The Hollywood Trilogy (29 page)

Eleanor and her two girls were still living in the housing project when the war ended, and even though the economy seemed to be booming, Eleanor had a hard time finding work. To complicate matters, a man had fallen in love with her, and Burt was on one of his long absences from Portland. Eleanor said Burt was “out of town,” but Lindy told her sister, “He's up at Rocky Butte, breakin rocks, I'll bet!”

Because she was hanging around downtown, Lindy knew a lot more about their father than their mother did. She knew where he drank and where he shot pool and the women he played around with, in Portland's smalltime coalition of bookies, pimps, gamblers and petty crooks. Lindy encouraged her mother to go out with Dick Westerhauser, and she even hinted that Eleanor ought to make it easier for Dick to give her money. He was always offering. He owned Westerhauser Buick in Beaverton, and since the end of the war he was rolling in money and did not know what to do with himself. He was a big man, bigger than Burt, for that matter, and old, perhaps as old as fifty, with a wife and a couple of grown children out in the suburbs. But he sought romance, and he
would take Eleanor out to movies and dinners, and even to night clubs once in a while, bringing her home at four or five in the morning, where as likely as not little Jody would be alone, even though Lindy had promised to babysit. Once Eleanor came in from the motel where she had been making love to Dick Westerhaus and found Ron Higby asleep on the couch and Jody asleep in her bed with a saxophone cuddled in her arms. She was angry with Lindy for lying to her again, but not as angry as before, and Lindy told her, “Mom, for Christ's sake, who's going to come busting in our place?”

Dick Westerhaus offered to help Eleanor move to a bigger apartment—a real apartment instead of a housing project—probably so that he could comfortably spend the night once in a while instead of going to motels and having to get up at the crack of dawn to get her home, but Eleanor, after several days of putting off her decision, perhaps hoping that Burt would show up, called him at the Buick agency and told him not to come around anymore. Then, with only the twenty dollars a week unemployment, she moved her family out of the project and into a small but private apartment across the river in Vancouver, Washington, where she continued to look for work. This move almost broke up the family. Lindy could not stand Vancouver. As far as she was concerned it was the North Pole, and she would often disappear into Portland for days at a time. She began also wearing clothes which Jody had never seen before.

Lindy was supposed to be going to Vancouver High School, but she wasn't. On her second day she told her home room teacher to kiss her ass, and left school with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. She found a boy hanging around outside the building and talked him into driving her across the river and down to Broadway and Yamhill, where she got out of the car and disappeared into the drugstore among her friends. She did not come home for nearly a week that time, and Eleanor almost called the police on her. But she didn't, because she understood what Lindy was after, or she thought she did. The world was a mess, and Lindy was too beautiful to waste her time in school. It broke Eleanor's heart to think of the punks and small-time gangsters Lindy ran around with, but she had a deep confidence in her daughter's native intelligence, and she was sure Lindy would get over it and move on to what they both hoped would be her career in motion pictures.

Lindy wanted very much to be a movie actress, and she knew that the best way to do it, if you were from Portland, was to be elected to the Rose Festival as a princess, and then be chosen as queen. That would get the national
attention and the offers to come to Hollywood, and Lindy figured she could take it from there. But the only trouble was, Rose Festival princesses were selected from among high school seniors, and Lindy could never stay interested in school long enough to become a senior.

There were modeling agencies in Portland too, but Lindy walked up the long dark staircase to one of them and inside ten minutes, five waiting and five being interviewed by a woman she could tell was high on pills, Lindy realized the modeling agency was a racket, a mere front for a school where dumb-looking girls were taught to walk around with a book on their head for eighteen dollars an hour, or some such ridiculous amount. And prostitution. More than one pimp had promised to keep her in clothes and money, so that when the time came she could go to Hollywood in style, register at the Pasadena Playhouse and learn her craft, and then move on into pictures. In fact, most of the young pimps in Portland claimed to have Hollywood connections. Maybe they did; but Lindy never went for their stories. Not that she wouldn't take clothes or money from men, but she saw no reason to turn a percentage over to a pimp just so that he could sit around the Desert Room with the other pimps and whine about his girls. Lindy considered herself the equal of any pimp she ever met. And besides, she had no intention of becoming a hooker.

