Making Pretty (23 page)

It turns out my father keeps all the rings in his office, in one of his desk drawers, like they're business contracts, which I guess they sort of are. I almost don't go in, even though we've searched everywhere else. I don't want to be anywhere near that photo of me and Arizona ever again, but I can't stop myself from looking for it.

I look in the folder again and it's gone.

Arizona must have taken it and destroyed it. I have a surge of love for her, and sadness that what I'm about to do with Bernardo will take me further away from her still.

“A drawer of diamonds,” Bernardo says, all poetic in his disbelief.

“A drawer of empty promises,” I say. The wine says it, not me.

There are eight rings in the drawer, but only four ex-wives, so I have to assume he intended to propose to some of the girlfriends and never got around to it, or he's planning ahead for three more wives after Karissa. It's a small fortune sitting in my dad's office. I fantasize that he's saving them for my college education or something, but the
sad reality is that he probably got half of them back after the divorces and promptly forgot they existed.

I swear if I said the name Natasha to him, he wouldn't even know who I was talking about.

They are perfectly lined up in the drawer, a row of boxes where pencils and spare staples and unpaid bills should be. My stomach turns.

“Let's try this again,” Bernardo says. He holds one of the rings to his face, then another, and settles on a simple one I've never seen before. “He won't miss this for a few weeks until I can buy you one myself, right?” I laugh and kiss his shoulder, but he has a serious look on his face and he's lowering himself down to one knee and we are doing this in the real way now.

“I can't . . . we can't . . . those things are probably bad luck . . . and I hate diamonds . . . and there's no way you're actually . . .” I'm finding it impossible to finish a sentence. Bernardo is on the floor of my father's office, on one knee, holding a blue Tiffany's box up to me.

“Will you marry me?” he says.

I grin. It's hard to say yes in a normal way, because the moment is so ridiculous and the ring is so shiny and my body is still rocking back and forth a little from the wine. I cover my face and laugh into my hands.

“Let's not be like everyone else. Will you not be like everyone else with me?” I like this question better, and that Bernardo's shoulders stay squarely back and his knees aren't buckling or anything. The ring in the box in Bernardo's hands gives my heart this unexpected leap, a feeling I wasn't prepared for, and my knees are the ones that buckle.

I don't want to be like everyone else.

I don't want to be like my father or my sad mother or the creature that Karissa is becoming or any of the other women who used to be my family but are now scattered all over the city in new lives. I want to be like Karissa was in acting class, and like Natasha told me to be in my journals. I want to write this down tomorrow. I want to be grateful for a stolen diamond ring and an hour-long kissing session on the floor.

“Yes,” I say, and go for the kiss, which is long and overpowering and adult.

The ring goes on my finger. Only for the afternoon. “I'm not actually keeping this,” I say.

“But we're actually engaged? I can get you a ring of your own?”

“We're engaged,” I say. I can't stop laughing. Or kissing. Then we are tangled on the floor, the drawer of rings still open and the contents probably watching us.

We're naked and then we're more than naked. We're doing it, or trying to. It's quick and fun and the whole thing is not as big a deal as I thought it would be, but maybe nothing is too big anymore when you have a massive diamond on your ring finger.

“That's what engaged people do?” I say when we've held each other and made eye contact and done all the things it feels right to do afterward. I mean it as a sexy joke, but Bernardo stiffens at the implication.

“That's not why I proposed,” he says. It's not that I forget about his seriousness, but I sometimes think it's a transitory state, not an actual long-term condition. I assume if he loves me, he has to have a
deep laugh and a lighter spirit somewhere in there.

“Of course! Oh my God, of course. I'm kidding, babe,” I say.
Babe
, as a word, doesn't come naturally to me. But he likes it. It softens him.

“I'm so bad at your jokes,” he says. He plays with the ring on my finger, and I think he wants me to keep it on, wants me to show my family, wants to make this even more real somehow. But I like it as dress-up.

“You really are,” I say. I smile big so he knows it's teasing, but he's too busy kissing the very top of my forehead, along the hairline, to notice.

“Who are we telling first?” he says.

“Oh God, no one for a while,” I say. I start getting dressed. I'm still getting used to all the nakedness.

“What do you mean no one?” he says.

