him. “So you think I move in with all the guys I date? That we’re living together until you find something better?”
He wraps his arms around my shoulders, pulls me back to his stomach and pinches my nose with his fingers. Normally, when he pinches, he says, “Honk,” which is one of his favorite and most embarrassing games to play in public places. “What I meant, Psycho, is that eventually we’ll get engaged.”
Oops. “I see,” I say, for lack of coming up with anything more clever.
“If it bothers you, I’ll tell them. Be truthful. Do you care?”
How can I be mad at him after an “eventually we’ll get engaged” comment? Is he planning on proposing? How long are we supposed to live together before we get engaged? Are we pre-engaged? Do his parents not approve of me? “I don’t care. Honest.”
Eden’s is loud, busy and green. The walls are covered in leaves. Pots of sunflowers stem up beside various tables. The waitresses are wearing skirts made of petals and sunflower-patterned bikini tops. My dad and Carrie are waiting at the bar. I can’t believe he made it. Hah! I told Dana he’d show.
As I approach, Carrie waves her Fendi bag at me with one hand and a martini glass with the other. I know it’s a Fendi bag because it has the FF logo trampled all over it, as if one medium-sized FF isn’t obnoxious enough.
My father’s arm is wrapped around her tanned, bare shoulders. “Hi,” I say, approaching them.
“Sunny!” she shrieks, and covers her mouth with both her hands. “Look at you! You are so gorgeous. Look how gorgeous you are! You got so big!”
She hasn’t seen me since I was twelve and she was my counselor, so I won’t be insulted. “Thanks,” I say. “I think.”
“Last time I saw you, you had braces and hair down to your waist! Adam, isn’t she gorgeous?” She waves her hands at the word gorgeous as if she’s Moses thanking God for the Ten Commandments.
My father nods. “Gorgeous, doll, gorgeous.” Am I the doll or is Carrie the doll? I haven’t seen him in about six months, since I met him for dinner at China Grill on South Beach when he was in Miami meeting a client. He only had the night free because he was meeting “a friend” in the Keys. It’s strange that I hadn’t seen him in so long, considering that lately I’d been coming to New York every few weeks. The last few times I was here, he wasn’t, which was fine with me, because it’s not like I came to NewYork to see him.
“Stop making excuses for The Jackass,” Dana says inside my head.
Two months ago he was supposed to meet Steve and me at Manna, but he didn’t show. “You surprised?” Dana asked later.
My sister hasn’t spoken to my father in three years. “He’s like tobacco,” my sister once told me. “Toxic. You’ll feel better about yourself if you cut him out of your life.”
Dana sees us as two orphans against the world. She’s either been reading too much Dave Eggers or watching too many reruns of Party of Five.
Tomorrow, I’ll definitely call.
You know how when you see someone daily, you don’t notice him getting older, but when you don’t see him for a few months, you’re shocked by the change? Like when you pick up People once a year and see a picture of Harrison Ford and you can’t believe how gray Han Solo got? Well, that doesn’t happen with my father. His looks never seem to change—he’s six feet, wide-shouldered, with a full head of chocolate-brown hair, wide blue eyes framed by dark spidery lashes, and a Tom Cruise smile that takes up half his face. Whenever he decided to show up on Parents’ Day at camp, all the female counselors would flock to him as if he were a free chocolate sampler at the supermarket. “Oh, Mr. Langstein. How are you? It’s wonderful to see you, Mr. Langstein.”
“Call me Adam,” he’d say, resting his hands on their seventeen-year-old shoulders.
I guess that’s when he first noticed Carrie.
My ex-counselor continues to review my outfit. “I love that dress. Did you get it here?”
I’m wearing Dana’s white V-neck cashmere sweater dress, one of the many items she bought but still had the tag attached when she handed it down to me. “Get good use of it, it’s Nicole Miller and cost three hundred dollars,” she told me. As if that would impress me. Tell me something, can anyone tell the difference between a three-hundred-dollar dress and a thirty-dollar dress? And would anyone who could tell the difference think less of me if I were wearing the thirty-dollar dress instead of the three-hundred-dollar dress? And if anyone would think less of me, is she really the type of person whose opinion of me matters?
The dress is really soft. I thought my dad would like it. It’s so girly.
“And your hair looks gorgeous.” All right, she’s made her point. I put it back in a low bun, because my father has always nagged me to “pull your hair back and show off that pretty face. Why are you hiding it with all that hair?”
Okay, Carrie, that’s enough sucking up for today. The occasional batting-eyed hopefuls I was allowed to meet have always held the mistaken idea that a nod from Dana or me would high-speed them from “we hang out on Saturday nights” to “look at the Harry Winston rock on my finger” status. As a teenager I was bombarded with tickets to see Michael Jackson (“Let’s do the moonwalk together, Sunny!”), Cabbage Patch Kid dolls (“Let’s change her diaper! Maybe one day we’ll have a real baby to change!”) and subscriptions to Teen Beat (“Isn’t your father as handsome as Tom Cruise, and by the way, do other women come over to the house, Sunny?”).
Sometimes I actually liked these women. Of course, as soon as my father moved on, I was expected to move on, too.
On my twelfth birthday, one of his ex-girlfriends sent me a card, wishing me a good year and telling me to call her if I ever needed anything.
“Throw that out,” my father said. “She’s only using you to get to me. Besides, it’s not appropriate for you to still see her socially.”
I threw it out.
Carrie always looked very—Vogue. Now her hair has that three-hundred-dollar blond highlighted, blow-dried straight then attacked with a curling iron look. She’s wearing black boot-cut pants, a tight silver strapless shirt and a black cashmere pashmina draped behind her back and over her arms. She looks shorter than she used to, despite her three-inch stiletto boots—ouch—but I think that’s because the last time I saw her I was only four feet tall. Now she looks about my height, five foot six. My brown patent leather pumps only add an inch. I don’t normally wear shoes like these out, they’re my suit shoes, my interview shoes. According to Dana, they’re called Mary Janes, meaning they’re pumps with a strap. They’re the only shoes I have that match with this dress. I’m not a fashion connoisseur, but I didn’t think my sneakers would go.
The hostess shows us to our table while batting her eyes, swooshing her petal skirt and thrusting her sunflower bikinied breasts at my dad. Carrie notices and wraps her fingers around his wrist like a jaywalking mother clinging to her daughter. Thankfully the waiter in our section is male. For some reason only the female staff members are dressed in garden-appropriate costumes. Maybe no one wants waiters clothed in fig leaves handling their shrimps. Carrie and my dad claim the seats in the corner, facing outward, and I slide into the art deco highly uncomfortable metal chair across from my father and an ivy-covered wall.
