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For my parents, with love and gratitude
These children that come at you with knives, they are your children.
—Charles Manson
Preflight
My first Manson girl was Leslie Van Houten, the homecoming princess with the movie-star smile. She was on death row at nineteen for putting a knife into the already-dead body of some poor, random woman for the lamest reason that anyone gives for doing anything: all the other kids were doing it. I found her by accident, reading an article in the waiting room of the lady-parts doctor my mom was going to when she was trying to get pregnant with my brother. I’d been to the same office the year before, when I got my period, because my mom wanted a professional to lecture me about not getting knocked up. I was probably so traumatized that I forgot you couldn’t use cell phones in the lobby—something about the radiation screwing with the pictures of the fetuses. This time, someone had left an old Rolling Stone next to the magazines about babies and pregnancy. Thank God. If the choices were between reading about psychopaths and “How I Fit Back into My Prepregnancy Jeans,” then it really wasn’t much of a choice.
The article was written by John Waters, a director who made a movie called Pink Flamingos. My sister’s then boyfriend had insisted we watch the film the Thanksgiving before, because he had seen it as a boy in Poland and had had some kind of revelation about his life. After that, he just knew that he wanted to go to America. Nasty, filthy America, where you could put a person on trial for being an asshole and supersize transsexuals ate dog shit off of lawns, at least in the movies. Happy Thanksgiving and pass the peas! After seeing Pink Flamingos, I wasn’t exactly shocked to learn that John Waters made friends with a Manson girl. He was out there. She was probably scared of him.
The whole morning had been stressful, because it was the day my mom was going to see if the baby inside of her had a heartbeat. The time before there hadn’t been, and months of torture followed. It’s not that I wasn’t sad for my mom, I was, but she took so long to start getting out of bed again that I practically had to move in with my best friend, Doon, just to get a bowl of cereal in the morning. I never knew someone could get so upset about something the size of a quarter.
The Rolling Stone article was about what a regular person Leslie Van Houten was, if you could get past that whole murder thing. I knew for a fact that Charles Manson was not a regular person. I had watched part of a biography about him once at Doon’s—he had pinwheels for eyes and a swastika carved in his forehead, which pretty much disqualified him from “regular.” He had masterminded the murder of Sharon Tate, a very pretty, very pregnant woman whose face I couldn’t remember, and that made me think of my mother and feel guilty for reading an article like that while she was having her big appointment. Manson did all of his crimes with a pack of women, girls who made it look like they’d found a way to clone crazy and dress it down with stringy hair, empty stares, lots of drugs, and lots of knives. Most people never thought about them as separate people at all. Definitely not as girls who went to homecoming once, or who got dragged to the lady-parts doctor by their moms.
Leslie Van Houten was a Manson girl, and she didn’t help kill the pregnant one. She did, however, put a knife into the corpse of mother-of-two Rosemary LaBianca—and not just once but at least a dozen times. Then she watched while her friends wrote on the walls in blood. She also read the Bible to Charles Manson while he bathed, which was just gross and weird on top of everything else. Three things stuck with me about the article. First, that John Waters, the writer, thought that forty years was long enough for a person to be in prison for doing something stupid as a teenager—even something really, really stupid, like World Series stupid. Second, that Van Houten was tripping so hard on LSD that she thought that after they’d murdered everyone she was going to become a fairy and fly away—she even asked her dad if she should cut holes in the back of her jacket to get ready for the fairy-tastic new world. In school, meth was the drug they were worried we’d start taking, and they liked to scare us with pictures of homeless-looking people, toothless and aged a decade overnight. LSD sounded like a whole other world of batshit.
The third thing I remembered was that John Waters said that Leslie Van Houten would have been happier if she’d wound up in Baltimore, hanging out with shit-eating transsexuals and making movies about killing people as opposed to actually killing people. She would have been a different person if she’d washed up in Baltimore, not California.
I made it most of the way through the article before my mom came out, hugging me and practically making out with her wife, because they were going to have a baby. It seemed like bad luck to keep reading about murders after news like that, so I left the magazine and forgot about Leslie Van Houten. I only remembered her two years later, when I was in the airport getting ready to board my flight to Los Angeles, looking over my shoulder to see if my mom had figured out that I’d left. The flight next to mine was headed to Baltimore—it was twice delayed and the passengers looked tired and sad, the exact wrong look for people to have before getting on an airplane. For some reason, when I was finally on my own flight, with the main door to the airplane safely sealing out the life I was leaving behind, I thought about John Waters and what he’d written about Van Houten, how she hadn’t just picked the wrong person but the wrong place. And I sent him a mental note, because it seemed like something he should have known, and because it was true: No one runs away to Baltimore.
