Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  Hair dripping black, she gets on the phone to her assistant to cancel every object-loving, death-obsessed client. Mainly she wishes to cancel the march of time, what others call her business: she works part-time as an estate planner, helping people with loads of cookies or crumbs decide who gets what after they pass.

  It’s all about planning, she always says in her first meeting with clients. Being able to control the ultimate unknowable. Plan your passage well and no one loses, no one gets upset.

  While to her boyfriend, not long ago, she had said that fulfilling appointments often makes her feel as if she too were swallowing cookies. As if everyone considers her, in the face of the uncomfortable topic of death, heroic for helping control what after all is just one more display of the hoarding and manipulation of crumbs, the sale of whatever someone held dear. In law school, she’d had a classmate, admirable if not friend material, with abundant dark hair and a glow Rose had admired, the classmate flouncing around and saving people, ending up a specialist on the problem of snitching in low-income communities and its impact on death-row cases. An exemplary road. Rose could have chosen a field of law where she really changed people’s lives for the better, child custody or capital punishment, but she had been repelled by, on the one hand, the rise of vigilance about sexual abuse, and on the other, the use of DNA testing, finding both too exact in their methodology, allowing for little nuance, and without planning, she had ended up in the cul-de-sac of estate law which was nothing if not about exactitude.

  Only a couple of months earlier, she had followed in the news the case of Dondi Watson, a boy from her elementary school who had grown up to face the death penalty for Oakland gang killings but who had one of those popular moralizing lawyers able to exonerate Dondi via DNA testing. Now that too seemed laudable: Dondi free to live. Years ago Rose had won a spelling bee, her face in the paper, and Dondi had biked up afterward, hair shiny, mouth happy and jeering, solely to let her know her chest was just as flat as her picture had promised. Back then she also could tell he was impressed and they had exchanged something of value and unknown valence so that years later, feverish in reading an interview with Dondi, just prior to his exoneration, she felt called to be less useless, as if the two of them had left invisible ash thumbprints on each other that only now became visible. She had thrust down the paper, lack of purpose heaped up, venting to her boyfriend all the reasons she felt so meaningless practicing something as petty as estate law. Maybe this uselessness had kept her barren, hope mislaid in her womb.

  Don’t be so hard on yourself, her boyfriend had said, want to go walk on the beach?

  In the welcome chill of the corner diner, awaiting an omelet of two whites, she lays down fork, knife and spoon with care, as ever trying not to feel the hole in her stomach, the one that makes her, right now, see the utensils as signs of the devil, ending and lost hope.

  Twenty-eight days prior, the city starting to cook, Gan, potential father of her future children, had left.

  Twenty-nine days prior, they had gone to a Dutch movie about a woman vanishing. In the movie theater, Rose had sat between Gan and some dreadlocked latecomer. At first she had not realized the hand running up her thighs belonged not to Gan but rather to the dreadlocked guy. Once aware, she vacated herself and let the stranger do whatever he wanted, his eyes on Gan the whole time. If this wasn’t the first time she had gone so passive, she now reached some new peak of dissociation. The movie unspooled before her, unheedable. Once the lights came up, in the aisle she did confide at least one portion of the extracinematic activity to Gan, leaving out her own awareness, finding herself pleased that Gan flushed. For the first time her fiancé showed his caveman side by saying: I want to go find that guy and smack him. Though clearly the dreadlocked guy specialized in covert ops, having long since fled the theater, who cared about that, Rose was thrilled to find herself smack in the middle of a freedom stolen from her Lola days, the movie moment parachuted down into one of her bleakest epochs yet, studded with uselessness and the bad news of fertility appointments. Between Gan’s anger and the dreadlocked guy’s disappearance, she got to feel criminal, heedless of usual laws, and at this joy, Rose had needed to hug Gan close, after which she was good at faking a knowledgeable, reviews-based discussion of the movie.

  Gan’s caveman side was what made her, the next day, all the more surprised. In the same tone a person would use to cancel an order of burritos, Gan chose to say—while driving to yet another doctor who would advise them on the odds of sticking six human eggs into Rose’s forty-one-year-old womb so she might gestate nine months and have at least one baby—that he thought it best they take a break.

