Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  A horse of a different color! she heard the taximan in Emerald City saying and then later I am the great and mighty Wizard of Oz, followed soon after by the response: I am Dorothy, the small and meek. And finally, her favorite line: pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

  This maybe shone as the most important idea: paying no attention when you were starting an adventure, keeping an open mind. She is trying hard to ignore certain features lining the chute toward the adventure she wanted to have.

  For one, the extent to which her boys have been skeptical about this new man Dirk, whom they call the Dirkster. In their meetings with the Dirkster up in Yalina, they had not been able to see how different he was from the few other conquests she had known after their father’s death. Dirk was, she had decided not to tell them, a bouquet of firsts. First time she is with such an older man, in his early fifties, a man wishing to achieve something beyond his own brute survival, and this means something to her given how many times she has heard her father complain about the limitations of his followers who thought their bliss could magically release others. Really, isn’t it one of the first times she gets to be with someone who, she thinks, is no hypocrite? Dirk wants to create what he calls an efficient methodology so that others’ bliss may come to full release and he bears this intention as if it were a proud burning torch. Lana Mahler, you get to be my age, you start wanting to have a last shot at something, really make a difference in people’s lives. I want to do nothing short of helping transform world consciousness or at least create seeds of change. In this vein, he has been invited to Hope for an indefinite residency, to be its resident guru, helping heal masses drawn to this Kurort, as her father liked calling any water spa.

  The other sneakier truth is that for long enough she had accepted the liberty of confinement as a new mother in Yalina and now she requires this adventure with Dirk. She must uncover her old self and shake things up enough to remember what freedom tastes like even if the twins think this move spells one bad idea. True, she had given up her job at the Yalina market and at first they would have to depend on Dirk’s gig. He himself had said to her: Lana Mahler, find your trust, don’t worry, all will be taken care of. (Though depending on anyone for too long always makes her itchy.) Don’t worry, she had echoed for the boys, we can always turn to your grandparents if you really need something special. Though of course she would never let it happen, would never go running back upstate to her would-be inlaws Jennie and BJ. No, she wants to make of trust a lilypad and just float on Dirk’s gig, supposing that at Hope, she too might latch on to a credible gig.

  First on the list is to see about the school for the twins. She had told the twins’ grandparents that schooling was her priority, saying this both for them and to remind herself. The grandparents should have stopped wringing their hands in trips between her car and their home that cold morning when they helped pack up her old brown undercover sedan, what their son Kip had called the pimpmobile. She had told Kip’s parents, in so many ways, that it would be good for the grandkids to have a break from studying up north among all Yalina’s fresh-faced but secretive children of potgrowers with their well-rehearsed scripts about daddy’s job, this being her last jab at her inlaws, one last hook at Indiana grandparents who had been the ones to choose Northern California and yet made no secret of blaming her for their precious, wild son’s pot-harvesting ways and unlikely death. He had driven his car into the ocean right at the point where their property had an easement into the ocean, namely

  Tract Two:

  A non-exclusive right of way to the existing stairway, and down the stairway to the ocean over a ten-foot strip of land lying along the Westerly side of the following described property: Commencing at the 1/4 section corner common; to Sections 21 and 28, Township 11 North, Range 15 West, Mount Diablo Base and Meridian, said 1/4 section corner being the NW corner of the property previously vested in the name of Tobiack; thence from said 1/4 section corner South 73^(degree sign) 14'40'' West, a distance of 562.08 feet to a point marking the corner of that particular piece of land conveyed from Riverside Townhouse, a corporation, to Walter B. Carr and Jane L. Carr in that instrument dated March 12, 1963, and recorded in Book 621 of Official Records at page 338, Mendocino County Records, State of California on March 19, 1963; thence North 44'48'20'' West, a distance of 107.22 feet; thence Easterly in a meandering line that follows the mean high water line to a point which bears North more or less to the true point of beginning

  as her father-in-law had waved this section of the title at her, you made Kip do it right here, Lana! You drove him crazy! Right here!

