The Girls (14 page)

When she hitched me closer, I felt the knock of her hipbones. These moments of kindness were never anything but dazzling to me.

Afterward, she and I walked over to Hippie Hill. It was grayed-out, and drizzling, empty, except for the undead stumbling of junkies. I tried hard to squeeze out a vibe from the air, but there was nothing—I was relieved when Suzanne laughed, too, halting any labor for meaning. “Jesus,” she said, “this place is a dump.” We ended up back in the park, the fog dripping audibly from the eucalyptus leaves.

I spent almost every day at the ranch, except for brief stopovers at my house to change clothes or leave notes on the kitchen table for my mother. Notes that I'd sign, “Your Loving Daughter.” Indulging the overblown affection my absence made room for.

I knew I was starting to look different, the weeks at the ranch working me over with a grubby wash. My hair getting light from the sun and sharp at the edges, a tint of smoke lingering even after I shampooed. Much of my clothes had passed into the ranch possession, morphing into garments I often failed to recognize as my own: Helen clowning around in my once precious bib shirt, now torn and spotted with peach juice. I dressed like Suzanne, a raunchy patchwork culled from the communal piles, clothes whose scrappiness announced a hostility to the larger world. I had gone with Suzanne to the Home Market once, Suzanne wearing a bikini top and cutoffs, and we'd watched the other shoppers glare and grow hot with indignation, their sideways glances becoming outright stares. We'd laughed with insane, helpless snorts, like we'd had some wild secret, and we had. The woman who'd seemed about to cry with baffled disgust, clutching for her daughter's arm: she hadn't known her hatred only made us more powerful.

I prepared for possible sightings of my mother with pious ablutions: I showered, standing in the hot water until my skin splotched red, my hair slippery with conditioner. I put on a plain T-shirt and white cotton shorts, what I might have worn when I was younger, trying to appear scrubbed and sexless enough to comfort my mother. Though maybe I didn't need to try so hard—she wasn't looking closely enough to warrant the effort. The times we did have dinner together, a mostly silent affair, she would fuss at her food like a picky child. Inventing reasons to talk about Frank, inane weather reports from her own life. I could have been anyone. One night I didn't bother to change, showing up at the table in a voile halter top that showed my stomach. She didn't say anything, plowing her spoon through her rice with a distracted air until she seemed suddenly to remember my presence. Darting a slanted look at me. “You're getting so skinny,” she announced, gripping my wrist and letting it drop in jealous measurement. I shrugged and she didn't bring it up again.

When I finally met him in person, Mitch Lewis was fatter than I expected someone famous to be. Swollen, like there was butter under his skin. His face was furred with sideburns, his feathered golden hair. He brought a case of root beer for the girls and six netted bags of oranges. Stale brownies with German-chocolate frosting, in individual frilled cups like Pilgrims' bonnets. Nougat candy in bright pink tins. The dregs of gift baskets, I assumed. A carton of cigarettes.

“He knows I like this kind,” Suzanne said, hugging the cigarettes to her chest. “He remembered.”

They all spoke of Mitch with that possessiveness, like he was an idea more than an actual person. They'd preened and prepared for Mitch's visit with girlish eagerness.

“You can see the ocean from his hot tub,” Suzanne told me. “Mitch put lights up so the water is all glowy.”

“His dick is really big,” Donna added. “And like, purple.”

Donna was washing her armpits in the sink, and Suzanne rolled her eyes. “Whore's bath,” she murmured, but she'd changed into a dress. Even Russell slicked back his hair with water, giving him a polished, urbane air.

Russell introduced me to Mitch, saying, “Our little actress,” his hand at my back.

Mitch studied me with a questioning, smug smile. Men did it so easily, that immediate parceling of value. And how they seemed to want you to collude on your own judgment.

“I'm Mitch,” he said. As if I hadn't already known. His skin was fresh looking and poreless in the way of wealthy overeaters.

“Give Mitch a hug,” Russell said. Nudging me. “Mitch wants a hug, just like the rest of us. He could use a little love.”

Mitch looked expectant, opening a present he'd already shaken and identified. Usually, I would have been eaten by shyness. Conscious of my body, some error I could make. But already I felt different. I was one of them, and that meant I could smile back at Mitch, stepping forward to let him mash himself against me.

