Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  In this case, Ma soon felt right. Kind as she was benign in her negligence, nest-filling, Joan aimed to supply. Rose would never again want for anything material and whenever tenderness flooded Joan, most often on holidays, she would pull Rose toward her muskmelon breast and call her saved little daughter her egg.

  Stationed in that grand house with Joan and her caustic son, Rose went to public school in Berkeley and Oakland during the height of busing, happy in hallways led by that first principal named Big Daddy. Respectful toward every part of her new social order, Rose learned how to perform, eyes closed, the Black Panther handshake, to dance Miriam Makeba’s Pata Pata and the Robot, to make her dancing body mechanical in strict enough a way to outperform any machine crafted on the backs of industrial-revolution slavery. With awe Rose listened to Free to Be…You and Me and sang Japanese kite songs. She would never learn what states neighbor Oklahoma or what happened in 1816. Instead she learned how to hula and incubate chicks, and in third grade started carrying around a big pad and pencil as transcriber for her own yearlong project, Say Something. Its highlights:

  Rose: “Say something.”

  Local Informant #241: “Something.”

  Rose: “Something else.”

  LI #241: “Something else.”

  As a pale girl who looked ready to cry, always a minority, Rose kept getting beaten up at school. Her acquaintances rescued her about as often as they also showed great talents for disappearing. Once Rose managed to escape from spelling-bee whizdom, shy dorkhood and Say Something, all of which had delighted Ma, once she came to the small scruffy private high school that was to be her own personal incubator, she sighted her future best friend in the halls like a flash, already laughing—long neck, round earrings, formidable bones—and later talked to this tall girl at the market while simultaneously handing over all her money.

  It may be Berkeley of the eighties but it remains the Berkeley where no household lacks its bedside copy of Gibran’s The Prophet, the western equivalent of The Bell Jar that lives on every east coast home’s bookshelf. The prophet matters in Berkeley, a place where no one has breakdowns because the idea of a breakdown simply does not exist. Instead people go into periods of healing and newly outfitted jargon. Adults visit others’ homes and speak a psychological code Rose learns to decipher. They do not say I’m thirsty but rather I find myself feeling the need for a glass of water. They lock themselves in lecture halls to have speakers accept confessions, forbid urination and destroy egos, or they follow leaders who demand that all possessions be placed on a pyre made up of the leaders’ bank accounts. Some massage therapist friend of her mother will end up living with Rose’s family for a spell. His first week with the family he will sit on the backyard’s divan, touching points on Rose’s adolescent neck so as to better connect her interior polarity. The next week the therapist will rub off the lipsticked lyrics scrawled on her bedroom mirror because a young girl should see herself clearly. Mirrors are important. The next week, one morning before school, the therapist will lean back on a pile of clean clothes in the darkened laundry room and beckon Rose into a hug she will run away from, as she has run away from other adult hugs composed with similar theme and scope. That afternoon she will have the good fortune of meeting her future best friend in the market and hand over her money with great good cheer, the massage guy at home immediately not mattering as much during his last few weeks at their house until he too will slip out of her mother’s life like all the other passing-in, passed-out therapists and humble gurus, French psychic ministers, Tibetan explorers, Israeli bakers or midwestern secretaries who have paraded through the stained-glass light of Rose’s living room and ended up staying a spell.

  None of this perturbs the onset of the Lolas. The week they meet, Lana and Rose—not yet Lola One and Two—will take a bus together to the avenue where grizzly war veterans lean against storefronts, everyone reassured by the open-air market of entrepreneurs trafficking in items bohemia calls useful, all the T-shirts tie-dyed and jewelry beaded, silver or turquoise in homage to conquered indigenous nations, all the incense handmade and quartzes magical in honor of eternal spiritual quest. A friendly, nonconformist orthodoxy pulses around all this and its consistency cocoons the girls. On the street, the black-bereted Bubble Lady will be selling books of her own poetry, blowing bubbles their way as if to salute her own girlhood.

  The Lolas, forming, buy a stick of sandalwood incense from a passing man, burning it as they walk, getting to feel happily outré since they wield the secret sincerity of mobile, satirical youth, feeling richer for passing by the dying world of the hippies. It will take only a few weeks after their first outing for the Lolas to become a bubble unto themselves, Lana being a prankster possessing a certain oblivion to the feelings of others and a welcome spirit of invention.

  Lana’s humor can be cruel. From the start Rose is so besotted, she cannot be a conscientious objector. One confident sophomore girl has a limp that makes her lift her right toe, pointed like a ballerina doing a parallel pas de chat, and whenever the Lolas see her, they too indiscernibly point their toes. To do so feels to Rose less like cruelty and more like crafting a bridge between their solipsism and every element of the external world, connecting to the world in a fit of girlishness, like a Giacometti drawing from art history class in which the potentially isolated figure bears a wild network of lines between the self and the surrounding room, the lines those drawn by the girls and their weekend night rituals.

