Man of My Dreams

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  She should do jumping jacks, Hannah thinks, right now—twenty-five of them, or fifty. But instead there’s the block of cheddar cheese sitting in the refrigerator, the crisp and salty crackers in the cupboard. She eats them standing by the sink until she feels gross and leaves the house.

  Her aunt’s street dead-ends onto a park, on the far side of which is a public pool. Hannah gets within twenty yards of the pool’s fence before turning around. She sits at a dilapidated picnic table and pages through the magazine again, though she has by now read every article several times. She was planning to work as a candy striper this summer in Philadelphia, and she could do it at the hospital where Elizabeth is a nurse if she knew how long she was staying. But she has no idea. She has talked on the phone to Allison and her mother, and nothing at home appears to have changed: They are still staying with Aunt Polly and Uncle Tom, her mother still will not return home. What’s weirdest, in a way, is picturing her father in the house alone at night; it’s hard to imagine him angry without them. It must be like watching a game show by yourself, how calling out the answers feels silly and pointless. What is fury without witnesses? Where’s the tension minus an audience to wonder what you’ll do next?

  A guy wearing jeans and a white tank top is walking toward Hannah. She looks down, pretending to read.

  Soon he’s standing right there; he has walked all the way over to her. “You got a light?” he says.

  She looks up and shakes her head. The guy is maybe eighteen, a few inches taller than she is, with glinting blondish hair so short it’s almost shaved, a wispy mustache, squinty blue eyes, puffy lips, and well-defined arm muscles. Where did he come from? He is holding an unlit cigarette between two fingers.

  “You don’t smoke, right?” he says. “It causes cancer.”

  “I don’t smoke,” she says.

  He looks at her—he seems to be removing something from his front teeth with his tongue—then he says, “How old are you?”

  She hesitates; she turned fourteen two months ago. “Sixteen,” she says.

  “You like motorcycles?”

  “I don’t know.” How did she enter into this conversation? Is she in danger? She must be, at least a little.

  “I’m fixing up a motorcycle at my buddy’s.” The guy gestures with his right shoulder, but it’s hard to know what direction he means.

  “I have to go,” Hannah says, and she stands, lifting one leg and then the other over the picnic bench. She begins to walk away, then glances back. The guy is still standing there.

  “What’s your name?” he asks.

  “Hannah,” she says, and immediately wishes she had told him something better: Genevieve, perhaps, or Veronica.

  AT A SLUMBER party when she was nine, Hannah learned a joke wherein whatever the joke teller said, the other person had to respond, “Rubber balls and liquor.”

  When her father picked her up from the party on Sunday morning, she decided to try it out on him. He seemed distracted—he was flipping between radio stations—but went along with it. It felt important to tell him in the car, when it was just the two of them, because Hannah doubted her mother would find it funny. But her father had a good sense of humor. When she couldn’t fall asleep on the weekend, she sometimes got to stay up with him in the den and watch Saturday Night Live, and he brought her ginger ale while her mother and Allison slept. At these times she would watch the lights of the television flickering on his profile and feel proud that he laughed when the TV audience laughed—it made him seem part of a world beyond their family.

  In the car, Hannah asked, “What do you eat for breakfast?”

  “Rubber balls and liquor,” her father said. He switched lanes.

  “What do you eat for lunch?”

  “Rubber balls and liquor.”

  “What do you buy at the store?”

  “Rubber balls and liquor.”

  “What do you—” She paused. “What do you keep in the trunk of your car?”

  “Rubber balls and liquor.”

  “What—” Hannah could hear her voice thickening in anticipation, how the urge to laugh—already!—nearly prevented her from finishing the question. “What do you do to your wife at night?”

  The car was silent. Slowly, her father turned his head to look at her. “Do you have any idea what that means?” he asked.

  Hannah was silent.

  “Do you know what balls are?”

  Hannah shook her head.

  “They’re testicles. They’re next to a man’s penis. Women don’t have balls.”

  Hannah looked out her window. Boobs. That’s what she’d thought balls were.

  “So the joke makes no sense. Rub her balls? Do you see why that doesn’t make sense?”

