The Secret Life of Prince Charming

by Deb Caletti

  It’s weird how much of a relationship isn’t even really about him or you, but about some other, alternate world where you’re working out your garbage from childhood. Love, as some walk through a mental junkyard, where you look for the broken carburetor that maybe will make your personal car run. Whichever parent you had the most trouble with, watch out—you’ll be looking for that type, in some version or another. You’ve got to be so clear about what you’re playing out. That, I know. Distant mother—bingo, you’re suddenly into some unavailable guy with a girlfriend. Or you’re going for the one who smothers you, because you’re trying to get what you didn’t have. Understand your own story, is the point. My sister and I were magnets for impossible-to-please narcissists. I just walk around with the invisible target on my chest. Egomaniacs inquire within. And no wonder—look at Mary Louise and Barry, and then at Mary Louise’s father, Rocky Siler. And look at Otto, that dick, and Mom. Otto, 50 percent of my genetic material, strutting around and talking with his notice-me boom. Telling everyone how he used to drive a freaking Rolls Royce. He’d flirt with a lamppost.

  I liked Hank Peters for his superiority and then dumped him because he was always acting superior.

  Everyone was in bed when I got home, or I thought so at first. I went into the dark kitchen to get something to drink and gave a little screech when I realized someone was sitting at the kitchen table. It was Aunt Annie, just sitting there, drinking red wine out of a juice glass, the bottle sitting in front of her.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I thought you were home already. I thought everyone was in bed. I just got back from my date with Quentin.”

  “Must have been great,” I said. “Drinking away the memories?”

  “No, no…,” she said. “It was great. Really great.” She was wearing a sparkly top and jeans, but her eyes looked tired. The curls she’d made in her hair were tired too, relaxing back to their old normal straight selves.

  “Yeah?”

  “He’s got the greatest eyes. Did you see him in the magazine?” Northwest Homes For Sale magazine. Quentin Ferrill was one of those real estate agents who felt that their picture would send the clients flocking. I nodded. Annie had left the magazine open to his page, him and the six bulky, high-end homes he was selling, some photographed at sunset. “He’s really into art, did I tell you? He used to teach at the university level, but didn’t like academia. Real estate gives him more freedom. But those are the kinds of words he uses—academia.”

  “Smart, then.”

  “God, beyond that. I can feel like such an idiot, compared. He’s always mentioning certain painters…The Fauvre Style…”

  “Do you like that?” I was still trying to understand the half-empty bottle.

  “I love that. I love everything about him. And he’s different than anyone else I’ve been with. He is. Not so full of himself. More vulnerable. I just don’t know what he feels about me. I mean, he asks me out, right? He looks into my eyes? But then I took his hand and he pulled away. What’s with that? I don’t get it. I don’t get what’s going on.”

  Ivar snored underneath the table at Aunt Annie’s feet. “It’s early,” I said. “Maybe he’s just…sorting out his feelings.”

  “Yeah,” Aunt Annie said.

  “I’m the wrong person to ask.”

  Aunt Annie didn’t think so. Or maybe she was just in that place where you need someone, anyone, to tell you what you need to hear. “He must like me if he asks me out, right?”

  “He wouldn’t do it if he didn’t like you,” I agreed.

  “I hate this,” she said. “It was the best night I’ve ever had, but I hate this.”

  I went to the refrigerator to get some juice. Mom had worked more on her list after she’d come home. It was now stuck to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a watermelon.

  He’s a loner. No one has ever understood him, one line read. He’s jealous and watchful, read another.

  And then, the last line on the page: You have a sense that something’s wrong but can’t quite figure out what it is.

  I went upstairs. The last thing I wanted then was to stop and think if my mother might be right.

