American Wife

  This was true—before we’d gotten to high school, Andrew’s brother had been a star running back for the Knights—but I said, “No, you look very tough in your football gear.” Immediately, hearing myself, I began to blush.

  “Yeah?” Andrew was watching me. “Do I look like I could protect you?”

  We both were smiling; every reference one of us made the other would get, every remark was a joke or a compliment, and I suddenly thought, Flirting.

  Then—I couldn’t help it—I said, “Why did you go steady with Dena?”

  “Because I was eleven years old.” He still was smiling. “I didn’t know better.”

  “But you kept going steady with her. For four years!”

  “Were you jealous?”

  “I thought it was”—I paused—“odd.”

  “When Dena was my girlfriend,” he said, “it meant I got to spend time around you.”

  Was he teasing? “If that’s true, it’s not very nice to Dena,” I said.

  “Alice!” He seemed both amused and genuinely concerned that he’d displeased me.

  I looked at the ground. What was I trying to express, anyway? The important thing I’d been planning all week to say when Andrew and I were alone—it was eluding me.

  “What about this?” he said. “What if I try to be nicer from now on?”

  Looking up, I said, “I’ll try to be nicer, too.”

  He laughed. “You’ve always been nice.” There was a pause, and then he asked, “Is that a heart?” He reached forward and lifted the silver pendant on my necklace, holding it lightly, the tips of his fingers grazing the hollow of my clavicle.

  “My grandmother gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday,” I said.

  “It’s pretty.” He set the pendant back against my neck. “I should probably go to practice so I don’t get yelled at. If I don’t see you tomorrow after the game, you’ll be at Fred’s on Saturday, right?”

  I nodded. “Will it be more a party where people come on time or later?”

  “I’ll leave my house about seven-thirty. You should come then, too.” Andrew was unusually direct, especially for a boy in high school; I think it came from an understated confidence. When I got to college, the guys and girls seemed to play such games, the girl waiting a certain number of days to return a phone call, or the guy calling only after the girl didn’t talk to him at a party or he saw her out with someone else. But maybe, unlike those boys and girls in college, Andrew genuinely liked me. Then I think no, maybe he didn’t. Maybe, because of what occurred later, I invented for us a great love; I have been granted the terrible privilege of deciding what would have happened with no one left to contradict me. And maybe I am absolutely wrong.

  After we said goodbye, I turned around, watching for a second as he walked toward the bleachers beyond which were the track and the football field: his light brown hair, his moderately broad shoulders further broadened by shoulder pads, his tan golden-haired calves emerging from those pants that stopped well before his ankles. When you are a high school girl, there is nothing more miraculous than a high school boy.

  And despite my concerns that I am manipulating the past, whenever I doubt that Andrew had feelings for me and that those feelings would have grown over time, that we had finally reached an age when something real could unfold between us, I think back to him examining my necklace, holding the pendant and asking what it was. That was obviously just an excuse to touch me. After all, everyone knows what a heart is.

  THAT EVENING, I was washing dishes with my mother after dinner when there was a knock on the front door. My father and grandmother were playing Scrabble in the living room, and I heard my father answer the door and then say, “Hello there, Dena.”

  “Offer her some peach cobbler,” my mother said, and Dena, entering the kitchen, said, “No thank you, Mrs. Lindgren. We just ate, too.” To me, Dena mouthed, I need to talk to you.

  “Mom, may I be excused?” I said.

  As soon as we were upstairs in my bedroom, Dena folded her arms and said, “If you try to get Andrew to be your boyfriend, I’ll never forgive you.”

  I closed the door and sat in the rocking chair in the corner. Sitting there made me feel like a visitor in my own room; my parents had given me the chair when I entered high school, thinking I’d use it to read in, but when I read, I always laid in bed. Dena was leaning against the bureau.

  “Andrew’s not my boyfriend,” I said.

  “But you want him to be. Nancy saw you flirting with him in front of the library after school.”

