American Wife (14 page)

“They tried to set you up with him and you said no?” Dena sounded incredulous.

“I was dating Simon.” The truth was that I probably would have declined anyway—money and Republicans and sausage did not strike me as a particularly tempting combination.

“Ed is the one who’s a congressman, but Charlie’s also about to run,” Dena said. “North of here, I think around Houghton. It’s still a secret, but Kathleen told me he’ll announce his candidacy in the spring. Don’t you think I deserve to be married to a powerful man?”

“Absolutely.”

When she spoke again, Dena sounded less confident. “Alice, the Hickens and all those people are so judgmental. The only reason Kathleen invited me is that I’m friends with you. I need you there for moral support.”

Dena had been married—her ex-husband was an older man, an ad executive who was already twice divorced when she met him while working as a flight attendant for TWA. They’d lived in Kansas City in the late sixties and early seventies, and in 1975, having had no children, they, too, divorced. Dena had moved to Madison then and used the money from her settlement to open a store on State Street that sold clothes and accessories to fashionable coeds: bell-bottoms and pantsuits and miniskirts, sheer scarves and velvety handbags, crocheted shawls, ambiguously ethnic baubles. Entering the store—it was called D’s—never failed to make me feel very old, and while the merchandise was not really to my taste, I usually bought something.

My inappropriate sartorial purchases aside, having Dena in town was a real joy, especially since almost everyone I’d once been close to from college had gotten married. And it wasn’t that you couldn’t be friends with a married woman, but you weren’t friends in the same way, she didn’t have the same freedom in her schedule, especially not after she had children, and even before that, she didn’t need you; you needed friendship, and friendship to her was auxiliary, extra.

But Dena and I would phone each other four times a day, including a minute after we’d just hung up if one of us remembered something we’d forgotten to say: “What’s the name of that guy at Salon Styles who cut your hair last time?” Or “When you come over tonight, will you bring the Carpenters’ album?” She’d swing by to show me her outfit before a date, or she’d call and say, “I’m in the mood for a movie,” and ten minutes later, we’d meet at the Majestic. We went for long walks together on Sunday mornings—Dena no longer attended church, either, and we called these walks our constitutionals, which made them sound a little more like a respectable substitute for prayer—and we’d regularly meet for dinner, after which she’d suggest having a drink and be gravely disapproving of my need to go home and sleep. She dated much more frequently than I did; she told me once that she’d gotten a prescription for the pill the first week she was hired at TWA, the summer we graduated from high school, and she hadn’t been off it since. As for my own dating habits, people I knew often tried to set me up, and sometimes I went to be a good sport, but on a Saturday night, I tended to be just as happy attending a play with a female friend—Dena also teased me for my friendship with Rita Alwin, a French teacher at Liess Elementary who was black and older than our mothers—or even staying in and reading. People like the Hickens, whom I saw every month or two, formed a kind of secondary social circle: I’d been sorority sisters at the University of Wisconsin with a lot of the wives in these couples, I’d gone to fraternity formals with a few of the husbands (one starry night beside Lake Mendota, in the spring of our junior year, Wade Trommler had drunkenly announced that he considered me the ideal girl), and we’d remained in touch after graduation as they all paired off and had children. Admittedly, my enthusiasm for spending time with them fluctuated with my tolerance for being pecked at about my single status. It always amazed me that married people thought they could say an illuminating thing to you on the topic, as if you were scarcely aware, until they pointed it out, of being unwed.

“Dena, I’m sorry,” I said, “but I already told Kathleen Hicken I can’t come. My mother and grandmother are expecting me.”

“Go home Sunday,” Dena said. “What’s the difference if it’s summer?”

“You don’t need me at the party,” I said. “Wear your halter dress, and Charlie Blackwell won’t be able to take his eyes off you.”

“Listen,” Dena said. “This isn’t negotiable. I’ll pick you up Saturday at five-thirty.”

“I thought the barbecue started at five.”

“We’re arriving fashionably late. We’ll toast to you becoming landed gentry.”

SO FAR, THAT
summer had been an especially nice one. The grief I felt about my father’s death was milder after a year and a half, without the rawness of surprise. Plus, I was filled with purpose, and not just in looking for a house; there was also my library project.

