Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  Acting pleased, the teacher weaves the blurt into a story about the monkey-god Hanuman who straddles the islands. “Any other comments on who else might be living in you?”

  Then rises the sweet heat of a voice from the back, someone who must have come in late, and who would not have craned around to find the source of that mellifluity? Vic had once said WE DEEM VOICES PLEASANT THAT COME FROM SYMMETRICAL BODIES.

  A woman shushing two young boys who must be hers.

  Lana. Lana in full symmetry.

  “Mine isn’t a hamster. I think I have a toad sitting on my chest,” Lana says, joking, not meeting any eyes. Her sons get excited by this response and interrupt each other. One says loudly he has a superspy magic robot in his gut while the other explains that an ice-cream cone sits at his forehead in torpedo position.

  If the yoga mat had turned into a thousand-volt landing dock, Rose could not have jolted more alive. She turns back to the instructor, away from Lana, a smile bursting her body: no prior rehearsal told her how to handle this second.

  The last she had really talked with her friend, they had been hugging goodbye outside a strip joint, a green magnetic flash between them, before a final non-moment in a New York apartment. After that, their wave had broken, leaving them the wash of separate destinies.

  Rose turns around again, unable to stop her goon smile, unmet and probably unnoticed but who cares when she gets to hear again that old knock-knock joke at her heart.

  Outside, Lana is cordial and well-defended, friendly and abstract, as if two former passengers bump into each other and in a feint at politesse try figuring out which bus they had once taken together. What she fails to show in the slightest is that—despite two decades of silence, unilaterally willed—once the Lolas had needed each other for survival.

  “Amazing to find each other at a nudist colony, right?” says Rose.

  “Instead of, what, a convent?” Lana squints, irradiated by a private sun. “So your inner child’s a hamster?” After so many years Rose welcomes Lana’s mockery, a promise of some return.

  “How old are your boys?”

  “How old are you, Sedge? Tee? Seven?” Clearly Lana has her father’s habit of ribbing offspring.

  “Nine and two sixths,” the smaller one protests, caramel eyes big. “Almost nine and three quarters.”

  The larger one twists her hand behind a hip. “Who’s she, mama?” he asks.

  “An old friend. Amazing to run into her.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Lola One!” Lana snorts.

  “I thought I was usually Lola Two.”

  “O yeah. Where do you live these days?”

  “You know, Ellay.”

  “Right, right,” says Lana, as if Los Angeles makes sense, offering no apology for having ignored those letters. Which scenario is worse? That Lana had received all Rose’s letters but hadn’t wanted to read them? Or that she’d read and had chosen not to answer?

  “You didn’t get my letters?” Rose unable to stop herself.

  “No.” And Lana’s head does shake somewhat credibly. “That’s nice. You wrote? To which address?”

  “Maybe I had the wrong one.” Cheered enough to meet in some communal alibi. “Hey, I have a room here. You guys too?”

  “Sort of. That hotel manager helped—”

  “Hogan? He’s funny.” Which gives them plateau enough to share a first real glance. “What are you guys up to now?”

  Lana shakes her head at the boys. “We were—actually, no big plans today.”

  “Want to take a walk or I don’t know?” Rose as embarrassed as if offering a prom invite, her interest too alarmingly genuine.

  “I’d love it,” says Lana. “We should. Hey, boys, want to go check out what Hogan’s doing with that burn?” a concept evidently calculated to a nanometer of precision on impact, enough to set her boys off running, leaving two old friends suddenly alone and facing each other with Lana the first to break the awkwardness. “Actually, Rosie, I’m so shocked to see you,” says Lana, giving Rose a sharp little hug, her shoulder striking Rose’s sternum, “shocked! Hey, you’re still wearing that same china musk perfume.”

  “Yeah, it’s crazy.” Rose’s face burns. “Maybe let’s go meet in one of the pools instead?”

  “Because you love the freaks here that much?”

  And between them escapes another little smile, almost enough to acknowledge everything. The country club hot tubs they had snuck into, climbing over redwood fences at night, and the boys they had teased into those hot tubs before running away, eternally retreating back into the safety of Lola One and Two.

  Or maybe this had just been Lana’s version of the polite smile.

  But as Rose walks back to her room, Venusberg 9, Lana’s touch still vibrates her shoulders. An old song hums inside, one she used to play badly on guitar: keeps me searching for a heart of gold.

  FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 10:40 A.M.

  Lana breathing sulfur, dangling her legs in the tub called the elf cave, struck by two impulses. Of course one route suggests it is only right to stay and wait for Rose. She could trust and tell her everything, girlishly tear the skin off the years. But then again, maybe something is closing in: it might be prudent to gather the boys up and, what, head back to Yalina, tail between legs, after only a few days here, because did she have any other choice?

  An alertness pours through, suggesting the nearness of escape. Instead she summons a rain of commands: don’t be a coward. You came here. Even if Rose has shown up, it’s not right to drag the kids north again. Just because you haven’t hooked into a gig here yet. Stay the course, Lana, she tells herself, in what is actually her mother’s voice, quiet and stern, just as Mary could coax even the most wayward dog to stay.