  Anyone would have had to escape that. The blame and being a she-devil in that place with Kip’s family: all a little too tight, familiar and foreign. And yes, she hadn’t known what kind of school her boys would find at Hope, only that it was accredited, a jawbreaker she likes rolling over her tongue, capable of soothing guilt. Her fantasy had been that at Hope her sons would find themselves playing and studying with California’s other grandsons and granddaughters, the spawn of Indians and ranchers, Mexicans and migrants and cowboys, those who had stayed put and those who moved through, all workers and heirs half-settled into a valley riven by the great highway. A person can dream; a person hurts no one by dreaming.

  Back in her room after the hot baths, Lana wonders if mulberries are edible or poisonous, slow while stripping her robe before the cheval mirror, the yellow-rose wallpaper reminding her of someone’s eyes on her in a room like this, whose or where she cannot say.

  NINTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 1:26 P.M.

  Lana not unhappy, sitting on the patio near the warm pool, outside the main dining hall of Hope Springs. Sitting with her sons, dawdling over fleshlike apricot-flavored tofu that her sons think is shaped like ears. Sedge says the stuff looks like it has been ripped from a troll who might grant endless life if you just answered the riddle correctly. The thirty-third anniversary of this place must be starting already, thirty-three in honor of Christ’s age at death: hordes of arrivistes come, towing expensive backpacks and battered suitcases, people clean-faced or hirsute engaging in long, decade-erasing hugs. Something about it makes her want to laugh.

  “What, mama?”

  She asks her boys: “Does this feel right or what?”

  “I dunno,” says Tee, blowing a strawpaper onto the pile of those he’d already jetted toward the general vicinity of a recycling bin.

  Sedge looks up from where he has returned to having a private talk with his space robot Lestrion, who to the outside world is no more than a tongue depressor and Q-tips, a crucifix with pentacle dreams stranded on legs, the robot’s head bound with rubber bands, his gamma-ray deflectors swaddled by well-crudified masking tape: the hidden nature of Lestrion aids his appeal. Sedge whispers “Q forty-one” before saying louder: “I guess. Mountains in the middle of the desert are pretty.”

  “Look, ma, why doesn’t that man have a face?”

  She looks before shushing her son. “Tee! He just doesn’t have a nose. Let’s not stare, boys.”

  “But the man doesn’t have a mouth either. It’s all sewn together or something. Just two dots for eyes, two dots for nostrils and barely a mouth. Like Michael Jackson!”

  “You want a time-out, Tee?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “You’re on warning. That’s a one.” Lana quotes from yet another recent book on parenting. “Two.”

  In the warm pool, a man laughs, big, extending his arms like a bear. “The colonies have been good to me,” he says loudly to another.

  “Nathan Hale,” the other agrees, nonsensically. Two large seals in a zoo, dunking heads, splashing up. “So you call this a colony? Hey, had a good time last night?”

  “The calories have not been so good.”

  A trio of women who in garb alone could be escapees from a hula troupe ensconce themselves in a hug between the warm pool and the dining patio. Lana recognizes them from Dirk’s grief workshop during which, this morning, all
supplicants had been asked to wear straw skirts, though Lana, as Dirk’s primary aide, had not participated much beyond handing out name-tags, a task he had called of course fully her choice.

  “Are there lions here, mama?” asks Tee.

