American Wife (5 page)

“Roy Ziemniak is short,” I said.

“Aren’t we picky? Eugene Schwab, then.” The Schwabs lived two doors down from us.

“Eugene goes out with Rita Sanocki.”

“Not Irma and Morris’s daughter?”

I nodded.

“I’ve always thought she has a piggy face.”

“Granny!”

“You called Roy Ziemniak short, my dear. And I don’t mean to be cruel about Rita, but you must know what I’m referring to. It’s her eyes and nose.” The waitress arrived then to take our order, and when she was gone, my grandmother said, “I’d had two marriage proposals by the time I was your age. It’s time for you to start dating.”

“WE’VE FOUND A
gentleman for you,” Dr. Wycomb announced the next evening at dinner. We were having rack of lamb, buttered rolls, and artichokes—another food I’d never tasted, and one Dr. Wycomb apparently ordered once a year in a crate from California. My grandmother had shown me how to remove the leaves and dip them in butter, how to daintily skim off the meat with my front teeth. “Marvin Benheimer is the son of a colleague of mine, a gastroenterologist,” Dr. Wycomb was saying to me. “He’s in his second year at Yale University, and he’s very tall. He’ll pick you up tomorrow at seven.”

“What fun,” my grandmother said.

“He’ll pick me up
here
? Tomorrow?”

“It’s New Year’s Eve,” my grandmother said. “We thought it would be a treat for you after spending all week with two old ladies.”

“I like spending time with the two of you.”

“You don’t have to marry him, Alice,” my grandmother said. “Just consider it practice. It’s important to know how to behave in a range of social situations.”

I couldn’t tell my grandmother that she was underestimating me—I may not have been on any actual dates, but Larry Nagel was not even the first person I’d kissed. At Pauline Geisseler’s fourteenth birthday party in ninth grade, when we’d played post office, Bobby Sobczak had picked me, and then it became my turn and I picked Rudy Kuesto. Both of them had tasted like peanuts because that was one of Pauline’s party snacks.

“You shouldn’t worry,” Dr. Wycomb said. “Marvin is an upstanding young man. He’ll take you to dinner, then bring you to the Palmer House, where your grandmother and I will be having a drink with his parents, and we’ll all ring in the New Year together. That doesn’t sound so dreadful, does it?”

Before I could respond, my grandmother set down her fork and beamed. “That sounds perfect,” she said.

HE HAD ON
a coat and tie, and I wore the kilt and blouse I’d worn on the train from Riley, but not the circle pin or the green wool sweater. “It’s manly,” my grandmother had said about the sweater when I appeared in the living room to show her and Dr. Wycomb the outfit, and though I protested that I’d be cold, she said it would be a short walk to the restaurant. Marvin visited with my grandmother and Dr. Wycomb before we left; when Myra asked what he’d like to drink, he said, “I’ll take a Miller, if you’ve got it,” then added, in the same tone of unjustified enthusiasm that the announcer used in the ads, “The champagne of bottled beers!” In this moment, I could feel my grandmother not making eye contact with me, refusing to concede what I’d been nearly certain of right away—that Marvin possessed little appeal.

When we stood to leave, Dr. Wycomb said, “Here’s a key, just in case, and I’ve written down my address and telephone number, should there be any sort of emergency.” She handed me a small square of paper.

“Gladys, they’ll be three blocks away,” my grandmother said. “And Marvin has no prison record, at least none that he’s mentioned.”

“Dr. Wycomb knows I’m as squeaky clean as they come,” Marvin said, and everyone chuckled. But I had an unsettled feeling in my stomach; it had come over me while I brushed my hair in the bathroom, and it hadn’t gone away when I’d met Marvin, even after I’d realized there was no reason to be intimidated by him. As she helped me put on my coat, my grandmother whispered, “So he’s a bit of a horse’s ass, but remember: practice.” In the elevator down to the lobby, I couldn’t help asking, “How tall are you?” and Marvin said, “Six-five,” in a way that implied both that he was asked often and that he never grew tired of answering.

The restaurant was called Buddy’s, which had made me imagine it would not be fancy, that we might even be overdressed. But it
was
fancy, and we were some of the youngest people there. Someone took our coats on our arrival, and the maître d’ led us to the dining room, which was dimly lit, with heavy curtains and large wingback chairs at the tables.

After we’d sat, Marvin said, “To be honest, when my father told me I had to do this, I thought you’d be a dog, but you’re pretty darn cute.”

