and as he passed, people roared their approval. After the oldest graduate, the order continued chronologically, oldest first, and each class was announced with a class-year banner that ran between poles, the fabric black with orange trim, the numbers orange. For the older classes, known as the Old Guard, the banners were carried by undergraduates or alumni’s grandchildren; for the subsequent classes, they’d be carried by the alumni themselves. Many of the Old Guard were ferried by golf cart, and in some cases, it was not the men but their widows who rode, a sight that I was scarcely the only one to find poignant; I noticed people all around me tearing up. When a member of an older class was walking—a remarkably spry fellow from the class of 1916, who had to be well into his nineties, was practically tap-dancing—the crowd would cheer at a deafening level. In every direction, as far as you looked, there were orange warm-up suits, orange and black blazers and pants and T-shirts, baseball caps, straw boaters encircled by orange and black ribbons, children and adults alike wearing furry tiger tails. Some graduates drove antique cars that they honked jovially, and in celebration of themselves, the major reunion classes had arranged for special performers—brass bands from local high schools, a belly dancer, even a fire-eater—who preceded the class. Charlie leaned over, grinning, and said, “Rich people are bizarre, huh?” This was, of course, my drunken comment to him at Halcyon, and as he squeezed my hand then dropped it to applaud for the class of 1943, I thought that at least in one way, I had not been wrong when I agreed to marry him: He had made my life more colorful.