American Girls

by Alison Umminger

  “Where are we filming today?” she finally asked, but it sounded like despair, like one of those questions you ask after you’ve just had the world’s hugest fight with someone that you’re still going to see every day. My mom used to do that with my dad, before they finally split. Things would be totally biblical-apocalyptic between them, explosive arguing that not even my bedroom door and television could block out, and then when I went in the living room, my mom would look at my dad and say something like “What’s for dinner?” in his direction, all dead and defeated. Like I was deaf. Like they were these amazing actors, which they definitely weren’t.

  “Darkroom,” Roger said.

  “Good. Maybe it will hide my face.”

  After that, Delia nodded off to sleep until we reached our destination.

  “I could not get the actual space,” Roger told me, “but this is nearby. William Richard Bradford killed, who knows, maybe fifty women, and before killing them, he took their pictures. He told them that they should be models. He was going to make them famous.”

  Sounded like someone else I knew, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “He would cut off the tattoos, so they were, how is it you say, Jane Doves?”

  “Jane Does,” I said.

  “There were pictures of over fifty women on his walls.”

  “So this isn’t the actual darkroom?”

  “No,” he said. “I have friends who have another space. Do you think Delia…?”

  He didn’t finish his sentence. I shrugged my shoulders. His guess was as good as mine as to what we were going to get when she woke up.

  “Ohmigod,” she finally groaned, pulling out a bottle of pills. “What the hell have I been taking? I feel like my skin is coming off my body. These pain pills are worse than pain.” She passed the bottle to Roger.

  “Percocet,” he said.

  “Just throw them out the window.”

  Roger rolled the window down and tossed them out.

  “I didn’t mean literally, you asshole!”

  “What?” Roger said. “I can do nothing to please you.”

  “You can start by not paying to have me mugged and deforming my face. Do you have anything for pain, Anna?”

  “I don’t,” I said. I was trying not to get yelled at. My sister was mental.

  “We are here,” Roger said, pulling into the lot of a run-down apartment building.

  Delia wouldn’t get out of the car. “How do I know you haven’t paid someone to stab me?”

  “Please,” Roger said. “I promise you. You will be beautiful. This movie will be beautiful. I have it now, the whole thing came to me last night. Like God had answered a prayer. This film will be my way of saying how sorry I am.”

  I didn’t care how many sketchballs were loitering in front of the building, I got out of the car. I could see my sister and Roger arguing through the window, and even the silent-film version of their relationship was depressing.

  “So you’ll have a full script for me by Monday,” Delia said, exiting dramatically.

  “I will do nothing else until it is finished.”

  “Okay,” she said. “You take a piss, you call me first.”

  “Can we please shoot?” Roger lowered his voice, like he was coaxing a rabid dog into its cage.

  The apartment building was like a more populated incarnation of the Bates Motel. Long and slender, it probably had peepholes in every wall, cameras mounted in every corner. Roger unlocked the door and the inside was worse. Top sheet on the bed from the seventies (when it had probably last been washed); dead roach on the floor; the sound of someone’s music pounding through the wall.

  “Can you film with all that noise?” I asked.

  “Sound is later,” he said. “I am still gathering images.”

  I couldn’t decide which was worse, the canned stupidity of Chips Ahoy! or the dressed-up stupidity of Roger’s image-gathering. But I did know which gave me a bigger headache. A much bigger headache. I wished I had Pinky the Penis from the Chips set to hide somewhere in the room. I could have bunny-eared it over Roger’s head when he started shooting my sister.

  “What is so funny?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I need two minutes,” Roger said, and opened his backpack. He pulled out stacks of pictures from inside, eight-by-tens of women, most beautiful, all young. Some looked like high school pictures, others like head shots, others like amateur porn. He taped them to the walls rapidly and without any seeming order. “These women, he took pictures of them before killing them. I could find pictures of some of the women but not all. So some are now Manson girls. Some are from the magazines. I think it is better not to be too literal.”

  “Is there a mirror here?”

  “In the bathroom,” Roger said.

  “I’m going to fix my face,” Delia said. “What’s left of it.”

  About nine pictures from the end, Roger put a picture on the wall that I recognized. Olivia Taylor. It must have been from her early pop-star days. Her hair was still curly and she was blowing a kiss. Three pictures later came Susan Atkins. The music from above switched to a pounding bass, and I checked the door to make sure that it was locked.

  “It is good, no?” Roger said, backing away.

  I nodded. It was creepier than any slasher film, smile after smile of hopeful faces, faces beautiful enough to be easily loved, unloved enough to be easily fooled. For the first time in my life I was glad that I didn’t look like that, that I wasn’t the kind of pretty that turned a girl into prey.

  “I can’t cover the splint,” Delia said, emerging from the bathroom. She had camouflaged the rest of the evidence of the mugging. Her face was heavily powdered and her eyes were wild. “Are these real?” She was pointing at the wall.

  Roger had started to film her.

  “I want you to look at the pictures.”

