The Girls from Corona del Mar Page 4

  There was a silence between them then, both awkward and intimate. Lorrie Ann half wanted it to go on forever. She liked not having to talk. Sometimes her favorite thing was just to meet Jim after he got off work at eleven and lie on his futon with him, watching TV. Food Network, mostly, and sometimes Animal Planet. There they could just rest next to each other, two tiny worlds, separate but at peace.

  “I don’t mean to be trying to sweet-talk you,” Jim said finally. “I really want you to go to Berkeley. I’ll move, you know. If you want to just defer a year. Or you could apply to UCI. We’ll make it work.”

  Lorrie Ann searched his face for any sign that he did not mean what he said. “My mom says that having kids is like getting a double helping of gravity,” she said. “Twice as hard to move, twice as hard to get things done.”

  “I like your mom,” Jim said. He did. Dana and he got along famously. It almost pained Lorrie Ann that Jim had done everything so right. Didn’t he deserve to get what he wanted? Didn’t he deserve to be happy? And he said his happiness would be in marrying her. This made the equation in her mind awfully unbalanced. On the one side of it was the life of an unborn child, Jim’s happiness, and doing the right thing, and then on the other side of it was drinking coffee in San Francisco and driving up those scary streets so steep it seemed like your car was on a roller-coaster track. She had pictures of herself in the city: all the things she would do there, the person she would grow up to be. A life of bookstores and cut flowers and tiny glass bottles arranged on window frames and trolley cars and everything she wanted.

  “I love you,” Lorrie Ann lied. (Was it a lie? I never knew, exactly. I couldn’t understand her love for Jim and so I made my peace with Lor’s decisions by assuming her feelings for him were either feigned or a delusion, but perhaps they were not. Perhaps she loved him with the same animal part of herself that couldn’t let that baby go.)

  “I love you too,” Jim said, “but you know that. Lorrie Ann, let’s be honest. You could probably find a guy ten times better than me. But you won’t ever find one who loves you as much as I love you.”

  And that was what clinched it. It was like a branch snapping inside of her, or so I must imagine. It must have been unavoidable, an almost physical fact, her decision. It must have been nonrational, or else I can never forgive her. How could it be that I wanted those scary narrow streets and books and coffee shops for her so much more than she wanted them for herself? But she stood up, and she grabbed him, squeezed him in his sweaty chef’s coat in a tight hug. “Yes,” she said into his apron.

  “Yes? Like yes-yes?” Jim said.

  “Yes,” Lorrie Ann said. And then Jim reached his arms around her and squeezed her so that she was lifted off the ground, and he began jumping up and down with her pinioned to the front of him, screaming and whooping and hollering. He let her go and opened the kitchen door and yelled at the salad boy: “The most beautiful girl in the world has agreed to marry me!”

  The salad boy came toward them, stuck his head out of the doorway. “You really did?” he asked Lorrie Ann.

  She nodded, blushing.

  “Well, shit,” he said.

  “Can you believe this?” Jim asked him, gripping the salad boy by the shoulders.

  “You’re one lucky fucker,” the salad boy said.

  “I am,” Jim said, crushing the salad boy to his chest. “I’m the luckiest fucker in the world.”

  ——

  It was a bit rushed, since Lorrie Ann wanted to get married before she was really showing, but they managed to put together a pretty good party at the community center, where the surviving members of Sons of Eden played one last reunion show, and everyone brought potluck, and Lorrie Ann looked so beautiful that for a while there it seemed like maybe she had been right, and maybe there was something in Jim that no one else could see, and maybe everything was going to be wonderful. It was impossible to imagine bad things happening to Lorrie Ann. There was just something about her. I remember at the reception, egged on by Jim and the bassist of Sons of Eden, she sang an old Kitty Wells number, “If Teardrops Were Pennies.” I shivered to hear her voice, a slender silver thread of sound in the heavy dusk of that California August, but as time kept unspooling and the years passed, I wondered if somehow Lorrie Ann had sung her own curse, had prophesied all that was to come.

  In Istanbul with Franklin, when I was translating the Sumerian myth of Inanna, I would think of my old friend.

