American Girls(49)
My sister was all but tripping on meds for the rest of the evening. The doctor said that they’d given her enough muscle relaxants to tranquilize a horse, but she’d found a way to stay awake and manic.
“When do you think the swelling will go down?” she kept asking. “I need to know what my face is going to look like. Google something.” And then if she looked in the mirror: “It’s the Elephant Man. I’m Jack Nicholson in Chinatown.” And then: “How am I going to explain this to Dex? What if I don’t look the same?”
And for just a minute, I had a nasty thought—well, then you’ll have to see how the rest of us manage—but then I felt terrible for it.
“Roger expects me to show up for work tomorrow,” she said. “What am I supposed to do? He thinks it will help with the shoot. In his sick little heart, this is better than he imagined. I feel like I’m in Boxing Helena. What if this is the last movie I’m even in? What if Roger is my only hope?”
“Then you’re screwed,” I said.
She started to laugh. “Okay,” she said. “Thank you. Will you call Dex, tell him that you’re going on location with me tomorrow?”
There were only two more weeks of shooting the Chips Ahoy! summer season, and I didn’t want to miss a day.
“Couldn’t Roger just pick you up? Wouldn’t it look more normal?”
“And then what? Dex has to drive all the way over here to pick you up while I hide my face? That makes zero sense, Anna, and thank you for all of your sympathy after all I’ve done for you.”
She yawned twice while she was ranting, which sort of broke the rhythm of how pissed off she was. If she even woke up tomorrow it would be a miracle. She looked like she was roofied enough to sleep for months.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
*
The next morning Delia’s face looked worse: more swollen, more purple, more hopeless. She took one look in the mirror, scarfed a handful of painkillers, and left Roger a message that she couldn’t shoot until the next day. Then she went back to bed. I watched her phone ring. Dex, Roger, Dex, Roger. She slept through all of it. There was nothing on television, and the only book that I’d downloaded but not finished was Susan Atkins’s autobiography. She was the Manson girl I least enjoyed reading about. Hers was the knife that had killed Sharon Tate and her unborn son, but on death row Atkins had evidently found Jesus and was super born-again. She reminded me of the girls I knew who would sleep with their boyfriends, then go get revirginized at some church camp, then sleep with their boyfriends again.
My sister would moan every so often, or wander into the kitchen, drink some water, take another pill, and go back to bed. After the first time, she stopped looking in the mirror.
Susan Atkins was like a lot of the other Manson girls—their lives were kind of screwed up, but definitely not screwed up enough to go out and start killing people. She was a middle child who craved attention, an expert thief, and when she was a teenager, her mom got cancer. I didn’t like the way her life was making me look more Mansonian by the minute, but I kept reading. Her dad was an alcoholic and she did a lot of drugs and hated him, and she had a son by one of the other Manson family members, which made it even crazier that she could kill someone who was eight months pregnant. Only she claimed that she didn’t kill Sharon Tate, or anyone else, that she just pretended to have killed them so that she could be the center of attention and so that she’d fit in with the rest of the psychopaths. If you crossed Mean Girls with The Lord of the Flies and weaponized all of them, then you pretty much had the Manson girls.
Leslie Van Houten, the ex–homecoming queen, begged to take part in the LaBianca massacre because her best friend had gone on the Tate rampage, and she felt left out. But Leslie didn’t really like Susan. Death row was soooooooo cliquey, what was a girl to do? Susan Atkins said she found Jesus and pretty much spent the rest of her life needlepointing and trying to do good things, like get paroled. Maybe she was sincere. Reading her whole story was kind of like becoming part of the Manson family for an hour. She believed whatever she was selling enough that her story was almost convincing. The fact that her reasons for taking part in the murders were all so stupid made the book extra depressing. I kept waiting for the moment when she revealed all the awful things that had happened to her that she’d forgotten to mention, but mostly she just sang the same old song. I wanted to be special. I wished Charlie and the other girls liked me more. When I finished, I had such a headache that I stole one of my sister’s painkillers.
Maybe it was because I took the painkiller and it made me as crazy as Delia that I did something that I could never, ever tell Doon about. I texted Paige Parker. Two lines: “Sorry. But for real, I am actually sorry.”
The afternoon that I took Lynette’s credit card, her wallet had been laying on the dining room table, right next to an apology note written by my mother: Dear Paige, I am sincerely sorry for whatever hurt I caused you or your family. I would never have intentionally hurt someone … blah, blah, blah. What it should have said was, Please don’t sue my mother. Please! because that’s what she really meant. I threw it away before I bought my ticket west.
I didn’t want Paige to think that the text was something that my mom made me send because she’d read some Internet article about making your kid be sorry. I wanted her to know that at that exact moment, maybe for the first time, I actually felt bad about what we had done. Not that it mattered. She probably deleted it and threw her phone across the room. At any rate, she didn’t exactly rush to text me back.