Making Pretty (15 page)

Roxanne and Arizona sit knee to knee on the couch. I take over the floor, my legs long in front of me and my elbows behind me. Bernardo stands. He is not a floor sitter.

“They seem happy,” he says. Arizona, Roxanne, and I scoff in unison.

“That's the most shrimp I've ever seen in one place,” Roxanne says. As far as post-proposal parties go, this one is particularly lame. With Natasha we went to dinner on the top of the Eiffel Tower. With Janie we had steaks uptown with the biggest baked potatoes imaginable. With Tess, Dad rented out a German beer hall, and we chowed down for hours on sausages and pretzels and Tess taught us German songs and we danced. Even Arizona enjoyed that night.

Tonight's after-party is low music and shitty catering, and we are hiding out in the basement while the adults mill around upstairs. I feel like I can breathe, at least, with Arizona, Bernardo, and Roxanne. I can breathe as long as I'm not in the same room as
the ring and all my feelings about it.

“What'd you get?” I ask Arizona, who has her tattered Trader Joe's tote bag, a sure sign that she poached a bunch of food from the party to bring down here. She smiles and starts unpacking. She's wrapped shrimp in napkins, and deviled eggs too, although they didn't survive the journey so well. She has boxes of crackers and an entire slab of brie, stolen from right under the caterers' noses. She has prosciutto slices and even attempted to pack bell peppers filled with goat cheese into a Tupperware container. The girl is a klepto rock star of epic proportions, especially when it comes to catered food.

She's so put together now in every other way, it's necessary that she has a few secret weirdo qualities. At a party like this, it's necessary that we all do. Otherwise the night would be unbearable.

Fuck I'm glad I wore zebra print.

I dig around in the bar, wondering if we should try to make our own crappy martinis while the adults rage upstairs.

“Looking for this?” Karissa has appeared at the bottom of the stairs. I didn't hear the door at the top open or her feet padding down the carpeted staircase, but Karissa has that whole lithe thing going for her. She flits. She's got a few bottles of white wine and a wicked smile and too much blush and not enough newly engaged sparkle in her eyes.

We all startle at her sudden presence among us. The exact way we've always done everything shifts, and it is as recognizable as a sudden drop in temperature. The wives are meant to be on my father's arm, showing his friends the new ring. The wives are meant to bury their faces into his shoulder with some combination of happiness and
shyness when people congratulate them.

This is something else. Everything is something else with Karissa.

“Jesus. Don't be creepy,” Roxanne says. “You can't show up places without announcing yourself. Unless you are a witch or a hologram or something. Are you a witch or a hologram?” She's like our id or ego or whichever one does all the shit you really want to do but stop yourself from doing.

“A witch,” Arizona says, not quietly at all, and I think she maybe has already had a drink or two. Maybe she snuck one in while she was stealing food. I kick in her general direction.

“I'm a girl who likes escaping prissy parties,” Karissa says. I think she thinks she'll win my sister over with coolness. It won't happen, but there's something nice about her trying. “My little sis and I used to sit outside whenever my parents had parties. But they had great parties, actually. You know the wine and pickle thing I do, Mon?” She uncorks the wine. She has the swift, expert movements of someone who has opened up a lot of wine bottles. She has a system.

I nod. She shouldn't call me Mon. I'm not ready and Arizona definitely isn't ready.

“Wine and pickles?” Bernardo asks.

Karissa gets choked up and starts swigging wine.

“Oh my God, so sorry, I'm such a freak. Sometimes talking about them gets me a little . . . like this.” She wipes away a few perfect, beautiful, star-like tears.

“That's okay,” I say, and try to make it sound robotic so that Arizona doesn't think I'm on Karissa's side, but also compassionate
because Karissa must be hurting. There's no way right now to be a good person and a good sister, so I settle for good person–ish.

“I wish they could be here for this,” she says.

“Of course you do,” I say, and mean it, because even if I hate what's happening, I can't let that go unsympathized with.

Roxanne clears her throat. Karissa's not sobbing or anything, but she's shifting the feeling of the energy down in the basement, and Roxanne was deep in party mode. I start rubbing Karissa's back. She has a frailty to her that I would never have imagined.

