I knew I wasn’t a perfect kid. I probably should have helped more with Birch, or complained less about the school thing. I should have walked to the grocery for her when she was pregnant instead of pretending I had homework to do and texting with Doon. There were about a million things I would have done differently if I had known.
“That’s not how cancer works,” Delia said. “Not even in her faux-hippie universe, okay? And if she ever says something like that again, tell her you are going straight to your therapist and not speaking to her again until your therapist gives you permission.”
“But I don’t have a therapist.”
“Anna. I hate to tell you this, but you’re gonna need one.” She laughed, and went across the room to the television, where she removed a small box of matches from beside one of the candles. From it, she removed the thinnest joint I have ever seen and looked at it like it was her oldest, dearest friend.
“This is just lazy-ass self-medication,” she said. “And I don’t recommend it.”
“Can I have some?”
I’d had one puff of pot a year ago when Doon sneaked some from her brother’s stash, and it just made my lungs burn. Nothing interesting happened. Either the pot was defective or I was.
“Not a chance,” she said, holding smoke in her lungs while she choked out the words. “But I will let you in on a little family gossip.”
“Can I at least have the last doughnut?”
“You can have ten more doughnuts. We’ll drive there later.”
She tossed a pillow onto the floor, sat down, and focused her eyes on the ceiling. Then she started talking to the ceiling.
“So I never told you this, but the first part I ever got in a movie, it was a Japanese horror flick called St. Succubus. It was pretty twisted, I guess—you know how when you’re on a set sometimes you can be doing the grossest stuff, but instead of seeming gross it just seems silly or stupid? Anyhow, there was this scene where I went down on a guy and then later I ate his boiled penis like it was, I don’t know, a suckling pig.”
“Can we stream it?” The thought of my sister cooking a penis for dinner was actually cheering me up. I moved my hands in front of my face like I was two-fisting some imaginary dinner. Dick a l’Orange.
“No way. It’s disgusting. And my acting is terrible. But it was my first role, so I was proud and all convinced that it was artistic, so I let Mom know that I had made a movie, and I kind of warned her about it, and I thought, stupidly, idiotically, flying in the face of everything I know about our mother, that she would be proud. Because it was a movie and I was her daughter, and I’d been paid to go to Japan and act and all of that. It was exciting. I thought it would be my breakthrough role, blah, blah, blah. So I called Cora about two weeks after it came out, to see if she and your dad had watched it, and you know what she says to me?”
I shook my head. My sister stopped looking at the ceiling and stared me dead in the face.
“She says, ‘I can’t have sex since I saw that movie. It’s disgusting and it’s made me realize that sex with men is violent and predatory. I’m not sure that I can ever have sex with any man again.’”
“Seriously?”
“Oh, I am the deadest of serious.”
“So it’s your fault Mom is a lesbian?”
“And her marriage ended. Something like that. I didn’t speak to her for, like, two years. She’s incapable of taking responsibility for any of her actions. Incapable. You must promise me to never, ever, ever under any circumstance take anything she says personally. Ever. Please. I’m making like it was funny, but it wasn’t. She’s my mother. I was devastated. I wanted her to be proud of me. I wanted her to be my mom. I mean seriously, isn’t it, like, rule number one of your marriage breaking up that you don’t blame your children? Don’t even psychopaths follow that rule?”
I shook my head. My sister had finished the joint and in spite of everything seemed to be in a considerably better mood.
“It helped me to think of her as ‘Cora’ after that, not ‘Mom.’ I don’t know. Everyone is different, but it worked for me.”
I always wondered why my sister called Mom “Cora.” I assumed it was because they’d had such a sisterly bond that back in the day they just broke down that mom-daughter distinction and rambled around the Las Vegas strip, chugging margaritas and putting dollars in the Speedos of cheesy male strippers. I should have known it was because my mom was batshit crazy.
