American Wife

AMERICAN

WIFE

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

PART I: 1272 Amity Lane

PART II: 3859 Sproule Street

PART III: 402 Maronee Drive

PART IV: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Curtis Sittenfeld

Copyright

For Matt Carlson,

my American husband

American Wife

is a work of fiction loosely inspired by the life of an American first lady. Her husband, his parents, and certain prominent members of his administration are recognizable. All other characters in the novel are products of the author’s imagination, as are the incidents concerning them.

PROLOGUE

June 2007, the White House

HAVE I MADE terrible mistakes?

In bed beside me, my husband sleeps, his breathing deep and steady. Early in our marriage, really in the first weeks, when he snored, I’d say his name aloud, and when he responded, I’d apologetically request that he turn onto his side. But it didn’t take long for him to convey that he’d prefer if I simply shoved him; no conversation was necessary, and he didn’t want to be awakened. “Just roll me over,” he said, and grinned. “Give me a good hard push.” This felt rude, but I learned to do it.

Tonight, though, he isn’t snoring, so I cannot blame my insomnia on him. Nor can I blame the temperature of the room (sixty-six degrees during the night, seventy degrees during the day, when neither of us spends almost any time here). A white-noise machine hums discreetly from its perch on a shelf, and the shades and draperies are drawn to keep us in thick darkness. There are always, in our lives now, security concerns, but these have become routine, and more than once I’ve thought we must be far safer than a typical middle-class couple in the suburbs; they have a burglar alarm, or perhaps a Jack Russell terrier, a spotlight at one exterior corner of the house, and we have snipers and helicopters, armored cars, rocket launchers and sharpshooters on the roof. The risks for us are greater, yes, but the level of protection is incomparable—absurd at times. As with so much else, I tell myself it is our positions that are being deferred to, that we are simply symbols; who we are as individuals hardly matters. It would embarrass me otherwise to think of all the expense and effort put forth on our behalf. If not us, I repeat to myself, then others would play this same role.

For several nights, I’ve had trouble sleeping. It’s not going to bed in the first place that’s the challenge: I feel all the normal stages of weariness, the lack of focus that becomes more pronounced with each half hour past ten o’clock, and when I climb beneath the covers, usually a little after eleven, sometimes my husband is still in the bathroom or looking over a last few papers, talking to me from across the room, and I drift away. When he comes to bed, he cradles me, I rise back out from the sea of sleep, we say “I love you” to each other, and in the blurriness of this moment, I believe that something essential is still ours; that our bodies in darkness are what’s true and most everything else—the exposure and the obligations and the controversies—is fabrication and pretense. When I wake around two, however, I fear the reverse.

I am not sure whether waking at two is better or worse than waking at four. On the one hand, I have the luxury of knowing that eventually, I’ll fall back to sleep; on the other hand, the night seems so long. Usually, I’ve been dreaming of the past: of people I once knew who are now gone, or people with whom my relationship has changed to the point of unrecognizability. There is so much I’ve experienced that I never could have imagined.

Did I jeopardize my husband’s presidency today? Did I do something I should have done years ago? Or perhaps I did both, and that’s the problem—that I lead a life in opposition to itself.

PART I

1272 Amity Lane

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 icecream 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 grownup 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 backseat, 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 only person in this country who became less frugal following the Depression.”

“If it’s all about to vanish at any moment, why not have some fun? And tell me that’s not stunning. The gloss on it, it’s absolutely—Mmh.” My grandmother shook her head appreciatively.

“Are you a clothes horse as well, Alice?” Dr. Wycomb’s voice was laced with affection for my grandmother.

“Oh, she’s far less shallow than I am,” my grandmother said. “Straight A’s every semester—imagine my disappointment.” In fact, while my parents did not seem to have strong feelings about whether I attended college, my grandmother was the one who’d told me that doing so would give me a leg up.

“Is that right?” Dr. Wycomb said. “All A’s?”

“I got an A-minus in home ec,” I admitted. The reason why was that on the final project, for which Dena, Nancy Jenzer, and I were partners, we had prepared Hawaiian meatballs in class, and Dena dropped the bowl of Oriental sauce on the floor.

“Are you interested in the sciences?” Dr. Wycomb asked me, but before I could answer, we’d pulled over in front of a maroon awning that said THE PELHAM on it in white cursive.

“Gladys, you stay here and we’ll just be a moment,” my grandmother said. “Alice, come in with me.”

Although we left our suitcases in the car, it wasn’t until we were inside that I fully understood: We weren’t, as my grandmother had claimed to Dr. Wycomb, canceling our reservation. We were checking in, then walking back out and riding away in Dr. Wycomb’s car. My grandmother did not explain this to me, but when the woman behind the reception desk said, “A view of the lake would cost you just six dollars more a day,” my grandmother replied, “We’ll be fine in the room we have.” She also said we wouldn’t need a porter. I was not a person who openly challenged others, and besides, I considered myself an ally of my grandmother. That was why, after we’d retraced our steps through the Pelham’s dim lobby and climbed back in the car, I said nothing when she told Dr. Wycomb, “All taken care of, and they didn’t give us a bit of trouble.” I couldn’t understand the reason for our double deception—lying to my father about where we were staying, lying to Dr. Wycomb about canceling the reservation—but I knew that good manners meant accommodating the person you were with. My grandmother assumed my loyalty, and this, surely, is the reason she got it.

IN THE TRAIN station, when Dr. Wycomb had suggested having a drink, I’d imagined she meant at a restaurant, but instead, we drove to her apartment on Lake Shore Drive, then rode an elevator to the seventh floor; an elevator operator wore a uniform not unlike the driver’s and nodded once, saying “Dr. Wycomb” just before pressing the button. With no additional exchange of words, we rose, and when the elevator stopped, we stepped into a hallway lined with gold fabric for wallpaper—not glittery gold but subtly shiny brocade with unshiny fleurs-de-lis appearing at tasteful intervals.

The elevator operator carried our bags inside the apartment. The room where I was to stay featured twin beds separated by a white marble table, and on the table sat a lamp with a large base of raspberry-colored ribbed glass; also, there was an actual suitcase stand on which the operator set my suitcase. At first I’d thought to decline when the man had offered to carry our bags, but when my grandmother had accepted, I had, too. Then I wondered if she ought to tip him, which she didn’t. Her room, connected to mine by a bathroom we’d share, had a canopy bed, the canopy itself silvery-blue silk shantung gathered in the center around a mirror the size of a Ritz cracker.

In the living room was a mix of modern and old-fashioned funiture: two low, geometric white couches, an antique-looking gold-leaf chair, a revolving walnut bookcase, and many prints and paintings, some of them abstract, hung close together on the walls. Dr. Wycomb asked a maid in a black dress and a white apron for a Manhattan. My grandmother held up her index and middle fingers: “And two old-fashioneds.”

Dr. Wycomb glanced at me through her cat’s-eye glasses. “Would you prefer a hot cocoa, Alice?”

“She’ll take an old-fashioned,” my grandmother said. To the maid, she said, “With brandy, not whiskey.”

“Oh, Myra knows.” Dr. Wycomb laughed. “Don’t forget, I’m from Wisconsin, too, Emilie.” When the maid left the room, Dr. Wycomb said, “Myra and I have quite a rivalry going. She’s a White Sox fan, while I root for the Cubs. Do you follow baseball, Alice?”

“Not really,” I admitted.

“We’ll convert you yet. Last season, I’m afraid Myra had more to gloat about, but with Ron Santo, the Cubs just might have a chance this year.”

When Myra returned with the drinks, my grandmother held up her glass and said, “Gladys, I’d like to propose a toast. To you, my dear, for being a world-class hostess and a true friend.”

Dr. Wycomb raised her own glass. “And I turn it back and say to both of you—to the Lindgren women, Emilie and Alice.”

The two of them looked at me expectantly. “To baseball,” I said. “To 1963.”

“Hear, hear.” Dr. Wycomb nodded emphatically.

“To a wonderful time together in Chicago,” my grandmother said.

The three of us clinked our glasses.

DR. WYCOMB, IT turned out, had taken several days’ vacation to be our hostess. Our first order of business was for my grandmother to acquire her sable stole, which, as by then I had intuited would happen, Dr. Wycomb paid for with no discussion. Over the next several days, we bundled up and toured the city together, visiting the Art Institute, Shedd Aquarium (I was appalled and transfixed by a ten-foot alligator), and the Joffrey Ballet, where we took in an afternoon performance of La Fille Mal Gardée and where Dr. Wycomb, I observed, fell deeply asleep. At the Prudential building, my stomach dropped as we rode the elevator forty floors—when the building had opened in 1955, its elevators had been the world’s fastest—and on the forty-first-floor public observation deck, I thought how much my father would have enjoyed the view. Even though I wore a hat, scarf, and mittens, it was unbearably cold in the wind, and I stayed outside under a minute before retreating. My grandmother and Dr. Wycomb did not venture onto the observation deck at all. In the evenings, we ate heavy dinners prepared and served by Myra: braised veal chops with prunes, or lamb and turnips.

That Sunday, Dr. Wycomb went to the hospital to check on her patients, and after she’d left the apartment, my grandmother and I caught a cab to the Pelham. We climbed the steps to the third floor—the building was five stories, with no elevator—and found in our room a double bed and not much else. Breathing heavily from the stairs, my grandmother threw back the coverlet, mussed the sheets, filled a glass with water from the bathroom sink, and set the glass on the windowsill. Then she stood at the window, which looked onto the gray backside of another building. It was seven degrees that day and so overcast I was tempted to lie on the bed and take a nap. “I’m being a little silly, aren’t I?” my grandmother said.

I shrugged, still unable to bring myself to ask about our duplicitousness.

“It’s not as if your father will ring the management to see if our room looks inhabited,” my grandmother said. This was true—due to the expense, my father avoided making long-distance calls. The rare times when he did make them, he shouted uncharacteristically, as if raising the volume of his voice would enable a second cousin in Iowa to hear him better.

“Did Dr. Wycomb ever have a husband?” I asked.

“Gladys is a suffragette. She always says she couldn’t have been a doctor if she’d married and had children, and I’m sure she’s right. Shall we go warm up with some tea?”

A block away, we found a café, mostly empty, where we were seated at a small table. My grandmother scanned the menu. “Have you ever had an éclair?” When I shook my head, she said, “We’ll split one. They’re bad for your figure but quite delicious.”

“Is Dr. Wycomb friends with Negroes?”

“Who told you that?” My grandmother scrutinized me.

It seemed unfair to pinpoint my mother. “I just was wondering, since a lot of them live in Chicago,” I said. I had at that time only the slightest awareness of the protests and sit-ins occurring in other parts of the country; my main reminder of race came from Dena, who was not allowed by her father to listen to records by black musicians and therefore liked for me to play Chubby Checker or the Marvelettes when she came over.

“Dr. Wycomb supports desegregation, as do I, as should you,” my grandmother said. “That just means they can eat and live and go to school where we do. But if you’re talking about socializing, Gladys spends more time with Jews than Negroes. Jews often become doctors, you know.” My grandmother still was looking at me closely and apropros of nothing, it seemed, she said, “You don’t have a beau, do you?”

