Arizona turned thirteen almost two years before me, but she didn't tell me about the thirteenth birthday gift until mine was presented by my dad and wrapped in fancy gold paper with a silver bow and a fake rose taped to the middle as extra decoration. I was pretty sure it was something shiny, like a necklace with my birthstone or the tiara I'd seen when I was out shopping with Natasha that Dad told me was ridiculous but I insisted was perfect for all kinds of events.
I used to like things like diamonds and glitter and princess costumes. I used to believe in things like birthdays and stepmoms.
The present was a slip of paper.
Dad's office stationery, and a promise that I could get any procedure I wanted when I turned eighteen.
“For confidence,” he said.
“I don't get it,” I said. I looked to Arizona for a translation, and she shrugged. Arizona was not very sociable when she was fifteen.
“When I was thirteen, all I wanted to know was that I would be
prettier when I was older,” Natasha said, trying to explain away the confusion all over my face. She had a bad habit of saying things that were definitely insulting but that she didn't spend any time thinking about, so were therefore somehow “not meant to be mean.”
“Oh,” I said, because there is very little else to say to a gift certificate for future plastic surgery.
“You can get anything done!” Dad said. “Like, if you don't grow into your nose. Or, you know, breast enhancement, if that's what you'd like. I can't imagine you'd need lipo, but that would be fine too.”
Dad had been talking about me growing into my nose for years. It had never seemed that big to me.
I thought of the random doodles he drew on magazine covers and spare slips of paper. Fixes he could make to the models' faces, arms, thighs, boobs. Idle illustrations of perfect and imperfect bodies and noses and chins. There was a magazine on the coffee table with Gwyneth Paltrow in a bikini on the cover. He'd drawn dotted lines around her eyes and near her hips. It shouldn't have been a surprise that he assumed I'd be imperfect too.
“Your ears are pretty close to your head, so pinning them back won't be necessary,” he went on. I was tearing up. But if he saw the tears, he'd be insulted. He liked to deal with facts, and the facts, the literal facts of numbers and symmetry and measurement, said that my nose was too big and my chin a little too small. It wasn't something to be sad about. Especially when he was promising to fix it. “But your chin we could add a little something to. When you're eighteen, of
course. I would never do any of this on someone your age. But to know it's there, like a safety net, Natasha and I thought it might help. With adolescence. With confidence. I want you to know we get how hard it is to be your age and that we're here for you and you'll get through it.” Dad smiled. “We're so lucky to have Natasha around to help me understand you girls.” He put his arm around her and beamed like a victor of some contest for Dad of the Year.
I wondered if maybe it was me. If I was the weird one who didn't like the gift. He and Natasha seemed so sure that it was a full-on winner, I assumed I must be somehow off. I knew I was supposed to reflect back Dad's happiness, but I felt the panicked sadness of waking up from a too-close-to-reality nightmare.
“I got you a pet chameleon!” Arizona exclaimed, right at the moment I thought all my insides were going to start pouring out of my eyes and nose. I thought I could maybe cry so hard and so long that I'd turn hollow, eventually.
“Youâyou did?” I said. Arizona was giving me our patented
don't cry
look, which we had perfected long, long ago when I was five and she was seven and Mom left.
“I did,” she said. “That's what you wanted, right?” She ran to her bedroom, where I guess she'd been storing the little guy, and brought him down in a glass cage with a book of instructions for feeding and cleaning and general chameleon care.
“Yes,” I said, staring at his scaly face, “this is what I wanted.” If Mom had been around, maybe she would have remembered the chameleon too, but it didn't matter. I had Arizona for that. Dad was good
at being around and not leaving and finding random women to live with us, and asking us one million times a month if we were happy, even if he never explained quite what that meant. Arizona was good at filling in all the gaps that were left. And Mom was good at birthday cards and not much else.
I loved that chameleon hard and named him Lester. I stopped wanting anything that glinted in the sun or was meant to make me prettier. I stopped wanting Natasha around. Until after she and my dad broke up a couple of years later.
I keep my plastic surgery gift certificate in my desk drawer. I am positive I'll never use it, but I keep it as a reminder of something. I'm not sure what.
I thought Arizona was doing the same thing. It's uneasy, to be suddenly different from the person you thought you were exactly like.
Dad's never mentioned it again, but I'm sure he's wondering how I'm going to use it, checking my face to catalog the ugliest parts and make suggestions.
Meanwhile, my chameleon Lester died two years ago. They don't have very long life spans, as it turns out. Changing themselves that often, to fit every possible circumstance perfectly, exhausts them, I guess.
