The Girls from Corona del Mar

by Rufi Thorpe

  “No,” Lorrie Ann said, swatting me away with her hands. “What, Mia, do you lie to him about everything?”

  “Lie to me?” Franklin asked, turning fully from the sink now. Because I was facing Lorrie Ann, my back was to him, but I could feel him come up behind me and place a hand on my waist. That was his first instinct: to protect me from her.

  “Honestly, Mia, I thought maybe you knew what you were doing,” Lorrie Ann said, “but then, all night we’ve been talking and—he’s great! He’s fucking fantastic! He’s one of the best guys I’ve ever met in my entire life and you are fucking this up.”

  “I don’t know what this is about,” Franklin said, making a circular motion with his hand in the air between me and Lorrie Ann on the word “this,” “but she isn’t fucking anything up.”

  I couldn’t speak. Lorrie Ann’s hair was shining like gold in the candlelight. She was so beautiful.

  “She broke her own toe with a hammer. She had an abortion in high school and she couldn’t get it scheduled except for the day before we had a championship game in softball, so she broke her own toe to get out of playing in the game.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “I know about the abortion,” Franklin said. He squeezed my waist.

  We both waited to see if he would say anything more, but he didn’t. Outside, I could hear a gaggle of teenagers laughing and talking together in Turkish. It was Saturday night. It came back to me in a flash: what it was like to be young and going out to a party on a Saturday night, your pulse quickening with the desire that something, anything happen.

  “She’s pregnant. The test came back positive. But she didn’t want to tell you,” Lorrie Ann said.

  I felt Franklin’s hand drop from my waist and I turned to him. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry,” I said. “I just needed time to think about it.”

  “You’re pregnant?” he asked, and his voice almost cracked. He looked confused, like a dog that has been hit for no reason.

  But I couldn’t stop. It was a kind of logorrhea, the words that kept spilling from my mouth: “And we’ve joked about the two-body problem before, but I just thought if this could happen after the book comes out then it would be a different story, and I don’t mind giving up my career, but how could I ask you to give up yours?”

  “You’re going way too fast for me,” Franklin said. “Are you pregnant?”

  I nodded.

  His face crumpled, and he hid behind his hands. After a moment, he rubbed his face as though to wipe the expression off it. His eyes were wide and staring. He was furious.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “So you really did lie to me?”

  “She was going to take another test next week and tell you the truth,” Lorrie Ann offered.

  “Shut up, Lolola,” I said.

  “I’m going for a walk,” Franklin said, and snapped the dish towel that was in his hands so that it landed in the sink.

  I held my face still as best I could and looked at the floor.

  And then he was gone.

  Yes or No, plus or minus, life or death. We were supposed to decide these things by what? Having conversations? Slamming doors?

  I had taken Space’s body to be cremated at the vet, but then, by some sort of voodoo or spell, I found myself unable to pick up her ashes. I don’t know what they do with the unclaimed ashes of the bodies of dogs. I suppose they throw them in the garbage.

  When they sent Jim back there were only pieces of him, and Lorrie Ann was not allowed to see them. They could have been pieces of anybody. Jim had in fact described for her the process by which locals were often hired to rove the city streets with trash bags, looking for human pieces. Sometimes there would be a piece big enough that you could tell which part of the body it had come from: a piece of scalp, an ear, a portion of a hand. But often they were simply chunks of meat like the stew beef you could buy at the supermarket. Iraqi men would wander around, their right hands protected by plastic grocery bags, their left hands clutching garbage bags held open to collect the pieces, bent over to scan the ground like chickens searching for grain.

  They gathered whatever could be found and then divided it by the number of soldiers that were known to have died. They sent the small clumps of stew meat back to the States in metal coffins, as though the stew meat could be equated with the human form in any satisfying math.

  How tiny was the being inside me? The size of a pea? Of a kidney bean?

  How could something that small feel so much to me like something that had a will? Like something that wanted to live?

  “I’m sorry,” Lorrie Ann said, in the reverberating silence that followed the slamming of the front door and the exit of the love of my life.

  “You are the most selfish person I’ve ever known,” I said.

  “Mia.”

  “Get the fuck out of my house.”

  She just stood there, primly holding the back of her chair as though waiting for the maître d’ to pull it from the table for her. “Get the fuck out,” I said again.

  “Maybe in a minute, when you’re less mad, it might be better if I were here.”

  I walked over to the table, poured the last of the wine into my already full glass, brought it to my lips, and gulped.

  “Maybe you need a friend,” she said, eyeing me.

  “You aren’t my friend,” I said. “We haven’t lived in the same state, let alone the same city, since we were eighteen years old. The fact that I thought we were friends was delusional. I don’t understand you. I can’t make peace with your decisions. I can’t make you my friend again just by telling you a secret, okay? Because you’re just going to fucking betray me by blurting it all out!”

  “There is some way,” Lorrie Ann said, carefully, as though she were stepping around a mine, “in which we are friends. We’ve known each other for an awfully long time. That counts for something. And maybe I told Franklin because I am your friend.”

