Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  Her mother shows allergy to this we that includes someone named Tumbleweed. With great daintiness, her daughter chews the last of her single egg.

  “I want to take the position this isn’t entirely over,” says Mary.

  “Okay.” Lana offers up a limpid smile.

  “I’m sure you don’t want to be selfish,” says Mary. “Or maybe you don’t want to hurt him. Maybe you don’t know how easy it is to cut off from people.”

  “Like you from dad?”

  “I’m saying later in life you’ll have plenty of chances to make mistakes without me.”

  Lana ignores her but when the bill comes makes a big show of paying for her own breakfast, scrabbling for coins from the beaded purse that her mother had once bought at an ethnic fair. Mary waves off the gesture but Lana insists.

  If Rose could, she would rush in to protect them from each other but she can’t, clandestine behind the nook with its magazine rack, just as Lana had asked her to be.

  When they are almost ready to go, Mary leans in. “What about writing a paper with outline and content about how you see this thing proceeding? Just let your mind go there. To the end of the line.”

  The hatred in Lana’s look at Mary, sharp as an icicle, makes Rose turn away. “Mary,” says her friend. “Mom.” A curse, as if trying to chill her mother into permanent cryogenic suspension. “Can you even get this? This is not a term paper. Not about colleagues. Not soft cheese at some faculty event. I’m talking about life.”

  “Life?”

  “Being natural. It’s hard for you to understand. You don’t know the first thing about relationships.”

  “Jinga,” says Mary softly. “Jinga.”

  “You don’t even call me that anymore! You cannot just show up and get me to connect like I’m some kind of daughter on tap.”

  And then Lana storms out the drugstore, leaving Rose alone to see Mary at the table, a goner, slumping as if someone had slid a hanger out from her sweater, a middle-aged mother barely able to keep herself from weeping at whatever barbs she must live with.

  Sitting, Rose fights the urge to reveal herself, the urge to be recognized as a sympathetic ear and good daughter. Instead she watches Mary gather herself and finally leave, bells jangling.

  JULY 1984

  Chord progression being an island of a moment in Greece bearing two girls, nurtured on American soil and pieties, hitchhiking to get a boat back to the mainland from which they’ll take a bus toward a plane toward home so they can return toward starting the first year of college and all its unknowns. These girls intersect with a native mode: two men of the islands driving a truck on a highway.

  The truckers pull over, understanding the girls enough to suggest a destination, asking do the girls mind stopping at a restaurant? Four plates of salad and fish, an afternoon stretching on, a broad continent of arm, a brush of skin, a narrow hand pulled back, continental drift, rough thumbs pressing an apology and offers of endless ouzo. The men drive farther down the road only to pull into another outdoor bar. Drink, dab bread into glistening plates of olive oil, dab hands, a brush of skin, no apology, drink and drive, brush some more, pull into another bar.

  We got to get to our boat, says one of the girls, it’s getting late. Let’s go check the schedule at the train station. One girl looks around outside the truck while one slouches inside, contemplating. The afternoon has slipped through their hands, a wild rodent. One man inside, one outside and, a drink-and-dab earlier, the plan must have been hatched: without warning, the man in the truck takes off with only the one girl inside, a tectonic plate shifting.

  He is driving her up the mountain road toward, ostensibly, the train station. For no reason the girl can see, he pulls over on the side, offering her then that downward arc that will become so familiar: his hand on the back of her neck, pushing her head down toward his lap as if a gentle derrick.

  She resists and he pushes farther, deeper toward the core of the earth. Years later another man will explore this similar gravitational potential and she will throw up in his lap, oddly elated. But right now there is the problem of her head’s habit of numbness and the bothersome question that lets her go down more easily: had she wanted this overpowering?

  Also and not insignificantly she wants to ace the situation, survive intact. Like that heiress, kidnapped, who immediately saw her kidnappers’ point of view. Could spinelessness be a surprise tactic of strength?