  “Probably,” says Lana, remembering a sign warning what to do if one came too close to a mountain lion. You back away and scream, you raise your arms to look bigger than you are, you don’t lean down to pick up a child, you throw stones. So what do you do? Leave your children as bait while you run off and get help? How clear is it at which point you intervene, lean down, hoist the kid high, get away from danger? She would ignore all of it, get her kids on her shoulders, probably ruin everything—it would be too hard, like the instructions they give on a plane, one of those biologically impossible imperatives. You’re supposed to ignore the hindbrain and fasten the oxygen mask on your own face before making sure your own kid’s okay? her father once had asked as they flew toward Nevada for some conference of his, just before using the safety manual to slap the top of her head. How much she loved exactly this kind of moment with him. Later she had paraded around the conference, watching his hale greeting of people—the names he could remember!—while she twirled some transparent adult drink. Only once in the hotel room had she felt uncomfortable, in her pajamas reading a Jim Morrison biography, not liking the way he ran a finger down her spine a little too low before asking what it was about ole Jim that interested her so. Psychic incest—as one of her friends in Yalina had termed it—almost worse than the real deal because it’s way foggier.

  “Shh,” she says.

  “What?” her sons ask at the same time, twin habit making them synchronous only sometimes, boys who talk to mirrors as much as to each other.

  At the next table, a woman in a purplish dress studies menu choices, an older woman with reading glasses who shakes her head, scanning the menu again before turning straight toward Lana.

  “Lana?” she says. “Incredible. Lana Mahler? That you?”

  Lana doesn’t remember the woman but shudders at the evocation of her old last name. Only Dirk knows her whole moniker. Years ago she’d gone through the whole bother of changing it, one of many feeble tactics, though she could not help but be inconsistent about the bandying about of names, and of course had checked in here not as Lana Mahler or Lana Fukuji but as Lana Wagner, her own made-up and not wholly necessary confection, at this point more tic than need.

  “Jane Polsby. High school, remember?” The woman chews bubble gum, her butter-blond hair a librarian bob over tetragonal horn-rim glasses, a substantial line incised between the brows, only one eye fixed by the snake-glaze of middle age.

  “Of course,” says Lana, bits and pieces floating up from whatever still remained of her neocortex.

  Back then it had been easy to consider Jane a blowhard burdened with the desire to be a model, a girl who’d gotten shots done and posed herself on her senior page in a manner meant to invoke celebrity. Hips thrust forward, knock-kneed, elbows akimbo, Jane gazed up from the yearbook, dark head tousled and lowered, Jane splayed out in twenty-five letters of the alphabet of seduction without ever having quite located some crucial twenty-sixth.

  Lana once had told Rose that she thought Jane was emotionally tone-deaf despite the sensitivity you’d think would be hers, given the small, minkish eyes and pallid skin. And still Rose and Lana had spent certain kinds of time with Jane Polsby, eating jam-slathered scones at the local bakery and acting polite whenever Jane quoted her aphorisms, so poorly remembered. Only later would the Lolas giggle in imitation. Be there then! What doesn’t make me stronger won’t kill me either!

  Vic had said he liked their third wheel’s vitality, calling Jane the kind of girl overendowed with life. “She’s the opposite of neurasthenic and the opposite of cool, true, but look, girls, she also makes no secret of craving the unction of cool! You’ve got to admire the honesty. You’d do well if you had the smallest ant-bite of her sincerity.” He had even said something approaching this idea to Jane’s actual face during the one dinner Jane had ever attended before a sleepover at Lana’s with Rose. Whenever Vic addressed her, Jane had acted flattered, kicking Rose under the table. Later she whispered to both girls that maybe Vic liked her a little. That night, in punishment, the Lolas joked about Jane, saying they could imagine her having both the sprinting ability and morning breath of a race-horse.

  “Jane Polsby,” Lana sighs, marveling at the rejuvenating magic of memory. She doesn’t stand because she is not yet ready for a hug or any precocious admission of anything: her hands are bloated, useless paws. And the boys can tell something odd is happening, their mouths hanging open with food.

  “I know. I changed. My hair for one. Screams midlife, right? Like a neon sign. I don’t care, blond hair makes me happy. Reminds me of my inner princess. Hey, you look great.”

  “Thanks,” Lana demurs, wiping yogurt off Sedge’s shirt because he still lets her do this.

  “Oh.” In full solemnity. “Sorry about your dad.”

