The Girls from Corona del Mar Read online

  “Why don’t you come in the kitchen and see?”

  Franklin and Lorrie Ann watched from the doorway as I presented the tea set to Bensu. I was dimly aware that I was being slightly theatrical, trying to show Lorrie Ann what a good person I was, trying to show Franklin how good with children I was. My mind flashed briefly to the Yes or No test right there in the kitchen drawer, tucked alongside the place mats. Was I auditioning somehow?

  “Isn’t it pretty?” I asked, pointing at the pattern of golden triangles along the edges of the teacups.

  Bensu could smell the falseness a mile away. “Why were you yelling at her?” she asked me, still not taking the tea set from my hands.

  “At who?” I asked.

  “That one,” Bensu said, indicating Lorrie Ann with a nod of her head.

  “It was just a misunderstanding,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t yell,” Bensu said. “It isn’t proper for a lady to yell.”

  “Take it,” I said, trying to hand her the tea set. Had I been yelling at Lorrie Ann? Was that how it seemed? It had seemed to me only that we were arguing.

  “I should get home to my mother,” Bensu said, and backed off a few paces, walking backward until she bumped into Franklin’s legs.

  “You don’t want your tea set?” I asked.

  “I already have one,” Bensu said.

  “No, you don’t,” I said. “You’re always pretending to drink out of doll shoes!”

  “Are you going to have a baby?” she asked, and it felt exactly like she had stabbed me in the stomach with a metal barbecue skewer.

  “No.” I laughed. “What gave you that idea?”

  “Then is she?” she asked.

  “Nope,” I said, trying to act confused and baffled by her questions. Kids! They say the strangest things! I was smiling, but my cheeks were numb, as though they were shot full of Novocain.

  “That is a very nice tea set,” Bensu said, trying to make it up to me. “Too bad that I already have one.”

  “Too bad,” I said.

  “I’ll take you downstairs,” Franklin said, and Bensu nodded, holding up her tiny hand to be taken in his big one and placidly following him out the door.

  “Well, that was fucking weird,” Lorrie Ann said once they were gone and out of earshot.

  “I know,” I hissed.

  “So do you know for sure yet?”

  “No, I haven’t even taken the test—I just, it just feels like I am.”

  Lorrie Ann nodded, eagerly. “Are you done being mad at me?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I said, even though I was in no way done being mad at her. It was more that, in the end, my love for her trumped everything.

  “Thank God,” Lorrie Ann said. “It’s the worst feeling in the world when you’re mad at me.” She took the tea set out of my hands and hugged me, long and hard.

  Her hair smelled of lavender covering over something greasy and unclean, like rancid cooking oil.

  One of Franklin’s most profound gifts was social ease. I didn’t consider myself socially awkward, exactly, but there was an unbendingness in me as well as a propensity to say cruel, but mostly true, things that seemed to make other people uncomfortable, whereas everyone, absolutely everyone, loved Franklin. I wasn’t jealous of him about it; I was extremely grateful.

  When he returned, sans Bensu, he brought with him an air of bonhomie so great that the moment he set foot in the apartment I could feel the muscles in my shoulders sag with relief. He opened a bottle of wine and began asking Lorrie Ann questions about herself almost as soon as he was through the door. He had retained every detail of her life, and he asked after Dana and Zach by name.

  He asked her if she still worked at The Cellar.

  He asked after Arman.

  He even asked about the cat.

  I was shocked and amazed by how much he knew about her, and Lorrie Ann was very obviously both flattered and alarmed, since she couldn’t remember the first thing about him and could ask him nothing in return. But even more than Franklin’s encyclopedic knowledge of her life, I found myself amazed by the answers his questions elicited.

  About Zach, Lorrie Ann said simply, “His disease had progressed to the point that in-home care was no longer an option. He’s in an inpatient care facility and I miss him every single day. Every day.”

  About The Cellar, she said, “Maybe I had just gotten too old to be a waitress anymore. I was struggling with my mom in the hospital and with Zach, and even though I had worked there four years, they wouldn’t cut me any slack. They treated me like I was a teenager, late for work because I’d overslept. The whole experience kind of stunned me, to be honest.”