1
I would never have gone after my mother with a knife, not while a credit card was cleaner and cut just as deep. It’s not like I was going after her at all—mostly, what I wanted was to get as far away from her as possible, and her wife’s wallet was sitting on the dining room table with the mail, just waiting to be opened. A person can only take so much. My mom had saged the house the week before and told me that she couldn’t even enter my room, the energy was so vile. She spent all her time with my new baby brother, talking about how he was the real reason she must have been put on this earth, that the universe was giving her a “do-over,” which made me what? A “do-under”? Once I added in the whole nightmare at Starbucks the week before—where my parents sat me down and put a price on my future like they were getting ready to list me on eBay—it seemed to me more likely that she wanted me to take the credit card. Was begging, even.
My sister, Delia, an actress in Los Angeles, told me last summer that everyone needs a “thing.” She’s beautiful, with silver-gray eyes and ink-black hair that goes halfway down her back, and a voice that sounds like she makes dirty phone calls for a living. She was almost cast as a Bond girl, but she told me that beauty isn’t enough. Everyone here is gorgeous, she said, so you have to figure out something else. You’ve got to be good at at least two things, and known for one. She’s a decent gymnast and can still cartwheel on a balance beam, so being able to do her own stunts is her “thing.” I visited her last summer, and she took me to a
boutique in Santa Monica and helped me pick out a new pair of glasses for when I started high school. It is safe to say that being beautiful is not what I am going to be known for, but she told me that with the right glasses I could rule the world of “nerd chic.” I think she forgot that nerds are not, nor will they ever be, chic in Atlanta, or maybe in any high school in America. I bought a pair of thick black frames that you normally see on blind old men and wore the reddest lip gloss my mom would let me leave the house with. Flawless, my sister had said. Very French. The only person who noticed my makeover was my best friend, Doon, and she pointed out that I had lip gloss on my teeth. I didn’t get beat up, but I didn’t get asked to homecoming, either. I think my sister forgot that I don’t live in a movie, or even in France.
Stealing, contrary to my mother’s latest take on me, is not my “thing.” Now, if you asked my mother, she would probably make me out to be a criminal of the first order. To hear her tell it, I’m no better than those actresses who shoplift from Saks and whine on the news about being bored with their lives. Blah, blah, blah, You can’t be trusted. She was actually crying when my sister gave me her phone at the airport. Blah, blah, blah, How could you have violated Lynette’s privacy like that? (Ummmm. Easy?) Blah, blah, blah, I wish I’d known more about how I was raising you when I was doing it. Like I’m some kind of paragraph she wishes she could delete and rewrite, but she already accidentally e-mailed it to the world.
The good thing is that I was now in Los Angeles, while my mother was still in Atlanta with her awful wife and my new brother, Birch. How? my mother asked. How did anyone let a girl who’s barely fifteen through security at the Atlanta airport? Are you on drugs?
She yelled at my sister for a while, who pulled the phone away from her ear and stage-whispered with her hand half covering the receiver, “Don’t think this means you’re not in a huge pile of shit, Anna. Because you are.”
But huge piles of shit are relative, and it was hard to feel threatened in the Hollywood Hills, not in my sister’s apartment, at any rate, which was all mirrors and white light. The space was carefully underfurnished. The living room had a Zen fountain, an oversize white sofa, a coffee table, and not much else. The doors between the living room and bedroom were translucent, and they slid to open. Her bedroom was like a crash pad from The Arabian Nights, with embroidered pillows and velvet curtains and a bed that sat close to the floor. I think if my sister were less pretty, her apartment would have seemed kind of ridiculous—there were too many pillows and candles in the bedroom and too few decent snack-food choices in the kitchen for your standard-issue human being. Instead, it felt like the inside of some Egyptian goddess’s sanctuary, full of perfumes you could only buy in Europe, expensive makeup in black designer cases, and underwear that was decidedly nonfunctional. It had crossed my mind that my sister might be a slut, but a really nice-smelling, clean, and carefully closeted slut. Even I knew better than to ask if that’s one of the two other “things” that she was good at, though Doon and I had some theories.
“Can we go shopping tomorrow?” I asked.
“Are you deaf? You’re in some serious trouble,” my sister said. Then she laughed a little; she couldn’t help herself. “So you stole Lynette’s credit card.”
“I didn’t steal it.”
“Have you considered law school? You stole the number.”
“I used the number,” I said, annoyed that she even wanted to talk about it. “It was under five hundred dollars.”
She kept an eye on me like I might make a break for the door as she leveled green powder and yogurt into a blender. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“What’s that?”
“Greens and probiotics,” she said. “Fish oil, B vitamins, acai berry juice, and herbs from my Chinese doctor. It’s like licking the bottom of a compost pile, so let’s hope it’s doing something besides bankrupting me.”
Dramatic, my sister. But at least she makes money for it.
“And don’t change the subject. You could have gotten nabbed by some pervert. Mom was scared to death. Oh yeah, roll your eyes and make me another mean, mean grown-up, but you’re lucky you got here. What if I had been on location somewhere?”
