American Wife (9 page)

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.

When I appeared in the living room, my mother said, “Don’t you look nice,” and they all turned toward me. My mother, father, and grandmother were playing bridge with our neighbor, Mrs. Falke, who was a widow, like my grandmother, but a few years younger.

“Who’s the fellow?” my grandmother asked.

“It’s just a regular back-to-school party,” I said. “There’ll be a bonfire.”

“I see.” I could tell my grandmother didn’t believe me, but where the understanding that passed between us in this moment once would have been sympathetic, it now contained a note of antagonism. Nevertheless, I kissed them all on the cheek one by one, even Mrs. Falke, because by the time I’d done everybody else, it felt rude to bypass her.

“You know your curfew,” my father said, and I replied, “Eleven o’clock.”

“Have fun,” my mother called as I stepped out the front door.

In the car, I changed the radio from my father’s preferred station, which featured big-band music, to mine, on which Roy Orbison’s “Dream Baby” was playing. I backed out of the driveway, first setting my arm around the passenger-side seat, as my father had taught me, which always gave me the sense that I was trying to embrace a phantom. It was getting dark, but full darkness hadn’t yet set in.

I wondered if Andrew and I would kiss that night, if we’d slip away from the other people, perhaps go for a walk in the apple orchard near Fred’s family’s farmhouse. I suspected there would be alcohol at the party, but if it were offered to me, I wouldn’t accept—I didn’t want Andrew to think I was trashy. At the same time, I was glad I’d kissed those other boys, Bobby and Rudy in ninth grade, Larry the previous winter and then again when he’d walked me to the door after prom, both of us seeming to recognize that we would never speak again but kissing anyway, maybe for that very reason. Now, when a kiss mattered, I wouldn’t be wholly unprepared.

I couldn’t imagine Andrew trying to take advantage of me, or talking afterward with other boys; I trusted him. And would
he
be the person I eventually gave my virginity to, not anytime soon but if we got married, or possibly even if we were engaged, because wasn’t that almost the same? This line of thought made my mind jump to Dena and how I’d greet or not greet her at the party. I would be polite, I decided. I would try to catch her eye, and if she seemed receptive, I’d say hello. But if she looked away sulkily, I would say nothing and let time pass before calling her the following week. I didn’t want to have any sort of public conflict—no doubt if we did, it would be terrifically entertaining to our classmates and probably serve as the defining event of the evening, but how mortifying.

And this was what I was pondering, this was the subject my skittering, fickle mind had landed upon, when I breezed through the intersection of De Soto Way and Farm Road 177 and collided loudly with a blur of pale metal. Very quickly, it had already happened. I was lying on my back on the gravel road; my door had flown open, I’d been thrown about eight feet from the car, and shards of glass were sprinkled around me. It was dark by then, the sun had set perhaps half an hour earlier, and I lay there, first confused and then so startled and upset that I had difficulty catching my breath. The collision (how had it occurred, where had the other car come from?) had been a squealing boom accompanied by the shatter of windshields, and now my car and the other one were making creaking, whirring noises of adjustment. Oddly, my radio was still playing—the song was “Venus in Blue Jeans.” The other car must have been making a right turn from Farm Road 177 onto De Soto Way, I thought, because when I lifted my head, I saw that the hood of my parents’ Bel Air was smashed up against the driver’s door. I was in the middle of the road, I realized; I needed to move. I tried to prop myself up on my elbows, and a searing pain shot through my left arm. I leaned my weight on my right arm and dragged myself around the back of the sedan, trying to avoid the glass; the road had no shoulder, and a shallow ditch ran along it, so there wasn’t really anywhere to go. Something was dripping from my left temple, and when I wiped at it, blood coated my fingers.

It was not until I saw the farmer and his wife approaching that I sat up, though I felt too weak to call to them. The farmer was a stout white-haired man in overalls, not running but lumbering along in a quick way, and his wife was a few yards behind him in a housedress. They had heard the collision and had called for an ambulance, the farmer said. When he asked what had happened, we all turned to look at the cars, the mess of metal and broken glass, and this was when I realized two things: that the other car was a mint-green Ford and that there was a slumped, unmoving figure in the driver’s seat.