  “It doesn’t count for enough,” I said, and tossed back the rest of the wine in my glass. “You told Franklin because you’re high enough to think that you know best about someone else’s life, when you don’t know anything. But you know what, you’ve always thought you were better than everybody. Hell, I thought you were better than everybody! I had this whole mythology about you and how fucking perfect you were. But how did that help you? It didn’t do a fucking thing. It didn’t matter how much I loved you—my love was just this sort of selfish indulgence, this thing I was doing for myself. When I came back to try to help when Zach was born, I was in the way. I’ve always just been in the way for you. That’s why you don’t think it’s any big deal to betray me.”

  Outside I could still hear the sounds of laughing groups of girls and guys, wandering from bar to bar. Istanbul had become a happening place to be. A destination. A party city. That was how Lorrie Ann had wound up here, after all.

  “I know it doesn’t seem like it right now,” Lorrie Ann said into the silence of the kitchen, for it had been some time since either of us spoke, “but it’s a happy thing when a child is conceived. No matter what. It’s a joyful thing.”

  I just stared at her. She tucked some loose strands of hair behind her ears. “Maybe you could let me celebrate with you.”

  “I’ve just lost the love of my life,” I said.

  “Don’t be melodramatic,” Lorrie Ann said. “He went for a walk. He’ll be back. And when he comes back, he’ll love you just as much as he did when he left.”

  “God, you’re so sane—it’s awful!” I said, and slumped down in a chair. Lorrie Ann just laughed. “Honestly, though,” I said, “if there is a time in my life that I get to be melodramatic, isn’t this it?”

  “No,” Lorrie Ann said, coming to sit with me, “you never get to be melodramatic ever again.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because,” she said, and reached out a hand, pressed her palm against my tummy, “you’re gonna have a baby.”

  “You don’t
know that,” I said.

  “You’re pregnant, Mia,” she repeated, smiling at me.

  “He didn’t smile. Even for a second. I know it’s too much to expect, but I thought maybe he would be happy.”

  “He didn’t have much of a chance,” Lorrie Ann pointed out.

  “I know,” I said. “I just wanted so badly for him to be happy.”

  The way Jim had been happy.

  The way Dumuzi had been happy.

  I wanted, more than anything, I realized, for Franklin to look at me with wonder, startled, the way the first man who ever bit into a peach must have looked: alarmed to realize that life was so good, so sweet, so abundant. I wanted to be that magic for Franklin.

  We had never talked about having children of our own, though. I had made a joke once that if we had children we should raise them speaking Latin like Montaigne and I felt that something about it had made him uncomfortable: maybe he had laughed too much, or not enough, but either way I got the feeling that he felt I was proposing having children, when of course I had not been, I wouldn’t have dared. Not knowing that the idea of children had been what drove a wedge between him and Elizabeth, Elizabeth who had an abundance of dark hair, which she kept tied back like a prairie woman and who had an unnaturally large and perfect mouth like Julia Roberts.

  Whatever it is that hurts you, don’t talk to anyone about it.

  I looked at Lorrie Ann in the candlelight, which was now low and guttering, and in her face I could almost see the ghost of Zach’s features. That had been the worst thing about Zach really: how much he looked like her. A distorted, howling galla made of Lorrie Ann’s own beautiful face. Where was he now? What hands smoothed his brow? It was too terrible to even think about, let alone speak of.

  I felt then that I would kill to protect the tiny bean inside of me, the plus sign, the zygote. I didn’t know why—it wasn’t so much that I wanted to become a mother or to have a child. It wasn’t anything to do with the Gerber baby or with the way an infant’s head smelled or with tiny shoes. It wasn’t anything I could name.

  “I just get the feeling,” I croaked to Lorrie Ann, “that it wants to live.”

  She nodded quickly as though she knew exactly what I was talking about, and suddenly I found that I was howling like an animal that has been mortally wounded, and Lorrie Ann’s arms were around me, and I was fifteen again, and she was my friend.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Amor Fati

  Some time after that, Lorrie Ann journeyed to the corner store to obtain her provisions. In addition to her Imodium A-D, candies, and juice, she also brought back a small plastic tub of baklava that she claimed was for the baby and a pack of cigarettes that she promised to smoke only on the balcony. Together we sat on the oversize red chenille sofa, our legs folded tailor style, facing each other with the plastic tray of baklava between us.

  “Even the idea of Mother’s Day just made me cringe,” Lorrie Ann said. “It felt like I might actually be becoming less of a person, less valid, less interesting.”

  “There is something powerfully uncool about motherhood in the cultural Geist,” I agreed.

  “But then what it actually was? Being a mom? Well, it seemed not just like the most important thing I’d ever done, but the most important thing anybody could do. What is more important? Buying and selling imaginary money? Making cars? Everything people make in this world is for people, and women are the only ones who make people.”

  “Men are sort of essential to the process,” I pointed out. Lorrie Ann stuffed another baklava into her mouth. She seemed ravenous. I was beginning to understand that something about the drugs made only sweet things taste good to her. It was strange how normal and manageable Lor being on heroin was rapidly becoming.

