Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  Of course the hope had been that Lana might grow with the beauty and strength of a black-eyed susan in rich imported soil: the best from everywhere. This being the myth of the Berkeley microcosm, with the special myth of the Mahler household being that it dwelled at the acme of same. Guests at their dinners often heard that Berkeley alone could raise a child to be tolerant and strong, and if anyone ever dared confront their bubble by calling it smug, the Mahlers would share a look. “It’s not as if a person can spoon-feed tolerance into a system,” Vic liked to say, his smile and meaning a mystification.

  And of course, a parent knows ahead of time that a girl will push hard against any wall formed by her mother. Mary hardly wants to be that cliché, a mother trying to restrain pubescence. On this account she has been quite vocal, trying to free her daughter into the embrace of awaiting womanhood, one she cannot help personifying as some kind of bare ivory goddess standing beyond the door, clutching cloth to chest. Mary has done what she could. In the wane of the twentieth century, when Lana was all of eleven, Mary had written the first of her treatises on fraught mother-daughter relations, The Corset of Anxiety. In the front she thanked Lana, part of her attempt to release her daughter, as important a token as the pink conch-shelled razor Mary had given as a gift for Lana’s thirteenth birthday, a day on which Mary found herself studious in avoiding the discussion of womanhood she had intended, speaking instead of leg-hairs’ directional growth, hoping to leave tougher jobs of explication to her daughter’s new friend Rose.

  For all Mary’s ability to chart anything from dinnertime discussion to larger social structures, she believes in the alleyways of her childhood Catholicism, and a dire vision long ago visited itself upon her, occasionally returning at night to steal her sleep: she thinks a sad fate might swallow Lana’s future. She has a vision of Lana lying on a bed while opaque needles from thousands of directions fly toward her prone body, the exact opposite of the light radiating from the immaculate virgin of Byzantine paintings. In Lana’s last year of high school, adolescence having bored through whatever recognizable tissue remains, Mary wishes to label no one but does find herself wondering if her daughter might not be exhibiting at least a few of the traits of a sociopath?

  From Mary’s field-notes book:

  Impulsivity

  Lack of remorse

  No tone of contrition

  Not much guilt

  An animal-like course of self-pleasuring

  And if Mary’s line of work asks its faithful to abandon many beliefs about innate lineage, to consider all influence cultural, even without Vic’s phrases humming in the background, she also cannot avoid the genetic and god-given. Just look at her own family, for god’s sake: hadn’t her own parents crafted, in the fields of Californian possibility, a golden calf out of impulse? Hadn’t they behaved like rutting animals? And hadn’t Mary followed her own animal nature in seeking out a force large and impulsive as Vic? While it is also true that in this era of dinner parties Mary cannot find a trace of whatever had made her beeline toward Vic: his voice too loud, his gestures too jerky, his thought too predictably provocative.

  Yet it will also be at parties that Mary can still locate whatever intimacy remains. All groups let her recall, if not animal nature, at least her familiarity with her husband, two allied steamships powered by their shared work ethic and skepticism about cultural pieties. The napkins will be laid out, candlesticks glimmering, first guests about to appear and she will find herself also gleaming at Vic. The person she tends to confide in is not Vic, however, but her assistant Sherry to whom Mary tells the fear: Lana represents the return of the repressed. That Lana is already refuting her mother’s feminism by starting young to lose herself in animal submission to men. Mary hates to admit how easy it is to see: her mother Zora begat Mary who birthed Lana, three generations of women linked by rebellion masking great inner compliance.

  For many years it has been Mary’s guilty pleasure to speak with Sherry, such a no-nonsense midwesterner, the kind of daughter—or even mother—Mary might have wished for, with her definite chin, her conscience clear as an empty silo and a wonderful tendency to write flower-trimmed thank-yous. Sherry often says the hatred of an adolescent daughter might shock but it will pass. And will even quote Vic: the hormones endured by women, estrogen and progesterone, can be called two gloved fingers of the devil.

