Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  The last Rose knew, some months earlier, before heading off to Roanoke for some useless choreographic internship, she had suggested to Lana she take a vacation from the dorms by staying to oversee Rose’s apartment and its real subletter, the itinerant premed Debbie. On Rose’s return from Virginia, however, she found a note from Debbie studded with exclamation points, describing how one weekend she had found Lana in a craze. First Lana had turned the whole apartment into one giant recycling bin carpeted with shredded newspaper. Not to mention that Lana had used all Debbie’s eyeliner to write formulae for creativity on the walls. What else could the premed do? She had fled the place, not without first summoning Lana’s parents from France. Apparently the parents did descend a few days later, scooping their daughter away but failing to clean up Lana’s mess, which included not just shredded paper but an empty hypodermic, all that Debbie had to clean up, though she was no reliable witness given her last act—leaving Rose with months of rent unpaid—and her temerity in grousing about Rose’s knack for choosing crazy friends.

  Rose found the histrionic premed’s note incredible. First, the odd unity of the effort was disturbing. Would Mary and Vic have ever united in scooping Lana up? It seemed too unMahlerian to be true. But how else had Lana vanished? Rose preferred to think instead that Lana had entered a new boyfriend or bohemian tunnel, slinking into another dark unreachable place only to emerge with some glittery treasure and a gypsy beau. Maybe the premed was covering her own debt with the story of Lana’s craze. Or maybe she was just jealous. Though it was also true that Rose lacked courage to call the Mahlers and find out why Lana had gone AWOL from college, telling herself she didn’t want to mistakenly inform on her friend. Also, Rose did not think she could stomach the usual telephonic banter with Vic, a flirt and flutter that used to speed her pulse along through some fidgety tête-à-tête.

  Because Vic always won. On the phone, as Lana said, he loved busting people’s chops, especially Rose’s, in whatever mode suggested itself to him that day. How would the conversation go other than some variation on hello, Mister Mahler? Oh, sorry, you’re right, Vic? Do you happen to know where I could reach Lana? Why do I need to tell you first? Well, okay, I’m studying choreography. Choreography. No, I only dance sometimes. Well, my mom does sort of think it’s a waste of my college education. Okay, but why call bodies moving through space any more a useless endeavor than, I don’t know, musical notes through time? Thank you, but before college you’re saying I wasn’t clever? Touché back in one squirm of a conversation, playing cards in Vic’s game with all the rules Rose could never master and now with the added twist that as a college girl, she could not tell whether she wished the old-time Lola-Vic game of her high-school years to intensify or abort.

  She would hang up elated and besmirched and despite all that, have no real clue about Lana’s whereabouts. Better to wait and trust Lana would surface. Far better. Whatever Lana was going through could not be much worse, Rose felt, than her own genius for getting her heart broken in new unfathomable ways with what seemed to be a flair for finding boyfriends with messy forelocks and merciless talents for fun.

  The important thing is that once Lana returns, once Rose sees her old friend, gaunt at the door days after graduation, days after Rose had packed her own mother Joan off into an airport taxi, Lana is love. Lana might be avoiding her eyes, she might be tender-footed in stepping back into the apartment, heading straight for the mustard couch to collapse into it but of course Rose must forgive her the silence, flattered as ever to be back inside whatever holds them together.

  “Sorry,” says Lana from the couch. “All that stuff.”

  Whatever was real the second before Lana appeared now turns ghost, Lana studying her twisting hands. Rose wants to wallpaper-strip the sadness right off her. “You were at your parents’ house?” is what she lets herself ask.

  “For a bit.”

  “My mom and I looked everywhere for you at graduation. They must have made a mistake, leaving your name off the program or something.”

  “Yeah. Do I owe you money?”

  “Not really. That premed does though.”

  Lana had plunged so readily onto Rose’s couch, clearly making any abode of Rose’s her second home that Rose could just launch back. Never mind months of silence or seemingly impermissible questions, Rose would have signed over rights to any future without Lana. “I’m sure whatever happened when you left wasn’t your fault,” says Rose. “That premed drove me batty too.”

