Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  “You know,” he finally says, “if you developed more of a spiritual practice—let me finish—you’d feel more linked as a parent. Your pores would be filled. Your nervousness about leadership or whatever American corporate interests couldn’t enter. You’d worry less.”

  “Worry?” she says, ready to mount a self-defense if he hadn’t already jumped out of bed to get the phone ringing in the next room.

  Watching him cross, she gets something crucial about Dirk. This guy must belong to that breed of older men who lack the patience of the young, the young who can hitchhike across three states and line up overnight, freezing, just to get tickets to hear some band to spike their id. When you’re young you have time for hope to find its object, she thinks. And now, instead of being with someone at least youthful in spirit, the way Kip was until the end, she has somehow landed smack into a coupling with one of those older men whose nearness to mortality mimics a surge of testosterone, Dirk the kind of man who must answer telephone calls, inaudible or not, as if they could be last-ditch offers from the angel of life.

  A wrong number, apparently, no one on the line. “Actually,” says Dirk, putting on a striped robe. “I don’t get who you are as a mother. Sometimes, forgive me for saying this, I feel you did sleepwalk into the role. Please, I don’t mean it in a bad way, I’m just saying—”

  She feels an urgency: seduce him. His words slime her.

  “For example, tell me if this is okay to say, you never talk about the daddy of your boys. I mean the imprint from daddy is huge, right? You especially know about daddies.”

  “Didn’t we say we weren’t going to talk about our romantic past?” A wheedle in her voice she doesn’t like. A weak defense but she is not ready to enter the taboo of total confession so fast.

  Somewhere in the bottom of her purse is a foil-wrapped wish-sighting pill—the dealer in Yalina had called it Avalokitesvara—that could, right now, if she managed to take it, make her able to handle anything. Without Dirk’s noticing, she could just go scrabble in the purse.

  No need. He returns to bed, robe on. “Here’s a book I’ve been wanting you to read,” he says, handing her The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment.

  Reading, half-peeking as he lies next to her twisting his spine, she tries to ignore the tornado. She has spent four months with Dirk. Up in Yalina the guy had seemed, like Kip had before him, a vote for stability. To follow him she had sacrificed, confused her ex-inlaws, left her job, left the swearing neocolonial and her vegetable garden and everything, not even saying one goodbye to all the pitying fellow bushmamas she never wanted to see again anyway.

  Now because of those burnt bridges she doesn’t really want to go back to Yalina. Yet the smallest spotlight reveals Dirk’s main flaw: his impatience plus his lust for applause, not exactly attractive traits. Plus had she wanted him or just, to use his term, walked asleep toward the idea that a slash lived between them, some kind of temporary chemistry? What was she thinking anyway being with such an older guy?

  Actually, she probably had never cared for his boy-o-boy sexuality. The guy acts as if sex is a rollercoaster ride. It comes to her: the inevitability that she will leave, probably soon, with only the how or when to be worked out. The why, however, does glow. Somewhere, she is sure, a normal life awaits her and the boys.

  JUST CONSIDER DIRK A PIT STOP ON THE WAY TOWARD NORMAL

  Lana hears it as clearly as if her mother’s voice came from across the room. As if her mother sat with legs folded, a person wearing a crocheted sweater, looking up over reading glasses, her mother using one of Rose’s favorite phrases, as in let’s make a pit stop for bubble gum? Lana’s spine quivers: never before has she felt her mother speaking so directly or in such strange tones, as if a ghost could speak with a mother’s worry through Rose’s voice.

  “Shhh,” says Lana.

  “Hmm?” Dirk says, mid-stretch.

  New terrain.

  Lana will go down Five and then, subtracting her last weird years, cross over to One. She will find a place by the ocean for the boys, somewhere smooth and demilitarized, a beach lifestyle, covert among thousands flocked to the ocean in a place where a person could own a standard slot of normal, a house with a stucco balcony encasing a life no one will question. She will ride her bike to the boardwalk, take pottery classes, paint, study music, have a fireman boyfriend, enough normalcy flowing in her veins to become the mother she was meant to be. Maybe she could finally follow a lifelong dream, take the firefighters’ test herself, train to ride the trucks: she’d be a lone woman holding her own among broad-shouldered, capable men.