  Ravines and clefts in his forearms, along his neck.

  Does he do manual labor on the side? She had liked his looks, the delicacy of the eyes, a femininity against harsher angles. His hand not ungentle but insistent on the back of her neck toward his lap where he is conveniently unsprung. She hadn’t chosen to enter this situation but now it has arisen, a pop-up dollhouse. A man’s hand warming her neck and is she willing or not? If she doesn’t want to be doing this, can this son of this country of mothers’ sons tell? How can a man want something not freely given?

  Does he tell himself that it is wanted? But maybe she wants. Is it bad if you aren’t the first person to know what you want?

  And hadn’t the lolling tongues and technicolor availability of certain magazines, her mother’s creased copies of certain novels, initiated her into some permanent hoarfrost of open-lipped readiness?

  In ninth grade, on the pastel carpet in the parental bedroom, the televised cartoon of Yellow Submarine playing on the tiny TV set above a pile of tea towels, had she not mouthed for the first time the young and grateful Flynn, seeking to initiate both of them? What was different between her liking for that boy’s good nature, his fatherless making-the-best-of-it self, and this moment in a Greek truck? Flynn too young and flimsy to bear the weight of her vague fantasy, not desire, really, but an apery of futurity, an ironic paroxysm.

  Her head breaks on the thought. She’s no virgin but in this truck in Greece she wants to choose, choice everything: she could choose rape and then, in a fight with this fellow, wouldn’t she win? If she doesn’t choose, she’ll emit the scent of fear and some unguessed-at contraption might release a lever making the whole moment plummet beyond danger into irreversibility on a mountain roadside where no one in the world knows the exact coordinates of her body. The moment narrows. She floats above her body, allowing for a certain kind of survival.

  After and in the truck’s fish-scent, she rifles through the phrase-book. Trying for let’s go back, though can a person go back? Epeestrophe, she says.

  Her rapist, a man of few words, agrees, drawing dignity back into himself. As if something quite normal has transpired, he drives back, fingers tapping out an idle rhythm on the steering wheel, knuckle hair matted by a wedding band shimmering in the last of the day. At the restaurant bar, her friend runs to the car. To stay safe from the other truckdriver, her friend had hidden atop the restaurant roof if in plain sight of diners and cooks, another chicken avoiding the pan.

  Stunned, the two girls grab backpacks, running blind in the dusk only to end up lying in a ditch. The girl who’d gone for the ride hugs the one who’d been left behind, crying: I hate men! Falling still when the two men tramp near holding flashlights, muttering as if they’ve stumbled into an outtake from a war movie, seeking American girls fallen to an earthen trench, parachutes broken. A search party of enemy soldiers who back away when they find nothing. One girl raped but might as well have happened to both of them.

  They will never talk about it. A vessel containing past and future, all the crisp nights when one girl failed to show at the other’s house or the moment when one had cried, saying your friendship means more to me, I didn’t mean to hurt you with that boy, I didn’t know you had a crush on him, he just showed up around my house, throwing rocks at my window at night and I won’t see him if it makes you feel better. Or the moment when one visits the other’s room at college. A debutante roommate will say—after seeing the girls’ shared uniform of messy hair, thrift-store patterned skirts and men’s white shirts—to the girl she’d suspected was a
witch because of her penchant for standing on her head and burning incense, that, at least, after meeting the girl’s friend, she could understand the girl a tiny bit better.

  It will contain the night when one of them finishes college and moves to Los Angeles, driving fast at night on Highway Five’s hills toward an art school with an old boyfriend who himself had just finished driving across the country to start over and he’s offering a bite of moo shu vegetables while her favorite song of the moment plays, a latterday version of Lola which happens to have the name Jane in the refrain.

  A truth will pop in her mind: that lost bubble. She lives in a post-girlfriend universe, left entirely alone to experience others. She will hold that boyfriend’s hand, drive hard.

  MARCH 1987

  What shoots Lana into the asylum?