“Well, it's not like we're getting married tomorrow or anything, and we can wait until people don't think we're insane.” With my clothes on and my hair up and no longer sweaty on my back, I feel more in control.

“Since when is this about other people?” Bernardo says. He puts some clothes on too but doesn't look happy about it.

“Exactly,” I say.

It's quiet between us for a while.

“I want it to be real,” Bernardo says.

“I do too. It is real.”

His face is cracking open with a sort of sorrow, and I know that even if he's over Casey, the echoes of heartbreak are still there. Ready
to light up and take over at any moment. I've said something that reminds him of that hurt.

He doesn't have to tell me. It's an energy shift so distinct he might as well be changing colors, like a mood ring.

Bernardo is a person who is scared he's not real enough.

Bernardo is a person who wants me to help make him real.

“I want to tell my family. And your family. We don't hold back. That's not us,” he says. It's strange, that there's such a strong sense of
us
already. But there is. And we do things big and strange and together. We don't hold back. We don't try to fit someone else's idea of what's right.

And I love that about us.

Muscles I didn't know I had are aching a little. A beautiful kind of soreness in mysterious parts of my body. It's possible I like after-sex even more than actual sex.

“I don't want to be engaged the way my dad is engaged. I don't want it to remind me of that.” I think Bernardo understands me the same way I do him. The sensitive bits, the little zones that grip up with feeling, are different but equally strong.

He nods.

“I forget sometimes,” he says. “I don't know anyone else who's been married more than once. I've never even been to a wedding.”

“I was so little at Janie's wedding. She was so . . . into it. I was a flower girl. She was a princess. Her little boys had seersucker suits. They did this whole ritual. With sand. And, like, pouring sand into a bowl together? I thought that meant it would work.”

I spin the ring around a few more times. I can't keep it on. But I do like how it looks on me. That we can both look at it as a symbol of Something Big.

“I don't know whose ring this was,” I whisper.

“Maybe it's one of the spares?”

I take it off and hand it over. I can't go downstairs with that thing on.

“It's cool,” Bernardo says. “We can do unexpected, big things.” He's flushed and dimpled and his glasses are hooked around one ear still, but not the other.

I'm sure I look the same: disheveled and happy and off-kilter. I think of when Dad proposed to Tess in broken German in our flower-filled living room. Tess had on a navy suit and had gotten a blow-out earlier that day, and her makeup was understated and pretty.

She'd kept touching her new nose.

That's how I know this is good and real. We are the opposite of put-together and perfect and planned. We are spontaneous and romantic and falling apart at the seams. I'm certain that's how it should be.

I take the ring off and look for clues of who it might have belonged to.

And there, on the inside, engraved and a little rubbed off:
My Always Janie
.

“I figured out where to get you a ring,” Bernardo says a few days later. We're at Reggio, which I've taught him to love so that I can come here with him when everyone else in my family isn't talking. I need to teach him everything Arizona and my dad do, so that as it keeps falling apart, I'll still have the best parts.

“I found Janie,” I say to Bernardo while I'm shaking way too much sugar into my latte. “I want to see her. I know it went badly with Tess. I need to do it anyway.” I put her ring back in the drawer as soon as I saw it was hers. It made my finger numb. It was a little too small. And a little too beautiful. And a little too reminiscent of the things I used to think I'd have.

She now works at a rooftop restaurant in Williamsburg.

Finding people is so easy it's a little scary. They're close, even though I haven't seen them in years.

“Perfect,” Bernardo says. “Williamsburg works for the ring too.”

“Janie first,” I say. I need to get her out of my system before
anything else. My very first stepmom, whose changes were the most extreme. Her mother visited us once, a little over a year into their marriage, and she didn't recognize her own daughter waiting for her at Penn Station.

It was awful. Janie waving maniacally while her mother looked everywhere for her skinny, big-nosed, brunette daughter. A pretty mole near her right eye was gone. Her squinting, happy eyes were opened wide and intense. She looked like an alien.

It's been years since I've seen her, so I'm half expecting her to be entirely plastic now. More mannequin than person.

“I think I need to do it alone,” I say. I lost sleep practicing that sentence last night. It's hard to tell Bernardo I need something other than the thing he wants to give.

“I messed up last time,” he says.

