Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  Each time she visits she makes a point of giving him small inconsequential gifts (a wooden massage roller, a crystal, a smooth blue pen) to make clear she is not after his millions. In turn he microwaves take-out tempura. They met when he asked for coins to feed a parking meter on Rodeo Drive. He asked to see her fingernails and supposedly was struck by the lack of vanity in how she kept them, pronouncing her the first woman since his arrival in Ellay to truly intrigue him.

  He calls Lana by the name she uses as an extra: Trixie Yokut, a waitress, a card-carrying member of the union of film extras, atmosphere, Trixie years away from having children of her own and the constant atmosphere children confer, as he says approvingly. Ellay has confirmed her choice of refuge because its daze grants anonymity, everyone sedated by climate, making it easy to cauterize the past and keep encounters in the smooth present.

  Is she not like everyone else scrubbing by?

  Inhabiting a banal condo in West Hollywood, a girl soothing aches or aspirations, neither murderer’s daughter nor the child of a famous philosopher and well-respected feminist but rather a girl with any future or past possible within some millionaire’s cool wood-shingled house, sinking into his hot tub on a fog day with the canyon wrinkled silk stretched below. Or else she sits on the redwood deck warming her hands on green tea brought by the Hungarian housekeeper who strives to subdue the disbelief of her penciled eyebrows.

  “Why do you love to work so hard, Trixie?” asks the millionaire on the deck. “Let me support you,” he says. “Live here! Why glamorize poverty? Only the young can afford such luxury.”

  Scanning the canyon she thinks this seems halfway true. But always later, drying off, wrapped in a towel, sitting on his couch waiting for god knows what, she hears her mother’s grim edict on Tumbleweed: THERE’S NEVER A FREE LUNCH. Each time Lana gets home from the millionaire’s house, clean and grimed, Lana has the odd urge to call Mary and tell her everything. The abortions, the weirdness of Los Angeles, this latest millionaire. As if she had ever called to confide, as if mother and daughter had magically become a mother-daughter pair fluent in the trite affairs of a day.

  But the purge of their future is so complete. Even the corner psychic cannot convincingly channel Mary though Lana keeps the wish alive, spending hours in the bodega’s fringed dark room to pay for a false connection, better than nothing.

  Maybe it is inevitable, after enough moments of sitting toweled on the millionaire’s couch, moments gathering, a necklace beaded toward final clasping, that Lana will sleep with the millionaire and he will grow addicted to her youth in the way the never-changing weather of Ellay makes old men grasp at the buttery sheen of the young until finally such addiction will distance her. She can see one inch of this rounding the bend but before the moment arrives keeps showing up at the guy’s mansion and smiling back at the housekeeper’s eyebrows to sit betoweled on his couch. This clinging to habit alone tells her she might be staving off another attack, what sanitarium doctors liked calling her sensitivity toward breakdown.

  Before the first time she goes down the rabbithole with the millionaire, it is not that any surge of attraction overcomes her. Rather, she listens to his philosophy, as attentive a student as Rose used to be. The millionaire is saying that he has not yet broached his philosophy of sex.

  “Basically,” he tells Lana, “if I’m attracted to someone and that person’s not attracted to me, we can still do something with the energy that has been generated. This is a Sufi idea. So for example I once met a girl in one of those bootleg video stores in Alexandria and I brought her home and I began touching her like this—and like this—”

  “I’m sorry but—” for some reason her voice escapes in tiny bubbles.

  One part of her wants to believe the millionaire’s thinking because it removes the burden of choice: she knows what it is to surrender responsibility just as if she were an infant, entering the inevitable opening.

  He continues: “You are a creature with an open mind. We are adults. We know how to do this. Take my hand.”

  In a weak moment, all too sensitive, the day before Lana chose to slip down the rabbithole, she had found herself walking the ocean boardwalk, lost amid all the neon bathing suits and finger-popping roller-skaters until she ducked into a pay phone. Without planning, her fingers started dialing Rose’s old New York apartment. Not to know if Rose was still gogo dancing. Not to talk about Vic. Just to call someone still grabbing a glossy tether toward what Lana was supposed to have become.

