The Man of My Dreams

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  She lies there exactly as he left her, her blouse half off, her bra unfastened, her legs parted. An indeterminable amount of time elapses, and then she hears the burst of firecrackers—they are very nearby, possibly in the courtyard below her window—and a whiteness flickers in the room like during a lightning storm. Who are the boneheads who always insist on setting off firecrackers on the third of July?

  Before the summer started, she’d had a feeling that it would be different, that her life was beginning to change. She was staying in Boston instead of going home, subletting this place with Jenny and Kim, and she had the internship. She had been hopeful. She thinks of that day in May, after lunch with her father. The restaurant was on Spruce Street, and when she got up from the table, she walked north on Twentieth—she was shaking—and took a right into Rittenhouse Square. The park was crowded with office workers eating outside, homeless men sitting on the benches surrounded by their bags of possessions, little kids running among the sculptures. On the far side of the park, she came out on Walnut, stopping to buy bottled water from a vendor. The temperature was eighty-five degrees, the first truly hot day of the year.

  She’d parked her mother’s car at Seventeenth and Walnut, and as she headed toward it, she passed a new clothing store that seemed to be holding some sort of grand-opening festivities. The employees were wearing jeans and brightly colored T-shirts, and they’d set up speakers outside the entrance that were playing the song that would become the catchy, inescapable hit of the summer; it was the first time Hannah had ever heard it. Just past Eighteenth Street, between a gourmet-food emporium and a fancy boutique with satin dresses in the window, Hannah fell into step behind three people who at first she thought were traveling separately but who, after a moment, she realized were together: a girl around Hannah’s age, a man a few years older, a woman who looked like one of their mothers. Hannah watched their profiles when they spoke to one another. The couple—and they must have been a couple, Hannah thought when the man linked his arm through the girl’s in a way too tender to make them siblings—were both quite good-looking, the man with broad shoulders and a strong nose. The girl wore a green sundress, and she had long white-blond hair; the lightness of it made her seem somehow vulnerable. She held her chin in the air, in almost a parody of fine breeding. The older woman was bulky and slower-moving, wearing a handkerchief wrapped around her head. Hannah wondered where they were going. The man said something to the girl, and the girl shook her head. Hannah could not hear their conversation, and she began to walk more quickly. But they didn’t speak again for nearly a block.

  Then, abruptly, the woman turned to the girl and said, “Are you happy?” She had an accent of some sort, so the emphasis came out on both syllables: Are you happy? She was Eastern European, Hannah decided, maybe Hungarian.

  The girl didn’t respond, and it was ridiculous, but Hannah felt as if the question had been directed at her. How could the girl not answer? Had her entire life been like this, one long inquiry into whether things were going the way she wanted?

  Across the street, a police car had on its flashing lights, and Hannah glanced at the swirl of blue, then looked at the police officer himself. He was writing a ticket to a man who sat in the driver’s seat of a minivan, waving his hands emphatically. They both seemed far away. The music from the store was still audible above the traffic, and, as she always did when she heard music while outside in an urban area, Hannah felt like she was in a movie. She had taken a drastic and possibly foolish step with her father. But she did not regret it. In a strange way, the ugliness with him contained its opposite, and everywhere around her lay the possibility that things would improve in the months to come. She drew closer to the Hungarian woman, so close she could have rested her palm on the woman’s back. “Are you happy?” the woman asked again, this time more insistently, and at that moment, heading up Walnut Street, Hannah was on the verge of saying yes.

  5

  August 1998

  IN ROOM 128 of the Anchorage Holiday Inn, Hannah’s sister, Allison, has just finished brushing her teeth, and Hannah is washing her face. When Hannah sets her towel on the edge of the sink, Allison says, “Hannah, I’m engaged! Sam and I are getting married.”

  “Sam?” Hannah says his name as if she isn’t certain who he is, though Sam is, right now, on the other side of the door, in this very hotel room. But she’s been caught off guard. She and Allison were talking about nothing, about brands of sunscreen. “Since when?” Hannah asks.

