American Girls

by Alison Umminger

  I had carried the picture of the girl with the heart necklace back onto the patio.

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  And because he’s such a dirtbag, a sketchball among sketchballs, I swear he was smiling. “The Geimer girl,” he said. “She was in some famous pictures, no?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ve never seen this. Am I supposed to know her name?”

  “I am paying you this money to research, you tell me.”

  I passed the picture back to Roger and the three of us sat in silence, watching the garbage rot. Thirty minutes later I helped my barely upright sister into the back of Dex’s car.

  Dex was doing the right thing, the kind thing, but he didn’t look happy. Once he buckled my sister’s slurring self into the car, he gave me one of those “Are you freaking kidding me?” looks that do not bode well. Delia smiled a little, too tired and too out of it to open her eyes. I honestly had to stop myself from telling her to wipe that stupid grin off her face, like I was her mom or something.

  “Thanks for answering your phone,” he said to me. “She went on a film shoot today? Must be some kind of director.” He was disgusted.

  My sister moaned and cracked the window, rubbing her head against where the glass opened into the night.

  Thirty minutes later I was cross-legged on Dex’s couch, watching bad TV and thinking how only a mental patient like my sister could find a way to like Roger more than this.

  * * *

  That night I looked up the name of the girl in the picture, Samantha Geimer. No wonder Roger was smiling. She was a girl who had been photographed, and famously, by Roman Polanski two weeks before he pumped her full of champagne and quaaludes and raped her. Like everyone in LA, it seemed, she’d wanted to be famous: a model, an actress, a star. He convinced her to pose topless, which I couldn’t even imagine. I hated taking my shirt off in the locker room, or at the doctor’s office. I had breasts, enough that my bra wasn’t just one of those lacy things that flat-chested girls get to be part of the club, but they didn’t totally feel like a part of me yet. Having breasts was definitely better than not having breasts, but I still wasn’t about to parade them around town. Samantha was thirteen years old when Polanski raped her, and thinking of the picture it wasn’t just that she looked older, but that she didn’t even look like someone I recognized as a girl, baby-faced and Do me all at once. The slutty girls that I knew went all-in, Olivia Taylor style, and the ones who weren’t wore promise rings from churches and could list all the ways you were going to hell and the diseases you would catch if you let a boy too near your crotch.

  My sister and Dex had retreated into his bedroom. He was a good boyfriend, the kind that came out to get her water and was okay with doing his work in bed next to her. But he didn’t look happy. Once my sister was better, my guess was they were going to have a conversation, and not about her face.

  I had watched so much television that I could feel my brain rotting in my skull, so I went into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. I took my shirt off and looked at my fake-flesh-tone bra, sensible but with a pink bow in the middle, and then I took off my glasses, so I could sort of see myself in soft focus. I pretended that the mirror was a camera, and I tried to imagine what it was like to strip for someone, what it would be like for someone to want that from you. I thought about Jeremy, and I felt dumb for thinking about him. My breasts looked more like something from a medical textbook than a porno, and it left me feeling the way I usually felt when I looked in the mirror. Unremarkable. Regular.

  Then I started to think about my mom. She was all about the breasts after Birch was born. When he was four weeks old, she opened the door to sign for a package with her shirt completely open. I think the UPS guy was more traumatized than turned on, and Lynette said that she needed to cover up. Even her wife and partner in lady-power knew that she’d gone bananas.

  “The breast needs to be desexualized,” my mom ranted, unwashed hair wild around her face, nursing pillow strapped around her middle.

  “Then you’re the woman to do it,” I said, and we all laughed.

  “Our culture’s obsession with seeing the breast only as a sexual object hurts everyone. Especially babies. Imagine what kind of world we would live in if women thought nothing about breastfeeding in public, not with all these wraps and covers, just breasts and babies. Is that too much to ask?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is. I vote no.”

  “That’s because you’re thirteen,” she’d said. “You’ll feel different one day.”

