The Girls From Corona Del Mar (2 page)

“I’m so sorry,” Lorrie Ann said, setting down a fry. She flicked her fingers to get rid of the salt. “I just keep thinking that I wish it were me, that I could have done it for you so that you didn’t have to do it yourself.” She was on the verge of tears, which was helpful. If she was going
to cry, then I couldn’t, and it was easier to comfort her than to comfort myself.

“It really wasn’t that terrible,” I told her. “They kind of keep it from all the way happening to you. They hide it from you. Maybe it would be better if they didn’t, if you got to see, if you knew. But really, I’ve had trips to the dentist that were worse on a pain and ickiness scale.”

Lorrie Ann looked at me, then laughed softly. “Fucking liar.”

Afterward, we went back to my house, where my mother was annoyingly home and annoyingly drunk. What was most upsetting about my drunken mother was how sentimental she became. “I love you girls so much,” she whispered as she tweezed our eyebrows for us, her own eyes filling with tears. “You’re so beautiful.”

I remember I was bleeding like a Romanov, going through Kotex after Kotex all afternoon, as she gave us facials, the one fan making a clicking sound every time it feebly rotated around the living room. I had to lie and say I had the runs to explain my frequent bathroom breaks and glassy-eyed distraction. I could feel Lorrie Ann worrying about me, and I kept trying to smile and shrug at her, mouth that I was fine, whenever my mother’s back was turned. But the finer I claimed to be, the more frantic I became inside, which resulted in a peculiar, languorous anxiety.

My brothers, struck dead by the heat, lounged on the leather sofas. Really, they were my half brothers, progeny to my new stepfather, Paddy. My real father was off living some kind of glamorous car-salesman life in San Francisco, where I visited him annually, usually for two or three days, though we were often exhausted from trying to be nice to each other by the end of the very first day. My father
never felt like family, not like my brothers. They were five and six then, naked except for their Superman briefs, their satiny tan skin seeming to glow against the black leather.

“This is an exfoliating serum,” my mother informed us, slurring only slightly. She was a makeup artist for Chanel, and my whole life was a
series of sample-size beauty products: tiny tubes of cream pressed into my palm as talismans against danger.

All afternoon and evening, Lorrie Ann and I waited: for our new faces to be revealed, for my mother to finally pass out, for my little brothers to go to bed (they still loved
Goodnight Moon
then—God, what a boring book! Good night this, good night that, over and over again). Finally, past midnight, Lorrie Ann and I snuck out to the small patio with the claw hammer.

I remember Lorrie Ann was chewing on her fingernails. Her mother, Dana, to discourage this habit, had painted them with a product disturbingly called Hoof Hands. But Lorrie Ann confessed to me that she liked the bitter taste and positively gnawed the polish off in flakes that melted on her tongue like battery acid, only to beg her mother to please paint them again.

“I can’t, Mia,” Lorrie Ann said, setting down the hammer and immediately beginning to chew on her nails again.

“Bitch, do it!” I shouted. We were both very, very drunk. My mother had been buying jugs of Carlo Rossi ever since my stepfather had been fired from the Italian restaurant where he worked. Supposedly, now he was going to become a hair stylist.

“I just can’t,” Lorrie Ann had said, starting to cry.

“Fine,” I said, “you fucking baby.” I remember that the night sky was clear, simply swimming with stars. And I grabbed the hammer and brought it down as hard as I could on my toe.

As to how I had gotten pregnant in the first place, I was one of what must be a magnificently small percentage of girls who become pregnant at the loss of their virginity. In my case, his name was Ryan Almquist, and he had insisted that the condom, when I asked for one, went on at the end. We were in his van, which smelled of surfboard wax and mildew, a combination that was not entirely unpleasant.

“At the end?”

“Yeah, dummy,” he said, kissing my neck.

Since I knew that the condom’s purpose was to catch all the sperm and that this definitely happened at the end, and was, in fact, The End of sex, it did not seem so improbable to me. Afterward, and especially after I realized I was pregnant, I was mortified by my naïveté.

