Man of My Dreams

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  On the fourth afternoon, during a sunny interlude, the brothers—they are usually far in front—wait for Allison and Hannah, then begin to splash them with the paddles. More exactly, the brothers splash at Allison. Elliot, like Hannah, is sitting in the bow, but he angles his body so he is turned back toward Allison. As Allison shrieks and laughs, the expression on Elliot’s face becomes one of such undiluted pleasure that he looks demented. His momentary, soaring happiness is what makes Hannah suspicious. And then, that night at the campsite, Elliot goes with Allison to gather firewood, and Hannah sees them coming back along the beach. The giveaway is his relaxed but attentive posture; clearly, of anywhere in the world, here is where Elliot most wants to be.

  It is in this moment, in his worship of Allison, that Hannah almost identifies with Elliot. Watching them, she can feel in her own hand the desire to touch this girl’s wavy hair, this girl whose kindness and beauty could make your life right if you could get her to be yours. Hannah wonders if Elliot imagined that she would be another version of Allison.

  When they are finished cleaning up after dinner, Elliot and Sam announce that they’re going to explore. After they leave, Hannah walks with her bell and pepper spray to sit on a large rock that juts down to the water. The sky has a low-hanging, cottony whiteness, tinged slightly with pink, and the edges of everything are starting to darken. The Sound is flat and glassy. Allison joins her. They are silent for a long time. “It’s so beautiful I feel guilty going to sleep,” Allison says at last.

  “I bet it’ll still be here in the morning,” Hannah says.

  “You know what I mean.” Allison pauses. “Hannah, I really think you should talk to Dad. If you apologize to him, I’m sure he’ll still pay your tuition this year.”

  Ah, yes—Hannah knew it was coming. She says, “There’s no way I’m apologizing to him.”

  “Where are you going to come up with the money?”

  “I’ve already met with a guy in the financial aid office. This isn’t your problem.”

  “It kind of is. You’re stressing out Mom, too. She can’t afford to pay all your tuition herself.”

  “I didn’t ask her to. I’m taking out student loans.”

  “You think that’s appropriate? I’m sure someone from a less well-off family needs the money more than you do.”

  “A loan, Allison, not a scholarship. I’ll have to pay it back, so yes, I do think I’m entitled.”

  “Dad paid for me to get my master’s,” Allison says. “I’m sure he’d pay for you to go to grad school, too, if you let him. He’s actually an incredibly generous person.”

  “Dad’s a prick,” Hannah says. “On a different subject, does Sam know his brother has the hots for you?”

  Allison laughs. “What are you talking about?”

  Of course Allison would laugh it off. But at what point is her optimistic denial the same as shallowness? Surely it’s not just that she’s dumb. Hannah tells people (she has told Dr. Lewin) that she and her sister are close, but is this really true? Do she and Allison enjoy each other’s company, do they know even the most basic things about each other anymore?

  “Has he ever come on to you?” Hannah asks.

  “Why are you asking me this?” Allison says, which is certainly less than a denial.

  “What a slimeball,” Hannah says.

  “It was once. He tried to kiss me at a party when he was really drunk, and the next day he was mortified.”

  “Did you tell Sam?”

  “Why do you care if I did?” Allison’s voice wavers between defiance and self-pity. “Either way, you’ll just sit there and judge us.”

  Oh, how Hannah has missed the elementary-school Allison, the Allison capable of taking digs when adequately provoked!

  “You know, I used to almost feel bad for you that men hit on you all the time,” Hannah says. “I knew I should envy you, but all those guys seemed like a burden. You barely ever liked them back, but you still had to return their phone calls or let them kiss your cheek or just, like, manage their interest in this way that seemed tedious. But now I think I was wrong. You thrive on managing their interest. Why else would you have invited Elliot on this trip, knowing he likes you?”

  “That’s so unfair.”

  “Was it so Elliot could watch you and Sam frolic in nature?”