  “Sure, and fatherhood is super important too. I’m not trying to make this a women-only club by any means. Just that even men rarely view their role in child rearing as the most important thing they do, when in fact it is clearly the most important thing that anybody does.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said.

  “What’s more important?” Lorrie Ann asked.

  “Scholarship? Art? Politics?” I took a bite of one of the baklava and suddenly understood why Lor was unable to stop eating them—they were dense with butter and honey. I had to fight not to shove the whole thing in my mouth at once.

  “Politics?! Politics is the most useless thing I’ve ever even heard of!” Lorrie Ann crowed. “You know what Arman had to show for his life? He killed a few people. Well, five people, one of whom was a child. He did that for George W. Bush. Do you know how much time women spent making those five people he killed? And all for what? Ideas, worldview, politics. It’s women who encode children with values and worldviews to begin with!”

  There was something about Lorrie Ann’s fanaticism that I found tiring. “Women are undervalued,” I said. “I get it.”

  “No,” Lorrie Ann said, “I’m not saying I want women to be valued more highly. That would be terrible. Then people would start paying attention to what we were doing.”

  “What do you mean: to what we were doing? What are we doing?”

  “I’m just saying, when a woman is a maiden, she’s in the spotlight. Everybody cares what a pretty, young girl does and says. And she’s got some pretty strict archetypes to adhere to: Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella or Britney Spears. Pick your poison. But when you become a young mother? People don’t give a fuck what you’re doing. Their eyes glaze over before they even finish asking you. Once a woman starts doing the most important work of her life, all of a sudden, nobody wants to know a thing about it.”

  “That’s kind of true,” I said. Even I had a hard time retaining interest in my grad school friends once they had become mothers. “People should care more about motherhood.”

  “God no! Please! I’m saying that this shroud of uncoolness around motherhood provides a tremendous amount of freedom.”

  I sucked the honey off my fingers. “But freedom to do what?”

  “Freedom to be,” Lorrie Ann said.

  There was something lofty about the phrase that I both immediately loved and felt suspicious of.

  Lorrie Ann went on, pressing flakes of puff pastry onto her fingertip and then nibbling them off. “Plus the experience of actually having children is so much more than anyone prepares you for, is so much realer than you thought reality could be—the experience itself blows the clichés of motherhood out of the fucking water.”

  “Really?” I said. “I just never got that sense from you.” I had seen Lor mother Zach, and I had even marveled over what a good mother she was, but I had always assumed that if she could somehow switch places with me, she would have.

  “Women who have babies don’t talk about these kinds of things to women who haven’t had babies.” She shrugged.

  “Some kind of secret club?” I asked.

  “I think it’s a protective instinct. The same way a religious person wouldn’t talk about his relationship with God to an atheist.” I felt at once that Lorrie Ann was somehow my ethical or spiritual superior, having gained access years ago to some secret world of motherhood while I chased the false idols of cultural elitism, and at the very same moment I thought: She’s a fucking junkie! These insights of hers are delusions of grandeur and nothing more. Let her have her delusions. Let her believe she is part of some secret cult of motherhood.

  “I can’t even think about the motherhood part right now, honestly,” I said. I kept straining to hear Franklin in the hall, his foot on the stair, but there was nothing, not even the little sounds of Bensu spying.

  “Sure.” Lor nodded.

  “I’m in love with Franklin. Like really in love,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “And this whole time I’ve been, like, straining to be perfect, to not move, to not break the spell, because this is the best thing that has ever happened to me and I know that I don’t deserve him, but—”

  Lorrie Ann made a snorti
ng noise. “Deserve him? Who deserves anything?”

  “You know what I mean,” I said.

  “No,” she said, “tell me, do we deserve the spring? Does the sun come out each day because we were tidy and good? What the fuck are you thinking?”

  I was struck dumb.

  “He loves you,” she said. “He loves you.”

  After a few hours, I wanted badly to go to bed. I wanted to go to bed in part because Lorrie Ann was like an air fern: how she was continuing to stay awake and alert was entirely mysterious to me. It seemed possible that she could stay awake forever. But I also wanted to go to bed because when Franklin came home I wanted to be in the bedroom where we could whisper in private, where he could, perhaps, shuck off his clothes, stinking of beer and cigarettes from whatever dive bar he had hunkered down in, and, in the vulnerability of his nakedness, find me under the covers by the dim light of the moon. This softened, possibly even nonverbal meeting seemed preferable to me than having him walk in on Lorrie Ann and me stuffing our faces with baklava and bitching about our lives, emitting that witchy stink of women gabbing without men.

  And so I made up the couch for Lorrie Ann and lent her one of my sleep shirts. It was when she peeled off her sundress and her impossibly tiny blue silk bra (she was so skinny now that she was even smaller breasted than me) that I saw the tattoo across her shoulder blade: Amor Fati.

  It could be translated “love of fate” or “love of one’s fate.” Nietzsche was obsessed with the idea, though he got it from the Stoics. He wrote in Ecce Homo: “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it.”

  In all, it was nothing more than a fancier version of “embrace the suck.”

  “I didn’t take you for a Nietzsche fan,” I said.