Making Pretty (14 page)

Victoria and Veronica hug my legs when we get there, and Natasha gives us iced tea and cookies, and I'm proud to show them off to Bernardo.

“Are you treating Montana right?” Natasha says. I can't read what she thinks of him right off the bat. I've never introduced her to anyone, aside from back in the day when she was my stepmom and I didn't give a shit since I hated her.

“I think so!” Bernardo says. He isn't nervous. Or at least he's not showing it. In fact, he looks more comfortable here than he did when he hung out with Karissa. He lifts Victoria onto his lap and I lift Veronica onto mine, and I'm thinking this was the best idea I've ever had.

“It's probably my job to show you embarrassing pictures of her ballet class and the Halloween she dressed up as an old man, right?” Natasha beams.

“An old man, huh?” Bernardo says. “What ever happened to, like,
Cinderella or a cat or a ghost?”

“Not my style,” I say, loving his teasing. “I made Arizona be an old lady, so we could match.” I'm laughing, thinking of it, and Natasha is laughing too. She remembers.

“You bossed Arizona around, huh?” he says. I like how he's trying to paint a full picture of me and my life. Write a whole novel on it.

“Hard to say.” Memories of growing up with Arizona are so vivid they hurt. “We bossed each other around, I guess.”

Victoria traces all the hearts she can find on Bernardo's skin, and Veronica keeps laughing at the ones on me. Natasha doesn't mention any of it. Everyone else in my life would say something about it, but Natasha doesn't do judgment.

“Nothing like siblings,” Natasha says, looking at her girls.

Victoria and Veronica run around tearing books off the wall for us to read to them, and Bernardo does all the guy voices and wolf voices and elephant voices and dopey voices while I read the fairies and princesses and narrators and monkeys.

“He's got a very gentle nature with the girls,” Natasha says when I join her in the kitchen to grab more cookies. “I can see what you like about him.” She rubs my shoulder where there's a cluster of hearts. “The girls love these.”

“It's silly. We're sort of silly together. Obviously. We're weirdos together.”

“Isn't that perfect?” she says. “My girl in love.” It hurts like it always does when she uses the phrase my father uses. Itches, really. The off-ness. A woolly sweater two sizes too small.

When we head back to the couch, the girls have brought Natasha's List of Things to Be Grateful For diary to Bernardo to read, but he hasn't opened it.

“What's this?” he asks. I love that he didn't open it, and I think Natasha does too. I want her to see at least a dozen things that are amazing about him.

“Montana's never told you about our lists?” Natasha says, and he shakes his head. “Well then, I know exactly what you need.” She goes to the bookshelf and pulls out a navy journal. It's masculine enough. “She'll tell you what to do with this.”

She's bringing him into the fold. Letting him in on the thing that is ours.

We take the subway to his place and I tell him about the List of Things to Be Grateful For, and he sits on a stoop and writes out his three right away.

They're about me and Victoria and Veronica and what it means to love a city that smells like garbage all summer long.

He gets it.

Dad asks to have one more breakfast with Arizona and me, the morning of the proposal. I don't like the way he phrases it—one last meal—marking a before and after where everything is going to change. Again.

We're at the diner, of course. It's a sort of autopilot assumption for him that the crummy lighting and chipped plates will fix what's wrong between us.

He's waiting there for us instead of walking over with me. He's probably been there for hours. His paper has expanded, the way papers do when they've been unfolded and refolded, never again managing to take their original shape.

“No,” he says when he sees my Sharpie-covered skin. “For the love of God, Montana, no.”

“Can we please make this not about me?” I say. I'm bleary-eyed and weary-limbed and wondering when and why I've started drinking quite this much. It's not like we're from Wisconsin, where there's
a sort of boredom that has to be drunk away. We're in New York City. But maybe the lights and sounds are more manageable when they're dulled, and maybe everything else is more manageable too.

Plus, I like getting tipsy with Bernardo. It enhances the falling-in-love thing and makes it even wilder and buzzier. We went to his place and poured gin into a bottle of juice and played a drinking game with old-timey TV shows where every time the guys were misogynists, we had to drink.

“I ordered you scrambled eggs,” he says. He looks legitimately sad, not just irritated.

“I don't like them scrambled,” I say, knowing a good daughter would say
that sounds fine
. “I like poached. Did you get bacon?”

“I didn't think about bacon,” he says. I'm even angrier about this than I am about the proposal.

“How do you not think about bacon? It's the whole reason we come to this stupid place!”

“I like this place. And you can order some bacon. Change your order. Or maybe Arizona will eat your scrambled eggs and you can eat her fried ones.”

“Fried's not the same as poached,” I say. I sound seven. I sound ridiculous. I want to throw the napkin holder at him. I don't want to eat eggs and talk about the future.

