The Girls From Corona Del Mar (7 page)

But what I found was disturbing in a completely different way. I pressed the doorbell and my little brother Max, who was the oldest, answered. “It’s Mia!” he screamed, and clamped his little arms around me, pressing his face into my stomach. Inside I could smell spaghetti sauce. There was a new lamp in the living room. My mother came out from the kitchen wearing an apron. An apron! When she kissed me, there was not even the smell of wine on her breath.

It turned out that without me, everything had been fine. They had been thriving. My belief that I had been the glue that was keeping our entire little family together turned out to be a complete delusion. In fact, they all seemed much happier and at peace than when I had lived there. Even the bathroom was squeaky clean, with a new and really lovely shower curtain, cream with pink and brown flowers, satiny and rich people–ish.

I could have cried.

The next few days were frankly a little boring. In the mornings, I would head to the hospital, where more and more I received the impression that I was actually in the way. I was rarely alone with Lorrie Ann, as Jim and Dana were ever present. Even Bobby swung by every day, bringing In-N-Out burgers or burritos for everyone. Eventually, Jim stopped me
in the hall outside Lorrie Ann’s room. “How long are you gonna stay?” he asked.

“I figured I’d get some lunch around one,” I said.

“No, I mean in California.”

“Oh, I’m here for two weeks.”

“Two weeks?” he asked. “Wow.”

There was an awkward pause. I could hear Dana laughing inside Lor’s room, and Lor murmuring something that made her mother laugh even louder.

Jim blinked his round, wet little eyes. “The thing is, Mia, I’m not sure this is really the best time for a visit, you know? Lorrie Ann’s trying to recover, we’ve got the baby to take care of, it just isn’t the best time for, like, guests, you know?”

I stared at him. “I guess I don’t think of myself as a guest, Jim.”

“Ach! See now?” he said. “Don’t get offended. Lorrie Ann knew you’d get offended. Listen, it’s just that we think it would be easier once she’s been discharged and we’re home if it’s just me, her, and the baby.”

I had pictured myself doing things like grocery shopping for them, fixing dinner, taking out the trash, but I suddenly realized Jim was capable of doing all those things. He was, after all, a chef and could probably make much better dinners than I could. Each time I was faced with a bell pepper, I had to re-derive the best method of slicing it. What really hurt was that Lorrie Ann had been part of this decision, but had opted not to talk to me herself. “You do it,” I imagined her saying to Jim.

“Okay,” I said. “No problem.”

In fact, it was better for me to go back earlier: less time to fall in love with my brothers and their micro-suede skin, less time to fight with my mother and her new domesticity, less work to make up at Yale, less money to spend on the rental car. But on the plane back to New Haven, I felt jilted. I knew it was irrational. They were a family. They should be together and celebrate their new son, who had miraculously lived.
It just hurt to finally understand that I was not part of that family, that it would now be Jim and not me that Lorrie Ann wanted when she was in trouble. I wondered whether the flight attendant would card me if I ordered a scotch. Beneath me, America was visible only as a series of gray and brown rectangles, innumerable and strange.

CHAPTER FIVE

After Yale, I attended graduate school at UMich and got a dog by mistake. What I mean is, my first year I had a roommate who got a pit bull puppy that she named Space Cake and who then promptly disappeared off the face of the planet, leaving me with the puppy and her part of the rent to pay. Space was solid white, and her pink skin shone through her creamy fur, making her look like a piglet. Her eyes were pinky blue like a white rabbit’s.

That dog ate everything nice I owned. Space devoured cell phones, designer sunglasses, shoes. She loved most to suss out and remove the metal fettuccine curve of an underwire bra. Her mouth was pink and wrinkly and wet like a vagina. It was like being the owner of a small, sensual monster. She would angle herself wearily, then suddenly flop, completely limp, into your lap. Her body smelled wonderfully of yeast, and in her eyes was a terrible knowing, as though with her bloody pink eyes she were saying that her fate was entirely in your hands and that she would surrender as willingly to violence as to pleasure.

