American Wife

Charlie didn’t make eye contact with me as he said, “Yeah, see, I’ve got kind of a work thing that came up. Kind of a major thing, actually, otherwise you know I’d postpone it.”

“Your brothers understand that you need to be with Alice today,” Harold said, and I said, “What is it?”

Charlie hesitated. “I’d prefer not to get too specific. Word of honor, I’ll tell you both the minute I can. Lindy, you’re thinking you’ll be home, what, around five or five-thirty?”

“Are you sure you can’t say what it is?”

His lips stretched into an apologetic wince. “Give me a couple days, can you do that? It’s come up all of a sudden, and I want to hold off on talking about it until it’s more of a done deal.” To his father, he said, “I’ll collect Ella and meet you out front?” He leaned in and kissed me. “See you tonight by dinnertime?”

When Charlie was gone, I felt that Harold and I were implicated in a shared embarrassment—we were, after all, Charlie’s father and wife. In a tone of feigned lightheartedness, I said, “I fully expect you to get it out of him on the ride home and report back to me!” I expected no such thing.

“All very cloak-and-dagger, isn’t it?” Harold shook his head. “Let us know if there’s anything we can do.”

ONE OF THE

last people to leave the reception was Lillian Janaszewski, Dena’s mother. I had already started carrying plates and glasses into the kitchen when she stopped me, saying, “Alice, you haven’t sat still all afternoon. You’re just like Dorothy.”

“Thank you for coming,” I said. “It’s so nice to see you.” I had repeated these words, or slight variations on them, so many times that day that they’d become automatic, as had the micro-update I provided on my life, as had the fleeting remembrances of my grandmother:

Yes, Charlie and I are still in Milwaukee. Ella’s nine now, she’s finishing up third grade. She’s over there, yes, that’s her with the long hair.

Or,

She just left—I know, I’m sorry you missed her. Charlie and I are very lucky.

Or,

I know, my grandmother was wonderful, wasn’t she?

This part of the funerary proceedings also seemed to have far less to do with my grandmother as a person than with decorum, to the extent that, as I listened to myself chatter, I felt pangs of disloyalty. But what was the alternative? How could I bear to vividly and realistically remember her with everyone?

She found Riley somewhat dull. She was an excellent bridge player. She never lifted a finger to cook or clean, even when she was younger and more spry and easily could have done so, and she smoked constantly, including around her granddaughter. She liked

Anna Karenina

because she loved the characters, but she thought

War and Peace

was tediously political, and she stayed abreast of current fashion into her nineties, despairing of the trend toward wearing exercise clothes at all hours of the day; she also claimed Laura Ashley dresses looked like they were meant for peasants. She had a longtime love affair with another woman, which none of us really talked about, and then they broke up, and we hardly talked about that, either.

There was a way in which my grandmother’s true self was not these guests’ business; no one’s true self was the business of more than a very small number of family members or close friends. In any case, I told myself, making superficial remarks didn’t have the power to eclipse or insult the dead any more than missing them had the power to bring them back.

Mrs. Janaszewski took my hand, gripping it in hers, and her skin was unexpectedly cool, given that it was a warm May afternoon. “It just breaks my heart about you and Dena,” she said. “She’s living back here, you know.”

“Is she not involved with D’s anymore?”

Mrs. Janaszewski said ruefully, “Clothing stores are a difficult business, Alice. Customers are fickle, and in Madison, there’s all the turnover with the students.”

This surprised me, because D’s had always been buzzing whenever I’d been by. Then I realized that my most recent visit to the store had been over a decade earlier; though I occasionally went back to Madison—to have lunch with Rita Alwin, my old friend from Liess, or to see an exhibit at the Elvehjem Museum—I avoided State Street because it made me sad.

“Dena’s a hostess over at the steak house in the new mall, but the real news is she has a steady beau,” Mrs. Janaszewski said. “You probably know him—Pete Imhof.” I suppose an expression of alarm appeared on my face, because Mrs. Janaszewski brought her hand to her mouth, saying, “Oh, Alice, he’s the brother—Oh, I’d forgotten all about—Forgive me.”

“No, no, that was such a long time ago,” I said, and I might have then felt the same disloyalty toward Andrew that I’d been feeling toward my grandmother

—I will minimize my grief for social pleasantries; this moment of small talk matters more than our history, your memory—

except that I was so disturbed by Mrs. Janaszewski’s news. Dena was dating

Pete

? But Pete was awful! Dena was fun and cute and hardworking, and Pete was a dishonest layabout; he was a jerk. I even wondered, was she supporting him? How had they reconnected? Was it at all possible—for her sake, I hoped so—that he had changed since he’d swindled my mother? And then I thought, if Dena and Pete were dating, surely she’d have told him about my abortion. And my God, for him to find out all this time later that I’d been pregnant—would he be furious at me? Disgusted, or disappointed, or maybe just relieved I’d taken care of it? I said