American Girls

by Alison Umminger

  That made her forget about her boobs for a minute.

  “That’s enough, Anna. I don’t expect you to understand how much work it is to take care of you and Birch.”

  A woman at the next table craned her head to get a closer look, and I didn’t even care.

  “Include me out,” I said. “You don’t take care of me. You take care of you. And stop touching your boobs.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was thinking about Birch.”

  That was it. I was done with both of them. Poor Birch, who was still stuck on my mom’s boobs half the day, when she could easily have kicked him off and given him a glass of milk or something normal. He was going to have thousands of dollars in therapy bills. Millions. Good luck when they realized they only had five hundred dollars for that when he turned thirteen.

  I was telling Jeremy all of this, the same way I’d run over the scene about a million times in my head, when I realized something that I hadn’t before. I realized that maybe, when we were at the Starbucks, my mom might have already found the lump in her breast. She might not have just been touching her boobs to see whether or not they were full, the way I’d seen her touch them about a million times since Birch had been born. She might have been touching her boobs because they were breaking her heart. And there I was, not helping things one little bit.

  “You okay?” Jeremy asked. “You went missing.”

  I had gone missing. And as much as I liked him and wanted him to like me, I wasn’t ready to tell him about my mom.

  So I told Jeremy the rest of the original truth, that I had taken the five hundred dollars because I figured if that was all the money they had saved for me, at least I could be the one to decide how to spend it. It might have been real stealing to take seventy-four more dollars from Lynette’s wallet, but I figured they wouldn’t want me getting to LA and thumbing a ride. Not even they would think that was a bad use of money, in the end.

  I stopped again because what I’d said sounded like the whole story, but it wasn’t. I’d left out the part that I’d made my mother swear not to tell my father, the real reason my mom probably first got it into her head that I needed to change schools, the thing that made me most like a Manson girl—though after seeing Sharon Tate’s grave I knew Roger was an actual mental patient for even starting with the comparison. I might have been a lousy person, but only an idiot like Roger would think that made me the same. I wasn’t. Not even kind of.

  Still.

  “There was one other thing,” I said. “This girl. Paige Parker. My friend Doon hates her because the guy she likes likes Paige more.” The whole situation sounded stupid and lame when I said it out loud, but I closed my eyes and spit the rest out. “Anyhow, Doon said that we could text her anonymously, so we did. Stupid things that were supposed to be kind of scary, like ‘I see you in your tutu, you whale.’ Then they got meaner and we attached some pictures. Like, Doon wrote that everyone wished she hadn’t been born at all and sent a picture of a gravestone and a gun.”

  I held my breath a second before I finished. “But even though texting Paige was her idea, I was the one who sent the worst picture. After Doon had gone for the night, I found a picture of a dead fetus from an anti-abortion site. It looked like something out of a horror movie, I guess that was probably the point, and I sent it to Paige and wrote, ‘Your mom should have scraped you out early.’” I heard my voice start to shake and I closed my eyes tighter while I finished. “I didn’t even do it because I hated Paige. I know that sounds crazy, but I wasn’t really thinking about her at all. I was thinking about Doon and how funny she would think the message was, and that I couldn’t wait to tell her. It was like, in my mind, what we were doing really didn’t have a person on the other end, getting the texts.”

  I had no idea what Jeremy was thinking, and I didn’t want to open my eyes and find out. “Anyhow, it turned out they weren’t anonymous like Doon had said, and I guess Paige liked to cut herself and had her phone open to the texts while she was doing it, and her mom caught her. Then her mom called mine, and my mom flipped out about the abortion pic. My mom said that if she was wasting money for me to become a bully, then she was flushing money down the drain. I couldn’t explain to her that I hadn’t even meant it with the fetus picture, that even that was kind of Doon’s idea too, but I knew that if I got her into trouble she’d never speak to me again. How was I supposed to know that perfect Paige Parker was a cutter? She was the popular one, what did she have to be mad about? After that my mom treated me like I was going to go buy a gun and shoot up the cafeteria. It was horrible. She wouldn’t listen to anything I said. I know they acted like they were changing my school because of money, but I think they just gave up on me. Who wants to throw money at a lost cause, right?”

