Making Pretty (9 page)

I learn very quickly that Bernardo looks as good on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as he does on the West Side. He buys me my very own winter scarf to wear in the summer at a stand on St. Mark's that is probably the only place in the entire city selling knit scarves in June.

“What if I get sweaty?” I say when he wraps it around me and declares it sexy.

“Sweaty is sexy,” he says.

We eat french fries from the Belgian fry place and I introduce him to garlic mayo, so if he wasn't falling for me before, he definitely is by the time we've finished a whole cone of the things.

“Next time we'll go to Brooklyn,” he says.

“Next time?” I flutter my eyelashes, but I'm not as uncertain as I'm pretending. When something's solid, you don't have to worry about it being a liquid. We are a solid. Sometime in the last few hours, walking around the city, or maybe texting late last night, we became one.

“Do you like guacamole?” he says. It sounds dangerous in my ear,
in a way I never thought avocados could be.

“To a kind of scary degree,” I say. “Guac and cheese are pretty much all I need.”

“You're in luck. My father makes the world's greatest guacamole.”

“You want me in your home? Me? You've seen me, right? Mothers don't love me.” I could change out of my cutoffs for a meet-the-parents moment. I could get real shoes instead of flip-flops and borrow a blouse from Karissa instead of a T-shirt, I guess. It must be serious if I'm willing to give up T-shirts. But I won't give up my pink hair.

Our pink hair.

Or the scarf, I guess.

“I want it all,” he says. “And she'll like you because I like you.”

“You don't know me,” I say. It's more Arizona's voice than my own coming out. It feels like he knows me and that I know him. It feels like all that time spent staring at each other in the park counted as getting to know each other.

But Arizona and I got coffee this morning in the park, and she kept shaking her head when I talked about Bernardo, like I was wrong about my own feelings.

“You can't like someone all at once,” she said before adding another packet of sugar to her iced latte. She was wearing a straw hat that would look elegant on a model but looked out of place in the park.

“It's not all at once,” I said. “A lot can happen in a short amount of time, though. And a lot can happen without speaking. And a lot can happen while you're kissing.”

“You sound like Dad,” Arizona said, and I almost canceled on
Bernardo because nothing would be worse and I am so used to trusting whatever Arizona says. I think she expected me to cancel on him too.

“We going to go to that place with the cute crappy cheap dresses in SoHo?” she said. They sell flimsy things in trendy patterns with lots of wood and metal embellishments at the chest and waist. Arizona thinks they'll have sundresses, but they won't. Not the kind she likes now.

“I told you I'm going out with Bernardo,” I said.

“And I said I think you're moving too fast and being a little too girlfriend-y with him,” she said. She might as well have been wagging her finger at me.

“I don't know what to tell you,” I said. “I guess I disagree?” Arizona and I must have disagreed a thousand times before she went to college. More, I'm sure. But now we disagree about things that matter. Like we are fighting about the shape of the earth. Whether it goes around and around or reaches an end point that we could all fall off of.

Arizona thinks we could fall off some cliff at the end of the earth, and I know that's not the shape of things.

Bernardo and I are outside a thrift store in the East Village, and I pull him in.

“Tell me what you like in here,” I say. “That will help me understand you in a way nothing else could.”

Bernardo picks out a fringed leather vest. “This,” he says. “What does this tell you about me?”

“You don't want to know,” I say.

I try on a hat with a veil, and Bernardo pulls down a retro airline messenger bag situation. He finds a red studded belt and buckles it around his waist. It looks fucking good on him, and I tell him so.

I find an enormous cashmere coat and wrap myself in it. It's a ridiculous thing to wear in June, but I'm learning from Bernardo that that's a stupid reason to resist something. Seasons and time don't mean anything.

With the coat and hat on and the music in the thrift store playing too loud, I ask him to tell me about his ex-girlfriend.

“Casey?”

