Curtis Sittenfeld - American Wife

LATE THE NEXT afternoon, when my father was still at work, my grandmother was in the living room smoking and reading Vogue, and my mother and I were preparing dinner, I walked to the edge of the living room. “Mom wants to know if you want the cheese sauce on your broccoli or on the side.”

My grandmother looked up. “On the side will be fine.”

I did n’t move immediately.“ Was that story about Mimi Étoile true?”

My grandmother regarded me. “If it were,” she said at last, “don’t you think it’d be awfully interesting?”

THAT WEDNESDAY MORNING, as I ate oatmeal in the kitchen, my mother said, “Spirit Club meets this afternoon, doesn’t it, sweetie?” And though I had not attended a meeting since the accident, I went because of the willed brightness of her tone, the way she thought—it was touching, really—that if we spoke cheerily, it might mean I hadn’t killed Andrew.

It was an ordinary meeting, with a forty-five-minute argument over whether the GO BENTON KNIGHTS banner for Friday’s football game against Houghton North High should be unfurled at morning assembly or withheld until the actual game; I did not speak at all except to vote yea for opening the banner at assembly. Spirit Club was composed of sixteen girls and one boy, a slim, excitable sophomore named Peter Smyth who was obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor and who would, at any opportunity, impersonate her in her role as a call girl in Butterfield 8.

The next day, I was leaving the cafeteria after lunch when Mary Hafliger, the Spirit Club president, approached me. “Can I speak with you in private?” she asked.

I nodded, and we walked from the noisy cafeteria outside to the faculty parking lot. It was a sunny day, and the leaves on the trees at the parking lot’s edge were red and gold.

“This is hard to tell you,” she said, “but we think you shouldn’t be in Spirit Club anymore.”

I was stunned and also not surprised at all. I expected censure in general, but I was never prepared for it in the moment.

I swallowed. “That’s fine.”

“I knew you would understand,” she said. “It’s just that you make people sad.”

I thought of having defended Mary’s hairy forearms to Dena the previous spring, and then I wondered, had I made people sad at the meeting the day before? It had consisted of nothing but bickering and, at random intervals, Peter Smyth announcing, “ ‘Mama, face it. I was the slut of all time!’ ”

But could I really fault Mary? I was Mimi Étoile, I realized suddenly, I was the girl whose nose had been bitten off by a tiger, and now I reminded cheerful people of life’s sorrow. Or no, maybe I wasn’t Mimi, because she had gone on to find her happy ending. Besides, it had only been her nose.

____

THE NEXT TIME was after school that Friday. He was in the rusty red pickup I’d seen at the Imhofs’ farm, and he’d parked near campus and was sitting in the driver’s seat. When I was right beside the pickup, he said in a low voice, “Alice.” I turned, recognized him, said nothing, and climbed in the truck. We didn’t speak until after we’d made a right into his family’s driveway. I was surprised; without consciously knowing I’d thought that far ahead, I’d assumed we’d go somewhere secluded, that we might even use the bed of the truck.

“But what about your—” I began, and he said, “They’re spending the weekend with my aunt and uncle in Racine.”

In the house, I followed Pete up the stairs; I felt purposeful and not nervous. The first round was like before, both of us on our hands and knees, him behind me. But after we collapsed onto the mattress, we eventually ended up turning over, so we were on our backs next to each other, then he was on his side facing me; because he was taller, his mouth was near the top of my head. This repositioning all took a long time, and we spoke very little. We still were lying like that when he began running his fingers back and forth across the concave dip between my hip bones, his hand dropping progressively lower after each round-trip. When he got where he’d been going, I flinched, which wasn’t the same as not wanting to be touched. He stilled his hand, but he didn’t lift it away, and he didn’t say anything. He was waiting, perhaps, for me to protest. When I didn’t, he proceeded. I shut my eyes. At first my gasps were shallow and quiet, but they grew deeper and louder, and this might have been mortifying if I were still me, if the world still existed, but I wasn’t and it didn’t. I’d open my eyes and see an off-white ceiling, the tops of brown-and-yellow-plaid curtains, and then I’d close my eyes and go back into the roiling blackness of outer space, comets, and asteroids, and then I’d open my eyes again—ceiling, curtains—and the difference was as great as if I’d been sitting at my desk in homeroom one moment and then I’d turned around and found the Great Wall of China stretched out before me. It was not clear whether he rolled onto me or I pulled him, but at some point he was in me again, we were face-to-face, grinding and colliding, and I was gripping his buttocks, and it happened at the same time for both of us, I raised my legs and curled them around his back to pull him as close to me as possible, to make him be as far inside. In retrospect, this whole time period with Pete is so clouded with sorrow and regret that I try not to think of it; sometimes still, it can make me wince. And yet I confess to slight amusement that what happened for us that day in his bedroom, the synchronicity of timing, has never once happened in decades of marriage to a man I love dearly.

Lying there with Pete Imhof, his weight on me as our breathing and our heartbeats slowed, I thought how there was nothing else, nothing on any topic that any person could say. This was the only thing more powerful than grief.

DENA HAD REALIZED that Andrew’s death was an act of God. She told me this while I sat on her bed watching her apply makeup before meeting people at Tatty’s on Saturday night. Several times, she had invited me to go, but I’d declined, and she’d said, “You have to quit thinking about him. Andrew was an angel taken from us too soon, but it’s not for us to ask why.”

Because she’d been having trouble sleeping, she told me, her mother had arranged for her to meet with their priest, and Father Krauss had helped her see that it was all part of God’s plan. “You should talk to your pastor,” she said.

I said nothing, and then she said, “You’re looking at my sideburn stubble, aren’t you?”

“I wasn’t looking at anything.”

“Nancy said I should just grow them out, but how many months will that take? Three?”

I hadn’t told Dena about Andrew’s brother, and I couldn’t. It was not a juicy tidbit, not even a moral quandary for us to debate; it was unspeakable.

“Your sideburns look fine,” I said.

WHEN MY FAMILY walked to Calvary Lutheran that Sunday, I drove back to the Imhofs’ farm. I knocked on the door, and Pete took so long to answer that I decided he wasn’t home, but I knocked once more anyway, for thoroughness. The previous night, the temperature had dropped to the low forties, and I wore a coat.

When he opened the door, he said, “That was stupid of you to come out here. What if my parents were home?”

“You said they went to Racine.”

“I didn’t say when they were coming back.”

“Should I leave?”

He gave me a surly look. “If you’re already here, you might as well come inside.” He turned and headed back toward the kitchen, and as I had both times before, I followed him.

In addition to scrambling what had to be five or six eggs, he was frying sausage and toasting two pieces of bread, and as I watched, he poured himself a glass of orange juice. When he’d assembled all the food on a plate, he sat at the kitchen table, so I sat, too. I took off my coat, folding it and setting it on the chair next to me. Neither of us spoke until Pete had finished his food. He leaned back, folded his arms, and looked at me.