Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  What Lana can’t accept is that her old schoolmate is so oblivious. Vic had once told Lana that Jane’s prodigious lifestream must keep her insulated. If you happen to believe in the idea of a soul—he had said, taunting Lana—you could say your little friend has a little too much blubber around hers.

  And Jane kept going, making Lana mock-slit her own throat and eye her sons significantly.

  “What’s she saying, ma?” asks Tee, perking up.

  “I’ll explain, honey,” says Lana. “One second.”

  Finally Jane does attempt to change the subject. “Hey, remember freshman year? Your mom and dad came up here. You and Rose let me come? I don’t bear grudges, I know I was a tagalong. We came for a weekend?” Lana does not recall a single bit of this, still in the glacier flow following the mention of Vic. “You don’t remember? We were the NoCal girls. That weekend you guys let me be Lola Three because remember how you were Lola One and Two—” assuming a mask of mock childish hurt.

  Tee tugs at her hand. “Ma! Can we go to the kiddie pool already?”

  Jane’s last factoid penetrates. Lana had been at Hope Springs before? Enough to explain why the place feels familiar. The mulberries, the wallpaper.

  “In a second,” she says to Tee.

  But how could Lana not have remembered? She had been here with Rose and with this Jane Polsby standing before her. Her mother and father had taken the three classmates on a trip. Memory is mischievous but bits return. Lana had thought that spa had been north, not south of San Francisco.

  What Lana remembers from that trip anyway has little to do with what her old classmate prattles forth, something about making art by gluing stones on redwood slats or how the girls kept their two-pieces on even among all the naked older men bubbling away in the cauldrons. While she cannot fully sight a younger version of Jane Polsby, the person she really sees for the first time in years is Rose, the spoken name enough to act as a lance through ice, making Rose palpable, puppyish in her love for Lana but also trying to get her back for something. Pulling off Lana’s bikini top. Or standing atop the rocks behind the sauna trying to appear smooth while instructing Lana about blow jobs or tampons. Vic had always said how knowledgeable Rose was. And then Lana could say one wrong word or another, enough to make sensitive Rose cry, enough that Lana always had to end up apologizing in what Rose called too casual a voice.

  But easiest to remember Rose laughing. They had given up finally and nude-sunbathed among all the lechers made ludicrous because of desire, males rendered beta because of the inherent weakness of statutory lechery. She could see Rose again, how primal she had been cannonballing into the cold water, strong in water just as Lana was more balanced when climbing rocks, and in water was probably where Lana loved Rose most because in water Rose fled adolescence and Lana, who had never learned how to swim well, got to follow.

  “Anyway, god, Lana, you look fantastic! You know ever since college I come here every year. Love the place. I’m leaving today but it’s great to see you. Going back to L.A. Basically, I had to declare a mini-sabbatical. My husband?” Jane grimaces. “Hates when I do these solo trips. Guilt-trips, you know, but got to do it. For sanity. Because my kids are three, six, seven, can you imagine? Left them with the nanny and instructions but no matter what, it’s hard, right?” She pats her cell with delicate attention as if it were the still-twitching end of an umbilicus. “Can’t get reception here. Your boys are twins? They’re eight?”

  “Nine,” says Tee, unable to let a slight pass.

  “Adorable. Hey, got to get together sometime. My kids love older kids. Let me see if I can dig up a card.”

  Tee smirks, Sedge manages a half-smile, Lana nearly chokes.

  Mainly she is surprised by a sneaky self, some part greedy to be recognized by anyone from the past. This greed fits with nothing and should be excised immediately. But while she says goodbye, while the boys finish their tofu before heading off to the kiddie pool, while she watches Jane take a latte and rolling suitcase and toddle off toward the griffin gate, Lana still pinches Jane’s card between her fingers, hard, as if she’d been thrown a rope from a leaky lifeboat.

  FOURTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 5:04 A.M. ONE EXIT SOUTH OF BUTTONWILLOW

  “I don’t get it,” Rose is saying. Outside, steam rises from the motel’s asphalt, calcium striping the hills. Chalk lines her lungs. “Not like it’s a holiday. It’s still mid-December.”

