by Edie Meidav
Inside the station she steals a moment on one of its old-fashioned wooden benches, liking the shaft of sunlight streaming down into the middle of the station and the scent of sawdust, cologne, exhaust. Passengers from all corners are so distinct she believes she will recall them forever. One woman a sun-creased apple doll in a peasant kerchief, another a tall unshaven musician, another a bouncy young college girl in a sweatshirt. So random, she tells herself, so perfectly costumed. Here in this town is where I should stay because here are enough different kinds of people to do what again? What hope is there again for me now?
She recalls a grid of respectability she and Rose had made up on the train from Grand Central in what seems a lifetime ago:
If I walk neatly but dress messily, people will think I am a bohemian, privileged girl, or else maybe Brazilian or Israeli.
If I walk messily and dress messily, they think I’m drunk or homeless.
If I walk messily but dress neatly, I could be Russian or East Asian.
If I walk neatly and dress neatly, I could be anyone.
She walks neatly out into the city, a Khazar, making exactly three visits to various automated teller machines using both of the cards Mary and Vic have bequeathed her. Each time, a serpent of thrill arises: no one knows her. Her passcode is NOWORNEVER. Between each machine she walks, self-conscious in the stupendous heat of Ellay, one that suits her, melting her link to Vic in his climate-controlled haunt. Shadowy and alone she smirks at the ATMs that don’t know her secret, since the eye of the state apparently blinks for long enough to let her take out the daily maximum of her parents’ money, planning that tomorrow and the next day and the next she will repeat this act, nothing too late, since it seems that no administrator has yet located the totality of Vic and Mary as a legal entity, no state directive has yet frozen anyone’s accounts and in this way, standing at a machine and typing in a number, she gets to be linked to the umbilicus of their funds, getting this whit of grace, a benefit of family, another set of twenty-dollar bills tucked into her bag.
In a used-car lot and without too much stammering she buys a former undercover police car, a brown pimpmobile called an Omega, a steal at six hundred dollars, and without too much worry gets it registered and insured using a version of her name, California Fu, with the used-car saleman believing, for the practicalities of the moment, her claim that the rest of her name—California Fukuji Mahler—is some married typo in the process of being changed anyway, an annulment, a legal change. All these steps of adulthood appeal: she uses cash, believing that no one but a sleuth could find her. In this fallow ground new life could start.
That night she sleeps in a rundown motel where the ice machine next to her room sounds as if it moonlights as a training zone for a hatchet murderer and in the morning, paying in cash, bags under her eyes carrying all she has recently seen, she seeks coffee, walking by a line of homeless people who turn out to be part of a film set. This town defies logic. In her new car, she drives toward the fresher air she thinks a person could find near the ocean, onto one-way freeways that become dead-ends, the labyrinth so maddening that she must pull over just to make a list as if a list alone promises a person sanity:
Rent post office box
Look at local newspaper
Find apartment
Make résumé
Get a job
What Lana will carry into her new life, she hopes, is nothing. As ever her religion is the gospel of a contrarian. Back in politically aware Berkeley, the only American town with a foreign policy, her religion used to manifest in the way she liked to find those who ignored political correctness. Similarly, back in the groves of ruthless, driven New York, it had been her joy to meet slackers. In Los Angeles, however, she will find it useless to seek people who are unplastic, since the plastic aspect of Ellay is universal, buffering its citizens from awareness of failure, failure here meaning one gets washed out to sea on a wave of mortality or, worse, public apathy and forgetfulness.
Confused, unable to practice her contrarian religion, seeking a tribe, Lana will therefore bed odd men: the underwear model whose career was sidelined when a car accident fractured his knee so that some strange bone sticks out like a knob from the middle of his shin, her bedmate before the bisexual temp but after the limo driver, before the famous bachelor Italian film director but after the millionaire with his steam bath and walnuts, only simultaneous with the hiphop boy who assists the fading disco queen, right before the handlebar-mustached plastic surgeon who claims to have invented liposuction. What the plastic surgeon will ask her at sunset on a beach: who cares, what does real versus plastic mean anyway?
