L.A.WOMAN (10 page)

All year long Molly would bustle around as though a long hard winter were coming to kill us, and it didn't do any good to wish she would stop her brimming
idées fixes
and take a look at the weather surrounding her all over the actual landscape because she was too disciplined and concentrated to ever believe that you could face reality and hardly notice anything awful about it at all.

She was such a miracle of consistency that she even drove my mother crazy sometimes wishing she were just dead so she could forget the whole business.

Every day she primly parted her light brown hair in the middle and braided it in the back and knotted it up so it didn't distract anybody from reality. Then she washed her face in Ivory soap which I'm sure she secretly wished were really pure and not just 99 and 44/100 percent, but she probably had to make do. Then she found the most obscure dress in her closet which was as clean as a nun's hat but a lot more modest and she put it on so it covered her arms and knees and collarbones. Everything she owned zipped in the back. Buttons down the front were too suggestive. She never shaved her legs or wore heels, and in black ballet slippers she took Shelly from ballet class to cello lesson to her tutor or her private specialist in posture exercise.

The sky still hangs overhead filled with smog which nothing Molly ever did could expel from the listless days of summer which are as listless today as they were when Shelly and I took swimming class three times a week at Hollywood High. (Hollywood High today is even worse than it was all
along. The trouble with Hollywood High today in fact is that the pimps across the street south of Sunset at Highland tie up traffic so completely that at three when school lets out you can hardly budge an inch.) We were only ten years old when we'd come from an indoor pool with eyes inflamed from chlorine and be blinded by burning smog, enough to force us to just go straight home practically and not go to Brown's “Home of the Hot Fudge Sundae” and get a hot fudge sundae, but we always made it to Brown's and managed to sit down and order in time to have a last dying meal.

What I really liked to do, unless a layer of smog covered the sidewalk so badly that you had to go straight home on the bus or die, was to dawdle along Hollywood Boulevard and walk the entire mile or so home. The hotter it was, the better I liked it although if it rained I liked it too.

Naturally Shelly was too sensible and never dawdled away her busy childhood summers on Hollywood Boulevard and even with the crowd that day in front of Grauman's Chinese, which was on her way to the bus stop and therefore not dawdling, she would have gone right by and missed everything if it hadn't been for me.

But fortunately I was not the type to miss Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell.

There they were, both of them.

“It's Marilyn Monroe,” I trembled.

“Don't grab me so hard,” Shelly screamed.

“Look at the cement and everything right there,” I said dying.

“And Jane Russell with the same dress on,” Shelly sighed, “both dressed alike.”

The dress was white with black polka dots and the neckline plunged daringly, the bust was fitted, their tiny waists were zipped up the back and the skirts were full and yards and yards of black polka dots hung on the white background down to their knees. Photographers were everywhere trying
to make Marilyn look at them and Jane Russell looked bored. And Jane Russell's nose was scary close up. This was just when Monroe had become a star in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
but I had already seen her in
River of No Return
nine times and I had a record of her singing “River of No Return” and now she was just right here in the smog before me.

We emerged from the crowd a half an hour later having watched both her feet in high heels and both her hands cemented. You were able to stare into her cleavage while she smiled. Bombs bursting in air couldn't have been more like American poetry.

Shelly and I were too exhausted to speak. I had to take the bus home I was so drained.

We walked up our street under the chartreuse leaves of the trees and one by one passed the lawns before the one in front of Shelly's house and everything was quiet and silent, likable but not right of course with Molly standing there ominously.

“You are never to make my daughter late again,” Molly said. “From now on I'm picking Shelly up from school and if you wish to get a ride home too then very well but I'm not letting Shelly do anything she wants like you, is that clear, Sophie?”

“I didn't make her late,” I said.

“We saw Marilyn Monroe,” Shelly said.

“Another one of those stories,” Molly deduced, yanking her child inside where she could decompress from smog among other bad influences. But, after all, I preferred dawdling down Hollywood Boulevard by myself to going straight home after swimming sensibly and since I wasn't the one who learned the cello or stood up straight while L.A. stayed the same and Hollywood High got worse, I was prepared.

Walking home down Hollywood Boulevard past streets
like Cherokee I was already pretty sure Hollywood was doomed long before the smog first killed off all the pepper trees lining the streets north of Hollywood Boulevard, which had created rosy clouds overhead before the smog, but after the smog, well. . . . People in their thirties would shake their heads and sigh, remembering how beautiful things had been before they went downhill.

People in L.A. just had no real sense of what a true city was, but since I was not prepared for a true city it was hard to imagine what people with real sense were like. Unless they were all like Molly.

The funny thing was that if anything had ever happened to me I know Molly would have flown to the rescue without a second thought—but luckily she never had to save my life, otherwise I'd never have forgiven her.

E
VERY NOW AND THEN
my mother and father simultaneously seemed to have a tacit understanding that struck both of them like a bolt from the blue and all of a sudden they would have a party and would instantly telephone the people they were going to invite, and before anybody knew what hit them my mother had amassed so much food that if you opened the icebox the house would collapse because first the tamales tilted over and smashed headlong into the whole slipshod game plan laid out on the kitchen table piled up with too many pots and too many stacks of damp paper wrappings to keep the handmade tortillas fresh in a package of a dozen each, and of course too many tomatoes were toppling around onto whole onions lying all over everything and then packages of jack cheese kind of lay there in rectangles thrown down any which way like meaningless books, and a bulb of garlic would roll out from under the cans of chili my mother used for
rellenos
because we
decided that chili
rellenos
were actually better made from canned chilies because fresh ones were intractable and too hard like rock on one end and canned ones were divine,
diviner,
but once the cans began rolling off the table onto the floor and all the large soup pans came down if they got knocked over by the tamales because someone had tried to open the icebox, then no wonder our entire house would simply end in collapse along with all hopes and dreams glut-onously shaping up for the party, which was why everybody stayed out of the kitchen and left my mother alone to contend with the icebox door since it was her party and all her parties were struck by the same bolt streaking through the tacit understanding from the beginning to the impossible-for-anything-to-go-wrong ending.