  If Lana had seemed somewhat safe during high school, deep in the sanctity of her girlhood friendship, once Mary had glimpsed her daughter’s rock-star boyfriend, who came in and out and in again only to disappear, she had started to fear that Lana, nominally college-bound, had grown too enamored of the edge. Far as Mary can see, her daughter finds only bad seeds interesting, with one particular fellow named Tumbleweed sticking around longest, Tumbleweed who emerged from the band of bad boys wasting time around the head shops, all the pot paraphernalia boutiques of Telegraph Avenue.

  For these latterday derelicts whom she must pass on her way to classes, Mary feels no pity. These boys stink of violence, whether from smoke, skateboards, needles, music or innate cruelty, a violence the shaggies with their world-peace saucercup eyes never exhibited. Mary studies this new breed of boys, the way they hold sarcastic cardboard signs begging not for peace but for coinage to spend on mary jane, boys whose very first fuck-you is their glassy youth followed quickly by the multiple piercings and their over-inked skin, shoes and skateboards, boys who crouch low so as to better whistle tunelessness toward the gutters where they all seem to have already lost some important treasure. The only thing such boys appear ready to consign themselves to is the care of girlfriends, social workers, MRIs and blood-work, clearly being boys whom any right-thinking parent would stow in a chamber far from the dark porcelain of a daughter’s body.

  So Mary will not let it happen: she may have messed up, not wishing to ponder how, when or why, but the one thing she will prevent her daughter from doing is falling in line with the laws of men. And because Vic laughs off the concern she does finally voice, she considers enlisting Rose. Might you talk to Lana? she imagines asking Lana’s friend, though instead she tells Sherry one afternoon, deep into a project of shelving books, the Lolas on the other side of the door, eavesdropping while getting ready to go out to a movie: “The terrible part is you never forget wiping your kid clean on the diaper table. You always remember that little rosebud smile up at you. Of course the kid gets lifelong amnesia. No child remembers her own sweetness.” In the epoch of a slogan made popular by a president’s well-trained wife, just say no, Mary decides that afternoon to do just that. Just say no to Lana. She steels herself from getting angry, believing it unhealthful, yet could not be angrier: her girlchild has slipped outside the hall of femaleness in which Mary wants her to live.

  Making Mary, the next morning, give no choice, saying to Lana: “Let’s meet somewhere.”

  “Why?” Impudence so much Lana’s default mode that Mary almost fails to notice.

  “Because we never do that anymore.”

  “When did we ever do anything?” asks Lana, indefatigable. As it is appointed however, that Sunday in the old neighborhood diner of South Berkeley mother and daughter will meet, Lana saying she will spend the night before at Rose’s a few blocks away.

  Upon entering, Mary is surprised to find Lana already seated. When driving down College Avenue in the stationwagon, Mary had passed her daughter, wrists taut and flared, but had shown motherly restraint, not shouting out, showing caution by not interfering with that brown-gazelle stride. Go laissez-faire, she tells herself, first do no harm. And only the direction of Lana’s stride reveals the first lie: her daughter had not slept at Rose’s house.

  The self-lecture had continued while Mary procured a parking spot and then entered the diner masked in briskness, existentially surprised as ever that this particular daughter had burst out of her, this mango of her being, a girl with the quirk, like a mafia don or Tourette’s heir, of always needing her back to the wall. Lana has started to be hard to reco
gnize in her temporarily magenta hair, bone holding it aloft, hood topping the entire ensemble, her dark-kohled eyes flickering the warning of a cave-dweller.

  A mother could think the girl meant to style herself to look, in yet another clever forfeiture of birthright, as if she’d crawled out of a hangover. Yet as Sherry had suggested, at least a strong daughter could not be pushed around and as Mary’s mid-century mission schools suggested, why not accentuate the positive?

  Lana had shown up;

  no one needed to wake her;

  so what if she leaves a diaphragm visible and unashamed in the shower, her daughter is punctual, a trait which might guarantee later success in life, not just with bosses but with others.

