The Girls (9 page)

Russell handed me a bottle of Coke. The soda was tepid and flat, but I drank the whole thing. As intoxicating as champagne.

I experienced the whole night as fated, me as the center of a singular drama. But Russell had put me through a series of ritual tests. Perfected over the years that he had worked for a religious organization near Ukiah, a center that gave away food, found shelter and jobs. Attracting the thin, harried girls with partial college degrees and neglectful parents, girls with hellish bosses and dreams of nose jobs. His bread and butter. The time he spent at the center's outpost in San Francisco in the old fire station. Collecting his followers. Already he'd become an expert in female sadness—a particular slump in the shoulders, a nervous rash. A subservient lilt at the end of sentences, eyelashes gone soggy from crying. Russell did the same thing to me that he did to those girls. Little tests, first. A touch on my back, a pulse of my hand. Little ways of breaking down boundaries. And how quickly he'd ramped it up, easing his pants to his knees. An act, I thought, calibrated to comfort young girls who were glad, at least, that it wasn't sex. Who could stay fully dressed the whole time, as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.

But maybe the strangest part—I liked it, too.

I floated through the party in a stunned hush. The air on my skin insistent, my armpits sliding with sweat. It had happened—I had to keep telling myself so. I assumed everyone would see it on me. An obvious aura of sex. I wasn't anxious anymore, wasn't roaming the party squeezed by nervous need, the certainty that there was a hidden room I wasn't allowed access to—that worry had been satisfied, and I took dreamy steps, looked back into passing faces with a smile that asked nothing.

When I saw Guy, tapping a pack of cigarettes, I stopped without hesitation.

“Can I have one?”

He grinned at me. “The girl wants a cigarette, she shall have her cigarette.” He held it to my mouth and I hoped people were watching.

I finally found Suzanne in a group near the fire. When she caught my eye, she gave me an odd, airless smile. I'm sure she recognized the inward shift you sometimes see in young girls, newly sexed. It's that pride, I think, a solemnity. I wanted her to know. Suzanne was giddy from something, I could tell. Not alcohol. Something else, her pupils seeming to eat the iris, a flush lacing up her neck like a trippy Victorian collar.

Maybe Suzanne felt some hidden disappointment when the game fulfilled itself, when she saw that I'd gone with Russell, after all. But maybe she'd expected it. The car was still smoldering, the noise of the party cutting up the darkness. I felt the night churn in me like a wheel.

“When's the car gonna stop burning?” I said.

I couldn't see her face, but I could feel her, the air soft between us.

“Jesus, I don't know,” she said. “Morning?”

In the flicker, my arms and hands in front of me looked scaly and reptilian, and I welcomed the distorted vision of my body. I heard the brood of a motorcycle ignition, someone's wicked hoot—they'd thrown a box spring in the fire, and the flames soared and deepened.

“You can crash in my room if you want,” Suzanne said. Her voice gave away nothing. “I don't care. But you have to actually be here, if you're going to be here. Get it?”

Suzanne was asking me something else. Like those fairy tales where goblins can enter a house only if invited by its inhabitants. The moment of crossing the threshold, the careful way Suzanne constructed her statements—she wanted me to say it. And I nodded, and said I understood. Though I couldn't understand, not really. I was wearing a dress that didn't belong to me in a place I had never been, and I couldn't see much farther than that. The possibility that my life was hovering on the brink of a new and permanent happiness. I thought of Connie with a beatific indulgence—she was a sweet girl, wasn't she—and even my father and mother fell under my generous purview, sufferers of a tragic foreign malady. The beam of motorcycle headlights blanched the tree branches and illuminated the exposed foundation of the house, the black dog crouching over an unseen prize. Someone kept playing the same song over and over.
Hey, baby,
the first lines went. The song repeated enough times that I started to get the phrase in my head,
Hey, baby.
I worked the words around with unspecific effort, like the idle rattle of a lemon drop against the teeth.

