Making Pretty Read online

  “Oh my God, Karissa, I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” I say. I’ve never before been this sad about someone else’s life.

  “We so get each other,” she says, her voice all thick and slurry too. “You and me against everything that has sucked in our lives. Two sad girls together. Can we toast to two sad girls?”

  I grin. I feel as light and bubbly as the champagne, next to Karissa.

  two

  I get home all buzzed and beautiful.

  Arizona is waiting for me with a finger on her lips.

  “Dad just went to bed. You do not want him to see you like this, trust me.” She wipes something off my cheek—maybe rogue mascara or sweat or Karissa’s peachy lipstick.

  “You’re here!” I say, and throw myself at her.

  “I told you I was coming in tonight.” She hugs back lamely. “What the fuck? Who were you even out with? I called Roxanne. She hadn’t seen you.” I hate the implication that she knows the exact size and shape of my life. That the world paused while she and Roxanne invented new lives in woody college towns.

  I hug her again anyway.

  Something is different. Everything is different.

  I squint at my sister’s body. Maybe I’m wasted, but it looks wrong. College has done something to her, even since I last saw her, over spring break. She’s fuller on top. More like a Mrs. Varren. Alien, compared to our formerly matching shapes. We have always had matching gaits and proportions—straight and narrow on top, wide on the bottom. We have had matching indignations and resentments, too. Matching long toes and back moles. Matching dirty mouths and a shared best friend.

  “You’re all wrong” is all I can say, but it’s not what I mean. I think I like being this drunk except for the inability to say what I mean. “You feel wrong,” I try again.

  “I wanted a whole night together,” Arizona says. “You and me and catching up and starting the summer together.”

  “You already started the summer without me,” I say, thinking of the one single Eiffel Tower postcard she sent me from her trip. She knows I prefer Notre-Dame and that the Eiffel Tower is what you send to your little cousin or the teacher you’re kissing up to or family you used to babysit for. Not your sister. Not your best friend.

  I wobble backward when she lets go of me. Our West Village brownstone has always had sloping floors and an almost-obvious crookedness, and it’s all bigger and wonkier after all that wine.

  “I don’t like the way you feel,” I say, the effort of words so exhausting I have to find my way to the couch. It’s something Janie bought years ago, which means it’s stiff and silky and ivory colored. “Fucking Janie,” I say, which I always say when I sit on things that Janie decorated our apartment with. The things Tess bought are comfier. The things Natasha bought are flashier. The things Mom bought look like home. Like an idea of home that I have in my head but doesn’t exist in real life. “Seriously, what happened to you? What’d they do to you up there?” She’s wearing khaki capris, which is lame, but something more substantial has changed. Something bigger than her clothing choices.

  She smells a little like the plane, like those ham and cheese sandwiches that they serve in the middle of long flights. Her suitcase is by the front door, a reminder that she’s not actually living here this summer.

  “Don’t freak out,” Arizona says. I squint harder at her. Shake my head to make things come into focus. Maybe I can shake off the drunkenness. Unblur the world.

  It’s her boobs.

  I realize it a single moment before she says it.

  “I got my boobs done in April. I didn’t want to tell you over the phone because I thought it would sound like I got porn-star boobs or something, but I wanted you to see it’s like a teeny-tiny upgrade. I’m still smaller than, like, everyone else. I mean, aside from you. So it’s not a big deal. Don’t be a psycho about it.” She’s in too many layers for June in New York. A long tee hangs out of her oversize Colby sweatshirt. She wants me to know, but doesn’t want me to see them.

  “I don’t understand,” I say. I grab my stomach, since all my feelings about it rush there, and I wish I were either more drunk or more sober. I am in the exact wrong state of mind to be hearing and seeing this.

  “I feel more like me now,” Arizona says. “Like this is how I’m supposed to look. I never fit in my body.”

  She’s right, her new boobs aren’t stripper big or anything, but they fill out the sweatshirt so that the letters of her college rise and fall in a new way. I hate that T-shirts and sundresses and fleece jackets will look different on us now. I won’t be able to look at her and see me.

