The Girls (21 page)

“And I love your father,” Tamar said. Her words were careful, like she was being archived. “I do. He asked me to dinner six times before I said yes, but he was so nice about it. Like he knew I would say yes even before I did.”

She seemed to catch herself—both of us were thinking it. My father had been living at home. Sleeping in bed with my mother. Tamar flinched, obviously waiting for me to say as much, but I couldn't muster any anger. That was the strange thing—I didn't hate my father. He had wanted something. Like I wanted Suzanne. Or my mother wanted Frank. You wanted things and you couldn't help it, because there was only your life, only yourself to wake up with, and how could you ever tell yourself what you wanted was wrong?

Tamar and I lay on the carpet, knees bent, heads angled toward the turntable. My mouth was still buzzing from the tartness of the orange juice we'd walked four blocks to buy from a stand. The wood heels of my sandals slapping the sidewalk, Tamar chatting happily in the warm summer dark.

My father came in and smiled, but I could tell he was annoyed by the music, the way it skittered on purpose. “Can you turn that down?” he asked.

“Come on,” Tamar said. “It's not that loud.”

“Yeah,” I echoed, thrilled by the unfamiliarity of an ally.

“See?” Tamar said. “Listen to your daughter.” She reached blindly to pat at my shoulder. My father left without saying anything, then returned a minute later and lifted the needle, the room abruptly silent.

“Hey!” Tamar said, sitting up, but he was already stalking away and I heard the shower start in the bathroom. “Fuck you,” Tamar muttered. She got to her feet, the backs of her legs printed with the nub of the carpet. Glancing at me. “Sorry,” she said absently.

I heard her talking in low tones in the kitchen. She was on the phone, and I watched her fingers piercing the loops of the cord, over and over. Tamar laughed, covering her mouth as she did, cupping the receiver close. I had the uncomfortable certainty that she was laughing at my father.

I don't know when I understood that Tamar would leave him. Not right away, but soon. Her mind was already somewhere else, writing a more interesting life for herself, one where my father and I would be the scenery to an anecdote. A detour from a larger, more correct journey. The redecoration of her own story. And who would my father have then, to make money for, to bring dessert home to? I imagined him opening the door on the empty apartment after a long day at work. How the rooms would be as he'd left them, undisturbed by another person's living. And how there would be a moment, before he flicked on the light, when he might imagine a different life revealed within the darkness, something besides the lonely borders of the couch, the cushions still holding the shape of his own sleepy body.

A lot of young people ran away: you could do it back then just because you were bored. You didn't even need a tragedy. Deciding to go back to the ranch wasn't difficult. My other house wasn't an option anymore, the ludicrous possibility of my mother dragging me to the police station. And what was there at my father's? Tamar, the way she insisted on my youthful alliance. The chocolate pudding after dinner, cold from the refrigerator, like our daily allotment of pleasure.

Maybe before the ranch, that life would have been enough.

But the ranch proved that you could live at a rarer pitch. That you could push past these petty human frailties and into a greater love. I believed, in the way of adolescents, in the absolute correctness and superiority of my love. My own feelings forming the definition. Love of that kind was something my father and even Tamar could never understand, and of course I had to leave.

While I had been watching television all day in the stuffy, overheated dark of my father's apartment, the ranch was going sour. Though I wasn't aware to what degree until later. The problem was the record deal—it wasn't going to happen, and that was not something Russell could accept. His hands were tied, Mitch told Russell; he could not force the record company to change their minds. Mitch was a successful musician, a talented guitar player, but he did not have that kind of power.

This was true—my night with Mitch seems piteous for that reason, a groundless whir of wheels. But Russell didn't believe Mitch, or it didn't matter anymore. Mitch became the convenient host for a universal sickness. The pacing rants that increased in frequency and length, Russell pinning it all on Mitch, that overfed Judas. The .22s traded for Buntlines, the frenzy of betrayal Russell worked in the others. Russell wasn't even bothering to hide his anger anymore. Guy was bringing speed around, he and Suzanne running to the pump house, coming back with eyes black as berries. The target practice in the trees. The ranch had never been of the larger world, but it grew more isolated. No newspapers, no televisions, no radio. Russell began to turn away visitors and send Guy out with the girls on every garbage run. A shell hardening around the place.

