The Man of My Dreams

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “Nobody here ordered a pizza,” Hannah told him.

  WHILE THEY WERE at the pool, Darrach made lasagna for dinner. There is fresh spinach in it, and lots of basil.

  “My compliments to the chef,” Elizabeth says. “Do you remember, Darrach, how Hannah’s parents helped us get ready for our wedding? I was thinking about this earlier.”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “It was wild.” Elizabeth shakes her head. “We got married at the house where I lived instead of in a church, and my parents refused to come.”

  “That’s awful,” Hannah says.

  “Mom was kicking herself for years afterward. She felt worse about the whole thing than I did. Your dad wasn’t exactly a fan of what he perceived as my flaky lifestyle, either, but he and your mom drove here from Philly the day of the wedding. They arrived mid-afternoon, and they’d brought about a million pounds of shrimp, frozen in coolers in the backseat. The reception was supposed to be very casual, but your parents wanted it to seem nice. We were literally peeling shrimp when the justice of the peace arrived, and your mom was worried that Darrach and I would be smelly at our own wedding.”

  “Can I be excused?” Rory asks.

  “One more bite,” Darrach says. Rory forks a large piece of lasagna into his mouth and leaps up from the table, still chewing. “Good enough,” Darrach says, and Rory darts into the living room and turns on the television.

  “It was all very frenzied,” Elizabeth says, “but fun.”

  “And no one smelled like seafood,” Darrach says. “The bride smelled, as she always does, like roses.”

  “See?” Elizabeth says. “A charmer, right? How could I resist?”

  Darrach and Elizabeth look at each other, and Hannah is both embarrassed to be in the middle of all this gloppy affection and intrigued by it. Do people really live so peacefully and treat each other so kindly? It’s impressive, and yet their lives must lack direction and purpose. At home, she knows her purpose. Whenever her father is in the house—in the morning before he goes to the office, after work, on the weekends—his mood dictates what they can talk about, or if they can talk at all, or which rooms they can enter. To live with a person who might at any moment spin out of control makes everything so clear: Your goal is to not instigate, and if you are successful, avoidance is its own reward. The things other people want, what they chase after and think they’re entitled to—possessions or entertainment or, say, fairness—who cares? These are extraneous. All you are trying to do is prolong the periods between outbursts or, if this proves impossible, to conceal these outbursts from the rest of the world.

  Hannah goes to the bathroom and is on her way back to the kitchen when she hears Darrach say, “Off to Louisiana tomorrow, alas.”

  “A trucker’s work is never through,” Elizabeth says.

  “But wouldn’t it be so much better,” Darrach says as Hannah steps into the kitchen, “if I stayed here and we could fuck like bunnies?” The way he pronounces fuck, it rhymes with book.

  Simultaneously, they turn to look at Hannah.

  “Well.” Elizabeth, still sitting at the table, smiles sheepishly. “That was elegantly put.”

  “Pardon me.” Darrach, who is standing at the sink, bows his head toward Hannah.

  “I’ll put Rory to bed,” Hannah announces.

  “I’ll help,” Elizabeth says. As she passes Darrach, she pats him lightly on the butt and shakes her head. In the living room, she says to Hannah, “Have we traumatized you? Are you about to puke?”

  Hannah laughs. “It’s okay. Whatever.”

  In fact, the idea of Elizabeth and Darrach having sex is fairly disgusting. Hannah thinks of Darrach’s brown teeth and unruly eyebrows and little ponytail, and then she thinks of him naked, with an erection, standing tall and thin and pale in their bedroom. This is a turn-on to Elizabeth? She wants him to touch her? And Darrach, for that matter, doesn’t mind Elizabeth’s wide ass, or how her hair is threaded with gray, pushed back this evening by a red bandanna? Is it like they’ve struck a bargain—I’ll be attracted to you if you’ll be attracted to me—or are they really attracted to each other? How can they be?

