The Girls from Corona del Mar Read online

  I had not studied cuneiform before; my subject was classics, in particular Latin. But in the spring of 2005, we decided to try to do a translation together of the full Inanna cycle, a series of ancient songs that tell the story of the Sumerian goddess Inanna. As a classics scholar, I had come across my share of goddesses. In fact, I credit my mother’s midlife crisis purchase of Goddesses in Everywoman for my later decision to study Greek and Roman literature and culture. I can still remember reading that peeling paperback in the bathtub as my brother Alex pounded and pounded to get in so he could use the toilet. I was fascinated by the gods: their amorality, their capriciousness, their bloodlust. But even in all my reading, discarded books littering my apartment like the carapaces of beetles, even in graduate school, those seven strenuous years of tugging myself slowly toward excellence, I had never come across a goddess like Inanna. She was a fucking rock star. She tricked her father into giving her all his wisdom while he was drunk and then gave it as a gift to her people. She married a mortal man and made him a king. And then, when she had it all, when the entire world was hers, she developed a hunger for death and insisted on traveling by herself to the underworld, where she was killed and then reborn.

  No one had ever published the full Inanna cycle before. Her story was still unsung, waiting inside those clay tablets simply covered in peculiar wedge-marked script, the writing without punctuation or spaces between words so that it reminded me of the lacy designs on Ukrainian Easter eggs. Only small pieces of it had been published in papers all through the last hundred years, so in the fall of 2006, we received the grants and the funding and we moved to Istanbul together to begin the first cohesive translation of the entire Inanna cycle.

  Before Franklin, I hadn’t even heard of Inanna. Franklin explained there was a reason for this. When the fragments, which had lain undiscovered for some four thousand years in the ruins of Nippur, were discovered in 1889, the spoils had been divided evenly between the University of Pennsylvania, which was funding the excavation, and the Istanbul Museum of the Ancient Orient, which was allowing the excavation to take place. But no one was reading the tablets as they were being sorted, so they were simply divided equally and shipped off to their separate destinations. And so it came to be that half the tablets containing the story were in Istanbul and half were in Philadelphia, and no one alive had read the entire story.

  So that’s what I was doing in Istanbul: turning Franklin’s rough translation into something Americans would actually want to read and falling in love with a goddess no one had worshipped in thousands of years. In our apartment building, there was a little girl named Bensu, which means “I am water.” She lived in the apartment below us and was perhaps five, with a pursed plum of a mouth and huge, rolling green eyes that seemed fashioned out of lab-synthesized emerald, and a tongue that curled out neat little phrases of English or Turkish, as though she were a toy designed by a multicultural idealist. And because of the innocence I projected onto her, I was time and again surprised by the perversity of Bensu’s whimsy.

  “Just for a minute,” Bensu said to me. “Just for ten seconds,” she said.

  What Bensu wanted was for me to stop in the stairwell, set down my grocery bags, and pretend to drink tea out of a plastic doll shoe. She did not have a tea set, and so she made do with the shoes of her biggest doll. She poured the tea into these shoes by artfully tilting a pincushion that must have belonged to her mother.

  Some days I gave in, and some days I did not. But when I did, Bensu raised her doll shoe and smiled at me, her eyes twinkling. “My tea is very good, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Bensu,” I said. “What do you put in it that makes it so tasty?”

  Bensu sipped slowly at the air inside the doll shoe. “That’s a secret,” she said.

  “No fair!”

  “Even if I told you the secret”—Bensu sighed, tired and patient—“you would not be able to make it taste as good as I can make it because I make better tea than anyone in the world.”

  “In the whole world?” I asked. “Wow. That’s incredible.”

  Bensu nodded modestly and sipped once more from her doll shoe. Suddenly and with great passion, she reached out for my knee. “Don’t worry,” she said, those huge emerald eyes glittering as though lit from within, “I’m sure someone will still marry you. Even though your tea is not very good.”

  “My tea isn’t very good?” I asked.

  Bensu shook her head sadly. My tea was so bad that it made her sad.

