The Girls from Corona del Mar

by Rufi Thorpe

“This isn’t a joke,” I said.

  “I know—I know,” Franklin said. “But, in all seriousness, how do you think people get to be musicians in the first place? Maybe that’s how it works—they make an increasingly devastating series of life decisions, and then some kind of crystallization process takes place, and they wind up suited to it.”

  It actually wasn’t a bad hypothesis. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t want to keep thinking about it. Let’s just have a good Sunday.”

  Dana was happy to give me the name and the address of the nursing home where Zach wound up. “He loves visitors,” she said.

  She didn’t ask me why I was going. She didn’t act like it was surprising at all. I had worried she would ask, and I couldn’t imagine what I would say. The best articulation I could give, really, was what Lor herself had said: it was the only thing left to do.

  I found a washed-up looking man with shoulder-length hair in a very worn gray suit, kneeling and praying softly by Zach’s bedside. He startled when he noticed I had entered the room and wrapped up his prayers quickly.

  “Please God,” he said softly, “expel the devil from his body. Untwist his limbs from the evil demons that strangle them. Let him be filled with light and peace. Amen.” His voice was throaty and hoarse.

  He looked at me furtively as he left the room, and his eyes were a startling and possibly drunken turquoise against the red of his sunburned face. He looked insane. Was he possibly homeless? Some sort of wandering, homeless preacher? And yet he seemed harmless. How could his strange prayers harm anyone?

  I stepped up to Zach’s bed. I had calculated in my mind: he was almost thirteen. He was still painfully thin, and he seemed scrunched down in his bed so it was difficult to get a sense of his full height. His eyes were open and he was looking at me. It was not difficult to imagine that demons were the ones who had done this to him. But really, I thought, remembering Lor, it was doctors who had done this.

  “Hi. I don’t know if you remember me,” I said. “I was a friend of your mother’s.”

  He looked so much like Lorrie Ann that it took my breath away. He even had that light dusting of halftone freckles across his upturned nose, the narrow jaw that turned his face into a heart. The expression in his eyes changed, as though he recognized me or had heard what I said.

  “Your mom?” I said.

  He turned his face away from me.

  “Your mom misses you so much,” I said, though I did not know why I was saying this to him or whether it was the truth.

  He gave a garbled yell and kept his face rigidly turned toward the wall.

  “You don’t want to talk about her?” I asked. I felt like I had been kicked in the gut. All this time and I had never once wondered what Zach thought of Lor. If she had returned, it would have been to a son who hated her, who would possibly never forgive her.

  “I won’t talk about her,” I said. “I promise.”

  He turned back to me, appraising, perhaps curious why I was there if not to torture him with memories of his mother.

  “I would like to be your friend,” I said.

  Silence as he regarded me.

  “I would like to come here and sit with you and get to know you. Maybe once a week. Would that be okay?”

  Suddenly, his face broke open into what was unmistakably a grin, a wild, asymmetrical grin. He gave a happy sound that I instantly translated as a giggle.

  “Do you still like dancing?” I asked.

  Zach and I cobbled together some moments of communication that morning, and I danced shamelessly to some early Michael Jackson that I played off the tiny speaker on my iPhone. I also read him a Babar book that was sitting by the side of his bed. I wondered, then, might Zach find Babar a little boring by now?

  I asked him this and he shouted something I interpreted as a yes. I told him that I would bring him a book for bigger boys called The Hobbit. He looked at me with weird concentration, like he was trying to poop, and suddenly I realized that he was slowly, meticulously nodding. It took everything he had to repeat such a small motion, but he was trying in order to show me he liked the idea. “It’s a really good book,” I gushed. “You’ll like it.”

  At one point a nurse came in, who was quite bright and cheery, and invited me to step into the hall while she changed Zach, and I did, in case Zach had modesty about his privates, but I spied on her from the door. She treated him gently and with respect. There was no rash on Zach’s narrow buttocks. I was unable to understand what about this place was so terrible that Lor had been forced to flee.

  Mostly we just sat together, sharing the morning sunlight that fell into his room and spilled across the floor as though to show off its abundance. Outside we could see a single palm tree that had been bent slightly by some storm or other. There was a blurry, human Zen to spending time with Zach, an honesty built from his inability to speak at all.

  “I think you’re brave,” I said to him after a long silence.

  Zach made a motion that was very much like a shrug.

  Suddenly, I saw, behind a picture frame on Zach’s dresser, a little yellow teapot. I stood up, and approached it slowly, as though it were a rabbit that would run from me. It was from the very same set that I had bought Bensu: I recognized the cunning little golden triangles against the bright yellow ceramic. Why would she give the tea set to Zach?

  The moment I picked it up, he started screaming. A nurse ran in. “Oh,” she said, “please put it down. That is a special gift from his mother. She sent it in the mail. So sad. He broke all the other pieces so we keep that one piece for him and do not let him hold it.”

