American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld Page A

“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