The Girls from Corona del Mar Read online

  “Beth dies,” I said.

  “No, she doesn’t,” Lorrie Ann insisted, sure that I was just messing with her.

  “She does. Skip ahead. She dies.” I was still craning my head awkwardly to look up at her upside-down face. Lorrie Ann bit her lip, and then—and this was such a Lorrie Ann thing to do, it almost made me sick—she said nothing.

  “You don’t believe me?” I asked.

  “So she dies,” Lorrie Ann said. “She’s still my favorite.”

  You simply couldn’t disabuse her of this kind of nonsense.

  It was similar regarding the death of her father. Because she believed a number of untrue and contradictory things, her inner world began to have strange, Escher-like spatial contradictions that kept her going in unending and insoluble logic loops.

  If there was a God, then life was meaningful.

  And if life was meaningful, then things happened for a reason.

  And if things happened for a reason, then her father was meant to die.

  And if her father was meant to die, then there must be something she was supposed to learn from it.

  But there was nothing to learn. There was nothing to fucking learn! Except maybe that the guy driving the pickup truck was a fucking idiot, loser, no-good piece of shit, who deserved to die for taking out one of the best men I have ever known and the father of a girl who deserved to have her daddy one day walk her down the aisle. I had fantasies almost constantly of finding the driver of that pickup and poisoning him or loosing bees inside his apartment or hammering an ice pick through his eye socket and into his brain.

  I may have been jealous of Lorrie Ann at times, but she was mine. The Swifts were mine. He had no right to interfere with their lives so stupidly, so wastefully, so tastelessly.

  Anyway, Lorrie Ann, during this period, began to worry that perhaps her father had been taken from them as some kind of punishment. If there was a reason for his death, maybe she was the reason. All of this is almost classically textbook, I know, but at the time I had read no such textbooks and neither had Lorrie Ann.

  And so she became a vegetarian. She made a conscious effort to no longer gossip and refused to laugh at any of my jokes about poor Brittany Slane, whose downy, thin baby hair had never filled in and who would eagerly announce at the slightest provocation that she was a direct descendant of Abraham Lincoln. Weirdly, Lorrie Ann’s new desire to be virtuous, however, did not extend to things like cigarettes, which she still smoked with me, Camels filched from my mother that we puffed behind the handball court at Grant Howald Park as we shredded yellow dandelion flowers between our fingers. In fact, I came to understand, the cigarettes were a form of self-abuse, much like a hair shirt.

  It wasn’t that Lorrie Ann was becoming a Goody Two-shoes. It wasn’t that she wanted to be perfect or loved or approved of. No.

  She wanted something much more dangerous. She wanted meaning. And she thought it could be gotten by following the rules.

  For the rest of her life, Lorrie Ann would regret not breaking my toe for me. She would remember forever the way I brought the hammer down, too hard and too wildly, so that my baby toe did not just break, but became a pulp, its tender bulb split and flattened like a squashed grape, the concrete of the patio beneath it cracked and slick with blood. She would think: I could have broken her toe so much better. She would think: What failing is it in me that masquerades as pure-heartedness? And what was one to do if goodness was so duplicitous as to require you to wield a claw hammer at fifteen on a patio, serenaded by the barking of sea lions and the pounding of surf, just outside a bedroom where two little boys slept in a tangle on an air mattress, their golden limbs unblemished and soft as suede, their sleeping eyelids trembling with unknowable dreams, their very cells thrumming with the futurity of all that would happen to them, the men they would become, the things that they would want and do and fuck and know and taste?

  These questions would become even more pressing for Lorrie Ann when two years later, just after our graduation, she discovered that she too was pregnant.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Decisions, Decisions

  Really, what are the chances? Two high school friends, both getting pregnant within two years of each other. Both faced with the same difficult decision. And yet, I’m not sure I know a single girl from our hometown who did not, at some point in high school or college, go through this. No, we were not some statistical anomaly, but a disturbingly median norm.

