I'm Not Julia Roberts

by Laura Ruby

  Fine. Fine, she thought. But not now, not yet. Didn’t she deserve some stillness? Some silky vacuum into which she might slip, secure in the fact that no rocks would ever roll uphill and nothing would ever change?

  With the girls still watching—gaping—Glynn lifted her head and scooped up the dice, rolling idly at first and then with more purpose. She rolled again and again, until she got what she wanted. Three fours. Bunko. “Take the box,” she said, telling them, telling them all. “Take the booze. Take the candy. Take whatever you want. The bunny’s mine.”

  THE DOG NEXT DOOR

  Tate’s sister is calling about her latest obsession: family therapy. Ever since her ex-husband announced that he was getting remarried, Glynn calls to ponder aloud which school of thought might be best, which members of the family should attend, which issues should be explored (as if the predominant issue isn’t Glynn’s hatred of her ex’s wife-to-be).

  “Glynn,” Tate says, sneaking a glance at Roxie, who’s scratching at her bare foot in a distracted way, “can we talk some other time?”

  “I was just thinking that all of this is connected somehow.”

  Tate sighs. “All of what is connected?”

  “To our parents. They’re divorced and divorced again. Then I got divorced.”

  “But you are married now,” he reminds her. “To a great guy.”

  His sister is not to be stopped. “And you’re not only divorced, you date bimbos. Don’t deny it, Tate. Bimbos. Well, except for Roxie. I like her. Anyway, don’t you think all these things are connected? Shouldn’t we explore these connections so that our children don’t suffer the way we did?”

  At the moment, the only connection Tate wants to make is the naked kind, the only suffering in his pants—which are, disappointingly, still on his body. Roxie’s knee begins to bob up and down, and he knows he can’t keep her waiting; Roxie is perpetual motion personified. Thirty seconds longer and Roxie’s knees will bob her right out the door.

  “Glynn, I have to go, okay? We’ll talk when I come get the kids. Or at the beach house this weekend.” Or never. The twelfth of never. How’s that look for you?

  “I didn’t call to talk about therapy. Your son bit Joey, that’s why I called.”

  Tate squeezes his eyes shut. “Boys hit each other.”

  “Bit. As in bite. As in teeth,” Glynn says. “This has really got to stop. You shouldn’t be begging me to watch your kids when you’re supposed to be spending time with them. You shouldn’t be on a date right now. Ryan shouldn’t be biting people. There’s a problem here. You have a problem.”

  Another glance at Roxie. “I hear you, Glynn. Really. And I promise we’ll discuss it later.”

  There’s silence on the line, then: “Fine.” Before she hangs up, she adds, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  Ten minutes later, he’s cupping Roxie’s pointed elfin chin in one hand and using his other to trace her clavicles. Roxie has delicious clavicles, one slightly lower than the other. He rubs the thin skin between them as if making a wish. For a moment, he almost wishes that she could come with him to the beach house. Roxie would look amazing in a bathing suit. Marilyn Monroe, all soft skin and dimpled elbows.

  “The dog’s watching,” Roxie-Marilyn says, pulling away from him.

  At first he thinks it’s one of those off-kilter Roxie jokes, the kind that don’t make much sense but are sort of funny because she won’t stop making them. He doesn’t have a dog. He smiles and leans in to kiss her.

  “Really, Tate, the dog’s watching. That dog next door.” She gestures to the basement window, where a rectangular vent is open in the center of the glass blocks.

  And there he is. Small, white, wiry haired. Black nose, black eyes, gnashing teeth bared. For once, he isn’t barking. He’s too busy staring. And breathing weird panty dog breaths.

  “Great. A doggie voyeur.” Tate shrugs and inches closer to Roxie. “Ignore him.”

  “I can’t.” Roxie looks at her watch. “Besides, I have to go.”

  He wants to stamp his foot like a child. “Why? It’s only nine.”

  “Liv’s out with her new boyfriend. I don’t want them to come home to an empty house.”

  Tate gets it but pretends he doesn’t. “And?”

