American Girls (12 page)

Since I couldn't pay for groceries with an IOU, Dex bought just about all the food. He never complained about springing for things, not like Delia, which should have made me feel like less of a mooch but did the opposite. Maybe he had signed up for one of those 1-800 numbers that came on late at night—his heart moved by pictures of starving actresses and their siblings. For thirty dollars a night, you could sponsor two ladies in Los Angeles. Before he braved the hippie grocery, I offered him some of the money I'd won. He waved me off like I was the crazy one.

While Dex was in the store, I read the last book Roger had given me and listened to an interview that Doon had downloaded where Karl Marx, the singer from Freekmonkee, was talking about LA. Karl Marx
liked
that LA was trashy around the edges. He said in a whisper-soft voice that LA was always pretending to be something better than it was, and that made it always the same. The music they were recording was about the emptiness in the air. The emptiness was inspiring.
Fill the void with the void.
At the end of the podcast he played a song they'd been working on, and it was so dark and beautiful that I closed my eyes and forgot for a minute that I was in a car in a grocery store parking lot. I hadn't understood everything he'd said in the interview, but when I listened hard, I could feel that space they wanted to fill.

“It's like the Hunger Games in there.” Dex slammed the door behind him and grabbed the steering wheel with both hands. “I almost had to take down a grown-ass woman. In front of her child.”

I started to laugh.

“I have three items, three dinners in the ten-or-less lane, and she's behind me with her kid and she gets mad at me that I don't let her go in front of me with her twelve items and nose-picking kid. What is wrong with people in this town? Riddle me that, grasshopper?”

“You should just start going to the normal supermarket. People are much nicer when they're buying Doritos. I have no medical or scientific explanation, but it's a fact.”

“Let's exit this hell.”

“Crappy food makes people nicer,” I said. “I'm telling you.”

I have never thought that hippies were nice. One afternoon in the Whole Foods parking lot and anyone can see that once the patchouli clears, those vegans would slice you for a parking space. Lynette, the world's biggest ex-hippie, was the one who made us get rid of our dog. As a newborn, Birch cried for four months straight—and he didn't exactly chill out so much as dial the volume down as he got older. He had slowly driven the poor dog psycho. Tarzan, our boxer, tried to rip a teething biscuit out of Birch's hands, and she growled, and it was scary. I offered to take care of her, but Lynette sent Tarzan away to my aunt's house anyway. The dog I'd had since I was seven.

My mom met Lynette at her grief group, after her first miscarriage, the one with my dad. I didn't even know she
was
grieving until my mom sat me and my dad down one afternoon and told us about Lynette, the person who had helped her reconnect with her true self. Note to ghost-of-self-past: if your mother starts talking to you about the fluid nature of attraction and the joy of finding out who she really is, you should probably start saving for a plane ticket west.

In the parking lot, while I was listening to Karl Marx, I'd been half reading about “Squeaky” Fromme. She was one of the most famous Manson girls even though she didn't take part in any of the Tate-LaBianca murders. Her real name was Lynette, which was crazy since I'd never met a Lynette other than my stepmom and I kind of thought it was one of those names that people just made up. The two Lynettes were nothing alike on the surface, but I couldn't help trying to line them up, see if anything other than their names matched. My mom's Lynette was like some kind of yuppie superhero: banker by day, hippie by night. She ate part of my mom's placenta after Birch was born, even though she didn't actually pass him through her lady parts. That was a health hazard of global proportions if you asked me.

The Manson girls were all in with the hippie lifestyle. They upcycled food from the local grocery stores' garbage bins, they breastfed in public, they made their own clothes (out of their own hair at times, which was weird, even for hippies). Squeaky Fromme was probably the biggest tree hugger of them all, and what did she wind up doing, you know, after the Tate case had died down and there hadn't been any massacres for a while? She decided to go and shoot the president.

