Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  And of course she could have adopted but she knew from their single conversation on it that Kip was against that idea.

  Not adopting a kid, he had said, end of discussion, let’s have our own kids, c’mon, they’d be super cute.

  So back from Oregon she came, months after she had left, returning to wake up the poor guy, tired at dawn, first birds of morning fish-like in streams above. To see the streaked sky she had roused him and brought him outside. He took all this, as she’d known he would, as a gesture toward reparations, a greeting-card return to courtship, an epiphany.

  He had reached for her in blind instinct but she had put a finger on his lips and then pointed to the two boys asleep in the car.

  Sedge and Tee, mouths lolled open, hands holding each other’s tight enough to destroy someone else’s tomorrow. Kip would later retell the moment: love for his sons fizzed his pores, a love he had never before known, as well as pride in the mother who had come back to him.

  “You can’t take the two apart,” she would later overhear him telling a buddy, “you got to love the mother as much as the kids that come from her body. It’s not like you quarantine love.”

  When he first saw the boys, she knew enough to stay silent, letting him put one and one together to get the idea of their four, of two boys now his. It took a second but to Kip’s credit or detriment not long. He got it, hugging her skinny ribs tight and asking: “You stopped taking your pills?”

  To which she’d smiled. She’d guessed the boys were a month old, had gone so far as to invent a birthday in her head but who knew?

  All too easily Kip accepted this idea of her having worked and lived on an organic blueberry farm up north—that part was true—and that she’d needed to be internal, out of touch with him after the bad trash fire that had burned down the best part of their garden. Some mysterious inner call, he figured. Some female workings had made her want to keep the pregnancy under wraps while staying faithful to him: most of this was true.

  Before she’d begun the long drive back to Yalina, she had needed to remind herself of Kip’s abiding loyalty and couldn’t that be enough to make their life together appear in someone’s dictionary of the normal? Never in life had she been a full-on liar, not really, but her milky-compliance time in the sanitarium had taught her how to hold someone’s gaze and deliver the thing without too many extraneous details.

  She had been planning a return anyway. Southward just past the Oregon border, down the circuitous coastal highway from the tiny island where she’d stayed with an old college boyfriend now living on an organic farm and trying to get an acupuncture degree, she’d found herself in low spirits, questioning her purpose. Every song on the radio mocked her: the way you sing off-key, no, they can’t take that away from me. Had she ever had anything solid enough that it could be taken from her? Had anyone ever really loved her? Even Rose had stopped. Lana wasn’t getting any more of those beautiful, stirring letters that used to be forwarded from one of her Los Angeles addresses.

  On a cloudy afternoon, having driven her determined chugger of an ex-pimpmobile for more than twenty-four hours straight, she’d pulled into a market’s parking lot to get a bottle of water, a camel coming to an oasis of love.

  This not being really any old market, rather more what people call a farm store, a place suggesting the purchase of family, the prediction of nostalgia and the racking up of summer fun. Provocative hay bales, half pints of raspberries, quart buckets of blueberries, cleavage-bursting bags of charcoal next to unstained wooden bird-houses stacked in front. Lots of families and kids entering and exiting, pushing mini-carts, happy to be connected, their purpose clear. Berry-gathering for the cave, her father would have derided the entire scene, stupid consumers of American bliss.

  She sat in similar stupor gazing at the berry-gatherers, surprised to see a hazy nimbus around every figure, her eyes that tired from the drive. Angels, she thought. Not consumers: angels. No one sees it but these family people are made saints by the perfection of this moment, the artistry of their devotion to one another.

  When she heard something cry out.

  Later she would tell herself that no spirit had possessed her. Not five little ghosts, not the time in the asylum, no fear, no craziness, not the belief that the doctors, those aliens, had ripped out her womb. Instead—a pure cry.

  In the next car, windows half rolled down, sweet cheeks full, tongues fluttering on a dream nipple, twin boys slept, blue-clad infants outside a supermarket on a main highway. Something unthinking must have given birth to them because how obvious that these children were unloved: you only had to stare down the facts. Two infants, heads sadly crumpled over the infant car restraint, abandoned in a car that defined disorder. Long wood antler slats roped to its roof and scrappy wind-battered yellow rope frayed from its end. She peeked her head inside and had to plug her nose at the garbage-truck scent, even with windows open, the interior with its hoary seats dirt-veined and on the floor a carpet of half-empty baby bottles flung over old mildewed newspapers with no blanket or toy to be seen.

  Someone had left two babies: a surge of proprietary interest flooded Lana.

  Who leaves kids in a car with the windows half-lowered so anyone could take them? Lana almost sputtered but would not give in to rage, and as she choked, a light flared around the car, the same energy capable of pushing a steam engine’s worth of goodwill into her hands.

  The surge in her said take and you will be given, paradise lost will be someone else’s gain, metamorphosis always proves beautiful. Not that she would call anyone hers. Only that her care could create an umbilicus, a pump of vitality into two angels, motherly interest.

