AMERICAN
WIFE

 

IN 1954, THE summer before I entered third grade, my grandmother mistook Andrew Imhof for a girl. I’d accompanied my grandmother to the grocery store—that morning, while reading a novel that mentioned hearts of palm, she’d been seized by a desire to have some herself and had taken me along on the walk to town—and it was in the canned-goods section that we encountered Andrew, who was with his mother. Not being of the same generation, Andrew’s mother and my grandmother weren’t friends, but they knew each other the way people in Riley, Wisconsin, did. Andrew’s mother was the one who approached us, setting her hand against her chest and saying to my grandmother, “Mrs Lindgren, it’s Florence Imhof. How are you?”

Andrew and I had been classmates for as long as we’d been going to school, but we merely eyed each other without speaking. We both were eight. As the adults chatted, he picked up a can of peas and held it by securing it between his flat palm and his chin, and I wondered if he was showing off.

This was when my grandmother shoved me a little. “Alice, say hello to Mrs Imhof.” As I’d been taught, I extended my hand. “And isn’t your daughter darling,” my grandmother continued, gesturing toward Andrew, “but I don’t believe I know her name.”

A silence ensued during which I’m pretty sure Mrs Imhof was deciding how to correct my grandmother. At last, touching her son’s shoulder, Mrs Imhof said, “This is Andrew. He and Alice are in the same class over at the school.”

My grandmother squinted. “Andrew, did you say?” She even turned her head, angling her ear as if she were hard of hearing, though I knew she wasn’t. She seemed to willfully refuse the pardon Mrs Imhof had offered, and I wanted to tap my grandmother’s arm, to tug her over so her face was next to mine and say, “Granny, he’s a boy!” It had never occurred to me that Andrew looked like a girl—little about Andrew Imhof had occurred to me at that time in my life—but it was true that he had unusually long eyelashes framing hazel eyes, as well as light brown hair that had gotten a bit shaggy over the summer. However, his hair was long only for that time and for a boy; it was still far shorter than mine, and there was nothing feminine about the chinos or red-and-white-checked shirt he wore.

“Andrew is the younger of our two sons,” Mrs Imhof said, and her voice contained a new briskness, the first hint of irritation. “His older brother is Pete.”

“Is that right?” My grandmother finally appeared to grasp the situation, but grasping it did not seem to have made her repentant. She leaned forward and nodded at Andrew—he still was holding the peas—and said, “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. You be sure my granddaughter behaves herself at school. You can report back to me if she doesn’t.”

Andrew had said nothing thus far—it was not clear he’d been paying enough attention to the conversation to understand that his gender was in dispute—but at this he beamed: a closed-mouth but enormous smile, one that I felt implied, erroneously, that I was some sort of mischief-maker and he would indeed be keeping his eye on me. My grandmother, who harbored a lifelong admiration for mischief, smiled back at him like a conspirator. After she and Mrs Imhof said goodbye to each other (our search for hearts of palm had, to my grandmother’s disappointment if not her surprise, proved unsuccessful), we turned in the opposite direction from them. I took my grandmother’s hand and whispered to her in what I hoped was a chastening tone, “Granny.”

Not in a whisper at all, my grandmother said, “You don’t think that child looks like a girl? He’s downright pretty!”

“Shhh!”

“Well, it’s not his fault, but I can’t believe I’m the first one to make that mistake. His eyelashes are an inch long.”

As if to verify her claim, we both turned around. By then we were thirty feet from the Imhofs, and Mrs Imhof had her back to us, leaning toward a shelf. But Andrew was facing my grandmother and me. He still was smiling slightly, and when my eyes met his, he lifted his eyebrows twice.

“He’s flirting with you!” my grandmother exclaimed.

“What does ‘flirting’ mean?”

She laughed. “It’s when a person likes you, so they try to catch your attention.”

Andrew Imhof liked me? Surely, if the information had been delivered by an adult—and not just any adult but my wily grandmother—it had to be true. Andrew liking me seemed neither thrilling nor appalling; mostly, it just seemed unexpected. And then, having considered the idea, I dismissed it. My grandmother knew about some things, but not the social lives of eight-year-olds. After all, she hadn’t even recognized Andrew as a boy.

IN THE HOUSE I grew up in, we were four: my grandmother, my parents, and me. On my father’s side, I was a third generation only child, which was greatly unusual in those days. While I certainly would have liked a sibling, I knew from an early age not to mention it—my mother had miscarried twice by the time I was in first grade, and those were just the pregnancies I knew about, the latter occurring when she was five months along. Though the miscarriages weighted my parents with a quiet sadness, our family as it was seemed evenly balanced. At dinner, we each sat on one side of the rectangular table in the dining room; heading up the sidewalk to church, we could walk in pairs; in the summer, we could split a box of Yummi-Freez ice-cream bars; and we could play euchre or bridge, both of which they taught me when I was ten and which we often enjoyed on Friday and Saturday nights.