  The motel owner tugs her sari and peers through glasses at her pad. “We’re overbooked, ma’am. Perhaps that place up the road? The spa?”

  The dust on the windowsills suggests to Rose that nowhere else will she approach her quarry with such lovely concealment.

  “But I called. I arranged for a place here,” says Rose. Here is where she came, here where she must find a room, in this motel off an interstate for which she still uses Vic’s names: Five or Highway Five. “Sorry, but I just drove all the way up. I can’t pay extra? There must be some room. Just a place with a phone?”

  “Not permissible, ma’am.” The syllables start a carnival whir behind the phrase, a rattle like the woman’s bangles.

  “But I called. Made a reservation.”

  “Sorry, ma’am. No record of you. If not in the books, you are not entitled.”

  “No one said entitled. Just said—”

  “You have no receipt, ma’am?”

  “No. I called in the reservation. If they charge me—”

  “You will be paid. On your statement.”

  “I don’t care about payment. I just want a place.”

  “Of course.” The motel owner now answers a phone, asking with deathly calm if ma’am wants three nights, repeating a name back before hanging up to examine Rose, her glasses reflecting the parking lot and the hills beyond. “People do stay one exit north, ma’am. One exit up you find the coffee shop. You go, ask about a room. People like those baths. Hot, you know? Not expensive.”

  “I said money’s not a problem.”

  “You will be okay. Come. No need to get upset. A tissue?”

  Rose leaves, trying to ignore the unignorably bad signs: no record of her and no room at the inn.

  To remind her of earlier times, she has put on a short red cotton skirt covered with black swirls which lets the carseat stick to the back of her legs. She opens her computer to the unsent letter she had written the day before to Lana’s father:

  December 13, 2008

  Dear Vic,

  Hope you’re well. Haven’t heard from you since they set the date for the hearing. Forgive me, this is not an attack but weren’t we on something of a roll in our correspondence? Maybe you were getting something from it? Now I’m wondering if you don’t understand the offer of help I’ve tried sending your way. I understand your feelings about lawyers but at this point wouldn’t it be helpful to have someone who actually cares about your case on your side? Don’t you think the others have bungled things a bit?

  Let me speak more directly. I have a small break from work and I understand you might not have gotten my last message. Thought I could come to the hearing next week and see if I could in any way be helpful. What I understood online is that your case is being presented to a federal judge north of Old Parcel.

  My plans are to be in Buttonwillow as of Monday the 15th and then continue north. What I wanted to ask is if you might reconsider putting me on the Permission-to-Visit list. I ask outright because it seems important. Of course I understand if you don’t want anyone you really know to see you in what must be a difficult state but after our years of letters, and given the current situation, don’t you think having a lawyer on your side would help? (I really have no motive other than trying to help.)

  And, too, let me err on the side of being too clear: receiving the sentence of a medical stay would mean not just your life continuing as it is, which I understand might feel a bit intolerable, but an actual improvement in your conditions. Maybe you’d be held in a different facility. I feel silly pushing it on you but mus
t ask again: given how delicate your case is and that I don’t qualify as kin (and since you have no kin visiting at least for now, as I understand it), why not put Rose Lemm (I’m going back to my birthname) on the list for approval?

  The letter will live as pixels unsent. Unlike her other letters it will never cross prison walls, instead going brittle in a metal box that Rose will keep until she is old enough that her own force has ebbed and she has neighborly customs, walking a dog every morning with another old lady down a dahlia-lined street. The box and its data will be bequeathed to an heir who uses pop-up electromagnetic holographs requiring only gloves to communicate so that Rose’s box will collect dust rime in a cellar until the day her legatee’s grandchild pulls it from an old-fashioned recycling bin to find its quaint computer backboard perfect for a bowling rink made of baby bottles.

  FOURTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 8:37 A.M.

  Lana fails to appreciate how slowly her boys are taking to her new beau Dirk. She can hear them through the thin stucco talking about the guy.

  “He’s creepy. That laugh of his is super-fake,” says Tee. And then attempts a machine-gun facsimile, a rat-a-tat-tat piercing through.

