American Wife

already in their bathing suits, with towels around their necks; they tossed their bags and backpacks at will on the grass. “Everyone, please go around back,” I kept repeating in my loudest and most authoritative voice. “The party’s in the backyard.”

Ella bounded over to me. “Where’s my starfish towel?”

“It’s in the kitchen. Remember, Ella—”

“Mother, I know,” she interrupted. “I’ll be a very gracious hostess.”

When she’d disappeared, Susan Levin stage-whispered, “Isn’t she becoming a looker? Alice, she’s the spitting image of you and Charlie.”

In the backyard, I’d set the grill away from the patio but in a spot where I could still observe the children on the Slip ’n Slide: the running start, the belly flop onto the wet yellow plastic—Joyce Sutter stood there continuously spraying the hose for maximum slickness—and then the long skid forward, arms first. I desperately hoped that no one would knock out their front teeth on a root or rock.

Ella ate her burger standing next to me, shivering in her wet swimsuit, and I said, “Get your towel, ladybug,” but she shook her head.

“I’m going again.”

“Don’t get a tummyache.” I scanned the yard. “Honey, where’s Megan Thayer?”

Ella shrugged.

“Did she come to school today?”

Ella thought about the question, then nodded.

“Was she on the bus?”

Ella shrugged again. “After this, can I wear my Addams Family dress?”

“Not while guests are still here.” I nodded across the patio, where a girl named Stephanie Woo was sitting by herself. “Why don’t you see

if Stephanie wants to play a game of H-O-R-S-E?”

“I’m going back on the Slip ’n Slide.”

“One game,” I said. Ella was obviously about to protest, and I said, “I thought you wanted to wear the dress.”

I set the top on the grill, closed the valve, and approached Joyce, who was standing by the pop table; Susan had taken over hose duty. “Would you mind keeping an eye on the grill while I run inside?”

In the house, I did a quick circuit of the first floor, which was empty except for the living room, where two boys—Ryan Wichinski and Jason Goodwin—were goofing around on the piano. Seeing them there brought me pleasure: Ella had so loathed the lessons I’d signed her up for that we’d let her quit after a year, and neither Charlie nor I could play at all. “You two are talented musicians,” I said as I stepped into the front hall.

Upstairs, the doors to all the rooms were open, and in the last one, the master bedroom, Megan Thayer was sitting on the floor, impassively paging through an issue of Penthouse magazine. Several more issues were spread out around her, and before I was close enough to see what they were—oh, that she might have been perusing The New Yorker, or gleaning decorating tips from House and Garden!—I knew.

It seemed she had not found the magazines right away. First she had tried on a few pairs of my shoes, then a few pairs of Charlie’s (they were scattered across the bedroom rug), and she’d sprayed herself with my lily-of-the- valley perfume—on my bureau, the cap was off the bottle, and the smell hung in the air—and she’d also dumped a jar of change Charlie kept on a windowsill onto the bedspread and separated out the quarters.

She looked up, and I am tempted to say the look she gave me was knowing, adult even, but to claim such a thing would only be an attempt to absolve myself. She was not knowing, she was not adult. She was nine years old, looking at photographs of women opening their legs, insolently thrusting out their abundant breasts.

I strode forward, swooping in to pull the magazine from her lap—she didn’t resist—and I said, “Megan, honey, that’s not appropriate for you.”

She simply watched me, saying nothing, slumping there with her dark hair and her broad shoulders.

“Did you go in there?” I pointed to the bottom drawer of Charlie’s nightstand, which, though it had a lock, he had apparently left open. “These kinds of magazines are for grown-ups, not children,” I said. “They have pictures that can be very difficult to understand.” (After the party, I started to page through a magazine, feeling that it would be responsible to know exactly what Megan had seen. I got to a spread of what I suppose was meant to be a “classy” woman: In the first shot, she was emerging from a limousine, wearing a fur coat and heels and nothing else; in the next, she was standing inside some sort of ballroom with her back to the camera, her buttocks on display, looking archly over one shoulder and holding up a flute of champagne. That was enough for me—I couldn’t look at any more, and I shut the magazine. It was so silly, the model was so painted and plasticky, the magazine’s notion of elegance was so inelegant, but it also seemed deeply strange, a violation of this woman’s privacy that I should know what she looked like unclothed. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would expose herself in such a way unless she was in the most desperate financial circumstances.)

Megan pointed to a magazine on the floor. “That one has a naked lady bowling.”

What on earth was I supposed to say? When her mother came to pick her up, I would have to explain what had happened, and the idea of confessing to Carolyn Thayer that her daughter had stumbled on my husband’s porn stash was about as unappealing a scenario as I could imagine.

“If you have questions about those magazines, Megan, I suggest you talk to your mom. I wish you hadn’t looked through the drawers, because those are private, and they’re not yours. But I’m also sorry about what you saw. It isn’t meant for a nine-year-old.” I hesitated. “And not all grown-ups look at these magazines. Personally, I don’t care for them.”

“Then why do you have so many?”

I’d asked for it, hadn’t I? Stalling, I gathered the magazines into a stack and deposited them back in the