The Girls (11 page)

“Wow,” Sasha said, deadpan. “Did you know that, Mom?”

She kept calling me Mom, her voice exaggerated and comical, though it took me a while to see how drunk she was. To realize how drunk I was, too. The night had sailed into foreign waters. The fritzing of the neon signs, the bartender smoking in the doorway. I watched the bartender stamp the butt out, her flip-flops sliding around her feet. Victor said it was nice to see how well Sasha and I got along.

“You don't always see that, these days.” He nodded, thoughtful. “Mothers and daughters who'd take a trip together. Who are sweet with each other like you two.”

“Oh, she's great,” Sasha said. “I love my mom.”

She cut me a tricky smile before she leaned her face close to mine. The dry press of her lips, the stingy brine of pickles on her mouth. The most chaste of kisses. Still. Victor was shocked. As she'd hoped he would be.

“Goddamn,” Victor said, both disgusted and titillated. Straightening his bulky shoulders, retucking his blousy shirt. He suddenly seemed wary of us, glancing around for support, for confirmation, and I wanted to explain that Sasha wasn't my daughter, but I was past the point of caring, the night stoking a foolish, confused sense that I had somehow returned to the world after a period of absence, had taken up residence again in the realm of the living.

My father had always been in charge of pool maintenance—skimming the surface with a net, heaping wet leaves into a pile. The colored vials he used to test chlorine levels. He'd never been that assiduous with upkeep, but the pool had gotten bad since he'd left. Salamanders idling around the filter. When I propelled myself along the rim, there was some sloggy resistance, crud dispersing in my wake. My mother was at group. She'd forgotten a promise to buy me a new swimsuit, so I was wearing my old orange one: pale as cantaloupe, the stitching puckered and gaping around the leg holes. The top was too small, but the adult mass of cleavage pleased me.

It had only been a week since the solstice party, and already I'd been back to the ranch, and already I was stealing money for Suzanne, bill by bill. I like to imagine that it took more time than that. That I had to be convinced over a period of months, slowly broken down. Wooed as carefully as a valentine. But I was an eager mark, anxious to offer myself.

I kept bobbing in the water, algae speckling the hair on my legs like filings to a magnet. A forgotten paperback ruffled on the seat of the lawn chair. The leaves in the trees were silvery and spangled, like scales, everything full with June's lazy heat. Had the trees around my house always looked like that, so strange and aquatic? Or were things already shifting for me, the dumb litter of the normal world transforming into the lush stage sets of a different life?

Suzanne had driven me home the morning after the solstice, my bike shoved in the backseat. My mouth was leached and unfamiliar from smoking so much, and my clothes were stale from my body and smelled of ash. I kept picking bits of straw from my hair—proof of the night before that thrilled me, like a stamped passport. It had happened, after all, and I kept up a vivid catalog of happy data: the fact that I was sitting beside Suzanne, our friendly silence. My perverse pride that I'd been with Russell. I took pleasure in replaying the facts of the act, even the messy and boring parts. The odd lulls while Russell made himself hard. There was some power in the bluntness of human functions. Like Russell had explained to me: your body could hurtle you past your hang-ups, if you let it.

Suzanne smoked steadily as she drove, occasionally offering her cigarette to me with serene ritual. The quiet between us wasn't slack or uncomfortable. Outside the car, olive trees flashed by, the scorched summer earth. Far-off waterways, sloughing to the sea. Suzanne kept changing the radio station until she abruptly snapped it off.

“We need gas,” she announced.

We, I echoed silently,
we
need gas.

Suzanne pulled into the Texaco, empty except for a teal-and-white pickup towing a boat trailer.

“Hand me a card,” Suzanne said. Nodding at the glove box.

I scrambled to open it, loosing a jumble of credit cards. All with different names.

“The blue one,” she said. She seemed impatient. When I handed her the card, she saw my confusion.

“People give them to us,” she said. “Or we take them.” She fingered the blue card. “Like this one is Donna's. She lifted it from her mom.”

“Her mom's gas card?”

“Saved our ass—we would've starved,” Suzanne said. She gave me a look. “Like you hustling that toilet paper, right?”

I flushed at the mention. Maybe she'd known I had lied, but I couldn't tell from her shuttered face—maybe not.

“Besides,” she continued, “it's better than what they'd do with it—more crap, more stuff, more me, me, me. Russell's trying to help people. He's not judgmental, that's not his trip. He doesn't care if you're rich or poor.”

