The Home for Wayward Supermodels Read online

  Finally, though, she stepped aside—moving, I was happy to see, to welcome Tati—and Tom came forward. He was shy at first, approaching me as if to ask me to dance for the very first time. But then, suddenly he swooped in and lifted me clear off the ground, swinging me around as if I were a little tiny girl. Now that was sexy, especially when you were used to, as I was, being the tallest person in any room. But Tom was taller, his shoulders broader, his arms strong as the limbs of a full-grown maple.

  I’d gotten unused to the feel of Tom in the months we’d been apart, and the unfamiliarity of his feel was heightened by his difference from Alex, who was sleek where Tom was muscled, compact while Tom was large. The contrast between them reminded me of Alex and all that had happened between us, and made me feel as guilty as I was excited to see Tom. I was unable, then, to surrender to him completely, and felt myself pull back from his grasp.

  “Tom,” I said, feeling shy. “Meet my friend, Tatiana.”

  Admitting to her pregnancy seemed to have made it blossom. In the time it had taken us to fly from our little island to Nassau to Miami to Chicago and on up to Rhinelander, Tati’s stomach had popped, a perfectly round basketball protruding from her otherwise sleek body. Maybe she was relaxing too, and maybe I was noticing what I’d let myself overlook for so long.

  “So,” said Tatiana, smiling for what I think was the first time since the day of the bikini shoot, “this is your mountain man.”

  Tom raised his eyebrows at me.

  I shrugged. “That’s what they call you in New York.”

  While Tati reached out to squeeze Tom’s biceps, I moved toward Duke, who was still standing back, not quite meeting my eye.

  “Hi,” I said, hesitating, “Dad.”

  He pulled me into a bear hug, but I sensed some tentativeness, and I was holding back a bit myself, so many questions still between us. Part of me wished everything was the way it had always been. But I couldn’t pretend that everything was the same, and I couldn’t let my family or Tom pretend so either.

  Eleven Things that Felt New About Wisconsin

  The flatness. When I first went to New York, I felt hemmed in by the tall buildings. Now I felt unprotected with the land stretching out to the horizon on all sides.

  The sky. So big!

  The people. So blond. And so big too.

  The road names. Highway Q. State Road XX.

  Cars. XXL.

  Fields, fir trees, lakes. Everywhere.

  Tom. How male he was.

  Mom. How nurturing she was.

  Dad/Duke. How sweet he was, behind his quietness. And how much he really, really didn’t look anything like me.

  The House O’ Pies. How amazing it smelled. Tati stood there breathing deeply, her eyes closed, not saying anything about Ukraine, until Mom walked over to her holding a warm piece of apple pie. Then Tati did something that amazed me: She ate it. And asked for another slice.

  Our house. How small it was, and how badly in need of paint. Plus, how absolutely it felt like home.

  Mom cooked us a huge dinner, which, despite the heat, included bratwurst, sauerbraten, sauerkraut, warm German potato salad, and warm noodle pudding. In a nod to the season, she also served two kinds of Jell-O salad: red with sour cherries and green with little marshmallows. Dessert was a pie smorgasbord, with a choice of whipped cream, ice cream, or cheddar cheese for topping.

  Tati ate more than I’d seen her eat in the entire two months we’d lived together. Then she burped loudly, rubbed her newly round stomach, and said she thought she’d go to bed.

  When we were alone, Mom said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Amanda, but they canceled the Amanda Day Parade.”

  I hadn’t known anything about such a parade, and the very idea was completely embarrassing.

  “Oh,” I said, figuring the people of Eagle River had judged it just as ridiculous as I had. “That’s okay.”

  “In fact,” said Mom. “They canceled all of Amanda Day.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Mom,” I assured her. “I would have felt silly anyway.”

  But Mom still looked uncomfortable, and then I noticed that both Tom and Duke were looking away and not saying anything—not unusual in itself, but Tom was also blushing. And I’d never seen Tom blush.

  “Why?” I said. “What is it? What was the problem?”

  “It’s that story about you, Amanda,” said Mom, looking away too. “About you and your friend Desi.”