I
WOKE TO A WASH OF FOG
pressed against the windows, the bedroom filled with snowy light. It took a moment to reoccupy the disappointing and familiar facts—I was staying in Dan's house. It was his bureau in the corner, his glass-topped nightstand. His blanket, bordered in sateen ribbon, that I pulled over my own body. I remembered Julian and Sasha, the thin wall between us. I didn't want to think of the previous night. Sasha's mewlings. The slurred, obsessive muttering, “Fuck me fuck mefuckmefuckme,” repeated so many times it failed to mean anything.

I stared at the monotony of ceiling. They'd been thoughtless, as all teenagers are, and the night didn't mean anything beyond that. Still. The polite thing to do was to wait in my room until they had left for Humboldt. Let them clear off without having to perform any dutiful morning niceties.

As soon as I heard the car back out of the garage, I got out of bed. The house was mine again, and though I expected relief, there was some sadness, too. Sasha and Julian were aimed at another adventure. Clicking back into the momentum of the larger world. I'd recede in their minds—the middle-aged woman in a forgotten house—just a mental footnote getting smaller and smaller as their real life took over. I hadn't realized until then how lonely I was. Or something less urgent than loneliness: an absence of eyes on me, maybe. Who would care if I ceased to exist? Those silly phrases I remembered Russell saying—cease to exist, he urged us, disappear the self. And all of us nodding like golden retrievers, the reality of our existence making us cavalier, eager to dismantle what seemed permanent.

I started the kettle. Opened the window to let a slash of cold air circulate. I gathered what seemed to be a lot of empty beer bottles—had they drunk more while I slept?

After taking out the trash, the tight heave of plastic and my own garbage, I caught myself staring at the poky blankets of ice plants along the driveway. The beach beyond. The fog had started to burn off, and I could see the crawl of waves, the cliffs above looking rusted and dry. A few people were out walking, obvious in performance wear. Most of them had dogs—this was the only beach around where you could take dogs off-leash. I'd seen the same rottweiler a few times, his coat a color deeper than black, his heavy churning run. A pit bull had recently killed a woman in San Francisco. Was it strange that people loved these creatures that could harm them? Or was it understandable—that they maybe even loved animals more for their restraint, for the way they blessed humans with temporary safety.

I hustled back inside. I couldn't stay in Dan's house forever. Another aide job would turn up soon. But how familiar that was—lifting someone into the warm, persistent waters of a therapy tub. Sitting in the waiting rooms of doctor's offices, reading articles on the effects of soy on tumors. The importance of filling your plate with a rainbow. The usual wishful lies, tragic in their insufficiency. Did anyone really believe in them? As if the bright flash of your efforts could distract death from coming for you, keep the bull snorting harmlessly after the scarlet flag.

The kettle was whistling, so at first I didn't hear Sasha come into the kitchen. Her abrupt presence startled me.

“Morning,” she said. A streak of spit had dried along her cheek. She was wearing high-cut shorts made of sweatpant material, her socks dotted with tiny hot-pink symbols I realized were skulls. She swallowed, her mouth furry with sleep. “Where's Julian?” she asked.

I tried to hide my surprise. “I heard the car leave awhile ago.”

She squinted. “What?” she asked.

“Didn't he tell you he was going?”

Sasha saw my pity. Her face tightened.

“Of course he told me,” she said after a moment. “Yeah, of course. He'll be back tomorrow.”

So he had left her. My first thought was irritation. I wasn't a babysitter. Then relief. Sasha was a kid—she shouldn't go with him to Humboldt. Ride an ATV through barbed-wire checkpoints to some shithole tarp ranch in Garberville just to pick up a duffel bag of weed. I was even a little glad for her company.

“I don't like the drive, anyway,” Sasha said, gamely adapting to the situation. “I get sick on those small roads. He drives so crazy, too. Super fast.” She leaned up against the counter, yawning.

“Tired?” I said.

She told me that she had been trying polyphasic sleep but had to quit. “It was too weird,” she said. Her nipples were apparent through her shirt.

“Polyphasic sleep?” I said, pulling my own robe tight in a prudish surge.

“Thomas Jefferson did it. You sleep in hour bursts, like, six times a day.”

“And you're awake the rest of the time?”

