Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  She has not yet met this guy Dirk but he looks as if he holds no candle to Lana’s first boyfriend, the first real one, a boy who sang into a mike, so inconquerable, the appeal of a kinetic body torqued around a point. For a second Rose stretches the back of her neck long and sings, a wistful mute in the mirror. Often she has this vision, Rose in a dead-hot spotlight with men pressed up against glass windows, peeking in at her while finding their need insatiable and intolerable. They want her bad. Secretly she would like to scoop up everything in this room, all of it, the Indian scarves and toiletry kit. With time enough, she would hunt for a journal or anything to emit more clues. Already she can tell Lana is keeping too much from her but, heart a gallop, Rose leaves, gentle in closing the door behind herself.

  Not having intended any direct theft, Rose is halfway down the stairs when she feels the earrings, such big triangles they graze her neck like a lover’s tickle. She must yank them off, pocket the booty, pull her fake dark hair back over her ears.

  FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:41 P.M.

  Lana accepts Rose rubbing her back with sunscreen. Why not relax into other people’s devotions? She could just seize the prospect of calm. Her boys play bingo one lounge chair over while the afternoon appears benevolent, acting on her behalf, lenient enough that she gets to glide off.

  FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 5:01 P.M.

  What they find at their room: the door completely ajar. Was someone here—? Lana looks at the boys.

  “I didn’t do anything,” says Sedge. “I didn’t mean to. Anyway, I won’t do it again.” This happens to be the last line from the Oogie-Poogie stories she makes up for them. She notes his attempt to get mama to smile, using the stories as their bond: tales about two misbehaving boys named Oogie and Poogie, the caught miscreant always using his tripartite weak excuse as the story’s moral.

  I didn’t do it, I didn’t mean it, anyway I’ll never do it again.

  While Tee’s face broadcasts the pure and absolute absence of guile.

  “Stay here,” she tells them. For all Sedge’s floundering, a real animal might have gotten in. She goes in to perform a check of all dark corners, making a show for the boys’ benefit that there is no beast, nothing to harm them, and then signals an okay. They can enter, return to calm, a family indivisible in the clean shaded happiness of someone’s idea of a room. On the couch, the boys eat saltines and play cards peaceably enough; she gets to shower. No one mentions Rose or Dirk or any other outsider. The idea of the animal and the fact of the open door have united them. For this moment, they are family and nothing will disturb them.

  Until Tee strings up Lestrion by a noose and approaches with kiddie scissors in his left hand, ready for the cut. “Lestrion’s dyinggg!” he sings in tones half mournful, half gleeful.

  “Mom, he’s doing it.”

  “Tee, stop killing Lestrion!” Lana, post-shower, doesn’t look up from her magazine. 101 WAYS TO ENJOY YOUR CHILDREN MORE. She’s onto RAINY-DAY ACTIVITIES. The idea appeals: things one could do.

  “Lestrion has to die though.”

  “Why?” their mother half-asks.

  “He committed halitosis.”

  “Aw man, you don’t even know what you’re saying,” says Sedge, scissor-kicking back onto the bed so Lana’s magazine jumps out of her hand.

  “You just failed the code of the holy knights!” Tee shrieks.

  This room has shrunk, too small to contain three. “You guys want to go see what’s going on outside now?”

  “A lot of naked people walking,” says Tee.

  “Tee, I don’t like how you’re talking.” Lana sits up, slaps the magazine shut, her hair falling out of its towel turban. “Did I say no whining? How about you guys going on a walk before dinner? Not on the trails though please.”

  The boys calculate the degrees of her mood and snap alert, Sedge snipping the cord holding Lestrion so the space robot falls, his swaddled body almost indestructible, Sedge unworried about her doldrums or the robot’s physical intactness because he and Lestrion had struck a deal about the supermagic superspy powers the robot grants only Sedge. This deal happens to be necessary as Lestrion is the last of the robots to survive while Sedge is the second of the twins and as such he and the robot possess a perfect understanding or what their mother always goes on about, empathy.