  Duke jumped up from the table and rushed to start clearing the dishes—a measure so extreme that it confirmed the subject could only be equally excruciating.

  “But, Mom,” I said. “Duke. Tom. That story isn’t true!”

  “Oh, we know, we know,” Mom said hurriedly. “It’s just that there was this picture.”

  Oh, no. Not the picture.

  “Where did you see this picture?” I asked.

  “Where was it?” Mom said, thinking. “I guess the first place was Us Weekly. Or People. Or, I guess, both. And then yesterday it was on the front page of the Eagle River News-Review.”

  “It was in the News-Review?” I squeaked. Everyone in Eagle River read the News-Review, the county’s weekly paper, religiously. A news event could make the front page of the New York Times, the lead headline of Reuters, the top story on the nightly television news. But if it wasn’t in the News-Review, as far as much of Eagle River was concerned, it hadn’t really happened.

  Mom, Tom, and Duke nodded mournfully.

  “But people in Eagle River aren’t that naïve. They know that a lot of that celebrity gossip stuff isn’t true. I mean, of course Desi hugged me, after our fashion show, but that doesn’t mean we’re gay.”

  Duke cleared his throat. “There was that interview with your friend, in the magazines, explaining everything,” Duke said. “The News-Review picked that up.”

  “An interview with Desi? So she said…”

  “She explained that she was gay but that the two of you weren’t a couple,” Mom chimed in. “But you know how people up here are. They think if there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

  Remembering how quickly a girl could get branded a slut at Northland Pines High, or how thoroughly everyone turned against the Presbyterian minister after he got divorced, I believed that was true.

  “Tom,” I said, laying my hand on his arm. “You told them, didn’t you? You told them that you and I were still together, that all of this was a lie.”

  Tom swallowed and nodded. But there was something in his demeanor that made me feel he was less than convinced.

  I looked hard at him. We hadn’t had even a minute alone yet. I didn’t really want to ask him this in front of my parents. But I had to know right now.

  “You don’t think it’s true, do you?” I asked him.

  He shook his head no, but almost too quickly. “I just don’t like it.”

  I went over and sat on Tom’s lap. I wanted to reassure him, even protect him from the pain of all this attention. But at the same time, I felt myself growing angry on Desi’s behalf. After all, I did love her, even if I wasn’t interested in sleeping with her.

  “What if I wasn’t your girlfriend?” I asked Tom. “What if it was even true? Are you saying you wouldn’t like me?”

  Duke snapped on the water and began washing dishes, something I’d only seen him do on Mom’s birthday.

  “I don’t like people talking trash,” Tom said, reddening.

  “But why is it talking trash to say that someone is gay? Why is it even anybody’s business what gender someone prefers in bed?”

  At this, Duke shook the water off his hands and walked out of the room, my mom staring worriedly after him.

  “Everybody here thinks everything is their business, you know that,” Mom said, still looking after Duke. “I’m sure once they stop talking about you, they’re gonna start in on Tatiana back there.” She nodded her head toward the back room, where I could hear Tati snoring.

  I had to laugh to myself, thin
king that Tati would be more than a match for the townsfolk of Eagle River. But it was probably not so easy for Mom twenty years ago, which made me understand a little bit better why Mom pretended all along that Duke was my real father, why she hid the true details of my conception and her pregnancy. She didn’t want me—didn’t want any of us—to be an outcast.

  “I better go after him. It’s been a long day,” said Mom, hurrying into the living room after Duke.

  Finally Tom and I were alone. Though that wasn’t an entirely comfortable feeling.

  “So are you here, Amanda?” Tom said softly. “Are you here to stay?”

  I sighed. Our departure from the shoot had been so frenzied that there was no chance to consider what it meant. Certainly once Raquel discovered that we’d run away, I might not have a career to go back to, and Paris might not even be an option anymore. But I realized that I wasn’t sure, even if I had no other choice, that I would want to stay here in Eagle River.

