The Girls (13 page)

“The guy gave Russell the truck,” Suzanne said, her face bright, casting around for an audience. She opened a cabinet, rooting inside. “It was so perfect,” she said, “ 'cause he wanted, like, two hundred bucks. And Russell said, all calm, You should just give it to us.”

She laughed, still residually thrilled, and sat up on the counter. Starting to crack her way through a bag of dusty-looking peanuts. “The guy was real angry, at first, that Russell was just asking for it. For free.”

Roos was only half listening, picking through the makings of that night's dinner, but I turned off the faucet, watching Suzanne with my whole body.

“And Russell said, Let's just talk for a minute. Just let me tell you what I'm about.” Suzanne spit a shell back into the bag. “We had some tea with the guy, in his weird log cabin house. For an hour or something. Russell gave him the whole vision, laid it all out. And the guy was real interested in what we were doing out here. Showed Russell his old army pictures. Then he said we could just have the truck.”

I wiped my hands on my shorts, her giddiness making me so shy I had to turn away. I finished the dishes to the sound of her snapping open peanut after peanut from her perch on the counter, amassing an unruly pile of damp shells until the bag was gone and she went looking for someone else to tell her story to.

The girls would hang out near the creek because it was cooler, the breeze carrying a chill, though the flies were bad. The rocks capped with algae, the sleepy shade. Russell had come back from town in the new truck, bearing candy bars, comic books whose pages grew limp from our hands. Helen ate her candy immediately and looked around at the rest of us with a seethe of jealousy. Though she'd also come from a wealthy family, we weren't close. I found her dull except around Russell, when her brattiness took on a directed aim. Preening under his touch like a cat, she acted younger, even than me, stunted in a way that would later seem pathological.

“Jesus. Stop staring at me,” Suzanne said, hunching her candy away from Helen. “You already ate yours.” Her shape on the bank next to me, her toes curling into the dirt. Jerking when a mosquito swarmed by her ear.

“Just a bite,” Helen whined. “Just the corner.”

Roos glanced up from the chambray mess of cloth in her lap. She was mending a work shirt for Guy, her tiny stitches made with absent precision.

“You can have some of mine,” Donna said, “if you be quiet.” She picked her way to Helen, her chocolate bar craggy with peanuts.

Helen took a bite. When she giggled, her teeth washed with chocolate.

“Candy yoga,” she pronounced. Anything could be yoga: doing the dishes, grooming the llamas. Making food for Russell. You were supposed to bliss out on it, to settle into whatever the rhythms were going to teach you.

Break down the self, offer yourself up like dust to the universe.

All the books made it sound like the men forced the girls into it. That wasn't true, not all the time. Suzanne wielded her Swinger camera like a weapon. Goading men to drop their jeans. To expose their penises, tender and naked in dark nests of hair. The men smiled shyly in the pictures, paled from the guilty flash, all hair and wet animal eyes.
“
There isn't any film in the camera,” Suzanne would say, though she had stolen a case of film from the store. The boys pretended to believe her. It was like that with lots of things.

I trailed after Suzanne, after all of them. Suzanne letting me draw suns and moons on her naked back with tanning oil while Russell played an idle riff on his guitar, a coy up-and-down fragment. Helen sighing like the lovesick kid she was, Roos joining us with a drifty smile, some teenage boy I didn't know looking at us all with grateful awe, and no one even had to speak—the silence was knit with so much.

I prepared inwardly for Russell's advances, but it only happened after a while. Russell giving me a cryptic nod so I knew to follow him.

I'd been washing windows with Suzanne in the main house—the floor littered with the crumple of newspaper and vinegar, the transistor radio going; even chores took on the delight of truancy. Suzanne singing along, talking to me with happy, fitful distraction. She looked different, those times we worked together, like she forgot herself and relaxed into the girl she was. It's strange to remember she was just nineteen. When Russell nodded at me, I looked at her reflexively. For permission or forgiveness, either one. The ease in her face had drained into a brittle mask. Scrubbing the warped window with new concentration. She shrugged goodbye when I left, like she didn't mind, though I could sense her watchful gaze on my back.