  “Later,” says Tee, halfway out the door, Sedge and Lestrion following, with Lana already back to RAINY-DAY ACTIVITIES, fending off the moment in which she will have to face Rose again. She does not want to let her mind run ahead of herself when everything is fine enough, when it is okay to release the boys to walk by themselves, especially after they have already seen the lion and will thus both stay on the safe side of statistics and off the trails. Part of her latest tactic as a mother is to err on the side of the super-casual, trying to downplay not just the rare encounter with a mountain lion but also a foolish story she had once mistakenly told them about Bad Scary Strangers. This fable had scared Sedge more than she had meant it to, devised to get the boys to stay good in public and never run away but it had spawned the ultimate monster stranger, namely, the beginning of Sedge’s parallel life, his epic serial anthology hinging on a supersonic spy robot named Lestrion.

  Whenever Lana asks about Lestrion, Sedge says, eyelashes long, cheek smooth and impenetrable: “Sorry, mommy, can’t tell you. Grown-ups can’t know supersonic secrets. If I keep the code, Lestrion will protect me.” She looks at him, understanding he needs more protection than mama can give, certainly more than she had ever received given that the most safety she had ever gotten from staying close to her parents had been the chance to spy on the wreckage of adult life.

  So let Sedge have Lestrion, god bless, let the boys be sent to go forage for dinner at the communal dining hall despite whatever Dirk or Hogan or Rose may think about boys set loose in a place still new to them. She doesn’t care what others think. Let them deem her a bad mother. She will defend herself to no one especially since she had not asked for Rose to show up like some ghoul of remembrance telling her in so many ways that a person cannot hide forever.

  Part Three

  NINTH OF APRIL, 1952 NOON

  Vic jutting forward, saying: you know, you can will yourself to die.

  So handsome and jutting toward Mary. This is how she will remember him for years, the memory central as if fronting an album bound with ribbon around a button. Unwind the ribbon and every picture stays in place, radiant with sentiment, illuminating this fellow leaning into her.

  All she had done was ask about his research but part of his jut means no answer he gives can ever be weak. They sit on a pocket of sand at Fisherman’s Wharf, a beach littered on one edge by masts and on the other by soggy sourdough crusts from tourists unsuccessful at luring gulls, crusts rippled like tiny breasts of a half-buried band of fairies.

  Years later when she returns to this spot, a spot you could wade out from, gone ugly and tar-balled, she finds it hard to believe how relatively pristine it had once been, untrashed, sand white, driftwood unsplotched, the little romantic fairy boats plying the water. Or did memory play a trick?

  The sand seeps through his fingers and onto her arm where she lies, belly down, propping herself up to look at this man with his slight foreign accent, the one she met last week in the university library. In seconds on a tourist beach, this man Victor Mahler could lie atop her, just press himself on top when the majority of her life has been dedicated to the thousand and one open and covert methods permissible in the protection of virginity which she feels deep down is a beautiful word, letting a maiden recall the beautiful inviolability of staying one.

  What she has done is ask about Vic’s research and the intensity of his answer chills: she finally understands the phrase to the bone. Bones cold, she watches him head into the water, rolling up his pants, begging her to enter, to rhyme with his daredevil ways. She won’t because she has a secret female reason not to go in water. Not to mention that she isn’t wearing a bathing suit and d
ampness will reveal her form too much.

  But before he goes wading, they talk of willing yourself to death. What could that mean? He elaborates: the mind, conscious of itself, knowing itself as motor, can be trained to stop, as the yogis promise in their talk of spontaneous combustion. This is the forefront of neurological research! Look at me, he says, then see if you can let part of your mind detach from the skull. Can you, Mary, can you?

  What does that mean, her mind detach from the skull? What is he trying to prove? Is he being a showman? She doesn’t care: what a jolt when he says skull and her name, and then later as she watches the ocean swallow his life force until he emerges, triumphant and golden as one of her childhood’s spelling trophies. Can you, Mary?

