American Girls(33)

For my part, the only real work I’d been doing was reading for Roger, and I had kind of hoped that Dex wouldn’t notice what I was reading, since when Dex was around I was supposed to pretend that Roger didn’t exist. Although calling what I was doing “reading” for Roger was probably wrong, because he’d sent me an e-mail the other morning that said, “JUST BE THE GIRL. DO NOT KILL ANYONE.” Ohmigod, like he really had to add the second part. He explained in a follow-up e-mail that he wanted me to spend a few days trying to see the world like one of the Manson girls. I had about a million things I thought about writing back to him, like, “I JUST GAVE A THIRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD EX-CON A BLOW JOB. DO I GET PAID EXTRA?” but given what he thought of me, he’d probably just send me a check for fifty bucks and ask for details.

Here’s the funny thing, though: the minute I made up some weird answer for my history final, it stopped seeming like a stupid idea and started seeming like a good one. Maybe Delia knew something I didn’t, that sometimes even something that started as a lie could become the truth before you knew it. At any rate, I knew for absolute truth that Delia would kill me if Dex found out about the Roger thing. Once I told Dex about the paper, he said that he owned a copy of Valley of the Dolls, and I should watch it because it was about LA and starred Sharon Tate and was her biggest role. In fact, he’d watch it with me. So the next night we hunkered down with cheese popcorn and real Doritos from the normal grocery store.

What Dex failed to mention was that Valley of the Dolls is a terrible movie, and not even in the fun way that might cause a person to run around quoting it and making fun of the weirdest scenes. It’s long and boring and the acting is terrible. Everyone is beautiful and on pills and sleeping with everyone else, and it’s still so dull that I almost fell asleep. The story follows three women who are trying to make it in entertainment and meet Mr. Right, and they get addicted to pills, or “dolls,” for a variety of reasons. Sharon Tate plays this dim-witted, sweet actress named Jennifer who falls in love with a nightclub singer who has a mysterious hereditary disease that shows up just when she reveals that she’s pregnant. Sadness follows. The moral of the movie is supposed to be that the struggle to become famous, or even just wanting to be famous, is better than what happens when a person reaches that goal. Kind of like Gatsby, but trashier and infinitely duller. Success just makes everyone miserable and pill-happy.

Mostly, though, I watched Sharon Tate. I’d never seen her in a movie before. There were plenty of pictures on the Internet, most linked to stories about her murder, or memorials, but even those let you forget that she was a real person. On the screen, she looked like a giant Barbie doll. She wasn’t an edgy kind of pretty, and even though she was skinny she was soft around the edges, fleshy, the way even the thinnest actresses sometimes look in old movies. Her first scene in the film she’s dressed as a showgirl with a giant feathered headdress, and the camera pans from her ass to her boobs to her face in a series of shots. A few scenes later, she’s on the phone with her horrible stage mother who reminds her that she’s nothing but a body.

Nothing but a body.

The line bothered me, because when I was reading about the murders, so much more seemed to be written about the Manson girls, and Charles Manson, than about the victims themselves. Sharon Tate was just a name, or a beautiful blonde, or an actress, or the wife of a director, or another woman who really became famous only when her life was over. When she went from being a body on a screen to a body in a bag. I wanted the movie to bring her to life, but the camera seemed intent on making her nothing more than a beautiful face and a banging body. It didn’t seem fair, not to her, at any rate.

But it would have been a lie to say that Sharon Tate was the only person I was thinking about. Roger had probably had me professionally hexed, because every time I saw Sharon Tate, I thought about Paige Parker. Paige looked kind of like Sharon Tate. They were both tall with dirty-blond hair and enormous boobs. Paige wasn’t quite as glamorous, but she tried. Even in gym class she wore pink sneakers with little crystals on the side, and she had a pink phone with rhinestones as well. But they both had that thing that pretty people didn’t usually have—a needy look, like they cared what other people thought. Like they wanted to be liked.

The weird thing was, I didn’t really have an opinion about Paige one way or another outside of Doon. Paige had started at my school last year, and she took ballet with Doon. Doon hated her like a week of snow-day makeups at the end of the year. I mean she loathed her. If you asked me, Paige didn’t have much of a personality to hate at all. She was more like Sharon Tate, pretty, but pretty boring. But friendships were kind of like poker games. The fact that Doon hated Paige trumped the fact that I didn’t care about her one way or another. I went along with Doon when she talked about how awful Paige was, that she was a slut, a whore, that she hoped her dog died and she got fat. That was a lie, I had more than just gone along with Doon, but I didn’t want to think about it.

“What did you think?” I asked Dex while the credits rolled.

“About what?” he said. After the first ten minutes, he’d been working on his pilot and only half watching the film. He didn’t really look up from his computer to answer, which meant he was probably in the middle of fixing a scene or something. I was learning how Dex worked: when to talk to him, when to give him another minute, when to suggest a doughnut run.