  Roxie smooths her hair and tugs at the hem of her blouse. “Tate, you have a teenage daughter. You know what I’m saying. I don’t really need to make it so easy for them to hook up, do I?”

  Tate doesn’t tell Roxie that the top two buttons of her blouse are unbuttoned, because he’s still hoping that he might unbutton the blouse all the way. He reaches out and curls his arm around her waist. “Hooking up sounds like an excellent idea.” Actually, it’s the whole idea, the reason he brought Roxie into the basement in the first place. It’s cool down here, and dark, and the red couch is the pullout kind.

  Roxie submits to a few minutes more of kissing, sighs in his ear when he puts a hand on her breast, but then pulls away again. “Sorry, Tate. I can’t relax with that dog staring at me. And I really do have to go.” She gets up from the couch and gathers her purse and shoes. “You’re not mad, are you?”

  “No,” he says, though he’s exasperated. Roxie is sexy but flighty, too often running off to her bitchy daughter, or to the university library, or to her “job” as a counselor on a suicide hot line. And if she isn’t running off, she’s questioning her role in the universe and the meaning of life and the meaning of meaning so much that he gets too annoyed and distracted to pull out the couch.

  Next time, he thinks, he’ll pull out the couch first.

  But he sees those lovely clavicles peeking out of the top of her shirt and gives it one last try. He presses his lips to the base of her neck, sliding his fingers around her rib cage.

  “I won’t be seeing you for a week,” he says.

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “My dad’s. He’s the one who wanted the trip.”

  Tate sees that Roxie wants to say, You could have asked me to come with you, or, I’ve never met your parents. But she doesn’t. She’s given up on such things. Instead, she says: “Can’t blame Daddy for your whole life.” She squirms in his Pepe LePew arms, trying to get free.

  The trip from O’Hare Airport to Surf City, New Jersey, which should have taken a grand total of five hours—including the flight and the drive to the beach—takes twelve instead, due to storms, crew problems, and strong winds (which Tate hears as “strong whims”). Tate spends the whole flight trapped next to a crazy man, who, between loud air phone calls, rocks in his seat, weeps, and prays in a mystery language. Toward the end of the flight, the attendant barks at Tate for having his tray table down when he wasn’t supposed to. “Okay,” Tate mutters like a teenager, “that’s fair.”

  “Where have you been?” his father wants to know when Tate and the kids drag themselves into the house at nine P.M. Tate’s father is deeply tanned, but his normally silver hair seems thinner, whiter. He’s holding a glass of clear amber liquid.

  “Where do you think we’ve been?” Tate says, setting the suitcases on the floor. There are at least four hundred suitcases.

  “If I knew where you’ve been,” says Tate’s father, “I wouldn’t ask. What happened?”

  Tate grunts. “Various natural and unnatural disasters,” he says. “Strong whims.”

  Ryan slumps into the nearest chair. “Daddy had to sit next to a crazy guy. And then they made him put his table up.”

  “Who?” says Tate’s father. “What table? The crazy man’s table?”

  “Never mind,” Tate says. “It doesn’t matter. We’re here now.”

  “Thank God,” says Ashleigh, kissing her grandfather’s cheek. “I need a drink.”

  Tate’s father starts. “Excuse me?”

  “Kidding, Grandpa,” Ashleigh says. “Cool house.”

  Technically, the house belongs to Renee, his father’s wife, who inherited it from her parents. It’s a modern affair, gray and boxy and enormous, w
ith decks on all three floors and a fourth on the roof. With his drink, Tate’s father points out the high ceilings, Italian tile floors, open staircases, private outdoor shower, Jacuzzi.

  “So, how are you doing, Dad?” Tate says after every architectural detail has been duly noted and appreciated.

  His dad takes a sip of his drink, and Tate sees that his hands are shaking and his eyes are bloodshot. “How does it look like I’m doing?” his father says.

  Well, Dad, it sort of looks like you’ve been smoking crack for a day or ten. But Tate won’t say it; he’ll leave the interventions to Glynn. “You look fine,” he says.

