Sylvie looks back at her open magazine page, tears spilling onto a picture of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. “It’s your money,” Sylvie says. “You can do what you like with it.”
Marilyn is one of three girls dressed in identical Levi’s low-rise jeans and crop tops. Her hair hangs long over her shoulders, her skin leveled by makeup. Under hot lights, she’s instructed to walk: up an escalator, down a hall, across the street. Walk this way, walk that way, shoulders back love, chest out, okay, but move your hips, I mean, can you hear the music?
During her My Little Pony commercial, she’d been called “Little Princess,” looked after by a woman whose hand she instinctively felt safe holding on to, and taken on constant trips to the craft services truck, where she was given snacks—Skittles, peanut butter sandwiches, and chocolate kisses. But here, the obvious has become more obvious—she’s a body, meant to sell a product. She’s a prop. All the organs that operate within her—the heart that pounds at James’s touch, the stomach that growls when hungry, the bladder that is right now full—they are invisible, unreal, unnecessary. She is flattened to her image on-screen.
It’s for us, for James and me, she tells herself when they ask her to sway her hips (aka stick out your ass), when they shout, “Number three, cross left!” It’s for their future—for the flights to New York, for the books they will buy at the student bookstore, for all the rolls of film she will be able to afford to develop. And. It’s for her mother—if not the house on the hills, it’s for what she hopes will be the consolation prize of a clean apartment of her own where she can watch her soap operas in peace, maybe a little pool where she can lie in the sun.
* * *
James has stayed on at the pawnshop and now makes a small salary, so he lent Marilyn the twenty-five dollars she needed to open her own account at Chase—a place to receive the Levi’s check when it arrives. But her newfound freedom has not come without consequence. Since their fight, Sylvie’s changed. Her glasses of wine have gotten bigger, her eyes more absent. Sometimes she doesn’t come home after work in the evenings, and Marilyn hears her return at one or two a.m. Marilyn doesn’t know where she’s been, where she goes. Maybe she’s dating a man, Marilyn suspects, but doesn’t ask. The wound between them is still open, and their words to each other, no matter how brief, no matter how softly spoken, are salt.
Since the day he hit her, Woody has spoken to her only to make requests. Sylvie, listless from drinking, no longer bothers to cater to his demands, so he calls upon Marilyn for trips to the store, dinner, cleanup. But his fits of rage have become worse, more frequent. In the dark of the house, he often looks as if he’s shadowboxing with a ghost. Many nights, after he’s safely passed out, she’ll go into the living room and quietly sweep shattered glass.
* * *
The Levi’s commercial wraps. It rains for days on end. The California sunshine goes into hiding, the streets flood. At school, the days feel dreary, but the January afternoons become lovely when Marilyn’s with James, the gray of the sky making the colors of the city look saturated: the greens of the trees deeper, the purple flowers more purple. The patter of droplets on the windowpane makes his apartment all the cozier. She most often has supper there, and she’s begun to think of his family almost as her own, as the place where she belongs.
The weather breaks just in time for Justin’s birthday, and the three of them spend the first Sunday of February at the beach. The storms have left the air piercingly clear, the morning sunlight incisive. Justin wants to take pictures in color, so Marilyn has loaded up the camera, and she and James watch him on the pier, stealthily aiming his lens. He captures a little girl rising on tiptoe to measure herself against the smiling wooden shark who will determine if she’s tall enough for the Ferris wheel, a man sleeping in the sand, a boy whose ice cream has just fallen from his cone.
James buys them corn dogs and fries for lunch and they sing happy birthday to Justin, sitting on the wooden slats at the edge of the pier, feet dangling over the water. As Marilyn swings her legs to the tune of the song, one of her brown moccasins goes flying into the ocean.
“Shit!”
Justin bursts into giggles. It’s contagious, and soon all three of them have erupted with laughter. Justin insists she shouldn’t walk barefoot. “You might get splinters,” he warns. “I got a splinter in my foot over here when I was a baby—”
“You were four,” James interjects.
