American Wife (13 page)

As she spoke, I could feel my lips curling out, the tears welling in my eyes. I whispered, “I’m sorry for disappointing you.”

“Come sit by me,” she said, and when I did, she rubbed my back, the palm of her hand sweeping over the white cotton of my nightgown. After a moment, she said, “We have to make mistakes. It’s how we learn compassion for others.” She paused. “You don’t need to tell me whose it is. That doesn’t matter.”

WE TOOK THE
bus rather than the train. At my grandmother’s instruction, I had gone to school as if it were a normal day, but before the end of first period, I’d been summoned to the principal’s office, where my grandmother awaited me. We walked quickly to the bus station, rode the bus to Chicago—“I’m sure there’s someone who does it in Riley, too,” my grandmother said, “but I’d have to ask around, and I don’t want people talking”—and from the bus station on Broad Street, we took a taxi to the hospital. As directed by my grandmother, I had not eaten or drunk since the night before, and in the taxi, my stomach turned, filled with nothing but anxiety. “I’ve given your name as Alice Warren,” my grandmother said. “Just as a precaution.” Warren was her own maiden name.

“You don’t think I’ll get arrested, do you?”

“You won’t get arrested,” my grandmother said.

“And the doctor won’t use dirty tools?”

My grandmother looked at me strangely. “I thought you understood that Gladys is performing the procedure. That’s why we’ve come here.”

My grandmother was not permitted in the operating room. I wore a blue hospital gown, and when I lay on the table, the nurse had me set my feet in metal stirrups. “The doctor wants to talk to you before we put you under anesthesia,” the nurse said, and ten or twelve minutes had passed before Dr. Wycomb appeared in a white coat. She squeezed my hand, and the warmth of her grip made me realize how cold I was.

“I know this is difficult, Alice,” she said. “It will be over before you know it, though, and you’ll recover quickly. The way a D and C works is that I’ll expand the entrance of your uterus, and I’ll use a very thin instrument for the curettage. You might experience cramps and spotting for several days—you’ll want to use sanitary napkins—but you’ll be able to walk out of here.”

I nodded, feeling faint. I did not even know then what
curettage
meant, but back in Riley, I looked it up; the dictionary definition was
scraping.

“If any problems arise in the next days or weeks, it’s important that you call me,” Dr. Wycomb said. “Your grandmother has my telephone number.” She was not distant—she still held my hand—but she was crisp and professional in a way that made me understand she was probably very good at her job.

“One more thing: I’ll leave these items with Emilie, and I want you to get them from her when you’re home. You need not discuss them with her.” Dr. Wycomb reached into a small brown paper bag I hadn’t noticed and extracted an object I didn’t recognize, a white rubber dome that she handed to me along with a capped tube, also white. “Fill the diaphragm with spermicide before you insert it,” she said. “Then push the diaphragm deep into your vagina so it walls off your cervix. Make sure to practice a few times before you’re in a situation where you need it and remember that spermicide alone isn’t effective—if your friends suggest otherwise, they’re wrong.”

Once, it would have been unthinkable, unendurable, to listen to my grandmother’s friend use the words
spermicide
and
vagina.
But by then so much had happened that was unthinkable and unendurable, and furthermore, the words themselves were overshadowed by the larger implication of her comments.

“It won’t happen again,” I said. “I’m not—” I wanted to say,
I really am the girl I seemed to be last winter,
but surely, the necessity of making such an assertion would undermine it.

“This is a conversation about health, not morality,” Dr. Wycomb said. “Once a person engages in sexual intercourse, the likelihood of remaining sexually active is high.” She patted my forearm. “I’m very sorry about the automobile accident,” she said, and then she called for the nurse.

WHEN I EMERGED
from the fog of anesthesia, I was in a different room—I opened my eyes, closed them, opened them again—and my grandmother was sitting beside me reading. I blinked several times, my mind blurry. “Should I write Dr. Wycomb a thank-you note?” I asked.

“I don’t think that’s necessary.” My grandmother set a bookmark between two pages and closed the book. “She’s coming by to check on you, though, if you’d like to thank her in person. How are you feeling?”

“What time is it?”

“It’s after two. You’ve been sleeping for nearly an hour.”

“Isn’t my mother—Won’t she expect me home?”

“I told her I was meeting you after school to take you shopping. Alice, if you’d like to tell them, that’s your decision.”

“I’ll never tell them,” I said, which proved to be true.

When Dr. Wycomb came into the recovery room, I still was loopy. I said, “I hope you don’t go to prison because of me.”

Dr. Wycomb and my grandmother exchanged glances, and Dr. Wycomb said, “This is a very common procedure, Alice. You were my third this week.”

