American Wife (56 page)

I’m not encouraging you to divorce Charlie, but if you do, I’ll understand—wasn’t that what she was saying, more or less?

She had turned the canvas over again, she was stitching steadily, and I leaned in to look at it more closely. I said, “That’s going to be a beautiful pillow.”

AFTER I’D CHANGED
into my nightgown and brushed my teeth, I returned to the kitchen with
The Old Forest,
waiting for the phone to ring. It was ten-thirty, then five after eleven, eleven-twenty, eleven-thirty, and I felt a growing irritation, thinking how inconsiderate it was for Charlie to call so late. By twenty to one, I knew he wasn’t calling at all. My mother’s house was very quiet, no cars passed outside on Amity Lane, and my irritation changed abruptly to a lonely disappointment.

WHEN THE PHONE
rang in the morning, we were finishing breakfast, and Ella answered. After listening for a few seconds, she said, “Mommy’s taking me ice-skating, and I know how to skate back-wards.” It was Charlie, wasn’t it? “In the mall,” Ella said. Then, practically shouting, “In the
mall
! Yeah, she’s right here.” Ella held out the receiver. “It’s Grandmaj.”

Without preamble, Priscilla said, “For crying out loud, Alice, get in your car and go back to Milwaukee. Chas sounds like a mess.”

I might have been tongue-tied anyway, but with Ella, Lars, and my mother right there at the table, I couldn’t think of a way to respond. Finally, I said, “If you wouldn’t mind holding on for just a moment, Priscilla, I’ll switch phones.”

Upstairs, the phone was still unplugged from the night before, and I got on my knees to stick the cord back into the jack, then lifted the receiver. As I sat on the edge of the double bed, I heard the phone downstairs being hung up, and I said, “Hello?”

“This is simply nonsense,” Priscilla said. “You knew he was a booze-hound when you married him. Now pull up your socks and fix things.”

“Priscilla, I don’t see Charlie’s drinking as a personality quirk. It might be less obvious from Washington than it is living in the same house with him, but he’s—” I hesitated, and then I went ahead and said it. “He’s drunk almost every night of the week. He’s an alcoholic.”

Priscilla did not react as if I’d offered a revelation. She said, “Whose fault do you think that is?”

“If you’re implying that I’m responsible for Charlie’s drinking, I have to object. He’s a grown—”

“Let me ask you this. What’s your job?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Indeed you don’t. You’re a housewife, my dear. It is your
duty
to ensure that your house runs smoothly. Just whose income do you imagine it is that allows you the luxury of staying home?”

“Priscilla, it’s not as if I’m sitting around eating bonbons and watching soap operas. But if I’ve disappointed you, I’m sorry.”

“Oh, I’m not
surprised,
” Priscilla said. “Great heavens, I’ve been waiting for this day for over a decade. Everyone knew you’d married down.”

I couldn’t resist the grim satisfaction of correcting her. I said, “You mean that Charlie married down.”

“Oh no, Chas married up. Why, Alice, he was a thirty-one-year-old wastrel, making that preposterous congressional run, no less, and he was dating waitresses. We couldn’t imagine what you saw in him!” She chortled, and as I sat there on my mother’s bed, bewilderment seized me.

“But—didn’t you think I had somehow tricked him into marrying me? You said as much when we announced our engagement.”

“I said nothing of the sort.”

“You came up to me, and you told me how clever I was.”

“You’d been so coy.” Priscilla sounded—it was bizarre—almost admiring. “Here you’d been in Halcyon all weekend without giving a clue that you and Chas were engaged, and at just the right moment, you pulled a rabbit from your hat. It was a flawless piece of theater.”

“I thought—” Had I misjudged her all these years? Or was she lying now? Or was it neither—perhaps it wasn’t so much that she’d ever had a high opinion of me, only that she’d had, or still had, a low opinion of Charlie. “I thought you thought—” I began, but again I sputtered out.

Overriding me, Priscilla said, “What mystifies me is your timing, why you’ve chosen now to throw your little tantrum when Chas has just made the best move of his life. He’ll be splendid with the Brewers, and Lord knows he’s never been fit for anything else. Here he was running our company into the ground for years, Harold’s intervention was the only thing that kept his brothers from firing him, and now that Zeke Langenbacher has done us all a great favor, the only thing for you and Chas to do is sit on your derrieres and clap for home runs. Surely you can manage
that
?”

