Man of My Dreams

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “If you’re worried, we sell these bells,” the guy says. “Let me show you.” He starts walking toward the back of the store, and Hannah follows him. “The other thing,” he says, turning, “is pepper spray. I’ll show you that, too.”

  The bells are like Christmas bells. They come individually, painted in bright colors, on a strap with Velcro.

  The guy holds up a red one. “You fasten it to you,” he says. “We’ll try it on your belt loop.” When he squats, his head is near her waist, and she wonders if she looks fat from this angle. He stands and says, “Now try walking.”

  The bell jingles. “How much is it?” she asks.

  “It’s three bucks. I’ll show you the pepper spray. So how long are you here for?”

  “A week, with travel and everything, but just five days kayaking.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Massachusetts.”

  “No kidding? You came all the way from Massachusetts for five days?”

  She should have said two weeks, she thinks.

  The pepper spray is thirty-five dollars. “Honestly, though,” the guy says, “your money is better spent on the bell.”

  She decides to get both. When she pays at the cash register, Allison, Sam, and Elliot are waiting. The guy starts talking to them about bears, too, and when she rejoins them, the guy puts a hand on one of her shoulders. “Everything will go great,” he says. “You’re golden.”

  “Are you scared?” Elliot asks.

  “No,” Hannah says, and at the same time, the guy says, “I was up in Denali with my girlfriend last weekend, hoping to see a bear, and we still didn’t.” At the mention of a girlfriend, Hannah feels foolish for having imagined this guy might have noticed the size of her waist.

  Elliot gestures toward Hannah’s pepper spray. “Did it occur to you that if the bear is close enough for you to hit his eyes with that, you’re pretty much toast? Or maybe you have superhuman aim.”

  “Fuck off,” Sam says lightly. “Let her carry it if she wants to.”

  Allison takes the bell from Hannah, holds it in the air, and rings it. “Ho ho ho,” she says. “Merry Christmas.” She turns to Sam. “Have you been a good boy this year?”

  THEY STOP BY a grocery store to stock up, then ride the train to Ander, which is where they’ll pick up their kayaks and take a charter boat into Prince William Sound in the late afternoon. Ander is roughly a half mile of irregularly spaced small buildings—a grocery store, a couple of restaurants, several kayak-rental places—along with abandoned or stalled railroad cars and a giant building of pink stucco, a former army bunker where, apparently, two thirds of the three hundred locals now live. Rising behind the buildings are jagged mountains, green in some places and snowy in others; in front of the buildings is the blue stretch of the beginning of Prince William Sound, with more snowcapped mountains across the water. Though it’s sunny out, there are puddles everywhere in the muddy gravel that makes up the town’s roads.

  It’s three thirty, and for lunch they get salmon burgers, except Allison, who’s a vegetarian and orders spaghetti. Their waitress seems drunk; she’s about forty, has stringy hair and a dead front tooth, and cheerfully tells them how she’s from Corvallis, Oregon, she came up here four years ago for the hell of it, and just two months ago, she married the cook, wearing the very jeans she has on at this moment, in this very restaurant. Now she and her husband live in the bunker on the fourth floor. She forgets what Allison ordered and has to come back, and Hannah feels an odd though not unfamiliar desire to be this waitress, to be forty and calmly unattractive, to live in a strange and tiny town in Alaska with a short-order cook who loves you. Also, to not be headed out onto the water, toward the bears.

  After lunch, they walk to the end of a dock and board a boat that slaps over rolling waves as it heads north toward Harriman Fjord. The captain is a big, older, bearded guy, and the others talk to him, but Hannah sits on one side of the boat, the air rushing at her face, numbing her skin. After an hour, the captain slows the motor, and they drift toward a rocky beach. Beyond the rocks are ferns and berry patches and big, bushy devil’s clubs, then spruce and alder trees and, beyond the trees, a glacier. It is the first they have seen, melded to a mountain, covering an expanse of perhaps three square miles. Hannah imagined glaciers as clear and glittery and neatly edged, like an oversize ice cube from a tray, but this is more like a field of ruffled, dirty snow. It has a blue tint, as if squirted with Windex.

