Curtis Sittenfeld - American Wife

“Well, I waited long enough.” He laughed a little in a self-effacing rather than bitter way. “No one would mistake me for Pete, that’s for sure.”

This was true—before we’d gotten to high school, Andrew’s brother had been a star running back for the Knights—but I said, “No, you look very tough in your football gear.” Immediately, hearing myself, I began to blush.

“Yeah?” Andrew was watching me. “Do I look like I could protect you?”

We both were smiling; every reference one of us made the other would get, every remark was a joke or a compliment, and I suddenly thought, Flirting.

Then—I couldn’t help it—I said, “Why did you go steady with Dena?”

“Because I was eleven years old.” He still was smiling. “I didn’t know better.”

“But you kept going steady with her. For four years!”

“Were you jealous?”

“I thought it was”—I paused—“odd.”

“When Dena was my girlfriend,” he said, “it meant I got to spend time around you.”

Was he teasing? “If that’s true, it’s not very nice to Dena,” I said.

“Alice!” He seemed both amused and genuinely concerned that he’d displeased me.

I looked at the ground. What was I trying to express, anyway? The important thing I’d been planning all week to say when Andrew and I were alone—it was eluding me.

“What about this?” he said. “What if I try to be nicer from now on?”

Looking up, I said, “I’ll try to be nicer, too.”

He laughed. “You’ve always been nice.” There was a pause, and then he asked, “Is that a heart?” He reached forward and lifted the silver pendant on my necklace, holding it lightly, the tips of his fingers grazing the hollow of my clavicle.

“My grandmother gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday,” I said.

“It’s pretty.” He set the pendant back against my neck. “I should probably go to practice so I don’t get yelled at. If I don’t see you tomorrow after the game, you’ll be at Fred’s on Saturday, right?”

I nodded. “Will it be more a party where people come on time or later?”

“I’ll leave my house about seven-thirty. You should come then, too.” Andrew was unusually direct, especially for a boy in high school; I think it came from an understated confidence. When I got to college, the guys and girls seemed to play such games, the girl waiting a certain number of days to return a phone call, or the guy calling only after the girl didn’t talk to him at a party or he saw her out with someone else. But maybe, unlike those boys and girls in college, Andrew genuinely liked me. Then I think no, maybe he didn’t. Maybe, because of what occurred later, I invented for us a great love; I have been granted the terrible privilege of deciding what would have happened with no one left to contradict me. And maybe I am absolutely wrong.

After we said goodbye, I turned around, watching for a second as he walked toward the bleachers beyond which were the track and the football field: his light brown hair, his moderately broad shoulders further broadened by shoulder pads, his tan golden-haired calves emerging from those pants that stopped well before his ankles. When you are a high school girl, there is nothing more miraculous than a high school boy.

And despite my concerns that I am manipulating the past, whenever I doubt that Andrew had feelings for me and that those feelings would have grown over time, that we had finally reached an age when something real could unfold between us, I think back to him examining my necklace, holding the pendant and asking what it was. That was obviously just an excuse to touch me. After all, everyone knows what a heart is.

THAT EVENING, I was washing dishes with my mother after dinner when there was a knock on the front door. My father and grandmother were playing Scrabble in the living room, and I heard my father answer the door and then say, “Hello there, Dena.”

“Offer her some peach cobbler,” my mother said, and Dena, entering the kitchen, said, “No thank you, Mrs. Lindgren. We just ate, too.” To me, Dena mouthed, I need to talk to you.

“Mom, may I be excused?” I said.

As soon as we were upstairs in my bedroom, Dena folded her arms and said, “If you try to get Andrew to be your boyfriend, I’ll never forgive you.”

I closed the door and sat in the rocking chair in the corner. Sitting there made me feel like a visitor in my own room; my parents had given me the chair when I entered high school, thinking I’d use it to read in, but when I read, I always laid in bed. Dena was leaning against the bureau.

“Andrew’s not my boyfriend,” I said.

“But you want him to be. Nancy saw you flirting with him in front of the library after school.”

How could I deny it? Even in the moment, I’d realized that was exactly what I was doing.

“And I already know you two danced at prom.”

“I didn’t think you still liked him,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter. If you’re my friend, you won’t steal a guy who belonged to me.”

“Dena, Andrew’s not a pair of shoes.”

“So it’s true you’re going after him?”

I looked away.

“I could get him back if I wanted,” she said. “He still carries a torch for me.”

Given my conversation with Andrew earlier in the day, this seemed unlikely, but I didn’t underestimate Dena—she’d once before surprised me with her ability to turn Andrew’s head.

Carefully, I said, “You haven’t dated him for two years, and now you have Robert. You don’t even mention Andrew anymore.”

“You mean every day I’m supposed to say, ‘I sure wonder what he’s up to! Hmm, I hope Andrew’s happy right now!’—that’s what I should tell you?” Color had risen in her cheeks, an outraged pink, and it was her very sincerity, her righteousness, that got to me.

“Dena, you took him from me! And you know it. In sixth grade, you wrote that stupid letter, and even though he said he liked me, you bullied him into being your boyfriend. How do you think I felt all that time? But I kept being your friend, and now it’s my turn.”

Dena glared at me. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house,” she said angrily. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

I never entirely trusted Dena’s religiosity—the Janaszewskis were Catholic, but I knew their attendance at church was spotty. I said, “I’m no guiltier of coveting than you.”

Dena took a step toward the door, but before she left, she gave me one last dirty look. “You and Andrew are alike,” she said. “You’re both quiet but selfish.”

DE SOTO WAY heads north from Riley and intersects with Farm Road 177 about five miles outside of town. Saturday, September 7, 1963, was a clear night. I wore a pale blue felt skirt and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, and I carried with me a light pink cardigan mohair sweater. I also wore light pink lipstick, lily-of-the-valley perfume (I had bought it at Marshall Field’s when my grandmother bought her sable stole, my main souvenir from the trip to Chicago), and my heart pendant necklace. Under normal circumstances, I’d have driven out to Fred Zurbrugg’s house with Dena and Nancy Jenzer—Nancy was the only one of the three of us who had her own car, a white Studebaker Lark—but in light of recent developments, I was borrowing my parents’ sedan.

I was pretty sure I looked the best I ever had. I was wearing the unprecedented combination of my favorite skirt, my favorite top, and my favorite piece of jewelry. After dinner with my parents and grandmother, I had tweezed my eyebrows, shaved my legs, and painted my nails. Getting dressed, I had listened to a Shirelles record—sometimes I would almost physically crave the song “Soldier Boy”—and I’d felt when I stood in front of the mirror over my bureau as if the music were building inside me; I was storing it up, and later in the night, I’d use it. In a strange way, my fight with Dena added to rather than detracted from the energy of the evening, amplifying the anticipatory hum in the air.