Curtis Sittenfeld - American Wife

This morning, when I assumed that it was Dena Janaszewski who had contacted Hank’s office, it made a sort of sense—there was unfinished business between Dena and me, and this would be a reckoning. Learning, then, that the blackmail threat had nothing to do with her was almost a disappointment. I’ve often recalled that afternoon in Riley when she gave Ella the tiara—the more time has passed, the surer I have become that it was Dena and not her mother who did it, and that the gesture was a peace offering as opposed to a taunt—and I’ve regretted that I didn’t reciprocate in some way. But that happened during such a topsy-turvy episode in my life, when every relationship other than the one I had with Charlie felt peripheral. All these years later, I am afraid I missed an opportunity, and I’m increasingly aware that if I don’t initiate it, I might not have another. Like most people, I’ve always been able to reassure myself, on entering a new decade, that I’m still not old, that my previous sense of this age, thirty or forty or fifty, was skewed by my own youth. I even managed this feat of self-persuasion after turning sixty—sixty-year-olds bungee jump and swim the English Channel!—but at this point, I’ve reached the age when, if something happened to me, it would be sad but not tragic. I would be slightly young, but only slightly. In the same vein, if I were to hear someday that Dena had died—it’s hard to know how the news would make its way to me, with my mother in her condition and both Dena’s parents deceased, but surely I’d find out eventually—I could not be shocked. Other peers have passed on, Rose Trommler from Madison died of breast cancer in 2003, and last year my high school classmate Betty Bridges Scannell’s husband had a brain aneurysm while they were on a cruise in the Caribbean. The sadness of these deaths clung to me for several days after I received word of them, but it would be remorse, a deep remorse, rather than mere sorrow I’d feel about Dena. For the first three decades of my life—for half of it—I didn’t have a closer friend. Sure, she had her shortcomings, but who doesn’t? She was lively and funny, she was much more daring than I was, and we knew each other so well; friendships have survived on far less.

It is strange to realize that at this point, my closest friend is probably Jessica. Jadey and I still speak once a week, and she visits us in Washington, sometimes with Arthur and sometimes without him, several times a year. Having her in the White House is always a tremendous breath of fresh air—she’ll say to Charlie, “I’m only calling you Mr. President if you call me Dame Jadey,” and she complains that visiting us makes her constipated because she can’t comfortably go to the bathroom in such a historic setting—but there is an unspoken wedge between us that has grown over time. Although she’s a Republican, she took it hard when Charlie supported the amendment to ban gay marriage; she remains tight with her interior-decorator friend Billy Torks, whom I always got a kick out of but haven’t seen for years. While that was a passing tension, I think this is the ongoing problem for Jadey and me: Once our lives were alike, and now they’re not. She still attends Garden Club meetings, she’s joined the board of the Milwaukee Art Museum, she fund-raises for Biddle even though both Drew and Winnie graduated years ago, and all these activities are parts of her life I envy, I feel a great pull of sentimentality when she mentions them, but she has made it clear that she thinks I must find it boring and provincial when she tells stories about Maronee. Despite my repeated efforts to convince her otherwise, she refuses to believe I’d far prefer discussing her life to mine. She says, “No, no, tell me what the king and queen of Spain were like.”

It feels unseemly to complain to my extended family or to friends from Wisconsin, so I don’t. Early on in Charlie’s political career, I once mentioned to another of my sisters-in-law, Ginger, that I was worried about the floral arrangements for a ball we were hosting in Madison, and she said, “I think it takes real nerve for you to complain about anything like that when Ed deserved to be governor a lot more than Chas.” I found this to be a breathtaking comment not least because of Ginger’s usual meekness, but perhaps even more surprising than the shift in Ginger was the one in Priscilla, who was the last person I’d have expected to be swayed by our fame: Shortly after Charlie was elected governor, she confided in me that I had always been her favorite daughter-in-law; she’d long believed we shared a similar sensibility. When Charlie was elected president, she began telling not just me but our relatives and also the media that I was her favorite

person.

As for the other women I knew in Maronee or Madison, my friends from Garden Club or the mothers of Ella’s classmates, so colorful and distracting is the pageantry of my life now that I think they have trouble remembering I am still myself, that my concerns are often mundane—my favorite shampoo has been discontinued, my husband snores, I struggle to find time to exercise—and that when my concerns aren’t mundane, when I’m worried about war or terrorism, the grandiosity of my anxiety doesn’t vault it into another category of emotion unimaginable to them; they’d be able to imagine it just fine if they could stop being impressed.

These all are reasons I so value Jessica, though I recognize that because I am her employer, ours is not a pure friendship. But the fact that we aren’t peers makes things easier, I think; unlike Jadey, she is not comparing herself to me or her husband to mine. (In 2002, Jessica married a lovely man named Keith who works for the World Bank; Charlie and I attended the wedding at the Washington Club on Dupont Circle, and at the reception, Charlie danced with Miss Ruby, now retired and in her eighties but still energetically grumpy, and I danced with Jessica’s younger brother, Antoine, then a six-foot-tall freshman at Biddle Academy.) Jessica and I have formed a two-woman book club; we switch off picking titles, and though there are no official rules other than that the books must be fiction, we tend to read translations of ones by authors from countries we’ve either just visited or are about to visit. In general, it’s not that I can explain to Jessica my first-lady angst—it’s that I don’t have to. She is part of everything that happens, she knows exactly how scripted and confined and luxurious my life is, how the strangest parts are what the public

doesn’t

see: that when Ella and I traveled to Peru, the hotel pool was drained as a safety precaution and filled with bottled water so we could swim in it; that I am called on by the White House’s chief usher to start preparing for Christmas—the parties and cards and decorations—every April.

“I’ll visit my mother on the next trip,” I say to Jessica. “It’s Dena Janaszewski I’d like to see, if we could arrange it.”

If Jessica is caught off guard, she doesn’t show it, a mark of her professionalism being that she expresses surprise only over minor matters and never over significant ones. I had an abortion? She simply nods. But I’m wearing magenta high heels? “Whoa!” she’ll exclaim. “Hey there, Mrs. Fashionista!”

She looks at her watch and says in an even tone, “It’s now one-twenty Central time, meaning two-twenty in D.C. Assuming it takes us an hour and forty minutes to fly back and then twenty minutes to get to the residence, that puts us at four-twenty without the stop in Riley, and the choir tour is scheduled for five-fifteen. Would you like me to delay the tour, cancel it, or find a substitute?”

The punctuality Charlie’s administration is known for is not something his own family was stringent about when he was growing up, but it’s another of the ways he sought to impose discipline on himself after he quit drinking. Following his example, I, too, strive to be on time; to do otherwise seems a form of arrogance. Furthermore, while it rarely bothers me to decline requests or invitations, it weighs on me when I make a commitment and am unable to honor it, and it weighs most heavily when that commitment involves children. And yet I want to see Dena today; I want to see her, and I want to see Pete, too, if they’re still together.