  In the back of her car, her own stab toward order, she had a laundry basket filled with folded clean clothes. Already a method suggested itself, screwing her tight, so that if someone had interrupted her, her alibi stood ready—I wanted to protect them, they were crying—while a mechanical knowledge entered her fingers, her quickness in unleashing both from the carseats a way of helping someone avoid bad parents. Because before she lifted each up and smelled the scent, the wet-grass, dried-milk baby scent, she still had the thought that she might just take them to some local sheriff’s office. But once that scent flared her nostrils, some milky vertigo opened a hole in time, enough to swallow all sense. She had never known the sugar of this moment, these two babies in her arms: a guard went and unlocked the mother waiting in her fingers, fingers that had spent so much time stroking the hair of grown men in consolation for the loss of their own mothers.

  Twins fraternal, not identical, she saw, babies in such deep sleep they barely stirred. One held his hands as if still tickling the inside of the womb’s walls, a bent bird-wing, while the other’s neck strained against an invisible collar. For this long moment she held each before placing them down, patting them in, covering them with her fleece, hand steady on their bellies in a rush of pure atavism. Never had she been around anyone so young, anyone whose promise was still so much a question: you had to wonder how responsible the world would be toward such perfect creatures.

  With folded shirts she braced their weak necks, not knowing this act of buffering against physical slights would turn out to be the easiest part of mothering.

  And once they were secured, she continued south on Highway Five, driving with hands gentle on the steering wheel, deciding to forget about any sheriff and each marker saluting her. I’m not crazy, she thought, I am helping and it was beautiful how no other thought interfered, making for almost the best high she would ever know, everything confirming her, etched in bright knowing complicity, so that if she had sailed off a cliff right then, she would have flown.

  Only briefly did she consider hiding. Hiding would be unclean, making her face the idea of unworthiness while having nothing to hide would be the brazen, right thing to do here when providence was finally trying to download into all her messed-up psyche without encountering any bottleneck. Could it be right to argue with such a force?

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nbsp; And how lucky that the boys stayed asleep until halfway toward Yalina when the coos of one woke the other. Not sure how to handle them, she pulled over at a convenience store, raising each onto her hip, carrying them into the lit space, their eyes scrunched, arms flailing. She read the instructions on a can of formula and with her smile apologetic, various bystanders, including an off-duty cop, helped mix the warm water in a cup, also unwittingly helping to birth Lana as a mother.

  We’re moving to formula, she said, loving this newly multiplied self, the first time in her life since Rose she had ever consciously said the word. We. The employees smiled lovingly as she mixed the formula, everyone suddenly so kind in helping her pour a simulacrum of milk into two doll-size bottles.

  And if it was a simulacrum of milk, so what, so what if the boys would not get that immune boost: the stationwagon drivers hadn’t promised more, she told herself, nor had her own mother ever nursed her, right? She brought the babies into the car, laying both across her lap. Already they were cued, one sucking in his breath, the other with lips smacking, knock-kneed, eyes crossed and then unfocusing in dream-love so as to slurp from the nipples.

  Don’t worry, she told these perfect amnesiacs. They needed the command more than herself. She would bring them to a paradise of clean air where all would be provided for.

  It was as they nursed that their names came, providence again shining one of its faces upon Lana Mahler. Tee for the caramel-skinned boy who strained against the collar, Sedge for the au lait baby with hands folded into bent wings. She could have eaten them, little bonbons she placed back into their backseat laundry cradle but for now she would not stop to savor. Stopping would stem this amazing all-flowing power.

  Already the dance of mother with children had begun. When she stopped, even at a traffic light, the boys cried because no way did they want to let trivia stop their journey of endless rocking. If their crying scraped every nerve, and why shouldn’t it, still the hum of rightness filled her. Diapers, she thought, I need to find some diapers.

  Somewhere around Eureka, right when her thumbs were losing most of their grasping power and her knees became rubber, almost unable to brake, the phrase she had never thought took over. Thank you Lord, she thought. A sustained ecstasy all the rest of the way down, along with another uninvited guest: I am in thy holy hands.

  One of the things she’d loved about Kip was the way he took on challenges.

  In this manner he had entered fathering. With a slow sizing-up of the reality of twin boys, and then, once he’d committed himself, with gusto. No one in Yalina, a town capable of hiding so many shotgun industries, ever needed so much as a birth certificate or social security record for her to begin giving the boys their tests and shots. At the underused, overfunded clinic, she’d say sorry, she’d lost the hospital records, and the pockmarked nurses, glad that at least one local bushmama chose not to depend on herd immunity, would fire away, as her own mother had not, with protections against diphtheria, hep B, measles, mumps, polio, rubella, tetanus, whooping cough, the alphabet of entry into civilization’s ideas of how to organize a body as liege and protectorate. Lana loved this motherly risk assessment: you had to figure out which dragon sting would fend off greater dragons.

  It’s good for you, she whispered, a loving sadist, her boys’ arms riddled with shots. Lana had never felt more serious or adult than when handing over the boys’ crisp yellow immunization cards.

  Did Kip ever suspect the boys were not his? She was almost sure he didn’t.

