The Girls from Corona del Mar

by Rufi Thorpe

  “Yeah. It’s what he thinks.” The darkness outside our bedroom window seemed vast. There were rats that lived in the palm trees, I knew, that could jump like miniature kangaroos. I pictured hundreds of rats leaping about in the darkness in multiple chaotic directions. “What if I didn’t really know her? What if all those years I just saw what I expected to see, what I wanted to see?”

  “You did,” he said. “You knew her.”

  “Can anyone know anyone? Do you know me?”

  “If I don’t,” Franklin said, rolling on top of me, “then I will devote the rest of my life to trying to know you.”

  “And what if you never succeed?” I said.

  “I still won’t ever stop trying,” Franklin said, looking down into my face, close up.

  “What if I give you to the demons? The way Inanna betrayed Dumuzi?”

  “I’ll come back.”

  “Even from death?”

  Franklin nodded, dragged a kiss across my cheek. “Even from death.”

  ——

  The next morning, bleary eyed and putting coffee on to brew, with Grant clinging to my pajamaed leg, I discovered that every apple in the bag of apples had a single bite taken out of it. I held up the bag.

  “Grant, did you do this?”

  “Oh yeah!” he said happily.

  When, how had he done this? I had just bought the apples the day before, and somehow, during the course of the afternoon, he had snuck in here, most likely multiple times, without being seen, taken a bite of each apple, and then replaced it neatly in the bag. He had even retied the twist tie.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, giggling.

  It occurred to me that I knew Grant as little as I knew anyone and that this did not bother me at all. No, instead I found the unendingness of his strangeness to be a great comfort. There would always be more Grant to get to know. It was the greatest joy on earth, getting to know him.

  Later I wrote to Lorrie Ann at Mistress​O​Cats​Baby@​yahoo.​com:

  Lolola,

  Probably you don’t even get these e-mails I send, but I can’t seem to stop. I had coffee with Arman. He thinks your father was raping you. Is that why your brother slept on the balcony? Is that why everything turned out so shitty? Is that why your mother filled the house with watchful, silent gnomes? Was everything secretly part of a nightmare and I just didn’t know it?

  Every time I think about you, you seem different. You’re like some goddamn infinite prism. Lots of times it seems like the tragedy of your life was Jim or being so broke, or, according to Arman, your getting raped by your father. But today it seems to me that the real tragedy must have been loving Zach.

  You must have loved him so much, and he could never talk back to you. He could never tell you what it was to be Zach. He could never tell you he loved you too. He could only look at you through the mask of his face, his eyes dulled with pain. How much did he understand? I think about you feeding him through that horrifying feeding tube. I think about the endless surgeries, the recoveries on nothing but Tylenol. I think about the years and years you spent holding him, trying to ease his pain with just your touch. Trying to make him know that he was loved and safe, though you couldn’t keep him safe no matter how much you loved him. As a mother myself now, I cannot imagine the agony you went through. It seems to me this morning to be as large a human achievement as Christ on the cross. They say he paid for our sins. Isn’t that a funny idea? A spiritual line of credit.

  I used to think that somehow there was a set amount of shitty-ness that just had to happen to people, and that normally it got fairly equally distributed, but somehow you rigged things so that you got my share. Horrible things you didn’t deserve kept happening to you, and good things that I didn’t deserve in a million years kept happening to me. I wished I could switch places with you, or else teach you the endless mental rituals I did to keep bad luck at bay. I think on some level that I really believed that obsessively thinking I didn’t deserve my good fortune was what kept the good luck coming.

  How insane! You were right: we don’t deserve the spring, and we don’t deserve the winter either. They just exist. I wish I could have been a better friend to you. The idea that even when we were girls I couldn’t see you for who you were, but was blinded by the idea of you, so that I didn’t notice what was happening to you, if indeed Terry was messing with you—this idea breaks my fucking heart.

  I’m so sorry.

  Where are you?

