The Girls (12 page)

My eyes were closed as I floated, and I only opened them when I heard thrashing beyond the tree line. A deer, maybe. I tensed, stirring uneasily in the water. I didn't think that it could be a person: we didn't worry about those kinds of things. Not until later. And it was a dalmatian anyway, the creature that came trotting out of the trees and right up to the pool's edge. He regarded me soberly, then started to bark.

The dog was strange looking, speckled and spotted, and it barked with high, human alarm. I knew it belonged to the neighbors on our left, the Dutton family. The father had written some movie theme song, and at parties I had heard the mother hum it, mockingly, to a gathered group. Their son was younger than me—he often shot his BB gun in the yard, the dog yelping in agitated chorus. I couldn't remember the dog's name.

“Get,” I said, splashing halfheartedly. I didn't want to have to haul myself out of the water. “Go on.”

The dog kept barking.

“Go,” I tried again, but the dog just barked louder.

My cutoffs were damp from my swimsuit by the time I made it to the Dutton house. I'd put on my cork sandals, grimed with the ghost of my feet, and taken the dog by the collar, the ends of my hair dripping. Teddy Dutton answered the door. He was eleven or twelve, his legs studded with scabs and scrapes. He'd broken his arm last year falling from a tree, and my mother had been the one to drive him to the hospital: she'd muttered darkly that his parents left him alone too much. I had never spent much time with Teddy, beyond the familiarity of being young at neighborhood parties, anyone under age eighteen herded together in a forced march to friendship. Sometimes I'd see him riding his bike along the fire road with a boy in glasses: he'd once let me pet a barn kitten they'd found, holding the tiny thing under his shirt. The kitten's eyes were leaky with pus, but Teddy had been gentle with it, like a little mother. That was the last time I'd spoken to him.

“Hey,” I said when Teddy opened the door. “Your dog.”

Teddy was gaping at me like we hadn't been neighbors our whole lives. I rolled my eyes a little at his silence.

“He was in our yard,” I went on. The dog moved against my hold.

It took Teddy a second to speak, but before he did, I saw him cut a helpless look at my swimsuit top, the exaggerated swell of cleavage. Teddy saw that I had noticed and got more flustered. He scowled at the dog, taking his collar. “Bad Tiki,” he said, hustling the animal into the house. “Bad dog.”

The thought that Teddy Dutton might be somehow nervous around me was a surprise. Though I hadn't even owned a bikini the last time I'd seen him, and my breasts were bigger now, pleasing even to me. I found his attention almost hilarious. A stranger had once shown Connie and me his dick by the movie theater bathrooms—it had taken a moment to understand why the man was gasping like a fish for air, but then I saw his penis, out of his zipper like an arm out of a sleeve. He'd looked at us like we were butterflies he was pinning to a board. Connie had grabbed my arm, and we'd turned and run, laughing, the Raisinets clutched in my hand starting to melt. We recounted our disgust to each other in strident tones, but there was pride, too. Like the satisfied way Patricia Bell had once asked me after class whether I'd seen how Mr. Garrison had been staring at her, and didn't I think it was
weird
?

“His paws are all wet,” I said. “He's gonna mess up the floors.”

“My parents aren't home. It doesn't matter.” Teddy stayed in the doorway, awkward with an air of expectancy; did he think we were going to hang out?

He stood there, like the unhappy boys who sometimes got erections at the chalkboard for no reason at all—he was obviously under the command of some other force. Maybe the proof of sex was visible on me in a new way.

“Well,” I said. I worried I would start laughing—Teddy looked so uncomfortable. “See you.”

Teddy cleared his throat, trying to throttle his voice deeper. “Sorry,” he said. “If Tiki was bothering you.”

How did I know I could mess with Teddy? Why did my mind range immediately to that option? I'd only been to the ranch twice since the solstice party, but I'd already started to absorb certain ways of seeing the world, certain habits of logic. Society was crowded with straight people, Russell told us, people in paralyzed thrall to corporate interests and docile as dosed lab chimps. Those of us at the ranch functioned on a whole other level, fighting against the miserable squall, and so what if you had to mess with the straight people to achieve larger goals, larger worlds? If you checked yourself out of that old contract, Russell told us, refused all the bullshit scare tactics of civics class and prayer books and the principal's office, you'd see there was no such thing as right and wrong. His permissive equations reduced these concepts to hollow relics, like medals from a regime no longer in power.

I asked Teddy for a drink. Lemonade, I figured, soda, anything but what he brought me, his hand shaking nervously when he passed me the glass.

“Do you want a napkin?” he said.