  All Lana had done was this: she had stood at a door, crossed a threshold, fallen onto a couch. How simple were the ingredients: the raw crudity, the bones and height, the chemical fix of Lana more present than ever.

  Vic would have called Rose’s question a tautology, but she still had to ask herself later that night how could such ingredients make so painfully clear what their absence had ripped from the rest of life?

  Rose uses her mother’s favorite Mexican blanket to make a comfortable night bed for Lana on the sofa. Outside the window, on a roof under a water tower, a family cavorts, busy in bringing out plates, beach balls, jump ropes, hammocks for some evening picnic. Lana back, Rose sparkles, their cast-off wryness a lifeline. “Too messy in the kitchen for you to actually bother cleaning, Rosie,” says Lana. “Come tell me what you’re planning these days.”

  “Nothing,” says Rose, smitten, “or just my next step,” realizing Lana is about to become her next step all over again.

  During college Rose was supposed to have become a choreographer and Lana meant to become a composer or painter, maybe a biologist. Now at some ostensibly shared crux they bear witness to the snub-nose paper planes of each other’s dreams. With Lana having shown up, mainly herself if with a few new eccentricities, such as her smoker’s laugh and the way she never parts with the ratty beaded purse she keeps under her pillow at night, the two girls seem ready to make some double-bladed point to each other about how to ignore aspiration. They will slum as a way to get the friendship back and the act will sweep away boyfriends, ignored phone calls, loneliness, parents, disappearance. Only once does Rose ask Lana what has made her so glum. “You maybe don’t know about all the abortions?” she says. “After the ones you took me to, I mean. Once I tried throwing myself off the top of a bunk bed just to not have to go through one. Or I don’t know. Something seems to have cost me something,” and that is as far as the conversation goes. The friendship needs ease and toward this point they unite, taking on the mantle of the bohemian slummer as their best revenge on whatever has cost them both.

  What they try to focus on is jobs. As Rose reminds her old friend, doesn’t everyone say how important that first post-college job is? Lana mainly wants any job that ignores her dad’s connections, waitress, undertaker, she didn’t care. Her first week back in New York, Lana acts as the apartment’s secretary, hunched over the dining room table, sipping ice coffee and highlighting POSITIONS OFFERED. One job locale sounds insurance-firm solid, upstate, only a half hour north of the city, enough to give up on the list of temp agencies they haven’t called yet.

  DANCERS! FLEXIBLE SHIFTS.

  “It sounds decent,” says Lana, “but I’m not super-ready to leave the apartment, just feeling still a little under the weather?”

  Instead Rose is sent to audition, and if she likes it, maybe Lana will come along.

  Obedient to the renewed law of Lola, Rose auditions in a room in a strip mall for two short guys, Dick-and-Dan, Dan-and-Dick, their names interchangeable as their rapid-fire commodity argot, though one is tall and bald-pated, loose-jointed while the other is a smaller, toupeed version peering with suspicion over glasses, stiff in shirt-sleeves as if someone had just appointed him footman for the queen of Romania. The two Ds say they love that Rose is a coed or whatever she is, shooting talk back and forth in spy code, their back office discolored by fluorescence, two desks presiding over paper piles and sample cans of diet powder, the men clearly keeping themselves from any existential brink as much as th
e Lolas used to, using suppressed fiendish mirth to answer phones in a great mimicry of masters of industry. Tell her send three! I’m taking my usual because she won’t be bad tonight.

  While Rose waits, a minor skirmish occurs when a tabby-cat named Diva refuses to descend from a file cabinet on which is pasted a bulletin board bearing palm-tree postcards from locales to which employees with bubble handwriting and a love of exclamation points have flown for vacation. Sniggering, Dick-and-Dan phone a few people, asking if anyone wishes to take home the kitty. No takers yet! they volley back and forth, no one wants to play daddy to some lost pussy!

  And yet exactly which kind of dance the Ds want for Rose’s audition is obscured as if some esoteric task until the taller one puts on a song with a chorus about canasta. Mid-song and sans notice, the Romanian footman asks her to take her shirt off—just one pic—marking the moment beyond which Rose can no longer pretend naïveté, since the beginning or end of a song matters little to the Ds, the song mere pretext, the moment a fizzle, the nudie photo a minor heist. A girl of twenty-something, with little artistry, her other half awaiting news back in the apartment, finds the ounce of stamina that lets her pivot back toward the men.

