American Girls

by Alison Umminger

  Then she lifted her face and pulled a lone black hair out of her chin. I almost threw up in my mouth.

  “It is a kids’ show, and for a kids’ show, I am old. Those are the facts. I don’t really have any more time to make it. I have to keep swinging. I have to.”

  And suddenly she looked determined. Creepy-determined. I always thought of things coming easy to my sister, of life handing her whatever she wanted. Two years ago she was almost cast as a Bond girl and filmed a sitcom pilot that never aired. She worked with Roger, but she was definitely doing him the favor. Now she was strictly B movies and reality TV, with Roger’s stupid film suddenly at the top of her priority list. Maybe I just didn’t like to think that Delia could fail, but for the first time I could see that she’d thought about it. Thought hard. Even with something as stupid as the herpes commercial, there were probably a hundred other girls who’d be just as geared up to pretend to have herpes.

  “I hope you get herpes,” I said.

  My sister finally cracked a smile in spite of herself.

  “Me too,” she said. “And if not, there’s always gonorrhea, right?”

  “Or the clap. Or is that the clap?”

  I couldn’t wait to pack my bag and sleep in that big, insulated condo building where you could hear your neighbors walking heavily across the floors above you, their weird sex noises muffled through the walls. I was triple-locking the doors and never leaving again.

  11

  By July, I’d spent most of my summer reading about people doing things so horrible that they seemed almost unbelievable. On the other hand, in this very same world there were things so amazing, so completely unlikely, that they sounded just as made up when you tried to tell them to another person. How could I text Doon, “Jeremy Taylor whisked me away from the set today to spend the afternoon with him. Just him,” without sounding like a pathological liar? A delusional lunatic? Still, that’s exactly what happened. When Dex and I arrived on the lot, we didn’t even make it out of the parking lot before Jeremy came up and asked if he could “borrow me” for the morning. Borrow me? He could have flat-out stolen me for the next two months and I wouldn’t have complained.

  “I thought about you this morning,” Jeremy said. He hooked his thumbs through the belt loops of his plaid shorts. The shorts plus the pink polo shirt he was wearing meant that the “Chips” had been “playing golf” on deck. I had on a flowered sundress patterned with oversize red flowers and emerald-green vines, one of my sister’s choices from the consignment shop on Melrose. I felt absurdly overdressed, but Delia was right, Jeremy didn’t seem to notice. “Well, to be honest, I was thinking about my grandfather.”

  “Oh,” I said, not exactly sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. “Where does he live?”

  He opened the door for me, and I climbed into a fortress of a vehicle, similar to Olivia’s but even larger. I buckled my seat belt and willed myself not to act as nervous as I felt.

  “He died a few years ago,” Jeremy said after he started the car and slowly drove us out of the studio compound. “He was a great character actor in the seventies. If you’ve seen any of those old gangster films, he’s the skinny one with the droopy eyes.”

  I was drawing a complete blank. I hated gangster movies.

  “I’d probably know him if I saw him.”

  “Definitely. He was hilarious. I still think about him almost every day.”

  I’m pretty sure that he was thinking about him right then, because he got quiet and for a while we sat there in silence, moving through a part of LA that I hadn’t visited before. As much fun as it was to be on the set, I liked the neighborhoods outside the make-believe world of Hollywood, the thirty different LAs hidden inside of LA. And the neighborhoods could change so fast that if you weren’t paying attention, you could close your eyes and miss one. I was worried for a minute that Jeremy was like my sister, that he was disappearing into a bad mood that was somehow going to wind up being my fault, but then he started humming along to the opening chords of a song that had just begun to play. He turned the volume up.

  “Who is that?” I asked, pointing at his stereo. “If I didn’t already know every song they ever recorded, I’d say that sounded like Freekmonkee.”

  “You like Freekmonkee?”

  “Um, yeah. That would be an understatement. My best friend, Doon, knows more about them than their own parents.”

  “Cool. Josh hates them.”

  “He hates Freekmonkee? And you let him live?”

