The Girls From Corona Del Mar (28 page)

Some time after that, Lorrie Ann journeyed to the corner store to obtain her provisions. In addition to her Imodium A-D, candies, and juice, she also brought back a small plastic tub of baklava that she claimed was for the baby and a pack of cigarettes that she promised to smoke only on the balcony. Together we sat on the oversize red chenille sofa, our legs folded tailor style, facing each other with the plastic tray of baklava between us.

“Even the idea of Mother’s Day just made me cringe,” Lorrie Ann said. “It felt like I might actually be becoming less of a person, less valid, less interesting.”

“There is something powerfully uncool about motherhood in the cultural Geist,” I agreed.

“But then what it actually was? Being a mom? Well, it seemed not just like the most important thing I’d ever done, but the most important thing anybody could do. What is more important? Buying and selling imaginary money? Making cars? Everything people make in this world is for people, and women are the only ones who make people.”

“Men are sort of essential to the process,” I pointed out. Lorrie Ann stuffed another baklava into her mouth. She seemed ravenous. I was beginning to understand that something about the drugs made only sweet things taste good to her. It was strange how normal and manageable Lor being on heroin was rapidly becoming.

“Sure, and fatherhood is super important too. I’m not trying to make this a women-only club by any means. Just that even men rarely view their role in child rearing as the most important thing they do, when in fact it is clearly the most important thing that anybody does.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said.

“What’s more important?” Lorrie Ann asked.

“Scholarship? Art? Politics?” I took a bite of one of the baklava and suddenly understood why Lor was unable to stop eating them—they were dense with butter and honey. I had to fight not to shove the whole thing in my mouth at once.

“Politics?! Politics is the most useless thing I’ve ever even heard of!” Lorrie Ann crowed. “You know what Arman had to show for his life? He killed a few people. Well, five people, one of whom was a child. He did that for George W. Bush. Do you know how much time women spent making those five people he killed? And all for what? Ideas, worldview, politics. It’s women who encode children with values and worldviews to begin with!”

There was something about Lorrie Ann’s fanaticism that I found tiring. “Women are undervalued,” I said. “I get it.”

“No,” Lorrie Ann said, “I’m not saying I want women to be valued more highly. That would be terrible. Then people would start paying attention to what we were doing.”

“What do you mean: to what we were doing? What are we doing?”

“I’m just saying, when a woman is a maiden, she’s in the spotlight. Everybody cares what a pretty, young girl does and says. And she’s got some pretty strict archetypes to adhere to: Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella or Britney Spears. Pick your poison. But when you become a young mother? People don’t give a fuck what you’re doing. Their eyes glaze over before they even finish asking you. Once a woman starts doing the most important work of her life, all of a sudden, nobody wants to know a thing about it.”

“That’s kind of true,” I said. Even I had a hard time retaining interest in my grad school friends once they had become mothers. “People should care more about motherhood.”

“God no! Please! I’m saying that this shroud of uncoolness around motherhood provides a tremendous amount of freedom.”

I sucked the honey off my fingers. “But freedom to do what?”

“Freedom to be,” Lorrie Ann said.

There was something lofty about the phrase that I both immediately loved and felt suspicious of.

Lorrie Ann went on, pressing flakes of puff pastry onto her fingertip and then nibbling them off. “Plus the experience of actually having children is so much more than anyone prepares you for, is so much realer than you thought reality could be—the experience itself blows the clichés of motherhood out of the fucking water.”

“Really?” I said. “I just never got that sense from you.” I had seen Lor mother Zach, and I had even marveled over what a good mother she was, but I had always assumed that if she could somehow switch places with me, she would have.

“Women who have babies don’t talk about these kinds of things to women who haven’t had babies.” She shrugged.

“Some kind of secret club?” I asked.

“I think it’s a protective instinct. The same way a religious person wouldn’t talk about his relationship with God to an atheist.” I felt at once that Lorrie Ann was somehow my ethical or spiritual superior, having gained access years ago to some secret world of motherhood while I chased the false idols of cultural elitism, and at the very same moment I thought: She’s a fucking junkie! These insights of hers are delusions of grandeur and nothing more. Let her have her delusions. Let her believe she is part of some secret cult of motherhood.

