I'm Not Julia Roberts

  “Not us,” Glynn says. “It’s a good thing, too, because there aren’t any beaches there.” She eyes Ryan. “And there won’t be any biting here, will there?” When Ryan doesn’t respond, when he lifts his sandy boogie board and strokes it like a dog, Glynn pinches her brother.

  “Ryan,” Tate says. “No biting, all right?”

  Ryan rolls his eyes and mumbles, which Tate takes as a “yes.” It’s enough for Joey, who immediately asks to borrow Ryan’s boogie board when they go to the beach the next day.

  Glynn pinches Tate again.

  “What?” says Tate.

  “I’ve almost got Mom talked into family therapy.”

  “No, you don’t,” Tate says.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “No, you don’t. She told me when I last talked to her that she’d go to family therapy when they pry her gun from her cold, dead hands.”

  “I think it would help us all understand this legacy,” Glynn says.

  “Please tell me that ‘legacy’ means someone old and wealthy kicked and left us all a billion dollars.”

  “The legacy of divorce.”

  “The legacy of divorce is the legacy of divorce,” Tate intones.

  “That’s exactly it.”

  “I know, you’ve told me. Over and over and over. And if you already know it, why do we need to go to a therapist?”

  “We’re not normal people, Tate. It’s pretty clear to me that we’re not normal people. The evidence is all around us.” She flaps her hand at the screen door that opens out onto one of the numerous decks. Their father sleeps on a lounge chair, an empty glass on the table next to him. “We call a man who isn’t our dad ‘Dad.’”

  “Glynn,” he says, “he raised us.”

  “I know,” Glynn says. “But it’s not normal. I’m tired of explaining it. ‘My dad, who’s technically my stepfather but not really, because he’s not married to my mom anymore, but he’s still my dad, because he adopted me when I was five. No, I don’t see my real dad, who isn’t my dad anymore, because the other one is.’ Who else has to say those kinds of things? Who else has to live like that? It’s insane.”

  “You don’t have to explain it to anyone, you know,” says Tate. “You could just call Dad ‘Dad’ and leave out all the details.”

  “But they’re important. Our pasts help to make us what we are.”

  Our fats help to make what we fart. “I know you’re upset that Derek is marrying Stacey, but you’ll get over it. I promise.”

  “Stacey has lips bigger than my whole head. In case of an emergency landing, you could use Stacey’s lips as flotation devices.”

  “You will get over it,” Tate says firmly. “And if you want, you could buy flotation lips, too. Ask Renee where to get some.”

  Glynn wrings her hands the way Ashleigh used to when she was a baby and wanted someone to pick her up. “Derek invited me to the wedding. They’re getting married at some estate on Lake Michigan. All the guests have to wear white for some insane reason. I’ll look like a barge. A big white ex-barge.”

  “You don’t have to go,” he says.

  “I have to go. You know I do.”

  “Okay. Do you want me to prescribe something for you?”

  Glynn glares at him. “What are you implying?”

  Renee stalks into the room, holding two small towels with tassels on the edges. “These are decorative towels,” she announces.

  Everyone turns to look at her.

  “There are stacks and stacks of towels in the linen closet. I don’t want anyone using the decorative towels anymore.”

  Ashleigh picks at her fingernails. “Why not?”

  “Because,” Renee says, eyes widening, “they’re decorative.”

  “Why did you hang them in the bathroom if you don’t want anyone to use them?” says Ryan, looking up from his boogie board.

  Renee stares. “Is that sand all over the floor?”

  Ryan stares back. “We’re at the beach. Beaches have sand.”

  Tate’s mother calls his cell phone just as he’s finished lathering up with sunscreen.

  “So,” she says, “how is it? A castle on the edge of the ocean?”

  “It’s on the bay side, actually. A few blocks from the beach.”

  “Really?” Tate’s mother says. “Slumming, are they?”

  “Slumming with Italian tile,” Tate tells her.

  “Ah,” she says. “Are you allowed to walk on it?”

  “Sometimes. But Renee does like to follow everyone around with the broom.”

