The Girls (4 page)

When the floorboards creaked from the hall, the spell cracked. Peter withdrew his hand, rolling abruptly onto his back. Staring at the ceiling so I could see his eyes.

“I've gotta get some sleep,” he said in a voice carefully drained. A voice like an eraser, its insistent dullness meant to make me wonder if anything had happened. And I was slow to get to my feet, a little stunned, but also in a happy swoon, like even that little bit had fed me.

The boys played the slot machine for what seemed like hours. Connie and I sat on the bench, vibrating with forced inattention. I kept waiting for some acknowledgment from Peter of what had happened. A catch in the eye, a glance serrated with our history. But he didn't look at me. The humid garage smelled of chilly concrete and the funk of camping tents, folded while still wet. The gas station calendar on the wall: a woman in a hot tub with the stilled eyes and bared teeth of taxidermy. I was grateful for Pamela's absence that night. There'd been some fight between her and Peter, Connie had told me. I wanted to ask for more details, but there was a warning in her face—I couldn't be too interested.

“Don't you kids have somewhere better to be?” Henry asked. “Some ice-cream social somewhere?”

Connie tossed her hair, then walked over to get more beer. Henry watched her approach with amusement.

“Give those to me,” she whined when Henry held two bottles out of reach. I remember noticing for the first time how loud she was, her voice hard with silly aggressiveness. Connie with her whines and feints, the grating laugh that sounded, and was, practiced. A space opened up between us as soon as I started to notice these things, to catalog her shortcomings the way a boy would. I regret how ungenerous I was. As if by putting distance between us, I could cure myself of the same disease.

“What are you gonna give me for them?” Henry said. “Nothing's free in this world, Connie.”

She shrugged, then lunged for the beers. Henry pressed the solid mass of his body against her, grinning as she struggled. Peter rolled his eyes. He didn't like this kind of thing either, the bleating vaudeville. He had older friends who'd disappeared in sluggish jungles, rivers thick with sediment. Who'd returned home babbling and addicted to tiny black cigarettes, their hometown girlfriends cowering behind them like nervous little shadows. I tried to sit up straighter, to compose my face with adult boredom. Willing Peter to look over. I wanted the parts of him I was sure Pamela couldn't see, the pricks of sorrow I sometimes caught in his gaze or the secret kindness he showed to Connie, taking us to Arrowhead Lake the year their mother had forgotten Connie's birthday entirely. Pamela didn't know those things, and I held on to that certainty, whatever leverage might belong to me alone.

Henry pinched the soft skin above the waist of Connie's shorts. “Hungry lately, huh?”

“Don't touch me, perv,” she said, hitting his hand away. She giggled a little. “Fuck you.”

“Fine,” he said, grabbing Connie's hands by the wrist. “Fuck me.” She tried halfheartedly to pull away, whining until Henry finally let her go. She rubbed her wrists.

“Asshole,” she muttered, but she wasn't really mad. That was part of being a girl—you were resigned to whatever feedback you'd get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn't react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they'd backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.

I didn't like the taste of beer, the granular bitterness nothing like the pleasing hygienic chill of my father's martinis, but I drank one and then another. The boys fed the slot machine from a shopping bag full of nickels until they were almost out of coins.

“We need the machine keys,” Peter said, lighting a thin joint he pulled from his pocket. “So we can open it up.”

“I'll get them,” Connie said. “Don't miss me too much,” she crooned to Henry, fluttering a little wave before she left. To me, she just raised her eyebrows. I understood this was part of some plan she had hatched to get Henry's attention. To leave, then return. She had probably read about it in a magazine.

That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of planning and speculation. But they were just boys. Silly and young and straightforward; they weren't hiding anything.

Peter let the lever ratchet to a starting position and stepped back to give Henry a turn, the two of them passing the joint back and forth. They both wore white T-shirts that were thin from washings. Peter smiled at the carnival racket when the slot machine clattered out a pile of coins, but he seemed distracted, finishing another beer, smoking the joint until it was crushed and oily. They were speaking low. I heard bits and pieces.

They were talking about Willie Poteracke: we all knew him, the first boy in Petaluma to enlist. His father had driven him to register. I'd seen him later at the Hamburger Hamlet with a petite brunette whose nostrils streamed snot. She called him stubbornly by his full name, Will-
iam,
like the extra syllable was the secret password that would transform him into a grown, responsible man. She clung to him like a burr.

