The Girls from Corona del Mar

by Rufi Thorpe

  “Dunny stayed for dinner?”

  “Yes,” Lorrie Ann said. “She did.”

  “Was Arman there?”

  “Yes,” Lorrie Ann said. “He was.”

  “This is the weirdest night I can even imagine,” I said.

  “It was the weirdest night of my entire life. But at the same time completely normal. We were all just exhausted. I went to bed early, after we finished eating. Arman came in and just stroked my hair. He was really good at touching my hair, not like most men. He understood long hair because he had long hair, and he knew what felt good. He braided my hair and didn’t talk to me at all. It was so kind. It was the nicest anyone has ever been to me.”

  I felt sure that I had been that nice to her, but I said nothing. I couldn’t bring to mind a specific time I had been nice to her. But I had, hadn’t I?

  “But I guess Dunny and my mom stayed up talking,” Lor said, wetting her lips with her tongue. I could hear how dry her mouth was, how thick her spit. “I guess they stayed up to chat.”

  Dana had confessed to Dunny that her Vicodin had gone missing and that it seemed to her like perhaps Lorrie Ann had been taking it. At first, she told Dunny, she had suspected Arman. After all, he seemed the drug addict type. But after some time observing her daughter, who rarely changed out of her pajamas, and who seemed content to spend all day every day watching SpongeBob SquarePants with her disabled son, Dana had realized that Lorrie Ann might have a problem. Did Dunny have any advice?

  And so Dunny and Dana hatched a plan. Dunny confessed that she had already alerted Child Protective Services at the hospital and had recommended that Zach be taken from the home. She had worried about making this recommendation because she didn’t know how Dana would feel about it, but Dana reassured her that she thought this was for the best. Taking care of Zach was more than Lorrie Ann was capable of these days. “It would have been different if my son-in-law had lived,” Dana said. “He could have helped her.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear that,” Dunny said. “I didn’t know he’d passed.”

  “The war,” Dana said. “War does not determine who is right—only who is left. Bertrand Russell said that.”

  Dunny, of course, had no idea who Bertrand Russell was. She only nodded, her brow knit, hoping to keep Dana from digressing into a rant. “I in no way blame her. I think she’s trying the best that she can. That’s what these systems are there for—a safety net. For when you just can’t do it on your own.”

  “Exactly,” Dana said. “I couldn’t agree more. But what do you think we should do about the drugs?”

  Dunny was more inclined to take the idea of Lorrie Ann as a drug addict seriously because of the way she had laughed at the hospital, had seemed so distracted, had been glassy eyed and distant all night. “You could ask her to take a drug test. You could confront her about the Vicodin. Have an intervention.”

  And so Dunny explained to Dana what an intervention was, and Dana was enchanted. It seemed like exactly what was called for. The very next morning she asked Arman to help her with the intervention. And so it was that Arman gave Lorrie Ann the heads-up about what was coming.

  Lorrie Ann was shocked. “Who all is going to be at this intervention?”

  “Dude,” Arman said, “I don’t know! Dunny and your mom, I guess. I told them I hadn’t noticed anything but that you’d seemed a little depressed. What were you doing taking her pills, Lorrie baby?”

  “I didn’t take her pills!” Lorrie Ann lied. “She’s just senile and she doesn’t remember when she takes them!”

  Arman shrugged. “What do you wanna do?”

  “I want to curl up into a ball and go to sleep for a thousand years.”

  Arman was grinding up a 30 milligram oxycodone for her on a saucer. He laid the pill under a twenty-dollar bill to keep it from getting everywhere, then ground it to fine powder with the edge of his lighter. “Well, aside from sleeping for a thousand years.”

  “Can’t I just say I don’t have a drug problem? How would they know?”

  “Your mom is clueless,” Arman said. “But Dunny probably knows what high looks like.” He scraped the powder into two lines using his Blockbuster card, rolled the twenty into a tube, and handed it over to Lorrie Ann.

  “Why did that fucking bitch have to get involved?” Lorrie Ann asked, snorting one line up her right nostril, then the other up her left.