  About Arman and the trip to India, she said, “We had both always wanted to see the world, and for the first time in my life, I was free to. So we traveled around India. Ultimately, I wound up traveling with another girl I met along the way and he went back to the States. He owns a smoke shop there and he has this whole life, whereas I didn’t have anything to return to, so it just made sense for me to keep traveling.”

  All the while as they spoke I quartered the chicken, rubbed the skin with spices, set the pieces in the baking dish, and put them in the oven. I made a salad of radishes, onions, and parsley as I waited for the water for couscous to boil. Obviously I could not call her a liar. Everything she said was perfectly true, even as it was deeply misleading. And even if she had lied outright, social propriety would have kept me quiet. I did, however, slice those radishes so thin they were nearly translucent.

  Eventually, of course, Lorrie Ann excused herself to go use the bathroom. I was fairly sure she was going to shoot up in there. The moment she was out of the room, Franklin was behind me at the stove, nuzzling me and taking in deep whiffs of my neck and hair. He always liked to smell me. It gave him some kind of knowledge of me, of whether or not I was okay. He rubbed his face back and forth in the crook of my neck, just inhaling and inhaling.

  “She’s not like I thought,” he said softly. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “She’s on drugs. She’s addicted to heroin.”

  “Ah,” Franklin said.

  “I’m so upset,” I said. “I don’t know how to help her. I don’t know how to fix it.” As I spoke, my voice got smaller and smaller and tighter and tighter, until by the end I was like a cartoon mouse. I had my eyes tightly shut but I was still stirring the couscous, fluffing sliced olives and dates into the webby grains. Franklin said nothing, but went on breathing into my neck, inhaling my smell and exhaling hot breath right against my skin.

  “I think I may have offered to let her stay here,” I said.

  “That’s okay,” Franklin said. “We’ll figure it out. It will all be okay.”

  “It feels like I just found out she has cancer and she’s going to die. I just keep thinking that, every time I look at her: You’re going to die, you’re going to die, you’re going to die.” This was true, even though I had not allowed myself to become conscious of it until that moment. The entire afternoon, from the moment I first saw her and she pointed the copy of Proust at the sky, a certain despair had been flickering in the corners of my vision. Lorrie Ann had entered the land of the dead and I had no idea how we would retrieve her.

  “Shh …,” Franklin said.

  “She won’t be out of the bathroom for a while,” I said. “She’s shooting up in there.”

  “Oh,” Franklin said, and I could feel him relax a bit as he hugged me tighter to the front of him. “Do you want to try and get her into some kind of rehab or something?”

  “Maybe,” I said. But I suspected Lor would refuse to go. My uterus felt different: swollen, tender, alive. There were some things you could not undo, some places you could not return from.

  “It will all be okay,” Franklin said. And even though I felt he was far too optimistic, I also suspected that there was wisdom in his optimism; Franklin’s scale for “okay” spanned thousands of years. He didn’t worry about s
omeone being unhappy for a few hours or days. He didn’t really worry about unhappiness at all. I think he worried about animals and sunlight and possibly grain. He worried about the furtherance of human knowledge as a grand cooperative endeavor that made him coworkers with everyone from Proust to Einstein to the author of Inanna.

  “Did you know,” he asked me, “that you’re the most beautiful woman in the world?”

  “No,” I said. My eyes were still closed, but my spoon had stopped its mechanical stirring of the couscous.

  “It’s true,” he said, and I smiled. I had never thought of myself as the pretty one.

  When Lorrie Ann returned, Franklin was still holding me from behind as I pretended to cook.

  “Aw,” she said. “Look at you two.”

  “Dinner’s ready,” I said.

  “I’ll set the table,” Franklin said, and turned from me.

  There must have been three or four seconds before he opened the drawer when I could have processed what he said and stopped him, but it seemed to take that long for his words to filter into my mind. When I finally heard what he said and realized that if he opened the drawer, he would find the pregnancy test, I turned around, my mouth open to speak. He was standing there, completely silent, the Yes or No test box in his hand. Lorrie Ann was sitting at the table, watching us as though we were a play.

