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IT WAS THE following spring, in early May, when I ran into my former realtor Nadine Patora. It was a Saturday morning, Charlie was off with Hank dashing from a 4-H dairy conference in Kimberly to a nursing home in Menasha to a diner in Manitowoc, and I was picking through a bin of apples at the farmers’ market when I felt the weight of someone staring. I glanced up. Nadine stood directly across the table from me. Unsure what to do, I smiled at her.
“I hear you got married.” She nodded at my wedding ring, which was a plain gold band.
I realized I had never written her a note apologizing for backing out of the purchase of the house. I had intended to, but during my courtship with Charlie, I’d forgotten. “Nadine, I’m really sorry about what—”
“I saw the wedding announcement in the paper,” she said. “You should have had the courtesy to tell me the truth.”
“My decision didn’t have anything to do with getting married,” I said.
“I don’t know what realtor you two went through, but I’ll say this: I was good enough to work with when you were a single gal on a tight budget, and I know, even if you don’t, that I could have done a first-rate job finding the right house for you and your husband. When you’ve been in the business as long as I have, you’re familiar with lots of areas.”
“No, no,” I said quickly. “We haven’t bought a house. We’re renting a place in Houghton.”
“There are public records, Alice. I can go on Monday and find out who brokered the deal and how much you paid.”
“Honestly,” I said. “We’re renting.”
Nadine pursed her lips. “The former governor’s son is running for Congress, and you expect me to believe he lives in some crappy little apartment?”
I DID NOT have another confrontation with Dena, but I am sorry to say this may have been only because I didn’t speak to her again before I moved from the city. The day she’d walked out on our lunch, I hadn’t thought that our friendship was over, her declarations to the contrary; I’d have guessed that she would forgive me. I still believe this may have been the case but that circumstances—geography, really—kept us apart. If I’d had the nerve to go into her store one day after enough time had passed, or if she’d found a serious boyfriend while I was still in Madison, I think we might have been able to pick up where we left off.
But only once before I moved did I see her, and I lacked the courage to say hello. This was a few months prior to when I ran into Nadine, a dark weekday afternoon in February, and I was coming out of a stationery store on State Street after buying a valentine for Charlie. I saw Dena from across the street, from the back, and my breath caught; I stood there, unmoving, against the brick exterior of the store, until she was all the way up the block. I did not lay eyes on her again for thirty years.
IN NOVEMBER 1978, Charlie lost the Sixth District congressional election to Alvin Wincek, 58 percent to 42 percent. Charlie had done better than people anticipated, but he still hadn’t come close. I had given notice to Liess’s principal, Lydia Bianchi, the previous spring, and I’d spent the summer and fall riding with Charlie in lawn chairs set in the flatbed of a pickup truck with BLACKWELL FOR CONGRESS signs affixed to the sides. I’d heard him introduce himself to thousands of voters and give the same speech hundreds of times, I’d passed him lozenges when he lost his voice and still kept speaking, I’d held his hand, I’d clapped, I’d eaten onion rings and french fries, I’d clapped again and eaten more onion rings and more french fries, and when Charlie gave his concession speech at the campaign headquarters on election night, we both had cried a little bit, and if our tears were not for exactly the same reasons, they weren’t for entirely different ones, either. We had gone together through something big; what we wanted was much more merged than it had been when we were dating.
In February, three months after the election, we bought a house in a northern suburb of Milwaukee—Maronee —and moved in on March 31, 1979. I was ten weeks pregnant, which I’d found out at the doctor’s office the day before we closed on the house; once we were in our new home, Charlie would scarcely let me unpack a box. We both were thrilled. We had stopped using any form of birth control a few weeks after our wedding, and given that seventeen months had passed since then and I was almost thirty-three, the arrival of my period had become a discouraging event; with increasing frequency, we’d been discussing the possibility of adoption.
The house we bought on Maronee Drive had five bedrooms, and it had cost $163,000. If Nadine had been our realtor, she’d have made almost $5,000, but we’d used a guy named Stuey Patrickson who played squash with Charlie’s cousin Jack. We made one bedroom ours, one we designated as a nursery, one was Charlie’s office, one was a guest room, and one was a mini-gym for Charlie where he could lift weights; we even had a large mirror installed along the wall, though more often he worked out at the weight room of the Maronee Country Club, whose golf course was across the street. (The weight room was a grim little affair back then, but it became increasingly fancy as the national interest in exercise grew.) Charlie and I did not discuss the possibility—it didn’t occur to me, and I don’t think it occurred to him, either—that I would also have an office in our new house. The second-floor hallway was spacious, and at one end, near a window, we set a desk where, kept company by my papier-mache Giving Tree, I paid bills and wrote thank-you notes. I had gotten quite good at writing thankyou notes; after our wedding, we’d received dozens and dozens of gifts from Blackwell family friends whom we hadn’t invited to the ceremony. For years, this was how I kept Milwaukee people straight in my head: the LeGrands, who had given us the toaster oven; the Wendorfs, who had given us the white porcelain serving platter.
Charlie and I settled easily into our new life together; the headiness of our courtship passed, but its passage seemed organic rather than lamentable. The rhythms of keeping a house suited me. I had wondered if I would be bored, but there was a lot to do when we moved in, painters and contractors to oversee (we renovated the master bathroom), and I also had a garden to maintain. Every morning after Charlie left for work—he was going to Blackwell Meats four and sometimes five days a week—I’d read for at least an hour, and I had worked long enough to recognize this for the great luxury it was. I admit that early on, I’d sometimes reach the end of a chapter, look up, and be startled by my surroundings; while inside a fictional world, I had forgotten what I’d become, it had slipped my mind that I was a married woman with a house, living with my husband in a suburb of Milwaukee. At these moments, and at others, I’d think of my apartment on Sproule Street, my former students and colleagues, my friendships with Dena and Rita (I had given my mother’s brooch to Rita when I quit my job—though it was pretty, it held such unpleasant associations that I’d never have worn it myself ). While on balance, I didn’t regret the changes that had taken place in my life, I’d feel a small twinge for what was no longer mine.
Charlie and I were newlyweds, and then, very quickly, we were just another married couple, socializing often with his brothers and other couples who belonged to our country club and our church. Charlie usually played squash or tennis after work and brought me flowers once a week. On Sundays, if Harold and Priscilla were in town, we went to their house for dinner—I learned to call them Harold and Priscilla rather than Mr. and Mrs. Blackwell—and we traveled, sometimes with Jadey and Arthur. In our first five years of marriage, we visited Colorado, California, North Carolina, New York, and New Jersey, and I was only slightly disappointed when Charlie decided for us against accompanying his parents to Hawaii. By then our daughter, Ella, was two and quite a handful to take on a
