The Man of My Dreams (2 page)

HANNAH TURNS OFF
the television—having it on in the daytime reminds her of being sick—and picks up the magazine from the day before. She is in the house alone: Elizabeth is at work, and Rory is at school, and Darrach, who is leaving for another run tomorrow, is at the hardware store.

It would be good to be famous, Hannah thinks as she turns the page. Not for the reasons people imagine—the money and glamour—but for the insulation. How could you ever be lonely or bored if you were a celebrity? There wouldn’t be time, because you’d never even be by yourself. You’d be getting shuttled between people and appointments, reading scripts, being fitted for the beaded silver gown you’d wear to the next awards ceremony, doing stomach crunches while your trainer Enrique loomed over you and barked encouragement. You’d have an entourage, people would vie to talk to you. Reporters would want to know your New Year’s resolution or your favorite snack; they’d care about this information.

Julia Roberts’s parents divorced when she was four—her father, Walter, was a vacuum cleaner salesman, and her mother, Betty, a church secretary—and then her father died of cancer when she was nine, which must have been terrible unless it was a relief. Regardless, Julia’s childhood was a long time ago, in Smyrna, Georgia. Now she’s twenty-three, living in California, which is a place Hannah has never been but imagines as windy and bright, full of tall people and shiny cars and a sky of endless blue.

It is a little after one o’clock, and Hannah ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich an hour ago, but she starts thinking of food she knows to be in the kitchen: Darrach’s vegetarian enchiladas left over from last night, chocolate-chip ice cream. She is gaining weight, which is something she’d been doing prior to her arrival in Pittsburgh. Since the beginning of eighth grade, she has gained eleven pounds; she now has hips, and the bra she wears is a displeasing and once-unimaginable 36C. Also, abruptly, a stranger’s nose has appeared on her face. She didn’t realize it until she saw her most recent class picture: her light brown hair and pale skin, her blue eyes, and there it was, an extra knob of flesh at the end of her nose when before she’d always had her mother’s small, upturned model. Hannah’s mother is a petite woman, partial to headbands, who maintains blond highlights and plays doubles tennis every morning, summer or winter, with Aunt Polly and two other women. She got braces at the age of thirty-eight, then had them removed at the age of forty—last year—but in fact she’d always possessed the personality of an attractive adult woman with braces: privileged yet apologetic, well meaning but hard to take that seriously. She has never remarked on Hannah’s weight per se, but she’ll sometimes make overly enthusiastic comments about, for instance, celery. In these moments she seems to Hannah less critical than protective, tentatively trying to prevent her daughter from taking the wrong path.

Is
Hannah becoming ugly? If so, it seems like the worst thing that could happen; she is letting down her family and, possibly, boys and men everywhere. Hannah knows this both from TV and from boys’ and men’s eyes. You can
see
how what they want the most is beauty. Not in a chauvinistic way, not even as something they can act on. Just instinctively, to look at and enjoy. It’s what they expect, and who they expect it from most of all is teenage girls. When you’re older, like Elizabeth, it’s all right to get heavy, but when you’re a teenager, being beautiful or at least cute is your responsibility. Say the words
sixteen-year-old girl
to any group of males, eleven-year-olds, fifty-year-olds, and they will leer maybe a lot or maybe a little or maybe they’ll try not to leer. But they will be envisioning the sixteen-year-old’s smooth tan legs, her high breasts and long hair. Is expecting her beauty even their fault?

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 buy 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.”