The Secret Life of Prince Charming

by Deb Caletti

  Jake got out. He was carrying his Burger King cup, monstrous in size, big enough for Bob to drink from. Jake’s back was shiny and slick with sweat. He flipped us a peace sign and that smile with the dimple in his left cheek. He lifted the hood and disappeared from view.

  “You’re sure about the asthma thing?” Frances Lee said to Sprout. “I could really use a smoke.” I’d noticed a new pack on the seat that she must have brought from home.

  “I’m sure.”

  Frances Lee got out too. I could see her making her way down the ravine by the highway, stepping carefully. She sat down on a rock, her back to us. A moment later, I could see the curl of smoke, and Frances Lee’s head tilted back as she exhaled toward the sky.

  “Quinn?” Sprout said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you wishing we were in Disneyland?” she said.

  “A little.”

  “Me too.”

  I had a sudden panicky vision of the truck getting started again only to break down at Abigail Renfrew’s. God, fate would never be that cruel, would it? The truck hood slammed back down again, and Jake reappeared. He crumpled the empty cup in one hand.

  “Did he just pour his Coke in there?” Sprout said.

  “I think so,” I answered.

  “Won’t that fuck up her engine?” Sprout said.

  “I think it is already,” I answered.

  Jake popped his head into the truck. “Hey, Quinn? Can you turn that key?”

  I scooted over into the driver’s seat. Jake leaned in my window as I turned the engine on. I was aware of his bare skin, the heat coming off him. He smelled salty-hot, tangy with sweat. I didn’t know that could be a good thing. The engine roared alive, and Jake watched the temperature gauge on the dash. The arrow rose then rested on the low end of the half-circle display. It sat there solidly, without moving.

  “Look at that!” Jake said. I could feel his breath on my cheek.

  “Hooray!” Sprout shouted from the back.

  “Great job, Jake,” I said. I looked at him and smiled.

  He sucked in his breath as if he was about to say something, then changed his mind.

  “What?” I asked. I was expecting a warning—that the truck was bound to overheat again, or break down, that we’d never make it. I was ready, but not ready enough.

  “It’s just, you have really beautiful eyes,” he said.

  I think that for a moment the blood in my veins just stopped pumping and the synapses in my brain stopped firing and that everything that was supposed to be working suddenly ceased to work. I just sat there.

  “Romantic moment,” Sprout said. I didn’t look at her, but I could hear that she’d wiggled her eyebrows up and down, same as Grandma or Aunt Annie or any of us would have done at a hint of this sort of attention. We would NOT have done it, though, with some guy standing right there, close enough that you felt his breath on your face. I wanted to kill her. I wanted to put my hands around her scrawny little neck.

  “Don’t you think?” Jake asked her. “Don’t you think she’s got beautiful eyes?”

  “Eye lashes,” Sprout said.

  “Those too,” he said. He was still looking at me, smiling.

  “If we’re all done discussing my eyes, maybe we’d better get going,” I said. I somehow managed to sound offhand, as if my eyes had regularly and frequently been the subject of admiration and I was just plain weary about it. This was to cover up what was really going on inside right then—some joy parade with marching bands, banners, clowns in clown cars, whistles and trumpets, and spinning silver batons.

  “Let’s get this show on the road,” Sprout said.

  “Right,” Jake said. He slapped the window ledge twice with his hand, stood straight as Frances Lee stubbed out her cigarette with the toe of her sandal and climbed back up the ravine to the car.

  “Okay, car-mechanic genius. Just promise me what happened last time won’t happen this time.”

  “A fluke,” Jake said.

  “What happened last time?” Sprout said.

  “Don’t ask,” Frances Lee said.

  We didn’t. Sometimes (a lot of the time) you just really don’t want to know the truth, right? We just kid ourselves, and don’t mind so much. I scooted back over to the passenger side and Jake hopped in and Frances Lee put the truck in gear. I wasn’t too hot anymore, or tired from driving, or even worried about reading maps and getting to Elizabeth Bennett’s house. My insides were just too busy with their energized, excited thrum. My mother had warned against this, I knew. Being taken in by a guy’s compliments. We can fall for a guy because he seems to like us, not because we really like him, she would say. Flattery is not love.

