The Lost Girls Read online

  ALSO BY LAURIE FOX

  My Sister from the Black Lagoon

  Sexy Hieroglyphics

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,

  places, and incidents either are products of the

  author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any

  resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,

  living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Laurie Fox

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks

  of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Book design by Ellen R. Sasahara

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fox, Laurie Anne.

  The lost girls / Laurie Fox.

  p. cm.

  1. Middle aged women—Fiction. 2. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction.

  3. Peter Pan (Fictitious character)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3556.O936L67 2004

  813'.54—dc22 2003 059168

  0-7432-1790-X

  Permissions:

  Excerpt from “The Breast,” from Love Poems, by Anne Sexton.

  Copyright © 1967, 1968, 1969 by Anne Sexton. Reprinted by permission

  of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

  Excerpt from Love Story, by Erich Segal. Copyright © 1970 by Erich Segal.

  Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  Excerpt from “A Case of You,” by Joni Mitchell. Copyright © 1972 by

  Joni Mitchell Publishing Corp. All rights administered by

  Sony/ATV Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203.

  All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1790-3

  eISBN-13: 978-0-7432-5357-4

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Part Two

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Part Three

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Part Four

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  A Final Word on Flying

  Deeply Felt Thanks

  About the Author

  For Sue Bender, who believes

  The intensity of the longing is what does all the work.

  —Rumi, translation by Robert Bly

  Had I been a man I might have explored the Poles or climbed

  Mount Everest, but as it was my spirit found outlet in the air. …

  —Amy Johnson, British aviatrix, Myself When Young

  Since You Asked

  I WAS warned against it, lectured, teased—even threatened. But it was bound to happen: I grew up.

  I grew up with purpose, I grew up with alacrity, with an excess of insolence and a daring lack of contrition. In so doing, I made a small dent in the heart of a young man, a boy really, whom I left behind in my drive towards self-knowledge and sophistication. For all I know, to this day he remains disappointed in me—and defiantly, stubbornly young.

  I paid dearly for my act. I married well; I bore and raised a ravishing daughter. Then I lost both husband and daughter to inner worlds that I am not equipped to enter. Which is why most nights I sit alone at my window, the fabled storyteller with a dearth of stories to tell the children she meets. For the only tale left is too hideous to confess—full of adult heartbreak, adult wistfulness.

  You could say mine is a story with a hook. A hook to a boy who hardly exists anymore, except in glimpses of my husband, in piss-poor dreams of flying around rooms like a damn fairy, in the stranglehold the past has on the imagination.

  When I was thirteen, I seriously believed that if I conjured up “happy thoughts,” I could float above the world. This belief had a poetic logic that wasn’t lost on me. Nowadays, the rare happy thought occurs to me as I look out at the San Francisco Bay. I meditate on lifting off, then touching down—on losing and finding myself in one fell swoop. And then I recall a boy who wanted too much from life; a grown man who wanted too little from me; the pressing needs of a dozen young boys. Such unhappy thoughts send my spirits crashing. A shame because, when I was thirteen, I was chock-full of possibility. I was magic incarnate! They called me the Wendybird, a creature admired by one and all, and flying was as natural to me then as sitting is now.

  Like all fairy stories, mine begins in the shadows—with one particular shadow called Pan. For I am fourth-generation Darling, the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of Wendy Darling, the original guide to the Other World. We Darlings all refused to surrender our family name, giving up instead a host of other essentials: our dewy youth, our equilibrium, a clear-cut sense of what is real. We donated our young bodies in Springtime and worked those bodies to the bone—scrubbing, laundering, sweeping—our ropes of strawberry hair tied up or back. We became consummate caregivers at an age when most children are looked after by responsible adults and given the opportunity to succeed or fail under loving eyes. Not unlike that of maids and nuns, our character has been shaped by service, by devotion. And, like nuns, we formed somewhat uneasy alliances with men. We all fell deeply in love at too tender an age and learned of loss before the sun set on our teenage years. We discovered that what young men offer is fleeting and slippery, and quite possibly the most glamorous adventure of all. Our hunger has been great and a certain kind of boy was food to us. Of course, boys don’t want to be eaten alive—they want to be mothered. Too bad, then, that not all of us are good at this, not properly motivated.

  Whenever we’ve confessed our common histories—to fathers and teachers and clergy and doctors—we’ve been met with silence, or worse, hospitalization. The four of us, plus my own daughter, Berry, have been misdiagnosed as “delusional,” our awfully big adventures reduced to psychotic episodes. Thankfully, in the nineties—the 1990s—my own melancholy bears a more charitable name: Seasonal Affective Disorder. It’s a serious affliction—have you heard of it?—but one that can be treated successfully with pills and light therapy.

  Still, one cannot easily dismiss our talent for self-delusion. We Darling girls take pride in our ability to craft whole worlds out of nothing but velvet curtains and blue patches of sky. And we never apologize for our visions—we’ve earned them. In my own case, I eschewed all pills the day I sprang myself from the psych ward. I’m tired of pretending my past is suspect, fabricated, faulty. It is what it is. And I can’t tell this story if I’m fuzzy at the edges.