I almost wish Arizona could feel it. There's some sort of truth in the way Karissa's bones protrude.

“I bet being up there and celebrating with Dad will help,” Arizona says.

Roxanne smirks, and I blush at the half-hidden meanness. Bernardo doesn't react, which I love.

Arizona stands up so that she's face-to-face with Karissa. We've been in this situation dozens of times, with me and Arizona always surviving and the stepmoms always falling away.

Except.

Karissa is different.

I care that she's hurting and drowning herself in white wine in my basement. I care that her dress is askew and her eyes are wild. I care that none of her wine-and-pickles friends were at the engagement. I care that the ring is too loose on her finger, like my father confused her ring size with someone else's.

“I wish your dad could have met my family. He would have totally,
like, gotten it. You know? Gotten me. He would have understood what kind of party to throw me.” Karissa takes some of the stolen shrimp. Dips it in brie. Making something strange out of something normal, as always.

“Dad only does this type of party for these things,” Arizona says. I think she's getting meaner, or else it's that I love Karissa more than I'm used to loving the stepmoms. That I'm not solidly enough on the side of anger and hate, even though part of me should be.

“Anyway, no one up there will notice I'm gone,” Karissa says. She's not crying anymore, but she's spacey. Almost like she's already past drunk and into that hazy post-drunkenness that comes if you stay awake for too long after drinking. “Your dad will, obviously, but he likes my mysterious side, so he'll think it's charming that I disappeared.” Karissa barely breathes when she gets on a riff. She talks right through. “I left my own birthday party, right after we started dating. He tell you that? I wanted pizza and met a cool drunk chick from Australia when I was grabbing a slice. I took her to Queens. She wanted to see the seediest club in the city. Thought Manhattan was too cleaned up. She wanted some, like, eighties experience.” Karissa laughs along with her own story, but I'm still stuck on my father going to her twenty-third birthday party, surrounded by recent college grads and wannabe actresses. The same friends I hung out with a few weeks ago. What would he have worn? Did he buy jeans? Did they think he was her father at first? Did they see the similarities in our faces and demeanors when they met me? Did he play Never Have I Ever with them and drink wine and eat pickles and smoke outside in
some weird parallel version of what I did?

She's changed him, at least a little. I noticed upstairs there were bottles of beer, which I know he hates, and chips and onion dip. He hates onions. And dip. And the greasy reality of chips. Maybe he loves Karissa.

Nope. Too gross. Too impossible. Letting someone eat chips at their own engagement party isn't the same as loving them.

“He didn't mind that you ditched him?” Bernardo says.

That's when I realize I'm still enthralled by her. I sit on my hands like a little kid while she speaks. I look at her eyes, which haven't changed at all and are grass-green and rimmed in purple eyeliner.

Except: she is going to be my stepmother.

And I feel, with an ill kind of certainty, that I don't want a stepmother who gets drunk on white wine and knows where the best strips clubs are. I don't want a stepmother who plays dirty charades and can't stop crying over her family.

That last part is true, even if it's cruel.

“Mind? No. Opposite. He called me an inspiration. Said I understand something . . . what was it . . . vital about life. Told me he loved me the next day. Do the honors, Bernardo?” she says, handing him the next bottle of wine. He pours it out in our little plastic cups better suited for rinsing with mouthwash than partying.

I have a feeling the wine is expensive. It tastes expensive. Like grass and lemon and it's light as air. I could drink bottles of it, I think, without stopping.

There's laughter and clinking glasses and elevator music drifting
in from upstairs. I get a text from my dad asking if I've seen Karissa, but I don't respond. We can keep her with us. We can save her, maybe. If she's down here drinking and telling too-long stories, she's not lost yet.

They're not married yet.

I'm pathetic for even thinking that. For having some hope for normalcy even in the face of all this. For wanting things to go back even when they're so clearly moving forward.

“So. You're happy, then?” Roxanne asks when she has finished off her wine. Karissa is staring at the ceiling, which is tin and awesome and totally old-school New York. I wonder if she's picturing her new life in this pretty home with ancient details and old-fashioned moldings and sleek silver kitchen appliances and picture windows that look out at other brick buildings.