  How could I deny it? Even in the moment, I’d realized that was exactly what I was doing.

  “And I already know you two danced at prom.”

  “I didn’t think you still liked him,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter. If you’re my friend, you won’t steal a guy who belonged to me.”

  “Dena, Andrew’s not a pair of shoes.”

  “So it’s true you’re going after him?”

  I looked away.

  “I could get him back if I wanted,” she said. “He still carries a torch for me.”

  Given my conversation with Andrew earlier in the day, this seemed unlikely, but I didn’t underestimate Dena—she’d once before surprised me with her ability to turn Andrew’s head.

  Carefully, I said, “You haven’t dated him for two years, and now you have Robert. You don’t even mention Andrew anymore.”

  “You mean every day I’m supposed to say, ‘I sure wonder what he’s up to! Hmm, I hope Andrew’s happy right now!’—that’s what I should tell you?” Color had risen in her cheeks, an outraged pink, and it was her very sincerity, her righteousness, that got to me.

  “Dena, you took him from me! And you know it. In sixth grade, you wrote that stupid letter, and even though he said he liked me, you bullied him into being your boyfriend. How do you think I felt all that time? But I kept being your friend, and now it’s my turn.”

  Dena glared at me. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house,” she said angrily. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

  I never entirely trusted Dena’s religiosity—the Janaszewskis were Catholic, but I knew their attendance at church was spotty. I said, “I’m no guiltier of coveting than you.”

  Dena took a step toward the door, but before she left, she gave me one last dirty look. “You and Andrew are alike,” she said. “You’re both quiet but selfish.”

  DE SOTO WAY heads north from Riley and intersects with Farm Road 177 about five miles outside of town. Saturday, September 7, 1963, was a clear night. I wore a pale blue felt skirt and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, and I carried with me a light pink cardigan mohair sweater. I also wore light pink lipstick, lily-of-the-valley perfume (I had bought it at Marshall Field’s when my grandmother bought her sable stole, my main souvenir from the trip to Chicago), and my heart pendant necklace. Under normal circumstances, I’d have driven out to Fred Zurbrugg’s house with Dena and Nancy Jenzer—Nancy was the only one of the three of us who had her own car, a white Studebaker Lark—but in light of recent developments, I was borrowing my parents’ sedan.

  I was pretty sure I looked the best I ever had. I was wearing the unprecedented combination of my favorite skirt, my favorite top, and my favorite piece of jewelry. After dinner with my parents and grandmother, I had tweezed my eyebrows, shaved my legs, and painted my nails. Getting dressed, I had listened to a Shirelles record—sometimes I would almost physically crave the song “Soldier Boy”—and I’d felt when I stood in front of the mirror over my bureau as if the music were building inside me; I was storing it up, and later in the night, I’d use it. In a strange way, my fight with Dena added to rather than detracted from the energy of the evening, amplifying the anticipatory hum in the air.

  When I appeared in the living room, my mother said, “Don’t you look nice,” and they all turned toward me. My mother, father, an
d grandmother were playing bridge with our neighbor, Mrs. Falke, who was a widow, like my grandmother, but a few years younger.

  “Who’s the fellow?” my grandmother asked.

  “It’s just a regular back-to-school party,” I said. “There’ll be a bonfire.”

  “I see.” I could tell my grandmother didn’t believe me, but where the understanding that passed between us in this moment once would have been sympathetic, it now contained a note of antagonism. Nevertheless, I kissed them all on the cheek one by one, even Mrs. Falke, because by the time I’d done everybody else, it felt rude to bypass her.

  “You know your curfew,” my father said, and I replied, “Eleven o’clock.”

  “Have fun,” my mother called as I stepped out the front door.

  In the car, I changed the radio from my father’s preferred station, which featured big-band music, to mine, on which Roy Orbison’s “Dream Baby” was playing. I backed out of the driveway, first setting my arm around the passenger-side seat, as my father had taught me, which always gave me the sense that I was trying to embrace a phantom. It was getting dark, but full darkness hadn’t yet set in.

