Local Girls: A Novel

by Caroline Zancan

  The rest of the night was uneventful. Max failed to tag anybody and kept asking questions about the origin of the game and why certain rules that felt counterintuitive to him existed, as if he were a Ph.D. student in hide-and-seek. Lindsey quit out of hunger and Lila found a half-bag of cashews, two pudding snacks, and a can of peaches, which we passed around on her front steps while we each tried to be the first one to shout when a lightning bug flashed, each winner getting one of the final spoonfuls of the pudding. And Max asked why we used the male pronoun for lightning bug, out of curiosity more than any sort of political agenda, and we all agreed that we associated different animals with different genders and that because we awarded the same number of animals to each gender, it was okay, but we couldn’t decide on the distinctions we used to determine which animal was lumped where. I had almost forgotten about what I had seen until Max pulled away after making a plan with Lila for when he would pick her up the next morning.

  “What do you guys talk about?” Nina asked. Quickly, like she was ripping off a Band-Aid and trying to make it as painless as possible. “All those hours you spend together.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” said Lila, in the first time I can think of that she ever talked down to Nina, or even disagreed with her. “You. We talk about you.”

  • • •

  We were about to ask Decker about his own love life, even though everyone who spoke English and a few million people who didn’t knew that he and Abby Madison, Maxim’s third hottest woman in the world, had been dating for about two years, when his phone, which was laid out on the table next to his drink, started vibrating, and her picture, a selfie, flashed across his screen. If someone had run into the bar totally naked, or a man with a gun had demanded that everybody freeze, our eyes could not have been more perfect circles of surprise and alarm, even though it made sense that a twenty-four-year-old woman would want to talk to her boyfriend on a Saturday night. Especially a woman as happy and in love as everyone knew Abby Madison was with Sam Decker. The thing we had no way of expecting was when he touched the button on the side of his phone that sent the call directly to voice mail. Even after he put the phone in the inside front pocket of his jacket we kept staring at the spot on the table where the phone had been.

  “Has the iPhone 5 not made its way to Florida yet?”

  “Dude, why didn’t you get it?” Lindsey asked.

  “Yeah, we don’t mind if you have to take that,” I said. “We can wait.”

  Now it was Nina’s turn to make the Seriously? eyes.

  “She’s on a press junket for Existential Madame. She’s in Spain right now. Or maybe France? I don’t know. They were gonna hit them both at some point. She probably just got up.”

  He had become animated in his playful ribbing about Lila and our love lives, but with Abby’s cellular presence hovering over our table, he fell into a slouchy, defensive posture, as if he were answering complaints from his male friends about how much time he was spending with his new girlfriend.

  “Isn’t it, like, three in the morning over there right now?”

  “Oh, you’re right. She’s probably on her way to the gym, then.”

  “At three in the morning?” Nina asked.

  He shrugged. “Workout time isn’t built into these tour schedules. But she would probably rather have her eyelids removed than skip the gym.”

  “Do you need to call her back?” asked Lindsey. “Seriously, we don’t mind.”

  “I don’t know.” His face made it clear that he was less uncertain than he’d said. “What could she possibly have to tell me about a European press tour that I don’t already know? Second-tier, middle-aged journalists with bad breath and paunch that you get to watch grow with every movie.”

  “Maybe she wants your help fielding a tough question they might ask her,” I said. “You know, since you have so much more experience with this kind of thing?”

  He laughed unkindly, but not at me. It was an internal laugh, at some private joke we hadn’t been granted access to.

  “No. Abby’s a pro. She knows exactly what she’s doing. Plus, the press loves her. She’s fine.”

  He said most of this into his bourbon, and a lock of his hair, which had been expertly groomed and combed back so that it looked styled and natural at once, fell into his face. I wouldn’t have thought it possible for the Sam Decker we had met an hour ago to get any more attractive, but this lock of hair proved me wrong. It made him look more vulnerable in the way we want all of our heroes to look, making their ultimate victory that much more triumphant.

  “Maybe she just wants to hear your voice?” said Lindsey. “You know, homesick and all that.”

  “I guess I’m just not a phone person,” he said. “It always makes me feel like I have nothing but pointless, banal things to say, and I end up asking about the weather where the other person is. Even if it’s someone I really like.”

  “So I guess that’s why you guys never go more than two weeks without seeing each other, huh?” Nina asked, finally conceding that Abby Madison existed, and that we weren’t going to stop talking about her anytime soon.

  He started laughing, loudly and for a beat too long, making sure his point registered.

  “What in the world makes you think that?”

  “I read it in Blush,” she said, more sheepish than I’d ever seen her. She looked like a dog waiting to be struck for eating the Thanksgiving turkey.

  “Don’t read that shit. I mean, unless you like fiction. But even then, I’m sure you could do better. The writing’s pretty bad.”

  “What, so they make stuff up?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes we make stuff up. Why do you think we hire publicists?”

  “No way,” I said. “The stuff they report always eventually ends up proving true. Like, they report that there’s trouble between certain couples, and then a few weeks later the couple admits they’ve broken up.”

