American Wife

  After I finished my description of meeting Charlie, my grandmother took a sip of her iced tea. “That certainly is awkward for you and Dena.”

  “Do you think I shouldn’t see him again?”

  She set the glass down on a cork coaster on the end table. “I wouldn’t rush to a decision. See how the situation evolves.”

  “I don’t even know if he’ll call, but meeting him made me feel hopeful—I can’t really describe it.”

  “He was good company,” my grandmother said.

  Was it that simple? And if it was, why did it feel so rare? From outside, I heard the approach of my mother’s car.

  “Don’t breathe a word about Lars Enderstraisse.” My grandmother pinched her thumb and forefinger together and ran them across her mouth. “Zip your lip.”

  THAT NIGHT, MY grandmother had gone upstairs by eight P.M., and my mother and I sat in front of The Six Million Dollar Man, though neither of us was really watching: She was needlepointing an eyeglasses case, and I was flipping through my grandmother’s latest issue of Vogue. During a commercial break, I turned to her. “Mom, if you ever want to start dating—”

  Before I could go further, she said, “Where on earth did you get that idea?”

  “I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t, but if you did—if you feel like you’re ready—no one will disapprove.”

  “Alice, think how your father would feel to hear you talk like that.” She set down her needlepoint and walked out of the room, and as I was wondering how deeply I’d offended her, she returned with her left hand clenched in a fist. When she’d sat beside me again, she uncurled her fingers, revealing a gold brooch. “Can you sell this for me?”

  It was shaped like a tree branch, the leaves encrusted with tiny diamonds, and one small round garnet—meant to resemble an apple, or perhaps a berry—hung down. I had never seen it before.

  “It belonged to my mother, but I don’t have any use for it,” she said.

  “It must be nice to have as a keepsake, though.” My mother seemed to have so few tangible ties to her family that it was hard to understand why she’d get rid of one. She passed me the brooch, and I touched the garnet with my fingertip; it was cool and smooth. “You could wear it to church on Christmas,” I said, and without warning, my mother burst into tears. “Mom, what’s wrong?” I set my hand on her back. I had not seen my mother cry since shortly after my father’s death.

  “I’ve made such a mess of things,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I had a misapprehension from the beginning. But you want to give a young person the benefit of the doubt, and I thought it could be an opportunity to create a nest egg not just for Granny and me but for you, too, because you work so hard at the school. And he said the annual returns get up to three hundred percent.”

  “Who’s he? Start at the beginning.” Although an anxious tingle had risen on my skin, I felt that it was important for one of us to remain calm. “I want to help you, Mom, but I need to understand what’s happened.”

  “It’s a fellow about your age. He came by, and he was very nice, very intelligent.”

  “So you gave him some money?” I strove to keep emotion from my voice.

  “I made a dreadful mistake.” The tears seized her again, and I said, “Mom, it’s okay. We’ll sort it out. I just have to ask, how much did you give him?”

  “From your father—from his insurance—” Her voice was shaky.

  The tingling had turned into goose bumps covering my entire body. “Money from Dad’s life insurance policy?” I asked, and she nodded. “Did you give him all of it?”

  “Oh, honey, I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Then how much?” It was astonishing to me that I sounded as neutral as I did.

  “Originally, he asked for ten thousand dollars, but I told him I wouldn’t recruit other investors. I said, ‘I don’t know about finances, and I won’t pretend I do.’ He said if I made a double investment, he’d make an exception for me, because most people have to recruit.”

  “So you gave him twice as much money?”

  Tears pooled again in her eyes, and she said, “Alice, I’m so ashamed. I don’t know what on earth I was thinking—I just—”

  “Mom, please don’t get upset. I’m wondering, was there anything you were buying? Was it stock, or real estate, or some kind of product?”

  “It was an investment fund.”

  “I can’t help thinking,” I said slowly, “could it have been a pyramid scheme?”