Every time Russell nodded at me like that, my heart contracted, despite the strangeness. I was eager for our encounters, eager to cement my place among them, as if doing what Suzanne did was a way of being with her. Russell never fucked me—it was always other stuff, his fingers moving in me with a technical remove I ascribed to his purity. His aims were elevated, I told myself, unsullied by primitive concerns.

“Look at yourself,” he said whenever he sensed shame or hesitance. Pointing me toward the fogged mirror in the trailer. “Look at your body. It's not some stranger's body,” he said evenly. When I shied away, goofing some excuse, he took me by the shoulders and pointed me back at the mirror. “It's you,” he said. “It's Evie. Nothing in you but beauty.”

The words worked on me, even if only temporarily. A trance overtaking me when I saw my reflection—the scooped breasts, even the soft stomach, the legs rough with mosquito bites. There was nothing to figure out, no complicated puzzles—just the obvious fact of the moment, the only place where love really existed.

Afterward he'd hand me a towel to clean myself, and this seemed like a great kindness.

When I returned to her purview, there was always a brief period when Suzanne was cool to me. Even her movements were stiff, as if braced, a lull behind her eyes, like someone asleep at the wheel. I learned quickly how to compliment her, how to ride by her side until she forgot to be aloof and deigned to pass her cigarette to me. It would occur to me later that Suzanne missed me when I left, her formality a clumsy disguise. Though it's hard to tell—maybe that is only a wishful explanation.

The other parts of the ranch flash in and out. Guy's black dog that they called by a rotating series of names. The wanderers who passed through the ranch that summer, crashing for a day or two before leaving. Denizens of the brainless dream, appearing at all hours of the day with woven backpacks and their parents' cars. I didn't see anything familiar in how quickly Russell talked them out of their possessions, put them on the spot so their generosity became a forced theater. They handed over pink slips to cars, bankbooks, once even a gold wedding ring, with the stunned and exhausted relief of a drowning person finally giving in to the tidal suck. I was distracted by their tales of sorrow, both harrowing and banal. Complaints of evil fathers and cruel mothers, a similarity to the stories that made us all feel like victims of the same conspiracy.

It was one of the few days it rained that summer, and most of us were indoors, the old parlor smelling damp and gray like the air outside. Blankets gridded the floor. I could hear a baseball game on the radio in the kitchen, rain dropping into the plastic bucket under a leak. Roos was giving Suzanne a hand massage, their fingers slick with lotion, while I read a years-old magazine. My horoscope from March 1967. An irritated sulk hung between us; we were not used to limitations, to being stuck anywhere.

The kids did better at being indoors. They passed only briefly through our watch, trundling by on their private missions. There was the bang of a fallen chair in the other room, but no one got up to investigate. Besides Nico, I didn't know who most of the other kids belonged to—all of them were thin wristed, like they'd gone to seed, powdered milk glazed around their mouths. I'd watched Nico for Roos a few times, had held him in my arms and felt his sweaty, pleasing weight. I combed his hair with my fingers, untangled his shark-tooth necklace. All those self-consciously maternal tasks, tasks that pleased me more than him and allowed me to imagine I alone had the power to make him calm. Nico was uncooperative with these moments of softness, breaking the spell bluntly, like he'd sensed my good feelings and resented them. Tugging his little penis at me. Demanding juice in a shrieking falsetto. Once hitting me so hard that I bruised. I watched him squat and take a shit out on the concrete by the pool, shits we'd sometimes hose away and sometimes not.

Helen wandered downstairs in a Snoopy T-shirt and too-big socks, the red heels bunched around her ankles.

“Anyone wanna play Liar's Dice?”

“Nah,” Suzanne announced. For all of us, it was assumed.

Helen slumped onto a balding armchair stripped of cushions. She glanced at the ceiling. “Still leaking,” she said. Everyone ignored her. “Can someone roll a joint?” she said. “Please?”

When no one answered, she joined Roos and Suzanne on the floor. “Please, please, please?” she said, nuzzling her head into Roos's shoulder, draping herself in her lap like a dog.