  “We don’t like boob jobs,” I say. My voice breaks; the pressure of a year of hearing about her new Montana-less life, a year of living alone with Dad and Tess and now Dad and his dreamy dating-someone-new look, is too much, and I need her to agree with me.

  “I sort of like mine,” Arizona says. “But it doesn’t have some big, deep meaning, okay? And you look excellent the way you are. Okay?”

  “Stop asking me if it’s okay,” I say. Late-night TV is droning in the background, and I wonder how this conversation would have gone if I hadn’t been out with Karissa all night. I wonder if we would have ended up eating prosciutto pizzas and looking at pictures of Europe and rating the Continent’s best kissers according to her very scientific data.

  I wonder if I have missed something vital, a moment between us I’ll never get back.

  I’m almost sad, but she turns slightly, enough so that I can see her in profile, and her new silhouette is all wrong and I’m filled with boozy rage again.

  “We promised we wouldn’t do it,” I say. “We promised Mom we wouldn’t do it.” I hold on to her elbow like that will help steady us both, bring us back to shore together.

  She looks like one of them. Like one of the stepmoms. Her clothes are airplane-messy, but her hair is smooth and blonder than I remember, and she has a headband with tiny pink rhinestones.

  They glint.

  “I don’t feel like we owe Mom anything. I’m not sure Mom is the role model of the year,” Arizona says.

  “You promised me, too. That we wouldn’t get any kind of plastic surgery, no matter what Dad said. You don’t owe me anything either?”

  She hugs me again and I hate it again. We’ve made a lot of promises over the years about staying away from the stepmoms and never forgiving Natasha and never getting plastic surgery and always being there for each other. These promises are the things that make us work—the levers and gears and mechanics that keep us ticking in sync with each other. They’re the things that make us sisters.

  It turns out we aren’t good at keeping promises or maybe even at being sisters.

  “We are going to have an awesome summer together,” Arizona says. She feels bad for me. She gets me water and rubs my back and I am a person to be pitied and cared for, but I’m not her best friend anymore. We aren’t going to explore Prague and Vienna and Croatia together, because she’s already done that with someone else.

  “We’re not going to be together,” I say.

  “I’m staying, like, two blocks away. I didn’t know Tess would be gone already. You know it has nothing to do with you. It’s you and me and Roxanne all summer, okay?”

  She’s asking me if it’s okay again, and I’m too hazy and sleepy to do anything but nod. I pull my feet onto the couch, which is mostly wood and silk, and I rest my forehead on my knees. I think it’s going to make the room spin less, but it makes the room spin more and I know so, so little about being messed up. I think I need pizza, but that could be wrong too. Maybe I need more water. Or Advil. Or sleep. Or a new sister.

  Arizona crosses her arms over her new chest.

  “Dad and I had a really good time tonight,” she says. “He’s been really supportive of everything.”

  Everything means the surgery, and that means he knew about it even though I didn’t. It makes sense, of course; she would have used the money he offered all those years a
go to do it. But it hurts on impact. And the hurt sticks.

  I want to tell Karissa. If Arizona has a million people she goes to before me now, I want to have Karissa be my best friend, my sister, my person. I am certain Karissa will agree with how ugly and wrong this all is. I’m sure Karissa will pour us wine and we will toast to never changing and keeping promises and telling each other everything.

  “Of course Dad’s been supportive,” I say. “You’re becoming exactly what he wants you to become.”

  Arizona pretends not to have heard me. She presses on.

  “He ate the pizza with me. We watched a movie. He told me he misses me. He said he’s proud of how well you’re dealing with Tess moving out.”

  “He actually said Tess’s name?” I say. It’s not the point, but he never says the wives’ names after they’re gone. Like if we don’t speak of them, they never existed. It means most of my life is erased, whole swaths of time, zillions of tiny and enormous memories deemed unmentionable. Arizona’s telling me about her night with Dad to make me feel good, but I’m pissed instead. She missed what happened with Tess, she left me to deal with it, she didn’t come home to help deal with the aftermath, she should join Dad in pretending it never happened.