  Take a break. She didn’t understand at first. Hadn’t they been getting along? They used to kid about her unknown Viking genes and the fanfold held by a foster kid’s endowment. He liked telling her she could be a product of royal incest, the heir of Lars the explorer and Birgit the queen. And when they had flipped through catalogues of potential egg donors, they had talked about Rose as a reverse chicken with someone’s new eggs laid inside. Hadn’t the whole thing really been one big copulative joke linking them? The odd-numbered dark rooms to which prim nurses sent Gan so he could scan magazines boasting trios of semi-naked Russian cheerleaders in order to ejaculate and save such strangely loved vital fluids in a test tube. And if their jokes faltered, hadn’t they anyway been doing their best? Hadn’t they been trying to produce something viable, the miracle of an organism with divisible heart and brain cells, a child and carrier of exquisite voltage, not triplets, not twins, no need to get greedy, just a singleton. Something viable, the voice of a newscaster broadcasting into her skull. Just one viable fertilized egg. She got it as she listened to Gan explaining his reasons for leaving: the punchline to all their attempts. Rose might end up one of those child-craving people who never got even one baby to cuddle.

  In the diner, she counted and realized it had been exactly twenty-seven days since her last conversation with Gan and that this moment had augured her month of bad news. Clearly, the universe was not exactly voting in her favor. Was she being punished? For what? For having let some guy with incomparable hair touch her during The Vanishing?

  Fourteen days before the diner breakfast, Rose had received a call from her adopted brother saying her adoptive mother had died. Nine days earlier, trying to understand how she fit into anyone’s planetary scheme, Rose had rocket-launched herself out of Ellay to go find the gravesite of her birth-mother.

  So this morning, after breakfast, still recovering from the bloat of all her recent egg-stimulating drugs, it makes sense that a flashing lightbulb in a diner’s bathroom could be the sole sign suggesting escape, one that Rose interprets this way: she should go visit a section of Ellay she never frequents just to find a little something, and, while driving, she finds the boulevard’s green lights confirm her choice. Having arrived at a freezing store, Rose fingers clothes undulating on a rack under five racks of recessed blue light, the beauty she has wished for serenading her down to the last wistful detail, to the salesgirl with her brown skin and a tattoo on her lower back: two tiger eyes, one of them winking.

  “Your name’s Rose?” says the salesgirl. “I love that. An old-fashioned name. You never hear it anymore. You barely belong in this modern period with a name like that, almost like Phyllis? I say don’t go to that rack, Rose, you’ll get lost over there, let me find you something amazing, like your name.”

  The salesgirl climbs high on a ladder to scavenge through boxes, working hard to earn her commission, here you go, Phyllis, when a voice enters the store, cutting through years.

  At first, when the woman enters the store, Rose doesn’t recognize her, since all women in Ellay look familiar, given that in Ellay women fashion themselves into recognizable icons so others may sight their potential as quickly as the eye processes a film frame, one sixteenth of a second. Yet if this woman in her long purple dress is disguised, her laugh gives her away, ripping through the store as she asks a
bout parking, the laugh unmistakable, given that her former classmates used to say only a mother could love that kind of voice. Still Rose must squint, fast-shuttering past the purple muumuu over espadrilles to find pale-skinned Jane who back in high school did have the kind of mother unusual back in that era, so attentive and keen on expanding everyone’s horizons that she hosted foreign students, a mother showing up early to every teacher meeting who made it seem that caring equated socially with throwing a smiling albatross around your kid’s neck.

  “Jane?”

  “Rose! God. Can’t believe it. Yesterday guess where I was? Remember that nudist colony up Five? Where we went years ago with Lana and her dad?”

  “And her mom.” Almost whispering.

  “Yeah. Anyway. Guess who I saw? Lana. I’m not kidding. She didn’t tell you she was going up there? But she looks great, of course, you too, right? But isn’t that a coincidinky, like we used to say?”

  “You saw Lana.”

  “I mean she barely had a grip on the fact we were all there together once. I’m not saying my memory’s great either. But you guys must be in touch.”

  “Sure.” The first voiced lie of the conversation.

  “It’s crazy she’s moving to that place. I mean permanently?”