  But, “beautiful”? The word used in connection to me? Could that even be real? Could that have really just happened? I glanced at Jake in the side mirror, and he caught me looking. He winked, and I turned away. God oh God oh God. I would force myself not to look. I would not ever again look in that mirror at him. My heart clutched up in some uneasy combination of humiliation, joy, and warning. But I knew one thing: I sure wasn’t wishing I was in Disneyland anymore.

  Chapter Twelve

  Elizabeth Bennett was expecting us. Frances Lee had called her last week, and she’d offered to have us over for dinner. We were running late, though, after waiting in an unexpectedly long line at the border crossing, and Frances Lee called Elizabeth to tell her as Sprout and I stretched our legs and walked around the Peace Arch in the center lawn at the border, a tall rectangular arch that looked like a huge bookend. It was easy to find the truck again in the long lines of cars—Bob was still smiling up there, with his cartoon-swirl hair still shiny and patient.

  There’s something about people in positions of authority that makes me feel like I’ve done something wrong even when I haven’t done anything wrong. If a policeman is behind me, I’m sure he’s about to pull me over. My guilty conscience is a full-time position, without even two weeks’ vacation in the summers. Going through customs was the same. I had our birth certificates, taken from Mom’s file cabinet drawer, but I was already concocting ways to convince him that we were indeed American citizens who were not smuggling drugs or guns or illegal aliens or those apples from the Apple Maggot Quarantine Area. I would smile in a way that he would know I was a nice person who would never do anything like that. I would greet him in a way that meant that we were perfectly open to having our car searched, no problem. My nonguilt guilt scrabbled around the whole time we waited, scratching at my moral side, which was indeed guilty of something—betraying my dad, lying to my mom. I could never commit a crime, that was for sure. I was wishing I could provide not only my birth certificate, but a passport and my birth parents, and my great-grandfather Aldo, the first American-born relative on my mother’s side.

  Of course, the customs guy did not think we were smuggling AK-47s or even fruit with stowaway fruit flies. We liked this customs guy, who asked if Bob was attempting to avoid the draft by moving to Canada. He waved us through for our day visit, gave Bob his own up-high wave.

  “It’s funny how Canada looks like Canada right away,” Sprout said, and it was true—as soon as you crossed the border, you could tell you were in a different country. The road signs were different and everything was metric and the gas station we stopped in had food we didn’t have at home—pickle-flavored potato chips, red plaid boxes of butter toffee.

  The city of Vancouver looked different too, a city of tall green-glass buildings, columns of hundreds of shimmery panes of glass. Elizabeth Bennett, Dad’s old high school girlfriend, lived on a houseboat on Granville Island, at the city’s center. We joined the traffic on the Granville Island Bridge, cars and trucks inching along over a twinkling waterway on which little boats traveled back and forth, ferrying people from land to island.

  “They look like bathtub boats,” Sprout said, and she was right. You could practically pick them up in your hand and give them a squeak.

  “This traffic sucks,” Frances
Lee said. “We’re going to be later than I even said, and her husband already made it clear we couldn’t come after seven thirty. Elizabeth had to go to bed early, he said.”

  “Control freak,” Jake said.

  “No kidding,” I said.

  “I ever have a husband who tells me when I need to go to bed, he’ll be out on his ass,” Frances Lee said.

  “Maybe he’s not too pleased that the children of his wife’s old boyfriend are descending upon him to give her back an old clock. A broken old clock,” Jake said.

  “Well, she seemed to understand the karmic mission perfectly when I talked to her,” Frances Lee said. “Are all the people in the city in this one place?” she asked. “Is there some rule in Canada that we all meet here at this time of night? Friendly mass get-together?”

