Man of My Dreams

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Hannah jerks up her head. “Why are you always defending my dad? I know you know that he’s an asshole.”

  “Hannah, your dad has some demons. He just does. We all do the best we can.”

  “I don’t care about his demons!” Hannah cries. “He’s a bully! He’s so mean that no one will stand up to him.”

  At first Elizabeth is quiet. Then she says, “Okay. He is a bully. How can I pretend he’s not? But something you won’t understand until you’re older is how unhappy your dad is. No one acts like that unless they’re unhappy. And he knows. He knows what he’s like, and for him to know he’s failing his family, to see himself acting just like our father did—it must tear your dad apart.”

  “I hope it tears him apart.”

  “You’ll leave all of this behind, Hannah. I promise. And if your mom can stay away, it already won’t be as bad when you get home. That’s the mistake my mom made, that she just stayed with Dad forever. But your mom is getting out while she can, which is the smartest, bravest thing she can do.”

  So her parents are splitting up. They must be. Hannah is pretty sure Elizabeth doesn’t realize what she’s just revealed, and perhaps at this point it’s not definite, but when Hannah’s mother drives to Pittsburgh in early August to pick her up and tells her over fish sandwiches at Dairy Queen on the ride home that she has moved into a condo, Hannah will not be surprised. The condo will be in a nice neighborhood, and her mother already will have decorated Allison’s and Hannah’s bedrooms. Hannah’s will have pink striped curtains and a matching pink bedspread over a double bed. Hannah will soon like the condo better than she ever liked the old house, which is where her father will live for several more years—the condo will not be so large that it makes her nervous to be there alone, and it will be within walking distance of a drugstore, a grocery store, and several restaurants where Hannah and her mother will go sometimes on Saturday nights. Hannah and Allison will have lunch with their father on Sundays and won’t see or speak to him besides that. He’ll tell them they’re always welcome to come over for dinner or to spend the night, but they’ll go only a few times, to gather the belongings their mother hasn’t moved already. Their father will start dating someone from the country club, an attractive woman whose husband died in a boating accident in Michigan. The woman, Amy, will have three young children, and Hannah will wonder whether her father purposely conceals what he’s like from Amy, or whether Amy chooses not to see it. For a long time, Hannah’s mother will not date.

  These will be the details of the Julia Roberts rumors: that Kiefer was cheating with a dancer named Amanda Rice, though the name she goes by at the Crazy Girls Club where she works is Raven. The day the wedding was scheduled for, Julia will fly to Dublin with Jason Patric, another actor who’s a friend of Kiefer’s. At the Shelbourne Hotel, where suites cost $650 a night, hotel employees will report that Julia looks gaunt, her hair is orange, and she is not wearing her engagement ring.

  Two years later, she will marry the country singer Lyle Lovett. They’ll have known each other for three weeks, she’ll be barefoot for the ceremony, and the marriage will last only twenty-one months. He will be ten years older than she is, with puffy hair and a lean, dour face. In 2002, Julia Roberts will marry a cameraman named Danny Moder. Their wedding will be at midnight on the Fourth of July, at her ranch in Taos, New Mexico, but before it occurs, Danny Moder will have to divorce his wife of four years, a makeup artist named Vera.

  Insofar as Hannah will have an opinion on the subject anymore, the Vera part will make her a little queasy, but she’ll believe overall that Danny and Julia are a good match. In photos, they’ll look comfortable and happy, only slightly too beautiful for normal life. However, except while paging through magazines in the waiting room of the dentist’s office, or in line at the grocery store, Hannah will no longer follow Julia Roberts’s activities; she won’t spend her own time attending to celebrities. Not because she’ll have decided it’s frivolous—it is, of course, but so are most things—but because she’ll be preoccupied; she’ll be a grown-up. On a daily basis, Hannah will not feel markedly different from the way she felt when she was fourteen, but this will be one of the signs that she must be: that she used to know many things about Julia Roberts, and now she knows very few.

  Far in the future, Hannah will have a boyfriend named Mike with whom she’ll talk about her father. She’ll say she isn’t sorry about her upbringing before the divorce, that she thinks in a lot of ways it was useful. Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn’t exist to accommodate you, which, in Hannah’s observation, is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into adulthood. It makes you realize how quickly a situation can shift, how danger really is everywhere. But crises, when they occur, do not catch you off guard; you have never believed you live under the shelter of some essential benevolence. And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement. To spend a Saturday afternoon mopping your kitchen floor while listening to opera on the radio, and to go that night to an Indian restaurant with a friend and be home by nine o’clock—these are enough. They are gifts.

