American Girls

by Alison Umminger

  But it would have been a lie to say that Sharon Tate was the only person I was thinking about. Roger had probably had me professionally hexed, because every time I saw Sharon Tate, I thought about Paige Parker. Paige looked kind of like Sharon Tate. They were both tall with dirty-blond hair and enormous boobs. Paige wasn’t quite as glamorous, but she tried. Even in gym class she wore pink sneakers with little crystals on the side, and she had a pink phone with rhinestones as well. But they both had that thing that pretty people didn’t usually have—a needy look, like they cared what other people thought. Like they wanted to be liked.

  The weird thing was, I didn’t really have an opinion about Paige one way or another outside of Doon. Paige had started at my school last year, and she took ballet with Doon. Doon hated her like a week of snow-day makeups at the end of the year. I mean she loathed her. If you asked me, Paige didn’t have much of a personality to hate at all. She was more like Sharon Tate, pretty, but pretty boring. But friendships were kind of like poker games. The fact that Doon hated Paige trumped the fact that I didn’t care about her one way or another. I went along with Doon when she talked about how awful Paige was, that she was a slut, a whore, that she hoped her dog died and she got fat. That was a lie, I had more than just gone along with Doon, but I didn’t want to think about it.

  “What did you think?” I asked Dex while the credits rolled.

  “About what?” he said. After the first ten minutes, he’d been working on his pilot and only half watching the film. He didn’t really look up from his computer to answer, which meant he was probably in the middle of fixing a scene or something. I was learning how Dex worked: when to talk to him, when to give him another minute, when to suggest a doughnut run.

  “That movie,” I said. “Why is it a cult classic? Because Sharon Tate was in it?”

  “Probably.” He finished typing and closed his computer.

  “I guess it works for my paper. But I didn’t like watching Sharon Tate. It’s too depressing.”

  “More depressing than reading yourself blind about the Manson girls?”

  “Yes. But it shouldn’t be, right? Does that make me a terrible person? And half the time I can’t even remember the names of the other people who were murdered. I can remember Abigail Folger, because it’s like the coffee, but other than that? It’s like they just evaporate. Why are the murderers the famous people? If Sharon Tate weren’t really beautiful and already famous, I probably wouldn’t remember her name either, right? That’s messed up.”

  “Indeed it is.”

  “That’s it? I thought you’d have something smarter to say.”

  Dex gut-laughed, which made me smile even though I hadn’t meant it as a joke.

  “From a narrative perspective,” Dex said, “maybe it’s because the stories of the victims are already over. And because they hadn’t done anything wrong, there’s really nothing left to learn from their lives, right?”

  I wasn’t sure that he was wrong, but it seemed like a terrible thing to say.

  “But the story of the murders doesn’t really make any sense. It’s crazy how these girls killed all these people, isn’t it? And they look all smiley and hippie-friendly in their pictures. It’s just weird. I thought girls only killed their boyfriends and husbands or rapists. Definitely not pregnant ladies. What’s the lesson there? Women are secretly batshit?”

  “Secretly?” Dex said, giving me his best faux-teacher tilt of the head. “Anna, what ever made you think that women are nicer than men? Has high school changed that much?”

  I thought about Paige Parker again, and then I made myself stop.

  “I guess not. But it’s kind of different, isn’t it? And why do you think they’re always talking about how pretty these girls were—not Sharon Tate, but the killers? I think they look crazy. Look at this: ‘Some thought Susan Atkins was the prettiest.’ What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It doesn’t. But Sharon Tate was fine.”

  I kept going back to that part of the murder, a bunch of okay-looking girls killing the really beautiful one. Not because it was creepy, but because it wasn’t so terribly hard to imagine after all. I had to remind myself that murders hadn’t been planned like that. The Sharon Tate part was an accident, a twist of fate.

  “This paper. You going to write anything about race?”

  “I think it’s just supposed to be about the girls.”

  “But you know they were a bunch of white supremacists, right?” Dex propped his feet on the table and leaned back.

  “Kind of. I hadn’t really been reading that part.”

  And then I felt embarrassed, like a big, shallow, white-girl disappointment.

  “Charles Manson thought he was going to take all his white ladies to some hole in the ground and then rule all the black people left after the great American race war.”

  “Seriously?”

  “How long have you been researching this?”

  “I don’t know. A couple of weeks.”

  “You need to be reading some different books.”

  He was probably right, but I knew that Roger wouldn’t care. All he would care about is that my sister looked beautiful and haunted and had some artsy, made-up past. If I mentioned a race war to him, he’d probably start cursing me in Polish.

  “Do you think Olivia Taylor is ever going to pay me back?”

  “Olivia Taylor? Not a chance.”

  “Seriously? But she’s rich.”

  “You think rich people stay rich by giving away their money?”

  “But I don’t have any money. And my dad is going to kill me when he finds the charge for that stupid bag. How is it that I’ve allegedly stolen a thousand dollars and now I don’t have any money and everyone is mad at me?”

  “Young one,” he said. “You are going to have to ponder that yourself. Doughnut?”

