Emma Cline - The Girls

“It’s a band,” she said. “You know, that rock-and-roll music the kids like.” And my father’s confused, orphaned face set us off again.

—

They had a fancy turntable that Tamar often spoke of moving to another corner or room for varying acoustic or aesthetic reasons. She constantly mentioned future plans for oak flooring and crown moldings and even different dish towels, though the planning itself seemed to satisfy. The music she played was more slick than the ranch racket. Jane Birkin and her froggy old-man husband, Serge.

“She’s pretty,” I said, studying the record cover. And she was, tan as a nut with a delicate face, those rabbit teeth. Serge was disgusting. His songs about Sleeping Beauty, a girl who seemed most desirable because her eyes were always closed. Why would Jane love Serge? Tamar loved my father, the girls loved Russell. These men who were nothing like the boys I’d been told I would like. Boys with hairless chests and mushy features, the flocking of blemishes along their shoulders. I didn’t want to think of Mitch because it made me think of Suzanne — that night had happened somewhere else, in a little dollhouse in Tiburon with a tiny pool and a tiny green lawn. A dollhouse I could look onto from above, lifting the roof to see the rooms segmented like chambers of the heart. The bed the size of a matchbox.

Tamar was different from Suzanne in a way that was easier. She was not complicated. She didn’t track my attention so closely, didn’t prompt me to shore up her declarations. When she wanted me to move over, she said so. I relaxed, which was unfamiliar. Even so, I missed Suzanne — Suzanne, who I remembered like dreams of opening a door on a forgotten room. Tamar was sweet and kind, but the world she moved around in seemed like a television set: limited and straightforward and mundane, with the notations and structures of normality. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There wasn’t a frightening gap between the life she was living and the way she thought about that life, a dark ravine I often sensed in Suzanne, and maybe in my own self as well. Neither of us could fully participate in our days, though later Suzanne would participate in a way she could never take back. I mean that we didn’t quite believe it was enough, what we were offered, and Tamar seemed to accept the world happily, as an end point. Her planning wasn’t actually about making anything different — she was just rearranging the same known quantities, puzzling out a new order like life was an extended seating chart.

—

Tamar made dinner while we waited for my father. She looked younger than usual — her face washed with the cleanser she’d explained had actual milk proteins in it, to prevent wrinkles. Her hair wet and darkening the shoulders of the big T-shirt she wore, her lace-edged cotton shorts. She belonged in a dorm room somewhere, eating popcorn and drinking beer.

“Hand me a bowl?”

I did, and Tamar set aside a portion of lentils. “Without spices.” She rolled her eyes. “For the tender heart’s stomach.”

I had a bitter flash of my mother doing that for my father: little consolations, little adjustments, making the world mirror my father’s wants. Buying him ten pairs of the same socks so he never mismatched.

“It’s almost like he’s a kid sometimes, you know?” Tamar said, pinching out a measure of turmeric. “I left him for a weekend, and there was nothing to eat when I came back but beef jerky and an onion. He’d die if he had to take care of himself.” She looked at me. “But I probably shouldn’t tell you this, huh?”

Tamar wasn’t being mean, but it surprised me — her ease in dismantling my father. It hadn’t occurred to me before, not really, that he could be a figure of fun, someone who could make mistakes or act like a child or stumble helplessly around the world, needing direction.

Nothing terrible happened between me and my father. There was not a singular moment I could look back on, no shouting fight or slammed door. It was just the sense I got, a sense that seeped over everything until it seemed obvious, that he was just a normal man. Like any other. That he worried what other people thought of him, his eyes scatting to the mirror by the door. How he was still trying to teach himself French from a tape and I heard him repeating words to himself under his breath. The way his belly, which was bigger than I remembered, sometimes showed through the gap in his shirts. Exposing segments of skin, pink as a newborn’s.

“And I love your father,” Tamar said. Her words were careful, like she was being archived. “I do. He asked me to dinner six times before I said yes, but he was so nice about it. Like he knew I would say yes even before I did.”

She seemed to catch herself — both of us were thinking it. My father had been living at home. Sleeping in bed with my mother. Tamar flinched, obviously waiting for me to say as much, but I couldn’t muster any anger. That was the strange thing — I didn’t hate my father. He had wanted something. Like I wanted Suzanne. Or my mother wanted Frank. You wanted things and you couldn’t help it, because there was only your life, only yourself to wake up with, and how could you ever tell yourself what you wanted was wrong?

—

Tamar and I lay on the carpet, knees bent, heads angled toward the turntable. My mouth was still buzzing from the tartness of the orange juice we’d walked four blocks to buy from a stand. The wood heels of my sandals slapping the sidewalk, Tamar chatting happily in the warm summer dark.

My father came in and smiled, but I could tell he was annoyed by the music, the way it skittered on purpose. “Can you turn that down?” he asked.

“Come on,” Tamar said. “It’s not that loud.”

“Yeah,” I echoed, thrilled by the unfamiliarity of an ally.

“See?” Tamar said. “Listen to your daughter.” She reached blindly to pat at my shoulder. My father left without saying anything, then returned a minute later and lifted the needle, the room abruptly silent.

“Hey!” Tamar said, sitting up, but he was already stalking away and I heard the shower start in the bathroom. “Fuck you,” Tamar muttered. She got to her feet, the backs of her legs printed with the nub of the carpet. Glancing at me. “Sorry,” she said absently.

I heard her talking in low tones in the kitchen. She was on the phone, and I watched her fingers piercing the loops of the cord, over and over. Tamar laughed, covering her mouth as she did, cupping the receiver close. I had the uncomfortable certainty that she was laughing at my father.

I don’t know when I understood that Tamar would leave him. Not right away, but soon. Her mind was already somewhere else, writing a more interesting life for herself, one where my father and I would be the scenery to an anecdote. A detour from a larger, more correct journey. The redecoration of her own story. And who would my father have then, to make money for, to bring dessert home to? I imagined him opening the door on the empty apartment after a long day at work. How the rooms would be as he’d left them, undisturbed by another person’s living. And how there would be a moment, before he flicked on the light, when he might imagine a different life revealed within the darkness, something besides the lonely borders of the couch, the cushions still holding the shape of his own sleepy body.

—

A lot of young people ran away: you could do it back then just because you were bored. You didn’t even need a tragedy. Deciding to go back to the ranch wasn’t difficult. My other house wasn’t an option anymore, the ludicrous possibility of my mother dragging me to the police station. And what was there at my father’s? Tamar, the way she insisted on my youthful alliance. The chocolate pudding after dinner, cold from the refrigerator, like our daily allotment of pleasure.