The Secret Life of Prince Charming

by Deb Caletti

  “What big boobs you have, Little Red Riding Hood,” Sprout said.

  “You’re the worst,” I said.

  “She’ll be picking us up at the train station next week,” Sprout said.

  “Impossible. She doesn’t have her driver’s license yet,” I said.

  “Good one,” Sprout said.

  “Her mom could pick us all up,” I said. I don’t know why, but I was suddenly feeling on Sprout’s side. My inner evil twin again. Anyway, we were insulting Hannah Reporter, not Dad.

  “She could drive us in her Fisher Price Cozy Coupe.”

  “We could all make it move with our feet,” I said. “Wait, here they come. Pretend we weren’t just talking about them.”

  Dad had his hand at the small of Hannah Reporter’s back, guiding her into the living room as if she might otherwise get lost.

  “What are you working on?” she asked Sprout.

  “A story,” Sprout said.

  “Charles is a wonderful writer,” Dad said. “I’m also working on a novel.”

  “Really?” Hannah said, but she didn’t write this down. “What’s your story about, sweetie?” she asked Sprout.

  “It’s about a girl spawned from the devil,” Sprout said.

  Hannah’s eyebrows went up, and her mouth opened like those dark tunnels trains go through. Sprout’s story was actually about Ivar and the neighbor’s dog, Tucker, who leave home and go on a trip. Stolen right from The Incredible Journey.

  “Cool,” Hannah said.

  Dad walked Hannah to the front door. We could hear him: “The novel’s based on my family history, told in magical realism,” he said.

  “Blah-be-blah-blah-blah,” Sprout said.

  The front door closed. He’d gone outside, where they were probably standing outside her car door. He was out there a long time.

  “For God’s sake, she’s twelve,” Sprout said.

  “He’s just being friendly,” I said.

  “If she becomes our new stepmother, I’m outta here,” Sprout said.

  FRANCES LEE GIOFRANCO:

  Before I started going out with Gavin, I met this guy, Terrence Vinnigan, who basically was just hot. Really great body. Nicest ass. Hard, round shoulders—they were like squeezing cantaloupes. I couldn’t believe he wanted to be with me. It made me feel a little insecure. I’m not exactly a workout, pump-it, gym type. Give me a pint of coffee ice cream. But Terrence went to the gym seven days a week—after school, weekends—classes. Cardio Boxing, Power-Strength Lifting, Super Big Guy Strong Man 101. He drank protein shakes and had these serious-looking vitamin bottles with brown and green labels; you know, no Flintstones Chewables like the ones me and Gavin have as a side dish to our Fruity Pebbles.

  I liked his body, I admit it, and he liked my potential. I guess he was going to shape me up too, so I could be a self-obsessed, freak-of-nature muscle mass like him. He started making these comments like, “We should start you out on little walks.” He called them “walkies,” isn’t that adorable? As if that might make actual exercise cuter and less intimidating to me. He jiggled my butt. He brought me sushi, when I hate sushi. He was one of those guys you feel you have to try hard to be equal to—as in shape as he is, as intelligent, as whatever. The kind you’re slightly uneasy around because you know that deep down, he feels you don’t measure up. Gavin—he brings me peanut butter cookies. He hates sushi too. With Gavin, I relax.

  Anyway, it all blew up in my face one day when I told Terrence I wanted to study child psychology, and he laughed and said that’s what people did who had fucked-up childhoods. It was a cliché, he said. You’re going to counsel people on how to run their lives? I said, “What do you mean by that?” And he said, “You don’t even see your own father. You have self-esteem issues.”

  And then suddenly, I realized he was right. I did have self-esteem issues. He was living, breathing, weight-lifting proof. He’d started to say things like, “Why do you wait so long before shifting into third? It’s bad for your engine.” “Why do you eat so fast?” Why do you everything, anything. And I just kept my mouth shut. He was always telling me how I felt and who I was, too. “You’re just upset because…” “You’re an overly sensitive person….” He was wrong 85 percent of the time, but all that mattered to him was his own version of me. I’d tell him how I did feel, and he’d shove it aside like he knew me better than I knew myself. It was bullshit.