  Inanna sings:

  My father has given me the me:

  …

  He gave me the art of the hero.

  He gave me the art of power.

  He gave me the art of treachery.

  He gave me the art of straightforwardness.

  He gave me the plundering of cities.

  He gave me the setting up of lamentations.

  He gave me the rejoicing of the heart.

  Inanna sings on and on about the different me, a Sumerian concept that has no direct English correlative, but can best be described as a mode of being. While her father was drunk, she tricked him into giving her everything, all the me: the art of the woodworker, the art of the metalsmith. He gives her the art of travel and the art of the secure dwelling place. The art of kindness and of deceit. It was this that reminded me of Lorrie Ann. The girl had all the me, had been given herself as a gift, so that everything she did was absolutely hers and hers alone.

  But I also wondered what happens to the songs we sing, even after we are done singing them.

  Which is not to say that I approved of her marriage to Jim. I never did, and in all of her wedding pictures my eyes are like black, smoldering coals. I was so angry that at the reception I got horribly drunk and brutally fucked a boy named Garrett in his car, riding him in the backseat, my hand clamped over his nose and mouth, pushing his face to the side and smashing it into the upholstery so that he couldn’t look at me.

  The thing was: I was supposed to go to Berkeley too. That had been the plan, for both of us to get into Berkeley and move to San Francisco together. But I hadn’t gotten in.

  I had procrastinated. It is impossible as an adult to even reconstruct the kind of magical thinking that seventeen-year-olds are capable of, but somehow I left my essays for both Berkeley and Yale for the last night before the deadline. I had sent in nothing applications to UCI, Santa Cruz, and UCSD earlier in the week. Maybe their deadlines were earlier; I don’t know. But I remember very specifically that I had one night to write the Yale and Berkeley essays, the two that were most important to me. (I had told no one I was applying to Yale, no one except the school guidance counselor, who told me I was wasting my time.)

  I waited until everyone was asleep, and then I snuck out to the patio with my mother’s pack of Camels and a glass of red wine, and I spent the next nine hours writing my Yale essay. I told them about the horrors of French Club, and the letters in sports, and the As, and the AP classes, and I told them that I had done all of this not because I wanted to make money or have a good career, but because I was sure that there must be, somewhere in the world, a place that I belonged, somewhere where I wouldn’t feel like I was hiding behind the mask of my face, somewhere where my mind could stretch out instead of being shunted back inside me by the trick sliding doors of multiple-choice tests, somewhere where I could find peers, where our ideas could come out of us and form a kind of glowing golden mesh between us of shared mental energy, just like in Plato’s dialogues, somewhere where what I was would not be a problem for anyone, where I wouldn’t be a “smart-ass,” or a “smart mouth,” or a “smart aleck,” but just fucking smart.

  In the morning, I cobbled together something to send in to Berkeley, something that, evidently, wasn’t good enough.

  Maybe if I had been going to Berkeley with her, Lorrie Ann would have chosen differently: Berkeley would have seemed more real, had a stronger gravitational pull. Or maybe it was the shock of hearing I was going to Yale, the betrayal, that kept her from going. I still remember the a
fternoon I told her, breathless, having run all the way to her house and then straight up those wooden steps and into the circle of gnomes, the admissions letter clenched in my hand. I had profoundly misunderstood how hurt Lorrie Ann would be that I had kept a secret from her, and such an important one. The look on her face when I told her gave me the sudden jolt of stepping off a curb without meaning to. But applying to Yale had been as private for me as masturbating. In a weird way, it had never occurred to me to tell Lorrie Ann at all. But I was leaving her. Was it insane to think that my betrayal was at least part of what made her think it was such a good idea to partner up with Jim?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Miracle

  At Yale, I began to drift away from her. Part of it was my inevitable involvement in the life of the college: I made friends; I started dating; I fell in love with translating Latin and Greek. (The elegantly playful way that Horace used the ablative case, the garish ugliness of Greek contrasted with the gorgeous things it said, as though butterflies were hidden in monstrous stone gargoyles!) Everything at Yale was so wonderful that I felt a perpetual impostor. It seemed sometimes that I was the only one who had routinely shoplifted from Victoria’s Secret in youth and who knew all of the words to every song by Sublime.