  It was impossible to look at anything else. Delia ran her hand across one of the middle rows, and then went from face to face for a while, stopping on a girl who seemed quietly beautiful, straight brown hair parted down the middle, a crucifix around her neck. The girl could have been Delia’s younger, clean-scrubbed twin. Maybe she’d been glad to be approached by a handsome photographer. Who wouldn’t want to have her face on someone’s wall, right?

  “This is fucking depressing,” my sister raged, pulling the pictures off with both hands, crumpling them and then going back for more. “Fuck this wall and fuck this film.”

  Roger kept filming. He didn’t smile, but I could feel the charge in the air. He was getting exactly what he wanted.

  “Is my picture in that bag?” she asked. “Do you have a picture like that of me?”

  She went over to his bag and dumped the rest of the contents. An energy bar, his phone, what looked like a pair of shorts for working out, a condom. Nice.

  “We’re done for today. Come on, Anna. My head is killing me. It feels like someone put an ice pick through my face. And I saw a liquor store across the street. Roger, you are buying me the strongest thing they have in that store. I am going to roofie myself, frat-party style, and then no one is allowed to touch me. Got it?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  Delia flopped back on the bed, closed her eyes, and rubbed the skin around her nose. I felt like telling her that she should be careful not to get bedbugs, but I didn’t want those to be my last words.

  “We can go now.” He had packed his camera and opened the door for us.

  “What time is it?”

  “Four o’clock,” I said.

  “Dex is coming at seven.”

  “Dex,” Roger said.

  “Yes, Dex,” I repeated. “D-E-X. It’s his name, not a curse word, okay?”

  “I said nothing.” Roger wasn’t above being smug with me, no matter how much he’d take from Delia.

  “If I’m sloshed, you explain, Anna.”

  “Okay.”

  But I couldn’t explain my sister, not to myself or anyone else. Dex had e
ven texted me to make sure that she was okay. Then he called. I told him that her face was messed up and she didn’t want him to see her like that. He told me that was crazy, and I agreed, but the person whose opinion really mattered was having none of it.

  We got back into the car and drove across the street to the liquor store. I waited in the car with Delia, who was moaning like an injured animal.

  “Why did he throw those pills out the window? I’m going to die of pain. Die.”

  She was talking with her mouth almost closed, because when she moved her lips it hurt more. Roger returned with a bottle of vodka in a brown paper bag, and passed me back a can of orange soda. Delia opened the bottle and drank straight from it, right there in the front seat of the car. A vagrant sitting outside the liquor store pointed at her through our window and gave two big thumbs-up. Delia didn’t stop drinking and gave him a thumbs-up with her free hand. It was like the opposite of how they tell you to live your life everywhere else on the planet.

  “How much of this do you think I can drink without ending up back in the hospital?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I’d slow down.”

  “Good idea,” Roger said. He looked nervous but weirdly happy. I think he liked my sister unchained. He probably had her face knocked in on purpose and now he was scared and lying, but loving it.

  “Can we go somewhere besides this parking lot?”

  “Yes,” Roger said. “Of course.”

  My sister talked with more and more of her mouth as the drive went on, but her speech was running together. Roger drove us back to his place, the same crappy apartment that he’d lived in with my sister. I had repressed, trauma-victim memories of the place, of listening to them have weird, angry sex through the walls, of my sister crying. Roger dropped us in front of the building and I helped Delia up the stairs and through Roger’s unlocked apartment door. For someone documenting murders in LA, he wasn’t exactly taking the safety lessons home.

  Once Roger came in, we sat on his decrepit balcony that overlooked a Dumpster, and I watched my sister drink more vodka, the scent of decaying food and urine not even kind of faint in the air.

  “I can’t breathe,” I said.

  Roger ignored me and so did Delia.

  “Can I get something else to drink? I finished my soda.”

  Roger gestured at the bottle of vodka. My sister shook her head.

  “She’s not even sixteen, Roger,” Delia said. “Don’t start thinking you’re Polanski. There’s water on the counter.” And I wondered why my sister was so sure of where he kept his things. Did she just assume, or was this where she’d been going those nights that Dex and I were watching bad TV?

  “Ugh,” I said. “Throwing up in mouth. I’ll get some water.”

  I wandered into his apartment, which had giant movie posters in Italian and French on the walls, L’avventura, La Dolce Vita, À Bout de Souffle. The women on the posters were beautiful and foreign, larger than life in every sense of the phrase. I took a handful of chips and ate them while I poured a glass of water from the pitcher, which was exactly where my sister said it would be. When I went back outside, they were going at it.

  “He is a beautiful director,” Roger said.

  “He’s a pervert and a monster,” Delia said. “I don’t care what happened to him. And I really, really, really don’t care how many times you’ve seen Chinatown, or The Tenant, or Repulsion, okay? So please don’t give me his résumé against his ass-rapery. Because it’s funky math.”

  While she was talking, the phone next to her kept ringing. I saw Dex’s number flash, and then the time, 7:20, and Delia ignored it, like having a broken nose was making her deaf as well.

  “Your phone,” I said.

  She looked at it, turned it off, and tossed it into her bag like she’d touched something radioactive.

  “Your reactions,” Roger said. “They are very American.”