“Sure. Casey,” I say, hating her already. Casey. She sounds peppy and pretty. She sounds brown-eyed and busty.

“I'm over her, first of all,” Bernardo says, like it's a question he gets asked a lot. I wrap another coat around myself. I need layers for this. What I really need is armor. “So don't freak out.”

“I'm not freaking out,” I say, freaking out.

“She was older. In college. Kind of a partyer. Really smart.”

Kind of a partyer means sex. And smart means really pretty. I should not have asked about her. Older means sex too. And older means better. And older means he'll never be over her.

I take a deep breath and tell those thoughts to go away. Natasha would remind me that being open is good, I think, and Karissa would tell me to trust in my awesomeness.

Karissa always wants me to trust in my awesomeness.

I take off the coats and try to trust in my awesomeness.

“You loved her,” I say. It's a statement. I already know it's true,
and I am desperate to be okay with it. A sad look comes over his face, and I know he loved her a lot and I also know that he needs me to be there for him while he talks about it.

So I do something I don't think I'm capable of, because he's worth it. I decide to support him. I decide to be okay with it.

“That must have been hard, when it ended,” I say. I start hunting through the store's box of jewelry. Necklaces and bracelets are all tangled up with one another, but if you look closely, you can find beautiful things. As long as you're willing to spend some time untangling them, righting them, making them yours.

“It was sort of bad. I don't know. We were really, really together. Then she changed her mind. Said I was too young and immature, and I think she started seeing someone old. Like twenty-five.” Bernardo shakes his head, trying to rid himself of the image he's created. “It happened fast. I was pretty unprepared.”

“That sounds terrible,” I say. I've pulled out a strand of gray pearls. I'm sure they're fake, but they're beautiful anyway. I put them around my neck and look at myself in the mirror. Do I look like the sort of girl who could inspire that kind of heartbreak?

“I sort of thought she was it,” Bernardo says. “My parents thought I was insane. But when you love someone . . . I don't know.”

“When you love someone what?” I ask. No one tells me much about what it's like to really love someone. I take off my hat and put on red-framed cat-eyed glasses with no lenses. Bernardo kisses my nose. I didn't know that I wanted to be kissed there. That I would feel small and sweet and adored.

I wrinkle my nose.

“Damn that's a cute nose,” he says. I cover it up. It hurts. Being complimented hurts sometimes.

“When you love someone what?” I ask again. “What were you going to say?”

“When you love someone, you want to be with them. You want that to be it. You don't want it to end. When you love someone and you're seventeen, you want to be thirty, you know?”

I don't know.

Bernardo's the kind of guy who wants to skip ahead fifteen years, to get to the boring part.

“That sounds intense,” I say. I grab a tie from the rack and throw it around his neck. It's green and paisley and wide. I show off my skill at tying ties. It's the kind of thing you become an expert in when your dad is sometimes single.

“You say intense like you really mean crazy,” Bernardo says. “Partly she was just really hot and liked watching baseball with me and my dad, and made paper cranes and origami and stuff, and I thought that was weird and cool and hot. Should I not say hot? It's bad to say hot about my ex, right?”

The store owner is giving us a look that means we either need to buy something or leave, so we leave.

I've taken the gray not-pearls by accident. I could go in and return them but they didn't notice, and the pearls are probably, like, a dollar, and there's something sort of wonderful about being dangerous and not myself. So I keep them on. Twist them around my fingers.

“You are an intense dude,” I say.

“You're still saying it like it means crazy,” he says.

“It does, a little,” I say. I bump his hip with mine. I kiss his neck. I haven't kissed him anywhere but his lips, so the smell and taste and feel are all brand-new. “I'm a little crazy too,” I say, and it sounds flirtier than I meant it to. Like an invitation for something.

“I loved Casey,” he says, a sentence I didn't need to hear. “Because she made me feel like I could be someone else. Someone new.” He shrugs. “Casey, loving Casey, was hopeful, like I could change. But that meant she wanted me to change. Wanted me to be someone else. And, I don't know, it's like . . . you can grow, but you can't really change. Or something.”