  In the evenings, laughing friends of diverse origins would sit with her to watch kids frolic on sugar-sand beaches in a supreme orgy of normalcy.

  But it’s too soon to surrender all hope about Dirk. They have not yet arrived at the edge of all that they can do or say to each other. More of a knife needs to twist her gut or some irrevocability to his badness needs to appear, something to let her know that choosing him had been her quest for the edge and the bad choice had at least some meaning.

  Alternatively, as Vic liked to say whenever he saw others engaged in whatever they called romantic—tango dancing, Valentine rituals, weddings—the universe is made up of randomness and the copulative dance can be just as meaningful as two ants bumping into each other before signaling each other off.

  “Goodnight, sugar. You’re the best,” says Dirk now. “I love how accepting you are. You really are great at knowing how to give a person space.”

  SIXTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 8:01 A.M.

  “I’d go in the water with those boys but could they just leave their penises out?”—the small girl named Chloe sneaks a sly smile up at her mother, a waif of a woman, seeing if this particular possibility, the omission of penises, could enter the forum. From her safe harbor at the rim of the kiddie pool, Chloe has been watching Sedge and Tee splash about. Anyone watching would think Rose hovering near a lounge chair next to Lana also finds the sight of two small boys captivating.

  “Want to lie here?” and Lana is so maternal, placing the towel on the chair next to her, smiling as Rose takes the bait that Rose’s old cells reactivate: being asked to be part of two girls lying together in early morning sun. It doesn’t hurt that one of their old songs plays the loudspeakers

  Ginger sighs and it’s a fogged-up day

  She loves to be part of your whirl

  She lives in a gutter by your Creamsicle hut

  With nothing jeweled you can steal

  O nothing you can feel

  Wielding long foam wands hued like carcinogenic food dyes, Lana’s sons get happy fast, beating themselves to mock death in the kiddie pool. Little sunhatted Chloe almost falls into the pool with interest. “Hey!” one boy shouts.

  “I say stop!” The other’s feathery voice. Sedge, Tee, Rose reminds herself, Tee caramel-eyed but sharp as his name, Sedge with straighter hair. Their battle resumes, a serious one heading toward unilateral victory or mutually assured annihilation.

  “You believe we’re middle-aged?” asks Rose, raising herself on an elbow, the heat of this place almost enough to dissolve the edges, pretext enough to muddle forth. “You like being a mother?”

  But she has miscalculated: Lana is not fully ready to talk, eyes guarded. Of course Rose knows there is no way to just appear somewhere and get a person to open like some fast-motion rosebud shedding petals. “It has its days,” says Lana, finally mustering as well. “You’d be a great mom, you know. You’re so, I don’t know, attentive?”

  At the breakfast bell they move to the slop area where Lana busies herself tending to her boys’ titration of milk and hot chocolate but after all spills and damage control, once there are no more excuses, hungry too for something, Lana slides in next to where Rose nurses a coffee cup at the table facing the valley.

  “What I can’t believe is we’re here together,” says Lana. “The Lolas in this kind of place?”

  Around them smooth young people
with determined hipbones, members of the kitchen crew, surely evolution’s most erect spines, show great awareness in how they ladle out leaves from large glass jars before stirring tea within individual mugs. Next to them, two of the kitchen crew melt into each other’s arms: a deep hug, pelvis to clavicle pressed as one to exchange silent body agreements.

  The manager Hogan veers in, tipping his railroad hat with one hand, grabbing a broom in the other. “You ladies know about the anniversary events today?”

  “We do,” says Rose, giddy, semi-naked, speaking to someone clothed.

  “Great,” he says, bowing off to sweep a walkway near the deck, almost out of earshot.