I had graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1968, taught for two years—I taught third-graders, an especially boisterous age—then returned to the university to get my master’s in library science. What I’d realized while teaching was that the part of the school day I loved most was reading period:
Charlotte’s Web, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Blueberries for Sal,
the kids sitting cross-legged on the floor, their eyes wide, their bodies leaning forward with anticipation. If I could be a librarian, I decided, it would be like reading period lasting forever. After I’d earned my master’s degree in 1972, I went to work at Liess Elementary, and five years later, at the age of thirty-one, I was still there.

My project that summer was this: I was creating ten large papier-mâché figures of characters from children’s books, among them Eloise; the mother and baby rabbits from
The Runaway Bunny;
and Mr. Sneeze from the
Mr. Men
series (I’d used chicken wire to fashion the triangular points of Mr. Sneeze’s oversize head). I’d had the idea the previous fall when I saw a little girl on my street dressed as Pippi Longstocking for Halloween. In the spring, I’d written to publishers asking for permission—I suppose I could have gotten away with not doing so, but the idea of being a librarian who infringed on copyrighted material made me shudder—and in early June, I’d bought the materials. By the time school opened after Labor Day, I planned to have all the characters displayed on the library’s shelves, or, in the case of the
Paddle-to-the-Sea
figure in his canoe, hanging over the entrance.

I’d been surprised by the scope of the project—I had thought it would take only a couple weeks—but the longer it lasted, the more absorbed I became. At first I’d worked in my living room, but the characters began taking up so much space, and I didn’t want anyone who might come over (mostly, this meant Dena) to see them before I was finished, so I’d covered the floor of my bedroom and even the bed with butcher paper, then started sleeping on the living room couch. When I was working, I wore a denim skirt and old shirts of my father’s, often dropping globs of the flour and water mixture on myself, and perspiring because I didn’t have an air conditioner.

Every morning, before it got hot, I’d cut through campus and walk along Lake Mendota, the sun sparkling on the water, the waves lapping lightly at the shore (walks by myself weren’t constitutionals—they were just walks), and then I’d come back and work until lunch, or until long after that if Nadine didn’t have any houses to show me. During my walks, and sometimes in the middle of the night, I’d suddenly have an idea about, say, how to create more realistic eyebrows for Maurice Sendak’s “I don’t care” Pierre (by snipping up a black wig, because when I painted on the eyebrows, they just looked flat). Early in the evening, I’d stop working and make a corn-and-tomato salad, or broil a pork chop, and after dinner, I’d perch on the windowsill of the bedroom and drink a beer and admire my progress. I hadn’t mentioned the project to anyone, and sometimes I worried that the other teachers might find it odd or excessive, but when I thought of the children entering the library on the first day of school, I felt excited.

NADINE CALLED EARLY
Friday afternoon. “The seller counter-offered—you interested in going up to thirty-five and a half?”

If I were putting down 20 percent, which was what I had told the loan officer at the bank I probably could do, that would mean seventy-one hundred dollars. “Okay,” I said.

“Jeez Louise, you’re way too easy. Don’t you want to complain just a little?”

I laughed. “I want the house.”

“All righty. Stand by.”

She called me back twenty minutes later and said, “Let me be the first to congratulate you on becoming a homeowner.”

I yelped.

“Why don’t you come by my office now to sign the papers, and I’d recommend calling the inspector before the end of the day. Can I make one more suggestion?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Buy yourself a bottle of champagne. You’ve got a lot to look forward to.”

DENA PICKED ME
up the next afternoon for the Hickens’ barbecue, but first we drove to McKinley Street. In the car, Dena sang, “ ‘Home, home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play . . . ’ ” When I pointed to where she should park, the house was both different and the same as I remembered—it was more vivid somehow, more
real.
There was a spruce tree in the yard, and the grass was deep green; the house was a white box, the wooden front-porch floor peeling maroon. There wasn’t a garage, just a driveway that was two concrete lines separated by a strip of grass. The knowledge that all of this would belong to me was overwhelming and exhilarating. I didn’t yet have keys, but Dena insisted on peering into the windows and wandering into the backyard, which sloped.

“It’s cute, right?” I said.

