The Girls From Corona Del Mar (3 page)

“I didn’t even fucking see him,” the man repeated to Dana in the hospital waiting room, as though these words could do anything for her. I was waiting with Lorrie Ann in that room, the two of us perched on chairs like nervous birds, ready to take flight. We did not yet know that Terry “hadn’t made it.” We were waiting for the doctor to come out, to let us know what was going on.

“Didn’t even fucking see him.” I remember the look on Dana’s face as she regarded the man, still slightly drunk, presumably under arrest,
but present at the ER for his own injuries. His attendant police officer, a chubby woman with dolorous eyes, wearing sharp perfume, shifted her feet as though to lead him away. But Dana only looked at him with the same sad patience as if he had been a child asking her to take a snotty Kleenex.

“I know you didn’t,” she said, with a kind of grace I knew my own mother would never have been capable of. My mother would have said something snide and then begun crying.

The whole family, of course, was devastated and mourned in the beautiful way that only perfectly happy families can. When Tori Stephenson’s little brother Graham died of leukemia when we were in eighth grade, her mother had gotten drunk at the funeral reception and barfed in a plant. On the way to the car, Tori’s stepfather, Rex, had slapped her, leaving a huge red handprint on her cheek.

Dana and Lorrie Ann and her brother, Bobby, did not barf in any plants, nor did they cry too loudly, nor fail to cry enough, nor slap one another, nor do anything except do everything just right. Lorrie Ann looked miraculously beautiful in her black dress—a simple cotton thing that managed to make her look almost freakishly long waisted, as though she spent summers performing in Cirque du Soleil. Her bitten fingernails, crimson and bloody, served only to show off her long-fingered, elegant hands. The black eyeliner my mother put on her made her look like a dwarf hotot rabbit, the pure white kind with black rings around their eyes that they sold at the mall, so shy they simply froze when you lowered your hand into their pen, their tiny hearts hammering with the fury of a kamikaze pilot’s. Lorrie Ann was full of this same ferocious vulnerability after her father’s death, which made it almost painful to look at her.

To be honest, I was insulted that her sadness seemed to somehow exclude me. I had imagined us weeping together, imagined myself comforting her. We had always shared even our smallest and most ridiculous
tragedies with each other. Instead she was behind layers and layers of glass. It made me furious. I was sixteen; I had a little black stone for a heart; what more can I say? But Lorrie Ann had suffered a profound loss.

Terry had been, to a large extent, the raison d’être of the entire Swift family. It was for him, and out of love for him and his dream of being a musician, that they all scrimped and saved and shared the tiny one-bedroom apartment. (Lorrie Ann had annexed a portion of the living room behind some bookcases; Bobby had moved onto the balcony and slept in a tent out there even when it rained.) Dana faithfully taught preschool, which paid badly, but was work she enjoyed, and Terry played as a set musician sporadically, but lucratively, and pursued his own musical projects full-time. They believed they were blessed to be so lucky as to do work that they believed in.

His band, called Sons of Eden, despite the name, did not sound particularly Christian. None of their songs even mentioned Jesus. Then again, they didn’t mention sex, drugs, or alcohol either, which was remarkable in and of itself in a rock band. Terry didn’t want to shove his religion down anybody’s throat. He just wanted to be a decent man who was also a musician. It bothered him that so many rock stars were such revolting ethical specimens. Why on earth did people take a musician more seriously if he was loaded? How did that make his music more authentic? And yet it seemed to. Terry experienced every day this peculiar kind of discrimination. “Even if you’re not loaded, try singing like you’re loaded,” a record exec had once advised him.

But Terry would not, and his crisp vocal annunciation and technically brilliant guitar playing allowed him to get small record contracts that rarely made any money at all, but did provide a creative outlet and some tangible proof for the family that all their sacrifices had been worth it.

I remember that I found it particularly maddening that he wrote songs for Lorrie Ann. We went once to a summer festival where his band was
playing. It was a glorious day, filled with cotton candy and sunburn and corn dogs. Bobby’s friend Tio was there, and I was convinced that somehow Tio might fall in love with me and decide that our six-year age difference was of no consequence. Both boys were indulgent of us and let us follow them around without making us feel like hangers-on. It was wonderful. And just as the sun was setting, Sons of Eden took the stage, and they started the set like this: “This song is for my angel, my little girl, my Lorrie Ann.”