  “Crazy.”

  “Not like I met her new boyfriend, but I’m sure he’s, you know, or I can imagine. She’s already been there a week. Different, right?”

  “Totally.”

  “I always admired her free spirit, I mean yours too, but wouldn’t you get sick of being in a place like that constantly? Her boyfriend’s going to be guru. I’m not that groovy.”

  “No, no, you are but what’s the name of the place again?”

  “Hope Springs.”

  Rose smiles as if someone had just emerged from all life’s inconsequential merchants to say now she could go dissolve herself in honey.

  “You’re too young to get senior moments, right, Rose? I mean we’re in our prime. You know, speaking of, did the spa special up there. The best. If you’re going up to visit Lana, got to try that, if you like seaweed—”

  Hope Springs! For years Rose had been looking. She had stopped with the detective and computer services, had almost given up looking for Lana altogether.

  Yet outside, after enduring much talk of seaweed facials and restorative wraps, there waits for Rose, on the Santa Monica curb, a perfect wheat-embossed penny, so rare these days.

  NINTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 10:43 A.M.

  Continue long enough in life, you find that what you call hope, some call amnesia and others call nostalgia. A woman enters a sulfurous open-air spa just south of California’s navel. The place happens to be called Hope Springs and its clocks lag at least ten minutes behind any other clock on the Pacific coast. The woman will learn that the name, Hope, does not come from the misunderstood name of some native tribe, since, if once there had been prayer grounds, they now lie beneath the place where feet—brown red black white—pad toward one of three pools.

  In her head she hears the refrain Kansas, she says, is the name of the star.

  The hot pool, as the sign notes, is kept at 116 degrees Fahrenheit so that it scalds the skin, a way of saying that purification has begun and all prior selves will be scalped.

  The woman—Lana Wagner, born California Fukuji Guzman Mahler—tells herself she is glad not to meet anyone’s eyes, though secretly she cannot help her seduction habit.

  The pamphlet says the warm pool is kept at a decent 96 degrees. Most people stand neck-deep, leaning against walls, showing a clear religion about the avoidance of gazes. Others float on backs, toes hooked under the guardrail, absorbing healing minerals, a whalelike breast or groin occasionally surfacing. Some help others float so they may deprive the senses. A few sit in dead seriousness facing each other, whispering, still enough to be having a sex at least tantric. The goals of this chosen gaol: push the senses forward or back, be in the body or float out of it in dead-man’s pose.

  As the catalogue states: this is a retreat center + site for soul expansion.

  The cold pool is at 30 nipple-hardening degrees Fahrenheit. You are to plunge into this immediately before or after the hot pool. In a zone partitioned away from the adults’ reconnection attempts, two small kidney-shaped baths await phantom kids.

  I am dying, the woman is thinking, as many have thought before her, heat working at least ninety-nine strands of her past out into the waters, since, like many others in the spa, she is making vows about future behavior. Her hair waves, swirls upon itself. She pulls it up, ties it in a knot.

  Tomorrow the Thirty-third Year birthday celebration of this place is due to start, a month of activities attracting all sorts of people wanting to let go, let it out, let God. According to rumor, there will be gatherings, rehearsals, reunions, a performance.

  Nearby, a man in a railroad cap sweeps mulberries off the path. Does he also study the back of her neck?

  Rules are posted everywhere around Hope Springs, taking on a tone familial or punitive, sometimes both.

  NO BREAKABLES OR ROOM TOWELS IN THE POOL AREA.

  NO CELL PHONES, DRUGS, PETS, OR CHILDREN IN THE ADULT POOLS.

  NO TALKING IN THE POOL AREA, ONLY WHIMPERING.

  CHECK-OUT IS AT TWELVE.

  NO MEAT, FISH, POULTRY OR NUDITY ALLOWED IN THE COOK-IT-YOURSELF KITCHEN AREA.

  UNLABELED FOOD WILL BE THROWN AWAY. ROUND-TOP COOLERS IN THE FRIDGE ARE PROHIBITED.

  NO USE OF RESIDENTS’ SHELVES.

  NO TARDINESS TO YOGA CLASSES.

  NO STAYING PAST YOUR PARKING PERMIT’S EJECTION POINT.

