American Girls

by Alison Umminger

  Only most of the time, the news wasn’t bad. I kept getting calls from my mom about how great her life was going. She’d found a circle of moms who would donate their breast milk to Birch (I cannot even get into how hard I almost threw up). She was meditating and imagining me with a circle of light all around me. Like a bull’s-eye, I said, and she didn’t even pretend to laugh. But she never apologized, never even admitted that she’d said the horrible things that she’d said. Oh, Anna, you hear things that aren’t there. I don’t remember saying anything like that. In fact, I would never say anything like that. The whole thing was making me crazy. When I wasn’t worried sick that she was dying, I was ready to quit talking to her forever.

  It would be wrong to say that I had a genuine premonition when Delia’s number flashed while I was tucked in my usual corner on the Chips Ahoy! set, but at the same time I had this crazy sense that something wasn’t right. Everyone had just finished the table-reading when my sister called, her voice cloudy, telling me to get to the hospital. It took me a minute to realize that she wasn’t talking about Mom, she was talking about herself. She sounded foggy.

  “Anna,” she said. “Just get someone to drive you. Do not, I repeat, do not let Dex know. Just make something up.”

  “Are you okay?”

  She started to cry. “No, I’m not okay. My nose is broken.”

  “Your nose is broken?”

  “Don’t say that, okay? Don’t say anything. Just get here and take me home. I don’t have money for a cab. I was mugged. Someone stole my wallet.”

  “Oh no!”

  “Please,” she said. “Just hurry.”

  I must have looked as worried as I felt, because Jeremy stopped milling around the food table and asked what was wrong.

  “My sister,” I said. “She got mugged. She’s in the hospital, and she needs a ride back to her place.”

  “I’ll get Dex. I just saw him.”

  “No,” I said, and hated that this was going to make me sound like an even bigger sketchball, a sketchball-ette from a family of the same. “She doesn’t want him to know. I think she’s really medicated. She said her nose is broken.”

  “I can drive you,” Jeremy said.

  “Really? That would be amazing.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I just realized, I don’t even know what hospital she’s at.”

  “What part of town was she in?”

  “Downtown. She’s shooting an indie film.” And I even had the sense not to say “with her ex-boyfriend.”

  “I think I know.”

  Jeremy was a slow driver, which I guess I had noticed before, but it hadn’t bothered me. I foolishly chalked it up to his wanting to show me the wonders of Los Angeles at a speed that I could appreciate. Now, when I needed to be at the hospital ten minutes ago, the fact that he was a terrible driver was becoming clearer with each stop on yellow and long pause as he rounded a corner. He was cautious. And by cautious, I do not merely mean “safe driver,” but scared old man going ten miles an hour down the road. For the first few minutes I looked at the faces of the angry motorists as they passed, throwing us shade for slowing them down. How had I missed this?

  “Do you need to call your mom?” Jeremy asked.

  “I can’t,” I said. And then before he could ask why not: “I can’t because she’s sick herself. She won’t know what to do. No one ever knows what to do in my family.”

  He pumped his brakes as we came to a four-way stop. Then he waited well past when my sister or Olivia would have turned, meandering through the intersection. He was going to get me killed. Then my whole family would be in the hospital.

  “I’m sorry about your mom,” he said. “What does she have?”

  “Cancer,” I said, and I realized I hadn’t said the word out loud since that first night. It sounded ugly and heavy.

  “Anna,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me? I’m really sorry.”

  “Remember how you told me that once you say something, it kind of goes away? It’s not like that with my mom. It’s more like if I don’t talk about it, it won’t be real. Like saying she’s sick really makes her sick. That probably sounds crazy. Plus, my sister hates talking about it. My whole family is insane, you realize that, right?”