  Your friend,

  Mia

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Must Come Down

  A month later, she wrote back:

  Mia,

  I hardly ever check this account, and now I’m sorry I did. You seem to still believe that my life is all about you. You wonder about my bad luck? Is it punishment for some sin I committed? Or is God testing me? Does he deal me the shitty hand because he knows I can take it? Or even, unfathomably, is it somehow your fault that I have bad luck? You ask: Was your father raping you? But you ask this because you believe it will tell you something about yourself.

  As you know, my life is my own.

  Sincerely,

  Lolola

  I was so stung by this that I did not know how to respond. I had thought that my last letter to her had been full of love. I wasn’t expecting her to be angry with me. I quickly went back and reread my letter. There had been a careless presumptuousness in the tone, it was true, that was caused by the fact I didn’t actually think she would ever receive it. My letter had suffered from the same self-conscious readerlessness of a diary entry, that performed quality.

  Still, it didn’t seem like there was really anything in the letter itself that was so terrible. “My life is my own,” she had said. Did she think I was trying to make her life my life? Had I? Was I really this horrible, life-sucking little gremlin that went around using other people as reflecting ponds so that I could admire myself? To think so was like the fulfillment of all my worst fears.

  And yet, I could also imagine a reality in which Lor was forced to build the same kind of wall against me that she had built against Zach. Wasn’t that why she really hated me? Because I had dared to say it? You need to go home.

  You need to go home and see your boy.

  And she hadn’t. Instead, she had stolen my tea set and disappeared.

  She was obviously telling me to mind my own business, and yet, I found I couldn’t.

  Dana was surprised, but not unhappy, to hear from me. One Sunday, we arranged to meet at the Coco’s that had miraculously survived the changes in Corona del Mar, right on the corner of Narcissus and PCH. I remembered being a kid and going with my mom and Paddy and Max and Alex to that Coco’s. I always ordered the spaghetti. The inside had been completely redone, and very large murals of baked goods together with the obviously oversize booths and dinner chairs, which made the patrons look like children sitting in adult furniture, gave the inside a vaguely hallucinatory feel. Dana was already seated at a table toward the back and she waved to me across the room.

  As soon as I saw her, I realized I had been thinking of her all wrong. When Lor had told me the stories of her life, about Zach and the Native Americans and Dunny, I had been picturing the Dana I had known when we were young: the navy blue eyeliner, the frizzy brown hair, the premature wrinkles. But something miraculous had happened to Dana.

  Gone was the blue eyeliner. In fact, I don’t think she was wearing any makeup at all, and yet her face glowed with health and her skin was bright and soft looking. As she had aged, her cheekbones, which had always been high, became even more exaggerated, as had the heavy hoods of her eyelids. Her hair had turned entirely white, and she wore it down and loose around her shoulders. She was wearing a simple cream-colored tunic sweater, and, I saw when she stood up to greet me, tan leggings and beaded moccasins. She wore no earrings, no wedding ring, no jewelry of any kind. As we sat again, she beamed at me with a smile bordering on the beatific.
r />   “So good to see you, Mia,” she said, in a voice much softer than I remembered. “You look beautiful!”

  Had Dana become some kind of saint? Or was this the relaxed serenity of the truly insane? “Thank you,” I said. “So do you—your hair! I love it.”

  She reached up shyly to touch her hair, then leaned in and half whispered, “I love it too! My mother’s was white. I never thought mine would turn, but then it did.” She shrugged, smiled.

  We ordered. Both of us got the spinach omelet, and for quite a while Dana kept me busy answering questions about myself: my career, Franklin, Grant. I didn’t know how to ask about Lor. I guess I assumed that probably Dana had heard as little from Lor as I had. Instead, I asked about Dana’s life. As it turned out, she had continued to be friends with Dunny and together the two of them had started a support group for parents of severely disabled children. She also volunteered two days a week at the library and had started a children’s program called Native World where they learned about the native peoples, plants, and animals of California. She and Dunny both visited Zach in the nursing home, usually twice a week.