Trying to assassinate the president should not be funny. It really shouldn't. It's not like I was cracking up when we read about Lincoln or JFK. But let's face it, they were real presidents. Gerald Ford ranks right up there with Millard Fillmore and Bush the First on the list of unexciting white men who have run this country, made their way into history books, and otherwise been human sleeping pills. If all the presidents had been television shows, Gerald Ford would probably have been a PBS fund drive. So I'd bet the fact that anyone would try to kill Gerald Ford, Gerald Rudolph Ford, was kind of hard to get excited about, even back in the day. And Fromme sounded like something out of Monty Python, dressed all in red with a sawed-off shotgun under her sister-wife dress and fake-nun robe, muttering “He is not a public servant” before
not
firing her gigantic gun at the president. “It didn't go off” was her great defense as the Secret Service took her out of commission in Sacramento.
Sic semper tyrannis
it was not.

Lynette told me once that I was “part of a generation of the historically illiterate” when I told her that I thought the sixties were ridiculous. Not the civil rights movement, or any of that, but the free love and bad hair and half-baked philosophies.
Look at me, I'm naked and having sex with everyone and getting stoned
. Groovy. “Hair was political,” Lynette told me. “Love was political. People wanted to change the world. Of course you'd only see the surface; that's all your generation really sees. Maybe you've all been medicated past caring.” Lynette could go on forever if you asked her to, about “the apathy of the young,” not like she did anything for the earth besides recycle her plastics.

“You're terribly cynical for such a young person,” Lynette told me a few months after she and my mom shacked up. I hated it when adults talked that way, looking at you like you're a charity case for not applauding every idiotic choice they made. She wanted me to be happy for her and my mom. Yay, divorce! Yay, midlife sexuality changes! I told her that by the time my mom reached her fifties they'll probably have figured out another way for her to have a fourth baby, so Lynette should probably have a backup plan before they started monogramming the towels. That wasn't cynicism; that was experience.

“I don't expect you to like me,” she had said. “But I will ask that you respect me.”

I decided to do neither, but had the sense to stop arguing.

Still, for as much as the two of them drove me crazy, sometimes, when I looked in the mirror, I worried that my mom and Lynette were rubbing off on me. Neither of them wore much makeup, and they tried not to shop at the mall. Lynette had a friend who spun her own wool and made sweaters, and they were super soft and comfortable, but they weren't exactly fashion-forward. Lynette probably would have made a good Manson girl. I could see her picking “perfectly good food” out of garbage bins and embroidering her own shirts, weaving fringe out of her stringy, unwashed hair.

If any of my clothes said “Made in China” on the tag, I got a lecture about the conditions of the kids who had to cut the patterns or work the sewing machines. And it was a tragedy, I got that, but lately when I looked at my wardrobe I wondered if that wasn't some kind of social injustice as well—a crime against what I could look like with normal moms. And since Jeremy Taylor had taken to asking me what I was reading, or how long I was staying this summer, I was starting to care. My jeans were the wrong length for what people were wearing, and when I cuffed them I just felt like Huckleberry Finn, some ragamuffin from the South slumming around the corners of the set. I wanted something tight and knee-length, like Delia was wearing, and some T-shirts that fit better. I probably needed a haircut, too, but since I couldn't really even afford new clothes, that was out of the question. I knew I'd never look like Delia, but if she took me shopping, there was a chance that I could be Delia-lite, the affordable model to her sports vehicle.

“Looks like Delia's home,” Dex said. Her car was parked in Dex's other space, even though she was supposed to be gone until ten.

“Good,” I said. “I need to talk to her about something.”

And it wasn't the Manson girls.

 

8

When we got inside, Delia was already there looking like death's torn-up sister. Half of her face was bloody, and maggots that seemed almost three-dimensional were eating out the side of her jaw. I knew that Delia had been reshooting some scenes from the zombie flick, but usually she had washed and changed by the time I saw her. Evidently, the director had gotten food poisoning, so the actors went home early. She'd kept on the makeup because she said that it made drivers much,
much
nicer in traffic. The sickest part was, she looked an almost creepy kind of sexy—bugs and all.