  But Rose made her usual mistake of answering right away, the hello so hopeful Lana had to hang up. The readiness of that hello terrified, containing the risk of pity, the one insult Lana could not handle since pity rip-cords a person back to gravity and bad choices. Having slammed down the phone, Lana kept her hand on it, breath jagged, while by her glided Los Angelenos, skating or jogging, scented with coconut, pineapple, hydrangea, all exercising toward the youth they wished forever to enjoy. As Vic liked quoting Kinnell: Here come the runners / they run in a world where brick-laying used to be work / their faces tell there is a hell and they will reach it.

  Lana vowed never again to be so weak as to call Rose.

  Better to keep alive the Lolas and their flow than to reencounter Rose in her recent incarnation, pitying or angry, since Lana had no stamina for being triply orphaned. Finally, as she had done with Mary, she pulled her hand from the phone. That evening she saw everywhere she went only two sorts of people: those who had locked themselves into a lifetime of community rich with friends and friendly acquaintances and those solitary types who lived out terms of loneliness, with no other category dwelling between.

  Back in New York, Lana had hung up on her mother after what turned out to be their last conversation and had experienced this same brer-rabbit moment in which she could not pull her hand away from the receiver, finding herself forced into the bad type of regret. Not the regret that pillows a person, plumping someone with the possibility of a parallel life continuing on undisturbed by bad choices but rather a truer regret, the double-bladed knife that memory wields.

  Take my hand. As Trixie Yokut she sits on the millionaire’s couch toweled and floating, the millionaire holding her palm with one hand, his other hand having her stroke him exactly as she had imagined, a dark curl fluted and veined.

  “Have an open mind, Trixie,” he croons. “We are adults, we know how to do this.”

  In coming to Ellay, she had wanted to believe she would be free to reinvent herself. That she could hide and be capable of anything, be truly seen, discovered despite herself. Lana as Trixie stares out at the millionaire’s canyon and thinks some good must come from learning the extremes. After a friend of hers met and forgotten on the set of a pilot had told her to read the writer Colette she had. With the millionaire’s excitement one lap over, she figures she may as well be one of Colette’s characters glamorous in Paris, or even like Colette herself because of course the author had experienced what she wrote about, hadn’t she?

  Amid the millionaire’s agitation she cannot keep from crying, which is strange because even when she wants to these days she cannot cry much but nothing stops the guy, a regular steam engine, so different from all those susceptible college boys he must go until he finishes. Afterward he offers walnuts from the tree out back and next morning the wrinkled nuts in a brown bag at her bedside stare back.

  To fend off regret, to prove she had willed it all—couch, steam, walnuts—the next day she returns to his mansion and the day after that, making herself available in any way he wants. During various acts, from above she can see their bodies and still manages to float, desire in no inch of her body as he dispatches himself first inside a condom and later onto her belly, admiring his script.

  Their routine begins: she affords him their coupling in his spartan bedroom while he intermittently raves about her dark body, always saying later how much he wants to photograph her so he can add her picture to his travel gallery, composed of bare-breasted, bamboo-frame
d women hanging on his spotless walls. “You could look Polynesian,” he says, pulling back her hair. After everything, a responsible citizen, he pats her off with soft tissues and together they step into the steam bath next to the huge bedroom, the bath that makes the sex part of a healthful purifying regime like psyllium, wheatgrass, mantras. They are both acolytes on a trip and their sex is an act beyond, promising everyone a better future.

  Until she will begin to avoid him and in response he starts to leave long, stern messages on her phone. “People must have told you before but you’re a sociopath. What truth is there to any part of you? You have a predator instinct, there’s no consistency to you! You’re an animal. You chew off legs. People like you think only about their own beast instincts. You will never succeed.”

