American Wife

For the next three nights, we stayed in a motel in St. Ignace, all of us in one room. The motel was called Three Breezes and had a pool in which my father swam laps, though my mother and I found it too cold. On the day we hiked the sand dunes of Lake Michigan, I thought, I will tell them in fifteen minutes. In another fifteen minutes. When we’re back in the car. The day after that, we took the ferry to Mackinac Island, where we rode in a horse-drawn carriage, ate fudge, and had lunch at a restaurant in the Grand Hotel. “Maybe you’ll come back someday for your honeymoon,” my mother said, and she squeezed my knee beneath the table. They are having an affair, I thought, and Dr. Wycomb is giving her lavish presents, and maybe she’s even giving her money.

During our last dinner in St. Ignace, my parents drank two bottles of wine between them, and later, my father convinced my mother to swim with him in the motel pool, the sky dark but the pool lit up. From the room, I could hear them giggling. I went to sleep, and the next morning, I opened my eyes and thought, They already know. I listened to them sleeping in the bed across from mine, my mother’s deep breathing and my father’s quiet snores, as if even when asleep, he was trying to be polite. They already know, I thought, and if they don’t, it’s because they’ve chosen not to. Surely that accounted for my father’s initial resistance to my accompanying my grandmother to Chicago the previous winter. I would say nothing, I realized, because it wasn’t necessary, it wasn’t my place. I was glad then that I had not previously been able to express the words.

And really, what has stayed with me from that vacation as much as my own suspicious, petty agonizing is my father on the esplanade just after our arrival. The wind blew his hair, and he was fidgety with delight, straining to explain to my mother and me exactly why the Mighty Mac was so impressive. I wondered at the time—I wonder still—if that was the happiest my father had ever been.

IT TOOK LONGER, but we drove home via the southern route: once more across the Mighty Mac (this time I was allowed to take the wheel), then down through the lower part of Michigan, curving southwest through the edge of Indiana and northwest into Illinois, where, at a train station in Bolingbrook, thirty miles outside Chicago, we picked up my grandmother. She and I sat together in the backseat, but she seemed to have given up on me months before and was reading Anna Karenina. “That’s the second time, isn’t it?” my mother asked, and my grandmother said a little tartly, “It’s the fourth.”

Then we were back in Wisconsin, a place that in late summer is thrillingly beautiful. When I was young, this was knowledge shared by everyone around me; as an adult, I’ve never stopped being surprised by how few of the people with whom I interact have any true sense of the states between Pennsylvania and Colorado. Some of these people have even spent weeks or months working in such states, but unless they’re midwesterners, too, to them the region is nothing but polling numbers and caucuses, towns or cities where they stay in hotels whose bedspreads are glossy maroon and brown on the outside and pilly on the inside, whose continental breakfasts are packaged doughnuts and cereal from a dispenser, whose fitness centers are a single stationary bike and a broken treadmill. These people eat dinner at Perkins, and then they complain about the quality of the restaurants.

Admittedly, the area possesses a dowdiness I personally have always found comforting, but to think of Wisconsin specifically or the Midwest as a whole as anything other than beautiful is to ignore the extraordinary power of the land. The lushness of the grass and trees in August, the roll of the hills (far less of the Midwest is flat than outsiders seem to imagine), that rich smell of soil, the evening sunlight over a field of wheat, or the crickets chirping at dusk on a residential street: All of it, it has always made me feel at peace. There is room to breathe, there is a realness of place. The seasons are extreme, but they pass and return, pass and return, and the world seems far steadier than it does from the vantage point of a coastal city.

Certainly picturesque towns can be found in New England or California or the Pacific Northwest, but I can’t shake the sense that they’re too picturesque. On the East Coast, especially, these places—Princeton, New Jersey, say, or Farmington, Connecticut—seem to me aggressively quaint, unbecomingly smug, and even xenophobic, downright paranoid in their wariness of those who might somehow infringe upon the local charm. I suspect this wariness is tied to the high cost of real estate, the fear that there might not be enough space or money and what there is of both must be clung to and defended. The West Coast, I think, has a similar self-regard—all that talk of proximity to the ocean and the mountains—and a beauty that I can’t help seeing as show-offy. But the Midwest: It is quietly lovely, not preening with the need to have its attributes remarked on. It is the place I am calmest and most myself.

THE WEEKEND BEFORE my senior year of high school, I emerged from Jurec Brothers’ butcher shop late in the afternoon on Saturday, carrying a pound of ground beef my mother had asked me to pick up, when I heard the salutatory honk of a nearby car horn. I turned my head to see a mint-green Ford Thunderbird with a white roof; leaning out the passenger window, tanned and smiling, was Andrew Imhof. I waved as I stepped off the curb, moving between two parked cars. When I was closer, I could see that beyond Andrew, driving, was his brother, Pete; the car was a two-seater.

“Welcome back,” Andrew said.

“How’d you know I was gone?”

“After you weren’t at Pine Lake the other night, I thought you might be sick, but Dena said—not that Dena and I are—I just ran into her there—”

“Not that he’s feeding at her trough again,” Pete said. “He wants to make that perfectly clear.” Pete leaned over the steering wheel and grinned sarcastically. He was four years older; after high school, he’d gone on to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and presumably, he’d graduated the previous June. He and Andrew didn’t look much alike: They had the same hazel eyes, but Pete didn’t have Andrew’s impossible eyelashes, and where Andrew was lean and fair, Pete was meaty and had darker hair. He looked like an adult man, and not a terribly appealing one.

Andrew rolled his eyes good-naturedly in the direction of his brother and said to me, “Ignore him. You were in Michigan, huh?”

“My dad wanted to see the Mackinac Bridge, and then we went to Mackinac Island. They don’t have any cars there, only carriages.”

“Where goeth the horses, so goeth the shit,” Pete said. “Am I right?”

“Pretend he’s not there,” Andrew said.

“It sounds like a lot of people were at Pine Lake,” I said. “Dena told me it was the most fun she’d had all summer.”

“Really?” Andrew looked amused. “It was mostly just Bobby challenging anyone who’d listen to a chicken fight. The real party will be next weekend at Fred’s, have you heard about that? If it gets below seventy-five degrees, we’re making a bonfire.”

Pete leaned forward again. “And Andrew promises he’ll roast you a nice big wiener. This has been a fascinating conversation, but I’ve got places to go, little brother. You and Alice want to wrap things up?”