“No,” I said, but I could feel my face heating. A month before, just after Thanksgiving, Dena and I had spent a Saturday night sledding on Bony Ridge with two senior boys, Larry Nagel and Robert Beike. Robert was the one who’d invited Dena, and Dena had brought me. In the inside pocket of his down coat, Larry had tucked a flask of bourbon that we passed around. More than once I’d sipped my grandmother’s old-fashioneds—she’d sometimes give me the maraschino cherry—but this was the first time I’d tasted alcohol away from home. And though I felt a wave of guilt, I knew I couldn’t refuse the bourbon without seeming to the boys and Dena like what I was: a goody-goody. So I had drunk from the flask each of the four times it came to me, and though it didn’t taste good, it made me warm and relaxed. Prior to meeting up with Larry and Robert, I’d been jittery, but I began to feel calm and amused. At one point, at the bottom of the hill, Dena and I scurried to a grove of trees, pulled down our snow pants, and urinated into the snow, giggly and unself-conscious. “Write your name in yellow,” Larry called to us. At the end of the night, the boys walked us back to our houses, and from across the street, I could see Dena and Robert on her porch, kissing deeply. For several minutes, Larry stood a few feet away from me—at one point, under his breath, he said, “If they don’t watch out, their tongues will freeze”—but after Robert and Dena pulled apart and Robert called in a shouting whisper, “We’ve gotta go, Nagel,” Larry zoomed toward me without warning, his mouth on mine, his lips cold but his tongue warm. The entire kiss lasted about eight seconds and involved much head and neck movement, as if Larry were participating in a pie-eating contest, but instead of a pie, there was my face. Then he was off our stoop, headed up Amity Lane with Robert, and as soon as they were sufficiently far away, Dena and I met in the middle of the street, clutching each other, trying not to scream. “You two were making out,” she hissed. Until Larry had kissed me, I had not necessarily thought I wanted him to, but after he had, I was glad. In the four weeks since then, Robert and Dena had gone on actual dates, but Larry and I had only passed in the halls at school, acknowledging each other vaguely.

In the café, my grandmother said, “You should have a beau. When I last went to see Dr. Ziemniak, he showed me a picture of Roy, who seems to be growing into a handsome fellow.” Dr. Ziemniak was our dentist.

“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.”

“Oh, I bet she’ll be well by tomorrow,” my grandmother said. “Don’t you suppose, Alice?” We were scheduled to take the train back to Riley late the next morning.

“Let’s not decide now,” Dr. Wycomb said.

Around eight that night, when my grandmother brought me two aspirin and a fresh glass of water, she said, “I’m sure your parents would rather have you home slightly under the weather than late. If we stay another night here, there’ll be calls back and forth. We’ll have to change the tickets, and your father will get out of sorts.”

More like there would be explanations required. There’d be shuttling between Dr. Wycomb’s apartment and the Pelham, the pretense of extending a reservation for a room where we’d never slept. This chain of lies enabling my grandmother to press her lips against the lips of another woman, an old woman, a not even attractive woman—and then I couldn’t stand to think about it anymore, the fragment of a moment, that weird disturbing glimpse.

I said nothing, and my grandmother said, “Get some rest. Our train isn’t until eleven, so we’ll have plenty of time to pack in the morning.”

After I’d closed my eyes, I heard her stand, and I was not sure whether I was dreaming or actually speaking when I mumbled, “I don’t even know why you brought me.”

“Brought you where?” my grandmother said, and then I knew I’d spoken aloud. “To Chicago?”

I rolled over. “What?”

My grandmother’s expression was shrewd and alert. She watched me for a few seconds. “You were talking in your sleep,” she finally said.

MY TEMPERATURE RIGHT before we left for the train station was just over a hundred degrees, but the truth was that by the time we passed Dodsonville, which was the stop before Riley, I felt almost normal. My parents greeted us excitedly. “Did you go to the top of a skyscraper?” my mother asked. “Was it wonderful?”

In the car, my father said to my grandmother, “It was very good of you to take Alice,” and this seemed a type of apology.

“The house was so quiet without you two,” my mother said. “I even started to read one of Granny’s magazines.”

My grandmother smiled over at me, and I almost smiled back, but then I remembered and turned my face to look out the window.

DENA CALLED THE next day. “You need to come over,” she said, and she sounded tearful. “It’s an emergency.”

“What happened?”

“Just come.”

I was standing in the kitchen, and after I hung up the phone, I pulled on my coat and hurried outside. Across the street, I knocked on the Janaszewskis’ front door—their doorbell had been broken since 1958—but I was too cold and concerned to wait, so I turned the knob and let myself in. “Hello?” I called.

In the living room, Dena’s sisters, Marjorie and Peggy, were squabbling over whose turn it was to play a record. Peggy glanced at me, said, “Dena’s upstairs,” and returned to the disagreement.

On the second floor, the door to the room Dena and Marjorie shared was open, but the room appeared vacant. Tentatively, I said, “Dena?”

A hand emerged from beneath one of the twin beds and waved at me. I squatted, then leaned forward so I was on my knees, and lifted the dust ruffle. “What’s wrong?” I said. “Should I come under there?”

“I’ve ruined my life.” Dena’s voice was loose and watery from crying.

I rolled over so I, too, was on my back, then I inched beneath the bed. Immediately, I could feel dust in my throat. There also were a few unidentifiable objects—shoes, maybe, and old toys—that I had to push out of the way before I was next to her. “What happened?” I asked.

She swallowed and then said mournfully, “I shaved my sideburns.”

“But you don’t have sideburns.”

“Yeah, now I don’t.”

I grabbed a fistful of dust ruffle and held it up so daylight would show under the bed. “I can’t see anything,” I said. “You have to come out.” I scooted away, and after a minute, she followed.

When she was sitting upright on the floor, her shoulders against the bed, her face was red and blotchy, her eyes were wet, and her hair, which was lighter brown than mine but styled the same way, was sticking up in the back like a little girl’s. She reached for a mirror that was resting on the carpet shiny side down. I knew this mirror well, having spent a large portion of my life gazing into it, often at the same time as Dena. The reflective part was about the size of an actual face, with a dull pink plastic backing and handle. Holding the mirror up in front of her, Dena turned to the side, her eyes focused grimly on the spot around her ear.

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Well, first I cut them, but they looked funny, so then I used a razor.”

I came in closer and rubbed the tip of my index finger over the area in question. “You did a good job. It’s completely smooth. Turn to the other side.” When she did, I touched the skin there, too. “It’s fine,” I said.

“But think about when it grows back. I’ll have stubble. Alice, I’ll have a five o’clock shadow!”

“You can just shave again.”

“Every day for the rest of my life?”

“Nobody will notice,” I said. “I promise.”

“Robert thinks hairy girls are like monkeys. You know how Mary Hafliger—”

“Dena, don’t,” I said. “She can’t help it.” Mary Hafliger, who I was in Spirit Club with, had dark, thick hair on her forearms, and I had heard it discussed among both our male and female classmates.

“She can too help it,” Dena said. “At the least, she could bleach it.”

“Mary’s nice,” I said. “Remember those pipe-cleaner Santa Clauses we were selling before Christmas? She glued all their beards on individually, and it took her about a week.”

Dena grinned. “Yeah, I’ll bet she glued on their beards.” Dena had made good on her preadolescent plan of becoming a cheerleader, and Spirit Club members ranked well below cheerleaders in our school hierarchy. More than once, she had encouraged me to trade up—if I tried out for cheerleading, she would put in a good word for me—but I had no desire to yell and leap in front of other people.

Dena was still holding the mirror, looking at herself, and, idly, she pursed her lips. Her teariness seemed to have departed. Then she set the mirror back on the carpet and whispered, “I’m only half a virgin.”

“What do you mean?”

“Close the door.” She gestured toward it, and when I had, Dena said, “I let Robert put it in partway.”

“You don’t have to do what he says, Dena. He should respect you.”

“Why do you think he doesn’t?” She smirked.

On prior occasions, I knew Dena had let Robert place his hand inside her skirt or pants, though not inside her underwear, or at least this was what she’d claimed. These reports from the field had struck me as exciting but very dangerous. As our home ec teacher, Mrs. Anderson, had told us, some men, once aroused, could not control themselves. There was also one’s reputation to consider, and most significantly, there was the risk of pregnancy. Certain girls at Benton County Central High were rumored to have had sex—what people said about Cindy Pawlak was not only that she’d done it but that she’d done it with multiple people, most scandalously with the junior high bus driver, a married man who lived in Houghton—and there were girls, usually country girls, who got pregnant and dropped out of school and then, if they were lucky, got married. Also, there was a girl in the class ahead of ours named Barbara Grob, a cheerleader with blond hair who’d supposedly decided the previous spring to go live with cousins in Eau Claire but everyone knew she was having a baby at a convent and giving it up for adoption; she’d returned to school looking drawn and heavy and had not attempted to rejoin the cheer squad. And yet, even if sex wasn’t unheard of, I hadn’t expected Dena to really do it; I’d expected her to teeter on the edge, bragging and teasing, without slipping over.

“Don’t you want to save it for marriage?” I said. This was my plan, and it seemed perfectly reasonable given that we’d likely be married within a few years. In Riley, even girls who went to college often were brides before they graduated, and if you got to twenty-five without a wedding, you were staring down spinsterhood. Ruth Hofstetter, who worked at the fabric store where my mother and I bought material for our clothes, was twenty-eight and had no beau, and whenever we left the store, my mother and I would talk about how sad it was, especially because Ruth was kind and pretty.

“It’s a little late for that,” Dena said. “There’s hardly a difference between partway and all the way.”

“Do you think you’ll marry Robert?”

“I might.”

“Dena, if you marry someone else, he’ll figure it out when you don’t bleed on your wedding night.”

She scoffed. “Not everyone bleeds.” She picked up the mirror again and looked into it. “You don’t know anything.”

I HAD BEEN avoiding my grandmother, but one afternoon in early February, my mother was at the grocery store when I came home from school, and my grandmother was sitting in the living room, smoking and reading a novel by Wilkie Collins. I hung my book bag by the door and went into the kitchen to make a snack, and my grandmother followed me. As I pulled honey from the cupboard—I was planning to spread it on toast—she said, “You’ve been awfully moody since we returned from Chicago. Is there anything about the trip you’d like to discuss?”

“No,” I said.

“No more questions about Dr. Wycomb?”

I shook my head.

The room was silent, and then my grandmother said, “I won’t claim I’ve never in my life done anything I’m ashamed of, but I haven’t done anything for a good while. If not everyone would agree with the decisions I’ve made, that’s fine. What other people think has never made a situation right or wrong.”

In this moment, I detested my grandmother. She was such a hypocrite, I thought—pretending to be bold and frank as she distorted the truth and implicated me in her distortions. Standing with my back to the stove, I glared at her.

“People are complicated,” she continued, “and the ones who aren’t are boring.”

“Then maybe I’m boring.”

We looked at each other, and in a genuinely sad voice, she said, “Maybe you are.”

ROBERT BEIKE AND Dena had officially been boyfriend and girlfriend for several months by the time the junior-senior prom rolled around that May, and Dena had decided in March that Larry Nagel ought to ask me. A few weeks before prom, this had come to pass; when I emerged from the chemistry classroom late one morning, he was standing in the hallway, his arms folded. We made eye contact, and I was pretty sure I knew why he was there. I’d been walking beside my friend Betty Bridges, and I murmured to her, “Go ahead and I’ll catch up.”

When she was gone, Larry said in a not particularly warm tone, “Are you going to prom?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Want to go together?”

“Sure.”

“Okay,” he said, and his tone remained flat. “See you around.” He then headed up the hall, which happened to be the same direction I was going, but since it didn’t seem to occur to him that we might travel together, or continue the conversation, I held back, letting him disappear. To be fair, I couldn’t expect him to be shocked or thrilled that I’d accepted when the entire scenario had been choreographed by Dena. Had I been shocked or thrilled that he’d asked? But I hoped I’d see more flashes of the sweetly impulsive boy who’d kissed me on the stoop, and in a way, his usual coolness made his capacity for sweetness even sweeter. Surely at some point on the night of prom, there’d be further evidence of it.