  She can. Tall girl, hope of her people, she’d found her future husband magnetic in his abrupt, cryptic manner. For their first date he rang her doorbell many times, impatient already, and couldn’t she have known something from that insistence, a man who had left other girls for reasons obscured, thus bearing the aura of someone she could actually save, especially given the sad hint about his orphanhood? You could love someone for lesser reasons. She appreciates how he carves for the two of them an elite, exalted sphere, rendering dismissive comments about whole tribes of intellectuals—and this when he had never even finished high school! The mischief stuns. Whenever wine-softened in all the years to come, Vic will boast of his autodidacticism, so happy to be found with his fist full of academic cookies: honors and tenure, for god’s sake, when he had never even put his hand in the cookie jar. And still higher-ups kept handing him awards, all prizes for how well he had followed his instinct and its superior fibers, his bold, American self-made spunk and grit, pure anti-intellectualism housed in a European body.

  Many of these later years, awards flowing his way, will fill her with disgust at her choice, the worst moments like phantasms almost ignorable if not enough to avoid the gallantries of Gallagher, someone her husband had always deemed a decent colleague. Through those years, Vic’s phrase will echo. Will yourself to die: the brash authority alone would make the hardest schoolgirl fall in love.

  I will, I will myself to you, I can, Victor Mahler.

  Back in their early days, she refuses none of the roles he believes contiguous with the connubial because she is his bedmate, initially wondering what link their sticky moments at bedtime have with her swoon during that first talk with Vic, or even before, when she had slow-danced at her senior prom with random foot-stomping swains, listening to adenoidal singers croon about hearts and flowers and trying to decipher her future from lyrics about spooning under June moons. She begins to type Vic’s papers and notes and one day they are married. At one point, pecking at the typewriter, over her shoulder she tries telling her new husband some point about clarity, this marking the first moment etched into memory that she sees the royalty of his disdain turned for the first time not just on others but on her.

  In this way, as if two scientists unearthing a treasure, they stumble upon the one argument that will never let them go: he will never grant her the intellectual respect she deserves and she will never be enough. Because she craves clarity, always, he finds his excuse and, from this time forward, in slow increments, will start treating her as if she has a small mind.

  Thus begins her curdle away. For years she will keep typing, typing as if the act alone might peck away enough to reveal the better future that awaits them, the act a form of trust: she will be released from the bad sentence of her marriage into a better one. Because somewhere in her schooling the nuns had given her the idea that her mind could be, if not brilliant, at least able to seize on facts, a mind good at lining them into neat cause, correlation and affinity. Such talent could spell salvation and escape, the equivalent of an arranged marriage between herself and brilliance.

  What she was all too happy to leave behind: the star-crossed oddness of her own mother’s legacy. She will tell Vic the story only once, early in their courtship. The Japanese internment camp had been erected some hundred miles away from the reservation and Mary’s mother Zora had fallen in love with a father Mary would never know, Kenji a Japanese greenhouse worker in an illegal squat behind the council house. “Less trouble,” she had tried joking to Vic. “No inlaws for you. But at least my father was brave.” The tribal council had wanted to throw Zora out for illicit behavior, while the American feds had managed to throw Kenji into the camp at Manzanar.

  In these juices of fear, from a short, taboo-charged, impermanent liaison, near where the reservation stored rusted hoes, the two had conceived baby Mary, a girl illegitimate everywhere, Mary Fukuji Guzman born in the fall of 1942 to an inspection of her eyelids by tribal elders. Her telltale ipecanthus fold made it hard for her to pass as Yokut Indian. Yet in a fluke of gentleness, liking Zora’s entreaties and downcast eyes, the elders decided to let baby Mary stay on the reservation with her mother and aunts.

