Man of My Dreams

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Sometimes when she and Allison are talking in front of Frank about, say, perfume, Hannah wonders if he finds them amusingly gabby or just frivolous. He has no children of his own. He was married for twenty-nine years to a woman who was either mentally ill or extremely difficult (Hannah’s mother speaks of the woman so briefly and mysteriously that Hannah has not been able to tell which), and he became a widower four years ago. “He’s a little shy,” Hannah’s mother said initially, though Hannah is not sure this is true—just because he isn’t chatty doesn’t mean he’s shy. Mainly, Frank is rich. This is the ubiquitous fact about him, the reason why his marriage to Hannah’s mother is, barring any as-yet-unrevealed psychotic streaks in him, a positive development. All things being equal, why not be married to a rich man? (Somewhere, Hannah thinks, there must be a needlepoint pillow asking this very question in a cleverer way.) Now there’s a guarantee that Hannah’s mother can, for the foreseeable future, keep wearing pleated pink pants and soft pastel cardigan sweaters, keep preparing shrimp fettuccine Alfredo (her signature dish) for special occasions. It’s not that Hannah’s mother is materialistic, per se, just that Hannah isn’t sure she knows how to live another way. And Frank possesses a certain competent, comforting quality that Hannah suspects comes partly from his money. She gets the sense that, under pressure, he could take care of problems—say, if Allison or Hannah had an eating disorder and needed to be hospitalized, or if one of them got a DUI. The likelihood of either is pretty much nil, but if one did occur, Frank seems like he’d acknowledge the problem and go about addressing it without getting bogged down in a lot of talk or blame. Plus, Frank doesn’t seem to be trying to prove anything, he seems the opposite of edgy. Even the fact that he’s driving Mrs. Dawes home—Hannah takes it as a good sign for Frank’s marriage to her mother that he doesn’t feel the need to bask in newlywedded attention, he doesn’t have to stay all night at his wife’s side so that he can see himself, or other people can see him, as someone who stayed all night at his wife’s side.

  Frank turns on the radio, set to the public station, and a polite volume of classical music fills the car. “Mrs. Dawes, how’s the temperature for you?” he asks. “It’ll get warmer in a minute or two.”

  “I’m never warm,” Mrs. Dawes says. “You could turn it up to ninety-five degrees and it wouldn’t be enough.”

  “Well, I’m certainly glad you could join us for the wedding,” Frank says. “It meant the world to Caitlin.”

  Hannah has never been all that fond of Mrs. Dawes, but it’s probably true that her attendance meant something to Hannah’s mother: the older generation sanctioning the union.

  “It’s remarkable how Caitlin’s kept her figure,” Mrs. Dawes says. She turns her head ninety degrees to the left. “I’ll bet you girls have to watch what you eat, but your mother has always been naturally slim. I don’t think I’m imagining that Allison is heavier than when I saw her last.”

  “Allison is pregnant,” Hannah says, and Frank snorts in a way that might mean he is suppressing a laugh—in which case, he’s aligned with Hannah—or might just mean he swallowed a piece of dust. “She’s due in May,” Hannah adds.

  “I hope she won’t have any trouble. They have a lot more trouble when they’re older, you know.”

  “She’s only twenty-nine.”

  Mrs. Dawes chortles. “That’s not so young, Hannah. I had four little ones by the time I was twenty-nine. But you girls with your careers, running about.”

  Mildly, not even vehemently, Hannah thinks, Oh, fuck you. In the abstract, Hannah considers herself evil to dislike an eighty-two-year-old. And Mrs. Dawes’s physical weakness is a sobering sight. But whenever Hannah talks to her for longer than a minute, she remembers immediately why she feels this antipathy: Mrs. Dawes complains and criticizes in an upbeat way, suggesting, perhaps, her own good-humored tolerance of others’ deficiencies. She never asks Hannah much of anything, nor is she particularly loquacious, yet you can feel her waiting for you to attend to and engage her, all of which makes talking to her work. Hannah knows that other people (Allison, for one) would not consider it fair to judge an octogenarian on the same criteria you’d apply to people much younger, which is why Hannah has never mentioned to anyone else her dislike for Mrs. Dawes. Also, Mrs. Dawes isn’t quite critical or grouchy enough to seem like a certified old crank.

