Lola, California Read online

  Imitating her father without meaning to, Lana beats an off-rhythm on her bare thigh, the tactic falling short, as not much will ever keep her friend from talking with Vic, who now looks over his shoulder.

  “Rose, what you need is a love golem. I mean it. Wish I could give you that. Someone who would meet your needs. Some little woman who’d stick with you for about three months. She’d tend your every need. Unpaid. Plug up your holes. That would really help. After that, you’d be mothered enough. You’d be healed.”

  “Please, papa,” says Lana, arriving late to Rose’s defense but still arriving.

  “I’m just asking Rose whether she believes no one gets a real parent anymore?”

  “I said that?” asks Rose, wishing to sound steadier. “Or what do you mean?”

  “What he always means,” Lana says. “Everything is relative.”

  As reward for the unintended pun, which happens to silence Rose, she gets from her father’s rearview face a lifted eyebrow and wry grin.

  Everything is relative, the easiest of insults to a foster kid whose thin skin is no secret to the Mahlers.

  The conversation sinks, enough that Vic decides to spin around on the two-laner: they are speeding back to where the handwritten sign commanded with its promise of malteds.

  Rose, still scrabbling out of conversational quicksand, wants to ask Vic a question that will mark one of her first disappointments in him, because until Arkansas, she had mistaken his exuberance and thumb-worn bedside stack of Playboys as signs of an idealist: “But you were saying you don’t think you can find a good malted anywhere?”

  “Forgive me,” he says to Rose, “but I must take you as an example. You romanticize the pain of your childhood. Right? Think you’re stronger for it? While I see you living around some central lack. If you could just acknowledge that things won’t ever get much better than this moment, you’d be better off.”

  “Please,” says Lana, truly meaning it this time.

  “You’re going to tell me I’m a buzzkill again? I’m giving you girls a gift. It’s called the reality principle.”

  They get out of the car to walk toward the MALTEDS sign, overseen by a toad-eyed woman seated on a lawn chair beneath a trailer’s flamingo awning. With time to spare, she watches, a lady of impressive girth wearing an apron and little else over sweaty flesh. Somewhere in that face you might find remnants of a heart-shaped chin. With method, she has pulled back strands of carmine hair. And now the lady says nothing, one minute of life dispensed into watching their approach.

  For a second, Rose is free to see her fellow companions as strangers, Lana a tawny jungle cat in cowboy boots, a shaft of effortless cool around her, eyes hazel and obscenely glamorous: almonds, delusions, foreign shores. Earrings jiggling, a shiny brown ponytail bouncing, a tall girl walking with a man her height but made of rougher stuff, shoulders a skewed shipwreck, his face dark-browed and rumpled, this man called a lapsed Yves Montand by his wife, walking toward the malted lady with a stride both serious and bandaged.

  And what does Rose look like to anyone, their mesmerized chameleon, hard to place, flip-flopping along with them, never quite on the ground? A fistful of strawberry blond, the drifting heir of fair-skinned, freckled Cossacks or Vikings, ancestors dribbled across the globe and unknowable. What Rose sees in her own eyes is the thirst of a blue sky and in her skin the porosity Vic calls out, all this haziness partly why the unimpeachable brown of others’ skin or eyes holds such beauty, the certainty of brownness shared by her friend and father. Warm, unbruisable earth, impervious.

  A few paces off, Vic, never pulling punches, asks, “These malteds any good?” to which the malted lady grunts, taking them for what they are, namely, people whose insolence warrants little notice, even if nonetheless the lady’s sales instinct remains vital and bubbling: the teeth she does have glint a near-smile. With a confidence worthy of a screen deity or lizard, moving mainly her tongue, flicked sideways before she speaks, she asks: “How many you’d like?”

  A shared article in deference to the car conversation: none of the passengers can commit.

  Vic seems dumbstruck but finally says, “One, we’ll share.”

  Curiosity thrills the girls: stakes are involved.

  The woman’s heavy tread levies her up into the trailer. There she busies herself blending up the single malted. A biplane could not have sliced the air with a greater knife of nostalgia: the three customers hang wordless, awaiting the seller and her unrushable rites. Once done, she pours the concoction into a paper cup marqueed with the face of a silent-screen idol before passing it through the trailer’s window.