“Nah.” The intensity of his attention seemed exposing, and I laughed a little. I was just starting to learn how to be looked at. I took a deep drink. The glass was full of vodka, cloudy with the barest slip of orange juice. I coughed.

“Your parents let you drink?” I asked, wiping at my mouth.

“I do what I want,” he said, proud and uncertain at the same time. His eyes gleamed; I watched him decide what to say next. It was strange to watch someone else calibrate and worry over their actions instead of being the one who was worrying. Was this what Peter had felt around me? A limited patience, a sense of power that felt heady and slightly distressing. Teddy's freckled face, ruddy and eager—he was only two years younger than me, but the distance seemed definitive. I took a large swallow from the glass, and Teddy cleared his throat.

“I have some dope if you want it,” he said.

Teddy led me to his room, expectant as I glanced around at his boyish novelties. They seemed arranged for viewing, though it was all junk: a captain's clock whose hands were dead, a long-forgotten ant farm, warped and molding. The glassy stipple of a partial arrowhead, a jar of pennies, green and scuzzy as sunken treasure. Usually I'd make some crack to Teddy. Ask him where he got the arrowhead or tell him about the whole one I'd found, the obsidian point sharp enough to draw blood. But I sensed a pressure to preserve a haughty coolness, like Suzanne that day in the park. I was already starting to understand that other people's admiration asked something of you. That you had to shape yourself around it. The weed Teddy produced from under his mattress was brown and crumbled, barely smokable, though he held out the plastic bag with gruff dignity.

I laughed. “It's like dirt or something. No, thanks.”

He seemed stung and stuffed the bag deep in his pocket. It had been his trump card, I understood, and he hadn't expected its failure. How long had the bag been there, crushed by the mattress, waiting for deployment? I suddenly felt sorry for Teddy, the neckline of his striped shirt gone limp with grime. I told myself there was still time to leave. To put down the now empty glass, to say a breezy thank-you and go back to my own house. There were other ways to get money. But I stayed. He eyed me, sitting on his bed, with a bewildered and attentive air, as if looking away would break the rare spell of my presence.

“I can get you some real stuff, if you want,” I said. “Good stuff. I know a guy.”

His gratitude was embarrassing. “Really?”

“Sure.” I saw him notice as I adjusted my swimsuit strap. “You have any money on you?” I asked.

He had three dollars in his pocket, wadded and limp, and didn't hesitate to hand them over. I tucked the bills away, all business. Even possessing that small amount of money tindered an obsessive need in me, a desire to see how much I was worth. The equation excited me. You could be pretty, you could be wanted, and that could make you valuable. I appreciated the tidy commerce. And maybe it was something I already perceived in relationships with men—that creep of discomfort, of being tricked. At least this way the arrangement was put toward some use.

“What about your parents?” I said. “Don't they have money somewhere?”

He cut a quick glance at me.

“They're gone, aren't they?” I sighed, impatient. “So who cares?”

Teddy coughed. Rearranged his face. “Yeah,” he said. “Let me check.”

The dog banged at our heels while I followed Teddy up the stairs. The dimness of his parents' room, a room that seemed both familiar—the stale glass of water on the nightstand, the lacquered tray of perfume bottles—and foreign, his father's slacks collapsed in the corner, an upholstered bench at the foot of the bed. I was nervous, and I could tell Teddy was, too. It seemed perverse to be in his parents' bedroom in the middle of the day. The sun was hot outside the shades, outlining them brightly.

Teddy went into the closet in the far corner, and I followed. If I stayed close, I was less like an intruder. He reached up on his toes to feel blindly through a cardboard box. While he searched, I shuffled through the clothes hanging from fussy silken hangers. His mother's. Paisley pussy-bow blouses, the grim, tight tweeds. They all seemed like costumes, impersonal and not quite real, until I pinched the sleeve of an ivory blouse. My mother had the same one, and it made me uneasy, the familiar gold of the I. Magnin label like a rebuke. I dropped the shirt back on its hanger. “Can't you hurry up?” I hissed at Teddy, and he made a muffled reply, rummaging farther, until he finally pulled out some new-looking bills.

He shoved the box back onto the high shelf, breathing hard, while I counted.

“Sixty-five,” I said. Neatening the stack, folding it to a more substantial thickness.

“Isn't that enough?”

I could tell by his face, the effort of his breathing, that if I demanded more, he would find a way to get it. Part of me almost wanted to. To gorge myself on this new power, see how long I could keep it going. But then Tiki trotted in the doorway, startling us both. The dog panting as he nudged at Teddy's legs. Even the dog's tongue was spotted, I saw, the crimped pink freckled with black.

