Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  Instead, Lana makes lists for the future

  flea market

  laundry

  needle and thread

  instant coffee

  cream

  to fend off chaos, Rose thinks, saying nothing and going forward with the idea that they surrender conversation and just live inside their bodies, tired or working, drinking sugary ice coffee and on the intensive schedule because the managers believe in working coeds hard since coeds burn out quickly, the girls able to share shifts because Killer and Babydoll will accrue distinct cults, which turns out, by July, to be true enough.

  The hardened exes come for Lana. The older ex-music-producer guy like an aged bearded lion, ripped at the edges, shirt buttoned too low. The ex–blues musician, the ex–sports player. Plus grimacing college boys, predictions of exness, whom Rose believes will soon become nervous stockbrokers or lawyers with drug problems, dark images of an eternal spring break dancing in their eyes, their baseball caps tipped toward libidinous gravity, their style drawn in uncasual equal parts from batting practice, the ghetto, jails, boys slumped in solidarity as if they, like the dancers, gun for triumph over society’s more standard measuremakers.

  Rose meanwhile brings on the manual laborers and immigrants, often the crazies and occasionally the guys who call themselves urban like the Vietnam vet from Canada who wears a duck-hunter’s hat pulled low over his pink eyes, the vet who each night brings her a different present: a teddy bear, a daisy bouquet, a candy T-shirt reading DADDY’S LITTLE GIRL.

  The only place their followings overlap is among the bland white executives.

  One night a man reaches into the halo of the stage toward Rose’s crotch and speaks the knotted history of the Americas just give me some of that white gold, girl, some of that white gold. Late at night the mirror reflects back to Rose’s face a surprised little pilgrim girl in lace and pigtails, one Rose cannot recognize at all. For a second, Rose wishes she could find someone better at the controls.

  That night and after, Rose tries using a theme song for solos, a climbing harmonic scale, semi-Eastern with its chorus I will be your father figure until Lana forbids the indiscriminate use of the song, saying they should take turns given that the melody mesmerizes customers, bringing on daddy-size tips and since there’s a traceable bit of love in Lana’s crooked smile, Rose accepts all terms of her confinement.

  Though toward the end of their seventh month, neither of them making steps toward any more meaningful employment, it comes to Rose how much they stammer their future, almost as badly as neon Trixie outside the bar. Rose had lost sight of what their plan had been: were they supposed to gogo dance until the novelty wore off or they made big bucks or what was supposed to come first?

  She dances with Lana, their dance more slack than electric, and into that hammock of time comes the news. On an unseasonably warm afternoon, a spring day midwinter, they take the train together and enter the club through Trixie to find the smoky regret of the previous night already shading into the next night’s dream of sexual blandishment, outside light filtering knifelike through the gash in the velvet drapes. Inside they find Thai Don, the club’s round-faced owner, bobbing to some unheard music, the folds between his bald head and neck almost winking. Multitasking, he has told them, multitasking is the way to live and at every moment he lives this credo: twirling take-out noodles from a Styrofoam container with one hand, wiping a barglass with the other, yelling on the phone while also signaling the barboy Manuel to quit raising dust with the vacuum.

  When Lana and Rose sit at a bar table, Thai Don twiddles the radio dial up.

  As Vic has noted often in his books, adrenaline heightens memory: the amygdala holds trauma better than pleasure, a fact that Vic declares forms an argument for attachment parenting, parenting in which the parent seeks to bind the infant to a sense of security, the delusional faith that all life’s needs will be met. Because of such amygdalic retention, Rose believes her memory of the preamble to be accurate. Retrospect, however, as people always say, colors all: look back at such moments and all coherent elements already break into particulate, jelly to powder, each gaining charge, meaning, predestination.

