American Wife

I’d called my mother on Tuesday, prior to my conversation with Charlie, to ask if we might come stay with them for a couple weeks, though I hadn’t told her the real reason. I’d said, “Charlie has a lot going on with the baseball team, and I think Ella is finally old enough to appreciate Riley’s charms.”

On Wednesday, we drove out around noon. I’d announced the plan to Ella only a few hours before, allowing enough time for her to pack and then for me to cajole her into repacking more realistically—two swimsuits instead of four, seven pairs of socks instead of one, no black dress. She seemed not particularly surprised by the abrupt announcement that we were leaving town, and even excited at the prospect. She said, “Will Papa Lars make me an egg with a top hat?” This was a breakfast that involved Lars placing a glass upside down on a slice of bread in order to cut out a perfect circle, toasting both the bread and the circle, preparing a fried egg, setting the toast over the fried egg with the yolky center peeking out the hole, and setting the toasted circle over the yolk—the top hat. I said, “If you ask him nicely, I bet he will.”

When we arrived, my mother had made peanut-butter fudge, which Ella and I dipped into while Lars carried our suitcases upstairs. It wasn’t until I made it to the second floor that I realized Lars had put Ella in my old room and me in my grandmother’s. My heart clutched—it was one of those moments when you feel time is a rug that’s been yanked out from under you; everything around you has changed so gradually that it is only all at once you look up and realize how different your life has become. There was my grandmother’s single bed, though the spread on it was different—this one was striped. My mother had cleared the surfaces of my grandmother’s bureau and night- stand of the cosmetics and perfume bottles, the ashtrays and cartons of tissue; she also had emptied the bureau’s drawers, I saw when I opened them. But the Nefertiti bust was still there, set at an angle, and the bookshelves still were full. I ran a finger over the spines—the books were not alphabetized by author, as mine were, or in any other order that I could discern. The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Group and Gone with the Wind, Frankenstein and Presumed Innocent and The Counte of Monte Cristo and The Golden Notebook, In Cold Blood, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Great Santini, The Maltese Falcon, Native Son—all those worlds, all the versions of myself I had been when I’d read these very copies, and all the versions of herself she had been. I pulled down The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington (the title and author’s name appeared in engraved gold on an otherwise blank cover of navy leather), and I opened to a random page, page 172, and smelled it, pressing my nose against the binding, but it smelled only like old paper, like an old house, and not like my grandmother.

At Fassbinder’s, Lars said to Ella, “Did you hear the cheese squeak?”

“So what if it squeaks?” Ella said, and I said, “That’s impolite, Ella.”

Genially, over Ella’s head—she was leaning against me, pulling on my blouse—Lars said, “I sense that someone’s ready for a nap.”

“I don’t take naps anymore,” Ella said.

This was not entirely true, but I simply said to her, “Do you think Grandma will like the jam Papa Lars picked out?” She didn’t respond, and I flashed an apologetic smile at Lars. “We’ll meet you in the car.”

CHARLIE CALLED THAT night around eleven, when I was the only one awake. I was lying in bed reading The Old Forest by Peter Taylor, and as soon as I heard the phone—there was the extension in the room my mother and Lars shared, and the extension downstairs in the kitchen—I knew that it was Charlie, but there wasn’t much I could do. I wasn’t about to barge in on my mother and Lars, and there was no way I could get to the kitchen in time. Then my mother knocked on the door. She was wearing a beige rayon nightgown with a scalloped yoke and sleeves that ended just below her elbows, and her hair was askew. “Sweetheart, it’s Charlie—”

I stood. “I’m so sorry, Mom. I’ll take it downstairs.”

In the kitchen, when I’d heard the click of the second-floor extension, I said, “Charlie, do you know what time it is?” and he said, “Just come home. Please. I’m begging you.”

“You can’t call like this,” I said.

“I’m losing my fucking mind. You know I can’t stay by myself. Want to know where I spent the night last night? At the Wauwatosa Ramada. The fucking Ramada, okay? You’ve called my bluff. I’m a lousy husband. But I need you, Lindy.”

This is, almost without fail, a powerful thing to hear a person say. I sighed. “Charlie, if I came back, I can’t see how anything would be different.”

“I’ll quit being an immature dick, that’s how. Yeah, I do know what you were talking about—I’ve been selfish lately. But things have changed for me, this baseball stuff is really gonna be good, and I’m ready to turn over a new leaf.”

“Are you going to keep drinking?” I could tell he’d been drinking in the last few hours. He wasn’t slurring, but his voice had that looseness.

“Is that what this is about?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I hope it’s the alcohol, but I’m not sure it is.”

He was quiet, and then he said, “When did you turn against me?”

“That’s not fair.”

“May? January? Two years ago?”

I said, “I know you’ve struggled with getting older, your fortieth birthday, your twentieth college reunion, but I wish you hadn’t been as—I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s such a thing as suffering quietly.”

He laughed then, a dark chuckle. “Yeah, and apparently, you’ve cornered the market on it.”

“I’m going to sleep,” I said. “Everyone here is in bed, and I don’t want to disturb them. If you’d like, we can talk tomorrow.”

“Listen to yourself. You’re a fucking ice queen.”

“Please don’t insult me.”

“What do you want? What am I supposed to do?”

“I told you—I want space.”