  Hannah nodded. She wanted to be out of the car, away from the site of this embarrassing error.

  Her father reached out and turned up the radio. They did not speak for the rest of the ride home.

  In the driveway, he said to her, “Women who are ugly try to be funny. They think it compensates. But you’ll be pretty, like Mom. You won’t need to be funny.”

  WHEN ELIZABETH GETS home from work, as soon as Rory hears her key in the lock, he runs around to the far side of the couch and crouches, his hair poking up visibly. “Hey there, Hannah,” Elizabeth says, and Hannah points behind the couch.

  “You know what I feel like?” Elizabeth says loudly. She’s wearing pink scrubs and a macaroni necklace Rory made at school last week. “I feel like a swim. But I wish I knew where Rory was, because I bet he’d like to go.”

  Rory’s hair twitches.

  “We’ll have to leave without him,” Elizabeth says. “Unless I can find him before—”

  Then Rory bursts out of hiding, flinging his arms skyward. “Here’s Rory,” he cries. “Here’s Rory!” He runs around the couch and throws himself against his mother. When she catches him, they both fall sideways on the cushions, Elizabeth pressing Rory down and repeatedly kissing his cheeks and nose. “Here’s my boy,” she says. “Here’s my big handsome boy.” Rory squeals and writhes beneath her.

  At the pool, Elizabeth and Hannah sit side by side on white plastic reclining chairs. Elizabeth’s bathing suit turns out to be brown, and around the stomach, there is a loose bunching to the material that Hannah sneaks looks at several times before she understands. But it would be impolite to ask the question directly, so instead she says, “Did you just get that suit?”

  “Are you kidding?” Elizabeth says. “I’ve had this since I was pregnant with Rory.”

  So it is a maternity suit. Elizabeth cannot be pregnant, however; shortly after Rory’s birth, she got her tubes tied (that was the expression Hannah heard her parents use, causing her to picture Elizabeth’s reproductive organs as sausage links knotted up).

  Rory is in the shallow end of the pool. Elizabeth watches him with one hand pressed to her forehead, shielding her eyes from the late-afternoon sun. He does not seem to be playing with the other children, Hannah notices, but stands against a wall wearing inflatable floating devices on his upper arms though the water comes only to his waist. He watches a group of four or five children, all smaller than he is, who splash at one another. Hannah feels an urge to get into the pool with Rory, but she is not wearing a bathing suit. In fact, she told Elizabeth that she doesn’t own one, which is a lie. She has a brand-new bathing suit—her mother purchased it for her at Macy’s just before Hannah left Philadelphia, as if she were going on vacation—but Hannah doesn’t feel like wearing it in front of all these people.

  And Elizabeth hasn’t said, Of course you have a bathing suit! Everyone has a bathing suit! Nor has she said, We’ll go to the mall and buy one for you.

  “How are your movie stars?” Elizabeth asks. “Not long till Julia’s big day.”

  She’s right—the wedding is this Friday.

  “We’ve got to get cracking on our party,” Elizabeth says. “Remind me Thursday to pick up cake mix after work, or maybe we should splurge and b
uy petits fours at the bakery.”

  “What are petits fours?”

  “Are you kidding me? With your fancy parents, you don’t know what petits fours are? They’re little cakes, which I probably haven’t eaten since my deb party.”

  “You were a debutante?”

  “What, I don’t exude fine breeding?”

  “No, I meant—” Hannah starts, but Elizabeth cuts her off.

  “I’m just teasing. Being a deb was horrible. We were presented at some museum, and our dads walked us up a long carpet so we could curtsy in front of this old aristocratic fart. And I was just sure I would trip. I wanted to throw up the whole time.”

  “Did your parents make you do it?”

  “Mom didn’t really care, but my dad was very socially ambitious. He was the one who thought it mattered. And you know your grandpa had a temper, too, right?” Elizabeth is acting purposely casual, Hannah thinks; she’s sniffing Hannah out. “But I probably shouldn’t blame my parents for all my misery,” Elizabeth continues. “I made everything much harder by being so self-conscious. When I think back on how self-conscious I was, I think, Jesus, I wasted a lot of time.”

