L.A.WOMAN (7 page)

By this time Pietro was the maitre d' at a Hollywood nightclub on the Sunset Strip where he worked till dawn trying to get rid of the drunken movie stars and set the tables up for the next night's dinner. And he didn't want Eugenia to work anymore but rather insisted she come with him instead. Since her job hadn't ended too well.

It was at this time that Eugenia and Billie began to see each other again every day. Billie had divorced Alphonso and moved to a little rented cottage on Clark Street just off the Sunset Strip not far from Pietro's nightclub. The little cottage was right down the street from the place where everybody working as a studio musician in Hollywood went to pick up girls, and it was here that my father picked up Billie and made a date to meet her the next day and go have Chinese food for dinner.

Both my mother, Eugenia, and my father, Mort, went to Billie's the next day at five to meet her for dinner (Billie was
very mixed up about dinner) and Billie wasn't home. Both of them waited on the front porch and talked for an hour but Billie still wasn't home.

By this time Eugenia was no longer a hick in a blue dress, and she no longer had even a trace of the South in her voice except that she spoke softly (though she did carry a big stick like Roosevelt which no one ever knew until she got mad). She wore her hair parted at one side and curled in honey curls and she wore rayon stockings that were always bagging, running, and having to be mended, and needed endless rearranging with the garter belt buckles before both the seams were straight at once. Rayon, though it was okay for stockings, was not what Eugenia wore otherwise and all her clothes were either pure cotton or pure silk with Mediterranean prints on them like Lartigue photos.

Mort looked like a dark Leslie Howard and dressed in the same kind of casual style which went with his black mustache and the intense blue-blackness of his wavy too-long hair.

No girl stood a chance if she liked that sort of thing and although Eugenia had no idea what a Jew was before she came to Hollywood, by the time she found out it was too late for she was married to an Italian instead.

On their first date they both went their separate ways, he to a Chinese restaurant and she to Barney's for chili where he met her afterwards for coffee and a cigarette. Even he, in those days, smoked like a normal person did back then.

Of course, having spent the last two years of his life trying to recover from the wrong wife he'd divorced before it was too late, when he clapped eyes on Eugenia who was to be the only woman for him ever again, he set about systematically to pry her loose from her Italian until finally he at least was able to get her to have lunch with him in the same restaurant.

“I was already married,” my mother says, “what did I want with two husbands?”

The trouble with Pietro was his job. He worked all night and left Eugenia to herself at home finally, not being able to trust drunken movie stars around anyone as beautiful as she was beginning to become—especially after she met my father, Mort.

So Mort had a free hand to convince Eugenia a second husband was the very thing. He found himself a respectable job as a studio musician working for a radio orchestra instead of free-lance, thus providing her with a prospective husband who hardly ever worked past dinnertime. And he found a small little stucco cottage covered with bougainvillea and morning glories with an apricot tree out front and a lawn and she moved in finally and filed for divorce. Pietro did not want to divorce Eugenia but it was too late, she was already pregnant or said she was and by the time she and Mort were married, she was five months pregnant and about to convert to Judaism.

For their honeymoon, they hitchhiked to San Francisco to visit Lola and Sam. Mort had a wonderful time catching up on political and social gossip but Eugenia just thought Jews talked too much and made her sick and she threw up from morning sickness or Jews, either one, all the way home from San Francisco newly married, pregnant, and out of Texas for years.

Going to meet Leah, Mort's mother, whose Jewish heritage made it her solemn duty to keep her children free from
goyim
(non-Jews), especially when it came to marrying them, Eugenia and Mort knew it would not be easy going in there with the pregnancy already showing, the marriage a
fait accompli,
and the two of them so invincibly euphoric. But Eugenia, who was raised by her mother to know that she wasn't trash because trash had no manners and didn't know its ass from a hole in the ground whereas she had perfect
manners and upheld this code of her mother's so she was a lady, knew that no lady ever made people feel bad no matter what. So Eugenia carefully chose a bouquet of flowers to bring to her new mother-in-law for their first meeting.

