The Girls from Corona del Mar Read online

  But she was too angry for that, and so after just a few minutes, she was pounding at his door.

  “Come in!”

  She pushed the door open.

  “What do you want?” he asked her. His eyes were bloodshot. She knew that if she got close to him, where he was sitting on the couch, she would smell pot on him and possibly other things, fruity perfume or the rawer, salty smell of sex. They were, as he constantly reminded her, “not in a relationship,” and so these trysts of his were perfectly within the rules.

  “Can you just watch Zach while I go to the hospital? My mom’s in the ICU.”

  Arman’s sneer melted completely. “Of course,” he said, scrambling to get to his feet, and quickly following her to her apartment, with his swinging gait, caused by the forearm crutches, but which Lorrie Ann now found charming, now loved.

  “He’s asleep,” Lorrie Ann said. “You don’t have to stay up or anything, but if you could just sleep in my room so you can hear him if he wakes up?”

  “What happened?” Arman asked.

  Lorrie Ann told him about Dana’s head injury, about the tube inserted into her brain, about the induced coma. If she had had access to details, such as Bobby’s vivid and descriptive “eggplant,” she no doubt would have used them on Arman to make him feel bad, but she did not, and so her explanation was technical and unemotional.

  “Why would someone break into your mom’s place and try to beat her to death with a gnome?” Arman asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lorrie Ann said.

  “I’m sorry, girl. I don’t know what to say. Just: embrace the suck.” Lorrie Ann understood that this was soldier slang and that it meant something along the lines of “The world is shitty, but we’ve got to deal with it.” She was too tired to accept Arman’s platitudes.

  “Is that what you were out doing?” she asked. “Embracing the suck?”

  “Every day I embrace the suck,” Arman said.

  “Oh, bullshit,” Lorrie Ann said. “Fucking teenage girls that wander into your fucking stupid smoke shop does not count as embracing the suck.”

  “First of all, they aren’t teenagers. They are fully in their twenties. And second of all, may I point out just one more time: I have no fucking legs.”

  “Wah, wah, wah,” Lorrie Ann said. “Poor Arman got his legs blown off.”

  “That’s right, bitch,” Arman said. “It sucks to have no legs.”

  “Cry me a fucking river,” Lorrie Ann said, grabbing up her keys and stalking out of the apartment. She did not slam the front door, but she definitely closed it aggressively, before making her way to her car, saying a small prayer that she would not be pulled over for a DUI, and turning the key in the ignition.

  It was dark in her mother’s room, and Lor approached the bed suddenly out of breath. She became aware of how much her mouth tasted of whiskey. I’m drunk, she thought. She stood at the side of the bed. Was it her mother? Was she in the right room? In the bed was a small figure with a head swathed in bandages, tucked under a thin sheet, with many tubes going in and out. Lor simply could not recognize her mother’s face, not in the dark, not with all the bandages. She sat in the chair. Certainly the bandages around the head seemed to indicate that it was her mother, but what if there was another woman about the size of her mother who had also had a head trauma? Lor told herself to stop being silly and just admit to herself that this was her mother, but the more she sat there, the more she worried that she was sitting at the bedside of a total stranger.

  Finally, she stood up and slowly peeled back the blanket, more of a sheet, really, from her mother’s feet. She saw the neon orange toenail polish, the thin white tan line on her mother’s second toe from the silver toe ring with a shamrock she habitually wore. What had they done with the toe ring? Cut it off? Something about the feet looked so forlorn. Her eyes had adjusted somewhat to the dark, but her vision was still drained of color, like one of those black-and-white photographs where only certain parts were colored in: there were her mother’s gray feet, the shadows rich and lustrous over her high arches, the toenails a sudden neon orange, breaking the gray scale.

  She touched them, gently pushing her thumbs into the arches, wrapping her warm hands around them. She sat one hip on the edge of her mother’s bed and rubbed her feet, long and slow and mournfully. She thought of Zach’s feet, twisted and pointed as though he were mid-leap in a ballet. She thought of Jim’s feet, dead and cold in dress shoes under the ground. And then, of course, Arman had no feet at all.