  “I don’t know,” I told Tom, drawing closer to him, laying my head on his substantial shoulder. “Tati’s here at least until she has her baby, and I—well, I’ll stay as long as I can, depending on what happens with work.”

  I could feel Tom holding himself stiff, holding himself back.

  If Tom had been a different man, there were any number of things he might have said to me, things that would have been true. He could have said that he still loved me, he still wanted to marry me, and he hoped I felt the same way. He could have said that I had to make up my mind, that he wasn’t willing to continue on in some halfway relationship. He might even have gotten angry and broken up with me, hoping to provoke some reaction from me—or just hoping to get away.

  But Tom being Tom, he sat there with his fingertips resting lightly on my ribs—neither returning my embrace nor pointedly keeping his hands off—until I lifted my head from his shoulder and drew back. He kept his eyes from meeting mine until I finally got up off his lap. Then he stood and jammed his hands in his pockets, and though he remained resolutely the tough guy, still refusing to look directly at me, I could see that his eyes were glistening with tears.

  After several days of languishing in bed, rising only to chow down yet another of Mom’s hearty meals and visit Dr. Greenberg, our gynecologist and the only Jew in Vilas County, Tati emerged looking round and healthy and happier than I’d ever seen her. True to my prediction, she didn’t care a fig what people in Eagle River had to say about her—in fact, the pointed stares and whispered comments merely seemed to excite her.

  “What? You never see baby belly?” she called, smiling, to the woman gaping at her on Wall Street, Eagle River’s main thoroughfare. “That’s right—sex put baby here!”

  I had to admit, I could understand why the other woman was staring. Tati was, after all, wearing a white tank that stopped above her belly bulge and a white miniskirt slung way south of it, plus her tiny denim shirt as a vest. Oh, and red cowboy boots. Although she’d packed on maybe twenty pounds in less than a month, she was wearing the same tight clothes she always had. And if something was too tight—like the tank she had on now—she simply cut off the fabric that didn’t fit. If that meant baring her entire basketball belly to the world, so be it.

  “I love to be pregnant!” Tati crowed to me now. “I love not giving shit!”

  I laughed. “I didn’t think you ever really cared what people thought of you.”

  “Oh, yes, I care,” Tati said solemnly. “I care what mommy in Ukraine think of me, and teacher, and husband, and of course Raquel, and you.”

  Tears sprang to my eyes. “You care what I think of you?”

  “Of course, Amandskala! You are dear one to me, dear to take me to this wonderful place, dear to put me in care of your beautiful mommy.”

  “I think Mom is really getting off on having you under her wing, on helping you have your baby the way I guess she wished someone had helped her.”

  Tati stopped walking. “Someone did help her,” she said gravely. “Duke help her, Amanda. He is very good man.”

  “I know it,” I said, feeling a sense of shame begin to creep over me. Duke had become so awkward around me, and it seemed like nothing I did reassured him. “It’s just that I was always Daddy’s little girl, and it’s weird now that I know he’s not my daddy anymore.”

  “He is Daddy,” said Tati. “Maybe not Sperm Daddy, but Heart Daddy.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “Much more difficult job to be Heart Daddy.”

  “You’re right.”

  “So,” said Tati, “maybe in end you have two good daddies, French Sperm Daddy plus Duke. Just like you have two good mens, Tom plus Alex.”

  Tati’s eyes were twinkling; in her new high spirits, she loved to tease me, especially about this.

  “In this case, two is definitely one too many,” I groaned.

  I’d been relieved that Tom had been too busy with the end-of-summer fishing rush—clients wanting to squeeze in one more day of trolling before returning to their jobs in Milwaukee or Chicago—to spend much time with me. But we were about to head off on our camping trip to the island, where we would be completely alone. At least there I wouldn’t have to worry about Alex calling and interrupting us, as he had a couple of times when Tom and I were with Tati, Mom, and Duke. I tried to stay neutral as he kept telling me how much he missed me, how much he wanted me to go to Paris.

  “Just be sure you don’t end up with zero,” said Tati, “like me and my poor baby.”