“He's always out in the driveway,” Peter said. “Washing his car like nothing's different. He can't even drive anymore, I don't think.”

This was news from the other world. I felt ashamed, seeing Peter's face, for how I only playacted at real feelings, reaching for the world through songs. Peter could actually be sent away, he could actually die. He didn't have to force himself to feel that way, the emotional exercises Connie and I occupied ourselves with: What would you do if your father died? What would you do if you got pregnant? What would you do if a teacher wanted to fuck you, like Mr. Garrison and Patricia Bell?

“It was all puckered, his stump,” Peter said. “Pink.”

“Disgusting,” Henry said from the machine. He didn't turn away from the looping images of cherries that scrolled in front of him. “You wanna kill people, you better be okay with those people blowing your legs off.”

“He's proud of it, too,” Peter said, his voice rising as he flicked the end of the joint onto the garage floor. He watched it snuff out. “Wanting people to see it. That's what's crazy.”

The dramatics of their conversation made me feel dramatic, too. I was stirred by the alcohol, the burn in my chest I exaggerated until I became moved by an authority not my own. I stood up. The boys didn't notice. They were talking about a movie they had seen in San Francisco. I recognized the title—they hadn't shown it in town because it was supposed to be perverted, though I couldn't remember why.

When I finally watched the movie, as an adult, the palpable innocence of the sex scenes surprised me. The humble pudge of fat above the actress's pubic hair. How she laughed when she pulled the yacht captain's face to her saggy, lovely breasts. There was a good-natured quality to the raunch, like fun was still an erotic idea. Unlike the movies that came later, girls wincing while their legs dangled like a dead thing's.

Henry was fluttering his eyelids, tongue in an obscene rictus. Aping some scene from the movie.

Peter laughed. “Sick.”

They wondered aloud whether the actress had actually been getting fucked. They didn't seem to care that I was standing right there.

“You can tell she liked it,” Henry said. “Ooh,” he crowed in a high feminine voice. “Ooh, yeah, mmm.” He banged the slot machine with his hips.

“I saw it, too.” I spoke before thinking. I wanted an entry point in the conversation, even if it was a lie. They both looked at me.

“Well,” Henry said, “the ghost finally speaks.”

I flushed.

“You saw it?” Peter seemed doubtful. I told myself he was being protective.

“Yeah,” I said. “Pretty wild.”

They exchanged a glance. Did I really think they'd believe I had somehow gotten a ride to the city? That I'd gone to see what was, essentially, a porno?

“So.” Henry's eyes glinted. “What was your favorite part?”

“That part you were talking about,” I said. “With the girl.”

“But what part of that did you like best?” Henry said.

“Leave her alone,” Peter said mildly. Already bored.

“Did you like the Christmas scene?” Henry continued. His smile lulled me into thinking we were having a real conversation, that I was making progress. “The big tree? All the snow?”

I nodded. Almost believing my own lie.

Henry laughed. “The movie was in Fiji. The whole thing's on an island.” Henry was snorting, helpless with laughter, and cut a look at Peter, who seemed embarrassed for me, like you would be embarrassed for a stranger who tripped on the street, like nothing had ever happened between us at all.

I pushed Henry's motorcycle. I hadn't expected it to tip over, not really: maybe just wobble, just enough to interrupt Henry so he'd be scared for a second, so he'd make some jokey exclamations of dismay and forget my lie. But I had pushed with real force. The motorcycle fell over and crunched hard on the cement floor.

Henry stared at me. “You little bitch.” He hurried to the downed motorcycle like it was a shot pet. Practically cradling it in his arms.

“It's not broken,” I said inanely.

“You're a fucking nutcase,” he muttered. He ran his hands along the body of the bike and held a shard of orange metal up to Peter. “You believe this shit?”

When Peter looked at me, his face solidified with pity, which was somehow worse than anger. I was like a child, warranting only abbreviated emotions.

Connie appeared in the doorway.

“Knock knock,” she called, the keys hanging from a crooked finger. She took in the scene: Henry squatting by the motorcycle; Peter's arms crossed.

