“I thought—” Had I misjudged her all these years? Or was she lying now? Or was it neither—perhaps it wasn’t so much that she’d ever had a high opinion of me, only that she’d had, or still had, a low opinion of Charlie. “I thought you thought—” I began, but again I sputtered out.
Overriding me, Priscilla said, “What mystifies me is your timing, why you’ve chosen now to throw your little tantrum when Chas has just made the best move of his life. He’ll be splendid with the Brewers, and Lord knows he’s never been fit for anything else. Here he was running our company into the ground for years, Harold’s intervention was the only thing that kept his brothers from firing him, and now that Zeke Langenbacher has done us all a great favor, the only thing for you and Chas to do is sit on your derrieres and clap for home runs. Surely you can manage
My head was spinning: Did all the Blackwells think Charlie was incompetent and foolish? Did everyone? (The Thayers did, as I’d recently learned from Joe.) And was I, by extension, incompetent and foolish for having married him? In this moment, I felt defensive on Charlie’s behalf—if he had a tendency toward swagger and raunch, Arthur did, too. Charlie wasn’t the runt of the litter, he wasn’t an idiot.
“It’s neither here nor there why you want to abandon your marriage,” Priscilla was saying. “I can imagine a dozen reasons, and frankly, none of them is very interesting. Nobody will dispute for a second that you’re smarter and more refined than Chas, but you were smarter and more refined than him the day you met. At this point, that’s your problem. It’s not his, and it sure isn’t mine. But you have a home together, and more important, you have a daughter. If you couldn’t give her siblings, the least you can give her is two parents.”
It was unclear to me if this had been the most illuminating conversation of my life, the most insulting, both, or neither. I took a deep breath—in general, the reason I tried to be diplomatic was that you might occasionally regret your diplomacy, but you’d more frequently regret having been snippy—and then I said to my mother-in-law, “Well, Priscilla, I have a lot to think about.”
THE WAY WE’D decided to go to the skating rink at the Riley mall was process of elimination: Ella refused to return to Pine Lake, and we’d already visited Fassbinder’s. Plus, she’d long wanted to try the skating rink at home, at the Mayfair Mall, and I’d never taken her; here, there wasn’t much disincentive. Because summer was still new, because it was not yet horribly hot, the rink was mostly empty, and the pop music that blasted from enormous speakers just below the roof seemed aggressive. The last time I’d skated had been up in Halcyon one winter, before Ella was born, and it had never been a great talent of mine. We slipped and skidded along, and I watched her watching two other girls, sisters, it seemed, a few years older than Ella, who were quite skillful and who often called out to each other, arguing and laughing. “Do you want to go play with them?” I asked. When Ella vigorously shook her head, guilt billowed inside me. After we’d unlaced and returned our skates, we ate chicken tenders in the mall’s food court, and in a store of cheap jewelry and accessories, I bought her a bracelet with a dolphin charm.
Walking down the mall’s wide pink marble corridors (why did a mall in Riley, Wisconsin, need a marble floor?), I couldn’t help wondering what I was doing to us. How long could Ella and I last in this town? Because it was easy to drive back and forth between Milwaukee and Riley in a single day, this was already the longest visit I’d made here in years, and while I had imagined it as a respite, what Ella had said in Fassbinder’s had not been wrong: It was boring. I was of this place, and gratefully so, but each day here seemed three times as long as a day in Maronee. And yet if we went home, wouldn’t it all be exactly the same? Charlie might be on his best behavior for a few weeks, a few months at most, and even that could be wishful thinking—he was as likely to be resentful as remorseful.
That afternoon, I called Jadey. (Looking back, this is what I most remember of that strange period in Riley— being on the phone. If my mother and Lars found the frequency with which I sequestered myself to call people or wait for calls to be reminiscent of a moody, inconsiderate teenager, I hardly could have blamed them.)
When Jadey answered, she said, “Please tell me you’re calling to say you’re home and you want to know if I can go for a walk, because the answer is yes. I’ve already gained four pounds from missing you—well, missing you, getting no exercise, and eating a tray of double fudge brownies.”
“Does everyone in the family think Charlie is some sort of dimwit?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Maj called earlier today—she’s none too pleased with me, as you can imagine—and she was implying—It was very strange. Have Arthur and John been wanting to fire Charlie?”
Jadey didn’t reply immediately, which was an answer, and not the one I’d hoped for. Then she said, “He plays tennis in the middle of the day, I think that’s the main thing. They don’t know where he
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We can’t babysit them, right? Don’t be mad. Are you mad? Alice, he’s always been like this. Nobody thinks he’s stupid. He’s just—maybe he’s not the hardest-working guy ever, let’s put it that way. But you know who the hardest-working guy ever is? Ed, and who’d want to be married to him?”
It was like the optical illusion of the hag and the elegant young woman—from this angle, my life was privileged and boisterous, containing its problems, certainly, but they were minor compared to its gifts; and from that angle, my marriage was a sham, my husband a laughingstock. I had long known how thin the line was that divided happiness and tragedy, tranquillity and chaos, but it had been many years since I’d walked it. “When you see him tonight, will you ask him to call me?” I said.
“Oh, Chas isn’t staying with us anymore,” Jadey said. “He was only here for the one night.”
“Where’s he staying?”
“I assume he decided to put on his big-boy underpants and go home.”
I felt a prickly alertness, the sort that precedes goose bumps. He was not staying at home; I felt sure of it.
“Are you still there?” Jadey asked. “Say something.”
I sighed. “I’m still here.”
THAT SUNDAY, ELLA and I went to church with my mother and Lars, and Ella squirmed through the service, no doubt thinking longingly of Bonnie, the prosthetic-eye-removing Sunday-school teacher at Christ the Redeemer in Milwaukee. Back at the house, after lunch, Lars and I started a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle of a train in the Swiss Alps—he’d set up the card table for this purpose—and in the front yard, my mother filled a clear glass salad bowl with water and a few squirts of Windex so that Ella could take Barbie swimming; if my mother or Lars had an opinion about Barbie’s skin color, neither of them ever expressed it. After a while, my mother came inside, saying, “It wouldn’t take five minutes for me to make a little towel for Barbie.”