  “It will be very difficult, but we will find you a husband,” Bensu said.

  “What about Franklin?”

  Bensu knew Franklin, my boyfriend, who lived with me upstairs.

  “I’m afraid he’s been being paid off.”

  “Paid off?!”

  “Yes, your mother has been paying him to pretend to be in love with you.”

  “Why would she do that?” I asked.

  “Because she felt sorry for you because of your tea.”

  I never knew this kind of canny cruelty that lurks in even very little girls when I was growing up, half raising my little brothers, who were more like animals than children at times: perfect, golden little animals. Lion cubs. But even five-year-old Bensu was able to detect that there was something wrong with me that would keep me from finding a mate.

  Was Lorrie Ann ever this cruel? I don’t know anymore. I cannot say. I can only answer for myself, the girl who once literally spat in her mother’s face, the girl who chose a boy to fuck because he was dumb, the girl who once, shamefully, kissed her two-year-old brother full on the mouth just to see what it would be like: yes, yes, yes. I was and am awful and terrible. I am sure I said treacherous things when I was five. In fact, I seem to remember informing a babysitter that our dog liked to hump everyone but her, and that it was probably because she was ugly.

  And yet it was not me but Lorrie Ann whom the vultures of bad luck kept on visiting, darkening the yard of her house, tapping on the panes of her windows with their musty, blood-crusted beaks. “Wake up, little girl!” they cried. “We’ve got something else for you!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Lost Worlds, Both Invisible and Physical

  To be perfectly precise, I suppose I would have to say that tragedy began to nibble at Lorrie Ann as early as junior year of high school, though at the time it all seemed so glamorous that we were not able to be suitably sympathetic, but were, instead, almost jealous of her. A full year after my de-virginization debacle and ensuing abortion, Lorrie Ann’s father, Terry, was killed in a motorcycle accident.

  Because her father didn’t survive the crash, and because the other driver (of a bright blue 1984 Toyota pickup) was drunk, it was never entirely clear what happened. “I didn’t see him. I didn’t even fucking see him!” the pickup truck driver insisted. He had turned left directly in front of Terry’s bike, which was going about forty miles an hour—five miles under the speed limit. It was mid-afternoon. No one was clear on why the pickup truck driver was simply unable to see Terry, who was a large man on a large Harley. Even dead drunk, the driver should have been able to see him—the only vehicle in those lanes of oncoming traffic.

  “I didn’t even fucking see him,” the man repeated to Dana in the hospital waiting room, as though these words could do anything for her. I was waiting with Lorrie Ann in that room, the two of us perched on chairs like nervous birds, ready to take flight. We did not yet know that Terry “hadn’t made it.” We were waiting for the doctor to come out, to let us know what was going on.

  “Didn’t even fucking see him.” I remember the look on Dana’s face as she regarded the man, still slightly drunk, presumably under arrest, but present at the ER for his own injuries. His attendant police officer, a chubby woman with dolorous eyes, wearing sharp perfume, shifted her feet as though to lead him away. But Dana only looked at him with the same sad patience as if he had been a child asking her to take a snotty Kleenex.

  “I know you didn’t,” she said, with a kind
of grace I knew my own mother would never have been capable of. My mother would have said something snide and then begun crying.

  The whole family, of course, was devastated and mourned in the beautiful way that only perfectly happy families can. When Tori Stephenson’s little brother Graham died of leukemia when we were in eighth grade, her mother had gotten drunk at the funeral reception and barfed in a plant. On the way to the car, Tori’s stepfather, Rex, had slapped her, leaving a huge red handprint on her cheek.

  Dana and Lorrie Ann and her brother, Bobby, did not barf in any plants, nor did they cry too loudly, nor fail to cry enough, nor slap one another, nor do anything except do everything just right. Lorrie Ann looked miraculously beautiful in her black dress—a simple cotton thing that managed to make her look almost freakishly long waisted, as though she spent summers performing in Cirque du Soleil. Her bitten fingernails, crimson and bloody, served only to show off her long-fingered, elegant hands. The black eyeliner my mother put on her made her look like a dwarf hotot rabbit, the pure white kind with black rings around their eyes that they sold at the mall, so shy they simply froze when you lowered your hand into their pen, their tiny hearts hammering with the fury of a kamikaze pilot’s. Lorrie Ann was full of this same ferocious vulnerability after her father’s death, which made it almost painful to look at her.