  Our health counselors had demonstrated to us how to put on a condom, and we used them. Except for me—I’m an exception here. But Lorrie Ann did. And the condom broke.

  They never told us how often that happens. Or that sometimes the condom will get lost up there, like a snake’s shedded skin, and you will have to get your partner, whose fingers are longer than yours and who has a better angle, to fish it out from where it has become trapped behind a corner of your cervix. We didn’t even know our cervixes had corners! We certainly didn’t know how to evaluate whether the men were telling us the truth when they said that “nothing felt any different,” they hadn’t known, they wouldn’t have finished if they’d known.

  And of course, Plan B did not yet exist. Our whole plan had been Plan A, and Plan A was condoms because the pill was retro and couldn’t protect you from AIDS, which we were secretly sure absolutely everybody unknowingly had. We wouldn’t have had sex with even a nun without a condom. It had been that firmly drilled into us.

  And so it was that Lorrie Ann came to be impregnated, just at the tail end of senior year, by a young man named Jim Swanson, who was twenty-two years old and who had been her boyfriend all that year.

  ——

  “Do you love him?” Dana asked with characteristic frankness, squinting through her navy mascara. Dana was one of those women who had begun wearing navy eyeliner and mascara in the sixties, found it suited her, and simply never stopped. Weirdly, we never judged her for it, just as none of us ever questioned the gnomes. These days, I am sure the sheer number of gnomes in their home would have occasioned some kind of reality TV show intervention, but at the time everyone thought it was perfectly normal.

  Dana and Lorrie Ann were sitting on the wooden stairs that led up to their tiny one-bedroom apartment, eating Popsicles. This conversation and countless others were reported to me as we sifted through her various options that summer, like detectives trying to solve an unsolvable crime, scrutinizing blurry close-ups of unknown suspects taken from security tapes, analyzing again the word choice of our few witnesses.

  “I’m not really sure,” Lorrie Ann admitted. “But is that really the question?”

  “What other question could there be?” Dana asked, nipping off the tip of her cherry Popsicle with her front teeth.

  Lorrie Ann considered Jim. He had many admirable qualities. When he was younger, he had had terrible acne, so now, even though he was strong and handsome and well liked by everyone, he wasn’t cocky and he never presumed. He loved his mother. He had an okay job as sous chef at a restaurant in Costa Mesa. He drank, but not so badly as to do anything stupid. He hadn’t gone to college, but he was smart: able to make the fast joke, to read people, to train dogs, to fix cars. He was a good dancer. He knew how to give a compliment. He had an unfortunate tattoo: the name Celia in cursive script on his left biceps. She had been his girlfriend in high school. But he had plans to cover it up with a tattoo of a crescent moon, or else a line drawing of a turtle. He really liked turtles. There was a small sandstone statue of one on the windowsill in his apartment right next to his futon, which is where the impregnating had taken place.

  The problem for Lorrie Ann, as she and I went over, and over, and over it, was not with Jim, but with the baby itself. In my estimation, Lorrie Ann was not in love with Jim. In her estimation, this did not particularly matter. No one, including Dana, was able to completely follow her on that one.

  “But don’t you learn to love someone?” Lorrie Ann asked. “I mean, what about arranged marriages?”<
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  “Well, this isn’t an arranged marriage, and it’s your choice, and you’re going to feel bad later if you choose wrong,” Dana said. Her tone was not cruel. For a week now, they’d been having this same conversation every evening, and each time her mother had arrived at a different conclusion. One night, Lorrie Ann should keep the baby and marry Jim. Another night, Lorrie Ann should get rid of the baby and go to Berkeley. It was all terribly unclear. Part of what was making it unclear was Berkeley: the scholarship, the lure of San Francisco, the feeling of escape from Corona del Mar.

  “I guess I’m just saying: he’s a good guy, he loves me, he’s willing to marry me. And that’s a very different situation than if it were some one-night stand.” Lorrie Ann scraped her teeth along her orange Popsicle, making infinitesimal amounts of shaved ice in her mouth.