Henry let out a harsh laugh. “Your friend's a real bitch,” he said, shooting me a look.

“Evie knocked it over,” Peter said.

“You fucking kids,” Henry said. “Get a babysitter next time, don't hang around with us. Fuck.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, my voice small, but nobody was listening.

Even after Peter helped Henry right the motorcycle, peering closely at the break—“It's just cosmetic,” he announced, “we can fix it pretty easy”—I understood that other things had broken. Connie studied me with cold wonder, like I'd betrayed her, and maybe I had. I'd done what we were not supposed to do. Illuminated a slice of private weakness, exposed the twitchy rabbit heart.

The owner of the Flying A was a fat man, the counter cutting into his belly, and he leaned on his elbows to track my movements around the aisles, my purse banging against my thighs. There was a newspaper open in front of him, though he never seemed to turn the page. He had a weary air of responsibility about him, both bureaucratic and mythological, like someone doomed to guard a cave for all eternity.

I was alone that afternoon. Connie probably fuming in her small bedroom, playing “Positively 4th Street” with wounded, righteous indulgence. The thought of Peter was gutting—I wanted to skim over that night, calcifying my shame into something blurry and manageable, like a rumor about a stranger. I'd tried to apologize to Connie, the boys still worrying over the motorcycle like field medics. I even offered to pay for repairs, giving Henry everything I had in my purse. Eight dollars, which he'd accepted with a stiff jaw. After a while, Connie said it was best if I just went home.

I'd gone back a few days later—Connie's father answered the door almost instantly, like he'd been waiting for me. He usually worked at the dairy plant past midnight, so it was odd to see him at home.

“Connie's upstairs,” he said. On the counter behind him, I saw a glass of whiskey, watery and catching the sunlight. I was so focused on my own plans that I didn't pick up the air of crisis in the house, the unusual information of his presence.

Connie was lying on her bed, her skirt hitched so I could see the crotch of her white underwear, the entirety of her stippled thighs. She sat up when I entered, blinking.

“Nice makeup,” she said. “Did you do that just for me?” She threw herself back on the pillow. “You'll like this news. Peter's gone. Like, gone gone. With Pamela,
quelle
surprise.” She rolled her eyes but articulated Pamela's name with a perverse happiness. Cutting me a look.

“What do you mean, left?” Panic was already dislocating my voice.

“He's so
selfish,
” she said. “Dad told us we might have to move to San Diego. The next day, Peter takes off. He took a bunch of his clothes and stuff. I think they went to her sister's house in Portland. I mean, I'm pretty sure they went there.” She blew at her bangs. “He's a coward. And Pamela is the kind of girl who's gonna get fat after she has a baby.”

“Pamela's pregnant?”

She gave me a look. “Surprise—you don't even care I might have to move to San Diego?”

I knew I was supposed to start enumerating the ways I loved her, how sad I would be if she left, but I was hypnotized by an image of Pamela next to Peter in his car, falling asleep against his shoulder. Avis maps at their feet gone translucent with hamburger grease, the backseat filled with clothes and his mechanic manuals. How Peter would look down and see the white line of Pamela's scalp through her part. He might kiss her, moved by a domestic tenderness, even though she was sleeping and would never know.

“Maybe he's just messing around,” I said. “I mean, couldn't he still show up?”

“Screw you,” Connie said. She seemed surprised by these words, too.

“What'd I even do to you?” I said.

Of course we both knew.

“I think I'd rather be alone right now,” Connie announced primly, and stared hard out the window.

Peter, fleeing north with the girlfriend who might even have his baby—there was no imagining the biology away, the fact of the multiplying proteins in Pamela's stomach. But here was Connie, her chubby shape on the bed so familiar that I could map her freckles, point out the blip on her shoulder from chicken pox. There was always Connie, suddenly beloved.

“Let's go to a movie or something,” I said.

She sniffed and studied the pale rim of her nails. “Peter's not even around anymore,” she said. “So you really have no reason to be here. You're gonna be at boarding school, anyway.”

The hum of my desperation was obvious. “Maybe we can go to the Flying A?”

She bit her lip. “May says you're not very nice to me.”

May was the dentist's daughter. She wore plaid pants with matching vests, like a junior accountant.

“You said May was boring.”

