American Girls(18)

I shook my head. My sister had finished the joint and in spite of everything seemed to be in a considerably better mood.

“It helped me to think of her as ‘Cora’ after that, not ‘Mom.’ I don’t know. Everyone is different, but it worked for me.”

I always wondered why my sister called Mom “Cora.” I assumed it was because they’d had such a sisterly bond that back in the day they just broke down that mom-daughter distinction and rambled around the Las Vegas strip, chugging margaritas and putting dollars in the Speedos of cheesy male strippers. I should have known it was because my mom was batshit crazy.

“So what are we going to do with you, Anna?” she said, looking at me like I was a picture that needed to be hung. Only my sister would get stoned and then want to start doing things. “I thought Cora would mellow out after two weeks and you’d be back in Atlanta, but now it looks like you’re here for the haul.”

“I thought I was supposed to earn my plane ticket back.”

“Technically,” she said. “But they really just wanted to make a point. We’d talked about two weeks and then home.”

“You’re such a liar. You were just lying to my face, right? This whole time.”

“It wasn’t a lie, it was a lack of plan.”

“Right. And Roger is just shooting some stupid movie with you because he’s all business and loves dudes. Riiiiight.”

The room had slowly darkened as we were talking, and Delia finally turned on the lamp behind her. Her apartment was like a cave, always ten degrees colder than it needed to be. My sister had zero body fat, but she never seemed to reach for a sweater. I wrapped my feet in a baby-blue fleece blanket that I was starting to think of as my own, and Delia scrunched her nose and turned her face to the side because she hated bare feet on anything.

“You can think what you want, but we barely had sex when we were in a relationship. Roger just likes the idea of things he can’t have. He might even be asexual. The important thing is the movie. He’s already talking to possible distributors and if it’s a hit for him, it’s a hit for me.”

“I thought you told me once there was no such thing as asexual. Just a train from straight to gay with a whole bunch of stops in between. How will you explain that to Dex?”

I already felt sorry for Dex. I liked him, but he was no match for my sister. He was probably raised by normal people, and we were clearly raised by wolves.

“Dex doesn’t quiz me about how I spent my day. Why don’t you help Roger by actually doing that research? I can get Dex to load up his Kindle with Mansonian weirdness and you can figure out my character.”

When she said “character” she got all dramatic, flourishing with one arm and pretending to smoke an imaginary cigarette.

“He doesn’t even know what he’s making the movie about.”

“He’s a very intuitive artist and, honestly, the strength of his work is usually in the image. I know he’s half full of shit, but I respect his process. And he’s not afraid to ask for help. I think he really values your opinion.”

“Because he thinks I’m crazy and lost. Great.”

I pulled the blanket over my shoulders and tucked the corners underneath me.

“Because he thinks you’re young and impulsive and you care. As you get older, you just care less. Or you care differently. I don’t know which, but it’s different. Never underestimate the power of youth—not in Los Angeles, at any rate. You can never be too young or too dumb.”

“I thought it was ‘too rich or too thin.’”

“That’s the East Coast. I’ll text Dex. I know he has some extra readers from when they were trying to get the twins to sponsor some kind of literacy awareness month. Like they read.”

On paper, you would think that I would like Roger more than Dex. Dex should have been the bigger loser with his sad apartment and weird job writing for a lame kids’ show, but every time my sister mentioned Dex, I felt a little jealous. He was normal enough to have a Peanuts comic strip on his refrigerator door, the one where Lucy keeps moving the ball and Charlie Brown keeps kicking. What was it Marilyn Monroe had said in the movie Dex had on when we were leaving, when she was breaking down how no man was a match for her mighty and heaving boobs? “He’s a man, isn’t he?” It worked for my sister like that as well.

“Will you be okay here by yourself tonight?” Delia asked. “It’s perfectly safe, just don’t do anything stupid like unlock the door or go for a walk. Remember, in LA pedestrians are just roadkill waiting to happen. I’ll be back in the morning first thing.”

Lying again, but at least she was trying to keep me safe.

“Where are you going?”

“For doughnuts,” she said, giving me a wink and perfectly perverted look.

“Gross,” I said. “I’m your sister, remember?”

“I’m leaving you twenty bucks, and ordering a pizza on the way. So you can open the door for the pizza guy, but that’s it.”

“Pepperoni?”

“It’s your body to pollute.”

She closed the door and locked it behind her, and I was really alone for the first time since my plane had landed two weeks ago.

*

On any other evening, I probably couldn’t have read about the Manson girls, not alone in that house in the Hollywood Hills. But I needed something to quiet the wah-wah-wah noise in the back of my head that was fast becoming a roar, something awful enough to trump the sad. My sister was right, in that normally I did like to read about awful things: leprosy, serial killers, global warming, flesh-eating bacteria, inbred babies from rural incest cults, etc., etc. For a while I even had Doon convinced that the real zombie apocalypse was going to be caused by the rash of dead armadillos by the sides of the roads; they were everywhere and they could carry leprosy—disaster seemed inevitable. Maybe I was morbid because it was easy to be morbid in the comfort of my own room, where my mom, however annoying, would be there to open my door if I so much as raised my voice. My mom. Just thinking about her made my eyeballs feel like they were made of cement and sinking slowly into my brain.