  “That’s true,” her mother said.

  “And when Mia got her abortion,” I imagine her saying, though of course she would not report this part of the conversation to me, and perhaps it never even happened, “I don’t know. I always felt like she regretted it. I don’t want to have any regrets.”

  Did I have any regrets?

  I dislike talking about this, and I lied even to Franklin when he asked me about it. I lied right to his face as we lay in bed, glutted and woozy from too many banana pancakes on a Sunday morning in our apartment in Istanbul: “It was the best decision I ever made.”

  “No regrets?” he asked.

  “None,” I said, running a finger over the skin of Franklin’s upper arm, marveling at the intricate mesh of his orange freckles, which covered his skin from head to toe. From across a room, he just looked faintly orange, but up close, the freckles were a world of pixelated detail that made me dizzy. I thought of the freckles as some kind of armor, fortifying him, protecting him from the world, a weightless and shimmering barrier, an enchantment.

  But I lied to him all the same.

  Did I feel the wrongness, the terrible violation of an ancient edict, when I lost that quickening inside me? Did I cry over the death of the child, whom I imagined would have been a girl, a daughter of the moon, like me, like Inanna? Of course I did.

  Did I spend my time at Yale, yes, at fucking Yale, getting As in all my coursework, falling in love with dead languages, learning to become myself and the woman I had every right to be, did I spend this time mourning and regretting my decision? Of course not.

  I labored for years to get into Yale. I was the president of the French Club and humiliated myself by wearing a beret that did not suit me at all. I lettered in volleyball, basketball, and softball even though I was short and not naturally athletic or even coordinated. I studied diligently for tests that were painfully, moronically stupid.

  And they took me. They took me and I became who I became and the cost of it was a baby that never got to be born. That was the price and I paid it.

  And yet when Lorrie Ann decided to keep the baby and marry Jim, everyone was deeply surprised. It was such a patently stupid thing to do. And Lorrie Ann was not a stupid girl.

  As for why Lorrie Ann did ultimately marry Jim, her thinking pretty much ran like this:

  The question was not, Would marrying Jim make her happy? But, Should one kill an unborn child? Or, more important, Should one kill an unborn child just because one has dreams of being a beatnik in San Francisco?

  She decided early on that one probably ought not to do that. She felt instinctively that if she killed an unborn child in order to go have fun in San Francisco, horrible, horrible things might happen to her in retribution. After all, her father had been taken from her just because she had eaten pepperoni and laughed at poor Brittany Slane’s downy hair. So then, if one couldn’t kill the baby, should one give up the baby for adoption, or should one raise it oneself?

  This was the main sticking point for Lorrie Ann. As she had been considering all this, she had looked up “children for adoption” online. There were hundreds of them, all black little boys. She showed them to me in the public library one afternoon. The descriptions of them were heartbreaking, and for weeks she was haunted by their nervous smiles. “Renaldo is eight years old and looking for his forever home. He has some anger management issues, but is seeking counseling and makes good grades in school. His mother is currently incarcerated, and his father …”

  There were page after page of them. From this she knew two things. One: her baby would be snatched up because it was white. And two: there was an army of young black boys who were being raised in the worst imaginable way, unloved, unseen, angry, and poor. She wondered when they would rise up. She wondered if anyone else could see it coming. She wondered if she prayed for them whether it would actually do anything, whether they would feel it, on their worn-out mattresses, in their foster homes, with the fear running through their veins, under scratchy blankets and broken moons.

  I hadn’t known what to say to her, as we wandered, dazed by the bright sun, away from the public library. My instinct, stupidly, was not to go out and protect those boys, but to protect Lorrie Ann from knowing about them.

  “How can this be going on? How can no one want these boys? Are they not human?” Lorrie Ann was literally pulling her hair. I guided her toward the window at the 76 station where I bought us 5th Avenue bars.