  “Oh, certainly not.” For the first time in several minutes, my mother’s tone was firm. “No, no. It was an investment fund, and the money would come back when new members joined.”

  “So maybe it still will make money—”

  She was shaking her head. “He couldn’t get enough people to join, but he had to pay the administrative costs.”

  “Who is this guy? This sounds incredibly fishy to me.”

  “I know, honey. I wish I didn’t make the double investment, but if I’d encouraged my friends to do it, oh, I would feel so much worse now.”

  “So besides what’s left of Dad’s life insurance policy, are there other savings you have?”

  “Heavens, Alice, Granny and I won’t end up on the street, if that’s what you’re worried about. If worse comes to worst, we can take out a home equity loan. You know Daddy’s bank will give us the most favorable rate, although to spare him the embarrassment, I’d have half a mind to go somewhere else. Oh, he’d be appalled at what I’ve done.”

  A home equity loan? I still couldn’t figure out what she had left in savings, nor did I know how much their monthly expenses were, but I feared that if I forced my mother to provide numbers, it would undo her.

  “You can’t beat yourself up,” I said. “You were trying to take care of you and Granny, and that’s exactly what Dad would want you to do.”

  “He was such a responsible man. Do you know I get half his pension every month, and when I’m sixty-two, I’ll get his social security as well?” This would be in 1987, which seemed so far away that it provided me with little comfort. “You mustn’t mention anything to your grandmother,” my mother was saying. “At her age, we can’t have her worrying.”

  “Fine, but it sounds like this investment guy should go to prison. I know you’re embarrassed, but I think you should report him.”

  An expression crossed my mother’s face in this moment, a look of fake innocence I had never seen on her.

  “We don’t—” I hesitated. “We don’t know him, do we?”

  “Honey, that hardly matters.”

  “Mom, you need to tell me who it was.”

  “Riley is such a small town, and you know how people talk,” she said, and I thought of having made a similar observation to Charlie Blackwell about Madison. But it was truer, much truer, of Riley. “After we sell the brooch, we’ll see where that leaves us,” my mother continued. “It’s Victorian, you know, which means it’s valuable. If I can make up some of what I lost, we’ll pretend it never happened.”

  “Mom, who did you invest the money with?”

  She did not seem angry at all, which was more than I could say for myself; she just seemed sad and tired. “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, do you understand? You can’t tell a soul. I’m sure he didn’t mean harm, but he was inexperienced, and he got ahead of himself.” She seemed to consider a few more rationalizations, but in the end, she simply said, “It was Pete Imhof.”

  AFTER A FITFUL night in my childhood bed, I ate the bacon and eggs my mother prepared for breakfast, and we did not acknowledge our conversation of the night before; my grandmother was still asleep upstairs. When I finished breakfast, I read The Riley Citizen, and as soon as my mother left the kitchen, I leaped up and opened the drawer where she kept the phone book. He was listed, his number and an address on Parade Street. A few minutes later, I took off on foot; I told my mother that, driving into Riley the previous afternoon, I’d s
een a blouse I liked in one of the windows downtown.

  Given that it was a Monday, my going over there before five o’clock, when he’d be at work, didn’t seem to serve much purpose, but I was so agitated that I was reluctant to be around my mother or grandmother. I’d walk by his place first, I thought, figure out exactly where it was, and then return in the afternoon to try to catch him before I left town. If I didn’t speak to him, I’d need to stay another night, which I wasn’t keen to do; among other reasons, I couldn’t help wondering if Charlie Blackwell would call, and if he did, I wanted to be in Madison. (Courtship before the widespread use of answering machines, before voice mail or e-mail—how quaint it seems now.)