But of course it was impossible for anything to go right about my mother's crammed parties because when we moved into the house in Hollywood when I was five, the little dining room just right for four people perhaps had been relentlessly wallpapered with gigantic roses in overblown pink which were woven in a trellis of gray all enlivened by green leaves much too large like the roses which were five or six inches across. The pink petals flopped like they were swooning over true romance and nobody but my mother would have allowed that wallpaper to remain in her home defiling her walls and being in such questionable taste that maybe she herself might be from Texas after all, maybe people in fact looking at that wallpaper would become unsure my mother was really a saint and perhaps she was simply an impossible person like Elmer Gantry passing herself off as an innocent dainty miracle but really just a vulgar
shiksa
like my grandmother had deduced all along, a nobody who'd just used her feminine wiles to catch the sensitive genius my father was believed to embody in those circles because nobody could get to first base with him, the girls died for him, he never even threw them down on their backs carelessly
and used them for his own lust like men did in those days when they only wanted one thing and my father was not even willing to endure their company long enough to get the one thing and then wish he hadn't. Not like Sam Glanzrock.

“I came,” Sam Glanzrock used to announce, “where's my shirt?”

“You mean, ‘I came, where's my shirt?' was what he actually told them?” I asked Lola.

“It was his eyes,” Lola remembered, “his eyes were that gray. That gray he could say anything and look at you and you quick ran and got him his shirt.”

“What color gray does that?” I asked.

“All I remember,” Lola said, “is that
that
gray in his eyes was why you'd get him his shirt.”

“But gray . . . ,” I dubiously grumbled.

“But
that
gray,” Lola explained so I'd never forget. “Don't think you know everything because you're from Hollywood. After all you're only eighteen.”

(I was seventeen, but it didn't matter, I was from Hollywood and I was positive I knew everything and gray eyes were not included in what I knew.)

· · ·

Half the girls seemed to want my father to give them a tumble and then drop them so they could experience that pain of life like Anna Karenina, though he probably was too conceited to slum around riffraff
hoi polloi
he probably thought dancers were, while the other half decided any genius so sensitive simply could not dally with just anybody unless it was true love because after all he was a violinist and a man who played the violin was simply inviolate with sensitivity and no woman on earth was probably good enough for such a dashing tormented figure.

Only suddenly walking down the street one day my Aunt Helen told me, “There was Eugenia, dressed like a flapper,
you know, the cutest thing with those little feet she had, her dress was silk and it had flowers all over it and she was wearing real flowers right in her hair—real ones. . . . Oh, I didn't think my dumb brother had sense enough to ever find a . . . a daffodil like your mother but your mother didn't seem to mind him, you know? And she was smart too. And she
still
didn't mind him. And she was wearing yellow shoes. Yellow! Ohhhhh, with little heels, what an adorable darling thing she was.”

I could imagine her flapping down the street, her flapper look seemed to have flared on into the thirties in spite of the Depression and everybody else being so depressed they dressed depressed. Her curly hair was dark blond in those days and her lipstick was Tangee orange.

In those days she turned out pies by the cloudful, bringing forth enormous lemon meringue specials for my father to indulge in because when you're Jewish among Jews nobody gives you any pies, especially not lemon meringue, and nobody ever pulled pies out of heaven like my mother did when she was still the best baker on earth, but that was before she encountered Molly and Mitchell Craven, over for dinner the first time, when all my mother made was mere hamburgers and they were such hamburgers from above that Mitchell Craven loudly remarked, “Molly, why don't you make food like this?”

My mother never allowed cookbooks or directions to interfere with her impossible dinner parties, stuffing people into that claustrophobic mash of impending roses and ladening the table with more tamales on top of more tacos next to the
rellenos
and their sauce and everybody was all pink and florid as the roses and laughing insanely because more food just kept being brought forth and nobody could eat one more bite only they did and everybody was ready to be rolled home by dessert which was an Italian Giocino's cake, a rum cake covered in flowers. We had coffee so strong it enabled
people to actually rise from the table and manage to unravel themselves out of the space in order to go play Bach quartets, drunkenly smoking cigars and laughing their heads off until it was 11:30 and everybody had to go home until the next bolt.

My mother's parties never dropped a stitch and nobody came away wondering what on earth all that rose-petal wallpaper meant. Instead they believed it was what it really was which happened to be gorgeous and as perfect as possible struck like a bolt from the blue forever into their memories.

· · ·

The summer Mitchell Craven got blacklisted and Shelly and I who were only in the third grade and used to walk home from school past the lawns on our block, one by one, beneath the chartreuse trees in June, was the summer the Cravens, not us, got to finally get a TV. But only to watch the people being blacklisted throughout the McCarthy hearings, not to watch Perry Mason which would have been why I would have wanted to have a TV.

“Maybe Daddy'll never work again,” Shelly used to laugh, bravely (like her mother), “and we'll have to go to the Poor House. And nobody will come visit us.”

“Oh,” I said, “I'll come visit you every day.”

“Maybe the Poor House is too far away,” Shelly complained.

“My mother will drive me,” I said.

“Yeah,” Shelly brightened, “and she could bring us tuna sandwiches, okay? My mother's are always the lowest. I wish we could just get my mother to disappear and only have your mother.”