  His dad holds out one quaking hand and smacks Tate’s cheek lightly. “That’s it,” he says. “We’re all fine, aren’t we?”

  Like the house, Renee—Tate’s “stepmother”—is also a modern affair. After the tour of the beach house, she appears from nowhere, sweeping down the steps in a champagne-colored pajamalike outfit. The only thing missing are the jewel-studded mules; Renee’s feet are bare, the toenails painted a bright pink. There’s a thin silver ring around the second toe of her right foot.

  Tate nods a greeting. “Say hello to your grandma Renee,” he tells Ryan, nudging him toward her. She hates to be called “Grandma.” She’s only forty-nine, just four years older than Tate, and takes great pride in the fact that most people think she’s at least a decade younger.

  “Call me Renee,” she says for the thousandth time, giving Tate one of Renee’s patented Looks of Doom and Destruction. Tate rather enjoys Renee’s patented Looks of Doom and Destruction and does what he can to keep them coming. Renee detonated his parents’ marriage in nuclear fashion some twenty-nine years before, and Tate has never forgotten it, or quite forgiven it. Payback, bitch, and all that.

  “Where’s Glynn?” Tate says.

  “She’s not getting here till tomorrow morning,” Tate’s father answers, sounding relieved. Tate himself is relieved. He’d had enough of his sister a few nights ago, when he went to pick up his kids after his date with Roxie. Glynn threw open her door and began berating him as soon as he stepped onto the porch. She said that Ashleigh was too old for a baby-sitter, that this was the second time Ryan had bitten Joey, that all of this was related to their parents and possibly their parents’ parents—their grandfather had divorced their grandmother back in the 1950s. It was about time, Glynn announced, that they saw a family therapist to work it all out, connect the dots. There were so many, many dots. Dots upon dots.

  Tate stood there trying to connect the dots, trying to remember the first time Ryan had bitten Joey. He had a dim memory of someone crying, but that could have been anything. Someone was always crying somewhere. “I don’t remember Ryan biting Joey before,” he said, then followed her into the house.

  “Of course you don’t,” Glynn said. She lowered her voice to a whisper so that the kids, wherever they were, wouldn’t hear it. “You weren’t there, you idiot. You were out on a date with that woman, What’s-her-name. The one with the boobs.”

  “Actual boobs? Crazy.”

  “And now he’s bitten Joey twice. When I told him to leave Joey alone, he called me a jerk.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Tate said.

  Glynn put her hands on her hips. “What are you doing? You date all these girls, rattle around in that huge house, and you dump your kids whenever and wherever. These kids need you, Tate. Especially now that Moira’s not with Ben anymore.”

  Ben. Right. Überdad. Superstep. Not so superüber after all, since he cut out. But then, Tate didn’t have much to say on that score, since he’d cut out once, too. He felt a small abrasion of guilt, and then more guilt because he didn’t feel guilty enough. He could never feel guilty enough. But then the kids were fine, mostly. Mostly, they were fine.

  Glynn didn’t think anything was fine. Glynn talked and talked and talked: “They’re totally lost. And what did Ashleigh do to her hair?”

  After Moira told Ashleigh that she couldn’t dye her hair colors not found in nature anymore, Ashleigh had dumped a bottle of peroxide on her head. Now her hair was a peculiar shade of orangey blond usually seen only in servings of sherbet.

  “It’s better than the pink,” Tate said.

  “I liked the pink,” Glynn said. “That was interesting. This is frightening.”

  “That’s her job,” Tate said, “to frighten her parents.”

  Glynn snorted. “She hasn’t frightened you yet. But she will.”

  Renee doesn’t look frightened as much as irritated by Ashleigh’s sherbet hair, cutoff shorts, and sloppy tank top that displays the straps of her navy blue bra. “Let me show you to your room,” Renee says. “You and your brother will be staying downstairs, right by the—”

  “What?” says Ashleigh. “I’m not sharing a room with him. Let him and my dad share a room.”

