by Edie Meidav
One of the things the girls do, and Rose is both proud and ashamed of it, is linger in skinny jeans around one of the pizza joints near the university, the one with its bathroom scented as if with hyperchemical bubble gum, the one with jukebox music loud enough that everyone upon entry ascends into soundtrack nirvana, each person starring in a pizza movie. If the girls are famished, which is always, and have no money in their coats, which is often, it is easy enough to be a bad guy and, when someone else’s slice is ready at the pick-up counter, to take it, to calmly slide into a booth and eat it. No one suspects two teenage girls with big smeared eyes and smooth legs of minor crime since it would insult the grace the girls bank on, the impunity granted by the other. Free, the pizza tastes better, though taste matters less than the confirmation of each other, the mobile law of two. And while Rose looks away from the customers’ consternation, Lana never seems to notice. Just once she says they are Robin Hood, taking from the pizza joint and giving to the poor. But what makes them so poor? What deficit lives in their hearts?
Sometimes their parents and onlookers want to tell them something to the effect that their gazes will exhaust each other and they should let others in more. Once Vic quotes to them some C. S. Lewis idea about true friendship dwelling not in those who stare into each other’s eyes but rather in those who hold hands and look ahead at the road. This quote is what makes Rose, at least, relent and teach the Lola flow to their most die-hard tagalong, Jane Polsby whom they tolerate because she never reproaches them, her bit lip adding only more energy to the Lolas. It doesn’t matter. Jane learns the dance and nothing changes. If the dazzle is too great and the Lolas do get exhausted, no one knows: they probably just go off giggling in one more frenzy of activity.
When Rose goes away for a summer after junior year, she returns to find new music forms Lana’s soundtrack. If they both once liked certain British bands with bleary morning-after tenderness, mumbled lyrics and fluted nasalities over insistent guitar lines, Rose finds, after her return, that there are zones to which she does not wish to follow Lana: bland overproduced bands, for one, or Lana’s new routine of not showing up for a walkabout. Or Lana’s new hair-gelled friend who goes out with Lana’s neighbor and whose disyllabic name, whenever Rose hears it, acts as a gut punch. It is during the Lolas’ last year of high school that, firing against loss, they both take on serious older boyfriends.
And still, half understanding their bereavement, based on the choice of a single upper-class girl they both glamorize, they apply to the same Manhattan college and get in. If it hadn’t happened, in a solo move, Rose had considered joining some touring all-women’s band for which she had auditioned as a keyboardist.
Instead, aiming for togetherness, their last-ditch attempt, that summer before college, the Lolas travel together, not admitting how apishly they mimic Kerouac or Hemingway. Together they budget-travel in Europe, stay with heroin addicts in Paris, sleep in rosebeds in Cannes, on parkgrounds in Pamplona, at a surfer’s home in Biarritz, under fishing boats on the beach in Greece before the policemen come, wielding flashlights. Along the way, bad things happen to both of them, separate and together, their connection faltering, their fuses disconnected.
Rose thinks the main problem is that Lana takes men too seriously, including the budding rock star she left back in San Francisco. In On the Road, Dean Moriarty and Sal hadn’t let conquests stir up their friendship, had they? On a Greek island beach, Lana reads Rose’s diary, the latest version of Say Something, and, dismayed by her friend’s dismay, Lana finally shows a trace of the female tenderness that four years of ironic teasing and manic listmaking have veiled. For a second, Lana looks upon Rose with a maternal tilt to her head, the unfamiliarity of her attitude a final sundering to the Lolas, Lana leaning toward Rose, sweet as a mother. How much Rose wants to lean away from that tilt, reject any stranger tenderness.
In their era, an unwritten curriculum comes with college: perform a certain kind of lesbian experimention and feel the act to be political, one more strike against the patriarchy! Girls from Boise, the South Side, Rockland County or Berkeley go to college, join the women’s center and after meetings tangle limbs, finding a way to bring all those heavy breathers from French lit or feminist film theory down to earth, even if after college many of these same limb-tanglers end up growing their hair long and seeking conventional marriages to brokers.