I can imagine Suzanne waking up, those mornings, with no sense of the days passing. The food situation getting dire, everything tinted with mild decay. They didn't eat much protein, their brains motoring on simple carbohydrates and the occasional peanut-butter sandwich. The speed that scraped Suzanne of feeling—she must have moved through the filtery electricity of her own numbness like moving through deep ocean.

Everyone, later, would find it unbelievable that anyone involved in the ranch would stay in that situation. A situation so obviously bad. But Suzanne had nothing else: she had given her life completely over to Russell, and by then it was like a thing he could hold in his hands, turning it over and over, testing its weight. Suzanne and the other girls had stopped being able to make certain judgments, the unused muscle of their ego growing slack and useless. It had been so long since any of them had occupied a world where right and wrong existed in any real way. Whatever instincts they'd ever had—the weak twinge in the gut, a gnaw of concern—had become inaudible. If those instincts had ever been detectable at all.

They didn't have very far to fall—I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board. My childhood visits to the family doctor were stressful events for that reason. He'd ask me gentle questions: How was I feeling? How would I describe the pain? Was it more sharp or more spread out? I'd just look at him with desperation. I needed to be
told,
that was the whole point of going to the doctor. To take a test, be put through a machine that could comb my insides with radiated precision and tell me what the truth was.

Of course the girls didn't leave the ranch: there is a lot that can be borne. When I was nine, I'd broken my wrist falling from a swing. The shocking crack, the blackout pain. But even then, even with my wrist swelling with a cuff of trapped blood, I insisted I was fine, that it was nothing, and my parents believed me right up until the doctor showed them the X-ray, the bones snapped clean.

As soon as I'd packed my duffel, the guest room already looked like no one had ever stayed there—my absence quickly absorbed, which was maybe the point of rooms like that. I'd figured Tamar and my father had already left for work, but when I came into the living room, my father grunted from the couch.

“Tamar's buying orange juice or some stupid thing,” he said.

We sat together and watched television. Tamar was gone a long time. My father kept rubbing his freshly shaven jaw, his face seeming undercooked. The commercials embarrassed me with their strident feeling, how they seemed to mock our awkward quiet. My father's nervous measurement of the silence. How I would have been, a month ago, tense with expectation. Dredging my life for some gem of experience to present to him. But I couldn't summon that effort anymore. My father was both more knowable to me than he had ever been, and at the same time, more of a stranger—he was just a man, sensitive to spicy foods, guessing at his foreign markets. Plugging away at his French.

He stood up the moment he heard Tamar's keys fussing in the door.

“We should have left thirty minutes ago,” he said.

Tamar glanced at me, reshouldered her purse. “Sorry.” She cut him a tight smile.

“You knew when we had to go,” he said.

“I said I was sorry.” She seemed, for a moment, genuinely sorry. But then her eyes drifted helplessly to the television, still on, and though she tried to click back to attention, I knew my father had noticed.

“You don't even have any orange juice,” he said, his voice flickering with hurt.

A young couple was the first to pick me up. The girl's hair was the color of butter, a blouse knotted at her waist, and she kept turning to smile and offer me pistachios from a bag. Kissing the boy so I could see her darting tongue.

I hadn't hitchhiked before, not really. It made me nervous to have to be whatever strangers expected from a girl with long hair—I didn't know what degree of outrage to show about the war, how to talk about the students who threw bricks at police or took over passenger planes, demanding to be flown to Cuba. I'd always been outside all that, like I was watching a movie about what should have been my own life. But it was different, now that I was heading to the ranch.

I kept imagining the moment when Tamar and my father, home from the office, would realize I was actually gone. They would understand slowly, Tamar probably coming to the conclusion faster than my father. The apartment empty, no trace of my things. And maybe my father would call my mother, but what could either of them do? What punishment could they possibly pass down? They didn't know where I'd gone. I had moved beyond their purview. Even their concern was exciting, in its way: there would be a moment when they'd have to wonder why I'd left, some murky guilt rising to the surface, and they would have to feel the full force of it, even if it was only for a second.

