The Girls from Corona del Mar

by Rufi Thorpe

  “Never mind,” he said, clearly put out by her silence. “I forget how puritanical you are.”

  “I’m not puritanical,” she said.

  “Whatever you want to call it,” Arman said, then chucked her on the shoulder. “I love you anyway, all right?”

  The next day they visited Elephanta Island to look at the cave sculptures. They did not know who the gods depicted in the sculptures were, but they wandered through them, in awe, as around them massive figures, twice as tall as Arman, writhed in the stone, frozen mid-coitus or splitting into snakes. There were no plaques that explained any of it, at least not in English.

  “This is incredible,” Lor said. “But what does … I wish I knew what it meant.”

  “I think that’s Shiva,” Arman said, trying to be helpful.

  “Right,” Lor said.

  Later, when they were buying a soda, they watched a monkey swing down from a tree and wrestle a bag of chips away from an eight-year-old. The startled child fell to the ground, but did not cry out, and then watched in wonder as the monkey ran away with her chips. Lor and Arman watched the monkey eat the chips up in the tree as they drank their Fanta.

  “So Shiva is …?” Lor finally asked.

  “The god of destruction,” Arman said.

  “How appropriate.”

  Arman fished in his travel pouch and handed her a Starburst. This was their preferred daytime drug administration method: they carefully inserted a quarter or half of a pill of oxycodone into each Starburst, then wrapped it back up again. During the day you could simply unwrap the candy and chew it thoroughly, crushing up the pill fragment with your teeth, but keeping yourself from gagging by means of the sour Starburst flavor. At this point they were still not shooting up. That would come later.

  When they began their descent down the thousand steps that led from the sacred caves to the docks, a man behind them began to take pictures of Lorrie Ann’s hair. She became nervous and tripped, and unable to catch her balance, wound up falling down thirty or forty steps quite brutally as all the while the little man chased after her with his camera, taking shot after shot. He kept shooting even as she finally stopped herself from falling farther, panting on her hands and knees on a step, looking up at him, her nose bleeding. It took Arman a long time on his legs to catch up to them, and so for almost a full minute Lor simply looked at the man as he took pictures of her bloody nose.

  She did not think he spoke English or maybe she would have yelled at him, at least said something indignant. At no point did he offer her a hand up. When Arman made it down to them, he shouldered past the man saying, “Show’s over, buddy,” and offered Lorrie Ann one of his crutches.

  There were things about India that Lorrie Ann simply could not understand. Prostitution was legal, but not in some enlightened, liberal, secular wet dream, not in a Nevada Bunny Ranch or Amsterdam sex club kind of way. The women seemed to be in an obvious state of enslavement. Yet it was not hidden. Indeed, you could see vibrators and dildos on display, laid out in neat rows on blankets, at the electronics market near Victoria Terminus Station. India was the birthplace of The Kama Sutra, after all. Porn DVDs were sold on almost every corner. And yet most marriages were arranged; most women were virgins when they married; to bare your shoulders was to announce yourself as a prostitute. Bombay was undoubtedly dangerous, yet women walked around unafraid, even at night, even by themselves. Lor simply could not figure it out.

  She also noticed how the women dressed. She loved their flowing salwar kameezes, their bright scarves, their proud lipstick. They seemed decorated not for the eyes of men, but for themselves. Even ugly or fat women took care with their appearance in this way. Part of it was the colors, which were wildly bright: blue silk pants with bright marigold tops and shimmering citrine scarves. Lorrie Ann couldn’t get enough of it, and eventually she asked Arman if he would think she was foolish if she bought one.

  “Buy one,” he said. “They look comfortable.”

  And so, in a session of awkward, virginal haggling, Lorrie Ann bought a beautiful olive green and mango salwar kameez from a vendor on the street, down past Leopold Café in Colaba, where there were many white people and where she was sure she would be ripped off, but at least able to negotiate in English. She tried it on that night in the hotel room and was stunned by how light and breathable it was. The relief from the heat was almost instantaneous—the breeze moved right through the fabric.