“Blissful,” she says. I believe that she believes it, at least. “Like Montana. We're just two girls in love, you know?”

Bernardo's eyes light up.

“Slow down there,” Arizona says, and elbows me like I'm going to be in on the joke of how ridiculous it would be to say
I love you
at this point in my relationship. My face goes up in flames.

“I mean, I'm in love,” I say, the words sounding like they're underwater and I'm above water, and it's funny when your sentences are located somewhere different from your body, like I'm not the same as the things I say. It's deep thoughts like this that really take hold when I'm drunk.

“That's enough,” Arizona says, like love is a thing she can Put a
Stop To. “That's enough.” She says it again, because sometimes when you're drunk you have to say things twice.

Roxanne lights a cigarette and Karissa wiggles her fingers as a way of asking for her own. Arizona rolls her eyes, and I wonder why she's down here at all if she's going to stay pissed.

“One for me and Arizona too,” I say. Everything is kind of the worst, but surviving this crap together is what we do.

“Me too,” Bernardo says. He's been so quiet I almost forgot he was here. I'm not the best girlfriend tonight. I kiss him on the cheek and hold the back of his neck in my hand for a moment. It's not enough, but for him it seems it could be. “I get it,” he whispers.

“It's Bernardo Day tomorrow,” I whisper back. “We can go see a Mets game. Or buy more scarves. Or read comics.”

“I don't read comics.”

“Oh. You seem like someone who might read comics,” I say. We forgot to keep whispering, so now everyone can hear. Arizona flinches.

“I'm good,” she says. “I don't want to smoke. Or drink.”

“Oh, come on, we need this,” I say. I want us to be in it together, whatever it is. However messed up it is.

“I'm going to head back upstairs,” she says. “Dad's gonna ask if I've seen his fiancée. I don't like lying.”

“Since when?” Roxanne says, laughing.

“Montana, you should come upstairs too. For a slice of cake. And our ritual.” She's saying this on purpose to leave Karissa out. I can tell from the lift of her eyebrows and the fact that her voice gets a little
louder on the word
ritual
.

I thought we were making a new ritual down here, but Arizona wants our old ones. And I love her a little more for that. It's comforting, to know we both want the sister-bond we had. We both miss the things before this summer. Before this year.

I chug a little more wine. With enough of it in my system, Arizona and Karissa can both look the way I prefer them to, the way they do in my ideal world. I can force this situation into something manageable. Survivable.

“It's that time,” Arizona says.

“Use more words?” Bernardo says. He tilts his head like that will help him understand what's happening.

Arizona and I have a ritual where we guess how long Dad will stay with his girlfriend or wife. We each write down our guesses—how many months—on a sheet of paper, fold the pages, and hide them under Arizona's bed in a jewelry box filled with old jewelry that Mom gave her before she left (ninety-five months, though we obviously didn't make guesses on that marriage). Whoever is closest gets a piece of jewelry from the box. I've had my eye on a string of turquoise beads.

Arizona always wins. She chooses the lowest number of months. I'm too optimistic, even when turquoise beads are at stake. I can't help myself. I've only ever won a single silver ring, a plain braided design from when he dated and immediately broke up with a girl named Fuchsia. For some reason, Arizona gave her three months. I gave it one. It lasted three weeks.

It is not our only ritual. There is also the Closet of Forgotten Things, filled with things the wives have left behind over the years. My father can never seem to bring himself to throw away the remnants of his failed marriages. We have a ceremony with that, too.

“Montana. Come on. Let's do this our way, okay? The Varren sisters way.” Her voice is low and sweet and so comfortable and soft I could fall asleep in it. I almost do.

I want it to be me and Arizona against the world again.

But Bernardo is next to me, and his hand circles my wrist, and he holds up his cig for me to smoke from, a gesture so sweet and gentle and small and sexy that I lose my head in it. It's not comfortable, like the things Arizona is describing. It's something else. Irresistible. Bernardo puts his arm around me and I fit there. Arizona's phone dings with a text message, and I'm sure it's a friend of hers I've never even heard of.