Reinventing Mona (2 page)

There was so much I needed to learn about Adam before our wedding. I needed to show him how perfect we could be together. I had to win over his friends and family, possibly convert to Judaism, then get him to propose. I needed a serious action plan.

I needed a first date.

“You will absolutely, positively never believe what I just did!” I shouted into my cell phone as I pulled out of my office garage. Sunlight flooded my car as I reached the street, and the cool December air wrapped itself around my skin.

“I have a patient due to arrive in two minutes. May I call you then?” Greta asked. The first truly huge announcement I’ve ever had was superseded by the needs of the mentally ill.

“When are you going to call me back? I did something so unbelievably not me, I still can’t believe it!” I shouted. I glanced at myself in the reflection of a convex mirror in the back of a Shell oil truck. I didn’t even look like myself anymore, but this car has always given me a little zip. When Grammy died, I had no reason to get rid of her sky blue Mercedes two-seater convertible. When we used to drive together, she looked like something out of a movie from the era that boasted Technicolor. She wore a silk Kandinsky print scarf over her head and tremendous tortoise shell sunglasses as we drove up the Pacific Coast. “We are two single gals in Southern California in a hot sports car!” she’d exclaim. Every time. Without fail. This is who we were in Grammy’s eyes. Two chicks on the open road. A car can do that for a person. Even I felt different in this car. If a car could transform a person, imagine what I could do with a well-engineered plan and no budget? I could completely reinvent myself. If my eighty-one-year-old grandmother with psoriasis and a heart condition could see herself as a babe simply by pulling down her convertible top, why couldn’t I accessorize my life and make myself over into the ultimate after girl? Why couldn’t I become the woman of Adam Ziegler’s dreams? Why couldn’t I shift gears and change to the wonderful life lane?

“I’d love to chat, but I’ve only got two minutes,” Greta clipped. “Give me the abridged version.”

“I quit my job,” I shouted. “Meet me for lunch when you’re done with your session? I have much to tell. I’m giving myself an early birthday present—a life.”

Greta said, “I’m having trouble hearing you. Can you meet me for an early lunch? You sound distraught.”

Distraught? Forty? I am misunderstood by the only people who bother to listen. The only one who sees me as who I really am—who I’m going to become—is the ass of a Shell oil truck. It’s a start. A meager one, but a start.

I wasn’t lying when I said I had no friends. There’s Greta, but she only moved back to San Diego a month earlier. Greta and I met a few weeks after I moved in with Grammy, which was my junior year in high school. We were inseparable nerds, which earned us the nickname Mona and Groana. We were charged with the high crime of being “lezzies.”

Grammy used her many social and political connections to enroll me in one of San Diego’s most elite private schools. Most were rich kids who had either been on the waitlist since gestation, or had parents who were surgeons, attorneys, and CEOs. There was one lottery kid, a fact that, once discovered, sent her social status on a downward spiral from which there was no recovery. I certainly did not let anyone know that a month earlier I was living on a commune in Montana with four other families. Or that I’d never been to a school with chandeliers and mounted animal heads on the walls. In fact, our home school desk was a kitchen table made out of an old barn door, and my parents, along with the others, taught us about calculus, chemistry, and the history of the labor movement in the United States.

As it was, my brown corduroy pants and embroidered peasant shirts made the other girls maintain a four-foot distance from me for fear my dated style might be contagious. I wasn’t about to add to this misery by letting these privileged snots know where I was from, and why I suddenly showed up at their school in the middle of the year. I didn’t even tell Greta until our senior year. Not that she didn’t ask. Even then, her career as a therapist was taking shape.

After a few weeks at the Coronado Academy for Girls, the rumors about me started. Popular student culture cast me as a drug addict who had to live with Grammy after being kicked out of multiple rehab centers for a love affair with crystal meth. “Hey, new girl,” Greta said to me in the lunch arbor. Great, I thought. Now even the loser girls are going to taunt me. I shuddered. I begged Grammy to let me finish high school through correspondence courses or tutors, but she refused. Consequently, I decided that if I was forced to attend a real school, I’d try to be as invisible as possible. I never raised my hand in class. I wasn’t part of any clique. Only accidentally did I ever make eye contact with my classmates. If there were an eraser for human flesh, I would’ve paid any price for it.