Dena nodded vigorously and sang, “ ‘Where seldom is heard a discouraging word / And the skies are not cloudy all day.’ ”

Although we were late to the barbecue, Charlie Blackwell was later, and Dena and I were already out back, sitting side by side on a picnic bench in the grass, when he emerged from the kitchen at the rear of the house and appeared on the deck holding a six-pack in each hand. He was wearing Docksiders without socks, fraying khaki shorts, a belt with a rectangular silver buckle, and a faded pink button-down shirt that I could tell, even from several yards away, had once been good quality. He held the six-packs up near his ears, shook them—a stupid thing to do with beer, I thought—and called out to the yard at large, “
Hello
there, boys and girls!”

About fifteen of us were present, and several men approached him at once, Cliff Hicken slapping him on the back. Charlie opened one of the beers he’d brought, and after he popped the top, some fizzed up and he pressed his mouth against the side of the can and slurped the cascading foam. Then he said something, and when he and the other men burst into laughter, his was the loudest. Under my breath, I said to Dena, “He’s perfect for you.”

“I don’t have lipstick on my teeth, do I?” She turned to me, baring her incisors.

“You look great,” I said. She waited ten minutes, so as not to be too obvious, and I watched as she crossed the yard and offered herself up, like a gift, to Charlie Blackwell. The day before, I had been in the public library and looked for mentions of Charlie in news articles—long before the arrival of the Internet, I prided myself on my ability to find information, my golden touch with reference books and microfiche—and although I’d turned up little about Charlie himself beyond his status as a former governor’s son, I’d learned that if he really was running in the district that contained Houghton, as Dena had claimed, he’d be up against an incumbent of forty years.

When Dena was gone, Rose Trommler, who was sitting on the opposite side of the picnic bench next to Jeanette Werden, said, “Dena Cimino is sure a piece of work.” Cimino was Dena’s surname now; she was no longer a Janaszewski.

As if I’d misunderstood Rose’s meaning, I nodded and said, “Dena’s the most entertaining person I know. She’s been exactly the same since we were in kindergarten.”

Rose and I were drinking white wine; Jeanette was six months pregnant and not drinking. Rose leaned forward. “I shouldn’t say this, but doesn’t she sometimes drive you crazy?” Rose and her husband lived next door to the Hickens; we’d been in Kappa Alpha Theta together in college, and she wasn’t a bad person, but she was quite a gossip.

“No more than I probably drive her crazy,” I said lightly.

“She’s practically throwing herself at Charlie Blackwell,” Jeanette said. “I wonder if we should warn him.”

I looked directly at her. “About what?” I asked in a neutral voice, and neither she nor Rose said anything. “I bet he can take care of himself,” I added.

“Alice, how about you?” Rose dunked a potato chip in a bowl of onion dip. “You must have your eye on someone special.”

“Not really.” I smiled to show that I didn’t mind. The irony was, I honestly didn’t mind, or not in the way they imagined. In my least charitable moments, I’d think about these women,
It’s not that I couldn’t have married your husbands; it’s that I didn’t want to.
But it was a rare married woman who was able to believe that a single woman had any choice in the matter of her own singleness. I shifted on the bench. “Jeanette, am I right that you and Frank were in Sheboygan for the Fourth of July? That must have been wonderful.”

“Well, the way Frank’s mother scolded Katie and Danny, you’d think she’d never been around children before.” Jeanette shook her head. “Just a broken record of ‘Put that down, quit running around,’ when why were we there but for them to run around? And Frank was one of six growing up, but he claims she was even-tempered back then.”

“That’s hard,” I said.

“Oh, but you’re lucky having the company of other adults, Jeanette,” Rose said. “When Wade and I took the kids up to La Crosse, he spent so much time fishing, I felt like a widow. I said to him, ‘Wade, if you’re not careful, your son won’t remember his daddy’s face.’ ”

Jeanette chuckled, and so did I, to be pleasant, though the remark made me think of my mother and grandmother—actual widows—and of how much I’d have preferred to be at the house in Riley with them instead of sitting with these two women. Or I’d rather have been working on my papier-mâché characters—I was halfway through Babar (the tricky part was his trunk) and hadn’t started on Yertle the Turtle—or I’d rather have been sitting alone with a pen and a pad of paper, figuring out plans for my house.