  “What were you self-conscious about?”

  “Oh, everything. The way I looked. How dumb I was. Here your dad goes to Penn and then to Yale Law, and meanwhile I’m muddling through Temple. But then I decided to do nursing, I got a job, I met Darrach, who’s the cat’s pajamas. Do you see Rory, by the way?”

  “He’s behind those two girls.” Hannah points across the cement. There is cement everywhere around the pool, as if it’s in the middle of a sidewalk. At her parents’ country club, the pool is set in flagstone. Also, you have to pay three dollars just to get in here, at the snack bar you use cash instead of signing your family’s name, and you must bring your own towels. The whole place seems slightly unclean, and though it is a humid evening, Hannah isn’t sorry she lied about not having a bathing suit. “How did you and Darrach meet?” she asks.

  “You don’t know this story? Oh, you’ll love it. I’m living in a house with my wacky friends—one guy calls himself Panda and makes stained-glass ornaments that he drives around the country and sells in the parking lots at concerts. I’ve gotten my first job, and one of my patients is this funny old man who takes a shine to me. He has pancreatic cancer, and when he dies, it turns out he’s left me a chunk of money. I think it was about five thousand dollars, which today would be maybe eight thousand. At first I’m sure I won’t get to keep it. Some long-lost relative will crawl out of the woodwork. But the lawyers do their thing, and no relative comes forward. The money really is mine.”

  “That’s amazing,” Hannah says.

  “If I were smart like your father, I’d have put it in the bank. But what I do instead is I give some to a cancer charity, ’cause I feel all guilty, and I take the rest and throw a party. I can’t convey to you how out of character this was for me. I’d always been so shy and insecure, but I just said to hell with it, and I told everyone I knew and my housemates told everyone they knew and we hired a band to play out in the backyard. It was August, and we had torches and tons of food and beer, and hundreds of people came. Everyone was dancing and sweating, and it was just a great party. And this tall, skinny Irish fellow who’s absolutely the sexiest man I’ve ever seen shows up with his friend. The Irish fellow says to me, ‘You must be Rachel.’ I say, ‘Who the hell is Rachel?’ He says, ‘Rachel, the girl giving the party.’ It turns out he and his friend—his friend was Mitch Haferey, who’s now Rory’s godfather—are at the wrong party. They were supposed to be one street over, but they heard the music and came to our house without checking the address. Three months later, Darrach and I were married.”

  “And now you live happily ever after.”

  “Well, I’m not saying what we did was smart. We probably rushed things, but we were lucky. Also, we weren’t exactly babes in the woods. I was twenty-seven by then, and Darrach was thirty-two.”

  “Julia Roberts is twenty-three.”

  “Oh, good Lord. She’s a child.”

  “She’s only four years younger than you were!” Hannah says. Twenty-three is certainly not a child: When you are twenty-three, you are finished with college (Julia Roberts actually didn’t go—she left Smyrna for Hollywood at the age of seventeen, the day after she graduated from high school). You have a job and probably a car, you can drink alcohol, you live somewhere without your parents.

  “Oh!” says Elizabeth. “Look who’s paying us a visit.” Rory is standing by Elizabeth’s chair, his teeth chattering behind bluish lips, his body shivering. His narrow shoulders fold in; his chest is very white, his nipples dime-sized and peach. Elizabeth wraps Rory in a towel and pulls him onto her reclining chair, and when Hannah can tell the smother-and-kiss routine is about to start, she stands. The routine is cute, but a little different here in public.

  “I think I’ll go back to the house,” she says. “I need to call my sister.”

  “You don’t want to wait and get a ride?” Elizabeth says. “We’ll leave soon.”

  Hannah shakes her head. “I could use the exercise.”

  THIS IS WHAT getting married means: Once, at least one man loved you; you were the person he loved most in the world. But what do you do to get a man to love you like that? Are you pursued, or do you pursue him? Julia Roberts’s wedding will take place at Twentieth Century Fox’s Soundstage 14. Already, it has been decorated to look like a garden.