  When Mary goes flat in her recounting, Vic teases the story out. Could it have been shame that made Zora turn inward and away from the lovechild to whom she gave the immaculate name Mary, Zora who gave the child her father’s last name but forbade any truck with him? Mary’s chance at love came not so much from Zora. Instead Mary leaned toward the attention from nuns who looked kindly on tall Mary’s deference, Mary a student who quickly learned to say I’m sorry for others’ mistakes, thrilling to the peaks of the catechism and working overtime to earn the nuns’ confidence. Mary only eight at her mother’s funeral, after which she had been deposited into the harsh hair-combing and collar-pulling of a trio of aunts sterner than any nun, this part of the story that Vic, years later, jealous of her commiseration with her girl assistant, will use against her. “Mary, don’t you think it’s time to stop looking for a mother already?” he will say.

  In their early days, she loves how Vic holds her hands and listens as she tells him of the tiled schools, their echoing corridors and shadowed naves bearing the imprint of Spanish missionaries. Her sharpened pencils and spelling trophies. How Mary shone. “That’s why you became an intellectual?” Vic sings out, and she is not sure, even then, whether he has come to mock or praise.

  There is so much to like about him. The way he rushes her, for one, into a wedding that offers the comfort of mischievous conformity. Naughty not just because they go to city hall but because she is marrying a grad student she has met on her own in the library, a white man foreign and older by some tantalizing years, this Vic Mahler who favors loud Hawaiian shirts from a thrift store, who keeps saying he loves her schoolgirl self, her shy candor and sensibility. Under the light of his attention, she finds herself as he seems to, laughable, endearing, reassuring. And despite his later scoffing that the university must be one of the world’s most goitered of free-thinking zones, she continues forward on the promise of all her trophies, managing to both follow and ignore the zeitgeist enough to become someone mostly free-thinking, a feminist ethnographer.

  When California Fukuji Guzman Mahler is born, the girl who will one day ask to be called just Lana, the baby with a shock of brown hair, Mary tells Vic: I don’t recognize her yet. The infant California sleeps away from them at the hospital, cleaned up, mouth pursed with a tiny O between rosebud lips, the very center of a fishbowl room guarded by nurses, as Vic sees when he leaves Mary in her recovery room to get a first gander at his legacy through the nursery window. Of course he does not think it right that tears usurp his gaze, that he is unable to watch the peaceful little brown-haired creature straight, but it helps to have heard that some similar sentiment has overcome a gaggle of other stiff-necked fathers and so finds himself laughing with embarrassment at the joy of being united with an imagined league of lachrymose Jimmy Stewart types sharing his moment, finally appreciating why a man would want to pass out cigars to his fellows—until some bandy-legged nurse comes up to tap his elbow, telling him he stares at the wrong baby, that his own girl was too waterlogged after the difficult birth and is in a different room for lung-pumping: little California
happens not to be viewable at the present time.

  Cast out of the league, enraged, Vic storms back to the room to shoot Mary a sidelong glance: “What did you mean about not recognizing your baby?” Mary’s womb had been barren until fifteen years after their first congress and Vic still does not claim complete understanding of his wife. When Mary stays mute, muffled by drugs the doctor had shot deep into her spine, he speaks more loudly. “Don’t worry,” he says, enunciating as if she had just turned foreign, this being the tone of many of their worst discussions. “Once we get the right one, you’ll recognize her. You just weathered a big storm.”

  And he can’t explain why Mary starts bawling. He must resort to a favorite epithet. “Women,” he sighs. None of this is playing out as it should but theoretically he believes in nuance so he tries reorienting by a grayer moon. Once she quiets herself, he takes Mary’s hands in his, believing someone invisible, watching him, could expect him to do this. Really he would like to run. Most truly he is scared; his wife looks pallid and unrecognizable, beyond death.

  “Remember you said you wanted a child?” he tells her. He knows this is useless but what else can a man say?

  His wife points her chin toward the door. Their baby lies swaddled somewhere, lungs being pumped. Mary manages to say, out of her morphine haze: “I feel we started a fire.”

  He chalks her nonsense up to some cause like painful breasts or the postpartum female brain addled by oxytocin. “You’ll be fine,” he says, pumping her hand in unconscious echo of the mechanical vacuum working their baby’s lungs a few rooms away. “She’s a baby. Go back to sleep. We always survive, don’t we,” and then stutters over the idea of their family as a new trio, “so we can survive this.”