Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

“I heard what she said.” He stood up. “How about some hot chocolate? A Jimmy Dexter Special.”

That was our thing, his and mine, hot chocolate on winter nights with a fingerful of pepper stirred in just for the sake of having a secret ingredient.

“I’m full.” I hated how much I sounded like my mother, her diet always absenting her from the room whenever chocolate entered the discussion, leaving my father and me another thing to call our own.

“And I should go,” Lacey said.

As soon as she did, I wanted to take it back, say yes enthusiastically— Yes, let’s drown ourselves in hot chocolate and gorge ourselves on cookies, whatever you want, whatever will make you stay —partly because she didn’t have a father and I felt evil for even momentarily refusing to share mine, but mostly because she was Lacey, and every time she slipped out of my sight I was worried she’d never reappear.

My father hugged her good-bye. It was a precise copy of the hugs he gave me, solid and all-consuming. I loved him then, for loving her on my behalf. For being not just the kind of dad who would want to hug Lacey but the kind she would deign to hug back. Still, the next day after school, I suggested we go to the lake instead of back to my place, and the day after that her favorite record store, and that weekend, when she asked about sleeping over, I said, knowing she’d hate it but suspecting she’d be too proud to say so, “Let’s do it at your place instead.”

THERE ARE THINGS YOU NEED to know,” Lacey said.

We’d been sitting in the Buick for twenty minutes, engine off, music silenced, house looming at the end of the driveway. I could say something to let her out of this gracefully, but I wanted to see inside.

She cleared her throat. “The Bastard is. .”

“A bastard? Got it.”

Lacey uncomfortable was a strange sight. I didn’t like it, or at least didn’t want to.

“I just want to be clear on the fact that I consider everyone in that house an accident of birth and circumstance. Nothing to do with me. Clear?”

“Clear. As far as I’m concerned, we’re basically orphans, raising ourselves in the wild.”

She snorted. “If only.” And then, “Let’s do this.”

But we didn’t, quite, not until she turned the cassette player on again and we listened to one more track, Lacey’s eyes closed and her head tipped back as she disappeared into that place only Kurt could take her. When his screams died out, she pressed stop . “Follow me.”

Lacey’s split-level was a mirror image of mine, right down to the shitty aluminum siding and single-car garage, two and a half bedrooms and bathroom down the hall, all of it reversed, like the parallel-dimension version of home.

The house was schizophrenic. Outside was Bastard territory, everything straight lines and sterile surfaces. Precisely trimmed grass, gleaming gutters, an economical distribution of hedges and evenly spaced potted plants. Inside, Loretta land, was wall-to-wall sixties tack, as if an alien had tried to piece together the American homestead by mainlining Nick at Nite. Flowered upholstery was zipped into clear plastic slipcovers; heavy gilt frames showed off motel art of lighthouses and dour livestock; a menagerie of china figurines grinned at me from behind beveled glass. There were lace doilies. Lots of doilies. A heavy wooden cross hung over the fireplace, and a framed copy of the Serenity Prayer was propped up on the mantel. Which made it slightly surprising when Lacey’s mother wandered into the room, breath stinking of what, by that point in our friendship, I could recognize as gin.

Lacey looked like she wanted to unlock the glass cabinet and take a sledgehammer to a few porcelain cats. “God, Mom, did you take a bath in it?”

Lacey’s mother had long black hair, longer than a mother’s was supposed to be, girlishly flippable and ratted at the ends. She was loaded down with clumpy mascara and cheap gold chains that disappeared into her red camisoled cleavage, and bleary-eyed in a way I would have read as new-baby exhaustion, were it not for the smell.

“And can you cover that up?” Lacey flicked a hand at the sodden circles around her mother’s nipples. “It’s disgusting.”

Lacey’s mother pressed a palm to each of the wet spots. It was always unsettling when parents of a certain age produced a new offspring, its existence undeniable evidence of copulation. But Lacey’s mother didn’t need a baby to broadcast her message: This was a woman who had sex.

“Never get pregnant, girls,” she said. “Motherhood turns you into a freaking cow.”

“I love you, too,” Lacey said dryly. Then, to me, “Upstairs.”

“Girls,” her mother said. “Girls! Girls!” It was like the word compelled her as much as we did. “ Stay. ” The couch squeaked as she settled her weight. “Sit. Keep an old cow company. Tell her what it is to be young and free.”

“No one forced you to procreate at your age,” Lacey said.

“The stack of abortion pamphlets you left for me made your position on that very clear, darling.” Then Lacey’s mother threw back her head and laughed, a laugh so uncannily like Lacey’s it was impossible to pretend they weren’t related. “But if it weren’t for little Jamie, I wouldn’t have all this.” Her hands flopped to her sides, lazily taking in the house, maybe the town, the life.

“You wouldn’t have Big Jamie, either,” Lacey said. “The horror.”

A boozy stage whisper: “Lacey’s a little jealous of her baby brother.”

Lacey whispered back, loud. “Lacey can hear you.”

“That’s the problem with only children,” her mother said. “No matter what you do, they end up as spoiled little bitches.”

“That’s right, Mom, you spoiled me . That’s my problem.”

“See?”

“Upstairs, Dex,” Lacey said. “Now.”

“ Dex? ” Her mother’s voice flew to a heavenly register. “ You’re the famous Dex?”

That she had heard of me; that I was known. That I mattered, this was proof. When she told me again to sit, I obeyed.

Lacey, disgusted; Lacey, reconciled. She sat, too.

“So, what’s she told you about me?” her mother asked.

I said nothing, which was true enough.

“Don’t worry, I won’t be offended. I know how it is with you girls. You think it’s your job to hate your mothers.”

“Nice work if you can get it,” Lacey said.

“Didn’t used to be that way, did it, Lace? Kid never wanted to leave my side. Would cry and hang onto my leg if I didn’t take her out with me. So what did I do?”

“We’re waiting with bated breath,” Lacey said.

“Took her with me. Every party, every concert. You should’ve seen her, swimming in a Metallica T-shirt, bangs sprayed up to here ,” she said, saluting the air a foot over her head. “Even got me backstage a few times. Bouncers couldn’t resist.”

“Ask her what she did with me then,” Lacey said. “Hard to keep track of a toddler when you’re fucking a roadie.”

“You shut your mouth,” her mother snapped. Then, summoning a full measure of dignity, “I have never in my life fucked a roadie .”

“Standards,” Lacey said.

“She won’t admit it now, but she loved it. How do you think she ended up so musical? It’s in her blood.”

Lacey snorted. “That trash is hardly music.”

“How did I raise you to be such a snob?”

“How did I raise you to get knocked up by Jersey’s biggest dickhead? Somebody call Unsolved Mysteries .”

If I’d talked to my mother like that, and it was a gargantuan if , I could only assume she’d duct-tape my mouth shut and sell me to the circus. Lacey’s mother, on the other hand, smiled fondly. Mother-daughter bonding, Champlain-style.