American Girls (7 page)

“Cool,” he said, nodding his head. “How's it going, Anna?”

I shrugged my shoulders like I had never met a boy before, like I was an unsocialized troll straight from Middle-Earth. Dex was about eight million times better-looking that most of the men my sister dated. He had a close-cropped 'do, almost bald with just a shadow of hair, and he was tall. Taller than Delia in her stiletto boots, so I'd say six foot two, easy, and slim but muscular. He had one of those superhero square jaws, and light brown eyes, and when he smiled the left side of his face dimpled. His teeth were spaced a little bit apart in front, and he wore a “Too Many Rich Crackers” T-shirt, with a box of faux Ritz crackers on it. I could totally, totally, totally understand why
Chips Ahoy!
was not a factor in the dating decision. He could have written in crayons, and I would have been like, “Go, Delia!”

“So you're a writer?” I finally said.

“I am,” he said. “I just got back from Hungary, helping a friend with a documentary he's doing on the local music scene. Flying back into LA, it's a different earth.”

My sister leaned over his kitchen counter, running her fingers over the tops of the doughnuts.

“You know you want one,” Dex said in a voice that was probably reserved for when little sisters were out of the room. “Do it.”

“Poison.” She closed the top. “I can't even look at it.”

Dex mouthed
She lies
at me and I whispered, “I know.” If he only knew the half of it.

“They're starting the summer season of
Chips
this week
,
and Dex said you'll be fine on the set, better than watching me do my herpes audition.” Delia smiled her most commercial, plastic smile and made a
Wheel of Fortune
swipe over her mouth and lady parts. “Herpes. It's not just for ugly people anymore.”

“Is that what you're supposed to say?” Dex nearly spit out his doughnut. His third doughnut.

“Of course not, but they should, right? I think they need to rebrand the herp, not make prettier commercials for some drug. I mean, it's just mouth sores on your ass, right? There are worse things in the world. It needs a better name. You're the writer. Suggestions?”

“Ass pox?”

“At least that sounds edgy,” Delia said. “‘Herpes' sounds like something a really dirty Muppet would get.”

Around Dex, my sister was a little less fake, a little more like the Delia I grew up with, goofy, even. She said that she'd met him when they were both stuck in line waiting to see the opening of
Three Girls to the Left,
a gag-worthy romantic comedy about a sports reporter and a wannabe cheerleader who keep meeting each other at the same basketball games. I'm not even kidding. Delia had three lines as “Bitchy Cheerleader,” and Dex had worked on one of the rewrites. They were both ashamed to be seeing the film in the first place, since the party line in LA is that no one ever watches their own stuff. I imagined them as two chimps who'd caught each other looking in the mirror and decided it was
awesome
. At any rate, Dex bought Delia some Twizzlers, and she knew she liked him because she ate half the pack, even though she made sure to let me know that she wound up with a stomachache later that night. All of this I had learned on the elevator ride to Dex's apartment, though she swore she'd told me before.

“Are we allowed to talk like this around your sister?”

“Please,” Delia said. “She's fifteen. It's the new thirty-seven, in case you haven't kept up.”

“I have
heard
of herpes.” I tried to be deadpan, and got a real smile from Dex.

“Speaking of,” she said. “Gotta get the children home.”

“I don't wanna,” I whined. “Please, can I stay with you guys? Please, please, please?”

“I lied. Fifteen is the new two and a half. I haven't seen my man in a month. Look homeward, little angel.” She pointed toward the door and Dex didn't object.

“I'll see you tomorrow,” Dex said. “We're gonna be running buddies this summer.”

“But…”

Delia had already opened the door, but she waited for a moment. “But what?”

I wanted to say,
But what about the note?
What about the fact that you're going to leave me in some house where someone's branding you “Whore” in their shaky, serial-killer handwriting and taping it to your door? I am not a whore and would prefer not to be confused for one in your absence. I don't know how to tell a sex maniac
Sorry, come back later,
because I'm pretty sure that sex maniacs are kind of like impulse shoppers—in a pinch, they'll take whatever happens to be around.

