Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  Yet in some moment when she had been existentially if not biologically asleep, some fiendish maker had on the sly installed that legendary clock: now her sense of purpose seems to come solely from the clock’s devil notches laid into her womb’s frozen sea which without her agreement has begun its thaw so that every day passes with more audible tick and tock, the exultation and panic of having a baby, someone who would promise that family, her family, known to her by blood, would never leave.

  The first anise-fueled night she decides to share the clock idea with Gan he laughs it off: having grown up in a family of strong-minded Armenians, he knows women have their whims and yet part of his beauty rests in his honeyed acceptance of such layers of delicacy. Rose saying she is ready to have kids makes him mug: “The most ecological choice you could make would be to adopt.” As if that weren’t bad he adds: “But I know how women are. Once they get the baby idea in their head, there’s no stopping.”

  “The hindbrain takes over,” says Rose, compulsive in echoing the title of one of Vic’s chapters.

  “You’re forty,” Gan tells her. What she listens to is not so much the words but rather the esoteric flute-music of intonation, some hope to be found in the glottal stop and perhaps the way his eyebrow sneaks up, a flag that he might, at the very least, be able to locate the project’s gravity.

  Long before their anise night she had thought Gan had too much California in him to make any space for fatherhood. A construction worker turned DJ who had glided through the world with little friction, his tectonics had made it easy—a bit too easy—to connect, a man so unmysteriously devoted in first courtship he might as well have rifled through some flower-emblazoned pamphlet on how to get the girl, so easy she had suspected he was not in it for a long sticking-together even as they slid into futon-sharing and all other Californian activities catalogued in local mate-seeking ads, a collective deposit into the state’s hedonistic safe filled with all the music-sharing, filmgoing, burrito-biting, mountain-climbing, hill-driving and beach-walking known by other couples.

  His easeful Piscean devotion meant that certainly on the baby question her Gan had agreed a bit too quickly, but since her fiendish clock meant she needed male agreement, even if slippery, she chose to ignore Gan’s ease, instead welcoming his heedlessness in bed, a quality almost enough to replicate passion. And later when their lack of heed bore no fruit Gan stayed in similar good cheer, his smile well-etched as they trekked to doctors dedicated to helping the Roses of the world reproduce. Until the day they were driving to yet another doctor and they were about to turn left off Mulholland. The luster in his eyes never more alluring, Gan chose to call the whole package of Rose-and-Gan-and-baby-to-be quits.

  Into her hangover about this romantic end, ungravid, unhitched, uncertain, Rose had received a morose phone message from her adopted brother on a zen retreat he had masked as yearlong forest service in Alaska.

  When Rose reached him at his base camp, her brother spoke with studied plainness: his mother, their ma, had died.

  An aneurysm. Happens even when people are young, he said. At least you don’t have those bad genes.

  Her foster brother did not mean to be unkind by mentioning genes. He spoke of how their mother’s brother was arranging all the details of the cremation and that in her aspiration toward simplicity, their mother had explicitly stated she wanted no funeral or commemoration. He droned all this as if reciting headlines without pausing for Rose to insert even silence. Of course she could not help but take the news as a punch to the gut.

  She might not have talked with her mother for months. She might have stowed her away in an imagined Berkeley. She might have laughed at her mother flitting about in her puffy blouses and dreaminess. But still and always Rose kept holy a small shrine of gratitude to Joan Batekin, a daughter of Chicago who had airlifted Rose out of what surely would have been a dismal fate uncountenanced by all the world’s teddy bears. And in the second after hearing the news of Joan’s death, what bothered Rose most was that she could not summon her mother’s face: only its glimmering contours surrendering themselves to memory, something of the edge of a blurred second after a joke.