  “Tell me,” Frank says, “is it sons or daughters you have, Mrs. Dawes?”

  “I have two of each, and would you believe they all live in California? All four of them.”

  Yeah, I would believe it, Hannah thinks. Then, though presumably her mother sent her on the ride less to provide directions than to relieve Frank of some of Mrs. Dawes’s unrelenting company, Hannah tunes out and lets Frank pull the weight of the conversation.

  Mrs. Dawes lives fifteen minutes from Hannah’s mother’s condo, in a wooded area where you can’t see most of the houses from the road. You take a driveway a quarter of a mile back through the trees, and then a house—invariably, a large one, though of the old-fashioned shingled variety rather than the immodest newer developments—appears at the end. Mrs. Dawes is describing to Frank her late husband’s interest in bird-watching—she refers to him as Dr. Dawes—when she interrupts herself to tell Frank to make a left into her driveway. Hannah has a dim memory of coming here years ago to the birthday party of one of Mrs. Dawes’s California grandchildren, which featured a magic show. Though Hannah couldn’t have been more than six or seven, she remembers thinking it was strange to attend the birthday party of a person she’d never met.

  The house is completely dark. Allison and Sam picked up Mrs. Dawes before the wedding ceremony, and Hannah thinks irritatedly that her sister should have left on at least one light. Frank suggests that Hannah help Mrs. Dawes from the car onto the brick walkway leading to the front door, and then he will back up a few feet and illuminate the walkway with his headlights. Hannah climbs from the backseat, opens Mrs. Dawes’s car door, and extends her right arm. Mrs. Dawes sets her feet on the ground, which is to say she sets her heels in the snow, since the walkway is not cleared at all. (Allison and Sam also should have done that—it would have taken Sam about three minutes.) Mrs. Dawes takes hold of Hannah’s arm, and Hannah can feel the old woman pulling herself up. When Mrs. Dawes is next to her, Hannah catches the scent not of garlic, as Fig claimed, but of a pleasant lilac perfume. Hannah leans around her to shut the car door, and Frank sets the car in reverse. Only a few seconds pass when the car doors are closed and Hannah and Mrs. Dawes are standing by themselves out in the night, but Hannah feels that primal fear of the dark—the house and woods and sky are black around them, all stealthily watchful and indifferent to an individual’s vulnerabilities, or possibly preying on such vulnerabilities. Even when Frank has parked and emerged from the car, Hannah’s tension dissipates only slightly. As when they left Hannah’s mother’s condo, they walk in tiny steps, but this time Hannah is the primary escort.

  “If you’ll give me your keys, Mrs. Dawes,” Frank says, “I can go ahead and open the door for you.”

  They pause while Mrs. Dawes rummages in her pocketbook. Her key chain proves to be a brown leather strap, not unlike a bookmark, beaded in turquoise, red, and black. Why, Mrs. Dawes, Hannah thinks, how ethnic of you. The confusion of explaining to Frank which of the twelve or so keys corresponds with which of the two locks means that by the time Hannah and Mrs. Dawes have arrived at the door, it still is not open. “Give them back to me,” Mrs. Dawes says sternly, but she spends no fewer than four minutes fiddling with them herself. “You’ve gotten them turned around so I can’t tell up from down,” she says to Frank more than once. During this interval, Frank and Hannah make eye contact several times. The first time he raises his eyebrows, and the second time he smiles the saddest smile Hannah has ever seen. He is not impatient right now, she realizes; he feels only sympathy for Mrs. Dawes.