  I wondered if Andrew and I would kiss that night, if we’d slip away from the other people, perhaps go for a walk in the apple orchard near Fred’s family’s farmhouse. I suspected there would be alcohol at the party, but if it were offered to me, I wouldn’t accept—I didn’t want Andrew to think I was trashy. At the same time, I was glad I’d kissed those other boys, Bobby and Rudy in ninth grade, Larry the previous winter and then again when he’d walked me to the door after prom, both of us seeming to recognize that we would never speak again but kissing anyway, maybe for that very reason. Now, when a kiss mattered, I wouldn’t be wholly unprepared.

  I couldn’t imagine Andrew trying to take advantage of me, or talking afterward with other boys; I trusted him. And would he be the person I eventually gave my virginity to, not anytime soon but if we got married, or possibly even if we were engaged, because wasn’t that almost the same? This line of thought made my mind jump to Dena and how I’d greet or not greet her at the party. I would be polite, I decided. I would try to catch her eye, and if she seemed receptive, I’d say hello. But if she looked away sulkily, I would say nothing and let time pass before calling her the following week. I didn’t want to have any sort of public conflict—no doubt if we did, it would be terrifically entertaining to our classmates and probably serve as the defining event of the evening, but how mortifying.

  And this was what I was pondering, this was the subject my skittering, fickle mind had landed upon, when I breezed through the intersection of De Soto Way and Farm Road 177 and collided loudly with a blur of pale metal. Very quickly, it had already happened. I was lying on my back on the gravel road; my door had flown open, I’d been thrown about eight feet from the car, and shards of glass were sprinkled around me. It was dark by then, the sun had set perhaps half an hour earlier, and I lay there, first confused and then so startled and upset that I had difficulty catching my breath. The collision (how had it occurred, where had the other car come from?) had been a squealing boom accompanied by the shatter of windshields, and now my car and the other one were making creaking, whirring noises of adjustment. Oddly, my radio was still playing—the song was “Venus in Blue Jeans.” The other car must have been making a right turn from Farm Road 177 onto De Soto Way, I thought, because when I lifted my head, I saw that the hood of my parents’ Bel Air was smashed up against the driver’s door. I was in the middle of the road, I realized; I needed to move. I tried to prop myself up on my elbows, and a searing pain shot through my left arm. I leaned my weight on my right arm and dragged myself around the back of the sedan, trying to avoid the glass; the road had no shoulder, and a shallow ditch ran along it, so there wasn’t really anywhere to go. Something was dripping from my left temple, and when I wiped at it, blood coated my fingers.

  It was not until I saw the farmer and his wife approaching that I sat up, though I felt too weak to call to them. The farmer was a stout white-haired man in overalls, not running but lumbering along in a quick way, and his wife was a few yards behind him in a housedress. They had heard the collision and had called for an ambulance, the farmer said. When he asked what had happened, we all turned to look at the cars, the mess of metal and broken glass, and this was when I realized two things: that the other car was a mint-green Ford and that there was a slumped, unmoving figure in the driver’s seat.

  I could hear the rise of my own hysteria, a panicked kind of panting—was it him or was it not him?—and the farmer spoke to his wife, and then his wife was crouching, her arms were around me, and she was saying, “Honey, when the ambulance comes, they’ll take care of that fellow.” I believe they thought I was babbling nonsensically, but the wife understood first. Raising her head, she said softly to her husband, “She thinks she might know him. She says they’re classmates.”

  There were two ambulances that came, ambulances in those days being just police-cruiser station wagons fitted in the back to hold stretchers, a single flashing red light on the top. As I was raised on the stretcher, I saw, shockingly and unmistakably: It was him. His head hung at a strange angle, but it was him. Inside the ambulance, while I cried uncontrollably, one nurse took my pulse and examined me as another nurse and two police officers attended to the Thunderbird. The farmer’s wife appeared at the rear of my ambulance and said she’d call my parents if I told her their name and number. Then she sighed and said, “Honey, they put that stop sign where it’s so hard to see that it was only a matter of time.” The ambulances were parked south of the accident, and I raised myself, peering out the window and noticing for the first time the sign she was referring to. It was in a field to the right of the road—it had been my stop sign.