  Chapter Four

  The reporter’s name was Hannah something, and Dad didn’t seem to mind that she was practically the same age as Frances Lee, Dad’s daughter with his first wife, Joelle. We’d only met Frances Lee once, when she and Joelle came all the way from Orcas Island, Washington, to meet Dad and us at an IHOP to discuss college. Frances Lee was wild haired and wore a bracelet of braided jute around one wrist. She had a tattoo of a mermaid on her ankle. Frances Lee seemed to me to be the visual equivalent of driving too fast—something you feared and wanted at the same time. It was strange to have someone like Frances Lee in your life but not in your life. She was my half sister, my father’s daughter, and yet, to me, she was only a rumor. I picked up pieces of Frances Lee and tried to make a whole. Frances Lee was in trouble again. Frances Lee was just like her mother. Frances Lee gave Dad a figure of an upraised wooden middle finger that she made in woodshop class in high school. Frances Lee was a secret box in an attic that you weren’t allowed to go near.

  At IHOP that day, Joelle seemed surprised we were there, and the talk was all about how Dad should contribute to Frances Lee’s education. What I remember is Joelle’s batik dress and strawberry pancakes and Frances Lee slamming down a syrup container when Dad joked that Frances Lee studying child psychology was like a bank robber studying law. I also remember Sprout knocking over her water glass and Dad taking a long time to figure out who owed what on the check while Joelle kept repeating, “Just give it to me,” wiggling her fingers in his direction and blowing long sighs of air out through pursed lips, like ladies do in childbirth.

  This reporter couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, Frances Lee’s age. Dad told us earlier that Hannah something was coming, and that she worked for the Portland Courier, which he said with a roll of his eyes. From his description, the Portland Courier was like our Nine Mile Falls Press, which specialized in the sports statistics for our high school athletes and updates from the Salmon Fest Planning Committee. Occasionally, they’d toss in a hard-hitting story on EDUCATION or POVERTY or THE ELECTION.

  “You must be really talented,” Dad said, “to have a job with a paper already. Quinn, can you get Hannah a drink? What, Perrier? Lemonade? Pepsi? Margarita?” He laughed.

  Hannah laughed too, gathered her shiny blond hair in one hand and let it drop down again over her shoulder. “Lemonade? Thanks. Well, you know, my dad owns the paper. True story.”

  “Oh sure,” Dad said. “Sure. But you should use the contacts you have, right? That’s smart. That’s only using your head. Perrier for me, as usual.” He looked at me and smiled.

  “You wouldn’t believe how many people give me shit for it,” she said. “Stuff,” she corrected herself.

  “Jealousy,” Dad said. “Look, you’ve got beauty and success. People are threatened by that. Let me show you around.” Hannah Reporter stopped scratching her heel with the back of her toe and looked at Dad as if she was surprised to finally find someone who understood her. She kept her eyes fixed on him as they went into the living room.

  “Cool room,” I heard her say. “Very cool.”

  “I’m a cool guy,” he said, and she laughed.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “I got that when I was in Africa,” he said.

  I knew she was looking at the red mask, the one with the words “Olivia Thornton” written on a piece of masking tape on the back. Maybe she was even holding the mask in her hands. The wrongness of that made my stomach fall, the way wrongness does for most people. There had to be some explanation. Maybe he’d gone to Africa with Olivia Thornton.

  “Wow,” I heard Hannah Reporter say again. She must have excelled on the vocabulary portion of the SAT.

  “Some of my most prized possessions are in this room,” Dad said.

  Sprout sat at the
kitchen table, pen scratching on paper, writing a short story. She did this for fun sometimes—she’d get an idea and scribble away for hours. “God,” she said. She’d been listening, too. She looked my way, stuck her finger down her throat, as Dad led Hannah out the French doors to the back deck.

  “I love your hair,” Hannah said to him.

  “It’s only been cut once, when I was two,” he said.

  “Really?” Hannah said. I wondered if her dad would have thought it was okay for her to come to an interview wearing shorts.

  “No, but you can write that if you want.” Dad laughed.

  They headed outside, sat at the umbrella table that looked over the river. “‘You can write that if you want. Ha-ha-ha-ha,’” Sprout said.

  “Be nice,” I said.

  “He had his eyes glued to her boobs,” Sprout said.

  “Okay, that’s not fair. That shirt’s so tight, they’re all anyone would look at.”

