The Secret Life of Prince Charming

by Deb Caletti

  “Helen and Louise…,” Mom said.

  “Who wants to spend the weekend shopping with a couple of old bags?” Grandma said. She snapped her fingers twice again.

  “Oh, Mother,” Annie groaned. “Why?”

  Grandma settled her napkin back in her lap. She decided she wasn’t finished after all. “You know, I got to thinking. About French fries.”

  “French fries,” Mom said.

  “You know when you get a bag of French fries and you’re so hungry, you eat them really fast?” Grandma said. “Scarf them down? I didn’t want that for my life. When you’ve gotten to the bottom of the French-fry bag and you realize you haven’t really tasted any.”

  DOROTHY HOFFMAN SILER PEARLMAN HOFFMAN:

  I realized something about my life and the choices I’ve made with men. Maybe it’s the same with the choices I’ve made as a whole, because if you look in my closet you’ll see what I’m talking about. I have pants I’ve worn only once, because they show a little sock. Too short. They were a good bargain. Or that blouse that itches, but I can’t throw it away because I didn’t get it on sale. There’s that dress that makes me feel like I’m a sofa in an old bat’s living room. I don’t know why I bought it. The music in some of those places, you’ll buy anything.

  My point is, there’s only a few things there that I like all the way. One hundred percent. My soft blue dress. My lounging pants. Had them for years, and they’re still what I reach for when I want to be comfortable. Everything else I like maybe 50 percent, or 75 percent, or 15 percent. And it’s been the same thing with men I’ve been with. I was married twice, and I didn’t feel 100 percent either time. Fifty percent maybe. Sixty-five percent.

  This is what I know. Don’t settle for 40, 50, even 80 percent. A relationship—it shouldn’t be too small or too tight or even a little scratchy. It shouldn’t be embarrassing or uncomfortable or downright ugly. It shouldn’t take up space in your closet out of a guilty conscience or convenience or a moment of desire. Do you hear me? It should be perfect for you. It should be lasting.

  Wait. Wait for 100 percent.

  That night, I knocked on Mom’s door. She was sitting on her bed, reading. I handed her the music box.

  She looked up at me, surprised. “He did have it.”

  I nodded.

  “It was given to me a long time ago. When I wanted to be a dancer.”

  “I know.”

  “I’d almost forgotten this about myself. That I wanted to dance.” She held it tenderly. She opened it, and it began to play. “Oh my God,” she whispered.

  “Now it belongs to you again,” I said.

  “Quinn, thank you,” she said. “Thank you. Really.”

  “Everything’s where it’s supposed to be now,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Within two days of getting back, I got the call from Dad that I’d been dreading. He was Zeus, King Triton, God. His fury was so dark, I held the phone away from my ear. We had betrayed him, he said. He should be calling the police right now. We had stolen from him. We were mocking him. After all he’d done for us…I was no better than Frances Lee. We were crazy, like our mothers.

  I was so upset, my insides heaved with grief. I felt like I needed soft foods, and to drink from a straw. I tried to call him, but he wouldn’t answer. I’m ashamed to say that I cried apologies into my messages. The strength and awareness about Dad that I’d gotten on the trip seemed to have left me; instead, I felt like a baby who’d been abandoned on the hospital steps. I begged him to see me. If we could just sit down and meet…

  A few days later, he called. He would be in Seattle the next day. He would see me for dinner. That hip new Ethiopian place on Queen Anne.

  It was Grandma’s birthday, but I would have to skip the celebration. I had to see him. We needed to talk. If we could just sit across from each other and talk…

  There was a downpour that night; the streets were shiny and black, and you could see the angled streaks of rain in the light of the streetlamps. I found the restaurant, packed tight between a Starbucks and a small gallery, its awning dripping water in steady streams. I looked in the window, trying to see if Dad was there, but I could only see my own reflection. When I went in, the restaurant was full, and we had to press inside—me and, ahead of me, a couple in wet coats, the woman drying her hair with one hand. The walls were deep blue, with ceiling-to-floor tribal masks painted on them, varying versions of the one we had returned to Olivia Thornton. I could see Dad at a window table, and he, too, was just arriving, removing his leather coat and handing it to a waitress. She was laughing at something he said, and he briefly touched her elbow as he maneuvered to his seat.

  I felt sick inside, but ready, too. I wanted to be brave and honest. I wanted to reach out to him so that we could understand each other.

  “Well, look who’s here,” he said.

  He didn’t get up. I sat across from him. “Dad,” I said.

  “The best thing to get is the special. Little of everything, on one large plate. You’ve eaten Ethiopian before, I take it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Never?” He looked stunned. “Whoa. Where’ve they been keeping you?”

  The waitress was back in a moment with his drink, a martini with three olives on a skewer.

  “Extra olives,” she said.

  “That was the fastest martini in the history of martinis,” he said to her, and smiled. She had dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, and shy eyes. She laughed again.