  She certainly did not seem psychotic. Could she possibly still be receiving disability from the state? It was not the kind of thing I felt comfortable asking about, and so I didn’t, though I did feel better that at least someone had been visiting Zach. At least he hadn’t been all alone. Dana transitioned to talking about Lor so breezily that I didn’t hear her for a moment and then suddenly came up short.

  “And Lor’s doing well,” she said, “with that band of hers. I’m sure she sent you their first album. Joachim is doing good too. I think she’s finally really and truly happy, you know, which she deserves.”

  “What?” I sputtered.

  “After all those years,” Dana said, “although Jim was a saint, and I always thought Arman was a good boy too.”

  “She has a band?”

  “Yes,” Dana said, clearly confused. “You didn’t know?”

  “No. No, I haven’t heard from her except one e-mail in the last three years. And she didn’t say anything about a band.”

  “Well”—Dana laughed—“it’s not like you would hear them on the radio or anything.”

  “Is she clean?” I asked.

  “Oh, she’s been clean for ages now. That was just a phase.” Dana waved her hand dismissively, as though Lor had never even had a serious problem with drugs.

  “Where is she living?” I asked.

  “Iceland. She and Joachim travel around Europe with the band, but Iceland is their home base.”

  “Joachim?”

  “Her boyfriend,” she said. “A really wonderful man. Very tall.”

  “Did you fly to see them?” I asked. “Did you visit them in Iceland?”

  “No, not yet!” Dana said. “Though I keep threatening to.”

  But she had said he was tall. Why would it occur to her to say that unless she had met him in person? Which meant that they must have come here, come back to California.

  “When’s the last time they were out here?” I asked.

  “Christmas,” Dana said. “They came out for a couple weeks. I guess they are doing quite well, so they came and visited and then took me and Dunny to Hawaii!”

  “That’s wonderful!” I said, eyeing the glistening painting of a giant croissant behind her. It must have been nearly five feet tall. A painting of a croissant nearly as tall as myself. I felt dizzy. So Lor had come home after all. “I’m so glad she’s doing so well,” I said. “So she’s singing?”

  “Yeah, she’s singing. Terry would have been so proud. Just so proud. I wish he were alive to see her.”

  It suddenly seemed improbable that Terry had molested Lor. In fact, I was mortified that I had even written her with the question. And yet, what else explained it?

  “I had no idea,” I said, trying to find something to say. “I talked to Arman a few months ago, but I guess he hadn’t heard from her either.”

  “That boy is such a sweetheart,” she said, which I found to be a deeply odd characterization of Arman.

  “What’s the name of the band?” I asked.

  “Amor Fati,” she said. “Which means—well, I forget what it means. She explained it all to me, but I can’t remember it. I’m sure you can look it up or she’ll explain it or whatever.”

  Amor Fati. Iceland. Joachim. Suddenly, Lor was thrust right back into her old role in my life: the goddess, impossibly, untouchably beautiful and perfect. She was a fucking musician in fucking Iceland. Her hardships had been revealed, in the end, to be an illusion, a mistake, just a phase that added to her allure. There had never been any danger, just as Cinderella had never been in danger of remaining a maid forever.

  “I know what it means,” I said, though there was a frog in my throat and the words were muddled.

  “What?”

  “I know what amor fati means,” I said.

  Do we deserve the spring? Lor had asked. And I had thought that maybe I had finally caught up to Lor, understood her insight. But I didn’t. I still wanted there to be some connection between what we did and what we got. Just as I didn’t believe she deserved the horrors of Zach’s birth, or the hardships of Jim’s death, I did not believe that she now deserved to be a successful musician in Iceland with a boyfriend named Joachim. I did not believe she deserved to go on vacation in Hawaii while Zach languished in a nursing home. Was he nothing to her? Could it really be okay to walk away from that kind of love, from that kind of belonging? Was there no punishing God to call bullshit?

