American Wife (40 page)

AT DINNER, I
did manage to eat the steak, though I wouldn’t have said I enjoyed it. Without consulting Charlie, I fixed Ella a peanut-butter sandwich instead—it would have made me far tenser for her to consume Blackwell meat than for me to—and Charlie either didn’t notice or chose not to comment. After dinner, Ella took a bath and I washed her hair, a request I was sadly aware that she’d stop making of me in the near future, and then I climbed into bed with her and read aloud from
The Trumpet of the Swan;
for me, this was the sweetest part of every day. Before I turned out the light, Ella summoned Charlie—she shrieked, “Daddy! Daddy, it’s time for me to be tucked in!”—and he came as called. About half the time, he’d rile her up more than settle her down, tickling her, dancing, making such outrageous noises or faces that she’d be squealing and jumping on the mattress, but on this night, he was so subdued that she whispered after he’d left, “Is Daddy mad at me?”

I ran my hand over her hair, smoothing it out against the pillowcase. Ella had a ridiculously girlish bedroom, all pink and white (we’d let her pick it out), and she had a double bed, which seemed indulgent for a third-grader, but it was actually the bed I’d had before I married Charlie. “Daddy’s not mad,” I said. The phone rang then, and I heard Charlie answer it.

“Can I rent
Dirty Dancing
this weekend?” Ella asked.

“You can rent
Dirty Dancing
when you’re in seventh grade.”

“Mommy, it’s not really dirty just because that’s what it’s called.”

I leaned in and kissed her forehead. “Time to go to sleep, sweetheart.”

WHEN I ENTERED
the den, I was startled to find Hank Ucker sitting in an armchair, watching the ball game with Charlie. Without standing, Hank bowed in his seat. “The maternal glow positively emanates from you, Alice,” he said. “You call to mind a Renaissance Madonna.”

“I see her more like the trampy singer Madonna,” Charlie said, and grinned. “Come here, baby.” When I stood beside him, he affectionately patted my rear.

“Hank, I didn’t realize we’d have the pleasure of your company tonight,” I said. “May I offer you something to eat or drink?” It was almost nine o’clock, so I wondered how long he planned to stay. As far as I knew, Hank still lived in Madison. Though I hadn’t seen him for a few years, I’d heard he’d left his position as chief of staff for the minority leader of the Wisconsin State Senate to help run the U.S. Senate campaign of a Republican from Fond du Lac, a man who initially hadn’t seemed to have much of a shot but in recent weeks had pulled ahead of the incumbent in several polls.

“A glass of ice water would be superb,” Hank said.

Charlie, who was drinking whiskey, chuckled. “Still living life in the fast lane, I see.”

Hank smiled his slow, untrustworthy smile. “As ever.”

I slipped away to the kitchen, filled a glass for Hank, and when I returned to the den, they were talking about Sharon Olson, the incumbent against whom Hank’s candidate was running. “A shame that had to come out about her taste for men of the Negro persuasion,” Charlie said, grinning. Hank’s candidate’s polling numbers had no doubt been bolstered by the recent revelation—this did not seem revelatory to me, but
revelation
was the word the local news programs used—that Olson, who was a white Democrat, had had a brief and childless first marriage to a black man in the late sixties. Olson was now remarried to a white lawyer with whom she had two teenage sons and a daughter, and I didn’t see how her earlier marriage had much bearing on anything (the first husband had long since moved to Seattle, where he, too, was an attorney), but a series of ads was running that showed her and the groom holding hands at her first wedding, accompanied by ominous music and concluding with a question posed in stark red letters against a dark screen:
IF SHARON OLSON HAS BEEN LYING TO US ABOUT THIS . . . WHAT ELSE HAS SHE BEEN LYING ABOUT
?

Hank smirked. “A shame indeed. That poor gal.”

I passed the water glass to Hank and said, “If you’ll excuse me, I have some reading to do. Hank, nice to see you.”

Over an hour later, after I’d heard the front door open and close and a car engine start, I returned to the first floor. “Are you thinking of running for office?”

“Jeepers creepers, woman, calm down.” Charlie’s voice was a little loose, and the whiskey bottle was, I noted, down to the dregs, but I couldn’t remember how full it had been before.

“Given that it’s almost June, what race could you realistically enter?”

“Seriously,” Charlie said, “calm down.”

“You know I’ve never trusted Hank.”