  Like most of the women in my family, I have been excused from intimate friendship—from decent, normal life. I have been touched by magic and hurt by magic. But to live without magic would have been a tragic waste of a life—don’t you think so? I have to believe this. I must believe that my dream was real and that reality can be an adequate, even satisfying, dream. In the same way my great-grandmother once sewed Peter’s shadow to Peter himself, I must sew the two halves of my life together. To make the cloth whole.

  PART

  ONE

  What is an adult? A child blown up by age.

  —Simone de Beauvoir, La Femme Rompue

  I

 
THE DAY Mother took me by the hand to visit Great-Nana Wendy in the hospital, we promised each other that when the past came up, we would change the subject as casually as changing the sheets. We would not validate Great-Nana’s stories, no matter how tempting or true. In this way, we would speed her recovery. At the time I didn’t understand why she had been locked up like a thief, for one’s memories can’t be stolen—they belong to you for life. However, Dr. Smithson patiently explained in the dreary hallway of Guy’s Hospital that Great-Nana had, in fact, stolen whole scenes and conversations from storybooks and made them her own, put her own psychic copyright on them. He went on to say that the voracious reading she had done in her youth had harmed her irreparably, that she couldn’t distinguish fairy stories from real life, and this made her a “dangerous woman.”

  Mother suppressed a giggle, then guffawed openly: “Christ almighty, what rubbish!”

  Dr. Smithson grimaced. “Mrs. Braverman, I’m not joking. If you recall, we picked up your grandmother after the neighbors spotted her straddling the sill of her second-story window, dangling her legs and talking to the Moon. She was babbling about comets, about steering clear of comets. I can assure you, after four days of extensive psychological evaluation, the results are conclusive: your grandmother is delusional. What you refer to as whims could make it very risky for her to negotiate the simplest activities: crossing the street, shopping for groceries. Consider what would happen if she spotted a ‘buccaneer’ at the supermarket—would she draw a ‘sword’ from her handbag and go on the offensive? You must think of her welfare, not your own interests.”

  Mother took a preparatory breath. She fluttered her lashes and placed her tiny hands on her hips, drawing attention to her thrilling hourglass figure. “Buccaneer? What in the world? I’m sorry, doctor, I don’t quite follow.” She winked at me broadly, like Shirley Temple in Little Miss Marker.

  Dr. Smithson patted his forehead with an ornate monogrammed handkerchief. “Mrs. Braverman, surely you’ve heard the stories?”

  “Stories?” Mother said. “Why, I’m not sure.”

  “Yes, yes, the tall tales. Mermaids, pirates, Indians. Don’t tell me your grandmother doesn’t regale you with this poppycock?”

  I could see that Mother’s calm was eroding. She shook her head sharply and her coiled plait came loose, falling open suggestively between herself and the doctor. “Nana’s faculties are unassailable,” she said.

  “I beg to differ, Mrs. Braverman. For one thing, the flying. Your grandmother doesn’t talk of flying around the parlor?”

  Mother smiled a bit too widely, showing off her glossy niblet teeth. She looked as if she was about to devour the man. “Hmm, let’s see . . . does Nana talk about flying? Well, only on Wednesdays, does that count?” She let go with a snort.

  Dr. Smithson reddened and bowed his head.

  “Well,” Mother continued, “if that counts, then, yes, she speaks about flying. But what’s the harm in that? Everybody talks about flying, women do these days. Really, if you don’t discuss heightened states of consciousness, you’re considered provincial. And Nana is nothing if not cosmopolitan. Her friends are legends, I tell you. Cocteau, Isadora Duncan, Huxley. Have you never read The Doors of Perception? No? Well, you’re in for a wild ride!” Mother patted the physician’s back. “You see, my grandmother isn’t mad, she’s progressive.”

  “Mrs. Braverman.”

  “Call me Margaret,” Mother encouraged. “No, call me Maggie.”

  “Mrs. Braverman. Your grandmother is seriously ill. This is not a matter of how artistic or liberal she is. She honestly believes that she flew off to some sort of funfair when she was a girl. And that she will return to this counterfeit world when she dies.”

  “How perfectly cyclical,” Mother said.

  Dr. Smithson heaved a laborious sigh and, changing direction, bent over to address me. “You do want your great-grandmother to get well?” he asked simply.

  “Mummy says she’s not ill,” I answered reflexively, chewing on my curls. “Mummy says, if Great-Nana is ill, then we’re all ill.” I smiled up at him; he was a handsome man after all.

  “Right. Well, let’s go see her then. I’m recommending a live-in nurse, but you can judge for yourselves.”

  EVERY Sunday morning until I turned five, I’d spent a few enchanted hours in Great-Nana’s presence. Splayed out on the Persian rug in her sitting room, I played amid the clutter—sheet music and watercolors, stuffed owls and marble busts of young, muscle-bound men. Born in 1953 and living in the shadow of the A-bomb, I was an anxious child who tended to cringe when emotions ran high between Mummy and Daddy, who both felt some time spent with Nana was time well-spent, indeed. Of course, Mummy didn’t always approve of Great-Nana’s methods.