  To be honest, I was insulted that her sadness seemed to somehow exclude me. I had imagined us weeping together, imagined myself comforting her. We had always shared even our smallest and most ridiculous tragedies with each other. Instead she was behind layers and layers of glass. It made me furious. I was sixteen; I had a little black stone for a heart; what more can I say? But Lorrie Ann had suffered a profound loss.

  Terry had been, to a large extent, the raison d’être of the entire Swift family. It was for him, and out of love for him and his dream of being a musician, that they all scrimped and saved and shared the tiny one-bedroom apartment. (Lorrie Ann had annexed a portion of the living room behind some bookcases; Bobby had moved onto the balcony and slept in a tent out there even when it rained.) Dana faithfully taught preschool, which paid badly, but was work she enjoyed, and Terry played as a set musician sporadically, but lucratively, and pursued his own musical projects full-time. They believed they were blessed to be so lucky as to do work that they believed in.

  His band, called Sons of Eden, despite the name, did not sound particularly Christian. None of their songs even mentioned Jesus. Then again, they didn’t mention sex, drugs, or alcohol either, which was remarkable in and of itself in a rock band. Terry didn’t want to shove his religion down anybody’s throat. He just wanted to be a decent man who was also a musician. It bothered him that so many rock stars were such revolting ethical specimens. Why on earth did people take a musician more seriously if he was loaded? How did that make his music more authentic? And yet it seemed to. Terry experienced every day this peculiar kind of discrimination. “Even if you’re not loaded, try singing like you’re loaded,” a record exec had once advised him.

  But Terry would not, and his crisp vocal annunciation and technically brilliant guitar playing allowed him to get small record contracts that rarely made any money at all, but did provide a creative outlet and some tangible proof for the family that all their sacrifices had been worth it.

  I remember that I found it particularly maddening that he wrote songs for Lorrie Ann. We went once to a summer festival where his band was playing. It was a glorious day, filled with cotton candy and sunburn and corn dogs. Bobby’s friend Tio was there, and I was convinced that somehow Tio might fall in love with me and decide that our six-year age difference was of no consequence. Both boys were indulgent of us and let us follow them around without making us feel like hangers-on. It was wonderful. And just as the sun was setting, Sons of Eden took the stage, and they started the set like this: “This song is for my angel, my little girl, my Lorrie Ann.”

  And then Terry proceeded to sing the most beautiful song I think I’d ever heard, with strange surreal lyrics I could barely follow wherein Lorrie Ann seemed to be conceived as some kind of barefoot angel that went around Southern California on the bus system, giving comfort to homeless schizophrenics and fat little kids and women who were afraid their husbands no longer loved them. The chorus went: “Get back into the bus, Lo-Lola / Get back into the bus, Lo-Lola!”

  I had never been so jealous in my life.

  And so when Terry died, an era ended for the Swifts. They went on living in the one-bedroom apartment. Lorrie Ann kept on going to high school. Bobby kept on going to community college, though what his ultimate plans were became vaguer and vaguer. But now they were all living in an untenable situation surrounded by far, far too many gnomes for no good reason. In a very literal sense, their lives had lost their music, their rhythm. Without Terry, they slowly stopped gathering for Friday-night horror movies or family trips to the world’s oldest McDonald’s, in Downey.

  Perhaps the worst part of all this was that Lorrie Ann stopped singing. She had always been a talented singer with a sweet and natural soprano like one of those Appalachian folksingers. Her voice had a crystal-clear quality that made your heart shiver, as though the notes were all wineglasses falling but never hitting the floor. She had loved to sing complex harmonies with her father, and he had been teaching her both the six-string and the twelve-string guitar, at which she had shown tremendous promise. She stopped practicing entirely, as far as I knew, though perhaps she began again after I went off to college.