Uncertainly, I said, “Thanks.”

“Don’t be insulted—I wouldn’t be telling you if you
were
a dog.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

“You’re still in high school, aren’t you?” When I nodded, he said, “Well, I advise you to stay away from Bryn Mawr. Of all the Seven Sisters, the girls there are the biggest ding-a-lings.”

“Who are the seven sisters?”

He looked at me as if trying to decide whether I was joking or serious. Then, not unkindly, he said, “You really are from a small town. They’re the female counterparts of the Ivies. Radcliffe goes with Harvard, Barnard goes with Columbia, and so on. In New Haven, our sister school is Vassar, though they’re a solid hour and a half away.”

“I want to go to Ersine Teachers College in Milwaukee,” I said. “It’s all girls, so maybe it’s a sister school—I don’t know.”

“It’s not a
Seven
Sisters school.”

“Yeah, I don’t think it is. I don’t know, though.”

“No,” he said. “It’s definitely not.”

That unsettled feeling from before—it still hadn’t gone away. It was now accompanied by a heat that was spreading through my body, collecting in my cheeks and neck.

“If I order for both of us, I’m sure they’ll bring you a drink,” he said.

“Water is fine.” I touched my fingertips to my face and, as I’d expected, my skin was burning. “Excuse me for a second.” The bathroom was also fancy: An attendant, a black girl who looked not much older than I, was sitting by the sink, and every stall had a wooden door that went all the way up to the ceiling; inside the stall, the fixture holding the toilet paper was gold. As my mother had taught me, I placed a strip of paper on either side of the seat before I sat down, and when I was finished urinating, I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees, covering my face with my hands. It was not that I definitely would throw up, but the possibility existed. Was I really such a social coward? Though I didn’t think I cared what Marvin thought of me, perhaps my body knew more than my mind.

Conscious of the attendant out by the sink, I forced myself to stand, flush, and fix my clothes. I washed my hands, and when the woman passed me a towel, I said—I’d seen the dish of coins—“I’m sorry, but I left my purse at the table.”

When I returned to the dining room, Marvin said, “I took the liberty of ordering an hors d’oeuvre. How do you feel about escargot?”

“That’s fine.” I had, of course, never tasted them, though I knew what they were, and they sounded awful. When the waiter brought the small white bowl filled with brown globs in a pool of melted butter, I had to look away. For a main course, Marvin asked for fricassee of rabbit—smirking, he added, “With apologies to Mr. Bugs Bunny”—and I asked for steak; it seemed like something that wouldn’t hold surprises, it would be straightforward, and I could take three bites, then push the rest around my plate.

Marvin leaned intently across the table. “Here’s a moral dilemma for you. You’ve built a bomb shelter in your backyard, and your neighbors haven’t. When the Soviets attack, you hightail it to your shelter, but your neighbors come around begging for food and water. What do you do?”

“What?” I said.

“Alice, do you follow current affairs? And I don’t mean what hat Jackie Kennedy is wearing this week and who designed her dress.”

“Sometimes I read the newspaper.” One of my organs had just done a somersault inside my stomach, which was distracting enough that Marvin’s condescension didn’t really offend me.

“You shoot ’em dead,” he said. “That’s what you do. If your neighbors didn’t plan ahead, their survival isn’t your responsibility.”

This was when the waiter arrived with our entrées, and my steak was a lump of brown meat still attached to the bone, accompanied by menacingly glistening peas and carrots, and a baked potato bulging at the seams. I knew I couldn’t eat any of it; I couldn’t touch it.

“The thing no one realizes about Khrushchev—” Marvin began, and I said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t feel very well. I need to leave.”

“Now?” Marvin looked bewildered.

“I’m sorry.” I stood. “Please stay. I’ll be fine getting back to Dr. Wycomb’s.”

“Are you sure?”

“Both our meals shouldn’t go to waste. I’m so sorry.” I hurried through the restaurant and retrieved my coat from the coat-check man, who spoke as he passed it to me, but I walked outside without replying. I was dizzy and scalding hot, focused only on not letting the horrible churning inside me erupt into something public and visible. If I could just get back to Dr. Wycomb’s empty apartment, I could sit on the bathroom floor next to the toilet, and it would all emerge in an orderly fashion; this moment would pass with no one watching.