  HANNAH’S FAVORITE IMAGE of her father is this one: After college, he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to work in a Honduran orphanage for two years. It was a difficult experience overall; he’d thought he would be teaching English, but more often they had him chopping potatoes for the cook, an older woman responsible for all three meals every day of the week for 150 boys. The poverty was unimaginable. The oldest boys were twelve and would plead with Hannah’s father to take them back to the United States. In September 1972, shortly before her father was set to return home, he and a bunch of boys awakened in the middle of the night and gathered in the dining room to listen to the radio broadcast of Mark Spitz swimming the 100-meter butterfly in the Munich Summer Olympics. The radio was small, with poor reception. Spitz had already broken world records and won gold medals for the 200-meter butterfly and the 200-meter freestyle, and when he broke another record—swimming the race in 54.27 seconds—all the boys turned toward Hannah’s father and began clapping and cheering. “Not because I was me,” he explained to her. “But because I was American.” Yet she believed it was at least partly because he was him: because he was strong and competent, an adult man. That was her default assumption of men; her assumption of women was that they were a little wimpy.

  So how exactly did her father go from a man cheered for by Honduran orphans to a man who would, nineteen years later, exile his own family from their house? Typically, when her mother has angered her father—she has prepared chicken when he said steak, she has neglected to pick up his shirts at the dry cleaner after promising in the morning—he has her sleep in the guest room; she sleeps in the twin bed on the left. This happens perhaps once a month, for perhaps three nights in a row, and it means an elevated level of tension. It doesn’t always become an actual outbreak or toxic spill—sometimes it’s just the threat. Her father ignores her mother during these periods, even though they all still eat dinner together, and he talks in an aggressively sociable way to Allison and Hannah. Her mother cries a lot. Before bed, her mother goes to the master bedroom to make a case for her return; she pleads and whimpers. When Hannah was younger, she’d sometimes stand there, too, crying along with her mother. She’d shout, “Please, Daddy! Let her sleep with you!” Her father would snap, “Caitlin, get her away from the door. Get her out of here.” Or he’d say, “I wouldn’t try to turn the children against me, if you care about this family.” Her mother would whisper, “Go away, Hannah. You’re not helping.” During all of this, the TV in the bedroom would be turned up high, adding to the confusion. A few years ago, Hannah quit joining her mother outside the bedroom and started going to Allison’s room, but after a time or two, she could see in her sister’s face that she didn’t like Hannah there because she was a reminder of what was happening. Now Hannah stays in her own room. She puts on headphones and reads magazines.

  The night of the exile, around eleven-thirty, Hannah awoke to hear them fighting. Her mother hadn’t been sleeping in the guest room on the prior nights, but now Hannah’s father wanted her to move. She was refusing. Not firmly but by begging. “But I’m already in bed,” Hannah could hear her saying. “I’m so tired. Please, Douglas.”

  Then it changed to he wanted her out of the house. He didn’t care where she went—that was her problem. He said he was sick and tired of her lack of respect for him, given all he did for this family. She should take the girls, too, who appreciated him even less than she did. “It’s your choice,” he said. “You tell them they need to get out of here, or I’ll wake them up myself.” Then her mother was calling out Allison’s and Hannah’s names, telling them to hurry, saying it didn’t matter that they weren’t dressed. That was on Thursday. The next morning Hannah didn’t go to school—her mother took her shopping at Macy’s so she’d have clothes—and on Saturday she boarded the Greyhound to Pittsburgh.


  But this is the thing: Hannah suspects her mother and Allison are actually enjoying themselves. The last time she spoke to her sister, Allison said, “But how are you? Are Elizabeth and Darrach being nice?” Before Hannah could respond, Allison said, “Fig, turn the radio down! I can barely hear Hannah.” Maybe it’s like when her father goes on business trips, how abruptly relaxed everything becomes. Dinner is at five P.M. or at nine o’clock; they eat cheese and crackers and nothing else, or a pan of Rice Krispie treats divided three ways, which they consume standing up by the stove; all three of them watch television together, instead of retreating to separate rooms. The lack of tension feels like a trick, and in a way, because it’s temporary, it is. But maybe while staying with their cousins, Hannah’s mother has realized their lives could be like this all the time. Which is not a wrong or unreasonable conclusion, and yet—if Hannah and Allison and their parents all live in the same house, they’re still a family. They seem perfectly normal, possibly enviable: athletic father, kind and attractive mother, pretty older sister who’s just been elected vice president of the student council, and younger sister with not much to recommend her yet, it’s true, but maybe, Hannah thinks, there’ll turn out to be something special about her. Maybe in high school, she’ll join debate and soon she’ll be attending national championships in Washington, D.C., using words like incontrovertible. The life they live together in their house isn’t that bad, and it doesn’t look like it’s bad at all, and even if their cousins on both sides are in on their secret now, well, those are only their cousins. It’s not like regular people know.