  I looked at the time on my cell phone. The ringer had been off from last night, and I saw that I’d missed three calls from Mom. Three, in the last…hour? All my panic neurons (or whatever they were) started to sway back and forth like those creepy underwater urchin things (whatever they were). Problem, definitely. Three calls in an hour meant cranked-up mother anxiety. I debated whether to check the messages. It was a quarter to seven, and we were still on the bridge, and it was not the time or place to have a private, calm-your-mom conversation. Better to not even know yet what disaster loomed on the horizon. It was a shame those Disneyland restaurants were so darn noisy that you could never hear your phone.

  We inched along, finally making it to Granville Island itself, a tiny place of art galleries and restaurants painted in bright shades of yellow and blue and red, a public market, jugglers and musicians performing amidst crowds, the smell of just-caught fish and browning garlic and caramel corn in the air. Groups of people stopped to turn to look at Bob; some guy in a Corona tank top shouted a drunk “I love you” up to Bob, who was not impressed but still smiled politely. We got untangled from the tourist center, drove to the edge of the small island where a tiny group of houseboats huddled together at the water’s edge. Frances waited for a huge RV with a license plate that read CAPTAIN ED and a bumper sticker that said HOME OF THE BIG RED-WOODS to pull out. Captain Ed reversed, then pulled back in, reversed and tried again.

  “For God’s sake, Captain Ed, get it right, we’re in a hurry here.”

  I craned my neck, trying to see who Captain Ed was, but no luck. We parked and Frances turned off the engine and sighed, and we all got out. I felt a sudden bout of nerves as we passed the PRIVATE! RESIDENTS ONLY! sign posted on the dock gate and made our way down the wooden planks, looking for her house number. The houseboats were all different—large, two-story geometric homes and small shingled cottages, all floating on the water and swaying with the waves made by passing boat traffic. Sprout carried the clock, with its hands stuck at three thirty. Jake had his shirt back on, and Frances Lee had brushed her hair. All we knew about Elizabeth Bennett was that she and my dad had gone to high school in Seattle together. No one else could quite compare to her in my dad’s eyes, Joelle had told Frances Lee. Sweet, beautiful, good.

  We reached houseboat number 6, and I knocked. I’d had Elizabeth Bennett’s husband pictured all different—angled cheekbones, maybe; angry eyes. The kind of man who watches a lot of sports and then expects dinner. But he wasn’t like that at all.

  “You made it,” he said. “My name’s Andy.” He held out his hand. He had a thin, kind face and warm eyes, curly brown hair that was turning gray. He had a soft T-shirt on from some marathon you could tell he probably ran in. He had that sparse, lean, no-frills body of a runner. “Elizabeth is in here,” he said, and we followed him through a hall lined with black-and-white photos into a living room that looked out onto the water. A woman lay on the couch, her head wrapped in a scarf, her knees in a blanket, which she kicked off to sit upright and greet us. Elizabeth Bennett was sick. Really sick. You could tell by the bottles of pills on the end table and by her bony face and hands and by the yellow cast of her skin.

  “Fair warning, I look terrible,” she said. It had been such a hot, hot day, but her feet had fuzzy pink socks on them. “So, I hear you’re on a quest. And that you’ve got something for me,” Elizabeth Bennett said.

  MARY LOUISE HOFFMAN:

  I want my daughters to understand that step one is avoiding the wrong men, but step two is finding the right one, if that makes sense. I used to think that finding the right one was about the man having a list of certain qualities. If he had them, we’d be compatible and happy. Sort of a checkmark system that was a complete failure. With Barry, when I was in my late twenties, I thought that list was made up of the things I liked in someone. Personal ad adjectives. Barry was fun, he was attractive. He was interesting and creative. Confident. Bigger than life. But those same qualities turned into other, really bad things—irresponsibility, disrespect, control; an endless and exhausting ego.

  After Barry, I felt the key was basically to find someone who wasn’t Barry. Barry’s opposite. The list changed. Someone really responsible. Someone less blatantly cocky. Someone more measured and less wild. Someone with a conscience. Enter Obsessive Compulsive Dean. Loved for those qualities, only to find out he was so responsible, he wouldn’t take home a paperclip that had come from his office. So lacking in confidence that his insecurity could never be fed. So measured he couldn’t make a decision between a blue towel and a red one without a list of pros and cons and who analyzed everything I said sixteen different ways. You could never just talk. To him, there was a reason you said that and in that way, and the reason usually involved some hurt feelings on his part. It was exhausting.