“What?” I folded my arms at Greta’s call to me at eleventh grade lunch period.

“My, my, aren’t we defensive?” she shot back. I couldn’t tell she was trying to be friendly. “I was just gonna ask if I could sit with you, but if you’re gonna have an attitude, forget it.” She turned to walk away and I realized Greta was my only chance at having a friend at school.

“Greta,” I shouted after her. She turned around and scrunched her mouth to one side with snide skepticism. “I’m sorry. I just thought you were going to, I don’t know. I didn’t think you were going to ask to have lunch. I thought you were going to say something mean.”

She sat down and leaned toward me conspiratorially. “It’s so easy to think that way in a hellhole like this. I mean, have you ever met a bigger group of bitches than these girls?”

I could honestly answer that I had not. The reality was that I hadn’t met that many people in my sixteen years. We lived in a farmhouse with nine adults and ten kids, but other than them, I had little interaction with the outside world. We knew the folks who worked at the food co-op, and everyone who shopped at the Missoula Farmer’s Market where we sold produce, hemp macramé, beaded jewelry, and wool sweaters and hats that my mother made. When I say she made them, I mean she really made them—from shearing the wool, spinning it to yarn, and knitting it as she softly sang her favorite Cyndi Lauper songs. We were eighties hippies, after all.

So, in all honesty, I could tell Greta emphatically that no, I had never met a bigger group of bitches than the girls at the Academy. Greta was beautiful in a natural, not-trying-at-all sort of way. Other girls in our school spent a tremendous amount of time making sure their irreverently individual appearance received high marks from our peer fashion critics. It absolutely amazed me that many girls were allowed to highlight their hair, don leather pants, and have their weak chins reconstructed. Greta threw herself together like a girl who didn’t give much thought to her looks, and yet was still stunning. She has her Japanese mother’s straight black hair and thick lips, and also moss green eyes compliments of her American father, the chief of staff at Scripps Memorial Hospital. Greta always wore a blue hoodie with “La Jolla Country Day Soccer” in chipped white print on the back. Her hair was always combed and tied in a low ponytail. No one could see that she was pretty because she had an unfinished, tomboy look. But there was no doubt about it, Greta was the best-looking girl at our school. Today, she maintains the same low-maintenance style with a uniform of starched white button-down tops, simple black pants, and patent leather “roach stompers,” accenting the look with one of her dozens of artistic necklaces from her travels.

“So, new girl. You got a name?” shot young Greta.

“Mona.” I wasn’t sure if Greta was really being friendly, or if she was just taking inventory of the new, lowest level of the social totem pole. She was so blunt in her delivery. “So, what’s your story, Mona? Where’d you come from? What are you in for?” Greta was the first to confront me with the rumor of my drug addiction. I kind of liked the cachet of being the exiled tweeker, but then again, anything was better than the real story of my journey to Coronado, so I decided I’d be evasive with Greta and let her draw her own conclusions.

“You know, sometimes a girl needs a change of atmosphere to clear her head,” I said.

“Clear her head of what?” Greta shot.

“You know, stuff…”

“No, I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking,” Greta persisted.

“I don’t really want to get into it. I just thought I needed a change in scenery, and what better place than sunny Southern California?”

“You know what they’re saying about you, don’t you?” Greta asked. I shook my head and knit my brows, coaxing her to continue. “They say your parents kicked you out. Couldn’t deal with you anymore.” My heart took a five-story plunge. I hated this group of over-privileged nitwits. I had heard about my supposed drug problems. I was even amused by the ludicrous rumors. But my parents kicked me out? Not amusing in the least.

I saw my mother sweeping a spider up with a sheet of newspaper and gently escorting it out the door. Once she even argued that a grape juice stain had every right to permanently reside on the blouse she spilled it on. She said there was no point in trying to wash out grape juice, so she may as well think of it as a new design. She used watercolor paints and placed petals around the misshapen purple center of her makeshift flower. Fully functional clothing would never be discarded on our Utopian commune. Ants were “redirected” to the outdoors through strategically placed slices of lemon rind. But according to the know-it-alls at the Academy, my parents kicked their own daughter out of the house.