Although my grandmother possessed a rowdy streak, my parents were exceedingly considerate and deferential to each other, and for years I believed this mode to be the norm among families and saw all other dynamics as an aberration. My best friend from early girlhood was Dena Janaszewski, who lived across the street, and I was constantly shocked by what I perceived to be Dena’s, and really all the Janaszewskis’, crudeness and volume: They hollered to one another from between floors and out windows; they ate off one another’s plates at will, and Dena and her two younger sisters constantly grabbed and poked at one another’s braids and bottoms; they entered the bathroom when it was occupied; and more shocking than the fact that her father once said goddamn in my presence—his exact words, entering the kitchen, were “Who took my goddamn hedge clippers?”—was the fact that neither Dena, her mother, nor her sisters seemed to even notice.

In my own family, life was calm. My mother and father occasionally disagreed—a few times a year he would set his mouth in a firm straight line, or the corners of her eyes would draw down with a kind of wounded disappointment—but it happened infrequently, and when it did, it seemed unnecessary to express aloud. Merely sensing discord, whether in the role of inflictor or recipient, pained them enough.

My father had two mottoes, the first of which was “Fools’ names and fools’ faces often appear in public places.” The second was “Whatever you are, be a good one.” I never knew the source of the first motto, but the second came from Abraham Lincoln. By profession, my father worked as the branch manager of a bank, but his great passion—his hobby, I suppose you’d say, which seems to be a thing not many people have anymore unless you count searching the Internet or talking on cell phones—was bridges. He especially admired the majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge and once told me that during its construction, the contractor had arranged, at great expense, for an enormous safety net to run beneath it. “That’s called employer responsibility,” my father said. “He wasn’t just worried about profit.” My father closely followed the building of both the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan—he called it the Mighty Mac—and later, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which, upon completion in 1964, would connect Brooklyn and Staten Island and be the largest suspension bridge in the world.

My parents both had grown up in Milwaukee and met in 1943, when my mother was eighteen and working in a glove factory, and my father was twenty and working at a branch of Wisconsin State Bank & Trust. They struck up a conversation in a soda shop, and were engaged by the time my father enlisted in the army. After the war ended, they married and moved forty-five miles west to Riley, my father’s mother in tow, so he could open a branch of the bank there. My mother never again held a job. As a housewife, she had a light touch—she did not seem overburdened or cranky, she didn’t remind the rest of us how much she did—and yet she sewed many of her own and my clothes, kept the house meticulous, and always prepared our meals. The food we ate was acceptable more often than delicious; she favored pan-broiled steak, or noodle and cheese loafs, and she taught me her recipes in a low-key, literal way, never explaining why I needed to know them. Why wouldn’t I need to know them? She was endlessly patient and a purveyor of small, sweet gestures: Without commenting, she’d leave pretty ribbons or peppermint candies on my bed or, on my bureau, a single flower in a three-inch vase.

My mother was the second youngest of eight siblings, none of whom we saw frequently. She had five brothers and two sisters, and only one of her sisters, my Aunt Marie, who was married to a mechanic and had six children, had ever come to Riley. When my mother’s parents were still alive, we’d drive to visit them in Milwaukee, but they died within ten days of each other when I was six, and after that we’d go years without seeing my aunts, uncles, and cousins. My impression was that their houses all were small and crowded, filled with the squabbling of children and the smell of sour milk, and the men were terse and the women were harried; in a way that was not cruel, none of them appeared to be particularly interested in us. We visited less and less the older I got, and my father’s mother never went along, although she’d ask us to pick up schnecken from her favorite German bakery. In my childhood, there was a relieved feeling that came over me when we drove away from one of my aunt’s or uncle’s houses, a feeling I tried to suppress because I knew even then that it was unchristian. Without anyone in my immediate family saying so, I came to understand that my mother had chosen us; she had chosen our life together over one like her siblings’, and the fact that she’d been able to choose made her lucky.

Like my mother, my grandmother did not hold a job after the move to Riley, but she didn’t really join in the upkeep of the house, either. In retrospect, I’m surprised that her unhelpfulness did not elicit resentment from my mother, but it truly seems that it didn’t. I think my mother found her mother-in-law entertaining, and in a person who entertains us, there is much we forgive. Most afternoons, when I returned home from school, the two of them were in the kitchen, my mother paused between chores with an apron on or a dust rag over her shoulder, listening intently as my grandmother recounted a magazine article she’d just finished about, say, the mysterious murder of a mobster’s girlfriend in Chicago.

