Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  Only a few people could recognize Rose and she is glad for it: so many wronged, placard-holding groups have gathered that Rose could be a member of any of them. EYE-FOR-EYE LIVES IN GOD’S TESTAMENT FOR A REASON! LIFE CONTINUES EVEN FOR FLAWED HUMANS! LET US NOT CAST THE FIRST STONE! In the front row, Mary’s assistant Sherry leans on someone who might have been a sister, now patting Sherry’s shoulder down as if she were a new foal.

  If Rose hopes that her witnessing the trial will, given the unguent of magical thinking, make the thing go well, while driving up to Sacramento she had accepted that going well might not mean that Vic escapes justice altogether but rather that the trial will restore some Mahler dignity. Rose has come to the trial because not coming would mean she accepted the Mahlers’ fall. In coming to hear Vic’s explanation, she hopes the family will live intact inside her given that their ideals had fashioned her current life. What they admired had made her.

  And selfishly she needs to locate Vic, a lost pharaoh first sighted in a Berkeley bookstore, someone who could spin a full world. He used to like to tease the girls, saying their ontology needed his epistemology in order to keep their teleology if not their eschatology straight.

  What? Lana would laugh.

  Back then Rose had not just been watching Vic: he had been looking into her when she had been all pullulating potential as he liked to say. He had seen her. He had seen and remarked her, liking something of her mind and questions and promise. She had felt known. On that slim golden ladder she had been able to string up something of a life, his belief in her so luminous with teasing, so teasing in its luminosity, making her still so zealous about the return of that particular Vic that it takes a while once the actual Vic enters the courtroom and starts undoing himself for her to understand how out of control he is, slipping backward. No, he has already slipped. She must fight the urge to get up and stop him. Each game he plays with the jury and prosecutor plays out more outrageously transparent than the previous so that it soon becomes clear that any more from him will hurt his case.

  “I just want to say—”

  He surveys the jury.

  O please, keep your dignity, she begs silently, using her last shred of magical thinking. This will be his final chance to talk and hasn’t he done enough damage? First he tried presenting himself as a vulnerable casualty of the system, even as prey of his slain wife, only to spend the rest of his cross-examination ping-ponging between the idea of himself as a victim of impulse and a premeditator of just revenge.

  At one especially low point, the prosecutor had sighed. “We cannot exactly claim retardation for you, Mister Mahler.” The five-hour-long ceremony, after multiple intermissions, prevarications on both sides and stalling, during which Rose had learned nothing new from either the gossip during intermissions or the bustling parade in court, narrows to his last statement: can Vic reconfigure the case?

  Yes. She wants to believe he might. He certainly can do no worse. And given the room’s fatigue Rose intuits that Vic might paradoxically manage to patch up the damage he has done.

  He scans not just the jury but his fans and the aggrieved as well as the faces of those who have taken him on as an impersonal cause. While he scans, Rose feels the body of the courtroom clench as one person.

  “In a sense,” he begins, “I am Vic Mahler. In another sense I am whoever you need me to be right now.” For the first time in the proceedings he twists toward Rose to point at her. “Take this woman over here. Rose! Rosie-anna!” and she cannot keep from gasping, unmasked, looking behind as if another Rose might be located, spinning back to find his eyes boring into her, fiery with accusation or sentiment. Given her oblique angle, she had been sure he could not sight her but clearly she had been wrong.

  “Too late to call new witnesses to the stand Mister Mahler,” says the judge.

  “Rose. You know this is true. Rose knows me as well as anyone. She was—is—a friend of our family. Of my daughter Lana. Could you please stand up Rose?”

  Uncertain, horrified, a moment having arrived, Rose struggles to her feet.

  “No temporizing at this juncture. Mister Mahler,” the judge says. “I repeat. No time to call in additional witnesses. This courtroom cannot become one of your classrooms.”

  Rose barely hears the room’s subdued titter. All she sees is the brilliance of Vic’s eyes. “Rose was a member of our family. A person who could tell you better than anyone how, as you people say, I tried my best. She knows I—”

  “Please sit. All respect, Mister Mahler, this status should have been introduced earlier. We stand ready to listen to your final statement.”

