The Girls from Corona del Mar Page 9

  Her mouth opened, but she said nothing.

  “Have you figured out yet that Paddy doesn’t really love you?”

  “That’s enough, Mia,” my mother said.

  “Oh, how cute,” I said, pulling back so I was no longer quite so close to her face, but instead leaning in the doorway. “You still think he does.”

  “I’m leaving,” she announced, pursing her lips so that faint frown lines appeared in her artificially preserved skin.

  “Of course you are,” I said, swinging away from the doorway and stalking along the wooden floor of the hallway, smacking the floorboards with my bare feet, before collapsing on the black leather couch with my brothers.

  As my mother passed me on her way to the front door, she called out for Paddy. “Are you ready?”

  I was grateful when they’d gone.

  Except, a few hours later, when the boys got hungry for lunch, I realized that there wasn’t really any food in the house. The only money I had was the ten dollars of my allowance. The supermarket really wasn’t far, perhaps a mile at the most. But we didn’t have a double stroller, and taking Max and Alex anywhere was a huge ordeal. In particular, Alex, excited but also confused by his birthday the previous weekend, had decided he wanted nothing but cake.

  “Cake!” he screamed.

  “We can’t have cake,” I said.

  “CAKE!!!!”

  “We can’t have cake because your mother is a vicious, selfish alcoholic,” I told him. “What about a pickle?”

  “No,” Alex wailed. “No!”

  I looked in the fridge some more. “What about a slice of bread with yummy ketchup on it?”

  “NO!!!!! CAKE!!!!!!!”

  “No more screaming,” I said. “What about …” I trailed off. I remember I was looking in the freezer and seeing that we had frozen peaches. I was wondering if maybe I could make something out of the frozen peaches and Bisquick and water that might be cake-ish, or at least cake-ish enough to fool a two-year-old. But just then Alex bit me, hard, on the thigh just below the hem of my jean shorts, breaking the skin. I screamed and started hitting him on the top of the head to try to make him let go. When he finally drew back, his mouth was smeared with my blood.

  “Cake!” he screamed.

  “NO!” I yelled, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him into our room. Looking back, I’m surprised I didn’t dislocate his shoulder. I didn’t know what I was doing; I had no plan. I remember he was wearing nothing but a diaper, and I wanted to spank him, but everything was happening too fast for me to take off the diaper. I threw Alex facedown on our air mattress, and I grabbed a wire hanger from the floor, and I began beating him with it, whipping him across the back as he screamed. Max watched from the doorway, sucking his thumb.

  It was this scene that Lorrie Ann walked in on, when she thought she was coming to meet me to walk to the mall. When I saw her I froze, the hanger still upraised in the air.

  And so Lorrie Ann knew exactly how much less I was than what I could have been, how far I had fallen from the mark. Lorrie Ann knew and, somehow, went on loving me.

  We never spoke of what had happened. Mutely, she helped me apply Neosporin to Alex’s back and to my thigh, and without discussion we pooled our money and took Max and Alex both out for pizza at Gina’s over on Iris. They loved pizza. They still do. We didn’t notify Meghan Farmer of the change in plans, and that day when we stood her up at the mall was the marker of the beginning of the end of our threesome, which was later punctuated by Meghan hurling her portion of the friendship necklace at me on the playground as I shouted, “At least I wash my vagina!”

  And yet, no matter how many times I steeled myself, pitted my gut, prepared for Franklin to suddenly reveal himself as selfish, as small hearted, as foolish or puerile, he always failed to say what I expected him to say, or do what I expected him to do. I never stopped being surprised by his goodness, just as I could not stop myself from being surprised by Lorrie Ann’s goodness. I held both of them in a fierce and irrational esteem that owed more to the veneration of the collector than the easy gratitude of a friend. They were my trophies, my prizes, my miniature gods. I did not pursue my relationship with either for personal reasons, but because I sincerely believed they were the two best specimens of humanity I had yet to run across on the planet.