  Joan gone. And what kind of ripple would the death cause in her mother’s circle of acquaintances? In keeping with her modesty, she wanted no commemoration. But was it not also in keeping with some absolute hole in the center of existence? Would any of Joan’s carefully pored-over details of her life matter in the end? Whether she had a rubied fan or a turquoise mala? Whether she had known this concentric circle of clients or that fanfold of admiring friends or any one of her transitory lovers? Whether she had followed her passion in any of her interest groups, squash book groups, peasant blouses, Nigerian children’s rights? Her mother had never cleaved to one cause or person. So was it this mosquito-eye affection for the masses that made few people single-minded in how they clung to Joan?

  Because while Joan had a flair for drawing people near, enthusiastic applauders who liked her quick smile and sharp nose, she also lacked a more general instinct for keeping friends. She had never believed in any rituals of permanence and loyalty and was it for this reason that her acquaintances tended to fade? This ease of connection—like Gan’s!—may have been exactly the quality that had allowed Joan to take on the adopting of a daughter, a foster kid with good report cards but a history of rejection for her involuntary mutism. There Joan had been, no doubt not without some struggle, a single therapist mother raising a son out of wedlock in Berkeley of the seventies, alighting on the decision to swoop Rose up into her life.

  Stay true to yourselves, Joan had once told Rose and her brother, that’s all that counts. Did the way Joan lived count as staying true?

  Maybe two months earlier, Rose had called her mother and they had bandied about talk of a visit. One of them, Rose could not remember who, had needed to cancel, this being their pattern since, after Rose went away to college, by slow degrees the two flowers in the family, as Joan liked calling them, had drifted away from each other on the gentlest of currents with only the briefest bumping up against each other after graduation. It was as if once Joan had succeeded in giving a kid a college education, her contract with parenthood had ceased and now she herself had been trying to graduate into some important second act of life in which she set out to meet loose-hipped men at folk-dance evenings so an expected interlude could follow, the quick pair able to share croissants after talks by ecologically forward-thinking scientists.

  Her mother in phone conversation tended to conclude by saying: “I’m proud of you, Rosie,” which always preceded “I love you,” the signal that it was time to hang up.

  On the phone, zen-powered, Rose’s brother waits. Better than anyone, he knows Joan had saved Rose. Only once in a moment of adolescent cruelty masquerading as realness had he spelled it out: too easy to see the path that could have been Rose’s—left in bad foster care or a series of group homes. “You would’ve ended up single, without a job, addicted to meth, black-eyed, pregnant.”

  “Or dead,” she had confirmed, the masochistic pleasure adding to their intimacy. For sure she would never have ended up in the private high school where she had found the best friend she had ever known, one with her own methods of salvation.

  Rose may have known what Joan had saved her from but still always found it hard to thank her: overt gratitude could open too many gates of vulnerability. At best the saved girl found herself as diffident as Lana, accepting all bouquets from her adopted mother as her due.

  Lana had once said of a college beau that she liked to lie there letting him pleasure her because she couldn’t be inauthentic by moving one nanometer toward him, preferring to be the object of someone’s attempts. “You like being the object?” Rose had squeaked.

  “Why not?” Lana smiled back, limpid, incurious, walking along the Hudson toward the George Washington Bridge, the girls sophomores in college. Rose had started a little nattering spiral about how in sex she never wanted to ask for anything because
asking makes a person vulnerable especially when no one can ever exactly meet any request, it’s like a language game and anyway who wants to be in some kind of Rose 101 mode where she would have to be the teacher, giving up the chance of being surprised by someone’s rough hand, hence her rape fantasies and anyway she had a hard time with anyone working on her because she didn’t like someone gratifying a sense of accomplishment by laboring toward a goal like arbeit that ends up making a person unfrei. Plus she didn’t want a boy thinking himself an expert on Rose. “You’re funny,” Lana had said. “I have rape fantasies too but honestly, don’t you think too much? Maybe let yourself enjoy things more?” Sneaking a hug around Rose’s waist, a tardy, quick attack of affection. “You have any idea how bad my life would have been if we’d never met? Seriously, Rosie. My life would have stunk.”

  Rose had stood, eyes wide, cells stilled, on alert, breath held, Lola revived, a hand imprinted in phosphorescence on her waist.