Sasha nodded. “It's kind of great, the first couple of days. But I crashed hard. It seemed like I'd never sleep normal again.”

I couldn't link the girl I'd overheard the night before to the girl in front of me, talking about sleep experiments.

“There's enough hot water in the kettle if you want some,” I said, but Sasha shook her head.

“I don't eat in the mornings, like a ballerina.” She glanced at the window, the sea a pewter sheet. “Do you ever swim?”

“It's really cold.” I had only seen the occasional surfer venture into the waves, their bodies sheathed in neoprene, hoods over their heads.

“So you've gone in?” she asked.

“No.”

Sasha's face moved with sympathy. Like I was missing out on some obvious pleasure. But no one swam, I thought, feeling protective of my life in this borrowed house, the local orbits of my days. “There are sharks out there, too,” I added.

“They don't really attack humans,” Sasha said, shrugging. She was pretty, like a consumptive, eaten by an internal heat. I tried to spot some pornographic residue of the night before, but there was nothing. Her face as pale and blameless as a lesser moon.

Sasha's proximity, even for the day, forced some normalcy. The built-in preventative of another person meant I couldn't indulge the animal feelings, couldn't leave orange peels in the kitchen sink. I dressed right after breakfast instead of haunting my robe all day. Swiped on mascara from a mostly dried-up tube. These were the cogent human labors, the daily tasks that staved larger panics, but living alone had gotten me out of the habit—I didn't feel substantial enough to warrant this kind of effort.

I'd last lived with someone years ago, a man who taught ESL classes at one of the sham colleges that advertised on bus-stop benches. The students were mostly wealthy foreigners who wanted to design videogames. It was surprising to think of him, of David, to remember a time when I imagined a life with another person. Not love, but the pleasant inertia that could substitute. The agreeable quiet that passed over us both in car rides. The way I'd once seen him look at me as we crossed a parking lot.

But then it started—a woman who knocked on the apartment door at strange hours. An ivory hairbrush that had belonged to my grandmother went missing from the bathroom. I'd never told David certain things, so that whatever closeness we had was automatically corrupted, the grub twisting in the apple. My secret was sunk deep, but it was there. Maybe that was the reason it had happened, the other women. I had left open a space for such secrets. And how much could you ever know another person, anyway?

I'd imagined that Sasha and I would spend the day in courteous silence. That Sasha would be as hidden as a mouse. She was polite enough, but soon her presence was obvious. I found the refrigerator door left open, filling the kitchen with an alien buzz. Her sweatshirt thrown on the table, a book about the Enneagram splayed on a chair. Music came loud from her room through tinny laptop speakers. It surprised me—she was listening to the singer whose plaintive voice had been the perpetual aural backdrop for a certain kind of girl I remembered from college. Girls already swampy with nostalgia, girls who lit candles and stayed up late kneading bread dough in Danskin leotards and bare feet.

I was used to encountering remnants—the afterburn of the sixties was everywhere in that part of California. Ragged blips of prayer flags in the oak trees, vans eternally parked in fields, missing their tires. Older men in decorative shirts with common-law wives. But those were the expected sixties ghosts. Why would Sasha have any interest?

I was glad when Sasha changed the music. A woman singing over gothy electronic piano, nothing I recognized at all.

That afternoon, I tried to take a nap. But I couldn't sleep. I lay there, staring at the framed photo that hung over the bureau: a sand dune, rippling with mint grass. The ghoulish whorls of cobwebs in the corners. I shifted in the sheets, impatient. I was too aware of Sasha in the room next door. The music from her laptop hadn't stopped all afternoon, and sometimes I could make out scraps of digital noise over the songs, beeps and chimes. What was she doing—playing games on her phone? Texting with Julian? I had a sudden ache for the obliging ways she must be tending to her loneliness.

I knocked on her door, but the music was too loud. I tried again. Nothing. I was embarrassed by the exposure of effort, about to scurry back to my room, but Sasha appeared in the doorway. Her face still muted with sleep, her hair scraggled by the pillow—maybe she'd been trying to nap, too.