  I knew too that I was not worthy of them, but then, I had not been worthy of Yale either, worthy of any of my accomplishments. I knew full well that I had stolen them, stolen all the beauty of my life, stolen scholarship itself, and I had resolved simply to be very careful that no one find out. Even in my most genuine moments there was a whiff of artificiality, a tremor that belied the force with which I was pretending to be myself.

  Once, when we were about ten, Lorrie Ann had been given too much change at the Chevron snack shop: she had paid with a ten, but the man must have thought she gave him a twenty. Lorrie Ann didn’t even notice until we were five blocks away, and then insisted we walk all the way back so that she could give him that unearned ten-dollar bill, which as I recall was soft and wrinkled like wilted lettuce. I am sure Lorrie Ann would never remember that day, such an insignificant anecdote, but in my mind it became a central organizing allegory about the differences between us. Everything I had in life was half stolen, a secret, wilt-y ten-dollar bill that Lorrie Ann would have been too good to keep, but which I could not force myself to give away.

  Incidentally, Franklin had been with me the very last time I ever saw my biological father. Paddy I still saw intermittently, whenever I would go to visit my half brothers, but my real father was doing God knows what in San Francisco. I no longer bothered to monitor his activities.

  He was a yacht salesman. He had started in cars, and gone through a brief RV period when I was in my teens, but now he did yachts and nothing but yachts. He was short, and he had worn a mustache since before I was born. It helped to balance his huge proboscis, which was the same red sunburn color as his face, but ovular and soft looking, as though it were made of foam like Bert’s nose from Sesame Street. I am grateful that I did not inherit his nose, but I always worried I would inherit his temperament.

  Basically, he was crazy. That’s the short version. Throughout my childhood I would see him once, maybe twice a year. I would be flown up to San Francisco and he would meet me at the airport, usually alone, sometimes accompanied by whatever bimbo he was dating. They were all blond and all about twenty-five. It was unclear to me how my father, who was not even very good looking, and not even very wealthy, managed to pull such young pussy. When I was a teenager and rebellious enough to give voice to such questions, he would scratch his ear, stare out at the wharf, and say, “I don’t know, pudding. It doesn’t hurt that I’m well endowed.”

  “Gross, Dad.”

  “Well, it doesn’t,” he would say.

  But really I think women dated my father because he was exciting. Whatever he did, he did 200 percent. That meant when he was interested in you or what you were saying, you felt like the only person in the room. And when he was no longer interested in you? You might as well have been exiled to northern Siberia. He was filled with whims and caprices, sudden passions and equally sudden aversions. He went on a kick where he decided he loved chocolate soy milk and he drank nothing else for six weeks. He would keep four or five cartons in the fridge at a time, so quickly did he go through them. He decided, one weekend when I was fifteen and visiting, just after Christmas, that he needed a new look. He made me help him dump all of his dresser drawers into garbage bags that we left at Goodwill. He refused to keep so much as an athletic sock. Then we went to Macy’s and bought him an entirely new wardrobe. (This was an unfortunate period, what I refer to as the Ed Hardy Years. There were a lot of sugar skulls and tattoo panthers and rhinestones on my father’s clothes for a while there.)

  And so I think these young women, most of whom were making up for their lack of any real direction or education with their hair color and grooming and slutty clothes, found it exci
ting that my father could decide at eleven p.m. on a Tuesday that he wasn’t going to go to work for the rest of the week, and moreover that the two of them were going to Atlantic City! Or he might decide that you should let him cut off all your hair. (He did this to me when I was thirteen.) Or he might decide, as he did on the trip where he met Franklin, and which was the last time I ever saw him, that you harbored secret animosity toward him.

  That Sunday, he took Franklin and me out to brunch, where he behaved sullenly, refusing to speak or to answer our questions. He kept leaving to go outside and smoke one of his Swisher Sweets. I couldn’t tell what it was about, if it was just some sort of elaborate way of saying he didn’t approve of Franklin. I hadn’t brought a serious boyfriend around in years, but when I had dated in high school and college, my dad hadn’t been the least bit protective. Finally, I lost patience. “Dad, what’s your deal? Why are you being such a grouch?”