  Latchkey kids for different reasons, the Lolas walk between Rose’s house—in the south flatlands of Berkeley—through wooded campus, rape-oblivious, to the highlands of Lana’s house in the hills swathed in the mist and oleander of north Berkeley. Along the way they stop to climb plum trees or enter the fluorescence of the convenience store for bubble gum. Or they eat cereal in the aisles of a supermarket, walking up and down using spoons, bowls, cereal and milk borrowed from the store. Often enough, they walk past Frat Row and dip into its endless party swoon.

  Into one of these party houses the Lolas saunter and make themselves at home, helping each other to a pot of yogurt pilaf while speaking in foreign accents. They go onto one of the many streetside redwood decks where frat boys barbecue while pretending to be their conservative fathers around sorority girls who mimic some unguessable sort of mothers. The Lolas stay eternal tourists, scooting around aliens who mingle with a drink in one hand and the other plunged into the inevitable khaki pocket. Everything is useful. The Lolas run across the soundstage of the parties while serving each other the college kids’ punch and pineapple barbecue skewers. Or else they spray water pistols into a strobed crowd of sweaty dancers sincere about mating rituals. In a sock-scented dorm, they nod their heads while yet another frat boy confesses his need to find athletic girls and then spend at least an hour in the mildewed gilt of someone’s bathroom, laughing.

  After school, they watch pickup soccer games, tanning their legs and cracking sunflower seeds, later running around inside one player’s apartment—poor Savaso—until he gets annoyed with their endless giggle and throws them out. Once two mocked boys from a night-time party throw them into the Bancroft fountain. No one hurts the girls and no one takes advantage, since the sharing of adventure forms their amulet, the Lolas two against any one.

  Their absurdist biographies change daily, the one constant being that their names stay Lola One and Lola Two. Sometimes they are sorority girls in Delta Delta Delta. Or they topless-sunbathe at a local lake and when the lifeguard catches them, they become foreign students, quibbling back in fake French or Swedish. Sometimes they are sisters or cousins, sometimes long-lost twins, sometimes they may as well inhabit the same skin.

  Whoever they are, they barely blink. They attend upperclassmen parties wearing period-stained sheets they have fashioned into tunics held up by one of Vic’s broad leather belts but instead of entering sit inside some improvised tent—and who had brought along the extra sheet? and why?—smoking oregano cigarettes they roll themsel
ves. Or, unwitting in their bad timing, locked into a room at a party, they must pee out a second-story window, potential crushes walking on the street seconds away from sighting their bare rear ends, shameful windowsill teenage moons.

  Their reprieve is the giggle, the one forever there to catch them: they fall upon each other giggling to stitch back a world where all is as forgiving as their fun-seeking selves. Because making themselves at home in a fraternity house or anyone’s dorm does not mean they ever kiss or sleep with any boy. What is fun is unilateral power, one the Lolas don’t understand, the bubble of oblivion keeping them content, the boys as boys never mattering. What is fun is disguise and age transvestism, the two-headed revolution of the Lolas, their statutory taboo entry into any place that would forbid them. Their religion is movement, their sacrament choice, their enemy everyone else’s sincerity, their savior the giggle that lets any wound of their own stay unspoken.

  Perhaps inevitably, they befriend a guy who may be in his twenties but could be crawling toward fifty, a genial bearded bear of a man who works in a used-record store and goes by the name Big George. On the sly he hands them old records so they each amass a collection, a departure from the lesbian songwriters whose work Rose memorized in her earlier years. Go back into the darkness like the wild thing that you are; sing out a song of the soul; I would go through the desert for you. By some implicit agreement, the Lolas divvy up bands. They love obscure songs but once they go to a concert by a London garage band they are smitten and start using the band as a mood regulator while getting dressed in their most frequent uniform, tank tops and plaid shirts, readying themselves for the serendipity of a nighttime walkabout.

  Behind these travels in best-friendship play not just a soundtrack but a couple of movies, both from swinging London of the sixties: one features a band in pill-addled, bonking high spirits while the other shows actors from another band as gangsters living it up, rousting about in leopard-print velvet pads with various actresses to whom, in their tease mode, the Lolas have been occasionally referenced. Both signify their mischievous future, the ability to hold power among danger without either element mastering them. Their soundtrack is mainly composed of songs that describe a She who Rose believes she should become, an elusive, mysterious, charismatic and slightly cruel girl driving the singer wild with desire or nostalgia while performing acts as simple as bending to tie the lace of the singer’s shoe. Three songs in particular have chord changes and lyrics that master Rose’s marrow. The first song, about a relationship gone sour, begins like this:

  (lucid, sad guitar riff) Angie, when will those clouds all disappear?

  During the peak of the Lolas, Lana likes to twiddle Rose by playing “Angie” at her like an instrument of war, since its A-minor sentiment can make Rose cry. What does Rose hear in the song? A future terminus? The malaise of adult relationships? The second song comes from Rose’s adopted brother’s domain: yearning, a cold spring rain, a smile from a veil, trading heroes for ghosts, wishing someone were closer.

  But the last song plays seed to their budding selves, beginning so deceptively bubble gum and danger-free. The song is by the band that Rose gets to implicitly claim, given both affinity and prior acquaintance. The song has an intro that goes like this: C (repeated many times), D, E, after which the majority of the song takes place in the I-IV-V realm of A-D-E. The stuttered insistence of the C is the first foreshadowing of the danger zones into which the song will slip later, the C only a temporary illusion of ease, and Rose feels that if she listens closely enough to the song, she will find her future.

