When I first met Karissa, she had on a pink camisole, a brown leather vest, and no bra. She did a monologue from the play No Exit, and everyone in class watched her with the jaw-open, wet-eyed look of people realizing they aren’t good enough.
“Amazing job,” our teacher said. “Now do it again, but remember that your whole life all anyone’s wanted from you is sex. And you love it, but you’re tired of it too. Right? Don’t apologize halfway through. It’s not okay, what they’ve done to you. How they’ve treated you. And you know that, but you also know it’s your only power. You understand what I’m saying, Karissa?”
Karissa teared up. She scratched her thighs with her silver fingernails and looked at the ceiling for too long a moment. Donna didn’t like when we tried to escape a difficult part of a scene by sighing or looking away or diffusing it in any way.
“No, no, leap right in! Get in there!” the teacher said.
This time, Karissa got choked up halfway through the monologue. The class nodded in unison at the perfection. When she got to the last line, she was on her knees. She was crying, but not wiping away the tears. Not choking them back.
No one from the outside was supposed to watch class. It was supposed to be a safe, private space. And I guess it mostly was, but the day that Karissa nailed her monologue, my father was at the door, peering in through the tiny window, watching the way her mascara tears made a spiderweb over her face. On someone else it might have looked messy and ugly, but on Karissa, with her brunette waves and unlined, practically translucent face, it was romantic. The mascara made a paisley pattern, black on white, and she looked masked rather than destroyed.
“Who was that?” Dad said after we walked in silence through Washington Square Park to our favorite place in the village, Caffe Reggio.
“Who?” I said.
“The beautiful one. Without the bra,” Dad said.
Karissa is not the kind of woman my dad usually calls beautiful.
The wife he was just about to divorce, Tess, has D cups and platinum hair and an impossibly flat stomach. My father likes impossibly perfect women. He likes them because he makes them possible.
That’s why when he tells me I’m beautiful, it reeks of lies. I know better. I know what he really sees when he looks at me.
“Please do not talk about my classmates’ bras,” I said. “Or better yet, please do not say ‘bra’ to me. Ever. Please extract the word from your vocabulary.” I dropped my voice on the word bra because the café was cramped and the table of seventy-year-old men playing cards over by the window were all wearing hearing aids, so I was pretty sure they were listening in.
“Well, don’t call her your classmate, then,” Dad said. “That makes her sound like a teenager. And that girl is not a teenager.”
“She’s, like, a few years older than Arizona.”
“She’s hot.”
I sighed, because hot should be banned the way the word bra is banned, but my dad cannot be stopped, especially when he’s all hopped up on a soup-bowl-size cup of cappuccino.
With his third wife, Natasha, he always used to say, “Now that’s an ass!” whenever she walked away from him in her tight black jeans. When he was with his second wife, Janie, I would catch them making out, his hand either up her shirt or down her pants. I was, like, eight. I don’t remember much about him being with my mother. I was only five when she left us for the West Coast and then India and communism or Buddhism or one of those, but I’m sure he didn’t hold back with her either. He gave her liposuction and a new nose, but, as she tells me once a year on my birthday, she regrets both of them and hopes I don’t take that route.
The point being, my dad can be exceedingly gross about women.
Even then, at Reggio, he was doodling on one of the postcards on the table. It was a Renoir, I think. A painting I’d seen a million times of a woman in a red hat with a little girl. My father drew lines on the woman’s face, places he could fix, if she were his client. He did it absently, not knowing it was happening. The doodles are all over the house, too—on magazine covers and friends’ Christmas cards. He can’t leave work, not ever. His mind looks for flaws to fix, always.