Dad had been talking about me growing into my nose for years. It had never seemed that big to me.
I thought of the random doodles he drew on magazine covers and spare slips of paper. Fixes he could make to the models’ faces, arms, thighs, boobs. Idle illustrations of perfect and imperfect bodies and noses and chins. There was a magazine on the coffee table with Gwyneth Paltrow in a bikini on the cover. He’d drawn dotted lines around her eyes and near her hips. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that he assumed I’d be imperfect too.
“Your ears are pretty close to your head, so pinning them back won’t be necessary,” he went on. I was tearing up. But if he saw the tears, he’d be insulted. He liked to deal with facts, and the facts, the literal facts of numbers and symmetry and measurement, said that my nose was too big and my chin a little too small. It wasn’t something to be sad about. Especially when he was promising to fix it. “But your chin we could add a little something to. When you’re eighteen, of course. I would never do any of this on someone your age. But to know it’s there, like a safety net, Natasha and I thought it might help. With adolescence. With confidence. I want you to know we get how hard it is to be your age and that we’re here for you and you’ll get through it.” Dad smiled. “We’re so lucky to have Natasha around to help me understand you girls.” He put his arm around her and beamed like a victor of some contest for Dad of the Year.
I wondered if maybe it was me. If I was the weird one who didn’t like the gift. He and Natasha seemed so sure that it was a full-on winner, I assumed I must be somehow off. I knew I was supposed to reflect back Dad’s happiness, but I felt the panicked sadness of waking up from a too-close-to-reality nightmare.
“I got you a pet chameleon!” Arizona exclaimed, right at the moment I thought all my insides were going to start pouring out of my eyes and nose. I thought I could maybe cry so hard and so long that I’d turn hollow, eventually.
“You—you did?” I said. Arizona was giving me our patented don’t cry look, which we had perfected long, long ago when I was five and she was seven and Mom left.
“I did,” she said. “That’s what you wanted, right?” She ran to her bedroom, where I guess she’d been storing the little guy, and brought him down in a glass cage with a book of instructions for feeding and cleaning and general chameleon care.
“Yes,” I said, staring at his scaly face, “this is what I wanted.” If Mom had been around, maybe she would have remembered the chameleon too, but it didn’t matter. I had Arizona for that. Dad was good at being around and not leaving and finding random women to live with us, and asking us one million times a month if we were happy, even if he never explained quite what that meant. Arizona was good at filling in all the gaps that were left. And Mom was good at birthday cards and not much else.
I loved that chameleon hard and named him Lester. I stopped wanting anything that glinted in the sun or was meant to make me prettier. I stopped wanting Natasha around. Until after she and my dad broke up a couple of years later.
I keep my plastic surgery gift certificate in my desk drawer. I am positive I’ll never use it, but I keep it as a reminder of something. I’m not sure what.
I thought Arizona was doing the same thing. It’s uneasy, to be suddenly different from the person you thought you were exactly like.
Dad’s never mentioned it again, but I’m sure he’s wondering how I’m going to use it, checking my face to catalog the ugliest parts and make suggestions.
Meanwhile, my chameleon Lester died two years ago. They don’t have very long life spans, as it turns out. Changing themselves that often, to fit every possible circumstance perfectly, exhausts them, I guess.
thirteen
These days Natasha lives in a big apartment on the Upper East Side with some burly lawyer guy and twin daughters, Victoria and Veronica.
And sometimes me.
Once every few weeks, I manage to convince my father I’m with some friends from school who don’t exist and convince Arizona I’m on some adventure and convince Roxanne I’m in for the night, and I stay at Natasha’s. Like it’s my home. It’s been easier this year, of course, without Roxanne and Arizona watching and caring.
I’d tell Roxanne, but I know she’d tell Arizona. In the hierarchy of friendships that everyone pretends doesn’t exist but everyone also knows does exist, Arizona loves me most and I love Arizona most but Roxanne loves Arizona most. It’s a thing I always suspected but am now sure about.
Sometimes I think Arizona loves me most but likes Roxanne better. That stings too. To be unchosen. To not be anyone’s favorite person.
So I stay sometimes on Natasha’s white leather couch under Victoria’s gray cashmere blanket. Natasha has a tiny white dog named Oscar and more shoes than any of the other wives, and as soon as she and my dad were over, she got nice.
We started with coffee.
I went to her wedding.