  “I’m never wearing anything else,” Lorrie Ann announced and threw her wadded-up jeans in the tiny wastebasket in their hotel room.

  “Good,” Arman said. “You look beautiful.”

  She waggled her head back and forth like an Indian girl for him. “You think so?” she asked, in a fairly good imitation of a Hindi accent.

  “Like a Bollywood star,” he said.

  “Yaar,” Lorrie Ann said, “you lie like a rug.”

  Perhaps they would have stayed in Bombay longer, or perhaps not, but they decided to leave after visiting the Haji Ali Dargah.

  The mosque was, quite simply, the most beautiful thing Lorrie Ann had ever seen. The mosque was built out at sea and was connected to the shore by a low seawall, so that at high tide it became an island, unreachable except by boat. At low tide, anyone could walk along the seawall and visit it. Her guidebook highly recommended it and told the story of the incredible Haji Ali for whom the mosque had been built, a saint who, it was said, met a woman in distress in the street who was holding an empty vessel and asked her what was wrong. She told him that she had tripped and spilled the oil her husband had sent her to get and now she was afraid to go home because she knew her husband would beat her. Saint Haji Ali asked her to take him to the spot where she had spilled the oil, and he stuck his thumb into the ground there and oil began to spout from the earth. The woman filled up her vessel, thanked him profusely, and went home. At first Haji Ali was well pleased with his act, but gradually he became worried he had harmed the earth in some way by so brutally jabbing it with his thumb. Full of remorse and suffering from constant nightmares, he soon fell ill and died. His coffin was sent out to sea, but through a miracle or else some trick of the tides, floated back to shore and so, where his coffin had been found, the mosque had been erected in his honor.

  The whitewashed dargah stood like a mirage upon the shimmering sea, and to Lor its minarets and spires looked like something from her dreams. The afternoon sun was blinding, and it was difficult to feel she wasn’t really in a dream as she and Arman slowly made their way along the seawall. Legless beggars were laid out on blankets, chanting, begging for alms. They made low buzzing sounds in their throats and waggled their amputated limbs in slow, rhythmic circles. Lorrie Ann asked Arman for money and he handed her a fistful of change. She gave a rupee or two to every beggar they passed. She did not know if they were lepers or if they had been disfigured another way. Some had faces that looked like heads of cauliflower. She stooped silently to place the coins on their towels, watching her own shadow move quickly over their prostrate bodies.

  “Cover your hair,” Arman said to her, very quietly and out of the corner of his mouth. Lor reached up and touched her hair, which was loose over her shoulders. She was wearing her salwar kameez, but she hadn’t even thought about a head scarf. She took the long narrow scarf that had come with her outfit and tried to wrap it around her head.

  “That’s good,” Arman said, though he still seemed nervous. They kept walking along the seawall. The dargah was more than five hundred meters from shore and it seemed they might never get there.

  “I don’t think we should keep going,” Arman said finally.

  “What do you mean?”

  They kept walking forward but they slowed their steps.

  “People are looking,” Arman said. “I just don’t think we should be here.”

  “The guidebook said we could—”

  “I know, but—” he began to say, and right at that moment Lorrie Ann felt something hit the back of her head.


  “Let’s go,” Arman took her by the arm and spun her around, walking her in the opposite direction.

  “What was that?” Lorrie Ann asked, reaching to feel the back of her head.

  “Don’t touch it. Don’t,” Arman said, but it was already too late. Her hand had found the huge wad of rapidly cooling mucus stuck to her hair. Lorrie Ann snatched her hand away, looked at her fingers.

  “They spit on me?”

  “Yes, don’t touch it,” Arman said. “You don’t want to get TB.”

  “They spit on me?” she asked again, unable to understand. She shook her hand, not wanting to rub it clean on her pretty outfit, but desperate to get the slime off her fingers. She began to hyperventilate, but she wasn’t sure why. Another part of her was perfectly calm: So you were spit on, so what?

  “Why would they do that?” she asked Arman, her voice quavery like a child’s.

