With the Millers, Frida felt like she’d fallen asleep and awoken in a bygone era. They could have been pioneers, hitching their covered wagons, staking claim on a new frontier. Manifest destiny bullshit. Or the opposite: with Bo and Sandy, the land outside wasn’t wild and uncharted, something to fear until conquered. No, the earth was to be respected. Only then would it collaborate with you, tell you what it needed and what it was willing to give. And it was willing to give you a lot, if you knew how to ask. It was a lesson in coaxing.
After they’d eaten a meal so succulent and satisfying Frida could have moaned with pleasure, Sandy asked her to follow her back into the house. The men had begun to discuss how to handle larger predators and keep the deer away from food storage and scare off the rare bear that skulked the grounds. Bo had once seen a mama bear and her cubs at the edge of the land; “Imagine if I’d been near them,” he was telling Cal. “They’re just animals and I’ve got a gun, but still, I’m not stupid. They scare me.” It was a conversation Frida thought she should be involved in, but what the hell, she could get a distilled version from Cal on the walk back to the shed. She wished Sandy and Bo would invite them to stay over, but she knew they wouldn’t. Already, Bo had made it clear that they would not be seeing one another all the time. “There’s always work to be done,” he’d said during lunch.
Sandy had grabbed Frida’s hand as they walked into the house. It was as dry as Frida’s own, her knuckles white and flaky. “I guess you won’t be lending me any lotion,” she said, nodding at their intertwined hands.
“I wish. I’m dry as an old lake bed. But I did want to show you this.”
They were like two little girls on a playdate, like Sandy was about to reveal her secret doll collection, her stickers, or her mother’s lacy lingerie. Jane tried to follow them inside, but once they were a few feet into the house, Sandy had turned around and said, “Go to Papa.”
Once Jane was gone, Sandy pointed to the far wall, just to the left of the bed she shared with Bo. Frida had seen the grayish marks earlier, but had taken them to be Jane’s scribbles: the cave paintings of a seven-year-old.
“Go ahead,” Sandy said, and Frida let go of her hand to walk closer.
Of course the drawings couldn’t be Jane’s, they were too far up the wall. At the top, a line of carefully drawn circles, some of them shaded in, others only partially.
“The phases of the moon,” Sandy said behind her, and Frida raised an eyebrow. She hoped Sandy wasn’t inviting her into a coven.
“You can’t just run to the store for tampons,” Sandy said, and Frida understood what this calendar kept track of.
“I figured that out pretty quickly,” Frida said. She didn’t bother to tell Sandy that most stores in L.A. had found the needs of women harder and harder to meet.
“You can’t be teenagers forever,” Sandy said. “Cal should give you a child.”
“Excuse me?” Frida said. No wonder Sandy had made Jane stay outside. “I don’t think I understand what you mean.”
“Yes, you do,” Sandy said. “Lovebirds. Eventually there’s a cloacal kiss.”
How close had the Millers been watching them? Close enough. They had seen Cal move off of her, just before he came. She and Cal liked to do it outside, if the weather was nice. Frida wanted to sew this strange woman’s mouth shut—or, better, her eyes.
“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Frida said.
Their birth control of choice was common back home. She didn’t know anyone who did it otherwise; it wasn’t foolproof, but no one she’d known had ever had an accident. And, thank God: Who wanted to bring children into this world? Who could find a doctor, who could afford condoms, let alone the Pill?
When Frida was in high school, she’d taken it to help ease her cramps. She’d loved the little pink clamshell they came in and the way the tiny tablets popped out of their plastic sheaths. But before her senior year began, Dada started having trouble finding work, and gas prices were rising every week, and the family began its Great Austerity Measures, as Hilda put it. Goodbye clamshell and a menstrual cycle Frida actually kept track of. Goodbye almost everything frivolous and easy.
By the time she and Cal had agreed to leave L.A., it seemed like no one had access to meds; only the deranged would buy a handful of drugs from a guy on the street corner. Was that really Xanax wrapped in tinfoil? Prescriptions, like doctors, were for the rich. The lucky ones, the people with money, had long fled L.A.
“I apologize if I’m embarrassing you,” Sandy said then. “I didn’t mean to see.”
“Don’t you believe in privacy?”
“Not really, I guess.”
Frida didn’t know what to do with Sandy’s candor. She finally asked: “Why are you showing me this?”
“Because it’s your responsibility. It’s everything,” Sandy said.
In the doorway, the sun caught the lightness of her hair, and it seemed for a moment as if she wore a halo.
“Don’t tell me you came out here to die.”
Frida was about to ask Sandy if she was nuts. She wanted to say it was too risky to have a kid, that it was selfish. What if they got sick? What if there wasn’t enough food? What if, what if. But Sandy was already turning around. She left Frida alone in the dark house.