American Wife

items of household paraphernalia sat above them on a high ledge: a Frisbee and snowshoes, a plastic kite, a copy of the Milwaukee White Pages, a dusty one-gallon metal can of gray wall paint.

Affixed to the outside of the bathroom door was a porcelain oval that said W.C. in fancy script. But this was disingenuous—it was no closet, I realized as I pushed open the door to find a room the size of my family’s dining room in Riley. In here were a washer and dryer; a clawfoot tub; an old toilet with a black plastic seat, a chain you pulled for flushing, and a tank situated above the user’s head; a small white porcelain sink; a low wooden table near the sink on which sat four mugs with two or three toothbrushes in each of them; a bookshelf with mostly paperback pot-boilers but also a few hardcovers—The Confessions of Nat Turner, a large green copy of Leon Uris’s Trinity; and a window blocked by a not entirely opaque white cotton voile curtain through which I could see parked cars and hear not just the breeze in the backyard but also the distant cries of the swimmers and sunbathers on the dock. I shut the door and was lifting my skirt—to meet Charlie’s family, I had chosen to wear a yellow knit dress with a collar, short sleeves, and a tie belt, along with my blue Dr. Scholl’s sandals—when I realized that the door had opened on its own. After a second attempt at closing it, I figured out that it didn’t stay put; no lock clicked into place, and the soft wood of the door slid away from the soft wood of the frame. Of course it did. I felt a brief rise of distress (one bathroom for eighteen people! for the next three nights!), but I swallowed it back, pulling Trinity and The Confessions of Nat Turner from the bookshelf and stacking them on the floor against the door—for all I knew, that was what they were there for. For good measure, I reached behind the curtain and shut the window; there was no screen.

When I reemerged, Charlie and Arthur were in the living room, where Arthur was showing Charlie an article about their brother Ed in Washingtonian magazine, a publication with which I was not familiar. “God almighty, is Eddie losing his hair.” Charlie held up the magazine for me to see. “I’m giving him grief about that, for sure. Alice, you want to put your swimsuit on?”

“It might be more dignified to meet your parents while I’m still wearing clothes.”

Arthur laughed. “If you’re looking for dignified, you’ve come to the wrong place.” He walked over to a small table between two white bamboo chairs, and he lifted from it a tarnished silver eight-by-ten picture frame. “I refer you to Exhibit A.”

“Oh, boy.” Charlie grinned. “You trying to get her to dump me here and now?”

Arthur passed me the frame. On the top, under the clouded silver, a monogram was discernible, the letters PBH, with the bigger B in the middle. The photograph showed a blond woman in a white wedding dress, Arthur in a tuxedo and tails, and fanning out on either side of them, a row of smiling young people; on the bride’s side were six women in matching satin pink dresses, and on Arthur’s side were six men in tails, the closest one to him being Charlie.

“This is beautiful,” I said. “When did you get married?”

“Seventy-one, but that’s not the point. Look closer.”

“All I can say is, you’d better watch your back,” Charlie said. “Not you, Alice.”

I was still scanning the photograph. Then I saw, and Arthur saw me see, and he said, “Quite a pair on him, huh? But I guess you already knew that.”

In the photo, in front of the place where Charlie’s zipper would be, hung a ruddy bulge. It was slightly out of context but unmistakable: He had (or at least I hoped it had been him and not someone else) removed his scrotum from inside his pants and displayed it for the photo.

I glanced at Charlie—really, the Blackwells were exactly like sixth-grade boys at Liess, the ones who’d use a dirty word in earshot of a teacher, waiting for a reaction—and I said mildly, “That’s an unusual pose for a picture.”

“Took about five years for Jadey to forgive me, but it was worth every minute.” Charlie grinned. “No, she knew it was all in good fun.”

“My wife is a huge admirer of the black-tie nutsack,” Arthur said. “And I do mean huge.”

Charlie took my hand and squeezed it. “I promise not to do that at our wedding.” Arthur chortled—having no idea that we really were engaged—and this was when we heard footsteps on the stairs leading up to the porch and then a voice, a refined, middle-aged female voice, calling out, “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an interloping girlfriend.”

“Do I call your mom Priscilla or Mrs. Blackwell?” I whispered.

Charlie was walking out to the porch with me behind him, and he said, “Hey, Maj, Alice wants to know if she should call you Priscilla or Mrs. Blackwell.”

“Charlie,” I hissed.

His mother laughed. “It depends,” she said. “We’ll have to see how much I like Alice.”

She had chin-length white hair that was slicked back, its wetness holding it in place in the way it does for only a few minutes after you emerge from water. She wore a navy blue tank swimsuit and a watch and nothing else, not even shoes or a towel. She was nearly six feet, and her legs and chest and shoulders were all both wrinkly and tan; her body was slim and athletic. (“I was field-hockey captain at Dana Hall as well as Holyoke,” she mentioned later in the weekend, and I murmured my approval not because I actually was impressed but because I could tell I should be.)

She had not yet glanced in my direction, and she reached out and set her fingers under Charlie’s chin—I observed the strange fact of Charlie and his mother not embracing—and after her eyes had roamed over his face, she said in a warm tone, “That haircut makes you look like a Jew.”

Without hesitation—sincerely, it seemed—Charlie laughed. “Hey, at least I still have hair, which is more than I can say for your oldest son.”

But she had already moved on; with no embarrassment or apology, she was looking me up and down. “Aren’t you a little dish.”

I stepped forward and extended the terra-cotta planter with the basil in it. “Thank you very much for having me.”

“Alice brought you some homegrown marijuana,” Charlie said. “Madison’s finest.”

“It’s basil,” I said quickly.