Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  FEBRUARY 1972

  This survives: parents in the backyard hammock with the little girl swinging between them, eating a chunk of pineapple, a first. Her father’s eyes crinkle down. “Tongue burning, Mopsy?” he asks.

  “I like it,” reports the girl called Mopsy by her father and Jinga by her mother, her father’s profile sharp, her mother’s nose squishy.

  “I’ll make your nose into hers!” the girl tells them. First she swallows the last of the yellow burning fruit and then turns to pressing his nose down with sticky fingers. Her father lets her do this forever, before she tries pulling her mother’s nose long. “Like clay!” she reports, making them laugh. Her mother buries her squishy nose in the top of her girl’s hair. “You smell like flowers, Jinga,” says her mother. “Or like our first kitten Roly. You smell like Roly.”

  “I am Roly,” sings the girl over and over, as they swing back and forth, legs bare to the sun, her feet white-sandaled. “Look, I’m making us go!” she says until they agree that most locomotion comes from her.

  “A child is potential energy,” says her father. “A child wants to believe her parents will always possess a perfect equivalent response.”

  This moment of swinging goes until it stops. Her mother kisses her father over the girl’s head, an arc like a rainbow.

  “Why do you kiss papa?”

  “To show I love him,” says her mother.

  “That’s good,” sings their daughter.

  “Why?” Her mother laughs, taking her hand like a small pat of dough before it gets thrown into boiling water to make dumplings.

  “Loveisgoodgoodgood,” their daughter chants, liking the unimpeachable response from her parents, charmed beyond words.

  One time, not yet five, she goes on a parade around the house, singing a different tune: “You’re a bad mommy! I want a better mommy! Go to work and bring back a better mommy!”

  “Is it that you want me not to go to work?” her mother asks gently. “Or why do you say that? How would you feel if someone called you a bad kid?”

  “Happy,” says their daughter, already a contrarian.

  Mary will notate the whole discussion in a book of their daughter’s pronouncements, one Lana will come across one day with her friend Rose as they poke through Mary’s belongings, an endless cabinet of curiosities. Rose will think that Mary having written down the discussion proves at least some maternal caring. Not really, Lana will say, my mother’s an anthropologist and I was just one of her objects for study. Rose will scrutinize her for a second. You’re so mad. You really think your parents stole something from you.

  Lana will laugh, changing the subject by putting on one of Mary’s big flouncy hats. At least she gave me some fashion sense, right?

  Once, daughter a little older, father gets sick.

  Her pale papa unable to keep anything down, left to tend himself with only a six-year-old wisp of a girl in a nightdress trying to soothe her father. Again and again she scoops up a rag to press to his fevered brow. Did anyone ever tell you you’re an angel? he murmurs, pressing cloth to his face, water dripping down.

  Later that night he gets better, enough to descend stairs in his rumpled half-open striped bathrobe and share vegetable bouillon, their concord perfect. He has passed the hump. They are united.

  When her mother enters the kitchen shortly after, breathless from outside, bearing a scent of fall leaves and busyness, appointments and lectures, people seen and the perfume of impatience, their little daughter announces proudly, Mommy, I cured papa.

  Nice, says her mother, not paying attention, how’d you do it?

  And the girl, sincerely wishing to teach her mother how to help Vic—but even then, one tiny bit lording it over her—explains how she has washed Vic’s head.

  “I dip the cloth like this. Then I squeeze it out in the hall. Then I place it on his head.”

  It takes the parents a second to realize where their daughter got the water, a second that offers no little girl a chance to finish, because soon as Vic realizes a ministering angel cooled his fever with water from the toilet, he bellows: what’s wrong with you? making his girl stand stricken, hands open, palming a low and invisible muzzle so that Vic’s only recourse is to stomp upstairs.

  You did seem to cure him, her mother remarks, turning a weak smile her way, the one that later will make her daughter hate rabidly, continually offered the cherry poison syrup of martyrdom. Mary tries again, calling the girl Mopsy.

  The girl shouts back Mopsy’s not even your name for me.