If Rose does believe that everyone lives on a spectrum of orientation, she also thinks her Lola experience makes her different. She holds the credo that college girls who have never known the kind of friendship she has, a female camaraderie embracing the whole of a person, will be more likely to take their college flings seriously, as cartoon-flipped signposts for their future rather than as some sort of theory-driven gangway. Rose sees the girls entwining and thinks: all these flings let girls undergoing their first homelessness find mother. They just want some breasts to bury themselves between. Either that, or they try hard to reconcile the contradictions of American mating rituals. While Rose will be like a battle-burnt soldier refusing to touch guns: she barely wishes to admit that girls could desire other girls, mourns her Lola days and rarely sees Lana in New York, sensing ahead a wasteland of compromise and more sundering. What had been sacred for her about the Lola bubble was how unconsumed by sexuality it had been, the Lolas a vessel for all those odd hormonal energies, endlessly self-replenishing and never subsumed by anything coarse. Is there a name for the complete love one teenage girl has for another?
For a Women and Love class, Rose writes an essay to ask:
“Is there a place defended against the onslaught of precocious American heterosexist socializing or adulthood’s torrid-water echo in homosexist theory? This indefinability makes me understand why a pop song about being initiated by a British transvestite became the high-school song that mattered most to me.
“My best friend and I did a dance we called the Lola flow, one that let pleasure come to the brim. We must have known our getting to live in a bubble, so oblivious and playful, was precious, undefinable, fleeting, cruel and foolish, a song of innocence. To do our dance, you had to close your eyes. Within that spotted darkness we belonged to a league of girls, to rules beginning and dying within thousands of pairs of teenage girls across the world who, at that exact moment, were inventing their own variation.
“Only recently, I had a dream that some big-spanned bird of endings flies over all us girls, spotting our hunger and still granting the illusion that we will get to do the dance undyingly or at least until a whole hopeful universe gets pecked away speck by speck.”
FEBRUARY 1981
Early in their friendship, the girls go with Lana’s father to San Francisco, the first of many outings in which Vic becomes not just conduit but charger of the Lolas, a crucial component making their electricity crackle. On this outing he takes them to a department store where he grows impatient with the salesgirls, fingering each sweater or shirt brought him before dismissing it as trashy, his edginess enough to reel the clerks in, making them turn amazed eyes on Vic and ignore other customers, instead hoisting shirts, sweaters and dresses Vic’s way, seeking to meet such high standards for this father that he becomes the last in a line of kings to understand garments, capable of turning an overcast Saturday in San Francisco into a medieval Michaelmas: the clothes brought for his consumption suckling pigs on trays, the Lolas mere mannequins for the king’s whim. When, too, the truth of Vic is that he cares not a jot about clothes, that his wife Mary tends to every detail of his personal appearance, and only by her ministrations does he approximate a put-together, tweed-patch professor.
Toward the end of the shopping trip, vocal in disgust at the poor quality of today’s tailoring, Vic does surrender, asking the girls to try on two overpriced fuzzy blue angora sweaters, a designer name stitched at the waistband. Outside the dressing room he sits, a book on ethics in his lap, smiling at first when the girls emerge and twirl before the mirror. “I like it, papa,” says Lana: shy for o
nce, breasts ripe, posture stiff in the blue sweater in order to keep some interior hourglass silt from rushing down.
This pleasure in her appearance swings him toward disdain. Before paying, Vic talks with scorn of female vanity, flipping another switch in Lana: she now preens with ostentation, erect in her sweater’s blue fuzz.
“Let’s leave this place,” he snarls.
“Why?”
“Too much titivation and tergiversation.”
“What?”
“Too many crowds.”
After which, in a mood, he takes them to the city’s edge where he rolls up his pants, emptying his pockets into Lana’s purse before wading into the water and leaving them as his onshore watchers. No longer the tweed professor, he enters his body just by walking through water. For the first time Rose can’t ignore his appeal. The barrel-breadth of his shoulders, the naked waist. When the ocean shelf drops, he begins swimming out.