  But part of why we drifted apart was that talking to Lorrie Ann about her pregnancy and her life depressed me. Perhaps it was my own abortion that annexed any feelings of excitement that I might have had on her behalf. Perhaps it was that I felt, but could not say to her, that she had made a mistake, that she should have gone to San Francisco, just as I had gone to New Haven. Perhaps it was just that every phone call confirmed for me that Lorrie Ann was good and I was bad. I spent my days lazing in a boy’s dorm room, eating microwave waffles and a can of frosting, trying to invent new sexual positions and discussing Catullus, while Lorrie Ann spent her days researching strollers and agonizing over which car seat to ask her mother to buy. I was growing tired of being bad and bored with her for being good. So this was what it was like to grow apart, I thought.

  But when she called to tell me the baby had been born, I understood that we had not been growing apart but had only been becoming more equal and opposite, and through our symmetry had been becoming even more deeply connected. The baby, a boy they named Zachary, had been born blue. The birth had been bad. An emergency C-section. There would be a brain scan, but not until tomorrow or the next day, when the baby was more stable. She told me these things and then neither of us could speak and the phone was filled with the staticky hiss of Lorrie Ann’s jagged breathing and my own high-pitched hyperventilation. Something in the universe was flawed and great masses were careening through space unchecked. I wanted so badly to keep this from happening to her, but it had already happened. It had already happened and nothing could undo it. “I’ll be there tomorrow,” I said, though I had no idea how, how I would afford a plane ticket, what I would say to my professors. I had not even come home for Christmas, that’s how broke I was.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I’ll be there tomorrow,” I repeated.

  “I believe you,” she said. “You’ll be here tomorrow.”

  As it turned out, I was able to buy a standby ticket on Delta with a combination of cash and a newly activated credit card, and I was indeed by Lorrie Ann’s hospital bed the following afternoon. I had written all my professors a strange, overly intimate account of why I would be absent from their classes for the next two weeks and asked for mercy. What I had not done was do laundry, and so my suitcase was filled with dirty clothes, and somehow I could smell them even through the duffel bag in the antiseptic clean of her hospital room.

  When I got there, she was asleep. There was no baby, no Jim, no Dana: just Lor, alone in her hospital bed. I had come with a pathetic bouquet of daisies I bought at the airport, forgetting entirely that I would be able to buy flowers at the hospital. Lor looked weirdly swollen. Her cheeks were chubby, her chin softly doubled, her lips so swollen the bottom one had a split in it. There were yellow circles under her eyes. Her hair was lank and greasy. Why hadn’t anyone washed her hair? She was wearing a hospital gown that was, I was astounded to see, flecked with blood. Why had no one brought her a nightgown of her own? Or at least insisted on a clean hospital gown? I found a spare water pitcher in the nightstand by her bed, filled it with water, and did my best to fluff the ragged daisies. There were no other flowers in the room. When I saw Jim, I would deck him.

  Except that when I saw Jim, he was in the nursery holding a tiny baby who looked exactly like Lorrie Ann, with tears of joy just streaming down his steamy, pink face. Not wanting to disturb Lorrie Ann, I had left the daisies by her bedside and gone in search of the baby. (Truthfully, it was only that once I had run out of things to fix or think about fixing, and I was left only to look at her, my Lolola, the pain of it was excruciating. I knew no answer to such pain besides action. That was what I had always done. Find your mother passed out in the bathroom? Pull her up and put her to bed, laughing to yourself because the tiles left a pink grid on her cheek, but for God’s sake, don’t think about it, don’t dwell on it, don’t allow yourself to fully know how terribly out of control your life is. It was best, in my opinion, to try to feel nothing at all.)

  I was on the other side of the big glass window that separated the nursery from the hall, but Jim caught sight of me right away and raised the baby in his arms slightly, so I could see, so I could admire what looked like a perfectly normal little baby boy. Jim was smiling and crying at the same time in a way that made him look perfectly idiotic, but was also, of course, deeply touching. I had never dated a guy like Jim, a guy who was firmly “a nice guy.” For the first time, I wondered what it would be like.