“This'll be fine,” I said, putting the money in my pocket. My damp shorts gave off an itch of chlorine.

“So when will I get the stuff?” Teddy said.

It took a second to understand the significant look he gave me: the dope I'd promised. I'd almost forgotten that I hadn't just demanded money. When he saw my expression, he corrected himself. “I mean, no rush. If it takes time or whatever.”

“Hard to say.” Tiki was sniffing at my crotch; I pushed his nose away more roughly than I'd meant to, his snout wetting my palm. My desire to get out of the room was suddenly overwhelming. “Pretty soon, probably,” I said, starting to back toward the door. “I'll bring it over when I get it.”

“Oh, yeah,” Teddy said. “Yeah, okay.”

I had the uncomfortable sense, at the front door, that Teddy was the guest and I was the host. The wind chime over the porch rippling a thin song. The sun and trees and blond hills beyond seemed to promise great freedoms, and I could already start to forget what I'd done, washed over by other concerns. The pleasing meaty rectangle of the folded bills in my pocket. When I looked at Teddy's freckled face, a surge of impulsive, virtuous affection passed through me—he was like a little brother. The gentle way he'd mothered the barn kitten.

“I'll see you,” I said, leaning to kiss him on the cheek.

I was congratulating myself for the sweetness of my gesture, the kindness, but then Teddy adjusted his hips, hunching them protectively; when I pulled away, I saw his erection pushing stubbornly against his jeans.

I could ride my bike most of the way there. Adobe Road empty of cars, except for the occasional motorcycle or horse trailer. If a car passed, it was usually heading to the ranch, and they'd give me a lift, my bicycle half hanging out a window. Girls in shorts and wood sandals and plastic rings from the dispensers outside the Rexall. Boys who kept losing their train of thought, then coming to with a stunned smile, as if returned from cosmic tourism. The barest of nods we'd give one another, tuned to the same unseen frequencies.

It wasn't that I couldn't remember my life before Suzanne and the others, but it had been limited and expected, objects and people occupying their temperate orbits. The yellow cake my mother made for birthdays, dense and chilly from the freezer. The girls at school eating lunch on the asphalt, sitting on their overturned backpacks. Since I'd met Suzanne, my life had come into sharp, mysterious relief, revealing a world beyond the known world, the hidden passage behind the bookcase. I'd catch myself eating an apple, and even the wet swallow of apple could incite gratitude in me. The arrangement of oak leaves overhead condensing with a hothouse clarity, clues to a riddle I hadn't known you could try to solve.

I followed Suzanne past the motorcycles parked at the front of the main house, as big and heavy looking as cows. Men in denim vests sat on the nearby boulders, smoking cigarettes. The air was prickly from the llamas in their pen, the funny smell of hay and sweat and sunbaked shit.

“Hey, bunnies,” one of the men called. Stretching so his belly strained pregnant against his shirt.

Suzanne smiled back but pulled me along. “If you stand around too much, they'll jump on you,” she said, though she was pushing her shoulders back to emphasize her breasts. When I cut a glance over my shoulder, the man flicked his tongue at me, quick as a snake.

“Russell can help all kinds of people, though,” Suzanne said. “And you know, the pigs don't mess with the motorcycle guys. That's important.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she said, like it was obvious. “The cops hate Russell. They hate anyone who tries to free people from the system. But they stay away if those guys are here.” She shook her head. “The pigs are trapped, too, that's the bullshit. Their fucking shiny black shoes.”

I stoked my own righteous agreement: I was in league with truth. I followed her to the clearing beyond the house, toward the campfire hum of voices in chorus. The money was banded tightly in my pocket, and I kept starting to tell Suzanne I'd brought it, then losing my nerve, concerned it was too meager an offering. Finally I stopped her, touching her shoulder before we joined the others.

“I can get more,” I said, flustered. I just wanted her to know the money existed, imagining I would be the one to give it to Russell. But Suzanne quickly corrected that idea. I tried not to mind how swiftly she took the bills from my hand, counting them with her eyes. I saw that she was surprised by the amount.

“Good girl.”

The sun hit the tin outbuildings and broke up the smoke in the air. Someone had lit a joss stick that kept going out. Russell's eyes moved around each of our faces, the group sitting at his feet, and I flushed when he caught my gaze—he seemed unsurprised by my return. Suzanne's hand touched my back lightly, possessively, and a hush came over me like in a movie theater or church. My awareness of her hand was almost paralyzing. Donna was playing with her orange hair. Weaving sections into tight, lacy braids, using her pinched fingernails to flay split ends.