  “Renee with a broom! I can’t believe it! She might get blisters on her delicate fingers! She might ruin her manicure!”

  “There are emergency numbers on the fridge just in case,” Tate says. “Plus, I am a medical professional, you know.”

  “Hmm,” his mother says. “How are the kids? Are they having a good time?”

  “The boys are fighting over the boogie board, and Ashleigh is flirting with the lifeguards. They torment Renee by kicking sand around the place and refusing to eat her food.”

  “So they are having fun,” she says.

  “I think so.”

  “Are you?”

  “Glynn won’t come to the beach because she’s worried about melanoma. And she keeps talking about family therapy.”

  “Oh, God! That girl! She always did read too many books. I told her that she should have been a lawyer. No, she wanted to be a librarian.”

  “She’s just upset about Derek getting married again,” Tate says.

  “Well,” says his mother, “I can understand that. But instead of therapy she ought to think about beheading all the roses in the garden. That’s what I did on the day your father married Renee.”

  “Therapeutic.”

  “Speaking of therapy, how’s your father’s drinking?”

  “Let’s not talk about that, Mom. Let’s talk about something else. How’s Len?” Len is his mother’s third husband. The first, Tate’s “real” father, she refers to as her “practice husband.” The second, Tate’s adoptive father, she refers to as “that bastard.” Or sometimes “schmuckface.” “Putz-a-doodle-do.”

  “Len,” his mother says. “Len is Len.”

  “What’s he up to these days?”

  “Who?”

  “Len, Mom.”

  “Oh. Let’s see. He found a three-headed ant on eBay, and he’s been bidding on it for the last twelve hours. We’re up to fifty-six dollars. For an ant.”

  Tate takes a deep breath, filling up his cheeks and exhaling like a balloon. “Okay. How are you?”

  “How do you think I am? My children are off at Renee’s fantasy castle by the sea, and I’m here with Len.”

  A flash of lime green catches Tate’s eye. The girl’s back, spreading out her rainbow-striped towel. She sees Tate and smiles.

  “I keep looking for Mr. Darcy and all I find are a bunch of Mr. Collinses,” his mother says. “Jane Austen has completely ruined marriage for any woman born after 1800. Someone ought to have arrested her for suggesting that men have inner lives, that men have something in the center. There’s nothing but nougat in there. No fudge, no caramel.” She laughs, delighted by her own analogy. “And you can forget about nuts.”

  There’s another girl with her, this one in pink. Green nudges Pink with a tanned toe, and Pink begins to giggle.

  “I don’t mean you, Tate. When am I going to meet this woman you’re dating? What’s her name? Trixie? Was her mother a truck stop waitress, by any chance?”

  Green hooks a finger into the top of her bathing suit and flashes a nipple.

  “Tate?” says his mother. “Hello, Tate?”

  For dinner, Renee makes softshell crabs with wild rice. Ryan says they look like giant bugs in piles of dirt. Joey sees what’s for supper and starts to cry.

  After the meal, or rather, after the tantrums, Tate loads Ryan, Joey, and Ashleigh into the car and drives to the nearest ice-cream shop, Scoopy Doo. Ryan demands the biggest b
anana split—four scoops of ice cream, two bananas, three types of sauce.

  “You wouldn’t need such a big ice cream if you had eaten your food,” Tate says.

  Ryan’s expression says his father has gone crazy if he expects a boy to eat giant bugs in dirt piles. Joey shyly asks for a Super Scoopy sundae.

  Ashleigh doesn’t want ice cream. She wants to talk. While the boys chase each other around the parking lot, she asks to live with Tate. “Mom doesn’t understand me.”

  Tate is momentarily speechless. Then he says: “I don’t understand you, either.”

  “Yes,” she says, “but it’s okay if you don’t understand me. You’re not supposed to.”

  “I’m not?”

  “No, you’re my father. You’re supposed to misunderstand everything. You’re supposed to hate my boyfriends. You’re supposed to threaten to shoot them or cut them into little pieces or something.”

  He does not want to talk about this. “Speaking of boyfriends, how’s Kevin?”