  “Almost as creepy as that guy who runs this place.”

  “Hogan? His eyes cross. Like this.”

  “Yeah but Hogan has a terrarium,” says Sedge, slow to laugh. “Anyway, Hogan doesn’t run the place, he manages it.”

  “Big diff,” says Tee.

  “You know Hogan doesn’t have any hair on his arms,” says Sedge.

  “Probably burned off.”

  “He said he’d let us see the tarantula.”

  “No way.”

  Tee has severe arachnophobia and Lana wonders that her sweet, sensitive Sedge would bring up tarantulas. Since they came to Hope, Sedge has been acting out.

  “Ouch!” moans Sedge.

  “C’mon, that was not a hard pinch. Don’t fake it.”

  “I’m not.”

  “How long is mama going to be with this guy? The Dirkster?” asks Tee, apparently unafraid to grant Sedge this tribute: his twin’s social periscope is capable of wider angles.

  “I don’t know—” stretching it into at least three syllables. Kno-oh-oh.

  “Just asking.”

  She doesn’t want to hear their mock-casual twin prattle. How easily the boys cope by faking not pain but adulthood, using this mortar to patch up their days.

  Were she to write a book about life as a mother, she would put a giant fluorescent-orange earplug on the cover. This is the cost of being with kids: to breathe any inner music, at times you must tune things out. No one, let alone her own mother, had ever told her about this trivia of motherhood, the comic battle of present self versus past. For nine-odd years she has buried herself in two boys, in stocking and waste-management issues arising from refrigerators, diaper pails, hampers, toychests containing objects wooden or plastic: this toy question had engaged her until she had just surrendered to the tsunami of petrochemical industry that is American upbringing in the early twenty-first century. She had found it easier to engage in talk of bisphenol-free mouthables with other mothers and superspy space robots with her sensitive son, all this much easier than trying to remember what kind of fruity wine she once liked or how she used to like taking hills, her legs avid for a quick climb. And then, as if surprised by an uninvited guest, she sometimes catches a glimmer of her old self when it comes around knocking, a sheer exile showing up in dreams, saying: excuse me, did you mean to abort me? Tell me you didn’t mean it.

  She had wanted a normal life for herself, for her boys, but is flailing.

  For example, they have arrived at a nudist resort.

  Could be someone else’s idea of normal, she says in defense.

  She has asked the twins to do the unheard-of, to hang in their rooms before breakfast because what she really needs is sleep and instead they must start piping in their twin prattle past stucco walls that must be super-thin for her to hear them so clearly.

  Across a pillow her hand crawls. Just one soft orange and yellow earplug that her hand finds with as much ardor as it used to find another’s hand, yet when she squeezes the plug in, the twins’ melody still pipes in. Imagining their discussion can be worse than hearing it.

  I give up, she tells her unmuscled pillow. Forget sleeping in today.

  Dirk is already out convening with the people who run the place. It’s true she knows the guy none too well but early signs have been promising. Normal, normal, this is her song. She does wonder if, during their courtship, she may have blinded herself, banking too much on her past, using the past profit of other men’s appreciation to bring Dirk into the black. Her swains have tended to be of the passionate and jealous ilk and it turns out there may be no such appreciative streak in Dirk: he appears to cherish little beyond his own ambition.

  Can she help it if she likes him anyway? Or likes him enough. For one thing, he makes a big show of talking equally to the bald groundskeeper Hogan and the owners of the spa, Doreen and Albert, DorAlba as they are called around here, two nudists in their seventies, hot-tub sitters proud of their intelligence who, in their first sentence to anyone, let it be known they are key members of a society for smart people but will never hold this fact against all the world’s non-members.

  And though the terrarium has endeared that head groundskeeper Hogan to her boys, Dirk confesses how unsettling he finds the guy. Even if some of our future survival here depends on him, Dirk says. That guy Hogan is in tight with the owners.