  Arman just shrugged, tapped his lighter against his fake leg, looked out the window.

  “This is the last thing I want to be dealing with,” Lorrie Ann said.

  “You don’t have a problem,” Arman said. “I’ve seen people with problems. You just like to party.”

  “Exactly. And it’s not like I’m fucking up or anything. Zipper firing me was some kind of act of God or something.”

  “Of course,” Arman said.

  “So maybe I just go in and I say, ‘Mom, I didn’t take your pills. I have no drug problem. This is all in your head.’ I mean, she is technically diagnosed as having psychosis, right?”

  “What if they want you to take a drug test?” Arman asked. He had, in fact, been told by Dana that she and Dunny planned to challenge Lor to take a drug test if she tried to deny taking the pills.

  “A drug test for what?” Lor asked. “Where would they even get one?”

  “Maybe Dunny has them. They could test you for opiates with just a pee test.”

  “They have that?”

  Arman nodded, not looking at her, still slowly rubbing his lighter up and down the titanium pylon of his fake leg. It made a hollow scraping sound like sharpening a knife. “You could always, you know, just not show up,” he said.

  “Where would I go?”

  “To your brother’s?” Bobby was now living by himself in the Larkspur apartment.

  “This is insane. They can’t make me take a drug test.”

  “But what if they take Zach?” Arman said.

  Because, of course, neither of them yet knew that Zach was already gone. In fact, as they spoke, Dunny was writing up her recommendation that Zach be removed from the home and faxing it over to Child Protective Services. Earlier, she had been on the phone with the woman assigned to Zach, trying to arrange what nursing home facility he could be released to when he needed to leave the hospital.

  “So what did you do?”

  “I did what any woman would do,” Lor said. “I told the truth. I begged for their forgiveness. I said I would do better. That I would do anything to get to keep Zach.”

  “And what happened?”

  “They offered to send me to rehab. But when I found out that Zach was already gone, I just—what would the point be? Why would I even do that?”

  “So then what?”

  “It’s—I was so honest. I was so sure that if I just came clean everything would work out okay. And then when I found out that my mother had actually agreed to this plan of taking Zach away. That she had actually given a report about the conditions of the house to the new social worker. Oh, God, I thought I was going to throw up. Arman was just furious. I couldn’t even speak, but he was screaming, yelling, ‘Is this what family is to you, you Brady Bunch bitches? Where’s your loyalty?’ It was a mess. I wound up dragging him out of there and spending the night at his place.”

  I imagined the two of them in the sudden silence of Arman’s apartment. I imagined him making her food—frozen fish sticks. I imagined her drinking Gatorade, the blue kind, and eating the fish sticks, and crying and crying over her lost son. “We came up with this idea,” she said, “that we would sell my car and sell Arman’s car and go to India.”

  “India,” I said. “Why India?”

  “I don’t know. I always loved The Secret Garden and A Little Princess. India seemed like a magical place. It seemed like a place you could lose yourself in.” She stretched, raising her arms above her head, and I could see there was a hole in the armpit of her sweater.

  “Tigers and monkeys and turbaned men with soulful eyes?”<
br />
  Lor stared at me blankly, said nothing.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’m just trying to understand,” Lorrie Ann said slowly, as though she were in a dream, “why you would mock me right now. Are you angry at me? For what?”

  “I’m not mocking you,” I said. But I was angry at her.

  “You loved The Secret Garden too. We both did.” She reached out and put her hand on mine. I wondered if she had track marks. I wondered what track marks looked like.

  “Yes, we did.” I heard a sound then in the hall and for a moment I thought it was Franklin coming home and panic swept through me in a wave. But whoever was in the hall walked past our door and unlocked another.

  “Do you hate me?” Lorrie Ann asked.

  “No, I don’t hate you,” I said. “But I don’t understand why you left. So Zach is in a home. Maybe that’s even a relief, not having to take care of him every single moment. You could at least visit him. You could at least do that much.”