These days Natasha lives in a big apartment on the Upper East Side with some burly lawyer guy and twin daughters, Victoria and Veronica.
And sometimes me.
Once every few weeks, I manage to convince my father I'm with some friends from school who don't exist and convince Arizona I'm on some adventure and convince Roxanne I'm in for the night, and I stay at Natasha's. Like it's my home. It's been easier this year, of course, without Roxanne and Arizona watching and caring.
I'd tell Roxanne, but I know she'd tell Arizona. In the hierarchy of friendships that everyone pretends doesn't exist but everyone also knows does exist, Arizona loves me most and I love Arizona most but Roxanne loves Arizona most. It's a thing I always suspected but am now sure about.
Sometimes I think Arizona loves me most but likes Roxanne better. That stings too. To be unchosen. To not be anyone's favorite person.
So I stay sometimes on Natasha's white leather couch under Victoria's gray cashmere blanket. Natasha has a tiny white dog named Oscar and more shoes than any of the other wives, and as soon as she and my dad were over, she got nice.
We started with coffee.
I went to her wedding.
I babysit her kids.
She cooks me dinner and gives me hand-me-downs and punks them up with me when they're too prissy.
She apologized for the gift certificate, for the things she didn't understand.
She is making plans to take out her implants.
She says she made a lot of mistakes and she is trying to unmake them or at least not make any more.
When she hugs me, she means it.
She is my big, unspeakable secret.
Once or twice a year I consider telling Arizona and letting her into the fold, but I can't seem to bring myself to admit I've broken one of our sister-promises. Or maybe I can't stand the thought that Natasha would like her better too. That there would be no one left who was mine.
I like to think it's the first thing. That I'm a girl ashamed to have broken a promise, and not that other girl who's all lame and selfish and needs more than I'm supposed to.
After too much of everyone else, I find myself at her place, where I'm safe. It's like hiding out when you're little. Under the table or in the
closet or whatever. No one knows I'm here, and they'd never think to look for me at Natasha's.
We sit on her couch, side by side, and share our Lists of Things to Be Grateful For.
“Victoria's wonderful spirit,” she says.
“The stoop,” I say.
“The Starbucks barista who told me I look like Denise Richards.”
“Coffee after nine p.m.”
“The way we change over time and become better and worse, in tandem,” Natasha says. She always has one thing on her list that blows my mind a little.
“Karissa. That she exists, but not what she's doing,” I say, because I've never not read something on my list. It's a weird intimacy between us. We don't hold back.
“New friend?” Natasha says.
“Sort of.” I kind of can't believe she hasn't been on any other lists I've read to Natasha, but sometimes it takes a while to admit you are grateful for something or someone. Sometimes I'll write about a great dinner with my father three months later. Like I can't appreciate it from up close, the way some paintings are better from a distance.
“New mom?”
“No. She's not the stepmom type. She's one of the in-betweeners.”
It feels mean to talk about Karissa that way, in the old lingo that I've always used about Dad's wives and girlfriends.
“I can live with it. I have love in my life. I'm filled with gratitude. I'd like those things for your father even though he is incapable of that
reality.” Natasha says all these yoga things that would sound like total bull coming from most people, but she is legitimately serene. I've seen the change, and that's even better than meeting someone who's always been sweet and kind and wise. I like Natasha even more because she used to be so heinous. “I want your dad to be happy. And you. I want you to have what you want.” She knows but doesn't say that what I want is to have had a mother. Wanting a mom is not the kind of thing you say out loud. Not unless you're five and have a boo-boo. “And Arizona,” Natasha says, with a sigh. She always says Arizona's name with a sigh, because she can't fix what went wrong there and it twists her up inside.
There was only one time that I actually tried to tell Arizona about my relationship with Natasha. I floated the idea that Natasha had changed. Said I saw her walking down the street, pregnant and looking all cherubic. Arizona scoffed and said
that poor baby
and stomped instead of walked the rest of the day.
I wonder if it would be different, now that Arizona has actually used the gift certificate. It's the thing that made Natasha worse than the others. The thing that made her unforgivable. I wonder if Arizona actually using the thing makes her hate Natasha less. Or, I guess, more.
Maybe more, since no matter what happiness crap she's spouting, I think Arizona did it to get closer to my father, to be the daughter he wants in the hopes that that would make him stop finding new women in his life.
And now that she's met Karissa, she must know she failed.
“Monanana!” Victoria calls out, waking up from her nap. Veronica
doesn't have as many words as Victoria, but she's every bit as loving. She hugs my legs and gurgles in my direction.
“They love you,” Natasha says. “Their big sister.”
