Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  In Yalina, Lana triumphs: I am mommy!

  Which means that Lana has become a whole maternal field for her boys. They raise rights of approach to a highly calibrated system all about staking out territory, tummy holdouts, strategic defense of the motherland. Every breath of being a parent comforts her since it undoes what she knows about being mothered. Every small spiky cold toe trying to find the warmth between Lana’s calves tells her she is not Mary. She giggles at this: POPsicles! she calls out, your toes are POPsicles! until the boys start to love that word so much, it becomes one of their first.

  Later one of the boys learns to write and will start hiding secret love letters to Lana saying he wants to marry her while the other will bury his nose in her hair and emerge to report that it smells like a hundred cones of banana ice cream. All spells confirmation of Lana’s choices. To her own mother Lana would never have even known how to start such a love-sentence: to the crash of lightning behind a totem you do not falteringly stutter. Mary had been both household deity and distant force, too removed for Lana ever to do more than smile in her direction. I have come far, Lana tells herself, these tumbling happy boys a bridge over her past.

  And Kip snaps to it, no distant god but deep into this fatherhood thing with his boys even if his fingers are too thick to fiddle with snaps on small boys’ pajamas. One thumb, the casualty of construction jobs, has been hammered this side of smithereens while one index finger torques south, a ballpeen toward his body’s median. Because Sedge’s eyes are crossed and Tee’s legs bowed, Kip jokes that men in the family turn inward, strong silent manly types, and while she is happy that so much joking goes on in the strong unsilent manliness of this time, on many nights their life up north gets to be too much for Lana. A lonely cabin fever sets upon her so that she must abandon the twins and Kip inside with their loud negotiations over protocol, food, sharing, respect, manners, clothes, bath, sleep and instead go keep a particular stump company on the wet grass near her vegetable garden, alive with the endless quiet optimism of insects and gophers. She sits by her stump breathing in the night and indulging in an old-time furtive habit: smoking a clove cigarette, a small waft of homage to her old friend Rose.

  Sometimes on these clove nights Lana feels as if her friend sits and gleams back at her, as if she gets a gentle hand on her shoulder, Rose waiting for Lana in the furrow of pine and sequoia, a muse ready to talk and answer questions. For example, would it be too much to ask that Kip could have a more even temper? Not too much. Lana’s loneliness seems to have summoned Rose’s most calm voice, one telling her there will be no problem, nature will provide, something greater than that tiny house will swoop down and help if something else doesn’t swallow them first. Nature will provide, Lana repeats, meek in the face of a wild beauty that promises all badness can be worn away, absolved by natural cycles the way salmon each year get suctioned up from the vast ocean and come to the same river to spawn.

  After Kip’s death, once the twins are asleep, Lana surrenders both the garden and the specter of Rose for stronger addictions, smoking hand-rolled nicotine cigarettes in the doorway before pocketing cooled stubs away from the talent for shaming in her inlaws’ eyes. New habits pile on others. Lana sleeps late or finds herself organizing her sock drawer in the wee hours before driving to her market job. The moments alone in a car cliffside are worst, making her try to find reasons to live while turning the bad country station up loud. Nothing fully deafens her to the way Vic keeps his scoffing alive in her head.

  Reason to live? The banal name for a simpleton’s confection. Reason to live means a bluff against mortality, the one law greater than anyone’s capacity to locate meaning.

  How had Kip not found a buffer in his sons? How does a father commit suicide? Could she blame it on some new meds?

  Smoking at night, those bad first months, she second-guesses the years she spent with Kip, all his stories’ warp and weft. For one, the knee. To work the seasonal harvest, during the era of clean sweat, Kip had taken a drug to trick his knee’s pain. How much more relieving it was for Lana to think that the painkiller had turned trickster, stripping Kip of free will and making him lose all desire to live, an idea much more warming than believing her mate had chosen death and conned her when she had thought him a vote for stability.