  If by one day she meant never, then she was right.

  I knew what my mom was supposed to be going through right now. Lynette had sent the details of Mom’s surgery in an e-mail to Delia and me. They would take out as much cancer as they found, and so long as everything looked clear, they would remove the right breast and rebuild it with some of her other skin. She wouldn’t be able to raise her arms, or hold Birch, or even hold the phone for a few days, and then it would be weeks before she’d heal and then there was chemo. I wasn’t sure whether or not she’d be through with the chemo by the time I got home, but I hoped so. I touched my right breast and wondered what it would be like to lose something like that, something that was actually a part of you. No matter how terrible my mother could be, I didn’t want her to have to go through that. No matter how much I hated her, I didn’t want her gone, not even one little piece of her.

  I wondered if Delia felt the same way, if maybe that’s part of the reason she was acting so crazy, why she wouldn’t touch her phone. Lynette had left a message, saying that Mom was doing well, that Birch was with friends, that we were all missed and that she’d call again tomorrow. By then, hopefully, they’d have the pain managed enough for my mother to talk on the phone. I didn’t like to think of her in pain, laid up in some hospital bed, pushing buttons for drugs and moaning in the night.

  Dex tapped on the bathroom door. “You okay?”

  “Just a minute,” I said, trying to fix my bra and button up my shirt as quickly as possible.

  I went into the hallway, where Dex was looking at me, worried.

  “Delia told me what happened.”

  “She did?”

  He leaned against the wall, ran his fingers over his scalp.

  “I never know how to help her,” he said.

  I didn’t know what she’d told him about: our mother, Roger, the real reason she was mugged, the stalker she liked to pretend didn’t exist. There were so many things he wasn’t supposed to know. I wasn’t about to take a guess.

  “So how about you?” he said. “Has anyone asked you lately how you’re doing?”

  We both knew the answer.

  “How are you doing?”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  He reached across the hallway and hugged me, not in a pervy way at all, but the kind of long bear hug that my dad gave me when we were kids, before I turned thirteen and it seemed like he was suddenly afraid to touch me. It was probably half my fault that my dad checked out. I wanted to spend time with my friends more than him, he was such a sad sack and wanted to talk about my mom all the time, and his feelings. I didn’t like it when he touched me, not because it was gross or anything, but because he seemed so needy. Not like a dad. And then he found Cindy, and I sort of vanished, became the kind of person he could forget while he went to Mexico for a month and not even feel bad.

  Dex was strong and warm and he smelled like the deodorant he wore, clean and minty. I relaxed into his arms, and if I’d been less exhausted I might have started bawling, but I was suddenly so tired that I thought I was going to faint, standing up, right there under his ugly fluorescent hall lights. I had turned into one of those pathetic animals that we read about in science class that practically cracks up when someone treats it like it has warm blood, when its wire-monkey family gets replaced with something real.

  “I’m so tired,” I said.

  “You need an extra pillow?”


  I nodded.

  “Just knock on the bedroom door if you need anything. And if your sister ever gets like that again, promise me you’ll call me before she spends a day on a film set. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I curled up beneath the pile of blankets on the sofa and slept eleven hours straight.

  15

  It had been a week since he’d taken me to the hospital when I saw Jeremy again. Delia and I had pretty much moved into Dex’s, and she spent most of her time sleeping, massaging the area around her nose, and driving to acupuncture appointments to get the blood flowing and facilitate healing. When Dex was gone, she’d waste hours on the phone quizzing various friends of hers on their favorite plastic surgeons. I pretended not to hear.

  During that time, if she wasn’t thinking about her own appearance, she was working on mine. She started with my hair, showing me how to braid it into a kind of funky side ponytail, thinning it out so that it had a better shape when I wore it over my shoulders. She went through everything we’d bought together and everything I already owned and lined up outfits for me like I was a toddler. She insisted that the next time I saw Jeremy I should wear the slinky black top and cuffed jeans that we’d bought on our shopping trip. She even lent me a long, vintage necklace that she said would save me from looking like I was too dressy, or trying too hard.