Connie was quiet. We used to feel sorry for May, who was rich but ridiculous, but I understood that now Connie was feeling sorry for me, watching me pant after Peter, who'd probably been planning to go to Portland for weeks. Months.

“May's nice,” Connie said. “Real nice.”

“We could all see a movie together.” I was pedaling now, for any kind of traction, a bulwark against the empty summer. May wasn't so bad, I told myself, even though she wasn't allowed to eat candy or popcorn because of her braces, and yes, I could imagine it, the three of us.

“She thinks you're trashy,” Connie said. She turned back to the window. I stared at the lace curtains I had helped Connie hem with glue when we were twelve. I had waited too long, my presence in the room an obvious error, and it was clear that there was nothing to do but leave, to say a tight-throated goodbye to Connie's father downstairs—he gave me a distracted nod—and clatter my bike out into the street.

Had I ever felt alone like this before, the whole day to spend and no one to care? I could almost imagine the ache in my gut as pleasure. It was about keeping busy, I told myself, a frictionless burning of hours. I made a martini the way my father had taught me, sloshing the vermouth over my hand and ignoring the spill on the bar table. I'd always hated martini glasses—the stem and the funny shape seemed embarrassing, like the adults were trying too hard to be adults. I poured it in a juice cup instead, rimmed with gold, and forced myself to drink. Then I made another and drank that, too. It was fun to feel loose and amused with my own house, realizing, in a spill of hilarity, that the furniture had always been ugly, chairs as heavy and mannered as gargoyles. To notice the air was candied with silence, that the curtains were always drawn. I opened them and struggled to lift a window. It was hot outside—I imagined my father, snapping that I was letting the warm air in—but I left the window open anyway.

My mother would be gone all day, the liquor aiding the shorthand of my loneliness. It was strange that I could feel differently so easily, that there was a sure way to soften the crud of my own sadness. I could drink until my problems seemed compact and pretty, something I could admire. I forced myself to like the taste, to breathe slowly when I felt nauseous. I burbled acrid vomit onto my blankets, then cleaned so there was just a tart, curdled spice in the air that I almost liked. I knocked over a lamp and put on dark eye makeup with inexpert but avid attention. Sat in front of my mother's lighted mirror with its different settings: Office. Daylight. Dusk. Washes of colored light, my features spooking and bleaching as I clicked through the artificial day.

I tried reading parts of books I'd liked when I was young. A spoiled girl gets banished underground, to a city ruled by goblins. The girl's bared knees in her childish dress, the woodcuts of the dark forests. The illustrations of the bound girl stirred me so I had to parcel how long I could look at them. I wished I could draw something like that, like the terrifying inside of someone's own mind. Or draw the face of the black-haired girl I'd seen in town—studying her long enough so I could see how the features worked together. The hours I lost to masturbation, face pressed into my pillow, passing some point of caring. I'd get a headache after a while, muscles jumpy, my legs quivering and tender. My underpants wet, the tops of my thighs.

Another book: a silversmith accidentally spills molten silver on his hand. His arm and hand probably looked skinned after the burn had scabbed over and peeled. The skin tight and pink and fresh, without hair or freckles. I thought of Willie and his stump, the warm hose water he sloshed over his car. How the puddles would slowly evaporate from the asphalt. I practiced peeling an orange as if my arm were burned to the elbow and I had no fingernails.

Death seemed to me like a lobby in a hotel. Some civilized, well-lit room you could easily enter or leave. A boy in town had shot himself in his finished basement after getting caught selling counterfeit raffle tickets: I didn't think of the gore, the wet insides, but only the ease of the moment before he pulled the trigger, how clean and winnowed the world must have seemed. All the disappointments, all of regular life with its punishments and indignities, made surplus in one orderly motion.

The aisles of the store seemed new to me, my thoughts formless from drinking. The constant flickering of the lights, stale lemon drops in a bin, the makeup arranged in pleasing, fetishistic groupings. I uncapped a lipstick, to test it on my wrist like I'd read I should. The door rang its chime of commerce. I looked up. It was the black-haired girl from the park, in denim sneakers, a dress whose sleeves had been cut at the shoulder. Excitement moved through me. Already I was trying to imagine what I would say to her. Her sudden appearance made the day seem tightly wound with synchronicity, the angle of sunlight newly weighted.