  “Shut up so I can concentrate,” Sprout said.

  God, she got weird over at Dad’s house. I twisted a tray of ice, clinked cubes into tall glasses, the ice crackling and popping when I poured in the drinks. I carried the glasses outside, set them on the table.

  “Quinn’s going to Yale,” Dad said.

  “No way,” Hannah said.

  “I’m not actually sure where I’m going yet,” I said.

  “You must be really smart,” Hannah said. She stirred her ice with the tip of her finger.

  Dad held up his hands in front of himself, tipped his head down, as if bowing to applause. “Naturally…,” he said.

  “The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Hannah said.

  “Acorn,” I said.

  Dad sipped his drink. “So, questions?” he said.

  I went back inside. “Still staring at her boobs?” Sprout asked.

  “Your attitude sucks,” I said.

  “Your attitude sucks,” Sprout said.

  “You don’t even try,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t have to try in a family,” Sprout said. “You should just be able to be.”

  Sprout hunched back over her paper, one arm over her work like she was protecting it from cheaters. We did have to try, she didn’t get that, because everything was still so new. You can’t just expect things to be natural and easy when they’re new. And Dad was still pretty new to us.

  He came back into our lives mainly because of my eighth-grade heritage project, the last big deal of middle school. You had to make a family tree, pick a relative to study, trace his or her history, splay it all out on a trifold board, which would earn you “creativity points.” Then, you had to give a presentation in front of judges (meaning Mrs. Wilkowski, the vice principal; Mrs. Lincoln, Kyle Lincoln’s mom and Booster Club president; and Hailey Richard’s dad, Brian Richards, who was some big shot at Cingular Wireless and who brought us all Cingular Wireless pins that read Please Turn On your phones!).

  There’s something sort of sadistic and voyeuristic about teachers making you do family trees. Family trees should be private matters. No one would ask you to show your family’s medical records or list of dirty secrets, and yet it’s all there, divorces and marriages and babies, the most private stuff. Or maybe it only seems that way to those of us whose trees have broken branches and sawed-off limbs.

  I could study Gram, Mom suggested. I could study Gram’s parents. Her father was a builder with hunched, uncertain shoulders who died young, and her mother, short and frail as a lace hankie, later married a man who drank. That’s what we knew of him: He was A Man Who Drank. The rest of that tree was as fuzzy as old photographs, not worthy of memory or ink in journals. But Dad’s family—even what I knew already was more vibrant and plot filled than any of the plodding folks in Mom’s family. There was his Armenian grandfather, who sold silks and then came across a fortune buried under a plum tree; his grandmother, who had a sixth sense so right on that she was called to service by a Russian czar on the imminent birth of his daughter. His father, the diamond merchant; his mother, who hopelessly loved them both. There were roots and branches there, and the branches were filled with flowers that would turn to lush, ripe fruit. He would have boxes of photographs, I was sure, snippets of songs, his father’s ancient shoes, gold coins, love letters written in pen strokes delicate as spider’s legs.

  It was a reminder, is what it was. Of everything I could have had but didn’t.

  “This is crazy,” Mom said. “How much of that do you think is even true? You want to open all that back up again? Because of a school project?”

  But even Mom knew it was more than a school project. The need for a mom and a dad, for their love and approval and presence, it’s such a deep need. Old and deep, like the need of oxygen for blood, blood for a heart. And a year later, the need was still present, even after my project on Gram’s father, the builder Stewart Ewing, was completed. I’d used the only photograph we had of him and his wife, and I’d painted the Transcontinental Railroad (he crossed the country while laboring on it) across the back of the board, earning me a B, a mercy grade next to the solid A that Celia Harris got for her project on her great-grandfather, George W. Ferris, inventor of the Ferris wheel. She’d included a miniature battery-operated version of his invention, snitched from some Christmas scene—it was set in plastic snow, with two tiny plastic people below in earmuffs and scarves, mouths open as if caroling.