Leah from Kiev, Boyle Heights, and now Hollywood opened the door frowning miserably.

“How do you do,” Eugenia smiled, nodding her head in a slight bow as she handed the bouquet to her husband's mother.

“Humph,” Leah said, hastily laying the flowers down on a hall table, “better you should bring scissors.”

Eugenia and Mort stared at each other. Both were seeing an umbilical cord neatly cut in two with new scissors.

“I am so happy to make your acquaintance,” Eugenia nevertheless went on, not stopping a single beat for pondering.

When Mort and Mitzie, Mort's first wife, were married, Leah had hated Mitzie because she had red hair and was a Polish Jew, which was worse than nothing, like a peasant. But when Mort not only married Eugenia but arrived with her radiantly pregnant in a loose, flowered silk blouse and three fresh flowers pinned to her hair, Leah was ready to have nothing to do with any of it and for the rest of her life to wash her hands of Mort like he was dead—though of course he was worse than dead to her.

Knowing his mother, Mort had taken Eugenia to every single family friend and introduced her, letting the softness of her voice and the glow of her skin totally knock them to smithereens. Thus when Leah came to vent her spleen—“How could my Mort marry that
shiksa?”
—to everyone she knew, everyone would say, “But she's wonderful, you are so lucky, I envy you.” And everybody did.

By the time Eugenia had to go to the hospital and get it over with and have me, Leah was the envy of all her friends whose children had married nice Jewish husbands or wives and were in the throes of horrors, like Reno, where six-week
divorces were simple as pie, which never happened back in Russia when the ghetto and pogroms made divorce a sophistication few could imagine. In Russia, young couples who got married got used to it or else.

Here in America, Leah got used to Eugenia. After all, it wasn't like Eugenia had red hair or anything.

And when I was born nobody could say I had red hair either because I had no hair—just a head. Just a head was all I had for the first eleven months when I just sat around baldly wanting more this and more that, screaming from any room I was left in by myself and supposed to sleep, screaming baldly for louder music and madder milk and hotter entertainments performed live by adults all day and all night.

When it became time for me to go to nursery school I was never old enough and though by then my hair was grown in and covering my bald head, my original bald attitude remained and never left.

Nevertheless, the underlying fact that I was only a baby or only a tiny child later on caused Leah and all sorts of adults in general to ignore my bald head and nature and drool at my skin and fingers and perfect eyelashes like they did for all babies. They wanted to bite babies' cheeks, they wanted to squeeze babies and watch them smile so they could scream with delight. And apparently, even I was able to provide Leah with enough babylike qualities to captivate her and gradually subdue Russia's hold on reality and make California's version seem not so bad after all.

And if I had not been baby enough to soothe the savage beast, then three years later my sister's round little face, surrounded by bright blond curls the moment she hit the delivery room, was.

By the time her second daughter was born and she and Mort were moving into a house in Hollywood where I grew up and where Lola came to stay with me when everybody went to New Jersey, Eugenia had so successfully lost all traces of Sour Lake that only when she was so mad she forgot
herself did the girl ever appear as she had that first day on Billie's doorstep—from Texas, the girl in blue.

A
UNT
H
ELEN
was nearly eight years younger than her brother Mort and only six when she left Brooklyn to take the train to L.A. For Helen, Southern California was not a privilege or a miracle, it was—as it was for Lola—perfectly okay. She was a true L.A. woman from the first week they lived near Hollenbeck Park when she suddenly disappeared and the family, especially her mother, Leah, who went white with irrational shadows of past pogroms in her mind, looked everywhere trying to find her. Finally, there she was, feeding popcorn to the swans under a tree when the rest of them found her. They stood and beheld her as their terror subsided and she said:

“Papa got lost, Mama got lost, brother got lost, and sister got lost,” and she smiled and said, “but now they all got found.”

