Emma Cline - The Girls

She must have sensed my hesitation.

“Whatever,” she said. “It was a while ago.”

This is what it might be like to be a mother, I thought, watching Sasha drain her beer, wipe her mouth like a boy. To feel this unexpected, boundless tenderness for someone, seemingly out of nowhere. When a pool player sauntered over, I was prepared to scare him away. But Sasha smiled big, showing her pointed teeth.

“Hi,” she said, and then he was buying us each another beer.

Sasha drank steadily. Alternating between distracted boredom and manic interest, feigned or not, in what the man was saying.

“You two from out of town?” he asked. His hair graying and long, a turquoise ring on his thumb — another sixties ghost. Maybe we’d even crossed paths back then, haunting the same well-worn trail. He hitched up his pants. “Sisters?”

His voice barely tried to include me in the purview of his effort, and I almost laughed. Still, even sitting next to Sasha, I was aware of some of the attention washing onto me. It was shocking to remember the voltage, even secondhand. How it felt to be a desired thing. Maybe Sasha was so used to it that she didn’t even notice. Caught up in the rush of her own life, in her certainty of the meliorative trajectory.

“She’s my mother,” Sasha said. Her eyes were taut, wanting me to keep the joke going.

And I did. I huddled my arm around her. “We’re on a mother-daughter trip,” I said. “Driving the 1. All the way up to Eureka.”

“Adventurers!” the man exclaimed, pounding the table. His name was Victor, we learned, and the background wallpaper on Victor’s cellphone was an Aztec image, he told us, so imbued with powers that just the contemplation of said image made you smarter. He was convinced that world events were orchestrated by complicated and persistent conspiracies. He took out a dollar bill to show us how the Illuminati communicated with one another.

“Why would a secret society lay out their plans on common currency?” I asked.

He nodded like he’d anticipated the question. “To display the reach of their power.”

I envied Victor’s certainty, the idiot syntax of the righteous. This belief — that the world had a visible order, and all we had to do was look for the symbols — as if evil were a code that could be cracked. He kept talking. His teeth wet from drink, the gray blush of a dead molar. He had plenty of conspiracies to explain to us in detail, plenty of inside information he could clue us into. He spoke of “getting on the level.” Of “hidden frequencies” and “shadow governments.”

“Wow,” Sasha said, deadpan. “Did you know that, Mom?”

She kept calling me Mom, her voice exaggerated and comical, though it took me a while to see how drunk she was. To realize how drunk I was, too. The night had sailed into foreign waters. The fritzing of the neon signs, the bartender smoking in the doorway. I watched the bartender stamp the butt out, her flip-flops sliding around her feet. Victor said it was nice to see how well Sasha and I got along.

“You don’t always see that, these days.” He nodded, thoughtful. “Mothers and daughters who’d take a trip together. Who are sweet with each other like you two.”

“Oh, she’s great,” Sasha said. “I love my mom.”

She cut me a tricky smile before she leaned her face close to mine. The dry press of her lips, the stingy brine of pickles on her mouth. The most chaste of kisses. Still. Victor was shocked. As she’d hoped he would be.

“Goddamn,” Victor said, both disgusted and titillated. Straightening his bulky shoulders, retucking his blousy shirt. He suddenly seemed wary of us, glancing around for support, for confirmation, and I wanted to explain that Sasha wasn’t my daughter, but I was past the point of caring, the night stoking a foolish, confused sense that I had somehow returned to the world after a period of absence, had taken up residence again in the realm of the living.

My father had always been in charge of pool maintenance — skimming the surface with a net, heaping wet leaves into a pile. The colored vials he used to test chlorine levels. He’d never been that assiduous with upkeep, but the pool had gotten bad since he’d left. Salamanders idling around the filter. When I propelled myself along the rim, there was some sloggy resistance, crud dispersing in my wake. My mother was at group. She’d forgotten a promise to buy me a new swimsuit, so I was wearing my old orange one: pale as cantaloupe, the stitching puckered and gaping around the leg holes. The top was too small, but the adult mass of cleavage pleased me.

It had only been a week since the solstice party, and already I’d been back to the ranch, and already I was stealing money for Suzanne, bill by bill. I like to imagine that it took more time than that. That I had to be convinced over a period of months, slowly broken down. Wooed as carefully as a valentine. But I was an eager mark, anxious to offer myself.

I kept bobbing in the water, algae speckling the hair on my legs like filings to a magnet. A forgotten paperback ruffled on the seat of the lawn chair. The leaves in the trees were silvery and spangled, like scales, everything full with June’s lazy heat. Had the trees around my house always looked like that, so strange and aquatic? Or were things already shifting for me, the dumb litter of the normal world transforming into the lush stage sets of a different life?

—

Suzanne had driven me home the morning after the solstice, my bike shoved in the backseat. My mouth was leached and unfamiliar from smoking so much, and my clothes were stale from my body and smelled of ash. I kept picking bits of straw from my hair — proof of the night before that thrilled me, like a stamped passport. It had happened, after all, and I kept up a vivid catalog of happy data: the fact that I was sitting beside Suzanne, our friendly silence. My perverse pride that I’d been with Russell. I took pleasure in replaying the facts of the act, even the messy and boring parts. The odd lulls while Russell made himself hard. There was some power in the bluntness of human functions. Like Russell had explained to me: your body could hurtle you past your hang-ups, if you let it.

Suzanne smoked steadily as she drove, occasionally offering her cigarette to me with serene ritual. The quiet between us wasn’t slack or uncomfortable. Outside the car, olive trees flashed by, the scorched summer earth. Far-off waterways, sloughing to the sea. Suzanne kept changing the radio station until she abruptly snapped it off.

“We need gas,” she announced.

We, I echoed silently, we need gas.

Suzanne pulled into the Texaco, empty except for a teal-and-white pickup towing a boat trailer.

“Hand me a card,” Suzanne said. Nodding at the glove box.

I scrambled to open it, loosing a jumble of credit cards. All with different names.

“The blue one,” she said. She seemed impatient. When I handed her the card, she saw my confusion.

“People give them to us,” she said. “Or we take them.” She fingered the blue card. “Like this one is Donna’s. She lifted it from her mom.”

“Her mom’s gas card?”

“Saved our ass — we would’ve starved,” Suzanne said. She gave me a look. “Like you hustling that toilet paper, right?”

I flushed at the mention. Maybe she’d known I had lied, but I couldn’t tell from her shuttered face — maybe not.

“Besides,” she continued, “it’s better than what they’d do with it — more crap, more stuff, more me, me, me. Russell’s trying to help people. He’s not judgmental, that’s not his trip. He doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor.”

It made a kind of sense, what Suzanne was saying. They were just trying to equalize the forces in the world.