“So what are we going to do with you, Anna?” she said, looking at me like I was a picture that needed to be hung. Only my sister would get stoned and then want to start doing things. “I thought Cora would mellow out after two weeks and you’d be back in Atlanta, but now it looks like you’re here for the haul.”
“I thought I was supposed to earn my plane ticket back.”
“Technically,” she said. “But they really just wanted to make a point. We’d talked about two weeks and then home.”
“You’re such a liar. You were just lying to my face, right? This whole time.”
“It wasn’t a lie, it was a lack of plan.”
“Right. And Roger is just shooting some stupid movie with you because he’s all business and loves dudes. Riiiiight.”
The room had slowly darkened as we were talking, and Delia finally turned on the lamp behind her. Her apartment was like a cave, always ten degrees colder than it needed to be. My sister had zero body fat, but she never seemed to reach for a sweater. I wrapped my feet in a baby-blue fleece blanket that I was starting to think of as my own, and Delia scrunched her nose and turned her face to the side because she hated bare feet on anything.
“You can think what you want, but we barely had sex when we were in a relationship. Roger just likes the idea of things he can’t have. He might even be asexual. The important thing is the movie. He’s already talking to possible distributors and if it’s a hit for him, it’s a hit for me.”
“I thought you told me once there was no such thing as asexual. Just a train from straight to gay with a whole bunch of stops in between. How will you explain that to Dex?”
I already felt sorry for Dex. I liked him, but he was no match for my sister. He was probably raised by normal people, and we were clearly raised by wolves.
“Dex doesn’t quiz me about how I spent my day. Why don’t you help Roger by actually doing that research? I can get Dex to load up his Kindle with Mansonian weirdness and you can figure out my character.”
When she said “character” she got all dramatic, flourishing with one arm and pretending to smoke an imaginary cigarette.
“He doesn’t even know what he’s making the movie about.”
“He’s a very intuitive artist and, honestly, the strength of his work is usually in the image. I know he’s half full of shit, but I respect his process. And he’s not afraid to ask for help. I think he really values your opinion.”
“Because he thinks I’m crazy and lost. Great.”
I pulled the blanket over my shoulders and tucked the corners underneath me.
“Because he thinks you’re young and impulsive and you care. As you get older, you just care less. Or you care differently. I don’t know which, but it’s different. Never underestimate the power of youth—not in Los Angeles, at any rate. You can never be too young or too dumb.”
“I thought it was ‘too rich or too thin.’”
“That’s the East Coast. I’ll text Dex. I know he has some extra readers from when they were trying to get the twins to sponsor some kind of literacy awareness month. Like they read.”
On paper, you would think that I would like Roger more than Dex. Dex should have been the bigger loser with his sad apartment and weird job writing for a lame kids’ show, but every time my sister mentioned Dex, I felt a little jealous. He was normal enough to have a Peanuts comic strip on his refrigerator door, the one where Lucy keeps moving the ball and Charlie Brown keeps kicking. What was it Marilyn Monroe had said in the movie Dex had on when we were leaving, when
she was breaking down how no man was a match for her mighty and heaving boobs? “He’s a man, isn’t he?” It worked for my sister like that as well.
“Will you be okay here by yourself tonight?” Delia asked. “It’s perfectly safe, just don’t do anything stupid like unlock the door or go for a walk. Remember, in LA pedestrians are just roadkill waiting to happen. I’ll be back in the morning first thing.”
Lying again, but at least she was trying to keep me safe.
“Where are you going?”
“For doughnuts,” she said, giving me a wink and perfectly perverted look.
“Gross,” I said. “I’m your sister, remember?”
“I’m leaving you twenty bucks, and ordering a pizza on the way. So you can open the door for the pizza guy, but that’s it.”
“Pepperoni?”
“It’s your body to pollute.”
She closed the door and locked it behind her, and I was really alone for the first time since my plane had landed two weeks ago.