I would have been angrier if I believed Ryan had intentionally deceived me, but I felt fairly sure he really was just an idiot. That was, after all, part of why I had chosen him to lose my virginity to. Lorrie Ann had been patient with me as I explained my reasoning to her, though I could tell she was not convinced: one of us had to go first, I argued, and it might as well be me. Ryan was (a) harmless, (b) hot, and (c) in possession of a van. Besides, he went to a different high school and so resulting gossip would be minimal.

“Don’t you want to love the person you do that with?” Lorrie Ann had asked.

“No,” I said. “Because what if it hurts and it’s awful and you wind up embarrassing yourself and crying or bleeding or farting or something? It’s better to do it with someone you don’t care about at all.”

“I think I’d rather do it with someone I loved,” Lorrie Ann said softly.

“Well, that’s an option for you,” I said, “but who am I going to love with this black heart of mine?”

Lorrie Ann and I often joked that my heart was nothing but a small, dark stone, lodged painfully in my chest, glittering dully like graphite or charcoal.

“I don’t even love my own mother!” I would cry out as Lorrie Ann collapsed in peals of laughter.

“You do too,” she would say.

“No,” I would say, breathless, laughing, “I really don’t.”

Years and years later, in Istanbul, I would still worry that my heart was a stone. It was Franklin, a visiting scholar at UMich, who introduced me to cuneiform, the very first system of writing ever invented, which
was his subject, and it was also he who first made me wish my heart were made of something else: bunny rabbit essence, perhaps, or pixie dust and nougat, or just whatever tender flesh a regular girl might have.

I had not studied cuneiform before; my subject was classics, in particular Latin. But in the spring of 2005, we decided to try to do a translation together of the full Inanna cycle, a series of ancient songs that tell the story of the Sumerian goddess Inanna. As a classics scholar, I had come across my share of goddesses. In fact, I credit my mother’s midlife crisis purchase of
Goddesses in Everywoman
for my later decision to study Greek and Roman literature and culture. I can still remember reading that peeling paperback in the bathtub as my brother Alex pounded and pounded to get in so he could use the toilet. I was fascinated by the gods: their amorality, their capriciousness, their bloodlust. But even in all my reading, discarded books littering my apartment like the carapaces of beetles, even in graduate school, those seven strenuous years of tugging myself slowly toward excellence, I had never come across a goddess like Inanna. She was a fucking rock star. She tricked her father into giving her all his wisdom while he was drunk and then gave it as a gift to her people. She married a mortal man and made him a king. And then, when she had it all, when the entire world was hers, she developed a hunger for death and insisted on traveling by herself to the underworld, where she was killed and then reborn.

No one had ever published the full Inanna cycle before. Her story was still unsung, waiting inside those clay tablets simply covered in peculiar wedge-marked script, the writing without punctuation or spaces between words so that it reminded me of the lacy designs on Ukrainian Easter eggs. Only small pieces of it had been published in papers all through the last hundred years, so in the fall of 2006, we received the grants and the funding and we moved to Istanbul together to begin the first cohesive translation of the entire Inanna cycle.

Before Franklin, I hadn’t even heard of Inanna. Franklin explained there was a reason for this. When the fragments, which had lain undiscovered for some four thousand years in the ruins of Nippur, were
discovered in 1889, the spoils had been divided evenly between the University of Pennsylvania, which was funding the excavation, and the Istanbul Museum of the Ancient Orient, which was allowing the excavation to take place. But no one was reading the tablets as they were being sorted, so they were simply divided equally and shipped off to their separate destinations. And so it came to be that half the tablets containing the story were in Istanbul and half were in Philadelphia, and no one alive had read the entire story.