“And anyone who runs for elected office is a pompous shyster—right, baby?”

“You’re putting words in my mouth.”

He leered. “I can think of something I’d like to put in your mouth.”

“Can’t you just give me a straight answer about why Hank was here?”

We faced each other, him still sitting on the couch, me standing a few feet away, and he said, “I got a call from Arthur before Ucker arrived—turns out I was right that we weren’t to blame for the contamination. It wasn’t the store the sports-banquet folks got the chuck from that had the problems, it was the basement fridge where one of the athlete’s moms was storing it. Seems that a rat had gnawed the power cord.” Charlie raised his glass. “Bon appétit.”

“That poor woman—she must feel terrible.”

“I’m just glad we recalled one-point-two million pounds of meat. Good thing the Upper Midwest region is safe tonight from the scourge of Blackwell beef.”

“You did the right thing.”

Charlie gestured toward the TV. “You just missed John on Channel Twelve news. He said, ‘Our meat is not a crook.’ ” Charlie leaned back, chuckling at his own joke.

“I’m glad everything is cleared up.” I took a seat and leaned forward to pull the latest issue of
The New Yorker
off the coffee table. “Did you know Yvonne Sutton had a baby?”

“Who’s Yvonne Sutton?”

“Miss Ruby’s daughter.”

Charlie shook his head wonderingly. “You can’t say those people aren’t fertile.”

“Charlie, Yvonne has two children. She’s not exactly contributing to overpopulation.”

“I assume it’s a different father from Jessica’s?”

“It’s her husband, and he also works at St. Mary’s.” I closed the magazine, which I wasn’t reading anyway. “I invited them over for lunch on Memorial Day.”

“Wasn’t that egalitarian of you? Maybe they can show our daughter how to grow dreadlocks.” Several years before, for Ella’s fifth birthday, she had requested a Barbie doll. We’d bought one for her—Dreamtime Barbie, who came with her own miniature peach-colored teddy bear—but when Ella unwrapped the box, she burst into tears. She wanted a Barbie “like Jessica’s,” she kept insisting, and eventually, I figured out she meant a black Barbie. I ended up exchanging Dreamtime Barbie for Day-to-Night Barbie, who came with a pink business suit and a pink dress that had a sparkly top and a sheer skirt, whose skin was dark brown, and whose hair was black. I felt almost proud of Ella, and I think Charlie was amused, though he did say, “Show that to Maj, and you and Ella will both be excommunicated.” The irony was that while Charlie regularly remarked on his mother’s racism, he made offensive comments more often than she did. That he made them with a wink, he seemed to think, meant he was less culpable and not more so, and although I disagreed and particularly disliked when he used slurs in front of Ella, I’d long ago given up trying to edit him.

In our den, I said, “Jessica is going to Stevens next year for junior high, which really makes me worry.”

“I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

“It sounds like she’s a great student and does lots of extracurricular activities.”

“Did you run into her recently?”

“I saw Miss Ruby last night—when I was looking for you, I went by your parents’ house.” Mentioning that Miss Ruby had accompanied me to the play seemed unnecessary. I added, “I bet Jessica would thrive at a place like Biddle.”

“Sounds like she’s thriving already.”

“Do you know which school Stevens is?”

Charlie grinned. “Where do you think I go to replenish my crack supply?” Then he said, “I’m not running for anything, okay? Hank came over so we could think about options for the future, but you’re right—it’s too late for this election year.”

“Good,” I said.

He extended one leg so his sock-encased foot was balanced on my knee. “I sure do love you, Lindy, even if you’re a narrow-minded liberal who thinks I’m a conniving Republican.”

I set my hand on top of his foot. “Sweetheart, if I were narrow-minded, I wouldn’t love you back.”

WHEN THE PHONE
rang on Friday afternoon, it was one o’clock, and I was scrubbing the tiles in our master-bathroom shower (I had never hired a maid or housekeeper, which I knew Priscilla and my sisters-in-law considered odd, but I actually found it soothing to clean). I pulled the yellow rubber glove off my right hand as I walked into our bedroom, and after I’d lifted the receiver, I heard Lars Enderstraisse say, “Alice, I’m awful sorry to be the one calling you—”

Immediately, my heart stopped, it hung there unmoving inside my chest, and then, squeaking out the words, I said, “My mother?” and he said, “No, no, not Dorothy. It’s Emilie. I’m afraid she took a spill, and there’s been some internal bleeding, some bleeding in the brain, so we’re over at Lutheran Hospital.” This was the same hospital where I’d been born, the hospital where both Andrew Imhof and I had been taken that horrible night in September 1963.