Years later at Hope she and Rose will compare notes about Ellay and will agree: no one in that town ever admits to hardship since everyone wishes to be a recipient of grace.
EIGHTEENTH OF FEBRUARY, 1989
In considering their last moment together, Rose will find it odd that Lana had been struck more by her father’s atrocity than by the loss of her mother. Sitting in the welfare café near the Columbus Avenue crack houses, Rose reads the article in the paper before calling gogo Dick-and-Dan from the outside drug-dealer phone to say sorry, neither girl can continue dancing, Rose having hurt her foot, Lana burdened by some family matters. Too bad, says Dick-or-Dan, regret pure and economic, you two were just getting going, but we did know what we were getting into—you coeds are all the same!
A bit lost, Rose tries reading the article again, wishing to find Mary between the lines, Mary who looms so large it is impossible to erase her. Even if it is also the case that for years Mary has been performing a vanishing act, slipping around corners with her Cheshire grin. On the surface Mary had seemed plausible enough, mother of a friend, a rose-scented feminist professor teaching ethnography to worshipful undergrads, a mother available at dinnertime, half-telling loving jokes about Lana when she was little. Remember when Jinga ate that pineapple? Remember when you fell out of the tree?
This being one of Rose’s favorite parts about the Mahlers, how Mary acted as repository of memory for all of them, even for Rose as an honorary part of the family: the photo albums lined up, the bemused self-regard and silent applause that followed each Mahler, immortalized by nicknames and Mary’s voice so throaty and kind, a cello bow dipped in honey. For all her abstraction, Mary had also been more embodied than Vic, the one to finger favorite recipes on index cards, to keep the house clean and light-filled—and why did the house on Spruce Street seem so still and magical when late-day light collected in the eaves of those interior arches? Mary and her random swipes of cloth over the counter while using careful Spanish with a maid named Dora, the bad idiom Lana had loved to imitate. Por favor Dora. For years Rose had studied Mary, half wanting to be her once she got older, tending an herb garden and stag ferns with the help of hopeful ponytailed acolytes, all the female grad students hanging about to decipher clues about their future selves. Late-fall apples crisp in a blue ceramic bowl she herself had potted; Mary turning to Rose after hanging up the phone, having enrolled Lana in a karate class (so Lana wouldn’t be gendered too girly) to ask Rose at the table how her school science project was going. On the stove, a sauce forever bubbling. As Rose made up some answer, Mary would be placing cheese in a quatrefoil on a reclaimed wood board. And yet this same mother twinned the other Mary, the one who never stopped abandoning bits of herself, muttering as she sorted through journals or reams of paper.
Both of us must have been half in love with her, Rose thinks, remembering how the Lolas always borrowed Mary’s clothes without asking, the old vintage dresses and worn girlish shoes, the paper-covered buckled poodle skirts signaling Mary’s past whimsy. Mary must have known the theft and let it go. They’d slide whatever was needful out of the perfumed closet for a nighttime walkabout and Mary never mentioned a thing.
Mary’s job as Rose understood it had something to do with feminism and ethnology in communities, willed or forced. Once, Mary had told Rose she was especially interested in modern-da
y forms of exorcism and self-sacrifice. Yet to Rose the sacrifice Mary seemed most involved in was her own, rituals of fussing over steaming pans in order to avoid Vic’s anger about a late dinner. Mary laying sprigs of mint and basil on plates, ensuring the cheese was appropriately moldy and bread correctly sliced, always trying so transparently and with such a nervous laugh, to whisk to the corners Vic’s disdain.