  “You can’t ever give it a rest, can you?” Allison says, and she is getting to her feet angrily and awkwardly. Her cheeks are flushed. When she’s gone, Hannah sits there in the hideous, quiet aftermath of her own hostility. But then Allison comes back. She stands in front of Hannah, her eyes narrowed. “Mom sometimes asks me if I think there’s something wrong with you. Did you know that? She says, ‘Why doesn’t Hannah have a boyfriend, why doesn’t she have more friends? Should I be worried?’ I always defend you. I say, ‘Hannah marches to the beat of her own drummer.’ But it’s not that. It’s that you’re completely stubborn and bitter. You think you have everyone figured out, all of us with our stupid little lives, and you might be right, but you’re a miserable person. You make yourself miserable, and you make the people around you miserable, too.” Allison hesitates.

  Just say it, Hannah thinks. Whatever it is.

  “The irony is,” Allison says, “you remind me of Dad.”

  IT IS THEIR last night in the backcountry. They’re on another island tonight, the third and final one (the trip is almost finished, it’s almost finished, it’s almost finished). Hannah has no idea what time it is but senses only that she has been deeply asleep, probably for several hours, when she awakens to Elliot’s weight on top of her, his hand clamped over her mouth.

  “You need to stay calm,” Elliot says. He is whispering directly into her ear, more quietly than she’s ever heard anyone whisper; it’s like he’s thinking the thoughts into her. “Something’s trying to get at our food. You can’t scream. Do you understand? I’ll take my hand away, but if you make noise, I’m putting it back.”

  Though he does not use the word, she understands—once she understands that he is not raping her—that he’s talking about the bear. Finally, as she knew it would, the bear has come.

  She nods, and he lifts his hand. The sound from outside the tent is a scratching, as against bark, and an unself-conscious huffing. The scratching stops, then begins again. Are Sam and Allison awake as well? Elliot remains on top of her. She is lying on her side in her sleeping bag, and he is out of his, propped on his arms, the center of his torso pressed to her shoulder, his abdomen against her hip, his legs straddling her. Is he staying in this posture because he doesn’t want to risk even the slippery noise of climbing off? Because, in the event of the bear’s approach to the tent, he is protecting her? Or because it feels nice, and surprisingly normal, for them to be entwined like this? The pressure of his body is not unpleasant at all.

  Elliot’s breath carries onions from dinner and would probably strike her as disgusting if she were confronted by it at a party. In this moment, it is not disgusting. She wonders if they will die. She thinks of the exhibit in the Anchorage airport: The bear shows its anger by growling and snapping its teeth, and the fur on its neck stands up as its ears flatten. When threatened, a bear may charge. And yet she is almost glad that the bear came; it means she wasn’t paranoid.

  Then the bear crosses between the moon and the tent’s triangular screen, and she sees it incompletely but definitively—its dark, silver-tipped fur and the hump of muscle on its shoulder. It’s a grizzly; a grizzly is outside the tent. It is on all fours (she’d been picturing it standing), less than ten feet away. How can they not die, so close to a grizzly bear? Maybe the reason Elliot has remained in this posture is that it doesn’t matter what he does right now—he could grab her breast or spit in her eye, and no one will ever find out. Her heart thuds against her chest. A wave of unhappiness sweeps over her, and she feels her features contort; she starts to cry. A stopped-up sniffle escapes, and Elliot immediately collapses his arms so his face, too, is pressed to hers, his nose
under her chin, his forehead at her ear. He shakes his head. He wraps his arms around the top of her head, pinning and suppressing her. Against his face, Hannah breathes the word Allison. He shakes his head again. If he were anyone else, anyone whose own sibling was not in the other tent, she wouldn’t trust him. Somewhere deep in her backpack is a key ring—how abruptly your keys become irrelevant out of your home city—and attached to the key ring is a whistle, which perhaps would scare off the bear if she blew it. It would be something to try, if she didn’t trust Elliot about staying still.

  And then the bear leaves. Like a person—she can feel this—it is glancing vaguely around, checking that there’s nothing to attend to before it departs. But its focus is already gone from here, directed at the next thing. It is leaving, and then it has left. Neither she nor Elliot moves at all. How long do they not move? Maybe six minutes. It is Sam who breaks the silence. He calls out, “Holy fucking shit!”

  “Are you okay, Hannah?” Allison says. “You guys are fine, right? We saw it near your tent.”