“And it got in so deep, I had to go to the doctor for them to cut it out, and then I couldn’t walk for a month.”
“A couple days,” James corrects, but Justin wins the argument anyhow, and Marilyn hops along the boardwalk with one arm around each of their shoulders. (Justin’s nearly as tall as she is now—how could that be? It seems as if he’s grown more than a foot in the six months since she met him.) The three of them laugh all the way to the vendor selling knock-off sunglasses and flip-flops whose soles are stamped with white palms and the words LOS ANGELES. Marilyn asks for Justin’s input on color and ends up with a red pair. James pays for the shoes while Marilyn tries on oversize sunglasses.
“You’re channeling Joan Didion in those,” James tells her. She replies with a grin and puts the glasses back on the spinner rack, but a moment later James appears behind her, places them jaggedly on her face.
“You got them?”
“They were made for you. I had to.”
Marilyn turns, kisses him. “I love you,” she whispers into his ear. He smiles, and she smiles at his smile.
“This way,” Justin says, and they turn to see he’s aiming the camera at them. Click.
They must look happy, Marilyn thinks. They are happy. And this is only the beginning: next year, they’ll stand together on a New York City rooftop, the city spread below them. When Justin comes to visit, they’ll show him the neon lights of Times Square and the museums full of art. They’ll stay up all night studying in the library; they’ll watch the leaves go golden in Central Park; they’ll sneak into bars to hear music. They’ll graduate, proud in their sky-blue gowns. James will write his essays; she will take her pictures; they will travel and see the world together. And, she hopes, they will one day have a daughter and call her Angela.
ANGIE
Angie wakes alone in a bed she doesn’t recognize, her head throbbing, the light too bright. She looks at the mural of Cherry on the wall and slowly remembers where she is. Welcome to LA.
She opens her palm, sees the black ink smudged on her hand—179 Sycamore.
Today she’ll go to knock on Justin’s door. She’ll meet her uncle, and he will tell her where her father is. So why does she feel as if something inside of her has been lost? The mold of her body, the very shape of her seems somehow askew. Her head—Jesus, it hurts. She tries to walk through the events of the night before, but it goes by in a blur. She tries to remember Justin’s face, but can’t.
“Hey, sleepyhead. You’re awake.”
She rolls over, slowly, to see Sam sitting up in bed, holding a cup of coffee, reading.
“What’s that?” Angie asks.
Sam tilts the book to show her the cover: Citizen: An American Lyric. Claudia Rankine. There’s a picture of the hood of a black sweatshirt, cut off from the body.
“It’s poetry. My dad’s teaching it next year.”
“Oh.”
“She’s writing about racism, like the microaggression kind of stuff that can just build up.”
“Oh.”
“Here, listen. This is really good. The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard…”
Angie nods. “That is good.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Okay,” she says, trying to maneuver around the shame that’s settled in her center, running into nausea. “What time is it?”
“One thirty.”
“Where are Miguel and Cherry?”
“They took an Uber to Cherry’s place last ni
ght.”
“Oh.”
“Want some coffee?”
“Some water maybe.”
Sam stands, and brings her a glass.
“We should talk,” he says, as she sits up, sips. It occurs to Angie with a rush of anxiety that she’s wearing only a T-shirt and underwear.
“Did we—”
“No. Nothing happened. You just—you just got undressed before bed. I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Oh.”
“But you know, you did kiss me the other day—”
“Sam—I—”
“Just—let me talk. Don’t ‘Sam I’ me.”
Angie looks back at him, her heart knocking insistently against her chest like an impatient visitor.
“Angie, do you love me? Did you mean that?”
“What? I—” Angie’s heart now pounds so hard it could knock down the door. “I can’t—I can’t talk about this now. It’s all going to be okay—it’s all going to get better.”