My grandmother never vacuumed or swept, and only rarely, if my parents weren’t home or my mother was sick, would she cook, preparing dishes notable mostly for their lack of nutrition: An entire dinner could consist of fried cheese or half-raw pancakes. What my grandmother did do was read; this was the primary way she spent her time. It wasn’t unusual for her to complete a book a day—she preferred novels, especially the Russian masters, but she also read histories, biographies, and pulpy mysteries—and for hours and hours every morning and afternoon, she sat either in the living room or on top of her bed (the bed would be made, and she would be fully dressed), turning pages and smoking Pall Malls. From early on, I understood that the household view of my grandmother, which is to say my parents’ view, was not simply that she was both smart and frivolous but that her smartness and her frivolity were intertwined. That she could tell you all about the curse of the Hope Diamond, or about cannibalism in the Donner Party—it wasn’t that she ought to be ashamed, exactly, to possess such knowledge, but there was no reason for her to be proud of it, either. The tidbits she relayed were interesting, but they had little to do with real life: paying a mortgage, scrubbing a pan, keeping warm in the biting cold of Wisconsin winters.

I’m pretty sure that rather than resisting this less than flattering view of herself, my grandmother shared it. In another era, I imagine she’d have made an excellent book critic for a newspaper, or even an English professor, but she’d never attended college, and neither had my parents. My grandmother’s husband, my father’s father, had died early, and as a young widow, my grandmother had gone to work in a ladies’ dress shop, waiting on Milwaukee matrons who, as she told it, had money but not taste. She’d held this job until the age of fifty—fifty was older then than it is now—at which point she’d moved to Riley with my newlywed parents.

My grandmother borrowed the majority of the books she read from the library, but she bought some, too, and these she kept in her bedroom on a shelf so full that every ledge contained two rows; it reminded me of a girl in my class, Pauline Geisseler, whose adult teeth had grown in before her baby teeth fell out and who would sometimes, with a total lack of self-consciousness, open her mouth for us at recess. My grandmother almost never read aloud to me, but she regularly took me to the library—I read and reread the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, and both the Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys series—and my grandmother often summarized the grown-up books she’d read in tantalizing ways: A well-bred married woman falls in love with a man who is not her husband; after her husband learns of the betrayal, she has no choice but to throw herself in the path of an oncoming train …

Such plots infused my grandmother’s bedroom with an atmosphere of intrigue enhanced by her few but carefully chosen belongings, my favorite of which was a bust of Nefertiti that rested on her bureau. The bust had been given to my grandmother by her friend Gladys Wycomb, who lived in Chicago, and it was a replica of the ancient Egyptian one by the sculptor Thutmose. Nefertiti wore a black headdress and a jeweled collar, and she gazed forward with great composure. Her name, my grandmother explained, translated as “the beautiful woman has come.”

Beside the bust were framed pictures: a photograph of my grandmother as a girl in a white dress, standing next to her parents in 1900 (so very long ago!); one of my parents at their wedding in which my father wore his army uniform and my mother wore a double-breasted sheath dress (though the photo was black and white, I knew because I’d asked my mother that her dress was lavender); a photo of my grandmother’s deceased husband, my grandfather, whose name had been Harvey and who was caught here squinting into the sun; and finally, one of me, my class picture from second grade, in which I was smiling a bit frantically, my hair parted in the center and pulled into pigtails.

Beyond her books, her photos, the Nefertiti bust, and her perfume bottle and cosmetics, my grandmother’s bedroom was actually rather plain. She slept, as I did, on a single bed, hers covered by a yellow spread on which she heaped plaid blankets in the winter. There was little on her walls, and her bedside table rarely held anything besides a lamp, a book, a clock, and an ashtray. Yet this was the place, smelling of cigarette smoke and Shalimar perfume, that seemed to me a passageway to adventure, the lobby of adulthood. In my grandmother’s lair, I sensed the experiences and passions of all the people whose lives were depicted in the novels she read.

I don’t know if my grandmother was consciously trying to make me a reader, too, but she did allow me to pick up any of her books, even ones I had small hope of understanding (I began The Portrait of a Lady at the age of nine, then quit after two pages) or ones my mother, had she known, would have forbidden (at the age of eleven, I not only finished Peyton Place but immediately reread it). Meanwhile, my parents owned almost no books except for a set of maroon-spined Encyclopaedia Britannicas we kept in the living room. My father subscribed to Riley’s morning and evening newspapers, The Riley Citizen and The Riley Courier, as well as to Esquire, though my grandmother seemed to read the magazine more thoroughly than he did. My mother didn’t read, and to this day I’m not sure if her disinclination was due to a lack of time or interest.