  “Because you’re an infidel,” Arman said gruffly. “Let’s go to McDonald’s.”

  And so they went to McDonald’s, where they bought Maharaja Macs and where Lorrie Ann was able to wash the phlegm out of her hair in the women’s restroom. After frantically scrubbing her hands with the pale pink soap that seemed to be a staple of all bathrooms throughout the world, no matter what country you were in, she returned to the table and pretended to think it was funny and part of a great adventure that she had been spit on.

  Arman laughed too. They giggled, eating their curried French fries, sipping their Diet Cokes. Neither of them commented on how odd it was that Arman, with his shorts, his Metallica T-shirt, his pierced ears, and his long flowing hair, had not been spit on. Nor did Lorrie Ann broach the wild panic floating just beneath the surface of her mind that somehow the person had known what she had done, had spit on her not because of her blond hair and her inadequate scarf, but because of Zach, because of Dana, because of the drugs, because of the way she let Arman touch her body at night, even the way she let him hold her throat while they were kissing in a gentle parody of strangulation, as though it were essential for his eroticism that he toy with the idea of killing her. She believed, on some level, that the man who had spit on her had seen all of this and had known, known as Arman had said, that she was an infidel.

  She did not belong in God’s house. That much she knew for sure, even as she ate the Maharaja Mac, even as she reached out a hand and snagged one of Arman’s huge brown fingers and squeezed, smiling in his eyes.

  And so they decided, later that night, to head down to Goa and they bought bus tickets the very next morning. Goa: land of untariffed beer and white sandy beaches, nesting place of American hippies, wanton sprawl of spice farms traversed by elephants wearing garlands of flowers, the spring break destination of every young Indian student. Goa, surely, would be kind to them and would restore order to what had increasingly become a jumble of events they were unable to interpret. Things had stopped leading from one to another. A monkey could just swoop down from a tree and steal your bag of chips. A man could spit on you or take pictures of you when you were bleeding and nothing at all would happen except that later you might go to Leopold’s and drink what you thought was perhaps the best Long Island Iced Tea you’d ever had in your life. Imagine finding it in India! Of all places!

  In other words, the proper scale of things was dangerously askew and reality was fraying. Goa was supposed to fix all of that, or at least Lorrie Ann hoped it would. Between the malaria medication and the state of her life, she was having nightmares every night. She wasn’t the kind to wake up screaming, but the kind to wake up silent and paralyzed, and so she rarely woke Arman and instead spent many two a.m.’s watching Bombay flicker outside their hotel window, smoking a cigarette, piecing together dreams that seemed to be about her mother, about the Native Americans, about Iraq and Jim and gunfire amid the floating minarets of impossibly beautiful mosques, about Zach and a preacher who stood over him speaking in tongues and foaming at the mouth.

  Whatever the procedure may have been for boarding the bus to Goa, Lorrie Ann and Arman were unable to determine what it was. They stood in a mob of anxious people with suitcases late at night, where they repeatedly asked others if they were in the right place. They were told that they were, but neither Lorrie Ann nor Arman felt at all sure that they would make it onto a bus, which was why when a man beckoned them to board, they simply got on, even though the bus he put them on was not the first-class, air-conditioned bus with sleeping bunks they had been promised and had paid for, but a stifling tour bus where the AC was broken and the seats did not recline. As soon as they ascertained from their neighbors that the bus was indeed going to Goa, they decided it was worth it to just stay on and not make a fuss.

  The drive, they soon discovered, was through a series of switchbacks in the mountains that the bus took at far above what seemed a safe speed. In fact, the bus was so loaded down that the brakes were not actually fully functioning, or at least this was Arman’s interpretation of the frantic way the bus driver would punch the horn as he headed into each curve, warning all other cars to get out of the way. Traffic lanes in India were also more of a suggestion than a mandate, and so the bus driver handled the wild fishtailing of his vehicle with aplomb by making use of both his own lanes and the lanes reserved for oncoming traffic. It was hot inside the bus and it smelled strongly of exhaust. They had boarded at ten at night and were expected to arrive at their destination in Goa at seven in the morning.

