Third Girl from the Left (5 page)

All the air rushed out of Angela's chest. Her hand flew to her heart, just like in a movie. The ocean glittered blue and green, sun-touched, just like in a movie. But with the salt on her face and the sky above and her body warmed by the air all around her. She had come to where she was meant to be. Sheila stood next to her, grinning. “Nice, huh?”

“Oh, Sheila, I can't even tell you.”

“I know. I thought you'd feel that way.” Without speaking they moved a step closer to each other. They stood looking at the water for a long time, the sound of the waves in their ears, the noise of the city behind them forgotten. They might have been alone in the world.

 

When Angela met Sheila, she was close to giving up. Her work as a Katharine Gibbs girl was disappearing. She was a fast typist, but when she met Sheila she'd worked only three days out of the previous ten. She had no idea how she was going to pay the rent at her pay-by-the-week hotel, and she couldn't bear taking the bus one more second. She had to get a car. She was sitting behind the desk at Goldstein and Associates, a casting agency she'd been sent to that morning. She had her headset on and was staring at the wall in front of her, trying to stay awake. She'd gotten only five hours of sleep the night before. Her neighbors, two extremely large transvestites, were screaming at each other at glass-shattering levels most of the night. Her eyes were grainy and her neck felt loose; she kept drifting off. She woke up when Sheila came in. It was as if a lioness had entered the room. She had skin the color of a buckeye and about the same satiny smoothness. She had the walk of a runway model, one foot swinging way in front of the other, her fake-fur-trimmed ankle-length orange maxicoat swinging open with every step to reveal a tiny white mini and black go-go boots. Her hair was wrapped in yards of blue silk that matched the shirt that clung to her. She walked up to Angela: “I'm here to see Mr. Goldstein,” she said. Her deep voice was cool water in the desert.

“Yes, ma'am.”

The woman laughed, giggled really. Her sophistication fell away for a moment and Angela realized that they were about the same age. “Yes, ma'am?' Where you all from?” she said in an exaggerated fake southern accent.

“Tulsa, ma'am. I been here about nine months.”

“Nine months, huh?” The beautiful woman looked speculative. “You been working here the whole time?”

Angela blushed and looked down. “Not really. I want to be an actress. I've been working wherever I can. This is just a temp job.” She sighed, uncertain why she was telling the truth. “This ends tomorrow. Then I don't know what I'm going to do.” The phone rang and she busied herself with it for a moment. The woman watched her sympathetically. She considered something, then decided. “Listen, my name is Sheila Jenkins. I'm an actress too, and I need a roommate. Here's my phone number. Why don't you call me after work and we can talk. I think I might know a place where you could work too.” She smiled. “I know how it is when you first get here. You're gonna get famous right away. And then when you don't . . .” They smiled at each other. Angela slipped Sheila's note into her pocket, feeling as though she might cry. “Mr. Goldstein will see you now,” she said. But what she wanted to say was “Thank you. You're saving my life.”

She moved in with Sheila a week after that conversation. Sheila came over to help her move her two boxes and one suitcase. She looked around the hotel room, her mouth in a little pout of disgust. “How long you been living here, Angela?”

“The whole time I been in LA.”

Sheila hoisted a box under her arm. “Hmm. I stayed in a place like this too. Cried myself to sleep every night.” She looked at Angela. Angela was suddenly very aware of the chocolate-cream texture of Sheila's skin, the large depths of her eyes. “I don't cry anymore, though. You'll stop too, you knock on enough doors. Come on.” They left without checking for things under the bed or in the drawers. Nothing left behind was worth keeping.

The apartment wasn't far from the hotel. Sheila drove like the first woman allowed into the Daytona 500. Angela clutched the door handle and didn't speak. She kept looking at Sheila, who pushed the pedal to the metal as soon as the light changed and threw her cigarettes out the window like
she
was on fire. She talked the whole drive, offering to get Angela an interview at the Playboy Club where she worked. “The money's good and there's lots of movie types there. I been there two and a half years. It's good.”