Because I was the daughter of a bank manager, I believed us to be well off; I was past thirty by the time I realized this was not a view any truly well-off American would have shared. Riley was in the exact center of Benton County, and Benton County contained two competing cheese factories: Fassbinder’s out on De Soto Way, and White River Dairy, which was closer to the town of Houghton, though plenty of people who worked at White River still lived in Riley because Riley, with nearly forty thousand residents, had far more attractions and conveniences, including a movie theater. Many of my classmates’ parents worked at one of the factories; other kids came from small farms, a few from big farms—Freddy Zurbrugg, who in third grade had laughed so hard he’d started crying when our teacher used the word pianist, lived on the fourth largest dairy farm in the state—but still, being from town seemed to me infinitely more sophisticated than being from the country. Riley was laid out on a grid, flanked on the west by the Riley River, with the commercial area occupying the south section of town and the residential streets heading north up the hill. As a child, I knew the names of all the families who lived on Amity Lane: the Weckwerths, whose son, David, was the first baby I ever held; the Noffkes, whose cat, Zeus, scratched my cheek when I was five, drawing blood and instilling in me a lifelong antipathy for all cats; the Cernochs, who in hunting season would hang from a tree in their front yard the deer they’d shot. Calvary Lutheran Church, which my family attended, was on Adelphia Street; my elementary school and junior high, located on the same campus, were six blocks from my house; and the new high school—completed in 1948 but still referred to as “new” when I started there in 1959—was the largest building in town, a grand brick structure supported in the front by six massive Corinthian columns and featured on postcards sold at Utzenstorf’s drugstore. All of what I thought of as Riley proper occupied under ten square miles, and then in every direction around us were fields and prairies and pastures, rolling hills, forests of beech and sugar maple trees.

Attending school with children who still used outhouses, or who didn’t eat food that wasn’t a product of their own land and animals, did not make me haughty. On the contrary, mindful of what I perceived as my advantages, I tried to be extra-polite to my classmates. I couldn’t have known it at the time, but far in the future, in a life I never could have anticipated for myself, this was an impulse that would serve me well.

FOR A FEW years, I hardly thought of that day at the grocery store with my grandmother, Andrew Imhof, and his mother. The two people who, in my opinion, ought to have been embarrassed by it—my grandmother, for making the error about Andrew’s gender, and Andrew, for having the error made about him (if any of our classmates had caught wind of it, they’d have mocked him relentlessly)—seemed unconcerned. I continued going to school with Andrew, but we rarely spoke. Once in fourth grade, before lunch, he was the person selected by our teacher to stand in front of the classroom and call up the other students to get in line; this was a ritual that occurred multiple times every day. First Andrew said, “If your name begins with B,” which meant his friend Bobby could line up right behind him, and the next thing Andrew said was “If you’re wearing a red ribbon in your hair.” I was the only girl that day who was. Also, I was facing forward when Andrew called this out, a single ponytail gathered behind my head, meaning he must have noticed the ribbon earlier. He hadn’t said anything, he hadn’t yanked on it as some of the other boys did, but he’d noticed.

And then in sixth grade, my friend Dena and I were walking one Saturday afternoon from downtown back to our houses, and we saw Andrew coming in the other direction, riding his bicycle south on Commerce Street. It was a cold day, Andrew wore a parka and a navy blue watch cap, and his cheeks were flushed. He was sailing past us when Dena yelled out, “Andrew Imhof has great balls of fire!”

I looked at her in horror.

To my surprise, and I think to Dena’s, Andrew braked. The expression on his face when he turned around was one of amusement. “What did you just say?” he asked. Andrew was wiry then, still shorter than both Dena and me.

“I meant like in the song!” Dena protested. “You know: ‘Goodness, gracious …’” It was true that while her own mother was an Elvis fan, Dena’s favorite singer was Jerry Lee Lewis. The revelation the following spring that he’d married his thirteen-year-old cousin, while alarming to most people, would only intensify Dena’s crush, giving her hope; should things not work out between Jerry Lee and Myra Gale Brown, Dena told me, then she herself would realistically be eligible to date him by eighth grade.

“Did you come all the way here on your bike?” Dena said to Andrew. The Imhofs lived on a corn farm a few miles outside of town.

“Bobby’s cocker spaniel had puppies last night,” Andrew said. “They’re about the size of your two hands.” He was still on the bike, standing with it between his legs, and he held his own hands apart a few inches to show how small; he was wearing tan mittens. I had not paid much attention to Andrew lately, and he seemed definitively older to me—able, for the first time that I could remember, to have an actual conversation instead of merely smiling and sneaking glances. In fact, conscious of his presence in a way I’d never been before, I was the one who seemed to have nothing much to say.

“Can we see the puppies?” Dena asked.

Andrew shook his head. “Bobby’s mother says they shouldn’t be touched a lot until they’re older. Their feet and noses are real pink.”

“I want to see their pink noses!” Dena cried. This seemed a little suspect to me; the Janaszewskis had a boxer to whom Dena paid negligible attention.

“They hardly do anything now but eat and sleep,” Andrew said. “Their eyes aren’t even open.”

Aware that I had not contributed to the conversation so far, I extended a white paper bag in Andrew’s direction. “Want some licorice?” Dena and I had been downtown on a candy-buying expedition.