One day Lindy came home to the apartment in Vancouver in the middle of the afternoon. Jody was there alone. Eleanor was working part time at the public library, helping take inventory. Lindy looked very bad, with dark circles under her eyes, and as she sat at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee Jody could see that her hands were trembling.

“What's the matter with you?” she asked.

“I'm okay. Just a little tired, honey.”

“You're not even talking to me,” Jody said. Usually she was anxious and unhappy until she knew where Lindy was, but this time Lindy was actually home, and she was still unhappy. Lindy smiled at her, and reached out to touch her on the forehead.

“Don't worry about me,” she said. “I've been up for like five days, that's all. I just need some sleep.”

But later, when Jody peeked into the bedroom, Lindy was lying on her back in the semidarkness with her eyes open. When Eleanor got home, she went into the bedroom, and Jody stayed in the kitchen, listening to the murmuring
voices of her sister and her mother. She heard the word ‘drugs' several times, but at the time she related the word to the kind of things you got from drugstores, and so did not understand until some years later that they moved back to Portland not because the job opportunities were better but so that Eleanor could try to exert just a little more control over Lindy's life.

Eleanor was just past thirty-five when she got the job at the Piggly Wiggly, and although the money was not as good as the shipyard, she did not have to work so hard. The days went faster than she expected, because from the time she came to work until closing, the store was crammed with shoppers, and Eleanor was frantically busy unloading carts, slamming the keys on the cash register and sacking groceries. The fluorescent lighting was unearthly and the noise was constant, but Eleanor did not notice. Nor did she often notice the faces of the customers, unless they were trying to cash checks, and then all she really had to do those first months was wave for the assistant manager to okay the check. After a few weeks she even stopped being amazed at the kinds of things people put into their stomachs. For a while Eleanor sweated heavily while she worked, and she had to wear a bandanna around her head not only to keep her hair out of her eyes but to keep the sweat from rolling down her face and embarrassing her, but after she got more into the pace of her work she could make one uniform do for three days. This was important, because the faded yellow and green dresses had to be heavily starched, a job she hated.

But she was thirty-five years old, busy day and night raising her two children and working, and it had been a long time since she had been to bed with anybody. Actually, Burt had been around for a few days when she moved into the little house behind the store, helping connect the stove and painting the two tiny bedrooms, but although he slept in the same bed with her he did not try any lovemaking. Maybe it was just as well, she thought, because for the past few years sex with Burt hadn't amounted to much. Usually he was drunk and would fall into bed with a woozy grunt, grasp her and begin kissing her with a mouth that smelled foul with beer and potato chips. Burt never completely undressed in front of Eleanor, not even at his drunkest, and they always made love in the dark, so for Eleanor the sensual experience was limited to his bad breath, the way his stubbled cheek felt against hers, the heavy sound of his breathing and muttering, and the few pokes he would take at her with his usually half-erect penis. Burt was not the lover of her
dreams. Nor was Dick Westerhaus, who never removed his undershirt and often ejaculated on her leg or her stomach, his lips pressed tightly together to keep him from making a sound. Eleanor was a very shy person and could not talk about sex. She wished sometimes that she could talk to Lindy about it, because Lindy seemed to have a much better time, and secretly Eleanor was pleased that her daughter was so attractive to so many men and took such unceasing advantage of it. In a different life Eleanor might have loved many men.

