Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  What the parents cannot forget is the phone call that came at dawn, their small French landlady summoning them to her mentholated apartment while squinting up at her gargantuan American tenants, now with final evidence that les americains were up to nefarious ends. Over the tinny connection some girl calling herself Debbie, a medical student staying in Rose’s apartment, spoke to Mary in an insincere, nasal voice: “Mrs. Mahler? I’m sorry, but—” and in the pause, Mary knew almost all, since fake apology never prefaces good news. “I’m sorry but your daughter has gone over the deep end,” Debbie the premed finished.

  Having once studied the clichés used to describe both death and insanity, the formulations that help reassure people of their own grip—it had to be done, sometimes there’s no choice, you do what you need to—Mary is left speechless, with nothing to tell Vic, which will be the case for years whenever they find themselves talking about the end of the mystifying catacomb of decision that led them to lock up their own daughter. They get set on the course that will return Lana to a womb, to someone else’s institution, while Mary gets swallowed by the minotaur of clichés. No choice.

  Because when Mary looks back at it, their plan seems to have begun without root or branches. The two will just hone in on the problem and show up where their daughter seems to be staying alone in Rose’s apartment. Their daughter is imploding and anyway doesn’t Vic need to research in New York at some specialist archive on manias? On the plane from Paris to New York, Mary berates Vic: why must she be the one to figure out what to do for Lana? Why has she always needed to be both heart and connective tissue of their house? Why must she be the one to consider what is best for their girl? Could the household name beam down to his own household a bit?

  The conversation ends where it starts, each hushing the other so that Mary cannot help entering what he calls her martyr mode. To punish her, he returns with what she calls the cold sizzle, a rage manifest in the precise torture of inanimate objects, the quick flip of a magazine, the undoing of a seatbelt with great force, a stewardess call button pressed too often. No ice in his gin and tonic, the coffee acid cold, the pillow insufficient: goddamnit, nothing goes right.

  In the airport, the married dance continues. A slam of keys onto a countertop while awaiting baggage, a tight strop to get their luggage bound. This being the tango they know, the dance of martyr and tyrant, continuing in the hotelbound taxi as he pounds the seat hard enough to make the driver, an old-fashioned hard-luck-actor type, turn back toward Mary and Vic to ask: what’s with you, friend?

  Nothing, this is who he is, Mary whispers to the traffic, unfortunately. An elevator rises, their container in a hotel chosen not for its faux marble and creaky balconies but its bargain price. Vic breaks its calm only to ask her if she really wanted a plan.

  Before Mary finishes her shower, Vic has arranged it, eye for eye.

  At most, Mary later considers, he must have talked five minutes to one of his old colleagues, five minutes in which he had learned from his psychiatrist friend that Ulster State, while a bit old-fashioned in its techniques, would be just the thing, since the colleague had a son who’d also gone off the deep end. He therefore advises Vic that they will have to approach the whole thing like wild game capture with poison darts and name-tagging.

  To Mary, Vic leaves only the most insidious details: the medical transit for their daughter upstate and how to gain parental rights of entry with the terse man who calls himself the super for Rose’s building, all plans and details arranged so they may burst in on their progeny in some New York abode.

  He will later berate Mary that it was she who had asked him to arrange everything.

  Arranged, unarranged, they discover their daughter. She has turned Rose’s apartment into the habitat of an adult hamster so that even Mary, having thought herself inured to varieties of teenage protest, finds herself shocked by the tiny papers shredded into a nest around a prone body.

  Lana’s head twists atop a disjointed neck and torso, a daughter far too narrow, veins pulsing out, a girl strewn over papers on a sofa not knowing she is prey for the gray-vested men who burst in with armlacings, needles and gurney, their force so great Mary must look away, only able to stay in place by imagining nuns’ nails holding her feet, mental stigmata she has not needed to use since schoolgirl days. All while Vic does what he excels in: absenting himself fully in the next room, flipping through documents before lifting drawn blinds to gaze out as if seeing a tugboat for the first time. Mary steels herself, mouthing platitudes no one listens to. For this willingness to be on the frontlines she suffers. Before the syringe pierces flesh of Mary’s flesh, meant to dull Lana’s electricity, her too-muchness, before the sedative seeps in, Lana manages to shoot her mother a look with enough venom to freeze time.

  Parents, concerned parents: Mary and Vic try locating themselves in this role as they ride down the elevator and out into the morning.

  A few days later, having been successful at avoiding each other by various appointments in New York, they take the subway from their hotel into Grand Central where they transfer to the local up the Hudson. It could not be a more splendid fall day. Together they try not admiring the showy orange of the leaves, try not uttering phrases like peak moment for foliage. “Such a pretty mask for death,” Vic does say. Mary is not sure whether he means the leaves, train ride or herself and decides on the first. It is permissible for them to give just a little to each other in conversation: they will not admit that the Lana troubles have united them, as one of Lana’s long-ago accusations charged.

