American Wife

  “Now you have to say it.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded.

  I took a breath. I rarely talked about my job when I was out on dates—though this was not, of course, a date. “Tikki Tikki Tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo,” I said, and when I finished, we were smiling at each other.

  “One more time,” he said. I complied, and he said, “That’s most impressive.”

  I bowed.

  “Those kids you teach must be nuts about you,” he said.

  “Well, I’m no fool. Students start rebelling against their teachers in junior high, but in elementary school, they’re fighting to sit on your lap.”

  He regarded me—he was still in the center of the room, and I was just inside the door—and the only way I can describe the expression on his face is to say it was one of enchantment; I had no idea why, but Charlie Blackwell found me enchanting. And I recognized, with a pang that was at once sorrow, remorse, and the first stirring of hope, that it was a way no one had looked at me since Andrew Imhof. In the last fourteen years, I had been on plenty of dates, I’d been in relationships, I’d even been proposed to, but there was nobody I’d enchanted.

  “Alice, what would you do if I kissed you right now?” Charlie said.

  We looked at each other, and the room was filled with shyness and promise. After a long time, I said, “If you want to find out, I guess you’ll have to try.”

  I’D MET SIMON Törnkvist at a shoe store when I was twenty-six; he was buying clogs, and I was buying Dr. Scholl’s sandals. He was six-four and slender, wore John Lennon–style glasses with gold frames and round lenses, and had floppy blond hair, a wispy blond beard, a droopy left eye contiguous to a scar running from the outer tip of his cheek-bone to below his ear, and an amputated left hand. His injuries were from Vietnam, which I guessed before he told me. Because he’d been left-handed, his writing looked childish; this was something I learned later.

  As we sat in the store waiting for the salesman to return with shoes, I remarked on the unseasonably warm March weather. After we’d made our purchases, we stood on the sidewalk outside the store, continuing to talk. Perhaps ten minutes passed, and then he held up his left arm. He wore a long-sleeved rust-colored velour shirt, and the sleeve was folded under his elbow and pinned at his shoulder. He said, “Does this bother you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then would you like to see a movie sometime?”

  We went to The Godfather, and I made sure to sit on his right side, in case he wanted to hold my hand, but he didn’t try. Afterward, we ate dinner at a pub on Doty Street, and he said he’d found the movie overrated, though he did not explain in what way. He was a year younger than I was—this surprised me, because upon meeting people, I had a silly tendency to think of those who were shorter than I was as younger and those who were taller as older—and he was working as the dispatcher for a plumbing company while taking classes at the university. He hadn’t decided on a major yet but was inclined, he said, toward philosophy or political science. He had grown up on a pea farm outside Oshkosh.

  I didn’t find our conversation very interesting, but the entire time, I felt a sort of internal shuddering, as if my ribs were about to collapse and I had to concentrate fiercely to hold them aright. I recognized this sensation for what it was: physical attraction. Simon drove me home (I had wondered if he might have on his steering wheel what we’d called, growing up, a “necker’s knob”—Dena’s grandfather, who’d lost his right hand in a tractor accident, had had one—but Simon did not and was a perfectly competent driver with one hand), and outside my apartment I scooted across the seat and kissed his cheek. I had never made the first move, but the fact that Simon was a little younger emboldened me.

  He seemed surprised but receptive, and we curled toward each other, he wrapped his right arm around me, and I hoped he would set his left arm on me, too, the stub, but he did not. I know now—I didn’t know it then, but years later, I read an article—that there are amputee fetishists, and while denying such an inclination in myself feels rather defensive, I sincerely don’t think that’s what it was. I recognize in retrospect that I wouldn’t have been attracted to him if not for his injuries. But it wasn’t the injuries, per se. It was that if he set his handless arm on my back, it would be an act of trust, he would make himself vulnerable in order to be closer to me, and it would give me the opportunity to show I was worthy of the risk he’d taken. Unjudgmentally, I would care for him.