He sighs but lights up when Arizona breezes in all coiffed and curved and blank-faced.

“You look beautiful!” Dad says, so loud half the diner hears him and turns to check her out. Dad forces a smile at me too. “My two
beautiful girls,” he says, and I can see him giving himself a mental pat on the back for complimenting us both even though it's clear who has won the day.

“Interesting look there,” Arizona says. She mumbles under her breath, “This your solution? Drawing on yourself? Grow up.”

“Don't worry, Montana's going to scrub that off by tonight,” Dad says, as if we've discussed it already and some decision has been made.

“It won't wash off,” I say. “Permanent marker. Gonna be a few days.”

The waiter comes over at the exact right moment and drops scrambled eggs and fried eggs and no bacon onto the table.

Arizona picks her fork up.

“I'd like to order poached eggs and bacon, please,” I say. “And coffee.” The coffee here is thin and unlimited. I'm going to need a lot.

“I'll eat the scrambled,” Dad says. He takes the salt and pepper shakers, one in each hand, and goes to town.

“Nothing is more important to me than you girls,” he starts. “I want you to have everything you deserve. I hope you know that.”

I almost want to ask him if he's talking about the eggs. I'm not in the mood for this conversation. Coffee gets poured, and the smell is a little burned but not terrible. Familiar.

“I haven't always done the best job at giving you what you need,” he says.

It's weird to feel sadder about how sad he is for me than I am about my actual sadness. It sucks not having Mom around, but it's even more
painful seeing how desperately Dad doesn't want us to have gotten robbed of something everyone else has.

“I'm vetoing,” Arizona says. Her voice is higher and pointier than usual, but under control. Like she's practiced this in the mirror.

“I'm sorry?” Dad says.

“I'm vetoing Karissa,” Arizona says again, like it's some rule we decided on when Dad started dating and marrying and falling in love with everyone. “I don't want her in my family, I think it's a mistake, I'm saying no.”

It is beyond lame that my first thought is that Arizona left me out of this decision. That she planned some rebellion without me. That she probably talked to Roxanne about this plan but not me.

“Yeah, maybe you could wait, Dad?” I say. I'm trying to join in, even though I haven't been invited.

“Not wait,” Arizona says. “Not do it. Ever. I think we deserve one unilateral no, and I'm using mine.” She keeps digging into the eggs and makes her eggs-eating face that I've seen for years. Adds salt and pepper to each bite. Our diner trips are practically choreographed.

“Arizona Varren,” Dad says. His voice is low and shaking. He pushes his eggs away like they're suddenly sickening. “Absolutely inappropriate. What's gotten into you?”

She doesn't even look down. Doesn't wince or stop eating.

“You're trying to marry a twenty-year-old who you met, like, five minutes ago. I don't think I'm the one with the problem,” Arizona says.

“She's not twenty,” I say, because I am literally the stupidest person
on the planet. I wish I could time-travel back thirty seconds and unsay it, but I can't. Without thinking, without even considering the epic fallout from the choice, I've taken Karissa's side.

Arizona glares at me. I'm sure forks continue clattering and random conversations keep going, but I don't hear them.

“I mean, I also would rather you didn't marry her,” I say, but it's so weak compared to whatever it is she's doing that it gets lost, maybe doesn't even travel across the table to my father's ears.

Dad takes a bite of eggs at last but makes a face like he's swallowing glass.

Maybe the images of his ex-wives are bouncing in front of his eyes. Maybe he's remembering that Tess's shitty Lean Cuisine meals are still in our freezer. If the former wife's food is still edible, you're not yet ready for a new wife. I'm pretty sure that's a rule somewhere.

“I expect you both to be there tonight,” Dad says. “I expect you to support the thing that makes me happy, like I support both of you.” His voice cracks, and I wonder if he's going to cry. If we're seeing him grieve something real and complicated and basic. His failed marriages. The things he's done that have made all our lives erratic and tense. Taking us for five-dollar eggs when he knows we'd prefer bagels and cream cheese and lattes and the park.

Arizona sees it too. She reaches for his hand. Holds it in hers. He stares at the ceiling and we wait in that moment, together.

“I'd like my girls there,” he says. “It's that simple.”

This is why hope is such a stupid thing to have. Especially when it comes to people you know well.

“You should have told me what we were doing,” I say when he's gone and the rest of the diner has more or less stopped listening in and the eggs are cold and the coffee is refilled to the tippy top, where there's no more room for milk and sugar.

“
We
weren't doing anything,” Arizona says. “I did something. You're in la-la land losing your mind over there. I'm trying to fix the situation.” The hardness hasn't faded from her face, and I can't read her.

“That's not fair,” I say. “I talked to Karissa about it. I told her what was happening. I thought I could stop it on her end.”

“And?”

“She's not stopping it,” I say. “But I tried.”