  Her first day there, she makes a list to answer the intake question: what factors in your life may have worked to bring you today to Ulster State?

  Lana writes:

  the urges of my body

  and at first thinks that probably should stand for enough but then decides to vary the theme:

  too many abortions—I mean how can a person know what to believe when after each one you have a bone that makes it impossible to swallow, like something got lodged in your throat for weeks after—all this makes it a little hard to know who you are

  my mother (never really able to see me etc)

  my father (thinking he was such a big deal etc)

  my habits (solitude, art)

  my habits with people (letting too many tramp in)

  my parents’ hopes (my failure because I was never their star student etc)

  my inability to speak (can’t say the words me or my and really know what they mean)

  my friends (never really being good to at least the one friend who was decent to me, Rose)

  before she chokes up and quits, though no one else will, since the white coats push forward the juggernaut of inquiry that rules this place and will keep wanting to ask her why she ended up, essentially, a nut.

  APRIL–AUGUST 1987

  Here’s how it works. Count backward into the ether mask and then start to see numbers fly near the tongue-guard and they soon become dream angels with folded wings, soaring straight into the smoke-box of the room. After that you exit your body. Shock gets administered. Sometimes it takes a few days to come back: this is, at least, the story they will tell you after the days have passed. You get piloted toward various human functions. Eating, sleeping, drinking.

  Lana fakes sleep and stops counting backward. Just to know. To not sleep as atrocities get committed. She sees it from inside and then from the ceiling. The lever pulled, her back arched, every muscle contorted, her head someone else’s banging back and forth on the table.

  This however is better than a lobotomy, her asylum roommate later tells her.

  Lana hisses back: “I’m sure even at Ulster they don’t do those. Not anymore,” though later she will find herself envying that same roommate for the way a partial lobotomy lends a person the patina of spiritual calm.

  At least one thing Lana does know: being awake for shock is better than those times she has overheard the psychiatric resident whispering facts about her case.

  She is twenty, a time when lots of girls crack, and she is not alone. As the resident says in their opening interview, given who her father is, doesn’t Lana have a community of love and respect surrounding her?

  1987

  One of the two things Lana will never tell anyone is about the time in the hospital because isn’t it better to keep certain secrets buried in the trunk of family? Though the bothersome part of this decision is how secrecy makes family all the more important, shame its fierce lock: only her parents know about the hospital time.

  She had not gone down easily. Once she woke from sedation, finding herself staring at a Georgia O’Keeffe poster of a weeping purple flower, soft-cuffed to a hospital bed, the room perfumed by an orderly’s acrid sweat, she kept saying: there must be a mistake.

  But there was none. They showed her the forms signed by mother and father, the signatures no impostors. Once they let her move about, even with someone’s arm on hers, she felt as alone as she had ever been, walking halls in which every footfall felt spongy, a deep impress on the linoleum. For a good five minutes she had paused before the door marked electrotherapy, eyeing it with dull alarm. Apparently her parents had found the one revanchist place that still believed in electroshock. Ulster State had an advanced program, certified on puce paper by the state: electrotherapy.

  That first evening, having refused a meal made entirely of orange and white mashed items, she started to realize how improbable escape might be. To the resident psych with the kind periwinkle eyes, called in to see about her low-level defiance, Lana had explained: “I was never like this.”

  I understand—the eyes twinkled, kinder than her mother’s—you don’t belong here.

  “Does what I’m saying shock you?” Lana asked.

  “No. You’re more polite than most,” the shrink said, her professional spiel not yet watertight.

  “Why? What do people usually say?”

  “Usually they start by saying f-you!”

  “Uphill from there, right?” Lana had said, deciding to aim for penetration via charm but deciding later that her stink of desperation, undisguised, made the shrink leave soon after.

  Who would not be desperate here? It was all too easy to see the lost and charmless, the drooling chlorpromazine cases, the cardboard people. It was also disconcerting how at the outset of her stay, she was a little too happy to surrender the tyranny of getting dressed in streetclothes, too happy at the prospect of surrendering decisions about minutiae. No choice of clothes, no choice about which spices go on food.