  WHEN HANNAH TRIES to call her sister in Philadelphia, it is her cousin Fig who answers the phone. Fig is exactly Hannah’s age, and she is Hannah’s classmate in school; they have spent much of their lives together, which is not the same as actually liking each other. “Allison isn’t here,” Fig says. “Call back in an hour.”

  “Will you give her a message?”

  “I’m leaving to meet Tina Cherchis at the mall. Would I look good with a double pierce?”

  “Are you allowed to?”

  “If I wear my hair down, they probably won’t even notice.”

  There’s a silence.

  “My mom thinks your dad is a maniac,” Fig says.

  “That isn’t true. I’m sure your mom is just trying to make my mom feel better. Are people at school asking about my mono?”

  “No.” There’s a clicking noise, and Fig says, “Someone is on the other line. Just call back later tonight and Allison will be here.” She hangs up.

  HANNAH’S WORST MEMORY—not the episode of her father’s greatest anger but the episode that makes Hannah saddest to think of—is a time when she was ten and Allison was thirteen and they were going with their father to pick up a pizza. The pizza place was about three miles from their house, owned by two Iranian brothers whose wives and young children were often behind the counter.

  It was a Sunday night, and Hannah’s mother had stayed at home to set the table. Also, it had been planned in advance that for dessert Hannah and Allison would get to have vanilla ice cream with a strawberry sundae sauce, which Hannah’s mother had been talked into buying that afternoon at the grocery store.

  In the car, they came to an intersection, and Hannah’s father braked for the red light. Just after the light changed to green, a guy who looked like a college student approached the crosswalk, and Allison reached out and touched their father’s upper arm. “You see him, right?” Allison said, then gestured to the pedestrian to go ahead.

  Immediately—their father bit his lip in a particular way—Hannah could tell that he was furious. Also, even though Hannah could see only the back of her sister’s head, she could feel that Allison was oblivious to this fury. But not for long. After the pedestrian crossed, their father roared through the intersection and jerked the car to the side of the road. He turned to face Allison. “Don’t you ever interfere with the driver like that again,” he said. “What you did back there was stupid and dangerous.”

  “I wanted to make sure you saw him,” Allison said quietly.

  “It’s not yo
ur business to make sure of anything!” their father thundered. “You don’t tell the pedestrian if he can walk or not. I want to hear an apology from you, and I want to hear it now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  For several seconds, he glared at Allison. Lowering his voice, though it still simmered with anger, he said, “We’ll just go home tonight. You girls can have pizza some other time when you decide to behave yourselves.”

  “Dad, she said she was sorry,” Hannah said from the backseat, and he whirled around.

  “When I need your input, Hannah, I’ll ask for it.”

  After that, none of them talked.

  At home they filed silently into the front hall, and their mother called from the kitchen, “Do I smell pizza?” then came out to greet them. Their father brushed past her and stormed into the den. The really bad part was explaining to her what had happened, observing her face as she grasped that the evening had turned. Plenty of other evenings had turned—the why and how were only variations on a theme—but their mother had usually been present for the turning. To have to tell her about it—it was awful. She wouldn’t let Allison and Hannah find something in the refrigerator to eat because she wanted them to wait while she tried to coax their father out of the den (which Hannah knew wouldn’t happen) and made offers to go and pick up the pizza herself (which Hannah knew he wouldn’t let her do). After about forty minutes, their mother told them to make sandwiches and carry them up to their rooms. She and their father were going to have dinner at a restaurant, and he didn’t want to see Hannah or Allison downstairs.

  Hannah did not cry at all that night, but sometimes now, thinking of the table her mother had set, the blue plates, the striped napkins in their rings, and thinking of the brief segment of time after they weren’t going to eat pizza together but before their mother knew they weren’t, when she was still getting ready—that particular sadness of preparing for an ordinary, pleasant thing that doesn’t happen is almost unbearable. Soon after her parents left the house, the phone rang, and when Hannah answered, a man’s voice said, “It is Kamal calling about your pizza. I think it is getting cold and you want to come get it.”