American Wife (46 page)

“Don’t ever do that,” I said to Ella.

“Drive fast?”

“That, too, but I meant don’t throw Mommy’s purse.”

We went inside for her to put on shorts, then headed back out because she still wanted to play with the Frisbee. After we’d tossed it a few times, she said matter-of-factly, “You’re not as good as Daddy.”

“I haven’t had as much practice,” I replied.

When she’d tired herself out, we went in, and I ran a bath for her, and when it was time to wash her hair, she summoned me. For all that I had believed before the fact that I didn’t want my daughter to have long hair, this was one of my favorite rituals. I still used Johnson’s baby shampoo on her, with the pink droplet on the label that said no more tears. Soon enough, I suspected, she’d take note of this label and be perturbed by the word
baby,
but so far she hadn’t said anything. She sat naked and cross-legged with her back against the side of the tub, her head tilted forward, and I massaged her scalp in amiable silence; she occasionally flicked the surface of the water with her thumb and middle finger. I rinsed the shampoo out with the shower nozzle, and when she stepped from the tub, I was sitting on the toilet lid holding up a towel; she walked into it, and I wrapped her, holding her tight in my arms. “Mommy,” she said.

“What?”

“I can lift a pencil with my toes.”

I kept hugging her. “Since when?”

“Christine taught me. Want to see?”

“You can show me after you put on your pajamas.”

The book I read to her that night, not for the first time, was
The Giving Tree.
We were at the part where the boy gathers the tree’s apples to sell when I sensed that Ella had fallen asleep—both of us were leaning against the headboard of her bed—and after a few more pages, I shifted so I could look down at her eyes. They were indeed closed. I ought to have shut the book and turned out the light then, but I kept reading; I read until I’d reached the end.

IT WAS, I
saw on the digital clock on my nightstand, after one when Charlie climbed into bed beside me. Groggily, I mumbled, “Did you have a flat tire?”

“Shh,” he whispered. “Go back to sleep.”

But as we lay there in the dark, instead of drifting off again, I became more alert. My mind pulled itself into focus, and I thought,
Where on earth could Charlie have been?
Surely this had been the longest day of my life.

When I spoke, it was in a normal volume. I said, “You need to tell me now.”

Immediately, he rolled over and placed his arms around me, and when he spoke, his breath was warm against my face. I could tell he was excited. He said, “No, no, everything’s good. Everything’s
great.
” His happiness filled our darkened bedroom. He said, “I’m buying the Brewers.”

THE COUNTRY CLUB
pool opened that Saturday—it was Memorial Day weekend—and Ella insisted that we arrive right at nine o’clock. First, though, we picked up Jadey and Winnie. As they emerged from their house, a mammoth Tudor, I saw that Winnie was wearing a red bikini, the cups of it flat against her twelve-year-old chest, and Ella said to me from the backseat, “You said bikinis are inappropriate before you’re sixteen!”

“Every family has its own rules.”

“But Winnie is
our
family!”

“We’ll talk about this later,” I said, because Jadey and Winnie were almost to our car. Jadey, for all her talk about needing to lose weight, was wearing a bikini, too
—Bully for her,
I thought—which I could see under her sheer white linen cover-up. She also had sunglasses set on her head, pushing back her blond hair, and over one shoulder she carried a huge canvas bag with navy straps and a navy monogram. When they opened the car doors, I noticed that she and Winnie wore matching red toenail polish.

The girls immediately started talking in the back (Winnie was very sweet with Ella, very inclusive, which was part of how I knew Jadey and Arthur were good parents) and next to me, Jadey said, “How was the funeral? As funerals go, I mean.”

“Not bad.”

“Your grandma seems like she must have been such a cool lady.” Jadey pulled a can of Diet Coke from her bag and popped it open. “I wish I’d gotten to know her better.” As I turned out of their driveway onto Maronee Drive, Jadey rolled down the window on her side, then faced the backseat. “Ella, I hear you’re joining the swim team this year. You will
love
Coach Missy. You girls are gonna have the best summer ever.” Although we’d be spending July and part of August in Halcyon, missing half the swim season was considered acceptable because so many families who belonged to the country club also went away to vacation homes.