  The wind rushes in at the stations, exhilarated, Vic and Mary having time-traveled to a courtship date from their past. Well-being fills them. They must struggle to stay somber. They arrive, it is after Lana’s first treatment, which, according to the doctor, means their daughter might later recall the visit. The family Mahler sits by black-eyed susans but their daughter cannot eat the sandwich they brought without dribbling it out her mouth and so Mary must dab her chin before Vic wheels her back in, Lana their baby all over, the institution a successful womb in mainly this aspect. Lana’s parents share a look that to Vic means their daughter can, after all, be successfully retrained; to Mary the look is a contract meaning the married pair link forever in culpability.

  Soon after, to avoid cutting short their sabbatical year, Vic and Mary take train, bus, plane and train again, back to their pastoralia in the town of Foix. In France they go marketing for goat cheese or garden barefoot, continuing with their holy work.

  Just once they sleep together, Mary interested mainly in how polite the married pair has become, remembering how the savage in Vic had been so appealing. Now the two seem to have tamed each other. You, no you; please, you.

  Afterward Mary broods about who they have been to Lana. Where did we go wrong? Was she this way at birth? And yet she has also managed to break free of some anchor of worry about their girl, having handed over parenting for the first time.

  Which is when Mary starts to write about male/female decision-making patterns. In exploring these for the first time she knows the true beatitude of work: throw yourself over a cliff and trust that work alone can act as an elegy, capable of saving and redeeming. Perhaps Lana hates such tendencies but can her parents, captive mates, help their survival instinct?

  Soon after Lana leaves the asylum, neat and meek in crossing their Spruce Street doorstep, she returns to one of her several former selves: hiding upstairs, bangs hiding her eyes, face hollow and gaunt, regressing to the loud spiral of a teenager’s music.

  A month after this return, after the dinner in which Lana shouts that their forks have become the dance of synchronized insect legs, Mary drives her back to the airport.

  Lana is supposed to return to school half-time and get a low-stress job but instead will spend the next few months missing all her classes and getting jobs only to immediately lose them, ending up needing finally to cross the threshold of Rose’s apartment just to locate herself.

  “Going ba
ck to my life back east—the doctors didn’t think it that great an idea, Mary,” Lana will say on the way to the airport, the lie recognizable. “Isn’t it just you want to get rid of me?”

  “But you’ll have things back east to keep yourself busy, right?” Mary says, glancing away from the gouges inside Lana’s arm, which might have come after all from some rusty nails on attic boards the day the Mahler family, as it was constituted, had tried to work as a team to help Vic bring down some boxes of papers on narcissism. When Mary was Lana’s age, hadn’t she already figured out so much? Wasn’t she independent? Why had the simple act of growing up become such a difficult endeavor?

  After the goodbye between mother and daughter, apart from a few scurrilous letters she sends to Mary, Lana will have nothing to do with either parental unit, as she calls them. She is rageless, Mary will think, spent passion, maybe also a little mean. Lana could have left forwarding numbers but never will.

  In that first week post-Lana, to her assistant Sherry, Mary calls it a phase. To herself, unwillingly, she calls it failure, but you can’t let failure become a refrain. Instead Mary accentuates the positive. Her daughter needs to find her sea legs again, back in New York, and probably needs time away from her parents. As Sherry promises, it will all work out. Completely expressionless, before the Mahlers’ first post-asylum party, Mary stands before a blender, dropping in one cooked potato after another for a vichysoisse, almost ready to lose it herself. For too long she has been the one holding things together. What they could really use around here would be an earthquake.

  SEPTEMBER 1987–APRIL 1988

  Lana peruses random newspapers in New York City coffeehouses, perusal being the habit Lana continues from her parents’ parallel-world breakfast table. Lana skips class to look for random jobs and finds her mother unavoidable, Mary’s book Wishing for Cordelia having taken off enough that her face seems a kid’s nightmare: everywhere she goes, Mary is quoted, Mary opines, Mary’s photo smiles back at her from papers crumpled by others. Does anyone know the ways she has failed?

  Lana will not speak of this to Rose, successfully avoiding any café, park or dorm space where Rose might find her since only Rose would be curious enough to pester her about where Lana had sequestered herself these last few months. Instead Lana stays in the single dorm her suitemates call, behind her back, the Crazy Hamster. She registers for classes in psychology, classes she barely attends, and tells herself it will be made up for, that she will still graduate with everyone else given the credits from the fancy high school to which her parents sent her a whole lifetime ago. One morning she realizes she must be depressed but thinks it has nothing to do with her and everything to do with the entire east coast since even when Lana gets on a random train to escape Manhattan for the country she finds not liberty but moldering cemeteries, overcrowded and blatant, pressing forward into village greens, the whole zone infatuated with flags and patriotic rituals as if the country had magically grown older than its two hundred years. The life-span of a single tortoise, as Vic loved saying. Lana tries. She tries to stay open to new people but keeps finding every person in the east hides a strong covert obsession with class and on top of that, she has started to miss the drugstores and billboards of California, the ones highlighting contraceptives, youth creams, exercise tricks, scented pleasures. All the ones here scream in block letters of panacea against hemorrhoids, corns, incontinence, bad weather, bad breath, mood swings.