It made a kind of sense, what Suzanne was saying. They were just trying to equalize the forces in the world.

“It's ego,” she went on, leaning against the car but keeping a sharp eye on the gas gauge: none of them ever filled up a tank more than a quarter full. “Money is ego, and people won't give it up. Just want to protect themselves, hold on to it like a blanket. They don't realize it keeps them slaves. It's sick.”

She laughed.

“What's funny is that as soon as you give everything away, as soon as you say, Here, take it—that's when you really have everything.”

One of the group had been detained for dumpster diving on a garbage run, and Suzanne was incensed, recounting the story as she pulled the car back onto the road.

“More and more stores get wise to it. Bullshit,” she said. “They throw something away and they still want it. That's America.”

“That is bullshit.” The tone of the word was strange in my mouth.

“We'll figure something out. Soon.” She glanced in the rearview. “Money's tight. But you just can't escape it. You probably don't know what that's like.”

She wasn't sneering, not really—she spoke like she was just stating the truth. Acknowledging reality with an affable shrug. That's when the idea came to me, fully formed, as if I had thought of it myself. And that's how it seemed, like the exact solution, a baubled ornament shining within reach.

“I can get some money,” I said, later cringing at my eagerness. “My mom leaves her purse out all the time.”

It was true. I was always coming across money: in drawers, on tables, forgotten by the bathroom sink. I had an allowance, but my mother often gave me more, by accident, or just gestured vaguely in the direction of her purse. “Take what you need,” she'd always said. And I'd never taken more than I should have and was always conscious of returning the change.

“Oh no,” Suzanne said, flicking the last of her cigarette out the window. “You don't have to do that. You're a sweet kid, though,” she said. “Nice of you to offer.”

“I want to.”

She pursed her lips, affecting uncertainty, igniting a tilt in my gut.

“I don't want you to do something you don't want to.” She laughed a little. “That's not what I'm about.”

“But I do want to,” I said. “I want to help.”

Suzanne didn't speak for a minute, then smiled without looking over. “Okay,” she said. I didn't miss the test in her voice. “You want to help. You can help.”

My task made me a spy in my mother's house, my mother the clueless quarry. I could even apologize for our fight when I ran into her that night across the stillness of the hallway. My mother gave a little shrug but accepted my apology, smiling in a brave way. It would bother me, normally, that wavery brave smile, but the new me bowed my head in abject regret. I was imitating a daughter, acting like a daughter would. Part of me thrilled at the knowledge I held out of her reach, how every time I looked at her or spoke to her, I was lying. The night with Russell, the ranch, the secret space I tended to the side. She could have the husk of my old life, all the dried-up leftovers.

“You're home so early,” she said. “I thought you might sleep at Connie's again.”

“I didn't feel like it.”

It was strange to be reminded of Connie, to jar back to the regular world. I'd been surprised, even, that I could feel the ordinary desire for food. I wanted the world to reorder itself visibly around the change, like a mend marking a tear.

My mother softened. “I'm just glad because I wanted to spend some time with you. Just us. It's been a while, huh? Maybe I'll make Stroganoff,” she said. “Or meatballs. What do you think?”

I was suspicious of her offer: she didn't buy food for the house unless I wrote notes for her to find when she got back from group. And we hadn't eaten meat in forever. Sal told my mother that to eat meat was to eat fear and that ingesting fear would make you gain weight.

“Meatballs would be good,” I allowed. I didn't want to notice how happy it made her.

My mother turned on the radio in the kitchen, playing the kind of slight, balmy songs that I'd loved as a child. Diamond rings, cool streams, apple trees. If Suzanne or even Connie caught me listening to that sort of music, I'd be embarrassed—it was bland and cheerful and old-fashioned—but I had a grudging, private love of those songs, my mother singing along to the parts she knew. Rosy with theatrical enthusiasm, so it was easy to get caught up in her giddiness. Her posture was shaped by years of horse shows in adolescence, smiling from the backs of sleek Arabians, arena lights catching the crust of rhinestones on her collar. She had been so mysterious to me when I was younger. The shyness I had felt watching her move around the house, shuffling in her night slippers. The drawer of jewelry whose provenance I made her describe, piece by piece, like a poem.

The house was clean, the windows segmenting the dark night, the carpets plush beneath my bare feet. This was the opposite of the ranch, and I sensed I should be guilty—that it was wrong to be comfortable like this, to want to eat this food with my mother in the primness of our tidy kitchen. What were Suzanne and the others doing at that same moment? It was suddenly hard to imagine.