  Once, Hannah’s boyfriend will cry as she tells him about her father, though she will not be crying. Another time he’ll say he thinks she has Stockholm syndrome, but he’ll be a psych major and, in Hannah’s opinion, rather suggestible. During sex, Hannah will memorize a particular section of Mike’s back, the view from over his left shoulder, and sometimes when she’s trying to come, she’ll imagine that just out of her line of vision is an enormous eagle tattoo; she’ll run her fingers over the place where the tattoo should be. She’ll never have seen the guy with the real tattoo after that day she left Rory waiting. Though she’ll stay for two more months at her aunt’s, she’ll never return to the park.

  In this moment on the front stoop, when Hannah is still fourteen, she is sitting so close to Elizabeth that she can smell the hospital soap on her aunt’s hands. Elizabeth’s grocery bags are in the yard where she dropped them. Rory is about to come outside and plead to be taken to the pool, and after they go, because Darrach is out of town, for dinner they will order wonton soup and cashew chicken and beef with broccoli. “Are my parents getting a divorce?” Hannah asks. “They are, aren’t they?”

  “You just have to realize how weak most men are,” Elizabeth says. “It’s the only way you can forgive them.”

  Part II

  2

  February 1996

  THE PLAN IS that they’ll pick up Hannah at nine o’clock, but at five to nine Jenny calls to say it will be more like nine thirty or quarter to ten. She says that Angie got off work late and still needs to shower. (Hannah has no idea what Angie’s job is.) “Sorry about this,” Jenny says.

  Hannah is sitting at her desk. She turns in her chair and looks around her dorm room: the stack of newspapers that has grown so high, waiting to be recycled, that it’s like an ottoman; her shoes lined up against one wall; the trunk she uses as a bedside table, with a plastic cup of water on it; and her bed, which she made a few minutes ago, even though it’s nighttime, because she had finished getting dressed and wasn’t sure what else to do with her nervous energy. It is the sight of the bed, its pillows plumped and flannel-sheathed duvet smoothed flat, that tempts Hannah to tell Jenny they don’t need to swing by after all because she’ll just stay here tonight. She could be asleep within ten minutes—all she’d have to do is go down the hall and wash her face, then change into her pajamas, apply ChapStick, and turn out the light. She regularly goes to bed this early. It’s kind of strange, not like other college students, but she does it.

  “So we’ll be there in half an hour or forty-five minutes,” Jenny says.

  The words are formed already: You know what, I’m kind of tired. Here, Hannah could laugh apologetically. I think I might stay in. I’m sorry, I know it’s totally lame. But thank you so much for inviting me. And definitely tell me how it goes. I’m sure it’ll be really fun. If
Hannah opens her mouth, the words will jump into the air and travel across campus through the telephone wires to Jenny, and Hannah won’t have to go. Jenny will be nice—she is nice—and maybe try to persuade Hannah otherwise, but when Hannah is firm, Jenny will let it drop. She’ll let it drop, and then they’ll never become true friends because Hannah will be the weird girl who flaked at the last minute the time they were driving to western Massachusetts. And Hannah will have spent another night doing nothing, sleeping. She’ll wake at six A.M., the campus dark and silent, the dining hall not open for five whole hours because it’s the weekend. She’ll shower, eat dry cereal from the box on her windowsill, start her homework. After a while, when she has finished Marxist Theory and gone on to Evolutionary Biology, she’ll look at the clock and it will be seven forty-five—only seven forty-five!—and still no one else will be awake, not even close to awake. She will be sitting there with her hair combed out straight and wet, squeaky clean, with page after page of her textbooks highlighted, and she will feel not industrious, not diligent, but panicked. The morning will be a rush of gray air she must fill alone. Who cares if her hair is clean or she’s read about pathogen population structure? Who is her hair clean for, who does she have to talk to about pathogen population structure?

  Go, Hannah thinks to herself. You should go.

  “I’ll wait by the main entrance,” she says to Jenny.