“Andrew,” Dena said as he removed his mittens and stuck one hand in the bag, “I heard your brother scored a touchdown last night.”

“You girls weren’t at the game?”

Dena and I shook our heads.

“The team’s real good this year. One of the offensive linemen, Earl Yager, weighs two hundred and eighty pounds.”

“That’s disgusting,” Dena said. She helped herself to a rope of my licorice though she’d bought some of her own. “When I’m in high school, I’m going to be a cheerleader, and I’m going to wear my uniform to school every Friday, no matter how cold it is.”

“What about you, Alice?” Andrew gripped the handles of his bicycle, angling the front wheel toward me. “You gonna be a cheerleader, too?” We looked at each other, his eyes their greenish-brown and his eyelashes ridiculously long, and I thought that my grandmother may have been right after all—even if Andrew wasn’t flirting with you, his eyelashes were.

“Alice will still be a Girl Scout in high school,” Dena said. She herself had dropped out of our troop over the summer, and while I was leaning in that direction, I officially remained a member.

“I’m going to be in Future Teachers of America,” I said.

Dena smirked. “You mean because you’re so smart?” This was a particularly obnoxious comment; as Dena knew, I had wanted to be a teacher since we’d been in second grade with Miss Clougherty, who was not only kind and pretty but had read Caddie Woodlawn aloud to us, which then became my favorite book. For years, Dena and I had pretended we were teachers who coincidentally both happened to be named Miss Clougherty, and we’d gotten Dena’s sisters, Marjorie and Peggy, to be our students. As with Girl Scouts, playing school was an activity Dena had lost interest in before I did.

Dena turned back to Andrew. “Tell Bobby to let us come over and play with his puppies. We promise to be gentle.”

“You can tell him yourself.” Andrew pulled on his mittens and set his feet back on the pedals of his bicycle. “See you girls later.”

THAT MONDAY, DENA wrote Andrew a note. What is your favorite food? the note said. What is your favorite season? Who do you like better, Ed Sullivan or Sid Caesar? And, like an afterthought: Who is your favorite girl in our class?

She didn’t mention the note before delivering it, but when a few days had passed without a response, she was too agitated not to tell me. Hearing what she’d done made me agitated, too, like we were preparing to sprint against each other and she’d taken off before I knew the race had started. But I wasn’t sure feeling this way was within my rights—why shouldn’t Dena write Andrew a note?—so I said nothing. Besides, as three and then four days passed and Andrew sent no reply, my distress turned into sympathy. I was as relieved as Dena when at last a lined piece of notebook paper, folded into a hard, tiny square, appeared in her desk.

Mashed potatoes, it said in careful print.

Summer.

I do not watch those shows, prefer Spin and Marty on The Mickey Mouse Club.

Sylvia Eberbach, also Alice.

Sylvia Eberbach was the smallest girl in the sixth grade, a factory worker’s daughter with pale skin and blond hair who, when I look back, I suspect had dyslexia; in English class, whenever the teacher made her read aloud, half the students would correct her. Alice, of course, was me. Surely, to this day, Andrew’s answers represent the most earnest, honest document I have ever seen. What possible incentive did he have for telling the truth? Perhaps he didn’t know any better.

Dena and I read his replies standing in the hall after lunch, before the bell rang for class. Seeing that line—Sylvia Eberbach, also Alice— felt like such a gift, a promise of a nebulously happy future; all the agitation that had consumed me after learning Dena had sent the letter went away. Me—he liked me. I didn’t even mind sharing his affection with Sylvia. “Should I keep the note?” I said. This was logical, my ascent over Dena clear and firm. But she gave me a sharp look and pulled away the piece of paper. By the end of the school day, which was less than two hours later, I learned not from Dena herself but from Rhonda Ostermann, whose desk was next to mine, that Andrew and Dena were going steady. And indeed as I left the school building to go home, I saw them standing by the bus stop, holding hands.

When I approached them—Andrew rode the bus, but Dena and I walked to and from school together—Dena said, “Greetings and salutations, Alice.” Clearly, she was delighted with herself. Andrew nodded at me. I looked for a sign that he was Dena’s hostage, being held against his will, or at least that he felt conflicted. But he seemed amiable and content. What had happened to Sylvia Eberbach, also Alice?

Improbably, Dena and Andrew remained a couple for the next four years. A pubescent couple, granted, meaning there may have been no one besides me who took them seriously. But they continued holding hands in public, and they were permitted by their parents to meet for hamburgers and milk shakes at Tatty’s. Andrew was quiet, though not silent, around Dena. The three of us sometimes went to the movies at the Imperial Theater, and once in seventh grade it happened that he sat between us—usually, Dena sat in the middle—and before the curtain opened, Dena got up to buy popcorn. During those few minutes when she was gone, Andrew and I said precisely nothing to each other, and for the entire time, I thought, It is really the two of us who are together. Not Andrew and Dena. Andrew and me. I know it, and he knows it, and anyone who would look over at us now would know it, too. I felt that we were under a kind of spell, and when Dena returned, the spell broke; his energy shifted back to her. Certainly he never gave any proof that I was still one of his two favorite girls. I searched for it, I waited, and it didn’t come. In eighth grade, Dena fell while running across the pavement behind the school, and he licked the blood off her palms. For weeks, thinking of that made me feel like a chute had opened in my stomach and my heart was descending through it.