  Vic avoids her eyes. He tastes the potion, considers, and then points to the cup, handing it on to Lana who sips before Rose. “Wow,” says Vic finally. Of course Rose, with her tic of echoing, answers. “Wow is right.”

  “It’s thick,” says Lana right away, beaming up at her father, not yet wholly disobedient to the regime of Vic.

  They take turns sipping and savoring while the seller glints, confirmed. From the trailer’s window she waits for them to pay, unsurprised when Vic tells her to keep the change.

  Back in the car, they barely talk the whole way to Bentonville: the perfection of the moment has stripped them clean.

  Years later, Rose, unsmiling, will show the scrapbook from the trip to a man named Hogan just as if she were an emissary revealing a relic lifted from the last days of Christ. Matchbooks, napkins, the spoon from the malted place.

  Usually people say you can’t go home but that day the three of them arrived at a taste no one else shared. When Rose tells the story, she says every now and then the world trickles down some grace.

  Hogan will say that what Rose calls grace has to do with a more testable physical principle, like the conservation of matter. “You like thinking everything recirculates. Like what Mahler called the metaphysical law of thermodynamics. That everything is basically permanent.” Whatever Hogan says, Rose will not agree, because given what everyone has lost or gained, she might never stop craving mystery but can never again believe in permanence.

  SIXTEENTH OF MARCH, 1982

  marks the first and last time Lana will attend one of her father’s events. She comes so she can bring Rose: sophomore year of high school and second year into their friendship, already at a peak. When Lana’s father reads at Berkeley, she has heard, the scene defines chaos, and though Lana knows about the legion of fans, she still finds herself surprised by the number of people splayed out. The loudspeaker on the lower floor plays a segment of an old interview with Vic, one she has heard quoted too many times to count. Still it is disconcerting to have her father’s disembodied recorded voice following her; he didn’t know she was coming to hear him talk tonight.

  “I am hardly the neo-Freudian some take me for, nor, as others have said, the latest town crier of Californian existentialism. Not a classicist in neurobiologist clothes nor a latterday William James, not some Jungian new ager in tattered philosopher’s rags, nor a lapsed scientist come to the softer realm of words, but rather someone who believes that if we dwell deep in the physical center of our own motivation, aiming to understand how, when and why our neurons fire, we receive the truest gift of Prometheus. Boil all my life’s work down to this one idea, if you must—we have not been created to be machines of genetic input. All recent brain research supports me in this. My claim is that we do best when we articulate our own foundational myths, deeper than psychology itself, the very intersection of our will with physical matter’s reality principle. In this way we locate, dare I say, not just the efficiency of our neurons but their endless possibility, which should give us hope when we turn toward fashioning a life of meaning.”

  She and Rose make their way through followers breathing patchouli and body ripeness, heads lifted, kenning their Vic, the actual oracle himself soon to speak in the flesh. The girls climb past those hanging kamikaze off stairway edges and those who take cues from the piling of books by stacking themselves
up toward the store’s second floor where Lana’s mother had promised to save seats. Before Rose had met Vic and Mary, way back, all Lana had said about her mother was that she was half Yokut and half Japanese and that strangers always act as if they compliment Mary by telling her how fucking exotic she is, how she could pass as Andean, white, Slavic. Whenever Lana hears this, she has to roll her eyes with no little theater. What Rose will never tell Lana is the magic in Mary’s untraceable, unmistakable poise. A girl feels she has stumbled into the presence of royalty.

  And paired to such poise, up on the mezzanine, in a corner like a veteran bullfighter sizing up his opponent, stands Lana’s progenitor: Vic Mahler rumpled in a business suit, eyes burning under the heavy brow, profile sharp. The corduroy patches at his elbows and wrinkles in his suit form cuts of vortex, all lines of energy pointing at him. Nearby hovers the bouncer, his mutton-chop sideburns furious as he yabbers left and right, hands anchored on a huge belt buckle signifying the tail-biting snake of kundalini. “A failed local poet,” her mother whispers to Lana about the bouncer, the merest eyebrow lifted toward the man, a comment at odds with her nun posture, unperturbed by the girls sliding in.

