Making Pretty (17 page)

Bernardo brings me a bagel the next day.

I got up early and bought us huge blueberry muffins from a place that serves them with clotted cream to dip them in. He shows me the bagel and I show him the muffins and the cream and we marvel at ourselves.

I think that is part of love too. Basking in the wonder of how great you are for each other.

“You are the sweetest,” I say.

“But you are also the sweetest,” he says.

“So we're going to have to eat it all, right?” I say.

“I see no other option.” He takes a bite of bagel right there on the stoop, followed by a bite of muffin.

“Clotted cream,” he says. “Who knew?”

Being near Bernardo and eating clotted cream feels good, but nothing else does. I can't even look in the mirror. Errant marks fly up in front of my image, zaps like the kind that happen when you rub
your eyes too hard or first try to adjust to the light after an evening of dark.

“You still hurting from the other night?” he asks.

I am still hurting, but not from a hangover.

“Are you ready for today?” I say. I haven't let go of the Pilates brochure or the idea that seeing Tess will do something, make me see something new. Arizona is so sure that I don't see anything clearly. Fine. I'll look more closely. At all of them. At my father and Natasha and Tess and Janie. At my mother. At Karissa. At myself.

“Use more words?” Bernardo says.

“Can we do something kind of crazy today? Are you up for it?”

“What are we doing?” Bernardo says. It's not yes or no, it's something better.

“I want to see Tess,” I say. “The most recent stepmom.”

He studies my face, and without thinking I bring my hand to my chin, to cover it up. It's funny, how aware of my weak chin I suddenly am. I've been walking around with it my whole life, barely even noticing, and now that I've seen my father's pictures I can think of nothing else. “You look sad. Are you sad? I haven't seen you sad before. All kinds of other things. Not sad, though. Is this what it looks like on you?”

I love that everything he says is a poem.

“I'm motivated,” I say.

“And sad.”

“Yeah. And sad.”

He kisses me and I'm almost not sad anymore. I feel almost
beautiful again. The Sharpie markings on my arms and chest and thighs are blurry now. Not gone and not distinct. More like a fog over my skin and his. I miss them. Tess will hate it all. The hair and the scarf and the fog and the Sharpie and Bernardo and me being there.

I don't think I care.

The last time I saw Tess she was in the middle of moving out and Dad forgot to tell me. We have a rule that he's supposed to tell me and Arizona when someone is moving in or out so that we don't have to actually see or experience the change. It's a weird, chosen denial, like it's not happening if we don't see it happen. If a stepmom moves out and no one sees it, did she ever really exist?

At the time Tess was wearing pink leggings and too much makeup, and she was shaky and weepy on our stairs. I tried to sneak away unseen, but she heard my shuffling and looked up.

“Did you know this was coming?” she said. She looked young, then, underneath all the makeup and Botox and cascade of tears. She looked like a little girl. It was scary.

“I mean, I don't know,” I said. “I've never seen it work, so I guess . . . sort of?”

“I'd never done any of this before,” Tess said. “Movie night and making dinner and worrying about you getting home by curfew and cleaning the blades of the ceiling fan and saying I love you to someone every night before bed. That was all new to me.”

“Yeah. See, it wasn't really new to us,” I said.

“That's the worst fucking thing I've ever heard,” Tess said. “This should make you feel something.” She pointed to her pile of moving
boxes, the truck outside, the burly men heaving the boxes from our apartment to their truck.

“I mean, we'll miss you for sure,” I said, but I know it wasn't convincing enough. I couldn't muster up tears or even a crack in my voice or a big sigh or anything.

“Today I feel bad for me,” she said. “But in, like, six months I'm only going to feel bad for you.” She took one of the smallest boxes out to the sidewalk and stayed there, surveying the house and sipping a big green juice, and she never came back inside.

I don't have cute workout clothes, so I take Bernardo to the Closet of Forgotten Things, where I'm sure I'll find stretchy pants and tank tops with built-in bras and everything else I need to pull off Girl Going to Pilates Class.