“Except not,” I say. I love-hate when Natasha calls me their sister. I even love-hate it that Victoria knows my name. It's light and heavy, right and wrong. I lift Veronica in the air. She has brown eyes and her mother's old nose. I remember Natasha's old nose from when she was first with my father, and seeing it on Victoria feels right.
I wish I shared something like that with them. Something tangible to tie me to this family, like a nose or an eye color or a last name. And I wonder if Natasha regrets changing her nose every time she sees it on her daughter's face.
“So. What's this new girl look like?” Natasha says. She's looking over my list again. She's the only person who's allowed to do that. She flips back in time, to older entries she missed, and I love watching her smile at the things I've written. “Goddamn it you are a writer, lady,” she says, reading back a few of my entries in this awe-filled voice that hurts from how good it feels.
“Karissa's like a fairy,” I say. “Like . . . hipster Tinker Bell. Or punk ballerina. She's perfect, sort of.”
“Well, don't rub it in. I'm not that evolved,” Natasha says. But we both know she pretty much is.
“Whatever, she's not about to be a wife or anything,” I say. “I'm still rooting for you to get him back. We can adopt the girls. You liked the brownstone.”
It's a nice dream to have, but I could never wish that on Natasha for real. Her new husband is kind, and they have this incredible marriage.
He reads her gratitude journals too. I was a little devastated when she first told me, since I thought I was the only one who got that privilege. But really it's good to see solid proof that closeness, the way I imagine it, exists, even if it doesn't happen exactly when you want it to.
“We're a forever thing,” Natasha says all the time. “You and me.”
But I have to let go of the dream, since she's a forever thing with her husband too. I'm not her daughter. I'm not her best friend or her wife or her sister. I'm not even her stepdaughter anymore.
Other dreams: joining a commune of motherless girls with Arizona. Running away with Bernardo. Moving permanently into Natasha's apartment. Making a weird sort of family with Karissa where we go to bars and live in her apartment and throw our own pickle-and-wine parties. I'd accept anything, as long as it feels like it will last and be mine.
Anything but Karissa being the next temporary moving part in our nonfamily.
If Karissa hadn't turned everything on its head, I could see myself sharing the List of Things to Be Grateful For with her too. I ache for how badly I want her to be mine again. I was so close.
“I'm gonna tell you about a boy,” I say to Natasha, testing it out with her the way I did with my sister and Karissa.
“You better,” she says, and pours me more tea and brings me another cookie, and if I didn't have a pack of cigarettes in my purse and the memory of a bunch of drunk nights in my head, I'd think this was my real life.
“You're falling in love?” Natasha asks, and I shake my head and
say of course not, but the things Bernardo said ring in my ear like a premonition, and I wonder if I could be. Falling, of course. Not fully in. I don't believe in falling in love too quickly or with someone I don't know. I don't believe in anything my father does.
But I like the idea that Natasha can see the beginnings of it, like it's a scent on me or etched onto my skin, and not the fleeting, ephemeral thing I've always thought it was.
Love, as something stable and real and tangible.
I can't really imagine.
I stay over at Natasha's, and the girls keep me up most of the night by calling out for me and their mom and dad from their cribs.
I feel like I'm in the CIA, like I have a secret identity where I live part-time as a good girl with a mother.
Natasha didn't even comment on my hair. Maybe in this light it isn't noticeable. Maybe her apartment is that transformative.
Between nights out with Karissa, and days in the park with Roxanne, and the memories of the school year spent in a cloud of invisibility and vague friendliness, and Bernardo on my mind, and trying to fall asleep on Natasha's couch, it's like I'm living seventy-five different lives and don't feel fully comfortable in any of them. Arizona digs her heels in on the life she wants, and I'm out here dipping my toes in everything to see if any of it could fit.
It gives me a miniature panic attack. Something stuck in my heart and throat that doesn't ever bloom but festers and hurts.
I don't fit anywhere.
I am a mess
, I text Bernardo when I'm half-asleep on the couch and too drowsy to stop myself. The leather keeps sticking to my legs, and the girls have lullabies playing too loudly on their baby sound system. Natasha turned it back on when they woke her up a half hour ago, and it hasn't turned itself off yet.
That's why I like you so freaking much
, he texts back.
I love that he doesn't try to tell me I'm not a mess.
I want to tell you everything
, I say. It's funny. When someone is romantic and strange and too big to be real, you learn to match them, at least a little.
And I want you to tell me everything
. I'm thinking of the girl he used to love, and I think I could even handle knowing about that.
Then that's what we'll have to do
, Bernardo writes back.
I could melt into this thing between us.