  My ambulance left before the other one, and though I did not yet understand everything, I knew that it was very bad, that it was far worse than I’d realized even in the seconds following the collision: The other driver was Andrew, and the accident was my fault. I sensed, though no one would tell me until we’d reached the hospital and my parents had met us, that he was dead. I turned out to be correct. The cause of death was a broken neck.

  I THINK OF this time as an oyster in a shell. Not pried open and nakedly displayed—that hideous pale flesh lined in black around the edges and hued purple, stretched over the oyster’s insides, the mucus and feces and colorless blood—but not tightly closed, either. It is open a few centimeters. You can look if you choose; it would not be difficult to open further. But the oyster is rancid, there’s no need. Everyone knows what’s in there.

  For any question, the answer is of course. How would you feel if you killed another person? And if, further, you were a seventeen-year-old girl and the person you killed was the boy you thought you were in love with? Of course I wished it had been me instead. Of course I thought of taking my own life. Of course I thought I would never know peace or happiness again, I would never be forgiven, I should never be forgiven. Of course.

  To open the oyster shell—it is an agonizing pain. I am haunted by what I did, and yet I can hardly stand to think about the specifics. There were so many terrible moments, a lifetime of terrible moments, really, which is not the same as a terrible lifetime. But surely, surely, the moments right after it happened were the worst.

  If I said now that not a day passes when I don’t think of the accident, of Andrew, it would be both true and not true. Occasionally, days go by when his name is nowhere on my tongue or in my mind, when I do not recall him walking away from me toward football practice in his jersey, his helmet at his side. Yet all the time, the accident is with me. It flows in my veins, it beats along with my heart, it is my skin and hair, my lungs and liver. Andrew died, I caused his death, and then, like a lover, I took him inside me.

  MY PARENTS DIDN’T understand that night at the hospital, at first, that it was my fault; they thought the blame was shared. They arrived as the doctor was wrapping my left wrist in a putty-c
olored bandage that seemed embarrassing in its inconsequentiality, less a true injury than a plea for leniency from others. I also received twenty-five milligrams of Librium and a bandage on my left temple, and a nurse dabbed translucent yellow ointment on the cuts on my arms and legs.

  I was the one who told my parents there had been a stop sign, that Andrew had had the right of way. My mother and father were wearing what they’d been wearing when I’d left the house under an hour before, my father in a twill shirt tucked into trousers, my mother in a belted shirtwaist dress, and I thought of having made them jump up from their card game, of how I’d been in their presence so very recently. The shift in events seemed bizarre and bewildering; it all had happened far too fast.

  In the empty waiting room, when a police officer confirmed to us that Andrew had died, my mother gasped, my father took her hand, and none of us said a word. The officer asked me a few questions about the accident, including how fast I’d been driving (I had not been speeding), and then he spoke alone to my father. They were still speaking when Mr. and Mrs. Imhof arrived and were escorted away; his mother’s wails were audible all the way down the hall. My father concluded his conversation with the police officer and said, “Dorothy, we’re taking her home.”

  “Should she talk to his parents?” my mother asked.

  “For now, leave them be,” my father said.

  In the parking lot, I saw that my parents had borrowed the Janaszewskis’ station wagon. We rode home in silence (what must they have been thinking during this drive?), and on Amity Lane, my father dropped my mother and me off in front of our house and drove across the street to return the keys. My grandmother had already come out to the front stoop—this was unusual, she rarely even stood when you came home and found her reading on the living room couch—and she said, “Thank goodness you’re all right.”

  My mother, in a curter tone than I’d ever heard, said, “Emilie, we need to get inside.”