  I called Dad after a week of fighting with Mom and three days of near silence and cool politeness, which had finally disintegrated into a night of us both sobbing and hugging on my bed. I don’t want you to get hurt, Mom said. I don’t want you to get more hurt. I wasn’t sure if she was talking about me or her. But she agreed. If I needed this, she needed this for me. Gram said she was going to have a parade now that the war was over, throw around some Styrofoam packing peanuts in lieu of confetti.

  These were the things I remembered about Dad when he lived with us all those years ago: eating crab on newspapers at the kitchen table. Playing with his shaving foam. Riding next to him in a car, his legs hairy in shorts. Maybe a bike? Him cleaning gravel from my knees? Or was that Mom? Beauty and the Beast wrapping paper, his hands around a shovel as he dug something in the yard. It made you wonder (and worry), your memory. Like maybe you’d be ninety years old and all you’d recall of your life would be the hem of a skirt and beach sand in the cracks of a book and a birthday cake with frosting roses and the chicken pox.

  But when I saw the real him again after almost seven years’ absence, his presence came back to me. His smell, his voice, the light in his eyes—they were all familiar even though I hadn’t remembered them. They were there again, and the feeling of that, its importance, its loss not lost anymore, was something I felt so far inside me that it was as if I felt it to the very edges of my cells, to the farthest reaches of their earliest memories. It was a connection a heritage project was supposed to make me feel but could never really make me feel, because this was not about cardboard and glue and Magic Marker but about the way you know things and recognize the people who do mean the most and will mean the most to you in your life. Even his shirt, the shirt he was wearing that day, bought by Brie the week before—as he hugged me against him, it seemed I had felt that fabric for years.

  He told me then, Sprout and me, and Brie, too, who sat and held his hand in her lap, that he never wanted to stop seeing us. He never wanted this separation. That it had just gotten too hard, there was too much fighting. It had been the best thing for us, for him to back out. Did we remember coming over to Abigail’s house every weekend? The back and forth? We had had some great times, he said. I had nodded and smiled but didn’t really remember the great times. Weirdly, I remembered only the feeling of a strange place, my father in a strange place, and signs of Abigail Renfrew. Red geraniums, when my mother hated red geraniums (she said they stank); Abigail Renfrew’s personal items on the bathroom counter (a blue box of Tampax, a pink bottle of Nair), when Mom kept hers tucked in drawers and
used a razor. Watching a National Geographic movie about tornados while sitting on Abigail Renfrew’s woven couch with cat hair on it, and Abigail Renfrew asking if we’d enjoyed it as much as she had. The way Abigail Renfrew’s name felt when my Mom said it when we were back home again. As if it were something you’d pick up off the floor using a Kleenex.

  Brie’s eyes had been shiny with tears. She patted the place next to her own on Dad’s leather couch there, in the house on the river, and Sprout sat beside her and looked up at her white-gold hair. Dad had given up because he had thought it was best for us, he’d said, and I believed him. Dad even had a term for what had happened: “Parental alienation.”

  “Parental alienation” meant that Mom had turned us against him, and not that he had turned us against him. It was a campaign, he had said. He didn’t want to say anything bad about Mom, but it got so relentless that one time Sprout wouldn’t even get in the car to go over. She had clung to Mom like Dad was some Nazi ax murderer—did we remember that?

  Brie shook her head in that way people do when something is sad, sad. A shame. Something preventable, if not for the poor behavior of human beings. But the truth rises, Dad had said. See? The truth rises. He had pulled me close. He told us how perfect and special and wanted we were. Wanted—I felt it, too. He started to cry. Brie got up and made tea. She delivered him a cup and kissed the top of his head. The kiss was like a period at the end of a sentence. A paragraph completed, or a story. A good ending.

  I watched Dad and the reporter, Hannah, outside. Dad leaned in toward her, on his elbows. She was teasing him, it looked like; she waggled her finger in his direction as if he were a naughty child. He grabbed her finger, pretended he was going to take a big bite. He raised his voice dramatically, “What big teeth you have, Grandmother,” he said, and they both laughed.