  Easily Rose can remember other picturesque moments in the friendship—say, the girls with their legs outstretched on a sun-baked boat to a Greek isle, listening to the song about Lola or later, Rose tight-lipped while driving Lana to yet another abortion appointment, a Buster Keaton gasp as her car catches on the train tracks for a few perilous seconds while far off the girls do see an actual train approaching—all moments that Rose could say, in retrospect, had gunshot the start of their friendship’s descent. Instead she ends up believing that in that bar’s womb came their first irrevocable loss, the one from which they will never recover.

  While her amygdala still hums at a pleasant low-grade buzz, before the moment etches into some unfortunate forever, Rose sits at the bar table and is punctured by love for the place, for the scent of gallons of beer spilled into Astroturf like some ancient peasant sod-seasoning practice, the moment sharp in its dusty column of light and the girls’ fake nonchalance, for Lana sewing red and gold jewels onto her costume. What Rose fails to recall, as she later tells the story to Hogan, is whether the girls felt at all flush with their old-time criminal glee or had some sullenness already permeated everyone?

  Right before the wormhole, Thai Don doesn’t hang up the phone and doesn’t turn down the radio but does turn up the TV to an imbecilic loudness because, as he shouts into the phone, he is heading out back to have it out with the cook and doesn’t want to miss the chance to see his cousin who sometimes fills in for the afternoon newscast though today it is someone else, a woman discussing in a tone both urgent and unfeeling the Good Life First! policy, some kind of new eye-for-eye justice in the penal system.

  This will be the moment the girls first hear mention of Vic, three times in a row, unmistakable.

  Vic, Victor Mahler, Mahler.

  “What was that?” says Rose half joking, pinching her friend’s arm.

  Legions of fans. Protest. New judicial policy.

  Already Lana has understood. In that vertical column of light the wormhole opens and she is slipping through. Already Rose won’t be able to catch her.

  Rose still doesn’t get it. “Your dad?” and can’t help stuttering. “They said what? Your dad did what?”

  To which Lana flashes her deer’s look. She touches the beads that are supposed to flash, grabbing the strobes when her hips shimmy. “I’ll be back,” she says. Rose stays pinioned, craning forward trying to understand the news though she can’t, some new topic about a fallen bridge already taking over. When Lana returns, five minutes later, ten, beckoning Rose to the door, her face looks punched. “You come outside?” she squeaks and Rose follows her out. Lana says she had tried calling her parents and when that hadn’t worked she had finally reached their Spruce Street neighbor. “The neighbor said it was self-defense. As if Mary,” and Lana can’t finish. “As if my mom.”

  Cars may have been shooting by but on that sidewalk the two girls stay safe. The only people who might arrive would be earlybirds like the duck-hunter and it is still too early for him. A few cars slow, mistaking the girls’ intention, but move on soon enough.

  In the way Rose has waited their whole friendship to hold Lana, beyond their night in a Greek trench, Rose reaches out, understanding only that Mary is gone, for once not asking more. And though their old-time physical connection used to feel like live branches, thorny knots rubbed against each other, a hand flopped over a nighttime waist, now she hugs Lana as if they melt together, a river of bright green molecules flowing between.

  “You’ve always been there for me,” Lana tells Rose’s shoulder, “from the start. You’re the best partner I’ll ever have.”

  Rose shakes her head, guilty. In such a terrible moment, a baby trusts her.

  “You know me,” says Lana and then her shudder starts. There they stand, joined together for once, Lana quak
ing, Rose realizing that this moment marks her friend’s greatest openness. So that when they finally pull apart, Rose asks what turns out to be the wrong question, since who cares what Lana’s next action will be when Rose cares only about the extension of their moment. Her question unfortunately brings Lana back to herself.

  “Guess just tell them I’m leaving?” says Lana and what Rose will remember is their fluency at avoiding plans, both telling the other not to worry, they’ll see each other later. On that worn road outside Thai Don’s bar, Rose imagines Lana showing up at the apartment to sleep on the sofa as usual, believing this roadside moment together will herald some unguessably close era for the Lolas.