  When thoughts of Charlie came to me, as they had repeatedly in the last twenty-four hours, I’d have the feeling of a pat of butter melting in a hot pan. Our initial kiss had lasted for several minutes, and eventually, we’d ended up sitting on the couch and then lying on it, me on my back with my head on the armrest, and him on top of me. We had talked and talked and kissed and kissed, his mouth warm and wet and familiar and new, and sometimes we’d just looked at each other, our faces ridiculously close together, and smiled. We both were old enough to know how unlikely this was to last or become anything genuine, but that probably made us enjoy it more, the awareness that it might only be these few hours. Lying beneath him, I felt tremendously happy.

  Just past midnight, he said, “I think I’d better leave in the next five minutes, before I abandon my gentlemanly act and try to seduce you.”

  Although we both had on all our clothes, my bra had come unfastened along the way, and as he spoke, he had an erection. And certainly we could sleep together, people did that now, it was 1977. A diaphragm (not the one given to me by Gladys Wycomb but a newer version) sat inside a toiletry case in the cabinet beneath my bathroom sink, unused since Simon. But this was the first time in my life I’d been tempted to have sex with a man the night we met, and I was only half tempted—it would be like leapfrogging over the normal stages of getting acquainted. Besides, Dena would never speak to me again.

  A little reluctantly, I said, “Maybe you should kiss me good night and ask if I’m free later this week.”

  “Hold on a second.” He feigned shock. “You mean to tell me you can squeeze in a date in between all the library preparation?”

  “That’s not very nice.” I turned my head to the side, glancing back at him from under my eyelashes. “I wanted to accept when you asked me out earlier. I just thought I shouldn’t because of Dena.”

  “I’m glad you reconsidered.” When I turned my head again, he was grinning, and the force of his grin was almost enough to obliterate the idea of Dena’s wrath.

  But he didn’t ask me out again before he left, we didn’t make a firm plan, and as soon as he was gone, I wished we had. I didn’t specifically think that I liked Charlie Blackwell, but it was the same as wondering where to put my furniture in the house on McKinley before realizing I wanted the house itself. Except, I thought now, how could I buy a house when my mother’s financial situation had become so precarious? Wouldn’t I be better off keeping my money in savings in case the problem was even worse than I thought?

  And what about Dena? As I headed east on Commerce Street, away from the Riley River, my betrayal of her seemed far starker without Charlie present to distract me. I needed to talk to her. First I needed to think of what to say, then I needed to talk to her. No, first I needed to figure out what was happening with Charlie, if he was nothing but a flirt, or if we really would see each other again, then I needed to think of what to say to Dena, then I needed to talk to her.

  Walking up Commerce, I passed Jurec Brothers’ butcher shop, Grady’s Tavern, and Stromond’s bakery, where, if you were under the age of twelve, they gave you a free sugar cookie in the shape of a dog bone. In the space that had once been occupied by the fabric shop, there was now a Chinese restaurant—a Chinese restaurant in Riley!—and I had heard that Ruth Hofstetter, the comely fabric-shop clerk whose single status into her late twenties had confused and saddened my mother and me, had later become the shop’s proprietress before selling it altogether when she married a widowed farmer in Houghton. Ruth was probably in her early forties now, I thought, and the age difference between us struck me as significantly smaller than when I was in high school and she was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. It had occurred to me recently that I could marry a man in his forties or even his fifties, as I was pretty sure Ruth had, especially if I didn’t marry anytime soon. And this seemed not so much objectionable as impossibly hard to fathom. How could you, if it was your first wedding, marry an old man? How could you still carry within yourself the you of your girlhood, your ideas of satin dresses and white lilies, yet be joined to a groom with fleshy hands, age spots, thinning gray hair? Dick Cimino had been forty-eight when Dena had married him, though in her case, that had sort of been the point, May-December, a sugar daddy to bestow on her gifts and attention.

  The answer to how Ruth had done it, I supposed, was that she was older, too; if you married an older man, you were older, and you looked older. You were not so different from him. Or, inversely, he carried inside him a younger self, his droops and wrinkles felt like a costume.