  “Wasn’t she fast?” Dad said to me. And then to her again, “Are you always this good, or did you know I just finished a performance and needed this martini pronto?”

  “You’re an actor?” she asked.

  “Something like that,” he said.

  “That’s amazing,” she said.

  He ordered our dinner, popped an olive into his mouth, and chewed with satisfaction. He looked over my head toward the door, as if hoping for more interesting company. I felt my courage slipping. I felt like I was disappearing as I sat in that chair.

  “You had a show tonight?” I said.

  “Next week,” he said.

  I ran my fingers along the edges of my napkin. “Dad. I know I have some explaining to do.” He sipped his martini. The words poured out. My feelings, my confusion. My need to know him. His face was blank. He didn’t say anything. Not a word. I started to feel angry at that nothingness. I could feel the heat of irritation hurling forward.

  “So?” I said.

  But he just looked at me with that wall. Like my words weren’t good enough to reach his ears. The anger was building and building into fury. My voice rose. The words were out before I could stop myself.

  “I think you were really wrong to take those things,” I said. “I think you treated those women like shit.” I didn’t even know what I was saying. This wasn’t going how I had intended. I felt full of rage, but he just sat there. God, I wanted to hit him, throw something at him as he just sat there in cool silence and stared nothingness back at me.

  My eyes bore into his. But his—they were flat and hard. They didn’t even see me. His eyes were like the glass on the restaurant’s window. I couldn’t see anything there but my own reflection.

  The food arrived. “Look at this!” Dad said. “Well, I sure hope they appreciate you here, sweetie,” he said to the waitress.

  “Not really,” she said.

  “When’s your birthday?” he asked.

  “January twenty-eighth,” she said. “You going to give me a present?”

  “I might,” he said. “But you’re an Aquarius. I knew you were an Aquarius. Me too.”

  She set down the food—a huge circle of bread with various mounds of stuff on it. Brown lumps, black ones. A knoll of orange, a strange heap of yellow. I couldn’t eat—I knew that.

  “Enjoy, Mr. Aquarius,” she said, and he laughed.

  The waitress left. Dad ripped off a chunk of the bread, dipped it in the brown glob and stuf
fed it into his mouth.

  “Dad,” I said. I heard pleading in my voice. But he just chewed that bread, a big ball in his cheek.

  “Dad.” I wanted to cry. I wanted out of there. I grabbed my coat off the back of the chair. I could leave right then, and he wouldn’t even care.

  He swallowed. “Oh, by the way,” he said. “Did I tell you I’m getting married?”

  A few days later, our things arrived in a box.

  “He kept the video games,” Charlotte said. “And the Xbox. But look.” It was our tube of toothpaste, half-used. Our toothbrushes.

  “I can’t stand this,” Mom said.

  School started again. My senior year. Ms. Little in Spanish Three, another two semesters of her whiteboard being pelted with Skittles and en masse slamming of books at exactly one thirty. I applied to Yale, but I also applied to the University of Washington, where Jake went. Where I could live at home and better afford to go. Liv got a new boyfriend—an exchange student from Britain whose name was Giles and who had an accent that had snappy, stylish edges. I saw Daniel every now and then at school, and it was hard for me to think we’d ever been together. He seemed so wrong to me now. I saw Jake on weekends—we’d walk around Greenlake, or lay on a blanket under a tree on the university campus, and it was Jake who was right for my eyes, and for the rest of me, too. Jake was seashell right. Real and absent of show—just himself. More beautiful because of that.

  I’d see Frances Lee and Gavin in Seattle on the weekends also, and I’d bring Charlotte along. All of us would go bowling or hang out at Frances Lee’s new apartment, and Gavin would teach Charlotte how to do tricks on her skateboard in the apartment’s parking lot. We went to Joelle’s house, too. When the old horse, Harvey, finally died in October, Joelle held an elaborate funeral, and we ate dinner on hay bales. We had carrots and apples, because Harvey liked those. Jake played sad songs on his guitar until Frances Lee said we’d better liven things up or she was leaving.

  Albert would drive up to see Grandma on weekends, and they would go to the movies or for a walk holding hands. Albert had lied about the river rafting (water frightened him), but it was all right because Grandma had lied about the skydiving.

  Charlotte got a poem published in a children’s magazine, and Aunt Annie became a manager of her store; like Abigail Renfrew, she’d sworn off men until she could be more trustworthy. Will Green would come over often with his dog, Tucker, who sniffed Ivar politely and laid in whatever spot of sun he could find. I saw them outside once, he and my mother; Will sat on the lawn, plucking pieces of grass and teasing her. My mother was laughing, and then she stood suddenly, as if on a dare. I didn’t know she could still do a cartwheel. She was so graceful, too. One hand was on the ground, her feet in the air. Whenever they hugged, my mother closed her eyes and smiled and gave a sigh, like Will’s arms were a good place to rest.