  “Devin. With a D. And you’re not listening! You’re supposed to hate my clothes and disapprove of my choices.”

  “What choices are we talking about here?”

  “My choices,” she says again.

  He thinks of his house, where he has only the barest essentials: a couch, a chair, a coffee table, a plasma TV. After the divorce, his ex, Moira, kept the house and Tate moved into his own. He doesn’t know why he bought a house; he never liked the upkeep a house required, never kept up with upkeep. But Moira said it might be a good idea that the kids have their own rooms in his place, and he thought it was a good idea, and everyone he talked to said, “Oh, what a good idea.” But the kids had slept in those rooms only a handful of times, and they never really decorated them. And sometimes, after he’s had a glass of red wine or two or three, he can admit to himself that it was a bad idea to buy a big house, a bad idea to buy any kind of house. Why does he need a house? He doesn’t need a house. Every woman he brings there says the same thing: “This could use a woman’s touch.” And they’re right, of course, women are often right about a lot of things, but he doesn’t want a woman’s touch. At least, not that kind of touch. They should feel free to touch other things, though, the women. Sometimes, if it’s the right woman, he says as much.

  Roxie hasn’t said anything about a “woman’s touch.” He likes that about her. She doesn’t seem to notice the mess, the lack of decoration, the Ramada Inn-ness of his whole enterprise. Plus, there’s her name. That strange throwback of a name. It makes him feel young, it makes him feel he’s living in an Elvis movie or maybe a dream.

  But sometimes he feels Roxie staring at him when she thinks he isn’t looking, sizing him up, and he wonders when she will start pushing, asking him if their relationship is “going somewhere.” It seems to Tate that all women think they should be going somewhere. Tate wants to know where all the women think they are going.

  “So can I live with you?” Ashleigh tosses the sherbet hair from her shoulder. “I really want to get my belly button pierced.”

  Glynn finally decides to come to the beach. She wears a large floppy hat, a bathing suit with a skirt, and a white film of SPF 10,000. She opens up a book, but Tate knows she’s not going to read it. She blurts, “What do you remember about our father? The real one, I mean.”

  “What do I remember about him?” Tate doesn’t remember much and doesn’t care to remember. Why would he want to remember anything about a man who walked out on him and his sister and then kept walking? But his sister is looking at him as if she’s dying of thirst. “Uh . . . he was tall. And he had a lot of hair all over the place, like a crazy man. He had crazy man’s hair.”

  “Crazy man’s hair. I must have inherited that. What else?”

  “He collected stamps. I remember him hunched over those books, pasting the stamps into them. He tried to get me interested, but I didn’t care about that stuff.”

  “Did he play with you?”

  Tate shrugs. “He taught me to ride my bike. What do you remember about him? Anything?”

  Glynn folds the page in her book. “Not much. I know that he was a smoker.”

  “What?” says Tate. “No, he wasn’t.”

  “Sure he was,” Glynn says. “You don’t remember those skinny cigars? They stank up the room.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “We used to fight over who got to blow out the match, so he’d always light two matches, one for each of us.”

  Tate shakes his head at his sister. “You must be thinking of someone else. He wasn’t a smoker.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “Glynn,” he says, getting a little annoyed, “I don’t think he smoked a day in his life.”

  “You just don’t remember, that’s all,” Glynn says.

  “You don’t remember,” Tate says. “You were three years old.”

  Glynn opens her book, closing the subject.

  “Why did you ask me what I remember if you don’t want to know what I remember?” he says, though she continues to ignore him.

  Tate pushes his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose in disgust and pretends to sleep. But he can’t stay irritated for long; the sea air scours away irritation, exasperation, consternation. Anyway, he has something else to think about. Green is no longer wearing green, she wears a new bathing suit, a polka-dotted one. Though it covers more of her body, she seems more naked in it, as its different shape reveals secret stripes of untanned skin.

