Emma Cline - The Girls

“I was seeing friends,” I snapped. “I have other friends besides Connie.”

“Other friends. Sure. You were out screwing some boyfriend, God knows what. Nasty little liar.” She was barely looking at me, her words as compulsive and fevered as the muttered obscenities of a pervert. “Maybe I should take you down to the juvenile detention center. Is that what you want? It’s clear to me I just can’t control you anymore. I’ll let them have you. See if they can straighten you out.”

I wrenched away, but even in the hallway, even with my door closed, I could still hear my mother at her bitter chant.

—

Frank was called in as reinforcement: I watched from the bed as he took my bedroom door off its hinges. He was careful and quiet, though it took him a while, and he eased the door out of the frame as if it were made of glass instead of cheapo hollow-core. He placed it against the wall gently. Then hovered for a moment in the now empty doorway. Rattling the screws in his hands like dice.

“Sorry about this,” he said, like he was just the hired help, the maintenance man carrying out my mother’s wishes.

I didn’t want to have to notice the actual kindness in his eyes, how immediately it drained my hateful narration of Frank of any real heat. I could picture him in Mexico for the first time, slightly sunburned so the hair on his arm turned platinum. Sipping a lemon soda while overseeing his gold mine — I pictured a cave whose interior was cobblestoned in stony growths of gold.

I kept expecting Frank to tell my mother about the stolen money. Pile on more problems to the list. But he didn’t. Maybe he’d seen that she was already angry enough. Frank kept up a silent vigil at the table during her many phone calls with my father while I listened from the hallway. Her high-pitched complaints, all her questions squeezed to a panicked register. What kind of person breaks into a neighbor’s house? A family I’d known my whole life?

“For no reason,” she added shrilly. A pause. “You think I haven’t asked her? You think I haven’t tried?”

Silence.

“Oh, sure, right, I bet. You want to try?”

And so I was sent to Palo Alto.

—

I spent two weeks at my father’s apartment. Across from a Denny’s, the Portofino Apartments as blocky and empty as my mother’s house was sprawling and dense. Tamar and my father had moved into the biggest unit, and everywhere were the still lifes of adulthood she had so obviously arranged: a bowl of waxed fruit on the counter, the bar cart with its unopened bottles of liquor. The carpet that held the bland tracks of the vacuum.

Suzanne would forget me, I thought, the ranch would hurtle on without me and I’d have nothing. My sense of persecution gobbled up and grew fat off these worries. Suzanne was like a soldier’s hometown sweetheart, made gauzy and perfect by distance. But maybe part of me was relieved. To take some time away. The Dutton house had spooked me, the blank cast I’d seen in Suzanne’s face. These were little bites, little inward shifts and discomforts, but even so, they were there.

What had I expected, living with my father and Tamar? That my father would try to sleuth out the source of my behavior? That he would punish me, act like a father? He seemed to feel punishment was a right he’d relinquished and treated me with the courtly politeness you’d extend to an aging parent.

He startled when he first saw me — it had been over two months. He seemed to remember that he should hug me and made a lurching step in my direction. I noticed a new bunching at his ears, and his cowboy shirt was one I had never seen before. I knew I looked different, too. My hair was longer and wild at the edges, like Suzanne’s. My ranch dress was so worn I could hook my thumb through the sleeve. My father made a move to help me with my bag, but I’d already hefted it into the backseat before he reached me.

“Thanks, though,” I said, trying to smile.

His hands spread at his sides, and when he smiled back, it was with the helpless apology of a foreigner who needed directions repeated. My brain, to him, was a mysterious magic trick that he could only wonder at. Never bothering to puzzle out the hidden compartment. As we took our seats, I could sense that he was gathering himself to invoke the parental script.

“I don’t have to lock you in your room, do I?” he said. His halting laugh. “No breaking in to anyone’s house?”

When I nodded, he visibly relaxed. Like he’d gotten something out of the way.

“It’s a good time for you to visit,” he went on, as if this were all voluntary. “Now that we’re settled. Tamar’s real particular about the furniture and stuff.” He started the ignition, already beyond any mention of trouble. “She went all the way to the flea market in Half Moon Bay to get this bar cart.”

There was a brief moment I wanted to reach for him across the seat, to draw a line from myself to the man who was my father, but the moment passed.

“You can pick the station,” he offered, seeming as shy to me as a boy at a dance.

—

The first few days, all three of us had been nervous. I got up early to make the bed in the guest room, trying to heft the decorative pillows back into completion. My life was limited to my drawstring purse and my duffel of clothes, an existence I tried to keep as neat and invisible as possible. Like camping, I thought, like a little adventure in self-reliance. The first night, my father brought home a cardboard tub of ice cream, striated with chocolate, and scooped free heroic amounts. Tamar and I just picked at ours, but my father made a point of eating another bowl. He kept glancing up, as if we could confirm his own pleasure. His women and his ice cream.

Tamar was the surprise. Tamar in her terry shorts and shirt from a college I had never heard of. Who waxed her legs in the bathroom with a complicated device that filled the apartment with the humidity of camphor. Her attendant unguents and hair oils, the fingernails whose lunar surfaces she studied for signs of nutritional deficiencies.

At first, she seemed unhappy with my presence. The awkward hug she offered, like she was grimly accepting the task of being my new mother. And I was disappointed, too. She was just a girl, not the exotic woman I’d once imagined — everything I’d thought was special about her was actually just proof of what Russell would call a straight world trip. Tamar did what she was supposed to. Worked for my father, wore her little suit. Aching to be someone’s wife.

But then her formality quickly melted away, the veil of adulthood she wore as temporarily as a costume. She let me rummage through the quilted pouch that held her makeup, her blowsy perfume bottles, watching with the pride of a true collector. She pushed a blouse of hers, with bell sleeves and pearl buttons, onto me.

“It’s just not my style anymore.” She shrugged, picking at a loose thread. “But it’ll look good on you, I know. Elizabethan.”

And it did look good. Tamar knew those things. She knew the calorie count of most foods, which she recited in sarcastic tones, like she was making fun of her own knowledge. She cooked vegetable vindaloo. Pots of lentils coated with a yellow sauce that gave off an unfamiliar brightness. The roll of powdery antacids my father swallowed like candy. Tamar held out her cheek for my father to kiss but swatted him away when he tried to hold her hand.

“You’re all sweaty,” she said. When my father saw that I had noticed, he laughed a little but seemed embarrassed.

My father was amused at our collusion. But it sometimes shook out so we were laughing at him. Once Tamar and I were talking about Spanky and Our Gang, and he chimed in. Like the Little Rascals, he figured. Tamar and I looked at each other.