  “He’s working on his rap CD. I guess they’re the wrong kind of Freek-ee.”

  If my dad had made a comment like that, I would have groaned, but Jeremy’s jokes were cute even when they bombed. And the thought of his brother making a rap album was actually hilarious, though I was pretty sure that being the first to laugh at that idea was not a strong move.

  “So what is this?”

  “It’s the new Freekmonkee. Lost in Space. They have the same label as Olivia, so she got me a copy.”

  “Get. Out. Get, get, get, get out.”

  I turned the music up louder before realizing that I should have asked first.

  “But the first single isn’t out until next month—I just heard Karl Marx say so. On a podcast, I mean. Is this a CD or just the music? How many songs did you get?”

  I was babbling like a deranged toddler.

  “It’s ten songs. There’s a promo case back there somewhere. Here.” He pushed a button and skipped to the next song. “This is going to be the first single.”

  I had officially died and gone to heaven. Karl Marx’s low voice half chanted, We’re all just part of the void. Travelers on a lonely path. Lost in space. Lost on Earth. No looking back, no looking back.

  “This is amazing,” I said. “Amazing. Can I play some for my friend?”

  Jeremy shrugged, which I took as a yes. I recorded the next verse and texted it to Doon.

  He smiled, and if it weren’t almost too crazy to allow in the realm of possible, I think he put his hand on mine and squeezed.

  “Killer song, right? Every song is that good.” He moved his hand like he was going to give me the Chips Ahoy! salute, but stopped himself.

  I gave him my very best “Hey buddy, old pal” smile, so he’d know that I wasn’t crazy enough to think that he’d really be attracted to me, that his hand on mine was an accident we could both forget.

  “Look,” he said, leaning across me and pointing out the window on the passenger side, “That’s where we’re going.” He pointed to a stretch of rolling hills just off the street. We were outside the heart of Los Angeles, but other than that, I had no idea where we were. “Holy Cross Cemetery,” he continued. “It’s where my grandpa is buried.”

  I had no idea what to say. If you had asked me where we were going that day, I think a cemetery would have been about one millionth on the list.

  “Really?” I said. “Do you go and talk to him?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes I just go because it’s peaceful and they don’t allow photographers. Low stalking factor. When I was a kid, my grandpa took us there because we loved Dracula. You know who Bela Lugosi was?”

  “Was he Dracula?”

  “The best Dracula.”

  “I know who he was,” I said.

  “Did you know they buried him in his cape? Josh and I used to plan how we would try to come back one night and see if he was still there. We were gonna steal the cape if no one was around. Obviously, never happened.”

  “It’s kind of a funny thought,” I said. I had spent so much time watching him play a kid that I almost forgot he had been an actual kid.

  He parked the car, and we went to walk the grounds. I hadn’t really spent any time in a cemetery, and maybe it was the kind of place that would be scary at night, but during the day it was beautiful. Los Angeles stretched out below as we passed through beautifully twisted iron gates. The hills had shrines carved into them, the votives inside both burning and burnt out, and stat
ues of the Virgin Mary kept watch over the dead. I didn’t know much about Catholics, but I did know that they were crazy about Mary.

  In places, the landscape was like something out of Middle-Earth but without the hobbits. At the top of one of the hills, two trees grew out of a hole cut in the side of the minimountain, and under the trees a shrine had been hollowed out. Inside the shrine, ten or twelve candles in long cylinders had been lit and left to burn.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said to Jeremy, who was walking ahead of me but had stopped. “And so quiet.”

  “I know,” Jeremy said. “I think my grandpa is probably happy here. My grandma is pretty loud,” and we both laughed like I knew exactly what he was talking about. “I remembered something the other day, and I thought you might think it was cool.”

  We started walking down a gently sloped hill pocked with smooth granite graves that vanished into the grass if you weren’t looking. There was a cemetery in downtown Atlanta that I had been to with my mother once, and it seemed like even in death, Southerners were trying to outdo each other. Every grave was bigger and showier than the one before. But this was the exact opposite. Whoever designed it had made sure the gravestones almost disappeared into the ground, but the weird thing was that it made me think about death even more.