  The question he’d asked outside the shoe store notwithstanding, Simon himself didn’t appear all that self-conscious about his wounds. He also had scars, as I discovered over our next several dates, on the left side of his chest. In Phuoc Long Province, in the early winter of 1970, his company had been ambushed, and he had been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. He was matter-of-fact about this, as about most everything; he referred more than once to the Vietnam War as “a bill of goods,” but he expressed his political views infrequently and succinctly. He was certainly not the first person I knew to have fought in Vietnam. More than a dozen boys from my class at Benton County Central High School had gone over, and Bradley Skilba had been killed in Tay Ninh in September 1968, three months after we graduated; in 1969 Yves Haakenstad had come home in a wheelchair, paralyzed below the waist; Randall Larson had died northeast of Katum in 1970. Sometimes I thought of how things might have been different if Andrew Imhof had gone over also—not an impossibility—and if it had been in Vietnam that he had died instead of at the intersection of De Soto Way and Farm Road 177. Probably it would have been easier for his family, I imagined; it would have felt like an honorable tragedy and not just a waste. Clearly, it would have been easier for me, without the suffocating guilt. But I’d still miss him, he’d still be gone, and in some ways, it would be worse to know it had happened in another country, that he’d been so far from home; in the end, it didn’t really seem a better sadness.

  The first few times Simon and I had sex, it was flushed and protracted and new and exciting. Since Pete Imhof, I had slept only with Wade Trommler, whom I’d dated for two years in college; although we’d broken up when I turned down his marriage proposal the summer before we were seniors, I would always be grateful to Wade for his kindness and tenderness, for being so different from Pete. In the time since Wade, I had gone on dates here and there, and I’d often been able to sense when certain fellows would have asked me out, had I given them encouragement. But these men seemed to me, as Wade had, mostly innocent, boyish.

  During my senior year in high school, I’d stopped thinking of marriage as my birthright. It wasn’t just that I no longer considered myself inherently deserving or that I no longer believed I was looked after by the universe. It was also that I would not want to marry a man unless I could show myself to him truly—I had no interest in tricking anyone—but I couldn’t imagine showing myself to most men, revealing myself as someone more complicated than I seemed. If thinking of the exertion and explanations that would require discouraged me, it also made me calm. I didn’t work myself up, as other women I knew did, panicking over finding Mr. Right. I accepted that the years to come would unfold in their way, that I could control only a few aspects of them. To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.

  Then I met Simon, who was a variation I hadn’t anticipated. He represented neither solitude nor phony bliss but some third possibility, a redemptive coupling. I thought this had to be the next best thing to being accepted completely—to completely accept someone else. I still partly agree with this notion, though the rest of what I thought about Simon, about my own capacity to take care of him, I now see as vain and wrongheaded.

  We dated for eleven months, during which time we lived a mile and a half apart and saw each other twice a week. I was busy teaching, he was taking classes and working at the plumbing company, but that should have been another sign: It wasn’t that I was consciously unwilling to tu
rn my schedule upside down for him, more that the thought never occurred to me. Although he had a younger sister who was married and a younger brother who was mentally retarded and lived with his parents on the farm, I didn’t ever meet anyone in his family. I did, however, after about three months, take him to have Sunday lunch in Riley. At the end of the visit, though the subject of Vietnam had not come up, my father—himself a veteran—shook his hand and said, “Young men like you are a credit to this country.” In the car back to Madison, Simon said, “Your father is painfully naive.”

  Was I some kind of automaton? That’s what I wonder now, not just about that moment when I didn’t respond, but about all my time with Simon. But it appeared to be a relationship, it had all the contours and rituals, so who was to say it wasn’t? I made dinner for him Wednesdays, we went to a movie every Saturday night at the Majestic (he was the only person I knew besides my friend Rita Alwin, the French teacher, whom I never had to convince to see a foreign film), and following the movie, we went back to my place and had sex before he drove home around midnight. After the first few episodes, I did not climax regularly with Simon, but I attributed the erraticness more to an early abundance of excitement on my part than to a subsequent failure on his. We soon became used to each other, and if he was grumpy, then his grumpiness was a guiding force; to accommodate him was an opportunity. And I didn’t think this because of generational notions about gender, not really. I thought it because I was me, because he was him.

