American Girls (14 page)

For my part, the only real work I'd been doing was reading for Roger, and I had kind of hoped that Dex wouldn't notice what I was reading, since when Dex was around I was supposed to pretend that Roger didn't exist. Although calling what I was doing “reading” for Roger was probably wrong, because he'd sent me an e-mail the other morning that said, “JUST BE THE GIRL. DO NOT KILL ANYONE.” Ohmigod, like he really had to
add
the second part. He explained in a follow-up e-mail that he wanted me to spend a few days trying to see the world like one of the Manson girls. I had about a million things I thought about writing back to him, like, “I JUST GAVE A THIRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD EX-CON A BLOW JOB. DO I GET PAID EXTRA?” but given what he thought of me, he'd probably just send me a check for fifty bucks and ask for details.

Here's the funny thing, though: the minute I made up some weird answer for my history final, it stopped seeming like a stupid idea and started seeming like a good one. Maybe Delia knew something I didn't, that sometimes even something that started as a lie could become the truth before you knew it. At any rate, I knew for absolute truth that Delia would kill me if Dex found out about the Roger thing. Once I told Dex about the paper, he said that he owned a copy of
Valley of the Dolls,
and I should watch it because it was about LA and starred Sharon Tate and was her biggest role. In fact, he'd watch it with me. So the next night we hunkered down with cheese popcorn and real Doritos from the normal grocery store.

What Dex failed to mention was that
Valley of the Dolls
is a terrible movie, and not even in the fun way that might cause a person to run around quoting it and making fun of the weirdest scenes. It's long and boring and the acting is terrible. Everyone is beautiful and on pills and sleeping with everyone else, and it's still so dull that I almost fell asleep. The story follows three women who are trying to make it in entertainment and meet Mr. Right, and they get addicted to pills, or “dolls,” for a variety of reasons. Sharon Tate plays this dim-witted, sweet actress named Jennifer who falls in love with a nightclub singer who has a mysterious hereditary disease that shows up just when she reveals that she's pregnant. Sadness follows. The moral of the movie is supposed to be that the struggle to become famous, or even just wanting to be famous, is better than what happens when a person reaches that goal. Kind of like
Gatsby,
but trashier and infinitely duller. Success just makes everyone miserable and pill-happy.

Mostly, though, I watched Sharon Tate. I'd never seen her in a movie before. There were plenty of pictures on the Internet, most linked to stories about her murder, or memorials, but even those let you forget that she was a real person. On the screen, she looked like a giant Barbie doll. She wasn't an edgy kind of pretty, and even though she was skinny she was soft around the edges, fleshy, the way even the thinnest actresses sometimes look in old movies. Her first scene in the film she's dressed as a showgirl with a giant feathered headdress, and the camera pans from her ass to her boobs to her face in a series of shots. A few scenes later, she's on the phone with her horrible stage mother who reminds her that she's nothing but a body.

Nothing but a body.

The line bothered me, because when I was reading about the murders, so much more seemed to be written about the Manson girls, and Charles Manson, than about the victims themselves. Sharon Tate was just a name, or a beautiful blonde, or an actress, or the wife of a director, or another woman who really became famous only when her life was over. When she went from being a body on a screen to a body in a bag. I wanted the movie to bring her to life, but the camera seemed intent on making her nothing more than a beautiful face and a banging body. It didn't seem fair, not to her, at any rate.

But it would have been a lie to say that Sharon Tate was the only person I was thinking about. Roger had probably had me professionally hexed, because every time I saw Sharon Tate, I thought about Paige Parker. Paige looked kind of like Sharon Tate. They were both tall with dirty-blond hair and enormous boobs. Paige wasn't quite as glamorous, but she tried. Even in gym class she wore pink sneakers with little crystals on the side, and she had a pink phone with rhinestones as well. But they both had that thing that pretty people didn't usually have—a needy look, like they cared what other people thought. Like they wanted to be liked.