Russell looked younger when he sang, his mess of hair tied back, and he played the guitar in a funny, mocking way, like a TV cowboy. His voice wasn't the nicest I'd ever heard, but that day—my legs in the sun, the stubble of oat grass—that day, his voice seemed to slide all over me, to saturate the air, so that I felt pinned in place. I couldn't move even if I wanted to, even if I could imagine there was any place I could go.

In the lull that followed Russell's singing, Suzanne got to her feet, her dress already thick with dust, and picked her way to his side. His face changed as she whispered to him, and he nodded. Squeezing her shoulder. I saw her slip him my wad of money, which Russell put in his pocket. Resting his fingers there for a moment as if giving a blessing.

Russell's eyes crinkled. “We've got good news. We've got some resources, sweethearts. Because someone has opened themselves up to us, they've opened their hearts.”

A shimmer passed through me. And all at once, it seemed worth it—trawling my mother's purse. The stillness of Teddy's parents' bedroom. How cleanly that worry had been transmuted into belonging. Suzanne seemed gratified as she hurried to settle back beside me.

“Little Evie's shown us her big heart,” Russell said. “She's shown us her love, hasn't she?” And the others turned to look at me, a current of goodwill pulsed in my direction.

The rest of the afternoon passed in a drowsy span of sunlight. The skinny dogs retreating under the house, tongues heaving. We sat alone on the porch steps—Suzanne rested her head on my knees and recounted scraps of a dream she'd had. Pausing to take ripping bites from a length of French bread.

“I was convinced I knew sign language, but it was obvious to me I didn't, that I was just flailing my hands around. But the man understood everything I was saying, like I actually did know sign language. But later it just turned out he was only pretending to be deaf,” she said, “in the end. So it was all fake—him, me, the whole train.”

Her laugh was an afterthought, a sharp addendum—how happy I was for any news of her interior, a secret meant for me alone. I couldn't say how long we sat there, the two of us cut adrift from the rhythms of normal life. But that's what I wanted—for even time to feel different and new, washed with special import. Like she and I were occupying the same song.

We were, Russell told us, starting a new kind of society. Free from racism, free from exclusion, free from hierarchy. We were in service of a deeper love. That's how he said it, a deeper love, his voice booming from the ramshackle house in the California grasslands, and we played together like dogs, tumbling and biting and breathless with sun shock. We were barely adults, most of us, and our teeth were still milky and new. We ate whatever was put in front of us. Oatmeal that gummed up in the throat. Ketchup on bread, chipped beef from a can. Potatoes soggy with PAM.

“Miss 1969,” Suzanne called me. “Our very own.”

And they treated me like that, like their new toy, taking turns hooking their arms through mine, clamoring to braid my long hair. Teasing me about the boarding school I'd mentioned, my famous grandmother, whose name some of them recognized. My clean white socks. The others had been with Russell for months, or years, even. And that was the first worry that the days slowly melted in me. Where were their families, girls like Suzanne? Or baby-voiced Helen—she spoke sometimes of a house in Eugene. A father who gave her enemas every month and rubbed her calves after tennis practice with mentholated balm, among other dubious hygienic practices. But where was he? If any of their homes had given them what they needed, why would they be here, day after day, their time at the ranch stretching on endlessly?

Suzanne slept late, barely up by noon. Groggy and lingering, her movements at half-speed. Like there would always be more time. By then, I was already sleeping in Suzanne's bed every few nights. Her mattress wasn't comfortable, gritty with sand, but I didn't mind. Sometimes she reached over blindly from sleep to sling her arm around me, a warmth coming off her body like baked bread. I would lie awake, painfully alert to Suzanne's nearness. She turned in the night so she kicked off the sheet, exposing her bare breasts.

Her room was dark and jungly in the mornings, the tar roof of the outbuilding getting bubbly in the heat. I was already dressed but knew we wouldn't join the others for another hour. Suzanne always took a long time to get ready, though preparation was mostly a matter of time and not action—a slow shrug into herself. I liked to watch her from the mattress, the sweet, blank way she studied her reflection with the directionless gaze of a portrait. Her naked body was humble at these moments, even childish, bent at an unflattering angle as she rummaged through the trash bag of clothes. It was comforting to me, her humanness. Noticing how her ankles were gruff with stubble, or the pin dots of blackheads.

Suzanne had been a dancer in San Francisco. The flashing neon snake outside the club, the red apple that cast an alien glow on the passersby. One of the other girls burned off Suzanne's moles backstage with a caustic pencil.

“Some girls hated being up there,” she said, tugging a dress over her nakedness. “Dancing, the whole thing. But I didn't think it was so bad.”