It’s all going to get better. She’s going to meet Justin. She’s going to find out the truth about her dad. Her dad, whom she hopes will fill in the gap between her and the world.
But she can see Sam’s face shutting down, the hope in his gaze replaced by desolation.
“What am I to you?” he asks after a moment, his voice hard-edged.
“You’re—you’re someone I care about. You’re—my friend.”
“Your friend? ’Cause sometimes it feels a lot like you don’t give a shit about me. Like you think you can just walk right into my heart whenever it’s convenient, whenever you need something. But it doesn’t work like that, Angie. You’re not the only one in the world with problems.”
“Sam, I know! I know I am not the only one in the world with problems, I know in the grand scheme of things I’m meaningless—”
“You’re not! Maybe if you could wrap your head around the fact that you matter, you’d start learning how to treat other people like they matter too.”
“Listen, I’m sorry that I’m not ready to—to talk about our relationship right this second, but, Sam, I am this close, closer than I’ve ever been, to finding my dad, and I—”
“Fine. Go.”
Sam gets up and pulls the keys from his jacket pocket, throws them to her from across the room.
Angie picks up the keys, which have landed on the floor. She pulls on her jeans. She steps into the bathroom and splashes water on her face. She tells her heart to stop knocking, to stop pounding against her chest. She is not going to open the door to let it out, not going to let it escape her. They are going together, in one piece, to find her father.
Angie steps into the too-bright sunlight, Sam’s keys in hand. A car honks. A siren in the distance. A mother pushing a stroller up the sidewalk veers around her. She has no memory of where they might have parked last night and begins to circle the block, but she gets only a few steps before she leans into the gutter and throws up. Two kids on skateboards clatter past her. She shuts her eyes and takes a deep breath. Get it together, she tells herself.
She stands and continues walking until she sees Sam’s Jeep parked around the corner, in front of a small stucco house. As she goes to unlock the door, she watches a hummingbird land on the trumpet vine that grows over the chain-link fence, and at once, she’s lost in a memory.
She and Marilyn are unpacking boxes in the kitchen at their new house, when Marilyn gasps. “Angie, come here!” she whispers, peering out the window. A hummingbird, beating its wings a million times a minute, stares back at them. Her mom squeezes her hand and says, “It’s a sign. We’re home.” Angie can’t tell if her mom is sad or happy, or something in between, but Marilyn insists they abandon the boxes and drive to the hardware store. She lets Angie pick out a feeder, made of blue glass and decorated with cheerful red flowers.
Get. It. Together, Angie tells herself again, and opens the door to the car. She pulls her phone from her bag to find her battery’s at ten percent. Ugh. Of course she didn’t plug it in last night. She types Justin’s address into Google Maps: seventeen minutes away. But she can’t go like this.
Siri guides her to the nearest CVS, where she buys a bottle of Smartwater, a toothbrush, and travel-size toothpaste. She asks to use the bathroom, waits for the door to be unlocked by the clerk, and brushes her teeth.
When she finishes off the water she buys another, along with red lip gloss and mascara. Back in the Jeep she applies the makeup using the rearview mirror, hoping she looks better than she feels. She follows the directions to 179 Sycamore, driving carefully on the city streets, trying her best not to be rattled by the honking cars that veer around her. The Miss Mari Mack tape plays on the stereo. She fast-forwards to “At Your Best,” and lets Aaliyah’s voice soothe her. At a stoplight, she stares up at the twinkling palm leaves, a billboard tagged BLANK FACE, the empty blue sky, and tries to imagine her mother—the mother from the picture, the mother with the golden smile—listening to this song in the car with James. Stay at your best, baby …
She turns onto Sycamore, parks, and walks up the block. An Orthodox Jewish family with three small kids crosses the street, two black girls in designer dresses get into a Prius, a white dude jogs past them. A huge eucalyptus tree grows beside the pathway to 179, its roots pushing up against the bricks.
She knocks on the door that Justin disappeared into the night before.
She waits. And waits.
She knocks again.