  All that night Rose covers for Lana, dancing an apology for not being Lana, for not having Lana’s rude grace, covering the double shift for both her own hardcore nutcases and Lana’s disappointed exes, the cabal of hairy-chest followers. This moment will stick so that the next morning on a scrap, once Lana leaves for good, Rose will write an apology that steals from what Vic said in that long-ago bookstore reading:

  To all the men who were there last night, I am sorry. No one knows with greater pain than I do the disparity between Lana and me.

  After the shift, the bleary pre-dawn after the revelation, Rose is uncustomarily alone, Lana’s bag at her feet at the upstate train station platform, the minute-hand stuck in place at 2:30 in the morning with four bandanna’d gang members shuffling toward her down the platform. One seems to have nodded to the others to start the approach, hands in their pockets, smiling at the girl because time is theirs to play out like the length of a magician’s red scarf, smiling as one reaches deep into his back pocket for what could be a knife-handle or gun-barrel.

  And Rose could not have prayed for what happened next: Lana’s bag overflowing with white goo, pouring out of the bag from some bottle of mousse and exploding into a river as if out of a slapstick Busby Berkeley comedy. Whatever the stuff is, the guys stop and laugh. She hears one of them: shitload! The leader punches another guy, the sheer craziness making the two still laugh when, minutes later, the train slides in to the station.

  It is the gift of criminal glee all over again, commuted, and Rose can’t wait to tell Lana about it though from now on she will have to carry such moments permanently solo. Whatever the news about Mary, riding back to her apartment, Rose exults at life, at Lana, at how no matter what, they will swim through any mess. All the way downstate she hugs her friend’s sopping bag. Half turning away, as always, Lana had half saved Rose.

  On the next day, right off, Lana betrays whatever their promise had been. She leaves as relics only her books and clothes and necklaces in the apartment so that for years, wherever Rose moves, she ships and stores them, packed boxes of sentiment, LANA’S STUFF TRAVELING with her everywhere.

  FEBRUARY 17–25, 1989

  You can’t put gold back in the mine, ore back in stripped earth. The morning after Lana learns of her mom’s end, definitively, she stands still as a monument in the light tweaking Rose’s apartment. Outside, eleven stories below, the gray Hudson stays a long flat snake. Lana may be unsure but as her father had once told her, no westerner stays east forever. Of all days, an invitation, embossed on pinked ivory, has traveled through boxes and bags and hands, only to land, practically vibrating, on the dwarf entrance table in Rose’s apartment.

  Lana holds the invite in her hands, her eyes trying to tame the devilish embossed words: the card notes a Berkeley event on the intersection between neuroscience and psychology and that Vic Mahler is to give the keynote speech. The words tug off the paper and start to float.

  On a morning when even boats plying their trade on the flat river look like they haul depression, Lana doesn’t want to learn more. Acedia, her father called it, the depression that even the bacchanalian Greeks had to fight off. Invite between her fingers, Rose still asleep, Lana feels return as a wrench in the genes.

  Without considering, the manic defense as Vic would say, she starts throwing random items of clothes into a pile, making a mobile nest of her belongings. Even after Rose awakes, Lana keeps going, not listening to Rose say how tired she is, Rose who apparently had stayed up late to watch the news. She only hears Rose ask: “Why leave though?”

  The best Lana manages is to say: “Close flanks?”

  “Ranks?” says Rose, incorrigible.

  Of course Lana can’t explain much to Rose who stays loud in speechless judgment, scrambling up eggs for the two of them.

  “You have no idea what funny thing happened last night. Before I got on the train,” Rose says finally, her back toward Lana.

  When Lana doesn’t ask, Rose pushes a plate toward her friend. “Here.”

  Lana ignores the offering, instead rising to pound her nest of stuff into the army satchel from her father’s early immigrant years, green and boasting a red-star button she fancies is Communist. She will be happy and not creeped to carry his bag, a talisman meaning some union will be found and that she will be able to shoulder all appropriate burdens.

  “You’re not hungry?” Rose asks, already knowing that the most she’ll get now will be a shrug.

