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The Girls from Corona del Mar - Hardcover

Thorpe, Rufi

 
9780385351966: The Girls from Corona del Mar
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385351968 ISBN 13: 9780385351966
Verlag: KNOPF, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

“Why did Lorrie Ann look graceful in beat-up Keds and shorts a bit too small for her? Why was it charming when she snorted from laughing too hard? Yes, we were jealous of her, and yet we did not hate her. She was never so much as teased by us, we roaming and bratty girls of Corona del Mar, thieves of corn nuts and orange soda, abusers of lip gloss and foul language.”

An astonishing debut about friendships made in youth, The Girls from Corona del Maris a fiercely beautiful novel about how these bonds, challenged by loss, illness, parenthood, and distance, either break or endure.

Mia and Lorrie Ann are lifelong friends: hard-hearted Mia and untouchably beautiful, kind Lorrie Ann. While Mia struggles with a mother who drinks, a pregnancy at fifteen, and younger brothers she loves but can’t quite be good to, Lorrie Ann is luminous, surrounded by her close-knit family, immune to the mistakes that mar her best friend’s life. Then a sudden loss catapults Lorrie Ann into tragedy: things fall apart, and then fall further—and there is nothing Mia can do to help. And as good, brave, fair Lorrie Ann stops being so good, Mia begins to question just who this woman is, and what that question means about them both.

A staggeringly honest, deeply felt novel of family, motherhood, loyalty, and the myth of the perfect friendship,The Girls from Corona del Mar asks just how well we know those we love, what we owe our children, and who we are without our friends.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

RUFI THORPE received her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2009. A native of Corona del Mar, California, she currently lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and son. The Girls from Corona del Mar is her first novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CHAPTER ONE

The Best Tea in the World

“You’re going to have to break one of my toes,” I explained. Lorrie Ann and I were sunning ourselves in the tiny, fenced-­in patio of my mother’s house on thin towels laid directly over the hot, cracked pavement. We had each squeezed a plastic lemon from the supermarket into our hair and were praying to be blonder, always blonder, our eyes closed against the sun. There was jasmine on the wind.

In the narrow cove of our nineties California neighborhood, there was no girl more perfect than Lorrie Ann Swift, not so much because she was extraordinary, but because she was ordinary in a way that surpassed us. Her parents loved her, and she loved them. In fact, it was difficult to even get an invitation to their house, so much did they prefer one another’s company to the company of outsiders. Even her older brother, instead of cruelly taunting her or running her over with his bike, shared his CD collection and advised her on her breaststroke.

Most of our parents had wound up in the sleepy ocean hamlet of Corona del Mar through a series of increasingly devastating mistakes. The Southern California real estate market, which had seemed throughout the eighties to have no ceiling, had suddenly crashed, and many fathers were now stay-­at-­home dads whose time was divided equally between the bottle and the couch, an ice pack over their eyes, as their wives scrambled to become certified dental hygienists. One girl, Miranda, had a mother who worked at Disneyland during the day and then worked all night from home as a telephone hotline psychic. “It pays better even than phone sex,” Miranda reported one afternoon as we licked sugar-­free orange Jell-­O powder from tiny saucers. I remember too that they had four extremely aged rottweilers, two of whom had lost control of their bowels.

Mostly, our parents had assumed that life would be self-­explanatory and that, bright and eager as they were, they ought to be able to handle it just fine. This faith, a faith in their own capableness, was gradually leaving them and being replaced, at least in the case of my own mother, with an interest in the occult and a steady red wine habit. Some have characterized the boomers as optimistic, but to my view they were simply soft and rather unprepared. They didn’t know how to cook or sew or balance their own checkbooks. They were bad at opening the mail. They got headaches while trying to lead Girl Scout meetings, and they sat down in folding chairs with their fingers pinching the bridges of their noses, trying not to cry over how boring and hard life had turned out to be, as around them feverish little girls screamed with laughter over the fact that one of them had stepped in poop.