My mother sewed my dress from a pattern I found in Mademoiselle—it was green, with a sweetheart neckline and tulle skirt—and I planned to wear it with white gloves that went above my elbows and made me feel, in both good and bad ways, like the queen of England. A few hours before prom, I discovered a paper bag on my bureau containing a green headband that was an almost identical shade to the dress. I bounded downstairs with the headband in my hand. In the kitchen, my mother was putting a casserole in the oven. “Thank you so much,” I said. “It matches perfectly.”

She smiled. “I hope you have a wonderful time.” She closed the oven door, and impulsively, I hugged her—I felt closer to her now that I steered clear of my grandmother. Because of my position in Spirit Club, I’d been responsible for bringing two hundred cupcakes to school that morning, which would serve as prom refreshments. The night before, my mother had stayed up with me until midnight, applying yellow frosting.

A little later, as my parents and grandmother were finishing dinner, I came downstairs, still barefoot but with the gloves and headband on, to model the dress. When I entered the dining room, they applauded. “Curtsy,” my grandmother commanded, and because it was more when we were alone together that things between us seemed strained—in the presence of my parents, their obliviousness negated the tension—I complied. Really, how could I not? It was a spring night; next door, Mr. Noffke was mowing his lawn, and the smell of cut grass wafted through our dining room windows.

Then, to my astonishment, my father stood, extended his hand, and said, “May I have this dance?”

“Oh, let me put on music!” My mother hurried into the living room to turn on the radio, and big-band music—it sounded like Glenn Miller—became audible.

My father raised our arms so they made an arch above my head, and he twirled me beneath it. Over the music, my mother said, “Alice, the dress really flatters your figure.”

My father held me lightly, prompting me to turn and sway, and he said, “Stand up straight. Even short fellows prefer girls with good posture because it’s a sign of confidence.”

I set my shoulders back and lifted my chin.

“Dip her!” my grandmother called, and my mother immediately said, “Don’t hurt your back, Phillip.”

As the saxophones on the radio soared, I felt myself swooshing down, and I heard my mother and grandmother clapping again. It may just have been the blood that had rushed to my head when I was near the floor, or the emotion of the music, but in this moment I loved my family, including my grandmother, so greatly that I felt I might weep. They were so kindhearted and good to me, I was so lucky, and even then I sensed luck’s fragility.

When I was upright again, my father said softly, so my grandmother and mother couldn’t hear, “You’re a very pretty girl. Don’t let your date take advantage of you tonight.”

ROBERT AND LARRY and Dena and I ate dinner at Tatty’s. This was Riley tradition, to get all dressed up in your finery and then go have a greasy hamburger, and, remembering stories of girls who ended up in tears well before they got to prom, their silk dresses splattered with ketchup or relish, I took care to fold my white gloves into my purse and spread three separate napkins across my lap. Robert had driven us, and sitting in the backseat next to Larry, I’d first felt my optimism for the night dimming when Larry made one perfunctory attempt to affix my corsage to my dress and then held out the pale pink rose and said, “Can you just do this yourself?” From Tatty’s, we drove to school, where the gym was hot and loud and crowded, which seemed to me exactly how it ought to be. The yellow and blue streamers crisscrossed above our heads, and the yellow-and-blue-frosted cupcakes were being consumed enthusiastically—I scanned to see how mine were faring, though with all of them lined up on tables against the wall, I couldn’t tell my own apart from anyone else’s—and a cover band from Madison called the Little Brothers, four men in tuxedos, were standing onstage playing “Who Put the Bomp.”

“Hey, Alice,” Robert said.

I looked at him.

He grinned lasciviously. “Larry’s really excited to dance with you.”

Both Dena and Larry laughed, and I felt a lurching panic that Dena had, via Robert, made some promise to Larry about my physical availability for the evening. Dena and Robert had by then had sex six times—once for each month of dating, as she explained, although half the times were retroactive. She told me she didn’t want to do it too frequently because then it wouldn’t be as special. Also, she said that his knowing he might or might not get it made Robert dote on her more; the week before, he’d bought her a stuffed white poodle that came with its own miniature fake-gold bone.

When Larry and I started dancing, he did not, to my relief, immediately try groping me. In fact, he was a good dancer, a better dancer than I was, and we stayed out there as one song ended and another began, and then another and another. The songs were all fast, and in the middle of “The Watusi,” he shouted into my ear, “Robert has some—” He mimed drinking from a flask. “We’re meeting in the parking lot.”

“But there’re teachers everywhere.”

“No one will see us in Robert’s car.”

“I need to check on my cupcakes.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

As he walked away, I saw that Dena and Robert, who had been dancing close to us, were already near the doors of the gym. I headed to the refreshment table, where Betty Bridges was helping scoop punch, and I was still several feet away when I felt a hand on my forearm. I turned, and Andrew Imhof was standing beside me. “Would you like to dance?”

“Sure.” Then I recognized the first notes of Ricky Nelson’s “Lonesome Town” and I said, “Oh, but it’s a slow song.”

He smiled. “Does that matter?”

“No, I guess not,” I said, but I wondered, was it bad manners to slow-dance with someone other than your date?

As we walked together back to the dance floor, I felt an immediate and unexpected awareness of how we appeared—a sense that if people looked at us, they might form an impression. What that impression would be was harder to say.

We found a space in the forest of couples and faced each other. After a second’s hesitation, I set my left hand on his right shoulder, he set his right hand on my lower back, and we clasped our free hands together, held high. I was wearing my gloves.

“Who’s your date?” I asked.

“Bess Coleman.” He gestured with his chin, and I saw that Bess was dancing beneath a basketball hoop with Fred Zurbrugg, one of Andrew’s close friends.

“Are you and Bess . . . ?” Later, I thought that if I’d consciously been interested in Andrew that night, I wouldn’t have been so direct.

He shook his head. “You’re here with Larry, huh?”

“Dena set us up, but I’m beginning to wonder about her skills as a matchmaker.”

Andrew laughed. “Yeah, you’re definitely way too good for Nagel.”

We both were quiet, and then Andrew said, “Do you remember when your grandma thought I was a girl?”

“I had no idea you knew!”

“After she said to my mom, ‘Your daughter sure is pretty,’ it wasn’t very hard to figure out.”

“She never said that,” I protested.

“Close.”

“It was only because—”

“I know.” He covered both of his eyes—both sets of eyelashes—with his right hand and shook his head. “I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy. My brother says Max Factor should hire me to model mascara, and he doesn’t mean that as a compliment.”

“I’m sure he’s just jealous,” I said.

Onstage a member of the band was singing solo: “ ‘Goin’ down to lonesome town / Where the broken hearts stay . . . ’ ”

“What I said before, I didn’t mean Larry’s a bad guy.” Andrew’s tone had become more serious. “He’s just not who I’d picture you with.”

I could sense what Dena would say in this situation, what probably a lot of girls would say: Who would you picture me with? But it was so nice to rest in the moment without pushing it further, to feel its possibilities rather than its limitations. Later, I remembered thinking that I knew then Andrew would become my boyfriend, but that it wasn’t as if I were realizing it for the first time. Hadn’t I always known, for my whole life? And therefore, what was the hurry? Experiencing other people was almost a thing we ought to do before we were joined to each other.

“Have you eaten any of the cupcakes?” I asked.

“Yeah, they’re pretty good. There’s potato chips over there, too.”

“I made some of the cupcakes,” I said. “Not the blue ones, but the ones with yellow icing.”

“I thought that tasted like it came from the kitchen of Alice Lindgren!” he said, and I lightly slapped his arm. “No, it was delicious,” he said. “Really.”

We both were smiling, and after a beat, he said, “If you want to, you can put your head on my shoulder.”

I hesitated. “Am I tall enough?” Obviously, this was not my only hesitation.

“You don’t have to,” he said. “Just if you want to.”

When I did, we were body to body in a way we hadn’t been before. I could feel the heat of him, the solidity, and a calmness came over me; it made the conversation we’d been having seem like nothing, the words were nothing, they were raindrops or confetti, and holding on to each other was real.

When the song ended, we stepped apart, and then Bobby Sobczak approached Andrew, and I made my way to Betty Bridges at the refreshment table. Ten minutes had passed when Dena materialized, her cheeks flushed and liquor on her breath. “Were you dancing with Andrew?” she asked, and she sounded not quite accusatory but almost—she was forceful and intensely curious.

I was under the impression that she’d been outside all this time, which meant someone else must have already told her. “When you all left, I guess he saw me standing by myself,” I said. “He probably felt sorry for me.”

But I knew that wasn’t true. At one point, near the end of the song, Andrew had inhaled deeply, and I’d been pretty sure he was smelling my hair.

THAT AUGUST, MY grandmother returned to Chicago to visit Gladys Wycomb, and my father, mother, and I packed our suitcases and ourselves into our sedan—it was a turquoise 1956 Chevy Bel Air, with a silver hood ornament shaped like a paper airplane—and we drove north through Wisconsin to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to visit the Mackinac Bridge, aka the Mighty Mac. As we approached the St. Ignace side, my father, who’d driven the entire way up to this point, pulled over and switched places with my mother so he’d be free to look around as we crossed the bridge. It went on and on, over rough blue water, and on the other side, my mother turned around and we drove back, heading north. It was a toll bridge costing fifty cents, which wasn’t much, but still, it was an uncharacteristic indulgence on my father’s part. We parked on the shores of St. Ignace, my mother and I wearing jackets even though it was summer, and my father shook his head happily. “Imagine all the concrete, steel, and cables running for five miles over water,” he said. “That’s a remarkable feat of engineering.”

The sky beyond the bridge held curvy cirrus clouds, and in the air you could feel fall’s approach. Back in Riley, it was still hot.

“Shall we stroll for a bit?” my father asked.

We walked along an esplanade. At intervals, coin-operated binoculars sat atop poles, and my father paused at several of them, though I couldn’t really see how the view would change much from one to the next. “Before they built the bridge, it used to take people an hour to get across by ferry,” he said. “But sometimes there was such backup you’d have to wait ten or twelve hours before there was room for your car.”

I nodded, while inside I was thinking of the announcement I’d make. Granny is having an affair with Dr. Wycomb, I would say. Briefly, I had believed she wouldn’t return to Chicago now that I knew her secret. Or maybe she didn’t realize I knew. But she had to, otherwise she’d have demanded more explanation for my sullenness.

“Can you imagine having the patience to wait twelve hours?” my mother was saying.

Should I have guessed about my grandmother? I had read The Well of Loneliness at the age of fourteen, pulling it down from her shelf and returning it with slight confusion at the idea of two women falling in love, but not enough to ask her about it. Anyhow, that book had been set decades ago, and in England. For my own grandmother, the grandmother living in my house, who used the same bar of soap in the bathroom that I did, whose jewelry and high heels I’d dressed up in as a little girl—for her to be in a homosexual relationship didn’t make sense. She’d been married, she’d had a child! And even if it was true, why hadn’t she been more careful to prevent me from becoming party to her secret? She was making me choose between her and my parents, and what sort of choice was that? In a way, I had always loved her more deeply, I had loved her most, but I had thought she and I were conspiring to conceal this hurtful fact.

We were passing another set of binoculars, and my father stooped and peered into them. When he rejoined us, he took my mother’s hand, and I could sense the buoyancy of his enthusiasm.

For the next three nights, we stayed in a motel in St. Ignace, all of us in one room. The motel was called Three Breezes and had a pool in which my father swam laps, though my mother and I found it too cold. On the day we hiked the sand dunes of Lake Michigan, I thought, I will tell them in fifteen minutes. In another fifteen minutes. When we’re back in the car. The day after that, we took the ferry to Mackinac Island, where we rode in a horse-drawn carriage, ate fudge, and had lunch at a restaurant in the Grand Hotel. “Maybe you’ll come back someday for your honeymoon,” my mother said, and she squeezed my knee beneath the table. They are having an affair, I thought, and Dr. Wycomb is giving her lavish presents, and maybe she’s even giving her money.