  Everything was changing so fast. And Terry’s death was just the first thing, the first tap-tap on Lorrie Ann’s windowpane by those bad luck vultures. Over the next few years, more and more of them would come, bobbing their burned-looking heads, the skin of their faces red and raw and peeling.

  In fact, the Corona del Mar in which Lorrie Ann and I grew up actually ceased to exist almost at the exact moment we left it. You can, of course, still go there now, but you will find only young women pushing Bugaboo strollers in Lululemon yoga pants, flaunting their postpartum tummy tucks. The playgrounds are swollen with little Jaydens and Skylers. The old bungalows have been ripped down and replaced with mini-mansions with two-car garages. More and more expensive restaurants serving “American cuisine” have opened along the highway, and boutiques have replaced most of the mysterious Oriental rug emporiums that once dominated that stretch of Pacific Coast Highway.

  But when Lorrie Ann and I were girls, Corona del Mar was half empty, somewhat decayed, beautifully perfumed. Always there was jasmine on the wind, or the subtler, greener scent of potato vine, or the almost hostile peppery scent of bougainvillea. In every median and useless ditch, ice plant grew with frightening tenacity, and you could break off sprigs of it and write with water on the sidewalks, secret messages that the sun would dry to invisibility like disappearing ink. There were tufts of some kind of sour yellow flower you could chew as you marched along the highway, swinging your backpack on your shoulders so that it whacked you in a satisfying rhythm, on your way to the Chevron, where you intended to buy Dr Pepper but steal gum. There were hardly any cars, hardly any people. You walked around on sidewalks as blank and shining as drafting paper!

  It was a distinctly unreal place, and I don’t think any of us had any intention of staying. There were no jobs in the area; the houses were too small and too expensive. We couldn’t picture ourselves making actual lives there. Even our parents planned on leaving, on moving somewhere more reasonable, eventually.

  Still, back in the spring of Terry’s death, we had no idea how quickly we would lose Corona del Mar. We thought, or at least I thought, that Terry’s death was just another of the exciting things that was happening to us, a plot event planned out by the writers in advance to provide occasions for good dialogue and new romantic entanglements. I thought we were just a few digits off from being 90210, and, frankly, I resented the Terry Death Plot because it seemed to cast Lorrie Ann in the lead, and she was always cast in the lead!

 
; When would it be my turn? When, when, when?

  If my thoughts during this period were both predictable and disappointing, Lorrie Ann’s were doubtless more interesting. I was given only fleeting glimpses into the labyrinth of her mind, and so was forced to piece together her inner world through inference and observation.

  I already knew that Lorrie Ann had a peculiar predilection for the ethical. As a simple example, when we read Little Women, her favorite character was Beth. It so happened that I had read ahead and knew what happened in the book. (We often read books together, and I often read further and faster than she did, so that it became our practice to buy only one paperback copy, which I would then tear in half once I had reached the nadir of the novel, giving her the beginning and reserving for myself the end.)

  “You can’t like Beth best,” I told her. “Pick someone else.”

  “But Beth’s my favorite!” Lorrie Ann had insisted.

  “You should like Jo,” I said. “Beth’s stupid.”

  “She is not. She’s the only one who really cares about the soldiers and the war. She’s always knitting socks and things. All the other girls are just kind of selfish.”

  I craned my head to look up at her. Lorrie Ann was sprawled on her narrow twin bed, which was canopied in a waterfall of fluffy mosquito netting and pink ribbons, her mother’s budget version of every little girl’s dream, and I was sitting with my back braced against the side of the mattress, facing away from her, so it hurt to crane my head to look at her. Her face was upside down to me, which made her mouth look like the mouth of a frightening monster, even though her teeth were nice and straight. (My teeth were not. They suffered from “crowding.” I had had braces at one time, but then something catastrophic happened, and we were no longer able to afford it, and so I was given a retainer instead, which I promptly lost.)