Curtis Sittenfeld - American Wife

When I did, we were body to body in a way we hadn’t been before. I could feel the heat of him, the solidity, and a calmness came over me; it made the conversation we’d been having seem like nothing, the words were nothing, they were raindrops or confetti, and holding on to each other was real.

When the song ended, we stepped apart, and then Bobby Sobczak approached Andrew, and I made my way to Betty Bridges at the refreshment table. Ten minutes had passed when Dena materialized, her cheeks flushed and liquor on her breath. “Were you dancing with Andrew?” she asked, and she sounded not quite accusatory but almost—she was forceful and intensely curious.

I was under the impression that she’d been outside all this time, which meant someone else must have already told her. “When you all left, I guess he saw me standing by myself,” I said. “He probably felt sorry for me.”

But I knew that wasn’t true. At one point, near the end of the song, Andrew had inhaled deeply, and I’d been pretty sure he was smelling my hair.

THAT AUGUST, MY grandmother returned to Chicago to visit Gladys Wycomb, and my father, mother, and I packed our suitcases and ourselves into our sedan—it was a turquoise 1956 Chevy Bel Air, with a silver hood ornament shaped like a paper airplane—and we drove north through Wisconsin to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to visit the Mackinac Bridge, aka the Mighty Mac. As we approached the St. Ignace side, my father, who’d driven the entire way up to this point, pulled over and switched places with my mother so he’d be free to look around as we crossed the bridge. It went on and on, over rough blue water, and on the other side, my mother turned around and we drove back, heading north. It was a toll bridge costing fifty cents, which wasn’t much, but still, it was an uncharacteristic indulgence on my father’s part. We parked on the shores of St. Ignace, my mother and I wearing jackets even though it was summer, and my father shook his head happily. “Imagine all the concrete, steel, and cables running for five miles over water,” he said. “That’s a remarkable feat of engineering.”

The sky beyond the bridge held curvy cirrus clouds, and in the air you could feel fall’s approach. Back in Riley, it was still hot.

“Shall we stroll for a bit?” my father asked.

We walked along an esplanade. At intervals, coin-operated binoculars sat atop poles, and my father paused at several of them, though I couldn’t really see how the view would change much from one to the next. “Before they built the bridge, it used to take people an hour to get across by ferry,” he said. “But sometimes there was such backup you’d have to wait ten or twelve hours before there was room for your car.”

I nodded, while inside I was thinking of the announcement I’d make. Granny is having an affair with Dr. Wycomb, I would say. Briefly, I had believed she wouldn’t return to Chicago now that I knew her secret. Or maybe she didn’t realize I knew. But she had to, otherwise she’d have demanded more explanation for my sullenness.

“Can you imagine having the patience to wait twelve hours?” my mother was saying.

Should I have guessed about my grandmother? I had read The Well of Loneliness at the age of fourteen, pulling it down from her shelf and returning it with slight confusion at the idea of two women falling in love, but not enough to ask her about it. Anyhow, that book had been set decades ago, and in England. For my own grandmother, the grandmother living in my house, who used the same bar of soap in the bathroom that I did, whose jewelry and high heels I’d dressed up in as a little girl—for her to be in a homosexual relationship didn’t make sense. She’d been married, she’d had a child! And even if it was true, why hadn’t she been more careful to prevent me from becoming party to her secret? She was making me choose between her and my parents, and what sort of choice was that? In a way, I had always loved her more deeply, I had loved her most, but I had thought she and I were conspiring to conceal this hurtful fact.

We were passing another set of binoculars, and my father stooped and peered into them. When he rejoined us, he took my mother’s hand, and I could sense the buoyancy of his enthusiasm.

For the next three nights, we stayed in a motel in St. Ignace, all of us in one room. The motel was called Three Breezes and had a pool in which my father swam laps, though my mother and I found it too cold. On the day we hiked the sand dunes of Lake Michigan, I thought, I will tell them in fifteen minutes. In another fifteen minutes. When we’re back in the car. The day after that, we took the ferry to Mackinac Island, where we rode in a horse-drawn carriage, ate fudge, and had lunch at a restaurant in the Grand Hotel. “Maybe you’ll come back someday for your honeymoon,” my mother said, and she squeezed my knee beneath the table. They are having an affair, I thought, and Dr. Wycomb is giving her lavish presents, and maybe she’s even giving her money.

During our last dinner in St. Ignace, my parents drank two bottles of wine between them, and later, my father convinced my mother to swim with him in the motel pool, the sky dark but the pool lit up. From the room, I could hear them giggling. I went to sleep, and the next morning, I opened my eyes and thought, They already know. I listened to them sleeping in the bed across from mine, my mother’s deep breathing and my father’s quiet snores, as if even when asleep, he was trying to be polite. They already know, I thought, and if they don’t, it’s because they’ve chosen not to. Surely that accounted for my father’s initial resistance to my accompanying my grandmother to Chicago the previous winter. I would say nothing, I realized, because it wasn’t necessary, it wasn’t my place. I was glad then that I had not previously been able to express the words.

And really, what has stayed with me from that vacation as much as my own suspicious, petty agonizing is my father on the esplanade just after our arrival. The wind blew his hair, and he was fidgety with delight, straining to explain to my mother and me exactly why the Mighty Mac was so impressive. I wondered at the time—I wonder still—if that was the happiest my father had ever been.

IT TOOK LONGER, but we drove home via the southern route: once more across the Mighty Mac (this time I was allowed to take the wheel), then down through the lower part of Michigan, curving southwest through the edge of Indiana and northwest into Illinois, where, at a train station in Bolingbrook, thirty miles outside Chicago, we picked up my grandmother. She and I sat together in the backseat, but she seemed to have given up on me months before and was reading Anna Karenina. “That’s the second time, isn’t it?” my mother asked, and my grandmother said a little tartly, “It’s the fourth.”

Then we were back in Wisconsin, a place that in late summer is thrillingly beautiful. When I was young, this was knowledge shared by everyone around me; as an adult, I’ve never stopped being surprised by how few of the people with whom I interact have any true sense of the states between Pennsylvania and Colorado. Some of these people have even spent weeks or months working in such states, but unless they’re midwesterners, too, to them the region is nothing but polling numbers and caucuses, towns or cities where they stay in hotels whose bedspreads are glossy maroon and brown on the outside and pilly on the inside, whose continental breakfasts are packaged doughnuts and cereal from a dispenser, whose fitness centers are a single stationary bike and a broken treadmill. These people eat dinner at Perkins, and then they complain about the quality of the restaurants.