One afternoon in the beginning of our sophomore year in high school, Andrew unceremoniously broke up with Dena; he said football practice made him too tired to have a girlfriend. He was six feet tall by then, was a JV kicker for the Benton County Central High School Knights, and wore his once-shaggy hair in a crew cut. At that point, I stopped talking to him altogether. This was less out of loyalty to Dena—Andrew and I did still smile mildly at each other in the halls—than due to simple logistics, the fact that I had no classes with him. Our high school was bigger than our elementary or junior high schools had been, drawing kids who came from as much as an hour away.

During the years Dena and Andrew had been together, I’d often marveled at both the swiftness and randomness of their coupling. Ostensibly, he’d had no interest in Dena, and hours later, he’d become hers. It seemed to be a lesson in something, but I wasn’t sure what—an argument for aggression, perhaps, for the bold pursuit of what you wanted? Or proof of most people’s susceptibility to persuasion? Or just confirmation of their essential fickleness? After I’d read Andrew’s note, was I supposed to have immediately marched up to him and staked my claim? Had my faith in our pleasantly murky future been naive, had I been passive or a dupe? These questions were of endless interest to me for several years; I thought of them at night after I’d said my prayers and before I fell asleep. And then, once high school started, I became distracted. By the time Dena and Andrew broke up (she seemed insulted more than upset, and the insult soon passed), I had, somewhere along the way, stopped dwelling on the two of them and on what hadn’t happened with Andrew and me. When I did think of it, fleetingly, it seemed ridiculous; if the events behind us held any lessons, they were about how silly young people were. Dena and Andrew’s supposed love affair, my own yearnings and confusion—they all came to seem like nothing more than the backdrop of our childhood.

EVERY YEAR, THE day after Christmas, my grandmother took the train to visit her old friend Gladys Wycomb in Chicago, and every summer, my grandmother returned to Chicago for the last week in August. In the winter of 1962, when I was a junior, my grandmother announced at dinner one evening in November that this Christmas she wanted me to accompany her—her treat. It would be a kind of cultural tour, the ballet and the museums, the view from a skyscraper. “Alice is sixteen, and she’s never been to a big city,” my grandmother said.

“I’ve been to Milwaukee,” I protested.

“Precisely,” my grandmother replied.

“Emilie, that’s a lovely idea,” my mother said, while at the same time, my father said, “I’m not sure it’ll work this year. It’s rather short notice, Mother.”

“All we need to do is book another train ticket,” my grandmother said. “Even an old bird like myself is capable of that.”

“Chicago is cold in December,” my father said.

“Colder than here?” My grandmother’s expression was dubious.

No one said anything.

“Or is there some other reason you’re reluctant to have her go?” My grandmother’s tone was open and pleasant, but I sensed her trickiness, the way she was bolder than either of my parents.

Another silence sprang up, and at last my father said, “Let me consider this.”

In the mornings, my family’s routines were staggered: My father usually had left for the bank by the time I came downstairs—I’d find sections of The Riley Citizen spread over the table, my mother at the sink washing dishes—and my grandmother would still be asleep when I took off for school. But that next morning, I hurried downstairs right after my alarm clock rang, still in my nightgown, and said to my father, “I could buy my own train ticket so Granny doesn’t have to pay.”

My allowance was three dollars a week, and in the past few years, I’d saved up over fifty dollars; I kept the money in an account at my father’s bank.

My father, who was seated at the table, glanced toward my mother; she was standing by the stove, tending to the bacon. They exchanged a look, and my father said, “I didn’t realize you were so keen on seeing Chicago.”

“I just thought if the ticket was the reason—”

“We’ll talk about it at dinner,” my father said.

Every evening, the grace my father recited before we ate was “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, and let these gifts to us be blessed. O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good, and His mercy endures forever.” Then the rest of us said “Amen.” That night, as soon as we’d raised our bowed heads, my father said, “My concern about Alice traveling to Chicago with you, Mother, is the imposition it creates for Gladys, so I’ve called and made a reservation for you both to stay at a hotel called the Pelham. You’ll be my guests for the week.”

As if she, too, were hearing this offer for the first time, my mother exclaimed, “Isn’t that generous of Daddy!” In a normal voice, she added, “Alice, pass the creamed broccoli to your grandmother.”