  1993

  Equipped at least with social instinct, she goes on as Trixie Yokut long as she can take it, waitressing and working as an extra, dwelling in her condo while shrouding from herself the idea that she counts as one of Ellay’s fallen and only the night sky fills with stars. On the boardwalk near an old bohemian bookstore, ducking away from the path of the turbaned rasta who smiles, plays guitar and rollerskates all at the same time, she meets Kip and finds relief in his surfing roughness, his earthbound rituals and buried vulnerability.

  Meeting Kip, she stops being Trixie Yokut and calls herself Lana Wagner, close enough to her real name but far enough to surrender Vic. Because Kip reforms her sentence, letting her feel she has served her time and that a new man will release her from her sleeping-beauty float. Both Kip’s habit of seeing meaning everywhere and his rage coax her north.

  Without knowing the full terms of his offer, she grasps his kite-tail to head up Five, turning left toward the coast to get to his cool foggy nowhereland of Yalina, a cocoon with better geography.

  In Yalina she will be able to lose herself in tribal prescriptions and small-town contradictions, a place where her own choices will possess gravity. The town’s best escape will be commitment since no one here ever escapes: not surfers who have avoided sharks long enough to chat over morning coffee with potgrowers who steer clear of the feds, not redneck loggers from the woods shunning the publicity that comes from treehuggers who do their best to spurn the loggers’ truckwheels, not back-to-the-landers shying away from the weekenders by pulling honey from beehives, not the new computer billionaires shirking desk jobs by driving in with four-wheel-drive conquistadors, desperate to find the city newspaper and evading the rez kids who duck their parents’ destiny by hanging with skate punks who dodge everyone in the one town center.

  As in Ellay, here everyone obeys the follow-your-own-lifestyle laws of the land with Californian unease, their faces genial and smoldering, a little scared of personal incursions, keeping self and clan sacred above all. Yet the drama of high cliffs and shark-infested ocean means that those who live here year-round are whether they like it or not connected, unable to avoid the collectivity of geographic fate.

  Each night, whole sections of crumbly sandstone cliff fall into the ocean; quakes tremble the mountains; neighbors get eaten by sharks or nabbed by law enforcement. Not to mention that tsunamis could rinse everything away in a second. The single north–south highway gets blocked for weeks on end, surrendered to cows who cross it to get to the better grass on the oceanside cliffs. At many points on the road, no fence separates the highway from the ocean below. Minute by minute you must choose life.

  If the scarcity of people gives Kip, a semi-native son, heartburn, it lends Lana new destiny.

  Back in the seventies, from what Lana understands, Vic had written a treatise on choice sickness as a contemporary pathology. He’d said that if you made neural plasticity a friend you could paradoxically more quickly find some predetermined bliss and in this way he configured the thought of the later pharmacologists, the prophets and wielders of Cymbalta and Lexapro and Welbutrin, the slingers of Zoloft, Lithium, Alvia, Adderall, some of whom Lana had ended up meeting in her life away from the Mahler house, all awed by Vic and his role in having been among the first of the third-wave neurogenic mystics to suggest that one can find self-definition by surrendering prior self-definition and so stumble upon one’s highest calling: this is how she understands Vic’s thought, which is to say, not fully. And as Lana walks the Yalina cliffs with her head cloudless, feet stumbling only occasionally, she thinks that just because Vic had spoken of choice sickness did not make the idea wrong. Sometimes even Vic spoke the truth. In Ellay she must have suffered from choice sickness, as earlier in life, and now finally, in Yalina, unable to escape its dangerous cliffs and ocean, she is released. Everything here gives little choice.

  Another truth being that the job she finds at the market of Yalina—the ungourmet one on the wrong, eastern side of the highway, stocked with powdered drinks and no goat cheese—spits so beautifully in the face of her parents. As hers is the most limited job she has ever had, she gets to feel righteous while collecting customers’ government coupons or passing discount boxes of frozen foodstuffs under her hand, each act a breathtaking repudiation of Mary and Vic. And while it is also true that Kip never understands her pleasure in this job, given that his father is the local state trooper, she thrills, telling Kip he can’t understand only because if he were the one standing there as market cashier, he would become everyone’s sitting duck, absorbing hatred since his father BJ in his prime was notorious for slapping speeding tickets on everyone, never mind if the motor vehicle happened to be driven by BJ’s neighbor or son’s friend. BJ, so unlike her own father, believed in the idea of a justice single and absolute, a world in which every sinner gets his due.

