The Girls from Corona del Mar

by Rufi Thorpe

  In Hvar, a count, also a multimillionaire, had asked Lorrie Ann to marry him one night and she had even said yes, but then in the morning he didn’t seem to remember it and she didn’t bring it up, in part because a sloth, which had been rented from the zoo for the party, had somehow died during the night and the entire morning was like an extended game of Clue, all of them trying to piece together how the sloth had ended up floating in the pool with the side of its head bashed in. One of the girls, a former Playboy bunny, had had some kind of emotional breakdown over the sloth and did nothing but sit on a deck chair, cradling its wet, dead body all morning as she wept into its fur. Finally, it had to be taken from her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just can’t listen to any more of this.”

  Lorrie Ann stopped short. She had been enjoying telling me all this. She glowed as she mentioned Leonardo DiCaprio and counts and the names of exotic cities. These were her adventures and I was telling her to stop.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  Her hands were folded on the table in front of her, as though she were a child at school. What did she think? How on earth was she justifying it to herself?

  “Say it,” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said. I did not want to say things to Lorrie Ann that I couldn’t take back. I wanted to think it through.

  “I know you’re thinking it—just say it. Say it.”

  “He’s all alone!” I cried. “He’s alone in a nursing home and you’re fucking doing blow in nightclubs throughout Europe!”

  Lorrie Ann smiled as though I had said exactly what she expected. “And it makes you sick,” she said. “It makes you sick to think of him suffering while I have a good time.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry, but it does.”

  “Tell me, how much of my life would be enough? How much am I supposed to be willing to give up? All of it?”

  “No, obviously—I’m not talking about that,” I said, unsure what I really was asking of her.

  “You want me to be a martyr? Is that the idea? Motherhood equals martyrdom. There isn’t supposed to be any limit to the amount of suffering you can voluntarily endure?”

  I felt that she was twisting things, making this about something else. “No, but you can’t be partying in this frivolous, gross way while he’s suffering. Doesn’t his suffering matter to you at all?”

  “How is it any different than you enjoying your life with Franklin here in Istanbul, having the gall to do something as useless as translate an old fucking poem, when there are women being raped and dying every fucking day in the Congo, men slaughtering one another, children becoming soldiers. They rape the women with guns. Did you know that? After they are done raping her themselves, they sometimes put a gun up her and pull the trigger. So tell me, how is it different?”

  “He’s your son!” I said.

  Lor sighed, as though I were offering her the most pedestrian and boring of arguments.

  “We’re all brothers and sisters, Mia. Every ounce of human suffering is equal to every other. Zach’s suffering is not more than a child’s in the Congo just because we are genetically related. That’s just … obviously fallacious.”

  When had Lorrie Ann started using words like “fallacious”? Was it Arman and his collection of strange books that was responsible? When had she begun living according to general principles so abstracted from reality? It was almost as though Zach were an idea and not a person. But then, I realized, she had approached the decision about whether or not to have him in the exact same abstract way. I sensed dimly that all of Lor’s life had been this same kind of grueling march back to the Chevron to return that wilted ten-dollar bill. It was a mathematical goodness, without spontaneity or heart.

  She covered her face with her hands for a moment, then sighed and resettled herself at the table. She spoke as though earnestly trying to explain to me the simplest of factual things: “If the general idea is to decrease human suffering, then it is unethical for me to seek suffering. If I thought I could make Zach’s suffering less, I would do it, because then it would balance out. But my choice was that either both of us should suffer unspeakably or only he should suffer unspeakably. If I were making the choice regarding someone other than myself, the answer would be clear. If I had to decide: either Mia and Zach can both suffer unspeakably or only Zach can suffer unspeakably, obviously, the right thing would be to choose that only he suffer. But somehow when I make the same decision regarding myself, it is considered selfish instead of sane.”

  It was just a math problem to her. I thought about the way Zach looked at her, with wonder, with such awestruck love.

  “But obviously,” I said, “seeing you would make his suffering less! You know that. You know he loves you and he’s scared and he’s all by himself in a strange place.”

  Lorrie Ann sighed. “I have come to believe,” she said, as though she were finally confessing the truth, a truth she had wanted to shield me from, but now had no choice but to reveal, “that what they are doing is morally wrong.”

  “They?”

  “The doctors. The hospitals. The social workers.”

  “In what way?”

  “They keep him alive—that’s the only definition of goodness they know, so they don’t care what the cost of life is, they want life and only life at any cost. They discount his suffering, they discount his misery. They even refuse to give him painkillers because they want him to live longer. It is beginning to seem to me like Mengele. Like science without any human feeling. It is the way robots would run things, creatures without any feelings.”

  “But—”

  “They do it for dogs, Mia. For dogs. For dogs, we believe in kindness over life. Put them out of their misery. Once their lives become agony, we end it.”

  “But who has the power to decide that for another human being? Zach can’t decide. You can’t decide.”