I could hear the rise of my own hysteria, a panicked kind of panting—was it him or was it not him?—and the farmer spoke to his wife, and then his wife was crouching, her arms were around me, and she was saying, “Honey, when the ambulance comes, they’ll take care of that fellow.” I believe they thought I was babbling nonsensically, but the wife understood first. Raising her head, she said softly to her husband, “She thinks she might know him. She says they’re classmates.”

There were two ambulances that came, ambulances in those days being just police-cruiser station wagons fitted in the back to hold stretchers, a single flashing red light on the top. As I was raised on the stretcher, I saw, shockingly and unmistakably: It
was
him. His head hung at a strange angle, but it was him. Inside the ambulance, while I cried uncontrollably, one nurse took my pulse and examined me as another nurse and two police officers attended to the Thunderbird. The farmer’s wife appeared at the rear of my ambulance and said she’d call my parents if I told her their name and number. Then she sighed and said, “Honey, they put that stop sign where it’s so hard to see that it was only a matter of time.” The ambulances were parked south of the accident, and I raised myself, peering out the window and noticing for the first time the sign she was referring to. It was in a field to the right of the road—it had been my stop sign.

My ambulance left before the other one, and though I did not yet understand everything, I knew that it was very bad, that it was far worse than I’d realized even in the seconds following the collision: The other driver was Andrew, and the accident was my fault. I sensed, though no one would tell me until we’d reached the hospital and my parents had met us, that he was dead. I turned out to be correct. The cause of death was a broken neck.

I THINK OF
this time as an oyster in a shell. Not pried open and nakedly displayed—that hideous pale flesh lined in black around the edges and hued purple, stretched over the oyster’s insides, the mucus and feces and colorless blood—but not tightly closed, either. It is open a few centimeters. You can look if you choose; it would not be difficult to open further. But the oyster is rancid, there’s no need. Everyone knows what’s in there.

For any question, the answer is of course. How would
you
feel if you killed another person? And if, further, you were a seventeen-year-old girl and the person you killed was the boy you thought you were in love with? Of course I wished it had been me instead. Of course I thought of taking my own life. Of course I thought I would never know peace or happiness again, I would never be forgiven, I
should
never be forgiven. Of course.

To open the oyster shell—it is an agonizing pain. I am haunted by what I did, and yet I can hardly stand to think about the specifics. There were so many terrible moments, a lifetime of terrible moments, really, which is not the same as a terrible lifetime. But surely, surely, the moments right after it happened were the worst.

If I said now that not a day passes when I don’t think of the accident, of Andrew, it would be both true and not true. Occasionally, days go by when his name is nowhere on my tongue or in my mind, when I do not recall him walking away from me toward football practice in his jersey, his helmet at his side. Yet all the time, the accident is with me. It flows in my veins, it beats along with my heart, it is my skin and hair, my lungs and liver. Andrew died, I caused his death, and then, like a lover, I took him inside me.

MY PARENTS DIDN’T
understand that night at the hospital, at first, that it was my fault; they thought the blame was shared. They arrived as the doctor was wrapping my left wrist in a putty-colored bandage that seemed embarrassing in its inconsequentiality, less a true injury than a plea for leniency from others. I also received twenty-five milligrams of Librium and a bandage on my left temple, and a nurse dabbed translucent yellow ointment on the cuts on my arms and legs.

I was the one who told my parents there had been a stop sign, that Andrew had had the right of way. My mother and father were wearing what they’d been wearing when I’d left the house under an hour before, my father in a twill shirt tucked into trousers, my mother in a belted shirtwaist dress, and I thought of having made them jump up from their card game, of how I’d been in their presence so very recently. The shift in events seemed bizarre and bewildering; it all had happened far too fast.

