American Wife (8 page)

Certainly picturesque towns can be found in New England or California or the Pacific Northwest, but I can’t shake the sense that they’re
too
picturesque. On the East Coast, especially, these places—Princeton, New Jersey, say, or Farmington, Connecticut—seem to me aggressively quaint, unbecomingly smug, and even xenophobic, downright paranoid in their wariness of those who might somehow infringe upon the local charm. I suspect this wariness is tied to the high cost of real estate, the fear that there might not be enough space or money and what there is of both must be clung to and defended. The West Coast, I think, has a similar self-regard—all that talk of proximity to the ocean
and
the mountains—and a beauty that I can’t help seeing as show-offy. But the Midwest: It is quietly lovely, not preening with the need to have its attributes remarked on. It is the place I am calmest and most myself.

THE WEEKEND BEFORE
my senior year of high school, I emerged from Jurec Brothers’ butcher shop late in the afternoon on Saturday, carrying a pound of ground beef my mother had asked me to pick up, when I heard the salutatory honk of a nearby car horn. I turned my head to see a mint-green Ford Thunderbird with a white roof; leaning out the passenger window, tanned and smiling, was Andrew Imhof. I waved as I stepped off the curb, moving between two parked cars. When I was closer, I could see that beyond Andrew, driving, was his brother, Pete; the car was a two-seater.

“Welcome back,” Andrew said.

“How’d you know I was gone?”

“After you weren’t at Pine Lake the other night, I thought you might be sick, but Dena said—not that Dena and I are—I just ran into her there—”

“Not that he’s feeding at her trough again,” Pete said. “He wants to make that perfectly clear.” Pete leaned over the steering wheel and grinned sarcastically. He was four years older; after high school, he’d gone on to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and presumably, he’d graduated the previous June. He and Andrew didn’t look much alike: They had the same hazel eyes, but Pete didn’t have Andrew’s impossible eyelashes, and where Andrew was lean and fair, Pete was meaty and had darker hair. He looked like an adult man, and not a terribly appealing one.

Andrew rolled his eyes good-naturedly in the direction of his brother and said to me, “Ignore him. You were in Michigan, huh?”

“My dad wanted to see the Mackinac Bridge, and then we went to Mackinac Island. They don’t have any cars there, only carriages.”

“Where goeth the horses, so goeth the shit,” Pete said. “Am I right?”

“Pretend he’s not there,” Andrew said.

“It sounds like a lot of people were at Pine Lake,” I said. “Dena told me it was the most fun she’d had all summer.”

“Really?” Andrew looked amused. “It was mostly just Bobby challenging anyone who’d listen to a chicken fight. The real party will be next weekend at Fred’s, have you heard about that? If it gets below seventy-five degrees, we’re making a bonfire.”

Pete leaned forward again. “And Andrew promises he’ll roast you a nice big wiener. This has been a fascinating conversation, but I’ve got places to go, little brother. You and Alice want to wrap things up?”

Andrew shook his head again, and Pete revved the engine. “Sorry,” Andrew said to me. “See you on Tuesday at school. Hey, pretty cool we’ll finally be seniors, huh?”

I smiled. “The great class of ’64.”

The mint-green Thunderbird pulled away, and as I walked home carrying the ground beef for my mother, an unexpected energy seized me, spurred by a jumble of fresh thoughts: how good Andrew looked, tanned from the summer sun; how weird it was that Pete Imhof knew my name; how excited I felt for the start of school, for new classes and the perks of being the oldest students; and how much I hoped it fell below seventy-five degrees on Saturday so they’d build the bonfire at Fred’s party and I could stand next to it, braced by that wall of heat against my body, watching the leap of the flames, being reminded, as I always was by fires, that they were alive and so was I.

WHEN I SAW
Andrew over the next few days, sitting a couple rows ahead of me in the bleachers at the assembly that first morning back, or pulling books out of his locker in a crowded hall between classes, there was little chance of us talking, or even making eye contact, and I didn’t try. I was always with Dena or another friend, or he was with guys from football, and I felt like what I had to say to him, I could say only when we were alone. It wasn’t even that I
knew
what I wanted to say, but surely, if we found ourselves with no one else around, I’d be able to come up with something.

All that week, I had the sense that we were making our way toward each other—even when we passed outside the science classrooms, headed in opposite directions, I had this sense—and I was not surprised on Thursday afternoon when, half an hour after the final bell of the day had rung, I walked out of the library and saw him coming from the gym, dressed for football practice in a jersey and those shortened pants, holding his helmet in his right hand. Looking back, I find it hard to trust my memory of this episode, hard to believe I’m not infusing it with meaning it didn’t contain at the time. It was a sunny afternoon (as it turned out, the temperature would not fall below seventy-five degrees that Saturday, or for another few weeks), and the cicadas were buzzing and the trees and grass were green, and we were walking toward each other, he was squinting against the sun, we both were smiling, and I loved him, I loved him completely, and I knew that he loved me back. I could feel it. That moment—inside it, I could anticipate the thing I most wanted and I could be beyond it, it had happened already, and I was ensconced in the rich reassurance of knowing it was certain and definite.

Or maybe this is only what I think now. But it was all we ever had! Approaching each other, him from the gym, me from the library—this was when I walked down the aisle and he was waiting, this was when we made love, it was every anniversary, every reunion in an airport or train station, every reconciliation after a quarrel. This was the whole of our lives together.

It seemed like the natural thing to do when we were in front of each other would have been to embrace, but we didn’t. It is a great regret, though not, certainly, my greatest. We stood there with the roiling energy of not hugging between us, and he said, “Sorry about my brother the other day,” gesturing over his shoulder as if perhaps Pete were nearby. “I hope he didn’t offend you.”

“No, he’s funny, but you two seem very different.”

“Wait, I’m
not
funny?”

“No, you’re funny, too,” I said. “You’re both funny.”

“That’s very diplomatic—I appreciate it. You coming to the game tomorrow?”

“I’ll be selling popcorn.” Working at the refreshment stand was one of my Spirit Club duties. “I heard you’re starting this year,” I said.

“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.