“I’m fifteen, it’s not like I’m twelve.”
“And it’s not like you’re forty-two, either. People are disgusting, or have you forgotten?”
“How could I?”
My sister put on music and I checked to see what she was playing: Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here. Lonesome music that seemed like it could only belong on the West Coast. My sister only thinks music is good if it’s a thousand years old. I sent her some music by the band that Doon and I love best, Freekmonkee, and she told me that it sounded like bad Nirvana covers, which proves she didn’t even listen to it. They’re British but just relocated to LA. Doon had a shrine on her computer for the lead singer, Karl Marx, and I was mildly obsessed with the guitarist, Leo Spark. When I first got on the plane, I actually checked first class to see if any members of Freekmonkee were on board, but no luck.
My sister and mom always thought that something awful was going to happen to me—they acted like the only option for running away was winding up in pieces in some stranger’s freezer. My family was clearly the place where optimism went to die. What about the hope that something amazing might happen? Half the time I wondered if they weren’t wishing for the worst, then they could turn me into a sad story they told their friends instead of having to deal with me as an actual life-form who shared their DNA.
“What if the taxi driver had been a serial killer?” I said. “What if terrorists hijacked the plane? I did get here. I’m fine. I’d like to know how long it took her to notice I was gone.”
“You laugh, but stranger things have happened. Did you know they found a severed head in Griffith Park last week? I jog there, or at least I did. And as to your second question, not long.” My sister sipped the grass-shake. “Lynette’s credit card company called a few hours afterward about a suspicious charge.”
Lynette’s bank called. I’ll bet they did. Before my mom decided she was a lesbian, I thought lesbians were all these really nice, earthy, crunchy, let’s smother you with our twenty extra pounds of lady love and fight the power people. But Lynette wasn’t like that at all. She was thin and smart and mean, and probably slept with her cell phone to get bank alerts like that.
“So it’s really their money they’re worried about,” I said.
“That’s not what I said at all. That’s how they found out. Are you depressed or something?”
I didn’t shake my head either way. I hadn’t really thought about it.
“I’m not taking sides on this one. Cora’s clearly lost her mind and I regret that you’re living the crazy, but you can’t just steal people’s credit cards. You can’t. Okay?” She ran her finger inside the glass to get the last of the sludge while I reopened the refrigerator door to see if anything with refined flour or sugar had materialized. No luck.
But it wasn’t really theft. It wasn’t.
One thing I didn’t tell my sister, and I wouldn’t tell my mom or dad, or anyone, really, because it’s the kind of thing that just makes you look sad when you’re supposed to be having a good time, but when I charged the ticket I imagined that when I got on the plane I’d try to order a wine, or see if they’d upgrade me to first class, or at least spend some money on the snacks they make you pay for. Traveling with parents meant sad dried fruit and chewy popcorn in Ziploc bags. I was going to have Pringles! I thought it would be my reward for talking my way through security, but the crazy thing was that after I flashed my passport (stamped once from a horrible weekend “getting to know” Lynette in the Bahamas), they let me through security like a fifteen-year-old traveling alone was the most normal thing in the world. Maybe it was, but I’d never done it. They didn’t even find the mini can of mace attached to my key chain. By the time I got on the plane, I felt even more invisible than I had at home, and I munched my sa
d peanuts like there were no other options. I had become the human equivalent of one of those balloons we used to send into the air with our name and address on the string in the hope that someone might mail it back, but no one ever did.
Maybe my sister was onto something, and I was depressed. A normal person would have at least bought an in-flight snack box. The thought did cross my mind that once I landed in LA, I could take a taxi to Disneyland, or hightail it to the Hollywood sign, or get one of those maps of the stars’ houses and maybe even become the youngest member of the paparazzi and get accidentally famous for my pictures in a straight-to-Pay-Per-View-movie kind of way. I thought those were optimistic ideas, but maybe they were really depressing.
When we landed, my sister was waiting right outside the gate, inside security, plastered to her cell phone.
“Yes,” she’d said. “She’s here. I see her now. She looks fine. I know. Okay. Love you too.”
“What are you doing here?” I thought about hugging Delia, but her hands were crossed over her chest and she didn’t make a move in that direction.
“What am I doing here? Have you completely lost your mind?”
“No.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. Well, right now, I’m missing work because my phone rang this morning and I had to talk Cora off the ledge. Seriously, I’ve got to hand it to you. I thought I was a grade-A fuckup for not going to college, but you’re leaving me in the dust. Is something happening?” Her voice lowered a bit. “Is anyone molesting you? Because I wouldn’t send you back, and I would always believe you.”
“No!” I said. “Gross. Who would molest me? Dad? Lynette? No, it’s just … I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You flew all the way across the country and you don’t want to talk about it. Fine for now, but I’m gonna let you in on a little secret, they’re gonna want you to talk about it.”
American Girls Page 1