Lola, California Read online

  Back in that long-ago century, ladies wishing to see greater beauty in life traveled backward on wagons, looking into a popular, smoky and distorted mirror that let them see the world—land, trees and sky—as far more picturesque than any reality could ever hope to be.

  In this limited way, during a limited time, the female half of the species found their freedom.

  —Eden Always

  Victor Mahler

  Freedom Press

  Berkeley, California, 1984

  And what happens to the selfish ones?

  —Rose’s diary, 1983

  Contents

  PART ONE

  FOURTEENTH OF JULY, 1982 1:15 P.M.

  SIXTEENTH OF MARCH, 1982

  1980–1984

  FEBRUARY 1981

  TWELFTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 6:09 A.M.

  TWELFTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 12:42 P.M.

  PART TWO

  THIRTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:02 A.M.

  NINTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 10:43 A.M.

  NINTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 1:26 P.M.

  FOURTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 5:04 A.M. ONE EXIT SOUTH OF BUTTONWILLOW

  FOURTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 8:37 A.M.

  1980–2008

  FOURTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 2:04 P.M.

  FOURTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:32 P.M.

  1983 & 2008

  FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 10:01 A.M.

  FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 10:40 A.M.

  FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 3:26 P.M.

  FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:20 P.M.

  FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:41 P.M.

  FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 5:01 P.M.

  PART THREE

  NINTH OF APRIL, 1952 NOON

  FEBRUARY 1972

  1970–1979

  1976–1980 SUNDAYS

  1978–1980 THURSDAYS

  DECEMBER 1980

  APRIL 1982

  AUGUST 1982

  JUNE 1984

  JULY 1984

  MARCH 1987

  APRIL–AUGUST 1987

  1987

  1987

  SEPTEMBER 1987–APRIL 1988

  1988–1989

  FEBRUARY 17–25, 1989

  1989

  EIGHTEENTH OF FEBRUARY, 1989

  1990–1995

  1990–2008

  1993

  1993

  2001–2008

  PART FOUR

  FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 6:10 P.M.

  FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 9:07 P.M.

  SIXTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 8:01 A.M.

  SIXTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 8:19 A.M.

  SIXTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:48 P.M.

  DECEMBER 17–19, 2008

  NINETEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 11:01 A.M.

  NINETEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 2:27 P.M.

  NINETEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 9:17 A.M.

  NINETEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:04 P.M.

  NINETEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:40 P.M.

  NINETEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 7:03 P.M.

  TWENTIETH OF DECEMBER, 2008 10:20 A.M.

  TWENTIETH OF DECEMBER, 2008 8:32 P.M.

  TWENTIETH OF DECEMBER, 2008 10:27 P.M.

  2001–2006

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 9:32 A.M.

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 9:41 A.M.

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 10:14 A.M.

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 10:14 A.M.

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:58 P.M.

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 5:12 P.M.

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 5:29 P.M.

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 5:44 P.M.

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 5:46 P.M.

  SEVENTEENTH OF FEBRUARY, 1989

  SEVENTEENTH OF FEBRUARY, 1989 5:02 P.M.

  MARCH 1990

  TWENTY-SECOND OF DECEMBER, 2008 10:04 A.M.

  TWENTY-SECOND OF DECEMBER, 2008 7:37 P.M.

  SOON

  TWENTY-SIXTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:32 P.M.

  TENTH OF MARCH, 2009 8:01 A.M.

  LATER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY EDIE MEIDAV

  1984

  Rose crossing a square in Spain, could be Valencia or Granada or any of the places where two girls stay the summer after high school, sleeping under rowboats or in flowerbeds, in hostels or pensions with balustrades and mites made venerable and happy by tourists, but it happens to be a less trafficked area of Barcelona, not far from where Senegalese vendors pray. Rose is all chrysalis, bruisable and diffident, aware of contours, thrilled by the people she will meet, the ones who will reveal all her possible faces, still hidden in magic invisible cloak sleeves.

  She is crossing a newly washed square toward Lana in a white T-shirt called a wifebeater and does it matter whether she holds aloft two drinks and one straw or one drink with two straws and whether the drink is horchata or limonata and that in a shaded patio Lana sits awaiting Rose with some dark-browed man they have just met?

  The man doesn’t matter: he just spells the name of some new adventure together. Rose’s tongue inches forward, all is potential. The surface of her skin could be a plum’s, ripe and ready for anything, because someone just granted her new sap: at that point, Rose is still included in Lana.

  All that matters is crossing toward her friend, their bubble mostly unburst, Rose no longer an observer, now someone deserving to take breath and live, every footfall commuting what had been one long and lonely life sentence.

  What goads her on could be as happenstance as the single brush of an arm as they stride along a railway platform, enough to act as a million fireflies of encouragement in the dark of all they leave unsaid. Rose, crossing toward Lana, shivers. They will never be lovers, they have been newly set loose on the world, fairly oblivious to everyone else. Masters or meteors: two girls at seventeen.