* * *
On any other evening, I probably couldn’t have read about the Manson girls, not alone in that house in the Hollywood Hills. But I needed something to quiet the wah-wah-wah noise in the back of my head that was fast becoming a roar, something awful enough to trump the sad. My sister was right, in that normally I did like to read about awful things: leprosy, serial killers, global warming, flesh-eating bacteria, inbred babies from rural incest cults, etc., etc. For a while I even had Doon convinced that the real zombie apocalypse was going to be caused by the rash of dead armadillos by the sides of the roads; they were everywhere and they could carry leprosy—disaster seemed inevitable. Maybe I was morbid because it was easy to be morbid in the comfort of my own room, where my mom, however annoying, would be there to open my door if I so much as raised my voice. My mom. Just thinking about her made my eyeballs feel like they were made of cement and sinking slowly into my brain.
Earlier in the day I’d been reading about Patricia Krenwinkel, the only one of the Manson girls to take part in both of the murders. She wasn’t a very pretty girl. That doesn’t sound like a nice thing to say about someone, or like being ugly should have mattered, except that because they were girls, it mattered big-time. Krenwinkel had a face that was more dude than lady, and a medical condition that caused extra hair to grow all over her body. From what I read, her parents just made matters worse, which was starting to seem like the reason God made parents, to put the cherry on top of a shit-sundae. Her folks split when she was seventeen and pretty soon after that she met Charles Manson, and she stepped right out of her life to follow him around. As in, she didn’t even cash her last paycheck before she hit the road.
Another Manson girl, Mary Brunner, who was also technically the first Manson girl, had a witchy face as well. And it’s not like either of those girls had crazy written all over them—what they had written all over them was ugly with a big, fat side of alone. I kept kicking the same idea around my head the way I did a face that I couldn’t match to a name—that the people that these women killed were richer, more attractive, more hip. Insiders. The fact that all the books mentioned how they looked meant that their appearances mattered, but no one ever said why or how. Before the carnage began, Susan Atkins herself said about Tate and the others, “Wow, they sure are beautiful people.” Whether that made the rest of the night easier or harder, she didn’t say.
I guess that Charles Manson had figured out why pretty mattered. Because he called Patricia Krenwinkel beautiful, even kept the lights on when they did the nasty, she chased down Abigail Folger and stabbed her so hard that she broke her spine in half. The murder was so brutal that Abigail Folger, her white nightgown soaked red, pleaded with Krenwinkel, “Stop! Stop! I’m already dead.”
Such a creepy and sad thing to say!
All that death over nothing.
I was trying not to think about my mom, but that was impossible. She was going to need chemo. She was going to lose her hair. She might lose both of her boobs. She was going to look sick and sad and not like herself, and there was a chance I wouldn’t even recognize her by the time I got home. My eyes were watering and I knew that if I started crying I probably wouldn’t stop.
Then I remembered the letter outside my sister’s door, my beautiful sister’s door. For a minute I thought about Paige Parker as well, with her perfect skin and giant boobs, about how much boys liked her and how much Doon hated her. My head started to pound harder and I closed my eyes to make the letters inside the envelope go away, to squeeze them out of my mind. They weren’t written in blood, but they felt just as sinister, and my sister just dismissed them, like the maid who told Manson he had the wrong house the day before he sent his followers back to murder everyone. And now I was living with Delia. And my mother thought I was as toxic as any zombie hippie. And she was probably dying and just not telling me. I took two aspirin and waited to feel better, but I didn’t.
My sister’s windows opened onto the valley below, with nothing but a sheer metallic curtain to shut out the night. The view could be beautiful, when she lit candles and watched the moon, but there was no telling who was looking in. I hunched down further into the couch and covered my head with a blanket, peering at the chalk-black sky through a pocket of light like I had done when I was a little girl and scared of the dark.