I remembered how my father looked the last time I saw him, closing the door of the school bus and giving me a thumbs-up as if their road trip to the capitol for a nuclear disarmament rally would actually make a bit of difference. As if a few thousand hippies were going to change Ronald Reagan’s mind and get him to think, “Well, what do you know, this peace-through-strength thing really
is
a bad idea. Now that you mention it, why
don’t
we just give peace a chance?” Laughably, the girls at the Academy cast my father as a pinstriped CEO of an electronics company who sent me to the finest rehab programs for teens.

“My parents didn’t kick me out,” I told Greta through my gritted teeth. “I had to leave Montana, but it’s not what you think.”

“Then educate me.” Greta smirked. “Are you running from the law? Shady past? Ex-boyfriend with a vendetta? And what’s the deal with the freaky hair?”

“I don’t know what it is that makes you think that just sitting down next to me and asking rude questions entitles you to hear my life story, but I can tell you right now, you are sorely mistaken,” I stood up with my tray and no particular exit strategy. “I think you’re a very nosy person and I don’t like you one bit.”

I really don’t remember how we came together after that, but I do recall that by spring we were best friends. By senior year, we were inseparable, doing homework together by telephone and spending weekends pretending to be tourists at the Hotel Del Coronado. I loved looking at the photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon from when they filmed
Some Like It Hot
there. I’d run my feet across every inch of the hotel’s deep red patterned carpet hoping to soak up some sex appeal Marilyn left behind.

* * *

Greta convinced me to join the girls’ soccer team at the Academy and tried desperately to get me to apply to colleges out of state. A therapist-in-the-making, Greta considered me her personal project, always trying to get me to explore what was best for my personal development. At that age, however, she lacked the maturity to help me truly discover what was best for me, and simply imposed her agenda of what she thought I should do. Her heart was in the right place, but the reality was that she had the wisdom of a teenager. Within three days of hearing about how I came to live with Grammy, she had my entire future mapped out, including what issues I needed to work through and how I was to do it. I never needed to figure out who I was. Greta was always there to do it for me. Perhaps that was a cheap shot. Greta is a truly decent person, but it was tough being the source of her frustration when I dared to disagree with her often-hurried analysis of my life.

When Greta left for Texas to attend college, I was free to continue my quiet pursuit of nothing at UCSD. I received an engineering degree, but otherwise camouflaged myself into the wooded seaside campus. I remember the first day of class when I noticed how many kids attended the school. It wasn’t like the Academy, where we graduated sixty-one girls; at the university, students bustled about everywhere. No one seemed to notice me, or the intoxicating scent of eucalyptus leaves drooping from countless branches overhead. This was the perfect place for me, I thought. My momentary sense of peace in having discovered my personal Valhalla was interrupted by guilt over the fact that I was both relieved and saddened to have lost my best friend to the Lone Star State.

I found a parking spot across the street from the Big Kitchen, a three-room breakfast joint in Golden Hill. Greta said that on weekends there’s an hour-long wait for a table, but on a Wednesday morning at eleven-thirty, the wooden screen door was motionless and the bench outside sat empty. The crisp December air was still and dry. Directly outside the door was a three-foot wooden coffee cup, brightly painted, reading: small world, big kitchen.

The dining room was cluttered with thousands of snapshots stapled to the walls. Beside them hung handmade posters, postcards from around the world, and autographed pictures of comediennes with a woman with a tie-dyed dress and salt-and-pepper wavy hair. A large cutout of Jerry Garcia stood in the corner beside a framed newspaper article about a group that burned sage to ward off evil spirits at the San Diego Convention Center the day after the 1996 Republican National Convention ended. On the menu, house specials were crammed together like commuters on a New York City subway.

The woman from the pictures emerged from the kitchen like smoke. She introduced herself as Judy the Beauty in a pack-a-day gravelly voice that was an inviting combination of boldness and warmth. “You’re Mona, oui?” I nodded my head. She had a New York Jewish way about her, but I imagined Judy took on snippets of foreign languages in her everyday speech depending on what type of mood she was in. Some days, it very well may have been Yiddish; others French. “Greta is running late so get that little tushie in here and grab a seat while I pour us a fresh cup of coffee,” Judy offered. “Welcome to the Big Kitchen, where everyone’s a friend,” Judy said, motioning to a bearded man at the counter. “Ain’t that right? If you don’t act right at the door, we don’t let you in.”