Vic had told the girls that in his days as a young immigrant student, fresh from Liechtenstein in the fifties, hopeless and uncool, he had come to community college in Los Angeles, where he had started working in a board shop by the beach and there learned to surf, waiting hours in the waves for the right ride with a philosophical Bolivian friend, a great mentor to his later thinking. Those hours on his board he counted as among his best, the negative ions around the ocean acting on the brain, leaving the temporal lobe more capable of embracing the present. Within this blankness, his best and first ideas had grown: I’ll never recapture the inspiration of those first moments. Like many young American boys, he’d found the ocean complete as a mother, baseball or rock and roll in how it granted tribe and hope.
“You’re making it up.” Lana had laughed. “What are you talking about?”
Watching him swim out from the San Francisco shore, Rose wonders how far he will go, because even after she had stopped living in group homes and been adopted by Joan, she has seen that adults in the outside world are prone to freakish displays of will. She also remembers the scene in a movie Joan had taken her to when Rose had been too young, the movie with the proud and stiff Vietnam-vet husband leaving his wife because she had been unfaithful with a hippie paraplegic at home, after which the vet goes into the waves to kill himself.
But eventually Lana’s father returns, bobbing up and down in the waves. No one mentions his swim or the dragon of fear raised in the girls. Instead they lean back, hands planted on the beach, mock casual, seeing him so alive. Hair wet, profile rugged, attitude impatient, handsome and grilling them as if he must make an important decision.
He wants to know. “Which do you like more, girls? Mountains or ocean? Mountains or ocean?” When riled, he speaks in pairs, a metaphysical weight hinging on their response.
“Mountains with ocean,” says Rose, hedging bets.
“What about you, Mopsy?”
“Neither,” says Lana, smirking.
He wants to get at them somehow, riddle their teenage confidence. “Do you two believe God made man before woman?”
When they don’t know, his answer is this: he scoops up a handful of sand, leaving a pit and making a small mound. “You see? Tell this to people who accuse me of being antifeminist. You see who really came first?”
“I don’t,” says Lana. “I have no idea what you’re saying.”
And he looks at her perplexed, dark child in her new sweater, his girl offspring, shaking his head as if he has fallen into some unfortunate spell that he should have gotten rid of at least fifteen years earlier. And then wants to wear his wet clothes back to the car, puddling the driver’s seat, hurrying everyone home to Berkeley, cautioning them not to wear the blue sweaters around either of their mothers, a condition they accept, just one part of an eccentric day with a man whose odd self, like his daughter’s, doesn’t make it easy for people to fall in love and so most of them can’t help but go ahead and fall.
TWELFTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 6:09 A.M.
All you must do is connect with prison mind.
Vic’s beloved guard Javier loves telling him this. “Prison mind means you get to choose the terms of your imprisonment. Also you got to try to understand connection.” Javier happens to be a third-rate philosopher who could have awoken to find himself in a two-bit coffeehouse rather than a grade-one prison. He does not belong in a world made up of contraband tattoo guns, shanks sharpened from seat-release levers stolen from admin chairs, drug-sniffing German shepherds and a super who makes up for his short height by walking the hallways daily around four o’clock with razor nose aloft, squinting into the bike-repair shop where Vic worked in the beginning before he’d tried the child’s toy factory until he finally gave up on finding any meaning through the prison’s idea of work. Vic actually likes the pompous superintendent and his predictability, his childish bliss when ordering the masked, hooded, armor-plated cell-extraction team to come, the super’s obvious enjoyment in rippling safety measures through the institution at the slightest encounter of defiance in an offender. On his walkie-talkie, the super becomes ecstatically terse: we found a kite, he mutters, a kite and a tool besides.