  HIGHWAY FIVE TENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 9:54 A.M.

  Vic has been, for years, losing his appetite. This happens on death row. In the last thirty days he has lost fourteen pounds and much of his eyesight.

  “What’s the matter, boss?” the guard Javier asks. “You want to look like a war victim?”

  “Who do I want to look like?” Vic’s fingers hover over yet another food tray, its edges webbed with grime, as if sensing radioactivity. “Who’s looking?”

  “Food smells bad today?”

  “The body doesn’t want food,” says Vic. The day before, he’d had a consuming hallucination that some old friends from early schoolboy and surfing days in America awaited him in the prison courtyard. In a fancy suit he had gone out to bless them. Then he argued with some official that he wasn’t ready to follow the guy into a cold corridor. Too tired, he had to get back to bed.

  Later Vic talked to Javier about how nice and thoughtful it was that the prison had arranged this courtyard ceremony. Only from Javier’s tone did Vic understand that no ceremony had taken place.

  “I don’t understand what’s happening to my body,” he says now to Javier, because Vic can’t rise from his cot. There’s a machine making his heart tick and a numb ellipsis occupying the nib where his stomach used to be; the ellipsis makes it hard to rise. He speaks to the fifteen by fifteen sound tiles in the ceiling.

  15 + 15 = 30, as he knows well. Also 5 + 25. Also 9 + 21. Much better to count these than the click and screech of gates locking and unlocking.

  Javier stands on the other side of the food slot. “Didn’t take your meds yet? Took the vitamins at least?”

  “I’m not that optimistic.”

  Javier sees the untouched tray. “Señor Legend, maybe it’s time for us to call Doctor K?”

  “No. Interference would be problematic. Who’s Doctor K?”

  “You’ll see him tomorrow. Mayb
e later today.”

  Such concern emanates from the guard, for a second Vic knows Javier to be one of the thirty-six righteous people walking the face of the earth, if not already an angel.

  Vic waits. “Could you please come in?” He clears his throat before repeating himself.

  Javier looks behind and then unlocks, making the choice to reach upward and slant the cell’s camera a few centimeters away. Someone might see them but in so many ways his prisoner is right: who’s looking?

  “I’m here,” says Javier. In the protocol book, one exemption gets its own page: once the Bureau of Prisons finalizes the sentence and only the slimmest chance of gubernatorial intervention remains, humane and dignified treatment beyond the scope of protocol becomes permissible. How can anyone define the slimness of a chance?

  “Would you mind lying with your head right there to give me some of your body warmth?”

  Javier gets down on his knees next to Vic, ginger in laying his head down on the bony prisoner chest, an emptied birdcage. “This is crazy, man.”

  “Your warmth is kindness,” says Vic. “I feel it entering me. In your hand too. But you could lose your job.”

  “Also my pension.”

  “No man ever laid his head on me.”

  “Well, they don’t give out teddy bears around here, right?”

  “True. No one ever gave me a teddy bear.”

  Javier stands up quickly. “You okay? You’re talking strange.”

  “How do I talk?”

  “Your tongue, like it’s heavy.”

  In mock joust, Vic sticks out his tongue at Javier, a proof of how manly and battle-ready he remains. He tries straightening the wayward vertebrae in his spine. “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.”

  “You’ll be okay, boss. I’m going to ask for another blanket. Maybe I can get you another Mahler recording.”

  “You know he’s a distant ancestor.”

  “I know, Legend.”

  “What do you live for?” asks Vic, desperate to keep him near.

  “My kid. Or grandchildren.” Then Javier stops.

  “But that’s for them. What keeps you going?”

  “I don’t know.” The guard waits. “Maybe your daughter will visit today?”

  “Now you’re lying,” says Vic. “You never lied before.” His eyes betray and don’t stop betraying. Since the time when he was small and someone shot a wolf cub in front of him, he had never cried, at least not in front of a living person. Today his eyes happen to let tears slide out.

  “I’m saying maybe.”

  “Maybe,” echoes Vic, already turning away as Javier leaves the cell, showing the humanity of a good host: flouting regulations, removing the tray.

  Part One

  FOURTEENTH OF JULY, 1982 1:15 P.M.

  On a road leading from California to the flagship Wal-Mart in Bentonville, Arkansas, they come across the sign.

  Deceptively simple: MALTEDS, in the rickety orange handwriting you still find in the American south, usually advertising sunbeds or churches. The girls notice that there must be some agreement between sunbeds and churches because find a church and down the road two bends you find a sunbed. Vic speaks an English that still curls odd words: “These places of worship promise to clean whatever they call your soul. Then the town offers you a sunbed to help you become a tanned god. The sunbed does what it can to antidote the tabernacles.”

  “Right,” says Lana, the torch in her gut generally more alive than anything sparking on the outside.

  “It’s a Lebensraum of flesh.”

  “What?” Rose knows Lana doesn’t like when she talks too much to her dad but can’t help asking.