  On their first day the tall one picks the Lolas up at the train station, fuzzy dice hanging from the front of his car. That he has a bag of laundry to drop off makes the girls share a backseat smile. Someone thinks they are dispensable, equivalent to a laundry errand, and this droll fact makes the girls reenter their delicious paradox: they live again at the smack-dab center of irrelevance.

  They drive around that day, Rose having asked if she could bring a friend, the two of them delegated to the care of a stringy scion from a fallen New England family, the scion not clocking a single backseat smile and thus unaware of his utter charity, à la Jane Polsby, in helping them etherize back to another heist as Lola One and Two. No one really matters: they go in and out of dressing rooms while the scion bounces a rubber ball against store walls with a tournament player’s dedication.

  Because the scion types Rose as babydoll, she tries on foamy confections. “Go white. Lace fishnets, garters, underwear. Men recognize your type plus pervs go ballistic,” he says, never stopping the bounce. “Get your hair in curly pigtails. Stick oversize diaper pins on the lace. When you come onstage, suck a lollipop. Because your face has the hunger of a little girl, you got that sadness in your eyes, plus you could bounce dimes off your butt. You’ll see, babydoll helps, you’ll go like zero to a hundred, make more.”

  When Rose emerges his Galatea, he seems pleased, ricocheting his ball off the ceiling. In the meantime he has sized up Lana as a savage woman of experience. “You’re leopard, jaguar, ruby red. Start at eighty-five then go slow so you don’t get to a hundred too quickly. I have a girlfriend, she’s a stripper, but I see way too many naked girls so I always say, hey, keep your clothes on, even during lower-case intimacies if you know what I mean. By the way, take off that ratty purse.”

  When Lana appears as a red-trimmed leopard, she unfortunately seems to have entered a jungle where Rose cannot find her. Rose tries to keep their backseat smile going but finds her friend gone autonomic as if the costume had transfixed her. Back in the old days, no matter the terrain, Lana would have stayed the same impulsive, goofy girl who never took anyone’s talismans too seriously. At least her laugh would have stayed joyful instead of this latterday version, a ratcheting cough only hinting at charm. It will be okay, Rose tells herself, we’re in this together.

  Once they get to the bar, five o’clock with Lana still too serious in her leopard print, a red velvet choker across her neck, the scion asks Bev, an oldtimer with long nails and a lemur’s face, to do Lana’s hair in a bedtime bun. Rose stands by in her ridiculous babydoll get-up, suddenly wishing to exit the scene, watching as the oldtimer fingers and sprays Lana’s hair, keeping up a train of talk during which she states she is bi, swings both ways, and her boyfriend doesn’t mind.

  “So what’s the thing they keep calling getting to one hundred?” Rose asks oldtimer Bev, who shrugs before jutting her chin stage-ward where a happy-hour welfare mom sneaks onstage with actual safety-pins seaming her skirt.

  “There’s your dead end right there,” says Bev. The welfare mom kneels at the stagelight’s greasy rim, allowing some loner guy who five minutes earlier had been scarfing up twenty-five-cent chicken-wings to now stick a beer bottle into her. “That lady,” says Bev, “don’t get me wrong, loves her kids. Does it for all three. Plus you got to admire the Thai stuff she does, tricks of control. You won’t see me doing them. She can get a whole chain of safety-pins going in and out.”

  Overhearing, bouncing his ball against the bar, the scion muses in his Connecticut accent that the birth canal never fails to amaze. Only six o’clock and two friends almost reunite in a smile, ready to rejoin in the deployment of questionable skills, here in a warren just beyond an interstate overpass with a pumping bass driving guhguhguhguhGUH on a collision course toward skull and groin, under lights hazy and gelled red, the scent of spilled beer and smoke in every breath: push it real good.