“No, no. You were great. I needed you. And I need your support with this too. But I want Janie to see me. Only me. I want it to be about her and me and things we were and who we are now and . . . I don't know. Maybe there's something about the first woman you see in a wedding gown. Maybe it's that simple.”

“I want to see you in a wedding gown,” Bernardo says, which means it's okay and I can stop apologizing.

We go to Brooklyn together, and Bernardo finds a bookstore to wander around in while I see Janie. He heads right for the mysteries section, and I think there are so many things I don't know about him at all. As I'm leaving, he sings along with the Beatles playing over the loudspeaker. He doesn't hum. It is not quiet.

I add it to the List of Things to Be Grateful For.

I ask the hostess to seat me in Janie's section.

The menus are huge, and I could still choose to hide behind mine and never actually talk to her.

I decide on a lobster roll with bacon on it, because it's impossible to think of any greater combination. And for the most difficult moments, it's always a good idea to have bacon.

Arizona would agree. And I know—with as much certainty as I know that lobster and bacon is a perfect combination—that I should have told Arizona to come with me.

I recognize Janie when she comes over, but only barely. Everything about her is bigger except for her nose and her waist, which are both terrifyingly smaller. Her forehead is a flat, motionless desert. Her hair has grown to three times its size. Her nose looks strange and smushed. Her lips are rosebud red and so inflated I'm sure they could be popped with a needle, like balloons.

She doesn't recognize me. I order the lobster roll and watch the expression on her face, which doesn't change except for the light in her eyes, which goes dimmer and dimmer with every passing moment.

“Janie,” I say, when she's turning away to put my order in.

“Uh-huh.”

“I'm Montana,” I say.

“I'm Janie,” she says. But before she's even done saying her name, she startles herself into remembering who I am. “Montana! Montana? Like, little Montana?”

“Stepdaughter Montana,” I say, like giving myself that title will
somehow make her be something special to me. I'm increasingly ashamed by myself and how pathetic I'm turning out to be.

“Are you here on purpose?” Janie says. She looks around like maybe my father is here or maybe a hidden camera is trained on her surprised expression.

“I should totally not be here, right?” I have some kind of PTSD from what happened with Tess. I'm filled with the most humiliating type of regret, and I'm getting out of my seat.

“What do you want?” Janie says. “Did your dad send you? Are you in AA or something? Are you, like, getting closure?” She's deeply nervous, but not pissed like Tess was. I am trying to remember everything about her and her kids. Little boys, Frank and Andy. They fought over toy trucks and grew from little to not-so-little in the time our parents were married. I feel a deep need to know how they ended up.

“How's Frank?” I ask. I'm gripping the bottom of my chair and trying to calculate how old he'd be now. Two years younger than me, I guess, so fifteen. He's a teenager.

“You came to catch up?” Janie says. She looks confused, but still not mean, so I soldier on.

“And Andy? Is Andy okay?” Andy would be thirteen or fourteen now. Maybe his voice is changing. Maybe he's smoked a cigarette. Maybe he's kissed a girl. My heart is fluttering, not pounding, a sweeter kind of excitement.

“They're both . . . good. Andy is at boarding school in New Hampshire. Frank plays baseball.” She clears her throat, and I guess
that's all I'm going to get about the boys who used to be my brothers. I almost never think about them, but even these two tiny details give me a rush of feeling for them. An ache. Maybe I'll go to New Hampshire or start attending middle school baseball games.

“I miss them,” I say, a thing that isn't really true until I say it, and then it makes me weepy.

“I wonder if they remember you,” Janie says. It's mean and I don't know if it's on purpose. “So how can I help you? I'm not giving you their emails or anything. I'm not comfortable—”

“I wanted to say hi?” I say. Arizona would have had something better to say. She'd smooth over the situation and make it something good, worthwhile. I can't imagine what I was thinking, doing this again. Janie's in the middle of a busy lunch shift. Hipsters in plaid shirts and bushy beards are signaling at her to get them more beer, and she smells like seafood and garlic. There are out-of-season Christmas lights all over the place, not only the white kind, but colored bulbs and reindeer heads. It is not a place for a serious conversation.

Janie blinks. It looks painful, the movement of her perfectly smooth eyelids and the unwrinkled corners of her eyes. She's had so much work done on her face it doesn't even look like a face anymore.

