Free Look at You Now by Liz Pryor

disappear. She didn’t know yet.
    I remember the moments before he told her, thinking to myself, The second my mother knows it will all become real. My hell, my pain, the reality of my shame will begin. I don’t know why that was true, but it was. She sat down in an overstuffed chair in the living room, keeping on her coat. Maybe she didn’t think she’d need to stay long. I was on the couch and my dad was in another big chair, and we formed a triangle. Farrah Fawcett sashayed into the room wearing a short flowery dress and cowboy boots. Oh God, I thought, she’s here in front of my mom. She smiled and offered us beverages. I could barely watch. My mother managed a soft Katharine Hepburn “Helllllloo.” There was a framed picture of my dad, the wife, and the wife’s four-year-old daughter on the table next to the couch. Dorothy noticed it and then looked back out the window. It was excruciating: to watch my mom seeing my dad together with his new wife, seeing their home, their contentment together.
    Lee wasted no time. He wore his blue-and-white pin-striped Brooks Brothers button-down, khaki pants, and soft leather loafers,and had his vodka with a splash of soda next to him on the table. He looked at my mom—everything about him attractive—and began, “Dorothy, our daughter—the daughter you live with every single day of your life—is more than four months pregnant.” There was a long pause. My mother didn’t move. My dad continued, never raising his voice: “How in the world can that be? Do you see nothing? You don’t know when or if your own daughter gets her period, or gains weight, or throws up? What the hell is going on in that house?”
    My mom was staring past Farrah Fawcett, out the huge plate glass windows; her face was surrendered, her eyes blank. Kate was uncomfortably messing with the tray of drinks. I could not hold back the tears. The tears came for a million reasons: I was pregnant, it was now indisputably real, and my father was torturing my mother, stabbing her with a horrible knife of blame, turning it over and over again. I couldn’t believe what was happening—and all because of me. I let out an audible cry. My mother turned to me with a look I’d never seen and a voice I’d rarely heard, strong and cold.
    â€œPull yourself together, Liz, and stop crying.” Then, with what I’m sure was the last shred of dignity she could find, she politely asked Farrah Fawcett to leave the room.
    Kate stood up and said, “Of course.”
    Lee went on. “It took my wife one day, Dorothy, one day of being around Liz to ask her if she might be pregnant. You’ve had seven children, for Christ’s sake. What kind of a mother does this?”
    I wanted to die. The room was still. I was choking back everything that wanted to come out. I wanted to say, But, Dad, I was in a bathing suit on the boat, she’s been seeing me in winter coats. That’s not fair . . . But then my mother, with seamless composure, answered, “Perhaps, Lee, if Liz had a father in her life, one who showed up more than one Sunday a month, who cared about her more than himself and hadn’t deserted his family, she wouldn’t feel the need to be having sex . As far as the kind of mother I am, Iimagine the answer to that is not going to change the fact that she is pregnant. It would be wise for us to figure out what to do here, Lee, rather than cast stones.”
    Her eloquence floored me. But then my dad continued.
    â€œThe doctor has informed us that an abortion is out of the question,” Lee said. “She is too far along; it would endanger her life, so that is off the table.”
    â€œWhat doctor, Lee?”
    â€œMy wife’s doctor, who saw Liz this morning.”
    She responded, “I see.”
    Shit. Now Dorothy was going to think I’d confided in Farrah Fawcett. She was going to imagine I trusted