The Girls from Corona del Mar

by Rufi Thorpe

“Portia,” Lorrie Ann said, as though that explained everything.

  “Are you going to go back to her?” I asked. It seemed appropriate that Portia would love Nietzsche; I actually held Nietzsche himself in slightly higher esteem than I did his fans, which is only to say that I did not actively hate Nietzsche for being himself.

  Lorrie Ann slipped my old blue-and-white-striped sleep shirt over her head and tugged it down. It looked huge and billowing on her. “I lied to you,” she said.

  I almost wanted to laugh. How could there possibly be more lies? And yet, of course there were more. There were always more. I rubbed the heel of my hand into my forehead.

  “Portia didn’t throw all of our shoes off the balcony. I threw all of our shoes off our balcony. She’s not the one who went crazy—I’m the one who went crazy. We got into a fight.”

  “A fight over what?”

  Lorrie Ann pursed her lips, sighed, sat down on the made up couch. She looked so much like the little girl who had slept over at my house so many times. “There was a girl. She was young. She had been partying with us for a few nights in a row, and one night she was crying in the bathroom of our hotel suite. She had had some bad sex. I mean, she had started off really liking this guy and she’d gone home with him, but then he was rough with her and she tried to leave. She had these huge handprint bruises and a split lip. I said it was rape. Portia said it was the girl failing to be realistic.”

  “Oh, God,” I said.

  “She said, ‘Men are men, dogs are dogs, a dog will bite you if you take a bone from his mouth. Why are you surprised?’ ”

  “How disgusting.”

  “No, it’s weird—with Portia, she says these things and it doesn’t register as awful right away. She was telling these things to the girl to be nice. She was mentoring her. ‘You made a miscalculation,’ she told the girl, ‘and the best thing to do when you have done that is cut your losses and go limp. If you had just done what he wanted, he wouldn’t have had to beat you so badly.’ ”

  “Gross,” I said.

  “But can you see how, if you’ve lost everything beautiful in your life, that might seem true?” Lor asked. She looked at me with an earnestness that I had not seen in her since she was fifteen.

  “Yes.” I nodded.

  “The worst thing is that I didn’t even get mad at her in the moment. It was days later. I kept thinking about that girl. She looked like you. I mean, not really, but there was something about her that reminded me of you, and I couldn’t get her out of my mind, and then Portia said something about me being lucky for having such pretty feet, and—I mean, I don’t have to tell you that lucky is something I have never been, not once, not ever—I just lost it. We got into this bizarre screaming match, where I kept saying, ‘Lucky is not feet!’ and she kept saying, ‘Luck is nothing but feet! Everything else is what you make it!’ And then I threw all of our shoes off the balcony and into the river, and stormed out.”

  There was silence for a moment as both of us pictured all of those fancy shoes: some scattered on the pavement, some floating on the Bosporus like fantastical, miniature boats.

  “You need to go home,” I said. I hadn’t even been planning to say it, but it slipped out. Without fanfare or dramatics, it just came out—that’s how badly it needed to be said.

  Lor nodded slowly, and her face twitched as she looked at me.

  “You need to go home to your boy,” I repeated.

  “I know,” she said. “But there’s like … a wall.”

  “A wall?”

  “Some kind of huge, towering wall in between me and America.”

  “You’ll be okay,” I said. “I promise.”

  “I know,” she said, “but how to get over the wall?”

  “Is the wall your fear?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, with an eerie matter-of-factness. “The wall is how I’ve been not thinking about him. I built it, but if I’m going to go back, I’ll need to take it down.”

  I sat beside her on the couch. The baklava tray was empty.

  “Can I help?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “But thank you for telling me to go home. It’s true. That’s the only thing left to do.”

  There was a ring to those words: the only thing left to do. Suddenly, I worried Lor might kill herself. When I looked back over at her, she was crying into her clasped hands.

  “I’m fucking terrified,” she said. “I miss him so much.”