  But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man And so is Lola.

  Somewhere around so is Lola, a potent danger chord enters: the return of the C, which undoes the sharps of the A-D-E system, presenting more of a stealth danger than the going-out-on-a-falsetto-limb of the G#7-C#m at I got down on my knees.

  In the song that loans them their nighttime names, Rose hears at least some of her future with Lana, who, by letting her live as an outlaw, makes her whole.

  On the day squeamish Rose is to dissect fetal pigs in biology lab, Lana covertly places thick slabs of ham between the pages of the lab book so that, on opening the book, Rose almost faints before falling back into the giggle. Or Lana fills Rose’s locker with water balloons so that when she opens the metal door, a cascade of balloons splashes her homework. Later that day Lana convinces Rose to steal the keys to her mother’s car for some stammering neighbor boy to instruct them in how to start the Volvo so that two girls can drive underage in 1950s missile-breast bikinis they have pilfered from one of those mysterious mother drawers filled with layered silk scarves and well-perfumed earring boxes.

  Nothing is not useful. They drive poorly to a eucalyptus clearing where they lie on their backs wearing cardboard-tipped swimsuits, letting rain drum the flat of their bellies, their viewers not just each other but the imaginary, slightly shocked audience they always tote around to cheer them on. They have come to this clearing as if rain-spattered beatnik exhilaration had been their mission back at alpha, drugged without drugs, beatitude theirs to find even if their own chivalric code means that the next day they can never talk about the previous day’s hijinks.

  Instead they return to their usual sport, running the halls of their school with its organized topography. On the roof, stoners sit between classes, listening to country-inflected rock, ushering in dense, eloquent silences while future alligator lawyers circumnavigate the school’s lower levels, nearly indistinguishable to the girls from unmoored oddities like the bearded Trotskyite who will become a deacon, a boy navigating adolescence by carrying a small black briefcase around everywhere, using a ruler from it to measure the straight nose of any potential future wife. Lana and Rose belong to no group but travel in and out of many, still a possibility in a small high school. Because Lana has an older soccer-playing neighbor at the school who is friendly with Rose’s adopted brother, the girls hear megaphoned the older kids’ gossip. Certain boys who, according to Rose’s brother, may have a crush on the Lolas become just silly background. Whenever such boys turn a corner in the halls, following Lana’s lead, Rose squeals some non sequitur and runs away.

  According to these older boys, the Lolas are cruel. And if this repute has not deterred them in the slightest, if they go on squeaking names and dancing away, perhaps it is because they know they get to stay basically good girls whose friendship keeps them safe, riding every rule on the outskirts of respectability.

  Really, they might as well be Catholic-school girls rather than girls whose parents have no idea where they are: their friendship keeps them chaste. Another era surely would call them teases. Yet being a tease suggests manipulation while the Lolas stay virgins, dancing on the brink of understanding the power that Rose will later think America—and especially California but most particularly Berkeley—gives girls too early. The Lolas never look directly into the flame, preferring to use it without possessing it. Instead they act as enlightened despots of pubescent sexuality, willing to listen to their peasants’ complaints without ever taking any charge of burnt barns, stolen cows or pilfered land as seriously as the workers might like.

  Why take anything seriously? All along they stay physical with each other in some sort of jokey nipple-tweaking way, nicknaming each other Buxom, their love less sexual than total, Californian in its appreciation of the other’s physical being, an annexation of identity. They give each other long oil massages in invented steam rooms powered by blow-dryers under a hanging sheet, seeming to horrify Lana’s father Vic when he catches them engaged in their sport. But the actual sexual act is inconceivable: music lubricates them, Lana’s long-limbed beauty soothes Rose, and what they really mate with is the accretion of all their moments into one brilliant future.

  Lying in one of their beds after another nighttime walkabout, adults vanished, what Rose always says to Lana is can I hug you from behind? since behind demands nothing. Can I hug you from behind, which makes Lana automatically turn an
d Rose’s hand flop over that waist, casual in touching a human screen that lets the world’s eye of grace stare back.

  Grace—because she is learning something, especially having been let into Lana’s house, an abode with two married parents and her bathroom a tiled nave perfumed by kitty litter and the banana-peel warmth of Lana’s sweat. Rose seethes with curiosity, feeling as if she has been let into the sanctum of a fellow novitiate who has managed, so far, to navigate girlhood with an admirably simple diffidence.

  While Rose will later think that the interior of any woman’s medicine cabinet reveals all attendant fantasy life, Lana’s cabinet secrets are so simple: scissors, an eye pencil, a medieval French amulet of two fish swallowing one bird. Cloaking all anthropological tendencies, Rose will be studious and make no comment, given the formality that descends on them in the daytime in either girl’s house, making them exquisitely sensitive to the invisible rites of family, the girls turning boyish as they grab apples from the kitchen so they can scoot by, usually, Mary cooking, their haunt most often Lana’s house. The girls grab their apples before hitting an outside world that returns the liberty of disguise.