  Despite how skittish a widow she is, the neighbors act like heat-seeking missiles in their ability to geolocate. She sees them coming and hides behind curtains, inside locked bathrooms, or, if outside, drops to her knees by the garbage cans. And still they walk around the house: Lana? I brought you something. Blue-haired, bushy-haired, bald, on lawnmowers and scooters, neighbors of all ages keep dropping by to check up on the widow. Perhaps they understand that distractions keep her from some inky well but why can’t they let her have the full ecstasy of melancholic dissolution? Both the neighbors and her boys seem determined to keep her from succumbing fully to the urge to never smile again.

  Once, to fend off yet another visit, she tells her guest: “Look, Kip and I never married!” This matters little to neighbors who breathe the lawlessness of disaster, understanding it to be as pungent and ubiquitous as salt air. After the donation drive for the funeral and burial, after the memorial fund for the boys, the neighbors still keep bringing their funnel cakes (moldy before she wraps and throws them out at night) and jasmine bouquets (withered before she locates the right vase). She doesn’t know what she needs. Outside her inlaws’ front door, neighbors mount a birdbath for hummingbirds, Kip’s name carved in flowing script. The thing seems to attract not hummingbirds but rather only morbidly obese crows.

  Is there a contest for loss? It remains unclear to Lana who needs reparations the most. Would it be Kip’s beautiful sons, his suffering parents, or his clearly too edgy widow?

  In the local paper, Lana, under her alias of Wagner says of Kip that no one would ever find a better father, her way of making a simple offering, a gift to the twins. One day they will read her statement and, memories dimmed, might know a basically good man had cared for them. “He was ultimately decent. Being a parent made him even more decent,” she says.

  For this pure immunity of goodness, Lana has often missed the early days of motherhood, boys crawling all over with a touch that would never intentionally hurt, morse-coding with their fingertips that they would grant her entry into the greater family of man, fingers and hot little breath telling her she was trustworthy and good, someone who showed integrity and humanity in every little maternal thing she did. Lana had been so happy to submit to the order of motherhood: the whole apparatus of being a parent gave her a joy greater than doll-playing years had let her imagine. She loved the rapture of doing dishes while thinking solely of dishes or the exaltation of arranging the old-style twins’ carriage, Lana’s particles humming as she lay her twins down on a sheepskin blanket—her own contribution—in order to spark their intellectual development.

  Why so happy, Lana Wagner, Kip asked once and she tried explaining: for the first time in her life, to everything there had been a greater purpose. These kids anchored her, no longer letting her float too freely in the universe.

  And because of this, those baby months marked the period when she knew the greatest partnership with anyone other than Rose. Once again she was joined to the greater project of losing herself.

  But after the bliss with the boys had started the messy willful period when the boys had spat out food and separated from her ideas about perfection. Only a few months ago the boys had become so fully their own creatures, separate and ill-smelling, that she’d begun again to taste that dull metallic aloneness in her mouth, as fatal as if she’d never known any merge with them or as if the remembered togetherness made the return of isolation that much sharper. And every potential hope—say, any random person she would meet at the market—only dilated her loneliness. Life asked her to labor a stillbirth. Where was the joy? Times like this, she smoked any cigarette she could find and could not believe she had ever been as young as the girl who once fo
und great sufficient pleasure in lying on her back with a girlfriend next to her facing a thunderstorm.

  A question to Vic at the one Berkeley reading Lana had attended long ago with Rose: “Why is anger sexy?”

  Vic’s answer:

  Anger is the only strong limbic emotion popularly termed negative—in the way that fright, hate or sadness are considered negative—which is capable of flooding the hypothalamus and making someone go toward.

  At the government-coupon, welfare-cheese supermarket, on the wrong side of the highway, at the next cashier station over she encounters the world’s most civilized man, one Lana thinks of as a neocolonial, a WASP tall and tightly bound, a boy’s face on him as she tends to fancy. He makes pedantic comments and then looks out from under his mischievous brow, smiling, eyes blue, seeking concord, handsome in a roué alcoholic way, another man fallen from his intended station in life and wearing a brown tweed jacket to check out groceries. People call him the professor but also say never call the professor after five at night when he gets busy pickling his liver. He could be a smoker’s forty-five or a well-preserved seventy-three but what counts is no one can enter the guy.