  “Are we going to your grandfather’s grave?” I asked.

  “Definitely,” Jeremy said. “I always light a candle for him when I’m here. But I’m looking for something.” He scanned the ground and finally pointed to one of the identical gray-black stones that we’d been walking around. “Sharon Tate,” he said.

  Once, when I was singing in chorus and it was hot outside, I had been standing too long with my knees locked and before anyone knew it, even before I could figure out what was happening, I had this feeling like I was on fire and drowning at the same time, and I passed out completely. The next thing I knew, someone was giving me water and propping me up, trying to decide whether I needed to go to the hospital. When Jeremy pointed to that gravestone, I had the same feeling, like something in the ground had buckled and I was going to collapse.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” I said, kneeling in case I fell. “It’s just so real.”

  I said “real,” but that wasn’t the word I was looking for; the word I meant was “sad.” The kind of sad that would swallow you whole if you sat beside it too long. The gravestone marked four bodies. The top read “In Loving Memory of” and the left side continued with “Our loving daughter and beloved wife of Roman, Sharon Tate Polanski.” The dates she lived were separated by the thin slivers of a cross, 1943–1969. Beside that were the dates for her mother and, at the bottom, her sister. But as haunting as it was, the name that knocked me down was just below Sharon’s, “Paul Richard Polanski,” followed by “their baby,” and no dates beneath the name. No dates below this tiny person who both was and wasn’t, but who had a name. I thought about Birch and the way he had kicked inside my mom when her belly was so big that I could line up Cheetos on it, the way he already had a name, and a face that we could see in his little ultrasound pictures, and how much I had been looking forward to meeting him.

  “I’m sorry,” Jeremy said. “I don’t know why I thought this was a good idea. Do you need some water? Should I call Dex?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m fine. I really am. I’m glad I saw this.”

  And I was, because it was important. Because I needed to keep those murders as real and sad as they actually were, or there was no point in any of it.

  “But can we go see your grandfather?”

  “Sure,” Jeremy said. “And we can say howdy to the Count while we’re at it.”

  “If he’s there,” I joked, trying to pull myself out of the space I was in.

  “Your color’s coming back,” Jeremy said. He gestured at the bottle of water he’d been carrying. I took a sip, and my mouth flooded with saliva. I willed myself not to pass out.

  “I’ve never seen someone’s face really turn white. That was wild.”

  “Great,” I said. “Good to know.”

  * * *

  On the ride home from the cemetery, I wrote the name Paul Richard Polanski on the sheet of paper that I had taken to carrying around with me, next to the name of his mother, Sharon Tate Polanski, and alongside Jay Sebring, Rosemary LaBianca, Leno LaBianca, Steve Parent, Abigail Folger, and Wojciech Frykowski. The names of the dead, which, like the gravestones themselves, could be lost all too easily in the clutter around them. I refolded the piece of paper and put it back in my pocket.

  “What’s that?” Jeremy asked.

  “A list,” I said. “Some names I need to remember.”

  He smiled and looked at me like I was a puppy.

  “It’s cute that you make lists and carry them around.”

  “Really? My mom complains that it ruins the laundry when they disintegrate.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” he said. We were stuck in traffic, but he looked at the convertible in front of us instead of my way when he asked, “And you don’t have to answer. Did you really steal five hundred dollars from your parents?”

  He didn’t ask in a judgy way, like my sister, but I could tell that he wanted to know. I started to formulate a lie in my mind, but just as I was about to tell it, I realized that if I started down that road, I was going to wind up exactly like my sister. So I told him the truth. I broke the whole scene down for him in cinematic detail, so that if he decided that he liked me, that he wanted to keep hanging out with me, at least he’d know who he was dealing with.

