American Girls(28)

“It’s like the Hunger Games in there.” Dex slammed the door behind him and grabbed the steering wheel with both hands. “I almost had to take down a grown-ass woman. In front of her child.”

I started to laugh.

“I have three items, three dinners in the ten-or-less lane, and she’s behind me with her kid and she gets mad at me that I don’t let her go in front of me with her twelve items and nose-picking kid. What is wrong with people in this town? Riddle me that, grasshopper?”

“You should just start going to the normal supermarket. People are much nicer when they’re buying Doritos. I have no medical or scientific explanation, but it’s a fact.”

“Let’s exit this hell.”

“Crappy food makes people nicer,” I said. “I’m telling you.”

I have never thought that hippies were nice. One afternoon in the Whole Foods parking lot and anyone can see that once the patchouli clears, those vegans would slice you for a parking space. Lynette, the world’s biggest ex-hippie, was the one who made us get rid of our dog. As a newborn, Birch cried for four months straight—and he didn’t exactly chill out so much as dial the volume down as he got older. He had slowly driven the poor dog psycho. Tarzan, our boxer, tried to rip a teething biscuit out of Birch’s hands, and she growled, and it was scary. I offered to take care of her, but Lynette sent Tarzan away to my aunt’s house anyway. The dog I’d had since I was seven.

My mom met Lynette at her grief group, after her first miscarriage, the one with my dad. I didn’t even know she was grieving until my mom sat me and my dad down one afternoon and told us about Lynette, the person who had helped her reconnect with her true self. Note to ghost-of-self-past: if your mother starts talking to you about the fluid nature of attraction and the joy of finding out who she really is, you should probably start saving for a plane ticket west.

In the parking lot, while I was listening to Karl Marx, I’d been half reading about “Squeaky” Fromme. She was one of the most famous Manson girls even though she didn’t take part in any of the Tate-LaBianca murders. Her real name was Lynette, which was crazy since I’d never met a Lynette other than my stepmom and I kind of thought it was one of those names that people just made up. The two Lynettes were nothing alike on the surface, but I couldn’t help trying to line them up, see if anything other than their names matched. My mom’s Lynette was like some kind of yuppie superhero: banker by day, hippie by night. She ate part of my mom’s placenta after Birch was born, even though she didn’t actually pass him through her lady parts. That was a health hazard of global proportions if you asked me.

The Manson girls were all in with the hippie lifestyle. They upcycled food from the local grocery stores’ garbage bins, they breastfed in public, they made their own clothes (out of their own hair at times, which was weird, even for hippies). Squeaky Fromme was probably the biggest tree hugger of them all, and what did she wind up doing, you know, after the Tate case had died down and there hadn’t been any massacres for a while? She decided to go and shoot the president.

Trying to assassinate the president should not be funny. It really shouldn’t. It’s not like I was cracking up when we read about Lincoln or JFK. But let’s face it, they were real presidents. Gerald Ford ranks right up there with Millard Fillmore and Bush the First on the list of unexciting white men who have run this country, made their way into history books, and otherwise been human sleeping pills. If all the presidents had been television shows, Gerald Ford would probably have been a PBS fund drive. So I’d bet the fact that anyone would try to kill Gerald Ford, Gerald Rudolph Ford, was kind of hard to get excited about, even back in the day. And Fromme sounded like something out of Monty Python, dressed all in red with a sawed-off shotgun under her sister-wife dress and fake-nun robe, muttering “He is not a public servant” before not firing her gigantic gun at the president. “It didn’t go off” was her great defense as the Secret Service took her out of commission in Sacramento. Sic semper tyrannis it was not.

Lynette told me once that I was “part of a generation of the historically illiterate” when I told her that I thought the sixties were ridiculous. Not the civil rights movement, or any of that, but the free love and bad hair and half-baked philosophies. Look at me, I’m naked and having sex with everyone and getting stoned. Groovy. “Hair was political,” Lynette told me. “Love was political. People wanted to change the world. Of course you’d only see the surface; that’s all your generation really sees. Maybe you’ve all been medicated past caring.” Lynette could go on forever if you asked her to, about “the apathy of the young,” not like she did anything for the earth besides recycle her plastics.

“You’re terribly cynical for such a young person,” Lynette told me a few months after she and my mom shacked up. I hated it when adults talked that way, looking at you like you’re a charity case for not applauding every idiotic choice they made. She wanted me to be happy for her and my mom. Yay, divorce! Yay, midlife sexuality changes! I told her that by the time my mom reached her fifties they’ll probably have figured out another way for her to have a fourth baby, so Lynette should probably have a backup plan before they started monogramming the towels. That wasn’t cynicism; that was experience.

“I don’t expect you to like me,” she had said. “But I will ask that you respect me.”