The couple took me as far as Woodside. I waited in the parking lot of the Cal-Mart until I got a ride from a man in a rattly Chevrolet, on his way to Berkeley to drop off a motorcycle part. Every time he went over a pothole, his duct-taped glove compartment clattered. The shaggy trees flashed past the window, thick with sun, the purple stretch of the bay beyond. I held my purse on my lap. His name was Claude, and he seemed ashamed of how it jarred with his appearance. “My mother liked that French actor,” he mumbled.

Claude made a point of flipping through his wallet, showing me pictures of his own daughter. She was a chubby girl, the bridge of her nose pink. Her unfashionable sausage curls. Claude seemed to sense my pity, suddenly grabbing the wallet back.

“None of you girls should be doing this,” he said.

He shook his head and I saw how his face moved a little with concern for me, an acknowledgment, I thought, of how brave I was. Though I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains. Some violent daydream prompting their guilty exhortations to “make it home safe.”

“See, I wish I'd been like you,” Claude said. “Free and easy. Just traveling around. I always had a job.”

He slid his eyes to me before turning them back to the road. The first twinge of discomfort—I'd gotten good at deciphering certain male expressions of desire. Clearing the throat, an assessing nip in the gaze.

“None of you people ever work, huh?” he said.

He was teasing, probably, but I couldn't tell for sure. There was sourness in his tone, a sting of real resentment. Maybe I should have been frightened of him. This older man who saw that I was alone, who felt like I owed him something, which was the worst thing a man like that could feel. But I wasn't afraid. I was protected, a hilarious and untouchable giddiness overtaking me. I was going back to the ranch. I would see Suzanne. Claude seemed barely real to me: a paper clown, innocuous and laughable.

“This good?” Claude said.

He'd pulled over near the campus in Berkeley, the clock tower and stair-step houses thickening the hills behind. He turned off the ignition. I felt the heat outside, the close wend of traffic.

“Thanks,” I said, gathering my purse and duffel.

“Slow down,” he said as I started to open the door. “Just sit with me a second, hm?”

I sighed but sat back in the seat. I could see the dry hills above Berkeley and remembered, with a start, that brief time in winter when the hills were green and plump and wet. I hadn't even known Suzanne then. I could feel Claude looking at me sideways.

“Listen.” Claude scratched at his neck. “If you need some money—”

“I don't need money.” I was unafraid, shrugging a quick goodbye and opening the door. “Thanks again,” I said. “For the ride.”

“Wait,” he said, grabbing my wrist.

“Fuck off,” I said, wrenching my arm away from the bracelet of his grasp, an unfamiliar heat in my voice. Before I slammed the door, I saw Claude's weak and sputtering face. I was walking away, breathless. Almost laughing. The sidewalk radiating even heat, the pulse of the abrupt sunshine. I was buoyed by the exchange, as if suddenly allowed more space in the world.

“Bitch,” Claude called, but I didn't turn back to look.

Telegraph was packed: people selling tables of incense or concho jewelry, leather purses hung from an alley fence. The city of Berkeley was redoing all the roads that summer, so piles of rubble collected on the sidewalks, trenches cracking through the asphalt like a disaster movie. A group in floor-length robes fluttered pamphlets at me. Boys with no shirts, their arms pressed with faint bruising, looked me up and down. Girls my age lugged carpetbags that banged against their knees, wearing velvet frock coats in the August heat.

Even after what had happened with Claude, I wasn't afraid of hitchhiking. Claude was just a harmless floater in the corner of my vision, drifting peacefully into the void. Tom was the sixth person I approached, tapping his shoulder as he ducked into his car. He seemed flattered by my request for a ride, like it was an excuse I'd made up to be near him. He hurriedly brushed off the passenger seat, raining silent crumbs onto the carpet.

“It could be cleaner,” he said. Apologetic, as if I might possibly be picky.

Tom drove his small Japanese car at exactly the speed limit, looking over his shoulder before changing lanes. His plaid shirt was thinning at the elbows but clean and tucked, a boyishness to his slim wrists that moved me. He took me all the way to the ranch, though it was an hour from Berkeley. He'd claimed to be visiting friends at the junior college in Santa Rosa, but he was a bad liar: I could see his neck get pink. He was polite, a student at Berkeley. Premed, though he liked sociology, too, and history.