  “I—” But there was no way for me to finish the sentence.

  “Probably,” Franklin said, turning to me, his eyebrows upraised as though he were begging, “I did a bad thing. Probably you wanted to wait and take this without us watching you, and I should have just pretended not to see it. But now I just can’t do that.”

  Lorrie Ann suddenly beat her hands in a drumroll on the kitchen table, and both Franklin and I startled and looked over at her. “Sorry,” she said, “but this is so exciting! So are you going to take it?” She had definitely shot up in the bathroom. Her pupils were tiny as a snake’s.

  “Right now?” I asked.

  “Why not?” she said.

  I looked over at Franklin but he was just holding the test, looking at me. “You don’t have to,” he said.

  “Go! Go, do it!” Lorrie Ann pounded on the table again in her excitement.

  I kept looking back and forth between them, my mouth open like a fish gasping at the sudden change from sea to air.

  Franklin reached out and pulled me to him, pressing me into his chest. “I love you,” he said into my hair. When he pulled away, I realized he had somehow put the box in my hand.

  “Just go take it,” he said.

  How had they managed to do this? How had I let this happen? I gave Franklin a pleading look.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” he said. “Do you want me to go in with you?”

  “No,” I said. To have Franklin watch me pee on the stick would be even worse. At the very least I wanted the privacy of the bathroom, the time alone to read the results before having to come out and announce them.

  “How long have you guys been trying?” Lorrie Ann asked.

  “I love you,” Franklin said again, ignoring her question and giving me a gentle push down the hall to the bathroom.

  In the bathroom, I sat on the edge of the tub, trying to breathe. I was, in truth, almost entirely certain I was pregnant. My period was three weeks late, and I was on the pill. I had actually been in the process of switching brands since my usual kind wasn’t available here in Turkey. I started the new pack, and then when I came to the pretty pink pills that signified I was supposed to start bleeding, nothing happened. I took all seven, and still nothing. I started on the next month’s gleaming row of white pills, but after a week of those I decided to stop taking them.

  But why? Why stop taking them?

  (Because, I worried, they might hurt the baby!)

  But wasn’t I planning to kill the baby?

  (…)

  And so I knew that if I took the test, it would come out positive, and then I would have to go out there and tell them, and then … what would happen?

  I knew obviously that whatever happened, Franklin would be decent. It would be impossible for him not to be. In fact, it was his rigidly “good guy” status that made me worry most. I knew from everything he had said about Elizabeth that he did not want children, at least not now. I didn’t think he would leave me or something like that—he was too good a guy. If I wanted an abortion, he would support me. And if I wanted to keep it, he would support me. But what if he felt forced to do the right thing and marry me, even though he didn’t want me or the child? It seemed to me that the danger of this kind of false pretense was even higher with an audience, with the dead goddess Lorrie Ann looking on, judging us mere mortals.

  Even worse, part of what Franklin would want and need to know was whether I wanted the child, and I did not know the answer. I could not even bring myself to fully consider the question. I couldn’t allow myself to start wanting the child in case I would then have to kill it.

  What I wanted most was to not lose Franklin, and I worried that either way, yes or no, I would still wind up losing him. If we kept the baby and he felt trapped, then slowly, over years or months, I would lose him. I couldn’t even really think what having a baby would mean for us financially or career-wise. It was too terrifying.

  And if we didn’t keep the baby, I was not sure I would ever be able to forget that we had made such a decision together. I knew that if Franklin consented to kill our baby it would extinguish some of my feelings for him. Which was why, if I was going to kill the baby, I would rather Franklin not know about it at all. I could handle being Medea, being a monster, but I could not handle asking Franklin to help, to consent, to agree.

