American Wife

keeper.”

THE FOLLOWING WEEK, which was the one before school started, I drove my papier-mache characters to the library. It took two trips to fit them all in my Capri, delicately stacked atop one another. Though no one had seen them besides Charlie, I felt nearly certain that they had turned out the way I’d wanted. Even Babar’s head stayed upright once I’d secured it to a hook behind him.

While I was situating Eloise on a shelf, I heard a deep voice say, “Those are real nice, Alice.”

“Big Glenn!” This was what we all, teachers and students alike, called Liess’s janitor, who was an extremely tall black man in his early seventies; he’d worked at the school for over fifty years. I hurried over and hugged him. “Did you and Henrietta have a good summer?” I had never actually met Big Glenn’s wife, though there was a famous pineapple upside-down cake she made that Big Glenn dropped off in the faculty lounge every May, some morning before the end of the school year. It was usually decimated by eight-twenty A.M. as if its consumption were a competitive activity.

“It’s sure been peaceful not having the hellions around.” Big Glenn smiled.

“You mean the teachers or the students?” He laughed, and I said, “I bet you missed us all.”

He stepped forward, his voice lowered. “Don’t go repeating this, but I hear Sandy’s husband is real sick.”

I winced. “Again?” Sandy Borgos taught second grade and was a friendly woman twice my age who knitted during faculty meetings and wore, whenever possible, a beige shawl that she’d made herself. Her husband had been diagnosed with throat cancer two years earlier, though the last I’d heard, he’d been in remission.

“It’s in God’s hands now,” Big Glenn said. “You know about Carolyn, anyone tell you that?” Big Glenn was, among other things, an extremely well-informed source of school gossip.

I shook my head. Carolyn Krawiec worked in the kindergarten and was seven or eight years younger than I was; she’d been at Liess just a short time, and I hardly knew her.

“Not coming back this year,” Big Glenn said. “Took up with a new beau and followed him to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.” He arched his eyebrows meaningfully. This was always part of the transaction—the eschewal of explicit disapproval in favor of coded glances.

“Wow,” I said.

“Must be the real thing.” Big Glenn’s tone was highly dubious, and I felt a wave of defensiveness. Maybe it was the real thing.

“How long ago did she tell Lydia?” Lydia Bianchi was our fifty-five-year-old principal and a woman of whom I was quite fond. She was married but had no children, which led to speculation among her employees—that is to say, us—over whether her childlessness had been a choice or a private disappointment.

“Not more than a week or two,” Big Glenn said. “The gentleman is in the pharmaceuticals field, comes up to Madison on a regular basis, so you might think they could have seen each other like that.” He shrugged. “I must have forgot the passions of young love.”

“Have they hired her replacement?”

“You interested?”

“No way—I’m staying right here in the library.” This was when, somewhere inside, I knew that the opposite was true. I would leave. I would go away. If Charlie and I stayed together, if things progressed between us in ways I had not specified to anyone, including myself, since that conversation with Dena at the sandwich place, then my days as a teacher were probably numbered.

Standing there chatting with Big Glenn, I could feel the present moment rushing from me. I would leave soon, I realized, and when I did, in my absence, the other teachers would talk about me, too.

EVERYONE ALWAYS SAID there weren’t tornadoes in Madison because of the lakes. The city is an isthmus, a term children who grow up in Madison know from an early age. And while Wisconsin wasn’t hit by tornadoes with the regularity of towns in the states south and west of us, we tended to have a few watches a year and perhaps one warning and one real storm. In Riley, when I was a girl, we’d have tornado drills every spring. If we were in class, we filed out and sat Indian-style on the floor in the hall, knee to knee with the students beside us, all of us facing the wall, our heads down and our hands crossed over the crowns of our skulls. If we were outside—the drills happened sometimes at recess, which felt like a great waste—a teacher would lead us to a dip in the grassy hill behind the elementary school, and we’d lie flat on our bellies and join hands, forming an irregular circle or a human flower, our bodies the petals pointing out. In high school, we joked about the absurdity: That was supposed to save us? I pictured a net of children blown aloft, straining to hold on to one another.

The tornado watch that happened in late August 1977 was on a Sunday afternoon, and the night before, Charlie and I had gone to a party at the house of a couple he knew named the Garhoffs. I was pretty sure people had been smoking marijuana in the upstairs bathroom, which surprised me—I’d been to parties where there was pot, but the Garhoffs had children who were asleep on the same floor. We left a little after midnight, Charlie came to my apartment for an hour, and he tried to persuade me to let him stay over. “Like in Houghton” was his new argument. “And see, the flames of hell haven’t licked us yet.”

I declined. I knew that the next morning, he was going with Hank Ucker to a church service in Lomira, followed by a pancake breakfast. I, meanwhile, was greatly looking forward to cleaning my apartment—there were dishes in the sink, several loads of laundry, unpaid bills, everything that you happily neglect in the early stage of a relationship.

On Sunday, I tended to this tidying up for several hours while the sky turned from blue to dark gray. By two P.M., the temperature had dropped at least fifteen degrees since sunrise, and I shut my kitchen and bedroom windows and turned on the radio. A tornado was approaching Lacrosse, apparently, heading southwest, and it wasn’t yet clear if it would hit Madison. I called Charlie, and when he answered, I said, “I’m glad you’re home safely.”

“I am never eating another pancake. God almighty, Lindy, those little old ladies refuse to take no for an answer.”

“Have you looked outside lately?” I was standing in front of the kitchen sink, which faced the backyard and the rear of the house behind mine. “Even the birds aren’t chirping.”

“You’re not worried, are you?”