The Man of My Dreams (3 page)

“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 your 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.”

“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.