“But she’s not—” I paused. “She’s alive?”

“She isn’t conscious, but I know the doctors are working hard. Your mother’s talking to one of them. Me and her are here outside the ICU, and we’re hoping they’ll let us see—”

“Granny’s in the ICU?”

“Being that she’s up there in years, they’re taking every precaution.”

“I’ll get there as soon as I can,” I said.

IT HAD HAPPENED
late that morning, and not for any obvious reason—she had been walking from the dining room into the living room and had somehow landed on the floor, unconscious—and what the doctors were trying to figure out was whether the bleeding in my grandmother’s brain had caused the fall or the fall had caused the bleeding. My mother had heard a thud, but not even a loud one, “like the mail dropping,” she said, and she’d hurried out and seen my grandmother lying there. My mother tried unsuccessfully to revive her, and then she called an ambulance.

At the hospital, my mother kept apologizing, as if it were her fault, saying, “I’m just so sorry you had to come rushing out here.”

“Mom, of course I came.”

At some point late in the afternoon, Lars walked across the street to a convenience store and bought boxed cookies, which neither my mother nor I ate; he then offered them to the other people in the waiting room. A television sat in one corner, playing soap operas and then talk shows, and though no one seemed to be watching it, it appeared that everyone was too diffident to turn it off. The commercials, with their relentlessly zippy announcers and upbeat jingles, felt like a particular affront.

On the waitingroom pay phone, I had called Charlie, then I’d called Jadey to see if she could pick up Ella after school, and a few hours later, I’d called Jadey’s house to talk to Ella, to explain what was happening. I’d hoped that hearing my voice would let her know I was fine and so was she, but instead, it was her voice that upset
me;
I so wanted to be beside Ella, holding her, that I had to blink back tears. In her serious, girlish voice, she said, “Is Granny going to die?” Granny was what Ella called my grandmother, just as I did; she called my mother Grandma, and she referred to Lars (he and my mother had quietly married in 1981) as Papa Lars.

I said, “I hope not, ladybug.”

Around five, I called Charlie again at the office. “I’m still here, and there’s no real news,” I said. “Can you go get Ella?”

“You think Jadey would mind watching her a little while longer? I’m scheduled for a five-thirty squash match with Stuey Patrickson.”

From the pay phone in the corner, I surveyed the room: a young husband sitting with one hand over his eyes, either resting or weeping; a small child running a truck along the carpet; my mother reading a months-old
McCall’s
while Lars Enderstraisse sat beside her eating another cookie. (
My stepfather
was never how I thought of Lars. Not that I disliked him, I actually had developed a great deal of affection for him, and to my surprise, so had my grandmother; she had taught him to play Scrabble, and he’d become particularly knowledgeable about the tricky two-letter words, which meant he was a considerably more challenging opponent to my grandmother than my mother was. But still, I did not think of Lars as a father figure; he was simply my mother’s husband, her companion.)

“Alice?” Charlie said, and I said, “I’d prefer for you to pick up Ella now. I don’t want her to feel unsettled.”

“Is she upset?”

“Well, I’m leaning toward staying at my mom’s tonight. We haven’t been allowed to see Granny, and I’m reluctant to come back to Milwaukee when everything is up in the air.”

“You don’t even have a toothbrush, do you?” he said.

“I can buy one.”

“If you come home, you can jump in the car if you need to get back to Riley. It’s, what, thirty-five minutes?”

The way Charlie drove, perhaps, but not the way I did. Besides, I knew that Charlie’s eagerness to have me return to Milwaukee stemmed less from a particular wish to see me than from—it persisted—his fear of the dark; my husband was afraid to spend the night in our house without me. Depending on the circumstances, I found this phobia either cute or irritating. “How about this?” I said. “I’ll call Jadey, and you and Ella can stay there.”

“Remember how that fucking dog of theirs barked and slobbered in my face all night last time?”

“Charlie, my grandmother is in the intensive-care unit. Your options are to stay at home, go to Arthur and Jadey’s, or you’re welcome to drive out here with Ella and stay at my mom’s. Why don’t I give you a few minutes to make a decision, and I’ll call back?”