  I set it down and Zach stopped yelling. He was panting, breathless, glaring at me. At first I thought he didn’t want me to touch it, this special relic from his mother. “Please don’t touch,” the nurse said, before leaving us alone again. Zach did not stop staring at me, did not even blink. I picked up the teapot, and he watched me.

  I slowly walked it over to him and set it in his open hand. His fingers clenched around it so hard he almost dropped it, but I pushed it back into his hand. His movements were both clumsy and weirdly precise, and it reminded me of the frustration of playing one of those claw games where you try to grab the toy. I watched as he pulled the little teapot behind his head, then jerked his elbow down, hurling it at the wall, where it broke into shards of yellow, scattered on the floor.

  “Whoops,” I said, and I swear to God he laughed.

  I wanted badly to ask him about his mother, to try to understand her through his eyes, to achieve some kind of parallax, but I had promised him, I had said that I wouldn’t talk about her.

  And really, I thought, there wasn’t anything left to say.

  As I drove home that day, I felt excited. A new part of my life was beginning, here, nestled in the coves of the Pacific. If I had been so blinded by the idea of Lorrie Ann that I failed to see who she actually was, I had been just as blinded by who I thought I was. I didn’t need any longer to be the bad one, the sexy one, the wicked one. Or even the smart one, the good one, the pretty one. Instead, I was a young mother, and hardly anyone gave two shits what I did or who I was. I was absolutely free. Free to make friends with a boy who could not speak. Free to drive along PCH thinking nothing at all. Free to cut my hair off. Free to love my husband, who was lettuce planted by the water. Free to collect gnomes. Free to encode my children with whatever values and worldviews I chose. Free to say whatever I was thinking. Free to be happy without reason. Free to trust I would be loved. But mostly, free to love.

  When Zach died that winter of pneumonia, Lor did not come to the funeral. Dana tried lamely to excuse her, saying, “They’re on tour and they just can’t cancel the Berlin dates. They can’t. She was so sad she couldn’t come.”

  “Um hmm,” I said, nodding.

  “So sad,” Dana repeated.

  I smiled at her, touched her shoulder through the thick, black cable-knit of her sweater. “But we’re here,” I said. “It’s a good
funeral, Dana. You did such a nice job planning it out.”

  “Thank you,” she said, nodding, tucking that gleaming white hair behind her pink little ears. Zach had been cremated, and Dana had hired a boat to take a small group of us out far enough from shore that we would be allowed to dump the remains. On board were myself, Franklin, and Grant; Dunny and Dunny’s girlfriend, a horsey-faced, good-natured woman, tall and built like a string bean; then Dana and Bobby.

  As we rode out past the waves, our little yacht, sweetly called The Quiet Place, jogged up and down with the swells. It was cold, but Franklin and Grant stayed on the aft deck with me, while most of the group huddled inside the main cabin with its long, cream leather couches. I felt happy for Zach that he had died and gotten free of his body. I did not worry about him at all, but I did get weird prickles of sadness that we hadn’t gotten to finish the whole trilogy, but had stopped halfway through The Two Towers. He had loved the books so much, it seemed a shame that he didn’t get to find out how they ended.

  As we rode, our faces pressed into the wind, I mostly thought of Lorrie Ann. Against my will, I missed her. I hoped she had let go of trying to be the good one, the untouchable one, the goddess, just as much as I had stopped trying to make her be that. I hoped she could feel my love, somehow, just as Grant and Franklin and I could feel the sun on our faces, despite the wind.

  A Note About Inanna

  While Mia and Lorrie Ann are entirely fictional, the Sumerian poetry about the goddess Inanna is very real. To find out more about the true story of how Inanna was translated and to read the full version of the poems quoted in this book, please refer to Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer. It is an incredible volume, and I would not have written this book if not for that translation, which ensnared my mind and made me fall in love with Inanna in all her ancient strangeness.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to the brilliant Molly Friedrich, for being crazy enough to agree to read my novel in the first place and for making this book what it is today, teaching me about novel writing, motherhood, and friendship in the process. Thank you too to my editor, Jennifer Jackson, who always knows better than me, but never forces me to be aware of this, and whose grace, strength, and insight are an inspiration. Thank you to my readers: Lucy Carson, Matthew Ducker, Simone Gorrindo, David Isaak, Joe Kertes, Nichole LeFebvre, and Molly Schulman. Thanks to Erinn Hartman and to all the people at Knopf who have made this process like a dream. Thank you to my husband, Sam, who is my lettuce planted by the water, my reader when the ink on the pages isn’t even dry, my best friend and co-creator of weird kitchen dance moves, the love of my life, my lion, my Dumuzi. But the biggest thank-you of all these goes to my mother, Kimberly, who bought me the chance to be a writer with her blood and sweat, who believed in me so much she tricked me into believing too. You taught me what love was and how to live a life that honored truth and beauty. You taught me tenacity and laughter. When I was a little girl, I believed you were the most beautiful woman who had ever lived, and I still think that today. Thank you for all of this, for everything you gave me.