  “He proposed last week. Look.” Allison holds out her left hand, on which she’s wearing a silver band of curling waves. Hannah noticed the ring already, though it did not occur to her that it could represent an engagement. “I almost let it slip over the phone, but I thought it would be more fun to tell you in person,” Allison says.

  “Does Mom know?”

  “She and Dad both do. Are you not happy for me or something? You might want to say congratulations.” Allison laughs a little helplessly. “I thought you liked Sam.”

  “I don’t dislike him. I just—I didn’t have any idea you guys were that serious.”

  “Hannah, we’ve lived together for a year.”

  “Well, it didn’t occur to me. You’re only twenty-four—that’s kind of young. Sam’s fine, though. I mean, yeah, congratulations. I guess I just don’t see him as very special.”

  “My God, Hannah.”

  “Sorry,” Hannah says. “Is that rude? I was trying to be honest. Should I not have said that?”

  “Yes,” Allison says, “you shouldn’t have said that.”

  But it didn’t occur to Hannah that her sister would marry Sam. Allison never accepts when someone asks her to marry him. She doesn’t have to, because there will always be another man to fall in love with her. She has large green eyes and long, wavy light brown hair, and two guys before Sam have proposed. One was her college boyfriend, whom she turned down because, as she told Hannah, she wasn’t ready for that level of commitment, and one was a guy outside a bar in San Francisco on Valentine’s Day. Allison was waiting for her friend on the sidewalk, and when she turned, there was this tall, skinny guy with black hair and a black leather jacket and lots of silver hoop earrings, not Allison’s type at all, but he and Allison looked at each other and the next thing she knew, their mouths were smashed together, his hands were in her hair. She imagined she really might swoon. The guy said, “Marry me, gorgeous.” Hannah can picture this part, her sister looking at the guy with her big, surprised eyes; some people’s eyes say no before the person speaks a word, but Allison’s never do, not even to bums or ex-boyfriends or letches at bars. Then Allison’s friend materialized and pulled Allison away, and she didn’t resist. She and the guy lost each other and she never saw him again. But she said the reason she didn’t say anything was that she was afraid she was going to tell him yes.

  In the Holiday Inn bathroom, Hannah says, “Don’t be mad. I’m getting used to the idea already. Here—” She holds out her arms, and Allison, only slightly grudgingly, steps into them. “It’s exciting,” Hannah says as they hug. “Hooray.”

  When they leave the bathroom, Sam is lying in bed looking at a map of Prince William Sound, and Elliot, Sam’s brother, is digging through his backpack, which is propped against one wall. “I hear congratulations are in order,” Hannah says, and she swoops in to embrace Sam, feeling like a large and clumsy bird. This is her second time today clumsily hugging Sam; the previous time was in the airport.

  Hannah was the first to arrive in Anchorage, and she wasn’t sure what to do with herself, so she bought a turkey sandwich full of clammy, pale meat, most of which she pulled out, set on the plastic tray while continuing to eat the lettuce and bread, then threw in the trash. She wandered over to a grizzly bear: a real though dead grizzly, nine feet tall with dark brown silver-tipped fur, paused midgrowl behind glass. According to the sign, an adult grizzly could weigh over eight hundred pounds and could smell carrion from eighteen miles away. I’m in Alaska, Han
nah told herself. Alaska. Alaska! A wish flickered through her to be back in the sublet in Boston, watching television dramas about police precincts with Jenny and eating scrambled eggs for dinner. She entered a gift shop, examined the key chains and magnets, and considered buying postcards, but she felt like maybe she hadn’t yet earned the right.

  Four hours later—finally, she gave up and bought magazines to read while waiting—there was the flurry of the others’ arrival. Allison and Sam and Elliot had flown in together from San Francisco, and when they came off the plane, Hannah was standing at their gate. When she first spotted her sister, Hannah felt that rising in her chest that always occurs when she sees Allison after several months apart. Allison is so familiar, every feature of her face, every gesture she makes, and she is so extraordinarily pretty, and she is Hannah’s. In all this crowd of people, Hannah was the one Allison was looking for. Hannah actually had to blink back tears.