“I'll have to wear that little costume, though, huh?”

Sheila looked at her quickly. “You sure as hell will. You'll look good in it, though.” She glanced up at herself in the rearview mirror. “I do.”

 

Angela's final interview took place at the large Mission-style house that Hugh Hefner rented to use when he was in LA; the mansion was still a few years away. She'd made it through the big cattle-call audition in town and Mr. Hefner's brother, who ran the auditions, said, “Don't worry. You've got what we need.” He patted her butt briefly and shoved a wrinkled slip of paper with a phone number and address on it into her hand. On the assigned day, Angela smoothed her very short red skirt over her hips and pushed the doorbell. It played the first few notes of “Take Five” by Dave Brubeck. A butler Bunny answered the door. She was heavily made-up and pushed-up, wearing the full Bunny costume augmented by a small white collar and a black bow tie. She led Angela from the brilliant white marble hall with the zebraprint rug to an anteroom with blood red walls and a black bearskin rug. She was kept waiting there for the better part of a half hour. The rug still had a head. Angela stared into its glass eyes. It had many yellow teeth. Finally, she was summoned in to see Mr. Hefner—or Hef, as his brother had told her he liked everyone to call him. Sheila had told her that he took great pride in briefly meeting as many of the Bunnies as he could before they were officially hired. She walked into the room and a tiny gasp escaped her. Her future boss sat before her in an enormous tub full of constantly bubbling water—she found out later that it was called a Jacuzzi and was the latest thing. With him were two naked, blank-looking blondes. He looked at her levelly. He had a very raspy voice. “So, Angela . . . that's your name, right, Angela? You want to be a Bunny?”

“Yes, sir, I do.” She tried not to look at Hef's penis, only somewhat obscured by the bubbles. One of the blondes idly ran a hand over her left breast, stopping to finger a large pink nipple.

“Well, what makes you think you can do it?”

“I've got a lot of energy, sir. And I like people.” She was trying to sound as she would on any other job interview. That seemed the safest thing to do.

“Hmm.” His hand traced small circles around the shoulder of the right-hand blonde. “That's good.” He paused. “Take your clothes off, would you?”

“Sir?”

He smiled, and repeated his words as calmly as though she had misheard a request to hand him a glass of water. Angela's stomach slid down to her toes, which curled involuntarily. Was she going to have to get in the tub with three naked white people? How could Sheila not have told her about this? OK. OK. So take the skirt and top off. That's Hollywood. Tears stung her eyes sharply. She swallowed twice. Hard. Reached around to undo the zipper of the skirt, pulled the shirt off, wiggle, twist, out. She reached around to take off her bra and stepped forward, but Hef held up his hand magisterially. She dropped her arms and stood in her clean white bra and panties, her arms loose at her sides. The blondes didn't look at her.

“You have a nice rack,” Hef finally said.

Angela sucked her breath in quickly and straightened up. She'd come so far. She didn't fold. “Glad you think so, sir.”

He laughed and slid his arm around the blonde on his left. “Turn around, would you?” Angela did what he asked, turning slowly. “Nice ass, too. You'll do well at the club. Lot of my customers want a little hot chocolate. Good to bring you girls in.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“See Mr. Jensen on your way out. He'll get you all signed up and outfitted. You'll have orientation next week, I think. And listen to your Bunny Mother. She won't steer you wrong.” He stretched one leg out in front of him. “Welcome to our little family, Angela. I think you'll enjoy working with us.”

“I'm sure I will, sir.” But she wasn't sure he heard her. He was sloppily kissing the blonde on the right, whose hands moved rapidly beneath the bubbles. Angela didn't look too closely at what she was doing. They didn't watch her put on her clothes. When she got into the car, which she had borrowed from Sheila, she sat for a long time, the heels of her hands pressed into her eyes. But when she started driving, she felt OK. She'd done what she had to do.