The weird thing was, I didn't really have an opinion about Paige one way or another outside of Doon. Paige had started at my school last year, and she took ballet with Doon. Doon hated her like a week of snow-day makeups at the end of the year. I mean she
loathed
her. If you asked me, Paige didn't have much of a personality to hate at all. She was more like Sharon Tate, pretty, but pretty boring. But friendships were kind of like poker games. The fact that Doon hated Paige trumped the fact that I didn't care about her one way or another. I went along with Doon when she talked about how awful Paige was, that she was a slut, a
whore,
that she hoped her dog died and she got fat. That was a lie, I had more than just gone along with Doon, but I didn't want to think about it.

“What did you think?” I asked Dex while the credits rolled.

“About what?” he said. After the first ten minutes, he'd been working on his pilot and only half watching the film. He didn't really look up from his computer to answer, which meant he was probably in the middle of fixing a scene or something. I was learning how Dex worked: when to talk to him, when to give him another minute, when to suggest a doughnut run.

“That movie,” I said. “Why is it a cult classic? Because Sharon Tate was in it?”

“Probably.” He finished typing and closed his computer.

“I guess it works for my paper. But I didn't like watching Sharon Tate. It's too depressing.”

“More depressing than reading yourself blind about the Manson girls?”

“Yes. But it shouldn't be, right? Does that make me a terrible person? And half the time I can't even remember the names of the other people who were murdered. I can remember Abigail Folger, because it's like the coffee, but other than that? It's like they just evaporate. Why are the murderers the famous people? If Sharon Tate weren't really beautiful and already famous, I probably wouldn't remember her name either, right? That's messed up.”

“Indeed it is.”

“That's it? I thought you'd have something smarter to say.”

Dex gut-laughed, which made me smile even though I hadn't meant it as a joke.

“From a narrative perspective,” Dex said, “maybe it's because the stories of the victims are already over. And because they hadn't done anything wrong, there's really nothing left to learn from their lives, right?”

I wasn't sure that he was wrong, but it seemed like a terrible thing to say.

“But the story of the murders doesn't really make any sense. It's crazy how these girls killed all these people, isn't it? And they look all smiley and hippie-friendly in their pictures. It's just weird. I thought girls only killed their boyfriends and husbands or rapists. Definitely not pregnant ladies. What's the lesson there? Women are secretly batshit?”

“Secretly?” Dex said, giving me his best faux-teacher tilt of the head. “Anna, what ever made you think that women are nicer than men? Has high school changed that much?”

I thought about Paige Parker again, and then I made myself stop.

“I guess not. But it's kind of different, isn't it? And why do you think they're always talking about how pretty these girls were—not Sharon Tate, but the killers? I think they look crazy. Look at this: ‘Some thought Susan Atkins was the prettiest.' What does that have to do with anything?”

“It doesn't. But Sharon Tate was fine.”

I kept going back to that part of the murder, a bunch of okay-looking girls killing the really beautiful one. Not because it was creepy, but because it wasn't so terribly hard to imagine after all. I had to remind myself that murders hadn't been planned like that. The Sharon Tate part was an accident, a twist of fate.

“This paper. You going to write anything about race?”

“I think it's just supposed to be about the girls.”

“But you know they were a bunch of white supremacists, right?” Dex propped his feet on the table and leaned back.

“Kind of. I hadn't really been reading that part.”

And then I felt embarrassed, like a big, shallow, white-girl disappointment.

“Charles Manson thought he was going to take all his white ladies to some hole in the ground and then rule all the black people left after the great American race war.”

“Seriously?”

“How long have you been researching this?”

“I don't know. A couple of weeks.”

“You need to be reading some different books.”

He was probably right, but I knew that Roger wouldn't care. All he would care about is that my sister looked beautiful and haunted and had some artsy, made-up past. If I mentioned a race war to him, he'd probably start cursing me in Polish.

“Do you think Olivia Taylor is ever going to pay me back?”

“Olivia Taylor? Not a chance.”