  Dean felt there was a proper, efficient, twelve-step way of doing everything. He’d reload the dishwasher the “right way” after I or the girls loaded it. Everything had a right way. Choosing a path across a parking lot had a right way. Who knew? No one ever gave me the “Right Way to Do Everything” manual. I thought we all just had our own way. And conscience—his thinking was so black and white he thought I was going to hell for having premarital sex. It didn’t cross his mind that throwing a water glass across the room at me when he’d found out I’d had premarital sex was not exactly heaven-bound behavior.

  This was not a story I did or did not tell my girls—they lived it. One of the million reasons why divorce is awful—your kids have to suffer your current or future romantic catastrophes.

  I found out that a healthy relationship isn’t so much about sense of humor or intelligence or attractive. It’s about avoiding partners with harmful traits and personality types. And then it’s about being with a good person. A good person on his own, and a good person with you. Where the space between you feels uncomplicated and happy.

  A good relationship is where things just work. They work because, whatever the list of qualities, whatever the reason, you happen to be really, really good together.

  The clock had belonged to Elizabeth Bennett’s grandmother. It had Elizabeth’s name on it because her grandmother had labeled all of the objects in her home before she died, indicating who should get them. Elizabeth had been twelve years old then, but she knew enough to keep the little piece of tape where it was, with her name written in her grandmother’s hand. She especially liked that, she said, her grandmother’s ink loops of love.

  Years ago, when Dad still lived with us, his mother, my grandmother Yvette, had been in the hospital in Santa Barbara. We didn’t know her, really, but I’d gone with Dad to the hospital, and we sat on the top of the air conditioner, which made a long bench against one wall. Dad had brought an enormous bouquet of yellow balloons, her favorite color. We all looked up at the television during the visit, because there wasn’t much to say. Dad had to tie the balloons to a chair because they kept drifting and blocking Grandma Yvette’s view of the TV. Even the memory made me cringe with the discomfort of illness and strangers and too-big things that there aren’t words for.

  But this wasn’t like that, not at all, even though Elizabeth Bennett was so obviously sick. The room wa
s cozy and cluttered—full of books and spinning shelves of movies and CDs, quilts and pillows amidst the water glass and thermometer and plastic bin of supplies from what must have been a recent hospital visit. Jake sat in a beanbag chair on the floor, Sprout sat next to me on a little leather couch, Frances Lee was in a rocker, and Andy had turned on some music and opened a window and brought us pizzas. He made Elizabeth a milk shake; you could hear the blender going on in the kitchen as we talked.

  “I’ve got to tell you, this is a little double whammy from the past,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t think I’d ever see this again.” She patted the clock in her lap. “And Barry. Honestly, he’s someone I try not to think about.”

  “He talks about you all the time, according to my mother,” Frances Lee said. “He always said you were the love of his life.”

  Elizabeth threw back her head and laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “That’s what he said,” Frances Lee said.

  “Did you hear that, Andy?” she shouted toward the kitchen. “Barry thought I was the love of his life.”

  “I thought you said he was the love of his life,” he shouted back.

  “Barry,” she said, and shook her head. “Ah, he broke my heart. God, the time I spent being torn up over him. You men don’t do this, do you?”

  “Get upset over a woman? Hell yes,” Andy said. “You think we don’t have these same problems? Of course we do.” He’d reappeared and was now studying his CDs. He plucked one out with his finger, interrupted what was playing, and put the new one on instead. Some kind of relaxed piano replaced a jazzy guitar.

  “Affirmative,” Jake said.

  “But you don’t spend months and months in agony over some guy,” Elizabeth said.

  “Not over some guy,” Andy said.

  Elizabeth rolled her eyes at us, to show how exasperating he could be. “Anyway, all that romantic agony…And then you look back over who you wasted all this time on. I mean, I spent my whole sixth-grade year in pain over Harvey Kamada, who was the Whac-A-Mole game champ at Chuck E. Cheese.”