I'm Not Julia Roberts (16 page)

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 cover 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.”

“Not us,” Glynn says. “It’s a good thing, too, because there aren’t any beaches there.” She eyes Ryan. “And there won’t be any biting
here,
will there?” When Ryan doesn’t respond, when he lifts his sandy boogie board and strokes it like a dog, Glynn pinches her brother.

“Ryan,” Tate says. “No biting, all right?”

Ryan rolls his eyes and mumbles, which Tate takes as a “yes.” It’s enough for Joey, who immediately asks to borrow Ryan’s boogie board when they go to the beach the next day.

Glynn pinches Tate again.

“What?” says Tate.

“I’ve almost got Mom talked into family therapy.”

“No, you don’t,” Tate says.

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t. She told me when I last talked to her that she’d go to family therapy when they pry her gun from her cold, dead hands.”

“I think it would help us all understand this legacy,” Glynn says.

“Please tell me that ‘legacy’ means someone old and wealthy kicked and left us all a billion dollars.”

“The legacy of divorce.”

“The legacy of divorce is the legacy of divorce,” Tate intones.

“That’s exactly it.”

“I know, you’ve told me. Over and over and over. And if you already know it, why do we need to go to a therapist?”

“We’re not normal people, Tate. It’s pretty clear to me that we’re not normal people. The evidence is all around us.” She flaps her hand at the screen door that opens out onto one of the numerous decks. Their father sleeps on a lounge chair, an empty glass on the table next to him. “We call a man who isn’t our dad ‘Dad.’”

“Glynn,” he says, “he raised us.”

“I know,” Glynn says. “But it’s not normal. I’m tired of explaining it. ‘My dad, who’s technically my stepfather but not really, because he’s not married to my mom anymore, but he’s still my dad, because he adopted me when I was five. No, I don’t see my real dad, who isn’t my dad anymore, because the other one is.’ Who else has to say those kinds of things? Who else has to live like that? It’s insane.”

“You don’t have to explain it to anyone, you know,” says Tate. “You could just call Dad ‘Dad’ and leave out all the details.”

“But they’re important. Our pasts help to make us what we are.”

Our fats help to make what we fart.
“I know you’re upset that Derek is marrying Stacey, but you’ll get over it. I promise.”

“Stacey has lips bigger than my whole head. In case of an emergency landing, you could use Stacey’s lips as flotation devices.”

“You will get over it,” Tate says firmly. “And if you want, you could buy flotation lips, too. Ask Renee where to get some.”

Glynn wrings her hands the way Ashleigh used to when she was a baby and wanted someone to pick her up. “Derek invited me to the wedding. They’re getting married at some estate on Lake Michigan. All the guests have to wear white for some insane reason. I’ll look like a barge. A big white ex-barge.”

“You don’t have to go,” he says.

“I have to go. You know I do.”

“Okay. Do you want me to prescribe something for you?”

Glynn glares at him. “What are you implying?”

Renee stalks into the room, holding two small towels with tassels on the edges. “These are decorative towels,” she announces.

Everyone turns to look at her.

“There are stacks and stacks of towels in the linen closet. I don’t want anyone using the decorative towels anymore.”

Ashleigh picks at her fingernails. “Why not?”

“Because,” Renee says, eyes widening, “they’re
decorative.
”

“Why did you hang them in the bathroom if you don’t want anyone to use them?” says Ryan, looking up from his boogie board.

Renee stares. “Is that sand all over the floor?”

Ryan stares back. “We’re at the
beach.
Beaches have
sand.
”

Tate’s mother calls his cell phone just as he’s finished lathering up with sunscreen.

“So,” she says, “how is it? A castle on the edge of the ocean?”

“It’s on the bay side, actually. A few blocks from the beach.”

“Really?” Tate’s mother says. “Slumming, are they?”

“Slumming with Italian tile,” Tate tells her.

“Ah,” she says. “Are you allowed to walk on it?”

“Sometimes. But Renee does like to follow everyone around with the broom.”

“Renee with a broom! I can’t believe it! She might get blisters on her delicate fingers! She might ruin her manicure!”

“There are emergency numbers on the fridge just in case,” Tate says. “Plus, I am a medical professional, you know.”

“Hmm,” his mother says. “How are the kids? Are they having a good time?”

“The boys are fighting over the boogie board, and Ashleigh is flirting with the lifeguards. They torment Renee by kicking sand around the place and refusing to eat her food.”

“So they are having fun,” she says.

“I think so.”

“Are you?”

“Glynn won’t come to the beach because she’s worried about melanoma. And she keeps talking about family therapy.”

“Oh, God! That girl! She always did read too many books. I told her that she should have been a lawyer. No, she wanted to be a librarian.”

“She’s just upset about Derek getting married again,” Tate says.

“Well,” says his mother, “I can understand that. But instead of therapy she ought to think about beheading all the roses in the garden. That’s what I did on the day your father married Renee.”

“Therapeutic.”

“Speaking of therapy, how’s your father’s drinking?”

“Let’s not talk about that, Mom. Let’s talk about something else. How’s Len?” Len is his mother’s third husband. The first, Tate’s “real” father, she refers to as her “practice husband.” The second, Tate’s adoptive father, she refers to as “that bastard.” Or sometimes “schmuckface.” “Putz-a-doodle-do.”

“Len,” his mother says. “Len is Len.”

“What’s he up to these days?”

“Who?”

“
Len,
Mom.”

“Oh. Let’s see. He found a three-headed ant on eBay, and he’s been bidding on it for the last twelve hours. We’re up to fifty-six dollars. For an ant.”

