Local Girls: A Novel

by Caroline Zancan

  “I don’t know,” said Decker. “I guess they’re just a little more . . . How do I put this . . . discreet about it.”

  “Maybe you’re all just really good actors. So you fake it really well. Not hating each other, I mean.”

  “Yeah, right,” Decker said. “You’ve clearly never seen most of the people in L.A. act.”

  “I Get Around” by the Beach Boys came on, and Decker looked like someone who had just spotted himself on the Jumbotron at a sporting event—he popped up involuntarily from an affectless slouch, eyes cartoonishly wide. He would have similar reactions to the songs that came on throughout the night, and every time he did, it reminded us how much older than us he actually was. From his outfit—an expensive-looking but rugged chambray shirt with a soft-looking cotton waffle weave under a low button job, and brown motorcycle boots that matched his bomber jacket—and his meticulously groomed-to-look-effortless hair, he looked too hip, too timelessly cool, to be old. But at thirty-four, he was closer to our parents’ age than our own, and while he wasn’t old enough to have grown up listening to these songs, his parents surely had, and hummed them over his shoulder while they helped him with his homework, or while making dinner or taking out the trash, the way ours did Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel.

  “Maybe your old uncle Sam should gather you silly girls around and we can sort this out so that you can all drink together.” He raised his eyebrows, clearly satisfied with his deviance.

  “It’s early yet,” Nina said with unreadable eyes, their vacancy more unsettling because of how big they were, making it impossible not to go right to her eyes when trying to decode her mood. “Too early to tell how this night is gonna go. But I can promise you that’s one thing that’s not gonna happen.”

  • • •

  We didn’t always hate Lila Tucker, and in fact, as far as we knew, Nina still didn’t. She rhapsodized about the empty black hearts and the lonely dismal futures of Carine and the patterns with all the creativity and malice she showed to their faces, but Lila was the one subject that ever drew silence from her. This befuddled Lindsey and me into hours of circular conversation, because Nina had more reason than either of us to hate her.

  Years ago, they lived on the same block, and we had all gone to school with Lila. The concept of a parent who stayed home full-time to take care of the kids was totally unheard-of where we lived—a home with two parents was rare enough—so our parents relied on us as childcare for each other. It was understood that while some dark, unthinkable deed committed by or upon any one of us might go unreported by any other one of us, if a large group of kids witnessed something worth talking about, eventually one of them was going to talk, and the truth was going to leak up to the older, disciplinary generation.

  So while our parents could not afford the Disney World camp that we begged them to send us to every summer, they did encourage us to get together with all the other kids in the neighborhood to engage in the same activities we would have if they did have the money to send us. “Who needs to spend five hundred dollars so your kid can play capture the flag?” and “My kid’s got a good enough imagination to entertain himself” and “Only boring people get bored” were the mantras overheard in our neighborhood when our overworked parents gathered in fraying lawn chairs in the middle of the streets after double and triple shifts, cheap beer finally in hand, content at the energy we seemed to have collected across the day that was at the point of bursting as we rode our bikes in loops around where they sat, whooping and shouting the happy, nonsensical calls of summer.

  These mantras and the cheap beer were flimsy covers for the sense of dread that pervaded Florida in the summer of 2009, the summer before our freshman year of high school, and the last year we were all friends. The biggest industry in the area before September 2008 was real estate. Second homes. Vacation homes. It was the land of getaways and escape. By living there year-round, we were the minorities. Our parents worked as secretaries or handymen in real estate offices, construction workers on the new condo developments going up every month, or as waitresses in theme restaurants that catered to sunburnt men in Hawaiian shirts who had chosen to spend their two weeks of vacation with their families in a brutal, blistering climate that none of them were conditioned for. After the crash, the second-home class of people could barely afford their first homes, and foreclosure rates in the area rose to an all-time high. Everywhere you looked, half-built housing developments loomed, like skeletons whose flesh had been picked off. The sounds of bulldozers and drills and concrete mixers was the symphony of our home, and the silence that replaced it in the fall of 2008 burned our eardrums and put everyone on edge. Our neighborhood had always been working class, but when their old jobs ceased to exist, our parents had to settle for even less reliable, less rewarding work with longer hours and lower pay. We had thought that after a few months or a year these developments would be back on track, that it was only a matter of time before their completions gave way to new blueprints and plans and buildings in progress that would call for even more manpower than before, but by that summer it was clear that the silence was there to stay.

  The result was a pessimism that colored every interaction, and every decision, and went deeper than our smooth brown skin. There was not much good luck anywhere you looked, and as a result, our parents were prepared, at all times, for the worst: for the gator that always gets too close to finally strike; for soft, weak plots of land to finally give way to the sinkhole beneath; or for the rebellious teenager who always has something to say to just not come home one night. The only guard against these ever-lurking dangers, it was understood, was to combat them together—to pool safety in numbers. This meant that Nina’s mom was allowed to yell at me, and my own mother never felt bad about asking any of the neighbors to watch me without any warning. Everyone’s house was open to everyone else’s kids, and which kid was struggling in algebra and which kid had just landed the lead role in the school play were common knowledge. Good luck had abandoned all of us at once, and we would make do together.