“My colleague Mr Erle used to live in Chicago,” my father said. “According to him, the Pelham is a very fine place, and it’s in a safe neighborhood.”

“You’re aware that Gladys has an enormous apartment with several spare bedrooms?” It was hard to tell whether my grandmother was irritated or amused.

“Granny, we just don’t know Mrs Wycomb the way you do,” my mother said. “We’d feel forward presuming on her.”

“Doctor,” my grandmother said. “Dr Wycomb. Not Mrs And Phillip, you know her well enough to realize she’ll still insist on having us over.”

“Gladys Wycomb is a doctor?” I said.

Once again, my parents exchanged a look. “I don’t see that having dinner with her once or twice would be a problem,” my father said.

“What’s she a doctor of?” I asked.

All three of them turned toward me. “Female problems,” my mother said, and my father said, “This isn’t appropriate conversation for the dinner table.”

“She was the eighth woman in the state of Wisconsin to earn her medical degree,” my grandmother said. “I don’t know about you, but as someone who can hardly read a thermometer, I take my hat off to that.”

I HAD GROWN up hearing Gladys Wycomb’s name—given my grandmother’s biannual journeys, Gladys Wycomb was, in my mind, less a person than a destination, faraway yet not entirely unfamiliar—but it was only with the introduction of my own trip to Chicago that I realized how little I knew about her. A few hours later, my mother came to say good night while I was reading an Agatha Christie novel in bed, and I asked, “Why doesn’t Dad like Dr Wycomb?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say he doesn’t like her.” My mother had been standing over me and had already kissed my forehead, but now she sat on the edge of the bed, setting her hand where my knees were beneath the covers. “Dr Wycomb has known Daddy since he was a little boy, and she can be a bit bossy. She thinks everyone should share her opinions. I guess you wouldn’t remember her visits here because the first was when you were just a baby, and the next one might have been when you were four or five, but there was something that happened on the second visit, a discussion about Negroes—should they have rights, and that sort of thing. Dr Wycomb was very keen on the subject, as if she wanted us to disagree with her, and we just thought, for heaven’s sakes, there aren’t any Negroes in Riley.” This was literally true, that not one black person lived in our entire town. I’d seen black people—as a child, I’d once been captivated as we drove by a restaurant outside which stood a mother, father, and two little girls my age in pink dresses—but that had been in Milwaukee.

“Do you dislike her?” I asked.

“Oh, no. No. She’s a formidable woman, but I don’t dislike her, and I don’t think Daddy does, either. It’s more that we all realized it might be simpler for Granny to go there than for Dr Wycomb to come here.” My mother patted my knee. “But I’m glad they’re friends, because I know Dr Wycomb was a real comfort to your granny after your grandfather died.” This had happened when my father was two years old; his own father, a pharmacist, had had a heart attack one afternoon at work and dropped dead at the age of thirty-three. Just the idea of my father as a two-year-old pinched at my heart, but the idea of him as a two-year-old with a dead father was devastating.

My mother stood then and kissed my forehead a second time. “Don’t stay up too late,” she said.

THOUGH MY CULTURAL enrichment had been the justification for our trip, the train had scarcely left the Riley station when it emerged that my grandmother’s overriding goal in Chicago was to buy a sable stole from Marshall Field’s. She’d seen an advertisement for it in Vogue, she confided, and she’d written a letter to the store asking them to save one in size small.

“If I’d been clever, I’d have ordered it a month ago and worn it to church on Christmas Eve,” she said.

“Does Dad know you’re buying it?”

“He’ll know when he sees me in it, won’t he? And I’ll look so ravishing that I’m sure he’ll be thrilled.” We were sitting side by side, and she winked. “I have some savings, Alice, and it’s not a crime to treat yourself. Now, let me put some lipstick on you.”

I puckered my mouth. When she was finished, she held up my chin and gazed at me. “Beautiful,” she said. “You’ll be the belle of Chicago.” Personally, I did not consider myself beautiful, but in the last few years, I had begun to suspect that I was probably pretty. I stood five feet five, with a narrow waist and enough bosom to fill out a B-cup bra. My eyes were blue and my hair chestnut-brown and shiny; I wore it chin-length and curled toward my cheeks with a wispy fringe of bangs. Being attractive felt, more than anything, like a relief—I imagined life was harder for girls who weren’t pretty.

Our train ride was just over two hours, and at Union Station in Chicago, we were met by a woman I did not recognize at first as Dr Gladys Wycomb; absurdly, I think I’d expected her to have a stethoscope around her neck. After she and my grandmother embraced, my grandmother stood next to Dr Wycomb and set one arm on her back. “A legend in her own time,” my grandmother said, and Dr Wycomb said, “Hardly. Shall we go have a drink?”

