Curtis Sittenfeld - American Wife

We’re not worth it!

I want to say.

You should have paid off your credit-card bill, invested in your grandchild’s college fund, taken a vacation to the Ozarks.

Instead, in a few weeks, they receive in the mail a photo with one or both of us, signed by an autopen, which they can frame so that we might grin out into their living room for years to come.

But there was one fund-raiser that, to my own surprise, I did find fun. This was a million-dollar dinner held at a former plantation in Mobile, Alabama, in July 2000. Charlie and I always ate at separate tables, and that night I was assigned to be with the wife of the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, two well-dressed middle-aged couples who looked like variations of the people we knew in Maronee, and a father-and-son duo. Before an event, an aide provides a paragraph or two describing each of the bigwigs who will be in attendance, and that evening, the original plan had been that I’d be sitting between a man named Beau Phillips, who owned a regional chain of fast-food restaurants, and a man named Leon Tasket, who was the CFO of the largest producer of industrial machinery in Alabama. As it turned out, Leon Tasket’s wife had come down with the flu, and in her stead—it’s hard to imagine this last-minute switch happening now or at any point after Charlie became president—Mr. Tasket had brought his adult son Dale, a tall, heavy, mentally disabled fellow. Though I suspect Dale had the intellectual aptitude of a nine-or ten-year-old, I wouldn’t have guessed this if I’d been observing him from any distance—his features weren’t irregular, except perhaps that he looked friendlier than most other guests. When it was time to sit for dinner, the men at the table remained standing while I and the other wives found our places, and Dale, to whom I had been briefly introduced a minute before, plopped next to me in the seat that had a place card for his father; Mrs. Tasket’s place card was one more over. “Oh, no, you don’t,” Leon Tasket said immediately. Mr. Tasket was shorter and wirier than his son, with a well-trimmed white beard and mustache and a three-piece suit. “Boy, if Miss Alice Blackwell saw the way you ate, she’d be scared half to death.”

I smiled, shaking my head. “It’s fine with me if he stays there—if it’s all right with you, that is.”

“That’s an awful brave lady who doesn’t mind sitting in the vicinity of a black bear, isn’t it, Dale? You think we should call her bluff?”

On the stage just above our heads, a man in a flag tie was tapping the microphone, saying, “If you’ll all take your seats . . . ” At another table, Charlie sat between the governor and the state’s Republican Party chair.

“Really,” I said. “It’s fine.”

As waiters brought our salads, Beau Phillips, the fast-food honcho on my right, said, “Your husband is on a sure path to victory,” and simultaneously, on my left, Dale said, “My favorite actress is Drew Barrymore, do you know who Drew Barrymore is?” Both men had endearingly thick southern accents, though only one of them—Dale—was talking with his mouth full; he had torn into his salad with gusto. To Mr. Phillips, I said, “Thank you,” and then I turned toward Dale. “I do know who she is.”

“The liberal elite has lost touch with real American values,” Mr. Phillips said. ”We need someone to stand up to those activist judges pushing for the homosexual agenda. That lifestyle might cut it in the Northeast, but I’ll tell you what, it sure doesn’t fly down here.”

Mildly, I said, “I know Charlie likes to focus on what we as Americans have in common.”

“Did you see her in

The Wedding Singer

?” Dale was asking.

I turned back. “I didn’t, but I’ve heard of it.”

“She’s the most pretty and talented actress there is,” Dale said, and his father, who’d been talking to the chairman’s wife on his other side, chuckled and said, “If I were a bettin’ man, I’d say we must be discussin’ Drew Barrymore.”

“I saw her when she was a little girl in

E.T.,

” I said. “Oh, and you know what, Dale—my daughter and I recently watched a movie she was in called

Never Been Kissed.

Have you seen that?”

It was Mr. Tasket who said, “Have we seen

Never Been Kissed

? Only three times a week do we see

Never Been Kissed

at our house. I’ve watched that little movie more times than I’ve watched the evenin’ news.”

“Mr. Coulson thinks Josie’s a student, but when he finds out she works for the newspaper, they can fall in love,” Dale said.

“I remember that part,” I said.

“Drew’s birthday is February twenty-second, 1975,” Dale said. “That means she’s twenty-five and seven months and three days, and she’s a Pisces, and I’m a Gemini, but I’m older than her because I’m forty.”

Dale’s father had faded again from the conversation, but on my right, Mr. Phillips said, “This election will be a real comeuppance for the Democrats. You mark my words, we’ll have payback after eight years of them running roughshod.”

“Charlie and I are as curious about what will happen as you are,” I said. To Dale, I said, “If you’re a Gemini, that must mean you were born in May or June.”

“I was born on June third, 1960. What are your hobbies?” Dale had a dab of salad dressing on the outer corner of his lips. “Mine are Nintendo, stamps, and the zoo.”

I couldn’t resist. I said, “It sounds like Drew Barrymore is a hobby of yours, too.”

Dale smiled slyly and said, “A girl can’t be a hobby!” Then he said, “When you come to our house, I’ll show you my Classic American Aircraft stamps. I have all of them, but the best is the Northrop YB-49 Flying Wing.”

“Mrs. Blackwell, are you and your husband in the area for long?” This came from a wife across the table, but Dale preempted my response by saying, “And the Thunderbolt is real cool, too.”

I said to the woman (I already couldn’t remember her name), “Unfortunately, we fly out tonight, and I’m sorry, because it would be fun to explore. I was just reading about the Bellingrath Gardens.”

“When you’re next here, you ought to go over to the Eastern Shore. We all have places there”—she gestured to the other couples at the table—“and it’s a wonderful place to relax, very quiet. Campaigning must be tiring.”

They were polite, all of them, and they also were clearly irritated that Dale was monopolizing my attention, and that his father and I were allowing it. And I was fully complicit—what could have been more delightful than to sit beside someone brimming with his own interests and enthusiasms, none of which was political, a person who neither knew nor cared who I was beyond the fact that I’d heard of Drew Barrymore and was willing to talk about her? No one else at the table could compete with Dale’s volubility, his lusty and fearless ingestion of the food on his plate, his ingenuous questions and announcements; I was enchanted. The others at the table soon gave up on me, and several times after I’d been left to conspire with Dale, I noticed his father glancing with amusement at us, and I wondered if he hadn’t brought his son as a sort of joke, an antidote to the stuffiness rampant at these fund-raisers. There was something fearless about Mr. Tasket, too; despite his earlier demurrals when Dale had sat by me, he seemed unapologetic about having brought his mentally disabled adult son to a fancy dinner.

When our entrées came, I wasn’t particularly hungry and ended up offering my sirloin to Dale, which he accepted with great pleasure. He said, “Are you sure?” He ate my dessert, too, a strawberry shortcake.