We look at each other on the sidewalk, which is not an easy thing to do in New York. People have to bump and maneuver and sigh around us. Sidestepping our little moment.

“Intense,” I say for a third time, grinning and squinting from the way the sun sometimes hits a window and becomes a burst of blinding light. “Intense,” I say, and this time I do mean crazy, but I also mean wonderful.

“Thanks for asking about her,” Bernardo says as we walk, slipping an arm over my shoulders and pulling me close before we both realize it's too hot and humid to be stuck together like that for too long.

“I used to sort of think I could have that with my sister. That closeness. But I think we have too many weird things between us now,” I say. I wasn't thinking about Arizona, but now I can't help it. It's that word—
mine
. It makes me think of the way we used to hold hands on
subway rides with my father, when he left us in the hospital day care on summer days when he couldn't find a babysitter. We'd read books to each other in the corner of the room and not give anyone else the time of day. It reminds me of Roxanne too, and the way she ate breakfast at our house before school instead of hers. That the three of us could fit in one bed and I didn't feel younger or smaller or anything.

“Weird things?” Bernardo says.

He told me so much and it feels like I should tell him something real, so I tell him my one big secret.

“Like, this one ex-stepmom, Natasha? I still hang out with her. A lot. All the time. My sister would kill me,” I say. It feels new to say it out loud.

“Is she great?” he asks. Bernardo asks perfect questions.

“She is the greatest. She's family. Except not. She's family and she's also the terrible thing I'm doing to my family. It's strange.”

“It sounds like you need her,” Bernardo says. His glasses are getting a little foggy from the thickness of the air, and I take them off so I can rub them down for him. Make things clear again.

“I don't know what I need,” I say.

“What about all the other stepmoms? There were a few, right?”

“What about them?” I say. It's hard to explain how Tess and Janie and the other girlfriends are all variations on a theme, or else wildly inappropriate deviations. My dad's love life is a long, complicated pattern that I still haven't completely worked out.

We're making turns every single street, bringing us farther east, then farther north. The farther away from the center we go, the fewer
people there are, until it's almost possible to imagine a moment alone.

“What are they all doing these days?” Bernardo says. “Or I guess, do you think about them? Or what were they like? I don't know what I'm asking.”

“I think about them,” I say. I don't know how to answer the rest of it. “I think about seeing them. I think about what if they'd stayed with us.”

“Like, alternate lives?” Bernardo says. He's trying to put words to something that I've never even thought through. A little place in my mind I've been avoiding. “Like how you are with Natasha?”

Something about the way he phrases it hits me weirdly. Not the wrong way exactly, but askew.

“Natasha isn't an alternate life,” I say, “she's part of my actual life.”

“Totally. Of course. I'm sorry. I meant . . . maybe you don't want to have to leave them all behind.”

There's this complex at the top of the East Village, Stuyvesant Town, and we've somehow found our way there, by accident. Dad dated a woman for a few months who lived here, so I know the playgrounds and the funny little car-less labyrinth inside. I lead him in. There's nowhere to actually go in there—no cafés or pretty views or anything—but it's a funny pocket of Manhattan that I haven't seen for five or six years probably.

It's comforting, that I still know my way.

“I guess I would like them to be more than . . . apparitions. Or blips. Or whatever. At one time or another I really tried to make each of them feel like an actual mom, you know? Or at least like an aunt.”

“Maybe someday you'll meet them again,” Bernardo says. He adjusts his glasses and we leave Stuyvesant Town as quickly as we came. Back out on the street I'm happy not to have grown up there, no matter how cute and village-y and cozy it seems. I like the wildness of the rest of New York better.

“I guess I have no idea what's going to happen next,” I say, “even if it seems like I do.”

Bernardo pulls me in again, and we walk like that, his arm around me, our skin sticking together from the heat and sweat.