During our last dinner in St. Ignace, my parents drank two bottles of wine between them, and later, my father convinced my mother to swim with him in the motel pool, the sky dark but the pool lit up. From the room, I could hear them giggling. I went to sleep, and the next morning, I opened my eyes and thought, They already know. I listened to them sleeping in the bed across from mine, my mother’s deep breathing and my father’s quiet snores, as if even when asleep, he was trying to be polite. They already know, I thought, and if they don’t, it’s because they’ve chosen not to. Surely that accounted for my father’s initial resistance to my accompanying my grandmother to Chicago the previous winter. I would say nothing, I realized, because it wasn’t necessary, it wasn’t my place. I was glad then that I had not previously been able to express the words.

And really, what has stayed with me from that vacation as much as my own suspicious, petty agonizing is my father on the esplanade just after our arrival. The wind blew his hair, and he was fidgety with delight, straining to explain to my mother and me exactly why the Mighty Mac was so impressive. I wondered at the time—I wonder still—if that was the happiest my father had ever been.

IT TOOK LONGER, but we drove home via the southern route: once more across the Mighty Mac (this time I was allowed to take the wheel), then down through the lower part of Michigan, curving southwest through the edge of Indiana and northwest into Illinois, where, at a train station in Bolingbrook, thirty miles outside Chicago, we picked up my grandmother. She and I sat together in the backseat, but she seemed to have given up on me months before and was reading Anna Karenina. “That’s the second time, isn’t it?” my mother asked, and my grandmother said a little tartly, “It’s the fourth.”

Then we were back in Wisconsin, a place that in late summer is thrillingly beautiful. When I was young, this was knowledge shared by everyone around me; as an adult, I’ve never stopped being surprised by how few of the people with whom I interact have any true sense of the states between Pennsylvania and Colorado. Some of these people have even spent weeks or months working in such states, but unless they’re midwesterners, too, to them the region is nothing but polling numbers and caucuses, towns or cities where they stay in hotels whose bedspreads are glossy maroon and brown on the outside and pilly on the inside, whose continental breakfasts are packaged doughnuts and cereal from a dispenser, whose fitness centers are a single stationary bike and a broken treadmill. These people eat dinner at Perkins, and then they complain about the quality of the restaurants.

Admittedly, the area possesses a dowdiness I personally have always found comforting, but to think of Wisconsin specifically or the Midwest as a whole as anything other than beautiful is to ignore the extraordinary power of the land. The lushness of the grass and trees in August, the roll of the hills (far less of the Midwest is flat than outsiders seem to imagine), that rich smell of soil, the evening sunlight over a field of wheat, or the crickets chirping at dusk on a residential street: All of it, it has always made me feel at peace. There is room to breathe, there is a realness of place. The seasons are extreme, but they pass and return, pass and return, and the world seems far steadier than it does from the vantage point of a coastal city.

Certainly picturesque towns can be found in New England or California or the Pacific Northwest, but I can’t shake the sense that they’re too picturesque. On the East Coast, especially, these places—Princeton, New Jersey, say, or Farmington, Connecticut—seem to me aggressively quaint, unbecomingly smug, and even xenophobic, downright paranoid in their wariness of those who might somehow infringe upon the local charm. I suspect this wariness is tied to the high cost of real estate, the fear that there might not be enough space or money and what there is of both must be clung to and defended. The West Coast, I think, has a similar self-regard—all that talk of proximity to the ocean and the mountains—and a beauty that I can’t help seeing as show-offy. But the Midwest: It is quietly lovely, not preening with the need to have its attributes remarked on. It is the place I am calmest and most myself.

THE WEEKEND BEFORE my senior year of high school, I emerged from Jurec Brothers’ butcher shop late in the afternoon on Saturday, carrying a pound of ground beef my mother had asked me to pick up, when I heard the salutatory honk of a nearby car horn. I turned my head to see a mint-green Ford Thunderbird with a white roof; leaning out the passenger window, tanned and smiling, was Andrew Imhof. I waved as I stepped off the curb, moving between two parked cars. When I was closer, I could see that beyond Andrew, driving, was his brother, Pete; the car was a two-seater.

“Welcome back,” Andrew said.

“How’d you know I was gone?”

“After you weren’t at Pine Lake the other night, I thought you might be sick, but Dena said—not that Dena and I are—I just ran into her there—”

“Not that he’s feeding at her trough again,” Pete said. “He wants to make that perfectly clear.” Pete leaned over the steering wheel and grinned sarcastically. He was four years older; after high school, he’d gone on to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and presumably, he’d graduated the previous June. He and Andrew didn’t look much alike: They had the same hazel eyes, but Pete didn’t have Andrew’s impossible eyelashes, and where Andrew was lean and fair, Pete was meaty and had darker hair. He looked like an adult man, and not a terribly appealing one.

Andrew rolled his eyes good-naturedly in the direction of his brother and said to me, “Ignore him. You were in Michigan, huh?”

“My dad wanted to see the Mackinac Bridge, and then we went to Mackinac Island. They don’t have any cars there, only carriages.”

“Where goeth the horses, so goeth the shit,” Pete said. “Am I right?”

“Pretend he’s not there,” Andrew said.

“It sounds like a lot of people were at Pine Lake,” I said. “Dena told me it was the most fun she’d had all summer.”

“Really?” Andrew looked amused. “It was mostly just Bobby challenging anyone who’d listen to a chicken fight. The real party will be next weekend at Fred’s, have you heard about that? If it gets below seventy-five degrees, we’re making a bonfire.”

Pete leaned forward again. “And Andrew promises he’ll roast you a nice big wiener. This has been a fascinating conversation, but I’ve got places to go, little brother. You and Alice want to wrap things up?”

Andrew shook his head again, and Pete revved the engine. “Sorry,” Andrew said to me. “See you on Tuesday at school. Hey, pretty cool we’ll finally be seniors, huh?”

I smiled. “The great class of ’64.”

The mint-green Thunderbird pulled away, and as I walked home carrying the ground beef for my mother, an unexpected energy seized me, spurred by a jumble of fresh thoughts: how good Andrew looked, tanned from the summer sun; how weird it was that Pete Imhof knew my name; how excited I felt for the start of school, for new classes and the perks of being the oldest students; and how much I hoped it fell below seventy-five degrees on Saturday so they’d build the bonfire at Fred’s party and I could stand next to it, braced by that wall of heat against my body, watching the leap of the flames, being reminded, as I always was by fires, that they were alive and so was I.

WHEN I SAW Andrew over the next few days, sitting a couple rows ahead of me in the bleachers at the assembly that first morning back, or pulling books out of his locker in a crowded hall between classes, there was little chance of us talking, or even making eye contact, and I didn’t try. I was always with Dena or another friend, or he was with guys from football, and I felt like what I had to say to him, I could say only when we were alone. It wasn’t even that I knew what I wanted to say, but surely, if we found ourselves with no one else around, I’d be able to come up with something.

All that week, I had the sense that we were making our way toward each other—even when we passed outside the science classrooms, headed in opposite directions, I had this sense—and I was not surprised on Thursday afternoon when, half an hour after the final bell of the day had rung, I walked out of the library and saw him coming from the gym, dressed for football practice in a jersey and those shortened pants, holding his helmet in his right hand. Looking back, I find it hard to trust my memory of this episode, hard to believe I’m not infusing it with meaning it didn’t contain at the time. It was a sunny afternoon (as it turned out, the temperature would not fall below seventy-five degrees that Saturday, or for another few weeks), and the cicadas were buzzing and the trees and grass were green, and we were walking toward each other, he was squinting against the sun, we both were smiling, and I loved him, I loved him completely, and I knew that he loved me back. I could feel it. That moment—inside it, I could anticipate the thing I most wanted and I could be beyond it, it had happened already, and I was ensconced in the rich reassurance of knowing it was certain and definite.

Or maybe this is only what I think now. But it was all we ever had! Approaching each other, him from the gym, me from the library—this was when I walked down the aisle and he was waiting, this was when we made love, it was every anniversary, every reunion in an airport or train station, every reconciliation after a quarrel. This was the whole of our lives together.

It seemed like the natural thing to do when we were in front of each other would have been to embrace, but we didn’t. It is a great regret, though not, certainly, my greatest. We stood there with the roiling energy of not hugging between us, and he said, “Sorry about my brother the other day,” gesturing over his shoulder as if perhaps Pete were nearby. “I hope he didn’t offend you.”

“No, he’s funny, but you two seem very different.”

“Wait, I’m not funny?”

“No, you’re funny, too,” I said. “You’re both funny.”

“That’s very diplomatic—I appreciate it. You coming to the game tomorrow?”

“I’ll be selling popcorn.” Working at the refreshment stand was one of my Spirit Club duties. “I heard you’re starting this year,” I said.

“Well, I waited long enough.” He laughed a little in a self-effacing rather than bitter way. “No one would mistake me for Pete, that’s for sure.”

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, and 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-colored 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.”

My grandmother followed us back in. “I take it the car was wrecked?” In my peripheral vision, I saw my mother shake her head: Do not ask. Then I saw that Mrs. Falke was still there, sitting at the card table smoking, and she said, “Alice, you’ve had us on pins and needles. Now, what have you done to your arm?” and my mother said, “Go upstairs, Alice.”

I didn’t look at my grandmother or Mrs. Falke as I left the room. I’d stopped crying after the nurse had given me the Librium, but my throat was still raw, and my eyes felt scrubbed out, my cheeks puffy. Decades later, I had a friend named Jessica who was much younger than I, and I once told her about the night I hit Andrew Imhof’s car. I almost never discussed it with anyone, but Jessica and I were very close, and it was around the anniversary of the accident, always a difficult time. Jessica couldn’t believe that I had come home from the hospital and gone up to my bedroom, that my parents and grandmother had left me alone. It was such a different time, though, there was so much less talk of feelings, and of course we were so unprepared; it was not the type of tragedy for which there was a script.

I entered my room without turning on the lights, removed my shoes, and climbed under the covers with my skirt and blouse still on (the cardigan sweater I never saw again—I must have left it in the car). It was impossible: I had caused another person’s death? And the person whose death I’d caused was Andrew, Andrew Imhof was dead because of me? There were things I worried about, tests, and the tension with my grandmother, and sometimes, when it occurred to me, Khrushchev bombing the United States. But this? It was, in all ways, impossible.

And I thought, Andrew. His smile and eyelashes, his hazel eyes, his tanned calves, my head against his chest at last spring’s prom. He had always liked me, he had never hidden it—the Dena years, I thought, didn’t really count, and why had I pretended they had?—and I had felt his recognition of me. People recognized you or they didn’t, and it was unrelated to knowing you. Knowing you could just be your name or the street you lived on, your father’s job. Recognizing you was understanding you had thoughts in your head, finding the same things funny or excruciating, remembering what you’d said months or even years after you’d said it. Andrew had always been kind to me, he had always noticed me. Who else in my life was that true of beyond my immediate family?

So why, when Andrew had offered his attention and affection since childhood, since well before Dena had staked her claim to him, why had I waited, holding him off? And I had held him off, I knew it now, and I’d known it when I was doing it. I’d been passive and ambivalent, I’d imagined that we had plenty of time. Then I thought that if he’d become my boyfriend earlier, we’d have gone to the party together; I would not have been driving alone.

The confusing part, the sickening part, was the double calamity. If Andrew had been killed in a car accident in which I was not involved, it still would have felt to me like a devastating loss. Or if I had hit the car of a person I didn’t know and the person had died, that, too, would have been a devastation. But both—both at once were unbearable. He was gone from me and I had caused it. In my life now, every year or so in a newspaper or magazine, I come across reports of similarly coincidental misfortunes: two brothers die on the same road on the same evening in separate motorcycle accidents, or a husband and wife, each in their own car, have a head-on collision. “How bizarre” is the tone of such articles, how interesting and unlikely. What are the odds! To me, these stories don’t seem interesting, and they don’t seem unlikely.