“Oh, just do it,” Suzanne said. Helen jumped up to get the fake ivory box they kept the supplies in, while Suzanne rolled her eyes at me. I smiled back. It wasn't so bad, I thought, being inside. All of us huddled in the same room like Red Cross survivors, water boiling on the stove for tea. Roos working by the window, where the light was alabaster through the scrappy lace curtain.

The calm was cut by Nico's sudden whine, stampeding into the room as he chased a little girl with a bowl cut—she had Nico's shark-tooth necklace, and a yelping scrabble broke out between them. Tears, clawing.

“Hey,” Suzanne said without looking up, and the kids got quiet, though they kept staring hotly at each other. Breathing hard, like drunks. Everything seemed fine, quickly handled, until Nico scratched the girl's face, raking her with his overgrown nails, and the screaming doubled. The girl clapped both hands over her cheek, wailing so her baby teeth showed. Sustaining a high note of misery.

Roos got to her feet with effort.

“Baby,” she said, holding her arms out, “baby, you gotta be nice.” She took a few steps toward Nico, who started screaming, too, sitting down heavy on his diaper. “Get up,” Roos said, “come on, baby,” trying to hold on to his shoulders, but he'd gone limp and wouldn't be moved. The other girl sobered in the face of Nico's antics, how he wrenched away from his mother and started banging his head against the floor. “Baby,” Roos said, droning louder, “no, no, no,” but he kept going, his eyes getting dark and buttony with pleasure.

“God.” Helen laughed, a strange laugh that persisted. I didn't know what to do. I remembered the helpless panic I'd sometimes felt when babysitting, a realization that this child did not belong to me and was beyond my reach; but even Roos seemed paralyzed with the same worry. Like she was waiting for Nico's real mother to come home and fix everything. Nico was getting pink with effort, his skull knocking on the floor. Yelling until he heard the footsteps on the porch—it was Russell, and I saw everyone's faces condense with new life.

“What's this?” Russell said. He was wearing one of Mitch's cast-off shirts, big bloody roses embroidered along the yoke. He was barefoot, wet all over from the rain.

“Ask Roos,” Helen chirped. “It's her kid.”

Roos muttered something, her words going wild at the end, but Russell didn't respond on her level. His voice was calm, seeming to draw a circle around the crying child, the flustered mother.

“Relax,” Russell intoned. He wouldn't let anyone's upset in, the jitter in the room deflected by his gaze. Even Nico looked wary in Russell's presence, his tantrum taking on a hollow cast, like he was an understudy for himself.

“Little man,” Russell said, “come on up here and talk to me.”

Nico glared at his mother, but his eyes were drawn, helpless, to Russell. Nico pushed out his fat bottom lip, calculating.

Russell stayed standing in the doorway, not bending down eager and wet toothed like some grown-ups did with kids, and Nico was mostly quiet, settling into a whimper. Darting another look between his mother and Russell before finally scurrying over to Russell and letting himself be picked up.

“There's the little man,” Russell said, Nico's arms clinging tight around his neck, and I remember how strange it was to see Russell's face change as he talked to the boy. His features mutable, turning antic and foolish, like a jester's, though his voice stayed calm. He could do that. Change himself to fit the person, like water taking on the shape of whatever vessel it was poured into. He could be all these things at once: The man who crooked his fingers in me. The man who got everything free. The man who sometimes fucked Suzanne hard and sometimes fucked her gently. The man who whispered to the little boy, his voice grazing his ear.

I couldn't hear what Russell said, but Nico swallowed his crying. His face was thrilled and wet: he seemed happy just to be in someone's arms.

Helen's eleven-year-old cousin Caroline ran away from home and stayed for a while. She'd been living in the Haight, but there had been a police crackdown: she'd hitched to the ranch with a cowhide wallet and a ratty fox fur coat she petted with skittish affection, like she didn't want anyone to see how much she loved it.

The ranch wasn't that far from San Francisco, but we didn't go there very often. I'd gone only once with Suzanne, to pick up a pound of grass from a house she called, jokingly, the Russian Embassy. Some friends of Guy's, I think, the old Satanist hangout. The front door was painted a tarry black—she saw my hesitation and hooked her arm through mine.

“Doomy, huh?” she said. “I thought so too, at first.”