The girl wasn't beautiful, I realized, seeing her again. It was something else. Like pictures I had seen of the actor John Huston's daughter. Her face could have been an error, but some other process was at work. It was better than beauty.

The man behind the counter scowled.

“I told you,” he said. “I won't let any of you in here, not anymore. Get on.”

The girl gave him a lazy smile, holding up her hands. I saw a prick of hair in her armpits. “Hey,” she said, “I'm just trying to buy toilet paper.”

“You stole from me,” the man said, shading red. “You and your friends. Not wearing shoes, running around with your filthy feet. Trying to confuse me.”

I would have been terrified in the focus of his anger, but the girl was calm. Even jokey. “I don't think that's true.” She cocked her head. “Maybe it was someone else.”

He crossed his arms. “I remember you.”

The girl's face shifted, something hardening in her eyes, but she remained smiling. “Fine,” she said. “Whatever your thing is.” She looked over at me, her glance cool and distant. Like she hardly saw me. Desire moved through me: I surprised myself with how much I didn't want her to disappear.

“Get on outside,” the man said. “Go.”

Before she left, she stuck out her tongue at the man. Just a peep, like a droll little cat.

I'd only hesitated for a moment before following the girl outside, but she was already cutting across the parking lot, keeping up a brisk pace. I hurried behind.

“Hey,” I called. She kept walking.

I said it again, louder, and she stopped. Letting me catch up to her.

“What a jerk,” I said. I must have looked shiny as an apple. Cheeks flushed with half-drunk effort.

She glared in the direction of the store. “Fat fuck,” she muttered. “I can't even buy toilet paper.”

She finally seemed to acknowledge me, studying my face for a long moment. I could tell she saw me as young. That my bib shirt, a gift from my mother, was considered fancy. I wanted to do something bigger than those facts. I made the offer before I'd really thought about it.

“I'll lift it,” I said, my voice unnaturally bright. “The toilet paper. Easy. I steal stuff from there all the time.”

I wondered if she believed me. It must have been obvious how lightly I was wearing the lie. But maybe she respected that. The desperation of my desire. Or maybe she wanted to see how it would play out. The rich girl, trying out kid-glove criminality.

“You sure?” she said.

I shrugged, my heart hammering. If she felt sorry for me, I didn't see that part.

My unexplained return agitated the man behind the counter.

“Back again?”

Even if I'd really planned to try to steal something, it would have been impossible. I dawdled down the aisles, making an effort to wipe my face of any delinquent glimmer, but the man didn't look away. He glared until I grabbed the toilet paper and brought it to the register, shamed at how easily I snapped into the habit. Of course I wasn't going to steal anything. That was never going to happen.

He got on a tear as he rang up the toilet paper. “A nice girl like you shouldn't hang out with girls like that,” he said. “So filthy, that group. Some guy with a black dog.” He looked pained. “Not in my store.”

Through the pocked glass, I could see the girl ambling in the parking lot outside. Hand shading her eyes. This sudden and unexpected fortune: she was waiting for me.

After I paid, the man looked at me for a long moment. “You're just a kid,” he said. “Why don't you go on home?”

I had felt bad for him until then. “I don't need a bag,” I said, and stuffed the toilet paper in my purse. I was silent while the man gave me change, licking his lips as if to chase away a bad taste.

The girl perked up as I came over.

“You get it?”

I nodded, and she huddled me around the corner, her arm hurrying me along. I could almost believe I had actually stolen something, adrenaline brightening my veins as I held out my bag.

“Ha,” she said, peeking inside. “Serves him right, the asshole. Was it easy?”

“Pretty easy,” I said. “He's so out of it, anyway.” I was thrilling at our collusion, the way we'd become a team. A triangle of stomach showed where the girl's dress wasn't fully buttoned. How easily she invoked a kind of sloppy sexual feeling, like her clothes had been hurried on a body still cooling from sweat.

“I'm Suzanne,” she said. “By the way.”

“Evie.” I stuck out my hand. Suzanne laughed in a way that made me understand shaking hands was the wrong thing to do, a hollow symbol from the straight world. I flushed. It was hard to know how to act without all the usual polite gestures and forms. I wasn't sure what took their place. There was a silence: I scrambled to fill it.