  I wrapped my arms around her. Crying, I understood. Crying, I knew what to do with. “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, over and over again. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, and in that moment, her anguish was more real to me than anything in the world. I rocked her back and forth until she stopped crying, and then I tucked her into the couch, expecting at any moment for Franklin to walk through the door.

  I waited in the dark for hours. In my mind, I had imagined that I would hear the front door, then Franklin’s steps as he made his way through the darkened living room back to our bedroom, and then, louder, crisp and suddenly near, the sound of our bedroom door unlatching, the sound of his sandals scuffing on the vinyl flooring, his keys being set down on the dresser. I did not count on the fact that Lorrie Ann would still be awake and that Franklin would stop to talk to her for almost half an hour, assuming as they both did that I was asleep.

  “She asleep?” I heard him ask.

  “I think so. Her light’s been out for hours.”

  “Are those your cigarettes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I bum one?”

  “Do you want to go on the balcony?” she asked.

  “Fuck that,” he said, and I heard them both light cigarettes. Then I heard his heavy step as he stumbled to the kitchen and clattered around to find the ashtray that had come with the apartment: a curious little orange ceramic thing with black fleurs-de-lis crudely painted on it.

  “That fucking tea set,” Franklin said when he got back to the living room.

  “What was that about?”

  I could smell the cigarettes. They weren’t even bothering to blow out the window. I felt somehow peeved that they were subjecting me, an innocent, sleeping, pregnant woman, to their secondhand smoke, and yet I knew this was entirely insane.

  “She wanted to do something nice for Bensu. She just doesn’t know how to be natural. It’s a shame, you know? She tries so hard but it’s always obvious she’s trying so hard.”

  “You should have seen her try to date boys in high school.” Lorrie Ann laughed. “She’d march up to them and tell them that she would like to date them. Or fuck them.”

  I felt like I was going to throw up. I could recognize that neither of them perceived themselves as saying anything mean about me. If anything, there was something loving about the tone of their voices. And it wasn’t even that I was unaware of these flaws in myself—in fact, I was only too aware of them. It was that I had thought that Franklin and Lorrie Ann were somehow magically unaware of these flaws.

  Franklin laughed. “She’s so fucking fierce,” he said. Then, in a different tone: “And insane! God, I keep thinking about it. Why did she lie to me?”

  “Oh,” Lor said, exhaling, “why does anybody lie? She was scared.”

  “I know. I know, she was scared. But that still fucking sucks for me.”

  “It’s scary, finding out you’re pregnant,” Lor said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Fuck yeah. And it’s not—I don’t know, it’s just not a clean choice. It’s not something completely rational.”

  “I may be too drunk to talk about this,” Franklin said.

  “I’m just saying it’s emotional. You can feel the baby inside of you.”

  “Already?”

  “Already,” she said. “Not like kicking and moving, but you’re aware of it.”

  “But you decided not to have an abortion. Right?” Franklin said. “I mean, i
sn’t that the whole dichotomy, you both got pregnant, and Mia had an abortion and you didn’t.”

  “I’ve had an abortion,” she said.

  I froze. I was listening so hard that my spine was tensed, as though I could use my own vertebrae to amplify their voices.

  Was she lying? She’d had her fucking uterus removed!

  “I didn’t realize,” Franklin said. “I’m sorry.”

  “No. You don’t need to be sorry. You’ve only just met me! I don’t expect you to know every footnote of my life story.”

  There was a heavy silence then.

  “But this doesn’t need to be some debate about abortion,” Franklin said. “I mean, does she even want an abortion?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lorrie Ann said. “I don’t think she wants to kill it, but I think she’s terrified of having it too. Which is why she’s so hung up on whether or not you want it. If you wanted it, she could handle having it, she could face the fear of it. But she thinks you don’t want it.”

  “God, she’s a retard!” he cried. “I’m in love with her! I wanted to marry her!”

