I think for the thousandth time over the last three years that I should tell Arizona that I still see Natasha. That she is real, as far as I’m concerned. That she’s my family too, and that Victoria and Veronica exist and are little mini-sisters and that things could have been different, that there was space for a different outcome there too.
Instead I shrug and watch her open up my father’s desk drawers. She brings out a few folders. They are filled with pictures of women. Not the dirty kind, although some of them are naked-ish. They are women he is performing surgery on or women his partner wants advice on. The bodies and faces are covered in lines and marks and notes. Dashes under their eyes. Red marks drawn in under their breasts. Circles around their flaws.
I hate how their flaws are annotated. How he sees them as beings to be made better, instead of seeing them as they are. I hate the Post-it notes with surgical drawings that are really actually drawings of better versions of normal women. I hate the magazine covers and the Renoir painting with his dotted lines. But I hate his desk drawers filled with these poor makeup-less women most of all. They’re too vulnerable.
“I mean, we’ve seen this before,” I say. “This is his job. He does it at the counter.”
It’s shocking to see them all at once, bundles of women and his ideas about how they could be better. But this isn’t a new thing.
Arizona scrounges around some more, opening and closing folders, flipping through photographs. “I found something else,” she says. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but you’re being all crazy and reckless and fucking naive, and I guess the only way to stop that is to show you what’s actually going on here.”
Her voice is too loud for the small room and the headachy morning. She’s edgy and off. She’s breaking.
She pushes aside a brochure from a Pilates studio. Tess’s Pilates studio, where she’s started teaching. Her face is on the front with a few other pretty, skinny, rosy-cheeked instructors.
Dad has drawn on all of their faces too.
He’s already done a lot to Tess’s face and body in real life, but in picture form he still draws lines under her eyes and at her neck. Improving on his own work. His dissatisfaction so large and powerful I swear it’s in the room with us.
I pocket the brochure. As evidence of how impossible it will be to ever be good enough for him. Maybe to show Karissa.
Maybe because I want to know where Tess is.
Finally Arizona finds what she’s looking for. It’s a photograph of the two of us.
We’re in bikinis. We’re fifteen and seventeen. We’re squinting from smiling so hard. There are palm trees in the background and Tess’s pedicured toes in the bottom of the frame. I have four tiny braids on one side of my head. Arizona has a sunburn on her nose.
It’s hard to tell us apart.
Partly because there are lines on our faces. And our bodies. A few near my eyes and ears. A question mark near my nose. And a whole new shape drawn in around my chin. It’s the shape my father wishes my chin were. Strong and solid and in proportion with my cheekbones and forehead. An ideal shape. Dotted lines make my hips smaller. The insides of my thighs touch in the photo, but he’s circled the exact spot where they hit.
It’s like a paper at school, all marked up with needs improvement and has potential.
Arizona is marked up too. Some lines on her face and vague markings on both of our chests, like he forgot we were his daughters.
He probably did forget we were his daughters when he was doing it.
It doesn’t matter if he doodled it while he was on the phone or spacing out. It doesn’t matter that if I show him an issue of Glamour with a marked-up model, he doesn’t even remember doing it. That he laughs at his own doctorliness. “You can’t turn it off, I guess,” he’s said.
It hurts. My hangover turns into something else entirely. Something burning and drowning me. Something unsurvivable.
“I’m sorry,” Arizona says.
I’m gutted and she knows it, because she was gutted too.
“This is what he sees?” I say, but I know the answer.
“They’ve only ever made it worse. His women. They make him less of a dad. And she’s the worst one. You don’t see it, but he’s forgetting about us. He’s not seeing us as daughters anymore. As family. As important. You think you understand Karissa and the other women. But you’re missing the most important parts.”
I want to be on her side and be upset about this together. But her boobs are pushed up too far, and they’re all I can see.
“We’re in it together,” Arizona says. “You and me and no one else. Roxanne can hang out. She can help or make us laugh or give you cigarettes if you really need to do that. But stop trying to bring other people in. It’s you and me.”
“It’s not,” I say.
I’d go out right now if I could. See Bernardo. See myself through someone else’s eyes. Never talk to my father again. But my head hurts too much and I’m dizzy. I wouldn’t make it out of the building probably.
“You shouldn’t have shown me that,” I say.
I sleep away as much of the next twenty-four hours as I can. Because in sleep I don’t remember that image of myself marked up beyond recognition, made into someone my father would love more.
twenty-eight