  When she hangs up the phone, she is, as she was before Jenny called, unsure what to do. She shouldn’t do homework—either she won’t be able to concentrate or she’ll become so absorbed that she’ll entirely lose the mood she’s losing now anyway, the mood that ascended as she stood under the hot water in the shower, raising her left leg and running the razor up her calf, then putting down her left leg and raising her right. Back in her room, she turned the radio way up and stood in front of the closet inspecting her clothes. She pulled out two black shirts, trying on one and then the other. She imagined which her cousin Fig would recommend (Hannah is a freshman at Tufts, and Fig is a freshman at Boston University). Fig would say to wear the tight one.

  She wishes she owned nail polish so she could paint her nails right now, or that she wore makeup and could stand before the mirror with her lips puckered, smearing them some oily, sparkly shade of pink. At the very least, she wishes she had a women’s magazine so she could read about other people doing these things. She does have a fingernail clipper—that’s not festive, but it’s something. She returns to her desk chair, pulls the trash can in front of her, and sticks the tip of a nail into the jaw of the clipper.

  This doesn’t take long. When she’s finished, she stands and looks at herself sideways in the full-length mirror on the back of the door to her room. The shirt she chose isn’t that flattering. It’s tight in the arms but loose across the boobs—tight in the wrong way, and actually, it’s not even that tight, not compared to what the other girls will probably be wearing. She changes into the second one.

  The song on the radio ends, and the DJ says, “Who’s psyched that it’s Friday night? We’ve got more of today’s greatest dance hits coming up after this, so stay tuned.” An advertisement for a car dealership comes on, and Hannah turns the radio down. She listens to the radio a lot, including when she’s studying, but she rarely listens to it on Friday or Saturday nights for this very reason: the DJs’ delighted tone of anticipation. Every Friday afternoon at five, the station plays a song with the lyrics “I don’t want to work / I just want to bang on the drum all day,” and that’s when Hannah switches off the radio. She imagines the working men and women of Boston leaving their offices, pulling out of parking garages or hopping on the T. The people in their twenties call their friends and plan to meet at bars, and the families in the suburbs make spaghetti and rent movies (it is the families she’s more jealous of), and the weekend opens up to them, the relief of empty hours. They will sleep late, wash their cars, pay bills, whatever the things are that people do. Sometimes on Fridays Hannah takes cough medicine so she can fall asleep even earlier than usual, once as early as five-thirty in the afternoon. This is probably not the best idea, but it’s only cough medicine, not real sleeping pills.

  Tonight it is strange to be part of the DJ’s universe, to be going out. She looks at her watch and thinks she might as well go downstairs. She pulls on her coat, feels in the pocket—ChapStick, gum, keys—and looks once more in the mirror before heading out the door.

  They are late, which she expects. She reads the campus newspaper, first today’s, then yesterday’s, then the classifieds from today’s. Other students cut through the entry hall of the dorm, several of them conspicuously drunk. One guy wears jeans so many sizes too large that six inches of his boxer shorts are visible in the back. “What’s up?” he says as he passes her. He is with another guy, who holds a bottle inside a paper bag. The other guy grins at her. Hannah says nothing. “Yo, that’s cool,” says the first guy.

  She is sitting on a bench, and every few minutes she walks to the window next to the front door and presses her face against the glass, peering into the blackness. She is looking out the window when the car pulls up; she doesn’t recognize it as the car she’s waiting for, but then Jenny waves from the passenger seat. Hannah steps away from the window, zipping her coat. There is a moment when she’s standing in front of the door, a massive door of dark wood, when they can’t see her and she thinks that she could crouch down and back up on all fours and sneak upstairs, that by the time one of them came inside to look for her, she’d have vanished.

  “Hey,” Jenny says when Hannah is outside. “I’m sorry we’re so late.”

  Climbing inside the car, Hannah is bombarded with music and cigarette smoke and the creamy, perfumed smell of girls who take better care of themselves than she does.

  Jenny turns around from the front seat. “This is Kim.” Jenny gestures to the driver, a tiny girl with short dark hair and diamond earrings whom Hannah has never seen before. “And this is Michelle, and you know Angie, right?” Angie is Jenny’s roommate, whom Hannah has met while studying with Jenny. In Jenny’s room, she has also met Michelle, though Michelle says, “Nice to meet you.”