  Vic’s lawyer, a famous liberal with gray hair tucked vainly behind his ears, nonetheless turns and looks importantly at Rose, raising an eyebrow, inviting her to ignore the judge. She is being called. They are asking her, in some impromptu last-ditch strategy, to speak.

  And she does her best. She tries. Her lips move without sound. She waves an apology. All this happens in the interminable second before her knees give out and she sinks back down.

  In the front row Sherry, Mary’s assistant, breaks down, sobbing: “This is just wrong!”

  “Order!” the judge requests, slamming her gavel. “I have stated the protocol of this courtroom. No one new is being called to the stand.”

  “This man!” Sherry shouts as if higher decibels invoke higher justice. “This man murdered one of the best women who ever lived. No one asked me to testify because I love women and the prosecution didn’t want complications.” A significant look at the district attorney.

  “Out of order!”

  “But what can be lost? Does sexual orientation strip a person of the ability to know the truth? This family I know. I know this beast had a murderer’s anger from day one. When you sentence, remember you are sentencing a force of evil.”

  The judge is distracted, whispering to her aide, and Sherry continues.

  “The autopsy shows extreme intemperate murder. This man planned every second of his life.”

  “Guards?”

  “He robbed all of us. Not to mention stealing the only true mother I ever had!”

  Later Rose will think that, rather than having gone mute when called to testify, what she wished she could have done would have been the adult equivalent of a childish dream. That she might have spread a net over the whole courtroom capable of turning back time, one that would comfort Sherry, shield Vic and keep the jury from casting stones. She will wish she could have discussed the complexity of justice. Which really would have been her way to question whether anyone ever knows the depth of their own badness and more truly state that Vic’s eyes still have a vital force which acts as a kindness in the world. All to finally ask: can’t we believe in second chances?

  In the moment she fails. She cannot rise again, she does everyone wrong, she is unable to help. The very something that should have helped her speak blocks her throat.

  Before the jury returns, Rose excuses herself out of the courtroom, not sure whether or not Vic sees her tiptoe out. A failure, a lapsed Aaron, she walks as if with purpose out glass double doors and into the flat heat of Sacramento streets. For an hour or more she walks nowhere, x-ray vision making her see holes burning through whatever she used to pretend to be. Pure ectoplasm of Rose sees only the faces of passersby who possess enviable destinations. Even an older lady who almost hits her in a crosswalk—pastel car, auburn hair, wrinkled face—seems of an anointed race, belonging to a car and a destination, more of the world than boneless Rose, a pretender belonging to no one. And when the ectoplasm named Rose had been sleeping, everyone else had figured out their lives, everyone else handed a calculus to let them know which appointments to keep and which to cancel, where to live and whom to see, whom to bed so as to lie easily, legs brushing, receiving some share of unmanipulated human concord and touch. All these souls so untroubled, trusting the calmest of sleeps await them, all living a miraculous life outside of which Rose will forever be doomed to live.

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nbsp; If any emotion is boundless, it does not belong solely to you, Vic had once told her, one of their better conversations, turning almost mystical. In it she had been vulnerable, telling him that fatherlessness could feel like a huge Pandora’s box: she didn’t even want to talk about it. He had stared into her and said: “Someone like you carries not just your grief but the grief of everyone in your line.”

  “I don’t know my line,” she had said for the umpteenth time only for him to wave such objections away, his eyes as coruscatingly radiant on that day as on this bad afternoon in court.

  Better if I were the one in prison, she tells herself, pacing Sacramento streets. Lucky Vic; he gets a container. She could just drag the hand of any stranger to get answers. Anyone would be better at life than she is. No one can explain how much she had wanted to matter to the Mahlers in the way they still matter to her. Why had she bothered to attend the trial? Was it solely for Lana and Vic and not for Mary? How much has Rose been tainted by the two she has started to think of as complicit culprits?