In the empty waiting room, when a police officer confirmed to us that Andrew had died, my mother gasped, my father took her hand, and none of us said a word. The officer asked me a few questions about the accident, including how fast I’d been driving (I had not been speeding), and then he spoke alone to my father. They were still speaking when Mr. and Mrs. Imhof arrived and were escorted away; his mother’s wails were audible all the way down the hall. My father concluded his conversation with the police officer and said, “Dorothy, we’re taking her home.”

“Should she talk to his parents?” my mother asked.

“For now, leave them be,” my father said.

In the parking lot, I saw that my parents had borrowed the Janaszewskis’ station wagon. We rode home in silence (what must they have been thinking during this drive?), and on Amity Lane, my father dropped my mother and me off in front of our house and drove across the street to return the keys. My grandmother had already come out to the front stoop—this was unusual, she rarely even stood when you came home and found her reading on the living room couch—and she said, “Thank goodness you’re all right.”

My mother, in a curter tone than I’d ever heard, said, “Emilie, we need to get inside.”

My grandmother followed us back in. “I take it the car was wrecked?” In my peripheral vision, I saw my mother shake her head:
Do not ask.
Then I saw that Mrs. Falke was still there, sitting at the card table smoking, and she said, “Alice, you’ve had us on pins and needles. Now, what have you done to your arm?” and my mother said, “Go upstairs, Alice.”

I didn’t look at my grandmother or Mrs. Falke as I left the room. I’d stopped crying after the nurse had given me the Librium, but my throat was still raw, and my eyes felt scrubbed out, my cheeks puffy. Decades later, I had a friend named Jessica who was much younger than I, and I once told her about the night I hit Andrew Imhof’s car. I almost never discussed it with anyone, but Jessica and I were very close, and it was around the anniversary of the accident, always a difficult time. Jessica couldn’t believe that I had come home from the hospital and gone up to my bedroom, that my parents and grandmother had left me alone. It was such a different time, though, there was so much less talk of feelings, and of course we were so unprepared; it was not the type of tragedy for which there was a script.

I entered my room without turning on the lights, removed my shoes, and climbed under the covers with my skirt and blouse still on (the cardigan sweater I never saw again—I must have left it in the car). It was impossible: I had caused another person’s death? And the person whose death I’d caused was Andrew, Andrew Imhof was dead because of me? There were things I worried about, tests, and the tension with my grandmother, and sometimes, when it occurred to me, Khrushchev bombing the United States. But this? It was, in all ways, impossible.

And I thought,
Andrew
. His smile and eyelashes, his hazel eyes, his tanned calves, my head against his chest at last spring’s prom. He had always liked me, he had never hidden it—the Dena years, I thought, didn’t really count, and why had I pretended they had?—and I had felt his recognition of me. People recognized you or they didn’t, and it was unrelated to knowing you. Knowing you could just be your name or the street you lived on, your father’s job. Recognizing you was understanding you had thoughts in your head, finding the same things funny or excruciating, remembering what you’d said months or even years after you’d said it. Andrew had always been kind to me, he had always noticed me. Who else in my life was that true of beyond my immediate family?

So why, when Andrew had offered his attention and affection since childhood, since well before Dena had staked her claim to him, why had I waited, holding him off? And I
had
held him off, I knew it now, and I’d known it when I was doing it. I’d been passive and ambivalent, I’d imagined that we had plenty of time. Then I thought that if he’d become my boyfriend earlier, we’d have gone to the party together; I would not have been driving alone.

The confusing part, the sickening part, was the double calamity. If Andrew had been killed in a car accident in which I was not involved, it still would have felt to me like a devastating loss. Or if I had hit the car of a person I didn’t know and the person had died, that, too, would have been a devastation. But both—both at once were unbearable. He was gone from me
and
I had caused it. In my life now, every year or so in a newspaper or magazine, I come across reports of similarly coincidental misfortunes: two brothers die on the same road on the same evening in separate motorcycle accidents, or a husband and wife, each in their own car, have a head-on collision. “How bizarre” is the tone of such articles, how interesting and unlikely. What are the odds! To me, these stories don’t seem interesting, and they don’t seem unlikely.