  “I’m okay,” Hannah calls back. “Elliot made me stay quiet.”

  “I want to come give you a hug,” Allison says. “But I think I’ll wait until morning.”

  “Did we not hang the food high enough?” Elliot calls to Sam. He says this in an ordinary voice while still on top of Hannah. His breath has started to bother her.

  “I did it the same as the other nights,” Sam says. “I don’t think it got anything. I think it was just curious.”

  “Or trying to be friendly,” Elliot says dryly. Underneath him, Hannah laughs—not because the comment is particularly funny, but because of her bottled-up energy. They all are willing the moment to turn, and it is turning, it’s starting to contain the mood it will contain later, as a story they tell to other people.

  “It didn’t want to disappoint Hannah,” Sam says. “It knew she’d feel gypped if we didn’t get at least one sighting.”

  “It wasn’t even a real bear,” Allison says. “It was that guy from the store in Anchorage, dressed up in a bear suit. Otherwise, he was afraid you’d demand a refund for your pepper spray.”

  Now they all are laughing. Also, Elliot has an erection. If she were a different person, not a virgin, this is when Hannah would—what? Unzip her sleeping bag, pull off her sports bra? To get things rolling, she’d probably need to do very little. Plus, there would be the giddy aspect of trying to keep Sam and Allison from hearing. On the plane home, she’ll kick herself for not going with the moment. Elliot was hot, they were in Alaska, and for Christ’s sake, they’d just escaped being mauled by a grizzly. The fact that things don’t shake out for her with guys—who, really, does she have to blame but herself? At critical moments, she can’t seem to summon the appropriate energy. But if she keeps thinking of this particular episode, thinks of it in any depth rather than breezing by it as part of a larger list, she must admit that if she had the situation to relive, she would make the same decision. She was tired. He had bad breath. There was a rock beneath her right thigh, poking into her through the bottom of the tent, her sleeping pad, and her sleeping bag. It would have been awkward the next day, or maybe for years to come; she’d wonder obsessively if he had been able to tell she was inexperienced, if he’d thought she was a horrible kisser. And besides, her sister was the one he really wanted. Just because he’d settle for her, just because the proximity of the bear had made him horny—it didn’t seem like enough of a reason.

  She shifts as if to lie on her stomach, and he rolls off her.

  IN THE MORNING, there is the requisite debriefing, the repeated reenactment of the bear’s trajectory through their campsite. They pack up for the last time and paddle out. In the afternoon, they will meet the captain on the same beach where he first delivered them.

  After lunch, the sky drops and darkens. “Hannah,” Allison says, and abruptly, Hannah is waiting tensely, every strand of hair on her head electrified. “I know things went wrong in a big way on this trip, right off the bat,” Allison says. “I wish I could fix them, or maybe we never should have all come here. But you have to accept that I’m marrying Sam. He’s honestly a good person, and he likes you. And if you refuse to make an effort, things will be unpleasant for everyone.”

  “I’m not disagreeing with you,” Hannah says. “But can you just explain why you’re marrying him? I swear I’m not being a bitch. I’m genuinely curious. I want to understand what qualities he has that you like so much.”

  “I’m marrying him because he makes me happy,” Allison says, and all at once it begins to rain. Real rain, not drizzle. Hannah can’t entirely turn around—she can turn her head so she’s facing the side and Allison is in her peripheral vision, but that’s it. “I feel better when I’m with him than I feel when I’m alone,” Allison adds, and because of the increasing volume of the rain, she is almost yelling. Far away—how far it’s hard to say, being on the water like this—a flash of lightning splits the sky. Hannah is not sure if Allison notices. “I know it’s wimpy,” Allison says, “but Sam takes care of me. It’s not that I don’t see any of his flaws, because I do. But I love him anyway.”

  It is pouring; raindrops bounce off Hannah’s jacket and soak her face and hair. “My glasses are steaming up,” she says. “I can barely see.”

  “Take them off. If you already can’t see, it won’t be any worse.”