She assessed the dress in the mirror, cupping her breasts through the fabric. “People can be so prudish,” she said. She made a lewd face, laughing a little at herself, and let her breasts drop. She told me, then, how Russell fucked her gently and how sometimes he didn't, and how you could like it either way. “There's nothing sick about that,” she said. “The people who act so uptight, who act like it's so evil? They're the real perverts. It's like some of the guys who'd come to see us dance. All mad at us that they were there. Like we'd tricked them.”

Suzanne didn't often talk about her hometown or family, and I didn't ask. There was a glossy pucker of scar tissue along one of her wrists that I'd seen her tracing with a tragic pride, and once she slipped and mentioned a humid street outside Red Bluff. But then she caught herself. “That cunt,” she called her mother, peaceably. My dizzy solidarity overwhelmed me, the weary justice in her tone—I thought we both knew what it was to be alone, though it seems silly to me now. To think we were so alike, when I had grown up with housekeepers and parents and she told me she had sometimes lived in a car, sleeping in the reclined passenger seat with her mother in the driver's side. If I was hungry, I ate. But we had other things in common, Suzanne and I, a different hunger. Sometimes I wanted to be touched so badly I was scraped by longing. I saw the same thing in Suzanne, too, perking up like an animal smelling food whenever Russell approached.

Suzanne went into San Rafael with Russell to look at a truck. I stayed behind—there were chores, and I threw myself into them with an eagerness born of fear. I didn't want to give them any excuse to make me leave. Feeding the llamas, weeding the garden, scrubbing and bleaching the kitchen floors. Work was just another way to show your love, to offer up the self.

Filling the llamas' trough took a long time, the water pressure sluggish at best, but it was nice to be out in the sun. Mosquitoes hovered around my bare skin and I kept having to shiver them off. They didn't bother the llamas, who just stood there, as sultry and heavy-lidded as screen sirens.

I could see Guy beyond the main house, messing with the bus engine with the low-stakes curiosity of a science fair project. Taking breaks to smoke cigarettes and do downward dog. He went to the main house every once in a while to get another beer from Russell's stash, checking to make sure everyone did their chores. He and Suzanne were like the head counselors, keeping Donna and the others in line with a stray word or glance. Operating as satellite versions of Russell, though Guy's deference was different from Suzanne's. I think he stayed around because Russell was a way to get things he wanted—girls, drugs, a place to crash. He wasn't in love with Russell, didn't cower or pant in his presence—Guy was more like a sidekick, and all his blustery tales of adventure and hardship continued to star himself.

He approached the fence, his beer and cigarette in the same hand, his jeans low on his hips. I knew he was watching me, and I concentrated on the hose, the warm fill of water in the trough.

“The smoke keeps 'em away,” Guy said, and I turned as if I'd just noticed his presence. “The mosquitoes,” he said, holding out his cigarette.

“Yeah,” I said, “sure. Thanks.” I took the cigarette over the fence, careful to keep the hose trained on the trough.

“You seen Suzanne?”

Already Guy assumed I'd know her movements. I was flattered to be the keeper of her whereabouts.

“Some guy in San Rafael was selling his truck,” I said. “She went with Russell to look at it.”

“Hm,” Guy said. Reaching to take his cigarette back. He seemed amused by my professionalism, though I'm sure he saw, too, the worship that hijacked my face whenever I spoke of Suzanne. My half-hitch step those times I hurried to her side. Maybe it confused him not to be the focus of all that desire—he was a handsome boy, used to the attention of girls. Girls who sucked in their stomachs when he put his hand down their jeans, girls who believed the jewelry he wore was the pretty evidence of his untapped emotional depths.

“They're probably at the free clinic,” Guy said. He mimed scratching his crotch, his cigarette waving around. He was trying to get me to snicker at Suzanne, collude in some way—I didn't respond, beyond a grim smile. He tilted back on the heels of his cowboy boots. Studying me.

“You can go on and help Roos,” he said in between the final slugs of his beer. “She's in the kitchen.”

I'd already finished my chores for the day, and working with Roos in the hot kitchen would be tedious, but I nodded with a martyr's air.

Roos had been married to a policeman in Corpus Christi, Suzanne had told me, which seemed about right. She floated around the border with the dreamy solicitude of beaten wives, and even my offer of help with the dishes was met with a mild cower. I scrubbed gelatinous fug from their biggest stew pot, the colorless scraps of food gumming up the sponge. Guy was punishing me in his petty fashion, but I didn't care. Any irritation was softened by Suzanne's return. She gusted into the kitchen, breathless.