  She thought of her own feet, which for once were not aching, and the way they vibrated in her shoes slightly, as though they longed to have real contact with the ground, not the hospital floor, but real dirt, real earth. She thought about monkey feet and human hands and human feet. With a jerk, as though remembering an appointment, she remembered that human beings were animals. Nothing more than animals. It was because of this fact that Dana might die.

  As Lor rubbed Dana’s feet, she whispered to her mother, “You are going to need these feet, Mom. You are going to wake up and you are going to walk and even run around again. You will need these beautiful feet.”

  It was true; Dana’s feet were beautiful, far more beautiful than Lor’s. Dana was a perfect size six, with high arches and magnificently even toes, like a doll’s. Lor’s feet were wider and flatter and bigger than her mother’s. She pulled on Dana’s toes individually, rubbing the bulb of each between her fingers. Suddenly she remembered the night she refused to break my toe, and the image of my foot flashed before her, the horrible split bulb, the cracked asphalt, the sudden explosion of blood and screaming, but she pushed it away.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Let Them Eat Cake

  If anything, it was Istanbul that created distance between me and Lorrie Ann. The international calls were outrageously expensive, and Lorrie Ann’s dial-up connection in the sad, subsidized apartment was so slow it rendered Skype some kind of slow-motion, avant-garde collage. Lorrie Ann could hardly ever afford to call me, and I could afford to call her for only twenty minutes once a month or so. Franklin and I were living off a grant, and Turkey wasn’t as cheap as we’d been hoping. So I didn’t hear all that much about Lor’s life after Dana’s attack. I knew only that Dana recovered but was classified as disabled, and that she had moved in with Lorrie Ann and Zach, which actually solved some of Lorrie Ann’s babysitter problems. In fact, Lorrie Ann seemed preternaturally relaxed about all of this the few times I talked to her.

  And so my life became my own again. The narrative concerned only myself, Franklin, and the wonders of ancient Sumer, and I did not have to worry about my opposite twin, who was unlucky, or who else was being punished for sins I did not understand. Left to my own devices, I was richly, deeply, quietly happy.

  I was attending the excruciatingly boring reception at which I met Franklin only to steal food. This was back at UMich, during my second-to-last year there. I intended merely to gather a few cheese cubes and chocolate-covered strawberries on my miniature paper plate and snag a glass of wine before hightailing it back to my office, where I could put some Queen on my fabulous new computer speakers and get back to work on my article. But the chair, a man I adored, whose name was Dr. Wooly, and who was perfectly rubicund and always smiling, much like a 1950s illustration of Santa Claus, insisted that I go shake hands with Franklin.

  “It would be good for you to date someone like him,” Dr. Wooly said as he steered me by the elbow, his great mane of white Santa hair cascading down his tweed-clad shoulders. Normally, I rather enjoyed the avuncular way in which Dr. Wooly affected to advise me regarding my love life, but nothing Dr. Wooly could have said would have set me against Franklin so completely. I did not like doing things that were “good for me.” Not even yoga.

  And Franklin himself turned out to be a complete snooze. He was nice. He shook my hand. He was, of course, very red haired, a true ginger, with hair the color of Cheetos and skin absolutely covered in freckles of a more muted orange.
He was of slightly above average height and with an unusually athletic build. I noted that he was good looking, despite his freckles, but good looking was not everything for me, was not even a must. The most interesting thing about Franklin looks-wise were his eyes, which were an almost iridescent brown that was dangerously close to being orange, like a Halloween cat’s. I have never, before or since, met someone with eyes that color.

  It would have ended there, except that, for whatever peculiar reason, Franklin liked me. Later he would say, “I fell in love with you from the moment I saw you.” At first, I thought it was only his romanticism talking, a confusion between lust and love. But later, I came to believe him.

  (I am sentimental about only two things in this world: Franklin and Lorrie Ann.)