I DID NOT attend his funeral, nor did my parents. I didn’t return to school for a week, and then I did return, and very few people said anything to me that was either kind or unkind. An article about Andrew’s death had run on the front page of The Riley Citizen, but I didn’t know this at the time—my parents hid it from me, and many years passed before I was prompted by outside forces to read it. At school, there was no public acknowledgment, even in my absence, though after I graduated the following spring I learned the yearbook had been dedicated to Andrew. But even this was restrained, just a page that said IN MEMORIAM with a photo, his name, and the dates of his life: ANDREW CHRISTOPHER IMHOF, 1946–1963. Mrs. Schaub, my tenth-grade English teacher, slipped me a card and a copy of a Shakespeare sonnet, the one that starts “That time of year thou mayest in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang,” and I was not exactly sure what I was supposed to take from it. I could manage only to skim her note, and I saw the phrase “very difficult time for you” in Mrs. Schaub’s loopy blue cursive, the same handwriting in which she’d praised my papers on Beowulf and Canterbury Tales. That was what I still wanted, to be treated as a regular student, to be regular—not this fraught goodwill, or the surreptitiously curious glances of my classmates, or the outright animosity, though that was rare. On my second day back at school, I passed Karl Ciesla, a former football teammate of Andrew’s, in the hall, and he murmured, “There’s a reason girls shouldn’t be allowed to get a license.”

But generally, there was an aura around me, and I knew it: a stunned, ashamed haze that made me both piteous and unapproachable. I think this was why almost no one besides Karl expressed their anger, though surely some people were angry with me. Also, I had years of being a good girl to trade on, a credit history of pleasantness. Once during the week I’d stayed home, I’d been at the kitchen table, trying to eat a tuna sandwich my mother had fixed for lunch, and I had stiffened in my seat, panicked by a horrifying thought: What if people suspected I’d done it on purpose? That I had wanted, in some crazy fashion, to keep him for myself, or that he’d spurned me and I was seeking revenge? But no one seemed to think this, or at least no one accused me—there had been, after all, no obvious link between Andrew and me other than that we were classmates.

Really, almost no one said anything, no one suggested I see a counselor, not even my grandmother, who was a reader of Freud and Jung. The Sunday morning after the accident, my mother had knocked on my door and said, “Daddy thinks it’s all right for you to miss church, but we’ll pray for Andrew, just you and me.” I let her lead the prayer (the scab on my left elbow hurt when I bent my arms), but the lack of comfort I drew from it was my first indication that I’d begun to lose my faith. The next evening, Monday, my father came into my room and said, “I went to see Mr. Imhof, and there aren’t going to be any charges pressed, not by them or the county. Mr. Imhof is an honorable man, and we’re very lucky.” I was sitting at my desk, and soberly, he patted my shoulder. But I was less grateful for this news than startled to learn charges against me had been a possibility; so dumbfounded was I by everything else that I hadn’t considered it.

This was just about all either of my parents ever said on the topic of the accident. A consensus seemed to have been reached among everyone in Riley, including my own family members, that the best thing was simply not to mention it at all.

ONE PERSON WAS direct with me. At the end of that first day back at school, when I went to drop off books in my locker before going home, Dena was waiting. Unsure what I was in store for, I stopped a few feet short of her.

“I’m so sorry I made you drive to the party alone,” she said, and she burst into tears.

“Dena—” We stepped into each other’s arms, we clung to each other, and her tears fell on my neck and shirt.

“I know he liked you better,” she blubbered, “he always liked you better, and if you’d ridden with Nancy and me, it never would have happened.”

I took a step back so I could see her; her face was red and smeary. “It wasn’t your fault,” I said. Already, in the privacy of my mind, I had considered her culpability and ruled against it. No matter what events had led up to that moment in the car, I was the one who’d run the stop sign.

“I just can’t picture him, you know”—she paused then whispered —“dead.”

Instantly, an image came to me of that strange angle of his head, his face obscured. Why hadn’t I gone to him, why hadn’t I climbed through the passenger window and across the seat and wrapped my arms around him when he’d been so alone there, amid the broken glass and ruined metal? There are many ways I tortured myself in the subsequent months and years, and one of them was wondering if he’d still been alive then, and if he had, whether human touch, my touch, could have saved him. But I do not think this way any longer. If I’d climbed in the car and he’d still died, I’d have been convinced that that, too, had been a mistake.

To Dena, I said, “Are people mad at me?”

“Robert thinks your family should move away, but he’s an idiot. I told him he should move away.”

Robert thought my family should move away? He had graduated the previous spring and was working at White River Dairy.

“What else have people said?” I asked.

Dena sniffled. “You don’t have a tissue, do you?”

I did; I pulled it from my bag and passed it to her.

After she’d blown her nose, she said, “When I found out, I thought the police were going to arrest me. I was so scared, I made Marjorie sleep in my bed.”

“I never even told anyone about our fight,” I said. “Dena, really, that isn’t why it happened.”

She bit her lip, clearly trying to suppress more tears. “I just shouldn’t have gotten in the way of him being your boyfriend,” she said. “But I didn’t think I could stop it, and that’s the only reason I tried.”

I NO LONGER attended church with my parents and grandmother. I had stayed in bed that Sunday following the accident, and then the next Sunday as well, and after that, it seemed they never expected me to return at all. In fact, and it was a painful notion to consider, my absence might have made churchgoing easier for them; the other parishioners wouldn’t stare, or if they did, they’d do so less intently. On the last Sunday in September, I waited until my parents and grandmother had left, then pulled the envelope I’d already sealed from my desk drawer and walked out the front door. I had not driven since the accident, and I had never driven this car—it was a newer model and a different color of the Chevy Bel Air. The day my father had brought it home, which had been the week after the accident, I’d heard my mother say, her voice anxious, “Black, Phillip?” and he sounded very tired when he replied, “Dorothy, it was what they had.”

It was a cool gray fall morning, and I drove out of town under twenty miles an hour, my heart jolting against my chest and my hands shaking. I could never have another accident, I realized; I would always have to be extremely careful. The streets were quiet and empty because everyone was at church—including, I presumed, Andrew’s parents, who were Catholic. The emptiness was calming. By the time I picked up De Soto Way, I felt confident enough to press my foot more heavily against the accelerator. I wasn’t at the speed limit—though I hadn’t been speeding before the accident, I’d never speed for the rest of my life—but I was close enough to the limit that a car behind me would not have honked. Luckily, there wasn’t a car behind me, and I was alone in a way I hadn’t been since the accident, alone in a way I no longer could be at home. Even when I was by myself in my room, with the door shut, there was someone on the other side of the door—my mother or father or grandmother, individually or in combination—and that person or those people knew. They might be sympathetic, but they still knew that I was in there and that I had done something hideous, however inadvertently. In other parts of the house, they walked and breathed and sighed and shifted, and their presence was always a question, even if they weren’t speaking, even if they were consciously refraining from asking me anything: Are you going to come out of your room? Are you crying right now, or not crying? When will enough time have passed that this misfortune won’t hide in every corner and wait beneath every conversation, including the conversations that seem at first to be about something else? Obviously, they weren’t really asking these questions, which meant I didn’t need to answer. And I was willing to fake it, willing already to pretend I was fine, that life was close to normal. I didn’t want them to carry my burden but preferred for it to be condensed and only mine, a knapsack of distress. Out on the road, though, beside the bur oak trees and silver maples, the hickories and elms, I felt a gratitude for my own insignificance. I was nothing but a nameless, foolish girl. The Wisconsin land, scraped and rearranged by glaciers, accosted by tornadoes, drenched and dried out and drenched again—it didn’t care what I had done.

I knew I’d need to stay neutrally focused as I approached Farm Road 177, and I repeated to myself, Turn right, turn right, turn right, the world reduced to two words, and then I did turn, and the site of the accident was behind me. I had driven past it without weeping or hyperventilating, without even slowing down. From there, I had to concentrate on finding the Imhofs’ driveway—I’d been out at their house once, for Andrew’s birthday party in second or third grade—and after a mile, I saw it, a black mailbox with a red metal flag, recently harvested cornfields flanking the narrow driveway.

The house was white with green shutters; it seemed a house where you’d have an unremarkably happy childhood. A swing hung unmoving on the front porch, and a red barn sat a few dozen yards back, chickens waddling in front of its open double doors. No cars were visible, only a decrepit red pickup truck of the sort farm families kept for driving around their own land but didn’t use on the roads. Holding the envelope, I walked up three steps to the porch. I set the envelope between the screen door and the wooden door and hoped neither Mr. nor Mrs. Imhof would step on it as they entered the house. I will never be able to express to you how sorry I am, I had written on the card. I know that I have caused you great pain. If there was anything in the world I could do to change what happened, I would. I had written five drafts of the note; one had included the line I will spend the rest of my life trying to make up for my actions, but I’d cut that part because I feared it emphasized that I had a life still to live. This pendant is something of mine Andrew once told me he liked, so I thought it might comfort you to have it, I had written in conclusion, and this was the reason I was delivering the note rather than mailing it; I’d removed the silver heart from its chain before inserting it in the envelope.

I was not quite back to the car when I heard a sound behind me, the lift and release of a door opening, and I whirled around mostly in terror and also, just a little, in hope; under my surprise and alarm was the irrational idea that it might be Andrew himself. Even when I was facing the house again, the difficulty of seeing the features of the figure behind the screen prolonged this glimmering impossibility. And then I realized it was Pete Imhof. Of course it wasn’t Andrew.

He didn’t open the screen door right away, but stood there for several beats, watching me, I suppose. I was pretty sure he wasn’t wearing a shirt. At last, pointing, I called out, “I left a note.” And then, absurdly, with my palm against my chest, “It’s Alice Lindgren.”

He pushed the screen door open, and because it seemed like I ought to, I walked toward him, reclimbing the steps, standing before him on the porch. He was indeed shirtless—he was wearing light brown corduroys, no socks, and no shoes—and though I tried to avert my eyes, I noticed the dark hair covering his chest. It was heavier around his nipples, which were broad and ruddy, and it thickened in a line down his sternum to his navel, and then down farther, where he had a pinch of flesh hanging over the waist of his pants. His arms were also lined with dark hair, except at the tops, where he was visibly muscular. My father, who was the only man I’d seen shirtless on a regular basis, including the previous summer at the motel pool in St. Ignace, was muscular, too—at five-nine, he had a compact muscularity—but his chest was white and almost hairless.

“My parents aren’t here,” Pete said. “They’re at church.” His face was stubbly and puffy. I had thought often of Mr. and Mrs. Imhof during the last few weeks, but the truth was that I had hardly considered Pete. I hadn’t even been sure that he still lived in Riley, though I realized in this moment that the car I’d plowed into had most likely been his.

“I thought—” I hesitated. “It seemed like it would be better if I came when they weren’t around. I’m sorry if I woke you up.” And then, predictably, there was the silent echo of the bigger apology I owed him: I’m sorry I killed your brother.

“You didn’t wake me up,” Pete said.

I looked down (there even was dark hair on his bare toes) and then up again at his eyes, hazel, like Andrew’s. “I’m sorry,” I said, and we held each other’s gaze, and then I said, “for what I did,” and to keep from crying, I looked down and pressed together my thumbs and forefingers. I couldn’t cry in front of an Imhof.

“Everyone knows that,” Pete said.

I looked up.