  At the podium, Mahler too may appear calm but his voice is oracular, booming once he starts to read from his latest, Firing the Love Hole:

  “What I both advocate and long for is symmetry, an ideal of absolute reciprocity, a perfect task-and-reward system. At moments in history we have thought the productions of the frontal brain define the outermost contours of human potential but what we seem to have ignored is this: Aristotle’s final and material causes correspond to mechanisms in our entire animal being. Let us consider for a second the breadth of this proposition. We can already sight leeway in the burgeoning science of neuroplasticity. If our brains are made of movable parts, how do we take heed? This is not to say that, in the terms of the pop psychologist, you are condemned like a slave to serve your bliss, or that like some child despot you alone create your reality, but rather that endless hope remains for those of us who believe they have been locked into some dusty Freudian legerdemain. Similarly, we may also free those who find themselves locked into that other tale, the one suggesting some collectively orgasmic socioeconomic release. Let us consign such talk to poets. Instead, consider taking as a first principle the following: there is no time like the present to understand all the selves feasible in your one lifetime, not to mention the vestigial selves locked in your metaphysical DNA.”

  Until, afterward, he tells the masses: “I’m ready for your questions.”

  And a woman stands to say:

  “For years I have been interested in extraterrestrial visitations. We think it’s a fairytale, the relation between holes in certain cheeses and craters on the moon, and the way all of it could resemble how the drain in your bathtub might make faces from your own past appear—it’s true! go look it up sometime!—but what I’m asking is whether you feel there’s some biomorphic resonance at work in the culture at large. You know how counterculture forms the larger culture. Basically, do you think it’s centrifugal or centripetal? Maybe I’m asking because originally I come from a Wisconsin dairy farm so you can understand what Berkeley means to me. Anyway, that’s my way of saying I really enjoy your book. Plus that whole idea of wormholes and portals in one’s brain through which all sorts of things can enter.”

  And Mahler nods, genially, an old European courtesy in his nod. A costumed man, whom Lana hadn’t seen, pushes forward. Rose tries to hold back her giggles but still Lana pinches her, trying to get her to quit what Vic has already called Rose’s hebephrenic gift, her unstoppable laughter.

  Now the man, in a polar-bear outfit, holding a transistor and a giant cream-colored velour phallus, speaks, his voice throttled by anger:

  “Excuse me. I appear today in costume as a manifestation of Hermes, the messenger, and just want to say, Mahler, you urge us to follow one kind of life. You preach biological birthright versus choice and self-creation, self-mythologization beyond the determinism of neurons and then Mahler! Man! You live the most predetermined life. A tenure-track bourgeois professor’s life! I mean how cliché does it get? You have your lovely wife and rollerskating kid and vintage Porsche, your ivy-covered North Berkeley house, which, if these are not received icons, right, if they are not about choice but about perpetuating the bourgeois status quo, I’m Hermes, so what gives, man, what’s with that?”

  A speech enough to make the bouncer-poet with the belt buckle start toward the polar-bear Hermes with the clear plan of ejecting the offender from the ingathering of Mahlerites.

  And yet Mahler raises a cordial, slow hand, an emperor emerging from a long sleep to say: don’t worry, I know this man. Mahler pauses before beginning again, this time with greater care:

  “No one knows with greater pain than I do the disparity between what my work suggests and the way I lead my actual life.”

  Which fills Lana with a passion for her father. Honest, not thrown by criticism, a father who knows how to handle everything. Distant, maybe, but capable of inspiring such outlandish loyalty among his fans. If only they knew about his rage.

  Still, for a second she can see her father as he is loved, reflected in the cracked-marble eyes of his followers. How could his calm not make her love him more? She is his Mopsy, his good-mood moniker for her, her name when he is smoking a Cuban cigar. For a second she loves him more than she can contain.

  Two women up front start waving their arms in genial paroxysm.

  “Yes?” he says, pointing.

  One begins:

  “I just want to say, in response to whatever the Hermes guy said, that your first book really gave me great permission to follow my muse all these years. It gave us all sorts of freedom. And we both really want to thank you for it.”