  My parents seemed pleased. My mother wouldn’t bring herself to ask directly when we might get engaged, but she’d say, “Do you think if Daddy could help Simon get a job at the bank, would he be interested in that?” Or “Ginny Metzger told me that Arlette found a wedding dress with real lacework for seventy dollars at a bridal shop in Milwaukee.” Meanwhile, all my grandmother said was “He’s like Mr. Lloyd, isn’t he?” This was a reference to the licentious one-armed art teacher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and I knew it meant Simon had made an unfavorable impression on my grandmother. I did not realize how unfavorable for several months.

  At Christmas that year—it was 1973—I was ironing a shirt in my grandmother’s room while she sat on her bed reading when she said, “You simply can’t marry that friend of yours.” She wasn’t even looking at me as she spoke.

  I turned. “You mean Simon?”

  “He’s a wet blanket.”

  I was taken aback. “Granny, he’s been through a lot.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not saying he hasn’t known difficulty, but I’ll bet he was a wet blanket even when he was a boy.”

  “Are you suggesting I end things with him?”

  My grandmother considered the question, then said, “I suppose I am.”

  I was silent.

  “With Dena down in Kansas City, who’ll give you a piece of their mind if I don’t?” my grandmother said. “Don’t be offended. I’m only thinking of your best interest.”

  “Maybe you don’t want me to get married,” I said, and the part I did not say was to a man. My grandmother and I never discussed Gladys Wycomb, not even before or after my grandmother’s visits to Chicago. Following everything that had happened in the fall of 1963, my grandmother and I had wordlessly made peace—there was much I was indebted to her for—and over time, our interactions had returned to normal. But it was a normality that sometimes had to be attended to and guarded. I tried to be less judgmental, more deferential and considerate, than I had been as a teenager, and the very fact of my trying was evidence that things between us would never again be effortless.

  “Why would I not want you to marry?” My grandmother scoffed. “That’s absurd. Marriage is no picnic, but it compares favorably to the alternative. I’ll tell you what the problems are with your beau. There are two.”

  I felt torn, tempted to stop her before she could go any further, and also extremely curious to know what she thought.

  “First,” she said, “he’s dull. He’s not lively. Now, plenty of women marry dull men, but your Simon isn’t kind, either, and that’s a terrible combination. Marrying a man who’s dull and nice is fine, or a man who’s cruel but fascinating—some people have an appetite for that. But marrying a man who’s ponderous and unkind is a recipe for unhappiness.”

  As I listened to her, I felt my face flushing, and it wasn’t from the iron. “You scarcely know him,” I said.

  “I’m a keen observer of human behavior. You dote on that young man, and he’s a cold fish. Listen—if you choose to marry him, I’ll sit in the church smiling, because I’ll know it’s a decision you made with your eyes wide open. But if I’d never said a word, I’d wonder if I could have prevented a great deal of heartache.”

  “Well, you can’t be held responsible now.” I used a light tone, I meant to show I was willing to forgive her harsh remarks, but apparently, she didn’t yet wish to be forgiven.

  “It’s very clear to me that this is about the Imhof boy,” she said. “You want to trade a dead boy for an injured man, and if I thought it would work, I’d let you try. It isn’t immoral. But it’s unrealistic. Misfortunes don’t cancel each other out.”

  I thought, of course, that she was wrong about Simon. I thought it almost completely, then less so as days passed and her words continued to echo in my head; I remembered them one evening after dinner at an Italian restaurant, when I stood on tiptoe to kiss Simon before we climbed in the car, and he turned his head and said, “Your breath is too garlicky.”

  Still, we continued to spend time together twice a week, and on a Wednesday night a month before our one-year anniversary, as I dished creamed chicken onto plates at my apartment, I said, “Do you ever think of us getting married?”

  The chicken was steaming, and Simon had removed his glasses and was rubbing at the lenses with a napkin. He said, “Not really.”

  I knew right away that both the conversation and our relationship were over, but the situation seemed to demand that I persist.

  “Even though we’ve been dating for almost a year?”