  Against. The operative word on this coast seems to be against. As in the idea of life working against a person. On a few occasions, Lana passes by a television and spots two white-teethed New Yorkers proclaiming against each other regarding the way men and women make decisions. When they agree only on the pioneering work of Mary Guzman Mahler, this whole famous-mother thing fills Lana with nauseating pride, because how obvious that Mary has aced the world of the Mahlers. And how short Lana has fallen, far from Vic’s goals, her father of course having wished Lana would have become yet another egghead prized for the egg.

  One time the pixels on a morning talk show form into Mary and perhaps for the first time Lana truly sees her mother: Mary with her tapered forehead, an uncaged beast, long and graceful, turquoise earrings dangling. Lana gets it. Her mother is happy after years spent in the cage of Vic’s name. She has emerged with her mind speedy, laugh refined, a cough hiding how much she revels in the moment.

  When we say a girl comes of age, we don’t mark with sufficient ritual her emergence into what is actually a secret society, its codes, skullduggery, incantations and rituals as intricate as any found by Mead in Samoa.

  You could almost discern the immensity of her gratification, her manner in nice contrast to the TV host’s crudity. Lana has never seen her mother this way and now feels raped into admiration for the chattering monkey on the screen.

  In response, Lana writes the parental units a letter in which she says she wants to blend back into a tribe made up of anyone but her birth family.

  And because she leaves no address and moves out of her crazy single and because she needs something beyond their money, which until then has been diplomatically and negligently accessible from any ATM, she does actually call home on April Fools’ Day from an untraceable pay phone in the spring of what should have been her final year of college. She asks Mary to avoid coming to her graduation though behind her expression bleats a plea to which her mother might be congenitally deaf: chase me but don’t ever lock me up again.

  A week later, a note from the college comes to Mary and Vic, copied to their daughter, suggesting Lana has lied, that she will not graduate, that she has done little more than stumble forward from one semester of incompletes and academic probation to the next, having apparently been persuasive in private meetings. An appended note by an unsigned hand says that

  familial trauma has interfered with Ms. Mahler’s successful achievement as a student. As such, the committee recommends that she be afforded incompletes and a chance to make up her work for a designated period, while also strongly encouraging medical supervision.

  But could Mary have guessed any of that when Lana called on April Fools’? The pearl of their discontent is still well-cultured, a girl for whom finishing college should have been easier than a roll off a hospital bed.

  “You don’t want to be around all those proud parents,” Lana says in that conversation, taunting them from her pay phone, trying to speak their lingo.

  “Why not?” Mary asks, entering the trap with presentiment.

  “Can’t you listen? Please.”

  “I’m just saying wouldn’t it be nice for you if we came to celebrate? Your graduation. It’s an accomplishment.”

  “But Mary. Mom. You really don’t want to be one of those parents. You know, double-parked outside the dorm room. I’ve seen them. They wait in some fuel-efficient rental to whisk everyone home for what?” She waits before the dart. “You think this moment is any different than getting me out of an asylum?”

  The logic doesn’t track, that much Mary knows.

  As they talk, wind whistling near the pay phone by the church with its leering iron gargoyle, Lana hears the strain in Mary’s voice and the way she tries to bridge, clearly deciding whether or not to bend down and be submissive, showing her mother’s neck to keep Lana on the phone a bit longer. She doesn’t. Instead she stays polite, accepting, respectful of Lana’s wishes.

  “That’s all you have to say?” asks Lana, disappointed. “I can listen.”

  “I’m at a loss,” her mother says. “Is there anything else you—?”

  To which, in answer, Lana clicks the phone dead.

  She stands, hand burning on the phone for a second, staring into the gargoyle’s face, unsure why she had hung up. Mary used to say within earshot of Lana that being a mother is a guessing game and that one day Lana would understand: it is easy to imagine Mary saying this now to the receiver in a room gone dark. At least Mary had always tried her hand at the game, never using great rationale to prop up her
arrogance as Vic had, Mary never truly slipping away from being a parent. As if her baby’s tenancy in her womb had left a permanent stain, as if Mary lacks Vic’s methods for freeing himself. And so what if Mary had found her refuges, her absentmindedness and submersion into work, so what if she loves her assistant a little too much, at least she would always stay a mother connected to her daughter, guilt scripting her veins.

  That second Lana wonders if she had been too harsh, this second after the phone call beginning a lifetime of feeling worse. Once you act like an ogre, it becomes doubly hard to forgive a mother for her kindness. Hand still on the phone, a regretful Lana imagines Mary as an aged woman on her deathbed, Mary saying to Lana: above all, the person I need forgiveness from is you.

  To which her daughter would say, with a queen’s nobility: I’m sorry, mom, I was the one who should have said sorry to you.

  Years later, Lana will keep creased and folded in her wallet the newspaper article on the death of Mary, the article citing her contributions if shrouding whatever had led up to the terminus. Keeping Mary’s obituary in her wallet will be Lana’s whisper of an apology.

  1988–1989

  Right when Rose is thumbing want ads and thinking she will never make a difference, unable to deafen herself to the exhortations of the commencement speaker imploring the seniors to do big generous things in life, Lana shows up a few days after graduation. She just appears at the door, mum about her great disappearing act.