Free The Girls From Corona Del Mar by Rufi Thorpe Page A

skeletally thin. His lips were a little spitty and glistened, red and curly—a woman’s lips on a boy’s face.
    “Can I get you something to drink?” Lorrie Ann asked. “Beer? Milk? I don’t think I have anything besides beer and milk.”
    “Beer, please.”
    And Lorrie Ann disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me alone with Zach, who was silent but kept opening and closing his mouth, and Arman, who said nothing and did not acknowledge me in any way. Ilooked around. There was a small bookshelf positively weighted down with what I could already tell from across the room was an eccentric collection of books. I saw several popular science books, Stephen Hawking and that kind of thing, but I also saw
1001 Arabian Nights
, a few mystery novels, a copy of
Light in August
and a volume of poetry by Rumi, as well as several books on kabbalah. I noticed that the carpet was actually three different patterns of carpet, all thin and industrial, like the kind installed in elementary schools. They were joined at the seams by neat-looking lines of duct tape. I could also smell, distinctly, that somewhere in this house there was a cat. On the wall, a large cheaply framed Magritte print hung: the one of a man in a bowler with his face, if indeed he really has a face, obscured by a levitating apple.
    Lorrie Ann returned with three cans of Bud Light.
    She knelt easily beside me as she handed out the cans of beer, and then we both sat on the floor, facing Arman. “It’s so good to see you!” she said, in a kind of singsong, smiling at me, chipper as a little fucking Girl Scout. Was she still angry at me? Had she ever been angry at me?
    “It’s good to see you too,” I said, “but it’s also really weird.”
    “It’s weird?” Lorrie Ann asked.
    I nodded. “Yeah, it’s weird. I don’t think I really understood how dead Jim was until I was ringing the doorbell, and then I was like, ‘Shit, he is dead-dead, like all the way dead.’ ” I was rapidly spiraling into some kind of perverse truth-telling mode as a highly ineffectual defense mechanism. “That came out awful, but what I mean is that when you are a half a world away, it seems more like something happening in a novel, you know, and we’ve lived apart for so many years now that you are kind of like that for me, except when I see you, then you are suddenly terribly real, and that made Jim’s death real and now I feel like I can’t catch my breath because everything is too real for words.”
    Lorrie Ann looked at me critically for a moment, as though I were a gem she were assessing through one of those tiny eyepieces. Then she said, “I know exactly what you mean. For most of the year you are just a character in a book I’m reading. And then when you do show up,I think: Oh, God, it’s
her
! It’s
her
! The girl I knew when I was a kid. My friend.” She nodded then, smiling, her eyes damp, and I thought: She forgives me. She understands me. Perhaps that was what I loved most in Lor, nothing in her, but the very fact that she seemed to always understand me.
    “And I’m sorry,” I said, “but this housing complex is depressing. I don’t like you living here. I know I should lie and say it’s cute, but it just makes me sad. If you have to live without Jim, I wish it was in a house with a white picket fence somewhere.”
    Lorrie Ann laughed. “It is depressing here. It is. And I’m really fucking poor,” she said. “I thought I was poor growing up, but this! Jesus. But, no debt! I can’t even tell you what a relief it is to not be getting calls three times a day from twelve different hospitals. I will take poor any day over that.”
    Arman raised his can of Bud Light, and he and Lorrie Ann clinked. “Who, being loved, is poor?” he asked, and dimly I registered that he was quoting Oscar Wilde. Who was this guy?
    “You know, Mia,” Lorrie Ann said, “I actually really like my job waiting tables. If that makes you feel any better.”
    “Shut up, you