  HANNAH IS SUPPOSED to meet Rory when his bus comes home. Usually, the person who meets him is Mrs. Janofsky, who’s sixty-eight and lives across the street, but Elizabeth says Rory hates staying at Mrs. Janofsky’s house, and if Hannah doesn’t mind, it’s really a huge favor for everyone. This might be true, or Elizabeth might be trying to give Hannah something to do.

  An hour before the bus is due—she has been watching the clock—she takes her second shower of the day, brushes her teeth, and applies deodorant not only below her arms but also at the V of her upper thighs, just to be safe. She ties a blue ribbon around her ponytail, decides it looks fussy, removes it, and takes out the rubber band as well. She can’t be certain that the guy will be in the park, but this is approximately the time he was there before.

  He is. He’s sitting on a picnic table—not the one where she was last time, but in the same general area. Immediately, she wonders, what is it he does in the park? Is he a drug dealer? When they’re twenty feet apart, they make eye contact, and she looks down and veers left. “Hey,” he calls. “Where you going?” He smiles. “Come over here.”

  When she gets to the picnic table, he gestures to the space beside him, but she remains standing. She crosses one leg in front of the other and folds her arms over her chest.

  He says, “You was swimming, right? Can I see your swimsuit?”

  This was a bad idea.

  “I bet it looks good,” he says. “You ain’t too skinny. A lot of girls is too skinny.”

  It’s because her hair is wet—that must be why he thinks she was swimming. She is simultaneously alarmed, insulted, and flattered; a warmth is spreading in her stomach. What if she were wearing a swimsuit, and what if she actually showed it to him? Not here, but if he followed her over to the grove of trees. Then what would he do to her? Surely he’d try something. But also—this knowledge gnaws at her—she probably doesn’t look, underneath her clothes, like what he’s expecting. Her soft belly, the stubble at the top of her thighs, just below her underwear (she’s heard other girls say in the locker room after gym class that they shave there every day, but she forgets a lot). He doesn’t necessarily want to see what he thinks he wants to see.

  “I can’t show you right now,” she says.

  “You think I’m being dirty? I ain’t being dirty. I’ll show you something,” he says, “and you don’t even have to show me nothing.”

  If she is raped right now, or strangled, will her father understand that it’s his fault? Her heart pounds.

  The guy laughs. “It ain’t that,” he says. “I can tell what you’re thinking.” Then—they are five feet apart—he pulls his tank top over his head. His chest, like his arms, is muscular; his shoulders are burned, and his skin, where his shirt covered it, is paler. He stands, turns, and leans forward, his hands against the picnic table.

  This is what it is: a tattoo. It’s a huge tattoo that takes up most of his back, a bald eagle with wings spread wide, head in profile, a ferocious glaring eye, and an open beak with a purposefully protruding tongue. Its talons are poised to grip—what? A scampering mouse or possibly patriotism itself. It’s the biggest tattoo she’s ever seen, the only one she’s seen this close. The rest of his back is hairless and broken out in places. Most visibly, it’s broken out at the corners of his shoulders, after the tattoo stops.

  “Does it hurt?” she asks.

  “It hurt to get it, but it don’t hurt now.”

  “I think it’s cool,” she says.

  After a pause, almost shyly, he says, “You want, you can touch it.”