“LBJ,” he said. “Now there was a president.”

He had a large family, I learned, and a dog named Sister, and too much homework: he was in summer school, trying to get through prereqs. He'd asked me what my major was. His mistake excited me—he must have thought I was eighteen, at least.

“I don't go to college,” I said. I was about to explain I was only in high school, but Tom immediately got defensive.

“I was thinking of doing that, too,” he said, “dropping out, but I'm gonna finish the summer classes. I already paid fees. I mean, I wish I hadn't, but—” He trailed off. Gazing at me until I realized he wanted my forgiveness.

“That's a bummer,” I said, and this seemed like enough.

He cleared his throat. “So do you have a job or something? If you're not in school?” he said. “Gee, unless that's a rude question. You don't have to answer.”

I shrugged, affecting ease. Though maybe I was feeling easy on that car ride, like my occupation of the world could be seamless. These simple ways I could meet needs. Talking to strangers, dealing with situations.

“The place I'm going now—I've been staying there,” I said. “It's a big group. We take care of each other.”

His eyes were on the road, but he was listening closely as I explained the ranch. The funny old house, the kids. The plumbing system Guy had rigged in the yard, a knotty mess of pipes.

“Sounds like the International House,” he said. “Where I live. There are fifteen of us. There's a chore board in the hall, we all take turns with the bad ones.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, though I knew the ranch was nothing like the International House, the squinty philosophy majors arguing over who'd left the dinner dishes unwashed, a girl from Poland nibbling black bread and crying for a faraway boyfriend.

“Who owns the house?” he said. “Is it like a center or something?”

It was odd to explain Russell to someone, to remember that there were whole realms in which Russell or Suzanne did not figure.

“His album's gonna come out around Christmas, probably,” I remember saying.

I kept talking about the ranch, about Russell. The way I tossed free Mitch's name, like Donna had that day on the bus, with studied, careful deployment. The closer we got, the more worked up I became. Like horses that bolt with barn sickness, forgetting their rider.

“It sounds nice,” Tom said. I could tell my stories had charged him, a dreamy excitement in his features. Mesmerized by bedtime tales of other worlds.

“You could hang out for a while,” I said. “If you wanted.”

Tom brightened at the offer, gratitude making him shy. “Only if I'm not intruding,” he said, a blush clotting his cheeks.

I imagined Suzanne and the others would be happy with me for bringing this new person. Expanding the ranks, all the old tricks. A pie-faced admirer to raise his voice with ours and contribute to the food pool. But it was something else, too, that I wanted to extend: the taut and pleasant silence in the car, the stale heat raising vapors of leather. The warped image of myself in the side mirrors, so I caught only the quantity of hair, the freckled skin of my shoulder. I took on the shape of a girl. The car crossed the bridge, passing through the shit-stench veil of the landfill. I could see the span of another distant highway, sided by water, and the marshy flats before the sudden drop into the valley, the ranch hidden in its hills.

By that time, the ranch I'd known was a place that no longer existed. The end had already arrived: each interaction its own elegy. But there was too much hopeful momentum in me to notice. The leap in me when Tom's car had first turned down the ranch drive: it had been two weeks, not long at all, but the return was overwhelming. And only when I saw everything still there, still alive and strange and half-dreamy as ever, did I understand I'd worried it might be gone. The things I loved, the miraculous house—like the one in
Gone with the Wind,
I'd realized, coming upon it again. The silty rectangle of pool, half-full, with its teem of algae and exposed concrete: it could all pass back into my possession.

As Tom and I walked from the car, I had a flash of hesitation, noticing how Tom's jeans were too clean. Maybe the girls would tease him, maybe it had been a bad idea to invite him along. I told myself it would be fine. I watched him absorbing the scene—I read his expression as impressed, though he must have been noticing the disrepair, the junked-out skeletons of cars. The crispy package of a dead frog, drifting on the surface of the pool. But these were details that no longer seemed notable to me, like the sores on Nico's legs that stuck with bits of gravel. My eyes were already habituated to the texture of decay, so I thought that I had passed back into the circle of light.