But I wasn't supposed to have seen the note, and I would have bet real money that Dex wasn't supposed to know about it, so I was just going to have to double-lock the doors, sleep with a phone by my head, and accept my fate.

“But nothing,” I said.

 

5

When we got back to Delia's house, my mom called. She still phoned me every night, mostly to remind me about something she'd left off her laundry list of complaints: to tell me that my dad was going to have my head when he got back from Mexico, to ask me if I had a job yet, to bore me with more Internet blather about the importance of taking responsibility for my actions. She always signed off by reminding me that I wasn't on vacation, that she hoped I knew that I still had a paper to write. I was ready to tell her that I was going to be researching the Manson murders instead of working on my project, just to see if I could hear her overheat from Atlanta, but her voice sounded tired when Delia handed me the phone.

“Is your sister there? Could you put me on speakerphone?”

My sister was walking around her apartment, stuffing clothes into a gym bag, makeup, underwear from her special sexy drawer.

“You want to listen to the sound of Delia getting ready to go screw her boyfriend?”

Delia threw a pair of underwear at my head. So gross.

“Please, Anna. This really isn't a good time.”

“For me either.”

I handed the phone to Delia, and after brief hellos, I could hear my mom take a deep breath from her bedroom. The air purifier rumbled in the background and Birch was saying, “Dis, dis, dis,” over and over again. He must have been rummaging through her jewelry or tearing books off the wall.

“Okay,” she said. “I want to start by saying that I don't want either of you to panic, because this is going to sound like bad news, but it's all going to be okay. A few weeks ago I had to go in for a mammogram, and they saw something that made them nervous. It should have made me nervous too, but I had other things on my mind.”

My sister looked at me. I kept looking at the phone. My mom continued. “I truly didn't think anything of it, because I'm nursing and I've had clogged ducts before, but they wanted the area biopsied.”

I watched my sister while we listened. She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked slowly back and forth, silent.

“And it's cancer. There's no other way to say it. But they caught it early, and it's very treatable. They won't know for sure how to proceed until they've removed what they found, but the doctor assured me that we'd caught it early and treatment would…” Her voice wavered. “It should work. I have surgery next week and then some chemo to follow up, and it should all be gone by the end of the summer.”

After the word “cancer” it was like I didn't hear anything else she said. A low, radio-static buzz starting to build in the back of my head, and my mouth felt sticky and walled off.

“Oh my god,” I said. “I want to come home. I can help with Birch.”

“Anna,” she said. Another long pause. Another deep breath.

“So what's the prognosis,” my sister said, “long-term?”

“Long-term I should be great. I don't have the gene. There's no way of knowing why this happened, and I”—now she was starting to cry—“I'll feel okay when it's all taken care of. When they have it out. It's hard knowing this is inside of me.”

For the first time, I hated myself for being so far away.

“And I've been able to breastfeed for over a year. I'm trying just to be grateful for that.”

“What about me? Can I come back?”

“Anna,” she said, and it was her no-nonsense voice all of a sudden. “I just—we don't know how cancer works. I don't know what caused this. I don't know what would make it come back or make it spread, but I do know that I can't have any more stress in my life than I already have.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. Delia was staring at the phone on the living room floor like how those priests in horror movies look at calm little girls who have the devil inside of them. Waiting.

“I just—” she said again. “I can't take the risk that having you here might make the cancer worse.”

My sister looked like she'd swallowed poison.

“What?” I said. I couldn't speak. I couldn't catch my breath.

“That's it,” Delia said. “Conversation over. I'm so sorry about your news, but we can talk about this tomorrow. Good night, Cora. And thanks for handling this in such an adult fashion. She's not old enough to handle your bullshit, you get that, right? You get that you're the adult?”

One of them must have disconnected because my sister tossed the phone across the room and then picked up her gym bag and slammed it against the floor.

