The Girls From Corona Del Mar Read Online Free PDF Page A

were not some statistical anomaly, but a disturbingly median norm.
    Our health counselors had demonstrated to us how to put on a condom, and we used them. Except for me—I’m an exception here. But Lorrie Ann did. And the condom broke.
    They never told us how often that happens. Or that sometimes the condom will get lost up there, like a snake’s shedded skin, and you will have to get your partner, whose fingers are longer than yours and who has a better angle, to fish it out from where it has become trapped behind a corner of your cervix. We didn’t even know our cervixes had corners! We certainly didn’t know how to evaluate whether the men were telling us the truth when they said that “nothing felt any different,” they hadn’t known, they wouldn’t have finished if they’d known.
    And of course, Plan B did not yet exist. Our whole plan had been Plan A, and Plan A was condoms because the pill was retro and couldn’t protect you from AIDS, which we were secretly sure absolutely everybody unknowingly had. We wouldn’t have had sex with even a nun without a condom. It had been that firmly drilled into us.
    And so it was that Lorrie Ann came to be impregnated, just at the tail end of senior year, by a young man named Jim Swanson, who was twenty-two years old and who had been her boyfriend all that year.
    ——
    “Do you love him?” Dana asked with characteristic frankness, squinting through her navy mascara. Dana was one of those women who had begun wearing navy eyeliner and mascara in the sixties, found it suited her, and simply never stopped. Weirdly, we never judged her for it, just as none of us ever questioned the gnomes. These days, I am sure the sheer number of gnomes in their home would have occasioned some kind of reality TV show intervention, but at the time everyone thought it was perfectly normal.
    Dana and Lorrie Ann were sitting on the wooden stairs that led up to their tiny one-bedroom apartment, eating Popsicles. This conversation and countless others were reported to me as we sifted through her various options that summer, like detectives trying to solve an unsolvable crime, scrutinizing blurry close-ups of unknown suspects taken from security tapes, analyzing again the word choice of our few witnesses.
    “I’m not really sure,” Lorrie Ann admitted. “But is that really the question?”
    “What other question could there be?” Dana asked, nipping off the tip of her cherry Popsicle with her front teeth.
    Lorrie Ann considered Jim. He had many admirable qualities. When he was younger, he had had terrible acne, so now, even though he was strong and handsome and well liked by everyone, he wasn’t cocky and he never presumed. He loved his mother. He had an okay job as sous chef at a restaurant in Costa Mesa. He drank, but not so badly as to do anything stupid. He hadn’t gone to college, but he was smart: able to make the fast joke, to read people, to train dogs, to fix cars. He was a good dancer. He knew how to give a compliment. He had an unfortunate tattoo: the name Celia in cursive script on his left biceps. She had been his girlfriend in high school. But he had plans to cover it up with a tattoo of a crescent moon, or else a line drawing of a turtle. He really liked turtles. There was a small sandstone statue of one on the windowsill in his apartment right next to his futon, which is where the impregnating had taken place.
    The problem for Lorrie Ann, as she and I went over, and over, and over it, was not with Jim, but with the baby itself. In my estimation, Lorrie Ann was not in love with Jim. In her estimation, this did not particularly matter. No one, including Dana, was able to completely follow her on that one.
    “But don’t you learn to love someone?” Lorrie Ann asked. “I mean, what about arranged marriages?”
    “Well, this isn’t an arranged marriage, and it’s your choice, and you’re going to feel bad later if you choose wrong,” Dana said. Her tone was not cruel.