  The kayaks are strapped to the top of the boat, and the captain climbs up with surprising agility to pass them down. They gently lay the kayaks against the rocks, then slosh back through the shallow water in their black rubber boots to retrieve their backpacks. The captain leaves. Everything feels enormous, the sea and the sky and the mountains and the vast, rocky unpeopled expanse of beach. Hannah cannot believe that this, all of this, exists. It exists while she babysits the professor’s children, while she eats frozen yogurt with Jenny in the student center on campus. Now that seems distant and irrelevant. This is the world: the clearness of the air, the wind stirring the tall grasses, the way the late-afternoon sunlight glints off the tiny waves hitting the rocks. And yet she feels silly; thoughts about how small you are always feel small themselves. Besides, amazement does not preclude anxiety.

  About fifty yards back from the water, they set up the tents. “Just, if you can tell me what to do,” Hannah says to Elliot. He passes her the poles, which are folded up, with a rubbery cord running inside. The way you slide the metal pieces onto each other, something bent becoming something straight, reminds her of the wand in a children’s magic show. The ground is soft, easy to push the stakes into. The tent is turquoise, and when Hannah climbs in, on her knees so as not to track in dirt, she notices that the nylon casts a shadowy blue on her forearms. At the back of the tent, Elliot has unzipped a flap of fabric to reveal a triangular screen—a window—that strikes Hannah as quaintly domestic. It’s as if he’s hung up wind chimes, or set out a mailbox with their names on it, should Allison or Sam wish to deliver a letter. Hannah sticks the sleeping bags inside the tent, still in their stuff sacks; the backpacks they lean against trees.

  They won’t kayak until morning. For dinner, the brothers make macaroni and cheese mixed with chopped veggie dogs. “Don’t put any veggie dog in Hannah’s,” Allison says. “She doesn’t like the texture.” When they have cleaned up, Sam hangs their food in a tree. The brothers play chess on a tiny magnetic board while Allison sits on the beach, writing in her journal. Unsure what to do, Hannah goes into the tent, changes into long underwear and a different T-shirt, and gets inside her sleeping bag. In the fading light, she is reading a mystery Allison finished on the plane, except that she keeps spacing out and having to turn back a page. Forty minutes have passed by the time Elliot enters the tent. He greets her with a one-syllable noise of acknowledgment. He pulls off his T-shirt and fleece jacket, and with his back to her, his skin is golden, his arms lean but muscular. He takes off his jeans as well and climbs into his sleeping bag wearing gray boxer-briefs.

  “You’re getting your Ph.D. in neuroscience, right?” Hannah says. “Which isn’t the same as being a doctor?”

  “I’ll do research and possibly teach, but I’ll never perform surgery, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Do you have a special focus?”

  “I’m on a team that’s studying how different parts of the brain respond to stress. Right now we’re looking at the amygdala, which I assume means nothing to you.”

  “It sounds familiar.”

  There’s a long silence.

  Fine, Hannah thinks. Never mind.

  But at last Elliot says, “You go to Tufts, right?”

  “Yeah, I’m about to start my senior year. I was interning this summer at an ad agency. I like Boston pretty much. It’s true what people say about drivers there, but I don’t have a car, so I don’t really mind.”

  “I know what Boston is like. I went to law school at Harvard.”


  “Wow—you’ve been busy.”

  He doesn’t respond. But they both have been lying on their backs, and it is impossible for Hannah not to feel a little like he’s her husband. It’s the blend of intimate and mundane, as opposed to intimate and sexy; her sophomore year, she once randomly helped the R.A. on her hall, a guy named Vikram, buy groceries for a study break, and it was like this, too. She wasn’t attracted to Vikram, but they walked up and down the aisles together with the cart, conferring about prospective purchases: Why are grapes so expensive? We want the salted pretzels, right?

  Elliot rolls onto his side, away from Hannah. She should just stay quiet—obviously, he’s trying to go to sleep—but she hears herself ask, “So what do you think of Sam and Allison getting married? Pretty wild, huh?”

  “It’s great,” Elliot says. “I hope they’re happy.”

  “Did you know they were so serious?”

  “He’d have been a fool if he wasn’t. Your sister’s awesome.”