She glances at the second-story window but can’t see anything behind the curtain.
She waits.
But he doesn’t come.
It’s okay, she tells herself. He’s just out. He’s just not home right now. He’ll come home.
Angie gets back in the Jeep, her hands shaking. She starts the song again, and closes her eyes.
Angie blinks her eyes open to find the last of the sun draining from the sky. Shit. How long did she sleep? Her mouth is dry. She searches the floor of the Jeep and comes up with half a bottle of purple Gatorade. Sam loves purple Gatorade. Sam.
She pushes the thought of him away and chugs the liquid. Now she can see Justin’s black Mustang parked across the street ahead of her. Angie gets out and quickly retraces her steps to his apartment, tugging at her jeans, squeezing at her curls, inhaling the smell of jasmine on the warm evening air. The window on the second story is open, the lights on behind the curtain. Music drifts out: I tried to dance it away …
Solange, “Cranes in the Sky.” Angie loves this song. It must be a sign—there’s already a thread tying her and Justin together. As she reaches the door, she can hear voices from inside. She knocks before she can think about it—a good, hard knock—and exhales, not realizing she’d been holding her breath.
* * *
A moment later, the door swings open. It’s him. Justin, right in front of her.
His eyes look like her father’s in the photo, the eyes she’d stared into so many times.
She stands there taking in every detail: the Smog City beer in his hand, the sugar skull tattooed onto his ring finger, the baseball cap that says COFFEE, his faded gray hoodie, the smell of pot smoke wafting out of the apartment.
“What’s up?” he says.
But her voice has fled. She’d assumed he’d recognize her. She’d been expecting—what?—that he’d wrap her into an embrace, that he’d say—what?—Oh my god, your father, he’s going to be so excited to meet you?
He focuses on her more fully, his eyes squinting. “You alright?” he asks.
“Yeah,” she manages. “Sorry. Hi. I’m Angie…”
He looks back at her quizzically. “You look familiar but I can’t place it. We met?”
“I think you might be, well, um … my uncle.”
Almost in slow motion, his face changes first into a look of recognition and then into one of shock.
“Shit,” he finally says. “Fuck. Wow … Yeah. You look … so much like him.”
“So do you.”
r /> “I had no idea,” Justin says. Angie can see he’s blown open, can see him trying to gather himself as if he were chasing leaves in the wind. “I had no idea,” he says again. “You’re—you’re Marilyn’s kid?”
Angie nods her confirmation. “… Can I come in?”
“Um, yeah. Yeah. Just—hold up.”
Justin goes inside, leaving Angie standing alone beneath the eucalyptus tree, its papery bark peeling off. She peers through the half-open front door and spots him partway up a flight of stairs, resting his head against the wall.
After a moment he disappears into another room. She can hear his voice calling, “Yo! Put that out!”
He returns and leads her inside. “Sorry, I—wasn’t expecting you. Obviously,” he says, trying for a laugh as he leads her up the steps. “I just have a few people over, but we can bounce if you want? Are you hungry? I can take you to get some food, or…”
Before Angie can answer, they arrive in a living room that smells like a recently extinguished joint. The apartment has creaky hardwood floors and high ceilings. A marquee sign that says OPEN leans against the wall. A French poster for a movie she doesn’t recognize hangs beside a Basquiat print. A small crowd sits around a table—the girl with the curly hair from last night, a black guy with baby dreads and a collared shirt, a white guy with glasses and stubble. A girl with pink hair sitting on the lap of another girl with a buzzed head and big earrings. They’ve paused their poker game, it seems, to stare at her.
“This is … Angie,” Justin says.
Choruses of “What up, Angie.” “Nice to meet you.” “Welcome to the Sycamore Lounge.”
She raises her hand in an uncertain half wave.
“Can I get you something? Are you hungry? Did I ask you that already?” Justin watches Angie. She watches the room. Could her father be there too, around the corner? Perhaps he’s in the bathroom?