American Wife (27 page)

Standing there chatting with Big Glenn, I could feel the present moment rushing from me. I would leave soon, I realized, and when I did, in my absence, the other teachers would talk about me, too.

EVERYONE ALWAYS SAID
there weren’t tornadoes in Madison because of the lakes. The city is an isthmus, a term children who grow up in Madison know from an early age. And while Wisconsin wasn’t hit by tornadoes with the regularity of towns in the states south and west of us, we tended to have a few watches a year and perhaps one warning and one real storm. In Riley, when I was a girl, we’d have tornado drills every spring. If we were in class, we filed out and sat Indian-style on the floor in the hall, knee to knee with the students beside us, all of us facing the wall, our heads down and our hands crossed over the crowns of our skulls. If we were outside—the drills happened sometimes at recess, which felt like a great waste—a teacher would lead us to a dip in the grassy hill behind the elementary school, and we’d lie flat on our bellies and join hands, forming an irregular circle or a human flower, our bodies the petals pointing out. In high school, we joked about the absurdity:
That
was supposed to save us? I pictured a net of children blown aloft, straining to hold on to one another.

The tornado watch that happened in late August 1977 was on a Sunday afternoon, and the night before, Charlie and I had gone to a party at the house of a couple he knew named the Garhoffs. I was pretty sure people had been smoking marijuana in the upstairs bathroom, which surprised me—I’d been to parties where there was pot, but the Garhoffs had children who were asleep on the same floor. We left a little after midnight, Charlie came to my apartment for an hour, and he tried to persuade me to let him stay over. “Like in Houghton” was his new argument. “And see, the flames of hell haven’t licked us yet.”

I declined. I knew that the next morning, he was going with Hank Ucker to a church service in Lomira, followed by a pancake breakfast. I, meanwhile, was greatly looking forward to cleaning my apartment—there were dishes in the sink, several loads of laundry, unpaid bills, everything that you happily neglect in the early stage of a relationship.

On Sunday, I tended to this tidying up for several hours while the sky turned from blue to dark gray. By two
P.M.
, the temperature had dropped at least fifteen degrees since sunrise, and I shut my kitchen and bedroom windows and turned on the radio. A tornado was approaching Lacrosse, apparently, heading southwest, and it wasn’t yet clear if it would hit Madison. I called Charlie, and when he answered, I said, “I’m glad you’re home safely.”

“I am
never
eating another pancake. God almighty, Lindy, those little old ladies refuse to take no for an answer.”

“Have you looked outside lately?” I was standing in front of the kitchen sink, which faced the backyard and the rear of the house behind mine. “Even the birds aren’t chirping.”

“You’re not worried, are you?”

I could hear his television, and I said, “Are you watching baseball?”

“The Brew Crew is trouncing the White Sox, thank you very much. Victory tastes even sweeter after our last two losses.”

“Would it be annoying if we stay on the phone?” I said. “We don’t need to talk.”

“Why don’t you come over? Or want me to come there?”

“Do you remember that my TV is black and white?”

“Then you come here, and I’ll let you rub my tummy.”

“I’d rather not drive right now, in case—” I began to say, and outside a pounding rain abruptly started. Then I realized it was not rain but hail.

“Mike Caldwell’s the next at bat,” Charlie said. “I had my doubts about him, but he’s playing a decent game. Steve Brye, on the other hand—” This was when there was a flash of lightning followed by a terrific crack of thunder, and then the sirens went off, that menacing wail.

“I’m going down to the basement, and you should, too,” I said. “Please, Charlie, don’t keep watching the game.”

“You know everything’s fine, don’t you?” His voice was calm and kind.

“Charlie, turn off the TV.”