“I can’t even think about the motherhood part right now, honestly,” I said. I kept straining to hear Franklin in the hall, his foot on the stair, but there was nothing, not even the little sounds of Bensu spying.

“Sure.” Lor nodded.

“I’m in love with Franklin. Like really in love,” I said.

She nodded.

“And this whole time I’ve been, like, straining to be perfect, to not move, to not break the spell, because this is the best thing that has ever happened to me and I know that I don’t deserve him, but—”

Lorrie Ann made a snorting noise. “Deserve him? Who deserves anything?”

“You know what I mean,” I said.

“No,” she said, “tell me, do we deserve the spring? Does the sun come out each day because we were tidy and good? What the fuck are you thinking?”

I was struck dumb.

“He loves you,” she said. “He loves you.”

After a few hours, I wanted badly to go to bed. I wanted to go to bed in part because Lorrie Ann was like an air fern: how she was continuing to stay awake and alert was entirely mysterious to me. It seemed possible that she could stay awake forever. But I also wanted to go to bed because when Franklin came home I wanted to be in the bedroom where we could whisper in private, where he could, perhaps, shuck off his clothes, stinking of beer and cigarettes from whatever dive bar he had hunkered down in, and, in the vulnerability of his nakedness, find me under the covers by the dim light of the moon. This softened, possibly even nonverbal meeting seemed preferable to me than having him walk in on Lorrie Ann and me stuffing our faces with baklava and bitching about our lives, emitting that witchy stink of women gabbing without men.

And so I made up the couch for Lorrie Ann and lent her one of my sleep shirts. It was when she peeled off her sundress and her impossibly tiny blue silk bra (she was so skinny now that she was even smaller breasted than me) that I saw the tattoo across her shoulder blade:
Amor Fati
.

It could be translated “love of fate” or “love of one’s fate.” Nietzsche was obsessed with the idea, though he got it from the Stoics. He wrote in
Ecce Homo:
“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it.”

In all, it was nothing more than a fancier version of “embrace the suck.”

“I didn’t take you for a Nietzsche fan,” I said.

“Portia,” Lorrie Ann said, as though that explained everything.

“Are you going to go back to her?” I asked. It seemed appropriate that Portia would love Nietzsche; I actually held Nietzsche himself in slightly higher esteem than I did his fans, which is only to say that I did not actively hate Nietzsche for being himself.

Lorrie Ann slipped my old blue-and-white-striped sleep shirt over her head and tugged it down. It looked huge and billowing on her. “I lied to you,” she said.

I almost wanted to laugh. How could there possibly be more lies? And yet, of course there were more. There were always more. I rubbed the heel of my hand into my forehead.

“Portia didn’t throw all of our shoes off the balcony. I threw all of our shoes off our balcony. She’s not the one who went crazy—I’m the one who went crazy. We got into a fight.”

“A fight over what?”

Lorrie Ann pursed her lips, sighed, sat down on the made up couch. She looked so much like the little girl who had slept over at my house so many times. “There was a girl. She was young. She had been partying with us for a few nights in a row, and one night she was crying in the bathroom of our hotel suite. She had had some bad sex. I mean, she had started off really liking this guy and she’d gone home with him, but then he was rough with her and she tried to leave. She had these huge handprint bruises and a split lip. I said it was rape. Portia said it was the girl failing to be realistic.”

“Oh, God,” I said.

“She said, ‘Men are men, dogs are dogs, a dog will bite you if you take a bone from his mouth. Why are you surprised?’ ”

“How disgusting.”

“No, it’s weird—with Portia, she says these things and it doesn’t register as awful right away. She was telling these things to the girl to be
nice
. She was mentoring her. ‘You made a miscalculation,’ she told the girl, ‘and the best thing to do when you have done that is cut your losses
and go limp. If you had just done what he wanted, he wouldn’t have had to beat you so badly.’ ”

“Gross,” I said.

