Emma Cline - The Girls

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.