“Well, see? You're doing a bunch of shit without me too. So.” Arizona is bristly and flustered. I want out of the diner. Someone ordered tuna salad, and it's stinking up the place. “All that complaining about me being away for college, and you've spent all this time with freaking Karissa and that dude.”

“Oh my God, you know his name!” I could slap her. I don't get frustrated with anyone the way I do with Arizona. I want to shake the table until she hears herself.

“I love you, but you're making a big mess, Sean Varren–style, and you need to know that,” she says after rolling her eyes and picking a little at her cold eggs.

“I don't do anything Sean Varren style,” I say.

“Whatever, dude,” Arizona says. “You'll see. In like a year, when you leave and go to your own college, you'll see what really happened this summer.”

I hate that she said the word
college
. I hate that she thinks I'm in need of some Maine-campus-induced epiphany. I don't respond.

She pays the bill and looks at me like I'm supposed to know we're leaving together. “Park?”

“I thought you hate me.”

“I mean, I do, but it's our last day to be in the park before Dad ruins it with his proposal crap. Roxanne's already there. Told her I'd bring her a diner coffee to go.”

“It's even worse when it's to go,” I say, and somehow we're back to ourselves for a moment. We find each other, again and again. I'm happy that that, at least, hasn't changed.

That night, as planned, we hold candles in Washington Square Park and wait for Karissa to walk by, which she is supposed to do with her friend at exactly nine p.m., when the sun is mostly set but the summery sky is still sort of gray and blue and gold instead of black.

Arizona is there.

Somehow we're still unable to put a real foot down when it comes to this shit.

“Maybe she'll change her mind,” I say. “Maybe getting proposed to is one of those things that seems like a great idea until it happens.”

“I have a friend from school who thinks she's about to get engaged,” Arizona says instead of postulating about Karissa. “I mean, this guy is sort of Christian-y or whatever, and I guess Christian-y people get married young.”

“Midwest?” Roxanne says.

“Exactly,” Arizona says, and I know I'm missing some joke about the rest of the country and the people you meet when you leave New
York City, and I try to lean harder on Bernardo. I hold his hand with one hand and a candle with the other.

“Karissa's not Christian,” I say. “Or from the Midwest.”

“I know,” Arizona says. “I wasn't talking about Karissa.” She has this edge in her voice that she used to use sometimes with Roxanne when Arizona and I would be using all this shorthand and Roxanne would struggle to keep up. Roxanne would keep asking who the guy from the beach two summers ago was, or which ice cream place it was that spilled the rainbow sprinkles down Dad's girlfriend's shirt one time, and Arizona would sigh and refuse to explain except in really short, irritated, fraught sentences.

I've never heard her speak that way to me.

The part of me that still thinks of Karissa as a friend has a strange instant of being happy for her, watching for her to come and for her face to light up. I can't stop hearing the words she said the other day, about deserving something good. I wonder if she'll be sad her mother's not here. I wonder if she'll wish she could call her sister.

I would want to call my sister.

I move to Arizona, to put my chin on her shoulder for a moment.

“Remember the girl with the bad breath?” I say. She's our favorite of Dad's girlfriends to make fun of. “I've decided I think it had something to do with Tabasco sauce and sex.”

“You're disgusting,” Arizona says. “And it was absolutely McDonald's french fries, poor flossing, and mouth breathing.”

“Mouth breathing,” I say, nodding my chin against her shoulder
blade before moving back next to Bernardo.

She's not gone entirely.

Dad's a few feet away, and he keeps rubbing his hands against the top of his thighs, like he's nervous. But it seems like he shouldn't be nervous. He's had practice.

We're all new versions of ourselves tonight.

I haven't even tried to scrub off the Sharpie, and neither has Bernardo.

“It's pretty out here,” Roxanne says, looking at thirty-five people with tea candles circled around the bench that was the site of Karissa's first date with my father. They are mostly doctor-friends and their wives because our limited extended family lives upstate and is uninterested in my father's engagements.

“I don't get when people want an audience for their freaking engagements,” Arizona says. “And by people, I mean Dad. Also, fire hazard. Seriously. I'm tempted to preemptively call an ambulance.”

“But
pretty
,” Roxanne says again. Since my father is not her father, she has the luxury of finding him romantic on occasion.

“Yep. Pretty,” I say. “Very hazardous. Extreme. Not his best, though. Maybe his second best. Definitely better than when he and Janie got engaged at Starbucks. And better than when he learned German to propose to Tess. Because that was truly awful.”

“What was the best?” Bernardo says.

I tell him my favorite was and will always be the time he proposed to Natasha on the intercom as we passed over the Atlantic Ocean on our flight to Paris. He said he knew Paris was the most romantic city
in the world, but he simply couldn't wait to get there.