  Still, Dirk tries to show an egalitarian streak, one she appreciates, especially since his vision is to turn this residency into something more than a residency. Allowing him this bit of male vanity, she hadn’t pressured him to tell her his age but guessed he must be somewhere in his fifties. He says that after all his years in the trenches—a transcendental meditator leading groups in dance and emotional management while maintaining a strict focus on dance continuum and contact improv—he had realized the time was ripe for him to find a following for a movement that had come as a flashing epiphany. Now, he says, he has moved beyond movement to form an all-encompassing theory/praxis.

  “It’s about the slash,” he had intoned, his smile serious and then—this is half his charm—quickly sexy, almost self-deprecating, ready for fun. “Whaaaat?” he says, never quitting the smile, as if he could join in the prospect of someone laughing at him.

  Which makes her hear her father’s edict on Jane, that a person’s SELF-REGARD MAKES FOR A BLUBBER OF THE SOUL, though whenever Vic’s phrases flood her synapses, inevitable and urgent, Lana cannot help but cringe. And yet her situation has to do with exactly that, the blubber of self-regard in new beau Dirk, one offering the strangely appealing outcome of making her own goals haze.

  In coming here, Lana had thought it might be great to get back to songwriting and had brought along her guitar. Or maybe she would paint a bit, though Dirk had been concerned when she’d asked where she might set up a painting studio. He’d pointed out the ecological mission of Hope and that pigment carried in toxic media might not be great for the local watershed if they hoped to make a good impression, given that he was coming with a family entourage, one that, if you thought about it, hadn’t been in the original ecology of his arrangement with DorAlba.

  Which makes her wonder: when had she signed on to be part of an entourage, a blight on the ecology, an addition to someone’s roadshow? But hadn’t it been fun to release into Dirk’s master plan, even if the plan does start to seem birthed from the head of a narcissist? Because it is relieving to be stripped of choice, here in the desert, and she is unhappy as ever to hear her father’s voice still pinging about, Vic’s ideas keeping a manic, eternal pinball game alive in her head’s backroom. THE DESERT MAKES MOST HUMAN ENTERPRISE START TO SEEM FOOLISH OR, CONVERSELY, ALL TOO NECESSARY FOR SURVIVAL.

  In bed, Lana tries remembering what foolish or survivalist hunch had led her toward Dirk when she’d met him four months before dur
ing a dance seminar in that rain-spattered Catholic church up north with its exquisite name—Mary, Star of the Sea.

  Hadn’t a sign come? The sign being that her womb had softened, a cell with doors flung open. Even the church’s all-windowed walls had fallen away. When Dirk had walked afterward with her on the cliffs, she chose to follow this sign, deciding to tell him stories that, with inarticulable instinct, she knows function like a universal Turing machine of mating, stories good as patterned stockings and tall boots in that they kick open certain responses, enough to make certain men surrender fear and allow them to make a move if said move is up for question. Concerning:

  Times you have been raped or almost raped;

  Times you have worked as a gogo dancer;

  To certain men, you could tell the story about using heroin in Paris.

  Hearing such stories seemed to send electric impulses direct into the reptilian brain. But did she want Dirk to make a move? After one of her mother’s stories about a colleague experiencing sexual harassment on the job, her father had said: “Mary, you believe your friend? She says that once she announced her engagement, she became prey for constant sexual predation? But we’ve talked about this too many times, please, let me finish. Your friend’s experience has nothing to do with societal unfairness and everything to do with the testosterone-driven neural loop. A clear case of the norepinephrine circle jerk of aggression, one more case of the bride laid bare by other bachelors. One man’s claim paves the way for others. No, this is a friendly discussion. Where are you going?”

  The bride laid what? little Lana had asked, making Vic stare a frozen second before he too left the room.

  Lying in bed at Hope, Lana recalls her favorite scene in a movie, where the girl gets raped before the guy kills himself, the one Lana had watched so many times with her lost fiancé she still feels guilty. Could the scene have caused his death? Had her Kip thought of Last Exit to Brooklyn before choosing to drive over a cliff below his parents’ house? His reptilian brain had opposed evolution, Vic would have said. Or he had made a decision about the calculus of sadness, believing it easier to bear on the other side.