  For some reason Rose thinks of this conversation after her brother relays the news.

  This too she gets: there Rose had been lying flat and still—just like Lana with a beau—while her mother had been trying to get Rose to admit to the pleasure of being mothered.

  For the first time, the suggestion that Joan might have been disappointed in her adopted daughter raises its head. The idea so clear Rose would have shared it with her brother if she were sure she wouldn’t cry. Meanwhile Rose’s brother stays dry, saying Joan’s most recent boyfriend had called and asked him to come down but what was the point of leaving his Alaska retreat since there was just stuff to sort through and objects are objects—his zenspeak self-conscious—maybe the stuff should just be donated? And then asks if Rose could be the one to go up to Berkeley, go through the house. Has Rose ever felt their camaraderie as strongly as she does now? According to Joan’s will, the siblings share a house and given how quickly they discuss a real-estate broker their uncle knows, both are unsentimental in considering how quickly to sell it. If her brother is busy freeing himself of sentimental baggage, Rose will do the same.

  “Talk to the executor,” he warns. “It’ll be a swamp, Rose.”

  The task is a blessing, a relieving distraction. Into the continental crackle Rose tells her brother: “I don’t mind.”

  “You could say no. No one wants you to become a martyr.”

  She can say no more. She and her brother tend not to leak hints about the embarrassing weakness found in adult life and she doesn’t want him to know how good it will feel to exit purgatory: slamming a door might open another or at least muffle a clock.

  Up in Berkeley, going through Joan’s oddments from the aspirational life she’d led—matchbooks, wood buttons, pressed flowers, clippings—Rose finds one truth: the grave of her birth-mother.

  While Joan liked calling herself a love-mother, here Rose finally holds between her hands the information she’d looked for her whole life, blue mimeograph ink on old-fashioned translucent onionskin: a cemetery in San Diego.

  In one of those mysteries that cling to foster kids, the grave does not rest in some overgrown Berkeley burial ground as Joan had hinted, always waving the question away, but in a plot partly deeded to some military camp.

  Once Rose finishes packing away Joan’s things, having donated most of her detritus to the Brothers of Africa—shoes with insoles pressed by toes that will never again walk, blouses still scented from an evening of self-betterment, funky rosewood furniture loyal to an era—Rose drives in a one-day heat down Five, speeding past the turnoff in Los Angeles, going south until she gets to San Diego an hour before dusk when the cemetery closes.

  Along the military camp’s barbed wire, Rose stops by a hillock where she sees, hot in mock battle, recruits in camouflage scattering off a green truck and then falling left and right. From a tower a gunfire sound track blasts, making each soldier appear even more purposeful, vicious in rapture.

  Of course a person wants reciprocity. Of course at a cemetery a person secretly hopes the dead could meet one’s wish with theirs and that a conversation might start or continue.

  “Why do people bother going to graves?” Lana in a mood had once asked Vic. The black-cloaked family-Mahler-plus-Rose had been traipsing to some colleague’s memorial.

  “Because memory wants embodiment. Because the living want to fix a person beyond the great fix of life.”

  “Foolish,” Rose says back to Vic’s voice. Of course, speak at a grave and you get only mouldering bones. Ask for a sign, you get nothing verifiable by outside witness. “What were you hoping for anyway?”

  By the time she finds the gate and gets to the alphabetical zone for her birth-mom’s gravesite, a tropical wind bows the cypress trees into gnarled hands, the coiled breath of it making name cards and salutations whirl about, lost wraiths.

  The paper dampens in her hand, ink blurred: of course she knows her birth-mom’s name and could recheck the paper to verify locale but would rather forsake the hunt for serendipity, proving the grave tugs at her genes.