  Where Commerce crossed Colway Avenue, I could feel a shift in the neighborhood. Not that it was seedy, none of Riley was truly seedy, but there were more houses here with peeling paint, ratty indoor furniture on their front porches. The sun had gone behind a cloud, but it was still hot.

  I turned onto Parade Street, checking the numbers. His address was a two-story structure with gray vinyl siding; it clearly had been built as apartments without ever having been a house. My heart beat rapidly as I tried the main door, which was not locked, and then I was standing in an entryway with gray walls, a blue linoleum floor, and a wooden staircase covered by a clear plastic runner. The hall smelled of old cigarette smoke. His door was along the left wall of the first floor, and I thought before I rang the bell that he would be home after all, because if you lived in a place this dingy, you probably didn’t have a job, and then I thought that was a snobby observation on my part and no doubt incorrect, and then he opened the door.

  He seemed surprised, but in a faintly amused way, to find me standing there. “Alice Lindgren,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

  Although I was nervous, I was angry, too, and my anger guided me. “How could you?” I blurted out.

  He actually smiled, which infuriated me more. He was wearing a white tank top, cutoff jeans, and flip-flops, and he had grown a dark, dense beard and gained perhaps forty pounds since I’d seen him last. (Once, getting milk shakes at Tatty’s with Betty Bridges when I was home from college, I’d spotted him across the restaurant, sitting at the counter with his back to us, and I had hardly moved or spoken until he left half an hour later. Other than that, I had not laid eyes on him in nearly fourteen years.)

  He ambled to the couch where it seemed he’d been sitting before—the television beside me was on, showing The Price Is Right (Pete Imhof watched The Price Is Right?), and on the coffee table in front of the couch was an incomplete Riley Citizen crossword puzzle with an uncapped pen lying sideways atop it and an ashtray, the smoke still rising from a just-stubbed cigarette. Only after he’d lit a fresh one, inhaled, and released smoke through his nostrils did he say, “Business deals go south all the time.”

  “Pete, it was clearly a scam!”

  “Since when are you an expert on asset management?” He looked indignant, and for the first time, it occurred to me that this hadn’t been intentional. He had gone to my mother because, presumably, he’d heard my father had died, he’d guessed she’d have received an inheritance, and he’d been trying to raise money for this scheme. But he really might have thought it would turn out to be profitable. Perhaps it hadn’t been just to spite me.

  “Whatever it was,” I said, “you don’t involve vulnerable people in a risky venture. My mother needs that money to live off, and to supp
ort my eighty-two-year-old grandmother.”

  “Alice, I lost out, too. Thirty-five grand, in fact, which is a lot more than anyone else.”

  “You need to repay my mother.” I tried to sound firm and persuasive.

  He snorted. “You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.”

  “Then find some other way to fix the situation.”

  “If I hear of an opportunity in the future she might be interested in—”

  “Don’t even think about contacting her again.”

  “You seem to be having trouble making up your mind.” I glared at him, and he added, “Why don’t you relax?” He extended the pack of cigarettes to me—they were Camels—and I shook my head. “If you’d prefer a beer, I’ve got plenty,” he said. “It’s early in the day, but I don’t judge.”

  I folded my arms in front of my chest.

  “Hey, I see you’re not wearing a wedding ring,” he said. “You still single?”

  I stared at him, and my rage was like a storm inside me, a hurricane of fury. I thought of him calling me a whore that day at his family’s house; it was a memory I’d never forgotten but one I tried to store as far back in my mind as possible.

  “I can think of something that might take the edge off.” He was smirking. “Be fun for both of us.”

  “You’re repulsive,” I said.

  “That’s not what you used to think.” He smiled, and when I didn’t return the smile, his expression grew sour. “Forget about the money, Alice. Your mother’s a grown woman, married her whole life to a banker, for Christ’s sake. That deal had a lot of potential, but not enough people came on board, and we had to cut our losses.”