  “I don’t know if I believe in marriage.” He put his glasses back on. “It seems like a doomed institution. But I do know I definitely don’t want children.”

  I’m not sure what expression I made in this moment (as much as I felt disappointed and caught off guard, I also felt just plain stupid—shouldn’t I have found this out about him months earlier, shouldn’t I have done my research?), but Simon said, “I take it you do want kids.”

  “Simon, I’m a teacher. I wouldn’t work with them if I didn’t enjoy being around them.”

  He set his hand on mine. “Let’s talk about this another time.”

  Two weeks later, over the phone, he said, “I’m not sure we’re compatible in the long term,” and I said, “I think you might be right.” In this way, we completed perhaps the most bloodless breakup of all time. When I was home next, my grandmother said, “I know in my bones you made the right decision.” Because I didn’t want her to see me as pitiable, I simply nodded, never revealing that the decision had hardly been mine.

  WITH CHARLIE AT my apartment until late the night before, I had gotten so little sleep that by the time I arrived in Riley early Sunday afternoon, I was giddy and guilt-ridden and exhausted; a headache had formed in a band above my eyes.

  I noticed that my mother’s car, a cream-colored Ford Galaxie, wasn’t in the driveway. When I let myself in to the house, my grandmother was seated on the living room couch—my skinny, ageless grandmother, sustained on a diet of nicotine and literature—and she offered her cheek to me to kiss. “I think your mother has a secret,” she said.

  “A good or bad one?”

  My grandmother’s features formed an expression of both concentration and confusion, the sort you’d make if you were tasting a spice whose name you couldn’t remember. “I believe she might be having a romance with Lars Enderstraisse.”

  “Mr. Enderstraisse the mailman?”

  “He’s a decent-looking fellow. A
bit portly, but he probably doesn’t eat right, living on his own.”

  “You think Mom is dating Mr. Enderstraisse? Since when?” Mr. Enderstraisse had worked at the post office on Commerce Street since I was a child; he was a kind-seeming man with a walrus mustache and a rotund midsection.

  “There’s no need to work yourself up,” my grandmother said. “Your mother is a mature woman, and she deserves to enjoy herself.”

  “But how certain are you?”

  “She’s been having lengthy phone conversations that she takes upstairs—to thwart my attempts at eavesdropping, I can only assume. And she runs mysterious errands. When I ask where she’s been, she’s quite vague.”

  “How does Mr. Enderstraisse figure into this?”

  “That’s where she is now. He has shingles, or so Dorothy claims, and she’s taken him some cold soup.”

  “But if you know where she is, that’s not a mysterious errand.”

  My grandmother frowned. “Don’t sass me.”

  “I just meant—” I paused. “Granny, I might be having a romance, too.”

  She perked up immediately.

  “But Dena had dibs on the guy first, so I have no idea what to do. I really like him, even though I just met him last night.”

  “Oh my word.” My grandmother crossed one leg over the other. “Bring me an iced tea, if you would, and then you can tell me the whole story.”

  I poured iced tea for both of us from the pitcher in the refrigerator, carried the glasses back to the living room, and summarized the events of the previous night, skimming over Dena’s intoxication and Charlie’s extended visit to my apartment; I tried to imply, without saying it out-right, that we’d bade each other farewell after he’d walked me home. I was genuinely uncertain what my grandmother’s reaction would be, given her fondness for Dena. Never a particular Dena fan when I was growing up, my grandmother had developed a soft spot for her the summer I’d graduated from college. This was 1968, and my grandmother had announced to me one afternoon that she’d like to try marijuana; she was hearing a lot about it. I hadn’t previously tried pot myself, and without enthusiasm, I’d approached Dena when she was next in town—as a stewardess, she could fly free into Milwaukee, then come to visit me in Madison or go home to Riley—and the time after that, when my parents were at a fish fry, the three of us sat in my grandmother’s bedroom, smoking a joint. “While I’m having trouble seeing what all the fuss is about,” my grandmother said, “I’m very grateful to you girls for satisfying my curiosity.” When the joint was gone, she lit a normal cigarette.