  “Yep. No more stepmoms, I think,” Arizona says. She finally uncrosses her arms and puts her shoulders back.

  Looking at her will never not hurt. That’s how I’ll open, when I tell Karissa the story of tonight.

  Arizona hates the stepmoms. She’d set the apartment on fire to keep them away. And now she’s trying to become one. It sounds almost like she thinks her looking like one of them will keep the women away. I want to ask if this is the grand plan, but the crying starts without warning, and I don’t get a chance to wonder and hypothesize and calculate.

  Apparently, I do a lot of crying when I’m drunk. My eyes hurt from it all.

  “We used to be the same,” I say in a voice from the part of me that only Arizona knows. It’s the sudden, violent kind of teariness, and I grip the edges of the not-sofa and work to keep it in.

  I wonder if Karissa will ever see me like this. If Arizona can move on from the world we created together and the secrets we kept, so could I. I don’t want her to be the only person who’s seen me cry like this. I don’t want her to have that part of me.

  But it feels good to have her hand around my shoulder and her head close to mine.

  “This is a good thing,” Arizona says. “And it didn’t even really hurt.”

  But it does hurt, I think. It does.

  three

  Dad isn’t asleep, it turns out.

  “Girls?” he says. “Are both my girls here at last?”

  I can’t help it. I love when he calls us his girls.

  He offers to make us popcorn, so I try to stand up straight in the kitchen and talk about going on a nice walk and eating some nice gelato, which is my excuse for where I’ve been all night, but all I really want to do is eat a whole bunch of Goldfish and un-dizzy myself before bed.

  “You were supposed to be here for movie night,” Dad says. “I wanted the whole family together.”

  There it is again, another phrase that zings me, heart-adjacent. The Whole Family. Like we could be all he needs, like the three of us aren’t waiting around for that perfect person to fit into the Dad’s Wife role. The Whole Family sounds complete. Finished.

  “We haven’t done that since Tess left,” I say. “Family Night was a Tess thing, not an Us thing.” Tess instituted monthly movie nights when she and Dad got married. It wasn’t the worst. We made it through all of James Bond and about a dozen Jack Nicholson movies and any Pixar movie that came out over the last few years. We ate guac and a lot of cheese, and even after Arizona left for college it was still sort of nice, wrapping ourselves in blankets and turning up the volume whenever sirens screeched or cabs blasted their horns. Tess getting a little tipsy. Dad falling asleep before the best part.

  “We still have traditions. Tess wasn’t the head of this family. We were here before her and we’ll be here after.” He looks put together even in pajamas. They’re the matching, stripey kind that people in the movies wear, which is fitting because Dad looks like he’s from a movie. He touches his perfect head of hair. He used to be balding, but he’s not anymore. He used to be graying, but he’s not anymore.

  I want what he’s saying to be true so badly it nearly sobers me up.

  Then I catch sight of the ceiling fan and I’m drunk again.

  Being drunk is a little like running a race against your last drink, and mine has officially caught up with me. I was pretty gone before, and now I am officially trashed. Nothing feels particularly real, and that makes me sputter-laugh.

  It is not subtle.

  “You’re drunk,” Dad says.

  “Well, that didn’t take any see-rus, see-yus, serious detectiving work,” I say, struggling to get my mouth around the words.

  “You’re acting out because I’ve made mistakes,” Dad says. Arizona grins like she’s proving a point, and I dig into the popcorn. It’s hot and on the cusp of being burned. I try not to care and just crunch. “I understand that and I’m ready to earn back your trust.”

  Arizona mouths I told you and tucks her hair behind her ears and juts out a hip.

  “Dad feels bad about how hard this year was for you,” she says. “So do I.” They share a look, and I know I missed some kind of bonding situation, but I’m pretty sure half my buzz is from simply being around Karissa, so I don’t care the way I should.