  When Hannah removes them she doesn’t know what to do with them. If she puts them in one of the pockets of her raincoat, she’s afraid they’ll get crushed when they’re landing the kayaks, so finally, she slips them inside the neck of her shirt. In the rain, everything in front of her is gray and indistinct.

  “See the guys?” Allison says. “They’re heading toward that beach on the right. Just keep paddling, and I’ll steer us.”

  Hannah’s teeth are chattering, and her hands are cold and slick with water. The rain is almost solid, like sleet. She turns partway around. She says, “I don’t really think Sam’s a dick. I hope you know that.” (As if calling him a dick is the worst thing Hannah said. What she really should apologize for is I guess I just don’t see him as very special. But the sincerity of that comment makes it unerasable; it is better just to move on.) “And I know that I am like Dad in some ways. But I feel sort of like, of course I am. It’s in my genes. Isn’t it weirder that you’re not like him than that I am?”

  “You give too much attention to things that make you unhappy,” Allison says.

  No doubt she is right. And yet attending to things that make Hannah unhappy—it’s such a natural reflex. It feels so intrinsic, it feels in some ways like who she is. The unflattering observations she makes about other people, the comments that get her in trouble, aren’t these truer than small talk and thank-you notes? Worse, but truer. And underneath all the decorum, isn’t most everyone judgmental and disappointed? Or is it only certain people, and can she choose not to be one of them—can she choose this without also, like her mother, just giving in?

  They paddle through the rain, and when at last they reach the island, the brothers, who have landed already, come into the water to help. “I put up a tarp,” Sam says. After they’ve secured the second kayak, Elliot unrolls another tarp on the ground. They lie on it, all four of them flat on their backs.

  “Does anyone else have raisin fingers?” Allison asks.

  “I have raisin you-don’t-even-want-to-know,” Sam says.

  Prostrate on the tarp, sore and chilled and not making eye contact with anyone, Hannah smiles. She is, after all, no longer waiting for the bear, and they are leaving tomorrow. She pushes a clump of wet hair off her forehead and abruptly sits up. “I don’t know where my glasses are,” she says.

  “When did you last see them?” Sam asks, and Allison explains to him that Hannah took them off when it started raining.

  “Fuck,” Hannah says. She stands and pats her chest and stomach. “They must have fallen out as we were pulling in the kayak.”

  She ducks under the tarp
, back into the rain, and jogs toward the water. Where the waves hit the shore, she peers down. She kicks at the black sand and the small rocks with the toes of her rubber boots, but this makes the water murkier. She goes in deeper, stopping when the waves are just below her knee, threatening to wash over the tops of her boots.

  “Hannah. Hey, Hannah.” Allison has ventured out from under the tarp. “I’ll help you look,” she says.

  They search, shoulders and heads tipped, squinting into the water. They follow separate paths, passing sometimes as they comb over nearby sections, and don’t speak. The rain is a huge and violent whisper.

  Perhaps ten minutes pass, and Hannah knows she will not find them. But they keep looking, or at least they keep trudging through the water. She glances sometimes at Allison, a blurry figure in a green raincoat, her light curly hair straight and dark, plastered to her head. Hannah will have to be the one to give up searching; Allison won’t, by herself. “They must have washed away,” Hannah says. “It’s all right. I’ll get new ones.”

  “I feel terrible,” Allison says.

  “It was dumb of me not to put them in a pocket.”

  “Maybe we could get you glasses in Anchorage.”

  “No, I’ll be fine. Really.” And she will. Airports, optometrists—these Hannah can handle, even without all her faculties she can handle them.

  Allison squeezes Hannah’s forearm. “You can be my maid of honor,” she says. “I totally want you to. I was being ridiculous before.”

  Back under the tarp, they decide to make hot chocolate, and Sam is the one who finds Hannah’s cup for her, then washes out the oatmeal remnants from breakfast—he insists—and pours in the cocoa powder and the boiling water from the pan. “I’m nearsighted,” Hannah says. “It’s only faraway stuff I can’t see.” But he wants to wash her cup again after she’s used it, and she acquiesces with minimal protest. As she passes the cup to Sam, their fingertips touch. I give you my sister, Hannah thinks, because I have no choice. But you will never catch up to us; I will always have known her longer.