  Stupid, she tells herself, you’re a useless savior. Be kind to yourself, she tries following up with all her lame affirmations: I am loved, I am loving, she says, I am lovable.

  The next week, unable to finish law school in Berkeley, Rose drives down Five to try to invent a new life for herself in Los Angeles, a place that from the vantage of Northern California looks like a tabula rasa.

  By 1995 she finally has her law degree, a few fair-weather jog-buddies and maybe a new lease on life in her small apartment on a palm-flecked boulevard, technicolor blue and sunny whenever copters don’t whir overhead. She lives on a boulevard heading west toward the total blank of the ocean and still tries to find her friend, using all the newly accessible but slow computer technology, typing in Lana’s name again and again only to come up empty-handed, often having to placate annoyed people who pick up the phone when she reaches the wrong L. Mahler. Mahler is far too common a name for so rare a breed and perhaps Lana had gone far enough to change her name given that Rose can locate no record and not because she is lax. Once she goes so far as to pay a detective service, chalking up the payment as equivalent to the cost of a hundred lottery tickets. No one can help, not even the Mahlers’ neighbors from Spruce Street who know only that the state had seized both accounts and house and all was still held in escrow to be refigured. Rose sucks in her breath: how thoroughly into her father’s notoriety Lana has vanished.

  Nighttimes find Rose in her tiny efficiency in Venice, a former pleasure motel converted to apartments on a road with a few HUD houses good at covering crack addicts from the whirring scopes of the copters, drug-seeking or malathion-spraying, all of which makes her have one sustained two-year dream that she wakes in Iraq with body bits splayed about.

  Many nights find her splayed on a floor futon near the long hip-bone stretch of Gan and his oceanic snore, Gan the DJ she had met on the sunset path when unwieldy on skates they had practically skated into each other’s arms. In the copter-blast of these early days the couple gets along despite the futon being so thin it could be taken from the moment just after the pea gets placed under the mattress, before mattresses get stacked, before the princess admits to sensitivity.

  It is not the flat bed or Gan’s snore that makes Rose insomniac, also not the sirens, snores or even alcoholic howls of Sunny, a sound engineer who lives across the courtyard, tan cracking, her lemon convertible undriven for uncountable days of lonely descent. Not even that Rose has finished law school but finds her advice column for a women’s magazine more fulfilling than her ostensible vocation, the practice of estate planning. She had ended up not in death law, as it is called, where she had shown what felt like a morbid aptitude, her mind grabbing on to all the cases jamming the courts in those years—the Arizona mother awaiting capital punishment, the date night gone wrong, the pair of hapless friends. Instead she let herself in by a side door by practicing estate law. No matter how exact it all is, the name proclaims the importance of serene, unbroken lines of heritage.

  But the main thing she wishes to do, what she can and must do, is write Vic. She writes letters, she tells herself, to make up for her tongue-tied courtroom appearance. Or she does it because Mary had always silently but often asked her to be a good role model. Now Rose believes she might form part of an important overhaul. She will be no one’s ectoplasm and will never admit how ravenous she stays for the Mahlers, as if she has left some crucial part of herself back inside their kitchen, she and Lana slipping past Mary, grabbing an apple before heading with or without Vic but always on an escapade.

  Rose writes to Vic as rehab for him but recuperation for her.

  Her letter-writing becomes so much greater a part of her life than her column clippings flying around her front seat, her advice to the lovelorn:

  Dear Clueless,

  I suggest you stop beating up trees that no longer bear fruit.

  Dear Lost,

  High time for you to stop letting other people call the shots. You have a gift for romanticizing others that will lead nowhere.

  While Rose ascends as a giver of advice, she finds the letters passing between her prisoner and her brim with enough passion that they filch life out of her own. In one letter Vic accuses Rose of feeling his pain because it is easier than feeling her own. “But can he say that?” Rose asks her intended baby-daddy Gan. “He loves to tease me with clichés. Anyway I’m not feeling his pain, I’m trying to help.”

  “Maybe Mahler calls helping and pain the same thing? Or what do you think you’re doing for him anyway?”