  “It’s Michelle’s friend who goes to school at Tech,” Jenny says. “So what have you been up to—still recovering from the stats test? If I just pass, I swear I’ll celebrate.”

  Hannah and Jenny know each other from statistics class, though they met during the freshman orientation camping trip, when they slept in the same tent. Hannah remembers most of this trip dimly, a blur of other freshmen who seemed to be trying embarrassingly hard; she did not understand that this was the part when you had to try. Her one distinct memory is of awakening around three in the morning, with girls whose names she didn’t know in sleeping bags on either side of her, the air in the tent hot and unbreathable. She lay with her eyes open for a long time, then finally stood, hunching, stepping over arms and heads, whispering apologies when the other girls stirred, and pushed through the tent flap into the night. She could see the bathroom, a cement structure thirty yards away, on the other side of a dirt road. In bare feet, she walked toward it. On the women’s side of the structure, greenish light illuminated three stalls whose doors were scratched with initials and swear words. When she looked at her face in the mirror above the sink, Hannah felt a desperate wish for this moment to pass, this segment of time not to exist anymore. Her misery seemed tangible, a thing she could grasp or throw.

  The next morning they returned to campus, and Hannah didn’t talk to anyone she’d met on the orientation. She saw the people sometimes; at first it seemed that they were pretending not to recognize her, then, after a few weeks, it seemed that they were no longer pretending. But one day in January a girl fell into step beside Hannah as they were leaving the lecture hall after statistics class. “Hey,” the girl said. “You were on my orientation trip, weren’t you?”

  Hannah looked at the girl, her blond bangs and brown eyes. Something in her features made her seem friendly, Hannah thoug
ht, and realized it was her teeth: The incisors were disproportionately large. But she wasn’t unattractive. She wore a white tailored shirt underneath a gray wool sweater, and jeans that looked pressed. It was the kind of outfit Hannah imagined on a coed from the 1950s.

  “I’m Jenny.” The girl stuck out her hand, and Hannah shook it, surprised by the firmness of Jenny’s grasp.

  “So I have to confess something,” Jenny said. “I have no idea what’s going on in that class. I mean, not a thing.”

  That Jenny’s confession was so bland was both a relief and a disappointment. “It’s pretty confusing,” Hannah said.

  “Have you heard of any study groups?” Jenny asked. “Or would you be interested in studying together? I think it might be easier with someone else.”

  “Oh,” Hannah said. “Okay.”

  “I’m starving,” Jenny said. “Have you had lunch yet?”

  Hannah hesitated. She ate only breakfast in the cafeteria because you could eat breakfast alone; other people did it. “Yeah, I have,” Hannah said, then regretted it immediately. In her room, she ate bagels and fruit for lunch and dinner. It had become disgusting. She wanted something hot or wet—a hamburger or pasta. “But maybe after class on Wednesday,” Hannah said.

  “Let me give you my number,” Jenny said. They had reached the path leading to the cafeteria. When Jenny passed a scrap of paper to Hannah, she said, “So I’ll see you in class, assuming I don’t stab myself in the heart doing the reading before then.”

  Walking back to her dorm, Hannah thought, A friend. It was miraculous. This was how she’d once imagined she’d meet people in college, just this effortlessly, but it had never happened. She’d seen it happen to other students, but it hadn’t happened to her. The first problem was that, randomly, she’d been assigned to a single. The second problem was Hannah herself. She had had friends before this—not a lot, but some—and she’d believed college would be a vast improvement over high school. But upon her arrival at Tufts, she hadn’t joined clubs. She hadn’t initiated conversations. Early on, when her hall would go en masse to watch student improv troupes or a cappella groups, Hannah didn’t go because she didn’t want to, because she thought improv and a cappella were kind of stupid. (Later, that seemed like poor reasoning.) On Saturday afternoons, she’d take the T over to Fig’s dorm at BU and hang out while Fig got dressed for frat parties, and then Hannah would return to Tufts around eight P.M. and her own dorm would be silent except for certain throbbing rooms, and these Hannah would hurry past. All her decisions alone were trivial, but they accumulated and she felt herself sliding backward. By October, when the kids who lived around her were going out, she couldn’t go not because she didn’t want to but because she just couldn’t. Because what would she say to them? Really, she didn’t have anything to say to anyone. Five months passed, the longest months of Hannah’s life, and then she met Jenny.