The Girls (20 page)

I got caught; of course I did.

Mrs. Dutton on her kitchen floor, calling my name like a right answer. And I hesitated for just a moment—a stunned, bovine reaction to my own name, the knowledge that I should help the fallen Mrs. Dutton—but Suzanne and Donna were far ahead, and by the time I jarred back into that realization, they had almost disappeared. Suzanne turned back just long enough to see Mrs. Dutton clamp a trembling hand on my arm.

My mother's pained and baffled declarations: I was a failure. I was pathological. She wore the air of crisis like a flattering new coat, the stream of her anger performed for an invisible jury. She wanted to know who had broken into the Dutton house with me.

“Judy saw two girls with you,” she said. “Maybe three. Who were they?”

“Nobody.” I tended my rigid silence like a suitor, full of honorable feelings. Before she and Donna disappeared, I tried to flash Suzanne a message: I would take responsibility. She didn't have to worry. I understood why they'd left me behind. “It was just me,” I said.

Anger made her words garbled. “You can't stay in this house and spout lies.”

I could see how rattled she was by this confusing new situation. Her daughter had never been a problem before, had always zipped along without resistance, as tidy and self-contained as those fish that clean their own tanks. And why would she bother to expect otherwise or even prepare herself for the possibility?

“You told me you were going to Connie's all summer,” my mother said. Almost shouting. “You said it so many times. Right to my face. And guess what? I called Arthur. He says you haven't been there in months. Almost two months.”

My mother looked like an animal then, her face made strange with rage, a gaspy run of tears.

“You're a liar. You lied about that. You're lying about this, too.” Her hands were clenched hard. She kept lifting them, then dropping them at her sides.

“I was seeing friends,” I snapped. “I have other friends besides Connie.”

“Other friends. Sure. You were out screwing some boyfriend, God knows what. Nasty little liar.” She was barely looking at me, her words as compulsive and fevered as the muttered obscenities of a pervert. “Maybe I should take you down to the juvenile detention center. Is that what you want? It's clear to me I just can't control you anymore. I'll let them have you. See if they can straighten you out.”

I wrenched away, but even in the hallway, even with my door closed, I could still hear my mother at her bitter chant.

Frank was called in as reinforcement: I watched from the bed as he took my bedroom door off its hinges. He was careful and quiet, though it took him a while, and he eased the door out of the frame as if it were made of glass instead of cheapo hollow-core. He placed it against the wall gently. Then hovered for a moment in the now empty doorway. Rattling the screws in his hands like dice.

“Sorry about this,” he said, like he was just the hired help, the maintenance man carrying out my mother's wishes.

I didn't want to have to notice the actual kindness in his eyes, how immediately it drained my hateful narration of Frank of any real heat. I could picture him in Mexico for the first time, slightly sunburned so the hair on his arm turned platinum. Sipping a lemon soda while overseeing his gold mine—I pictured a cave whose interior was cobblestoned in stony growths of gold.

I kept expecting Frank to tell my mother about the stolen money. Pile on more problems to the list. But he didn't. Maybe he'd seen that she was already angry enough. Frank kept up a silent vigil at the table during her many phone calls with my father while I listened from the hallway. Her high-pitched complaints, all her questions squeezed to a panicked register. What kind of person breaks into a neighbor's house? A family I'd known my whole life?

“For no reason,” she added shrilly. A pause. “You think I haven't asked her? You think I haven't tried?”

Silence.

“Oh, sure, right, I bet. You want to try?”

And so I was sent to Palo Alto.

I spent two weeks at my father's apartment. Across from a Denny's, the Portofino Apartments as blocky and empty as my mother's house was sprawling and dense. Tamar and my father had moved into the biggest unit, and everywhere were the still lifes of adulthood she had so obviously arranged: a bowl of waxed fruit on the counter, the bar cart with its unopened bottles of liquor. The carpet that held the bland tracks of the vacuum.

