Emma Cline - The Girls

“I like your outfit,” I said, pushed to speak by the burn in my chest. She had her back to me and didn’t hear. I repeated myself and she startled.

“Evie,” she said, pleasantly enough. “You scared me.”

“Sorry.” I felt foolish, blunt in my shift dress. Her outfit was bright and new looking, wavy diamonds in violet and green and red.

“Fun party,” she said, her eyes scanning the crowd.

Before I could think of a rejoinder, some crack to show that I knew the tiki torches were stupid, my mother joined us. I quickly put my glass back on the table. Hating the way I felt: all my comfort before Tamar’s arrival had transformed into painful awareness of every object in my house, every detail of my parents, as if I were responsible for all of it. I was embarrassed for my mother’s full skirt, which seemed outdated next to Tamar’s clothes, for the eager way my mother greeted her. Her neck getting blotchy with nerves. I slunk away while they were distracted with their polite chatter.

Queasy and sunbaked with discomfort, I wanted to sit in one place without having to talk to anyone, without having to track Tamar’s gaze or see my mother using her chopsticks, announcing gaily that it wasn’t so hard, even as a mandarin orange slithered back onto her plate. I wished Connie were there — we were still friends then. My spot by the pool had been occupied by a gossipy scrum of wives: from across the yard, I heard my father’s booming laugh, the group surrounding him laughing as well. I pulled my dress down, awkwardly, missing the weight of a glass in my hands. Tamar’s boyfriend was standing nearby, eating ribs.

“You’re Carl’s daughter,” he said, “right?”

I remember thinking it was strange that he and Tamar had floated apart, that he was just standing by himself, powering through his plate. It was strange that he would even want to talk to me. I nodded.

“Nice house,” he said, his mouth full. Lips bright and wet from the ribs. He was handsome, I saw, but there was something cartoonish about him, the upturn of his nose. The extra ruff of skin under his chin. “So much land,” he added.

“It was my grandparents’ house.”

His eyes shifted. “I heard about her,” he said. “Your grandmother. I used to watch her when I was little.” I didn’t realize how drunk he was until that moment. His tongue lingering in the corner of his mouth. “That episode where she finds the alligator in the fountain. Classic.”

I was used to people speaking of my grandmother fondly. How they liked to perform their admiration, tell me that they’d grown up with her on their television screens, beamed into their living rooms like another, better, family member.

“Makes sense,” the boyfriend said, looking around. “That this was her place. ’Cause your old man couldn’t afford it, no way.”

I understood that he was insulting my father.

“It’s just strange,” he said, wiping his lips with his hand. “What your mother puts up with.”

My face must have been blank: he waggled his fingers in the direction of Tamar, still at the bar. My father had joined her. My mother was nowhere in sight. Tamar’s bracelets were making noise as she waved her glass. She and my father were just talking. Nothing was happening. I didn’t get why her boyfriend was smiling so rabidly, waiting for me to say something.

“Your father fucks anything he can,” he said.

“Can I take your plate?” I asked, too stunned to flinch. That was something I’d learned from my mother: revert to politeness. Cut pain with a gesture of civility. Like Jackie Kennedy. It was a virtue to that generation, an ability to divert discomfort, tamp it down with ceremony. But it was out of fashion now, and I saw something like disdain in his eyes when he handed me his plate. Though maybe that is something I imagined.

—

The party ended after dark. A few of the tiki torches stayed lit, sending their bleary flames streaking into the navy night. The vivid oversize cars lumbering down the driveway, my father calling out goodbyes while my mother stacked napkins and brushed olive pits, washed in other people’s saliva, into her open palm. My father restarted the record; I looked out my bedroom window and saw him trying to get my mother to dance. “I’ll be looking at the moon,” he sang, the moon’s far-off face the focus of so much longing back then.

I knew I should hate my father. But I only felt foolish. Embarrassed — not for him, but for my mother. Smoothing her full skirt, asking me how she looked. The way she sometimes had flecks of food in her teeth and blushed when I told her so. The times she stood at the window when my father was late coming home, trying to decode new meaning out of the empty driveway.

She must know what was going on — she had to have known — but she wanted him anyway. Like Connie, jumping for the beer knowing she would look stupid. Even Tamar’s boyfriend, eating with his frantic, bottomless need. Chewing faster than he could swallow. He knew how your hunger could expose you.

The drunk was wearing off. I was sleepy and hollow, cast uncomfortably back to myself. I had scorn for everything: my room with my childhood leftovers, the trim of lace around my desk. The plastic record player with a chunky Bakelite handle, a wet-looking beanbag chair that stuck to the backs of my legs. The party with its eager hors d’oeuvres, the men wearing aloha shirts in a sartorial clamor for festivity. It all seemed to add up to an explanation for why my father would want something else. I imagined Tamar with her throat circled by a ribbon, lying on some carpet in some too-small Palo Alto apartment. My father there — watching her? sitting in a chair? The perverse voltage of Tamar’s pink lipstick. I tried to hate her but couldn’t. I couldn’t even hate my father. The only person left was my mother, who’d let it happen, who’d been as soft and malleable as dough. Handing money over, cooking dinner every night, and no wonder my father had wanted something else — Tamar’s outsize opinions, her life like a TV show about summer.

It was a time when I imagined getting married in a simple, wishful way. The time when someone promised to take care of you, promised they would notice if you were sad, or tired, or hated food that tasted like the chill of the refrigerator. Who promised their lives would run parallel to yours. My mother must have known and stayed anyway, and what did that mean about love? It was never going to be safe — all the mournful refrains of songs that despaired you didn’t love me the way I loved you.

The most frightening thing: It was impossible to detect the source, the instant when things changed. The sight of a woman’s back in her low dress mingled with the knowledge of the wife in another room.

—

When the music stopped, I knew my mother would come say good night. It was a moment I’d been dreading — having to notice how her curls had wilted, the haze of lipstick around her mouth. When she knocked, I thought about pretending to be asleep. But my light was on: the door edged open.

She grimaced a little. “You’re still all dressed.”

I would’ve ignored her or made some joke, but I didn’t want to cause her any pain. Not then. I sat up.

“That was nice, wasn’t it?” she said. She leaned against the door frame. “The ribs came out good, I thought.”

Maybe I genuinely thought my mother would want to know. Or maybe I wanted to be soothed by her, for her to offer a calming adult summary.

I cleared my throat. “Something happened.”

I felt her tense in the doorway.

“Oh?”

Later I cringed, thinking of it. She must have already known what was coming. Must have willed me to be quiet.

“Dad was talking.” I turned back to my shoes, working intently at the buckle. “With Tamar.”