  For about the first two hours, Lorrie Ann felt she was having an adventure. By two in the morning, she felt trapped in a nightmare. She was unable to sleep, yet unable to stay awake. The floor of the bus was burning hot from the engines, and so she couldn’t let her sandaled feet touch the floor without the skin of her feet starting to blister. She actually started crying at one point, silent tears just slipping down her face, both because she was uncomfortable and because she was ashamed that being uncomfortable was proving to be too much for her. At a rest stop she peed and then managed to beg two Valium off some British tourists, young men who agreed that this bus ride was one of the worst things that had ever happened to them.

  The Valium helped, but it still seemed to be an eternity before they arrived in Goa and the bus ride came to an end. Lor realized that the fact that she was in such psychological distress from a simple nine hours of discomfort—not even pain, just discomfort—was a sign of how radically different she was from the Indians around her, who accepted this trial as nothing more than an ordinary part of life. All of the Indians were laughing and excited as they exited the bus, stretching their limbs joyfully, ready for a day of touristing in sunny Goa. Arman, even, had taken it a bit better than she had, and it made her understand more fully how much one is changed by war. Lor, of course, had never fought in a war. She had never even run an obstacle course. The most that she had done, really, was birth a child—even that she had done with an epidural and, in the end, while unconscious.

  It made her think that all of Arman’s talk about fat-fuck Americans being somehow unworthy of their status as world megapower was more justified than she had at first thought.

  Despite the hellish ambiance of the journey, Goa was all they had been promised and more. Their hotel was located in a tiny and little-touristed village called Mandrem and was a large two-story circular green building like a beautifully frosted layer cake. She and Arman took a room on the ground floor that contained a platform bed, a small bathroom where the water that came out of the tap was a deep umber brown, and a small niche in the wall that housed a pure white statue of Ganesh, the plaster never having been painted. Their room smelled faintly of incense. The walls were painted purple and green. The tile floor was a mosaic of different colors of marble.

  The other guests of the hotel were largely British or Australian. Most were families, the parents in their thirties or so, their children naked and brown with suntan, running around the terraced gardens like some kind of hippie fantasy. If it was taboo to bare your shoulders in Bombay, white women in Goa wo
rried about no such thing, and wandered about in shocking states of undress, naked under thin silk dresses, or else topless at the beach. No one ever worried about anything, not even about what time it was, and businesses had no set hours of operation. If a business was closed, you could just continue to knock at the door and someone might come who could help you. If not, you would try again later, or else you wouldn’t. You could rent a motorcycle on the strength of your word and a promise to bring it back sometime in the next week. You could pay a young man in a music shop to teach you how to build a guitar. You could get vegetable fritters by the fistful for ten cents American. You could spend all afternoon drinking beer and roasting on the sand, not being bothered by anyone except, at one point, a curious little calf the color of coffee with lovely black eyes as shiny as lacquered boxes.

  And yet, reality here proved not to be any more lucid than reality in Bombay. In fact, with each passing day, Lorrie Ann felt she was falling deeper and deeper into some sort of terrible, unending dream.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A Kinder Sea

  Part of the problem was that they had no plan. When they had first decided to go to India, it was “for a few months” and “to bum around.” They assumed they would have some kind of enlightening experience that would allow them to discover what the next part of their lives should be. They were counting on India to be the mystical experience that would save them from their secular, Western nightmare, allow them to find their true selves, etc., etc. And yet, it turned out, India was a real place. It wasn’t just a fantasy. And they had a set amount of money and a set amount of drugs, both of which were slowly running out.

  What would they do when they ran out of pills? They had been in India only a month and already the pills were more than half gone. “We should start conserving,” Arman said when Lorrie Ann pointed this out, and yet neither of them did anything to begin cutting back. They continued budgeting three pills a day each, but almost always having four. Lor wondered if she would get sick when they ran out. In a way, she was looking forward to it: a few cleansing days of fever and then a fresh start, sober, clear eyed. Perhaps then India would do its work on her. Perhaps India was failing to affect her because she was too high.