  “Say there was a game authored by your so-called forgiving God, what would its rules be?” Vic had gone on after the memorial. She picks up one of the flying notes. I LOVE YOU FOREVER. “People think they love beyond death because the idea banishes death,” Vic ostensibly explained to Rose why he’d never bothered seeking out the cemetery of his own mother, though she preferred to think of him not as a lost child but, as he called himself, the world’s orphan. He went on: “In the case of a dead public figure, people go to a gravesite because they love history. Maybe to consider greatness forged out of humble origins. Or how the mighty have fallen. Just so they feel better about their lives.” He waited. “But when they go to the grave of someone for whom they have only a name and a single fact—as would have been the case between my mother and me—what can they focus on?”

  “Lunch?” Lana had said, forever ready to derail her father’s talks with Rose.

  “A change of fortune? Their own hormonal protest against the senescence of cells? The endless optimism of the life urge?” He accepted their silence. “No. If I had gone to find my mother’s grave I would’ve gotten nothing but worms and some lousy cracked gravestone.”

  “At least you had children.” Lana smiled too hard. “A child.”

  “At the very least.”

  In a cemetery in San Diego, Rose comes across the cenotaph of her birth-mother:

  EMILY ROBBINS, 1950–1970, RIP

  Rose can’t read the acronym at first, misreading it as rip, as in a ripping, to be ripped until she is struck by the lie: while Rose’s adoptive mother had always said Rose’s natural mother had died in the pangs of labor, here comes contrary evidence:

  Rose was born on January 18 in 1967, not in 1970.

  Yet in 1970 someone had buried her birth-mother Emily Robbins here. Which means that, for three long years after baby Rose had been given up to the state’s dispensations, her birth-mother had lived.

  Meaning that while baby Rose had traveled through blankets, cribs, occasional arms, group abodes—contracting hepatitis, ringworm, pneumonia, while she had undergone transfusions and incubations, all those moments still finding eternal life in shards of dreams—her birth-mother had lived. While Rose managed to get good at loss, turning into an infant who became an oddly mute toddler, her birth-mother had lived on for three more mystery years.

  Once when Rose had prodded Vic about some inconsistency in something he had said, he had shouted: “You’re just wrong, Rose! Your early life made holes in your brain! Later plasticity can correct only so much! You lacked secure attachment.” (And then was surprised that Rose didn’t stay that night for her usual dinner and veined cheese with the Mahlers.) He had once asked Rose if he could use the story of her life to introduce one of his books—your homelessness, you know, your difficulties—and because Rose was unsure which way he’d spin it, because she glimpsed for one swollen second the vulture inside Vic she had said no.

  Of course he was right abou
t those holes in her brain or at least Rose couldn’t contradict him given that home has always been her lack.

  The wind gathers, roiling the Pacific as if a tsunami might soon swallow all those pathetic headstones. When the cypress branches bend close enough to strike her head, Rose ducks and runs, distressed by the notes to loved ones swirling up in such a bunch that she must stop to gather a few:

  TO THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN I WILL EVER KNOW

  YOU ARE IN US ALWAYS AS WE REMEMBER YOUR BIRTHDAY

  Rose gathers a corsage of notes, holding them close to her chest. When the wind stops, she tries redistributing the notes back to whatever graves seem correct, the act so disturbing she finally submits to the arbitrariness of affection, enough to shove all that flyaway sentiment under one unmarked stone.

  One week later she is at Hope, where she wishes she could feel happier about being with Lana and less that she has chased an old friend straight into a gorge.

  1993

  The last millionaire Lana meets in Los Angeles during her floating time—after the abrupt goodbye with Rose in her apartment, the bus ride across country from New York with her father’s credit card warm in her hand, the card with which she had bought huge movie-star sunglasses she’d worn to discourage strangers from conversation—the last guy in that floating time before Kip wants her to move up to Northern California.

  This millionaire from northern India desires a penthouse overlooking the bay, a sanctuary in a temperate climate. We all want refuge, he says, chucking her under the chin. He lives in Benedict Canyon and imports medical supplies from Canada. With the pragmatic disinterest of the young, Lana believes his biography. Because his ambition forks toward filmmaking, she spends afternoons before waitressing gigs on his couch overlooking the ginger canyon. They discuss ideas and in that late light she tries figuring out what they want from each other.