BACK IN RILEY
, I could hardly make eye contact with my parents.
Whatever you are, be a good one,
I had grown up hearing my father say, and oh, how I had failed him, how I’d failed them all. On the weekends, when Mrs. Falke came over to play bridge with my parents and grandmother, I’d stand in the upstairs hall listening to the slap and turn of their cards, and they seemed to me like children.

I bled for a few days, and then I stopped. I was not even sore, not really. When an image or a feeling of Andrew or Pete came into my mind—they came at different moments, for different reasons—I’d try to suppress it. I waited for time to pass.

On November 22, a Friday, I was walking out of the cafeteria after lunch, just behind a few other students, when a sophomore named Joan Skryba and a junior named Millie Devon came toward us, running and crying. Though they were shouting, they were nearly incoherent. I couldn’t understand at first, and when I finally did, I still wasn’t sure I had because it seemed so unlikely—the president of the United States? President Kennedy? Then someone else, a boy, emerged from the cafeteria behind us and said the same thing, and everyone was talking at once, and a girl next to me whom I wasn’t friends with at all, Helen Pajak, took my hand and gripped it tightly. It wasn’t until I saw Mrs. Moore, my math teacher, weeping openly that I knew it was true: A little over an hour before, President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

Everything felt suspended; in the remaining classes that afternoon, we spoke of nothing else, but people were no longer excitable. We all were simply stunned. And then, an hour or so later, we heard he had died, and if President Kennedy had just been assassinated, what would happen next? What sense or logic was there, which rules still existed in the world? Normally, at the end of the day and especially on a Friday, the hall containing our lockers was filled with yells and laughter and slamming metal, but that afternoon it was quiet.

I did not cry for him, not then or ever, though I, like everyone, found the television coverage mesmerizing. That evening was the only time I can recall my family watching television while we ate dinner; we carried our plates into the living room. Everything was canceled, in Riley and everywhere else, sports events and plays, and restaurants and stores and movie theaters were closed, and you hardly saw a car on the street. Really, there was nothing to do but wonder at what had happened. Over the next few days, seeing the picture in the newspaper of Lyndon Johnson being sworn in on
Air Force One
by Sarah Hughes, watching the surreal footage of Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot at the police headquarters by Jack Ruby, listening to Johnson’s address on Thanksgiving—“From this midnight of tragedy we shall move toward a new American greatness,” he told us—my parents and grandmother seemed as stupefied as I was.

But this is the truth: I had admired Kennedy, I’d thought he was smart and handsome and full of vigor. And yet with his death, I felt a grim relief. I wasn’t
happy;
certainly not. But something had occurred that was so dreadful, it eclipsed the dreadfulness of what I had caused. Not in my opinion, it didn’t, but in everyone else’s; it made what I’d done seem small. And I knew it immediately that afternoon at school. This was a death far bigger and worse than Andrew’s, and it had nothing to do with me; there was no part of it that was my fault. If this was not absolution, it was as close as I would get.

To this day, I remain deeply ashamed of my reaction. In all my life, I have admitted what I felt that afternoon to just one person.

PART II

3859 Sproule Street

W
HEN I WAS
twenty-seven, the month after Simon Törnkvist and I broke up, I decided that if I wasn’t married by the time I turned thirty, I would buy a house alone. Although I told no one, keeping this idea in the back of my mind provided reassurance; it made my life seem less like something I was waiting for and more like something I was planning. When I drove around Madison, I’d sometimes think,
A place like that.
Three bedrooms at the most, a yard but not a large one, on a street with tall trees. Also, not a house on a corner, because those seemed too exposed. As a librarian at Theodora Liess Elementary School, I earned eight hundred and thirty-three dollars a month after taxes, and as soon as I’d made my decision, I began to put away two hundred dollars from each paycheck in a savings account; I deposited the money at my neighborhood branch of Wisconsin State Bank & Trust on the last Saturday morning of every month.

I’m not sure exactly when I would have called a realtor—the day I turned thirty? The day after? My plan had never gotten that specific—but it didn’t turn out to be anywhere close, because it was two months before my birthday, in February 1976, that my father died. Like his own father, he had a heart attack, and although my father made it into his fifties—two decades longer than my grandfather had lived—this seemed to me even then to be a dubious reprieve. Now, of course, it does not seem like a reprieve at all.

It snowed the day of my father’s funeral, and my mother, grandmother, and I all tried, for one another’s sakes and because we were midwestern, to be stoic; my mother either was or pretended to be greatly preoccupied by whether the black crepe dress I had bought at Prange’s was warm enough. Back at the house, we visited awkwardly with my mother’s siblings and their spouses, none of whom I’d seen in years. Other members of Calvary Lutheran dropped by, and my father’s coworkers at the bank, all of them bearing flowers or food (mostly casseroles, though the assistant manager brought a whole ham). Then they were gone and a quiet descended, amplified by the snow that had fallen.

