It’s hell, wanting a slightly different version of a situation you’re in. Or getting what you want, but it being wrong anyway.
“I’m okay being a guest,” I say. It is the most polite I can be. Karissa gives me a long stare. She looks the way she did when she played Laura in a scene from The Glass Menagerie. A disturbing kind of naive.
“You don’t want to do it,” she says. That’s when she drops my dress to the floor. She gets up on her knees, pushing aside more of my blankets, and tries to get a look at my phone. “Who are you texting? Are you texting everyone? Your friends? Your mom? Arizona? You think she doesn’t hate me enough?”
“No, oh my God, no,” I say. “Nothing about you, I swear. I’m saying good morning to Roxanne. I’m making plans with Bernardo. We talked about maybe getting grilled cheese somewhere with really good grilled cheese? Because there are all these places that specialize in random classic foods, and we vowed to try them all?” I sound too panicked, I’m sure, and I turn my phone off so she can’t catch sight of the series of distress signals I sent out to basically everyone.
“Sounds fun,” she says. She’s still side-eyeing me. She’s still furrowing her brow. “I know we have work to do. On our relationship. But I want to do it. I don’t want things to change.”
Then you shouldn’t have gone and changed everything, I think.
I don’t want to talk about us or the relationship or what we are to each other, because the more we talk about her marrying my father, the more real it will become. So I find a smile and imitate a person whose life isn’t getting blown up by a beautiful disaster.
“I’m sorry. I’m not a morning person. But sure. We can hang out for a little,” I say in slow, measured sentences. Karissa makes me a little breathless.
Maybe she does that to everyone.
“So then we’ll dress shop? Today?”
“Aren’t you planning on a wedding next summer?” I say.
“Well, sure, but that doesn’t mean we can’t shop now!” She is brimming with energy. I’ll never catch up.
“How about instead I help you with your monologue?” I say. “Aren’t you learning a new monologue for auditions?” I want to see her do her acting warm-ups—windmills with her arms and swooping sounds with her mouth, followed by an intensive session of rolling around on the floor. There’s nothing quite like watching Karissa roll around on the floor. She’s as comfortable as a puppy and emerges vertical and dust-covered and victorious. Her hair turns into a tangled mess, which makes her even prettier, and by the time she is upright, her back is straight in a mathematically perfect way.
I could stand an afternoon with the Karissa that she used to be.
“I’m going to hold off auditioning for a few weeks,” she says. “I’m not quite ready to be auditioning right now. But soon.”
“Oh.”
“Your dad’s helping me,” she says. I nod but don’t know what help Dad could be. “He thinks I could make it in L.A. Or maybe London. There’s a lot of theater in London. We’re thinking of getting a place.”
I want to go back to bed for the rest of my life. But a tiny part of me wonders at Dad changing alongside Karissa. Changing for Karissa. I don’t think he’s ever thought about moving or supporting or adventuring with his wives and girlfriends. It’s a little bit beautiful even if it’s mostly awful.
“Dad loves New York” is all I can think to say.
“Well, sure. But what if we could love other things too?” Karissa shrugs like she hasn’t asked the world’s biggest question, or at least my biggest question. What are the things we are supposed to love the most? And what happens when we want to love other things too?
thirty
Karissa and I go to a street in the East Village that is crowded with bridal shops.
“It’s like a fairy tale, right?” she says.
She knows I don’t want to answer, but she keeps asking anyway. Like if she says it enough times, I’ll give in. It makes me think she doesn’t need my actual approval, only the surface of approval.
“I have a secret,” she says. “I already booked us an appointment at this one place.” She smirks and elbows me like it’s all a big joke.
I think it’s not cute and it’s not okay, but I’m sort of held hostage by her energy and her dead family and the promise that every hour or so I get a moment of the person she was. Plus the tattoo of her own eye on her back and her crazy beaded sandals and the fact that she knows awesome places to get egg sandwiches and coffees, which we did before heading to Wedding Dress Row.
Karissa tries on eight gowns in an hour.
“You must be so happy for your sister,” the clerks say, one after the other. I don’t tell them she’s not my sister.
“You try one on!” Karissa says, twirling around in something full-skirted and skimpy-topped.