“Everyone knows you’re sorry.” His voice was neither harsh nor compassionate; it was matter-of-fact. And though I don’t think he doubted my sincerity, I felt a wish to convince him of it that seemed in itself insincere. “You don’t have to write my parents a letter,” he said. “They already know. My mother feels bad for you.”

“Should I take it with me?”

He shrugged. We both were silent for almost a minute. Finally, he said, “Are you waiting for me to invite you in?” I was about to say no when he added, “You can do what you want,” and he turned and walked back into the house. I followed him. Not by a lot but by a little bit, it seemed less awkward than just leaving.

No lights were on inside, and as we passed a dim living room, I observed a stone fireplace, a settee covered in navy blue velvet, and an old-looking upright piano. A wooden staircase with a shiny banister rose from the first-floor hall, but we took a second staircase, cramped and carpeted, that we entered from the kitchen. At the top of the steps were two doors, one closed and one open, and in the room with the open door was the first lit lamp I’d seen in the entire house. It was a small room with a large bureau, a little desk, a single bed (this was unmade, the white sheets and brown spread rumpled at its foot, a paperback book open and facedown against the mattress), and a nightstand on which rested the lamp and an ashtray.

As he sat on the bed, I stayed in the doorway and pointed. “I read that.” The book was Atlas Shrugged.

“It’s interesting, but it’s too long,” he said.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t say it was my favorite.”

He was looking at me, not speaking. Then he patted the space on the bed next to him and said, “Why don’t you come over here?”

I swallowed and stepped forward. It is important for me to say that I was complicit—I had followed him into the house and up the stairs. None of it was premeditated, but I was complicit. When we were sitting next to each other, I don’t think more than a second or two had passed before his mouth was on mine, his hungry, pushy, wet, sour mouth, moving in a way that seemed too desperate to be called kissing, and no more than a few seconds had passed after that before he set his fingers firmly around my right breast, squeezing and releasing and squeezing again. Although his desire was stronger than mine, and his strength was greater—although he was already shirtless—I was not afraid. What I felt was enormous relief. I’d been trying so hard these past few weeks to prop myself up, to act the way I was supposed to and try to take the first small steps toward compensating for my terrible error, and now I was only submitting. I wasn’t being watched or talked about or gently queried, not condemned or accommodated. I was being asked for something, something wrong, which another person wanted, and I could give it to him.

He had reached beneath my blouse and under my bra, and because it seemed that the buttons on the blouse might pop otherwise, I unfastened them. When I wore nothing on top, he pushed me down on the mattress, straddled me, and leaned forward to roll his face between my breasts, pressing them against his cheeks and licking my nipples, his stubble rubbing not unpleasantly over my skin, and the more he grabbed and thrashed, the more the grabbing and thrashing seemed to stir rather than satisfy his desire. He pulled off my pants and underwear at the same time—I was wearing blue jeans, and he had to unbutton and unzip them first—and then I was naked except for my socks, which were white with lace trim. He tugged me upward and flipped me over, and when he said, “No, you have to be on your knees,” it was the first time either of us had spoken in several minutes.

I have never described this to another person, I would never. And in today’s world, where nineteen-year-old girls on reality shows kiss each other for the entertainment of male onlookers, where women on network television climb into hot tubs in string bikinis, the globes of their fake breasts bobbing merrily—in this world, perhaps it wouldn’t seem so shocking. But it was 1963, I was a high school senior, and I had not known this sexual position existed, had never heard the fittingly coarse phrase doggy-style. I wasn’t sure what Pete and I were doing, wasn’t sure it was sex, and then after a few minutes of his pumping, I felt his surge inside me, and I knew it must have been. He pressed his hand against the side of my thigh, prompting me to lie down. When I did, he lay flat on top of me, and I could feel his sticky erection shrink up.

We stayed like that, both of us facing the mattress: his head over my left shoulder, beside my head; his chest to my back; his flaccid penis in the split of my buttocks; his legs against my legs. His body was heavy and warm, and my mind was blank, and there was only his welcome weight, like a shield that covered me completely.

Unsurprisingly, it had hurt somewhat, and it had been hasty, and there had not been the physical release for me that there had been for him; I was so naive that I didn’t know there could have been. Also, it had been ill-advised. None of that mattered. Lying on my stomach against the mattress, I could not see his face next to mine, but I could see the fingertips of his hand grazing my shoulder, and I could smell his skin, like sautéed onions and soap. So this was what it was to lie unclothed in the arms of a young man.

Another minute passed before abruptly, Pete rolled off me. When he rose, the entire back of my body was exposed in his bedroom, beside the lamp, at noon on a Sunday, and I instinctively turned over and pulled up the sheet. He stood naked before me, his dark body hair and impassive expression. “My parents will be home,” he said. “You need to leave.”

EVEN BY THE time I was back on De Soto Way, it seemed shocking and inexplicable. I’d had sex with Andrew’s brother? Forty minutes before, I’d been a virgin with a condolence note, and then Pete Imhof had been inserting his penis into me from behind and I’d resisted not at all? I’d practically invited it! As I drove into town, I’d have thought I’d imagined the whole scene except for the indisputable leaking between my legs.

And yet I felt far lighter than I had driving out. Presumably, I had betrayed people—my parents and grandmother, maybe Andrew—but that wasn’t how I felt. It was more like something had been awry, a phone off the hook, a sink of dirty dishes, and what I’d done was to clean it up and set it right.

At home, I parked the car and entered the house, and when I appeared in the dining room, my mother exclaimed, “There you are!” She was already standing and walking toward me, setting her hands on my shoulders. They were eating Sunday lunch, lamb and green beans and biscuits.

“We were concerned,” my father said. “We didn’t know where you’d gone.”

“I had to run an errand.”

“Next time leave a note,” my father said. “Dorothy, let her sit so she can eat.”

I longed to go upstairs and take a bath, but that would seem suspicious; I’d already showered that morning. Taking my place at the table, I wondered if Pete’s fluid had seeped through my underwear and stained the back of my jeans.

“What was your errand?” my grandmother asked.

There was a long silence. “For school,” I said. Another silence descended—they seemed to do that more often now, or maybe I just noticed them more—and then my mother said, “Alice, the Frick girls sang ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’ today. Such beautiful voices.” No one responded, and my mother added, “Do you know, Cecile told me the girls hope to perform at the state fair next summer.”

“Fools’ names and fools’ faces often appear in public places,” my father said. Although he repeated this expression frequently—the most recent time had been when Mr. Janaszewski won three rounds of bingo in a row at St. Ann’s, and his photo ran the next day on the front page of The Riley Citizen—performing at the state fair did not strike me as all that unseemly.

“Well, I don’t think it’s definite,” my mother said.

I knew I should help out—my mother was trying—but I’d been gripped by a paralyzing awareness of a smell coming from inside me, a sour salty odor I had never been exposed to yet recognized immediately.

“I went to school with a girl who had a gorgeous voice,” my grandmother said. “Leona Stromberg.”

My grandmother set her knife and fork side by side on the edge of her plate, though she’d eaten less than half her food. She lit a Pall Mall as she talked. “When she sang, she was so good it gave you goose bumps. One summer, this must have been in ’09 or ’10, the circus came to town. She convinces someone to give her an audition, and what I always heard is they didn’t hire her for her voice as much as her looks, which is a shame. Not that she wasn’t pretty, too, but she had a real gift, and I take it they used her more as a magician’s assistant. In any event, she leaves Milwaukee with the circus—she’s about eighteen—and she travels this way and that, hither and yon. One night the circus is performing in Baltimore, and what happens in the middle of the show but a tiger bites off her nose.”

“Oh my word,” my mother said.

“Is this appropriate for the table?” my father asked.

“We’re all adults.” My grandmother winked at me, something she had not done in a long while. “Now, by this time, I forgot to mention, she’s changed her name. No more Leona Stromberg. Instead, she goes by Mimi Étoile—‘Étoile’ is French for ‘star.’ Parlez-vous Français?” She was looking at me. I shook my head. An image of Pete Imhof appeared in my brain like a flare, and I did my best to ignore him. “Me, neither,” my grandmother said. “But back to our heroine. Mimi née Leona has no nose, which means no more performing. You don’t want to remind the audience of the circus’s dark side, after all. Now, you’d think she was out of luck. She doesn’t have savings, she isn’t married, she’s far from home. But the circus owner goes to fire her, and lo and behold they fall in love. Her face is covered with bandages, but that just forces him to listen more attentively to her exquisite voice. He’s years older than she is, in his fifties, but he courts her and makes her his noseless bride. They lived happily ever after, so far as I know.”

“That’s a very peculiar story,” my father said.

“Did she keep traveling with the circus?” my mother asked.

“For a little while, but soon he bought her a house in Denver, and he stayed there, too, when the circus didn’t need him. Eventually, because remember, he was no youngster, he sold the circus and joined Mimi year-round. The weather in Denver is quite temperate, apparently, even though it’s near the mountains.”

I swallowed my last bite of green beans. “May I be excused?”

“Sweetheart, there’s butterscotch tapioca,” my mother said.

“I have a history test tomorrow.” I stood and kept speaking as I backed out of the room, so that that would seem like the reason I was still facing them. “I need to study.”

In my bedroom, I changed underpants. I didn’t know what to do with the soiled pair—I didn’t want to risk leaving them in the laundry basket in the corner of my room and having my mother find them—so I balled them up and set them in the back of my sock drawer. In the bathroom, before urinating, I wiped a wad of toilet paper between my legs, and the wad came away with a clear, filmy smear. The second time I wiped myself, I wet the toilet paper first. Then I flushed both wads away, as if destroying the evidence could undo the act.

LATE THE NEXT afternoon, when my father was still at work, my grandmother was in the living room smoking and reading Vogue, and my mother and I were preparing dinner, I walked to the edge of the living room. “Mom wants to know if you want the cheese sauce on your broccoli or on the side.”

My grandmother looked up. “On the side will be fine.”

I did n’t move immediately.“ Was that story about Mimi Étoile true?”

My grandmother regarded me. “If it were,” she said at last, “don’t you think it’d be awfully interesting?”

THAT WEDNESDAY MORNING, as I ate oatmeal in the kitchen, my mother said, “Spirit Club meets this afternoon, doesn’t it, sweetie?” And though I had not attended a meeting since the accident, I went because of the willed brightness of her tone, the way she thought—it was touching, really—that if we spoke cheerily, it might mean I hadn’t killed Andrew.

It was an ordinary meeting, with a forty-five-minute argument over whether the GO BENTON KNIGHTS banner for Friday’s football game against Houghton North High should be unfurled at morning assembly or withheld until the actual game; I did not speak at all except to vote yea for opening the banner at assembly. Spirit Club was composed of sixteen girls and one boy, a slim, excitable sophomore named Peter Smyth who was obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor and who would, at any opportunity, impersonate her in her role as a call girl in Butterfield 8.

The next day, I was leaving the cafeteria after lunch when Mary Hafliger, the Spirit Club president, approached me. “Can I speak with you in private?” she asked.

I nodded, and we walked from the noisy cafeteria outside to the faculty parking lot. It was a sunny day, and the leaves on the trees at the parking lot’s edge were red and gold.

“This is hard to tell you,” she said, “but we think you shouldn’t be in Spirit Club anymore.”

I was stunned and also not surprised at all. I expected censure in general, but I was never prepared for it in the moment.

I swallowed. “That’s fine.”

“I knew you would understand,” she said. “It’s just that you make people sad.”

I thought of having defended Mary’s hairy forearms to Dena the previous spring, and then I wondered, had I made people sad at the meeting the day before? It had consisted of nothing but bickering and, at random intervals, Peter Smyth announcing, “ ‘Mama, face it. I was the slut of all time!’ ”

But could I really fault Mary? I was Mimi Étoile, I realized suddenly, I was the girl whose nose had been bitten off by a tiger, and now I reminded cheerful people of life’s sorrow. Or no, maybe I wasn’t Mimi, because she had gone on to find her happy ending. Besides, it had only been her nose.