But in this life she was afraid her sex was going to dry up and blow away, and she would be an old woman. She knew a great deal more about menopause than she did about sex in general; a lot of the women she worked with in her life had been through it, or were going through it, and Eleanor dreaded the day. Sometimes she would lie in her bed, perhaps waiting for Lindy to come home or telephone, and she would suddenly grasp her breasts and clench her teeth in deep frustration. She wanted a man. She wanted somebody to wrap her legs around. Even Burt. She did not love Burt anymore, but she understood herself well enough to know that she would never divorce him. She just didn't have the guts, she told herself, to either end it with Burt or start it with somebody else. Dick Westerhaus had been an accident, a breezy but gentle automobile salesman who at least had a sense of romance and told her he loved her and sent her flowers. And of course she had been somewhat younger then.

Plenty of the men who came through her line at the store flirted with her, but she put them off with a laugh or a smart retort, and that was all most of them really wanted anyway, and with a smile she would imagine their surprise, these grocery-store romeos, if she had taken them up on any of their proposals. She was almost tempted to try it on some of the more offensive ones. Only once a man waited outside for the store to close and then followed her through the parking lot. When she got around the corner and saw him coming, she ran up the steps and into the house, locked the door and called the police, but he was gone when the patrol car got there twenty minutes later, and she never saw him again.

So she really did not expect anything to come of it when the nearly bald man with the beautiful eyes made jokes with her, even though these were the only little flirtations that made her blush. He looked about forty, and was a clean but sloppy dresser, always coming in the store wearing faded blue pants
and a grey raincoat over his sport shirt. Often he would still have drops of water on his naked scalp, and she was tempted to make a joke about it but didn't because she felt he might be sensitive about his baldness. Aside from the lack of hair, he was a very good-looking man, with a sensitive mouth and a large firm nose, supported by a good wide chin. Except for the clothes, he looked like a doctor or a lawyer, at any rate from a class well above Eleanor's. He usually came in on Wednesday and Friday evenings just before closing, and he ate almost nothing but garbage—candy and bakery goods, prepared dinners and canned spaghetti or chili. Obviously not a married man.

Her name was stitched onto her uniforms, and he always called her Eleanor. “Well, Eleanor,” he might say, “how do you like all that snow out there?”

“I'm glad I work indoors,” she would say.

“You have a long drive to get home? Looks like it's going to snow for six months.”

“Oh it won't be that bad.”

“Oh you never can tell, Eleanor. You never can tell. Once in Cleveland it snowed for exactly three hundred and fifty-two days. Right through spring and summer, didn't stop snowing until Thanksgiving day.”

“Must have piled up pretty high.”

“Oh not at all. See, the temperature was always up in the eighties. Stuff melted as soon as it hit the ground.”

She often wondered where he got his bizarre sense of humor, but when she found out that he was a professor up at Reed College, that seemed to explain it.

Then one night as she was crossing the parking lot against a slanting rain, with an armload of her own groceries, she heard him call out to her from a parked car.

“Eleanor!”

He was sitting behind the wheel of a little black Plymouth, his window open and the rain spattering his face as he looked up at her.

“Oh hello there,” she said. She knew what was coming, and even though her feet hurt as usual and her back was sore, she felt a thrill of anticipation.

“Can I give you a lift? Or do you have a car of your own?”

“I just live a few doors away,” she said.

“Then let me help you with your stuff.” He opened his door, quickly
rolled up the window and got out. “Here, gimme,” he said. This was the moment, and instead of saying, “Oh that's all right,” and ducking around him and going on home, Eleanor, for reasons she never questioned, handed him the sacks of groceries.

Jody did not like Quentin Corby. The eyes her mother thought beautiful were dark and shifty to Jody, and she did not like the fact that he was nearly bald or that his skin had a soft, almost silken look.

“That's a very nice-looking girl,” Corby said after Jody had gone into her room to listen to the radio. Eleanor smiled and wished he would go away. She was exhausted, and the impulse that had allowed him into the house had faded now, under the very real possibility of getting her shoes off and having some dinner. Fortunately he was sensitive to this and after only twenty minutes or so, just enough time to drink his coffee and smoke a couple of cigarettes, he got up, politely took her hand, smiled and said, “Look, are you doing anything Saturday night? I'd like to take you to a movie.”