As for Cline’s Daddy, here’s Amazon’s synopsis:
From the bestselling author of The Girls comes a “brilliant” (The New York Times) story collection exploring the dark corners of human experience.
For our purposes, we’ll recap Daddy’s “Los Angeles”, “Marion” and “A/S/L”.
“Los Angeles”
In “Los Angeles”, Alice worked at a flagship store near the ocean that sold “[overpriced] cheap, slutty clothes”. Alice’s mandatory uniform was the brand’s clothes that were “a little too tight, a size too small”.
As for the store’s decor, large photographs of nubile nymphet graced the walls:
“On every wall were blown-up photographs in grainy black-and-white of […] girls with knobby knees making eye contact with the camera, covering their small breasts with their hands. […] Alice supposed that was to make sex with them seem more likely.”
17-year-old Oona worked with Alice on Saturdays while during the week she went to a “[…] private school where she played lacrosse and took a class in Islamic art.”
The narrator described Oona as: “[…] easy and confident, already well versed in her own beauty.” Consequently, the men “loved” Oona, and unsurprisingly, “she didn’t mind the men”.
Oona and Alice wanted to be actresses. And they had an “easy, [and] mild rapport”. Ergo, during a break over cigarettes, Oona shared with Alice that a customer, a man with black hair, informed Oona that he would give her $50 for her panties.
Oona said, “More like, he said, ‘I’ll give you fifty bucks to go into the bathroom right now and take off your underwear and give them to me.’ ”
Alice was (initially) incredulous, but Oona, whose parents were attorneys, was “giddy”, she found the idea of selling her panties to men to be “hilarious”, and she encouraged Alice to look into the side hustle.
“It’s hilarious,” Oona said, dreamily combing her long bangs out of her eyes with her fingers. “You should look online, it’s a whole thing.”
Predictably, Oona sold her panties (thong?) to the black haired man for $50, and she assumed that Alice had done or would have done the same.
“Why?” Alice said.
Oona laughed. “Come on, you’ve done these things. You know.”
However, Alice had not done such a thing, and she asked Oona, “Aren’t you worried he might do something weird? Follow you home or something?” And what was teen Oona’s response? “Oh, please. I wish someone would stalk me.”
Unsurprisingly, after Alice’s mother stopped paying for Alice’s acting classes, Alice started selling panties to men as well.
“Marion”
In addition, to Cline's The Girls, we know Cline from our piece on The Paris Review’s Instagram post about “Marion”. In terms of “Marion”, it’s not uncommon, in both fiction and non-fiction, for teen teleiophiles to indulge in (teen) lipstick lesbianism, which is the case with the 11-year-old narrator and 13-year-old Marion. For example, four paragraphs into the short story we see the narrator “straddling” Marion and massaging her with oil.
Marion lying on her stomach, her shirt pushed up, me straddling her and moving my hands across her back in firm circles, my palms slick and yellowed with oil. Marion had just turned thirteen. I was eleven.
On a road trip to Los Angeles, the nymphets sat in the “backseat, holding hands” with their “bare thighs sticking and skidding on the leather seats.”
And while Marion photographed the 11-year-old narrator, in the nude, Marion opined, “You look good,” and “You look young, really great”. That was before Marion touched the tip of the narrator’s nipple with the lens of the Kodamatic and consequently gasped, “It’s hard.”
Subsequently, the nymphets kissed, Marion told the narrator to pretend that Marion was Jack - Marion’s much older crush, and she encouraged the 11-year-old to look sexy.
She threw her arms around my neck, loose like a child, and kissed me with her eyes open. “It’s okay,” she said. “Pretend I’m Jack. Look sleepy. Look sexy. Try to look like I do.” We were breathing hard.
Bobby, Marion’s father, gave Marion and the narrator goodnight kisses “square on the mouth”, and Marion’s other seventh-grade classmates were not allowed to visit Marion, because her father walked around naked in front of the schoolgirls, but let’s skip over Bobby to elaborate on Marion and Jack.
Jack, like the narrator, was visiting Marion’s family on their ranch. Jack, with his “tanned skin”, stayed in the barn with his girlfriend. As an excuse to see Jack, Marion, while dressed seductively, moaned, “I need cigarettes.”
Marion was wearing her shorts over her favorite bright orange bikini, nubby fabric stretched tight across her breasts, her shoulders shining from sunscreen.
Men stared at her when she wore that suit, and she liked it.
Unsurprisingly, Jack was attracted to the allure of the two nymphets. For example, “When Jack first came for dinner at the ranch, he would follow Marion with his eyes when she got up from the table.”