We weren’t the only ones who’d come right on time for the pool’s opening, and the lower parking lot was a chaos of children, mothers, a few fathers, and teenagers. The Maronee Country Club, really, was its own small nation, one of those tiny, slightly absurd kingdoms—Liechtenstein, perhaps. It took up sixty acres, most of this land occupied by the eighteen-hole golf course. The clubhouse was an extremely long rectangle of white stucco—it always reminded me of a wedding cake—with a front porch full of oversize white rocking chairs and an American flag flying from the cupola. A valet took your car, though I always felt a little silly and would just as soon have parked myself. The main dining room was on the first floor, and this was where wedding receptions and debutante parties were held and where the tables and chairs were cleared out on alternating Fridays in the fall and winter for dancing school, which was open to children in sixth and seventh grade. On the lower level was a casual dining area known as the sports room, where, before my parents-in-law had moved east, Harold and Ella and I had met sometimes for a Saturday lunch of BLTs or Monte Cristos. In a building adjacent to the clubhouse were the weight room, squash courts, locker rooms, and lounge, and in the lounge, you were as likely to see a foursome of seventy-year-old matrons playing bridge as you were to see two male college students at the bar, outfitted in white, sweaty from a squash match (in the nation of the Maronee Country Club, a drinking age did not exist). The tennis courts sat between the clubhouse and the road, more than a dozen courts with a tennis shop in the middle where the pro had a desk and where one could get a cup of water, have one’s racquet restrung, buy apparel, or argue about whether or not Björn Borg was the greatest player of all time (a comparable golf house existed, and there was a special section of the parking lot reserved for the fleet of golf carts). The tennis courts formed a barrier between the road and the clubhouse; the sandy green courts were enclosed by twenty-five-foot-high chain-link fences, and as you approached, you’d hear the hollow rubbery thwack of balls being hit.

Of course, the main attraction that morning was the pool—the enormous, majestic, glittery blue-tinted pool, which, between Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend, exerted a magical pull not just for the children but for the adults as well. It was located behind the clubhouse, and six years earlier, at the wedding reception of Polly Blackwell (Polly was Charlie’s first cousin), at dusk on a June evening, I’d looked out the window of the dining room, and it had been like gazing upon a lake in a fairy tale. The pool was Olympic-sized, with dark blue floating lane dividers, a deep end at the northwest corner, and a shallow end at the southeast (the shallow end was not the same as the baby pool, which was its own entity; predictably, its relative warmth was a source of endless jokes). One entered the pool area through a black-painted iron gate at the southeast tip; on the north side was a lawn of grass where the swim teams congregated during meets and where the rest of the time teenage girls sunned themselves; on the south side was the baby pool and the sign-in desk, which was also where you got towels (no one brought their own), and the concrete steps leading to the men’s and women’s locker rooms—every summer, a confused child would wander into the wrong one—and the snack bar. (Surely there are no smells and sounds more evocative for me than that particular combination of fried food being consumed under a midday sun, with a backdrop of splashing water and children’s cries. To think of it now—normal life—fills me with nostalgia.) At neither the snack bar nor the clubhouse dining room nor the sports room nor the golf nor tennis stores nor anywhere on club grounds did you use cash. Rather, you were given a half-length forest-green pencil with no eraser that said
MARONEE COUNTRY CLUB
along the side, and you signed a bill that had a piece of carbon paper attached beneath it; I’d write
Mrs. Charles V. Blackwell.
At the end of the month, an itemized tab was sent to our house.

Either the best or worst part about the country club, depending upon how social I felt on a particular day, was that we knew nearly everyone who belonged; going for dinner there was like going to a restaurant where every face happened to be familiar. For the most part, this was comforting, giving me a stronger sense of community than I’d had even growing up in Riley. Sometimes, however, when I was in a hurry—if Ella had attended a friend’s birthday party at the pool and I just wanted to pick her up quickly—it would not have been my preference to greet seven people, to have to say to Joannie Sacks, “Was France wonderful?” or to have Sandra Mahlberg announce, “Your sister-in-law made the most fabulous horseradish trout the other night!” And at rare moments, the insularity was downright unbearable—it made me ashamed of myself and everyone else at the club, ashamed of our wealth, our unthinking claims to privilege. The previous summer, I had brought that day’s
Sentinel
with me to the pool, and I was sitting with Jadey on the flagstone terrace behind the diving boards when I read an article about a man living in the Walnut Hill area of the city who had hepatitis C and cirrhosis and who couldn’t afford medication. And then I looked up and saw fifteen-year-old Melissa Pagenkopf rubbing oil on her belly, I heard a woman a few feet away say, “We never fly United if we can help it,” and I felt a terrible sense of culpability. In this case, I couldn’t simply write a check—there was no organization mentioned in the article, he was just an individual, and wouldn’t he need medication for years to come? To send two hundred dollars would be a drop in the bucket. And I already knew I was not bold enough to seek him out (his name was Otis Donovan) without a charity acting as intermediary; I wouldn’t want to write him a check that had my address on it, wouldn’t want him to have a way of finding me.