  It was bullshit, and it was my dad all over again. He has a whole relationship with a you that’s not even you. It reminded me of when I was a kid, right around the sixth grade. I’d put on weight and Barry, who has always thought he was Mr. Beautiful, was on this running kick at the time. He’d lecture me about carbs and shit and how I needed to be in control of food and not let it be in control of me, and he’d take pinches of me and say things like, “What do we have here?” Thank you very much. One more way I wasn’t good enough for him. And he’d given me all this shit about what I was going to study in college too. You know, all the two times he happened to call me. He said that me studying child psychology was like an armed robber studying law.

  Anyway, I decided to tell Terrence Vinnigan to take a walk. I told him it was too bad you couldn’t go to the gym and get a new personality. And I told my self-esteem issues to take a walk too. Gavin treats me great. He’s there for me in all the ways that matter. I can be a bitch, my ass can jiggle, he loves me for who I am. You’ve got to have someone who loves your body. Who doesn’t define you, but sees you. Who loves what he sees. Who you don’t have to struggle to be good enough for. “He loves me for who I am”—a cliché, but one of the most fucking powerful clichés in the history of all clichés.

  My mom thinks it’s amazing that I found a great guy so early on. She says it wasn’t until she was over forty and hit a “I won’t take shit from anyone anymore” age that she started looking out for herself the way I do already. She’s really proud of me for that. She says, “How do you do it, my girl?” And I say, “I’m learning from your mistakes, sweetie,” and she knows I mean that in the best way possible.

  Dad worked in his office the rest of the day, and Sprout and I did homework. Later, Uncle Mike and Thomas came over to talk about the Jafarabad Brothers’ summer show, and Dad made beef curry for dinner. Dad was a really good cook, though he didn’t usually do it unless there was company over. He liked to make dishes that he could prepare right in front of guests, rather than something you shoved in an oven and forgot about. He liked to stir things up dramatically and flourish knives and juggle bottles of herbs and spices, same as he would in one of his shows.

  Everyone sat down to eat, and Dad lifted a large goblet of red wine from his place at the head of the table. “To the Jafarabad Brothers’ World Tour.”

  “The world’s gotten pretty damn small.” Uncle Mike laughed. He rubbed one eye with his fingers.

  “Lift your glass, damn it,” Dad said. “Our lives are more interesting than ninety-nine percent of the population.”

  “Barry, you’re so full of shit,” Uncle Mike said.

  “The world?” Thomas said. “Wisconsin? New Jersey?”

  I could almost feel Dad’s face change before I saw it. “Fuck you,” he said. “Fuck. You.”

  The room was suddenly quiet. Mike rubbed his thumb and index finger up and then down over the stem of his wineglass. “A joke, Barry,” he said.

  “I like New Jersey,” Thomas said. He seemed a little stunned. I felt a sort of sick shame, either for Dad or about Dad, I couldn’t tell which.

  “You could still be juggling Coke bottles in your garage, if it weren’t for me,” Dad said. He stared coldly at Thomas, and then seemed to change his mind about the whole thing. Dad looked toward Sprout and me. “All right, then. To my family,” Dad said. “Each and every one of you in this room.”

  We raised our glasses, and the weird and hollow clinks hung there in the tension of the room. Amidst the arm raising and elbows, Sprout knocked over the large bottle of Perrier in the
center of the table, sending everyone scurrying for napkins. The strained moment passed, and we ate curry and Dad made Sprout read her story about Ivar and Tucker, which earned a round of applause. The dishes were piled in the sink. “Just put them in there for the maid,” Dad said, even though we didn’t have a maid, of course. After Uncle Mike and Thomas left, there was the smell of garlic and turmeric hovering around the house like a restless ghost.

  Restless was how I felt inside too. I kept passing the living room and looking at that statue and those other objects, feeling a should I/shouldn’t I push-pull. I wanted to confront Dad, but I didn’t want to make him mad. Probably, it wasn’t my business anyway. But why did it feel very much like my business? Why did I feel like one of those art films where time was chunked up and out of order and it was only somewhere near the end that all the pieces came together in a way that made sense? I wanted to understand things, really understand them, in some way that was deep and solid, and yet my own niceness required that I keep skimming along the surface. I brushed my teeth, decided to go to bed, backspaced on that idea, and set my toothbrush down suddenly.