  I’d told him the ugly truth, my entire crappy past life in Atlanta. The parts that were all my fault and the parts that were only kind of my fault. And the awful thing was, even when I was talking about Paige Parker, I was still more mad at her than sorry for her. Maybe it was meaner than I’d thought, but it was still just a stupid picture. It’s not like I’d sent her an actual fetus. And now she was ruining my life from two thousand miles away. So much for Jeremy liking me. By the time I was finished we were back on the lot, I’d probably been talking forever. I opened my eyes to see what he was doing, but he was looking out his window.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I should have given you the short version. You probably think I’m a terrible person now.”

  “No,” he said, turning toward me. “I wanted to know. I can tell that was hard for you to say. Thanks for letting me know the truth. Someone told me the other day that once you say something it loses its power.” He was starting to sound like Lynette or my mom. Not a great sign. “I’m glad you wanted to come with me. Is it okay if I drop you? I didn’t realize the time and I have to get to a meeting across town.”

  Great. I had officially scared him off. Maybe there was a reason no one asked me about my life. I was like some prehistoric aunt that your parents forced you to visit once a year—blabbing like I’d just learned how to talk, carrying weird lists around in my pocket, and not even all that nice at the end of the day.

  “Catch you tomorrow,” Jeremy said, and he looked for a minute as if he might reach over to hug me, but didn’t. I’d gone from sad puppy to untouchable. Double great. “It was fun, Anna. I’m glad you got to see my grandpa.”

  By the time I crossed the thirty feet to the entrance of the set, Jeremy was long gone.

  12

  The next week was busy on the set with shooting and reshooting an episode where, I’d bet my last dollar, Josh was deliberately flubbing his lines. At night, Dex wrote and I tried to finish up my research for Roger’s movie. I told Roger that I was done pretending to be a Manson girl, it was too weird, and he raised my salary to fifteen bucks per hour and told me to focus on the details around the murders. He had the girl figured out, but he wanted more background.

  My sister claimed to have two auditions and then I think she was meeting Roger, but I had started to assume that she only told me what she thought I wanted to hear. If I lied, it was usually because I had a reason, but I think Delia lied for the sake of lying—it made her feel like she had a leg up on everyone. She was a strange one, my sister.

  Dex was rewriting his pilot, and I helped him decide which parts sounded best. It was a drama about a single mom, a white lady in New Orleans whose husband, a black man, had been lost during Hurricane Katrina. She was raising their biracial kid and trying to figure out whether her husband was still alive or not—because his body was never found. Dex told me that he grew up in New Orleans, and his mom raised him, and he wanted to make a show that would be like a giant thank-you to her. He also said this was the ninth pilot he had written in three years, so he wasn’t exactly counting on anything.

  I had stopped feeling like the 130-pound weight Delia had dumped on Dex’s doorstep. Dex and I had gotten good at working side by side, and
I found myself wishing that he and my sister would be forever. I even searched the top of his dresser for a ring, but I guess that was wishful thinking. When Delia showed up, Dex talked a lot more, but they bickered about how much she was gone. My sister bickered with everyone she ever dated, so that wasn’t a shock or anything. In our family, conflict was a form of affection. Still, there was something easy about the times when it was just me and Dex, like we were family already.

  “You still reading about Chuckles Manson?”

  “I am. It’s pretty depressing.”

  Dex laughed and thumped me over the head with the folded pages of a script, like, Duh, genius, what’d you expect it to be? Uplifting?

  “I know,” I said. “I know.” For longer than you’d think possible, I’d avoided reading more about the actual murders and just read about the girls, the trials, the crazy that came before and after. But now I was knee-deep in the awful thing itself, and it made me feel dirty.

