The Girls from Corona del Mar

by Rufi Thorpe

  “In the thing I’m translating,” I said finally, “there’s this part where this goddess, Inanna, goes to the underworld. She just develops this craving for death, to know death. And as she goes, deeper and deeper, she has to give up everything. All the gifts she’s been given, all the wisdom of her father, all her armor, everything. And each time, she asks why, she says, ‘What is this?’ And she’s told, ‘Quiet, Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.’ And finally she’s naked, and she stands before the goddess of the underworld. And the judges of the underworld surround her and pass judgment over her. They kill her. It says, ‘Inanna was turned into a corpse, a piece of rotting meat, and was hung from a hook on the wall.’ ”

  “Does she really die there? That can’t be the end of the story. Stories just don’t end like that,” Lorrie Ann said.

  “She escapes,” I admitted, impressed by Lor’s canniness. “Her servant begs the gods for help, to go and get her, but each god says no. Her father says no because he says she chose this. He says, ‘My daughter craved the Great Above, Inanna craved the Great Below … She who goes to the Dark City stays there.’ Finally her uncle decides to help.”

  “So does he go and get her?” Lorrie Ann had made her thumb bleed and was now sucking on the wound.

  “Weirdly, he doesn’t go himself. He fashions little genderless creatures out of dirt and then gives them instructions on how to save her. They act all friendly to the queen of the underworld, sympathizing with her pain. And when she decides she likes them, she offers them a gift, and they ask for Inanna’s corpse. Then they bring her back to life. They resurrect her. After that it gets complicated—the demons follow her out. The galla, they follow her back out into the world.”

  “How weird.”

  “I know.”

  We were silent then. The tea had turned bitter in the pot, and I flinched when I took a sip.

  “Mia, do you think I’m a corpse hanging on the wall?” Lorrie Ann asked. “Is that it?”

  “A little bit,” I said. “Maybe.”

  I looked into my cup of tea. There was a pattern of sediment on the bottom, and I thought about the practice of divining things from tea leaves. Were women so desperate to know what would happen to them that they would tell themselves such lies, such fairy tales? Certainly, for most of history, women had not had control over what would happen to them at all, and so perhaps it was as effective as anything else to try to read the future in tea leaves. The next time I looked up, Lorrie Ann was crying.

  “Where’s Zach?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you,” she said, “but can I please, please, please go shoot up in your bathroom?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Men Who Die Again and Again

  Of course I said yes. There was a deep instinct in me, left over from the years with my mother and Paddy, I guess, to avoid conflict with any person who was not sober. A drunk could insist that the moon was green, and I would do nothing but nod affably. Certainly, I knew enough not to try to take away the bottle from someone trying to see the bottom of it. So there was no way I would tell Lorrie Ann she could not shoot up in my bathroom, even though I am sure that would have been the sane thing to do.

  The thing that most disturbed me, and what I hadn’t wanted to get into with Lorrie Ann, about the underworld section of Inanna was that when the demons follow her out of the underworld, they want to take someone in her place. A life for a life. The most ancient form of mathematics.

  At first they want to take her best friend, but Inanna says no. “She is my constant support,” she says. “She is my sukkal who gives me wise advice. She is my warrior who fights by my side.” They ask for her two sons, but again, Inanna says no. She faces those terrifying galla, who I could not help but imagine as wooden gnomes like those Lor’s mother collected, and staring deep into their wooden, inhuman eyes, she refuses to give them her sons.

  But who will Inanna give up? She has to give up someone. Who will it be?

  It is her lover, her husband, her mortal man, Dumuzi.

  “Inanna fastened on Dumuzi the eye of death. She spoke against him the word of wrath. She uttered against him the cry of guilt: Take him! Take Dumuzi away!” And the demons fell on Dumuzi. The Sumerian descriptions of violence disturbed me—they were obscene in some way that was new to me precisely because it felt so old. The passages described the demons seizing him by the thighs, pouring out his milk, gashing him with axes.

