Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  He breaks their quiet only to point out, far away on the hill, some women on horseback: where do you think they come from? he asks. From her tiny shrug, he sees she has not wholly shut him out.

  Yet at the school she undoes their routine. She says no goodbye, just pulls the backpack from the tiny backseat to run up the ramp to the schooldoor and is immediately consumed by the institution. Gone so quickly, leaving him empty-handed and, though he will not name it, with a sinking heart. She must be happy for the order of school, he realizes. School must provide an order higher than that of the Mahler household. In that dim moment a future chapter begins to form on how society disrupts blame, how its schools, sanitaria and jails always trump the innate disorder of the nuclear family. His daughter won’t give her angry father a moment more than he deserves and for one unfortunate second he almost regrets his vigor.

  DECEMBER 1980

  “This is how it works with a kid,” Vic tells someone at one of their end-of-the-semester parties. In the next breath he asks teenage Lana in tank top and plaid shirt to go around and check on everyone’s drink but she cannot fulfill the request as someone must have sunk her boots into unseen cement blocks, forcing her to stay and watch him talk to the young coed whose wildly fertile horizontal hair already looks as if it argues with Vic’s gray peaks. “The kid becomes your libido, yes. Something messy on the boulevards of life. Then you do what you can to contain libido. You wipe the kid’s drool. Your swipes and smiles act as a tissue over their libido.” He takes a sip of champagne, swishing it before swallowing and then nodding at Lana politely as if she were the stranger she has become. Yet she can’t leave, afraid he will spill some childhood secrets. “The tissue marks the thinness of civilization. Meanwhile your kid grabs her crotch or her mother’s breasts.” The coed laughs, starting a reciprocal whirlpool in her drink. “Your kid wiggles her bare derrière poolside before strangers. Wipes her nose on someone’s heirloom silk. Crushes berries and crayons into carpets. Essentially the kid does whatever she can to make all your wipes and smiles—which are probably your form of the death instinct—ineffectual.”

  “I’m not planning on having kids,” says the female student.

  Vic arches one gray eyebrow. “No?”

  “Too many things I want to do first.”

  And it is as Lana finds power enough to leave that she hears him say: “Good woman! The plan’s great! I’ll drink to it! Semper iuvenis! What’s your name anyway?”

  No one knows, Lana thinks. No one knows the big things and the little things. How the night before, needing a pencil, she had burst into his office and found him on his belly, on the carpet, marveling at the dance of carpenter ants parading under his bookcase. She was not sure which Vic she was finding. On seeing her, her father had laughed like a wild beast. “Look, Lana, these ants only eat books by Apuleius. They have comic proclivities!”

  “Oh.”

  “And then they eat only the sexual pages. It’s the strangest thing. At least they know their taste, right?”

  Right. Later at that party Lana remembers bringing red wine to Gallagher, the flame-haired friend of the family with his freckled butcher arms, her father’s colleague, a bachelor with money to burn whom she likes because every summer they stay at his beach house but as she hands him the glass, her father says: “Hey! Gallagher deserves only wine coolers. Guy’s a lout. No burgundy for him.”

  To which Gallagher lets out a jovial belch and her father jumps back, recoiling as if burnt, Vic with his delicacy affronted, Vic who raises an invisible flag of higher civilization atop his pinkie each morning while slurping his morning au lait from a bowl à la française. “See his manners, Mopsy?” Vic says to Lana.

  That teenage night, ashamed for many reasons, she considers what Vic said about kids playing out the libido of the parents—Lana knowing mainly that libido means something bad and eager, an idea her father uses whenever he wants to tweak a conversation—and if in fact Vic’s words are true, whose libido does she play out?

  “Lana’s diffident,” her mother had said at the same party, drink-loosened and ignorant of the keenness of Lana’s hearing from across the cheese table, Lana only pretending to fold napkins.

  “Charismatic though, right?” Mary’s assistant answered and for this defense, Lana half-forgave the assistant her theft of Mary.

