Read Online Third Girl from the Left by Martha Southgate - Free Book Online

deny it.
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    Two years had passed since Angela had come to LA. She never went home to visit; she didn’t call often. Every week at first, halting, filled with pauses, then every month. There were no friends to talk to back there. Louann, married and pregnant already, would not even begin to understand. And her brother and sister remained the strangers they had always been. She did talk to her parents, lying with almost every word she spoke. She told them that she auditioned as much as she could on her lunch hour from the fictional dentist’s office. That she lived with two other girls in a nice part of town. That she was dating nice young men and not letting any of them go too far. That she’d heard about this new marijuana, but, no, she didn’t know anyone who’d tried it.
    Her parents never suggested visiting and eventually they stopped pressing her to come home. Sometimes this made Angela feel a little sad, but other times she thought they could hear that she was a different person now and they didn’t want to know about it. She didn’t tell them about the movie she was in, the slow hip swivel on the bar.
    One cool fall night, when she answered the phone, she didn’t recognize the voice. It sounded like a woman’s, but it was hard to tell. “Naked. Naked up there” was all the voice said.
    â€œWho is this?” Angela said. She almost hung up, but her hand tightened around the receiver at the same moment.
    â€œYou know who this is,” the voice went on. “It’s your mother. Though God help me, I never raised you to do anything like that.”
    Angela’s hand went from tight to boneless. She nearly dropped the phone.
    â€œAngela, you know you are to answer me when I’m speaking to you. I could not believe what I was seeing.”
    â€œMama?”
    She went on. “I
wouldn’t
have believed it except I saw it with my own two eyes. Everyone in town is talking. That’s why I went. And there you were, right up on that bar. Naked. Naked!”
    â€œMama, I—”
    â€œWhat in the name of all that is holy are you going to say to me? What are you going to say to me about that?”
    Angela felt her mouth working, tried to think of what she could say. But nothing would come. “You’ve got nothing to say, have you, miss?” More silence. “Well, I don’t want to speak to you until you do. Until you can somehow explain this to me. And I don’t see how that day is ever going to come.” Then came the slam of the phone in Angela’s ear. Angela sat there, her beautiful face a fist. She could feel all her muscles under her skin, the skin that her mother had seen when she was a baby, the skin that horrifled her now. Her hands rested on her smooth brown thighs, the thighs that frightened her mother. Her breath came hard in her throat. She thought she might vomit.
    Sheila was out shopping. Angela choked on the silence in the apartment. Her hand worked furiously twisting her hair in back. After a while—she couldn’t have said how long—she got up, took off her robe, and walked into the bathroom. She looked down and surveyed her body. Her skin was the color of pennies underwater, stippled here and there with moles in unexpected but oddly inviting places, like one side of her left knee. Her stomach was a little bit rounded, her breasts medium-sized perfect globes. She cupped her hands underneath them, touched the nipples experimentally. This is what her mother hated and feared—the amount of pleasure her body could give someone, even herself. Her mother would never understand the power of being wanted. The way she felt when she was just a little high and making love, like she was in charge of everything. She slid her hands over her stomach again, felt the insides calm down a little. The outside still looked good.
    Angela was sitting in the dark when Sheila came home. She had not risen from the sofa for