  “A grouch, Mia?” He gave a derisive bark of a laugh and rubbed his toast into his egg yolk aggressively, as though he were scouring the plate with it.

  “Yeah, and frankly, you’re being rude,” I said.

  “Well, pardon me. All of this is just a little hard to swallow.”

  “What is hard to swallow?”

  “I’m betrayed by my own flesh and blood and then I’m made to sit in it, like a dog, sitting, in, in, its own—shit.” He punctuated this outburst by putting on his sunglasses, even though we were indoors.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “You act all sweet and harmless,” he said, “but I know what you really are. I know what you think of me.”

  “I’m your daughter,” I said. “That’s what I really am.”

  “I never entirely trusted your mother on that one,” he said.

  “What is your problem?” I was beginning to be rattled. Sometimes my dad would get into an irrational funk that required extreme cajoling, but this was over the top even for him.

  “You’re a little traitor,” he said. “You should have been an actress.” Then to Franklin: “Don’t trust her. Don’t trust her for a second. Get out while you can.”

  Franklin just raised his eyebrows and smiled. Though I was mortified and upset, Franklin still seemed utterly good-natured. “I’ll take that under advisement,” he said.

  “You smug bastard,” my father said.

  “Daddy,” I said, wringing the napkin in my lap, “I really don’t understand what this is about.”

  “Why don’t you run and go tell your mother that I’m behaving ‘irrationally’?” he sneered, making elaborate finger quotes in the air.

  As it turned out, my father had seen a note I wrote on my mother’s Facebook page for Mother’s Day. I had written: “Thank you for being my mother. I could always depend on you, even if I couldn’t agree with you. Thank you for being there day in and day out. Thank you for loving me.”

  My father, of course, took this to mean that if my mother was dependable, he was not, and if she was there for me day in and day out, this was a jab at him for not being there. And if I needed to thank my mother for loving me, it was only because I must think that my father hadn’t loved me enough.

  “Daddy,” I said, “none of that’s true! I had to thank her for being there because that’s all I could thank her for! You know me and Mom never got along. I was just desperate for something nice to say!”

  “I think you know,” Franklin said suddenly, butting his head in where perhaps it didn’t belong, “that Mia loves you and that loving her mother doesn’t make her love you any less. I’m positive you understand that.” I watched as he stared my father down, Franklin’s orange cat eyes almost flickering with rage.

  I tensed myself, sure that my father was going to throw a gigantic fit. I wanted to correct Franklin: you couldn’t strong-arm my father into doing the right thing, you had to slowly manipulate him by catering to his ego, flattering him bit by bit until you had gotten him to shift his position. I had spent a lifetime manipulating my father’s moods. I knew what I was doing.

  “Of course I know that,” my father said, and I thought I must have misheard him.

  “Because you and Mia have such an incredible bond. I know you couldn’t ever doubt that.”

  “Of course not!” my father said.

  I sat between them, just staring in slack-jawed wonder.

  “I hate Facebook,” Franklin said, seemingly apropos of nothing.

  “So do I!” my father said.

  And just like that, Franklin vanquished the dragon that was my father.

  When I got him home that afternoon, I leaped on him like a hungry creature: I couldn’t even speak or verbalize my gratitude, I just covered him in ravenous kisses. And ever after that, I just didn’t care quite as much what my father thought of me or what my father felt. We exchanged a few more phone calls and e-mails, but none of them moved me particularly. I was like a marionette clipped free from the wooden cross of its control.

  On the day that Lor called me, I had just bought a pregnancy test. If I was indeed pregnant, then it would be the first time since my unfortunate tryst with Ryan Almquist in tenth grade. At this point I was twenty-eight, and you can imagine it took a certain level of scrupulousness on my part to remain so infertile over the years, especially since I was rarely without a sexual partner, in fact, rarely without several. Until Franklin. Franklin, I loved. Franklin, I simply could not lose. I did not know what would happen if I were pregnant, what we would do, and so I was contemplating the test box with my heart in my throat, when the phone rang.