  Rose hadn’t quite worked out the plan. What she’d thought, after two phone calls yesterday with Vic’s lawyer, is that, as she’d guessed, the best bet for an overturn in Vic’s verdict might rest in new evidence being introduced. Given that no prior defense team had yet been able to summon any law-abiding, rational person willing to speak in defense of Vic, no one yet offering any substantive character testimony, if the defense could introduce even the merest new deposition in the final hearing, it would not be improbable that sentencing could be delayed. Vic could at least get the chance of a medical stay. This is Rose’s thinking and she has impressed it upon his current lawyer.

  At least Vic would get the dignity of dying in his own time. Isn’t that all anyone wants, Rose had said to the lawyer in the last phone call. Everyone wants a choice about when a thing ends, right? “Sure,” the lawyer had said, uncommitted. After the talk, Rose researches the woman and finds Hogan was right after all: this lawyer had served on seven capital cases. One went directly to firing squad, four dawdled toward the electric chair, two ended with lethal injection.

  This particular fact means Rose really has no time to beat around the bush with Lana. The hearing comes in a matter of days, before winter recess, and after that there will be only a few more days before the event she does not want to utter. As Rose sips her coffee, the letters glow before her in obsidian.

  Lana could just say this one thing: Vic had been prone to a lifelong pattern.

  Fits of temporary insanity.

  Lana had witnessed these fits, big and small, since childhood. Her testimony would change his fate. Everything had led to this moment, everything was converging. Rose would not fail as she had during the trial. All she had to do now was hand Lana the key.

  “Hey. I don’t know how to start.”

  Lana faces her, all interest. “Start what?”

  “Well, there’s something I wanted to tell you.”

  “You’re a hermaphrodite.”

  “No, wouldn’t you have known by now?”

  “Okay. You’re pregnant.”

  “I wish.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s a whole different story. But yes. Listen. It’s more serious than that.”

  “Is anything more serious than pregnancy?” Between them flashes another memory, two of the abortion appointments to which Rose had escorted Lana.

  “It’s you know.” Rose stops, wishing to have a perfect mind-meld instead of this clumsy parry. “Your dad. Sorry. Vic’s case?”

  “Rose.” Lana narrow-eyed. “I mean come on.”

  “I’m sorry. Just let me get this one thing out. At least I should tell you I’m meeting with one of Vic’s lawyers today.”

  “Oh.” Lana stirs some invisible poison in her mug. “Why though?” Her squint so mean, Rose must look away.

  “Well. Thought I could help—your dad, his case.”

  “He asked? You saw him?”

  “Not since what, our graduation party in high school?”

  Lana’s stare is unflinching. “So you’ve been in contact?”

  “If some other friend’s dad ended up in prison, wouldn’t you try to help?”

  “What other friends do I have?” Lana barks a laugh, laughs a bark, wishing she could shut Rose down like the Pandora’s box she is turning out to be. Only a few hand-spans away from them, one of the kitchen crew nuzzles her boyfriend, splayed across his lap. Lana leans in to Rose, trying for calm, though now she feels owed something. “Whatever. But if you see him, don’t tell me about it.”

  “No, I mean, I’d be upset too. But he’s not the one I’m going to see.”

  “Promise. And don’t tell him about the twins.”

  “Actually, I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind coming with me. To the lawyer.”

  “Well.” Lana palms the table, throbbing with rhythm. Things are getting a little out of reach. “Maybe you don’t get it? I want nothing to do with him.”

  “No, of course. We all do what we need to. I’d feel the same.” Rose lets the demurral sit only a second. “But just this one thing Lana? Because you know he’s sick, right?”

  “So I’m trying to figure out what you thought I’d say here. Like wow, that’s so great, Rosie, I’m so happy my savior friend is trying to help out my poor murderer father in his last days? Plus she wants to drag me into it?”

  “But maybe if I could tell you the exact details—”

  “Don’t you think I come somewhere like this place so I don’t have to know?”

  “No, I totally understand.”

  “Thanks.” Lana manages a kinder smile. “But you don’t always have to be so sincere.”

  “I’m not. But he has nine days left.”

  “Ten.” Lana cannot help but correct her.

  “You do know then?”