Leah raised her eyes toward heaven to silently ask God the meaning of His latest scare when she was stopped by the skimpy tassel-top palm which all over L.A. made light of human suffering in a kind of half-baked attempt at humor.

“Oi,”
she said, and shook her head.

To her, these palm trees were no better than peasants, after this.

She grabbed Helen and knocked the popcorn out of her hand, dragging her daughter to their Hollenbeck Park duplex to teach her what was what before it was too late. But it was too late already, Helen had succumbed to the swans.

· · ·

“Sophie darling,” Helen told me once, “always buy those plums they sell in Beverly Hills. Even though they cost twice as much as anywhere else. Because they are the best.”

We were lying in the summer sunshine on the sand. Our striped canvas backrests were side by side and the noises of people and water were appropriate. However, we weren't at a beach or a lake—we were at the Ambassador Hotel, where for a small price people who were not guests of the hotel could mingle with ritzy real rich people.

My father was always taking me and Bonnie, my sister, to this place somewhere out in the valley called Pickwick Pool which—although much larger and more obvious as it was filled with kids, parents, everyone on earth just about—was not the Ambassador Hotel where Helen would take me.

· · ·

“Sophie darling,” Helen asked me once, “does your father have any candy?”

“Yes,” I instantly answered.

My father had a wonderful Victorian chest of drawers which particularly fit music scores. When I first knew this chest of drawers existed, I hardly existed myself. In fact, it was taller than I until I became almost twelve. And in it was sheet music neatly divided by composer alphabetically into each of the twenty or thirty drawers, half on one side and half on the other.

However, about three drawers down on the righthand side was a special space with my father's gold medal for violin in it, little packets of gut strings, curiosities from out of Dickens, and although this drawer actually smelled of chocolate my whole life there was never really any chocolate there, there were only peppermint Life Savers.

“You mean your father really has some candy?” Helen asked. “God do I need some.”

I was about thirteen and Helen was babysitting for us that night, having come down from San Francisco to scratch our backs. (Helen was the gossamer wings of angel kisses when it came to erotic back rubs for her nieces since we were five.)

I returned with the Life Savers.

“This isn't candy!” Helen burst out.

“It isn't?” I asked. All my life adults had been trying to convince me Life Savers were candy, and although I myself didn't think so and was sure only chocolate was even remotely candy, I had never met an adult until Aunt Helen that day who refused to even look at a Life Saver as though it were candy.

“No,” Helen went on, “doesn't your father have any chocolate? I want chocolate. I've got to have chocolate. Where does your mother keep the chocolate?”

“We don't have any chocolate,” I meekly confessed.

“You must have some chocolate!”

“But we don't,” I said.

“Let's look,” Helen decided, “where do they usually keep it?”

“They usually hide it,” I said. “But I always find it. And when I do, I eat every last one.”

“Oh,” Helen said.

“I can't help it,” I said. “I love chocolate.”

“Let's look anyway,” Helen said.

I knew, however, that there wasn't any chocolate in the bottom of my father's socks drawer, the box where my mother kept her chinchilla stole (which, she always said, she got “the hard way—by buying it myself”), the toolbox, the space behind the bookshelf at the foot of the stairs, inside the fireplace, upstairs underneath the paperbacks where I discovered a book by Jean-Paul Sartre called
Intimacy
which was actually so dirty it made me suddenly realize what they meant by orgasm one day when I was twelve, and that orgasms were why adults were so different from normal people was at once abundantly obvious. Suddenly adults became much more complicated than the fools I imagined they were.

Helen and I, however, turned my parents' house upside
down looking for a single M&M but there wasn't one because I had eaten the last one two hours before.

“The only kind of chocolate we have at all is that Mexican.”

“Where!”
Helen suddenly lit up.

In my mother's cooking shelves was always this package of Mexican chocolate which if you chipped it off and went to extravagant lengths to doctor it up in a hot chocolate kind of way still didn't taste worth a red cent.