  “The thing is,” I said, “you can’t do anything about it now, right? So better to work now, go to college, become someone who does have power, who can help. Right? I mean, isn’t that the only way? Just—just—try not to think about them right now.”

  But where I was callous and intellectual, Lorrie Ann was all heart.

  “I can’t stand for her to ever feel unwanted like that,” she said. (She felt instinctively that the baby inside her was a girl.)

  “But you saw,” I argued, my mouth stuffed with candy bar, “she would be adopted right away. It wouldn’t be like with those boys.”

  “But don’t all adopted children feel unwanted?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, dizzy, blinded by the white glare of the sidewalk, by Lorrie Ann’s perfect, smooth skin.

  “Well, they should. They weren’t wanted. They were given up. They’re stupid if they don’t feel unwanted.” She began the laborious process of picking all of the chocolate off her 5th Avenue bar in flakes, which she ate separately. Only when the peanut butter center was completely nude would she begin to ingest it, and only then in tiny, butterfly nibbles.

  No, she would not give the baby up. She just couldn’t. She wouldn’t. So then, if she was going to keep the baby, would it be better for it to have a father, or for it to not?

  Having loved and lost Terry the way she had, how could she not want a father for her child?

  Jim was a good guy, and so having him in the child’s life would be a good thing. It would have been different if Jim had been less good, if he had been mean or sneaky, but he was decent. And she felt that it would be easier if she and Jim were married.

  So she married him.

  The day she finally decided, Jim was working at his restaurant, a small, fairly high-class Italian place where he had learned the word “amuse-bouche,” which he loved to say, senselessly, over and over again into the skin of her neck to make her laugh. He was stupid and childish like that, and for some reason it delighted Lorrie Ann. He had called her because the kitchen had run out of baby powder. The restaurant was housed in an old converted private home, and the kitchen was not properly ventilated, and so with the fryer going and the stove going and the oven going, it was often more than 100 degrees in there, and the boys, from standing and running around, suffered horrible ball chafe and ass chap, which they attempted to combat by dumping loads of baby powder down one another’s pants. Lorrie Ann was familiar with this practice (there was no hiding the white powdery stains on Jim’s chef pants when he got off work), and so when he called her to say they had run out of baby powder, she had known that it was serious business and immediately stopped off at the Rite Aid to buy them a bottle.

  She pee
ked her head in the back door of the kitchen.

  “Your girl’s here, Jim,” the salad guy said when he saw her. She waved at him, showing the bottle of baby powder. “You’re my savior!” he called to her.

  Jim came around the side of the line and into the little hallway. “There’s a beautiful woman in my kitchen!” he said, his cheeks red. Because of the stifling heat of the kitchen, Jim sweated constantly at work, which made his skin unnaturally clear and babylike. It also made him smell like mice, which Lorrie Ann had objected to at first, but which now gave her an erotic thrill. I disliked hearing about this, but it is also one of the facts about Jim I have been unable to discharge from my memory, even now, all these years later.

  “I brought you baby powder,” Lorrie Ann said. She was nervous about being in the kitchen, didn’t know if she should step all the way inside, if she was allowed to be there. She didn’t want to get Jim in trouble.

  He took the bottle from her and set it on a rack, then turned to the salad guy: “I’m going to go outside and have a cigarette. I’ll be back in five.”

  Outside, even the summer heat was a relief from the temperature of the kitchen, and Jim dusted off a cobwebby milk crate for Lorrie Ann to sit on while he smoked.

  “You really are glowing, you know. They always say pregnant women glow, but some of them don’t. Some of them get all pimply and nasty.”

  These compliments made Lorrie Ann shy, and she dipped her head as she laughed. Once, Jim had told her she had such pretty eyes and that they reminded him of Dentyne gum, “like if I chewed on them, they’d be minty.” She found his lack of guile charming. “It makes the compliments mean more,” she told me, “because he must really mean them.”

  “But,” I had objected, “he’s imagining eating your eyeballs.”

  “So?” she asked.