American Girls by Alison Umminger

carcinogenic: a human cigarette without a warning label.
    Finally, I gave up trying to sleep and opened the book again, because the only thing harder to think about tonight than the women in the Manson family was the women in my own.

 
    6
    My mother left a long message in the night. I played it three times before my sister finally came home from Dex’s place. Anna, darling, I’m so sorry. I don’t want you to ever think that you can’t come home. I just think you’d have so much more fun there this summer, spending time with your sister. Birch is going to be in the day care at Lynette’s work, and I want to rest, to really heal and recenter myself. There’s so little time for that. I’d like for us to talk; we’re so far from how I want us to be as a mother and a daughter. Maybe we could write letters, or e-mails, or something to get to know each other again. And then when we’re both ready, we can be friends. I’d like this summer to be about healing for all of us. You can call me later if you like, and your dad is coming back from Mexico soon, so he should be in touch. I’m sure that he would let you stay with him if you like. I love you so much. I don’t want you to forget that.
    That’s my mom’s favorite MO: punch you in the gut and then tell you that she loves you. It’s almost worse than being a garden-variety psychopath, because on top of everything you walk around feeling like you can’t tell what’s true anymore. My mom probably should have been the one to move to Los Angeles. We ’ re so far from how I want us to be as a mother and a daughter. She was like something out of a bad Tennessee Williams play. We read A Streetcar Named Desire for English this past year, and there were times when my mom seriously reminded me of a dyked-out Blanche DuBois. And it’s not because she’s so southern, but because she likes the idea of things more than the actual things, and she can’t own up to anything she’s actually done. Once she told me: You were such an easy baby, a joy until you turned five or so. Then I just lost track of you . Poor Birch. I wondered if he’d have a longer shelf life, or if she’d turn on him too when he developed an actual personality.
    As much as I did not identify with Patricia Krenwinkel, it made me think of how after she was arrested her family wanted to make it like she had this perfect home life, when her parents were both AWOL while she was getting tortured at school for being fat; how her folks separated and Patricia felt like it was her fault. No one seemed to care that she was drinking and smoking pot, or that she’d run away, until mass murder in the news made them look back. They were an awesome family, the Krenwinkels—all you had to do was ask them. Maybe that was part of the appeal of the Manson “family,” not as a family, but as a myth of a family, a clown-collage of bad parenting and anger focused in all the wrong directions. And batshit crazy—it was every bad headline you ever read, supersize—something you could point to at the end of the day and say, Well, I’m not that bad, my life couldn’t suck that hard.
    I’d meant to check out front to see if anyone had come during the night, but my sister’s keys rattled in the door first. She had a dead-bolt lock and one of those chains at the top of the door that I’d seen kicked through in 3.5 seconds in true crime reenactments. The security system in the apartment was defunct, though she still kept the sign for it outside her door. Last night I thought I’d heard a car driving past, idling, and I turned on a light and slept with the covers over my head. My sister’s apartment faced a large, sloping hill, and since the curtains were practically see-through, I had tried to maneuver a sheet to cover the glass with little success. Anyone determined could still look inside. I couldn’t