  Which is when Lana realizes the two milkmaids on the metal chairs—but for the pansies bedecking their long hair—sit naked, their butt-flesh spread in luxury.

  She nudges her mother. “What’s that?” she asks.

  Next to her, Rose still giggles, unstoppable.

  “It’s okay,” says her mother, lower lip trembling. “A new sort of shaggy. You know your father’s work—it attracts certain followers.”

  Lana studies her mother Mary: the way she lingers on the idea of work, their family’s holy flag, while the nervous brown hands stay crossed like the well-bred schoolgirl she remains, an optimistic product of the twentieth century, a leftover from Catholic-school-near-the-rez upbringing, Mary’s nunnishness her continued trait despite the reams of essays she may have written on the lexicographic, neutering failures of Western thought in its depictions of othered women—

  —and again Lana makes her favorite vow: better to die than grow up to become her.

  1980–1984

  marks the bracelet of nights during which the dance, in so many ways, creates the friends: one boy says some invisible goddess moves their limbs. Using their false names, Lola One and Two, they most often call their dance the Lola flow, though the name matters less than the span of time during which they close their eyes so that arms climb unseen ladders. And who cares if hips shimmy or whether knees bend since the rules stay simple: you close your eyes and life will toss up what it wants. Risk, salvation, seduction. You cannot do the dance alone, you do it with a friend, your flesh almost commingled in order to surrender control. If a person could x-ray the thought above the dance, the hope for early death or glory would be clear while below the two girls stay teenage fish indefinitely, blind and riding currents that say all will be smooth, sweet, a fantasy of selfhood.

  To this flow there is background, the electric guitars against a drumbeat that Vic calls the idiot snare, and if sometimes the girls call their dance the electric sugar glide or the beauty of choice sway, it is always flow, hands climbing, eyes closed.

  To only one of their followers do they teach the dance: Jane Polsby, a girl who sticks around, forever alert to the idea of Lola squared—LanaRose, RoseLana—the two
friends never admitting they need Jane as glue, her outsider’s zeal coupling them all the more, while poor Jane never realizes the Lolas could never become LanaRose Jane as it would undo a central tenet. If the Lolas do teach Jane the dance, which Rose does one day, the act marks a confidence that the universe will never budge, no one else will ever enter their rhythm.

  Because their flow depends on silly vigils of twoness, on cutting the corners of pillowcases to make them tunics. They go to school sporting such tunics or pajamas with no underwear. When people ask, the girls start calling themselves Lola One and Two since a song about a British transvestite is Rose’s favorite, one that can move her to tears.

  The Lolas think they stay impermeable in their Berkeley of the eighties, a town inhaling during the corset of the Reagan years. Conspicuous consumption lives in the gourmet ghetto and beyond, a future of blandness and money awaiting the girls like a gaping dragon’s maw. On the streets the Lolas ignore the bland spermatic yuppies spilling out of new zinc bars, the men in candy-hued shirts emblazoned with alligators, mouths half open, caught in yet another moment of consumption, so much foreplay taking place a beat away in a cleft valley of computers. If the bar-studded streets possessed subtitles, they would say I am hungry and nothing will stop me.

  The Lolas live beyond all that.

  They first meet in a market near school, when Lana calls out gleefully from a neighboring checkout to borrow money she will never return to Rose, Lana’s gangly self clumping around in boots terribly attractive.

  For all sorts of reasons, Rose had been told she was one of those textbook foster kids, one of those resilient kids who patch together a parent out of cornflake-box commentary or the few fleeting adult connections they make. Patchworking, she had lived in orphanages and group homes, awaiting placement. After second grade had ended up in Berkeley with a wealthy older single mother named Joan, a therapist who’d always wanted a girl to complement her ten-year-old birth-son. It didn’t take a genius to know to call any future mother Ma almost immediately, because doing so had seemed to increase Rose’s chances of staying longer in a good situation. When Rose had first seen Joan speaking to the social worker in the office, Rose had sidled up, clutching her little teddy bear and saying: are you the rich lady who is going to save us? And Joan’s smile had been so warm, Rose thought she had done something right for once, so she had added quickly, speaking for herself and her doll: will you be our Ma?