I wondered if my mom was feeling bad about what she’d said to me, or if my sister cared that she’d driven off and left me here with nothing but a pizza box and plastic silverware for protection. The dogs a few doors down started barking wildly at something, and I repeated to myself, It’s probably a rabbit; it’s probably a rabbit; it’s probably a rabbit until they quieted again. I closed my eyes to try to sleep, but instead I just heard my mom telling me that it was my fault she was sick, that I was carcinogenic: a human cigarette without a warning label.
Finally, I gave up trying to sleep and opened the book again, because the only thing harder to think about tonight than the women in the Manson family was the women in my own.
6
My mother left a long message in the night. I played it three times before my sister finally came home from Dex’s place. Anna, darling, I’m so sorry. I don’t want you to ever think that you can’t come home. I just think you’d have so much more fun there this summer, spending time with your sister. Birch is going to be in the day care at Lynette’s work, and I want to rest, to really heal and recenter myself. There’s so little time for that. I’d like for us to talk; we’re so far from how I want us to be as a mother and a daughter. Maybe we could write letters, or e-mails, or something to get to know each other again. And then when we’re both ready, we can be friends. I’d like this summer to be about healing for all of us. You can call me later if you like, and your dad is coming back from Mexico soon, so he should be in touch. I’m sure that he would let you stay with him if you like. I love you so much. I don’t want you to forget that.
That’s my mom’s favorite MO: punch you in the gut and then tell you that she loves you. It’s almost worse than being a garden-variety psychopath, because on top of everything you walk around feeling like you can’t tell what’s true anymore. My mom probably should have been the one to move to Los Angeles. We’re so far from how I want us to be as a mother and a daughter. She was like something out of a bad Tennessee Williams play. We read A Streetcar Named Desire for English this past year, and there were times when my mom seriously reminded me of a dyked-out Blanche DuBois. And it’s not because she’s so southern, but because she likes the idea of things more than the actual things, and she can’t own up to anything she’s actually done. Once she told me: You were such an easy baby, a joy until you turned five or so. Then I just lost track of you. Poor Birch. I wondered if he’d have a longer shelf life, or if she’d turn on him too when he developed an actual personality.
As much as I did not identify with Patricia Krenwinkel, it made me think of how after she was arrested her family wanted to make it like she had this perfect home lif
e, when her parents were both AWOL while she was getting tortured at school for being fat; how her folks separated and Patricia felt like it was her fault. No one seemed to care that she was drinking and smoking pot, or that she’d run away, until mass murder in the news made them look back. They were an awesome family, the Krenwinkels—all you had to do was ask them. Maybe that was part of the appeal of the Manson “family,” not as a family, but as a myth of a family, a clown-collage of bad parenting and anger focused in all the wrong directions. And batshit crazy—it was every bad headline you ever read, supersize—something you could point to at the end of the day and say, Well, I’m not that bad, my life couldn’t suck that hard.
I’d meant to check out front to see if anyone had come during the night, but my sister’s keys rattled in the door first. She had a dead-bolt lock and one of those chains at the top of the door that I’d seen kicked through in 3.5 seconds in true crime reenactments. The security system in the apartment was defunct, though she still kept the sign for it outside her door. Last night I thought I’d heard a car driving past, idling, and I turned on a light and slept with the covers over my head. My sister’s apartment faced a large, sloping hill, and since the curtains were practically see-through, I had tried to maneuver a sheet to cover the glass with little success. Anyone determined could still look inside. I couldn’t imagine how that never bothered my sister, who seemed to think it was no big deal.
Delia said that if you looked carefully, up the hill, there was a house that flew a rainbow flag on Sundays because that was the day they filmed porn, and people wandered around naked talking on their cell phones and eating pizza. She said that as long as people could look out their windows and see something like that, whatever happened in her living room was snoozer central.
“How’d it go?” Delia asked. “Did the pizza come?”
“Do I have to stay here every night?”
“Why? Did you find a hotel you’d prefer?”
She went in the bathroom and half closed the door; the hum of her electric toothbrush made it hard to hear what she was saying. Something about how she was doing me a favor.
American Girls Page 6