American Wife

“You don’t mind if I head over to the deWolfes’ for a couple hours after dinner, do you?” Charlie said.

I shook my head. “I need to pack anyway.”

“Eager to make your escape?”

“I like your family, Charlie,” I said. “They’ve been really hospitable this weekend—well, besides the limerick, but I’ve gotten over that.”

“You know what? I like you. And I think you look very pretty right now.” Charlie leaned in and kissed me on the lips. It was a quick peck, but right away I heard someone cry out, “Look at the lovebirds!” Then John, who was nearby, said, “Good Christ, can you two not keep your hands off each other?”

I stepped back, though we truly hadn’t been touching at all inappropriately. The porch grew quiet, and from the other end of it, Uncle Trip called, “Chasbo, now that Alice has seen the kind of stock you come from, think she’ll stick around?”

“Hope so,” Charlie said, and—I could feel the Blackwells’ eyes on me—I smiled stiffly. Do not cower. These weren’t the words Jadey had used, but that had been the message.

John said, “Alice, if you’re not careful, it looks to me like Chas here might pop the question.”

There was a silence, a short one, and before someone could fill it with an off-color joke, I said, “Actually—” My voice was hoarse, and I cleared my throat in as genteel a way as I could manage. “Actually, Charlie has already asked me to marry him, and I’ve accepted.”

I might have imagined this part, but I think I heard a gasp—a woman’s gasp, which I’m pretty sure was Ginger’s. Charlie set his hand on the small of my back, and then Harold, who was standing by the hammock, said, “Golly, that’s tremendous. That’s just super news. We couldn’t be happier for both of you.” Soon all the Blackwells were talking at once. “No shit?” Arthur was saying, and he and John were manfully hugging Charlie, and Ed returned to kiss my cheek, and Arthur gave me a noogie and cried, “Welcome to the fam-damily, Al!” Harold leaned around Charlie to pat my hand, then Jadey enveloped me, shouting, “I knew it! I knew it! I told you we’d be best friends, and now it’s even better, because we’ll be sisters!”

I disentangled myself from Jadey’s arms when I saw Mrs. Blackwell approaching; I smoothed my hair. The rest of them—they faded around me. That I was not afraid of Mrs. Blackwell was more or less true, at least in the abstract. But it was also true that when she turned her attention to me, I always felt, and not in a positive way, as if we were the only ones in the room and total vigilance were required.

She did not hug or kiss me, she didn’t touch me at all. She seemed both amused and dubious as she looked at me for a long moment before speaking. Finally, she said, “What a clever girl you are.”

IN THE CAR driving back to Madison, Charlie said, “I’m not angry. I’m really not. In a perfect world, would it have been better if we’d told Maj and Dad first, without everyone else around? Sure, but what’s done is done.”

“Do you know that your mother is displeased, or do you just think she is?”

“Maj likes to be deferred to.” Charlie grinned. “Like all women. Listen, you were the one who wanted to wait and tell our parents together, but everybody was going to find out eventually, so I don’t see the big difference.” He reached across the seat and squeezed my hand. “If Maj is unhappy about anything, it’s how the news broke. She’s not unhappy with you.”

“I’ve never had trouble getting along with people,” I said. “If she’d prefer a daughter-in-law from a more socially connected family, I don’t fault her. That’s what she’s accustomed to. But I think she’ll get used to me, and I don’t want you to worry about having to run interference.”

A minute had passed when Charlie said, looking straight ahead out the windshield, “Just so you know, I’d choose you over them.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

“We could run away to—Where have you always wanted to run away to? In my fantasies, it’s Mexico, but I’d probably just get giardia. California might be a safer bet.”

“I’m not that concerned,” I said.

“A little shack on the beach,” Charlie said. “We’ll sleep in a ham-mock, live off the conch that I spear, and you’ll wear a coconut bra.”

What if I’d said yes? Not to the cartoon version but to a real one, a move to another state. Lives that we carved out for ourselves rather than inheriting, distance and space. What would we—would Charlie—have had to prove, away from his family? Could what has happened in the years since have been prevented, could I have prevented it by merely capitulating? Did Charlie have more foresight than I gave him credit for? Perhaps the future appeared with greater clarity to him than it did to me. Or perhaps he was simply bluffing.

“We’re from Wisconsin, Charlie,” I said. “This is where we belong.”

AND THEN SCHOOL had started, that inimitable, unmistakable sound of children crying out and running around before the bell rang in the morning, the checkout cards that I kept on my desk, the careful way the students gripped the pencils to print their names, and the pride of the ones who were just learning cursive. I read Tico and the Golden Wings to the first-graders, and Flowers for Algernon to the sixth-graders—I believed eleven-year-olds, even if they didn’t admit it, still liked to be read aloud to—and the fourth-graders made paper cranes during our origami unit. There were our Monday-morning assemblies, there was recess duty, when I tried to keep the viciousness of the foursquare games in check, and there were lunches in the cafeteria: chili hot dogs and pepperoni pizza and peach halves in syrup, and on alternating Fridays, breakfast for lunch, which the students loved and the teachers hated—French toast, hash browns, sausage links. You’d be finished with this meal at a quarter to twelve, your stomach churning with sugar and starch and cheap meat, and you’d feel like what you most wanted to do was lie down, and then another class would come flying in, frantic about who got to sit in one of the two bean bags during story time, or who was next in line to check out the newest Encyclopedia Brown. Every day, when school let out at three o’clock, I felt exhausted and happy.

But here was the difference: Whereas for all the years I’d been working, I’d spent vast amounts of time focused on school during the hours it wasn’t in session, I now spent almost none. Once I had stayed in the library until early evening, preparing for the next day, or after the final bell had rung in the afternoon, I’d gone to Rita’s classroom to discuss some student I was concerned about—had Rita also noticed the rash on Eugene Demartino’s arm, or did she think it seemed like Michelle Vink and Tamara Jones were ganging up on Beth Reibel? But with the start of this school year, I hurried to my car when classes were out, and I experienced mild irritation on the days I had bus duty. I felt the press of my other life, my life with Charlie—I wanted to go to the grocery store to buy food for the dinner