  “Despite herself. People do gravitate to her. For all I say about nurture, she definitely has her own strong nature. Funny, what I just said refutes all my cultural work, right?” Mary tossed back her drink more quickly than usual. Only Sherry cast an anxious look across the table. “All I mean is my daughter could do more with what she has. But she’s not the kind to stick her neck out into the world. She always shrinks back.”

  “Maybe she’s one of those empaths. A kid who can’t let too much enter her pores?”

  “Is someone empathetic just because she spends hours in her room?”

  “Reading?”

  “Trying on outfits. In black. Or making little charcoal scritchiescratchies on paper.”

  “Maybe she’s an artist.”

  “But it may sound harsh, I’m sorry, no real talent, at least as far as I’ve seen? And not exactly the reader you’d think would come from two professors.”

  “Maybe she’s a late bloomer?” to which Mary had demurred. Sherry persisted: “You’d be a hard act to follow. If I were your daughter I might hide in my room too.”

  “Thank god you’re my assistant then!” The women laughed, ending as always in one of those loose, knowing embraces that Lana both hates and covets.

  If no one cares to know exactly what Lana has been doing in her room’s seclusion it is this: ordering. To this task of ordering a girl could lose herself. Some secret meaning, occult even to Lana, dwells in her methodology for organizing horses, dolls, saints, snails, banana slugs, potato bugs and pebbles into hierophantic combinations held in shoe boxes or jars, sometimes on banana leaves, traveling over a Maogreen bedspread toward individual eucharists. Most commonly she spreads out creatures of two and four legs, amassing them into random families, each with its own distinct flavor, a sensibility, each clan happy that she alone serves as its capricious creator and destroyer.

  Though it is also true that soon after meeting her friend Rose, some months earlier, Lana had started to put away childish things and has slowly surrendered some of her passion for ordering.

  One foggy day when Rose complains that Lana always seems to be half turning away, for once Lana lets her friend’s grievance pierce her, realizing with a start that she probably had not left her shoe-box-and-jar solitude so far behind. “You’re right,” says Lana, “maybe that’s what my mom calls my diffidence.”

  Rose gasps. “I love how you can admit things. Such a great quality.”

  Lana cuts the flattery short, saying whatever, she can know something but that doesn’t mean she can change it. What she is unable to tell Rose is that turning away might always stay one of her greatest pleasures. She doesn’t elaborate but what better joy is there, really, than knowing you are not quite of the family of man but not shut out either, that rather you have your own niche, in parallel? What Lana loves most is when others breathe nearby, accessible, making noise yet not about to make an incursion or cross any border, keeping themselves from burdening her with all their messy insides.

  APRIL 1982

  What starts it may be the wine but it is the unbelievable light that continues it. The girls have set up a wine bar culled from Lana’s parents’ collection and the Lolas are busy sampling not just dessert wines but also those that should have stayed corked a few more years. This venture is the logical aftermath of their jaunt a month or so before when the girls had concocted a French bistro to which they had invited random boys from school.

  For the bistro, on Lana’s veranda the girls had served oysters to a couple of crackly-voiced skulkers, mere rehearsal for the fantastic restaurant the girls imagine they will open up in Paris one day, Lana and Rose murky in their g
iggle and their shared French-waitress personae while serving mystifying hors d’oeuvres that their teenage customers, dutifully enough, swallow.

  The bistro started it, a halfway success, and a month later the wine bar continues it. Vic is the one who ends it.

  Why Vic did whatever he did seems less relevant than the how of it: an amber afternoon, the girls solo and raiding the liquor cabinet, one more lark as Lola One and Two. First they had pretended to be wine snobs uncorking various pedigrees for each other, sniffing and swishing and spitting, only sometimes swilling, girls together in the golden afternoon light spilling forth from the arched windows. Soon for some reason they found themselves down to their underwear, wearing only Mardi Gras beads they’d discovered secreted away in Mary’s wicker cache-tout. Swilling more and now aiming for the very perfection of wine snobbery, Lana has some torn white sheet scrap wrapped around her head while Rose sings old Cuban revolutionary songs her adoptive mother had used as lullabies when, in one single ear-splitting moment, the front door creaks and in Vic walks, early from work. He stands in the entry, half-solid, bathed in that honeyed afternoon glow.