  “I don’t know. The publicist probably starts leaking that there’s trouble when his client finds a younger, prettier girlfriend, so that when he has to actually announce that it’s over, people are primed for it. Minimal damage to the reputations involved.”

  Getting to exhibit expertise was having the effect on Decker that it had on most people. It was drawing him out. He was talking to us now, instead of to himself. Making eye contact and using his hands and body language to emphasize his points.

  “That’s crazy,” Lindsey said.

  “I’m telling you. That’s how it works.”

  His jacket started vibrating.

  “Dude, just pick up and tell her that it’s raining here!” I said, half joking, suddenly panicked at the thought of Abby Madison alone in a dark hotel room in Europe, unable to speak the language of the excited bellboys and desk clerks who kept inventing excuses to talk to her, already exhausted with a long day ahead of her, her adorable little face scrunched up in frustration at not being able to talk to the one person who might be able to make it okay. There are some things in life you have to believe in, even if you have no evidence of them, and up until that moment, the fact that Sam Decker picked up Abby Madison’s calls on the first ring was one of them.

  “Seriously,” said Lindsey. “Who doesn’t pick up when Abby Madison calls them? She’s the world’s best human being. Even her name is perfect.”

  His That’s absurd laugh got bigger every time.

  “That’s not her real name. Of course it’s not. That’s nobody human’s real name.”

  We all spoke at once.

  “What?”

  “So what’s her real name?”

  “I’m confused.”

  “Stacy Berliner, of the Tennessee Berliners.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s not a bad name, but I guess it doesn’t have the same ring. I mean, are there any famous Stacys?”

  “No, because all the Stacys a
nd the Nancys and the Joans change their name before they even get their union cards. You actually all have first names that might work,” he said. “Except for maybe you,” he said to Lindsey. “No offense.”

  She put her hands up to ensure none was taken.

  “But you’d probably have to come up with new last ones.”

  “Wait!” Nina said. “What about Lindsay Lohan? Lindsey’s a totally vanilla name.” She looked briefly at Lindsey to reiterate the benevolent spirit in which her name was being taken down. “And Lohan is her mom and her siblings’ name!”

  She looked like a Jeopardy! contestant who had just gotten the Daily Double right, an achievement that happened surprisingly often when she watched the show at home, given that she had graduated high school with a 2.3 GPA. Decker shook his head.

  “Child actors,” he said. “Parents feel bad about subjecting their kids to such a crazy life so early. They go to absurd lengths to keep things ‘normal’ even as their kids start making ten times what they made last year in a single week of work. Changing their names would be out of the question.”

  We nodded like good students, confirming the logic of this explanation. This was the Decker we knew. The one who had an answer for everything. His stepping into his role made us all more confident and easy. It was like we all suddenly remembered our lines.

  “I just missed the era when parents and managers started worrying about these things. When I started, the kids were paid talent just like everybody else. I don’t know if that makes me lucky or un.”

  “I just can’t believe we didn’t know this,” said Lindsey. “Like, that Rumor and Kiss haven’t uncovered it yet.”

  “They don’t report it because it’s not a big deal. It’s a well-known fact that everybody does it.”

  “Wait a minute!” said Nina. “Does that mean—”

  “Matt Brandon,” he said, offering up his bourbon, ready to receive our glasses. “Nice to meet you.”

  • • •

  My own parents, meanwhile, didn’t have even the consolation of the lawn chairs in the street. They would have been welcome—it was never a terribly exclusive gathering, though you were generally expected to bring beer, which they didn’t drink—but they made less noise than any two people I’ve ever met, even now, and I get panicky just thinking of them in such a rowdy, expressive circle.

  My parents decided early on, it’s apparent to me, to be good parents. And they succeeded. They reprimanded me when I broke curfew and monitored the length of my skirts in a place where hems moved upward with age until you became a parent yourself, and they always insisted that the three of us sit down to meals that didn’t come out of a box. Maybe the problem is that they were too good at it, and by that I mean that I have trouble identifying for you much about them outside of that role, and not only out of some selfish, ego-driven insistence that the world see them as I do.

  I never heard either of them raise their voices in the eighteen years I lived with them, and their laughter, also scarce, was almost always something elicited by one of the detective novels they read with a fervor they applied to little else, or the one hour of old sitcom reruns they allowed themselves a night, rather than something one of them said. Their idea of spending time together was being in the same room reading books that they would both read at some point, though I’m not sure they even discussed them. They had one glass of wine a night at dinner, always the same bargain brand, two on Saturdays, and I never saw any indication that they were ever tempted to have more. There were never lulls in the conversation, but we always talked about the same things—events we had coming up, things we had read about in the news, a new dish my mother was thinking about making, though I can’t think of any time now that she actually did. I couldn’t have told you what they worried about, or what they had wanted to be when they were young. The only time I ever saw my mother cry was when I spilled a tall glass of Coke on a couch she and my father were still paying off, even though the three of us were the only people who ever saw it. She started covering it in plastic that smelled like the rubber sheets I had to use when I wet the bed as a child and made awkward squeaking noises that sounded like flatulence, and even then she stared at it like it might run off.