  This meant we walked one another to and from school every morning and home again every afternoon five days a week from September through June, and gathered in the hallways according to the neighborhoods we lived in, with the people we both commuted with and played with after school. We spent nearly every waking minute of the summer with each other. And when I say we were like family, I don’t mean that as a cozy, sentimental concept, but a practical one. We spent more time together than most siblings do. The only time I used to spend away from Nina and Lindsey and Lila were the eight hours I spent sleeping every night.

  We had been friends our entire lives—the shit economy can’t be credited for that. I can no more remember meeting Lila or Nina than I can my own parents, and there are pictures of all of us in plastic wading pools in each other’s patchy front yards, and flying around so joyfully, so urgently, in nothing but diapers that it looks like our happiness is about to sprout wings. But while there is no hard beginning any of us can point to, that summer does mark the start of the stretch of years I think of when I think of them now.

  Even in the hard times our state had fallen on, it wasn’t entirely unpleasant to be young when and where we were, and not only because we knew one another. When we were kids, our neighborhood was in the middle of nowhere, a strip of empty land between swamps. But we had charted the spread of upscale vacation developments and the bougie shops and restaurants to accommodate them optimistically—in the years just before the crash, we were surrounded. The gated communities-in-progress we lived in the shadows of were designed so that each cul-de-sac within each community had a different aesthetic—missionary, ranch, whitewashed with red roses climbing up the sides—and was named accordingly. The Sierra. The Rose Bed. And all the identical units of each street were clustered around a pool. While each cul-de-sac was halted midway through its completion after the crash, there were always one or two occupied houses on every st
reet. Which meant they had to keep the pools open and operating, since it was one of the amenities that had been promised in the brochure.

  All of these cleverly named, meticulously styled and crafted lanes of identical homes were lumped and gated into larger planned communities with equally charming names—Alligator’s Walk, Sunset Point. The guard towers you had to pass to get into these communities—“welcome points,” they were called—ran along Route 49, across which sat the ungated, unplanned streets that our less colorful, unnamed homes lined. The men who manned these welcome points really were fairly welcoming. Most of the guards were retirees who lived in the gated communities, pleasant and probably a little bored old men who were happy to show you pictures of their grandkids if you had the time. They wore matching polo shirts and had perfected the art of the friendly nod. In general, we didn’t mind the people of these communities the way we did the Golden Creekers. They were vacationers and retirees—we had no idea what kind of lives they led in the real world, and this made any interactions we had with them impersonal, and very low-stakes. They were individual entities, all of them, whose polite waves at each other when they passed made it clear they didn’t know each other. They had not gathered into a force that was threatening to us. That they had gone so far out of their way to spend time in our home seemed promising.

  One of the guards, a widower, had a brief fling with Elaine, which is how we all had stickers on our bikes signifying the right to come and go from Panther Crossing whenever we pleased, giving us access to twenty-seven different half-finished cul-de-sacs, and the swimming pools that sat unused within them. That these pools were maintained for no one further drained the already dwindling funds of these communities, but was great for us.

  Elaine had eventually tired of Henry’s early bedtime and his lack of interesting stories after long days spent nodding at the cars that had windshield stickers proving they lived in Panther Crossing, and punching the button to raise the bar to grant them entrance. But he still nodded at us every time we went cruising down the bike lane that ran past his guard tower.

  These bike rides and pool crashings were, like everything else, a four-person event. I can’t remember a single ride or swim that summer that one of us missed. Nina and Lila never excluded me or Lindsey—it was understood that any gathering that any combination of the four of us held was open to every member of the group—but there was a physical component to the bond between Lila and Nina. I don’t mean they were lesbians, as the older boys who lived in the neighborhood always screamed at them when we rode our bikes through their street hockey games, just that they were constantly drawing each other in some magnetic, physical way. Their bodies were always turned toward each other in a way that didn’t seem entirely voluntary. Even by that night in the bar, the one thing that made me even a little insecure in my friendship with Nina was having seen her with Lila. I knew friendship could become even more intimate, more intense, for her, and that our friendship, as important as it was to me, and as influential as it was on every other aspect of my life, had not yet reached the level of friendship Nina was capable of. But I don’t think I would have believed that if I hadn’t seen it for myself.

  It wasn’t so much that they borrowed each other’s clothes as that they shared a wardrobe. They combined their allowances to buy the pieces of clothing that always hung exactly the same on both of them and never looked quite right on me and Lindsey even though we were invited to their trips to the mall to purchase them. Whenever the four of us agreed to meet somewhere at a given time, they always showed up together, even though we had seen them part ways when we all said good night after we made the plan. And we knew they hadn’t called each other in between to work out an earlier meeting time, because Lila’s family was so poor then that their phone service was cut off half the time. It wasn’t so much that they finished each other’s sentences as that when either of them was speaking it was understood that she was speaking for both of them. The other nodded along, smiling neutrally, confirming that she had signed off on the statement being made. People who lived in our neighborhood and had known them for years sometimes mixed their names up, and not just because they had the same four-letter structure.

