American Wife

BACK IN RILEY, I could hardly make eye contact with my parents. Whatever you are, be a good one, I had grown up hearing my father say, and oh, how I had failed him, how I’d failed them all. On the weekends, when Mrs. Falke came over to play bridge with my parents and grandmother, I’d stand in the upstairs hall listening to the slap and turn of their cards, and they seemed to me like children.

I bled for a few days, and then I stopped. I was not even sore, not really. When an image or a feeling of Andrew or Pete came into my mind—they came at different moments, for different reasons—I’d try to suppress it. I waited for time to pass.

On November 22, a Friday, I was walking out of the cafeteria after lunch, just behind a few other students, when a sophomore named Joan Skryba and a junior named Millie Devon came toward us, running and crying. Though they were shouting, they were nearly incoherent. I couldn’t understand at first, and when I finally did, I still wasn’t sure I had because it seemed so unlikely—the president of the United States? President Kennedy? Then someone else, a boy, emerged from the cafeteria behind us and said the same thing, and everyone was talking at once, and a girl next to me whom I wasn’t friends with at all, Helen Pajak, took my hand and gripped it tightly. It wasn’t until I saw Mrs. Moore, my math teacher, weeping openly that I knew it was true: A little over an hour before, President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

Everything felt suspended; in the remaining classes that afternoon, we spoke of nothing else, but people were no longer excitable. We all were simply stunned. And then, an hour or so later, we heard he had died, and if President Kennedy had just been assassinated, what would happen next? What sense or logic was there, which rules still existed in the world? Normally, at the end of the day and especially on a Friday, the hall containing our lockers was filled with yells and laughter and slamming metal, but that afternoon it was quiet.

I did not cry for him, not then or ever, though I, like everyone, found the television coverage mesmerizing. That evening was the only time I can recall my family watching television while we ate dinner; we carried our plates into the living room. Everything was canceled, in Riley and everywhere else, sports events and plays, and restaurants and stores and movie theaters were closed, and you hardly saw a car on the street. Really, there was nothing to do but wonder at what had happened. Over the next few days, seeing the picture in the newspaper of Lyndon Johnson being sworn in on Air Force One by Sarah Hughes, watching the surreal footage of Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot at the police headquarters by Jack Ruby, listening to Johnson’s address on Thanksgiving—“From this midnight of tragedy we shall move toward a new American greatness,” he told us—my parents and grandmother seemed as stupefied as I was.

But this is the truth: I had admired Kennedy, I’d thought he was smart and handsome and full of vigor. And yet with his death, I felt a grim relief. I wasn’t happy; certainly not. But something had occurred that was so dreadful, it eclipsed the dreadfulness of what I had caused. Not in my opinion, it didn’t, but in everyone else’s; it made what I’d done seem small. And I knew it immediately that afternoon at school. This was a death far bigger and worse than Andrew’s, and it had nothing to do with me; there was no part of it that was my fault. If this was not absolution, it was as close as I would get.

To this day, I remain deeply ashamed of my reaction. In all my life, I have admitted what I felt that afternoon to just one person.

PART II

3859 Sproule Street

W

HEN I WAS

twenty-seven, the month after Simon Tornkvist and I broke up, I decided that if I wasn’t married by the time I turned thirty, I would buy a house alone. Although I told no one, keeping this idea in the back of my mind provided reassurance; it made my life seem less like something I was waiting for and more like something I was planning. When I drove around Madison, I’d sometimes think,

A place like that.

Three bedrooms at the most, a yard but not a large one, on a street with tall trees. Also, not a house on a corner, because those seemed too exposed. As a librarian at Theodora Liess Elementary School, I earned eight hundred and thirty-three dollars a month after taxes, and as soon as I’d made my decision, I began to put away two hundred dollars from each paycheck in a savings account; I deposited the money at my neighborhood branch of Wisconsin State Bank & Trust on the last Saturday morning of every month.

I’m not sure exactly when I would have called a realtor—the day I turned thirty? The day after? My plan had never gotten that specific—but it didn’t turn out to be anywhere close, because it was two months before my birthday, in February 1976, that my father died. Like his own father, he had a heart attack, and although my father made it into his fifties—two decades longer than my grandfather had lived—this seemed to me even then to be a dubious reprieve. Now, of course, it does not seem like a reprieve at all.

It snowed the day of my father’s funeral, and my mother, grandmother, and I all tried, for one another’s sakes and because we were midwestern, to be stoic; my mother either was or pretended to be greatly preoccupied by whether the black crepe dress I had bought at Prange’s was warm enough. Back at the house, we visited awkwardly with my mother’s siblings and their spouses, none of whom I’d seen in years. Other members of Calvary Lutheran dropped by, and my father’s coworkers at the bank, all of them bearing flowers or food (mostly casseroles, though the assistant manager brought a whole ham). Then they were gone and a quiet descended, amplified by the snow that had fallen.

I needed to drive back to Madison that Sunday evening—I’d arranged to have a substitute for three days the previous week, but the next morning, I was due at school again—and my mother walked me to my car, hugging herself against the cold. When I was settled in the driver’s seat, she motioned for me to roll down the window and said, “Fasten your seat belt,” and I said, “It’s fastened already.” As I pulled away from her, away from the house where I’d grown up, I was alone at last, and I began to sob. By the time I reached the highway, a new snow flurry had started, and though it didn’t accumulate into anything, it was my father’s directions for driving in the snow that I thought of:

Go slowly. Stay well behind the car in front of you. If you skid, turn in to the skid.

When I unlocked the door to my apartment in Madison—I was living then on the second floor of a house on Sproule Street—I could hear the phone ringing, and when I answered, it was, as I’d known it would be, my mother, who’d no doubt been calling every ten minutes for the last hour to see if I’d arrived yet. My upper back, between my shoulders, ached from the tension of the drive and from everything else.

In the year and a half since my father’s death, I had gone back to Riley most weekends to check in on my mother and grandmother. Usually, I’d pull into the driveway shortly before lunch on Saturday, and I’d once brought them a pizza, but instead of relieving my mother of the burden of cooking, as I’d intended, it appeared to make her