“Maybe we can go by tomorrow, although I don’t want to jinx it before I hear back.”
Dena sighed extravagantly. “You have no sense of fun. Speaking of which, I ran into Kathleen Hicken at Eagle, and she said you told her you’re going home this weekend. Alice, you can’t make me socialize with those people by myself. Rose Trommler hates me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“All those women are fat, and their husbands are boring.”
“First of all, that’s not true, but if you really feel that way, why are you so intent on going?”
“I have to,” Dena said. “Charlie Blackwell will be there, and I’m planning to seduce him.”
I laughed. “I’m sure you’ll be just fine without me.”
“Charlie
” she said. “As in
Blackwells.”
“Oh, Dena, do you really want to be mixed up with that family?” The Blackwells, as everyone from Wisconsin knew, had made their fortune in meat products. (There were several plants near Milwaukee, and it was said you could now buy a package of Blackwell sausage at any grocery store in the country—not, I thought, that you’d necessarily want to. It was what I’d grown up eating, but as an adult, I found it rather greasy.) Harold Blackwell, this generation’s paterfamilias, had served as Wisconsin’s governor from ’59 to ’67 and then made an unsuccessful presidential bid in ’68. A week after a rally at UW in which a young woman named Donna Ann Keske, a sophomore from Racine, was paralyzed from the chest down when police used force to break up the demonstration, Governor Blackwell appeared on
and called Vietnam protestors “unwashed and uneducated,” thereby demonstrating a tin ear that would have been unfortunate under normal circumstances but was downright callous during a time of such tumult. Though Blackwell was a Republican and from Wisconsin, even my father wouldn’t have supported him had he not dropped out of the presidential race after the New Hampshire primary: He had a disdainful air, as if he didn’t trust the average person to be smart enough to vote for him. Now he was out of politics—I had the dim sense he was head of some university, though I couldn’t have said which—but one of his sons, of whom there were four, had been elected to Congress from Milwaukee the year before. “You know,” I said, “if Charlie is the Blackwell brother I’m thinking of, then Jeanette and Frank tried to set me up with him a couple years ago. But maybe it was a different brother.”
“They tried to set you up with him and you said no?” Dena sounded incredulous.
“I was dating Simon.” The truth was that I probably would have declined anyway—money and Republicans and sausage did not strike me as a particularly tempting combination.
“Ed is the one who’s a congressman, but Charlie’s also about to run,” Dena said. “North of here, I think around Houghton. It’s still a secret, but Kathleen told me he’ll announce his candidacy in the spring. Don’t you think I deserve to be married to a powerful man?”
“Absolutely.”
When she spoke again, Dena sounded less confident. “Alice, the Hickens and all those people are so judgmental. The only reason Kathleen invited me is that I’m friends with you. I need you there for moral support.”
Dena had been married—her ex-husband was an older man, an ad executive who was already twice divorced when she met him while working as a flight attendant for TWA. They’d lived in Kansas City in the late sixties and early seventies, and in 1975, having had no children, they, too, divorced. Dena had moved to Madison then and used the money from her settlement to open a store on State Street that sold clothes and accessories to fashionable coeds: bell-bottoms and pantsuits and miniskirts, sheer scarves and velvety handbags, crocheted shawls, ambiguously ethnic baubles. Entering the store—it was called D’s—never failed to make me feel very old, and while the merchandise was not really to my taste, I usually bought something.
My inappropriate sartorial purchases aside, having Dena in town was a real joy, especially since almost everyone I’d once been close to from college had gotten married. And it wasn’t that you couldn’t be friends with a married woman, but you weren’t friends in the same way, she didn’t have the same freedom in her schedule, especially not after she had children, and even before that, she didn’t need you; you needed friendship, and friendship to her was auxiliary, extra.
But Dena and I would phone each other four times a day, including a minute after we’d just hung up if one of us remembered something we’d forgotten to say: “What’s the name of that guy at Salon Styles who cut your hair last time?” Or “When you come over tonight, will you bring the Carpenters’ album?” She’d swing by to show me her outfit before a date, or she’d call and say, “I’m in the mood for a movie,” and ten minutes later, we’d meet at the Majestic. We went for long walks together on Sunday mornings—Dena no longer attended church, either, and we called these walks our constitutionals, which made them sound a little more like a respectable substitute for prayer—and we’d regularly meet for dinner, after which she’d suggest having a drink and be gravely disapproving of my need to go home and sleep. She dated much more frequently than I did; she told me once that she’d gotten a prescription for the pill the first week she was hired at TWA, the summer we graduated from high school, and she hadn’t been off it since. As for my own dating habits, people I knew often tried to set me up, and sometimes I went to be a good sport, but on a Saturday night, I tended to be just as happy attending a play with a female friend— Dena also teased me for my friendship with Rita Alwin, a French teacher at Liess Elementary who was black and older than our mothers—or even staying in and reading. People like the Hickens, whom I saw every month or two, formed a kind of secondary social circle: I’d been sorority sisters at the University of Wisconsin with a lot of the wives in these couples, I’d gone to fraternity formals with a few of the husbands (one starry night beside Lake Mendota, in the spring of our junior year, Wade Trommler had drunkenly announced that he considered me the ideal girl), and we’d remained in touch after graduation as they all paired off and had children. Admittedly, my enthusiasm for spending time with them fluctuated with my tolerance for being pecked at about my single status. It always amazed me that married people thought they could say an illuminating thing to you on the topic, as if you were scarcely aware, until they pointed it out, of being unwed.
“Dena, I’m sorry,” I said, “but I already told Kathleen Hicken I can’t come. My mother and grandmother are expecting me.”