“Do you want some tea?” I asked.

It took her a moment to nod, like she'd forgotten who I was.

Sasha was quiet at the table. Studying her fingernails, sighing with cosmic boredom. I remembered this pose from my own adolescence—thrusting my jaw forward, staring out the car window like a wrongfully accused prisoner, all along desperately wishing that my mother would say something. Sasha was waiting for me to breach her reserve, to ask her questions, and I could feel her eyes on me while I poured the tea. It was nice to be watched, even suspiciously. I used the good cups and the buckwheat crackers I fanned along the saucers were only a little stale. I wanted to please her, I realized, setting the plate gently in front of her.

The tea was too hot; there was a lull while we huddled over the cups, my face dampening in the thin vegetal steam. When I asked Sasha where she was from, she grimaced.

“Concord,” she said. “It sucks.”

“And you go to college with Julian?”

“Julian's not in college.”

I wasn't sure if this was information Dan knew. I tried to remember what I'd last heard. When Dan did mention his son, it was with performative resignation, playing the clueless dad. Any trouble reported with sitcom sighs: boys will be boys. Julian had been diagnosed with some behavioral disorder in high school, though Dan made it sound mild.

“Have you guys been together long?” I asked.

Sasha sipped at the tea. “A few months,” she said. Her face grew animate, like just talking about Julian was a source of sustenance. She must have already forgiven him for leaving her behind. Girls were good at coloring in those disappointing blank spots. I thought of the night before, her exaggerated moans. Poor Sasha.

She probably believed that any sadness, any flicker of worry over Julian, was just a problem of logistics. Sadness at that age had the pleasing texture of imprisonment: you reared and sulked against the bonds of parents and school and age, the things that kept you from the certain happiness that awaited. When I was a sophomore in college, I had a boyfriend who spoke breathlessly of running away to Mexico—it didn't occur to me that we could no longer run away from home. Nor did I imagine what we would be running to, beyond the vagueness of warm air and more frequent sex. And now I was older, and the wishful props of future selves had lost their comforts. I might always feel some form of this, a depression that did not lift but grew compact and familiar, a space occupied like the sad limbo of hotel rooms.

“Listen,” I said, slotting into a parental role that was laughably unearned. “I hope Julian is being nice to you.”

“Why wouldn't he be nice?” she said. “He's my boyfriend. We live together.”

I could imagine so easily what would pass for living. A month-to-month apartment that smelled of freezer meals and Clorox, Julian's childhood comforter on the mattress. The girlish effort of a scented candle by the bed. Not that I was doing much better.

“We might get a place with a washing machine,” Sasha said, a new defiance in her tone as she invoked their meager domesticity. “Probably in a few months.”

“And your parents are okay with you living with Julian?”

“I can do what I want.” She shuffled her hands into the sleeves of Julian's sweatshirt. “I'm eighteen.”

That couldn't be true.

“Besides,” she said, “weren't you my age when you were in that cult?”

Her tone was blank, but I imagined a slant of accusation.

Before I could say anything, Sasha got up from the table, listing toward the refrigerator. I watched her affected swagger, the easy way she removed one of the beers they'd brought. The cutout silvered mountains gleaming from the label. She met my gaze.

“Want one?” she asked.

This was a test, I understood. Either I could be the kind of adult to be ignored or pitied or I could be someone she could maybe talk to. I nodded and Sasha relaxed.

“Think fast,” she said, tossing the bottle to me.

Night came on quick, as it did on the coast, with no mediation of buildings to temper the change. The sun was so low that we could look directly at it, watching it drift from sight. We each had had a few beers. The kitchen grew dark, but neither of us got up to turn on the lights. Everything had a blue shadow, soft and royal, the furniture simplifying into shapes. Sasha asked if we could make a fire in the fireplace.

“It's gas,” I said. “And it's broken.”

A lot of things in the house were broken or forgotten: the kitchen clock stopped, a closet doorknob coming off in my hand. The sparkly mess of flies I'd swept from the corners. It took sustained, constant living to ward off decay. Even my presence for the last few weeks hadn't made much of a dent.