  “Bullshit,” Delia said, taking another shot of vodka. “You think European women like being raped? Not even in the most French film on the planet.”

  Roger leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head.

  “If you believe she was raped.”

  “I do. I do believe that she was raped. And they should drag his ass back to America and put him in jail.” Delia tossed her empty shot glass from the balcony into the Dumpster and looked at Roger like she was daring him to say something. The more relaxed Roger acted, the twitchier my sister became.

  “You do not like to believe,” he said. “But some girls, thirteen, yes, some girls, perhaps they do want this.”

  “You mean,” Delia’s voice sharpened, “that a thirteen-year-old girl was asking for it?”

  “Is it so impossible to imagine?”

  “Any girl who would want that hasn’t been taught what else to want. Or she’s been taught to want it. Either way. No. Just no.”

  “He was grieving,” Roger said. “Who can imagine how a person lives through what he saw? He lost his child and beautiful wife. It turned him ugly. Anna, you have read about this?”

  I had. I had read about how Roman Polanski was pretty much a sketchball who knocked up a very pretty actress and then continued to be a sketchball. Supposedly, after they’d been married a while, he was driving up to Tate from behind and started to catcall at the hottie walking down the road before he realized that it was actually his wife. His mother was killed in the Holocaust, his wife and unborn son were horribly murdered, and he turned around and raped a young girl. It reminded me a little bit of The Virgin Spring, an art film that Roger made us all watch one Christmas. In it, a young girl is raped and murdered by two men as the kid who is traveling with them, a kid who can’t even talk and doesn’t do anything, watches. They then accidentally go to the house of the father of the young girl, and after he lets them come in to spend the night, the father realizes that they’ve killed his daughter. He murders them all, even the kid who didn’t do anything, who couldn’t even talk. I don’t know why, but Polanski reminded me of the father, all of that death and then he goes and does the wrong thing. There had to be a reason, but it made no sense. Still, it seemed important.

  “I have a question,” I said.

  “The answer is no.” Delia was cracking herself up. She was seriously drunk.

  “Why do you think it is that Roman Polanski does this awful thing and doesn’t even feel sorry about it, but he gets to live his life? And you have these women, the Manson girls, who did this really horrible thing when they were young and stupid and on drugs, and they never get to spend one day not paying for it, even though most of them have spent the rest of their lives trying to do something to, I don’t know, atone?”

  “It is a good question.” Roger crossed and uncrossed his legs.

  I didn’t feel like it was a good question; in fact, it was the kind of question that made me want to wash my own mouth out with soap. How could a person ever make up for the things that those women had done? And yet, when the dust settled, it seemed like all of the women who had been part of the murder had genuinely been shocked that Charles Manson wasn’t right. Helter Skelter didn’t usher in some beautiful new world, it just left the old one a little more awful. They’d been following some horrible, sadistic loser who didn’t know any more about the end of the world than the sketchballs in the liquor store parking lot. Was it so impossible to believe that a person, having regained what little sanity she might have once possessed, would then feel outright awful about what she’d done? The easy thing was to say, No, they were monsters, they had to be monsters to do something like that. But what if the truth was more complicated? What if they weren’t really as different as everyone wanted to believe? But it was the kind of thought that was impossible to hold, double impossible if I tried to keep it in my head next to the list of the victims, or the thought of that sad, flat gravestone. Still, I had to ask: What if they were really and truly sorry? Did it matter at all?

  “Because women, my dear sister,�
� Delia said, “are fucked.”

  “Hypocrite.” Roger was matching her vodka for vodka. Not only was I not going to get a useful answer to any of my questions, I was also going to have to take a cab home.

  “Oh, screw you, Roger.”

  Then my phone rang. Dex. I slipped into the other room and answered.

  “Are you okay?” he said. “Delia was supposed to call me hours ago. What the hell is going on? Is she just messing with me, or does she need help, because I can’t figure it out right now. I really can’t. And I’m starting to feel like a chump.”

  Roger’s living room table was glass and steel, a window to the unvacuumed floor below, and the backpack he had carried to the shoot was open across its top. The faces that had been on the walls spilled onto the clear glass, on top of which was a young girl with a heart locket, lips parted and hair feathered away from her face. I didn’t recognize her. She might have been one of the real girls, the ones found in pieces around LA. She was no one famous. On the other end of the line, Dex was fuming. Irritated, worried, and mad—not a great combination.

  “We’re at her friend’s apartment. She didn’t like how she felt on her pain medications, so she decided that vodka was better than Percocet.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  I slumped back into Roger’s couch. The impossibly perfect Anita Ekberg looked down from the wall, back arched and ankle-deep in a Roman fountain.

  “I don’t think she wants you to see her face.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think she thinks that you might stop liking her.”

  There was silence for a good minute or so. I thought he’d hung up.

  “Do you know where you are? Do you have the address?”

  There was a stack of mail on the counter. I read him our location.

  “I’ll be there in thirty minutes. And please tell your sister to stop selling me short, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  When I returned to the patio, Delia and Roger were both quiet, staring across each other into space.

  “Dex is coming to get us,” I said.

  My sister stayed frozen. Roger repeated his name.