  “Ashleigh,” Tate says.

  “What?”

  Tate raises a significant eyebrow at her, a gesture that seemed to hold some power when his ex-wife did it. Ashleigh raises her own brow, probably because she’s seen her mother do the same thing. “You never said anything about sharing rooms,” she says.

  “You thought we’d rent you your own hotel suite?”

  “Why not? You’re a doctor. You can afford it.”

  Though she seems to be enjoying the exchange, Renee steps in. “You can stand your brother for a few nights, Ashleigh, I’m sure. Follow me. Bring your suitcases. And don’t drag them. I don’t want any scratches on the tile. It cost my parents a fortune to fly it in from Milan.”

  “I’m not staying in a room with him,” Ashleigh announces.

  “Well, then,” Renee says, “I’m sure you’ll be very comfortable sleeping on the driveway.”

  She sweeps out of the room and down the hall, Ryan and then, after a few minutes, Ashleigh waddling haphazardly behind her like gormless ducklings.

  Tate’s dad laughs. “Renee always had a way with children.”

  In the morning, Renee makes blueberry crepes with fresh whipped cream.

  “Ryan doesn’t eat blueberries,” Tate tells her. “He doesn’t like fresh whipped cream.”

  Renee dusts sugar over a plate. “Everyone eats blueberries,” she says.

  “Ryan doesn’t.”

  Renee looks at Tate. “Everyone does.”

  At the beach, Tate buys Ryan a hot dog with mustard, which Ryan then feeds to the seagulls.

  “I’m not buying you anything else, then,” says Tate. “I don’t care how hungry you get.”

  Ryan says, “I don’t like blueberries.”

  The lifeguards watch as Ashleigh peels off her jeans and T-shirt. Underneath, she is wearing a red bikini with letters scrawled across the ass.

  “What’s that on your butt?” Tate says, too loudly.

  “Everything she wears has something on the butt,” Ryan says.

  “What are you talking about?” says Ashleigh, twisting to see. “Oh, that. It says, Dump Him.”

  Tate sticks his feet in the sand so that the tops don’t get burned. “Who’s ‘him’?”

  Ashleigh shrugs. “All of them.” She sees the lifeguards and waves.

  Tate wakes from a nap. He hasn’t been to the beach in years and remembers now how much he likes it—the crash of the waves, the fresh skin smell of the sea, the sand scratching at his toes. He switches from the blanket to a beach chair and takes in the scene. Ashleigh is talking to the lifeguards, looking up at them with one hand tented over her eyes, one arm folded underneath her breasts. Ryan builds an elaborate sand castle high up on the beach—so that the water won’t rush in and wreck it, he told his father. The water always wrecks it.

  And then he sees her, the girl. She’s not his type—too small, too tanned, and way too young—but he can’t help staring. Years ago, when Tate was an intern, he’d walked into an examination room and seen this girl, this luscious, juicy-looking girl, perched on the table, and he’d thought, Whoa. He’d immediately fought to gather himself, to cove
r his feelings with that expression of professional dispassion he’d believed he’d perfected, but it was too late. The girl had seen the look on his face, the look of whoa, and wasn’t sure how to react to it. She’d seemed both pleased and alarmed at the same time.

  The effect he has on most women, now that he’s thinking about it.

  This girl, small and tanned and way too young, flips to her stomach. She sees him watching. She glances quickly behind her, to make sure it’s her he’s admiring, then undoes the back of her lime bikini top, exposing her smooth back and the whitish sides of her breasts. She smiles as she presses her face against the towel.

  She doesn’t look the least bit alarmed.

  Glynn and his nephew, Joey, are at the beach house when Tate and the kids return from the ocean.

  “Where’s your husband?” Tate says.

  “Oh, don’t remind me,” says Glynn.

  “George had to go to Africa,” Joey offers.

  “Alabama,” Glynn says.

  Joey shrugs. Africa, Alabama, same difference.

  “What’s in Alabama?” Ashleigh pronounces “Alabama” the way other people say “Antarctica.”