Curtis Sittenfeld - American Wife

The restaurant was called Buddy’s, which had made me imagine it would not be fancy, that we might even be overdressed. But it was fancy, and we were some of the youngest people there. Someone took our coats on our arrival, and the maître d’ led us to the dining room, which was dimly lit, with heavy curtains and large wingback chairs at the tables.

After we’d sat, Marvin said, “To be honest, when my father told me I had to do this, I thought you’d be a dog, but you’re pretty darn cute.”

Uncertainly, I said, “Thanks.”

“Don’t be insulted—I wouldn’t be telling you if you were a dog.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

“You’re still in high school, aren’t you?” When I nodded, he said, “Well, I advise you to stay away from Bryn Mawr. Of all the Seven Sisters, the girls there are the biggest ding-a-lings.”

“Who are the seven sisters?”

He looked at me as if trying to decide whether I was joking or serious. Then, not unkindly, he said, “You really are from a small town. They’re the female counterparts of the Ivies. Radcliffe goes with Harvard, Barnard goes with Columbia, and so on. In New Haven, our sister school is Vassar, though they’re a solid hour and a half away.”

“I want to go to Ersine Teachers College in Milwaukee,” I said. “It’s all girls, so maybe it’s a sister school—I don’t know.”

“It’s not a Seven Sisters school.”

“Yeah, I don’t think it is. I don’t know, though.”

“No,” he said. “It’s definitely not.”

That unsettled feeling from before—it still hadn’t gone away. It was now accompanied by a heat that was spreading through my body, collecting in my cheeks and neck.

“If I order for both of us, I’m sure they’ll bring you a drink,” he said.

“Water is fine.” I touched my fingertips to my face and, as I’d expected, my skin was burning. “Excuse me for a second.” The bathroom was also fancy: An attendant, a black girl who looked not much older than I, was sitting by the sink, and every stall had a wooden door that went all the way up to the ceiling; inside the stall, the fixture holding the toilet paper was gold. As my mother had taught me, I placed a strip of paper on either side of the seat before I sat down, and when I was finished urinating, I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees, covering my face with my hands. It was not that I definitely would throw up, but the possibility existed. Was I really such a social coward? Though I didn’t think I cared what Marvin thought of me, perhaps my body knew more than my mind.

Conscious of the attendant out by the sink, I forced myself to stand, flush, and fix my clothes. I washed my hands, and when the woman passed me a towel, I said—I’d seen the dish of coins—“I’m sorry, but I left my purse at the table.”

When I returned to the dining room, Marvin said, “I took the liberty of ordering an hors d’oeuvre. How do you feel about escargot?”

“That’s fine.” I had, of course, never tasted them, though I knew what they were, and they sounded awful. When the waiter brought the small white bowl filled with brown globs in a pool of melted butter, I had to look away. For a main course, Marvin asked for fricassee of rabbit—smirking, he added, “With apologies to Mr. Bugs Bunny”—and I asked for steak; it seemed like something that wouldn’t hold surprises, it would be straightforward, and I could take three bites, then push the rest around my plate.

Marvin leaned intently across the table. “Here’s a moral dilemma for you. You’ve built a bomb shelter in your backyard, and your neighbors haven’t. When the Soviets attack, you hightail it to your shelter, but your neighbors come around begging for food and water. What do you do?”

“What?” I said.

“Alice, do you follow current affairs? And I don’t mean what hat Jackie Kennedy is wearing this week and who designed her dress.”

“Sometimes I read the newspaper.” One of my organs had just done a somersault inside my stomach, which was distracting enough that Marvin’s condescension didn’t really offend me.

“You shoot ’em dead,” he said. “That’s what you do. If your neighbors didn’t plan ahead, their survival isn’t your responsibility.”

This was when the waiter arrived with our entrées, and my steak was a lump of brown meat still attached to the bone, accompanied by menacingly glistening peas and carrots, and a baked potato bulging at the seams. I knew I couldn’t eat any of it; I couldn’t touch it.

“The thing no one realizes about Khrushchev—” Marvin began, and I said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t feel very well. I need to leave.”

“Now?” Marvin looked bewildered.

“I’m sorry.” I stood. “Please stay. I’ll be fine getting back to Dr. Wycomb’s.”

“Are you sure?”

“Both our meals shouldn’t go to waste. I’m so sorry.” I hurried through the restaurant and retrieved my coat from the coat-check man, who spoke as he passed it to me, but I walked outside without replying. I was dizzy and scalding hot, focused only on not letting the horrible churning inside me erupt into something public and visible. If I could just get back to Dr. Wycomb’s empty apartment, I could sit on the bathroom floor next to the toilet, and it would all emerge in an orderly fashion; this moment would pass with no one watching.

Walk forward over the sidewalk, I thought, and as I repeated the phrase in my head, it seemed, in my unsteadiness and desperation, to be a palindrome I was inside of, a purgatory of nausea. It was brutally cold outside, which at first was an improvement over the restaurant but quickly became its own misery. Then, miraculously, I’d reached Dr. Wycomb’s building. The doorman nodded as I went in, and the elevator attendant also seemed to recognize me. “Happy New Year,” he said, and I did not respond, again aware of the rudeness of my silence yet afraid to open my mouth.

The gold silk wallpaper then, the hallway, the door to Dr. Wycomb’s apartment, my hands shaking as I turned the key she’d given me. There was music playing when I entered the apartment—it was jazz and it was loud—and this was why, in spite of my nausea, I did not immediately step from the foyer into the hall leading to the bedrooms. Having believed the apartment would be vacant on my return, I was surprised and curious (could Myra be playing this noisy music? But no, she’d gone home late that afternoon), so I stepped instead into the living room, and just before I crossed the threshold, I heard my grandmother’s laughter, and just after I heard her laughter, I saw her sitting on Dr. Wycomb’s lap, kissing Dr. Wycomb on the lips.

Dr. Wycomb was dressed in a burgundy silk bathrobe; my grandmother was wearing a beige bra and a beige half-slip trimmed with lace. She was facing Dr. Wycomb, and their mouths were open a little and their eyes were closed, and the kiss went on for several seconds and had not yet stopped when I backed out, so stunned that briefly, my shock outweighed my queasiness. I had to leave the apartment; there was no alternative. And so I did, handling the door as carefully and quietly as possible. In the hall, my nausea came roaring back, and by the time I knew what I was doing, I’d already done it. On either side of the elevator were large metallic vases, almost three feet high, with red bows tied around them and Christmas greens emerging artfully from their centers. Approaching the nearer vase, I pushed aside the greens and then I vomited—hideously, pungently, gloriously—into the vase’s depths.

FOR A LONG time, I remained crumpled on the carpeted floor, spent. I knew I ought to move, to either go downstairs to the lobby or knock on the door and wait for my grandmother or Dr. Wycomb to let me back in the apartment, but neither of these options was appealing. Instead, curled up in my kilt and coat by the elevator, I began to doze. I think about an hour had passed, though it could have been much shorter or longer, by the time the elevator attendant found me. He was the one who knocked on the apartment door, and when Dr. Wycomb answered, I felt like a truant. “She got sick out here,” the attendant said. “Now, I don’t know who’s cleaning it up, but I’ve got an elevator to run tonight.”