  “I should be allowed to decide. I love him more than anyone else. I should be allowed to decide. Now it is a doctor who decides. A doctor who doesn’t care about him at all.”

  Honestly, I could understand her outrage. I knew exactly how much medicine had betrayed Lorrie Ann: the My Little Pony eye shadow nurse, the doctors who used ulcer medicine on her without worrying. She didn’t trust these people and why should she?

  “In your particular case,” I said, “I agree. I would want you and not some doctor to have control over whether Zach lives or dies. But would you really want every mother to have that right?”

  “Yes,” Lorrie Ann said quickly. She’d clearly already thought about it. “I think mothers should be allowed to kill their children.”

  “Across the board?”

  “Across the board. From in utero until, I don’t know, until they are eighteen?”

  “Eighteen!”

  “All right, maybe twelve. Until they can decide for themselves. If they can decide for themselves. If the child is mentally incompetent, it is the mother’s job to decide.”

  “What about the father?”

  “Fuck the father,” Lor said.

  “Are you serious?” I was completely stunned. And yet, to be completely honest, I was enjoying the argument. I loved to argue; I loved the activity itself, of forming arguments and then rebutting them, finding holes in the logic.

  “Jim never had the same kind of connection to Zach that I had. I could feel what Zach needed in my gut. I knew when he had a dirty diaper, when he was hungry, when he was just overtired. Jim loved him, but he didn’t feel Zach inside his own mind—he didn’t have that intuitive connection.”

  I put on the kettle for more tea, but then it occurred to me that what we really needed to do was clean up Lorrie Ann’s bloody feet. I kept the kettle on, but got down a big plastic bin from on top of the fridge and filled it with hot soapy water. “But,” I said, “I would never, ever have wanted my mother to have the right to kill my brothers. I feel like I should have had that right—but not her! Can you imagine?”

  �
�Your mother was bad,” Lor said, “but she wouldn’t have killed your brothers.”

  “But what if she did?”

  “She wouldn’t have. You have to trust women. We rarely kill unless we have to. We are very reasonable.”

  “You say ‘we’ as though women were some kind of unified body.”

  “We are,” she said. I put down the tray of soapy water in front of her and knelt down. I had used dish soap, so it smelled like lemons. Lor hissed with pain as each foot went in.

  “People are people. Some of them are insane, most of them aren’t. But women aren’t all one way, and men aren’t all another way.”

  “Sure they are,” Lor said. “Women have vaginas and men have penises. I’m sick to death of people who claim to be feminists arguing that women are the same as men. They aren’t. They should be equal to men in our esteem, but they are not the same as men. And as history shows, men are prone to kill people for almost no reason at all. Women hardly ever do that.”

  I felt we had gotten off track. This didn’t need to be an argument about the difference between men and women. This was about Zach. This was about the grossness of Playboy bunnies holding dead sloths and marriage proposals you forgot about in the morning. I used a washcloth gently on the bottoms of her feet.

  “I think there’s a piece of glass in there,” Lor said.

  “Do you want me to get the tweezers?”

  She nodded, biting her lip, and I ran to the bathroom to get some tweezers. When I got back, the kettle was singing and I flicked off the burner. “Do you even want any more tea?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I left the kettle steaming on the stove and knelt in front of Lor again. “Which one?”

  She held up her left foot. “In the heel.”

  I smoothed the side of my finger up and down the skin of her heel until I found the lump and the sharp point of the shard of glass. “What I’m saying,” I said, “is that I think the current system works most of the time. It doesn’t work for you, but for most people it’s the best thing. So it’s imperfect, but it’s the best we can do.”

  “Well,” Lor said, “it’s not good enough. And I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s the best we can do at all! I don’t think anyone is even trying to make it better. That’s like saying a canoe is the best we can do!”

  I got the little sliver of glass with the tweezers—I could hear that I had it by the scraping glass and metal sound, but it kept slipping as I tried to pull it out.

  Lor went on, “Why not strive for perfect justice on earth? Why not try to find something that works absolutely perfectly all of the time? I mean, it’s like we’ve just given up on justice. No one’s even trying anymore. We just have all these shitty stupid laws, and people always say, ‘Well, it’s the best we’ve got!’ Fuck that. Fuck them. Oh, ow, that hurts!”

  “It’s out,” I said, holding out for her inspection the sliver of green glass I had extracted from her heel.

  “Listen,” Lor said, as she plucked the glass from me to see it closer, “we all know that the current justification for abortion is just bullshit. It’s not yet a life? Come on! That’s not the point! That’s semantics! It would become a life if you left it alone, and everyone, everyone knows that. Women who get abortions, they don’t feel light and easy about it—but they know, they know deep in their blood that it is their right to kill their children.”

  Her argument made me uncomfortable. When I had had my abortion, I had not considered it a “collection of cells.” I had thought of it as a baby, and I had decided it was my right to kill it.

  “That is not the point. That is not the point,” I said. “The point is, even if what they are doing is morally wrong, that doesn’t mean Zach deserves to be all alone.”