  “Trust me,” Delia said. “That boy is not driving you all over town because he can’t afford a pet. You need to step up your game and act interested.”

  “I do act interested!”

  “You act like he has smallpox. I’m not saying to stop, because it’s obviously working, but you might switch it up a bit since the summer’s almost over.”

  I trusted her because I had no other choice. There was no telling how Jeremy really felt about me, but she was right that in the unlikely event that he did like me, I needed counseling on what to do next.

  “Perfection,” Delia said, before sending me into the world to practice my new flirting skills (smile; make eye contact; quit calling myself a “troll from Middle-Earth”). “And don’t forget to let your hair out of the ponytail when you get there and fluff it, okay?”

  I nodded.

  * * *

  Josh and Jeremy were shooting when Dex and I arrived. They were dressed in these absurdly formal seersucker suits, and the butler was running around the set, jumping in fear of an imaginary mouse. “For this,” the actor who played the butler had told me the first week in his best British accent, “I went to the Yale School of Drama.” The hair people had gelled both of the twins’ hair identically to the side, and it was almost impossible to tell them apart.

  “I didn’t write this,” Dex whispered.

  “That’s encouraging,” I whispered back.

  When the scene ended, Josh immediately started to brush the gel out of his hair, cursing underneath his breath. The jacket he wore was on the ground within seconds, and one of the crew members scooped it up like it was what she’d been put on earth to do.

  Jeremy headed straight for where I was sitting, suit and hair firmly in place.

  “Anna. Where have you been? Do you never check your phone?”

  Something Delia had done must have been working, because Jeremy Taylor was all hot and bothered, and I appeared to be the cause. I was so nervous that I twisted the necklace Delia had lent me tightly enough that I almost choked myself.

  “What? I always check my phone.”

  He pulled out his own phone and shook his head.

  “Undelivered,” he said. “My bad. So after I left your sister’s place—” He lowered his voice, looking in Dex’s direction. “After I left, I was worried, so I parked my car and waited to see if that Honda came back.”

  “And?”

  “It did.” He talked with his hands, pointing ahead like we were in the car together. “I tried to follow it, but whoever was driving went really fast.” His face reddened. I knew exactly how “fast” he drove, but it was cute that he was embarrassed.

  “The car is always gone before I can even get the plate,” I said, helping him out as best I could.

  “But I got the number.”

  “Seriously?”

  “And,” he said, with the face of a conqueror, “I have a name and address.”

  I felt a little dizzy.

  “And, we’re taking a break so they can rewrite the rest of this episode. Even for this show, it’s ridiculous today.”

  “You think?” I said, and we both started laughing.

  “Come on,” he whispered. “Let’s go check it out. If they see us go they’ll make me stay.”

  No one noticed that we were leaving. Josh’s entourage had melted out of the darkness and onto the set the minute he wasn’t shooting. The writers were huddled together with Dex in the center, the quarterback of a losing team. Once we were clear of the set, we jogged to the car, probably moving faster than we would be once the car started to roll.

  “So how’s your sister?”

  “Worried about her face,” I said. “I had an epiphany. I realized that my sister on painkillers is kind of like your sister on Vitaminwater.”

  Jeremy laughed. “Did you go shopping?”

  “No,” I said. “We went to this crazy film shoot. It was just. Crazy.”

  “Same movie she was on when she got mugged? Already?”

  “Don’t tell,” I said, lowering my voice. “It’s her ex-boyfriend who’s directing it. So she doesn’t want Dex to know because she thinks he’d get jealous.”

  “That guy was her ex-boyfriend?”

  “Yeah.”

  He mulled it over for a minute. “I guess that explains it.”

  Who knew what he was thinking? If Roger explained anything about my sister, I didn’t want to know.