  Was that the choice—your friend, your son, or your husband? I think I had become fascinated with Inanna because I saw so much of Lor in her, or so much of her in Lor, but now, as I opened the drawer where I had secreted away the pregnancy test, a blue box with curly pink script reading “Yes or No,” I feared the Inanna in myself. I feared my ability to betray—to betray Lor, to betray Franklin, to betray the bean of life that might be inside me.

  How to excuse the way that Lor had betrayed Zach? If, indeed, that was what she had done. That night four years ago, when I had visited Lorrie Ann and Zach and the loser Arman in the sad, subsidized Costa Mesa apartment, there had been a moment when she was putting Zach to bed that stuck with me.

  She had been lifting Zach out of his wheelchair and up onto the bed with its spread-out blanket, where she prepared to feed him through his feeding tube, holding the little bag of formula aloft so that it would flow down the tube, led by gravity, into her son, where it would give him sustenance. “At some point, I’m not going to be able to lift him anymore, and I have no idea what I’ll do. Literally, I can’t imagine what I’ll do.”

  Was that what had happened? In some literal or metaphysical way, had Lorrie Ann been unable to shoulder the load?

  I could hear her running water in the bathroom. Lorrie Ann was here, was in my magical sublet apartment where nothing matched and where all the knives were dull, and what should have been happy was terrible. She was shooting up in my bathroom and I was so paralyzed I didn’t know what to do but pretend everything was normal.

  Even with that test in my hand, I was having trouble holding the thought of a baby still enough to look at. Did I want a baby? The one time Franklin and I had talked about it he had been vehement: he had no desire for children, he didn’t see himself as a papa type. It had been part of a discussion about his ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth. Her desire for children had been what made them break up. And I knew that, and so even considering keeping the child felt like a betrayal.

  My own feelings were more like a swarm than a coherent position. On the one hand, there was the feeling of the miraculous, the tender and tangled, the impossible and yet ordinary division of cells that must be protected, safeguarded. On the other hand, there was Zach’s infant body, gray-blue and still, all that could be taken from you when you risked wanting something. There was my crushed toe to contend with and the microsuede of my brothers’ skin, my mother’s puffy eyes, the possibility that I would be like her, or worse, the hanger, the horrible hanger that I had used. It was complicated, it was unspeakably complicated.

  But I was afraid that no matter what happened, I would wind up betraying somebody: Franklin, or the bean of life, or myself.

  I picture them in her kitchen, sometime after the Goldschläger night, Arman at the table and Lor doing dishes.

  “There were complications.”

  “Yeah, but what complications?” he would have asked. “I mean, something specific must have happened. It’s not like some percentage of children are randomly born with brain damage.”

  “There were problems with my uterus.”

  “What was the problem with your uterus?” Arman insisted, even as Lorrie Ann’s shoulders became rigid.

  “You’re really not going to stop asking, are you?” she said, slamming the dish she was washing back into the sink.

  “I told you how I lost my legs,” he said, still sitting easily at her kitchen table, playing with a fork, rubbing the tines with his thumb.

  “And I’m telling you: there was a problem
with my uterus.” She shook suds off her hands and into the sink, dried her hands on a dish towel. For a moment they just stared at each other in the small kitchen.

  “Please,” he said. “Please trust me.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what was wrong with my uterus. There just was. There was just something wrong, okay?” Lorrie Ann clutched the dish towel so that the veins and tendons in the backs of her hands danced just under the skin.

  “Do you want me to do the dishes?” Arman asked. Lorrie Ann knew it was a peace offering, but it also took Arman hours to do dishes because he had to do them one handed so he could use his other hand to keep himself upright on a crutch.

  “No.” She sighed, turning back to the sink.

  But then later in bed:

  “Please just tell me the story.”

  “Why do you want to hear the story?”

  They were in the dark, though the door was open to the lighted hall so they could hear Zach if he started to cry. He needed the hall light left on or he would get night terrors.

  “Fine, don’t tell me.”

  “Arman.”

  “No, if you want to stay closed up inside yourself forever, that’s your choice. Not my business.”

  “Arman.”