“How's Connie these days?” she asked, flicking through her handwritten recipe cards.

“Fine.” She probably was. Watching May Lopes's braces scum up.

“You know,” she said, “she can always come over here. You guys have been spending an awful lot of time at her house lately.”

“Her dad doesn't care.”

“I miss her,” she said, though my mother had always seemed mystified by Connie, like a barely tolerated maiden aunt. “We should go on a trip to Palm Springs or something.” It was clear she'd been waiting to offer this. “You could invite Connie, if you wanted.”

“I don't know.” It could be nice. Connie and I shoving each other in the sun-stifled backseat, drinking shakes from the date farm outside Indio.

“Mm,” she murmured. “We could go in the next few weeks. But you know, sweetheart”—a pause. “Frank might come, too.”

“I'm not going on a trip with you and your boyfriend.”

She tried to smile, but I saw that she wasn't saying everything. The radio was too loud. “Sweetheart,” she started. “How are we ever going to live together—”

“What?” I hated how automatically my voice tilted bratty, cutting any authority.

“Not right away, definitely not.” Her mouth puckered. “But if Frank moves in—”

“I live here, too,” I said. “You were just gonna let him move in one day, without even telling me?”

“You're fourteen.”

“This is bullshit.”

“Hey! Watch it,” she said, tucking her hands into her armpits. “I don't know why you're being so rude, but you need to quit it, and fast.” The nearness of my mother's pleading face, her naked upset—it stoked a biological disgust for her, like when I smelled the bellow of iron in the bathroom and knew she had her period. “This is a nice thing I'm trying to do,” she said, “inviting your friend along. Can I get a break here?”

I laughed, but it was dripping with the sickness of betrayal. That's why she'd wanted to make dinner. It was worse now, because I'd been so easily pleased. “Frank's an asshole.”

Her face flared, but she pushed herself to get calm. “Watch your attitude. This is my life, understand? I'm trying to get just a little bit happy,” she said, “and you need to give me that. Can you give me that?”

She deserved her anemic life, its meager, girlish uncertainties. “Fine,” I said. “Fine. Good luck with Frank.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”

“Forget it.” I could smell the raw meat coming to room temperature, a biting tinge of cold metal. My stomach tightened. “I'm not hungry anymore,” I said, and left her standing in the kitchen. The radio still playing songs about first loves, about dancing by the river, the meat thawed enough so my mother would be forced to cook it, though no one would eat it.

It was easy after that to tell myself that I deserved the money. Russell said that most people were selfish, unable to love, and that seemed true of my mother, and my father, too, tucked away with Tamar in the Portofino Apartments in Palo Alto. So it was a tidy trade, when I thought about it like that. Like the money I was filching, bill by bill, added up to something that could replace what had gone missing. It was too depressing to think it had maybe never been there in the first place. That none of it had—Connie's friendship. Peter ever feeling anything for me besides annoyance at the obviousness of my kiddish worship.

My mother left her purse lying around, like always, and that made the money inside seem less valuable, something she didn't care enough about to take seriously. Still, it was uncomfortable, poking around in her purse, like the rattly inside of my mother's brain. The litter was too personal—the wrapper from a butterscotch candy, a mantra card, a pocket mirror. A tube of cream, the color of a Band-Aid, that she patted under her eyes. I pinched a ten, folding it into my shorts. Even if she saw me, I'd just say I was getting groceries—why would she suspect me? Her daughter, who had always been good, even if that was more disappointing than being great.

I'm surprised that I felt so little guilt. On the contrary—there was something righteous in the way I hoarded my mother's money. I was picking up some of the ranch bravado, the certainty that I could take what I wanted. The knowledge of the hidden bills allowed me to smile at my mother the next morning, to act like we hadn't said the things we'd said the night before. To stand patiently when she brushed at my bangs without warning.

“Don't hide your eyes,” my mother said, her breath close and hot, her fingers raking at my hair.

I wanted to shake her off, to step back, but I didn't.

“There,” she said, pleased. “There's my sweet daughter.”

I was thinking of the money while I kicked in the pool, my shoulders above the waterline. There was a purity to the task, amassing the bills in my little zip purse. When I was alone, I liked to count the money, each new five or ten a particular boon. I folded the crisper bills on top, so the bundle looked nicer. Imagining Suzanne's and Russell's pleasure when I brought the money to them, lulled into the sweet wayward fog of daydreams.