  She and Allison embraced, and Allison said, “I like your glasses. You look very intellectual,” and Hannah said, “I saved you some cookies from the plane because they taste like cheddar cheese.” When Sam approached, Hannah was unsure whether they were about to hug or kiss, and she decided hug. But Sam zoomed in in such a way that she could tell he’d decided kiss, so at the last second she turned her cheek toward his approaching mouth and rested her hands abortively on his shoulders. By then, of course, he’d realized that she had anticipated he’d hug her, and he merely skimmed her forehead with his lips and threw his arms around her waist.

  “This is my older brother, Elliot,” Sam said when he and Hannah had disentangled themselves.

  “And this is my younger sister, Hannah,” Allison said.

  “And today on Family Feud…” Elliot said. Elliot was alarmingly handsome, Hannah thought as they shook hands, definitely more handsome than Sam, though their looks were similar. Elliot was blue-eyed, with a straight nose, blond hair, and a reddish-blond beard. It wasn’t the icky academic kind of beard, either, even though Elliot was in grad school; it was a sporty beard. Hugging Sam for the second time in the hotel room, Hannah thinks that maybe for cuteness alone, Elliot is the one Allison should marry.

  “You’ll be our flower girl, right?” Sam says.

  “She’ll be the maid of honor, you doofus,” Allison says. “Won’t you, Hannah?” Allison is climbing into bed alongside Sam.

  “Of course,” Hannah says. “This is so great.” Observing her sister and Sam next to each other, it strikes her that they actually are compatible: Allison is a social worker, and Sam is a sixth-grade teacher. They make thoughtful dinners that involve cilantro, they do the Times crossword puzzle together on Sundays, and in the colder months, they favor hats and mittens knit by Paraguayan peasants. Also, Sam’s father is CEO of a national chain of drugstores, so despite their own modest incomes, Sam and Allison still have the opportunity to vacation in Alaska. (It is probably Sam’s father who, indirectly, paid for Hannah’s plane ticket.) And Hannah wasn’t lying when she said she doesn’t dislike Sam. He’s always perfectly nice to her, and when she calls their apartment in San Francisco, he’ll ask her, before passing the phone to Allison, how she’s enjoying the land of the bean and the cod.

  Elliot goes into the bathroom, and Hannah sits on the edge of the empty double bed. A thought has just occurred to her, a concern she wants assuaged before she lies down. “Allison, you’re sleeping over here, right?” she says. “It’s brothers and sisters?”

  Sam folds down a corner of the map so they can see each other. “You think my brother smells?” She takes this to mean no, she’s not expected to sleep next to Elliot, but as Sam is looking at the map again, he adds, “Allison and I are used to sharing a bed. Is it that big a deal to you, Hannah?”

  “I just assumed you and Elliot would stay in one bed, and Allison and I would stay in the other,” Hannah says. Is her preference really so weird? She’d think that most everyone would agree it’s nerve-racking to sleep in a bed with a very attractive man you hardly know, and it’s easy to sleep in a bed with your sister; you feel no compunction about fighting over sheets.

  “You guys—” Allison begins, but she’s interrupted by Sam saying, “If you’re sleeping, why does it matter, anyway? I don’t know about you, but I’m beat.”

  You asshole, Hannah thinks.

  Elliot emerges from the bathroom, and Hannah is momentarily too embarrassed to continue the discussion in front of him. Then Sam says, “Elliot, Hannah doesn’t want to share a bed with you. I told her the assault charges were dropped, but she doesn’t believe me.”

  Elliot grins. “It wasn’t even a real woman. It was a shemale!”

  Allison says, “Hannah, what about if you and Elliot share a bed tonight and a tent when we’re in the backcountry, but you and I share a kayak?”

  This is typical of Allison; she’s such a compromiser.

  “If you want to spend time with your sister, that time is better spent awake than asleep,” Elliot says. His tone of voice is impatient yet eminently logical, and there is a silence during which it occurs to Hannah that she has the unpleasant power to ruin this vacation for everyone just by being herself.

  “Fine,” she says. “Allison and I will share the kayak.”