My head was spinning: Did all the Blackwells think Charlie was incompetent and foolish? Did everyone? (The Thayers did, as I’d recently learned from Joe.) And was I, by extension, incompetent and foolish for having married him? In this moment, I felt defensive on Charlie’s behalf—if he had a tendency toward swagger and raunch, Arthur did, too. Charlie wasn’t the runt of the litter, he wasn’t an idiot.

“It’s neither here nor there why you want to abandon your marriage,” Priscilla was saying. “I can imagine a dozen reasons, and frankly, none of them is very interesting. Nobody will dispute for a second that you’re smarter and more refined than Chas, but you were smarter and more refined than him the day you met. At this point, that’s your problem. It’s not his, and it sure isn’t mine. But you have a home together, and more important, you have a daughter. If you couldn’t give her siblings, the least you can give her is two parents.”

It was unclear to me if this had been the most illuminating conversation of my life, the most insulting, both, or neither. I took a deep breath—in general, the reason I tried to be diplomatic was that you might occasionally regret your diplomacy, but you’d more frequently regret having been snippy—and then I said to my mother-in-law, “Well, Priscilla, I have a lot to think about.”

THE WAY WE’D
decided to go to the skating rink at the Riley mall was process of elimination: Ella refused to return to Pine Lake, and we’d already visited Fassbinder’s. Plus, she’d long wanted to try the skating rink at home, at the Mayfair Mall, and I’d never taken her; here, there wasn’t much disincentive. Because summer was still new, because it was not yet horribly hot, the rink was mostly empty, and the pop music that blasted from enormous speakers just below the roof seemed aggressive. The last time I’d skated had been up in Halcyon one winter, before Ella was born, and it had never been a great talent of mine. We slipped and skidded along, and I watched her watching two other girls, sisters, it seemed, a few years older than Ella, who were quite skillful and who often called out to each other, arguing and laughing. “Do you want to go play with them?” I asked. When Ella vigorously shook her head, guilt billowed inside me. After we’d unlaced and returned our skates, we ate chicken tenders in the mall’s food court, and in a store of cheap jewelry and accessories, I bought her a bracelet with a dolphin charm.

Walking down the mall’s wide pink marble corridors (why did a mall in Riley, Wisconsin, need a marble floor?), I couldn’t help wondering what I was doing to us. How long could Ella and I last in this town? Because it was easy to drive back and forth between Milwaukee and Riley in a single day, this was already the longest visit I’d made here in years, and while I had imagined it as a respite, what Ella had said in Fassbinder’s had not been wrong: It was boring. I was of this place, and gratefully so, but each day here seemed three times as long as a day in Maronee. And yet if we went home, wouldn’t it all be exactly the same? Charlie might be on his best behavior for a few weeks, a few months at most, and even that could be wishful thinking—he was as likely to be resentful as remorseful.

That afternoon, I called Jadey. (Looking back, this is what I most remember of that strange period in Riley—being on the phone. If my mother and Lars found the frequency with which I sequestered myself to call people or wait for calls to be reminiscent of a moody, inconsiderate teenager, I hardly could have blamed them.)

When Jadey answered, she said, “Please tell me you’re calling to say you’re home and you want to know if I can go for a walk, because the answer is yes. I’ve already gained four pounds from missing you—well, missing you, getting no exercise, and eating a tray of double fudge brownies.”

“Does everyone in the family think Charlie is some sort of dimwit?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Maj called earlier today—she’s none too pleased with me, as you can imagine—and she was implying—It was very strange. Have Arthur and John been wanting to fire Charlie?”

Jadey didn’t reply immediately, which was an answer, and not the one I’d hoped for. Then she said, “He plays tennis in the middle of the day, I think that’s the main thing. They don’t know where he
is
a lot of the time, and if there’s a distributor who’s come in for a meeting that Chas set up . . .”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“We can’t babysit them, right? Don’t be mad. Are you mad? Alice, he’s always been like this. Nobody thinks he’s stupid. He’s just—maybe he’s not the hardest-working guy ever, let’s put it that way. But you know who the hardest-working guy ever is? Ed, and who’d want to be married to him?”

