The Guy Not Taken (32 page)
Authors: Jennifer Weiner
“You . . .” Dora swallowed. She had begun to imagine this as some kind of prank, a stunt; she thought that Amber had done it on a dare and conned her sweet, dim sister into coming along for the ride. But now . . .
“I take care of Dawn,” Amber said, and raised her chin pugnaciously. “She’s a little bit . . .” Her voice trailed off as she looked toward the dim living room.
“Slow?” Dora ventured.
“Not slow,” Amber said sharply. “She got better grades than I did. She’s not slow, she’s . . .” She combed her fingers through her hair, trying to rearrange it, and crossed her bony, burned legs. “I don’t know. I don’t know what she is.” She gave up on her hair and spooned more sugar into her mug, with her shoulders hunched and her mouth mere inches from the steaming liquid.
“Maybe she’s depressed,” Dora said.
“Maybe that’s it,” Amber agreed. “Over Lester Spano, who isn’t worth the gas it takes to go see him.” She slurped her coffee and slumped in her seat. “But it’s not workin’. She loves the beach. I thought she’d be cheered up by now. But she keeps talking about him. Lester. About how she always thought she’d go on a nice vacation with him.”
Dora poured herself coffee, then stared at the girl across the table. With her makeup smeared off and her hairdo deflated, Amber looked softer than she had on the boardwalk. She was a teenager, just like Sam had once been, just like Dora herself had been, once, a long time ago, and she was pretty, underneath the hairspray, the junky jewelry, the gangster-girl façade. She had fine features, a broad mouth, eyebrows as delicately arched as birds’ wings above her black eyes. With her hair down around
her shoulders and her eyeliner scrubbed off, she could have been the niece or granddaughter of anyone at the Windrift, one of those girls who went to a good school, and who did not claim her vacations at gunpoint.
“How about your parents?” she ventured. “Can’t they help?” Amber snorted dismissively. She flicked one slender hand in a shooing gesture in front of her eyes, then reached into her purse. Dora’s heart lurched. But instead of a gun, Amber pulled out her Zagat’s guide again and yawned, taking care to cover her mouth, as she flipped through it one-handed.
“This place,” she said, thrusting the book at Dora. “Snacks on the Beach. It says they’ve got pineapple pancakes. Dawn likes pineapple.”
• • •
The next three days passed in a blur of restaurants, afternoons on the beach, late nights in a series of hot, noisy, smoky, crowded nightclubs where the thudding bass lines would echo in Dora’s brain until morning. She’d sit at the bar with Amber beside her, holding her big white purse in her lap. “Go dance,” Amber would tell her sister, and Dawn would walk slowly toward the dance floor, close her eyes beneath the flickering lights, and stand in one place, hips swaying back and forth at the same languid pace whether the song issuing from the speakers was slow or fast, whether there was anyone in front of her or not, like she was dancing in a dream.
On the third night, the girls forgot to put the chairs in front of her bedroom door.
Dora lay on her bed with her heart hammering in her ears as the television finally clicked into silence. She crept to the door and crouched there with her ear pressed against a spot just above the doorknob, listening to the girls’ sleepy conversation, which finally trailed off. Amber snored lightly as she slept. Her sister’s breaths were deep and regular. Dora turned the doorknob by
millimeters and tiptoed into the living room, where she peered down at the girls, sleeping side by side on Florence’s air mattress. Amber’s purse was on the table next to the couch. Dora picked it up, slung it over her shoulder, and crept into the kitchen, where she pulled her telephone out of its cradle.
Who to call first? The police? Should she call her son?
Dora stood in the darkness and realized that no matter who she called, she’d sound foolish. Yes, officer, two girls from New York. They are holding me hostage. Where are they right now? Actually, they’re on my living room floor, sleeping. Tomorrow I’m supposed to take them to the new George Clooney movie, because Dawn likes George Clooney. (“He looks like Lester,” she’d told her sister, and Amber had said, “Oh, for God’s sake, he does not!”) Then we’re going on a helicopter ride over Atlantic City. To be perfectly honest, I’m sort of looking forward to it.
She set the telephone back in its cradle and froze when Amber rolled over, muttering in her sleep. Dora forced herself to take slow breaths and count to a hundred before unzipping the white purse.
There was a gun in there, just as Amber had told her. A squirt gun, a cheap thing made of pinkish plastic with a chipped white trigger, filled with water, Dora supposed, to give it that genuine handgun heft.
She laughed at herself softly before slipping the gun back into Amber’s purse. She listened to the ocean wind whipping at her window, not the soft breezy kiss she’d imagined when Atlantic City first occurred to her, or the still, humid night air in Clearwater, where she spent her winters. The wind blew hard in the darkness, dangerous and fierce. She could hear night noises through her window: traffic, the far-off wail of an ambulance, the water rolling onto the sand, the girls breathing. Dora hung the purse back over the dining room chair and crept back into bed.
• • •
“Come on,” Amber said, tugging at her sister’s hands.
“I don’t want to.”
“Come on!” she repeated. Dawn shook her head and crossed her arms above her life vest. Dora could see the edge of the tattoo on Dawn’s chest. She knew what it was now—a heart that had once held the word
Lester
. Dawn had told her the night before, on the beach, that Amber was going to pay for her to have it lasered off.
“Seriously, Dawn!”
Dawn closed her eyes and shook her head at the same dreamy pace she shook her hips at the dance clubs. The pilot yelled something Dora couldn’t make out as the rotors chopped at the air above their heads. Amber spoke urgently to her sister, then shrugged, and raised her voice.
“Dora, you tell her!”
Dora looked at Dawn. “It’ll be fine,” she said, looking at the girl intently so that she’d know that Dora meant more than the helicopter ride. “You’re going to be all right.”