  He began to hang around outside my office, to pop his head in and ask me questions, to stay late working, knowing I stayed late working. This kind of puppyish interest, if anything, made him less attractive to me. Indeed, I had to be wary because most men who were interested in me were masochists who wanted me to flagellate them in ways both physical and spiritual, which was, perhaps surprisingly, not in my line at all. If anything, I sought the reverse: men who would overpower me, who could make me feel small and frail and helpless, and for whose love I had to clamor and beg, whine and snivel. They were usually dangerously self-involved, the men I made lovers, one a Russian novelist with a recurrent alcohol problem and delusions of grandeur but with a remarkable and encyclopedic knowledge of Husserl, another a tortured African American painter (quite talented) who found his very interest and indeed love for me, a white girl, to be yet another form of his debasement and mental colonization by the white man. In short, Franklin was just not my type.

  And then one day, Franklin asked me out.

  “Remember the day I asked you out?” he often asks me, even now, years later.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I was so nervous.”

  “You didn’t show it,” I say.

  And he didn’t. He came into my office, casually leaning against the door frame. It was about eight at night, and he had been monitoring me, I suppose, and must have known that I had taken no dinner break.

  “You are going to have dinner with me,” he announced.

  “I am?”

  “I really hope so,” he said, his brow lifted, his smile wide.

  And so he, feigning nonchalance, as though none of this were planned, escorted me out of the building and around the corner to a not-inexpensive Italian place that had candles on the tables and where I ordered the farfalle and asparagus with gorgonzola cream sauce, and where he ordered a steak, and where we drank a bottle of wine.

  Our rapport was not immediate. In fact, there were several points during dinner when I zoned out completely and returned to the conversation with no idea of what he was saying. He was speaking, of course, about cuneiform, which should have been interesting to me, but Franklin was so good, so orderly, and so polite that it was difficult to tell at first that he was brilliant. But he was.

  After dinner, we returned to campus. “I’ve got to stop by my office,” Franklin said, and, unthinkingly, I waited with him while he unlocked his door. Inside, all was lit by candles. There was a bundle of lilies on the desk.

  “For you,” he said, handing them to me without any kind of fanfare.

  “For me?”

  He nodded eagerly. On the floor there was a blanket spread out, another bottle of wine, a plate set with cheeses and crackers, a box of chocolates. Some kind of chamber music was playing softly, what I later identified as a concerto by Fauré. I was so surprised by all this that I didn’t know what to do but laugh, not derisively, but nervously, girlishly, hiding my face in the lilies. I had never had anyone make such a gesture before. Not in my whole life. Not even when I went to prom.

  “Will you … stay and chat?” he asked.

  And so I began to take Franklin seriously as a suitor. And as time went on, I would take him more and more seriously, as a suitor, as a scholar, as a man.

  When we began working together on the Inanna project, I worried we would wreck things by spending too much time together, but we seemed unable to disappoint each other. How often had I sat across a table from some man or other and realized, in the elision of the moment, that they were about to disappoint me terribly?

  I remember once finding several Polaroids of a naked woman in my mother’s nightstand. I had no idea who the woman was; she was a stranger, someone I had never seen before, yet she was clearly posed on my mother’s bed—I recognized the tiny rosebuds of the bedspread. The first two were of the woman alone, and then there was another one of she and my mother, both naked, and artfully kissing each other, in the watched, passionless way familiar to firmly heterosexual women participating in polite threesomes. The photographer, I guessed, had been my stepfather, Paddy. I must have been around eleven when I found these photos, and I remember, not feelings of shock or scandal, but a sickening recognition of something I had known all along, this awareness of my parents’ base dirtiness. I slid the photos quietly back in the drawer, imagining my mother and Paddy pathetically showing these three washed-out Polaroids to one another after the “kids” were put to bed: my two wild little brothers and me, sleeping in a heap on our air mattress. This feeling of resigned disappointment, a kind of contained disgust, was present throughout the rest of my life in almost all of my human relationships. Always, people were turning out to be a bit less than they could have been, a bit more what you had uncharitably suspected. Even I was less than I had hoped I would be, and it was Lorrie Ann, in large part, who made me aware of this, not through her own perfection, but because she was the only witness to the thing I regret most in my life.