  When they turn out the lights, everyone is immediately quiet. Hannah becomes conscious of how foamy her pillow feels, then she becomes conscious of how stuffy the room is. She looks for a while at Elliot’s back in a gray T-shirt and wonders if he has a girlfriend and, if so, what she’s like. An hour passes. Hannah begins to feel desperate. She gropes her way through the darkness to the bathroom. When she sits on the toilet, all that comes out is a tablespoon of bright yellow pee. She goes back to bed.

  At midnight—four A.M. Hannah’s time, an hour and forty-five minutes after they turned out the light, and roughly twenty hours since she left Boston—she considers nudging Allison awake, but Sam and Elliot would probably wake up, too. She also considers sneaking out, calling a cab back to the airport, and going home, though that would set off a chain of excitement that wouldn’t be worth the trouble.

  It is 12:25. Hannah has squirmed around so much that the fitted sheet has come loose from the mattress on her side of the bed and twisted around her ankles. Just shut your eyes and don’t open them no matter what, she tells herself. This works for four minutes, as she notes on the digital alarm clock when she opens her eyes. Okay, try again. Somewhere outside, at a distance that’s hard to gauge, an odd wailing rises. She can’t tell if the wailing is human or animal. She lies listening to it, her body tensed, wondering what, if anything, she should do. She falls asleep while wondering.

  IN THE MORNING, she takes her last shower for the next five days. They walk to a sporting-goods store because Sam needs more wool socks. The store fills two floors and is brimming with canoes and tents and sleeping bags and bright-eyed, fit-looking salespeople who seem to Hannah, in their khaki shorts and hiking boots, effortlessly competent in a way she will never be. Already, she sees that she’s not the kind of person who goes camping in Alaska and that actually camping in Alaska, being able to say she’s been camping in Alaska, will not make her into this kind of person.

  Allison and Sam planned the trip months ago, and then in June they called to invite Hannah to come along and Allison said they were inviting Elliot, too, so there’d be no reason for Hannah to feel like a third wheel. She is pretty sure that Allison invited her because of the fight with their father—Allison probably has the idea that she’ll talk Hannah into calming down. When Hannah declined the invitation, saying she couldn’t afford it, Allison said, “We’ll pay your plane fare. You just get the gear.” This gear, which includes a so-called thermally efficient sleeping bag and an assortment of pants, jackets, and long underwear of varying degrees of water resistance, somehow added up to eight hundred dollars. Standing at the cash register in Cambridge, Hannah felt a queasy misgiving. She’ll probably never use any of it again.

  She is next to a row of raincoats when a sale
sperson approaches.

  “Can I help you with anything?” he asks. He has curly hair and a goatee—he’s cute—and he looks about her age.

  “I’m just waiting for some other people.”

  “You in Alaska on vacation?”

  “We’re kayaking in Prince William Sound.”

  “Oh, yeah? You’re in for a treat. You might even have a bear sighting. They’re pretty awesome in their natural habitat—none of that zoo stuff.”

  “But isn’t it dangerous to see a bear?”

  He laughs a little, a nice laugh. “Believe me, they’re more afraid of you than you are of them.” (In all her life, Hannah has never believed anyone who has said this to her about anything.) “Usually, you only see their scat,” the guy continues. “If you do see a bear, you’re lucky. The grizzlies you want to avoid, but the black bears can be playful little guys.”

  “But is it likely that we’ll see one?”

  “If you’re worried, what you do is, when you’re walking along, especially in an area with a lot of growth, you call out, like, ‘Hey, bear. Hey, dude.’ Or you can sing. The important thing is that you don’t want to surprise them, especially a mama with cubs. If they hear you coming, they’ll get out of the way. You’re camping, what, on little islands?”

  Hannah nods.

  “It depends on the size of the islands. Clean up after yourselves. You know that, right? Don’t wear perfume, hang up your food at night, that whole routine.”

  Everything he’s saying sounds familiar, like something Hannah read in the guidebook without paying attention to it—something she skimmed, maybe, that seemed irrelevant at the time. Now she thinks, Bears? Real, actual bears? She doesn’t even like dogs.