  My mom’s surgery was scheduled for tomorrow. Lynette had called yesterday to tell us that while they were optimistic, they wouldn’t really know anything until they were inside her. She’d decided not to have both her breasts removed, just the one, and to have chemo and reconstructive surgery. Lynette said that she was depressed. Birch was fussy, and every time she nursed him she became inconsolable. I think she’d really appreciate a call, some flowers, as much goodwill as you can send. Her mental state has me worried. I gave her a call later and she told me how much she loved me and missed me and couldn’t wait until I got home. How I was her baby, that she wanted her babies around her. But I didn’t want to be there the way I had when I first heard the news.

  “It’s the kind where she’ll get better. Only she doesn’t sound so good. I think she’s getting really depressed. The more she tells me that she’s trying to visualize her body becoming this healing space, the more I think she’s worse off than she’s letting me know. She was breastfeeding my brother, and she had to stop, and she thinks that my running out to LA just made it worse, so that sucks too. It all sucks. It’s a big fat pit of suck.”

  “And this all happened since you came out here?”

  “Yes.”

  The sad-puppy look again. Not what I had wanted. I did not want to be his good deed for the day. I wanted to be something more.

  We parked near the entrance, and I heard my sister before I saw her. She was yelling at Roger, “Only you would pay a poor person to mug someone and think they wouldn’t actually mug them. You get that people aren’t pretending to be poor, right?” The hospital lights had a blue-tinged fluorescence, and Delia looked like something that had crossed over from hell. Her hair was wild; her face was swollen around a tent of a splint pitched on the center of her face.

  “If my face is ruined, I will sue you for every penny I could have made in the best of all possible worlds.”

  Roger looked desperate. I dare say he was happy to see me.

  “Ohmigod.” I hugged her. She hugged me hard and started to cry a little. “What happened?”

  “You can leave now,” she said to Roger, and pointed at the exit.

  “I cannot leave you. Not until you forgive me.”

  “If you don’t leave, I’m going to start screaming, and I’m not going to stop.”

  Roger left.

  Delia hadn’t even noticed Jeremy, and he seemed to go unrecognized in this place where everyone had something more pressing on their minds.

  “You got mugged,” Jeremy finally said. “Have you talked to the cops?”

  “They just left. So Roger, because he wants to be super Method and cinema verité or God knows what, he decides that he’ll pay one of the homeless men, someone he just met this morning, to follow me. To give me a genuine scare. And the dickwad tried to take my purse, so I grabbed it and went for his balls. And he punches me in the face. He punches me in the face and says, ‘God, you’re a bitch.’ He took off with my purse, and instead of chasing him, Roger says to me—and I could not make this up—‘I’m so sorry. I never thought he would do something like that.’”

  “Man,” Jeremy said. “That’s a problem.”

  “What am I going to do? They called me this morning to say that I got the herpes. I can’t lose that. How can I work like this? I can’t even fucking breathe.”

  Jeremy looked confused.

  “A herpes commercial,” I said. Delia sounded crazy, like one of those old people who talk about people getting “the AIDS.” I was trying not to crack up, and so was Jeremy.

  “So is he a Method director or something?” Jeremy was looking at my sister’s face, which was still beautiful around the edges.

  “
He’s a Method asshole,” she said. “And a freaking Brando at that.”

  Jeremy laughed. I wondered if Delia knew who he was. As “the twins” they got stopped on the streets a hundred times a day, but when you separated Jeremy out, he became less recognizable by factors of ten.

  “Can you give us a ride home?” Delia asked.

  “Sure,” Jeremy said.

  “And please don’t mention anything to Dex but that I got mugged, okay?”

  I wasn’t sure which of us she was talking to, but we both nodded.

  Jeremy drove us, tortoise-style, up the winding hills to my sister’s apartment. As we climbed the last hill, the red Honda that Delia claimed I was hallucinating sat parked outside. I wanted to wake her up, but she was finally asleep and moaning in pain. I poked Jeremy and pointed, then shook my head so that he wouldn’t say anything. The car sped away as we approached.