  “To be young was very heaven,” Nana liked to sing as she bounced me on her knee. While Wordsworth had written this about the dawn of the French Revolution, for my own time period he couldn’t have been more on the mark. “To be young was very heaven, Wends,” Nana would repeat, eyes fogged with mist—or memories.

  “You’re very heaven,” I’d coo in return, and she’d blush down to her garter belt and silk stockings. Then she’d slip me—a slip of a girl—off her knee, inviting me to bang my bum on her threadbare rug. This was her way of illustrating that falling from heaven, when young, can land you on the nursery floor.

  “I’d much prefer hell as the entrée to life,” she mused one afternoon after dumping me on the floor. “The main entrée, with heaven for dessert! You see, a main course of heaven just makes you hunger for more. Yes, give me hell as the entrée, and heaven much later on—when a person can fully appreciate it.”

  “My bum hurts,” I complained. “Do I have to fall every time I visit?”

  “If you learn how to fall properly now,” she advised, “it won’t hurt so much later. When life is painful early on, the pain of growing up won’t come as such a shock.”

  On hearing this homily, Mother, who had been curled up on the settee with The Second Sex, hauled me off to the kitchen, telling her own grandmother to stifle herself. “You are a piece of work, Nana. You really have no business turning my daughter into a neurotic. When it comes to nutters, you take the grand prize!”

  “And your daughter, the little peanut, is first runner-up!” Nana said, eyes blazing.

  I nodded studiously, twisting a strawberry-blonde curl with my forefinger until a few hairs broke off. At the time I wasn’t clear on what a nutter was, but I was quite sure I didn’t want to be one.

  EVEN though I am now forty-two—an old forty-two—I recall the very moment I set eyes on Great-Nana that cheerless afternoon in the hospital. She was in her cups, as Mummy liked to say. Most amazingly, the nurses hadn’t gotten wind of this, allowing her to sip her “parfait” through a straw; by the time we arrived, she’d been working her way through a thermos for hours. The schnapps had been smuggled in by Daddy, a connoisseur himself, and the only one of us who could spring for private quarters. Apparently, the two of them had spent the morning sipping, watching the news, and gossiping about Princess Margaret’s sex life. Upon hearing us approach, Daddy had fled in a mild panic, a phantom whose only traces were the Player’s cigarette fumes he’d left behind. He hated running into Mummy—“the grand divorcée,” he called her.

  Daddy and Mummy’s path as a couple had taken a permanent detour by the time I was five. I hardly remember him from those early, stormy days. By my teens, however, every fact about him had been colored in and criminalized by Mummy. In her eyes, Daddy was a cretin, Daddy was a dildo, Daddy was a dumbfuck. In the fifties, went her mantra, Daddy had left the two of us to go fly his little airplanes and build his big airplanes. And, in the sixties, to start a hip company called Brave Hearts Airlines that played pop rock in the terminal and served weak French roast in the air. But as much as Mother demonized Daddy, my heart never blackened at the thought of him. Fathers are not exchangeable at Harrods or Nordstrom; you’re stuck for life with the one you’v
e got.

  Obviously, Mother didn’t share my opinion; she got rid of Daddy the night he went paragliding on the cliffs near Dover. Well before there were kits for such things, he rigged up the glider himself, then downed a few pints, stripped to his smalls, took flight abruptly, and mooned the world. In a second coup de grâce he crashed in a patch of ripe tomatoes. Why Mummy didn’t laugh at this is a mystery, but I believe it had something to do with me. Now that he was the parent of an impressionable girl, she scolded, he should put an end to all the stunts—the silly hot-air ballooning, the sophomoric scuba diving, and God knows, the rock climbing, the pub-crawling. It was time to come home and stay put. Unfortunately, Daddy’s appetite for life had to be fed on an hourly basis, and he fed it.

  My parents’ divorce was swift; there was money enough for everybody, enough for Mummy and me to leave the country for good. Hastily uprooting us from the suburbs of London, Margaret Darling Braverman planted us in the fragrant hills of Berkeley, California, where her “psycho-spiritual ideas could take root.” On the west coast of America, she could do her hatha yoga openly, worship her goddesses, and begin her career as an author of books on self-improvement.

  Upon arriving in the East Bay, I recall that the Queen Anne Victorians seemed pleasantly familiar; but the birds of paradise, the gladioli were alien to my eyes, almost wanton. On clear afternoons, you could see both bridges—the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate—from our backyard deck while hamburgers smoked and sizzled on our brand-new barbecue. On foggy, marine-layer mornings, you could scan this same vista and see nothing. Goodness, I was homesick for England and yet confused by my good fortune. Courtesy of Daddy’s bank account, I’d been given a new life as an American girl, but at quite a steep price: I had to content myself with stolen glimpses of my father on advertisements for Brave Hearts Airlines.

  “Look at Dummy!” Mother would shriek, slapping the telly whenever Daddy’s face lit the screen.