  It was late afternoon, and the traffic was heavy as we inched across town. Jeremy had one of “his people” trace the license plate, which was evidently less of a big deal than I thought it would be. A perk, he said, of having to deal with stalkers. The address wasn’t terribly hard to find, block numbers on the side of a curb, but the house itself was far removed from the road, guarded by hedges and a wide gate. Jeremy parked his car a block away, and we pretended to be walking, slowly casing the joint like a pair of unarmed teenage idiot detectives. The neighborhood seemed deserted, like so many LA houses during the day, the swimming pools abandoned, the lawns perfectly manicured for no parties, no sitting.

  “I think we could climb the side,” Jeremy said, pointing to the sloping hill next to the gate. “And peek down from there. See if the car is in the driveway. If it’s really the place.”

  “And then what?” I picked at the side of my nail, the way I did before tests.

  “I don’t know. We could knock on the door and tell them we’ve called the police.”

  “And that we’ve trespassed and then wait for them to do something even weirder?”

  “Let’s at least take a look. That won’t hurt anything. There’s no one around.”

  I looked at the embankment, at the totally inappropriate open-toe sandals I was wearing, at the dirt and debris and potential for sliding on my face. Then I thought about the chances that the people on the other side of the gate would have guns, dogs, surveillance cameras. I was like the opposite of a Manson girl, unarmed, unprepared, and these were the opposite of Manson times. Now most homeowners were armed and jittery, just waiting for the chance to pick off a kid who walked on the wrong lawn at the wrong time with a bagful of something sinister, like Mountain Dew. Or maybe I wasn’t so different from a Manson girl, ready to execute some incredibly stupid plan just because a boy I liked was telling me so.

  “Just to be safe,” I said, “how about this. You keep watch and I’ll climb up, and I’ll let you know if the coast is clear.”

  “How about if you keep watch and I climb?”

  I pointed to his clothes. “You wore your set clothes. And we’re due back in an hour. They’ll have your head if they’re dirty. H
ow are you gonna get dirty in the middle of the ocean?”

  “I can take this off,” he said, stripping off his shirt before I could stop him. He was even more beautiful half naked. I was going to climb a cliff for this boy, possibly get eaten by Dobermans and thrown in jail, and for what? To help my sister, who didn’t even want to help herself.

  “Ouch,” he said, starting to climb. “I guess we wear clothes for a reason, right?”

  “That’s probably the idea.”

  It wasn’t too far up the hill, a short climb, and frankly it made the gate by the entrance seem a little bit silly, unless the idea was to slow someone down on their way back out who’d decided to steal a car. From the top of the hill, it was easy to see the house, a flat-topped super-modern pad that hugged the side of a cliff. Three cars were parked beside the house. A blue BMW, its convertible twin, and a red Honda hybrid. The Honda was the one I had seen outside my sister’s house, but that wasn’t what made my breath catch in my lungs. The BMW and the convertible had the same magnets on the back, passes to some country club, which looked familiar to me, though I couldn’t quite make the connection.

  “Duck,” Jeremy whispered, pushing me down against the embankment as a woman wandered out of the house, talking loudly on her cell phone. She didn’t appear to notice us, though we were barely hidden, and it was obvious she was upset about something. Jeremy inched closer to me, pushed my head down a bit more, and made a sign against his lips to be quiet. Like I was really going to talk.

  “I’m going to check the license plates,” Jeremy said.

  “Are you crazy?” I whispered as loudly as I could, but he just put his index finger against his mouth again to shush me, and every time the woman turned away from us, he moved farther down the hill. He was going to go inside the house. He was officially insane.

  I’d read about how people think they can hear their own heartbeats when something really scary is going on, and I was pretty sure I could hear that plus every other weird thing my body was doing—blood rushing to my head, my mouth as it dried up, my palms beginning to sweat. I clutched my cell phone in my shaking hand, wondering if someone inside was going to catch Jeremy. He had disappeared into the open door when the woman wasn’t watching.