American Girls(6)

My sister moved from side plank position to side plank position, then effortlessly to upward-facing dog, arching her neck and talking at the ceiling. For someone who did a lot of yoga and had a peace sign tramp stamp on her lower back, she sure could be a bitch.

“There are three hours between now and eleven thirty. And please tell me Roger isn’t Roger-Roger.”

“Roger is Roger-Roger, and don’t mention anything about meeting him to Dex. It’s all professional between us now, but Dex won’t understand that, and between you and him, I get tired of explaining everything.”

Yeah, because it’s so complicated to explain Roger.

“Who is Dex, anyhow?”

My sister broke her pose, wiped her brow, and looked at me like I’d just ruined her workout. “Seriously, Anna, do you listen to anything? I’ve been talking about Dex for months. He’s my boyfriend, you know, the one who’s been filming in Hungary the last two weeks? The one who calls every night at ten forty-five?”

She was lying through her teeth, but if I wanted to eat again, I’d let it slide.

“How am I supposed to know who you’re talking to? I thought your boyfriend was that bald European producer with the car. Do we really have to see Roger?”

“I’m just borrowing the car while mine gets fixed, and Roger is doing very well these days, I’ll have you know. Did you watch those Burger Barn commercials? ‘The Revolution Starts Now’? That’s Roger. And now he’s making a film about murders in Los Angeles, and so far, it’s beautiful.”

By “beautiful” she meant really, really, really boring.

“Because murder is so uplifting.”

“It’s a part of life,” she said, like I was a total idiot from some other universe. “I’m playing a woman who is drawn to these places and doesn’t know why. Like Vertigo, but there’s a kind of spiritual kinship to the women who come to Los Angeles and never make it out. And it’s all visual, no speaking.”

I gave up and started eating the apple. “Dead women who don’t speak. Sounds right up Roger’s alley.”

Roger was like the Edgar Allan Poe of stupid people. He’d been making movies about women who were dead or dying, who didn’t have much to say, for as long as his stringy hair had been ponytailed into a cliché. My sister dated him for five years, and tortured us with as many Thanksgivings and Christmases where he reminded me how sad consumerism was and how unethical it was to eat meat, as if I asked, while I was just trying to have a second serving of dressing in peace. And he wasn’t even American, he was Polish, which should have made him more interesting but actually just made him more annoying. When Delia finally dumped him, my dad and I did an actual dance of joy around the living room.

I must have been daydreaming, because next thing I knew Delia was in front of me asking, “Ready?”

She had twisted her hair into a French braid that wound around her head, glossed her lips, and wrapped a chic white scarf around her neck. It was disgusting how little it took for her to look beautiful.

“Sure,” I said. “Just let me get my bag.”

“We’ll get some muffins,” she said. “There’s a holistic bakery on the way. Sugar and gluten free, but you’d never know it. I crave their blueberry flax cookies. They’re like crack.”

“Ass-crack,” I said, but softly, because I was hungry.

Outside, the air was cold and the fog or smog or whatever it was hadn’t lifted. In Atlanta, I always imagined LA as warm all the time, but this morning was cool and I’d only brought the thin jacket that I’d worn to travel. I wrapped my hands under the ends of the sleeves and hugged my fists close to my body. Delia was staring at her door. Someone had come in the night and taped a white envelope with her name handwritten across the front. No one had knocked, I was sure of that, and the handwriting was spidery, Delia’s name in all capital letters.

She turned her back away from me while she opened it, and when she turned back toward me her face had lost some of its color. If she hadn’t just gotten Botoxed, I would have said she looked worried. Maybe even scared. She folded the piece of paper and put it into her purse.

“Who’s it from?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “Not for you, okay?”

When my sister was finished with a subject, she had a way of letting you know. The letter had just been declared off-limits, but I was going to pretend not to care and see if I could fish it out later. That’s what we did with information in our family—we squirreled it away and then dared someone else to lay claim. When my mom became a lesbian, I called Delia and she said, “That’s the news?” like my mom had been batting for both teams her whole life. It made me mad, because I could tell she wanted me to be the last to know, or at least later than her. The note was probably just a bill for pizza, but as long as I couldn’t see it, it was interesting.

We hit the bakery drive-through and though Delia didn’t ask what I wanted, she did pay. I tried to eat around the flax-seeds, which only gave me less food and a lapful of crumbs.

“So,” she said. “You haven’t seen Roger lately. Be prepared for his hair.”

I was listening with one ear, and searching for my phone to see if Doon had texted me back. Since it was three hours later in Georgia, I figured she’d have something interesting to report. She had promised to low-level-stalk my mom and Lynette and remind Birch that he had a sister. For all I knew my mother was cutting my face out of pictures and reconstructing her perfect family, without me, from the ground up. I told Doon I would text her pictures every day to show him.