  An A. A. Knopf Reading Group Guide

  The Girls from Corona del Mar

  by Rufi Thorpe

  The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of The Girls from Corona del Mar, Rufi Thorpe’s magnificent debut novel about friendships made in youth, and how the intimacies and complexities of those relationships can reverberate throughout life in unexpected ways.

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  Deeply heartfelt and rich with emotional resonance, The Girls from Corona del Mar is an unflinchingly realistic portrayal of friendships made in childhood, and of how the bonds of these relationships flare and flail as life’s challenges present themselves.

  Mia and Lorrie Ann have been best friends since childhood, their relationship built on the familiar foundations of youth: laughing at inexplicable inside jokes, gossiping about boys and teachers, and harboring each other’s secrets. Yet, despite these intimacies, they couldn’t be more different: as a teen, Mia is hardened to the world, forced to raise

  her brothers and herself as her alcoholic mother becomes absorbed in her own romantic endeavors, while kindhearted Lorrie Ann comes from a loving, stable home. But when tragedy strikes Lorrie Ann, her life is forever changed, and she goes down a dark path that Mia never could have anticipated. As their lives move in separate directions and geography separates them, their friendship waxes and wanes, yet Mia always holds a special place in her heart for her best friend. When Lorrie Ann shows up unexpectedly in Istanbul, where Mia is living at the time, the dynamics of their friendship are tested as never before, leading Mia to question whether Lorrie Ann is the same person she has always known.

  With brilliantly drawn characters and prose that jumps off the page, The Girls of Corona del Mar is an incisive look at friendship, motherhood, and loyalty—a remarkable debut from a talented new voice on the literary scene.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. The Girls from Corona del Mar opens with a scene in which Mia asks Lorrie Ann to break her toe. How does this scene echo throughout the novel? Can this scene, and other scenes in which feet and toes appear, be read symbolically?

  2. How does Mia characterize herself in her youth? How does she characterize Lorrie Ann? Which aspects of their personalities re- main the same over the course of the novel? What are some notable changes?

  3. Discuss how Mia defines motherhood throughout the novel. How do Mia’s interactions with her own mother affect her understanding of what it means to be a mother? Why do you think Mia is so hesitant to become a mother?

  4. Discuss the scene in which Mia hits her brother with a hanger. Did it change your perception of Mia?

  5. What is the significance of the anecdote that opens the chapter “Dead Like Dead-Dead,” in which Mia’s dog gets hit by a car? Discuss the phone call that Mia makes to Lorrie Ann afterward. How does this incident change the dynamics of their relationship? Why do you think the author choose to juxtapose the death of Mia’s dog with the death of Jim?

  6. Mia and Lorrie Ann’s friendship is rooted in the common experiences of youth, but their lives take completely different paths after high school. Why do you think Mia holds on to the friendship? Is it because of nostalgia? Familiarity? Loyalty? Discuss the moments in which Mia doubts the validity of their friendship. By the end of the novel, how has she come to view their relationship?

  7. Lorrie Ann’s romantic relationships are sometimes judged harshly by Mia. Discuss Mia’s first meeting with Arman. What are her impressions of him? How do her assumptions about him change? By the end of the novel, does Mia see Arman in a different light?

  8. Consider Mia’s upbringing in Corona del Mar and her surprise when she is admitted into Yale. What value does she place on education, and why? Why do you think Mia chose to study classics? How do her studies shape her worldview?

  9. How does Mia describe her relationship with Franklin? Why do you think she is so hesitant about commitment in their relationship? How do her feelings about the topic shift after Lorrie Ann’s visit?

  10. On this page, Mia says that her father “never felt like family.” How does the absence of her father affect her? Discuss the scene in which Mia, Franklin, and her father meet. After Franklin defuses the tense conversation between Mia and her father, how does Mia’s perception of her father change?

  11. Discuss the significance of the tea set that Mia purchases at the beginning of the novel. What does her contentious relationship with Bensu symbolize? When Mia discovers the where the tea set has ended up at the end of the novel, how does she react?

  12. How does Mia’s anxiety about financial stability manifest throughout the novel? Discuss how wealth and poverty are explored by the author. How does Mia’s relationship with Franklin change these concerns?

  13. On this page, Mia stat
es that “I feared the Inanna in myself.” How does the mythology of Inanna factor in The Girls of Corona del Mar? How does Mia use the story of Inanna to explore her feelings about motherhood? Parental relationships? Lorrie Ann’s behavior?

  14. Discuss the emails that Mia sends to Lorrie Ann after Lorrie Ann leaves Istanbul. Why do you think she sent those notes?

  15. On this page, Mia mentions that “the Corona del Mar in which Lorrie Ann and I grew up actually ceased to exist almost at the exact moment we left it.” What is the significance of this statement? Does she mean that the town physically changes or that her connection to the town has changed over time? Or both?

  SUGGESTED READING

  Amanda Boyden, Pretty Little Dirty

  Jennifer Close, Girls in White Dresses

  Ann Packer, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier

  Ann Patchett, Truth & Beauty

  J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement

  Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rufi Thorpe received her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2009. A native of California, she currently lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and son. The Girls from Corona del Mar is her first novel.