I needed to drive back to Madison that Sunday evening—I’d arranged to have a substitute for three days the previous week, but the next morning, I was due at school again—and my mother walked me to my car, hugging herself against the cold. When I was settled in the driver’s seat, she motioned for me to roll down the window and said, “Fasten your seat belt,” and I said, “It’s fastened already.” As I pulled away from her, away from the house where I’d grown up, I was alone at last, and I began to sob. By the time I reached the highway, a new snow flurry had started, and though it didn’t accumulate into anything, it was my father’s directions for driving in the snow that I thought of:
Go slowly. Stay well behind the car in front of you. If you skid, turn in to the skid.
When I unlocked the door to my apartment in Madison—I was living then on the second floor of a house on Sproule Street—I could hear the phone ringing, and when I answered, it was, as I’d known it would be, my mother, who’d no doubt been calling every ten minutes for the last hour to see if I’d arrived yet. My upper back, between my shoulders, ached from the tension of the drive and from everything else.

In the year and a half since my father’s death, I had gone back to Riley most weekends to check in on my mother and grandmother. Usually, I’d pull into the driveway shortly before lunch on Saturday, and I’d once brought them a pizza, but instead of relieving my mother of the burden of cooking, as I’d intended, it appeared to make her agitated. So these days I brought only myself and sometimes some laundry, and the three of us sat in the dining room eating meals that had already started to seem old-fashioned to me: meat loaf and mashed potatoes, shepherd’s pie. I always planned to leave on Sunday after church (with no discussion, I had begun attending again after my father’s funeral, though it was for my mother’s sake, and I never went on the weekends I remained in Madison), but then thinking of saying goodbye, picturing them sitting in the living room that evening, my mother needlepointing in front of
60 Minutes
and my grandmother reading, always made me far too sad and I ended up staying a second night, sleeping again in my old bed. The next morning, if it was during the school year, I’d have to take off around six o’clock to get back to Madison and change clothes before work. Interstate 94 would be dark and mostly empty, me and a bunch of eighteen-wheelers.

It was, I suppose, for all these reasons that I had not started looking for a house to buy until the summer of 1977. My realtor turned out to be a woman named Nadine Patora who was lively, zaftig, and over a decade my senior. Given the modesty of the houses I was considering—I’d pay forty thousand dollars at the absolute most—she treated me with more patience than I had any right to expect. By early July, we’d looked at more than thirty places, and there was only one I’d seriously considered, a little brick one-story in the Nakoma neighborhood, but after thinking it over for a few days, I hadn’t made a bid. I wanted a house I really loved, one I’d be happy to stay in forever and sink endless energy into, rather than one that was merely adequate. Otherwise, why not keep renting? “I bet you’re just as picky with men,” Nadine said, smiling mischievously as we drove one Sunday afternoon to an open house.

I laughed. “I guess that would explain why I’m still single.”

“No, it’s good.” Nadine leaned over and patted my knee. She was divorced, with two teenage daughters. “Take it from someone who settled for the first thing that came down the pike.”

Most of the houses we looked at sounded quite appealing in the MLS listings Nadine showed me, but I’d know from the minute I stepped into them, and sometimes from the outside, that they weren’t right: The windows were too small, or the kitchen cabinets depressed me, or a sour smell hung in the rooms, and I didn’t want to run the risk of assuming it would vanish along with the current owner. And so when Nadine called me the Thursday after the Fourth of July and said, “I’ve found your new home,” I honestly didn’t believe her.

It was a two-bedroom bungalow on a street called McKinley, not quite as pretty as where I lived presently, but it was unlikely I could afford to buy in my current neighborhood. And McKinley did have a pleasant energy, I thought as soon as Nadine and I turned on to it, passing a man walking a dog, two children in bathing suits darting through a sprinkler. The house we parked in front of was white-shingled with a narrow porch and, as I saw when we went inside, a living room that had window seats, and a kitchen that was small and old-fashioned but very light. Even before I consciously thought I might like to live in it, I found myself imagining where I’d place various pieces of furniture, wondering whether my round breakfast table would fit in the kitchen, or which wall I’d put my headboard against in the master bedroom upstairs. The house was empty—there was a convoluted story I half listened to Nadine tell about the owner having moved to Tennessee six months before but putting the house on the market only this week. I peeked behind the shower curtain and opened all the closets; I walked down to the basement. The clincher was a little oak cabinet in the second-floor hallway, shoulder-high, with a clasp that you turned shut. It was about the size of a medicine cabinet you’d find behind a bathroom mirror but slightly deeper—too small to keep linens or cleaning supplies or anything truly practical. It seemed a place to store love letters, secret charms or trinkets.