Dawn shook her head again, with her black hair rippling against her lightly tanned cheeks. Her lips moved, and Dora made out the words
I’m scared.
“You’ll be sitting right next to us. Right between us,” Dora said.
Dawn seemed to consider this before giving in. “’Kay,” she said. Dora helped her fasten her belt, and she leaned over, forehead pressed against the window, as they left the ground. Amber had to yell to make herself heard above the helicopter’s blades, but Dora could read her lips.
Thank you,
the girl was saying.
You’re welcome,
Dora mouthed. And when Amber reached across Dawn’s lap and took her hands, she squeezed right back as they rose over the buildings and the boardwalk, the sand and the water, up into the endless blue sky.
T
hanks first and foremost to my wonderful agent Joanna Pulcini, without whose persistence, sharp editorial eye, and big heart, large chunks of this book would still be stuck in a Kohl’s bag in my guest bedroom. Joanna once again went above, beyond, and all the way to Cape Cod in service of these stories, earning my solemn pledge: No more house arrest! (And I promise I will quit archiving my short stories in shopping bags.)
I’m grateful to my teachers in high school and my professors in college: John McPhee, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, J. D. McClatchy, Ann Lauterbach. I’m also grateful to the editors who initially polished, and published, some of these stories: Adrienne Nicole LeBlanc at
Seventeen,
Dawn Raffel at
Redbook,
Sarah Mlynowski at Red Dress Ink, and Daryl Chen and Cindi Leive at
Glamour.
Thanks to everyone at Atria Books, the best publisher a writer could hope for: Judith Curr, Carolyn Reidy, Kathleen Schmidt, Gary Urda, Lisa Keim, Kim Curtin, Jeanne Lee, Christine Duplessis, Craig Dean, Nancy Inglis, Nancy Clements, Linda Dingler, and Davina Mock. Thanks to Suzanne Baboneau
at Simon & Schuster UK for phenomenal support across the pond, and to Regina Starace for a beautiful jacket.
My editor, Greer Hendricks, is worth a price above rubies for her smarts and skills and endless patience, and her assistant, Hannah Morrill, is a gem. My publicist, Marcy Engelman, is a superstar. I’m grateful to her and her team: Dana Gidney, Jor-dana Tal, and Samantha Cohen. Thanks also to Jessica Fee for the great job she does setting up my speaking engagements.
Thanks to everyone at DreamWorks and at Parkes/MacDonald Productions for falling in love with “The Guy Not Taken” (but not, thankfully, for messing with his online wedding registry). Thanks to Andrea Cipriani Mecchi for her friendship and for making me look so good, to the eternally calm Algene Wong, and to Tracy Miller for her hard work on tight deadlines.
Finally, thanks to the people who make my writing life possible and my real life so much fun: Jamie Seibert, Mary Hoeffel, and Terri Gottlieb, who hang with Lucy, and my indefatigable and very good-humored assistant Meghan Burnett, who will someday be a publishing powerhouse and way too important to take my calls.
Jake Weiner is not just my brother, he’s also my film agent (and a darn good one, too). My sister Molly, brother Joe, mother Fran, Nanna Faye Frumin, Uncle Freddy and Aunt Ruth, and sister-in-law April Blair are all excellent red carpet dates. Love to my b.f.f., Susan Abrams Krevsky, and to Sharon Fenick and Alan Promer, Phil DeGennaro and Clare Epstein, Alexa and Craig Hymowitz, Craig and Elizabeth LaBan, Debbie Bilder and Lee Serota, Olivia Grace Weiner, Renay Weiner, the Gurvitz family, Todd Bonin and Sara Leeder, Warren Bonin, Ebbie Bonin, and all my friends and relations for the love, support, and material. Most of all, a thousand kisses to Lucy, for being her sunny, funny, sassy self, and to Adam—the guy I took.
I
began this collection half a lifetime ago, when I was eighteen. I’ve always loved short stories, such as those from Stephen King and Andrew Vachss to Ann Hood and Amy Bloom to Kelly Link to Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison, and I’ve been writing them, and publishing them here and there, for years.
In this collection, the stories are arranged chronologically, starting with the youngest character (Josie Krystal, her first summer back from college) and ending with the oldest (Dora, widowed and retired and living on the beach.) I think each one illustrates a particular moment in a character’s life and illuminates the choices men and women make about how they love, and who, and why. Here’s a little more about each one.
Just Desserts
and
Travels with Nicki
(1990)
There’s a Sharon Olds poem that I love in which the narrator describes seeing her parents at their college graduation.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it
But she doesn’t.
I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
Or, as my mother still likes to say, “It’s all material.”
My parents split up when I was sixteen. When I was seventeen, I headed off to Princeton, which had (and has) about the best creative writing program for undergraduates in the country, to tell about it. I wrote about my parents’ divorce, and wrote about it, and wrote about it, and wrote about it. My joke about college is that everything I wrote had a single theme:
My parents got divorced, and it hurt.
Freshman year: My parents got divorced, and it hurt. Sophomore year: My parents got divorced, and it really hurt. Junior year: Did I mention that my parents got divorced? Senior year: No, I’m not over it yet! (I think we should all bow our heads in gratitude that I didn’t go to graduate school.)
I must have written hundreds of pages about families and divorce, daughters and divorce, fathers and divorce . . . you get the idea.
Just Desserts
and
Travels with Nicki
were written for a course with John McPhee, who was the most patient and generous teacher I had. These stories were about the only things worth saving from that period of my life, creatively speaking. I still have John McPhee’s original notes on
Travels with Nicki. Polish it up,
he wrote.
Publish it. Your sister will sue. But you have a great defense. You know how to tell a story.