  At last the door opens. Frank finds a light switch, and they are standing in a hall with a wooden
floor covered by an Oriental rug. To the right of the door is a mahogany bureau with a mirror hanging over it; to the left is a staircase with a shiny banister. The hall opens onto a shelf-lined living room filled with dated-looking but nice furniture—a white sofa, several large chairs covered in floral fabrics, marble end tables, a coffee table with a porcelain ashtray on it and a silver vase containing no flowers—as well as a brown La-Z-Boy stationed about six feet from a plasma TV.

  “Can I help you upstairs, Mrs. Dawes?” Frank asks. “I’d love to get you settled in before we take off.”

  Hannah glances to see if the staircase features a motorized chair. It doesn’t. And she knows from her mother that Mrs. Dawes has refused to get help outside of a housekeeper who comes three times a week. Hannah’s mother always mentions this refusal whenever she has reason to discuss Mrs. Dawes: Mrs. Dawes, who won’t even think of giving up that big house; Mrs. Dawes, who still won’t consider a night nurse, even a woman who just sits downstairs and Mrs. Dawes wouldn’t have to see her… For several years, Hannah’s mother has dropped off food for Mrs. Dawes once or twice a week—a few cookies, say, or a pint of soup—and the smallness of the quantity has made these deliveries seem to Hannah almost not worth the effort. Or, even worse, like maybe Hannah’s mother is simply passing on leftovers, when in actuality she purchases the items at an upscale deli. But now, imagining her mother driving out here, Hannah understands the minuscule portions. Also, possibly, she understands why her mother is willing to overlook Frank’s gut.

  “You two ought to get back so the others don’t think you’ve been buried in a snowbank,” Mrs. Dawes says.

  “No hurry at all,” Frank says. “May I make you some tea? I don’t know if you like a cup of tea at night.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’ve been planning to drink since we left Caitlin’s, and that’s a glass of water. The duck was extraordinarily salty. Didn’t you find it salty, Hannah?”

  “It tasted okay to me,” Hannah says.

  “I typically don’t care for duck. If you’d like some water, you can come this way.”

  There is another slow progression, this time down a hall, and then they’re in the kitchen: white-and-red-checked linoleum floor, a rounded refrigerator and sink Hannah thinks are from the fifties, but maybe it’s the forties or the sixties. When Mrs. Dawes turns off the faucet, Hannah becomes aware of the absolute quiet of this house. The only noise is the noise they’re making. Mrs. Dawes has provided clear juice glasses with faded nickel-sized orange polka dots. She offers no ice, and the three of them stand there, audibly gulping the lukewarm water. Hannah realizes she was sort of thirsty. She watches—she sees that it’s about to happen, then she sees it happen, but she doesn’t think of it until after as something she might have prevented—as Mrs. Dawes sets her glass on the edge of the drain board. Two thirds of the glass’s base are hanging in the air, as if over a cliff. The entire glass tips to the floor and shatters.

  Frank yelps, a high, embarrassing cry. Then he is hunching over, bending from the waist rather than the knees, to blot the spilled water with paper towels from the roll by the sink. Looking up, his face reddened because of either yelping or bending, he asks, “Mrs. Dawes, where’s your broom? We’ll get this up in no time.”

  When Mrs. Dawes pulls the broom from the closet in the corner, Frank tries to take it, and she won’t let him. “I made this mess, Frank,” she says. “I’ll clean it up.” She sweeps slowly and a bit shakily, and Hannah feels as if she is observing a private act; she should turn away or pretend to be preoccupied by something else. But she also wants to intervene. She waits until the shards of glass are in a pile, then says, “Let me do the dustpan. May I?”

  Perhaps Mrs. Dawes lets her because Hannah is a woman, or perhaps Mrs. Dawes can’t crouch over the floor in the way the dustpan requires. Is she getting all the tiny pieces, Hannah wonders, or is she leaving some tiny sparkle of glass? She hopes Mrs. Dawes wears slippers, because if she were to cut herself, it would all be such a complicated process—bending to press a piece of tissue to her foot, making her way to wherever she keeps Band-Aids, discerning whether the glass was embedded in her skin or somewhere still on the floor.