  “I have a question,” I said. “Do you think he was psychic? I know he was crazy and all that, but how does a person do what he does? I don’t mean just the awful part, but making all those girls do those things.”

  “Those girls had choices.”

  “Okay, they had choices, but Susan Atkins said that he could see right through her when he met her. And she wasn’t the only one.”

  “Anna,” Dex said, “never underestimate the power of telling a person exactly what she wants to hear.”

  He was talking to me like I was an idiot. And he was missing the point.

  “But what about the White Album? He thought the Beatles were talking to him, like they had some kind of psychic connection. Have you read all the stuff that he thought was written directly to him? Did you read that one of the lawyers thought that Manson stopped his watch in the courtroom? Don’t tell me I’m crazy, but sometimes it seems like it’s more than a coincidence. Some of it’s, I don’t know, it’s just weird. What if he was right?”

  Dex sat up straighter and closed his computer. “You mean right about hiding in a hole in the ground and starting a race war by having a bunch of crazy white people kill other white people? Was he right about every garden-variety racist comment that came out of his mouth? Oh, yeah, and did you miss that part of Helter Skelter where he called Hitler a ‘tuned-in guy’ out to ‘level the karma of the Jews’? That dude wasn’t exceptional. He was paranoid, actually insane, and straight-out racist. Is that what he might have been right about?”

  My face had probably gone blotchy and red, shamed by the stupidity of my brain-mouth connection. Everything I wanted to say kept coming out wrong, and now I sounded like some dumb bougie suburbanite, so white that it had bleached my brain. I couldn’t handle two of my sister’s boyfriends thinking I was no different from a Manson girl.

  “No,” I said. “You know that’s not what I mean. It’s just creepy, that’s all. Have you read these lyrics? I mean, ‘Sexy Sadie’? Did you know that’s what Charles Manson called Susan Atkins? Sadie. That’s weird, right?”

  Dex shook his head and walked to the other side of the room. Next to his bookcase, there was a cardboard box full of old vinyl albums. He closed his eyes, held his hand in the air, and then reached into the box dramatically, like he was drawing numbers for the lotto.

  “Here we go,” he said, pulling out an old LP from the back of the box. “Beastie Boys, Licensed to Ill, perfect. So let’s say that Charlie wakes up in 1987, Reagan’s in office, there are homeless people everywhere, he’s still a white boy, and black men are still plucking his nerves, but he’s about to talk to one of the great frat-party bands of the decade. The Beastie Boys.”

  I started laughing, because it did sound stupid.

  “Licensed to Ill. Clearly that refers to a race war. The Beastie Boys, being white and from New York and not having discovered Buddhism or feminism yet, are letting Charlie know that he has license to do whatever his little cracker heart desires. ‘Brass Monkey.’ Well, that funky monkey probably needs to be taken down, but maybe, because it’s brass, it’s strong and it’s going to rise up first, while he hides in some subway hole, right? ‘She’s Crafty.’ You know Charlie probably’s gonna use that on at least five ladies that he found at the Greyhound terminal. ‘Fight for Your Right to Party’?”

  “All right already,” I said. “Maybe that just proves you’re as crazy as Charles Manson.”

  We were both cracking up when Delia came through the door. She’d auditioned for the reality show earlier in the day, which was supposed to be about young actors in Hollywood trying to make it in the business.

  “What are you clowns doing?” She took a box of tofu curry out of the refrigerator and ate it with the door open. “It feels soooooooo good in here. I think my air conditioner is on the fritz. I was dying on the way home.”

  She had another friend, another producer, who had encouraged her to try out, and I could easily imagine my sister, face earnest against some white screen, her name and shaved-down age in bold letters underneath, talking about how hard it was juggling a boyfriend, an ex, and a delinquent half sister. I wondered for a minute how many sketchballs Delia really knew, if there might not be a coven of crazies stalking her apartment, waiting to see if she’d crack. She moved around the kitchen like she was still auditioning, striking a pose against the sink, the countertop, the silverware drawer. Maybe threats didn’t seem real to her because nothing did.