____

THE NEXT TIME was after school that Friday. He was in the rusty red pickup I’d seen at the Imhofs’ farm, and he’d parked near campus and was sitting in the driver’s seat. When I was right beside the pickup, he said in a low voice, “Alice.” I turned, recognized him, said nothing, and climbed in the truck. We didn’t speak until after we’d made a right into his family’s driveway. I was surprised; without consciously knowing I’d thought that far ahead, I’d assumed we’d go somewhere secluded, that we might even use the bed of the truck.

“But what about your—” I began, and he said, “They’re spending the weekend with my aunt and uncle in Racine.”

In the house, I followed Pete up the stairs; I felt purposeful and not nervous. The first round was like before, both of us on our hands and knees, him behind me. But after we collapsed onto the mattress, we eventually ended up turning over, so we were on our backs next to each other, then he was on his side facing me; because he was taller, his mouth was near the top of my head. This repositioning all took a long time, and we spoke very little. We still were lying like that when he began running his fingers back and forth across the concave dip between my hip bones, his hand dropping progressively lower after each round-trip. When he got where he’d been going, I flinched, which wasn’t the same as not wanting to be touched. He stilled his hand, but he didn’t lift it away, and he didn’t say anything. He was waiting, perhaps, for me to protest. When I didn’t, he proceeded. I shut my eyes. At first my gasps were shallow and quiet, but they grew deeper and louder, and this might have been mortifying if I were still me, if the world still existed, but I wasn’t and it didn’t. I’d open my eyes and see an off-white ceiling, the tops of brown-and-yellow-plaid curtains, and then I’d close my eyes and go back into the roiling blackness of outer space, comets, and asteroids, and then I’d open my eyes again—ceiling, curtains—and the difference was as great as if I’d been sitting at my desk in homeroom one moment and then I’d turned around and found the Great Wall of China stretched out before me. It was not clear whether he rolled onto me or I pulled him, but at some point he was in me again, we were face-to-face, grinding and colliding, and I was gripping his buttocks, and it happened at the same time for both of us, I raised my legs and curled them around his back to pull him as close to me as possible, to make him be as far inside. In retrospect, this whole time period with Pete is so clouded with sorrow and regret that I try not to think of it; sometimes still, it can make me wince. And yet I confess to slight amusement that what happened for us that day in his bedroom, the synchronicity of timing, has never once happened in decades of marriage to a man I love dearly.

Lying there with Pete Imhof, his weight on me as our breathing and our heartbeats slowed, I thought how there was nothing else, nothing on any topic that any person could say. This was the only thing more powerful than grief.

DENA HAD REALIZED that Andrew’s death was an act of God. She told me this while I sat on her bed watching her apply makeup before meeting people at Tatty’s on Saturday night. Several times, she had invited me to go, but I’d declined, and she’d said, “You have to quit thinking about him. Andrew was an angel taken from us too soon, but it’s not for us to ask why.”

Because she’d been having trouble sleeping, she told me, her mother had arranged for her to meet with their priest, and Father Krauss had helped her see that it was all part of God’s plan. “You should talk to your pastor,” she said.

I said nothing, and then she said, “You’re looking at my sideburn stubble, aren’t you?”

“I wasn’t looking at anything.”

“Nancy said I should just grow them out, but how many months will that take? Three?”

I hadn’t told Dena about Andrew’s brother, and I couldn’t. It was not a juicy tidbit, not even a moral quandary for us to debate; it was unspeakable.

“Your sideburns look fine,” I said.

WHEN MY FAMILY walked to Calvary Lutheran that Sunday, I drove back to the Imhofs’ farm. I knocked on the door, and Pete took so long to answer that I decided he wasn’t home, but I knocked once more anyway, for thoroughness. The previous night, the temperature had dropped to the low forties, and I wore a coat.

When he opened the door, he said, “That was stupid of you to come out here. What if my parents were home?”

“You said they went to Racine.”

“I didn’t say when they were coming back.”

“Should I leave?”

He gave me a surly look. “If you’re already here, you might as well come inside.” He turned and headed back toward the kitchen, and as I had both times before, I followed him.

In addition to scrambling what had to be five or six eggs, he was frying sausage and toasting two pieces of bread, and as I watched, he poured himself a glass of orange juice. When he’d assembled all the food on a plate, he sat at the kitchen table, so I sat, too. I took off my coat, folding it and setting it on the chair next to me. Neither of us spoke until Pete had finished his food. He leaned back, folded his arms, and looked at me.

“Should we go upstairs?” I asked. Although it was a forward question, it seemed so obvious this was the next step that to say anything else would have been disingenuous. Besides, once we were in his bed, undressed and entangled, I knew the dull hostility of his mood would recede.

But he ignored my suggestion and said, “What are your hopes and dreams, Alice? Think you’ll stay in Riley forever?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’d never stay here,” he said. “I’m moving to Milwaukee or Chicago to make something of myself.”

I was, of course, too young to know there’s no surer sign of a man who won’t make something of himself than his repeated assertions that he will, and I also was bewildered by why we were having this conversation. The wish to go upstairs was like a bar of gold hovering vertically inside my chest. “I went to Chicago with my grandmother,” I said.

“Yeah? Congratulations.” Though his comment had its desired effect—it made me feel foolish—I couldn’t tell if it meant Pete himself had or hadn’t been. “I could take over the farm, but farming is for chumps,” he continued. “I had to get up at six this morning to feed the chickens. You break your back in the fields, live at the mercy of the weather, and for what? I’m looking for a white-collar job, business or banking. Andy liked it here, but I never understood why.”

We both were quiet. I don’t think he’d meant to mention his brother, I think he’d temporarily forgotten my connection to Andrew or perhaps he’d even forgotten Andrew’s death.

All this time, there had been no light on in the kitchen, and we sat there in the gloomy quiet. In an unfriendly voice, he said, “Come here.” I stood and walked around the table. He was wearing the same tan corduroys from before and a sweater with wide black and red stripes. “Get on your knees,” he said.

When I was kneeling in front of him, I said, “Like this?”

Sarcastically, he said, “Pretend you’re in church.”

He held my gaze a she unbuttoned his pants, unzipped them, and slid them to his ankles along with his white jockey shorts. His penis looked shockingly small, but he took my hand and brought it toward him and said, “Move it around and rub it,” and soon his erection had sprung to life. “Come in closer,” he said. “Now put it in your mouth.” Even as he spoke, he was cupping my head with one hand, pulling me in.

Years before, in sixth grade, my classmate Roy Ziemniak, our dentist’s son, had described this act to Dena and me, and I hadn’t known whether to believe him. He had apparently been telling the truth.

I gagged twice in the first minute, and then I tried to keep a rhythm, up and down, and I thought, I’ll count to twenty-five, and I made sure to count with Mississippis in between so real seconds were passing: One Mississippi, two Mississippi . . . Above me, I could hear Pete sighing increasingly deeply. After thirty-four seconds, I raised my head. His eyes were closed, but he opened them quickly, and his voice sounded half sleepy and half desperate—it did not sound cruel—when he said, “No, you have to finish.”

When I’d resumed, I began to cry. I didn’t want him to notice, and I don’t think he did, preoccupied as he was; there was a lot of wetness down there already because I was drooling from not swallowing. When at last he erupted into my mouth, I quickly pulled back my head, and most of it dribbled onto his pale, hairy thighs. There was only a little I wiped from the edge of my lips, a tiny bit that might have gone down my throat. He leaned over to pull up his jockey shorts and trousers, and I bent my head, my tears flowing rapid and hot and unobstructed. Perhaps thirty more seconds had passed when he said, “Are you crying?”

I’d been sitting with my knees forward and my rear end balanced against my heels, and I shifted then so my rear end was on the floor and my knees were a tent. I crossed my arms, leaned my face into them, and wept so hard my shoulders shook.

“What’s wrong with you?” I heard Pete say.

When I looked up, he towered over me. A minute before, he’d been sitting and I’d been kneeling, but he’d gone higher when I went lower. Our eyes met, and I could feel my face contract (it would have been so different with Andrew; I would have wanted to make him feel good, and afterward he’d have held and kissed me). I said, “I know there’s nothing I can do to make it up to you or your parents, but I miss him, too.”

“You don’t think the two of you were in love, do you?” The fury in Pete’s tone told me not to answer. “That he was your boyfriend?”

I did not reply, but I had stopped crying and gone on a kind of bodily alert. I suddenly knew I would be leaving this house very soon, and the likelihood was slim that I would ever come back.

“My brother wasn’t your boyfriend,” Pete said.

I wiped my eyes, I tucked my hair behind my ears. As I stood, I held on to a chair.

“Did you hear me?” Pete said. “He wasn’t your boyfriend.” As I pulled on my coat, it occurred to me that he might try to bar my exit. “What you just did,” he said, “only whores do that, and my brother would never have dated a whore.”

I walked out of the kitchen, down the hall past the living room and front staircase. Pete followed me, but when I reached the door, he stayed over ten feet back. I grasped the doorknob, turning it, and he said, “See, you can’t even defend yourself. That’s what a whore you are.”

That this ugliness had arisen so quickly between us—it could only mean it had been there all along. I looked back at him and said the one thing I knew was true. I said, “I’m sorry it wasn’t me instead of him.”

IT WAS THEN in my life that I entered a twilight in which all I tried to do was move forward. I saw how, with Pete, I’d been trying to fix the situation—I’d been trying in a perverse way, but trying all the same—and now I understood that the situation was unfixable. That, in fact, I’d made it worse. And it wasn’t as if I could take consolation in the idea that I’d been martyring myself: I’d mostly liked it when Pete touched my body, I’d liked the physical aspect (he had been a naked, hairy man five years older than I was, stroking me in ways he ought not to have tried and I ought not to have allowed—of course it had been exciting) and I’d also liked the plot of it, wondering what would happen next, thinking about something that was close to Andrew without having to think about his death. But the end result had turned out to be rancor, rancor on top of tragedy, as well as new and incriminating secrets, misbehaviors that would further hurt the people who knew me if they learned of them. The solution was to retreat, to shut down, and doing so did not require effort. Rather, it was the opposite of effort—capitulation.

I went to school, and I continued to turn in all my work, most of which I completed in study hall; after sophomore year, study hall was optional, and in the past, I’d spent it in the gym with Dena, sitting on the bleachers while boys in penny loafers shot baskets, ducking when the balls came threateningly close. In the evenings, I watched television or played cards with my family just enough so they wouldn’t think I’d stopped watching television or playing cards with them, and at meals, I talked enough so they wouldn’t worry that I was on the brink of doing something rash and destructive, which I wasn’t. I didn’t have the energy.

I tried to read novels, once my most reliable refuge, but even when I was immersed in sixteenth-century Scotland or contemporary Manhattan, I could always feel the dread of my own life at the edge of the page, an incoming tide. Sometimes the dread simply washed right over me, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. It was worst in the morning, when I first awakened. I’d feel sick, literally nauseated, and occasionally, if I was still, it would pass. But more often I’d have to hurry to the bathroom, where I’d vomit into the toilet bowl and then try not to cry. It would be five-fifteen, five-twenty, and it would seem impossible that the day had gone wrong already.

At night, I’d lie on my bed with the lights on and my eyes shut, and I’d listen to “Lonesome Town,” and I’d feel the song steadying me, cradling me, the way another person can hold you in water when you are nearly weightless. “You can buy a dream or two / To last you all through the years,” Ricky Nelson sang. “And the only price you pay / Is a heart full of tears.” I’d fiddle with the silver necklace I’d been wearing that afternoon outside the library; though a part of me wished I hadn’t given the heart pendant to Andrew’s parents, the fact that I was bothered by its absence seemed a sign that I’d made the right decision.