The long afternoon that followed: Mitch and Russell took turns playing guitar. Helen sitting on Mitch's lap in a bikini top. She kept giggling and ducking her pigtailed head into his neck. Mitch was a much better musician than Russell, but I tried not to notice. I got stoned with a new and furious concentration, passing beyond the point of nervousness and into a blunted state. Smiling almost involuntarily, so my cheeks started to ache. Suzanne sat cross-legged in the dirt beside me, her fingers grazing mine. Our faces cupped and attentive as tulips.

It was one of those slurry days we offered up to the shared dream, a violence in our aversion to real life; though it was all about connecting, tuning in, we told ourselves. Mitch had dropped off some acid, sourced from a lab tech at Stanford. Donna mixed it with orange juice in paper cups and we drank it for breakfast, so the trees seemed to thrum with energy, the shadows purpling and wet. It was curious, later, to think of how easily I fell into things. If there were drugs around, I did them. You were in the moment—when everything back then happened. We could talk about
the moment
for hours. Turn it over in conversation: the way the light moved, why someone was silent, dismantling all the layers of what a look had really meant. It seemed like something important, our desire to describe the shape of each second as it passed, to bring out everything hidden and beat it to death.

Suzanne and I were working on the childish bracelets the girls had been trading among ourselves, collecting them up our arms like middle-schoolers. Practicing the V stitch. The candy stripe. I was making one for Suzanne, fat and wide, a poppy-red chevron on a field of peach thread. I liked the calm collection of the knots, how the colors vibrated happily under my fingers. I got up once to get Suzanne a glass of water, and there was a domestic gentleness in that act. I wanted to meet a need, put water in her mouth. Suzanne smiled up at me as she drank, gulping so fast I could see her throat ripple.

Helen's cousin Caroline was hanging around that day. She seemed more knowing than I had ever been at eleven. Her bracelets shook with the kiss of cheap metal. Her terry-cloth shirt was the pale yellow of a lemon slushie and showed her small stomach, though her knees were scraped and ashy like a boy's.

“Far-out,” she said when Guy tipped a paper cup of juice to her lips, and like a windup toy, she kept repeating this phrase when the acid began to hit. I'd started to detect the first signs in myself, too, my mouth filling with saliva. I thought of the flooded creeks I'd seen in childhood, the death cold of the rainwater as it came swift over the rocks.

I could hear Guy spinning nonsense on the porch. One of his meaningless stories, the drug making his bluster echo. His long hair pulled into a dark knot at the base of his skull.

“This fella was banging on the door,” he was saying, “shouting that he'd come to take what was his, and I was like aw, hell, big fuckin' deal,” he droned, “I'm Elvis Presley,” and Roos was nodding along. Squinting up at the sun while Country Joe sounded from the house. Clouds drifting across the blue, outlined in neon.

“Check out Orphan Annie,” Suzanne said, rolling her eyes at Caroline.

Caroline was overdoing it at first, her stumbling, dopey affect, but soon the drug actually caught up to her and she got wild-eyed and a little scared. She was thin enough that I could see the glandular throb at her throat. Suzanne was watching her, too, and I waited for her to say something, but she didn't. Helen, Caroline's supposed cousin, didn't say anything, either. She was sunstruck, catatonic, stretched out on a piece of old carpet and listing a hand over her eyes. Giggling to no one. I went over to Caroline finally, touching her tiny shoulder.

“How's it going?” I said.

She didn't look up until I said her name. I asked her where she was from; she screwed her eyes tight. It was the wrong thing to say—of course it was, bringing up all that bad shit from the outside, whatever rotten memories were probably doubling right then. I didn't know how to pull her back from the bog.

“You want this?” I said, holding up the bracelet. She peeked at it. “Just have to finish it,” I said, “but it's for you.”

Caroline smiled.

“It's gonna look real nice on you,” I went on. “It'll go good with your shirt.”

The electricity in her eyes calmed. She held her own shirt away from her body to study it, softening.