So that’s what I was doing in Istanbul: turning Franklin’s rough translation into something Americans would actually want to read and falling in love with a goddess no one had worshipped in thousands of years. In our apartment building, there was a little girl named Bensu, which means “I am water.” She lived in the apartment below us and was perhaps five, with a pursed plum of a mouth and huge, rolling green eyes that seemed fashioned out of lab-synthesized emerald, and a tongue that curled out neat little phrases of English or Turkish, as though she were a toy designed by a multicultural idealist. And because of the innocence I projected onto her, I was time and again surprised by the perversity of Bensu’s whimsy.

“Just for a minute,” Bensu said to me. “Just for ten seconds,” she said.

What Bensu wanted was for me to stop in the stairwell, set down my grocery bags, and pretend to drink tea out of a plastic doll shoe. She did not have a tea set, and so she made do with the shoes of her biggest doll. She poured the tea into these shoes by artfully tilting a pincushion that must have belonged to her mother.

Some days I gave in, and some days I did not. But when I did, Bensu raised her doll shoe and smiled at me, her eyes twinkling. “My tea is very good, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Bensu,” I said. “What do you put in it that makes it so tasty?”

Bensu sipped slowly at the air inside the doll shoe. “That’s a secret,” she said.

“No fair!”

“Even if I told you the secret”—Bensu sighed, tired and patient—
“you would not be able to make it taste as good as I can make it because I make better tea than anyone in the world.”

“In the whole world?” I asked. “Wow. That’s incredible.”

Bensu nodded modestly and sipped once more from her doll shoe. Suddenly and with great passion, she reached out for my knee. “Don’t worry,” she said, those huge emerald eyes glittering as though lit from within, “I’m sure someone will still marry you. Even though your tea is not very good.”

“My tea isn’t very good?” I asked.

Bensu shook her head sadly. My tea was so bad that it made her sad.

“It will be very difficult, but we will find you a husband,” Bensu said.

“What about Franklin?”

Bensu knew Franklin, my boyfriend, who lived with me upstairs.

“I’m afraid he’s been being paid off.”

“Paid off?!”

“Yes, your mother has been paying him to pretend to be in love with you.”

“Why would she do that?” I asked.

“Because she felt sorry for you because of your tea.”

I never knew this kind of canny cruelty that lurks in even very little girls when I was growing up, half raising my little brothers, who were more like animals than children at times: perfect, golden little animals. Lion cubs. But even five-year-old Bensu was able to detect that there was something wrong with me that would keep me from finding a mate.

Was Lorrie Ann ever this cruel? I don’t know anymore. I cannot say. I can only answer for myself, the girl who once literally spat in her mother’s face, the girl who chose a boy to fuck because he was dumb, the girl who once, shamefully, kissed her two-year-old brother full on the mouth just to see what it would be like: yes, yes, yes. I was and am awful and terrible. I am sure I said treacherous things when I was five. In fact, I seem to remember informing a babysitter that our dog
liked to hump everyone but her, and that it was probably because she was ugly.

And yet it was not me but Lorrie Ann whom the vultures of bad luck kept on visiting, darkening the yard of her house, tapping on the panes of her windows with their musty, blood-crusted beaks. “Wake up, little girl!” they cried. “We’ve got something else for you!”

CHAPTER TWO

To be perfectly precise, I suppose I would have to say that tragedy began to nibble at Lorrie Ann as early as junior year of high school, though at the time it all seemed so glamorous that we were not able to be suitably sympathetic, but were, instead, almost jealous of her. A full year after my de-virginization debacle and ensuing abortion, Lorrie Ann’s father, Terry, was killed in a motorcycle accident.

Because her father didn’t survive the crash, and because the other driver (of a bright blue 1984 Toyota pickup) was drunk, it was never entirely clear what happened. “I didn’t see him. I didn’t even fucking see him!” the pickup truck driver insisted. He had turned left directly in front of Terry’s bike, which was going about forty miles an hour—five miles under the speed limit. It was mid-afternoon. No one was clear on why the pickup truck driver was simply unable to see Terry, who was a large man on a large Harley. Even dead drunk, the driver should have been able to see him—the only vehicle in those lanes of oncoming traffic.