  Lorrie Ann’s face assumed a strange blankness. “I visited him once,” she said.

  I waited for her to continue.

  “Mia, the care he was getting there was worse than anything at my house. Worse. They changed him only every four hours, if that. He looked so thin. It was two weeks before they let me see him. And when he saw me, God, when he saw me, he just started crying and crying and crying. Mia, it was the most awful thing. It was like being eviscerated. It was the most awful day of my entire life.”

  “Which is why I can’t understand how you left! How could you leave him?”

  “I hate this fucking sentiment that you’re expressing. It’s a common one. The sacred child who must be cared for no matter what, no matter what the cost. You know, if this were a hundred years ago, Zach would have been left out in the woods. Because they knew—they knew no baby deserved to suffer like that, and no mother deserved to suffer that way either. But we’ve lost that. We’ve completely lost our fucking minds, so now the ‘right thing to do’ is to make him suffer pain we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy. That’s the civilized thing to do. To torture him to death inside his own body by refusing to let him die. He can’t even eat, Mia. He can’t eat! What animal is kept alive past the point where it can eat? It’s disgusting. It’s foul. I couldn’t watch it anymore. I couldn’t be part of it.”

  “Okay,” I said, stunned by her anger, her fury.

  “I should have ended it,” she said. “That would have been the right thing to do. To end it the right way. Where he would have been loved, and I could have—” she broke off, and I understood that she was having trouble speaking, couldn’t get the words out. “Held him,” she said finally.

  There was a long slow stillness then. I thought about her feet, bleeding under the table.

  “Tell me about India,” I said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Lorrie Ann’s Love and Travels

  After selling her own car and Arman’s, after spending three hundred dollars in a sporting goods store on backpacks, after several blow-out fights with her mother and one long handwritten good-bye letter, after carefully hiding more than 400 milligrams of oxycodone inside a pack of ballpoint pens (the 30-milligram pills fit perfectly into the plastic barrels of the pens once the ink was removed, and through some obscure genius with an iron Arman was able to reseal the entire package of Bic pens so that it looked perfectly pristine), after a fifteen-hour flight to Dubai and a three-hour flight to Mumbai, after a multitude of tiny bottles of gin, after being sprayed with deet by distracted flight attendants, Lorrie Ann and Arman wandered into what seemed to them a half-demolished and largely abandoned airport.

  Indeed, some kind of perpetual construction was at work in Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport that was carried out by what seemed to Lor to be fifteen barefooted men. At first she did not understand what they were doing because they had no uniforms and so few and clearly improvised tools, but gradually it became clear to her that they were repairing the building whether they were wearing shoes or not. If she and Arman were supposed to go through customs, they somehow failed to go through the right corridor because they never did see anyone official before arriving in baggage claim, where they had no suitcases to wait for. They pushed out the doors and into the bright, muggy Mumbai day, where forty cabdrivers promptly began to fight for their business.

  ——

  Those first few days, Lor worried she had made a horrible mistake. India was overwhelming. She had not been prepared for any of it: for the crowding, for the poverty, for the sheer difficulty of meeting basic needs. That first night she and Arman checked into their hotel, then decided to go for a walk, just around the block, to try to put off going to bed for at least another couple of hours in the hope that this would help them get over their jet lag faster, but even walking around the block with no destination in mind proved to be exhausting.

  “I don’t know if I can handle this many people staring at me,” she said softly as they waited at an intersection for the light to change. The air was heavy with exhaust and something both ammoniac and salty, like cat piss or burned anise seeds.

  “Ha,” Arman said. “Everyone stared at me in the States. But here—do you see the way they look at my legs?”

  “How are they looking?”

  “They look like … like they think I must be important to have such nice fake legs.”

  “And to be walking with such a pretty blonde,” Lorrie Ann said, as she watched a man with absolutely no legs at all push himself bravely into the intersection on a little mover’s dolly, just a square of plywood with wheels that he propelled by pushing off on the pavement with his hands.

  “Oh, they probably think you’re a prostitute,” he said.