  Livid, their daughter goes to lie in the cool alcove where the fine glass is stored. Years later this glass will be broken systematically, plate by plate, during one of Mary’s arguments with Vic but now the glass stacks intact in such a lovely hutch next to where the mobile made by the girl in kindergarten spins overhead, a paper lemon lined with red-glitter veins. Lying on her back, the girl stares at the ceiling where her dusty art twirls, its laze soothing, until she feels restored enough to emerge out into the kitchen. She finds her mother making sandwiches out of marshmallow and peanut butter, a concession toward America, one of Lana’s many ignored requests. Though the girl may be hungry, her mother’s effort sickens because it reminds her that Mary had taken away Lana’s role: ministering angel.

  No thanks, says the daughter, happy at the burn of refusal, I’m not hungry. Meaning: not hungry for you, mommy, for your body and its appetites, which means the daughter already acts as if her first fall was the mistake of popping out from the wrong body.

  1970–1979

  What Lana can save may not be their fevers but their arguments. When her parents start to fight, she does a little frantic jig from one foot to the other. She has become good at the dance, raising her voice louder and louder in nonsense syllables so they have to raise their voices too. She makes a sign, cardboard pasted to two paper-towel rolls, that says NO ARGUING OR ELSE I WILL BE VERY MAD and parades between them. They keep ignoring her, too caught in their song with its decibels and glares. One day she is clever, devising the joke that makes them stop, running to the pantry to get out cereal boxes, lining them up like a wall between. They are forced to stop and laugh, calling her creation the Berlin Wall: this becomes her routine, her last-ditch bulwark and it usually works. As she gets older, she abandons the jig and just heads straight for the cereal, this tactic good until it stops working, until the decibels and glares, slammed doors and car driving away become as unstoppable as a runaway train.

  Finally a mother, she tells her boys, pining for any story from her childhood, about the cereal wall, telling the tale as if her strategy had always worked. The first time Sedge starts building a wall between her and Kip, mid-argument, Tee thinks his twin has gone nuts. But when the cereal boxes actually get their mother to stop speaking in what Tee thinks of as her tightrope voice, when the boxes make her crack a smile, he sees his twin’s wisdom.

  The next time Tee is the first to head for the boxes. The third time, however, the wall stops working; both boys are told to go outside and check on the garden, an answer like an abyss, their only resort to burn flywings with magnifying lenses or throw acorns at squirrels. If the boys never make the wall again, years later when both try to remember their father’s face, they at least remember the bright yellow cheer of cereal boxes and how it marked one of the last times you could do a simple thing and think it big enough to stop calamity.

  1976–1980 SUNDAYS

  A great peace seems to be found by at least one of the father-daughter pair when Vic drives his daughter to her violin teacher, a woman who herself happens to be the daughter of a famous musician, requiring a drive of ninety minutes over bridges and mountains both ways, but Vic is committed to the drive because the teacher claims Lana has a talent for composition and improvisation. During the lesson, Vic sits in the next room, reading his book, happy to be released from other claims, looking forward to afterward when they go as pilgrims to his favorite mecca, a pink-stuccoed restaurant called Me & Me, a
place to sip cumin-tinged soup with a loyal daughter.

  “These are the best times in my life,” he says each time they station themselves at Me & Me, making her ache inward and proud, tongue heavy from the burden of having failed to improve the rest of his life and her constant betrayal of her mother. One time he goes further. “Did you ever guess how much of a salmon I am, Mopsy?”

  “What?”

  “I spawned and am good to go.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m not afraid of death. Never have been. Not when I surfed, not now. But when I’m here with you, Mopsy, you make me feel so alive. These moments with you make me think if I go on living I at least serve some higher purpose.” Casually he makes her his sharer, the one to keep away life’s dismalness, offering her the cinderblock responsibility that lies heavy on her breathing. His words make clear how much she must aim to be all the more amusing and interesting, a good listener, his daughter the perfect granter of life. Nodding toward an older woman at a nearby table, deep in some fog of dementia or sedation as she speaks a vortical codex to her crumpled napkin, he goes on: “Promise me you’ll make sure I keep my independence, my intelligence, dignity. An older woman I knew well didn’t recognize me when I went back to Liechtenstein and I had the horrible thought that it wasn’t worth it to live. Later I felt so guilty about my thought, I didn’t go to her funeral. You get my point? I never want to burden anyone. To be like that. So promise already?” His palm grasps her loose fist. He takes her unwilling shiver to be assent. “I knew I could count on you.”