After she had been mine almost the whole year, Space got hit by a car on Washtenaw Avenue near Carpenter. It was a busy street and one I usually avoided walking along, but on that night I was in a hurry to get back home and change so I could go out on a date. It was already dark. I should have been paying more attention. I was distracted. We were walking toward another woman and her dog, a mirror image of ourselves, really, and Space suddenly stopped as I kept walking and her collar pulled right off her neck. I felt the tug, turned to look, and reached
out my hand just as she bolted into traffic. She was hit twice, but made it to the other side, limping badly. I could still see her even though it was dark because of her white fur. The headlights of passing cars were a strobe. “Space,” I kept screaming. “Stay there! Space! Stay!”

But she didn’t. She ran to me. She was hit three more times on the way, and the last time she was hit so hard that she skidded on her side maybe fifteen yards past me. The woman and her dog who were our mirror image were both frozen, watching all this, horrified. The woman had her hand over her mouth. She had very curly hair, the kind that is difficult to take care of without it getting frizzy, and it was undulating around her head in the wind. When I got to Space, she was not moving, but her eyes were darting wildly about. I dragged her by her ankles farther to the side of the road, and knelt beside her. I tried to lift her head onto my lap, but the bottom side of her face was missing. She began shaking in such a way that I guessed she was having a seizure.

“She’s not dead!” I screamed at the woman who was watching us. “Oh God, she isn’t dead!”

I would have given anything to be able to kill Space, but I didn’t know how. How could I break her big thick neck? With what could I put her out of her misery? I had only an iPod and a house key. I had nothing. What was worse was how afraid I was to touch her, as though her body were dirty. I kept trying to make myself rest my palms on her body, to let her know I was there, that I loved her, but she was as foul to me as if she had been any anonymous roadkill, some infested carcass. She was still warm! And yet no matter how hard I tried, I could not keep my hands on her body, but kept pulling them back up and bunching them in fists under my face.

“My friend’s dog just had puppies!” the woman with the curly hair said.

“I don’t want puppies,” I said. “What do I do? She’s too big to carry!”

“I don’t know. Can you call someone?” the woman asked.

But I had no one to call. Eventually, a kind woman in an SUV stopped and offered to give me and Space a ride somewhere. The woman had
one of those windshield sun protectors that are shiny metallic paper-fabric and look like they should line the inside of a rotisserie oven. I tugged Space’s body onto it and then loaded her into this woman’s SUV. We were on our way to the vet when Space finally stopped shaking and her body became still. Instantly, the smell in the car changed. After a brief consultation, the woman reversed her direction and instead took me and the corpse of my dog to my apartment.

I had never before this understood the horror of death. I found poets and writers who wrote on themes of death to be slightly melodramatic. For myself, I looked forward to death. I was curious if there would be anything. If there would be a bright light or heaven or hell or nothingness. I thought it was going to be kind of cool to find out, and I had no worries that I would die whenever I was supposed to and that it would be fine. Before Space, I did not understand zombie movies either, or what makes vampires frightening. I didn’t understand how very dead dead things were.

The night of Space’s death, I called the only person I knew to call.

She picked up on the third ring.

“Hey, Mia, what’s up?”

Quavering, I told her the story. “And now I can’t stop seeing it happen in my mind, just over and over again. I’m not being melodramatic. I just keep almost seeing it. Do you know what I mean?” I could hear screaming in the background, child screaming.

“No,” Lorrie Ann said, in a way that I could tell was not meant for me, but for Zach. “Listen,” she said, “Jim gets home tomorrow in the morning and the house is a fucking wreck. It’s insane. The sergeant on Rear D only called me like half an hour ago.”