  I started at the beginning. The week before I took the card, my mom and dad had shanghaied me with a “family meeting” at my favorite Starbucks. I told Jeremy about how when they first split up, if either of them was late for a pickup, I would sit in the corner and listen in on people’s first dates, or the baristas bitching about who they thought was throwing up in the ladies’ room. I loved to put on my headphones and pretend to listen to music and spy. My parents decided it was a good neutral spot when they first separated, when they yelled constantly about “their needs” and who was doing what wrong and screwing me up for all eternity. Starbucks introduced the public shame factor. They learned to hate each other politely and with the volume dialed down.

  “My dad and mom only communicate over e-mail,” Jeremy interrupted. “When Josh and I were kids, they would have their assistants trade us off, kind of like we were secret documents. Josh would joke that it was because if they caught us with the other one, they’d have to kill us.”

  He said the last part in a spy-movie Russian accent, and I laughed.

  “I’m pretty sure that if my parents could have afforded assistants, they would have been all over that.”

  I could remember the details of the meeting exactly. My dad had worn a pink shirt, the button-down kind that his new girlfriend, Cindy, probably bought him. She’s a stylist, which means that she gets paid by adults to dress them in age-inappropriate clothing and then tell them that they look “hip.” Atlanta is full of tight-assed, bleached-blond women who look twenty from behind and turn around to reveal their Botoxed, eight-thousand-year-old, veiny-handed glory. Those were Cindy’s clients.

  “My dad met her on the Internet, the same Internet he was always warning me about,” I said to Jeremy.

  “Parents,” he said. “‘Physician, heal thyself,’ right?”

  I nodded.

  My mom had looked tired, but then she always looked tired. She had left Birch with Lynette, which meant that she was fiddling with her boobs to see if they were going to explode.

  “Mom!”

  “Oh,” she said. “Sorry. I forget sometimes.”

  “You forget all the time.”

  She closed her eyes for a minute and then opened them. I don’t think she even heard me.

  “Anna,” my father said in his sad, authoritarian voice. Pink shirt, soy-latte Dad, I cannot take you seriously. “You have to start treating Lynette with respect, and Cindy
as well.”

  Poor, poor step-dults. My parents both looked so earnest, like they really cared whether or not I pretended not to hear Lynette when she wanted me to play Cinderella for an hour, or that it hurt Cindy’s feelings that I didn’t want to go with her to buy overpriced purple jeans for some third-tier hip-hop star. I had almost convinced myself that I could leverage the situation into a new phone, when my mom came out with this beautiful and well-rehearsed number:

  “And because your father is starting his own business, and I’d like to stay home with Birch, we won’t be able to afford your school anymore. We have a thousand dollars allotted for your activities for the year. Five hundred for the fall and five hundred for the spring. It’s really a lot, if you think about it, but that’s only if we take you out of Lakewood and put you at McKinley.”

  My dad was staring right through me to the table behind us.

  My mom checked her right boob again.

  One of the baristas raised her overplucked eyebrow at me, like even she couldn’t believe this was going down at Starbucks.

  “We looked at the test scores, and they’re really not that different at McKinley. It’s close to the house, and you can walk home if you need to.” My mom was giving me the same look she gives a chicken when she wants to see if it’s done or not. “We know that you have friends at Lakewood, but you’ll make new friends.”

  “You make new friends,” I said. “I like my friends.”

  I had complained about Lakewood every morning my mom dragged me there, but suddenly it seemed like an island in the Caribbean. Lakewood was small, and there was a park on the campus where we could go outside to eat lunch. The teachers at McKinley looked like weekend pedophiles, and the cafeteria might as well have been a prison. I’d heard stories from Doon. I didn’t need my mom to give me the hard sell.

  “Now, Anna,” my dad countered. “This isn’t easy for us to have to say.”

  “Then don’t. You don’t have to say anything, do you? You just want to because you have some anorexic teenager buying you pink shirts, and you’re too lazy to work now that the baby is born. And he’s a toddler now, in case you hadn’t noticed. He’d be happy if you went back to work. I wouldn’t want to stay around that crazy house all day, why would he?”