  Allison’s awesomeness, usually a source of pride to Hannah, feels like a tired subject. She says nothing more, and neither does Elliot. It is very dark, and she can hear the lapping water. Forty-five minutes pass, and—her stomach feels bloated and hard—she vacillates between worrying that she will never fall asleep or that she will fall asleep and then fart loudly. She imagines the bear’s shaggy cinnamon fur and alert wet nose, its long claws, brown and slightly curved. It’s an illusion, of course, but she’s glad to be inside a tent, hidden away. How lucky the bear is, being the one everything else is afraid of; how free it must feel, roaming across the beaches and among the trees.

  AFTER BREAKFAST, WHEN they’re putting on the spray skirts and life jackets, Elliot says, “You’re not wearing that in the kayak, are you? There aren’t bears on the water.”

  Earlier, Hannah attached the bear bell to the sleeve of her jacket, and it rings whenever she moves. She looks at Elliot, then looks away. She is sick of trying to make him like her. “I want to,” she says just as Sam says, “Hey, Hannah, what size life jacket do you have?”

  “I don’t know.” She unclips the plastic hooks in front and shrugs it off so she can look at the tag. “It says large.”

  “Switch with me, will you?” Sam tosses her a different one. “The two mediums are for you and Allison, and the two larges are for me and Elliot.”

  “But—” Hannah pauses. “I know you’re taller than I am, but Sam, I have boobs. My chest is actually bigger than yours.”

  Allison giggles. “Hannah’s pretty stacked,” she says. “It’s been my torment since high school.” This isn’t true. By eighth grade, Hannah was wearing a larger bra than either her older sister or her mother, but it was her own torment. Still, for years, she and Allison have acted like there’s at least one thing Allison envies about Hannah.

  “It’s a fact that I’m bigger,” Sam says. “I’m not being sexist. Stand next to me, Hannah.”

  First they stand side by side, then back to back.

  “This is ridiculous,” Elliot says, but Hannah cannot tell what he’s referring to. The situation? Her?

  “It’s hard to tell without a tape measure,” Allison says. She’s still speaking with—pretending to feel, Hannah thinks—an air of amusement.

  “Can you fasten the medium one?” Sam asks Hannah.

  Hannah sticks her arms through the holes. She’s sure it won’t fasten, but then it does. But that probably means it would fasten for Sam, too, except that while she has been fiddling with the hooks, he has somehow eased the large life jacket out of her hands. There’s nothing to do but launch the kayaks.

  It’s tippy at first, then smooth, almost as if they’re gliding on the water itself, unseparated by fiberglass. Elliot and Sam paddle faster than she and Allison, and after they are a few hundred yards apart, Hannah turns her head and says over her shoulder—Allison is in the stern, steering—“So what do you think of that dick move by your boyfriend or fiancé or whatever he is?”

  “Hannah, calm down.”

  “Thanks for defending me. Were you afraid he’d feel emasculated if you admitted that his chest isn’t as big as he wants to think?”

  Allison says nothing.

  “But I do enjoy spending quality time with his brother,” Hannah says. “What a warm guy.”

  “Elliot’s cute,” Allison says, and it enrages Hannah that Allison won’t stick up for herself, she won’t even say anything connected to what the conversation is about. When they were young, they had real fights—hair-pulling declarations of hatred—and though the physical aspect petered out, they still bickered until Allison was in seventh grade. And then—it was awful—she turned nice. The way that in junior high some girls turn popular, or anorexic, or Goth, Allison turned resolutely, personality-definingly nice. She turned pretty, too, which made her niceness seem even more generous and less necessary.

  “You know what they both remind me of?” Possibly, Hannah thinks, this is going too far. “ ‘Beware the man who’s read one book.’ They’re acting like I’m all paranoid about the bears, but it’s not as if they have a ton of camping experience.”

  “Sam’s camped before,” Allison says. “I promise. Both of them grew up going on pack trips in Wyoming.”

  “Well, lah-dee-dah,” Hannah says. “Authentic cowboys.”

  Again Allison says nothing.

  “I do have one question,” Hannah says. “Don’t you feel shortchanged that his family is loaded, yet he only gave you a silver engagement ring?”

  “Right now,” Allison says, “I’m having a pretty hard time imagining you as the maid of honor at our wedding.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Hannah, why would I threaten you? But you’re making it clear you don’t like either Sam or Elliot. I wouldn’t want to put you in a situation where you felt uncomfortable.”