“Seriously? But she's rich.”

“You think rich people stay rich by giving away their money?”

“But I don't have any money. And my dad is going to kill me when he finds the charge for that stupid bag. How is it that I've allegedly stolen a thousand dollars and now I don't have any money and everyone is mad at me?”

“Young one,” he said. “You are going to have to ponder that yourself. Doughnut?”

Dex knew even better doughnut shops than my sister. He told me that he only ate the ones she brought to be nice, but the really good stuff, the crazy flavors, were at Do-Joe, which was in an even more sketchball part of town than the places where Roger filmed. But the doughnuts were otherworldly. I was hooked on a bacon-and-salted-caramel twist.

“I gotta do my work, kid,” Dex said, and that meant it was time for me to pretend to read my book. I tried not to be obvious while I watched him on the couch.

If I thought about it just right, I could pretend it was Jeremy sitting there, reading one of the meditation books he toted around and smiling at me and asking how I was every once in a while. Jeremy, who yesterday afternoon had watched a video of Barbara Hoyt with me that we found together on the Internet. She was the Manson girl who ate the hamburger that was supposed to kill her, and I'd told Jeremy that she had testified against her former friends during the trials. She hated them so much that she still showed up to make sure Leslie Van Houten didn't get parole, forty years later. But here's the scary thing, when we watched the video, Hoyt looked every bit as crazy as the crazy girls. If you had told me that she was one of the killers, I would have said, “Of course, she's clearly out of her mind.” She giggled about the trials and acted like she'd just made it to the finals in some idiotic reality show.

“Remind you of your cult days?” I asked Jeremy.

He did his best dead-eyed hippie impression and said, “There were no fries with my burger,” and he sounded just like Barbara Hoyt. The guy could act when he wanted to, and even though it didn't even make sense, we cracked each other up the rest of the afternoon asking for burgers and fries.

I told myself that I wasn't falling for Jeremy just because he was beautiful, because then I would have been as bad as anyone else out here, right? Dex moved his mouth while he was reading the lines he was writing, for possibly the world's stupidest television show, and I kept wondering if there was some planet on which Jeremy was on some other couch, thinking about how when I turned eighteen he could fly me out to LA to live with him. Mars or Jupiter, maybe. Pluto. Not even a planet. Because I didn't look like Delia. Beauty was such an unfair advantage. In the great balance scale of life, whatever I had to offer was always going to come up short next to someone like her. Everything was so much easier for her, and she didn't even have the gratitude to stick around for her awesome life. It almost made me want to break the bad news to Dex: “My sister is probably cheating with her ex.” Or at the very least: “My sister is lying to you.”

That would have solved at least one of my problems—I can just about guarantee I'd have had a plane ticket back east.

 

10

Reading about the weird and savage Hollywood that came out at night was starting to get to me. When my sister dropped me at her place, I would lock the doors and then move a chair in front of them. Since our shopping trip, I felt like I should at least try to stay out of her hair in the evenings, but it wasn't easy. I didn't want to admit that I was more spooked by the night, that the wind could sound as sinister as a hand rattling a doorknob, that I felt like at any moment there could be a pounding at the door, and I'd be huddled in the bathroom again, party or no party. I hated that I never sat on her porch and watched the moon, the way Delia talked about doing when she was alone and wanted to feel at peace.

One night my sister was in such a hurry to get out the door that she left her computer up and running, her opened e-mail spread across the screen just daring me to read it. I resisted the urge to eyeball the messages from her obviously lengthy history of Internet dating, but I opened the ones from Roger. And I wasn't spying on her because I was nosy. I was nervous. Too much reading about the secluded nature of 10050 Cielo Drive, how people down the hill from the house said that they had heard nothing, but others reported that the screams had carried for three or four miles. And then there was the fact that the same car kept idling outside the house at night. I saw it once, a boxy red Honda that sped away when I peered out the front window. My sister said they were probably just lost, but I knew better. If she didn't have the sense to be scared of the people around her, I did.