  When I was twelve, Lorrie Ann and I were pretending to be best friends with this other girl, Meghan Farmer. With a callousness that is common in twelve-year-old girls, but would be shocking in adult women, we verbally agreed that our friendship with her was “just pretend.” Truthfully, the idea had been mine and Lorrie Ann had fought me, stubborn as a donkey, every step of the way, but together we lured Meghan into the friendship, pooling our money to buy a Best Friends Forever necklace with three interlocking charms from Claire’s at the mall in order that she be part of a dance routine we were doing for a talent show. The three of us choreographed a horribly sexual bump-and-grind routine to TLC’s “Waterfalls,” which miraculously won first place.

  Also, we admired Meghan’s breasts, which were already huge. Unfortunately, the more we got to know Meghan, the more we didn’t like her. She wasn’t very good about brushing her teeth. I had also noticed that she seemed to wear the same pair of underwear for multiple days in a row. She loved to make the “Whoot-whoot!” sound for no reason. At first this had seemed festive and exciting, a kind of wonderful conversational punctuation mark, but after a while, it was just loud.

  In any event, Lorrie Ann and I had agreed to meet Meghan at Auntie Anne’s Pretzels at the mall, and so, since Lorrie Ann and I lived just a few blocks apart from each other, she was supposed to come by my house around two so that we could walk the mile and a half to the mall together.

  It was fall, which, frankly, is almost meaningless in Southern California. But I remember that it was fall because I remember that my little brother Alex, the youngest one, had just had his second birthday the weekend before. I also remember that it was a Sunday because the reason that we couldn’t all meet in the morning was because Lorrie Ann was at church.

  Normally my mother didn’t work Sundays, and so I had counted on her being home to watch the boys. We had a sort of informal understanding: my mother absolutely took advantage of me as free help with the boys, abandoning them to my care six days out of seven, and in exchange I was entitled to be as rude and demanding as I wanted. It was also understood that she would keep me in makeup and nice clothes, or the nicest we could afford. Since my mother was slender, we often shared clothes anyway, and it was from her that I developed a taste for fine fabrics.
In any event, when my mother had unexpectedly announced that morning that she and Paddy were taking the day to go to the beach and “rekindle their romance,” I was infuriated.

  “Why are you going to the beach?” I asked. “It’s fucking cold! It’s almost winter!”

  “We’re going to the Fun Zone. We’re going to ride the Ferris wheel and play skee ball. We hardly even see each other anymore, Mia.”

  “I don’t care!” I said. “I don’t care if you two never fuck again!”

  My mother was calmly putting on makeup in the bathroom, and I watched her in the mirror from the doorway. She finished with her eyebrows, then turned and sat on the pot to pee.

  “You can go with your friends to the mall another day.”

  I felt Paddy move behind me in the hall, walking swiftly, just the current of air as he passed. He and I hardly ever spoke. I watched my mother pee, thinking that every year she began to look more and more porcine, her fake-blond curls more and more reminiscent of Miss Piggy.

  “You know who you really never see? Your sons. Why did you even have them? You obviously don’t care about them.”

  I heard Paddy crack a beer in the kitchen. Alex and Max were watching Barney in the living room. They watched a lot of TV in those days, and the glowing screen kept them in an almost perpetual coma.

  “You think you’re all grown up,” my mother said, wiping herself. “But you’re not. You’re just not, Mia. You don’t understand the adult world.”

  I laughed, a big fake laugh then, a stage laugh. “God,” I said, “you really think you’re an adult, don’t you?”

  “I do,” my mother said, yanking up her jeans. “Because I am.”

  I leaned farther into the bathroom, getting my head close to hers, so that she jerked back. I breathed in her face. “Poor thing,” I said. “You have no idea what you’re doing. You’re just like a teenager playing pretend at being a grown-up.”