  Here’s where Lana tunes out, crumbling some tofu between her fingers, only coming back at this: “Can’t believe someone would be that famous and get put on death row for just one slip-up. Crazy. That must be hard.”

  Lana goes lifeless herself, her shiver taken as a nod. If she could, she would just jam the signal.

  “I mean, brain cancer on top of dementia? But the law’s changing, right? The governor should let him have that last stay, not like it’s skin off anyone’s back. I’m sorry, must be rough. You know my mom had dementia, called me Caesar’s daughter, but god, two weeks? Are you going to be in the room when—? You’d think there’d be some medical place where someone could just live out his days. Sorry, no. I understand. My dad, I wouldn’t want to talk either.”

  Lana aims for a shrug. If there existed a term for both horror and numbness hitting the windshield, this would be its moment. Most people don’t know Lana Wagner is linked to Vic Mahler, and Lana has been conscientious in avoiding details of the Mahler case. So this aged version of Jane delivers the news: brain cancer and a last stay? Dementia? Lana had not known. But she has found that the more she avoids the news, the more it chases her. In a highway coffee shop a television plays the tail end of Vic’s name, letting her know his time is coming. In a waiting room, from a tabloid’s headline, the Mahler name blares forth. Now Lana has run into Jane Polsby and gets the full slam-dunk.

  Clearly this Vic Mahler case is having its fifteen minutes of infamy. The thing had been caught forever in what Vic used to call the strobe of attention. Once he’d yelled at a tribe of reporters: stop playing the mommy-and-daddy’s-rolodex game of mediocrats! Her mother had later told her, lips pressed, eyes rolling, that papa was resting because after his lecture he had apparently needed to start ranting at the reporters: what, you people all did J-school together at Berkeley? You’re into conformity? Or what, you all got hazed together at some tony Upper East Side academy? Mary could imitate him so well Lana used to find it spooky, but back in those days, no one, especially not his wife, dared say the great Vic Mahler might have been, as people were just starting to say back then, losing it, which in his case would have meant that Vic Mahler had lost some central moral hub. None of them, whether family, follower or rival, saw his outbursts as anything more than flicked-off sparks of brilliance: inscrutable, irresponsible, the byproduct of inspiration.

  Later the day of his reporters’ rant, Vic had come downstairs, puffy-eyed, to slice a piece of French bread for himself. While studiously avoiding Mary, he told Lana that what had bugged him was how reporters kept marring the purity of the shaggies’ circle, being bottom-feeders who like nibbling at any frond that appears before them, just nibbling away until there’s nothing left for their appetites. And they do it without real intention. At the end of the day, Mopsy, what a person intends is what matters most, tell me I’m wrong?

  Sure, papa. Once Lana had been walking with him on campus when he was trying to outstride some young report
er asking about the controversy surrounding a recent book. Finally Vic had turned to the poor boy to hiss: you’re imagining some famous actor playing you as a young cub? Or you’re one of those kids with a last name on some old stone buildings around here? If a bomb fell on your parents’ home, would certain newspapers and TV shows close? Tell me I’m wrong about this guy, Mopsy.

  Sure, papa. This second, he probably does some similar second act in prison, busying himself making pronouncements against the power structure. All too easily Lana can see her father rabble-rousing, ranting about guards who should cease invading the prisoners’ right to freedom in the showers, or something about the cafeteria—but this is not a good path. She has kept herself from Vic being a live and screaming presence before her. Had she not worked overtime to lobotomize all memory of Vic?

  She comes to with a start. Again she has been a bad mom, again faltering, abandoning her boys by teleporting, letting herself seem present and yet spiraling off into Vic-land while Jane spoke. A good mother would have done more to protect her sons from hearing about the bequest of such a bad granddad, grandpa, grandfather, all the names the boys will never call Vic. She will never let them meet.

  Belatedly, Lana tries glaring but Jane is too awesome a force to silence. “The governor must have to throw bones to some big pockets in order to have to—”