  “You need water, Montana. And to never do this again, okay? Or to make sure you have adult supervision if you do.” He nods, agreeing with himself. It’s something he does.

  “I had adult supervision,” I say.

  It must come out like mush, because neither Dad nor Arizona replies, and there’s no look of wonder or confusion on their faces. I’m not sure who they think I was with—maybe the mysterious friends I pretend to have so that I can stay at Natasha’s apartment from time to time.

  My dad would hate me being there, but Arizona would hate it even more. We are supposed to have a united front on all stepmoms and girlfriends. We are supposed to forget all about them once they’ve moved out and moved on.

  It’s not as easy as they make it look. I tend to hang on. And with Natasha I’ve hung on for a long, long time.

  “I want you to know things are different,” Dad says. He seems relaxed, and he pulls a slab of cheddar out of the fridge and starts grating it over the popcorn. “Trust me, this is excellent,” he says. I believe him. Cheddar is the key to happiness. “A friend taught me to do this.”

  A friend always means a girlfriend.

  “I don’t want to have a whole big talk right now,” I say. “Are those new slippers?”

  He has zebra-striped slippers on. They look ridiculous and comfortable. Those are two things my father is not.

  “Your old man can still surprise you sometimes,” he says with a laugh. He kicks one off his foot, like a Rockette with a joint problem, and I try to imitate the movement, but slip and bump into the counter.

  “I’ll put her to bed,” Arizona says. She’s so sober it hurts.

  “I don’t need bed! I’m rocking out! I’m a whole new girl too! Wait until you see all the things I’m gonna be and do!” I stand up on one of the kitchen chairs. It seems like one of the greatest ideas I’ve ever had. “I’m gonna dance it out. I’m not gonna be one of you.” I point at Dad and then Arizona’s chest. I am on a freaking roll. “I’m not gonna be who you want me to be!” I sing to the tune of nothing.

  “You know I want you to be you and only you,” Dad says, even though we have cold, hard evidence that that isn’t true.

  “You and only you,” I sing to the tune of a Frank Sinatra song that may or may not actually exist.

  I don’t fall off the chair, exactly, but I slip and end up on my butt, hysterical on the ground. It feels so good to laugh this hard and be this wasted.

  “Montana
. You’re going to hate yourself in about six hours,” Arizona says. Dad nods.

  “Look. What I wanted to tell both my girls is that things are going to change around here. I know me and Tess splitting up was hard on everyone, and I’m finally ready to settle down and make a stable environment for all of us.”

  He looks very proud of himself. He has said this exact sentence so many times I hear it in my dreams. The optimistic part of my father forgets the past so easily, so fully, that we have entirely different experiences of our lives together.

  “I’ve met someone special,” he says. And I know that at least at this moment, Arizona and I have hearts and bodies and breath working in sync. Hearts drop. Bodies tense up. Breath stops. “I wanted to let you girls into this journey so we can go through it together and emerge together.” I think he memorized that last part when he was at his support group. He says it too fast and too proud.

  Dad started going to support groups after Mom left. Divorced men in random churches all over the city sipping coffee and handing one another tissues with as much masculinity as they can muster for that particular gesture. That’s what I imagine, at least. They tell themselves they are making the right decisions. They use words like journey and codependency and positive energy and staying in the present.

  I sort of hate these guys, who are on their first divorces, not their fourth, like my father. They don’t know us, and whenever he’s spending a lot of time in the group sessions, he makes grand pronouncements like this and feels very good about himself.

  I’d have to hate any group of people who make my dad feel that happily announcing another girlfriend at this point is a good idea or some “change.”

  “I’m sorry?” Arizona says. Arizona is polite until she isn’t. She has excellent manners, but pushed too far she’ll eventually explode. She’s broken more than one cell phone from throwing it on the ground.

  “All I want is for you girls to have what I had growing up,” he says. “That’s what I’ve finally realized.” His parents live on a farm in Vermont. We are never going to have that. On cue, an ambulance rushes by outside, the whining sirens growing and shrinking in volume.