Emma Cline - The Girls

Helen took a bite. When she giggled, her teeth washed with chocolate.

“Candy yoga,” she pronounced. Anything could be yoga: doing the dishes, grooming the llamas. Making food for Russell. You were supposed to bliss out on it, to settle into whatever the rhythms were going to teach you.

Break down the self, offer yourself up like dust to the universe.

—

All the books made it sound like the men forced the girls into it. That wasn’t true, not all the time. Suzanne wielded her Swinger camera like a weapon. Goading men to drop their jeans. To expose their penises, tender and naked in dark nests of hair. The men smiled shyly in the pictures, paled from the guilty flash, all hair and wet animal eyes. “ There isn’t any film in the camera,” Suzanne would say, though she had stolen a case of film from the store. The boys pretended to believe her. It was like that with lots of things.

I trailed after Suzanne, after all of them. Suzanne letting me draw suns and moons on her naked back with tanning oil while Russell played an idle riff on his guitar, a coy up-and-down fragment. Helen sighing like the lovesick kid she was, Roos joining us with a drifty smile, some teenage boy I didn’t know looking at us all with grateful awe, and no one even had to speak — the silence was knit with so much.

—

I prepared inwardly for Russell’s advances, but it only happened after a while. Russell giving me a cryptic nod so I knew to follow him.

I’d been washing windows with Suzanne in the main house — the floor littered with the crumple of newspaper and vinegar, the transistor radio going; even chores took on the delight of truancy. Suzanne singing along, talking to me with happy, fitful distraction. She looked different, those times we worked together, like she forgot herself and relaxed into the girl she was. It’s strange to remember she was just nineteen. When Russell nodded at me, I looked at her reflexively. For permission or forgiveness, either one. The ease in her face had drained into a brittle mask. Scrubbing the warped window with new concentration. She shrugged goodbye when I left, like she didn’t mind, though I could sense her watchful gaze on my back.

Every time Russell nodded at me like that, my heart contracted, despite the strangeness. I was eager for our encounters, eager to cement my place among them, as if doing what Suzanne did was a way of being with her. Russell never fucked me — it was always other stuff, his fingers moving in me with a technical remove I ascribed to his purity. His aims were elevated, I told myself, unsullied by primitive concerns.

“Look at yourself,” he said whenever he sensed shame or hesitance. Pointing me toward the fogged mirror in the trailer. “Look at your body. It’s not some stranger’s body,” he said evenly. When I shied away, goofing some excuse, he took me by the shoulders and pointed me back at the mirror. “It’s you,” he said. “It’s Evie. Nothing in you but beauty.”

The words worked on me, even if only temporarily. A trance overtaking me when I saw my reflection — the scooped breasts, even the soft stomach, the legs rough with mosquito bites. There was nothing to figure out, no complicated puzzles — just the obvious fact of the moment, the only place where love really existed.

Afterward he’d hand me a towel to clean myself, and this seemed like a great kindness.

When I returned to her purview, there was always a brief period when Suzanne was cool to me. Even her movements were stiff, as if braced, a lull behind her eyes, like someone asleep at the wheel. I learned quickly how to compliment her, how to ride by her side until she forgot to be aloof and deigned to pass her cigarette to me. It would occur to me later that Suzanne missed me when I left, her formality a clumsy disguise. Though it’s hard to tell — maybe that is only a wishful explanation.

—

The other parts of the ranch flash in and out. Guy’s black dog that they called by a rotating series of names. The wanderers who passed through the ranch that summer, crashing for a day or two before leaving. Denizens of the brainless dream, appearing at all hours of the day with woven backpacks and their parents’ cars. I didn’t see anything familiar in how quickly Russell talked them out of their possessions, put them on the spot so their generosity became a forced theater. They handed over pink slips to cars, bankbooks, once even a gold wedding ring, with the stunned and exhausted relief of a drowning person finally giving in to the tidal suck. I was distracted by their tales of sorrow, both harrowing and banal. Complaints of evil fathers and cruel mothers, a similarity to the stories that made us all feel like victims of the same conspiracy.

—

It was one of the few days it rained that summer, and most of us were indoors, the old parlor smelling damp and gray like the air outside. Blankets gridded the floor. I could hear a baseball game on the radio in the kitchen, rain dropping into the plastic bucket under a leak. Roos was giving Suzanne a hand massage, their fingers slick with lotion, while I read a years-old magazine. My horoscope from March 1967. An irritated sulk hung between us; we were not used to limitations, to being stuck anywhere.

The kids did better at being indoors. They passed only briefly through our watch, trundling by on their private missions. There was the bang of a fallen chair in the other room, but no one got up to investigate. Besides Nico, I didn’t know who most of the other kids belonged to — all of them were thin wristed, like they’d gone to seed, powdered milk glazed around their mouths. I’d watched Nico for Roos a few times, had held him in my arms and felt his sweaty, pleasing weight. I combed his hair with my fingers, untangled his shark-tooth necklace. All those self-consciously maternal tasks, tasks that pleased me more than him and allowed me to imagine I alone had the power to make him calm. Nico was uncooperative with these moments of softness, breaking the spell bluntly, like he’d sensed my good feelings and resented them. Tugging his little penis at me. Demanding juice in a shrieking falsetto. Once hitting me so hard that I bruised. I watched him squat and take a shit out on the concrete by the pool, shits we’d sometimes hose away and sometimes not.

Helen wandered downstairs in a Snoopy T-shirt and too-big socks, the red heels bunched around her ankles.

“Anyone wanna play Liar’s Dice?”

“Nah,” Suzanne announced. For all of us, it was assumed.

Helen slumped onto a balding armchair stripped of cushions. She glanced at the ceiling. “Still leaking,” she said. Everyone ignored her. “Can someone roll a joint?” she said. “Please?”

When no one answered, she joined Roos and Suzanne on the floor. “Please, please, please?” she said, nuzzling her head into Roos’s shoulder, draping herself in her lap like a dog.

“Oh, just do it,” Suzanne said. Helen jumped up to get the fake ivory box they kept the supplies in, while Suzanne rolled her eyes at me. I smiled back. It wasn’t so bad, I thought, being inside. All of us huddled in the same room like Red Cross survivors, water boiling on the stove for tea. Roos working by the window, where the light was alabaster through the scrappy lace curtain.

The calm was cut by Nico’s sudden whine, stampeding into the room as he chased a little girl with a bowl cut — she had Nico’s shark-tooth necklace, and a yelping scrabble broke out between them. Tears, clawing.

“Hey,” Suzanne said without looking up, and the kids got quiet, though they kept staring hotly at each other. Breathing hard, like drunks. Everything seemed fine, quickly handled, until Nico scratched the girl’s face, raking her with his overgrown nails, and the screaming doubled. The girl clapped both hands over her cheek, wailing so her baby teeth showed. Sustaining a high note of misery.