  “That car,” I whispered. “It parks outside her place. For weeks, it’s been there. She gave me some BS story about an actress who wanted some part that she got, but I don’t believe her.”

  Jeremy shook his head slowly. “Stalkers are no joke. Have you called the police?”

  “And said what? A car drives by our house, one that my sister won’t even acknowledge exists?”

  “You can tell her that I saw it. You should contact someone. This is kind of a secluded spot.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Delia woke up long enough to stumble through the doorway and collapse on the couch. Jeremy made sure that we had ice, Advil, and food.

  “I don’t feel great about leaving you here,” he said. “Is Dex coming?”

  “I think so. I hope so.”

  “Call the set if anything looks weird. Anything at all. I’m due back in an hour, but I’ll wait around in my car to see if anything happens.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Seriously. That’s really nice.”

  “It’s no big deal.”

  And I could tell that he meant it. It wasn’t a big deal, it was what any decent human being would do, given the circumstances. But decent human beings seemed hard to come by, and his was such unlikely packaging. For a minute I thought he was going to hug me, and instead of opening my arms, like a normal human female, I panicked. I bent down to scratch my knee, which kind of itched, because even more than I wanted him to touch me, I didn’t want him to blow me off.

  When I stood back up he was still there, and he rested his hands on my shoulders and held them there. I could barely breathe. If I was supposed to do something next, I had no idea what it was. After what seemed like forever, he squeezed my shoulders gently and ran his hands down both of my arms. Even though he’d only touched my arms, the whole inside of my body felt electric, lit up. And just when I’d almost convinced myself that he was about to draw me close and kiss me, he had opened the door and was waving good-bye.

  My sister was all but tripping on meds for the rest of the evening. The doctor said that they’d given her enough muscle relaxants to tranquilize a horse, but she’d found a way to stay awake and manic.

  “When do you think the swelling will go down?” she kept asking. “I need to know what my face is going to look like. Google something.” And then if she looked in the mirror: “It’s the Elephant Man. I’m Jack Nicholson in Chinatown.” And then: “How am I going to explain this to Dex? What if I don’t look the same?”

  And for just a minute, I had a nasty thought—well, then you’ll have to see how the rest of us manage—but then I felt terrible for it.

  “Roger expects me to show up for work tomorrow,” she said. “What am I supposed to do? He thinks it will help with the shoot. In his sick little heart, this is better than he imagined. I feel like I’m in Boxing Helena. What if this is the last movie I’m even in? What if Roger is my only hope?”

  “Then you’re screwed,” I said.

  She started to laugh. “Okay,” she said. “Thank you. Will you call Dex, tell him that you’re going on location with me tomorrow?”

  There were only two more weeks of shooting the Chips Ahoy! summer season, and I didn’t want to miss a day.

  “Couldn’t Roger just pick you up? Wouldn’t it look more normal?”

  “And then what? Dex has to drive all the way over here to pick you up while I hide my face? That makes zero sense, Anna, and thank you for all of your sympathy after all I’ve done for you.”

  She yawned twice while she was ranting, which sort of broke the rhythm of how pissed off she was. If she even woke up tomorrow it would be a miracle. She looked like she was roofied enough to sleep for months.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  * * *

  The next morning Delia’s face looked worse: more swollen, more purple, more hopeless. She took one look in the mirror, scarfed a handful of painkillers, and left Roger a message that she couldn’t shoot until the next day. Then she went back to bed. I watched her phone ring. Dex, Roger, Dex, Roger. She slept through all of it. There was nothing on television, and the only book that I’d downloaded but not finished was Susan Atkins’s autobiography. She was the Manson girl I least enjoyed reading about. Hers was the knife that had killed Sharon Tate and her unborn son, but on death row Atkins had evidently found Jesus and was super born-again. She reminded me of the girls I knew who would sleep with their boyfriends, then go get revirginized at some church camp, then sleep with their boyfriends again.