  I knocked on Dad’s bedroom door but there was no answer. I listened for sounds of him upstairs, but all I could hear was the technological twinkling of Sprout playing with her cell phone ringers. I walked downstairs and heard the kitchen drawer open (the Useless Gadget Drawer, as Dad called it), the sound of plastic spatulas and potato peelers and once-used candy thermometers all clattering together. The drawer shut. The water faucet went on. Dad stood at the counter in his black silk robe with a dragon on the back and poured a measuring cup of water into a bowl. The dishes in the sink had been done.

  “Chocolate craving?” I said. He was holding a telltale red box of brownie mix, head tilted back so that his eyes could see the small-for-him words of the directions.

  “You caught me,” Dad said.

  “Brownies,” I said.

  “Brownies,” he agreed, as if there may have been some dispute. He cracked an egg in with one hand. I saw that chocolate might not have been what he was actually craving—on a paper towel was a small hill of pot, which he’d stir in later, I knew. I’d seen this routine before, would sometimes also smell the burnt-grass-mat odor coming from the outside deck as he smoked, the orange rolling papers called Zig-Zag open on the counter.

  He must have felt my eyes. “Those guys always get me so uptight,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything. As part of my relentless trek along the road of good choices, I never drank or did drugs myself; honestly, I sort of looked down at those people. When I was friends with Sara Miller in the sixth grade (definitely not a good choice), we once downed a can of her brother’s beer, and I guess she liked it so much she kept it up from then on. But I think she was just one of those people who drank self-destruction in her baby bottle. You’ve got a good life and you purposefully set out to mess it up…I never got that. Maybe I just never understood the point, the way other people seemed to understand the point. Some people understood the point so well, they made it a personal credo, the law of their independent nation, but it just seemed stupid to me, and maybe even weak. Like the world was just too big and bright and real for you, and you just couldn’t take it.

  So, that Dad did this—it bothered me enough that I didn’t know what to do with it. Inside, it felt as if someone had handed me something bad I didn’t want—a switchblade, some poison in a bottle—and there it was, in my hand. The only thing I could do was to shove it in some drawer or at the bottom of a garbage can, pile other stuff over it. I didn’t say anything when he folded the drugs into the batter. But I did say something else.

  “How are you doing, Dad, with Brie gone and all?” I said. I sat down at one of the tall chairs at the counter. Folded my hands in front of me and then unfolded them. I looked like I was giving him a job interview. I looked like Mom.

  “Who?” he said. “Kidding! I’m kidding. God, you should have seen your face. Like this.” He opened his mouth and eyes wide, wide open. “I’m fine. Of course I’m fine. You can’t let any one person have that much power over you, okay, Quinn? Remember that. I didn’t fail, here. I gave her everything I could give.” He licked the spoon. “Hey, kiddo, I need to change the subject here for a minute, okay? We gotta talk about this whole college thing.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “First, can I say that I think you’re going to do great things in the world? Your intelligence, it makes you a very powerful person,” he said.

  I smiled. I liked the thought of that. I liked that he saw me that way.

  “I’ve got to tell you, though, my philosophy on this. A person’s education, well, I think they should own it, you know? Feel a sense of responsibility toward it. You see?”

  I nodded. I wasn’t sure I did.

  “It’s fine if that gets handed to you, but who cares about it then? Why do you need to work hard in school if someone just gives you a blank check? I just got to tell you, I don’t believe in that. I won’t participate in teaching those sorts of values.”

  I didn’t understand where he was going with this, and then suddenly I did. “I don’t have to go to Yale. I can go somewhere less expensive.”

  “It’s not about the money,” he said. “It’s not about not having the money. I’m talking about appreciating your education.”

  “But of course I’d appreciate my education.”

  “You’ll appreciate it more when you’re the one who has to pay for it,” he said. “We just need to get straight right now about what I’m willing to do and what I’m not willing to do.”

  His point was becoming clearer and clearer. I felt creeping, growing dread. In terms of college, I’d heard Your dad and I will work it out enough times to know that Mom was expecting his help. I pictured Mom writing checks, big checks, checks weighty enough to make her shoulders hunch. “What are you willing to do?” I asked.