The Closet of Forgotten Things is filled with handbags and failed pottery projects and expensive jewelry and jeans that are ripped in sexy places and books of poetry that are either sad or romantic but never both.

Arizona and I play a game sometimes, where we go through the closet and ask each other if the object is from the beginning or the end. If it is a symbol of manic falling in love or the spiral out of love and into despair. If it is a remnant from before they were a plastic wife or from the fizzy days where they're changing or the always depressing endings where they see how much they've lost and how little it mattered.

We played after Tess left, over the phone. I sent her pictures of objects and wished she were actually there.

Diet book: I say before, Arizona says after.

Gold bracelet with tiny diamonds: we both agree it's from the beginning.

iPod filled with sad songs: obviously it's from the end.

Never-worn sneakers: I say after, Arizona says before.

Arizona and I don't tell anyone about this or the betting box. They are things that make us terrible people. They are the things that make us sisters and help us survive.

And still, I tell Bernardo about it. Which must be love.

“I have never seen anything like this,” Bernardo says, watching me dig through the contents and find a sweat headband that I decide was Natasha's.

The sweat headband is super eighties and neon and trying pretty hard to be retro-hip, so it could be from the end, but it's also unself-conscious and, like, exuberant and for someone who doesn't care what people think, so it could be from before or during. It's a tough call.

I point at the shiny black leggings I'm going to put on. “After,” I say. Then at the headband. “Probably before.”

“I want to play,” he says, and picks up a stuffed giraffe. “What do you think? When's this thing from?”

“Oh, come on,” I say. “Clearly from, like, week one. You don't buy stuffed animals after the first few weeks.”

Bernardo nods his head like this is a research project and not a game. We head out.

It occurs to me on the subway, when I'm looking at my own Sharpied hands gripping the pole, that I have done to myself what my father did to me. “When do you think these markings will wash off completely?”
I ask Bernardo. I smile with the words so that he doesn't know how disturbed I now am by the thing we did.

“Another few days,” Bernardo says. “Unless I do it to you again.”

“No!” I say, too loudly. I want to wash my mind of the image of the photograph in my dad's office, but it's impossible with black markings crawling all over me.

“Are you sure you want to see her?” Bernardo says, knowing something's wrong but not knowing what and guessing incorrectly.

“I'm fine. I sort of miss the color of my skin. I miss how it looks, like, untouched.”

“Well, I'm with you on that,” Bernardo says. He kisses my shoulder, then my neck, then my cheeks, and then we're making out on the subway. Men in suits and women in empire-waist dresses and little kids on weird leashes avert their eyes. We stumble when the train comes to a halt, and our bodies fall against each other so that we both have to step back. I trip over a dude with a shopping cart full of blue garbage bags and cans. When I find Bernardo's lips again, we only have one stop left to kiss and we make the most of it.

The studio's near Lincoln Center, and everyone hanging out there looks the same. Looks like Tess.

Then there's Tess.

She looks good. Okay, at least. She hasn't changed except that her hair is even blonder and her body is contorted, with her legs above her head and her feet in straps and her hands gripping some medieval torture device situation.

I sit on a mat like I'm going to take a class, but there's no class
going on, so I catch her eye immediately. And Bernardo catches everyone's eyes. He didn't take off his shoes or his scarf or anything. He is squarely himself.

“Montana,” Tess says. Her voice goes hoarse mid-word, and I sort of know immediately this is a terrible idea. I'm not a regular girl to her anymore. I'm not me. I'm the symbol of the worst thing that ever happened to her. I'm the worst.

“I shouldn't have come,” I say. It's a weird way to start a conversation, and we both know it.

“Are you taking Pilates?” Tess says. It hasn't even been six months, but I wonder if her prediction was right, if she feels bad for me instead of herself already. I blush from the idea of it. When I last saw her, she was the humiliated one. The one left behind. The pathetic pink-outfitted disaster.

I wonder if I'm now that pitiable and pink and unaware.