As if I were headed to the beach, I grabbed a towel and a book (it was
Humboldt’s Gift
), and a flashlight as well, and I hurried from my apartment. The door to the basement was behind the stairs in the first-floor hall. There was one other apartment in the house, a first-floor unit belonging to a doctoral student named Ja-hoon Choi, and though I’d waited out tornadoes with him a few times before, his car wasn’t in the driveway, so I didn’t think he was home. The basement staircase was rickety and wooden, with air between the steps, and there was a bare lightbulb whose string I yanked on when I reached the bottom. Our landlord kept old sailing equipment here, and some outdoor furniture, but for the most part, the space was empty. I unfolded a lawn chair with metal arms and a plaid polyester seat, but it was so rusty and cobwebby that I folded it right back up. Then I just stood there holding the towel,
Humboldt’s Gift,
and the flashlight. In the last few minutes, it had become hard to suppress thoughts about the unreliability of luck.
I will not be the one it happens to—
this is what we all believe, what we must believe to make our way in the world each day.
Someone else. Not me.
But every once in a while it
is
you, or someone close enough that it might as well be you. People to whom a terrible thing has never happened trust fate, the notion that what’s meant to be will be; the rest of us know better. I pictured a tree crashing through Charlie’s living room window, Charlie himself being lifted from the couch, trapped in the spinning air, violently deposited on the street or a roof. It’s a phenomenon that seems comic to those who don’t live in tornado-prone areas—the flying cow or refrigerator—and even to those of us who live in tornado states, it can be funny during calm times. But it was hailing outside, it was as dark as night, and anxiety clutched me.
It can’t happen twice to a person I love,
I thought, but I was not able to convince myself.

Then, over the dropping hail and the squeal of the sirens, I heard a pounding that I eventually realized was coming from the first floor. I did nothing, and then I darted up the steps, expecting to see Ja-hoon Choi through the window in the front door. Instead, I saw Charlie.

I opened the door, saying, “Charlie! My God!” He sauntered in, sopping wet, and I threw my arms around him and said, “You shouldn’t have driven over!” When we kissed, his lips were slick.

I pulled him back toward the basement, and when we were safely down there, he gestured at the towel I’d been holding all this time. “That for me?” He rubbed it over his head, and after he pulled it away, he surveyed the basement. “Nice ambience.”

“I can’t believe you’re here.”

“There’s fallen branches on Williamson, but I bet you anything the tornado bypasses us. This is just a thunderstorm.” Even as he said it, the sirens stopped. “See?” He grinned. “God agrees with me.”

“Still, it can’t have been safe to—”

He put his hand over my mouth, cutting me off. “I thought of something on the way here, but you have to stop scolding me. If I move my hand, will you stop?”

I nodded, and he withdrew his hand.

“I decided we should get married,” he said. “No more of this running-through-the-rain shit. We should live in the same place, sleep in the same bed at night, wake up together in the morning, and whenever there’s a tornado, I can take care of you and watch baseball at the same time.”

We regarded each other. Uncertainly, I said, “You mean—Is this—Are you proposing?”

“It sure feels like it.” He grinned, but a little nervously.

I said, “Okay.” And then I beamed.

When Charlie took hold of me, he embraced me so tightly my feet left the ground—literally, I mean, not figuratively. And here we were in the basement, the grimy basement: My life was changing, and we stood in the dankest of places. I was still myself, I didn’t feel catapulted into a different existence, the room was not aglow. It was only later that this moment would take on its proper burnish. While it was happening, everything felt new and strange and exciting and tenuous, which was the opposite of how it would feel later: weighty and familiar and reassuring. It would in retrospect appear to be a stop on a narrative path that was inevitable, but this is only because most events, most paths, feel inevitable in retrospect.

And so I had lost Dena, and in exchange I had gotten marriage; I’d traded friendship for romance, companionship for a husband. Was this not a reasonable bargain, one most people would make? I’d no longer be that allegedly eccentric, allegedly pitiable never married woman; my very existence would not pose a question that others felt compelled to try answering.

But what amazed me was that I would marry a man I loved; my choices had not turned out to be settling or remaining single. The generic relief of being coupled off was something I could have found by marrying Wade Trommler in 1967, or another man since. The remarkable part was that I’d be getting much more. Charlie was sweet and funny and energetic, he was incredibly attractive—his wrists with light brown hair on the back, his preppy shirts, his grin, and his charisma—and I had waited until the age of thirty-one, I’d sometimes felt like the last one standing, and then I had found somebody who was not perfect but was perfect enough, perfect for me. I was not to be punished, after all. I was to be rewarded, though it was hard to say for what.

It had been six weeks since we’d met.

