Making Pretty (16 page)

“Stay down here,” I say. “Have a drink. Have a smoke. Let's stay up all night and be crazy, okay? Let's do that. Let's get your hair pink too!” I leap out of Bernardo's arms and hug my sister. We're not historically huggers, but it feels good. We could do this a whole new way. I think she'll maybe even say yes. She sighs and squeezes me more tightly. She runs her hands through my hair and calls me a nut. “I know this is fucked up, but it can still be a fun night,” I whisper, something only for Arizona so she knows I'm not on board with it all, I'm not crazy. “We're in it together. You and me,” I say, words that are sort of true and sort of false.

“I'll go pink too! Solidarity!” Karissa interrupts.

All Arizona's muscles tense, and she lets go of me.

“Or probably you two want to do that alone. Also great. I can help?” Karissa says, trying to shove the words back in her mouth, hearing her own mistake. It's too late. She's twenty-three and marrying our dad and overeager and freaking us out.

“I don't want to stay down here,” Arizona says. She's whispering, and Bernardo is so on top of it that he turns the music up, so we can have a moment of privacy. Roxanne sings along to words she doesn't know and a melody she has only a vague grasp on.

“You can keep the turquoise beads,” I say, because the look on her face says she wants to make a hope chest for failure. She wants to wish the worst on Karissa, and even though I don't want Karissa with Dad, I can't do a ritual that hopes for her heart to get broken.

“Keep them and the pearl necklace and the gold bangles and the heart locket Dad bought for Mom. You can have it all.” I try to pull Arizona onto the couch with me. “Let's stay down here. Let's do it a new way, this time.” I'm smiling and probably slurring, but I want her to agree to find some new way to be.

“You keep thinking I've done something to you,” Arizona says. “I went to Maine. You're in a fucking fairy tale.”

Her steps are loud enough to hear over the music all the way up the stairs, and when she opens the door for a second before closing it behind her, adult voices and classical music and the smell of baking feta and onion tarts waft downstairs.

I almost follow her. I am so close to following her.

“You know what's amazing?” Karissa says at the very end of the night, when everyone else is asleep and I'm somewhere past drunk. “You have, like, a whole life.”

“You don't have a whole life?” I say. She opens the vodka and pours a tiny mini-shot into each of our cups. I don't want it, I'll definitely throw it up in, like, twenty minutes, but I take it anyway.

There's a grief-filled pause, for all the things she's lost.

“Well, I do now at least!” she says at last, and gestures, a circular motion with her hand that is not occupied with vodka. I don't know if she's gesturing to the basement or the whole brownstone or me and my friends, or my absent father, or the cloud of smoke that hasn't quite made its way out of the basement through the crack in the windows.

In the morning everything is terrible. Bernardo has escaped and left a note on my chest and a message on my phone that he had to make it home before his parents woke up. Arizona stands over me with a coffee and a grimace.

Roxanne and Karissa are gone too. In some ways the night never happened.

Except for my hangover.

“I stayed over,” Arizona says. “I thought you might want me around today.” I hear the bit of apology in her voice, and that she wants to be us again.

But she's in this shirt. Maybe it's from the Closet of Forgotten Things or maybe she bought it with her roommates or maybe she's had it forever, but it's never fit quite this way before.

It's white and V-necked with rhinestones along the cleavage and lace on the sides. I hate it. Arizona should hate it too.

“I do. But you can't wear that shirt anymore,” I say, meaning it
to come out as a joke. But it's not a joke, so it doesn't sound like one.

“I get it. You hate my body. I hear you loud and clear, Mon,” she says.

“You look like a Varren wife. You hate Varren wives. You don't want to look like me anymore. I mean, how the fuck am I supposed to take it?”

“You wanted to become more you when you dyed your hair that awful color, right?” Arizona says. She doesn't wrap her arms around herself. She's decided not to be embarrassed about it anymore. “I wanted to become more me. This feels good for me. This feels better. You want some whole other standard for you than for me? You want me to stay the same but you get to change? I have no idea what you want!” Her voice keeps screeching and breaking and I've never heard her quite like this.

“I want one thing not to change. I want there to be one part of our lives that stays the same, that we can depend on. I thought that was you.” I'm clear when I'm hungover. Or less able to twist up truths like they're straw wrappers or hair bands or hoodie strings.

I've finally said a thing that feels true to me, and maybe Arizona will hear the truth in it too. Maybe it will repair something.

“You're like Dad in so many ways,” she says instead, and I know I've failed and that hungover Montana is every bit as irritating to her as sober Montana and drunk Montana. “The way you love and the face you make in the morning when you first wake up and the ridiculous way you hope for something that you know doesn't exist. But especially in the way you want us to be one very small and specific
thing. That you have this idea of who I am, and you're mad if I don't meet the standard. You know? You see that, right?”

I slide down, far under a blanket to a place where Arizona can't see me, can't see my face, can only see the blanketed outline of my body.

“I don't want you to think that about me,” I say. I know it's muffled from under the blanket, but she can hear me.

“You don't want to be Dad,” she repeats back.

“I'm not Dad,” I say. “I don't want
you
to think I'm Dad. And maybe Dad isn't even Dad! I don't know. I don't know.” It has got to be the hangover that's making everything look different today. The hangover and telling Arizona I love Bernardo and watching Dad propose to the person I thought I wanted to be. They're all changing the world's shape and texture and feeling.

“Are you still drunk?” Arizona says.

“You know he never brings up the gift certificate? I think it was all Natasha's idea. And he forgets so many things and, like, when he was with Tess he was really into running and ran that marathon last year, and I haven't seen him even, like, speed walk since she left. And when he was with that girl Fuchsia, he went to some weird church thing where they stay in silence the whole time, but now he doesn't even know when Christmas is.”