  “The space a nation needs in order to live. In this case, a nation of flesh. The sunbeds say American flesh matters in this moment but you can transform it to find a better, higher love. The churches might be native or imported but they all say it’s the past of our flesh that counts. To find a higher love, you thrive if you turn sinful dependence on the body into memory.”

  Within this fry-or-fly context, the orange handwriting is a cool surprise: MALTEDS.

  And then Vic begins talking about malteds: “So why do people say you can’t get a good malted anymore?”

  Lana laughs and Rose shrugs, pretending not to care because Lana doesn’t, both half-listening and with the other half making faces at the boys in the car behind. By now the girls know that Vic is warming to his subject.

  “Is the malted a marker of some perfect American childhood?” Vic had come to America in late adolescence as a scrawny immigrant. Once, mid-argument, Lana had accused him of having old-world Transylvanian vampire blood that could suck the life out of any room he entered, saying he never got anything about America right. He’d smiled back so coolly anyone could have mistaken him for a vampire: you may understand America better, Lana, but my blood is also your blood.

  In the car, driving in Arkansas, Lana whispers something to Rose that Vic ignores, staying in pursuit. “So if you can’t recapture childhood perfection, what then? You spend the rest of life trying to get back your ideal? Or you turn pragmatic and say no one gets great malteds anymore? You resign yourself to loss?”

  Rose answers in the idiom of teen muddle. People have called her knowledgeable but it will be years before people say she speaks with a silky tongue and before she starts thinking silk might free a person. Now she just practices. “Maybe they keep trying to return to the crime scene.”

  “To the moment of their first bad malted?”

  She mumbles.

  “Well,” says Vic, off on a riff. “There’s your problem, Rose! Somewhere in your foster group homes or wherever you lived, someone fed you bad ideology. Twelve steps, crypto-Californian, pseudo-Buddhist, something. Your ideals blind you. There’s your paradox.”

  “What paradox?” Rose dares to say. Even if the foster comment was gratuitous, even when she doesn’t understand all the crypto-pseudo parts of his speech, she loves when Vic ribs her.

  “You have passion but don’t know for what, Rose. Makes you think that to find goodness you must push past where others stop.”

  “That’s a problem?”

  “A custom that could thicken a person’s skin. You lose the possibility that lives in porosity. Your passion,” says Vic.

  “You know a lot about Rose,” Lana interjects.

  “A little. She’s a real Californian. She has that sunny appearance of hope rubbed up against some arid inner plan. Who really knows what she cares about?”

  Lana shoots a look at the rearview. She may be Rose’s best friend but she is still Vic’s daughter. Just the three of them in the car. Everyone knows that if Lana’s mother had traveled with them, Vic wouldn’t have snuck in any comments about passion or rubbing. Lana snorts. “What are you talking about?”

  The girls have been stretching into the luxury of high-school summer between sophomore and junior years. Only they accompany Vic on a road trip from California to some conference. When in the car’s mobile temple, they dedicate themselves to hedonism or exhibitionism, busy tanning their legs out the car window. When in a motel, they go giggling in polka-dot bikinis to soak up chlorine in motel pools while Vic, on various shaded lounge chairs, wears reading glasses and peruses journals, rolling them up only to kill mosquitoes drawn to the tight cordons of his professor legs.

  With Vic they trip through a catalogue of dining moments: BLTs, Cobb salad, Reubens, Spanish omelets, Waldorf salad, pit stops in diners filled with evangelicals, golfers, Hells Angels. Lana and Vic serve as amnesiacs while Rose is trip historian, saving every single napkin and matchbook for a journal that for years will be a prized possession until the day she tries to give it away.

  Vic’s parables about perfection on this trip do leave Rose feeling as if he turns her into some kind of clumsy Goofus against Lana’s elegant Gallant, given that he makes it seem she will have little choice left but to impale herself on perfectionist ideals if she doesn’t first founder in s
ome vale of passion. Of course he leaves her dumbstruck, because who ever refutes Vic Mahler—Mahler the lawless maker of laws! as one of his followers always salutes him.

  With no one volleying, between new tangents, Vic’s hand bangs a polyrhythm on the roof of the car. “People say nothing distinguishes our time. Big deal, this hundred ninety-ninth decade. So what, they say, we bridge the age of petrochemical industry and the age of information. I say big stuff! Because we just moved from the age of collective accident into the era of individual control.” His bang gets louder. “Who doesn’t think consumer control leads to happiness? But we end up lost in some new Middle Ages. People found greater collective meaning during the hula-hoop era. Nowadays we’re as starved for absolute connection as any peasant during the Crusades. I’m talking about that famous god-shaped hole we’re supposed to have—you have that too, girls? What’s the difference between one of your chain stores and ye old cathedral?”

  Rose stops making faces out the rear, at core unbothered by anything Vic says, loving how this important man talks with her. “Maybe people feel that if they make the right consumer choice, they find a perfect mother, you know, someone who will meet every need.”