At such moments, I felt that we were like the people in California who live in enormous houses on the sides of cliffs, that our lives were beautiful but precarious, their foundations vulnerable. And then I’d think, was it adolescent to become preoccupied with other people’s problems, or to feel, while reading the newspaper or watching the local news, that if you didn’t consciously will yourself not to, you might cry? Life was so hard for so many people, the odds were stacked so precipitously against them. The other adults I knew did not seem overly distressed about these imbalances, and certainly not surprised by them, whereas to me they were constantly surprising, they were never not upsetting.

I had turned to Jadey and gestured in front of us. “Do you ever feel guilty about all of this?”

“All of what?” she said.

“I’m reading an article about a man in Walnut Hill who has hepatitis, and then I think of how my worst problem is that I can’t get my daughter to eat vegetables. Does it ever occur to you that you should be leading an entirely different life?”

“Oh, I know.” Jadey was nodding sympathetically. “I used to want to join the Peace Corps. Can’t you picture me in, you know, Zambia? How could I have made it ten minutes without my hair dryer?”

Although she spoke warmly, I knew not to push my point—she had sidestepped it the way she sidestepped our mother-in-law’s insults and decrees—and I wondered if already I might have violated decorum, positing myself as ponderously thoughtful, as self-righteous. It was inappropriate to introduce poverty and woe while sunning yourself pool-side; you either ought to be elsewhere, doing something about it, or you ought to sun yourself in the spirit that sunning requires. There was an older woman I knew in Garden Club, Mary Schmidbauer, with whom three or four years earlier, I’d been assigned to host a meeting, and when I’d suggested holding it in the country club’s sports room, as was common, she’d said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, Alice, dear, but I haven’t been a member since my husband passed on. They’re not crazy about having women belong by themselves, and of course they’ve never allowed Jews or blacks. When Kenneth died, I realized I’d had enough.” I had been chastened, and Mary and I had ended up holding the meeting in my living room.

That Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, after Jadey, Ella, Winnie, and I had signed in—there was actually a line, which never happened on a normal day—we staked out lounge chairs on the southeast side of the pool, a little ways behind the lifeguard’s chair, and Winnie and Ella obliged Jadey and me by letting us rub sunscreen on their backs. The second we were finished, Ella followed Winnie as her cousin darted toward the water, and they both dove in; they had the clean form of children who’ve taken lessons for such things. Jadey adjusted her lounge chair so it sloped farther back, then settled in, surveying the scene before her. “Is this a gorgeous day or what?”

It was indisputably a gorgeous day: sunny and still, the temperature in the low seventies. Leaning toward her bag, which was set on the flag-stone between our chairs, Jadey extracted two magazines and held them up side by side: an issue of
People
and an issue of
Architectural Digest.
“Which one?”

I pointed at
Architectural Digest,
and she said, “I was hoping you’d say that, because I
need
to know what Princess Di is up to this week.”

As we sat there, companionably turning pages, occasionally reading aloud a line or showing each other a picture—the ones I showed her were of fancy pillows or antique desks, and the ones she showed me were of Cher in some peculiar outfit, or Bruce Willis and Demi Moore holding hands—I was very tempted to repeat to her what Charlie had told me about buying the baseball team. I couldn’t, though, because he’d explicitly asked me not to, and I didn’t blame him. What I shared with Jadey she would surely share with Arthur, who would share it with John and their parents, and presumably all of Wisconsin and half of Washington, D.C., would soon know.