“Rear D” was the rear detachment, or the group of soldiers who were left behind on a deployment. Jim had joined the army during my last year at Yale, so by now I knew all the lingo. They were living on base at Fort Irwin in San Bernardino, one of the most remote and desolate
of all army bases, surrounded on all sides by the Mojave Desert. Lorrie Ann spoke of this isolation often in tones that implied quiet persecution, by which I was completely baffled. Jim had not been drafted; he had enlisted. I didn’t have a terrible amount of sympathy for the Jim-Army decision.

Purportedly, he had done it so that they could have insurance for Zach, whose CP, it turned out, was diagnosed as more severe almost every time he was taken to the doctor. By the time he was two, Lorrie Ann and Jim were several hundred thousand in debt. Jim earned too much for them to qualify for Medicaid, but no private insurance would take them. I’m not saying their premiums would have been inhumanly high, I mean the insurance companies were actually saying no. Jim’s restaurant, being privately owned, didn’t offer any insurance to their employees. So he and Lorrie Ann were up shit creek, until Jim got the brilliant idea of joining the army.

If you asked Lorrie Ann, he’d practically martyred himself on behalf of their miserable little family, but, truthfully, he could have just gotten a full-time job with a corporate restaurant that offered its employees insurance. Hell, he could have gotten a job at Starbucks! (Lorrie Ann became so violently upset with me when I suggested this that I could hear the spittle flying from her mouth even over the phone, as she went on and on about how good the army insurance was and how the army was taking care of them and how cheap food was on base and their free housing and how naive it was of me to compare it to working at Starbucks. Yes, I wanted to say, but Starbucks doesn’t ask you to kill people. But I didn’t say that—how could I?)

In the end, I suspected, Jim joined the army because it seemed like it would be exciting, noble, violent, and also get him away from their claustrophobic little house, where Zach was refusing more and more to live up to Jim’s hopes for him, and where Lorrie Ann was slowly transforming into some kind of dim-witted saint. She had begun blogging. I’m not kidding. Lorrie Ann had begun blogging a terrifying admixture of casserole recipes, updates on Zach’s surgeries, and weird poems that
alleged that Zach was an angel sent from the Lord to teach her and Jim about the beauty of sacrifice. Some days it was just a creepy one-liner:
Zach’s life is more important for those around him than it is for himself
.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Lorrie Ann. “I just really needed someone to talk to.” Space’s body was on my balcony. What to do with it? In the morning I supposed I would call the vet and see if they did cremations or if I needed to call Animal Control. I had never dealt with an animal’s dead body in a legitimate way. When our pets died when I was a child, my mom would have us put the body in a cardboard box and drive around until we found a construction site with a Dumpster.

“I know,” she said, “I know, it’s hard when a pet dies.”

“But if you don’t have time …” I trailed off, shamelessly trying to guilt her into talking to me. She was my only friend! Actually, I had made many friends at Yale, even at UMich, but they were have-a-drink-at-the-pub friends, not my-dog-is-dead-on-the-balcony friends.

Lorrie Ann sighed. “Mia,” she said. “I know you really don’t want to hear this, but … it’s just a dog. I know it feels like this big profound thing right now, the nature of mortality and all that, but it only feels big and profound because it just happened, like just now. It won’t feel like such a big deal tomorrow, and in a couple of months it won’t seem like a big deal at all. So, just, you know, like, have a drink and rent a movie or something.”

I am sure that my eyes bugged cartoonishly out of my head. Lorrie Ann had never, not ever, said anything so cold to me before. Lorrie Ann was always nice—that was her role, to be caring and sweet and kind and call me Mia-Bear. What was even worse was that what she said reverberated with the chilling, metallic ring of truth. I would remember forever what Space’s dead body felt like in my arms, but eventually the experience would shrink until it fit in line with the other events in my life.

“I’ve gotta go,” she said. “Sorry for being such a bummer.”

When Jim was killed during his second tour, I was in Rome on vacation. One of my Latin professors was married to a woman whose family was
deeply connected to the Vatican and somehow he had gotten me reading privileges at the Vatican library, and had even arranged an adorable, if decaying, flat off the Piazza Barberini.