And then Terry proceeded to sing the most beautiful song I think I’d ever heard, with strange surreal lyrics I could barely follow wherein Lorrie Ann seemed to be conceived as some kind of barefoot angel that went around Southern California on the bus system, giving comfort to homeless schizophrenics and fat little kids and women who were afraid their husbands no longer loved them. The chorus went: “Get back into the bus, Lo-Lola / Get back into the bus, Lo-Lola!”

I had never been so jealous in my life.

And so when Terry died, an era ended for the Swifts. They went on living in the one-bedroom apartment. Lorrie Ann kept on going to high school. Bobby kept on going to community college, though what his ultimate plans were became vaguer and vaguer. But now they were all living in an untenable situation surrounded by far, far too many gnomes for no good reason. In a very literal sense, their lives had lost their music, their rhythm. Without Terry, they slowly stopped gathering for Friday-night horror movies or family trips to the world’s oldest McDonald’s, in Downey.

Perhaps the worst part of all this was that Lorrie Ann stopped singing. She had always been a talented singer with a sweet and natural soprano like one of those Appalachian folksingers. Her voice had a crystal-clear quality that made your heart shiver, as though the notes were all wineglasses falling but never hitting the floor. She had loved to sing complex harmonies with her father, and he had been teaching her both the six-string and the twelve-string guitar, at which she had shown
tremendous promise. She stopped practicing entirely, as far as I knew, though perhaps she began again after I went off to college.

Everything was changing so fast. And Terry’s death was just the first thing, the first
tap-tap
on Lorrie Ann’s windowpane by those bad luck vultures. Over the next few years, more and more of them would come, bobbing their burned-looking heads, the skin of their faces red and raw and peeling.

In fact,
the Corona del Mar in which Lorrie Ann and I grew up actually ceased to exist almost at the exact moment we left it. You can, of course, still go there now, but you will find only young women pushing Bugaboo strollers in Lululemon yoga pants, flaunting their postpartum tummy tucks. The playgrounds are swollen with little Jaydens and Skylers. The old bungalows have been ripped down and replaced with mini-mansions with two-car garages. More and more expensive restaurants serving “American cuisine” have opened along the highway, and boutiques have replaced most of the mysterious Oriental rug emporiums that once dominated that stretch of Pacific Coast Highway.

But when Lorrie Ann and I were girls, Corona del Mar was half empty, somewhat decayed, beautifully perfumed. Always there was jasmine on the wind, or the subtler, greener scent of potato vine, or the almost hostile peppery scent of bougainvillea. In every median and useless ditch, ice plant grew with frightening tenacity, and you could break off sprigs of it and write with water on the sidewalks, secret messages that the sun would dry to invisibility like disappearing ink. There were tufts of some kind of sour yellow flower you could chew as you marched along the highway, swinging your backpack on your shoulders so that it whacked you in a satisfying rhythm, on your way to the Chevron, where you intended to buy Dr Pepper but steal gum. There were hardly any cars, hardly any people. You walked around on sidewalks as blank and shining as drafting paper!

It was a distinctly unreal place, and I don’t think any of us had any intention of staying. There were no jobs in the area; the houses were too
small and too expensive. We couldn’t picture ourselves making actual lives there. Even our parents planned on leaving, on moving somewhere more reasonable, eventually.

Still, back in the spring of Terry’s death, we had no idea how quickly we would lose Corona del Mar. We thought, or at least I thought, that Terry’s death was just another of the exciting things that was happening to us, a plot event planned out by the writers in advance to provide occasions for good dialogue and new romantic entanglements. I thought we were just a few digits off from being 90210, and, frankly, I resented the Terry Death Plot because it seemed to cast Lorrie Ann in the lead, and she was always cast in the lead!

When would it be my turn? When, when, when?

If my thoughts during this period were both predictable and disappointing, Lorrie Ann’s were doubtless more interesting. I was given only fleeting glimpses into the labyrinth of her mind, and so was forced to piece together her inner world through inference and observation.

I already knew that Lorrie Ann had a peculiar predilection for the ethical. As a simple example, when we read
Little Women
, her favorite character was Beth. It so happened that I had read ahead and knew what happened in the book. (We often read books together, and I often read further and faster than she did, so that it became our practice to buy only one paperback copy, which I would then tear in half once I had reached the nadir of the novel, giving her the beginning and reserving for myself the end.)