“But can you see how, if you’ve lost everything beautiful in your life, that might seem true?” Lor asked. She looked at me with an earnestness that I had not seen in her since she was fifteen.

“Yes.” I nodded.

“The worst thing is that I didn’t even get mad at her in the moment. It was days later. I kept thinking about that girl. She looked like you. I mean, not really, but there was something about her that reminded me of you, and I couldn’t get her out of my mind, and then Portia said something about me being lucky for having such pretty feet, and—I mean, I don’t have to tell you that lucky is something I have never been, not once, not ever—I just lost it. We got into this bizarre screaming match, where I kept saying, ‘Lucky is not feet!’ and she kept saying, ‘Luck is nothing but feet! Everything else is what you make it!’ And then I threw all of our shoes off the balcony and into the river, and stormed out.”

There was silence for a moment as both of us pictured all of those fancy shoes: some scattered on the pavement, some floating on the Bosporus like fantastical, miniature boats.

“You need to go home,” I said. I hadn’t even been planning to say it, but it slipped out. Without fanfare or dramatics, it just came out—that’s how badly it needed to be said.

Lor nodded slowly, and her face twitched as she looked at me.

“You need to go home to your boy,” I repeated.

“I know,” she said. “But there’s like … a wall.”

“A wall?”

“Some kind of huge, towering wall in between me and America.”

“You’ll be okay,” I said. “I promise.”

“I know,” she said, “but how to get over the wall?”

“Is the wall your fear?” I asked.

“No,” she said, with an eerie matter-of-factness. “The wall is how
I’ve been not thinking about him. I built it, but if I’m going to go back, I’ll need to take it down.”

I sat beside her on the couch. The baklava tray was empty.

“Can I help?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “But thank you for telling me to go home. It’s true. That’s the only thing left to do.”

There was a ring to those words: the only thing left to do. Suddenly, I worried Lor might kill herself. When I looked back over at her, she was crying into her clasped hands.

“I’m fucking terrified,” she said. “I miss him so much.”

I wrapped my arms around her. Crying, I understood. Crying, I knew what to do with. “I know,” I said. “I know.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said, over and over again. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said, and in that moment, her anguish was more real to me than anything in the world. I rocked her back and forth until she stopped crying, and then I tucked her into the couch, expecting at any moment for Franklin to walk through the door.

I waited in the dark for hours. In my mind, I had imagined that I would hear the front door, then Franklin’s steps as he made his way through the darkened living room back to our bedroom, and then, louder, crisp and suddenly near, the sound of our bedroom door unlatching, the sound of his sandals scuffing on the vinyl flooring, his keys being set down on the dresser. I did not count on the fact that Lorrie Ann would still be awake and that Franklin would stop to talk to her for almost half an hour, assuming as they both did that I was asleep.

“She asleep?” I heard him ask.

“I think so. Her light’s been out for hours.”

“Are those your cigarettes?”

“Yes.”

“Can I bum one?”

“Do you want to go on the balcony?” she asked.

“Fuck that,” he said, and I heard them both light cigarettes. Then I heard his heavy step as he stumbled to the kitchen and clattered around to find the ashtray that had come with the apartment: a curious little orange ceramic thing with black fleurs-de-lis crudely painted on it.

“That fucking tea set,” Franklin said when he got back to the living room.

“What was that about?”

I could smell the cigarettes. They weren’t even bothering to blow out the window. I felt somehow peeved that they were subjecting me, an innocent, sleeping, pregnant woman, to their secondhand smoke, and yet I knew this was entirely insane.

“She wanted to do something nice for Bensu. She just doesn’t know how to be natural. It’s a shame, you know? She tries so hard but it’s always obvious she’s trying so hard.”

“You should have seen her try to date boys in high school.” Lorrie Ann laughed. “She’d march up to them and tell them that she would like to date them. Or fuck them.”

I felt like I was going to throw up. I could recognize that neither of them perceived themselves as saying anything mean about me. If anything, there was something loving about the tone of their voices. And it wasn’t even that I was unaware of these flaws in myself—in fact, I was only too aware of them. It was that I had thought that Franklin and Lorrie Ann were somehow magically unaware of these flaws.