  If people want utopia, they need rules, she keeps hearing her father’s voice. People come from everywhere with every bastard breed of idea so rules become both their linkage and religion.

  Uptight, she thinks, one of the few words her father had borrowed from the argot of his day, believing it an apt neologism. Uptight, Lana, is a useful idiom. But groovy, no. Radical as bland ubiquitous praise, no.

  The idea of uptight floats in her as the pool does its job, heating her up without fully undoing her. From other sectors that she has been in, she knows some people, radically groovy or uptight, giddily volunteer themselves to be enforcers, while others find delight in breaking rules, and that the signs bear witness to this essential division in human nature.

  NO UNINVITED SEXUAL ADVANCES OR ACTIVITY IN THE POOLS. NO SEXUAL ACTIVITY IN THE SAUNA—SECURITY WILL BE CALLED. IF YOU’RE IN A HURRY, YOU’RE IN THE WRONG PLACE.

  She reads it all, relieved by the explicit. The sum total of these signs is innocence: nothing can be covered. All can be if not regulated at least washed away.

  This is fertile valley in what would otherwise be unbroken desert along Highway Five, south of Bakersfield and north of Los Angeles, just below the Grapevine. Apart from the fields, the prison some miles north remains the main institution in the greater underpopulated county, one tip of the golden gulag, and having seen the signs while driving down, she can’t help knowing this, or that, by historic quirk, the current governor’s personal residence is planted only some twenty miles south of the prison, since one of the things the desert does well is maintain mileage signs. Along the interstate, no matter how isolated you might feel among tumbleweed, broken barbed-wire posts and dead-dream paralytic oil pumps, at least you know where you are—in your car, free in the USA, speeding north or south.

  She leaves the hot pool for the warm, in which an older man says to a younger girl: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” the girl laughing as if the cliché breaks anew upon the dawn of her consciousness. Does this exchange count as an uninvited sexual advance or would it be considered merely affable?

  Lana can’t help but be perturbed by the familiarity of certain details. The mulberries, for one. Why do the mulberries seem so familiar? Somewhere once she had learned about these dark fruit, about their short lives and need for little tending, here ending up smashed into the pavement next to the pools
so the concrete bears a splotched map of regret, not even the squirrels hungry for them.

  The ethos of the group dance night at Hope Springs, according to the catalogue, was: LOVE LIKE YOU HAVE NO FEAR, DANCE LIKE NOBODY’S WATCHING, LIVE LIKE YOU HAVE DIED A MILLION TIMES.

  The folksy but peremptory signs go along with the free Q-tips, cotton balls, lavender lotion and soap, all of it sharing the noblesse you find in utopia. Then again, there’s no blaming the place if something goes wrong and you get lost on one of the 1,600 acres of hiking trails or a mountain lion snags you because you crouched and didn’t throw rocks and spoke in a high voice or you end up getting Lyme disease from a tick bite since you did sign that liability release when you entered oblivious and hopeful through the big metal griffin gate: palsy, depression or memory loss being just a few of the unshakable symptoms you could get from a minuscule bug.

  That afternoon Lana had checked into the room that would belong to them, to her and her beau Dirk, the new resident guru of Hope Springs. Like a honeymoon suite: ruffled swag, floral bedprint, angel-shaped soap, towels well fluffed, next to the room for her nine-year-old twins and just down the path from the Moroccan-styled scarlet yurt in which Dirk would receive supplicants under a canopy, where he would seat himself on zabutons before a mirror shaped like a louse or maybe was it a scarab?

  Sometimes you open a suitcase and glimpse a ghost leaving: your hopes for this journey or your past journeys, all the beings you have traveled with. In much the same way that driving down here with the boys, the telephone poles had bounded like colts into her rear-view and then stayed, impassive, sentinels passing judgment. She’d been so caffeinated she’d jumped each time a pole appeared like a judgment from on high there in the desert plain heading toward the Grapevine. The boys hadn’t noticed her jumps because to distract them from their loss—leaving the north coast of Yalina and the house they’d known since they were tiny, their grandparents’ land, the whole bit—she had plugged them into watching movies like The Wizard of Oz, a fantasia for backseat animals.