  “Like this one, you mean? It’s obvious everyone would prefer that I hadn’t come.” She waits for Allison to contradict her, and when Allison doesn’t, Hannah adds, “Including me.”

  For more than twenty minutes, neither of them speaks. At first the life jacket felt to Hannah like a corset, but she’s gotten used to it. And it’s a relief to be in the kayak. Now she only has to get through the trip itself, not preparation for the trip and the trip.

  Finally, Allison says, “See the glacier up ahead? We can’t get too close, because chunks can break off at any second. It’s called calving.” Yes, Allison is more mature than Hannah, Allison is a better person, but there’s also less at stake for her. Allison can afford to capitulate conversation-wise because Hannah isn’t where her attention lies; to Allison, Hannah isn’t the primary person on the trip. “You’re doing well,” Allison adds. “The first time I ever went kayaking, I got seasick.”

  Grudgingly, Hannah says, “Is that possible?”

  “I vomited into the water. Ask Sam. He thought I was the biggest dork.”

  Later in the afternoon, they see a bald eagle, and then a seal surfaces close to their kayak. There is something sorrowful in its wet brown head, Hannah thinks, as it ducks under again and disappears.

  Before dinner, when Sam is boiling the water for couscous and Allison and Elliot are in the tents, Sam says to Hannah, “No hard feelings about the life jacket, right?”

  Hannah pauses, then says, “Yeah, it’s fine.”

  Sam lowers his voice. “Allison is really worried about your issues with your dad.”

  “I didn’t realize my issues with my dad were public information,” Hannah says, and Sam drops it.

  After dinner, they play hearts in Sam and Allison’s tent. It is so cold that they all put on jackets and wool hats. Around nine, when it starts getting dark—Alaska is not the land of the midnight sun this late in August—they pull out their flashlights and set them at angles pointing up, four moons inside the tent. But then it gets totally dark, and it’s impossible to see the cards even with the flashlights.

  Before following Elliot into their tent, Hannah
walks over to a tree twenty feet away. As she pulls down her underwear, long underwear, and fleece pants, she imagines a bear coming up behind her and pawing her ass. She shakes her bear bell, and Allison calls out, “I hear you, Hannah,” in a singsong. Hannah must squat there for an entire minute before she can relax enough to urinate. She’s pretty sure she gets a little on her feet—she’s wearing wool socks and flip-flops—but it is too dark, and she is too tired, to care.

  THE DAYS DEVELOP a rhythm. They eat oatmeal or Pop-Tarts for breakfast and sometimes hot cocoa; for lunch they have carrots and apples and bagels with peanut butter; and for dinner Elliot or Sam makes pasta or refried beans over Elliot’s stove. They each carry two water bottles, one bowl, one cup, and one set of utensils.

  They move to a different island, and in the soil just above the beach, Hannah sees several piles of what must be bear shit: big mashed-looking clumps that are sometimes dark brown and sometimes almost pink, dotted by whole unchewed berries. She thinks of the guy in the store in Anchorage, the way he said, “You’re golden,” and she tries to hold his words close, like a talisman.

  On the water, cruise ships appear in the distance. Sam and Elliot make sneering comments about their passengers, the inauthenticity of their Alaskan experience. “Tourists,” they say scornfully, and Hannah thinks, But what are we? She would rather be a cruise-ship passenger: a gray-haired woman from Milwaukee carrying a camera in a gold lamé shoulder bag and eating halibut off a white plate every night. The faraway ships make Hannah feel that they are less alone, and she is always sorry when they disappear from view. She also is comforted when, one evening at their campsite, she finds a Band-Aid half buried in dirt. The Band-Aid has a Flintstones motif, and Hannah picks it up—she would never do this in normal life—and looks at it in her palm.

  At night Hannah sleeps in a sports bra and, as Allison has instructed, lays wet articles of clothing—socks, mostly—against her stomach so they’ll dry. At least once a day, it drizzles. When this happens, Hannah thinks that if she just suspends thought, time will pass and she will find herself back at Tufts, starting the new school year, kicking herself for not having appreciated her exotic and expensive vacation.