  He sometimes makes little comments to the effect that aging is awful and should be avoided at all costs or that you get gypped when you give to charity but otherwise says little. Once he alludes to a relationship with a woman from the nearby Pomo reservation that went south during a bad drinking era. People try jollying him into revelation but he stays unfailingly civil and closed, tight as his high collar. He eats mostly whitish 1950s foods, brought to work in the same two Tupperware containers every day: macaroni salad, tapioca, tuna, peeled radishes and deviled eggs, making slight concessions toward celery and jicama. Lana never hears about his past, only about his ride to work that morning or what he anticipates watching that evening.

  His one bit of public expression is that on weekends he heads toward the municipal beach where he makes giant sculptures out of driftwood. Lana has found she can draw him out only if she gets him to speak about driftwood. He calls it a particularly Californian commodity expressing all those who float here bearing aspirations with short half-lives, turning bone-bleached and waiting for somebody to claim them. On the subject of driftwood he turns eloquent.

  But what makes Lana’s mind linger on him and why she occasionally imagines him peeking at her has to do with his lunch break. He sits in the fluorescent lunchroom by himself, reading the local paper, apparently unaware of the thinness of the walls so that she alone listens to him saying: cocksucker! Fucking bitch! Cuntlicker! Goddamn the moron! Fools!

  Though she never has more than a cordial acquaintance with him, it is this disparity between inner being and outer bearing that makes him almost unbearably attractive. She can’t get him out of her mind. Once, they are doing inventory and he brings in a cassette to play, a country singer performing at a prison. Through the night he plays it on loop so she keeps hearing the part about the record company asking the singer not to say hell or shit and also the clanking part when the prison’s announcer comes on amid the rumble of chains to make sure all the prisoners stay in their seats until guards come to release them. It is almost enough entry to allow broaching the subject of his lunchtime profanity but she stays mum.

  Having heard his fury, she wonders what the professor thinks as he drives to work or sculpts. She alone seems to have witnessed a bound-up volcano let loose. How sexy is that? Such a man needs untying. Such a man needs a magic person not only to unbind him but one who knows how to handle heat.

  Once Lana had tried talking with Kip about not swearing in front of the kids.

  “Damn is not a swearword,” he tells her. “Crap is not.”

  “You can’t blame the kids for your not finding a real job.”

  “But my job is taking care of them. You’re at the market. The kids take a lot of time.”

  “You’re blaming them.”

  “I’m not—”

  “You just said you couldn’t find a damn legit job because our fucking kids refuse to put on their jackets and come talk to the logging company with you. You don’t want them to spend an hour with your mom?”

  Ugly and spiteful, lip bitten down: “Fuck!” Between clenched teeth in the other room, he slams something. The boys look up from their toys to do a nanosecond radar-read of her face, now managing a watery 1950s housewife smile, the kind she has used to navigate airports, bus stations, the incomprehensible: her lips pressed together in that smile bad as the sagged rictus of her own mother when Vic used to rage.

  The problem was that Kip’s kids were in many ways his sole domain, everything else shot through by his parents. His mother and her ancestry well suppressed; his father whom called that sumbitch white Indiana state trooper moved where he don’t belong.

  And what do I get from this ball of wax, Lana would think, listening to the fizz of Kip in the other room. A wave of self-contempt for having chosen such an angry mate. How easy to remember exactly this same fizz in her father and how her mother held it together, to consider exactly the cartoon signs that should have made her run from Kip and not straight into this moment: the feeble pressure of top lip against lower, the burlesque of having become a woman eking out a smile, a mother but still an eternal daughter with no escape other than to recall the mocking echo of all the hundreds of interrupted dinnertable conversations back in the Spruce Street house.