Suzanne would forget me, I thought, the ranch would hurtle on without me and I'd have nothing. My sense of persecution gobbled up and grew fat off these worries. Suzanne was like a soldier's hometown sweetheart, made gauzy and perfect by distance. But maybe part of me was relieved. To take some time away. The Dutton house had spooked me, the blank cast I'd seen in Suzanne's face. These were little bites, little inward shifts and discomforts, but even so, they were there.

What had I expected, living with my father and Tamar? That my father would try to sleuth out the source of my behavior? That he would punish me, act like a father? He seemed to feel punishment was a right he'd relinquished and treated me with the courtly politeness you'd extend to an aging parent.

He startled when he first saw me—it had been over two months. He seemed to remember that he should hug me and made a lurching step in my direction. I noticed a new bunching at his ears, and his cowboy shirt was one I had never seen before. I knew I looked different, too. My hair was longer and wild at the edges, like Suzanne's. My ranch dress was so worn I could hook my thumb through the sleeve. My father made a move to help me with my bag, but I'd already hefted it into the backseat before he reached me.

“Thanks, though,” I said, trying to smile.

His hands spread at his sides, and when he smiled back, it was with the helpless apology of a foreigner who needed directions repeated. My brain, to him, was a mysterious magic trick that he could only wonder at. Never bothering to puzzle out the hidden compartment. As we took our seats, I could sense that he was gathering himself to invoke the parental script.

“I don't have to lock you in your room, do I?” he said. His halting laugh. “No breaking in to anyone's house?”

When I nodded, he visibly relaxed. Like he'd gotten something out of the way.

“It's a good time for you to visit,” he went on, as if this were all voluntary. “Now that we're settled. Tamar's real particular about the furniture and stuff.” He started the ignition, already beyond any mention of trouble. “She went all the way to the flea market in Half Moon Bay to get this bar cart.”

There was a brief moment I wanted to reach for him across the seat, to draw a line from myself to the man who was my father, but the moment passed.

“You can pick the station,” he offered, seeming as shy to me as a boy at a dance.

The first few days, all three of us had been nervous. I got up early to make the bed in the guest room, trying to heft the decorative pillows back into completion. My life was limited to my drawstring purse and my duffel of clothes, an existence I tried to keep as neat and invisible as possible. Like camping, I thought, like a little adventure in self-reliance. The first night, my father brought home a cardboard tub of ice cream, striated with chocolate, and scooped free heroic amounts. Tamar and I just picked at ours, but my father made a point of eating another bowl. He kept glancing up, as if we could confirm his own pleasure. His women and his ice cream.

Tamar was the surprise. Tamar in her terry shorts and shirt from a college I had never heard of. Who waxed her legs in the bathroom with a complicated device that filled the apartment with the humidity of camphor. Her attendant unguents and hair oils, the fingernails whose lunar surfaces she studied for signs of nutritional deficiencies.

At first, she seemed unhappy with my presence. The awkward hug she offered, like she was grimly accepting the task of being my new mother. And I was disappointed, too. She was just a girl, not the exotic woman I'd once imagined—everything I'd thought was special about her was actually just proof of what Russell would call a straight world trip. Tamar did what she was supposed to. Worked for my father, wore her little suit. Aching to be someone's wife.

But then her formality quickly melted away, the veil of adulthood she wore as temporarily as a costume. She let me rummage through the quilted pouch that held her makeup, her blowsy perfume bottles, watching with the pride of a true collector. She pushed a blouse of hers, with bell sleeves and pearl buttons, onto me.

“It's just not my style anymore.” She shrugged, picking at a loose thread. “But it'll look good on you, I know. Elizabethan.”

And it did look good. Tamar knew those things. She knew the calorie count of most foods, which she recited in sarcastic tones, like she was making fun of her own knowledge. She cooked vegetable vindaloo. Pots of lentils coated with a yellow sauce that gave off an unfamiliar brightness. The roll of powdery antacids my father swallowed like candy. Tamar held out her cheek for my father to kiss but swatted him away when he tried to hold her hand.

