American Wife

underwear, or at least this was what she’d claimed. These reports from the field had struck me as exciting but very dangerous. As our home ec teacher, Mrs. Anderson, had told us, some men, once aroused, could not control themselves. There was also one’s reputation to consider, and most significantly, there was the risk of pregnancy. Certain girls at Benton County Central High were rumored to have had sex—what people said about Cindy Pawlak was not only that she’d done it but that she’d done it with multiple people, most scandalously with the junior high bus driver, a married man who lived in Houghton—and there were girls, usually country girls, who got pregnant and dropped out of school and then, if they were lucky, got married. Also, there was a girl in the class ahead of ours named Barbara Grob, a cheerleader with blond hair who’d supposedly decided the previous spring to go live with cousins in Eau Claire but everyone knew she was having a baby at a convent and giving it up for adoption; she’d returned to school looking drawn and heavy and had not attempted to rejoin the cheer squad. And yet, even if sex wasn’t unheard of, I hadn’t expected Dena to really do it; I’d expected her to teeter on the edge, bragging and teasing, without slipping over.

“Don’t you want to save it for marriage?” I said. This was my plan, and it seemed perfectly reasonable given that we’d likely be married within a few years. In Riley, even girls who went to college often were brides before they graduated, and if you got to twenty-five without a wedding, you were staring down spinsterhood. Ruth Hofstetter, who worked at the fabric store where my mother and I bought material for our clothes, was twenty- eight and had no beau, and whenever we left the store, my mother and I would talk about how sad it was, especially because Ruth was kind and pretty.

“It’s a little late for that,” Dena said. “There’s hardly a difference between partway and all the way.”

“Do you think you’ll marry Robert?”

“I might.”

“Dena, if you marry someone else, he’ll figure it out when you don’t bleed on your wedding night.”

She scoffed. “Not everyone bleeds.” She picked up the mirror again and looked into it. “You don’t know anything.”

I HAD BEEN avoiding my grandmother, but one afternoon in early February, my mother was at the grocery store when I came home from school, and my grandmother was sitting in the living room, smoking and reading a novel by Wilkie Collins. I hung my book bag by the door and went into the kitchen to make a snack, and my grandmother followed me. As I pulled honey from the cupboard—I was planning to spread it on toast—she said, “You’ve been awfully moody since we returned from Chicago. Is there anything about the trip you’d like to discuss?”

“No,” I said.

“No more questions about Dr. Wycomb?”

I shook my head.

The room was silent, and then my grandmother said, “I won’t claim I’ve never in my life done anything I’m ashamed of, but I haven’t done anything for a good while. If not everyone would agree with the decisions I’ve made, that’s fine. What other people think has never made a situation right or wrong.”

In this moment, I detested my grandmother. She was such a hypocrite, I thought—pretending to be bold and frank as she distorted the truth and implicated me in her distortions. Standing with my back to the stove, I glared at her.

“People are complicated,” she continued, “and the ones who aren’t are boring.”

“Then maybe I’m boring.”

We looked at each other, and in a genuinely sad voice, she said, “Maybe you are.”

ROBERT BEIKE AND Dena had officially been boyfriend and girlfriend for several months by the time the junior-senior prom rolled around that May, and Dena had decided in March that Larry Nagel ought to ask me. A few weeks before prom, this had come to pass; when I emerged from the chemistry classroom late one morning, he was standing in the hallway, his arms folded. We made eye contact, and I was pretty sure I knew why he was there. I’d been walking beside my friend Betty Bridges, and I murmured to her, “Go ahead and I’ll catch up.”

When she was gone, Larry said in a not particularly warm tone, “Are you going to prom?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Want to go together?”

“Sure.”

“Okay,” he said, and his tone remained flat. “See you around.” He then headed up the hall, which happened to be the same direction I was going, but since it didn’t seem to occur to him that we might travel together, or continue the conversation, I held back, letting him disappear. To be fair, I couldn’t expect him to be shocked or thrilled that I’d accepted when the entire scenario had been choreographed by Dena. Had I been shocked or thrilled that he’d asked? But I hoped I’d see more flashes of the sweetly impulsive boy who’d kissed me on the stoop, and in a way, his usual coolness made his capacity for sweetness even sweeter. Surely at some point on the night of prom, there’d be further evidence of it.

My mother sewed my dress from a pattern I found in Mademoiselle—it was green, with a sweetheart neckline and tulle skirt—and I planned to wear it with white gloves that went above my elbows and made me feel, in both good and bad ways, like the queen of England. A few hours before prom, I discovered a paper bag on my bureau containing a green headband that was an almost identical shade to the dress. I bounded downstairs with the headband in my hand. In the kitchen, my mother was putting a casserole in the oven. “Thank you so much,” I said. “It matches perfectly.”

She smiled. “I hope you have a wonderful time.” She closed the oven door, and impulsively, I hugged her—I felt closer to her now that I steered clear of my grandmother. Because of my position in Spirit Club, I’d been responsible for bringing two hundred cupcakes to school that morning, which would serve as prom refreshments. The night before, my mother had stayed up with me until midnight, applying yellow frosting.

A little later, as my parents and grandmother were finishing dinner, I came downstairs, still barefoot but with the gloves and headband on, to model the dress. When I entered the dining room, they applauded. “Curtsy,” my grandmother commanded, and because it was more when we were alone together that things between us seemed strained—in the presence of my parents, their obliviousness negated the tension—I complied. Really, how could I not? It was a spring night; next door, Mr. Noffke was mowing his lawn, and the smell of cut grass wafted through our dining room windows.