“I made it,” she said, fingering the embroidered outline of a peace sign on the shirt, and I saw the hours she'd spent on it, maybe borrowing her mother's sewing box. It seemed easy: to be kind to her, to put the finished bracelet around her wrist, burning the knot with a match so she'd have to cut it off. I didn't notice Suzanne eyeing us, her own bracelet ignored in her lap.

“Beautiful,” I said, lifting Caroline's wrist. “Nothing but beauty.”

As if I were an occupant of that world, someone who could show the way to others. Such grandiosity mixed up in my feelings of kindness; I was starting to fill in all the blank spaces in myself with the certainties of the ranch. The cool glut of Russell's words—no more ego, turn off the mind. Pick up the cosmic wind instead. Our beliefs as mild and digestible as the sweet rolls and cakes we hustled from a bakery in Sausalito, stuffing our faces with the easy starch.

In the days after, Caroline followed me like a stray dog. Hovering, in the doorway of Suzanne's room, asking if I wanted one of the cigarettes she'd cadged from the bikers. Suzanne stood up and clasped her elbows behind her back, stretching.

“They just gave you them?” Suzanne said archly. “For free?”

Caroline glanced at me. “The cigarettes?”

Suzanne laughed without saying anything else. I was confused, in these moments, but translated them into further proof: Suzanne was prickly with other people because they didn't understand her like I did.

I didn't say it out loud to myself or even think about it too much. Where things were heading with Suzanne. The dredge of discomfort I got when she disappeared with Russell. How I didn't know what to do without her, seeking out Donna or Roos like a lost kid. The time she came back smelling of dried sweat and roughly wiped herself between the legs with a washcloth, like she didn't care I was watching.

I got up when I saw how nervously Caroline fingered the bracelet I'd given her.

“I'll take a cigarette,” I said, smiling at Caroline.

Suzanne hooked her arm in mine.

“But we're gonna feed the llamas,” Suzanne said. “Don't want them to starve, do you? Waste away?”

I hesitated, and Suzanne reached out to play with a part of my hair. She was always doing that: picking burrs off my shirt, once wedging a fingernail between my front teeth to dislodge a bit of food. Breaching the boundaries to let me know they didn't exist.

Caroline's desire to be invited was so blatant that I felt almost ashamed. But it didn't stop me from following Suzanne outside, shrugging an apology at Caroline. I could feel her watching us go. The hooded attentions of a child, that wordless understanding. I saw that disappointment was already something familiar to Caroline.

I was scanning the contents of my mother's refrigerator, the glass jars mortared with dried spills. The fumes of cruciferous vegetables, roiling in plastic bags. Nothing to eat, as usual. Little things like this reminded me why I'd rather be somewhere else. When I heard my mother shuffling in the front door, the razzle of her heavy jewelry, I tried to slink off without crossing paths.

“Evie,” she called, coming into the kitchen. “Wait up a minute.”

I was out of breath from the bike ride from the ranch and at the tail end of being stoned. I tried to blink an ordinary number of times, to present a blank face that would give her nothing.

“You're getting so tan,” she said, lifting my arm, and I shrugged. She idly brushed the hair on my arm back and forth, then paused. There was an uncomfortable moment between us. It occurred to me: she'd finally caught on to the trickle of money that had been disappearing. The thought of her anger didn't scare me. The act had been so preposterous that it took on the safety of the unreal. I'd almost started to believe that I had never really lived here, so strong was the feeling of disassociation as I crept through the house on my errands for Suzanne. My excavation of my mother's underwear drawer, sifting through the tea-colored silks and pilly lace until I closed in on a roll of bills banded with a hair tie.

My mother furrowed her brows. “Listen,” she said. “Sal saw you out on Adobe Road this morning. Alone.”

I tried to keep my face blank, but I was relieved—it was just one of Sal's bovine observations. I'd been telling my mother I'd been at Connie's house. And I was still home some nights, trying to keep the balance in check.

“Sal said there's some very strange people out there,” my mother said. “Some kind of mystic or something, but he sounds”—her face screwed up.

Of course—she would love Russell if he lived in a mansion in Marin, had gardenias floating in his pool, and charged rich women fifty dollars for an astrology reading. How transparent she seemed to me then, always on constant guard against anything lesser than, even as she opened the house up to anyone who smiled at her. To Frank and his shiny-buttoned shirts.