  I wrote Dad a long letter, which went unanswered. I still wanted him in my life, needed him, in the primal way you need food when you’re hungry, or a hand in the darkness when you’re scared. I felt a constant, low-flying desperation, the kind you feel when you are trying, trying, trying to get something you will never, ever get. Something that’s being withheld, just shy of your grasp. Maybe I didn’t know how to dislike someone I loved. Maybe I didn’t know how to love someone who kept causing so much pain. I guess I was inching and crawling my way toward Elizabeth Bennett’s words about unconditional love. That it was a dangerous thing without heavy doses of mutual respect.

  I decided, finally, to go and see him. To attend his show, to meet him afterward. I still believed in “one last try.” The more he shunned me, the more I needed him not to shun me.

  So I went to a show of his, (ironically) at the Music Box Theater in Seattle. I went alone. I sat in the plush chair on the aisle, next to a woman with a bulky coat; her heavy arms kept pressing into mine. The curtains parted and my father was there, his thick dark hair in a braid down his back, his energy filling the room, dark eyes flashing his playful grin. He tossed a chair to Uncle Mike, who tossed it back—and then another and another, so fast it seemed impossible, and the audience was gasping and laughing with him. I loved him, every minute he was on that stage, but the thing about love is that without its protections, without its boundaries and a close and careful watch, you can hand yourself over, little by little, pieces of yourself given up, until before you know it, you are standing like one of his admirers in the crowd when the show is over. Your need will be so bare it will hurt when exposed to mere air. You’ll tremble at his power when he stands before you. You’ll stand there, with the noise of the crowd around, and his name being called, and little shoves from people trying to get past, and you’ll wait for him to make a decision about you—yes or no.

  And when he sees you and he does not reach out, does not reach out but purposefully turns away, when he decides you are not good enough to love, when he does not see your goodness, your beauty, you will have a choice. To be devastated, or to let the truth in, finally, finally, all the way, all the way, all the way, until it fills you with its own strength, with its own knowledge—that love is light and not darkness, that love that is not good is not worthy of you, that love can only truly be given by those who are able, those with hearts of quality and with careful hands.

  My father, as I’ve said, had a way of drawing people toward him. Same as his mother, my grandmother, who was said to have powers of magic (at least, she could get the landlord to forgive the rent, could get grown men to hand over their best watches simply because she asked for the time). He brought people in, and I’d seen him do it. He’d turn on this something, this energy; he’d toss them a lightning bolt of flattery and the things a person most needed, and people went to that as if they’d been put under a spell. Maybe we all just want to feel special, even for a little while, to be fooled for a bit into feeling something besides the truth of our own ordinariness.

  I know about my own ordinariness, I think most people do, and I am okay with it. I am not the most, the best, the fastest, the greatest, but I am enough. Regular and enough, with my own simple but clear voice that I am learning to hear, and my own feelings I’m learning to accept. Beautiful enough for the good people who really care about me. But for Dad, ordinary was unthinkable. It was a crime, an evil force, kept far from his vulnerable center. NO PARKING signs did not apply to him, nor did lines, nor did past failures, or women and children not suitable for perfect storylines. The reason he took things from women, all things, but objects too, was because he wanted to. He wanted to, and so he did. He was a hurricane, a tornado, the powerful sea, God. But I had stopped thinking so. I was ordinary, and I pulled back the curtain and saw a man there, not Oz.

  I would probably never be forgiven for it.

  In the summer of my seventeenth year, I learned something about truth—that truth has an urgency. It forces itself up sometimes, disregarding your need not to look, brought to the surface by that part of us that looks out for our own safety and well-being, if only we’d listen.

  And I learned a lot about love. If you added up all the years of knowing—Mom’s and Joelle Giofranco’s and Olivia Thornton’s and Elizabeth Bennett’s and Abigail Renfrew’s and Brie’s—even Grandma’s and Aunt Annie’s and Frances Lee’s—you would get hundreds of years of knowing. And now I add my own piece to theirs.

  Sometimes you think you’ve found love, when it’s really just one of those objects that are shiny in a certain light—a trophy, say, or a ring, or a diamond, even. Glass shards, maybe. You’ve got to be careful, you do. The shine can blind you. The edges can cut you in ways you never imagined. It is up to you to allow that or not. You are the protector of yourself.

  The most basic and somehow forgettable thing is this: Love is not pain. Love is goodness.

  And real love—it’s less shiny than solid and simple. It’s the stuff of sunflower spirals and seashells, where there is beauty and mystery, but where there is logic, too. You do not need protection from it. It is n
ot about lies that someone else tells you or that you tell yourself, but about the truth. Real love is clear. It’s as uncomplicated as that shell. It’s as timeless.

  When you find it, if you find it, pick it up. For all the right reasons, pick it up and hold it close.

  —QUINN HUNT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Deb Caletti is also the author of The Queen of Everything; Honey, Baby, Sweetheart (a National Book Award finalist); Wild Roses; The Nature of Jade; and The Fortunes of Indigo Skye.

  Deb lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest and is currently working on her next novel for teens. Visit her at debcaletti.com.