Back in Nadine’s car, I said, “I want it.”

“Aren’t we decisive all of a sudden.”

“You were right,” I said. “It’s perfect.”

“All right, then.” Nadine seemed amused. “If you’re sure you wouldn’t like to sleep on it first, how much are you offering?”

The asking price was thirty-eight thousand, four hundred. “Thirty-seven?” I said uncertainly.

She shook her head. “Thirty-two. You’ll go up, he’ll come down, you’ll meet in the middle.” She glanced at her watch—it was a little before five on Thursday afternoon. “You want to give him twenty-four hours?”

“Are we allowed to make him decide that quickly?”

“If you’d rather, we can say forty-eight.”

“No, twenty-four would be great. I just don’t want to be pushy.” In fact, twenty-four hours was preferable; I was driving to Riley on Saturday, and I strongly wished to avoid being on the phone with Nadine in front of my mother or grandmother. I hadn’t told them I was hoping to buy a place because I was afraid my mother would try to give me money, which I doubted she could afford after my father’s death. My plan was to tell them when it was all finished, when rather than just mentioning the possibility, I could invite them to Madison, show them the actual house, and call it mine. The three of us would sit on the front porch drinking lemonade, I thought—well, assuming I bought some outdoor chairs.

“Pushy, my fanny!” Nadine was saying. “You’re offering this man money. Now, the likelihood is that negotiations
will
go through the weekend, but I’ll see what I can do.” She punched my shoulder lightly. “Kind of exciting, huh? Cross your fingers, babycakes.”

THAT NIGHT, ABOUT
twenty minutes after I’d turned out the light for bed, the phone rang, and I thought immediately that it might be Nadine, with an answer already, but when I picked up the receiver, a far more familiar female voice said, “Don’t you dare think of skipping the Hickens’ barbecue.”

“Dena, I thought you had a date tonight, or I’d have called to tell you I made an offer on a house.”

“You finally found one that meets your exacting standards? Hot damn—let’s go see it!”

“Not now,” I said quickly. “We’d be arrested for prowling.” By this point, I was seated at the kitchen table—the kitchen was where I kept my phone—wearing my white sleeveless nightgown. I’d been sleeping in the living room pretty much since school had let out in June. It was not yet ten-thirty, I noted on the wall clock, which meant I really couldn’t scold Dena for calling late. She already mocked my early bedtime, and my usual defense—that I had to get up in the morning to be at school—wouldn’t cut it, given that it was summer. “It’s on McKinley Street,” I said. “Maybe we can go by tomorrow, although I don’t want to jinx it before I hear back.”

Dena sighed extravagantly. “You have no sense of fun. Speaking of which, I ran into Kathleen Hicken at Eagle, and she said you told her you’re going home this weekend. Alice, you can’t make me socialize with those people by myself. Rose Trommler hates me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“All those women are fat, and their husbands are boring.”

“First of all, that’s not true, but if you really feel that way, why are you so intent on going?”

“I have to,” Dena said. “Charlie Blackwell will be there, and I’m planning to seduce him.”

I laughed. “I’m sure you’ll be just fine without me.”

“Charlie
Blackwell,
” she said. “As in
the
Blackwells.”

“Oh, Dena, do you really want to be mixed up with that family?” The Blackwells, as everyone from Wisconsin knew, had made their fortune in meat products. (There were several plants near Milwaukee, and it was said you could now buy a package of Blackwell sausage at any grocery store in the country—not, I thought, that you’d necessarily want to. It was what I’d grown up eating, but as an adult, I found it rather greasy.) Harold Blackwell, this generation’s paterfamilias, had served as Wisconsin’s governor from ’59 to ’67 and then made an unsuccessful presidential bid in ’68. A week after a rally at UW in which a young woman named Donna Ann Keske, a sophomore from Racine, was paralyzed from the chest down when police used force to break up the demonstration, Governor Blackwell appeared on
Face the Nation
and called Vietnam protestors “unwashed and uneducated,” thereby demonstrating a tin ear that would have been unfortunate under normal circumstances but was downright callous during a time of such tumult. Though Blackwell was a Republican and from Wisconsin, even my father wouldn’t have supported him had he not dropped out of the presidential race after the New Hampshire primary: He had a disdainful air, as if he didn’t trust the average person to be smart enough to vote for him. Now he was out of politics—I had the dim sense he was head of some university, though I couldn’t have said which—but one of his sons, of whom there were four, had been elected to Congress from Milwaukee the year before. “You know,” I said, “if Charlie is the Blackwell brother I’m thinking of, then Jeanette and Frank tried to set me up with him a couple years ago. But maybe it was a different brother.”