  On the deck, guests whom Lana has started to understand are the usual suspects start to gather. On the concrete nearest the elf cave tub, two girls—one dark-haired, one reddish—start talking, oblivious to any eavesdroppers:

  “So what happened? I was with that guy the rest of the night?” the redhead asks.

  “No! You left and then I don’t know.”

  “So tell me what I did?”

  “You drove to that place.”

  “No!” More giggling.

  “That was fun,” says the dark-haired girl, acting as historian. “You saw them.”

  “I don’t remember any of it.”

  “Those guys in Kim’s room, they asked who you were?”

  “Who are these people?”

  “The guy with the ears.”

  “I met all of them?”

  “You were in Ray’s room.”

  “Ray?”

  “As we were leaving—”

  “They said they wanted to go somewhere with me, right?”

  “I wouldn’t have let you.”

  “Oh, I was with John!”

  “Yeah! You looked happy. Or happy enough.”

  The amnesiac ignores an incoming call on her cell, preferring to drink water and green tea with her friend, a way of plumping herself up from whatever nighttime ghost marauders had gnawed out of her.

  “Could you be more out of control?” says the historian. “Or what’s gotten into you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I haven’t worked for a while?”

  Watching each other, a moment, a stalemate.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I don’t need any more meds.”

  “You know how I told you about my friend who’s schizophrenic, back at home?”

  “Nope,” says the amnesiac, a giddy, flirtatious tone entering, clearly relieved to be out of the historian’s spotlight. “You forgot that one.”

  “He went to Swarthmore but then they put him in a hospital and he sent me an email saying it was all useful because now he understood how the stock market worked.”

  “That’s so sad.”

  “He also said something like I want to be inside your freaking mind. Come visit me in my workplace and
that he was a little prince in the world of the undipped dipped.”

  “You have such a good memory.”

  “Because it was hilarious. I saved it. Come on, lie on this towel with me.”

  “Could you scoot over?”

  Lana cannot pull away from her eavesdropping. The girls find each other, soak up sun in parallel, make others’ suffering disposable, create an opalescent fizz around: the world is unknown so they flip-flop the important and secure solace, good at drawing the magic circle around themselves. As reward for their labors, they get to enjoy the unguarded hedonism of melting together, the pure prolepsis of sunbathing on concrete.

  Rose comes walking across the deck then, carrying a tray bearing two tall smoothies with straws and umbrellas. Pink, fruity, forgiving. A bluesy song plays on the palm-camouflaged loudspeakers—keep shining, baby, keep shining—and the smile Lana blasts on her friend must look so sincere that Rose almost drops their drinks.

  “Don’t let me make you trip,” Lana tells her.

  “Too late,” says Rose. “But you have no idea. It’s great to see you looking so good. I can’t even tell you how great.”

  “Hey, did you hear that thing on public radio today? About people who die and come back?” Lana doesn’t wait for the answer. “They say after the tunnel and the figure of light and all, people have this moment where they experience the suffering of everyone they were ever connected to?”

  Rose peers at her curiously, seeming to take this in exactly the way it was not meant: as a global apology. “That’s great.”

  “Why?”

  “I love you choosing to tell me that.”

  “But why?”

  In that acre of California, under the sun, Rose flashes a huge smile her way. “You always loved bluffing and you’re still the same,” and Lana, her pinkie furious in scratching an itch in her eye, lets this go.

  FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 3:26 P.M.

  “O yeah, and remember that time that we answered that job ad—”

  “Between freshman and sophomore years in college?” Lana enters the game slowly.

  “I guess, our first summer home, wasn’t it—”

  “That was weird. Getting flown to Florida. What did the ad say?”

  “That we’d be international couriers. What was that guy’s name?”

  “Zander?”

  “I’m so bad with names. But remember you saying he looked like Gerald Ford off a golf course?”

  “He did.” A man on Lana’s left, a bearded older guy, slips into the hot tub, intoning ventilate, ventilate before sliding below the surface of the water.

  “And then remember that limo out of the airport with a wet bar in the car and we were singing ‘joy to the world’ with that girl—”

  So much depends on recalling the girl’s name and Lana is pleased when it shoots up. “Angel.”

  “Then they were trying to fix you up with some war vet named Shooter, right—”

  “Scary.”

  “And you turned him away, remember, at your hotel room.”

  Lana rubs her wrists against each other as if manacled, looking into the forest of naked legs walking by, but Rose keeps going. “Remember—they loved some cheeseball hotel singer singing push it to the left—”

  “Yeah.” For the first time ever, Lana notices how Rose’s face is something like a pink teddy bear’s but keeps herself from blurting this. “And then you kept saying when are you going to interview us for the job?”

  “And that guy Zander kept saying well, hey, you need it, we’ll rig up a boardroom and be in suits, that’s what you want?”

  “We’re a fun company.”

  Rose lets out a little titter. “Fun.”

  “I liked those caipirinhas at those dog races in Orlando.”

  “But you felt bad. Remember the visitors were all white?”

  “I hated that. The way those dog-trainers held the dogs up so these jowly white men could look at their you know.” Lana shivers. The man in the pool, finished with his long submersion, pops out, still exhorting himself to ventilate.