  The girls too must stare. “We were just—” before falling upon each other in a topple of girl laughter.

  “This light is unbelievable,” he says then, ultra-slow, “unbelievable,” and then, as if this were logical. “I’ll just go upstairs and get my camera to capture it.”

  So that what remains captured so many unbelievable years later are these tawny photos of one girl staring into the camera or lying, laughing, shoulders against the other’s, torso arched over another rib-cage, arm, nipple. Entwined so it is hard to know where one begins and the other ends. Each of the girls will keep one set of photos until Lana in college will lose hers. What Rose will wonder later is what Vic said to himself, standing with straight face after having them developed, in line waiting to pick up triplicate sets at the film counter, paying, saying thank you and then what later to the girls while handing over each amber set? If neither friend remembers the exact steps down into that afternoon, each knows she stared at least once—a teenager deep-eyed and naked—into the lens of a Vic whose thoughts on the subject remain forever guarded, a victim of history.

  This will stay one more thing Rose would like to ask, a question upon a humpback multitude of others: what was he thinking?

  Which really fronts a deeper question. Had he liked her? And to what extent might he go because of his liking? Who was she to be so liked?

  With all the questions demanding, most broadly: what hunger had crossed him?

  Years later, because of such questions, she will not be able to say whether her justice-minded efforts to meet with Vic are her way to bring back Lana or at times more truly the reverse.

  AUGUST 1982

  A Saturday night and the girls head to a dance club on the far side of town. They are fifteen and a half, reveling in driving. Lana has learned to drive her father’s French car with its stick shift but Rose finds it too difficult to learn more than automatic; it is just too hard. At the club a mediocre band samples zydeco. A bunch of mostly whiteys jump around in off-time. Two bearded men in their mid-twenties start circling the girls, a move the girls are used to: some birthright makes them think such circling natural prologue to a night’s adventure, Kerouac-tinged. You hitch a ride onto someone else’s story, someone hitches onto yours and this hitching shoots everyone out at some undisclosed starry locale that much farther toward knowledge, with the thing that guards each girl being the other.

  But because these are men with important jobs, men who say they work at a Renaissance fair to recreate Shakespeare, not just skulking boys, Lana and Rose end up in separate rooms in a house where each suitor has his own carpeted floor. In the context of their fuzzy house and shiny objects, the bearded men seem impossibly mature. Rose is talking with the full-chested fellow, pleased to tell her all about the boat he works on: he gives her a picture of himself tying knots, masts and ocean behind. To forfend anything else she tries exchanging a massage, all energy coalesced two inches before her throat, a fearful ball of what might be said, wishing to push that power into her hands kneading his neck. It is not that she feels an ounce of desire but rather that she is nervously curious about what will happen behind each successive door in the night and what someone might be drawn to do. Now she massages his back.

  You’re like a concubine, he tells her, you’re only fifteen, how do you have such a mature touch? This is meant as a compliment: she could be good as a boat, belonging to a world of shiny kept things. Downstairs Lana plays games with her fellow and Rose finds these games reassuring, Lana doing her usual skitter away from anything too direct. The girls have some understanding that there is no need to tell either set of parents where they are, since each set—if they did think of their girls—assumes their daughter of Berkeley spends the night at the other’s house.

  In the gray morning, they walk back toward the French car over sidewalks littered with the tiny yellow flowers that fall into Indian summer.

  Rose says to Lana: “Well at least we didn’t sleep with them.”

  To which Lana fires a look. The look says Lana had gone and slipped over the brink alone.