Lorrie Ann’s parents were not losing faith, though. They were living in some other, better world. They went to church every Sunday. They rented classic horror movies every Friday night, and even Lorrie Ann’s older brother, then sixteen, stayed in to watch, as they ordered ­Domino’s and made popcorn in the tiny one-­bedroom apartment all four of them shared. Her father, Terry, had an earring (a big golden hoop like a pirate’s) and wore a black silk top hat to parent-­teacher night. He was a Christian rock musician, and Lorrie Ann’s mother, Dana, was a preschool teacher who collected gnomes: ceramic and wooden gnomes of all sizes and styles, standing on the floor and on tables and shelves, their backs to the wall, their dull eyes turned on the center of the room.

Certainly, it seemed to me, Lorrie Ann would never have been stupid enough to get pregnant in tenth grade by a boy she didn’t even like, which was precisely what I had done. And yet, the spring I was fifteen, it was Lorrie Ann who came with me to get the abortion, who helped me to plan it all out. She had already turned sixteen and gotten her license, but I didn’t just need her as my driver. I needed her, in all her goodness and her primness, to forgive me, to give her consent by participating in my scheme.

“Can’t you just say you’re having your period? Why do I have to break your toe?” Lorrie Ann asked, her eyes hidden behind the dusty lenses of my mother’s borrowed sunglasses.

“Who misses a championship game because they have cramps?” I argued. Trying to get an appointment at Planned Parenthood had been a nightmare. There wasn’t any way I could reschedule, and I doubted I could play softball the very next day. I wanted Lorrie Ann to break my toe so that I could show my coach a real and visceral damage. Also, in some strange way I viewed the breaking of my toe as the price of the abortion itself, a way of reassuring myself that I was still a decent ­person—­it was the punishment that makes the wicked good again. Though raised entirely without religion, I was somehow Catholic through temperament alone.

“Just say you’re sick!” she insisted.

“I don’t like lying, and this is as close as I can get to making everything true.”

Lorrie Ann looked at me dolefully. “You’re nuts,” she said. “You lie all the time.”

“Yes, and I hate it. It’ll be fine. We’ll get drunk and you’ll just do it.”

It made a lot of intuitive symbolic sense to force the beautiful, pure, and good Lorrie Ann to break my toe and punish me for my abortion. To us, Lorrie Ann’s family was magic, and this magic transferred to Lorrie Ann herself. It honeyed her golden hair and deepened the oceanic blue of her eyes. It made her upturned nose seem elegant, instead of Irish. It was what made it sweet, not dorky, that Lorrie Ann was the last girl in sixth grade to start shaving her legs. I think we all were jealous of those fine golden leg hairs, like a shimmer of fairy dust along Lorrie Ann’s calves. Why did it look so beautiful on her and so ugly and shameful on our own stolid little shins? Why did Lorrie Ann look graceful in beat-­up Keds and shorts a bit too small for her? Why was it charming when she snorted from laughing too hard?

Yes, we were jealous of her, and yet we did not hate her. She was never so much as teased by us, we roaming and bratty girls of Corona del Mar, thieves of corn nuts and orange soda, abusers of lip gloss and foul language, daughters to sham psychics and newly certified phlebotomists.

And so, just after high school, when terrible things began to happen to Lorrie Ann, we were all shocked. It was like some bizarre postmodern rendition of Job. We were transfixed, struck dumb, without access even to the traditional gestures of delivered casseroles and decent silences. The story of Lorrie Ann became the thing stuck in our throats, keeping us quiet as we nervously chose careers and, with many doubts and superstitions, consented to marry the men we were in love with. (All of our parents had gotten divorced—­how could we fail to be afraid? All of our parents, except, of course, Lorrie Ann’s.)

In a way, Lorrie Ann made me everything I am, for my personality took shape as an equal and opposite reaction to who she was, just as, I am sure, her personality formed as a result of mine. People do that kind of thing. They divvy up qualities, as though reality, in order to be manageable at all, should be sorted, labeled, pinned down. To this day, my mother considers herself the smart one and her sister the pretty one, even though her sister went on to get a PhD in marine biology and my mother became a makeup artist. For me, my friend Lorrie Ann was the good one, and I was the bad one. She was beautiful (shockingly so, like a painting by Vermeer), but I was sexy (at thirteen, an excess of cherry ChapStick was all that...

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Verlag
KNOPF
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385351968
ISBN 13 
9780385351966
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
241
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Knopf
https://knopfdoubleday.com

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