“I got engaged. I'm engaged. It made me think of you. That was the best wedding. Everyone was so happy.”

Janie does math on her fingers. She shakes her head like it can't be right.

“So you're, like, twentysomething now? How old were you when we broke up? I'm all off. Jesus. I haven't thought about you in years. Like, literally. Years and years.”

“Oh,” I say. I need that lobster and bacon situation immediately. I need something else to swallow down with the humiliating starkness of that particular reality. I'd rather be shoved around by Tess at this point than reminded by Janie in a dozen little ways that I meant nothing to her or to her boys.

Maybe the saddest feeling ever comes with the knowledge that you think about someone every day who never thinks of you. It's a type of loneliness. All the time it's been me and my memories and nothing else, even though I assumed there was an equal and opposite force coming at me from the stepmoms.

“I mean, no offense,” Janie says, seeing something in my face, surely, that turns her momentarily kind.

“I'm seventeen,” I say. “You left when I was eight.”

She laughs.

She may not remember me, but I remember so many little things about her, like her breathy laugh. I wonder if Frank and Andy blush like that, laugh like that. They can't possibly look like her, because she doesn't look like her. But maybe there are other things they've gotten from her. Maybe they even got something from me. I wonder if they still speak the pig Latin we taught them or if they've ever retold the scary stories we shared late at night.

“Oh, Montana. Wow. Wow. Your family, huh? A mini Sean right here.” Janie fluffs her hair. Her whole demeanor shifts from confused
to cocky, like she's been proven right about something very important and scientific. “Your family really falls in love fast and loves getting married, huh?”

“This is totally different,” I say, which is what people say when it's not so different at all. “I'm not my dad. I'm his exact opposite.”

“Honey,” Janie says. I try to remember if it's something she called Arizona and me when we were little. I think she's going to say more—give me advice or a warning or a punishment or a congratulations, but she doesn't have any of that for me, I guess. I wonder what she'd tell Andy or Frank if they came to her, wanting to get married so young. I imagine myself as a real child of hers, but I don't know what that looks like either.

I'm lonelier than I've ever, ever been.

“What do you mean you haven't thought of me in years?” I say. Something that hurts this much needs to be worth it, so I'm not leaving without lobster and bacon and answers. “We were family.”

“No, honey,” Janie says. “That's not family. We didn't even know each other.”

Déjà vu is supposed to be something kind of mysterious, but this is a pretty literal mirror of the last conversation I had with Tess. More like one of those paintings. The infinite ones—a painting of a person holding a painting of a person holding a painting, and on and on forever. Inescapable and repetitive and strange.

“I know a ton about you,” I say, and I believe it too. “I know how long it takes for you to do your hair and what you sound like when you're yelling at your kids and what you like for breakfast and what
time you go to bed, and I've seen you cry. If you see someone cry, you know them.”

“That's not knowing someone,” Janie says. “You have no idea what you're doing. And it's not your fault. But if you think those things matter, if you think anything you know about me makes me family to you, you are deeply confused. And you're seventeen. And your father is a weenie who won't stand up to anyone aside from some huffing and puffing. So he'll probably tell you this is fine, that you're getting engaged or whatever, or he'll give you the silent treatment or some other terrible parenting decision. But he won't tell you what you really need to hear. So I'm going to say it. You cannot be engaged. You cannot get married. And that? Me saying that? That's family. That's what that looks like.” She waits, like maybe I'll have a response to that, but I can't even get in a full breath.

I look for the Janie I used to feel I knew under all the plastic surgery she's gotten. Her eyebrows hike up to her hairline. I can't read what emotion she's feeling—they're all convoluted and wrong on the tight expanse of her skin.

“Maybe you shouldn't be telling me all this, honey,” Janie says. “Maybe you should be telling your mom. But if I'm the best you've got right now, that's the biggest favor I can do you.”

“I'd like that lobster bacon roll,” I say at last, since she's waiting for me to respond and I don't know anything except that that will be delicious.

Everything else is too complicated to tackle.

Janie brings the lobster roll with bacon piled on high and says it's on the house.

“You should tell your real family,” she says before leaving me with the food perfection.

“I have no idea who that is,” I say.

The lobster roll with bacon is fucking delicious. It's the best thing I've ever eaten. Dripping with mayonnaise and loaded with fresh lobster.