“Good news?” Delia asked, raising her eyebrow like it had to be from a guy.
I rolled my eyes back at her and then she parked and walked me through the airport all the way to security. Delia hugged me and then handed me off to an airline official whose name tag read “Michelle.” Michelle made small talk as she escorted me to my flight like a low-security prisoner. After I was safely buckled in my seat, she left to shuffle another kid from one place to the next. The walk from security to the gate had felt like a walk in a dream, slow and almost underwater. By the time I boarded, I was completely exhausted and yet too awake to sleep at the same time. The summer was really over.
I started my paper on the way home. The plane circled a wide arc around the city as it rose, the early evening’s pink glow warming the hills of Hollywood. Farther off, the occasionally broken darkness of the ocean loomed, and Los Angeles seemed like something perched on the edge of the earth, beautiful and always slightly in danger of being swallowed whole.
Somewhere, my sister was telling or not telling Dex the whole truth of what she’d done the night before, and Jeremy was sitting in a meeting asking for the serenity to face another day. The plane might even have flown over the jail where Leslie Van Houten was doing life, guilty as much as anything of choosing the wrong friends. There were beautiful homes full of boxes and dog shit, the kinds of things that didn’t make the gossip sites or glossy magazines.
Jeremy had texted me twice to wish me a safe trip home, but he hadn’t called and neither had I. Part of me was sad, the kind of sad you get at the end of a really beautiful and tragic book. Gatsby sad. My evening with Jeremy was one night and it was messy and perfect, and it was probably best just to leave it alone, to accept that anything that freakishly awesome should probably just be sealed in the amber of memory and left undisturbed. That was poor Jay Gatsby’s mistake—he had one great night with Daisy and tried to turn it into a whole lifetime. Then again, how could he not?
The lights in the cabin dimmed and I pulled down the shade of the window so that the woman next to me could sleep. She had on earphones and a face mask, and within minutes her head was tilted back taking in choked, openmouthed breaths. I put on my own earphones and read the second part of my assignment from Mr. Haygood: What’s so great about Los Angeles?
Probably because I am a professional procrastinator, I pulled out the magazine that someone had left behind. Right underneath “What NOT to Say to Make Him STAY,” in gummy pink letters, was “My Shopping Diet: Olivia Taylor Learns to Live Lean and Love It.” The article was a page and a half, about how hard it had been for her to stop shopping at first, and how many other things she’d started doing once she got used to it. Allegedly, she’d started writing “nice notes” to her friends every day. But the craziest part was that there were pictures of the inside of her house, and it looked like an actual house. Someone had cleaned it out before the photo shoot, or they had the most advanced computer in the universe erasing every bag from every corner and hallway. The picture featured Olivia, Mr. Peabody, and Iggy, and she looked like the kind of girl you’d want to be in the kind of house you’d like to own. I closed the magazine and put it back in the mesh pocket.
It was almost too easy to hate on Los Angeles. The city was a kind of apocalyptic tar pit, a freak show of broken hearts and half-fulfilled dreams, full of artists, liars, parasites, and roadkill, all of whom had just a touch of violence in their hearts. Even today, it was Manson territory without the Manson. But those hills and canyons were beautiful as well. Anyone could see how easy it was to write off the glitter, the fake boobs and hair, the way that the dumbest and worst seemed to rise to the top, that at the end of the day it was probably all just a big lie, but I still couldn’t do it myself. I may not have wanted to stay, but I sure liked to visit. Maybe Los Angeles was like Gatsby’s dream of Daisy, but for all of America. Instead of sitting on a pier and gazing at a green light across the water, now people just sat in their living rooms and watched the wide-screen, 3-D version of some life that was out there for the taking, if only they could get off the couch.
Los Angeles, I wrote, is not really so different from the rest of America. Los Angeles was Olivia Taylor spending the rest of her life trying to become Olivia Taylor again. And then I borrowed a phrase from Dex, who’d borrowed it from someone else. Los Angeles is simply the illusion America most chooses to treasure. The Manson murders changed that, and America, but maybe not that much.
And then something weird clicked, the way an idea can start to make sense only when you’re in the middle of writing, and so I wrote what would become my paper on the airsickness bags in the pocket in front of me. I wrote about Jay Gatsby and Leslie Van Houten. They might have seemed worlds apart, but they weren’t so terribly different. They both wanted to escape their families. They both believed in something that wasn’t half as awesome as it seemed to be at first, and believing in the wrong things ruined both of their lives. Had the Manson murders really changed America? Or was Manson just America gone wrong all over again, but with women in the headlines? I was either getting an A or going to hell.