  “Why?!” Lor said. She noticed a kid goat tied up outside a jewelry store, chewing at the decorative shrubbery. A two-year-old was standing next to it, petting its back roughly. There was no adult in evidence.

  “You’ve got your shoulders bare.”

  “It’s a tank top! It’s over a hundred degrees out!” she cried.

  “Do you see a single other woman out here in a tank top?” he asked. Lor looked around. The streets were filled with women, most of them in salwar kameez in bright parrot colors, a few in saris, none of them with bared shoulders.

  “But don’t they just know I’m American?”

  “Maybe,” Arman said. “I don’t know. Who knows, maybe they go back to the slums each night and watch dubbed episodes of Friends.”

  Just then a woman came up to them begging, holding out her hands, which had no fingers and so looked more like paws. Lor stared at the woman’s hands for what felt like the longest time, trying to sort out what she was seeing, before she understood that all ten fingers had been meticulously removed. Lorrie Ann said, “I’m sorry, no,” but Arman got out a few rupees and dropped the coins into the woman’s palms.

  “What do you think she did?” Lor asked, when the woman was gone.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What did she do to have all her fingers chopped off?”

  “Does it matter?” Arman asked.

  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t have given her money. I would have given it to her. I just couldn’t stop staring.”

  “Maybe she stole.”

  “Maybe,” Lorrie Ann said, flaring her nostrils and breathing the twilight and exhaust fumes deep into her lungs. Did she even remember giving back that ten-dollar bill? Did she feel, like I did, that every moment of her new life, this wild romp through India, was something she had stolen? It occurred to me then that maybe Lorrie Ann had never been good, maybe I had been misunderstanding her. Maybe she had just been too scared to break the rules.

  It was quite by accident that they stumbled upon the red-light district one night. It was not the first night they were in Mumbai (truthfully, no one called it Mumbai, preferring the older Bombay), but it was in that first clutch of nights when India was still new and overwhelming, when it seemed like a triu
mph to buy a soda or a pack of cigarettes. (Lor had taken up smoking.)

  The red-light district was surprisingly devoid of red lights, but it was not difficult to figure out what it was because the women were displayed in cages, little prison cells that lined the street, and wherein the women stalked like bored tigers in their lingerie. Lorrie Ann felt they should leave and immediately, but Arman was fascinated.

  “There’re other white people,” he pointed out. “It’s safe.”

  In fact, the only place they had seen more tourists was Leopold Café, the famous expatriate bar. Ahead of them were a giggling German couple, and farther downstream in the sea of people Lorrie Ann could see a gaggle of Japanese, their cameras at the ready. And so they continued to drift, slowly, down the street, eyeing the hubbub and circus around them. The street was indeed crowded, mostly with young Indian men who were grinning foolishly and laughing at one another, gesturing to the girls on the balconies and in the cages, daring one another to approach. The prostitutes were decidedly less energetic. Some of them were quite old and fat, while others appeared to be no more than nine or ten and seemed malnourished. The vast majority, of course, were between fifteen and twenty-five, with skin that ranged from the darkest black to the palest snow. There were also boys for sale, as well as transvestites of both the obvious and the not-so-obvious varieties. The street was permeated by a deranged carnival feel that reminded her of Pleasure Island in Pinocchio, where all the boys slowly turn into donkeys.

  “So is this legal?” Lor asked. “Is that why it’s so … open?”

  “It must be,” Arman said, just as they passed a cop laughing with his arm around what could only be a pimp. “Do you want to get one?”

  “What?” Lor asked, though of course she had heard him perfectly well. She was just surprised he had the poor taste to ask. She moved out of the way so that a water buffalo could pass.

  “You’ve never made love to a woman,” he pointed out. “It would be an adventure.”

  Her anger was so fierce and so intense that she didn’t know what to say. These women were in cages with dirty mattresses wearing soiled clothes. Not to mention the burgeoning AIDS epidemic that was ravaging India. An adventure? Honestly? She watched the pavement under her feet as she walked and avoided stepping on a dead bird.