  When the truth is she cannot imagine her daughter ever having a serious adult job. “What’re you having?” Lana asks before Mary sits down. Not even a pre-flood parent would be fooled by this parody of politesse, Lana’s forestalling of discussion a feeble tactic.

  “Oh. What do you suggest?” Mary smiles back, her fake good humor making Lana cringe so that both beat a retreat into their study of menus. Once the waitress comes, Mary chooses the western special while Lana’s enunciated choice—single egg, dry toast—rebukes her mother.

  Don’t take it personally, Mary tells herself, since, according to Sherry, all girls go through the realm of hell called adolescent mother problems.

  Mary does hear this parry: “So what’s the big plan?”

  “Maybe let’s go to that bookstore down the street. Isn’t there something you’ve been wanting?”

  “No.” Lana rolls her eyes, glances away. “Something you want. You want me to stop seeing Tumbleweed.”

  Mary could both admire and hate Lana’s straight speech, an example of the loss of finesse over generations, the bold crudity of naming all conversational goals, a way of saying ancients, I lack time to wither away into you.

  Because of course Mary wants to speak of Tumbleweed, whom she has glimpsed hanging around corners. At first she had mistaken him, thinking he was another of Vic’s shaggies, but there Tumble-weed had been every morning at 8:15 on the street just below their house’s perch on its hill, his battered moped pointing downhill, waiting for Lana whenever she left off her dalliance with the rock star who at least showed courtly manners around Mary. Instead this Tumbleweed came punctually to speed her daughter off to either her last days of high school or some unguessable adolescent hell.

  Ma, don’t need a ride, thanks, bye, Lana would shout before slamming the door on her way out, heading for this guy whom Lana and her friend must have met during one of their nighttime walkabouts.

  When Mary had talked to Vic about this crisis, given how clearly Tumbleweed ranked as one of those vampires who want to suck freshness out of young girls right as such men stand to lose their own, Vic had asked: “Is it a crime to be struck by the beauty of youth?”

  “No comment,” Mary had said.

  Last September, perhaps before Lana had ever met the guy, Mary had started seeing Tumbleweed lying on Telegraph Avenue with some teenage girl or another strewn over his lap. This is the kind of dog who shoots up girls—the thought had flared so purely through Mary’s head she had known it to be truth.

  And now that dogweed waits every morning on a street studded with poinsettias and liberal ideals, ready to give her sixteen-year-old a ride on his motorbike.

  Surely Rose would have had more sense. While Mary wants to believe Lana and Rose might still be virgins, she also guesses the girls like collecting ragtag men. Of course there is an appeal to the female hindbrain, as Vic would say, in any man who revolts against established orders. Yes, of course, able to spear more bison. She knows. But that Lana should be in such an antique scenario makes Mary’s feminism want to scream. If she could, she would make the weed himself talk with her. Of course the conversation would be doomed: the guy would pretend not to recognize her, scratching his crotch while lathering her off. And if Rose’s mother Joan were more available for discussion, perhaps Mary would have a mother-to-mother conference. What is happening to our daughters? Yet perhaps some similarity links the two mothers, Mary and Joan, a link greater than either wants to admit, making them, under the guise of delicate respect for their girls’ friendship, bristle in each other’s presence. No, Mary cannot talk to Joan. There really was no other way than meeting with Lana herself, this conversation in the drugstore diner Mary’s only gateway. Her smallest goal had been that Lana would open up and not stomp out.

  “You like Tumbleweed?” begins Mary, using a technique drawn from The Art of War.

  “His parties are okay,” offers her daughter, more an admission than Mary can guess, as attending these parties happens to be one of Lana’s favorite things to do with Rose, the girls getting to pass as twenty-one, allowed in by one of Tumbleweed’s cool bouncerward nods just so the Lolas can spend their time with their arms climbing air ladders, eyes closed, doing their flow.

  Rose the viewer, hidden behind marbled glass bricks three tables away in the drugstore, stifles a cough. She will later say that never before had she known so painfully the pretense of family. Here mother and daughter have what could have been a civilized chat—enough that Rose can almost see the floater in Mary’s head, this is something mothers and daughters do when smoothing disputes, they go out for coffee—but from the looks of it, couldn’t the mother have leaned over and just wrung that lovely throat?