  But he didn’t speak to her. He didn’t turn away; he let her keep lying there, nestled in his armpit, her head upon his chest, his long hair spread out under her like a blanket, but through some sort of voodoo he made his body unnaturally still, until it seemed he might be made of clay like a golem.

  “I needed to be induced,” Lorrie Ann said. Her voice sounded so tiny, so high in the darkness, even to herself, like a child’s or a puppet’s.

  Immediately, she could feel Arman’s body come back to life. She could almost hear the blood gush through his tissues. He squeezed her arm.

  “I was late. I was three or four days past my due date and they kept saying Zach was going to be a big baby, that we needed to get him out of there. They said he would be nine pounds at least. He turned out to be only seven, but I guess the ultrasounds really only give you a rough estimate.” She stopped for a moment, reining herself in. It was so difficult to talk about pregnancy and birth and babies because the details mattered only to people who had done it themselves. Arman wouldn’t care about birth weights; he wouldn’t know about how they told you the baby would be wrinkly and weird if it stayed in there too long.

  “I was excited to be induced,” she said. “I was huge. I was like a house. It was the middle of winter, but I was sweating all the time. I was just like: Get this baby out of me.”

  “Sure,” he said, squeezing her arm again.

  “So we go in, and they start the induction drugs, and I go into labor pretty quickly. A couple of hours, really. And right away I ask for the epidural because it hurts. I had thought I could handle it because I normally have a really high pain threshold, but—no.”

  “Right.”

  “Jim was there, and he was cute, he was like, ‘Get the drugs! This is why we live in America, baby!’ ”

  “I’ve always been curious—is the epidural just a nerve block or is there anything awesome in there?”

  “Oh, there was definitely something awesome in there. Either that or they were giving it to me intravenously. I’m guessing fentanyl. Something like that.”

  “So you got the good shit!”

  “Yep,” Lorrie Ann said into the darkness. “I had the good shit.”

  For a moment she just lay there, Arman’s arms around her. She wondered if Jim were looking down on her from heaven and if he would mind this man touching her, holding her in the dark of night as she told this story. Her instincts told her that Jim would hate it, that Jim would come back from the dead and charge into the room to stop it. But Jim wasn’t watching. Jim was gone.

  “For about the first two hours, I was like: This is great. And then I started feeling really weird. I felt panicky, like my heart was racing, just this overwhelming feeling of wrongness. And then, even through the epidural, pain started coming—pain like a knife. It felt like someone was sitting on my chest. I kept telling Jim: It hurts, it hurts. The next parts I don’t remember very well, but they turned up my epidural because I wouldn’t stop screaming. I remember the nurse rolling her eyes because she thought I was just being a baby. I kept saying: Something’s wrong, it hurts. Everyone kept saying: Yeah, it hurts—you’re having a baby. My labor had completely stalled and they were frustrated with me, I remember. I couldn’t breathe because that heavy feeling on my chest was getting worse and worse, like an elephant sitting down on me. And then … I passed out.”

  “What happened?”

  “Emergency C-section.”

  “But why did you pass out?”

  “My uterus just tore. And all the amniotic fluid started to leak out into my stomach cavity, and I guess I had a seizure.”

  “But why did your uterus tear?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Uteruses can just tear?”

  “I guess so.”

  There was silence, and then suddenly Lorrie Ann heard Arman sniffle. When she turned to look at him, she could see by the light on in the hall that he was crying. She was surprised. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “No,” he said, wiping the few tears away with the back of his hand. “It just kills me: that nurse rolling her eyes at you while your uterus was splitting open.”

  “She didn’t know,” Lorrie Ann said.

  “She should have.”

  “How could she have known?”

  “They should have listened to you. They ignored you.”

  “Everyone ignores a woman in labor,” she said.

  There was silence again. Lorrie Ann was surprised at how defensive she felt. She couldn’t afford, emotionally, for Arman to take her side in this way. She couldn’t afford it because Jim hadn’t done it. It had never occurred to Jim that everyone had ignored Lorrie Ann. That she had tried to tell them something was wrong, that an elephant was sitting on her chest, that her heart was racing. Jim had only been kind and never tried to make her feel bad for having a defective uterus that tore. But he had never, not even for a moment, suggested to her that she had been worth listening to, that she had been mistreated.