  It was uncomfortable sitting on the lip of the tub because it was so narrow, part of a hyper-modern tub/shower combo that looked like it could be launched into space, so I stood up and began, absently, to water the plants. Besides the wonderfully mismatched living room furniture, it was the strange excess of plants in the bathroom that I loved most about that apartment. There were several jade plants, a dracaena, some African violets, a hanging spider plant, and two ferns. I loved to take a bath in the morning in there. It was like being in a greenhouse. Part of me was toying with simply not taking the test at all. If I didn’t take the test, it would be less of a lie to go out there and say I wasn’t pregnant, because I wouldn’t know I was, and then I could have a few more days to figure out what the best thing to do was.

  There was a knock, and I turned when I heard the door open, sure that it was Franklin who had dared intrude on me, but it was Lorrie Ann.

  How many hours upon hours had Lorrie Ann and I spent shut up in bathrooms together? Time itself seemed to shift and resettle as she closed the door behind her, the past and the future fanning out from the present moment with the clicking riffle of playing cards.

  “I’m pregnant,” I said. “I’m sure I am.”

  Lorrie Ann was already nodding, her lips pressed together, as she closed the small distance between us and took the test box out of my hand. “Why don’t you take the test anyway?” she suggested, almost at a whisper.

  “I’m trying to decide what to do,” I said. “How do you decide what to do?”

  “Take the test,” she said again, slipping her fingernail underneath the cardboard seam at the end of the box.

  “What possible criterion does one even use to make life decisions?” I asked, but Lorrie Ann did not respond. I realized, in part because the faint metallic hum of the lightbulb seemed overpoweringly loud, and also because Lorrie Ann was not responding to me, that I was somehow estranged from the moment. I was failing to react appropriately to the task at hand.

  Lorrie Ann handed me the plastic stick. “Pee on this,” she said.

  Obediently, I pulled down my jeans and panties and settled on the toilet. “I hate peeing on these,” I said. “They always splash.”

  “Just wait—if you are pregnant, you’re going to have to pee in about a thousand tiny cups and by that time
your belly will be so huge that visibility will be pretty much nil. Every single time I peed all over my own hands.”

  “I don’t think I’m—if I’m pregnant, I don’t think I’ll be keeping it,” I said. I was holding the test stick under me, but I couldn’t make myself pee.

  “Sure,” she said, “but you can think about all that later.”

  “No, I need to decide now.” I still couldn’t pee.

  “Why?” she asked, kneeling so she could look me in the eye. Her breath smelled like fruity gum or candy.

  “Because I have to decide what to do about Franklin.”

  “What do you have to do about him?”

  “I need to figure out how to …” I didn’t know exactly how to phrase this next part. I needed to figure out how to control his reaction. I needed to figure out what I wanted so that I could give him cues so that he could not hurt me. I could come out breezily talking of abortion appointments, or I could come out with a shy smile, or I could pretend to be embarrassed as a way of drawing him out to see what his feelings were. All of these game plans were playing out in a simultaneous jumble in my mind.

  “Why don’t you let Franklin worry about how Franklin reacts?” Lorrie Ann said. She reached over and turned on the sink faucet.

  “Who are you,” I asked, “Dr. Phil?”

  “Pee,” she instructed.

  “Do you think the chicken is burning?”

  “Pee!” she said.

  And I did.

  I remember when Lorrie Ann took her pregnancy test, back in the summer after graduation, back when Zach was just the promise of a baby and not an actual baby, back before Jim was a soldier and then, later, a corpse, back before Lor was a junkie, back before Arman lost his legs even. It was the weekend and her parents were home and my parents were home and so, logically, we went to the mall.

  We had bought a two pack of tests from the Rite Aid on the walk to Fashion Island. We had also bought a box of Red Vines and two Dr Peppers. It was excellent to bite off the top and bottom of a Red Vine and use it as a straw for the Dr Pepper. The walk to the mall involved a long uphill stretch on Avocado Avenue that was in full sun, and the sugar from the sodas together with the scalded white pavement and shimmering heat gave us both a kind of giggly delirium we couldn’t shake. By the time we made it to the bathroom of the Barnes & Noble (the nicest, most luxurious bathroom we knew of at the mall), we were in helpless, senseless hysterics.