  During one of these Me & Me retreats, a psychiatrist at a neighboring table leans over to ask Vic: “What is your secret to such successful father-daughter interaction?”

  “Well,” says Vic, “the paradox is I always listen. I find my daughter so interesting.”

  “Would you like to share your secrets on a panel I’m organizing about parents and children?” asks the psychiatrist, and though Vic is usually a loud pundit against shrinks and their apothecaries, anyone who dispenses neuroactive chemicals too easily, he accepts.

  Some weeks later, after fussing over whether or not Lana should wear a frilly dress or can go in her usual overalls, Vic and Lana head to a panel where they sit onstage with a mother-and-son pair and speak to a professional audience and answer questions about how they get along.

  Vic speaks while Lana smiles shyly out: he talks about the great longing he had as a young adult for a perfect task-reward system. He says that having a child has proven such a symmetrical reward for all life’s prior tasks. Nothing could be a cleaner fit to all life’s yearnings than a fulfilling dialogue with one’s own child.

  The last question aims at Lana: “What does your father do that helps you get along with him?”

  She falters before saying, “I admire him. It sounds corny but I want to be just like him when I’m older.”

  This answer stirs a ripple of oohs in the crowd, palpable desire.

  After the father and daughter depart their anointing, after they run a gauntlet of hands possessed by beaming people who scrutinize them—seeking what exactly?—Vic chooses not to explain the title of the conference to her, Oedipus/Electra, saying certain topics can be understood in the course of time. While of course, the missing partner in all this anointing is Mary: where is Mary on their day?

  After the panel, they eat again at Me & Me. “Not such bad apothecaries after all,” says her father, “what did you think?”

  “Fun,” she says, getting only now for the first time that few other answers are available, that he is a little blind, choosing to hide this new awareness by slurping her smoothie in what she feels is his fairytale hall of mirrors.

  In some remote nook of herself she guesses that for years, anytime Vic’s pride in her flickers, he will choose to remind her that of all the denizens of Berkeley, one shrink-apothecary had singled father and daughter out. They have been elected for Vic’s special way of talking at her and in her prediction she is not wrong.

  At the breakfast table they read the paper together, the kettle whistling for his coffee a Pavlovian signal of closeness: Mary is a late riser and they alone share these mornings. To Lana, Vic will say of certain photos that this woman is beautiful but that one’s chin is too sharp, this one’s legs make her look like a giraffe while that one has eyes too deep-set and wide apart, far too brazen. He does this as if he must work overtime to inculcate in Lana his connoisseur’s eye for female beauty. She will never be able to see any woman, including herself, without also simultaneously regarding her through Vic’s prism of appraisal.

  Later about this fairytale pre-adolescence of Lana, Vic will marvel: I never had problems with you. He will regard her teenage self as if she had, at the end of their pink-stucco era, fallen from the moon and now, sadly, bears spores of unknowably foreign and potentially lethal origin.

  Soon after the panel, Lana will meet her new friend Rose and, almost simultaneously, tell her father she wants to quit violin, a wish he will take as a blow to his heart, her perfect arrow meeting its target.

  1978–1980 THURSDAYS

  In those last years before the advent of Lana’s best friend, Vic still takes his daughter to school, deep into an era when you find few other fathers at drop-off. This is part of a concession to Mary during the mid-to-late throes of feminism, that Vic will be a grand husband, enspirited with noblesse oblige, supporting his wife’s work. Hence, in addition to the violin lesson, he drives Lana to school one morning a week. He and Mary are professors and have, if not leisure, flexibility. Though he admits it to no one, though he cannot say why he would not wish to admit it, he looks forward to Thursdays and has said, mock sighing, many times to his Wednesday-afternoon students in his office: you have no idea what a twentieth-century man I am. Out of many grapes, one wine! You have no idea how domestic ritual shapes my week.