  Even if it was just one of the girls who was over—Nina or Lindsey—they were considered company. My mother never called them this, but she came just short of bowing to them in all her nervous fussiness over whether everyone had enough to eat and drink and whether the room was just the right temperature. Elaine dropped the f-bomb every other sentence and was constantly enlisting our help—be it manpower in moving their ratty couch when the concept of feng shui reached her, or matters that were literally trivial, as when she couldn’t place the name of an actor or a movie. We rolled our eyes every time she burst into Nina’s room—every query or request was urgent—but there was an easiness, a lack of formality, that made us gravitate toward Nina’s house without saying anything about it.

  To be fair, there was no question I ever asked my parents that they didn’t answer or scolded me for having asked, but I learned long before I left their house that they would not have been much help on the emotional festers that sometimes made their way into my life. If I had talked to them, for instance, about Lila transferring schools, my mother simply would have said, “Oh, how nice for Lila. I’m sure there’ll be a lot of opportunity in going to a school like that,” and my father would’ve said, “I hate to think what that’s costing Mike.” And it would never have occurred to me to tell them how seeing her in that blazer was like the moment the person you’re waving off at the airport finally disappears from sight on the way to their gate. There was such a tediousness to the number of times they turned around to wave at you where you were standing, just before the security checkpoint, feeling a little sheepish that the security agents could see how many times you were waving, that it never occurred to you that the waving would eventually have to stop. Or that when it did you’d have lost something. If I had told them, my mother might have said something about how dramatic girls can be, shaking her head at the silliness of it all, before pointing out that Lila still lived less than a tenth of a mile away from me. But I also think a comment like that would stir up in her a panic, a discomfort, not unlike the one being in the middle of all those lawn chairs would have.

  I had thought this is just who they were—the settings they were born on—until my mom’s ne’er-do-well younger sister, Donna, spun in and out of town on a doomed fund-raiser for OxyContin my sophomore year. I came home from school to find her rifling through my mother’s jewelry box in an empty house, muttering to herself. Or maybe to my mother. She was smaller and wirier than my mother—she had Madonna arms that you could actually see distinct muscles in, which Nina was always talking about and was determined to have, though I never once saw her lift a weight. Donna had dirty-brown hair and mosquito-bite scars up and down her legs that somehow smacked of debauchery even though everyone in Florida was covered in bug bites. I had seen pictures of her and though they were faithful to the woman in front of me—she had not gained or lost any weight and her hair was the same color and about the same length—when she turned around from the jewelry box to face me in the open doorway I didn’t recognize her. I realized after she left that it was because in every picture I had seen of her she was smiling, and everything about this woman, from her posture to her facial expression to the stains on her white T-shirt to the shake of her hands to her eyes, made it clear that smiling was no longer something she did a whole lot of.

  She gave no indication that she was embarrassed at having been caught.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked, holding up a handful of my mother’s jewelry, a cigarette in the other hand. “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna take it. There’s nothing but shit here. She has a two-bedroom house and nothing but fakes. I should’ve known.”

  I remained frozen in the doorway, petrified both that she wouldn�
�t leave and that she would, and I’d have to decide whether or not to tell my mother that she’d been here.

  “What has she told you about me?” she asked.

  “Not much,” I said, telling the truth, which must have pissed her off more than any insult I could’ve invented.

  “Yeah, well, you tell her at least I didn’t have a baby I couldn’t afford.”

  She looked me up and down, as if she were trying to decide how much she could get for me at the pawnshop around the corner.

  “And a bastard at that,” she said, pretty pleased about the whole thing.

  I didn’t mind the label. Most of the kids I grew up with already wore it. If not with pride, then without shame, either. It isn’t a slur where I’m from. But I had never stopped to think that my parents, in other circumstances, might not have chosen each other. It had been clear to me for some time that they didn’t suit each other—they never rushed home to share the particulars of their days, and I rarely saw them touch, outside of items passed across the dinner table. But I had had no way of knowing until then that the monotone setting on which they lived their lives might not have been hardwired into them.

  I became obsessed with other lives they might have had. Not grander, more ambitious lives, just different ones. My father, in reality a casual, mediocre golfer and the only pasty man in Florida, as a caddy at one of the Disney resort courses, lean and brown from his work. My mother a flight attendant who ushered the tourists back to where they came from, smiling, as she fetched pillows and directed people to turn off their phones, far more than she ever did at home.

  Jay called me every night at the same time to say good night, even if he was out with his friends, who ruthlessly made fun of the ritual and asked to be tucked in as they threw bar nuts at him. He let me pick the restaurant on the rare occasions we could afford a dinner out. He held open doors and ordered dessert when I was in the bathroom—knowing that I wanted it but didn’t want to spend the money—and though he no more wanted a child than any other nineteen-year-old boy did, I knew he would pick up double shifts or get a second job to afford one.