  My sister would moan every so often, or wander into the kitchen, drink some water, take another pill, and go back to bed. After the first time, she stopped looking in the mirror.

  Susan Atkins was like a lot of the other Manson girls—their lives were kind of screwed up, but definitely not screwed up enough to go out and start killing people. She was a middle child who craved attention, an expert thief, and when she was a teenager, her mom got cancer. I didn’t like the way her life was making me look more Mansonian by the minute, but I kept reading. Her dad was an alcoholic and she did a lot of drugs and hated him, and she had a son by one of the other Manson family members, which made it even crazier that she could kill someone who was eight months pregnant. Only she claimed that she didn’t kill Sharon Tate, or anyone else, that she just pretended to have killed them so that she could be the center of attention and so that she’d fit in with the rest of the psychopaths. If you crossed Mean Girls with The Lord of the Flies and weaponized all of them, then you pretty much had the Manson girls.

  Leslie Van Houten, the ex–homecoming queen, begged to take part in the LaBianca massacre because her best friend had gone on the Tate rampage, and she felt left out. But Leslie didn’t really like Susan. Death row was soooooooo cliquey, what was a girl to do? Susan Atkins said she found Jesus and pretty much spent the rest of her life needlepointing and trying to do good things, like get paroled. Maybe she was sincere. Reading her whole story was kind of like becoming part of the Manson family for an hour. She believed whatever she was selling enough that her story was almost convincing. The fact that her reasons for taking part in the murders were all so stupid made the book extra depressing. I kept waiting for the moment when she revealed all the awful things that had happened to her that she’d forgotten to mention, but mostly she just sang the same old song. I wanted to be special. I wished Charlie and the other girls liked me more. When I finished, I had such a headache that I stole one of my sister’s painkillers.

  Maybe it was because I took the painkiller and it made me as crazy as Delia that I did something that I could never, ever tell Doon about. I texted Paige Parker. Two lines:

  “Sorry. But for real, I am actually sorry.”

  The afternoon that I took Lynette’s credit card, her wallet had been laying on the dining room table, right next to an apology note written by my mother: Dear Paige, I am sincerely sorry for whatever hurt I caused you or your family. I would never have intentionally hurt someone … blah, blah, blah. What it should have said was, Please don’t sue my mother. Please! because that’s what she really meant. I threw it away befor
e I bought my ticket west.

  I didn’t want Paige to think that the text was something that my mom made me send because she’d read some Internet article about making your kid be sorry. I wanted her to know that at that exact moment, maybe for the first time, I actually felt bad about what we had done. Not that it mattered. She probably deleted it and threw her phone across the room. At any rate, she didn’t exactly rush to text me back.

  * * *

  The next day Delia woke up groggy and said that Roger was picking us up. She must have texted him in the night, because I hadn’t heard her on the phone.

  “Did you call Dex?” I asked.

  “I called him this morning. He’s coming over tonight.”

  I was worried for her. Worried that Dex would start to realize that my sister had more fantastic stories than the zaniest of pilots, that he wouldn’t like her face, that I wouldn’t get to go back to the Chips Ahoy! set.

  “How did he sound?” I chewed on my thumb, afraid of her answer.

  “You should care about me, not him,” Delia snapped.

  She was right, but she was also painkiller pissy, so I just shut my mouth.

  Not even Roger could pretend that her face wasn’t a mess. He’d probably been practicing some spiel in the car about how amazing she looked, how well she was healing, but it was definitely “worse before better” territory, and when he saw her, he froze.

  “That’s great,” Delia said. “We’ve finally found a way to keep you from lying to my face. Change my face.” She popped a pill and rubbed her head. “I’m still not clear on what we’re doing.”

  Had it been any other day, I would have said that made two of us. But Delia was freaking me out, because her nose was so busted that not even her voice was right. As lousy an option as Roger was, riding with him was better than being alone with my sister.