As I finished writing, I thought about Valley of the Dolls and the long line of beautiful women, from Daisy to Sharon Tate to Olivia Taylor to my sister, who made books and films and music come to life. In the middle of Kandy Kisses, Olivia Taylor smiles at the camera and says, “If I could blow the whole world a kiss, I would.” Then I almost started cracking up, because I remembered the afternoon when Josh was making fun of his sister, and he puckered up and said, “If I could blow the whole world, I would,” and he and Jeremy almost laughed themselves off their chairs. I knew Daisy was just imaginary, but I also wondered if the real girls, or women, or whatever, weren’t sometimes just as make-believe themselves. I thought about the wall of women’s faces in Roger’s movie, the new girls and the old. By the time the flight attendants turned the lights back on, I had a draft of something.
My mom was supposed to be meeting me with Lynette, and I wondered if she would still look like herself when she picked me up from the airport, if she’d let Birch stay up past bedtime to meet me as well, if she’d come at all. Lynette had promised that they would both make it, even though my mom was still more tired than usual from the chemo.
A calming voice announced: “Please fasten your seat belts and prepare for landing. All electronics should be turned off and properly stowed.”
I closed my eyes and for just a minute I felt how much I’d missed my mom, and I wondered if she missed me as well. It almost didn’t matter that within ten seconds of seeing her she would probably be driving me insane, or that for all I knew she wouldn’t be there at all, she’d just be the lame sound of parroted excuses escaping from Lynette’s mouth. But even that didn’t matter. In the moment, with my phone off and the landing strip ballooning in the window, anything was possible. I might turn on the phone and Jeremy would have called, begging me to go back to California. Or Doon would have texted to say that she hadn’t meant anything she’d said, that there was no need to apologize, that we would be best friends forever. I could imagine my mom healthy and Lynette and Birch standing next to her, and my dad back from Mexico, all waiting for me at the gate with one of those cheesy signs and flowers: Anna, we’ve missed you. Welcome home!
My mom asked me about a million times over the summer why I ran away. If it was because LA was so fabulous, or I liked my sister better than her, or if I was dealing drugs or whatever weird conspiracy she’d read about on the Internet that week. But the truth of it was, I didn’t really have a plan past getting on the plane. Even when my sister showed up, which seemed like the thing that had to happen, that should happen, part of me was still kind of surprised. I guess, at the end of the day, what I wanted most was to feel that moment when you’re on a plane and everyone around you is in their own world, anxious to stand up and open the overhead bin and get ready to start the life they’ve only ever dreamed of, or reenter whatever life they left behind: that moment before the pl
ane hits the ground, when the air starts to hum and it seems like if the impact doesn’t kill you, the possibilities are almost too much to bear.
Author’s Note
Why the Manson Girls?
I never set out to write a book about the Manson girls. In fact, I’d been at work on this novel for some time before the book told me that it wanted to be about the Manson family—and my first thought was that it couldn’t. The material was sensationalistic and a little clichéd, and who wanted to give another American psycho more attention anyhow?
Before I wrote this novel, my first thought about the Manson girls, like that of many people, was “Yuck, the Manson girls? They’re still in jail, right?” I wanted to write a book about Los Angeles, girlhood, and what the American dream might mean to a kind of lost, basically decent, deeply cynical fifteen-year-old girl. I definitely didn’t want the book to be about Charles Manson—and I don’t think it is.
To be honest, I didn’t even enjoy researching the Manson girls all that much. I kept looking for the key, the really horrific thing that must have happened in their lives that turned them into killers, a poorly wired circuitry that might excuse such colossally shorted-out humanity.
What I found was that most of them had screwed-up lives but low-level screwed up—their biographies suggested they could have gone on to become perfectly functional adults had they encountered a different group of friends (and had they had a few years of good therapy).
The Manson girls were lost girls who made bad choices. Really bad choices. And in some cases, most cases actually, wound up being really, really sorry about those choices.
What does one do with that?
Rather than mirroring the Manson family, I decided to write a novel that put the focus on emotional violence—the kind that doesn’t leave the obvious scars. I wanted Anna’s “crime,” as it were, to be invisible but damaging. I wanted her to be forgivable.