Tate takes a deep breath, filling up his cheeks and exhaling like a balloon. “Okay. How are you?”

“How do you think I am? My children are off at Renee’s fantasy castle by the sea, and I’m here with
Len.
”

A flash of lime green catches Tate’s eye. The girl’s back, spreading out her rainbow-striped towel. She sees Tate and smiles.

“I keep looking for Mr. Darcy and all I find are a bunch of Mr. Collinses,” his mother says. “Jane Austen has completely ruined marriage for any woman born after 1800. Someone ought to have arrested her for suggesting that men have inner lives, that men have something in the center. There’s nothing but nougat in there. No fudge, no caramel.” She laughs, delighted by her own analogy. “And you can forget about nuts.”

There’s another girl with her, this one in pink. Green nudges Pink with a tanned toe, and Pink begins to giggle.

“I don’t mean you, Tate. When am I going to meet this woman you’re dating? What’s her name? Trixie? Was her mother a truck stop waitress, by any chance?”

Green hooks a finger into the top of her bathing suit and flashes a nipple.

“Tate?” says his mother. “Hello, Tate?”

For dinner, Renee makes softshell crabs with wild rice. Ryan says they look like giant bugs in piles of dirt. Joey sees what’s for supper and starts to cry.

After the meal, or rather, after the tantrums, Tate loads Ryan, Joey, and Ashleigh into the car and drives to the nearest ice-cream shop, Scoopy Doo. Ryan demands the biggest banana split—four scoops of ice cream, two bananas, three types of sauce.

“You wouldn’t need such a big ice cream if you had eaten your food,” Tate says.

Ryan’s expression says his father has gone crazy if he expects a boy to eat giant bugs in dirt piles. Joey shyly asks for a Super Scoopy sundae.

Ashleigh doesn’t want ice cream. She wants to talk. While the boys chase each other around the parking lot, she asks to live with Tate. “Mom doesn’t understand me.”

Tate is momentarily speechless. Then he says: “I don’t understand you, either.”

“Yes,” she says, “but it’s okay if you don’t understand me. You’re not supposed to.”

“I’m not?”

“No, you’re my father. You’re supposed to misunderstand everything. You’re supposed to hate my boyfriends. You’re supposed to threaten to shoot them or cut them into little pieces or something.”

He does not want to talk about this. “Speaking of boyfriends, how’s Kevin?”

“Devin. With a D. And you’re not listening! You’re supposed to hate my clothes and disapprove of my choices.”

“What choices are we talking about here?”

“My
choices,
” she says again.

He thinks of his house, where he has only the barest essentials: a couch, a chair, a coffee table, a plasma TV. After the divorce, his ex, Moira, kept the house and Tate moved into his own. He doesn’t know why he bought a house; he never liked the upkeep a house required, never kept up with upkeep. But Moira said it might be a good idea that the kids have their own rooms in his place, and he thought it was a good idea, and everyone he talked to said, “Oh, what a good idea.” But the kids had slept in those rooms only a handful of times, and they never really decorated them. And sometimes, after he’s had a glass of red wine or two or three, he can admit to himself that it was a bad idea to buy a big house, a bad idea to buy any kind of house. Why does he need a house? He doesn’t need a house. Every woman he brings there says the same thing: “This could use a woman’s touch.” And they’re right, of course, women are often right about a lot of things, but he doesn’t want a woman’s touch. At least, not that kind of touch. They should feel free to touch
other
things, though, the women. Sometimes, if it’s the right woman, he says as much.

Roxie hasn’t said anything about a “woman’s touch.” He likes that about her. She doesn’t seem to notice the mess, the lack of decoration, the Ramada Inn-ness of his whole enterprise. Plus, there’s her name. That strange throwback of a name. It makes him feel young, it makes him feel he’s living in an Elvis movie or maybe a dream.

But sometimes he feels Roxie staring at him when she thinks he isn’t looking, sizing him up, and he wonders when she will start pushing, asking him if their relationship is “going somewhere.” It seems to Tate that all women think they should be going somewhere. Tate wants to know where all the women think they are going.

“So can I live with you?” Ashleigh tosses the sherbet hair from her shoulder. “I really want to get my belly button pierced.”

Glynn finally decides to come to the beach. She wears a large floppy hat, a bathing suit with a skirt, and a white film of SPF 10,000. She opens up a book, but Tate knows she’s not going to read it. She blurts, “What do you remember about our father? The real one, I mean.”

“What do I remember about him?” Tate doesn’t remember much and doesn’t care to remember. Why would he want to remember anything about a man who walked out on him and his sister and then kept walking? But his sister is looking at him as if she’s dying of thirst. “Uh . . . he was tall. And he had a lot of hair all over the place, like a crazy man. He had crazy man’s hair.”

“Crazy man’s hair. I must have inherited that. What else?”

“He collected stamps. I remember him hunched over those books, pasting the stamps into them. He tried to get me interested, but I didn’t care about that stuff.”

“Did he play with you?”

Tate shrugs. “He taught me to ride my bike. What do you remember about him? Anything?”

Glynn folds the page in her book. “Not much. I know that he was a smoker.”

“What?” says Tate. “No, he wasn’t.”

“Sure he was,” Glynn says. “You don’t remember those skinny cigars? They stank up the room.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“We used to fight over who got to blow out the match, so he’d always light two matches, one for each of us.”

Tate shakes his head at his sister. “You must be thinking of someone else. He wasn’t a smoker.”