  “Hey Mia, it’s Lor,” she said when I answered. “Are you still in Istanbul?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

  “I’m in town! I wanted to see you!”

  My mind was like a frozen computer. I hadn’t seen Lorrie Ann in two years, but I suddenly realized we hadn’t even spoken in perhaps six months. I felt like I had lost the plot of a novel I was reading. How could Lorrie Ann be in Istanbul when Zach could not fly and, moreover, they had no money. How the fuck had she gotten here?

  “That’s great!” I said, trying to cover my confusion.

  “How far are you from the Grand Bazaar?” she asked. “I don’t know my way around super well, so I’m worried I’ll get lost if I try to go to your place. I’m calling from a pay phone.”

  Stranger and stranger. Who even used pay phones anymore?

  “Not far,” I said. “I’ll come get you. I’ll meet you in the booksellers’ stalls.”

  And just like that, Lorrie Ann walked back into my life.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Loving a Loser

  The crowds in the main market, at any time of day, were simply crushing, but the booksellers’ stalls were sleepier: ancient old men sitting high up on stools, overseeing their hodgepodge of knowledge, religious tracts and decaying erotic manuals smashed together with out-of-date math textbooks and cheap romances. I imagined these men as the guardians of all human knowledge, and each piece of knowledge had value, was worth something, if only a single Turkish lira. When I found Lorrie Anne, she was browsing through an edition of In Search of Lost Time. She was wearing a yellow sundress that came to mid-calf and a long blue cardigan that hung from her shoulders. She’d lost weight. Her hair was pulled back in a sloppy braid that looked like it had been slept on.

  When she saw me, she said, “Oh my God!” and waved both her arms at me, as though I were very far away, across a crowded airport, instead of just a few feet from her. Suddenly, I noticed that she was barefoot and her feet were bleeding.

  “Isn’t this crazy?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Why aren’t you wearing shoes?”

  “I had to leave them behind,” she said, as though that sentence made any sense.

  “Do you want to come back to our flat? Have some tea, or, how long will you be in Istanbul?”

  “I don’t know,” she said and laughed. She gestured at the sky, which was a bright, almost Technicolo
r blue, with the book she was holding. “It’s great here! You have Proust and everything!”

  My God, I thought, this must be what Inanna looked like when she came back from the underworld: beautiful but mad.

  After deciding to visit my apartment for tea, I steered her back inside the Grand Bazaar, where I ducked into a side alley and purchased her a pair of pink cloth slippers because they were cheap and because I, bizarrely, thought she might like them as a souvenir. They had the traditional pom-pom on the toe. On impulse, I also bought a child’s tea set that was for sale in the same shop. It was time Bensu had a real one, I thought, and I also thought this particular tea set was beautiful and cunning: a bright yellow ceramic with gold geometric tracings. It was so pretty I wanted a full-size one for myself.

  Once Lor was shod, I led her through the streets of Beyazit to our apartment. Where was Zach? I felt the need to ask this urgently, and yet I sensed it would be cruel to, that in order for Lorrie Ann to appear alone in Istanbul, terrible things must have happened.

  “What are you doing in Istanbul?” I asked instead.

  “I don’t really know,” she said.

  “You don’t know?”

  “No, I’m sorry, that seems dramatic when I say it like that. I just mean, there isn’t really a good reason for me to be here. I was traveling.”

  “For business or pleasure?” I asked, though I couldn’t imagine what business Lorrie Ann might have here, or anywhere for that matter.

  “For my friend’s business,” she said.

  “Arman?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think he’d ever visit Turkey. Maybe I’m just here to piss him off.” She gave a little laugh. I had forgotten somehow that of course he was Armenian and would never want to come to Turkey.

  “Do you have a hotel?”

  “Yes,” she said, “but I can’t go back there.”