ONE MORNING IN early November, I emerged from the bathroom after throwing up—it was not yet six o’clock—and found my grandmother standing in the unlit hall, specter-like in her pink satin bathrobe and white slippers. “Were you sick in there?”

“I’m fine,” I said softly. “My stomach hurt, but now I feel better.”

She scrutinized me. “It’s not a way to stay thin, you know. It’s an old trick that lots of girls try, but it’s bad for your teeth and makes your cheeks swell. Before long, you’ll look like a chipmunk.”

“Granny, I didn’t make myself throw up on purpose.”

“If you’re worried about gaining weight, it would be much more ladylike to smoke. Cigarettes curb your appetite at the same time that they burn calories.”

I knew cigarettes were bad for you—Mr. Frisch had told us in biology—but I didn’t want to argue with her.

My grandmother reached out and held her thumb and forefinger around my chin, so I couldn’t look anywhere except at her. Since eighth grade, I’d been taller than she was, but she usually wore heels that eliminated the discrepancy in our heights. Now I was gazing down on her. “Don’t punish yourself,” she said. “It never makes anything better.”

ONCE I WAS at school, amid the noise and all the people hurrying toward obligations that didn’t really matter, I’d often wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off staying home, if I shouldn’t drop out altogether. But home was no better, just bad in a different way. Gradually, I came to understand that I needed to leave Riley, to go to college and not come back. And I needed to enroll somewhere other than Ersine Teachers College in Milwaukee, which had fewer than twelve hundred young women in the whole school. It was too likely, in such a small community, that my story would get out, someone there would know someone from Riley, or one of my high school classmates would also enroll. I suppose it’s a mark of my provincialism at the time that I thought applying to the University of Wisconsin in Madison was a radical move. The school had an undergraduate and graduate population of more than twenty thousand; this, I thought, would surely be enough in which to get lost.

THE SECOND TIME my grandmother caught me vomiting, she didn’t wait in the hall; she sat on my bed paging through the copy of The Rise of Silas Lapham that she’d found on my nightstand. Her voice was raspy with morning as she said, “Close the door.” When I had, she said, “That was very foolish of me before, wasn’t it? Thinking you were trying to lose weight.”

I stood by the bureau and said nothing.

“We’ll go to Chicago, and we’ll have it taken care of. Next week, likely. I need to make a few calls. You can do as you see fit, but I’d advise against saying anything to your parents. I just can’t imagine what purpose it would serve.”

I felt an impulse then to express incomprehension, except that I did comprehend. At night, when I listened to “Lonesome Town,” I knew. She was right.

“Isn’t it—” I hesitated. “Isn’t it illegal?”

“Certainly, and it happens all the time. You can’t legislate human nature.”

“You don’t think that I should have it?”

Quietly, she said, “I think it would kill you. If circumstances were different, I would say, ‘Go live at a girls’ home in Minnesota, go to California.’ But you don’t have the strength. You’ll be strong again, but you’re not strong now.”

As she spoke, I could feel my lips curling out, the tears welling in my eyes. I whispered, “I’m sorry for disappointing you.”

“Come sit by me,” she said, and when I did, she rubbed my back, the palm of her hand sweeping over the white cotton of my nightgown. After a moment, she said, “We have to make mistakes. It’s how we learn compassion for others.” She paused. “You don’t need to tell me whose it is. That doesn’t matter.”

WE TOOK THE bus rather than the train. At my grandmother’s instruction, I had gone to school as if it were a normal day, but before the end of first period, I’d been summoned to the principal’s office, where my grandmother awaited me. We walked quickly to the bus station, rode the bus to Chicago—“I’m sure there’s someone who does it in Riley, too,” my grandmother said, “but I’d have to ask around, and I don’t want people talking”—and from the bus station on Broad Street, we took a taxi to the hospital. As directed by my grandmother, I had not eaten or drunk since the night before, and in the taxi, my stomach turned, filled with nothing but anxiety. “I’ve given your name as Alice Warren,” my grandmother said. “Just as a precaution.” Warren was her own maiden name.

“You don’t think I’ll get arrested, do you?”

“You won’t get arrested,” my grandmother said.

“And the doctor won’t use dirty tools?”

My grandmother looked at me strangely. “I thought you understood that Gladys is performing the procedure. That’s why we’ve come here.”

My grandmother was not permitted in the operating room. I wore a blue hospital gown, and when I lay on the table, the nurse had me set my feet in metal stirrups. “The doctor wants to talk to you before we put you under anesthesia,” the nurse said, and ten or twelve minutes had passed before Dr. Wycomb appeared in a white coat. She squeezed my hand, and the warmth of her grip made me realize how cold I was.

“I know this is difficult, Alice,” she said. “It will be over before you know it, though, and you’ll recover quickly. The way a D and C works is that I’ll expand the entrance of your uterus, and I’ll use a very thin instrument for the curettage. You might experience cramps and spotting for several days—you’ll want to use sanitary napkins—but you’ll be able to walk out of here.”

I nodded, feeling faint. I did not even know then what curettage meant, but back in Riley, I looked it up; the dictionary definition was scraping.

“If any problems arise in the next days or weeks, it’s important that you call me,” Dr. Wycomb said. “Your grandmother has my telephone number.” She was not distant—she still held my hand—but she was crisp and professional in a way that made me understand she was probably very good at her job.

“One more thing: I’ll leave these items with Emilie, and I want you to get them from her when you’re home. You need not discuss them with her.” Dr. Wycomb reached into a small brown paper bag I hadn’t noticed and extracted an object I didn’t recognize, a white rubber dome that she handed to me along with a capped tube, also white. “Fill the diaphragm with spermicide before you insert it,” she said. “Then push the diaphragm deep into your vagina so it walls off your cervix. Make sure to practice a few times before you’re in a situation where you need it and remember that spermicide alone isn’t effective—if your friends suggest otherwise, they’re wrong.”

Once, it would have been unthinkable, unendurable, to listen to my grandmother’s friend use the words spermicide and vagina. But by then so much had happened that was unthinkable and unendurable, and furthermore, the words themselves were overshadowed by the larger implication of her comments.

“It won’t happen again,” I said. “I’m not—” I wanted to say, I really am the girl I seemed to be last winter, but surely, the necessity of making such an assertion would undermine it.

“This is a conversation about health, not morality,” Dr. Wycomb said. “Once a person engages in sexual intercourse, the likelihood of remaining sexually active is high.” She patted my forearm. “I’m very sorry about the automobile accident,” she said, and then she called for the nurse.

WHEN I EMERGED from the fog of anesthesia, I was in a different room—I opened my eyes, closed them, opened them again—and my grandmother was sitting beside me reading. I blinked several times, my mind blurry. “Should I write Dr. Wycomb a thank-you note?” I asked.

“I don’t think that’s necessary.” My grandmother set a bookmark between two pages and closed the book. “She’s coming by to check on you, though, if you’d like to thank her in person. How are you feeling?”

“What time is it?”

“It’s after two. You’ve been sleeping for nearly an hour.”

“Isn’t my mother—Won’t she expect me home?”

“I told her I was meeting you after school to take you shopping. Alice, if you’d like to tell them, that’s your decision.”

“I’ll never tell them,” I said, which proved to be true.

When Dr. Wycomb came into the recovery room, I still was loopy. I said, “I hope you don’t go to prison because of me.”

Dr. Wycomb and my grandmother exchanged glances, and Dr. Wycomb said, “This is a very common procedure, Alice. You were my third this week.”

BACK IN RILEY, I could hardly make eye contact with my parents. Whatever you are, be a good one, I had grown up hearing my father say, and oh, how I had failed him, how I’d failed them all. On the weekends, when Mrs. Falke came over to play bridge with my parents and grandmother, I’d stand in the upstairs hall listening to the slap and turn of their cards, and they seemed to me like children.

I bled for a few days, and then I stopped. I was not even sore, not really. When an image or a feeling of Andrew or Pete came into my mind—they came at different moments, for different reasons—I’d try to suppress it. I waited for time to pass.

On November 22, a Friday, I was walking out of the cafeteria after lunch, just behind a few other students, when a sophomore named Joan Skryba and a junior named Millie Devon came toward us, running and crying. Though they were shouting, they were nearly incoherent. I couldn’t understand at first, and when I finally did, I still wasn’t sure I had because it seemed so unlikely—the president of the United States? President Kennedy? Then someone else, a boy, emerged from the cafeteria behind us and said the same thing, and everyone was talking at once, and a girl next to me whom I wasn’t friends with at all, Helen Pajak, took my hand and gripped it tightly. It wasn’t until I saw Mrs. Moore, my math teacher, weeping openly that I knew it was true: A little over an hour before, President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

Everything felt suspended; in the remaining classes that afternoon, we spoke of nothing else, but people were no longer excitable. We all were simply stunned. And then, an hour or so later, we heard he had died, and if President Kennedy had just been assassinated, what would happen next? What sense or logic was there, which rules still existed in the world? Normally, at the end of the day and especially on a Friday, the hall containing our lockers was filled with yells and laughter and slamming metal, but that afternoon it was quiet.

I did not cry for him, not then or ever, though I, like everyone, found the television coverage mesmerizing. That evening was the only time I can recall my family watching television while we ate dinner; we carried our plates into the living room. Everything was canceled, in Riley and everywhere else, sports events and plays, and restaurants and stores and movie theaters were closed, and you hardly saw a car on the street. Really, there was nothing to do but wonder at what had happened. Over the next few days, seeing the picture in the newspaper of Lyndon Johnson being sworn in on Air Force One by Sarah Hughes, watching the surreal footage of Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot at the police headquarters by Jack Ruby, listening to Johnson’s address on Thanksgiving—“From this midnight of tragedy we shall move toward a new American greatness,” he told us—my parents and grandmother seemed as stupefied as I was.

But this is the truth: I had admired Kennedy, I’d thought he was smart and handsome and full of vigor. And yet with his death, I felt a grim relief. I wasn’t happy; certainly not. But something had occurred that was so dreadful, it eclipsed the dreadfulness of what I had caused. Not in my opinion, it didn’t, but in everyone else’s; it made what I’d done seem small. And I knew it immediately that afternoon at school. This was a death far bigger and worse than Andrew’s, and it had nothing to do with me; there was no part of it that was my fault. If this was not absolution, it was as close as I would get.

To this day, I remain deeply ashamed of my reaction. In all my life, I have admitted what I felt that afternoon to just one person.

PART II

3859 Sproule Street

W

HEN I WAS

twenty-seven, the month after Simon Törnkvist and I broke up, I decided that if I wasn’t married by the time I turned thirty, I would buy a house alone. Although I told no one, keeping this idea in the back of my mind provided reassurance; it made my life seem less like something I was waiting for and more like something I was planning. When I drove around Madison, I’d sometimes think,

A place like that.

Three bedrooms at the most, a yard but not a large one, on a street with tall trees. Also, not a house on a corner, because those seemed too exposed. As a librarian at Theodora Liess Elementary School, I earned eight hundred and thirty-three dollars a month after taxes, and as soon as I’d made my decision, I began to put away two hundred dollars from each paycheck in a savings account; I deposited the money at my neighborhood branch of Wisconsin State Bank & Trust on the last Saturday morning of every month.

I’m not sure exactly when I would have called a realtor—the day I turned thirty? The day after? My plan had never gotten that specific—but it didn’t turn out to be anywhere close, because it was two months before my birthday, in February 1976, that my father died. Like his own father, he had a heart attack, and although my father made it into his fifties—two decades longer than my grandfather had lived—this seemed to me even then to be a dubious reprieve. Now, of course, it does not seem like a reprieve at all.