  “But isn’t that why you broke up with your last girlfriend?” Lorrie Ann asked.

  I heard the lighter flick again, and I knew Franklin was lighting another cigarette. He chain-smoked when he was hammered. He had wanted to marry me. A sudden switch to past tense. Did that mean he didn’t want to anymore?

  “Yeah, but that was because I didn’t want to have babies with Elizabeth. Not that I didn’t ever want to have babies. And that was five years ago! Did she even tell you the context of that conversation?”

  “No.”

  What had the context been? I couldn’t remember.

  “She had been explaining to me that after raising her brothers she wasn’t sure if she ever wanted to have kids, that she wasn’t prepared to be that unselfish again, to have that much responsibility, and she wanted to make sure I was okay with that.”

  Lorrie Ann laughed like a donkey. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it’s not funny, but that’s kind of funny.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I’m sure she meant it at the time too. But now, I mean, does she want it? Is that why she’s being so weird? She wants it?”

  “Do you want it?” Lorrie Ann asked.

  Franklin didn’t answer for a long time. “I don’t know,” he said. I heard the lighter flick again. Maybe his cigarette had gone out, or maybe Lorrie Ann was lighting up too. “It doesn’t feel real. I need to talk to her about it.”

  “It won’t feel real until the baby’s born,” Lor said.

  “You know, I almost half guessed when Bensu asked her. I thought: Maybe she’s pregnant. Maybe Bensu heard something. I was excited. God, I feel like an idiot.”

  “Don’t feel like an idiot. She loves you. She just went about things in a stupid way. But that’s Mia, right? You said it yourself—she can’t act natural. Everything is a little bit forced. She overthinks it. Hard shell, squishy insides.”

  “Yeah, but like … can you really start a family and start a life with someone who goes about things like that? Can you trust someone who doesn’t fucking trust you?”

  I felt like I was falling an infinite distance, sitting there on our mattress in the dark, as Franklin’s voice said things I never expected to hear, had no idea he thought.

  “I don’t know,” Lorrie Ann said.

  There was a long silence, and then Franklin said: “How do you do that? I’ve always wanted to be able to blow smoke rings. I even had people try to teach me, but it never worked out.”

  “You have to get some backspin on it by tucking in your lips right as you blow out,” she said.

  Silence.

  “That was good!” she said.

  How, how could they be blowing smoke rings right now?

  “I’ve gotta take a piss,” Franklin said.

  “Can I borrow some money?” Lor asked.

  My eyes snapped open in the darkness. There was something so predatory about it—asking Franklin instead of asking me. But of course she would need money to go back home, to leave the party circuit.

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know,” Lor said. “Like a grand?”

  “And I’m guessing you don’t want me to tell her,” he said.

  “No,” she said reflectively, “you can tell her.”

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll go to the bank in the morning.”

  “Just write me a check,” she said.

  “In the morning,” he said. “I’m beat.”

  Then I heard him shuffle toward the bathroom and the creaking sound as he closed himself in with the plants to pee. Did we have a thousand dollars? Certainly there was money in the grant, but it was tightly controlled.

  As I waited for Franklin to finish peeing and come into our room, I tried to calm my heartbeat. All of the pieces of conversation I had overheard were jangling around in my bloodstream: the money, Franklin’s sudden past tense “I wanted to marry her!,” Lor’s weird lie about having had an abortion. He had been excited! When he first guessed, he had been excited! But then, the terrible question: Can you trust someone who doesn’t trust you? A new, cold, and strong feeling entered me. The answer was no. You could not trust someone who was behaving the way I was behaving. I sat in our bed, waiting.

  When he finally came in, I heard him set his keys down. I heard the shuffle of his feet, bare, on the vinyl flooring. Then I heard his pants hitting the floor, the clink of his belt left in the loops, and the brief cotton wrestling match with his button-down and undershirt. Then I felt him begin to crawl up the bed.