  “Your baby has a daddy,” I said, patting her bare stomach and feeling a subterranean kick in return. “Ouch, he’s powerful! Or she.”

  “I have name, either way,” Tati told me proudly. “If boy, Duke Patty Billings. And if girl, Patty Duke Billings.”

  My heart squeezed up, and not only because I knew I had to do anything to keep her from giving her poor kid that name. It was the reference to her ex, Bobby Billings, that really got to me.

  “Tati,” I said gently, taking her hands. “Won’t you at least tell Bobby Billings that he’s going to be a father, give him a chance to decide whether he wants to step up to the plate or not?”

  “No way!” said Tati, squeezing my hands and shaking her head so hard that a strand of her honey hair came loose from the knot on top of her head.

  “But what are you going to do after the baby’s born?” I asked. “You can’t just stay here in Eagle River.”

  Raquel had left several messages threatening to report Tati to immigration and to sue me for walking out on my contract. I was nervous about Raquel being on our trail, though I wasn’t totally convinced she’d be able to find her way to Wisconsin. At the same time, Desi had called to tell me how great the Amanda line was doing at Rush, and to say that my “disappearance” had proven to be even better publicity than our so-called lesbian affair. If my modeling career crashed and burned, I reasoned, I’d still be able to count on the income from Rush.

  “Why not stay here?” Tati said slyly, beginning to smile and swing my hands. “Maybe if you pick Alex, I take Tom.”

  “Hey, Amanda!” came a male voice from the other side of Wall Street.

  I shaded my eyes with one hand and made out the stocky figure of Brick Landesman, fullback and chief bully of Northland Pines High, grinning and waving both his arms over his head at me. From all the way across the avenue, I could see the sweat stains under the arms of his Packers T-shirt.

  “Hi, Brick,” I said dispiritedly.

  “Is that your girlfriend I’ve been hearing so much about?” said Brick.

  It took me a minute to understand, but when I did I grabbed Tati’s arm and pulled her as I began to trot down the sidewalk, with Brick trying to keep pace across the street.

  “Hey, are you her baby’s father, Amanda?” he called, snickering. “I swear, just let me watch.”

  “Brick,” I screamed, stopping so suddenly poor Tati almost lost her balance. And then I said something I’d sworn I would never say in my entire life—tho
ugh that was before I realized how good it would feel.

  “Fuck you!”

  When Tati swung into the pie shop to see Mom, I turned the other way and ducked into Duke’s bait shop. Duke was over by the big fish tank, cleaning off the fingerprints and smudge marks left by all the kids who loved to watch the big pike swim while their dads sorted through the flies and poppers.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Duke looked up and then quickly down again.

  This was the place, when I was little, where I loved hanging out. I’d rather be here than the pie shop any day, following Duke around, helping him hunt for bait, moistening the night crawlers and cleaning out the tanks where we kept the live minnows. In the pie shop, I had to be clean, to behave, but in here you couldn’t really do much good unless you got dirty.

  Now, I tore a paper towel off the roll, sprayed some glass cleaner onto it, and began wiping down the tank too, while behind the glass the big fish glided in prison.

  “I sure want to thank you and Mom for taking Tati in,” I said. “She really thinks the world of you.”

  “She’s a good girl.” Just like, I suppose, he’d always seen my mom as a good girl.

  “How’s the fishing been this summer?” I asked.

  “Not bad. Not bad.”

  I shot a glance at him, but his eyes were trained on a particularly stubborn fingerprint.

  “Get out much yourself?”

  “A coupla times. Went out with Tom.”

  I sighed, imagining the two of them sitting together in the boat, not saying anything but thinking so much.

  “Tom and I are going to the island this weekend,” I said.

  The first time I’d gone to the island with Tom, Duke had been against it, but Mom had talked him into letting me go. He liked Tom, after all, and Mom convinced him that camping was a wholesome thing for us to be doing together, even if there might be sex involved. The next year, he didn’t complain. And this year, I guessed he was afraid that we wouldn’t go. I suspected he was looking forward to having Tom as a son-in-law almost as much as he wished he could have me back as his daughter.