Walk forward over the sidewalk,
I thought, and as I repeated the phrase in my head, it seemed, in my unsteadiness and desperation, to be a palindrome I was inside of, a purgatory of nausea. It was brutally cold outside, which at first was an improvement over the restaurant but quickly became its own misery. Then, miraculously, I’d reached Dr. Wycomb’s building. The doorman nodded as I went in, and the elevator attendant also seemed to recognize me. “Happy New Year,” he said, and I did not respond, again aware of the rudeness of my silence yet afraid to open my mouth.

The gold silk wallpaper then, the hallway, the door to Dr. Wycomb’s apartment, my hands shaking as I turned the key she’d given me. There was music playing when I entered the apartment—it was jazz and it was loud—and this was why, in spite of my nausea, I did not immediately step from the foyer into the hall leading to the bedrooms. Having believed the apartment would be vacant on my return, I was surprised and curious (could Myra be playing this noisy music? But no, she’d gone home late that afternoon), so I stepped instead into the living room, and just before I crossed the threshold, I heard my grandmother’s laughter, and just after I heard her laughter, I saw her sitting on Dr. Wycomb’s lap, kissing Dr. Wycomb on the lips.

Dr. Wycomb was dressed in a burgundy silk bathrobe; my grandmother was wearing a beige bra and a beige half-slip trimmed with lace. She was facing Dr. Wycomb, and their mouths were open a little and their eyes were closed, and the kiss went on for several seconds and had not yet stopped when I backed out, so stunned that briefly, my shock outweighed my queasiness. I had to leave the apartment; there was no alternative. And so I did, handling the door as carefully and quietly as possible. In the hall, my nausea came roaring back, and by the time I knew what I was doing, I’d already done it. On either side of the elevator were large metallic vases, almost three feet high, with red bows tied around them and Christmas greens emerging artfully from their centers. Approaching the nearer vase, I pushed aside the greens and then I vomited—hideously, pungently, gloriously—into the vase’s depths.

FOR A LONG
time, I remained crumpled on the carpeted floor, spent. I knew I ought to move, to either go downstairs to the lobby or knock on the door and wait for my grandmother or Dr. Wycomb to let me back in the apartment, but neither of these options was appealing. Instead, curled up in my kilt and coat by the elevator, I began to doze. I think about an hour had passed, though it could have been much shorter or longer, by the time the elevator attendant found me. He was the one who knocked on the apartment door, and when Dr. Wycomb answered, I felt like a truant. “She got sick out here,” the attendant said. “Now, I don’t know who’s cleaning it up, but I’ve got an elevator to run tonight.”

Dr. Wycomb’s gaze had jumped to my face.

“Maybe I ate something bad,” I murmured.

“Thank you, Teddy,” Dr. Wycomb said to the attendant. “I’ll take care of the situation.” She guided me inside, calling, “Emilie, Alice has come back early.”

“Was he that objectionable?” My grandmother’s voice grew louder as she approached us. “Alice, you really ought to give—” Then she saw me and said, “Good Lord, you look ghastly.” She was fully dressed, I noted, wearing her brown suit.

“She’s vomited, and I suspect she also has a fever and is dehydrated,” Dr. Wycomb said. Together, they tucked me into bed and took my temperature—102, apparently—and Dr. Wycomb said, “It’s important for you to have fluids. Emilie, get her some ginger ale from the pantry.”

When my grandmother brought the glass to me, I took a few sips—it was sweet and fizzy—and promptly fell asleep, this time far more deeply than I had in the hallway. When I next awakened, it was close to four in the morning, according to the small round clock on the marble table, and my grandmother was sleeping in the other bed. The third time I awakened, it was light out, I was the only one in the room, and I could smell coffee. I rose to use the toilet, and when I returned from the bathroom, my grandmother was waiting for me, smoking a cigarette. “You certainly know how to bring in the new year in style,” she said.

“I’m sorry if I made you miss going to that hotel last night.”

“If Marvin’s parents are anything like their offspring, you spared us. I must say that for a sick girl, you chose the best place to be in all of Chicago. You have the city’s finest physician at your beck and call.”

I climbed back into bed, and for the rest of the day, I emerged only when I needed to go to the bathroom; I didn’t even bathe. Beneath the covers, I alternately shivered and sweated, my body aching, and they took my temperature at intervals. “This just needs to run its course,” Dr. Wycomb said. “You’ll feel like yourself in another day or two.”