  “What did the doctor say?” Arman asked.

  “He said I was lucky,” Lorrie Ann said, hoping like hell Arman wouldn’t hear the quaver in her voice.

  Then again, if he really wanted to cry, Arman could have just started doing a little bit of Internet research. The drug they gave Lorrie Ann to induce her labor was called Misoprostol. If Arman had Googled it, he would have seen that it was an oral medication for stomach ulcers that doctors had discovered also had a weird side effect of inducing labor if you stuck it up a woman’s vagina. Misoprostol was only eight dollars a dose; the next cheapest induction drug was almost two hundred dollars a dose. It wasn’t illegal to use Misoprostol; the FDA had approved it. For stomach ulcers. Taken orally. No one had studied exactly what it would do if you put it up a woman’s vagina, but it seemed to work great.

  Arman wouldn’t have really found much online back when all this happened to Lorrie Ann. Doctors had just started experimenting with Misoprostol, and, anecdotally, it was a miracle drug. The best thing about Misoprostol was that it would bring on labor so hard and so fast that a woman could be induced at eight in the morning and the doctor could be home by three in the afternoon. “Let’s just get this over with,” doctors would say to women, and the women agreed: they wanted to get it over with too. They were scared. All they knew of labor was women screaming and almost dying in movies and on TV. All they wanted was to be safe, and safety was doing what the doctor said.

  If he had looked into it later, when Zach was six, and when he first started banging Lorrie Ann, Arman would have found troubling indications that Misoprostol had been linked to uterine rupture, especially in cases where the mother had had a previous cesarean. The uterus would contract so violently from the drug that it wou
ld literally be ripped apart inside the woman’s body. The babies often drowned to death inside their mother’s abdominal cavities.

  But Lorrie Ann hadn’t had a previous C-section. What had happened?

  It was the kind of puzzle that would have bothered Arman. He would have wanted to figure it out. God knows, I did.

  Was it that Lorrie Ann’s doctor had given her four doses of 100 milligrams, when the standard dose was 25 milligrams? Or did she perhaps have a placental abruption or weakness that some careless ultrasound tech had missed? How big had the tears in her uterus even been? Had the complete hysterectomy the doctor performed during her C-section truly been necessary? Would things have turned out differently if anyone had actually listened to Lorrie Ann when she told them something was wrong, that there was a new pain? If the nurse with the My Little Pony eye shadow had been a bit better with those fetal monitors? If they had rushed her to surgery the moment she alerted them, would Zach have been born blue?

  Lorrie Ann would say that no one could know the answer to that question and that it wasn’t worth asking anyway. But I say that it was fifty-seven minutes between the time she first told them something was wrong and the time the C-section was performed, that was what the log in her records said: fifty-seven minutes. And those fifty-seven minutes were what cost Zach his brain. Fifty-seven minutes of drowning in Lorrie Ann’s stomach. Fifty-seven minutes, during thirty-five of which Lorrie Ann was conscious and begging. Thirty-five minutes of rolling their eyes at her. Of telling her to calm down. Of counting off Lamaze breathing techniques for her. Of telling her to focus. Just focus. Calm down. Stop screaming. Stop screaming. Thirty-five minutes.

  I would have suggested that Lorrie Ann sue, and would have offered to pay for the lawyers, if my preliminary research hadn’t already shown me how fruitless Misoprostol lawsuits were. I did all this research in the years after I saw Lorrie Ann and Arman in the subsidized Costa Mesa apartment and she told me she’d had a complete hysterectomy. I hadn’t known before that her uterus had torn. Was it standard to remove a woman’s uterus in an emergency C-section? I started to look into it. I asked Lorrie Ann for her hospital records. I told her I was looking into getting some kind of compensation for Zach to help pay for his physical therapy. And in a way, I was.