Of course, Vic knows the officials have long considered him a docile offender and as such he has often been granted special status. During smaller earthquakes or fire drills, even the occasional bright-light, midnight lockdown after evidence of gang activity on the grounds, the guards apologize when binding plastic cuffs to his wrists behind his back. From his earliest days, all the guards have called him Legend and the name has stuck. All these years, but for his time with Javier, Vic has done what he can to spiral in upon himself and keep apart from others in the institution. Mainly simple desires plague him. To see Mary asleep in a window seat, head resting on her hand. To breathe ocean air again. Vic has made friends with no one but for one jocular, well-tattooed offender nicknamed Fatback who’d landed in Old Parcel for two counts of murder on a bad Wednesday, as Fatback told Vic in their first meeting in the showers. Two notable years later, on another Wednesday, Fatback’s execution date, Vic had been unable to eat, sleep, speak a word to anyone.
Vic knows his luck. He knows, too, about shanks slid under light-bulbs or along elevator shafts; he has always tried to avoid staring at the offenders inking gang tattoos in the yard corner. Being stationed in a cell block with no bad offenders nearby, in a final station of the cross these last three months being administered by a CO named Javier, a real gentleman of a guard, all this should spell luck, if highly metered, for Vic.
Because unlike the other COs Vic has known, Javier early on started confiding in Vic, making Vic feel whole slices of himself dragged out of deep freeze. About Javier, Vic knows plenty: not only that Javier is alone in raising his daughter but also that his first child, a son, had been born in Mérida with cerebral palsy. And that after the family had crossed into California, right after Javier’s young daughter’s third birthday, the son had died.
At night I mothered that boy, Javier said, he could do nothing for himself. I had to neglect his baby sister. You know the boy was an angel, but I’m glad he found some peace. After the boy died, the kids’ mother was diagnosed with such severe depression that some American flag-flying, beer-drinking neighbors called child protection services while Javier was trying to live the American dream best he could. At that time Javier worked two jobs, one in a filling station and the other in a convenience store, while also taking night classes in criminal justice because he was the one in his family everyone knew would get out, the husband who had promised the mother of his kids he would never yell, having seen what bottles and fists do to a family as well as the sadness stretched like a crowbar across his own mother’s shoulders so that at age fifty she ended up with an actual dowager’s hump. He tells all this to Vic, Vic thirsty for others’ confessions. While another CO had once squawked on the intercom what, is this place a library? when Vic had asked to get some new books, Javier makes it a practice to bring Vic any new book available from the library two whole cell blocks away.
; Anyone can see Javier is a good sort, which is why Vic fails to understand his life story: though Javier had been good at promise-keeping, working around the clock to support his damaged son and perfect baby daughter, the child protection people had, some years ago, taken his daughter away just because the girl’s mother refused to take antidepressants and had one day let little Deisi sit for hours in a dirty diaper, playing with dirt in the yard. Javier’s entire life could have fallen like the house of cards it was had his wife not chosen to return to Mérida, a decision best for everyone given that Javier now gets to play both mother and father to his sixteen-year-old girl now entering the difficult teen years. His main wish is to keep the girl under tight lock and key so she can stay an honor student. His luck has changed and the raffle had granted him a green card, making citizenship hot in his heart, the name of the twenty-sixth president the kind of fact he can summon quickly. And Javier never, not even in traffic, speaks on a cell phone, a recent outside-world custom, one of many about which Vic knows nothing.
“Isn’t it nice sometimes to not be on the phone?” Vic asks, to which Javier just shrugs. He tells Vic that at times he is getting out of his car while staying on the phone with his daughter who stands at the door watching him tell her he is getting out of the car.
“That’s how things are on the outside,” says Javier, “we need tons of connection.”
Since the best pay in the area comes from the local prison and since a neighbor helps him supervise Deisi, Javier recently started working night shift, moonlighting two jobs to keep proving to the child protection people, who have never let him out of their sights, that a lone Mexican can make enough money to play both mother and father.
“Believe me, I do it all for my daughter,” he tells Vic. “Funny, right? I work for the state so I can keep the feds away?”