  They even looked alike. Or complementary, really, given that they were either identical or opposite on any given physical front. Their bodies took up the same amount of space volume-wise, I guess you could say—they were both small, compact girls who managed to afford Abercrombie clothing by virtue of being able to fit into the children’s line, which had most of the same styles as the adult store but cost less. But while Nina was all nobs and hard angles, boyish in hip and bosom, Lila was lithe. She seemed almost stretchy on account of how smoothly each part of her body flowed into the other. My mother called her Gumby. They both had thin, silky hair that they wore in face-framing bobs that curtained classic features. Nina, who loved to be surprising, suffered from the fact that her features and mannerisms were as Italian as the name Nina Scarfio promised they would be. She had the skin tone of a character in a Fellini movie and could never help gesturing with her hands as she spoke. Lila looked rich even before she was. She was the picture of an East Coast blonde rather than a California one, with delicate, straw-looking hair and china-doll skin that was never meant to spend as much time in the sun as it did. She was the kind of girl you knew would look great in a turtleneck, even though the weather kept her from ever confirming this. She had blue eyes the color of the swimming pools we were constantly trespassing in.

  Where Lindsey had the consolation of knowing that her mother would have been around if she could, and Nina had never met her father—did not, in fact, know his name—so didn’t have anyone to miss, Lila’s story was a little less tidy. Her mother had lived with her and her father until Lila was ten. She didn’t disappear completely, but went to work on one of the cruise ships based in Miami. Whenever she docked, Lila went to Miami to stay with her for a night. We would have been jealous, but Lila never came back from these trips with any good stories, or souvenirs, and only offered bland, one-word answers when we pressed her, until finally we stopped. I never saw Lila shed a single tear over her mother, or voice a single complaint, but after she left, Lila laughed less, and you could sometimes tell she was tuned out from the conversation we were having around her. She had always been the least silly of us—the one with the most proper grammar and the cleanest nails—but after her mother left she seemed adult in a serious, reserved sort of way.

  Lila’s father, Mike, was what was known as a dreamer in our neighborhood, which was certainly a notch, on the philosophical hierarchy, below a stern, nose-to-the-grindstone hard worker. But it was also understood that dreamers were broken by The Man, and The Man was the enemy. Which meant that while men sometimes shook their heads when they saw him sitting on his porch drinking a forty as they came crawling home after fourteen-hour shifts, they shared cans of beer from their own six-packs when his malt liquor ran out. He pitched new gadgets and schemes to the clusters of lawn chairs that gathered each night—an automatic baby bottle, a talking ball that would train your dog, a bookmark that was also a flashlight—and over time he became our parents’ very own court jester. At the very least, sentiment went, he made people laugh.

  The other reason people gave Mike a break was because of Marie, Lila’s younger sister. She was four years younger than us, and the only person Lila might’ve conceivably loved as much as Nina. She was rabid about her, often insisting that Marie come along on outings she probably shouldn’t have been part of. All of us knew better than to argue.

  Marie was a strange, haunting child who rarely said more than a handful of words that anyone could remember. She was gracious to adults and did well in school, but she was a chalky white color that unsettled her golden peers and made more noticeable the dark circles under her eyes. Her and Lila’s mother was generally blamed for this, along with just about everything else that went wrong in those first few years after she left. And every sm
all, kind gesture directed at Mike was understood to be compensation for his wife’s unthinkably selfish exit.

  Occasionally when a new product hit shelves with an uproar, Mike claimed he had been only a step or two behind arriving at that very same one. He had seen the hole in the market for it, he said, but the product that hole called for hadn’t taken a concrete form in his mind yet. The consistency of his confidence didn’t keep anyone from being shocked when one of his ideas finally did pay off. It was so simple, we couldn’t believe we hadn’t thought of it ourselves, and it was only later that our parents realized they were having a taste, finally, of what Mike had been going through for years. Sick of having to buy new crayons for Marie when she broke them, he patented a small piece of rubber that would fit perfectly around the two halves of a snapped crayon, making it whole again. It was rumored that Crayola had bought the patent for more than three million dollars.

  The deal had gone through in the summer of 2008, and though no one thought his sessions of make-believe would finally come to something, no one was surprised that he waited until everyone else was particularly poor before landing his fortune. He had never managed to get in line with what everyone else was doing. At the same time, no one was surprised that once he had money to spare, he didn’t change much, or pick up and leave altogether. He was a simple man who showed no frustration or regret at the simple life he led. He made a change here and there, but so gradually that we didn’t notice at first—a nicer backpack for Lila right in the middle of the school year when her old one was perfectly fine, top-of-the-line tires on his crumbling car. I don’t think now that he put off the new house in the nicer neighborhood and the private school for as long as he did only because the dual concepts of money and having any were so foreign to him that he had not had time to figure out what he would do with it.