“Please don't be mad at me,” I said.

“Oh, Anna. I'm not mad at you.”

She sat down across from me and collapsed into herself. I tended to think of my sister as a big person—tall shoes, wide smile, loud voice. But she was probably a hundred pounds soaking wet, and she looked kind of like a pill bug on her sofa, rolling into herself, almost disappearing.

“Don't cry,” Delia said. “Please don't let her make you cry. Please. It's not worth it. She's like a selfish two-year-old. With cancer, yes, but, Jesus, God Almighty, is it so hard, such a terrible challenge, for anyone in this family to be normal?”

“Do you think it's my fault?” I could barely even say the words.

I knew I wasn't a perfect kid. I probably should have helped more with Birch, or complained less about the school thing. I should have walked to the grocery for her when she was pregnant instead of pretending I had homework to do and texting with Doon. There were about a million things I would have done differently if I had known.

“That's not how cancer works,” Delia said. “Not even in her faux-hippie universe, okay? And if she ever says something like that again, tell her you are going straight to your therapist and not speaking to her again until your therapist gives you permission.”

“But I don't have a therapist.”

“Anna. I hate to tell you this, but you're gonna need one.” She laughed, and went across the room to the television, where she removed a small box of matches from beside one of the candles. From it, she removed the thinnest joint I have ever seen and looked at it like it was her oldest, dearest friend.

“This is just lazy-ass self-medication,” she said. “And I don't recommend it.”

“Can I have some?”

I'd had one puff of pot a year ago when Doon sneaked some from her brother's stash, and it just made my lungs burn. Nothing interesting happened. Either the pot was defective or I was.

“Not a chance,” she said, holding smoke in her lungs while she choked out the words. “But I will let you in on a little family gossip.”

“Can I at least have the last doughnut?”

“You can have ten more doughnuts. We'll drive there later.”

She tossed a pillow onto the floor, sat down, and focused her eyes on the ceiling. Then she started talking to the ceiling.

“So I never told you this, but the first part I ever got in a movie, it was a Japanese horror flick called
St. Succubus
. It was pretty twisted, I guess—you know how when you're on a set sometimes you can be doing the grossest stuff, but instead of seeming gross it just seems silly or stupid? Anyhow, there was this scene where I went down on a guy and then later I ate his boiled penis like it was, I don't know, a suckling pig.”

“Can we stream it?” The thought of my sister cooking a penis for dinner was actually cheering me up. I moved my hands in front of my face like I was two-fisting some imaginary dinner. Dick a l'Orange.

“No way. It's disgusting. And my acting is terrible. But it was my first role, so I was proud and all convinced that it was artistic, so I let Mom know that I had made a movie, and I kind of warned her about it, and I thought, stupidly, idiotically, flying in the face of everything I know about our mother, that she would be proud. Because it was a movie and I was her daughter, and I'd been paid to go to Japan and act and all of that. It was exciting. I thought it would be my breakthrough role, blah, blah, blah. So I called Cora about two weeks after it came out, to see if she and your dad had watched it, and you know what she says to me?”

I shook my head. My sister stopped looking at the ceiling and stared me dead in the face.

“She says, ‘I can't have sex since I saw that movie. It's disgusting and it's made me realize that sex with men is violent and predatory. I'm not sure that I can ever have sex with any man again.'”

“Seriously?”

“Oh, I am the deadest of serious.”

“So it's your fault Mom is a lesbian?”

“And her marriage ended. Something like that. I didn't speak to her for, like, two years. She's incapable of taking responsibility for any of her actions. Incapable. You must promise me to never, ever, ever under any circumstance take anything she says personally. Ever. Please. I'm making like it was funny, but it wasn't. She's my mother. I was devastated. I wanted her to be proud of me. I wanted her to be my mom. I mean seriously, isn't it, like, rule number one of your marriage breaking up that you don't blame your children? Don't even psychopaths follow that rule?”