Rachel remembers the first time she walked in on her father. He was standing in front of the bedroom mirror, using a can of hair-spray for a microphone. “Who here’s happily married?” he asked the mirror. “Can I get a show of hands?” Her father squinted his eyes, as if he were looking out past stage lights and into an audience. “What’s that? Five? Six? Well, there you have it, people. Proof of aliens.”
Rachel’s mother puts both of her hands on Rachel’s shoulders. “This is not a trip to the beach, Rachel. It’s a trip to school. Study these people like you’re going to be tested. Someday, you could spend a third of your year in a beach chair. You just have to work at it hard enough and then—abracadabra!—you won’t have to work at all.”
Rachel’s mother smiles. She sees Rachel living like someone in a soap opera: lethargic with wealth. Her tan arm, now thin, stacked with bracelets to the elbow. A silver-haired man in linen shorts at her side. Rachel’s mother sees Rachel with a husband so taken by her full lips and visible hipbones that he rewards her yearly with a new Lexus. Rachel, on the other hand, sees nothing but a container of Cool Whip. She’s eating out of it with a ladle. Or rather: her hands.
In the air, somewhere between Delaware and the beach the sisters insist on calling “Ass Island,” Davenport gestures loosely at the plane’s amenities: a narrow drawer lined with packs of spearmint gum. A first aid cabinet equipped not for engine failure but hangovers, stocked with envelopes of Goody’s Headache Powder. A breadbasket filled with boxes of animal crackers and buckled into a spare seat, like a neighbor’s child the Billingsleys have agreed to transport but are set on ignoring.
“Animal crackers,” scoffs Devlin. “You see any babies up here?”
“In your vagina,” Davenport says.
Devlin and Davenport lean across the narrow aisle to punch one another in the upper arms for a time, back and forth like papier-mâché marionettes, until their arms are red and welted from shoulder to elbow. It’s as if both have been grabbed and shaken by a middle-aged lover who’s discovered he’s been jilted for a pool boy.
“Trucey trucey?” Devlin asks.
“Vodka juicy,” Davenport answers.
At this, the sisters set about making cocktails, and Rachel watches, spellbound. The girls are a study in contradiction, equal parts crude and classy, mundane and mesmerizing. Their hair is eternally slept on, piled on their heads like Caucasian turbans. Their silk dresses are shapeless but clingy, their expensive loafers intentionally mashed into slides. Their bodies, fed only candy, seem to consist of neither muscle nor fat. They can slump in the corner of a tennis court biting Skittles in half; they can scuff across a tarmac with unwieldy handbags concealing liquor; they can slouch in leather seats, knees agape to show a pearly slice of panties and still, somehow, exude regality. Their only accessible flaws, Devlin’s fingernails and Davenport’s bottom lip, both of which have been habitually and vigorously chewed, only serve, in Rachel’s opinion, to humanize them, to mark them as either inwardly anxious or outwardly bored.
“Here,” Devlin offers Rachel a drink. “It’s a Stoli-and-Diet.”
Rachel takes it and sniffs. Beside her, Mrs. Billingsley naps with her mouth open, gasping, as if she’s slept alone for years.
“That,” Devlin points at her mother, “is how you make a man fuck the nanny.”
“No shit,” Davenport says, tossing back the contents of her plastic tumbler and mixing another drink inside the bowels of her Italian purse. “And yet, they’re still together. Because Daddy likes consistency.”
“And Mommy likes money,” adds Devlin.
For an instant, things go quiet. As if an intentional moment of silence has been observed for decency’s death. Then Davenport belches, unblinking, and says to Rachel, “So, who did your dad leave your mom for? A babysitter? A secretary?”
“Don’t say it’s someone not young,” says Devlin. “Because that is the burn of the century.”
Rachel takes a taste of her drink. And then a second. She doesn’t dare say why her parents split. That it was her mother who left her father. That it was her father who left banking for stand-up comedy, because he deserved—his word—applause. That her father now lives in a basement apartment with a recliner and a hot plate and an iguana he agreed to housesit but somehow got stuck with. That her father spends his days making long lists of catch phrases he believes will get him discovered, revered, iconized: And that’s the long and short of it, folks! Trust me, ladies and gents, I’m an expert! And that’s what you call screwed, my friends!
“He banged my French tutor,” Rachel lies, having had neither French nor tutors. “She was twenty-three.”
Devlin whistles and clucks her tongue in mock judgment. Davenport shrugs. “I’ve heard worse,” she says. “At least he didn’t bang you.”
At that, Rachel finishes her drink. Davenport makes her another. Halfway through the third, despite her mother’s warning, Rachel gets out of her figurative wheelchair and asks for the animal crackers. Devlin and Davenport watch unblinking as Rachel eats an entire box and then a second.
“Damn, bitch,” Devlin says. “Save some for the Africans.”
Davenport doesn’t comment. She just stares at Rachel as Rachel eats, chews her lower lip as Rachel chews, and it occurs to Rachel, as the plane whirs on slow and rich, as the girls splay warm and drunk, that Davenport’s lower lip and Devlin’s fingernails are the way they are not because the girls are scared or bored, but because they’re starving.
Ass Island turns out to be a private slice of Caribbean land, shaped like a hand giving the finger. Devlin and Davenport, immune to its grandeur and that of their beach house, give Rachel a passionless tour upon landing.
“This is our room,” Davenport says. “We’ve got a view of the ocean, a view of the pool, a view of where Devlin screwed the gardener.”
“How do you know where I screwed the gardener?” Devlin asks.
“Because I was watching,” Davenport says.
Rachel sits on a bed while the sisters unpack by tipping their suitcases onto the floor of the closet. They each deposit a pile of silk dresses and sunglasses, bikinis and lighters, playing cards and menthol cigarettes, smashed shoes and loose Skittles. There’s a pink plastic case that Rachel guesses might hold a diaphragm. A carved wooden box that must be for weed. When they’re done, they take Rachel on a half-hearted tour of the shingled house and flowering grounds, pointing out useless things: not where Rachel can find an extra roll of toilet paper or a glass of water or a bottle of sunscreen, but where their father once had a seizure from too much cocaine, which window the islanders climb into when the Billingsleys aren’t there.
“See these shotgun shells?” Davenport says, opening a drawer intended for silverware. “They come here and do drug deals. They use this house as a hideout.”
“Just doing our part,” Devlin says.
“Community service,” Davenport agrees.
Rachel is too ravenous to be impressed; she cannot help but point to the refrigerator next. “Any diet soda in there?” she asks.
Davenport yanks it open to reveal a lone champagne cork and an old jar of cocktail sauce, then she turns, slow, and looks at Rachel. “Oh, shit,” she says. “You’re hungry again.”
Devlin opens her mouth in awe, then closes it like a fish.
Rachel lifts her shoulders, then drops them.
Davenport thinks with the refrigerator open. “If we take you somewhere, will you eat for us?”
Devlin releases a gasp. “Oh, please,” she whispers. “Pretty pretty?”
Rachel looks from one to the other. This is why she was invited, she sees. This is how to make them happy. “All right,” she says, nodding her plain, round face. “I can do that.”