  How frustrated Mary must be with a daughter who probably never allowed much entry, but what great privilege Lana has, that she can risk barring a mother, that she is so unafraid of losing her mother’s goodwill, that she can patronize Mary while explaining Tumbleweed as if the guy belongs to a breed requiring rare sheep husbandry.

  Lana’s monotone emerges, reading from a parchment of insult. Rose cannot imagine speaking like that to anyone, so dully. We just want to try and—Lana keeps saying. He can’t really—

  “It’s like, okay,” Lana is telling Mary now, managing three microharmonic quavers within the last word. “It’s not about the relationship, it’s about how natural it feels. Natural,” repeats Lana as if the authentic were necessarily foreign to Mary, her mother looking away before excusing herself to the ladies’ room.

  Lana smirks and in a gamble peeks at Rose, thumbs up, having asked her to come; she needed backing. When Mary finally returns to the table, her face that of a general not ready to concede, it is clear she has pepped herself up with some internal command on how to continue. “Well, let’s keep talking, then, see how you feel.”

  Rose may not be able to hear everything Lana says but sees the scheme of self-enclosure, this girl successful at shunting her mother outside the jewel purse of youth. Rose had tried telling Lana that at least she was lucky. “No, you’re the lucky one,” Lana had said. “My mom’s unreasonable. Not there most of the time and then wants to float in, protect me like the lady in white she’s not and I’m like where have you been? Then she gets this wounded face.” Rose had loved this moment of confession: if not the Lolas against men, at least the Lolas have mothers. “She’ll want me to stop seeing Tumbleweed. I hate how she says relationship.”

  “You think she’s ever been with anyone besides your dad?”

  “Don’t make me think about that. Yuk.” Lana had long ago told Rose that what she had noticed about other mothers with daughters was that there were mothers who could sit across from their daughters and listen with true interest, undistracted and present, not doing some checking-off against an internal list stolen from the playbook of the latest child-rearing expert. “While my mother cannot for a second pay attention. She tries but can’t. Everything circles back to her. In my childhood, okay, maybe she was more there in body than your mom was? But really she was off somewhere in the future where she thought all her promise would be redeemed. She cannot listen.”

  In the diner, Rose believes Lana must be wrong. Mary seems to make every effort to understand Lana. Would Rose ever be that patient?

  Several times, L
ana overtly teaches her mother. “No, it doesn’t work like that, Mary,” she says. Only occasionally comes a crack in Mary’s facade which seems to make Lana want to surrender to impulse and do something like throw ice water on Mary before storming out. How long will this charade last? How much of a masochist is Mary?

  Finally the cavalcade of insult clearly fazes Mary. “Honey.” She tries taking Lana’s hands in hers but fails, her daughter too slippery. “I’ve been involved in situations like this.”

  “This doesn’t have to do with flipping the pages in some book.”

  “You remember my friend Juliet?” Mary adopts a soap opera tone as if this might penetrate Lana’s cool. “She had to play second woman to some man but just kept hanging on.”

  Lana turns nasal. “Yeah,” she says, dismissing any life knowledge Mary might have as inherently ludicrous.

  Rose had heard about Juliet, a friend of Mary’s once involved with an inappropriate man. The year before, she had attempted suicide, botching it enough that Juliet continued life in an institution, poring over the oracles of coffee grounds.

  Mary musters. “There’s something you’re not facing. Look at the situation. Talk to his parents.”

  “Parents?” says Lana, smirking. “Someone like Tumbleweed doesn’t have parents, Mary. This is no big deal.”

  “Well, to me it is,” says Mary. “Not until twenty-two is your brain developed enough yet to understand—”

  “Risk. I know.”

  “A person can go over some slope and never get back.”

  “You have too many books about teenagers on your shelves. Drug addiction.”

  “That’s just one concern.”

  “You see one side of this but we, we have to make our own decisions.”