  “Franklin,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”

  I felt him pause on all fours.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” he said. “I get it. I mean—it’s your body. I can understand why you would want a few days to figure out how you feel before you have to figure out how I feel.”

  “I need to say this,” I said, and patted the bed next to me. Franklin continued his crawl and scooted under the covers up next to me. He smelled overwhelmingly of cigarettes and booze. “I am so deeply sorry,” I said. “I’ve been acting like a teenager trying to fool her mother. You are nothing but open and honest and kind with me, and in return I was trying to manipulate you like I was going to trick you into loving me. I’m so sorry. You deserve so much better. And if you’ll let me, I would like to do better. I will be better.”

  The streetlight was coming across his face in slashes. “Thank you,” he said.

  I reached down and grabbed his knee, pull-rubbing the tendons that connected to his thigh.

  “So what are you thinking?” he asked. “About the—pregnancy?”

  I noticed he’d avoided using the word “baby.”

  “Well,” I said, feeling the honesty bite in my lungs like winter air, “I feel very scared that having a baby would ruin our lives. I don’t know how we would work out our careers, where we would get jobs in the same place. I don’t know how we would afford it. But even more than that, I am scared that having the baby would force you to marry me because you wanted to do the right thing. I don’t want you to be confined by doing the right thing. I want you to do what is really and truly best for you. And I know that with Elizabeth it wasn’t right, and so I was worried it wouldn’t be right with me.”

  Franklin grunted.

  “And of course,” I went on, “I’ve had an abortion before. So it’s not that I’m against abortion. I’m not.” I thought of Lorrie Ann saying women had a right to kill their children. “But I do feel like having an abortion at twenty-nine is a very different thing than having one at fifteen. And … if it is what you wanted, I would think about it, but I don’t feel good about it. When I think about it I feel dread.”

  He grunted again.

  “What do you feel?” I asked, my voice shaking.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how I feel. I have a headache and I’m still a little drunk, and I don’t want to say
the wrong thing.”

  My heart sank. I clenched my jaw and froze the muscles of my face. I didn’t want to make him feel bad by crying. I wanted him to be perfectly free.

  “I mean, I know that rationally everything you’re saying about the jobs and about money—all of that is true. But I still … I don’t know. Don’t you think we could make it work?”

  This was not at all what I was expecting him to say.

  “And even,” he went on, “worst-case scenario, we wind up teaching Latin at a liberal arts college or something? Still—what a life! I don’t know. I just … I know you’re scared, and I know we should think about it more, but I guess my most basic, gut reaction is that I’m fucking overjoyed.”

  “You are?” My eyes were stinging and I couldn’t really breathe, that’s how violent my happiness was.

  “Yeah. Is that okay? I mean, is that okay with you?”

  “That’s more than okay,” I choked out.

  I could hear the smile in his voice. “Good,” he said.

  “I just—Franklin, I just feel so strongly that it wants to live.”

  “We made a baby,” he said. “We made a person.”

  “I know,” I said, but in my mind I was already frantically praying to God, a God I knew I did not truly believe in, to let me keep this, to let me keep all I had been given. I didn’t know why I had been allowed to have so much. It didn’t seem right that I could be allowed to have still more. But I would take it. Even if it was all pure accident, and I hadn’t earned any of it, I would take it. What had Lorrie Ann said? Do we deserve the spring? No one, I thought, could ever deserve or not deserve the kind of happiness that was flooding me, lying there in that bed with Franklin, the bean of life twitchy in my womb, the streets of Istanbul finally quiet, the mists of the Bosporus rolling in.

  “I heard Lorrie Ann ask you for money.”

  “You did? Yeah, I mean, I don’t care, I’ll give her the money. But I mean, isn’t there a rule or something: don’t give money to junkies?”

  “No,” I said. “She’s going home. She’s gonna make things right.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Franklin said. “Mia?”

  “What?”

  “Will you marry me? For real? Will that still be true in the morning?”