  Early on the passions in the two boys became clear: Tee avid, Sedge’s enthusiasms more subtle, smacking his lips with less force as the bottle arrived to tickle above the upper lip. Which one takes after you? Kip asked her. Let’s not use labels, she would say, the books say not to compare, and she would smile up at him, a pious mom following all feeding and nap-training protocols dictated by the priests of attachment.

  Perhaps what had drawn her to the boys was that they did resemble Kip, didn’t they? But she could not have guessed, not fully, how the kids were exactly what Kip and Lana had needed for resuturing or how they would help Kip bond to his own parents.

  For parents who had been waiting year upon hope-defying year for their Californian son to grow up and give them grandkids, the twins ended up being the one right thing Kip had done, Lana temporarily relegated to cheering committee, starting with the way his parents loved quarreling over how best to furnish the nursery.

  And because of the tidal force of the grandparents’ love, Lana had to suffer the jokes: Big Jim liked to bring up the suppressed side of Jennie’s Springfield ancestry, her mother’s lineage of freed slaves, his smile crooking at what Jennie always mentioned just after, some story of the middle class Jennie had been forced to leave behind when she’d come with Jim to redneck hippieland in Yalina.

  Lana did not dispute what they said, basking in the respect her in-laws shone her way. She was the mother of their treasures, and okay, she had left their son for a few months, she still had come back with the treasures. And none of the bushmamas of Yalina ever asked why Lana chose not to nurse though she could tell that in silence and horror they pitied a woman’s sapped-out breasts or poor understanding of bonding.

  And because she lived in the lie that she’d given birth to the twins, Lana began to remember labor. The pangs and how giving birth had sent her into a dark cavewoman part of her psyche: she could recall it in mirror shards, the moment so intense one immediately forgets the worst. This part she did let herself talk over with other mothers. And it was also true that she did occasionally finger the boys’ navels, wondering over the stationwagon drivers whose kids had been spirited away and also why she never saw reports of their loss on the news, not on mailers or milk cartons, not on gumball dispensers. It was not that Lana failed to keep an eye out. It was that she did not wish to keep up with the news all that much anyway, given the unfortunate truth that occasionally some newscaster would also mention Mahler v. State of California and she’d have to overhear some bit about her father, his new appeal or the governor’s stay, an exemption or barring, some evidence of professional misconduct or revision of legislative process, all that could smooth or stall the case of Vic.

  His cause had been taken up by the one liberal radio station that got piped up the coast to Yalina:

  You got this guy who may have been demonstrating the ultimate in personal choice, I mean that’s how I see it and here at Men’s Liberation Hour we all know a crime out of impulse is bad, nothing to replicate in civil society but then you got to consider if you have a tree and its roots are rotten and then you got this guy standing at the tree trunk trying to prune the whole thing but who’s just like everyone getting fed by the sap in the poisonous fruit and the sap acts like poison in the system, doesn’t give anyone real recourse to understand what it means to be a man in our time, I mean where does it all cohere, and you’re stuck in this convention of matrimony and you come from a whole different era, I mean we’re talking a guy scarred by an entire European world war so where you going to point your finger first? The origin of war? The first cavemen? What men are taught to become? No one has any real modes of communication in the ongoing gender war, am I wrong? And so all we ask today here at Men’s Lib is whether it’s society to blame or Vic Mahler? I mean this is a guy actively trying to change the system, guy a Trojan horse in the academy trying to explode it, did so much for swarms of people, men and women, guy who became way more than a philosopher, a bona fide cultural hero, and in this way helped women too by trying to blow people’s assumptions apart, the whole thing. We’re asking our listeners this—if we had Mary Mahler as some kind of desperado, Mary and not Vic Mahler, wouldn’t she have ended up a feminist hero like Angela What’s-her-face rather than on death row?

  And so Lana did her best to avoid 94.1 on her radio dial, instead choosing to listen to bad honky-tonk filled with girlish yelps and cries.

  Perhaps the stationwagon drivers—that was how she thought of them, not as
parents—had been relieved. Perhaps she had been a delivering angel and they could now return to their stacking-up of mildewed newspapers, finding better jobs or who knows what. Perhaps she had been a necessary instrument in a desired change. She didn’t want to linger too long on the idea of what she called not crime but passage. She had helped Sedge and Tee entertain passage into a more orderly life. She would pay attention! She would be a good mother! Those two sweet-faced boys passed into the glistening hall of what she had never gotten and what the drivers probably could never have given. She would become their nun of devotion, making these twins’ lives really matter and in the process become, for the first time, someone.

  Long ago she had noted a mathematics to the way people had children. Some seemed to do it out of unthinking societal algorithm or a desire to multiply themselves narcissistically out of a fear of solitude or death and this could have been the case with the drivers—were they kid-collectors or former druggies? Did they pop out babies just to feed them sugar water? These were the kind of people who might have anyway been seeking a good foster family so they could, as shaggies liked to say, sort out their own heads.

  Growing up in Berkeley, Lana had known lots of kids with parents like that, uncertain parents giving birth to quick-witted and likable kids, to foster kids like Rose. Just think what would have happened to Rose if she hadn’t been adopted.