  One night, a divorced colleague of her parents named Henry had voiced aloud the worry that his son was choosing mean girlfriends, which made Vic discuss the experiment of a scientist named Nambin who in his spare time had knocked the gene for the happy cuddling hormone oxytocin out of a mouse before birth, thereafter finding that such a mouse becomes a social amnesiac bearing no memory of other mice it met.

  Hearing this, Lana had thought: poor mouse! And was glad when Henry had asked Vic what the experiment meant.

  Vic had sighed. “Well, I’d say it suggests memory depends on the oxytocin-driven love response. That is, your son’s choices have to do with some preprogrammed response to affection.”

  “You’re saying he has bad genes?”

  “Well, take yourself off the hook a bit?” said Vic, going on to discuss what Nambin had done in another experiment, this time with the prairie vole, Nambin holding a belief about the link between vasopressin and odor, proving that primal exposure to the opposite sex generates nerve cells in olfactory zones of the vole’s brain.

  “So my son doesn’t have vasopressin? Or what, he’s smelly?”

  “Really that the scent of your wife, his first opposite-sex partner, formed a scent impression which now combines with the emotive track of what he considers necessary traits in the opposite sex.”

  “So?”

  “If your ex was good or unkind, your son is doomed to go on seeking the same scent associated with any allied emotive track your wife provided—say, pleasure—”

  “—neglect, misery—”

  “—since one scent experience telegraphs opposite sex to his reptilian brain and gets bundled together with whatever emotion he finds most attractive and necessary to replicate with future mates.”

  “No hope then.”

  No hope! Lana had listened, tracing a snailshell on her bare knee, at the dinner table but not of it, whorish in what had started to feel like eavesdropping. And also knowing herself to be unlucky: her first scent of the opposite sex had to do with angry Vic and now in some endlessly mitotic fate, it looked as if she would be forever married to the sexiness of anger. She had not laughed, though his guest had. “How can you say nurture creates biological determinism? What can we do with that?”

  Vic coughed and then his gaze caught Lana’s. “My daughter will tell you, right, Mopsy? What do we parents do? Abandon all faith in our offspring and their prospects?”

  And after this parlay but before excusing herself from the table, Lana had for the first time seen herself as a naked slave in the court of the pharaoh. Exactly that: a naked slave. T
hat would be what she would remain, beholden until the day she could figure out how a slave gains intelligence enough to unspell fate.

  When she and Kip used to argue, about, say, who got to spend more time with the twins, the fights did offer security. Kip could be as irascible as Vic but unlike Vic, at least Kip noticed what she did. She was not her mother. She was not. Had Vic ever noticed how much Mary managed? All the karate classes for their girlchild, the herb-strewn meals? Kip’s rage nonetheless became Lana’s pacifier. Where the hell did you put my keys? Why are the boys’ shoes on my side of the bed? Who let the gopher into the garden? Who left this shit here? A grit to Kip’s voice that made life matter more: Lana could feel her contours knowing she had for a time appeased some local god and would not need to torch anything herself. Plus his wrath meant he would never leave.

  But every October into November they both knew the intensity of the pot harvest when Kip had to leave in earnest, able to a year’s income from his labors. For three weeks behind three locked gates somewhere on the hot ridge, he worked sixteen-hour days, part of a collective run by a radical faerie named Serenity who presided over his brood with a lordly gaze and made his workers be driven to the harvest site blindfolded.

  She knew certain facts about Kip’s work. She knew two vegetarian chefs worked overtime to feed the laborers and that ten thousand dollars of pure organic compost from San Francisco had been carefully laid in to the marijuana plants during the year. To earn their keep, workers labored hours in the field to get a half pound of pay each day which, given the ever-rising market price, was anything but tight-fisted. Evenings, the workers had a shiatsu masseur who jumped on their backs to help release the knots of their industry. Nighttimes, the workers heard mountain lions creeping through the jungle around them, staying safe if shivering within tents provided by the entrepreneur of a successful backpacking company whose daughter had died of cancer and who in her last months had depended on the collective for pain relief.