Lola, California A Novel

Edie Meidav is the author of The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon and Crawl Space (FSG, 2005). Winner of a Lannan Fellowship, a Howard Fellowship, the Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman, and the Bard Fiction Prize, she teaches at Bard College.

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 some 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."

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.

LOLA, CALIFORNIA Copyright © 2011 by Edie Meidav

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