  Tate’s not-father father insists on taking the family out for dinner, despite the fact that his wife has planned to make lobster tails with drawn butter, despite the fact that his wife is furious. “I can’t understand what we’re doing here,” she says, yanking her napkin off her plate in disgust and spreading it over her lap. Tate notices that when Renee frowns, she develops jowls. When he was little, he always wished that people looked more the way they really were inside. Renee’s jowls say a lot. Renee’s jowls say, I will devour your soul if you let me. I will stuff you with bugs and dirt.

  “The kids didn’t want lobster tails,” says Tate’s dad. “Kids don’t eat that sort of thing.”

  Renee doesn’t care what kids eat. “What am I going to do with all that lobster?”

  His father’s expression is blank when he says, “Maybe you can give it to one of your friends.”

  “Which friend?” Renee says. “Who are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know any of their names. Isn’t that funny that I don’t know any of their names? You’d think I would by now.”

  Renee studies her husband. “You’ve been drinking again.”

  “No more than usual.”

  It seems the kind of drama that teenagers live for, but Ashleigh isn’t interested. “So, Dad, have you thought about what I said?”

  “About what?” says Tate.

  “About living with you.”

  Glynn dribbles clam chowder down her chin and neck. Ryan’s head snaps up. “Are we moving in with Dad?”

  Tate says, “I don’t think that’s the best idea.”

  “Why not? We can hang out together. Do things, like we used to.”

  What things? All Ashleigh ever talks about is her hair or her nails or her boyfriends, and sometimes, sometimes, he has to remind himself that he’s her father. He doesn’t feel old enough to be Ashleigh’s father—or Ryan’s, for that matter. When did he have these children? How long ago could it have been? His forty-fifth birthday had come as a huge surprise. He does not want any more surprises.

  “Well?” Ashleigh says.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “I know what that means,” says Ryan. “That means no.” He wraps his hands around his warm Sprite. “Don’t put ice in it,” he told the waitress. Ryan hates ice, hates that the ice could abruptly avalanche as he’s drinking and hit him in the face.

  Glynn carefully crumbles crackers into her soup. “How about a compromise?”

  “What do you me
an?” says Ashleigh.

  “Maybe you could spend part of the week at your dad’s and part with your mom,” Glynn says.

  Ashleigh considers this. “That could be okay. As long as the weekends are with Dad. Maybe like Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays are Mom’s or something. Or just Mondays and Tuesdays.”

  Glynn nods energetically. “Yes, like that. I’m sure if you sat down with your parents and discussed it, you could work it all out.” She glances at Tate. “I don’t know if your father has mentioned it to you, but we’re thinking of taking the whole family to therapy. This is just the kind of thing that you could work through there. I think that it will be good for all of us to hear what you have to say.”

  Tate wants to throw something at her.

  Tate has now seen both of Green’s nipples and one butt cheek. He can’t imagine where she’ll go from here. Will she strip on the beach? Stride naked into the sea foam like Aphrodite in reverse? Behind dark shades, he watches, every muscle in his body tensing in anticipation.

  “Stop staring, Dad.”

  “What?” He sees Ryan, Joey behind him, both wearing little boots of wet sand.

  “You keep staring at those people,” Ryan says, dumping his boogie board on the blanket. “It makes you look weird.”

  “I’m not staring,” Tate says. “And I don’t look weird.”

  Ryan grabs a towel and, with it, wraps his head like a turban. “You always look weird.”

  Tate considers his son. “This from a boy in a turban.”

  “Not from me. Ashleigh.” He points to the lifeguard stand, where Ashleigh chats with two boys who look as if they’ve been sculpted entirely out of toffee. “She told me to tell you that the girl is too young.” Ryan puts his hands on his hips. “Are you going to marry her?”

  “No, Ryan. Ashleigh’s got the wrong idea. I’m not marrying anyone.”

  “My dad’s getting married,” says Joey. “Mom doesn’t like it.”

  “Do you blame her?” Tate says.

  “Huh?”

  “I mean, are you sad that your dad is getting married?”

  “No,” says Joey. “Mom got married, so it’s only fair that Dad gets to. That’s what I keep saying, ‘It’s only fair, Mom.’ It just makes her madder.”