  “Be careful,” Mrs. Dawes says, but she doesn’t say anything else, and neither does Frank. Hannah feels them watching from above. A few seconds ago, she was thinking how enormous her thighs look as she squats, but she has a sudden realization that what is most prominent about her right now is probably her health. Her youth, her vigor, her resilience—the effortlessness for her of squatting to sweep up broken glass, and the preoccupied quality of her attention to the sweeping. They might imagine that she has plans to go to a bar after this with her cousins and Oliver, that the wedding was the first part of the evening but for her there will be another part. As far as she knows, there won’t be, but it’s true that there could. In Mrs. Dawes’s kitchen, Hannah feels a hot bright awareness of the many flexibilities her life still contains, the unpredictabilities. Bad or painful things will occur for her, surely, but she will bounce back from them. A lot is going to happen.

  When the glass has been disposed of, Mrs. Dawes leads them to the front door, and Frank says to her, “You’re sure one of us can’t help you to the second floor? Either Hannah or I would be delighted—” Very quickly, he glances toward Hannah, then glances away. In that glance, she thinks he apologizes to her, and later, Hannah will remember this as the precise moment when she first loved her stepfather. The kindly presumptuousness of his volunteering her services as well as his own, and then his immediate unspoken apology for having done so, for possibly delaying their departure when he can tell she is restless—it feels so family-ish.

  Hannah is glad when Mrs. Dawes again rejects Frank’s offer. She does, however, allow him to remove her coat and hang it.

  “Truly, many thanks for sharing our wedding,” Frank says, and Hannah can tell he is debating whether it would be too forward to embrace Mrs. Dawes. He must conclude that it would be, or that Mrs. Dawes would think it was, because he settles for patting her shoulder three times. Before Hannah has consciously decided to, she leans in and kisses Mrs. Dawes’s cheek, not unlike the way she kissed her father several hours ago. It is possible, she thinks, that she’ll never see Mrs. Dawes again.

  Before Hannah and Frank walk out of the house, Mrs. Dawes turns on the outside light, and the illuminated brick pathway now staves off the sorrow and danger of the night. But also the sorrow and danger are held at bay, beyond the perimeter of the light, because Hannah and Frank have left Mrs. Dawes inside. Hooray! It’s not rude to feel this way, is it? They did everything they could for her. They were totally patient, they went overboard. How many times did Frank offer to help Mrs. Dawes upstairs? At least twice!

  But as they are fastening their seat belts, a mournful symphony emanates from the radio, and Hannah loses her brief giddiness. Abruptly, she and Frank no longer exist in contrast to Mrs. Dawes; they are just themselves, contained in a car. She glances to her left. Frank is focused on the curving driveway. They come to the road, and sitting there, perhaps feeling her gaze on his face, Frank shakes his head. “I never want to grow old, Hannah,” he says.

  She looks at him in astonishment. She thinks, But you already are.

  AT HOME, FRANK parks in the driveway, and as they are walking inside, she can see through the back porch window that her mother and Aunt Polly have been joined in the kitchen by Oliver and Fig. If Oliver weren’t here, she could go to sleep now, but because he is here, because he is Oliver, she will have to entertain him. This morning he asked her where they could rent porn, and she said, “This is my mom’s house, Oliver.”

  “There you both are,” Hannah’s mother says, and Oliver exclaims, “The chauffeurs!”

  Hannah takes a seat at the kitchen table and glares at Oliver—this is the look she was saving from hours before—but he merely smiles glassily, then returns his attention to tying shut a trash bag. (She is shocked he’s helping clean up.) Fig stands
a few feet from him, drying dishes. “Did Mrs. Dawes settle in?” Hannah’s mother asks.

  “She’s certainly strong-willed,” Frank says. “She wouldn’t even let us help her upstairs.”

  “Maybe she didn’t want you to see her dildo collection,” Fig says, and Aunt Polly says, “Honestly, Fig.” Fig, presumably, is drunk as well.