“You're completely still drunk,” Arizona says. She stamps her foot a little, and underneath the new boobs and the way she's looking at me like I'm a huge disappointment, she's still the girl she was at eight, at least a little.

“No, I'm not. I wonder sometimes if Dad even knows the mistakes
he makes. If maybe this whole thing, this thing that was the worst thing that ever happened to us . . . if it ever even really happened in the way we think it did. Or, like, what does it mean if it happened but he doesn't know it happened? What if he really does want a nice woman and a good life and for us to be happy? What if he loves us enough? What if he thinks we're great and he's actually in love? What if—”

“No.” Arizona doesn't even leave room for me to breathe. She gets so close to my face I think she's stealing the air. She's more sure of this than I've ever been about anything.

And I guess this is what she meant, about hope and me having it. Because hope is space. It's having room for something even when things are cramped and hard to move around.

There is space for our father to be a little different than we thought. There's room for us to have a different ending, a different situation.

“I'll show you why you're wrong,” Arizona says. “But you're not going to want to see.” I follow her like a zombie to my dad's office. “They're out to brunch,” she says, as if I've asked where Dad and Karissa are. “She looks excellent in the mornings, by the way. She was wearing one of his shirts and acting like nothing weird happened last night. You better not trust her. These people aren't real. This isn't real life.”

I think for the thousandth time over the last three years that I should tell Arizona that I still see Natasha. That she is real, as far as I'm concerned. That she's my family too, and that Victoria and Veronica exist and are little mini-sisters and that things could have been different, that there was space for a different outcome there too.

Instead I shrug and watch her open up my father's desk drawers. She brings out a few folders. They are filled with pictures of women. Not the dirty kind, although some of them are naked-ish. They are women he is performing surgery on or women his partner wants advice on. The bodies and faces are covered in lines and marks and notes. Dashes under their eyes. Red marks drawn in under their breasts. Circles around their flaws.

I hate how their flaws are annotated. How he sees them as beings to be made better, instead of seeing them as they are. I hate the Post-it notes with surgical drawings that are really actually drawings of better versions of normal women. I hate the magazine covers and the Renoir painting with his dotted lines. But I hate his desk drawers filled with these poor makeup-less women most of all. They're too vulnerable.

“I mean, we've seen this before,” I say. “This is his job. He does it at the counter.”

It's shocking to see them all at once, bundles of women and his ideas about how they could be better. But this isn't a new thing.

Arizona scrounges around some more, opening and closing folders, flipping through photographs. “I found something else,” she says. “I wasn't going to tell you, but you're being all crazy and reckless and fucking naive, and I guess the only way to stop that is to show you what's actually going on here.”

Her voice is too loud for the small room and the headachy morning. She's edgy and off. She's breaking.

She pushes aside a brochure from a Pilates studio. Tess's Pilates studio, where she's started teaching. Her face is on the front with a few
other pretty, skinny, rosy-cheeked instructors.

Dad has drawn on all of their faces too.

He's already done a lot to Tess's face and body in real life, but in picture form he still draws lines under her eyes and at her neck. Improving on his own work. His dissatisfaction so large and powerful I swear it's in the room with us.

I pocket the brochure. As evidence of how impossible it will be to ever be good enough for him. Maybe to show Karissa.

Maybe because I want to know where Tess is.

Finally Arizona finds what she's looking for. It's a photograph of the two of us.

We're in bikinis. We're fifteen and seventeen. We're squinting from smiling so hard. There are palm trees in the background and Tess's pedicured toes in the bottom of the frame. I have four tiny braids on one side of my head. Arizona has a sunburn on her nose.

It's hard to tell us apart.

Partly because there are lines on our faces. And our bodies. A few near my eyes and ears. A question mark near my nose. And a whole new shape drawn in around my chin. It's the shape my father wishes my chin were. Strong and solid and in proportion with my cheekbones and forehead. An ideal shape. Dotted lines make my hips smaller. The insides of my thighs touch in the photo, but he's circled the exact spot where they hit.

It's like a paper at school, all marked up with
needs improvement
and
has potential
.

Arizona is marked up too. Some lines on her face and vague
markings on both of our chests, like he forgot we were his daughters.

He probably did forget we were his daughters when he was doing it.

It doesn't matter if he doodled it while he was on the phone or spacing out. It doesn't matter that if I show him an issue of
Glamour
with a marked-up model, he doesn't even remember doing it. That he laughs at his own doctorliness. “You can't turn it off, I guess,” he's said.

It hurts. My hangover turns into something else entirely. Something burning and drowning me. Something unsurvivable.

“I'm sorry,” Arizona says.

I'm gutted and she knows it, because she was gutted too.

“This is what he sees?” I say, but I know the answer.

“They've only ever made it worse. His women. They make him less of a dad. And she's the worst one. You don't see it, but he's forgetting about us. He's not seeing us as daughters anymore. As family. As important. You think you understand Karissa and the other women. But you're missing the most important parts.”

I want to be on her side and be upset about this together. But her boobs are pushed up too far, and they're all I can see.

“We're in it together,” Arizona says. “You and me and no one else. Roxanne can hang out. She can help or make us laugh or give you cigarettes if you really need to do that. But stop trying to bring other people in. It's you and me.”

“It's not,” I say.

I'd go out right now if I could. See Bernardo. See myself through someone else's eyes. Never talk to my father again. But my head
hurts too much and I'm dizzy. I wouldn't make it out of the building probably.

“You shouldn't have shown me that,” I say.

I sleep away as much of the next twenty-four hours as I can. Because in sleep I don't remember that image of myself marked up beyond recognition, made into someone my father would love more.