“You're all sweaty,” she said. When my father saw that I had noticed, he laughed a little but seemed embarrassed.

My father was amused at our collusion. But it sometimes shook out so we were laughing at him. Once Tamar and I were talking about Spanky and Our Gang, and he chimed in. Like the Little Rascals, he figured. Tamar and I looked at each other.

“It's a band,” she said. “You know, that rock-and-roll music the kids like.” And my father's confused, orphaned face set us off again.

They had a fancy turntable that Tamar often spoke of moving to another corner or room for varying acoustic or aesthetic reasons. She constantly mentioned future plans for oak flooring and crown moldings and even different dish towels, though the planning itself seemed to satisfy. The music she played was more slick than the ranch racket. Jane Birkin and her froggy old-man husband, Serge.

“She's pretty,” I said, studying the record cover. And she was, tan as a nut with a delicate face, those rabbit teeth. Serge was disgusting. His songs about Sleeping Beauty, a girl who seemed most desirable because her eyes were always closed. Why would Jane love Serge? Tamar loved my father, the girls loved Russell. These men who were nothing like the boys I'd been told I would like. Boys with hairless chests and mushy features, the flocking of blemishes along their shoulders. I didn't want to think of Mitch because it made me think of Suzanne—that night had happened somewhere else, in a little dollhouse in Tiburon with a tiny pool and a tiny green lawn. A dollhouse I could look onto from above, lifting the roof to see the rooms segmented like chambers of the heart. The bed the size of a matchbox.

Tamar was different from Suzanne in a way that was easier. She was not complicated. She didn't track my attention so closely, didn't prompt me to shore up her declarations. When she wanted me to move over, she said so. I relaxed, which was unfamiliar. Even so, I missed Suzanne—Suzanne, who I remembered like dreams of opening a door on a forgotten room. Tamar was sweet and kind, but the world she moved around in seemed like a television set: limited and straightforward and mundane, with the notations and structures of normality. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There wasn't a frightening gap between the life she was living and the way she thought about that life, a dark ravine I often sensed in Suzanne, and maybe in my own self as well. Neither of us could fully participate in our days, though later Suzanne would participate in a way she could never take back. I mean that we didn't quite believe it was enough, what we were offered, and Tamar seemed to accept the world happily, as an end point. Her planning wasn't actually about making anything different—she was just rearranging the same known quantities, puzzling out a new order like life was an extended seating chart.

Tamar made dinner while we waited for my father. She looked younger than usual—her face washed with the cleanser she'd explained had actual milk proteins in it, to prevent wrinkles. Her hair wet and darkening the shoulders of the big T-shirt she wore, her lace-edged cotton shorts. She belonged in a dorm room somewhere, eating popcorn and drinking beer.

“Hand me a bowl?”

I did, and Tamar set aside a portion of lentils. “Without spices.” She rolled her eyes. “For the tender heart's stomach.”

I had a bitter flash of my mother doing that for my father: little consolations, little adjustments, making the world mirror my father's wants. Buying him ten pairs of the same socks so he never mismatched.

“It's almost like he's a kid sometimes, you know?” Tamar said, pinching out a measure of turmeric. “I left him for a weekend, and there was nothing to eat when I came back but beef jerky and an onion. He'd die if he had to take care of himself.” She looked at me. “But I probably shouldn't tell you this, huh?”

Tamar wasn't being mean, but it surprised me—her ease in dismantling my father. It hadn't occurred to me before, not really, that he could be a figure of fun, someone who could make mistakes or act like a child or stumble helplessly around the world, needing direction.

Nothing terrible happened between me and my father. There was not a singular moment I could look back on, no shouting fight or slammed door. It was just the sense I got, a sense that seeped over everything until it seemed obvious, that he was just a normal man. Like any other. That he worried what other people thought of him, his eyes scatting to the mirror by the door. How he was still trying to teach himself French from a tape and I heard him repeating words to himself under his breath. The way his belly, which was bigger than I remembered, sometimes showed through the gap in his shirts. Exposing segments of skin, pink as a newborn's.