Anna is a “regular” girl who finds her way home. I think that the Manson family continues to fascinate because—as hard as it is to imagine—the Manson girls were once “regular” girls as well.
Acknowledgments
I suppose there are books still written by the artist, toiling alone, wrestling with her genius—but this was not one of them! This book was written catch-as-catch-can, during toddler naps, in the waiting room of auto shops while the oil got changed, fifteen minutes at a time before I started the official day, and on occasion in large chunks, thanks to the generosity of Bruce and Judy Umminger, Mike Mattison, and the most caring Pam Murphy and Julie Reed.
One of the great advantages of being a late bloomer (that is to say, someone whose “first novel” is published after one has been writing for years) is that along the way I have collected some truly wonderful writer friends and brilliant readers, whose insights were instrumental in drafting, redrafting, and finally finishing this book. Thanks first and foremost to Margaret Mitchell, a friend and fellow writer extraordinaire, who read more versions of this than I could count. Thanks especially to Bob Bledsoe, Romayne Dorsey, Dana Johnson, Michelle Ross, Meg Pearson, Mike Mattison (again), Bruce Umminger (again), Jim Elledge, Dionne Bremyer, Sean Jepson, Christine Sneed, David Groff, Sarah Dotts Barley, Yael Sherman, and Neeti Madan for reading drafts, offering insight, and being most excellent cheerleaders. And speaking of cheerleaders—thank you, Kate Gace Walton, for your wonderful Web site, Work Stew, which inspired me to get back on the horse as a novelist after putting that dream aside. Thanks to Greg Frasier for helping me place an early section of this novel. Thanks to Bernadette Murphy, Alexandra Cordero, Linda Rattner Metcalf, McCalla Hill-McKaharay, Amy McIlwain, Lisa Connell and Jason Keesling, Elaine McSorley-Gerard, Dave Mandel, Aelred Dean, Jan Tolbert, and Katherine Hamburger-Schneider and April Umminger for always lending an ear and encouragement when I needed it most. GURU mamas, you know who you are, and thanks for your support and insights. Thanks also to Josh Black and Thomas Jones for their early help with research and to Jill Sutton for photos. And to Philip Pascuzzo for the amazing cover design.
Extra-special thanks to Neeti Madan for being the best agent ever—fabulous friend, wonderful reader, tireless advocate. I cannot say what a pleasure it was to work with Sarah Dotts Barley, the brilliant, lovely editor who helped make this book strong in ways that I couldn’t have predicted. Thank you. Thanks to the others who have made this experience of bringing a book into the world a dream come true—Amy Einhorn, Sarah Castleton, Madeleine Clark, Marlena Bittner, Sheryl Johnston, Liz Keenan, Molly Fonseca, Karen Horton, and Szilvia Molnar. I couldn’t be more excited to be on the Flatiron list. Thanks to Caroline Abbey and Donna Bray as well.
Thanks also to my big extended family—Judie Mattison, John and Lynne Mattison, Miles and Judy Renaas, and Katrina, Will, and Geneva Rutherford, and more Ummingers, Aherons, and Bryants than I can list—you’ve all been so encouraging and interested. This is a book—ultimately—about family, and I am blessed to have lived long enough to be able to see and truly appreciate how much love I have in my life. I couldn’t list everyone who’s offered an encouraging word along the way, but every bit of kindness mattered. (Do I sound like Jewel? Help!)
And finally, thank you, Mike and Maggie. You are my great loves and make it all worthwhile.
Recommend
American Girls
for your next book club!
Reading Group Guide available at
www.readinggroupgold.com
About the Author
Alison Umminger grew up in Arlington, Virginia, and as an undergraduate was the fourth woman to be elected president of The Harvard Lampoon. Today she is a professor of English at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton, Georgia, where she lives with her family. American Girls is her first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Preflight
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide Information
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
AMERICAN GIRLS. Copyright © 2016 by Alison Umminger. All rights reserved. For information, address Flatiron Books, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.flatironbooks.com
Portions of this book originally appeared in a slightly different form under the title “Anna Has Two Mommies” in Waccamaw.
Cover design by Philip Pascuzzo
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data for the print edition is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-07500-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-07502-4 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781250075024
Our books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at Mac
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First Edition: June 2016
American Girls Page 22