All this Rose knew well. She knew something about the courtship story of Vic and Mary and another bit about how Mary’s being able to pass as white had let her get a traveling musical theater grant back in high school, something to let smart Indian kids get off the rez, a gift that, long before the era of Sylvia Plath, had let Mary go to Smith and in her junior year come to Berkeley where she met Vic in the library before some oceanic first date. What Rose knew better than Lana was how Mary had entered Vic’s Liechtensteinian French-wannabe culture without a ripple since this part Mary had confided in Rose only. And how Mary showed her daring by letting only city hall see them married, trusting their bond would be forged by a private faith. Together they had moved through promotions, sabbaticals, tenure evaluation, only to land near the twenty-first century with that shared faith in work and as Vic liked to proclaim, a daughter whose inner life remained a mystery.
According to unspoken agreement, clearly Vic was the one who got to occupy the position of brilliance in the household, handsome and irascible, a boy despot coarse, refined and erratic, always in a fit about cleanliness, explaining the reason for such fits with blasphemy and profanity, a man not uninterested in body parts, apparently also not unhappy about leaving beetle-colored stripes of shit on the bed-sheets which Lana would laughingly point out to Rose.
And according to Mary’s murmured hints, later years had changed him: years of teaching others about ranklessness had made him start to rank everyone as if he had struck some bargain with the devil of hierarchy. She was right: at Mahler parties, Rose had seen firsthand how Vic, in his first attempts at socializing with anyone, liked reminding people of any hierarchy intrinsic to their profession:
To someone whose magazine had gone out of business he’d say: what was the profile of your reader?
To a lawyer: how long ’til you become partner?
To a teacher: how much of the day do you actually teach and how much do you spend filling out bureaucratic forms?
To a writer he’d ask: how are your books selling?
To a dentist: how much income goes toward malpractice insurance?
To a surgeon: how many patients have you lost?
To a psychiatrist: how many clients have committed suicide?
Girls in our culture mate too late, he liked telling Lana and Rose as they were hair-brushing before a walkabout, his rant always riffing off the same basic tune:
It’s a conspiracy on the part of Madison Avenue and the cosmetics and apparel industries. Young women spend too much time grooming to attract mates. This phenomenon has assumed the vast proportions of an anthropological problem. Think of all the human and creative capital that would be released if young women would just mate younger and then could pursue vocational fulfillment later when they are more mature and actually capable of making choices out of wisdom. No ape ever grooms so much. Greater petrochemical resources could be conserved, mascara wouldn’t leach vast elements out of whale and dinosaur bones, and women, who have often been vital forces toward social change, could actually orient themselves toward the kind of revolution we need. Can you imagine Joan of Arc with well-brushed hair?
What revolution did this we need? And what qualified him to make these statements? Vic a professor of neurobiology who had slid into philosophy and finally into social punditry and edicts heeded by a swelling mass of followers who had made him the envy of his colleagues. Vic couldn’t stop making statements. You know he has his way of engaging, Mary would explain, apologizing. And part of the problem, of course, was how much the girls wished to take him apart, make him a clock whose workings could be understood, the species male proximate and househeld, bearing the bedside drawer innocuous as a pirate’s treasurebox, containing what they found from quick survey of other girl classmates was nothing unusual: the same radioactive-hued condom packages, shopworn magazines and sharp nail scissors that many fathers maintained close to the bedside as talismans of their own bodies’ ambitions and regrets.
Rose had taken Vic’s eccentricities as some wayward bundle of traits that university life induced. Or as Lana had said: “Look, being a professor must mean you can’t help getting warped. Each year your students get younger.”
“Isn’t that true of every teacher?” Rose had asked.
“But it must be hard. At that age, students are deciding whether or not you’re what they want to become,” said Lana, repeating verbatim what they had both heard Mary say.