  Dex knew even better doughnut shops than my sister. He told me that he only ate the ones she brought to be nice, but the really good stuff, the crazy flavors, were at Do-Joe, which was in an even more sketchball part of town than the places where Roger filmed. But the doughnuts were otherworldly. I was hooked on a bacon-and-salted-caramel twist.

  “I gotta do my work, kid,” Dex said, and that meant it was time for me to pretend to read my book. I tried not to be obvious while I watched him on the couch.

  If I thought about it just right, I could pretend it was Jeremy sitting there, reading one of the meditation books he toted around and smiling at me and asking how I was every once in a while. Jeremy, who yesterday afternoon had watched a video of Barbara Hoyt with me that we found together on the Internet. She was the Manson girl who ate the hamburger that was supposed to kill her, and I’d told Jeremy that she had testified against her former friends during the trials. She hated them so much that she still showed up to make sure Leslie Van Houten didn’t get parole, forty years later. But here’s the scary thing, when we watched the video, Hoyt looked every bit as crazy as the crazy girls. If you had told me that she was one of the killers, I would have said, “Of course, she’s clearly out of her mind.” She giggled about the trials and acted like she’d just made it to the finals in some idiotic reality show.

  “Remind you of your cult days?” I asked Jeremy.

  He did his best dead-eyed hippie impression and said, “There were no fries with my burger,” and he sounded just like Barbara Hoyt. The guy could act when he wanted to, and even though it didn’t even make sense, we cracked each other up the rest of the afternoon asking for burgers and fries.

  I told myself that I wasn’t falling for Jeremy just because he was beautiful, because then I would have been as bad as anyone else out here, right? Dex moved his mouth while he was reading the lines he was writing, for possibly the world’s stupidest television show, and I kept wondering if there was some planet on which Jeremy was on some other couch, thinking about how when I turned eighteen he could fly me out to LA to live with him. Mars or Jupiter, maybe. Pluto. Not even a planet. Be
cause I didn’t look like Delia. Beauty was such an unfair advantage. In the great balance scale of life, whatever I had to offer was always going to come up short next to someone like her. Everything was so much easier for her, and she didn’t even have the gratitude to stick around for her awesome life. It almost made me want to break the bad news to Dex: “My sister is probably cheating with her ex.” Or at the very least: “My sister is lying to you.”

  That would have solved at least one of my problems—I can just about guarantee I’d have had a plane ticket back east.

  10

  Reading about the weird and savage Hollywood that came out at night was starting to get to me. When my sister dropped me at her place, I would lock the doors and then move a chair in front of them. Since our shopping trip, I felt like I should at least try to stay out of her hair in the evenings, but it wasn’t easy. I didn’t want to admit that I was more spooked by the night, that the wind could sound as sinister as a hand rattling a doorknob, that I felt like at any moment there could be a pounding at the door, and I’d be huddled in the bathroom again, party or no party. I hated that I never sat on her porch and watched the moon, the way Delia talked about doing when she was alone and wanted to feel at peace.

  One night my sister was in such a hurry to get out the door that she left her computer up and running, her opened e-mail spread across the screen just daring me to read it. I resisted the urge to eyeball the messages from her obviously lengthy history of Internet dating, but I opened the ones from Roger. And I wasn’t spying on her because I was nosy. I was nervous. Too much reading about the secluded nature of 10050 Cielo Drive, how people down the hill from the house said that they had heard nothing, but others reported that the screams had carried for three or four miles. And then there was the fact that the same car kept idling outside the house at night. I saw it once, a boxy red Honda that sped away when I peered out the front window. My sister said they were probably just lost, but I knew better. If she didn’t have the sense to be scared of the people around her, I did.

  Roger’s e-mails to Delia were about as short as the ones I got from him, and just as badly written. It is like blood, this hurt I have for you. You and my art are the same, ripped from this place I do not know. How would I be without either? I wonder. I have no answer. Crappy English, but I knew creepy even in translation. And Roger spoke the universal language of sketchball. Fluently. The last one he had written Delia early last week: You are like a haunted place I cannot exercise. I hate and am drawn to at once. It took me a minute to get to exorcise, which made the whole thing funny but not. And my sister never wrote him back. Not once. The last one had some weird quote about “the devil making the light more real” attached to the bottom. I closed her computer and hid it under a pillow. For all I knew Roger was hexing us both.

  When I was a lot younger, my mom took us to church all the time. We went to this super-evangelical church until I came home one day singing, “I’m no kin to the monkey,” and my dad said that was the end of that. The churches we went to after that were a lot less scary, but I still remembered the things we’d been warned about at the church: Satanists, Ouija boards, reading the wrong book or listening to the wrong song and accidentally letting the devil in. My mom, who was otherwise pretty new-age friendly, didn’t think anyone should mess with Satan, and the more I read about the Manson case, the more I didn’t think anyone should either.

  At night, my sleep was all messed up. I had nightmares about the white nightgown soaked red, these happy, smiling vegetarians who thought nothing of putting a knife in the belly of a pregnant lady. And they probably weren’t any different from the long-haired actress wannabes at Whole Foods making sure that their meat was cruelty-free. I worried that I shouldn’t have been reading about the murders at all, that I was catching some sinister wave and something might happen to Birch, or my mother. Maybe my mom was right in keeping me a whole continent away from her while she recovered. I felt like telling my sister and stupid Roger to forget the whole thing. It’s not like Olivia Taylor was going to show up and pay me for the bag, plus interest. The thousand dollars I owed felt more like a million.