  The last semester of high school, Lana finds herself a tall rock-star boyfriend. To be exact, not a rock star but almost, down to being skinny and fickle in black leather pants during the last breath of punk, right when punk starts hiding in the mainstream. It is true you hear the beau’s songs on the radio and see him perform in San Francisco, but he is biggest not in self-regard, which is considerable, but as he looms in the imagination of two teenage girls. He loves to make them cringe, saying things Rose remembers and Lana forgets like playing guitar strings is like playing a clitoris.

  Rose works after school in a dance-clothes store and doesn’t know it but she is preparing to meet someone. The dance-clothes manager walks her down Telegraph Avenue and there Rose meets her object: ten years older, like Lana’s boyfriend, an equivalently tall man in overalls who knows the manager. Everything falls away and stops. Rose will always remember what she is wearing that day, a plaid pajama dress disguised as streetclothes under which she is bare. Something kindles a light in this man’s dark eyes and she cannot help but be excited by such sheen.

  One day after school she walks to his bare apartment with its mattress on the floor. For an art-class project she winds plaster strips around his thick fingers: the cast dries, she pulls it off and leaves. A week later she rides her bike around Berkeley and bumps into him; he walks her home. At the foot of her twenty-three stairs he says: you want to go out? The phrase is anathema to her. She says she doesn’t believe in going out but then calls him later. It is not long after that she skips her prom to take this new tall man to see Lana’s on-again, off-again beau perform in a San Francisco club.

  After, near where the earthquake swallowed early-century bathers in the coastal rocks, they go to a beach. Her first sex is wordless and brutish and interesting for this exact reason. He is half-child, half-man, mourning the death of his father and living in an apartment in Berkeley, not really clear on any purpose other than his interest in art and philosophy books. She says to him why don’t you come live in my house? She is sure her mother won’t mind. Ma will barely notice. Or if she minds it would be hypocritical. Rose tells her ma that her new friend has landlord troubles and would it be hard if he stayed awhile in the unused guest room? When Joan lets this slide, Rose has her boyfriend living in her house, a coup.

  Off Rose goes for her last days as a senior at high school, feeling unbearably young and filled with potential, walking with her laden backpack and enshrined in someone’s affections, happy that when she comes home she finds him standing atop the sunny garage, gently brushing pollen from a tomato plant. She is sixteen and he is twenty-six: if they lived in a different kingdom, they would have exchanged cowrie shells and be married already.

  They spend hours driving up and down Highway One, the cliché road of California, its cl
iffs and coast: she does not know its interior roads yet, Five and all the others. Their silence she considers deep and philosophical. He talks of an old girlfriend who ate little—she liked to make herself disappear—and then Rose doesn’t want to hear anymore. One time he tells Rose he loves Lana as well because of the goofy smile she had once when her purse got stuck in a car door and this is also not such a fruitful subject. When Rose gets into a bad mood he calls her Murk. They hold hands all night, drinking coffee in a mah-jongg donut store in North Beach. As if all the philosophers flank their romantic passage, he says Kant says but Kierkegaard says. They sit under a tree in Golden Gate Park. He tells her she has the body he had always dreamed about. She shoots out of that same body to see herself, pleased, from above. Now everything will work; any button she presses will open whatever she wants. She seems to have ascended into being that mysterious, courted girl of every song she has ever liked.

  The great tragedy of this time is that despite whatever romantic flowering each girl finds alone, the Lolas’ life together gets smothered and their experience heaps dirt for the grave. At times they confide in each other but the confessions turn compulsive, spears into a body already struggling for breath.

  JUNE 1984

  Enter a lion’s cave sooner than meet with an angry teenage daughter.

  One of many subjects Mary has learned to discuss with Vic in a roundabout way: the ways in which all the beneficial tinctures that had flowed into Lana are seeping away. There is no real way to conjugate parental control: she is not yet lost, she could be lost, we cannot lose her.