They seemed to me an unlikely pair of friends, at least with regard to appearance: Dr Wycomb was a bit heavy in a way that suggested strength, and her handshake had almost hurt. She had short gray hair and wore white cat’s-eye glasses and a black gabardine coat over a gray tweed suit; her shoes were black patent-leather pumps with low heels and perfunctory bows. My grandmother, meanwhile, always proud of her style and slimness (her tiny wrists and ankles were a particular source of pleasure to her), was especially decked out for our city visit. We’d given ourselves manicures the day before, and she’d gone to Vera’s in downtown Riley to have her hair dyed and set. Under a tan cashmere coat, she wore a chocolate-brown wool suit—the collar was velvet, the skirt fell just below her knee—complemented by matching brown crocodile pumps and a brown crocodile handbag. So prized were these accessories that she’d bestowed on them the nickname “my crocs,” and the reference was understood by all other family members; in fact, a few weeks earlier, before we’d crossed our snowy street to get to the Janaszewskis’ Christmas party, I’d been amused to hear my father say, “Mother, I urge you to wear boots outside and change into your crocs at their house.” To meet Dr Wycomb, I also was dressed up, outfitted in a kilt, green tights, saddle shoes, and a green wool sweater over a blouse; on the collar, I wore a circle pin, even though Dena had recently told me it was a sign of being a virgin.

Outside the train station was a chaos of people and cars, the sidewalks swarming, the traffic in the street jerking and honking, and the buildings around us were the tallest I had ever seen. As we approached a beige Cadillac, I was surprised when a driver in a black cap emerged from it, took our bags, and opened the doors for us; being a lady doctor was, it seemed, a lucrative profession. The three of us sat in the back seat, Dr Wycomb behind the driver, my grandmother in the middle, me on the right side. “We need to make a stop, if you don’t mind,” my grandmother said to Dr Wycomb. “The Pelham at Ohio and Wabash. Phillip got it into his head that Alice and I together would be burdensome to you—you can see that Alice is very unruly and belligerent—so he made us a reservation, which of course we’ll cancel.”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Dr Wycomb said. “Does he really see me as such a corrupting influence?”

“We hope that’s what you are!” At this, my grandmother turned and kissed Dr Wycomb on the cheek. I knew that kiss, the lightness of her lips, the scent of Shalimar that floated ahead of her as she approached. When she’d settled against the seat again, my grandmother said, “Don’t we?” and patted my hand. Unsure what to say, I laughed.

Dr Wycomb leaned forward and said, “When your father was a boy, he’d remove all his clothes before making a bowel movement.”

“Oh, Gladys, she doesn’t want to hear about this.”

“But it’s instructive. It captures a certain … rigidity, I suppose, that Phillip has always shown. He’d remove his clothes, and when he was seated on the john, he’d shut his eyes tightly and press his hands over his ears. That was the only way he could eliminate.”

My grandmother made a face and fanned the air in front of her, as if mere words had brought the stench of a bathroom into the car.

“Am I telling the truth, Emilie?” Dr Wycomb asked.

“The truth,” my grandmother said, “is overrated.”

“Your grandmother was my landlady,” Dr Wycomb said to me. “Has she ever mentioned that?”

“It was scarcely as formal as you make it sound,” my grandmother said.

“In medical school, I was poor as a church mouse,” Dr Wycomb said. “I lived in a terrible attic belonging to a terrible family—”

“The Lichorobiecs,” my grandmother interrupted. “Doesn’t that sound like the name of a terrible family? Mrs Lichorobiec felt she’d been wronged by mankind.”

“She refused to let me keep food in the attic because she said it would attract animals,” Dr Wycomb said. “She wouldn’t let me keep food in the pantry, either, because she said there wasn’t space. This was nonsense, but what could I do? Luckily, your grandmother, who lived next door, took pity and invited me to have my meals at their house.”

“I thought you’d starve otherwise,” my grandmother said. “I’ve always been slender, but Gladys was positively skeletal. Just a bag of bones, and big dark circles under her eyes.”

“A bag of bones,” Dr Wycomb repeated, and chortled. She leaned forward again, and when our eyes met, she said, “Can you imagine?” In fact, I’d been thinking the same thing, but I smiled in what I hoped was a neutral and unrevealing way. “And then your poor grandfather died,” she continued. “What year was that, Emilie? Was that ’24?”

“It was ’25.”

“And your grandmother was ready to move, but I said, ‘Let’s think this through. If I’m champing at the bit to get away from the Lichorobiecs, and you’d just as soon stay in this house where you’re all settled …’ And so I became your grandmother’s tenant, and we had some wonderful times.”

“When the Depression hit, you can bet I was thankful to have Gladys,” my grandmother said. “Being a widow, I certainly couldn’t have gotten by on my salary at Clausnitzer’s. Speaking of spending beyond your means”—she pulled the Vogue ad from her purse and unfolded it—“have you ever seen more gorgeous sable?”

Dr Wycomb laughed. “Alice, your grandmother is the onlyless