  Dex went into the kitchen as well and kissed her even though she had food in her mouth.

  “Nice,” my sister muttered, still eating.

  “How’d it go?”

  “Terrible,” she said. “They kept asking me about our sex life.”

  “And I’m going to pretend I’m not here,” I said. “But just in case it matters, try to remember that I am.”

  “You wouldn’t have believed the other people there. One woman wasn’t wearing any underwear, and don’t ask me how I knew but suffice it to say that everyone knew. Everyone. I don’t know what my friend was thinking. They asked me how I felt about orgies.”

  “Gross,” I said.

  “I don’t know if it’s gross,” she said. “It’s more Roman than anything, but it’s not my thing. Can you imagine if I took Dex to an orgy?”

  Dex looked like someone had thrown up in his mouth.

  “Have you been to an orgy?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. Lying. “I lived with a girl once who had one while I was filming in Canada. She failed to mention that it was on her list of plans. Let’s just say that I found some of the evidence in the laundry room when I got back. I Lysoled the place and kicked her out the next week.”

  “So it is gross.”

  Delia ignored me. I knew she thought it was nasty, deep in her heart, but she never liked to admit that anything scandalized her.

  “She was being dishonest.”

  What’s that saying? “We always hate the things in others that we see in the mirror”?

  “I’m starting to despise auditions,” she said. “They won’t call me back. I think I was the oldest woman there anyhow.”

  “Seriously? How young was the youngest?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Nineteen?”

  “Did they ask her about orgies?”

  “I have no idea, I wasn’t in her audition.”

  “Can we drop it with the orgies?” Dex said. “Maybe you can both forget that we have a child in the room, but I’m having some trouble.”

  “I’m not a child,” I said. “Besides, I read about orgies most of this afternoon. Did you know the youngest Manson girl was, like, thirteen? That’s younger than me. I’ll bet she did more than hear about orgies.”

  “Great,” Dex said. “I feel better already.”

  “Can I ask a weird question?” I didn’t even know I had a question about orgies, but what the heck. “Do you think that people actually like having orgies, or do you think they just like being able to say that they were in an orgy?”

  “And, scen
e,” Dex said. “You sure you don’t want some ice cream? A lollipop? To go roller-skating?”

  “Ice cream,” I said. “Definitely ice cream.”

  My sister shook her head and narrowed her eyes.

  “Sex talk for ice cream. Kids today can work the system.”

  I shrugged my shoulders and smiled, but I was actually being serious with the question. One of the funny things, reading the Manson family members talk about all the crazy sex, is that they were all like, Yeah, that sex thing, kind of overblown, kind of didn’t really happen like that. It was almost like people wanted the crazy sex thing to be true even if it wasn’t. Mostly, when you read what the Manson family really said about those weeks before the murders, they were short on food and hungry, not horny. But talking about the sex was evidently more interesting than the actual sex. Not that I knew anything about sex myself, but sex with a bunch of dirty hippies not being awesome seemed totally possible. The story was better than the stinky, hungry truth.

  It’s not like that would have been a first.

  13

  Dex said one of the fastest ways to make money in LA was to be an extra on a sitcom—totally legal for minors, and the unions made sure the pay was sweet. He wrote me into a Chips Ahoy! episode, where I played the quiet half of a nerdy sister pair whose boat comes across the Chips’ yacht just before a hurricane hits. I got to wear glasses even bigger than my regular ones, and some crazy plaid miniskirt and kneesocks, and my one line was “Does not compute, buttercup,” which I tried to say like a computer, but I think I just sounded like the nervous lunatic I was. Dex said I was great, and even Josh gave me a high five when the scene was over. “I love those socks,” Jeremy said. “And the glasses. Classic.”

  “Yeah,” Josh said. “A few more cameos and you’ll be the next Olivia Taylor.” He was cracking himself up.