  In their goodbye at the door, they stay stiff: no more green-river hug as on the day before, no prickly branches, just two sets of bones, creatures maybe already dead, salt, adipocere, nothing.

  Once out that door however, Lana becomes alive as she has ever been, lacking gravity. They—whoever they are—they have finally set her free. How wonderful to escape an old friend’s questions and judgment, how free to go in the elevator down to the lobby so out she may walk, anonymous, a woman with a scarf around her neck striding past upper Broadway’s laboring and landed gentry, on the same road on which deer once ran from cougar, where according to her father in his one visit to her in college, Indians had sold off an island too quickly, a fact he mentioned in relation to her own atavistic memory and more universal laws of aggression. Now she doesn’t care what anyone has said, instead walking as if new in love all the way to Port Authority just to get on the first westbound Greyhound while holding the idea of reunion with Vic as a dim magnetic center.

  A bus ride will be the perfect act, granting time to rearrange inner partitions. In line, some businessman asks where she is going but she misunderstands the guy as asking why. She clutches her father’s credit card before answering: to figure things out.

  “Where you going, miss?” the lantern-jawed station clerk will also ask, making her understand someone must have screwed with the before and after of things: she can tell she keeps giving the wrong answer to the wrong people. Instead of her destination, she says, for the last time in years: “Lana—” faltering over the last name “—Mahler.” Because it hits: Mahler will now mean belonging not to the small coterie of fame but rather the larger clan of infamy.

  When she reaches Berkeley, she goes home because home should still be a place where a person won’t have to explain.

  Except home is yellow-taped with DO NOT ENTER, a black official car parked in the driveway. And she is beyond tired. From Omaha on, she had sat next to a garrulous addict with a determination to ply her with black beauties but since he reminded her of the days of Tumble-weed and her mother’s disappointment, Lana did play a game with him, accepting one hot pill only after every other stop, which meant that by the time they reached Reno’s boil all the chafed edges had come alive, making the bus jump into one sloshy mess around the pilgrims, each with a story to be told if time allowed, problem being that time slanted and would end in a crash of earthquakes and doom, horror and history, odd stones jutting up out of the desert, dinosaur bones and worn lassoes, given that all these people seemed to think they were heading somewhere better but the ride would self-combust and seal their fate. The driver, a rotating series of drivers, constituted a multi-headed Hindu savior, the riders and their wizened Dust Bowl faces his multiply condemned. When the skinny pill-proffering passenger got off in Sacramento, Lana entered a mood that didn’t lift until she saw the Oakland port and t
he sexy tiredness of the whores with a dissipation worse than her own, almost good as sea air in their restorative powers because they made the shared faith of the Mahler family return.

  Waiting for the luggage hatch to open, she hadn’t wished to hear the radio news that pierced her cool.

  At one point to the black-beauty man, she must have confessed something revealing because he’d been impressed. He said he knew Vic Mahler’s work because his older sister had joined some sort of spiritual commune thanks to the great buckaroo Vic!

  Here she is, trying to return to cool, almost laughing at the idea of buckaroo! being used by anyone as a compliment, almost laughing after the bus ride and radio news and another quicker ride to get to Spruce Street, not quite in her body hiking up the hill with its leaf-strewn sidewalks, roots bulging to crack the old sidewalk where shaggies used to stake out bed sites. Here she is almost laughing in the dappled light of her home street, the light a whisper that everything might be okay.

  Except it isn’t okay at all, she can’t enter her home, not according to the bored oil-sheened cop who looks over his sunglasses, telling her that he has orders to prevent driveway ingress. She can’t get inside. When he looks over his sunglasses one too many times at her, some fibers start to split.

  Worse than the news as it had crackled forth in the gogo place, the spire of coasters toppling as the television had blared forth news of Vic, worse than any end she had imagined is this yellow-taped proscription. No home. She repeats dumbly back to the guy, trying not to cry: “I can’t go inside?”