American Wife

“After she said to my mom, ‘Your daughter sure is pretty,’ it wasn’t very hard to figure out.”

“She never said that,” I protested.

“Close.”

“It was only because—”

“I know.” He covered both of his eyes—both sets of eyelashes—with his right hand and shook his head. “I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy. My brother says Max Factor should hire me to model mascara, and he doesn’t mean that as a compliment.”

“I’m sure he’s just jealous,” I said.

Onstage a member of the band was singing solo: “ ‘Goin’ down to lonesome town / Where the broken hearts stay . . . ’ ”

“What I said before, I didn’t mean Larry’s a bad guy.” Andrew’s tone had become more serious. “He’s just not who I’d picture you with.”

I could sense what Dena would say in this situation, what probably a lot of girls would say: Who would you picture me with? But it was so nice to rest in the moment without pushing it further, to feel its possibilities rather than its limitations. Later, I remembered thinking that I knew then Andrew would become my boyfriend, but that it wasn’t as if I were realizing it for the first time. Hadn’t I always known, for my whole life? And therefore, what was the hurry? Experiencing other people was almost a thing we ought to do before we were joined to each other.

“Have you eaten any of the cupcakes?” I asked.

“Yeah, they’re pretty good. There’s potato chips over there, too.”

“I made some of the cupcakes,” I said. “Not the blue ones, but the ones with yellow icing.”

“I thought that tasted like it came from the kitchen of Alice Lindgren!” he said, and I lightly slapped his arm. “No, it was delicious,” he said. “Really.”

We both were smiling, and after a beat, he said, “If you want to, you can put your head on my shoulder.”

I hesitated. “Am I tall enough?” Obviously, this was not my only hesitation.

“You don’t have to,” he said. “Just if you want to.”

When I did, we were body to body in a way we hadn’t been before. I could feel the heat of him, the solidity, and a calmness came over me; it made the conversation we’d been having seem like nothing, the words were nothing, they were raindrops or confetti, and holding on to each other was real.

When the song ended, we stepped apart, and then Bobby Sobczak approached Andrew, and I made my way to Betty Bridges at the refreshment table. Ten minutes had passed when Dena materialized, her cheeks flushed and liquor on her breath. “Were you dancing with Andrew?” she asked, and she sounded not quite accusatory but almost—she was forceful and intensely curious.

I was under the impression that she’d been outside all this time, which meant someone else must have already told her. “When you all left, I guess he saw me standing by myself,” I said. “He probably felt sorry for me.”

But I knew that wasn’t true. At one point, near the end of the song, Andrew had inhaled deeply, and I’d been pretty sure he was smelling my hair.

THAT AUGUST, MY grandmother returned to Chicago to visit Gladys Wycomb, and my father, mother, and I packed our suitcases and ourselves into our sedan—it was a turquoise 1956 Chevy Bel Air, with a silver hood ornament shaped like a paper airplane—and we drove north through Wisconsin to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to visit the Mackinac Bridge, aka the Mighty Mac. As we approached the St. Ignace side, my father, who’d driven the entire way up to this point, pulled over and switched places with my mother so he’d be free to look around as we crossed the bridge. It went on and on, over rough blue water, and on the other side, my mother turned around and we drove back, heading north. It was a toll bridge costing fifty cents, which wasn’t much, but still, it was an uncharacteristic indulgence on my father’s part. We parked on the shores of St. Ignace, my mother and I wearing jackets even though it was summer, and my father shook his head happily. “Imagine all the concrete, steel, and cables running for five miles over water,” he said. “That’s a remarkable feat of engineering.”

The sky beyond the bridge held curvy cirrus clouds, and in the air you could feel fall’s approach. Back in Riley, it was still hot.

“Shall we stroll for a bit?” my father asked.

We walked along an esplanade. At intervals, coin-operated binoculars sat atop poles, and my father paused at several of them, though I couldn’t really see how the view would change much from one to the next. “Before they built the bridge, it used to take people an hour to get across by ferry,” he said. “But sometimes there was such backup you’d have to wait ten or twelve hours before there was room for your car.”

I nodded, while inside I was thinking of the announcement I’d make. Granny is having an affair with Dr. Wycomb, I would say. Briefly, I had believed she wouldn’t return to Chicago now that I knew her secret. Or maybe she didn’t realize I knew. But she had to, otherwise she’d have demanded more explanation for my sullenness.

“Can you imagine having the patience to wait twelve hours?” my mother was saying.

Should I have guessed about my grandmother? I had read The Well of Loneliness at the age of fourteen, pulling it down from her shelf and returning it with slight confusion at the idea of two women falling in love, but not enough to ask her about it. Anyhow, that book had been set decades ago, and in England. For my own grandmother, the grandmother living in my house, who used the same bar of soap in the bathroom that I did, whose jewelry and high heels I’d dressed up in as a little girl—for her to be in a homosexual relationship didn’t make sense. She’d been married, she’d had a child! And even if it was true, why hadn’t she been more careful to prevent me from becoming party to her secret? She was making me choose between her and my parents, and what sort of choice was that? In a way, I had always loved her more deeply, I had loved her most, but I had thought she and I were conspiring to conceal this hurtful fact.

We were passing another set of binoculars, and my father stooped and peered into them. When he rejoined us, he took my mother’s hand, and I could sense the buoyancy of his enthusiasm.