  Her face only now starts to burn. “Maybe you don’t mean to do what you’re doing right now?”

  “I just wanted to help. I didn’t want to bother you but it does seem as if—”

  “Because it’s probably hard for you, right?”

  “What?”

  “I would’ve hoped, you know, better things for you. That you know—you would have had more of a life by now.”

  “Actually maybe we shouldn’t talk right now.”

  “Fine.” Lana studies her. “I wasn’t the one who asked to.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.” Lana steeples her fingers, unsteeples them. “But what is it? The myth of the great family Mahler? Or what, leeching off a great man? Is this about your never having had a real family?”

  It takes Rose more than a few seconds to realize how directly Lana wishes to sting. When she does get it, she cringes, hacking her hand like a visor to the side of her eyes and lying viciously: “I’m fine. Really I don’t care. It’s great seeing you. Let’s talk later?”

  And against all kitchen protocol, Rose, having blocked herself off somewhere far away, excuses herself, abandoning her flowered mug with its masking tape marked in big block letters rose, so that Lana must then wash it herself in communal buckets marked first rinse, second rinse, all while muttering to herself, as Mary used to, where’s the tragedy? only to leave the mug to get lost on the drying rack so that eventually one of the wash crew must strip the cup of Rose’s name and set it out to be chosen by some other guest of Hope.

  Trying to figure out where the room is, wanting to take comfort anywhere else, Lana navigates what has become a forest of rapists and then the voice comes, a screech from the past ready to scavenge her marrow. As if you could just turn back time and Wait! Lana? A voice crackled at the edges. Rose tugs and Lana pats her arm when really what she wants is to burn it, Rose’s face so broad in its eagerness, tilting up under that dark hair, blue eyes hesitant but expectant, holding that pink towel around her cleavage. She looks up at Lana as if this could be enough.

  “I mean it. I’m sorry,” says Rose. “It’s a tough subject. I just thought we could—”

  “No, I’m sorry too. Lost control. You’re right. Let’s not talk. I mean I was happy to see you too.” But Lana’s voice breaks. “So why’d you come? Here.”

  Rose tilts her head north. “You know.”

  Maybe Rose means something else. But that particular Rose look after so many years is troublesome. Head ducked, tongue lolling, eyes smeared,
hopeful: the look thwarts Lana. “No, actually I don’t.”

  “Please don’t give such a mean smile?”

  “No, I get it. You’re another shaggy.” Lana rolls the word with distaste.

  “I’m not.”

  “Finding me was your toy surprise.”

  “Or more the reverse, Lana? Not like I’m constantly in touch with him.” Blue shine. “Only here and there. More recently. Anyway.”

  Lana has to count backward from ten, because she will not give in to rage. See where rage got Vic or Kip, see where it would get her as a mother of sons. A breath. Eight seven six. “I mean, what gave you the right?” Four three two and she can’t be calm.

  Rose takes her arm. “Come on. Last time we saw each other was at the gogo place.”

  “That’s not true at all.”

  “Okay, you’re right. The apartment.”

  “But what is it Vic tells you? You’re the daughter he’s never had?”

  Rose’s face puffs up, a big pink teddy-bear face.

  “Come on, don’t lie to me.”

  The best Rose can manage, swallowing back the tears. “Maybe let’s start over?”

  Lana grimaces.

  “I mean isn’t it sort of amazing we’re both here?”

  It comes to Lana: in fact Rose had tracked her down and there could be no running from a vampire. Ten nine eight. Start over. Lana could take a breath and try seeing it differently. She would not be so angry if seeing Rose had not brought up her old hungers. Think normal, Lana tells herself. She could be a normal woman on vacation, starting up some new healthy life for her kids. And here appears her devoted friend—but it’s too much delusion, Rose the old-time meddler in her family. A huge wave steals over Lana, enough to make her wish for any exit. At the same time couldn’t she just give herself over, fall apart on Rose’s shoulder? Mary would never had said to trust anyone too much and yet Mary had always called Rose Lana’s good influence.

  “Well what, you searched for me?”