WE HAD BACK-TO-SCHOOL
faculty meetings that Wednesday and Thursday, before Labor Day weekend, and really, we teachers were no different than high school students, sniffing one another out after several months apart, comparing vacations, checking to see who’d gotten thin or tan. During the principal’s welcoming speech in the gym, I sat on the bleachers between Rita and Maggie Stenta, the first-grade teacher who’d had me to her house for sloppy joes and sangria the previous spring. As our principal, Lydia Bianchi, described the new schedule for after-school bus duty, Rita leaned over and whispered, “How’s your
boyfriend
?”

Maggie turned. “Are you dating someone?”

I shook my head as if I didn’t follow or dared not turn my attention from Lydia. Truthfully, I didn’t know quite how to talk about Charlie; I did not want to gush or boast. After three days, we still hadn’t mentioned our engagement to anyone. We wanted to tell our families first, and because we’d be spending Labor Day weekend in Door County with the Blackwells and would return to Riley the following weekend, it seemed nicer to wait and share the news in person. What his family would make of simultaneously meeting me and finding out I was to be their newest in-law, I couldn’t imagine.

Every year, all the teachers were required to watch the same half-hour filmstrip on head lice—it was a source of much grumbling, and I personally was seeing it for the sixth time—and the film was shown that Thursday in the library after lunch. I was walking back from the cafeteria with Rita and was still in the hall when Steve Engel, a science teacher who was six-five, hit his head on the
Paddle-to-the-Sea
canoe hanging in the library doorway. “Cool boat,” I heard him say to no one in particular.

After a bit of shifting, I’d found the right place for all the papiermâché pieces: the Runaway Bunnies and Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne perched on the lower shelves where the youngest children’s books were kept; Ferdinand stood guard over the card catalog; the Giving Tree received a place of honor on my desk. A part of me couldn’t believe I’d finished all ten of them, especially with the happy distraction of Charlie. I had probably spent two hundred hours total on the project—admittedly, most of those hours had been before Charlie—and I did not doubt that some people would have judged that a colossal waste of time.

When the filmstrip was over, Deborah Kuehl, the ostentatiously organized school nurse who was in charge of showing the film, was explaining the institution of a new no-nits policy. “I can’t believe she does this right after lunch,” Rita muttered. Although Deborah had a brisk manner, she was generous with her medical expertise and didn’t seem to mind when teachers hit her up for advice—she’d peer into your throat and tell you if it looked like strep, or advise you on whether the black fingernail you’d banged in a door needed to be treated for infection.

When Deborah asked if there were any questions, Rita raised her hand. “I just wanted to say, doesn’t the library look fabulous? Alice made all the animals herself.”

I could feel the teachers in the rows ahead of and behind us look at me.

“While that’s very supportive of you, Rita, I was hoping for questions pertaining to the nit policy.” Deborah scanned her audience. No one else raised a hand, and she seemed only a little disappointed. Primly but not ungenerously, she said, “The sculptures are indeed a colorful addition to this space. Bravo, Alice, for your creativity.”

Rita started clapping, and I murmured, “Rita, please,” but it had already caught on. I knew I was blushing.

As it happened, when the children returned to school the following week, they seemed to get a kick out of the characters but also to see them for what they were, which was background decoration. The characters did not wear well that year: Even by the end of the first day, one of Ferdinand’s horns had come off, a casualty of a second-grader’s overexcitement, and after the sixth-graders’ library period, I found a mustache drawn above Eloise’s lips (I was pretty sure I knew which two boys had done it). At the conclusion of the school year, I ended up throwing them all out except for the Giving Tree, which I still have; each time I move, I pack it more carefully, as if it is a priceless vase. But I can honestly say I didn’t mind the other characters’ short lives. I enjoyed making them, and if it’s great reverence you’re looking for, or earnest expressions of gratitude—well, then you don’t work with kids.

What I couldn’t have imagined at the time was that the applause after the lice film was the moment of my greatest professional achievement. It was the most public recognition I ever received for being myself rather than an extension of someone else or, even worse, for being a symbol. Thirty-five teachers clapping in an elementary school library is, I realize, a humble triumph, but it touched me. In the years since, I have received great and vulgar quantities of attention, more attention than even the most vain or insecure individual could possibly wish for, and I have never enjoyed it a fraction as much.