It was bullshit, obviously. He'd planned the whole thing weeks ahead of time, but I liked the sentiment. And I don't know, sometimes even if something is bullshit it can still be beautiful. Like Natasha herself, for example, who was mostly plastic by the time they got divorced, but is still, aesthetically speaking, totally gorgeous.

Plus, I got to go to Paris and see Notre-Dame, which is so pretty when it's lit up at night that I dream of living next door to it. Preferably, at this point, with Bernardo. I told him my plans the other night when we were a little naked and a little out of breath and very twisted around each other. He said whenever I'm ready he'll take me there. He didn't seem to be joking.

Romance is weird. Things get said that seem too large. Even
I love you
feels oversize and ill-fitting. Like dress-up clothes.

He says it in my ear now, and I wish he knew it isn't what I need at this moment.

I do love him. And I don't want him floating in the things he said that went unreturned, so I say it back.

“Paris is all ham and cheese sandwiches,” Arizona says with a nose wrinkle and a mini-glare in my direction. Her real problem with Paris is that Natasha was the wife who was there with us. No one could hate a Parisian ham and cheese sandwich. Melty cheese. Salty ham. All from some cheap place where you order at the window with your best impression of a French accent on the word
fromage
.

In the distance, I see Karissa. I see her long-legged gait and her wavy-messy hair and the distinct, almost symmetrical but not quite,
unmistakable shape of her face. Her red linen sundress. Her knows-what's-coming smile.

I reach for Arizona instead of Bernardo. She reaches back.

“What is this?” Karissa says, her voice rising high above the crowd. It sounds a little like a song.

There's that wave of anger and nausea and compassion that I have for Karissa, and I wonder what exact combination of feelings is running through Arizona right now. Something very different, I'm sure. Another recipe. I settle into my own sick feeling. I can't breathe.

“I know you love the park,” my father says to Karissa. “And I know you love candles. And dusk. And I know I love you.” He gets down on one knee. It's always the right knee and it's always a blue box. And it's always a woman in a low-cut dress, and it's always his best suit and a warm night.

My father is a man who gets engaged in the summer to beautiful women who I feel bad for.

“Oh my God,” Karissa says. They always say
oh my God
. I catch Arizona's eye, and she is squinty and pissed. She has her cardigan pulled over her boobs.

That Karissa is falling into the stepmom script makes me even sicker. Like she's passed over to the other side, and she's a Mrs. Varren already. I wanted her to respond differently. I wanted her to do everything differently.

It's funny to be able to pinpoint the exact moment you start losing someone.

“I want to give you everything you love,” Dad says. “Your life
will be filled with candles and dusk and the walk from the Washington Square arch to our apartment and my devotion.” The light from the candle is hitting my face. It doesn't burn or anything, but there's a heat, a small, pointed intensity at my chin. “Will you share that life with me? Will you marry me, Karissa?”

Dude's romantic. Can't deny that.

I'm fighting the urge to scream. Violent feelings keep popping up, then simmering down. Little impulses that don't stick around but don't totally fade either. I wish I could be anywhere but here. I wish I could be at the top of the Eiffel Tower. At least up there nothing feels real or permanent. Down here, in my park, it's too real.

“Of course,” Karissa says. She pulls my dad to his feet and people clap and Dad and Karissa kiss and then do more than kiss. Make out. Pet. Rub against each other in a completely non-park-appropriate way.

Arizona looks like she's going to knock the candles out of everyone's hands and start a fire. She failed at something vital. We both did, I guess, but it was the first time she took an actual stand. I think she thought she could stop this from happening.

Turns out it's always been far, far out of our control.

Roxanne's candle flickers out with a few others as a light breeze hits it. I lean into Bernardo. He is practically holding me up.

“She looks . . .” Roxanne doesn't finish her sentence. She puts an arm around my waist, which is awkward with Bernardo holding me close to him. She pulls me tighter, squeezes my hip bone, and he pulls me in harder, too. I'm crashing against each of their bodies.

“Yeah,” I say. I blow out my candle. It was starting to hurt my hands, the wax bubbling a little.

“There's dinner at my place,” my dad says, breaking apart from their embrace. She doesn't stop kissing his neck, his ear. “A celebratory dinner with everyone we love.”

They're mostly colleagues, but a few of them helped when my mom first left, and I guess we love them, in a way.

I don't see anyone who looks like they belong to Karissa aside from the one friend who brought her here, and that girl's checking her phone and looking like she's going to make an exit. I don't see all her cool friends who we hung out with that day at her apartment, which was actually only a few weeks ago but might as well have happened in a different century to entirely different people.

Karissa hugs me before anyone else. She smells like raspberries still, at least. I have that flicker of happiness for her again, like my heart has a tiny space in it for truly selfless feelings. It's a very small space.

Her heart is beating so hard and loud in her chest that I get confused and think it's mine that I'm hearing and feeling.