  One Thursday morning finds him sitting outside the house in his Citroën, motor running, waiting while items are flung or discarded from Lana’s backpack inside. Every so often he sees, through the paneled glass of the front door, a dark panel, a form moving or zippered, a picky silhouette casting off her mother’s choice of jacket. He stays in the driver’s seat while interior commotion swirls because he tries to find the right frequency for the classical music station but gets buggered by the hills they live on. He needs it: sometimes just one sweet strain of violins can set his day aright and if he doesn’t hear that sweetness, something to let his soul surf high on a crescendo, things go a bit awry. While he knows the need is illogic, he can’t help it.

  In his most recent book, he tipped his hat to the site for illogic in the forebrain as well as the hind: forget Freud, it is not just atavistic, superstitions have their place.

  Superstition is the name for other people’s religions, he postulates, wondering if he unwittingly swipes someone else’s idea.

  On the grass between him and his ivy-covered stone house, a shaggy in a sleeping bag fancier than he should own stirs. The mottled mass arises and shakes its mat of hair before offering a bedroom smile to the professor in the car awaiting his daughter. Out of professional habit more than intention, Vic nods. The shaggy proffers a slow peace salute.

  Finally the door belches open to show Mary in her blue-and-white men’s pajamas, the cast of her face before caffeine, mussed in sorrow. Lana ducks out from behind, waving her backpack at her father, a victory salute, this their collective morning tarantella, a dance with steps known in blood. As their daughter descends the first step, Mary continues to stand, a statue peering over her glasses and ruing their haste, as if she had signed on for worry, as if worry alone could stitch a family together. Or, as Vic has accused her, as if Mary doesn’t know what to do with the freedom he grants.

  Out of the house Lana runs, backpack half-open, her forward lip impish. She could be a French schoolgirl from Vic’s private adolescent hall of fame, a young colt with hair in barrettes, a ponytail. When she falls, which she often does, she doesn’t so much
stumble as fly, falling on one knee so that her backpack’s contents spray over the grass.

  Through his dirt, the shaggy cracks a grin; at the door, Mary shakes her head.

  I’ll come, mouths Mary but Vic gets out of the car. He finds himself by the yawning pack, kneeling so he can stuff Lana’s belongings back in with more force than is necessary. He can’t help his force. He pounds more than stuffs notebook and sweater and pencil case in, electing to ignore the yogurt leak from the bottom of the brown lunch bag. In this moment he is focused, a man of action and not observation. He does not need to look to know Lana in her recoil, shocked into watching him. And yet he cannot stop punching inside her bag because the punch is meant to teach a lesson: how important for people to try to be careful, thoughtful, more considerate of him. A more insidious subtext snakes under—the genetic material of mother and daughter remain inferior, mixed, and it is their haste that has brought them to this sorry pass, the mother mainly to blame. Beneath that message, he is also telling them what a self-made man he is, Vic an orphan who has triumphed on the strength of all his superior innate qualities. This is a point about genes and also about how genes have nothing to do with your success. The will can triumph. And all these points beat together in a crescendo about how these two women have stolen seconds of life from him, seconds of ambition otherwise lived.

  Because he never, but never, asked Mary to make him a parent.

  Done with the punching, he zips the backpack closed, its rip like a tiger’s teeth.

  Mary has retreated inside, her form still visible through the glass panels. She may be trembling but he doesn’t bother noticing. Years ago she stopped crying in any outright way.

  Onto his shoulder he slings the backpack and strides back to the car, knowing that Lana will enter a telltale second later. Lana is still curious, wishing to be near, her quietness meaning she has not yet arrived at the fully sullen age. He knows her well enough to know her love for sitting in the front but today he will let no small talk sugarcoat anger’s purity. That she sits in the front means she at least accepts him. Anyway, if he were to speak, he guesses he might be, at best, dismissed. Instead, a form of apology, he hums to Ravel poking through radio static. Once they get to her elementary school, they will get out, he will escort her in.