Claiming she loved history, Rose teased out from Vic that he missed the way no one kept up ritual, even if blind collective obedience to ritual had also led whole societies off catastrophic cliffs. Vic’s daughter in her scruffy T-shirt could irritate him as a visual: the loss of formality had begun with Mary in her plastic garden shoes. Vic’s rage came from the desire to restore what once lived, constantly vanquished by the insistence of what is: the made-upness of Berkeley, striving with the microcosm of its garden cafés and epicurean, mix-and-match foods to reinvent elegance, none of it balm for his scarred, riddled heart. He had tried to cut off only certain ties with Europe, California’s oceanic amnesia at first perfect, and yet the desire for order had risen, once placated by the planes of Mary’s face—you have to admit, the woman’s beautiful, he had said to Rose more than once, making her cringe. In Mary he seemed to think he had found something both tamable and recursive, enough to make her his home in the second half of the twentieth century, enough that he too, a young professor, had started to feel that finding the well-lived, unexamined life would not be misbegotten hope.
Rose used to imagine Mary and Vic in their dotage not exactly holding hands but at least content to be digesting in the same room while deliberating the relative perfections of roast beef au jus or pot-au-feu or baby mâche, finding themselves together in a calm French-flavored sanctuary against anyone they considered outside their tribe, happy in pyrrhic victory, and how she wished she could be the heir to such treasure, bearing the pride of her parents’ lives together while most of the rest of California scrabbled for significance if not history.
1990–1995
More than a year after the goodbye at the gogo place, finally the legal system leaps to its purpose. In a crowded courtroom in Sacramento, to the town where the venue had been changed to counteract Vic’s excessive celebrity in Berkeley, in a room boasting pasty men staring down from huge oil paintings, Lana’s father will be tried among legions of patchouli’d fans who have shown up: some in support, some betrayed. Not to count those who have come to rally for Mary: the Japanese-American rights and women’s rights people, the faithful grad students, some tenured professors or activists happy to be interviewed outside by ravenous mikes and cameras.
A doubled cloud of notoriety attaches itself to Vic, given that the system, in blind, jackpot manner, will be using Mahler in what keeps getting called a test case, a demo of the tough new Good Life First! protocol unrolled just a few months ago by the governor’s office. No one will emerge the winner, one op-ed had declared, no one can emerge untarred.
On a metal chair in the back of the courtroom sits Rose, now in her first year of law school, taught by professors who love to argue about the Good Life First! initiative, called by its proponents a pragmatic economic policy to rid overcrowded prisons of minor offenders, by offering earlier release dates, while also ridding prisons of murderers, by streamlining execution protocol so that death row stays become more efficient. Rose is trembling.
MAHLER IN THE RAGE CAGE! a few signs read, a reference to the title of one of Vic’s first published works, on the brain’s circuitry of anger: were these signs for or against him?
So f
ar in law school, Rose has been gifted in mock trials, able to find calm: her fellow students have praised her, as Vic had, for her silver tongue. She’d had an especially good mock trial only the week before, arguing that, given the ambiguity of a DNA match, the prosecutors wanted the jury to start at the end of the case and backfill with inference, suspicion and innuendo, applying guesswork when proper evidence still was lacking. With the strength of her argument she had managed to free a defendant facing capital punishment. So that if she lacked wings as a lawyer, without having thought it through, she still believed her presence in the courtroom might prove useful: the extent to which she admits anything.
I will go to Vic’s trial and—(here her well-meaning petered out).
She only wishes she might have found Lana and brought her to the courtroom under a protective wing, an invisible cloak. The problem being that, back then, before the Internet starts twiddling everyone’s fingertips, it had been hard to track down someone like Lana, so successfully out of sight. It’s a shame, Rose keeps saying to herself, her gut sense being that lack of testimony by any member of the family will work against Vic. Sure enough, early in the trial the judge, a square-faced woman with a fixed stare, remarks on the absence. The court notes that his own daughter doesn’t care to come forth.
Had she been Vic’s daughter, just as Lana used to sing teasingly at her, wild horses couldn’t have kept her away, no matter what, and it is the refrain of this wild-horse song that scalds Rose as she sits in the back, scenting sandalwood and acid sweat, her mouth dry, eyes hot, the refrain bothersome. Restless, claustrophobic, she moves forward to edge in next to a gray-haired composed woman in the second row.