  “I’m not willing to pay for your own higher education, and I’m not trying to be the bad guy here, it’s a matter of principles. It’s a matter of raising you to be the kind of person you should be.” He was still standing there with that fork. But then he turned back around, conversation over. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I hate to cry. But my chest seized up in some hot, heavy pain. I don’t know what I was feeling, only that it was too much.

  The words that came next—they were out before I even realized it. They shoved forward, rode a wave of what might have been anger. “Did Brie give you that statue?” I whispered.

  “What statue?” He plopped the batter into the pan. Scraped, scraped the last gooey bits in.

  “In the living room. The glass one. It wasn’t there before.”

  He didn’t look at me. He focused on that pan, opened the oven door. “Right. The glass one? She gave me that a long time ago. Long time. I never put it out before. It’s kind of gaudy.” His back was curved, bent over. His hand was in an oven mitt. But his back was a liar’s back—I could see the lie in that curve, I could see deception in the slope of his shoulders. I could feel it in the place between us—the lie filled the kitchen, all the air, squeezed at my own air in my lungs.

  “Gaudy, don’t you think? Little like Brie herself,” he said. “Let me tell you one thing about your good old Dad. He’s got a knack for finding crazy women.” I felt an internal slap of injustice at those words. My mother, sane, measured, practical. He finally turned, and right then I felt something else between us. That lie about the statue—he knew that I knew. He was inviting me to it. He was asking me to join him in it.

  After all these years of separation, there was nothing more that I wanted than that—to be one with him about something, to be let in and allowed to stay. I wanted that so much.

  I felt the open door, the chance to have permanent membership in the club that was my father. And maybe it really was “parental alienation” in action then, maybe something entirely complicated as loyalty. Or maybe it was something much simpler, my own caution, that kept me at the t
hreshold.

  “You’re lying,” I said. The words felt brave. Maybe more brave than any words I’d spoken before.

  “I always tell the truth to the best of my ability,” he said.

  JOELLE GIOFRANCO:

  My feelings for Steven Devlin were a strange recipe—the wild, the tumbling, the dark and forbidden, folded in with my desire to nurture and make him muffins and have his babies and live in a cabin somewhere. The thought that Steven Devlin would live in a cabin somewhere was ludicrous, naturally. A jail cell, perhaps. This was before Barry. Right before Barry. I met Steven Devlin in an anthropology class, where the professor had moons of dirt under his fingernails, as if he’d just returned from an excavation in the desert. Steven Devlin had raven-black hair. He was the kind of quiet that’s sultry and that simmers. Remember Richard Gere in the old days? Officer and a Gentleman days? The kind of quiet that you can think he’s thinking of all these deep things, the universe’s secrets, his private torment, when he’s likely only thinking about carburetors or lunch or breaking a lock. Listen to me—we have to be careful not to create a person in our imagination.

  Steven Devlin was the sort who was always in trouble at school, barely graduated, conflicts with teachers, picked up by police for drinking and drugging. I don’t know how he got into college, other than his parents probably paid his way in. I used to watch him turn in his tests, sauntering down the aisle, the low-slung walk of a coyote, and I’d picture us rolling passionately around on my dorm-room bed. He just looked so turbulent and dangerous and this appealed to me the way standing on a bluff in roaring wind does. Because you feel something, then, something real and large. He was a storm approaching. A walking, talking thundercloud.

  He didn’t disappoint me in the passion department. He was passionate all right, God, a great kisser, and once he ran right out in the middle of a busy street in the pouring rain to help a dog that had been hit. But he’d also disappear and get into deep depressions, and I’d cry and try to help him and it was all very dramatic. He didn’t feel loved by his father, and I thought I’d show him what love was. If only he knew what love was…He had trouble with authority—he’d tell off his bosses and a teacher who failed him. He’d get upset, then disappear in the middle of the night. He had a terrible temper—his face would turn into someone else’s when he got mad. That little muscle, you know, right here in your cheek? His would pulse with the force of his teeth clenching. He dislocated his arm once, throwing a book across the room.