And while Jack rolled the cigarette for Marion, he glanced at the narrator whom related:
When he glanced at me, I turned and hunched my shoulders, trying to relieve the strain of my breasts against the borrowed [bikini] fabric.
On a subsequent visit to Jack’s, Marion stole a pair of his girlfriend’s “black lace underwear” - with a “slit in the crotch”. Marion perused the Playboys, “This one’s real skinny, but her tits are big. Like me. Men love that.” And Jack told the nymphets about Roman Polanski, the then 44-year-old Academy Award nominated film director, and “THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL” whom he sodomized, which enthralled the nymphets.
WE talked about that a lot, what the girl might have looked like, how Roman Polanski knew her, how it had happened. Did she have breasts? Did she have her period yet?”
Intriguingly, Cline wrote that the nymphets were jealous of the nymphet whom Polanski sodomized:
“We were jealous, imagining a boyfriend who wanted you so bad he broke the law.” However, I wasn’t surprised, because per Hollywood Lolita, Polanski confided in his autobiography: “Many women seem irresistibly attracted by notoriety, and many – especially since the Los Angeles affair – are eager to meet me.”
Subsequently, the nymphets “spent more and more time at the barn” with Jack where “Marion leaned up against his desk [...]” and “[...] smiled at him with an intensity that made her look almost cruel.” And at the barn, Marion asked the narrator to watch Jack to see if he “liked her”. After that, the narrator noted when Jack looked at “Marion’s slim thighs in cutoffs.”
In addition to using cigarettes as an excuse to visit Jack, Marion volunteered to deliver messages from Jack’s girlfriend “[...] in the kitchen to Jack in the barn, or ice cream sandwiches in the peak hours of heat.”
Not only did Marion take nude pictures of the narrator, Marion had the narrator: “[...] take pictures of her naked body laid out on rocks [...] She tied a red ribbon around her throat like she had seen on one of the girls in Playboy.”
Along with a twenty-dollar bill and a lock of her hair, Marion placed her nude Kodamatic photos in a box and tied the box with the red ribbon. Voilà, a gift for Jack! However, before giving Jack his gift, strategically, Marion suggested that the nymphets had done enough pulling and needed to push.
Marion, “We’re staying away for a few days. You keep men on their toes. You make them miss you.”
Subsequently, the nymphets planned their return to the barn. The plan included what bras they would wear and what they would say. And to keep Jack close to her while they waited, Marion wrote: “[...] Jack’s name on her body, [and] on the bottoms of her feet, where the ink slid into the whorls.”
But before the girls could return to Jack’s, the nymphets had a spat, and Marion’s mother discovered Marion's photo with the “ribbon around her throat and her legs spread open.”
“A / S / L”
In “A / S / L”, the last time Thora had been in a chatroom was in “high school, [during] sleepovers where girls crowded around a desktop computer and wrote sickening things to men [i.e., sexting], all of it a joke, then furtively masturbated in their sleeping bags.”
Years later, while her husband was at work, 35-year-old Thora was back in the chat. She used the username Thora18, but despite the 18, she pretended to be a blond and blue-eyed 16-year-old cheerleader. She chatted about how big her tits were and how short she wore her cheerleading skirt, but every time the enthralled men mentioned sex, Thora seductively typed hahahaha and asked What’s that. Thora “enjoyed the back-and-forth”, and the men did too.
They were ecstatic, writing back instantly, the sudden use of exclamation points like cardiograms from their throbbing erections: I won’t tell babe don’t worry!!!!”
Initially, Thora was reluctant to post nudes, “but then she thought, why not?”
She had an entire run of photos of herself on her phone now: bending over, the seat of her underwear pulled tightly across her ass, pictures of her face from the nose down, a nipple between her fingers.
“She had never been the focus of so much attention.” However, when she got bored of chatting with the same men, Thora signed in under James45 or DaddyXO, and while pretending to be a man, she exchanged pictures. Of her picture she excitedly typed: Such a whore and Little teen whore.
She had never been so excited: seeing herself as these men did, some unformed idiot who needed to be fucked. Her sheets smelled like sweat, all the curtains drawn. She didn’t eat for whole days.
Thora was absolutely consumed with pretending to be a nymphet and chatting about nymphets. It gave her life meaning. She even chatted while her husband slept.
[...] truly, she would rather do this than anything else: run the usual errands that kept things in motion, see James, have dinner with him. It was like having a calling, finally, the way she had once imagined she might. A life organized around a higher goal.
While James slept, his back turned to her and the covers kicked off, she typed furtively on her phone to men who sent photos of dicks [...] sometimes overlarge penises with the porn watermark visible in the corner.
Wow, she always typed. I don’t know if it will fit.
We've written about nymphets lying to appear older, but this may be the first time we've written about the converse.