“You look like you saw a ghost,” she said to me, laughing.

It wasn't her nicest laugh. Technically, we were still in kind of a fight. The night before, she'd dropped me off at her place, which I was liking less and less by the evening. No more notes had been taped to the door, but I heard noises in the driveway at weird hours and the nights felt long and lonely. Delia said the noises were probably squirrels, or some dog loose in the neighborhood, but that's not how it sounded when there was no one else around. And last night, there had been a bona-fide knock at the door, then a louder knock, which I didn't answer because I could hear the woman outside saying, “I know you're in there.” Maybe pre–Manson project I would have considered cracking the door, but after what I had been reading, no way. So I hid, and the woman said louder, “I saw you in there. I saw you by the door.” I almost cried, I was so scared. I talked myself through how I had double-locked all the doors, then I remembered that the doors of the Tate residence had been locked the night of the Manson murders, but they had left a window open to allow the newly painted nursery to dry. I prayed that there were no weak points in my little fortress and called Delia from the bathroom, trying not to breathe because I was sure psycho-lady could hear that through the door as well.

Delia came home and while I guess she wasn't evil about it, she wasn't exactly nice. She pointed out that there was a roaring party two houses down, and couldn't I hear the music or was I going deaf as well as crazy? She figured it was just a lost partier who got the address wrong, and yes, that was probably scary, but maybe not scary enough to interrupt her evening. But that's what they said about Manson as well, that the people he murdered just happened to be at the wrong address. I told her as much and she said I was being hysterical, and that if she didn't get some time alone with Dex she was going to lose her mind or at the very least, her relationship, so could I please be more considerate. I thought about mentioning the note I wasn't supposed to have read, but worried that she'd ship me back home, whether my mom wanted me or not. I told her that she would probably be making excuses for how safe her house was as they chalked my outline across her apartment floor. She stayed the rest of the night, but left before I was up the next morning. I hadn't seen her since.

“That makeup is freaky,” I said. “I don't remember it being that gross before.”

“It wasn't.” She was quartering an apple and cutting out the core, the same way she'd always eaten apples. “I guess they've decided to go a little more oozing with the zombies. Our fearless ‘director'”—she circled her fingers before landing the air quotes—“is panicking because people were laughing at the rough cut. I'll probably still be getting calls to reshoot when I'm old enough to need the organs myself.”

“Good,” Dex said, and kissed her on the gross side of her face. “Let him suffer. I haven't seen you in daylight in a week.”

I told my sister that I wanted to go shopping.

“Sounds like sister talk,” Dex said. “I think I'll excuse myself.”

“Are you making that much money?” Delia asked, knowing full well what the answer was.

“I thought you could help me; we could make it my Christmas present.”

“I'm confused,” she said, joking but not. “I thought all of this was your Christmas present.”

She'd pulled some leftover chicken wings out of the kitchen, and as she ate them, the delicacy of her fingers next to the bugs painted on her face almost made me dry-heave.

“Are you going to keep your makeup on?” I asked. “It's kind of freaking me out.”

My sister waved me off and cleaned the chicken wing down to the bone.

“What's wrong with the clothes that you have?”

“Nothing.”

She chewed her chicken slowly, and I swear I could hear her thinking.

“Is this about one of the twins?”

“No,” I said, embarrassed that she'd said it out loud. “Why, did Dex say something?”

“I don't need Dex to spot puppy love. Plus, you get all misty now when we pass the cookie aisle.”

“Very funny,” I said. “And I'm not in love. I just want to look, you know, better.”

My sister narrowed her eyes and stared at me like I was a day-old doughnut, the fate of which was suddenly in her hands.

“Stop it.”

“I think you've lost weight,” she said. “Seriously. You do need new pants, and”—she lowered her voice—“Roger wants to see you. He had some questions about the write-ups you've been doing. I'm sure he'll pay you something, and I can cover the rest. Within reason.”