  My sister almost caught me reading her e-mails the morning I told her I’d had enough with playing Home Alone. I slammed her computer shut and practically winded myself running to the sink to get a glass of water when I heard her keys at the door. Even though the clock blinked seven forty-five, she had the messy hair and flushed cheeks of someone who had been up since before dawn, working out. She flopped onto the couch and stretched one leg into the air, close to her nose, then the other.

  “I can’t stay here anymore.” I sat beside her and talked to the floor so I wouldn’t lose my train of thought. “You shouldn’t leave me here at night. And you shouldn’t be here either. It could be dangerous.”

  She opened her computer and ignored me for at least two minutes. I almost checked her ears for earplugs.

  “Why?” she finally said. “There’s nothing up here. You’re too big for a coyote to eat. Don’t be so dramatic, Anna. Did you think you were going to become rich and fall in love with a girl named Daisy when you read The Great Gatsby? You’re as suggestible as Cora.”

  “I am not.”

  “Yes. You are.” She typed as she talked, pausing to delete, type, delete. “But you can come over to Dex’s if you want to. He has a couch and I don’t think he’ll mind.”

  “Thank you.”

  Before shutting the computer down, she logged out of her e-mail account. That was a first.

  “I get jumpy when Mercury is in retrograde. Yesterday Roger shot me on the steps of an apartment building where a stalker had killed an actress, a young one. She opened the door, and that was it. It’s the case that gave us the stalking laws we have now, so I guess that’s something good to come out of it, but it’s really eerie, being in all these places that look so, I don’t know, regular.” Delia’s eyes narrowed as she talked, like the body was right in front of her.

  “I think the whole thing is creepy. Roger is creepy, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

  “Roger has money and Roger is paying me.”

  “So? I think he’s driving by your house at night. I do. He even told me I should try to be like a Manson girl, you know, for research. I know he’s paying me, but he’d probably pay me to eat dog shit, too, and that wouldn’t make it okay.”

  “What are you talking about?” Delia said, laughing for real. “Why would he do any of that? He sees me every day. He doesn’t need to stalk me; driving by my house would be redundant.”

  I wasn’t buying what she had to sell, not with that pitch.

  “Anna, are you having an easy time paying back that money you owe Mom? Or your dad? Assuming that we forget that you’re living rent-free and eating my food? Does money just rain from the sky?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it doesn’t for me, either, okay? I can work five jobs one year and have nothing the next. In this town, unless you are insane, you say yes to everything within reason.”

  The last time I mentioned the stalker, Delia repainted her just-manicured nails. This time, she took a pair of tweezers out of her makeup bag and plucked at the stray hairs growing beneath her brows.

  “It’s not worth it if you wind up dead.”

  “Dead?” she said. “You really do have an imagination.”

  “I know about the note,” I said, playing a card I probably should have kept hidden.

  She was quiet for a good five seconds before she answered.

  “What note?”

  “The one Roger left on your door. He thinks you’re a whore. I mean, it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes, does it? He’s trying to ruin your relationship with his stupid movie, and he secretly hates you at the same time. I’ll bet he hired that lady to bang on your doors at night. Don’t you remember that awful thing that he said to you when you broke up?”

  Delia slammed her fist on the table.

  “I told you never to bring that up. Pe
ople say stupid things when relationships end. I’m over it. And it’s none of your business. None. Get it? It’s not Roger driving by, okay?”

  She was lying. I could tell because her lips were moving.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know. It could be a million different things. It could be press, right? Ever heard of them? They might have gotten wind about Roger’s film. I have a feeling it’s going to be huge.”

  I gave her a good, hard “Not on this earth” stare.

  “Okay, I have a feeling it might be the actress that I beat for the zombie role. She probably decided to see what life was like without her meds and is taking it out on me. Once she’s back on them I’ll be fine. Happy?”

  She wasn’t going to tell me the truth.

  “How is that better?”

  “It isn’t better, but she’s done this kind of thing before and she drifts on to the next person who beats her out. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. Just ignore it. I can’t afford the emotional energy to make this an issue. My relationship is suffering. I need to start making money soon, or I’m going to be back in Atlanta working retail, okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m not trying to make you mad. And I’m sorry I looked in your purse, okay?”

  “An apology doesn’t change anything, Anna. One more strike and you’re on the next plane to Atlanta. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  I had no idea what was really going on in her head. And while I definitely didn’t want to blow my invitation to stay with her in Dex’s condo, I knew for a fact that she needed to start taking the crazy around her a little more seriously. She could get as mad at me as she wanted to, but I was doing her a favor. Someone needed to wake her up.

  “Why is everything always about money?” I said. “Can’t Dex just hire you?”

  “No, he can’t. They don’t want to see old people on kids’ shows.”

  “It’s not a kids’ show, and you’re twenty-six. That’s not old.”