  When he gave the baby back to the nurse and came out into the hall, he said, “Sorry, that was just the first time they let me feed him. They just took him off the IV. And the more he suckled at that little bottle, the more I thought: He’s gonna live! He’s gonna live! It’s just been—oh, Mia.”

  He threw an arm over my shoulders as we headed down the hall back to Lor’s room. “How’s Lorrie Ann been?” I asked.

  “A trouper. An absolute fucking trouper. She’s doing so great.”

  I understood from this more that Jim approved of Lorrie Ann’s stoicism than that she was actually “doing great.” With his arm around me, I could smell the vague mice-smell Lorrie Ann had complained about. She was dead-on: he smelled like a hamster cage.

  “He kept choking, but he got some of it down. They said if he didn’t get better at it, they’d start feeding him with a tube, and we don’t want that.”

  “He looks beautiful,” I said. “He looks just like her.”

  Jim looked over at me. “That’s funny. Everybody says he looks like me.”

  The baby looked nothing like him. He looked like a miniature version of Lorrie Ann. If he’d spent as much time perusing her baby pictures as I had, he would know that. “Well, of course he looks like you too,” I said.

  I began to understand that Jim’s reality was highly dominant. Through his will, the baby was made to look exactly like him. And also through his will, what was obviously a tragedy, or at least a trauma, was transformed into a miracle. Their little boy had survived. Everything would be all right. That Lorrie Ann couldn’t yet pee on her own, or even stand up, that there was a seven-inch incision in her abdominal wall, that she hadn’t gotten to hold her baby for longer than twenty minutes, all of this was deemed inconsequential.

  When we returned to Lorrie Ann’s hospital room she was awake and there was a nurse at her side.

  “Mia!” she said.

  “Is this your friend? Do you want her to stay?” the nurse asked.

  “Yes, let her stay,” Lor said.

  “You, out,” the nurse said to Jim.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jim said, and popped back out the doorway.

  “She’s gonna help me stand up,” Lor explained. “I haven’t stood up yet. I can’t believe you got here so
fast.”

  “All right,” the nurse said. “I’m gonna put a pad down here on the floor because you’re gonna gush, all right? And you, you take her hands.”

  “I know,” I said. “I got the first flight out. I was lucky.”

  The nurse levered Lorrie Ann’s bed all the way up, so that she was sitting, and then helped Lor turn and put her feet on the ground. I was given Lorrie Ann’s hands to hold.

  “Pull!” the nurse cried, then softer, but insistently, to Lorrie Ann: “You can do it, you can do it, you can do it.”

  Lorrie Ann’s face was suddenly white and waxy, wet with sweat; she was biting her lip, but as she finally came all the way up to her feet she let out a yelp, a deformed little sound that seemed indicative of more pain than if she had been screaming. Her hands were squeezing mine so hard that our knuckles were white. She was shaking and trying to look down.

  “Don’t look,” I said, and she turned her gaze up to the ceiling. Blood was running down her legs and pooling around her feet.

  “Is this normal?” I asked.

  “I’m just gonna wipe you down, okay?” the nurse said. “This is totally normal. Then we’ll get you in the shower and your friend can help you get cleaned up.”

  “I think I’m going to pass out,” Lor said softly.

  “You’re not gonna pass out,” the nurse said, as she swabbed down Lorrie Ann’s legs and folded up the pad soaked with blood. “So are you her friend? Did you say you flew in?”

  “Yeah, I flew in,” I said.

  The nurse glared at me and made a motion with her hand to keep going. “It was an easy flight,” I said, “but it was so weird to be in California again. It’s snowing in New Haven. You know, everything feels so familiar that it’s like I never left, and yet I’ve missed it all so much that it almost hurts to look at things. I was getting weepy just driving on the 405.”

  “You were?” Lor asked.

  “Oh yeah. And I had the Beach Boys playing in the rental. I was a wreck. You should have seen me, you would have cracked up.”