It was like the optical illusion of the hag and the elegant young woman—from this angle, my life was privileged and boisterous, containing its problems, certainly, but they were minor compared to its gifts; and from that angle, my marriage was a sham, my husband a laughingstock. I had long known how thin the line was that divided happiness and tragedy, tranquillity and chaos, but it had been many years since I’d walked it. “When you see him tonight, will you ask him to call me?” I said.

“Oh, Chas isn’t staying with us anymore,” Jadey said. “He was only here for the one night.”

“Where’s he staying?”

“I assume he decided to put on his big-boy underpants and go home.”

I felt a prickly alertness, the sort that precedes goose bumps. He was not staying at home; I felt sure of it.

“Are you still there?” Jadey asked. “Say something.”

I sighed. “I’m still here.”

THAT SUNDAY, ELLA
and I went to church with my mother and Lars, and Ella squirmed through the service, no doubt thinking longingly of Bonnie, the prosthetic-eye-removing Sunday-school teacher at Christ the Redeemer in Milwaukee. Back at the house, after lunch, Lars and I started a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle of a train in the Swiss Alps—he’d set up the card table for this purpose—and in the front yard, my mother filled a clear glass salad bowl with water and a few squirts of Windex so that Ella could take Barbie swimming; if my mother or Lars had an opinion about Barbie’s skin color, neither of them ever expressed it. After a while, my mother came inside, saying, “It wouldn’t take five minutes for me to make a little towel for Barbie.”

I looked up from the puzzle. “Or you could relax for a change.”

But already, she had that musing, preoccupied look on her face:
a project.
She disappeared upstairs, where her sewing machine was in my old room.

Through the window screen, I occasionally could hear Ella talking to Barbie—“Now it’s time to do backstroke”—and then she was quiet. When I went outside to check on her, she was squatting by the bowl of blue liquid. “Ladybug, how are—” I started to say, and when she looked up, I saw that she was wearing a glittery purple tiara and matching purple droplet earrings. “Oh my,” I said. “Where did you get those?”

“From the lady.” She pointed to the house directly across the street from ours, which was the Janaszewskis’.

“She gave them to you?” I said.

Ella nodded.

“Did she help you put them on?”

Ella nodded again. The plastic tiara was tucked behind her ears, the gaudy curlicues on either side of the front band rising to meet an over-size fake amethyst in the center, and above it, a sparkly star. The earrings were clip-ons, the amethyst droplets nickel-size and encrusted with ersatz diamonds. Immediately, I knew who would get a kick out of these types of accessories, but of course I couldn’t be certain, and even if I were, I had even less idea of the gift’s meaning. Was it a casual unanalyzed kindness to amuse a little girl, a playful peace offering, or was it the opposite, a mocking criticism with a pointed subtext:
Your daughter is a princess.

“Did the lady say her name?” I asked.

Ella shrugged. “Grandma’s making Barbie a towel.”

“I know she is, and please be sure to thank her. Ella, did the lady who gave you this jewelry—did she know your name?”

Ella squinted, trying to remember. “I think so.”

“What did she look like?”

“Mommy, she went right
there.
You can go see her yourself.”

“Did she look closer to my age or Grandma’s?”

Briefly, Ella scrutinized my face, and then she said, “She looked old, but like you.”

I glanced again at the Janaszewskis’ front porch. Was this an invitation, a challenge, or both? Or was it merely a toy Dena’s mother had picked up at the drugstore and thought Ella would like?

I took a seat on the stoop, waiting to see if anyone would reemerge from their house, and soon my mother joined us—she’d even stitched a red B onto the miniature towel, which was clearly snipped from a worn-out full-size one—but she didn’t ask about the origins of the tiara or earrings; she must have imagined they’d come from me. When we all went inside close to an hour later, we’d seen no other activity at the Janaszewskis’.

I’D TRIED CALLING
our house in Maronee several times, at different hours of the day and evening, and Charlie had never answered; however, when I finally left a message, he called back within a few hours. We arranged that Ella and I would meet him the next day for a picnic lunch at a park off I-94, between Riley and Milwaukee. The picnic was my idea, and I thought it was better than a restaurant, in case he lost his temper and began to yell; also, it would allow him and Ella to run around. Our phone conversation was brief and not explicitly hostile—it wasn’t emotional in one direction or the other—but it was definitely strained.