  Bev wants to teach them how to get dollars to slide in more quickly. “Dance together and you’ll get more tips. Older guys especially love love love two girls together, you’ll see.” Lana will dance with Bev the first fifteen minutes, followed by a duet by Lana and Rose for fifteen minutes, finished by solos. “Chat up men at the bar first so they give you quarters to put in the jukebox. There’s your soundtrack. Use the pole and I promise you make fifty percent more. Can’t learn in a day what a lifetime of hard knocks gives. But you two will do okay. You’re the kind has good chemistry.”

  Chemistry or not, that first time Rose steps onto the stage with Lana, wrapped by smoke but also the worshipful circle of men’s gazes, she gets it. She has arrived! This moment is a lovechild created by all those moments of Lola and Vic, Vic and his ironic, confusing attendance to the Lolas, the whole thing spun by the secret code of all billboards and magazines.

  Only Rose’s new degree twists the coed-a-gogo moment into anything more illogical. B.A., big assumption, bare-faced amour, bitter about-face, she plays with the words while waiting in the dark of the stage, teased, ready, music playing, that driving bass of the song that is everywhere that summer, guhguhguhguhGUH chichichichichi. Rose knows she has arrived at the end of some freeway with the choice being to either jump or turn back. Onstage she and Lana will share one last look before the dance begins, the look containing almost everything, locking up their mobile morality, a flock of everyone outside the Lolas, the policemen who used to sigh and wave them off without writing up tickets. Again the Lolas will get off with another dereliction of duty.

  Though after that first second Lana never peeks at Rose or out at the crowd, her diffidence so appealing. She acts as if she needs nothing, her system self-sufficient, running on its own juices, Rose seeing for the first time that Lana’s beauty has to do with how she never cops to much, her brown nape forever turning away. While Rose stares out, brazenly curious under the thinnest veil of shyness, her tongue forever inching forward.

  At the peak of a certain power, the men’s desire becomes a hand persuaded to move. You find a way to convince this hand to uncurl and respond, to come forth with the bill you tuck into your garter. After their first night, on the train ride back, Rose tries speaking of a hand that Lana doesn’t want to discuss. Why does she love to hide her titillation? She admits to nothing.

  Home in the roach-friendly kitchen over the Hudson, they seem to skulk together, pulling damp bills from a paper bag, each George Washington or Abe Lincoln a mark of a second, an exchange of capital, one favor granted and another withheld. “Really, what’s wrong with it,” asks Rose, “given that aren’t all jobs a form of prostitution? You keep yourself from following your bliss for some period of time and then capital squirts toward you. At least we’re performing our dance authentically. Any other job we could get would serve someone else’s system and wouldn’t be true any
way to whatever self we want to believe in. Or what do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” says Lana. “Not much. It’s a job. Sorry. It’s just that these days I do better when I don’t think too much.”

  Later Rose will remember the whole package of Dick, Dan, the scion, Bev, the happy-hour welfare mom and their bar as a loss, another strangled death rite though in the moment, sharing anything with Lana spells adventure all over again. What she likes most is when they start the journey, taking the train ride together out from the grand half-egg of Grand Central. As they get off the train, some blocks still to walk, they travel already in that beer-smeared empire in which the girls become not Lola One and Two but Babydoll and Killer Girl. Rose will also like the way the bartender says with force get up onstage already and the sweaty collectivity of shoulder-rubbing near the bar with its customers who have spent their day welding, digging ditches, monitoring accounts or sitting in class but who now link, raising toasts to liquid joy.

  When the girls enter from the street they must first walk through the legs of a giant neon girl they nickname Trixie, Trixie whose long eyelashes blink into the New York night until last call, blinking like a person trying to stammer the truth but finding it endlessly hard: only on entering Trixie but never on exiting do they notice her neon flash, the girl giving you the chance to come in but not wanting you to leave.

  Though Rose’s spare room was long ago vacated by the premed, Lana refuses to sleep there, never budging from her lair on the mustard living room couch, hand thrown over her head, lips half open, dead under an eyemask until noon, playing languorous cat to Rose’s anxious mouse. So Lana does not talk as much as she used to and has that new horrible stoner laugh, an unfunny ax stuttering on unyielding wood. Still in that apartment they almost find their old ease, Rose trying not to use any of the college vocabulary to which Lana is allergic, the words she says freeze life, narrative or capital or locus or agency or discourse or postcolonial.