The Girls Read Online Free

eyeliner pencil she held over a lighter flame. Turning the point until it softened and she could draw slashes at each eye, making her look sleepy and Egyptian.
    She paused in my doorway on her way out for the night, dressed in a tomato-red blouse that exposed her shoulders. She kept pulling the sleeves down. Her shoulders were dusted with glitter.
    “You want me to do your eyes too, sweetheart?”
    But I had nowhere to be. Who would care if my eyes looked bigger or bluer?
    “I might get back late. So sleep well.” My mother leaned over to kiss the top of my head. “We’re good, aren’t we? The two of us?”
    She patted me, smiling so her face seemed to crack and reveal the full rush of her need. Part of me did feel all right, or I was confusing familiarity with happiness. Because that was there even when love wasn’t—the net of family, the purity of habit and home. It was such an unfathomable amount of time that you spent at home, and maybe that’s the best you could get—that sense of endless enclosure, like picking for the lip of tape but never finding it. There were no seams, no interruptions—just the landmarks of your life that had become so absorbed in you that you couldn’t even acknowledge them. The chipped willow-print dinner plate I favored for forgotten reasons. The wallpaper in the hallway so known to me as to be entirely incommunicable to another person—every fading copse of pastel palm trees, the particular personalities I ascribed to each blooming hibiscus.
    My mother stopped enforcing regular mealtimes, leaving grapes in a colander in the sink or bringing home glass jars of dilled miso soup from her macrobiotic cooking class. Seaweed salads dripping with a nauseating amber oil. “Eat this for breakfast every day,” she said, “and you’ll never have another zit.”
    I cringed, pulling my fingers away from the pimple on my forehead.
    There had been many late-night planning sessions between my mother and Sal, the older woman she had met in group. Sal was endlessly available to my mother, coming over at odd hours, impatient for drama. Wearing tunics with mandarin collars, her gray hair cut short so her ears showed, making her look like an elderly boy. My mother spoke to Sal about acupuncture, of the movement of energies around meridian points. The charts.
    “I just want some space,” my mother said, “for me. This world takes it out of you, doesn’t it?”
    Sal shifted on her wide rear, nodded. Dutiful as a bridled pony.
    My mother and Sal were drinking her woody tea from bowls, a new affectation my mother had picked up. “It’s European,” she’d said defensively, though I had said nothing. When I walked through the kitchen, both women stopped talking, but my mother cocked her head. “Baby,” she said, gesturing me closer. She squinted. “Part your bangs from the left. More flattering.”
    I’d parted my hair that way to cover the pimple, gone scabby from picking. I’d coated it with vitamin E oil but couldn’t stop myself from messing with it, flaking on toilet paper to soak up the blood.
    Sal agreed. “Round face shape,” she said with authority. “Bangs might not be a good idea at all, for her.”
    I imagined how it would feel to topple Sal over in her chair, how her bulk would bring her down fast. The bark tea spilling on the linoleum.
    They quickly lost interest in me. My mother rekindling her familiar story, like the stunned survivor of a car accident. Dropping her shoulders as if to settle even further into the misery.
    “And the most hilarious part,” my mother went on, “the part that really gets me going?” She smiled at her own hands. “Carl’s making money,” she said. “That currency stuff.” She laughed again. “Finally. It actually worked. But it was my money that paid her salary,” she said. “My mother’s movie money. Spent on that girl.”
    —
    My mother was talking about Tamar, the assistant my father had hired for his most recent business. It