  Back in New York, temporarily staying at Rose’s apartment, Lana had entertained a bad moment, flummoxed about which spice goes with oatmeal, cayenne or cinnamon, her head blurring on the question until next she knew people were strapping her onto a gurney toward the asylum. The afternoon after being admitted, during Quiet Time, she decided to locate herself in the Mahler-sanctioned manner by going to the institution’s library, trying to ignore the young cross-eyed orderly assigned her and thumbing through grease-tabbed romance novels and textbooks. The quiet dormer windows pleased her. For a second she let herself pretend she still marched on an upward path, improving herself in college.

  That first day she found herself attracted to reading a single passage from one of her father’s books on neuroleptics and systems theory as if—if she could just understand it—this passage could provide a better answer for her presence here:

  Ordinary objects run down unless they are fed energies and repairs or replacements from the outside. Entire physical systems cut off from other systems run down in this way too. But there are exceptions to the rule, and these are found within the closed systems of which the Second Law—that natural systems maintain themselves in a changing environment—speaks. The Law is permissive: it does not determine just how such a system runs down. It can do so very unevenly. In fact it is quite possible that it should run down on the whole, while in some areas or parts it should actually get wound up. That is, there can be subsidiary systems within the whole system, and these subsystems can get more organized as time goes on, rather than less. Of course, the rest of the system gets correspondingly depleted, and the sum of the energies used up is always positive—more energy is used up than is generated. The system as a whole gets disorganized, whereas some of its parts become increasingly organized at the expense of the rest. It is as though we used the electricity stored in the batteries of our house to produce more batteries. We concentrate our available energies in the new batteries, but use up more energy from the original ones to make them than we preserve. The sum of the electric power available to us has decreased, even if locally it has increased. The whole house runs down even if some parts of it wind up.

  She must have appeared so wound up t
hat no one had yet asked if she wished to contact her parents. For this small kindness she was glad; if she even imagined talking to the parental units, rage rose in her throat, a bolus making it hard to imagine the phrases a person would use with such inhuman robots. Wasn’t it better for her to punish everyone with mutism?

  Yet that didn’t mean she didn’t hold out hope that her father’s name might save her. Once, before a psychiatric session, she asked a different doctor, possessor of a particularly caustic gaze: you don’t know who I am? Lana Mahler.

  Soon after as if in answer, they were strapping her to a gurney all over again. How had her life come to fit Vic’s thoughts so perfectly? Her whole life he had talked of the magic of the brain and scoffed at the barbarism of early psychiatry. Back then she had still been asking him questions. Vic loved discussing trephining, the twelfth-century Italian doctor’s invention meant to treat psychologically unfit patients, the vise with its screws on the head or its predecessor, evinced in fossil skulls of prehistoric man, a metal spike driven by hammer blows into the skull.

  He had explained all this and yet still had managed to make her his puppet, putting her in a box where they could do whatever they wanted. On the gurney she let out a short barking laugh. The lunatic is on the grass. Beg pardon? asked the white coat. Exactly! said Lana, her triumphant tone making the orderly flinch. She had somewhere missed out on certain instructions and from now on was going to have to stop begging pardon from the awesome birthright of the Vic-and-Mary show. I’m done, she therefore explained to no one.

  Over three months in the nutcracker she tried explaining to a whole retinue of white coats about the slipping sands that made time not her own: about the abortions and potentially contaminated weed and the streetshow man who stood at Washington Square in gilded paint, barely moving. How whatever Lana called her soul had found its most definite expression in watching that gilded man for hours so that once, her mother visiting, Mary had needed to shake Lana’s shoulder to shock her out of a trance. Maybe this moment had birthed Mary’s worry, though no, the worry had lingered earlier, back in the era of Tumbleweed or maybe even Rose.