“Oh. No. I came to see you,” I say. “And I have a boyfriend!” Bernardo seems like as good a distraction as anything else. He has a red T-shirt and a red baseball hat with the word
word
on it. I do a Vanna White gesture in his direction, like he's something to be admired and won, which he sort of is, in my opinion. Tess nods and waves, but there's no warmth coming off of her.

The studio smells like sweat and too-sweet candles.

“Can you grab some tea with me?” I say. I remember Tess liking tea.

“No,” Tess says. “I'm working. And if there's something you need . . . I'm probably not the right person.” She pauses and takes me in. All of me. The hair and the Sharpie shadows and probably the
sadness, and she draws some kind of conclusion. “Are you okay?” she says.

“I'm great. I'm okay. I'm a little lost,” I say. It's three different answers. I wish I knew the right one. Some of Tess's coworkers inch closer to us, like they know she might need backup. I'm almost happy for her, all these people looking out for her. A little family.

It is pathetic that my heart tugs at the thought of that word. And that I'm jealous she might have it already, without me, in this form.

“What am I to you now?” I say. “Do you miss me? What, like, are we? To each other?” I am ten. I am eight. I am five and thirteen and so small. It hurts, to be this little and exposed.

Tess closes her eyes. She tilts her head up to the ceiling and takes deep breaths.

“Let's pretend we don't know each other,” she says. I am prepared for so many crappy things, but not that. “We don't, really. I don't know any of you. Not even your stupid fucking father.”

Tess was not a swearer when she lived with us, so the word hits hard.

Arizona is right. I don't see everything. I am too hopeful. I am too into the stepmoms. I am silly and stupid and wrong about my own life. “I should go,” I say.

“You and your brat of a sister,” Tess says. It's not even a full sentence. “You're terrible people. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

It's mean. The last few days have been so full of mean things I feel like I'm learning something true and awful about, like, the world. Humanity. A few days ago I was simply Montana. Now I am terrible
and ugly and ridiculous and a bad sister and a brat. My mind can't work fast enough to catch up with that idea of me.

“Don't talk to her like that,” Bernardo breaks in, a new side of him emerging too. His voice is a little too big for the studio, and everyone's listening in now and all I want is to be on the street where you can say anything at all and no one notices. The other day some guy was talking on the phone about guns and knives and all his friends who have them. I want to be out there, with them, where I am pink-haired and fucked up but not in a way anyone notices.

Everyone here looks like someone my dad would like to marry or who he would have already married.

“I don't know what question I'm asking,” I say. “But it's weird to have you live in my house and then never see you again. All of you.”

I know even saying it like that, lining Tess up as part of a string of people instead of her own individual person, is sort of me being the worst. Even Bernardo cringes at the phrasing.

“I tried to make it seem like a family,” Tess says at last. She's looking only at me, not at the people watching us. “But that's not the same as it actually being one, in the end, you know?”

“Maybe we didn't need you to make us a family,” I say. I don't even believe it myself, but I can't stand her acting like we're not. I can't let someone else confirm my biggest fear in a sweaty, too-pretty studio full of boring people who don't eat pasta.

Besides, my father kisses my forehead some nights when he thinks I'm asleep, and that has to mean something.

Tess lets out a loud, singular, explosive laugh.

“I can feel bad for you. For all of you. Because you're so terrible you don't even know what you're missing. So yeah. I was right. You're the one who's meant to be pitied.”

My heart's pounding and Bernardo is fuming. “Don't talk to her like that,” he says again.

“You came here,” she says, like the words came out of me, not him. I'm not sure if he's making things worse or better, being here. “To what? Make yourself feel better? Make fun of me? Feel all superior for knowing it wouldn't work out? You and your sister, both rooting for the worst possible thing to happen for me. Two teenagers actively rooting for my life to fall apart. Arizona said it under her breath a million times. Had a countdown of when he'd leave me. You're bad people. You don't care about anyone but yourselves. You don't care about anything.”