“You can’t like Beth best,” I told her. “Pick someone else.”

“But Beth’s my favorite!” Lorrie Ann had insisted.

“You should like Jo,” I said. “Beth’s stupid.”

“She is not. She’s the only one who really cares about the soldiers and the war. She’s always knitting socks and things. All the other girls are just kind of selfish.”

I craned my head to look up at her. Lorrie Ann was sprawled on her narrow twin bed, which was canopied in a waterfall of fluffy mosquito netting and pink ribbons, her mother’s budget version of every little
girl’s dream, and I was sitting with my back braced against the side of the mattress, facing away from her, so it hurt to crane my head to look at her. Her face was upside down to me, which made her mouth look like the mouth of a frightening monster, even though her teeth were nice and straight. (My teeth were not. They suffered from “crowding.” I had had braces at one time, but then something catastrophic happened, and we were no longer able to afford it, and so I was given a retainer instead, which I promptly lost.)

“Beth dies,” I said.

“No, she doesn’t,” Lorrie Ann insisted, sure that I was just messing with her.

“She does. Skip ahead. She dies.” I was still craning my head awkwardly to look up at her upside-down face. Lorrie Ann bit her lip, and then—and this was such a Lorrie Ann thing to do, it almost made me sick—she said nothing.

“You don’t believe me?” I asked.

“So she dies,” Lorrie Ann said. “She’s still my favorite.”

You simply couldn’t disabuse her of this kind of nonsense.

It was similar regarding the death of her father. Because she believed a number of untrue and contradictory things, her inner world began to have strange, Escher-like spatial contradictions that kept her going in unending and insoluble logic loops.

If there was a God, then life was meaningful.

And if life was meaningful, then things happened for a reason.

And if things happened for a reason, then her father was meant to die.

And if her father was meant to die, then there must be something she was supposed to learn from it.

But there was nothing to learn. There was nothing to fucking learn! Except maybe that the guy driving the pickup truck was a fucking idiot, loser, no-good piece of shit, who deserved to die for taking out one of the best men I have ever known and the father of a girl who deserved to have her daddy one day walk her down the aisle. I had fantasies almost
constantly of finding the driver of that pickup and poisoning him or loosing bees inside his apartment or hammering an ice pick through his eye socket and into his brain.

I may have been jealous of Lorrie Ann at times, but she was mine. The Swifts were mine. He had no right to interfere with their lives so stupidly, so wastefully, so tastelessly.

Anyway, Lorrie Ann, during this period, began to worry that perhaps her father had been taken from them as some kind of punishment. If there was a reason for his death, maybe she was the reason. All of this is almost classically textbook, I know, but at the time I had read no such textbooks and neither had Lorrie Ann.

And so she became a vegetarian. She made a conscious effort to no longer gossip and refused to laugh at any of my jokes about poor Brittany Slane, whose downy, thin baby hair had never filled in and who would eagerly announce at the slightest provocation that she was a direct descendant of Abraham Lincoln. Weirdly, Lorrie Ann’s new desire to be virtuous, however, did not extend to things like cigarettes, which she still smoked with me, Camels filched from my mother that we puffed behind the handball court at Grant Howald Park as we shredded yellow dandelion flowers between our fingers. In fact, I came to understand, the cigarettes were a form of self-abuse, much like a hair shirt.

It wasn’t that Lorrie Ann was becoming a Goody Two-shoes. It wasn’t that she wanted to be perfect or loved or approved of. No.

She wanted something much more dangerous. She wanted meaning. And she thought it could be gotten by following the rules.

For the rest of her life, Lorrie Ann would regret not breaking my toe for me. She would remember forever the way I brought the hammer down, too hard and too wildly, so that my baby toe did not just break, but became a pulp, its tender bulb split and flattened like a squashed grape, the concrete of the patio beneath it cracked and slick with blood. She would think: I could have broken her toe so much better. She would
think: What failing is it in me that masquerades as pure-heartedness? And what was one to do if goodness was so duplicitous as to require you to wield a claw hammer at fifteen on a patio, serenaded by the barking of sea lions and the pounding of surf, just outside a bedroom where two little boys slept in a tangle on an air mattress, their golden limbs unblemished and soft as suede, their sleeping eyelids trembling with unknowable dreams, their very cells thrumming with the futurity of all that would happen to them, the men they would become, the things that they would want and do and fuck and know and taste?