  “Remember you said the company probably had no job for us anyway right before the plane’s wing caught on fire? And we had to land in Houston?”

  “O, thought that was Dallas.” Lana starts laughing, can’t stop.

  “What?”

  “Remember the guy in a ten-gallon hat at the airport telling us his crystal pendant had kept us aloft, saved all of us?”

  “And then Zander. He called you once we got back in New York.”

  “But I started asking questions—”

  “He stopped right?”

  “And a month later I got this call from the FBI saying it was all a scam, we were just one of some bunch of girls those guys had tried ensnaring. And I pretended to be a reporter who needed more details but they wouldn’t tell me any more.”

  “You’re so good.” Rose starts laughing now. “What do you think that was? Like prostitution? Drugs? Your dad thought it was the white slave trade.”

  Lana shakes her head, savoring the weirdness, unexpectedly smiling at a hairy young couple two deck chairs away; the pair smiles back.

  “Remember Zander telling us the job was explaining contracts to various divisions of a holding company?”

  Lana decides not to tell Rose she had slept with Zander. Sometimes Lana had needed to use men like a yardstick to reach whatever she couldn’t reach and sometimes it had almost worked. “Right.”

  “And remember that millionaire we met in the airport who gave us a ride? The guy with a lisp?”

  “What was his job again?” Lana can tell Rose tries to jolly her into one long seamless slide, a slip into happy memory, but now feels as if she is getting one-two-three punched: first with the mention of her dad, continuing with Zander, ending with the millionaire.

  “Whatever, that guy was crazy. He liked talking about all the girls he’d been with.”

  “He served mushy macaroni.” No one has Lana’s back. With too much material on this one, she wants to cut it short.

  “I kept wanting to prove we weren’t hanging around just because we liked his technology.”

  “Like when he showed us the house the first time and said party-size video room, girls?”

  Rose slaps Lana’s arm, the tremor of her laugh almost a cry.

  Lana won’t tell Rose about the first night. Because Rose was working shifts at her dance store that summer, Lana started sleeping with that first of the millionaires, or rather, she let him worship her. The fact of his wealth did nothing but double his homage. She remembers he had a gogo pole in his living room and wanted to teach her how to use it and she’d felt so magisterial laughing him off, her girl-laughter a divine mantle. But after the first time, leaving his place at midnight, she also felt as if she had a pearl rolling down her spine, exploding into a tiger-orange flower and had the thought: that guy just gave me a tiger flame.

  She started seeing him every now and then, that foggy summer before second year of college, beginning a practice of lying to Rose in earnest, feeling she was making an important deposit into her later life by telling Rose that the reason she didn’t want to go again to his remote-control bachelor pad overlooking Coit Tower was because she was afraid of drinking too much. Really she didn’t go with Rose because she liked the guy’s intense solitary worship and the half-life of pleasure, her destiny already rotating away from Rose. In the beginning, of course Lana didn’t know the first of her abortions would come from this guy, one more casual upper-class white abortion as she overheard the nurse saying in the hall before the first of the operations to lodges a bone of grief in her throat for weeks after, tethering her so. And if she had glided through freshman year of college in something of a dream, if she had not seen much of Rose in their New York dorms, before overhearing the nurse in that waiting room, Lana still felt pearly opportunity at the base of her spine, still believed that being a girl among men could stake a claim on a credible future. When she had started l
etting herself go to his Coit Tower apartment, climbing the tiny sidewalk stairs, she had jumped when she’d realized the millionaire could have had a goat’s face, an orangutan’s torso, a mosquito’s hum, it didn’t matter, since what really mattered was an inside voice instructing her to see the guy and follow this particular path of service toward glory.

  Until she had to cut off seeing him, after the operation, just slicing it off without a single word to the guy. This decision she had also liked for its pure power and cleanliness though for some reason right now the question comes: if a figure of light did exist, would it understand or instead force her to feel everything the millionaire or Rose or anyone had ever felt? Basically, would she be punished? Lana needs some retort, and lying there on the deck while Rose goes on recalling moments Lana prefers to suppress, she considers what she would ask the figure: did everything always have to be her fault?

  FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:20 P.M.

  Rose stealing into Lana’s room at Hope, hand on the creases of Lana’s pillow, finding one of Lana’s long dark hairs, its end a curled question mark. Of course Lana wouldn’t have bothered locking her door. Rose had wanted to alphabetize some inner turbulence and so had stolen in with no clear purpose. One of the Mahlers or Wagners or whatever Lana’s little family calls itself these days could just burst in after lunch. Someone, having forgotten something, could just show up and Rose doesn’t know why but she had needed to take the chance. The boys having left the room, she seized the moment. Now she picks up some of Lana’s huge silver earrings and puts them on, for a second, puncturing unused holes in her earlobes. Just for a second so she can duck her head and smile in weary apology back up at herself in the bathroom’s bright stage mirror, her hair also newly black, her mind shut down, admiring mainly her backdrop, the geodesic toiletry kit, the room’s fig scent, the magazine from which Lana’s new mate smiles back under the caption YOU TOO CAN LIVE A BETTER LIFE.