  Both Kip and his father in their homespun absolutisms stay quaintly foreign to her given that Lana had been raised on the elitist exceptionalism of Vic, one that had slipped a skepticism about all orthodoxy into her system. Once she had yelled in self-defense at Vic: you’re the one who lives above everyone else’s rules! Not me! You have the morality of a rock star who thinks nothing ordinary applies to you!

  He had called her his little kitten and said, merely, touché.

  This then is also part of her inheritance from Vic, a desire for rules so hot in her that she paradoxically as ever cannot believe in any absolute fairness or convention, her oblivion what makes Kip’s life easier. For instance, she doesn’t care if she stands alone in her job while Kip stays unemployed for most of the year. As she wipes down the conveyor belt inhaling ammonia or deftly prices pudding, pasta and meat byproducts, Lana swells with the thought: all of us are limited but at least we’re in this together. Which we? What this? What together? It doesn’t matter: in Yalina, on this endlessly shifting coast with only its cows itinerant, she gets to locate herself. Never before has she felt so fully at home.

  Only one thought nags.

  They have closed her asylum records. When the officials had released her she’d tried obtaining them but an overworked secretary had regarded her request for information as beyond what was prescribed for the post-release period. Will Lana never know what happened to her? Isn’t there a Freedom of Information act somewhere? She thinks about hiring a lawyer but doesn’t want to stir up too much muck.

  During spare moments at her market, she rubs the oddly smooth concavity of her belly with its small scar of unknown provenance, almost sure that at some point when she’d been a zombie under the spell of the doctors and their electricity addictions, the doctors had taken out her womb. Just like that they’d decided they could not take the stink of Lana’s femaleness; just like that they’d declared she should not bear fruit and had voted for eugenics. They had guessed how bad Vic was some months before what she calls his atrocity and had punished her, stuffing a chapter of her future history into a glass bottle before throwing it into the ether of forgetfulness.

  2001–2008

  Mommy: it becomes three syllables, ma—ah—mee. Voiced in the uncanny middle of the night, the middle syllable becomes a love grumble that also locates her.

  Ma—she who
can put things right—

  ah—not coming fast enough

  —mee. I need you.

  The need thrills her. Mommy, as if just like that she had ascended to being the equivalent of a Hindu deity. Maamih. And was any sound more basic? Had she ever been able to call her own mother mommy?

  Once Mary had gone a bit nutty, waking up Lana at seven in the morning, on a timetable of her own devising, saying: Lana, I need you to call me mother. This urge arose because one of Mary’s aunts had died the week before, too young, an aunt called mother by her ramshackle brood and maybe Mary had realized, standing by as a few oldtimers trotted out to do the Yokut funeral dance, step flat step flat, honoring the spirit of her aunt, that her daughter failed to render upon her any special title. When Mary returned, she explained she wanted at least one remnant of what sounded to Lana like one awful hierarchical childhood made up of nuns and the reservation. As a result, growing up in the Mahler house of slippery nicknames, Lana had never known exactly what name to call her mother.

  Lana, from now on I want you to call me mother.

  Okay, Lana had said, mother, so sardonic her mother had winced.

  At least mom, then, okay? Not Mary.

  Okay, mom. Up in Yalina, Lana starts to realize that what her mother had missed out on was the full sweetness children could offer. As a daughter, Lana had failed, always teetering in her approach, never sure a lap would stay anywhere long enough for her to crawl into it, her mother always on the move. Her first memory of Mary holds this: a tempting bright-lipped presence across the room, preparing sandwiches for some hike that her baby girl will take up a hill on papa’s back. That same baby girl felt she couldn’t cross the room toward the pretty lady, lacking an essential right to ask her for anything.