American Wife

seemed to be waiting for a sign from me, and I did not provide it; I barely met his eyes. Ella, too, was unusually watchful, looking tentatively between us. In the kitchen that morning, Charlie had shown Ella the article in the Sentinel about the Capital Group’s purchase of the Brewers, and though his demonstration was subdued, I sensed that it was as much for my benefit as for hers. I didn’t read the article myself.

Waiting for our plane, I had wondered if we might run into Joe Thayer, but it appeared we were on a different flight. Instead, we saw Norm and Patty Setterlee—Norm was a Princeton graduate from the class of ’48, and he lightly punched Charlie’s bicep and said, “Just promise we’ll never let the White Sox win again.”

On the plane, with Ella in the seat between us, Charlie had said to me, “I’ve given it some thought, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Jessica Sutton is eligible for a scholarship.”

Ella looked up from the book she was reading, which was Bunnicula. “What does eligible mean?” When neither Charlie nor I responded, she pulled on my sleeve and said, “Why is Jessica eligible?”

“It means qualified for,” I said. To Charlie, I said, “That’s what I was trying to explain. She probably would be, but they’ve given out all the financial aid for the upcoming school year.” I tried to sound matter-of-fact—calm and civil, not overheated, as I’d been the night before. If I was seriously thinking of leaving him, there was no reason to be anything but cordial.

Charlie said, “It’s an admirable thought on your part, there’s no doubt about that, but this isn’t the ideal time for us. I’m unloading a huge chunk of our assets for the purchase of the team, and I want to be prudent in other areas.”

I said—civilly, I hoped—“Do you know what the tuition for a seventh-grader at Biddle is?”

“Five grand? Six?”

My plan had backfired. “Fifty-five hundred,” I said. “But”—calmly, matter-of-factly— “that’s a fraction of the savings you’re using for the Brewers. It’s almost unnoticeable, isn’t it?” Why was I still arguing for this? Even if I could convince him now, if I told Charlie I was leaving, there wasn’t a chance he’d go through with it.

“We’re not just talking for one year, though,” Charlie said, and he, too, sounded like he was trying his utmost to be conciliatory. “Let’s say she enrolls for the fall, we pony up the fifty-five hundred, and then Nancy Dwyer says, ‘Whoops, clerical error, turns out there isn’t money for her in next year’s budget, either.’ At that point, we’re not going to yank Jessica out, are we? If we signed on, we’d have to assume we were signing on for the next six years.”

He wasn’t wrong, but still, he could spare what would amount to forty thousand dollars. It wasn’t nothing, but we—he—could do it. Besides, wasn’t part of the incentive of buying the Brewers the likelihood that eventually he and the other investors would make a profit? My impatience swelled; really, this conversation was only an opportunity for him to show his thoughtfulness. He’d ultimately reject the possibility, but he wanted credit for having examined it from all angles.

“I guess that’s true,” I said, and I went back to my New Yorker.

In the rental car, we hardly spoke until we were near campus. From the backseat, Ella said, “I’m hungry.”

I turned. “They’ll have food in the tent, but snack on these.” I pulled a plastic bag of pretzels from my purse.

“I don’t like pretzels.”

“Since when?”

“Since always.”

“That comes as news to me.”

Charlie, who was driving, said, “Then I guess you won’t mind if I have a few.” He reached toward my lap, wriggled his hand into the bag, scooped up most of the pretzels at once, and shoved them into his mouth. His cheeks bulged, and crumbs collected on his shirt as he chewed and, his mouth still full, he made the Cookie Monster noise: “Nom, nom, nom.” Ella giggled, and he grinned at her in the rearview mirror. Then he swallowed and glanced at me. “Hope you weren’t saving those, ’cause if you were, I can give ’em back.” He jerked forward and to the right, pretending to vomit: “Blegggggh.”

“That’s disgusting,” Ella cried—the performance clearly pleased her—and I said, “Will you watch the road?”

We parked behind the New New Quad and made our way to the twentieth-reunion tent. I had accompanied Charlie to his tenth reunion, in ’78, when we’d been married under a year, and to his fifteenth, in ’83, when Ella was four, and both times my reaction to the campus was similar to the one I had now: that it looked, in its perfection, more like a movie set of a college campus than a real campus; that you initially resisted its charms as you’d resist the advances of a handsome, charismatic man at a party, knowing that he probably flirted with everyone.

Its buildings were Tudor or Victorian Gothic, brick and marble and ashlar blocks, with many-paned Palladian windows, with crockets and finials and coats of ivy (I had not realized prior to my visit in ’78 that the ivy in the Ivy League was literal). There were towers and turrets and arches you walked under, arches that were shaded enchantingly, that smelled like learning and promise. There were the grassy quads bisected diagonally by walkways, and at the front of campus there was Nassau Hall, the first structure you saw upon entering FitzRandolph Gate, built of sandstone, grand and upright and sprawling; on either side of its front steps, bronze tigers whose coats were silvery-green from age and exposure sat guard. And then there were the students, the graduating seniors and also the underclassmen who’d stayed on to work at Reunions—among them our nephew Harry and our niece Liza—who were smart and sporty and privileged. Being at Princeton felt unfair in the way our lives in Milwaukee sometimes felt unfair, unfair in our favor. I could see Ella eyeing these nineteen- and twenty-year-olds, and I knew they were creating formative ideas for her of what it was to be a college student when, in fact, a student at Princeton University was as representative of a larger type as a thoroughbred racehorse or a Stradivarius violin.

The twentieth-reunion tent was in Holder Courtyard. Like the other reunion tents constructed at various locales around campus, it was massive—perhaps thirty by forty feet of white canvas supported by three interior poles—and at its entrance were black wooden signs with the class years in orange, and orange lightbulbs over the numbers: on top 1968, and below 1966, 1967, 1969, 1970. The tent held a wooden dance floor, a raised stage for the bands that would play that night and the next, a long buffet table covered in an orange paper tablecloth (I spotted some not terribly appetizing-looking turkey sandwiches as well as some cookies that were more tempting), and many round tables surrounded by folding chairs where, already, men in orange warm-up suits and floppy white hats sat drinking