  “Nothing,” says Rose, trying not to be disappointed by the literalism she finds so unbrilliant and constant in Southern California and maybe in the United States, in everywhere but one cell where a finely honed irony makes do with whatever muscle the pen of Vic Mahler has left.

  1990–2008

  If Rose cannot say why she keeps sending Vic science magazines and clippings, pretext for the long confessions she also sends, scrawled with her mother’s old fountain pen, the inexplicability keeps her sending one bundle after another. A package leaves her hand and a nervous relief steals over Rose.

  Vic used to say Rose enjoyed hardship yet whenever she mails him she lacks trust in her stamina. Once she and Lana had been climbing a Berkeley hill together but Rose had needed to run, not trusting the liminal zone, needing to make her desire to get to the top out-pace any bent toward inertia. In similar fashion she mails Vic packages quickly, trying not to overthink them, racing past the sticky threshold where she would have to admit her letters are pure striptease. Keeping up a relationship with a condemned man is beautifully asymmetrical as burlesque, an offer of freedom sans future, while also binding her by restoring the past. “O, I don’t know, I just feel bad for the guy alone in his cell,” she tells Gan, not telling him she also holds herself responsible for Vic’s fate. Not just that she should have spoken up and swung the jury’s findings; she could have done better, before or after, to reconstitute the freeze-dried family of Mahlers. “I think they’re your sea monkeys,” says Gan, “those little brine shrimp people used to send away for? Just because the drawings in the ads looked like a frolicking kingdom?”

  “I loved those. I sent away for them more times than I want to admit.” She almost laughs.

  “You never got disappointed?”

  At one low point, cycling together, Gan does ask if she prefers her boyfriends caged where at least she can locate them?

  “So uncalled for,” says Rose. According to Gan before he cycles off down the boulevard, part of her problem is that Rose lives in the past and should dedicate herself more to her current life, not just to future kids. Childhood living is easy to do, Lana used to sing at her, presciently enough. Abandoned temporarily, Rose gets off her bike to sit by the side of the path so she can pull out her ever-present pad and notate her present life, proving she can stay in the moment:

  I am a columnist, a part-time estate lawyer living near the Southern California beac
h with a boyfriend, trying to have a baby. No one has helped me. I created all this.

  She does not wholly believe these parameters of a life. They scarcely resemble the more credible life the Lolas used to hold up for each other, the sparkly crystal ball held inside the other’s potential. But she wants to pinpoint at least this moment so as to better inspect it. Rose sits by the path and looks at a butterfly against the sunset, at an animated conversation against far-off waves, a small child confident on skates and tells herself: I am appreciating this moment and who says that can’t be enough?

  While Vic’s occasional silence does nothing but provoke an itch. She works on being good at making herself forget which letters Vic ignores. On a whim, continuing the striptease, she writes a true rape story to send to Vic at Old Parcel, leaving it unclear which girl had been raped. When he queries her later she falls silent, happy to have a nugget he requires: information about his daughter. Dropping the story into the slot of her corner mailbox, she doesn’t know how the story will provoke him but still her face prickles with the closest she gets these days to that old-time smile, the wicked joy.

  What bothers Rose most is that she’d always thought she would prefer not to have kids, thinking she’d end up inside one of those sleek smooth-thighed childless couples in their fifties who tend to each mate’s catalogue of fetish regarding spice preference, coffee strength, waist-girth, animal tolerance, texture, topography.

  Because she has long felt illogically enough that her birth-mom’s death tainted her own fertility, it has started to seem likely that Rose might never know someone related to her by blood.

  As a child carrying her scruffy teddy bear with its welcome scent of spoiled milk into yet another loud living room, maybe her fifth or sixth foster home, Rose had made an oath into the teddy’s half-bitten ear that, if she ever did get to have kids, she would die before making any kid feel unwanted. She would make sure everything was squared away and prepared for a kid because she would never wish her fate on another, preferring to die first. The original sin rests in being unwanted, a weight a person never fully casts off.