  It also suddenly seemed clear that Lorrie Ann had never loved me the way that I loved her. I had assumed that she had stayed away from me out of shame: she knew that I disapproved of the drugs, of the lifestyle, and so she stayed away. The idea that she was clean, that she was happy, that she was in love, that she was singing, and she did not want to talk to me, did not want to tell me her good news, did not want me to hear her music—well, it made me feel like an idiot for loving her. For thinking of her. For allowing her life to live inside my own like a ghost. She had come to California and she hadn’t even called me.

  I replayed over and over again in my mind the moment we met at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. I had thought she called me at the time because she wanted to see me, needed me in her distress, but now I wondered if she hadn’t called me because she simply had no other choice. Perhaps she dreaded seeing me. Perhaps all night she had been planning only to borrow money and then disappear.

  And then to take the tea set! Why take the fucking tea set?!

  It wasn’t even clear, I realized, that Lorrie Ann was actually as happy as Dana said she was. Dana insisted that Jim was a saint, that Arman was a sweetheart. Maybe she had a permanent case of rose-colored glasses. How would Dana know if Lor was clean anyway?

  And how big a deal was this band? Had they just made a CD on a four-track in their apartment, or were they actually signed by a real record label? And even if they were signed by a label, how hard could it be to get signed in a country the size of Iceland? It could easily be that Lor and her junkie boyfriend Joachim played once a week at a dive bar in Reykjavík and just made a big deal of it to Dana to make her feel better.

  What wouldn’t we say to make our mothers feel better at this late date?

  By the time Franklin came home that afternoon with Grant, I had downloaded and listened to both of Amor Fati’s albums. They were available on iTunes. The second album was better than the first, but they were both pretty good. I felt frantic and angry and sad, all at once. The records were by a real label. Amor Fati even had a website, a good one. They had tour dates posted. She was legit.

  “Lorrie Ann’s a rock star,” I said, once Franklin had gotten himself a beer and settled down to watch football.

  “Oh dear,” he said.

  “I mean—a rock star! Really? A rock star?”

  “She’s not a rock star,” Franklin said. “Right? I mean, she’s in a band or something?”

 
“Look at this,” I said, and I loaded one of their videos on YouTube and played it for him. It was a live performance in a huge, rolling field in Iceland. Lor was wearing a cream-colored, raw-silk dress, and was balanced on a stool with her guitar, which seemed giant, big as a boat compared to her, hugged to her chest. She sang with her eyes closed. The whole song, her eyes were closed. In one of the close-ups, I could see she still bit her nails. There were thousands of fans. They filled the entire valley, swaying, rapt, as she sang.

  “Yeah,” Franklin said. “Okay, so she’s a rock star.”

  “I know that I should just be happy for her.” Grant could sense my restlessness and kept trying to give me Clown Puppy, a horrifying dog-doll in blackface makeup, or what I argued was blackface, who lit up and told the names of red, blue, and yellow in three languages.

  “I don’t want Clown Puppy,” I said.

  “So, is Zach still alive?” Franklin asked.

  “Yeah, and Dana and Dunny visit him.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “I agree,” I said, “but she’s coming back here. She’s visiting California! She took Dana and Dunny to Hawaii! What happened to the wall she built that was keeping her from thinking about Zach and making it impossible for her to ever return to the land of our girlhood or whatever that line of bullshit was?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how she’s justifying it.” Franklin shrugged. “But I will say this, however it’s working, however she’s doing it, I doubt it’s good. Like spiritually, internally good.”

  “So …?”

  “So what?”

  “What do I do?” I asked.

  “Here, Daddy,” Grant said, handing him a little plastic truck. Franklin accepted it wordlessly.

  “Well,” Franklin said to me, “what can you do? You can’t make her be what she doesn’t want to be. She wants to be a musician. Fine, she’s a musician. In fact, it seems like a kind of best-case scenario, really. Now all her tortured-ness has a purpose. She can be all weird and emo onstage.”