  “You want me to be party to actions I believe are unethical, and I just can’t. You want me to sit there and watch while they torture my boy. Well, I’m not that brave. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “I’m not asking you to be brave,” I said, flustered.

  “But you would rather I was sober,” she said. “And it takes being brave to be sober. Part of the reason I do drugs is because I can’t handle any of this, and you want me to be able to handle it because you would feel better about that. But, Mia, I don’t make decisions in my life based on how it makes you feel.”

  I stammered because of course it sounded absurd, the idea that she would make major life decisions according to my feelings, and yet that was exactly what I wanted her to do. “But you know this is gross. You know it is.”

  “Exactly,” Lor said, “which is why I choose to be high all the time.”

  “I think I might be pregnant,” I blurted. It was almost as if her honesty had pulled it out of me the way a metal filing is drawn to a magnet.

  Lor looked up at me as though I had rung a gong. “That’s so exciting,” she said.

  Just then, Franklin walked in the door with Bensu on his shoulders.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Yes or No

  Franklin stood there for a moment, his hands on Bensu’s ankles, taking in the scene. Bensu was wearing little black patent-leather dress shoes. I remembered suddenly the tea set I had bought her. I wasn’t entirely sure how much Franklin had heard. He could read me as easily as he could read Inanna, and he knew he had walked in on something, but had he heard the word “pregnant”? Had he heard that it was my voice saying it?

  “Hey, baby,” I said. I caught his eye, but his face was a mask of friendliness.

  “Look who I found out in the hall,” Franklin said.

  “I refuse to betray my country,” Bensu said. “Do whatever you want to me.”

  “She’s a spy,” Franklin explained. “And you must be …?” He reached out a hand to shake with Lorrie Ann, and Bensu had to cling to his hair in order to keep her balance as he leaned. If it hurt him, the way she grabbed his hair, he gave no sign of it. My pulse began to regulate as more and more it seemed that Franklin hadn’t heard anything.

  “Lorrie Ann,” she said.

  The change in Franklin was instantaneous and so genuine it almost broke my heart. “Oh my God!” he cried. “Why didn’t you call me and tell me?” he asked, turning to me. “We’re so, so happy to have you here. I’m so glad to meet you!”

  Behind him I mimed to Lorrie Ann a zipper across my lips. I mouthed: “He doesn’t know.”

  Lorrie Ann was clearly flustered, trying to greet Franklin and take in my frantic sign language. “It was a surprise,” she said, smiling winningly at him. I noted that she did not say: “I called Mia for help when I was barefoot and bleeding in the Grand Bazaar.”

  “How crazy!” Franklin exclaimed. “Still, you should have called me, Mia. I would have picked up something special.”

  “I’m making chicken,” I said.

  “Chicken will be fine,” Lorrie Ann said. “More than fine.”

  She flicked her eyes at me, and I knew she was saying: “He didn’t hear. It’s okay.” Once more, we were co-conspirators, the way we had been as girls. That was how easy it was to regain: one secret, and suddenly we were a team.

  “You should see how she cooks the chicken,” Franklin said. “She rubs it with cinnamon and all these crazy spices—unbelievable.”

  “If you are going to kill me,” Bensu said from above him, “please have mercy and do it quickly.”

  “Oh, okay,” Franklin said and swung her down from his shoulders. “Where would you like me to kill you?”

  “In the living room,” Bensu said.

  “Come this way then,” Franklin said. “I’ll be right back,” he assured us, but Lorrie Ann and I were both too curious to see how he was going to kill Bensu in the living room, and we followed them.

  “Now you have to stand bravely against the wall,” he said, “and close your eyes and then I’m going to shoot you with this gun”—he gestured with his fingers, making the shape of a handgun—“and then you have to die, all right?”

  Bensu nodded gravely and r
eadied herself against the wall.

  “Any last words, spy?” Franklin asked.

  “I only want to say,” Bensu said, “that I have chosen to die instead of to betray my country. And also that I am very jealous that she got to meet Leonardo DiCaprio.” Bensu tried to point at Lorrie Ann, but her eyes were closed and so she wound up pointing at the ottoman beside the red chair. So that was why I had kept hearing someone out in the hall; Bensu had been spying. Had she heard me say I might be pregnant?

  “I see,” Franklin said and raised his eyebrows at me and Lorrie Ann. “Prepare to die!”

  Bensu smoothed her brow, her eyes still closed, and waited bravely for death.

  “Pow pow pow!” Franklin said, shooting her with his fingers. “Pow pow!”

  Bensu’s eyes flew open, those emerald eyes, with a look of pure betrayal. She clutched at her chest as she slowly slid down the wall, her legs buckling beneath her. “Shame on you,” she said. “I’m just a child!”

  Franklin just shrugged, still smiling, as Bensu went through her death throes. She moaned and spasmed for a very long time. When it seemed she was finally done, he went over and offered her a hand. “Very good dying,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Hey Bensu,” I said, “I have a present for you.”

  “What is it?” Bensu asked skeptically.