  Until the moment of contact, the tip of her index finger against the skin on his back, she’s not sure she’s really going to. Then she runs her finger over the eagle’s yellow talons and black feathers and beady red eye. The Chinese symbol that means strength of heart, she thinks. She runs her finger back up, and the guy says, “That feels soft.” Her hand is just below his neck when she notices that her watch reads ten past three.

  “Oh my God,” she says. “My cousin!”

  Later, she doesn’t remember lifting her hand from his back, she doesn’t remember what else she tells him; she is already running across the park. Rory’s bus should have gotten in at three, and she was with the guy for only a few minutes, but it took her so long to get dressed that it must have been almost three by the time she started talking to him. If something has happened to Rory, she will have to kill herself. That she could ruin Elizabeth’s family—it’s unthinkable. She has always been a bystander in family destruction, never realizing she herself possessed the capacity to inflict it.

  Rory isn’t at the bus stop. Less than a block up, he is standing in front of his house, in the middle of the yard. He’s looking around, wearing the backpack that’s wider than his back. A few nights ago, at Rory’s request, Elizabeth sewed an owl patch on the outermost pocket.

  “I’m so sorry,” Hannah says. She is breathless. “Rory, I’m so glad to see you.”

  “You were supposed to meet me at the bus.”

  “I know. That’s why I said I’m sorry. I just was running late, but now I’m here.”

  “I don’t like you,” Rory says, and Hannah feels first surprised and then humiliated. He is perfectly justified. Why would he like her?

  She unlocks the front door, and they walk inside the house. “How about if we get ice cream at Sackey’s?” Hannah says. “Would that taste good?”

  “We have ice cream here,” Rory says.

  “I just thought if you wanted a different kind.”

  “I want Mom’s ice cream.”

  She fixes him a bowl of chocolate, then one for herself, though he eats in front of the television and she stays in the kitchen. She is getting increasingly upset, weirdly upset. Something horrible could have happened because of her. But also, what would the guy have done if she hadn’t had to get Rory? Maybe something could have unfolded that felt good, maybe the beginning of her life. Yet she’s selfish to be thinking this way. Elizabeth and Darrach have opened their home to Hannah, and Hannah has repaid them by neglecting their son. There are resolutions she needs to make, she thinks, steps that must be taken so that she becomes a very different sort of person. She’s not positive what the steps are, but surely there are several.

  She keeps walking into the living room, imagining she hears Elizabeth’s car, but when she looks out the front window, it’s nothing, a phantom engine. Then
, finally, Elizabeth is really there. Hannah can’t even wait for her to get inside. She runs out as Elizabeth is unloading groceries from the trunk, and Elizabeth looks up and says, “Hey there, Hannah, you want to give me a hand?” But Hannah has begun to cry; the tears are spilling down her face. “Oh, no,” Elizabeth says. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I saw on TV at the hospital, but I didn’t know if you’d heard. Poor Julia Roberts, huh?”

  Through her sobbing, Hannah says, “What did you see?”

  “Just the quick snippet on one of the networks. If it’s true he cheated on her, I say she’s right to call it off.”

  “Kiefer cheated on her?” This is when Hannah’s tears become a flood; she can’t see, she almost can’t breathe.

  “Oh, sweetie, I don’t know any more than you do.” Elizabeth’s arm is around Hannah’s shoulders. She has guided them both to the stoop to sit. “Probably nobody knows for sure but the two of them.”

  When Hannah can speak, she says, “Why would Kiefer cheat on Julia?”

  “Well, again, maybe it’s not even true. But we have to remember celebrities are real people, with their own sets of problems. They live in the same world as the rest of us.”

  “But they were a good couple,” Hannah says, and a new gush of tears surges forth. “I could tell.”

  Elizabeth pulls Hannah even closer, so one side of Hannah’s face is pressed to Elizabeth’s breasts. “They’re no different from anyone else,” Elizabeth says. “Julia Roberts goes to bed without brushing her teeth. I’m not saying every night, but sometimes. She probably picks her nose. All celebrities do—they feel sad, they feel jealous, they fight with each other. And Hannah, marriage is so hard. I know there’s this idea that it’s glass slippers and wedding cake, but it’s the hardest thing in the world.”