When she got home and reported that she'd had to take her clothes off for the interview, Sheila pulled an “oops, I forgot” face and said, “Dag. Sorry. I should have told you about that. Sometimes he asks to see some of the girls before he hires them. I had to do it.” She looked at Angela intently. “You did it, though, right?”

“Yeah. Sure. I woulda liked to known what to expect, though.”

Sheila laughed and punched her in the arm like an affectionate big sister. “Girl, you don't
ever
know what to expect in this town. I thought you knew that already.”

 

When Angela first left Tulsa, she didn't call her parents for a week. They were frantic. The first time they spoke after she left home, her mother cried wordlessly into the phone for five whole minutes. Her father asked all the questions: “Angie, Angie, we were so worried. What on earth were you doing, leaving us like that with just a note? Where are you?”

She told them that she was in Los Angeles (which caused a sudden change from sobbing to shrieking) but that she had found a job and a nice place to live (an outright lie). She told them no, they shouldn't come visit her but that she'd call as often as her busy schedule would permit. She told them that she was all right. They said they would pray for her. She thanked them. Then she hung up the pay phone in the filthy, savagely battered phone booth and watched a roach scurry up the grayish green wall. The hall smelled of urine. She sighed and blinked back tears. It was difficult to believe that Sidney Poitier or Jane Fonda or any of them had ever lived this way. She went back to her moldy, damp bedroom and cried until she fell asleep.

Once Sheila took her in and she went to work at the club, it was immeasurably better. She was able to send money and little presents home sometimes. Her parents thought this was all being funded by her work in a dentist's office as she tried to make it as an actress. But even though things were better, even though she liked the Playboy Club, it wasn't getting her into any movies. Sheila had the same problem. They both auditioned some—not enough—and were passed over plenty. There just weren't that many parts for girls like them yet. And they didn't know how to get the ones that were there. They could smell the change all around them, but they didn't know how to touch it. They lamented their situation often, but nothing happened until late one hot morning when they were watching TV together, not talking. Sheila was rubbing Angela's feet, which felt so good she was almost asleep. Suddenly Sheila's voice cut through her stupor. “I can't believe we didn't think of this before!”

“What?”

“This!” She picked up a copy of
Ebony
lying on the floor next to the sofa on top of a pile of dirty clothes. On it was a picture of Cicely Tyson, her hair in a neat Afro. “We need to change our hair.”

“Change it into what?” said Angela, genuinely puzzled.

Sheila shook the magazine. “This. We need to look today. Hot. Happening. We need naturals!”

Angela's hands flew to her head. “You mean let our hair go back?”

Sheila rolled her eyes. “Yeeees. It is almost 1972, after all. And we look just like every other girl who goes on an audition in this godforsaken town. We all look like Diahann Carroll in
Julia
. Nice. Sweet. Enough of that. It's time for power to the people. Let's do it. OK?”

Angela fingered the hair at the back of her neck. It was starting to go back already. What would it feel like to have that softness all over her head? “Well. OK. If you don't think they'll give us a hard time at work.”

“No. We can just tell them it's the next big thing. You know they'll listen to us 'cause we're black chicks. We're always ahead of everybody else. It'll look good. Look at her, Angela. She's beautiful.”

Angela looked. Cicely was smiling, confident. Beautiful. She was beautiful. Angela's hair had not been left to its natural texture since she was five years old. Her mother was not raising any nappy-headed little ragamuffins. In Tulsa, a girl would no sooner have run around with unstraightened hair than she would have run around naked. It would have been worse than running around naked, letting everyone see your naps. Angela touched the photo, a little self-conscious. OK. She came here to become someone new. It was time to look different too.

They both had the night off so they started right away. Despite Sheila's bold proclamation, it had been so long since either of them had had more than the slightest contact with their God-given tresses that they weren't sure how to proceed. Finally, Angela proposed that they wash their hair so it would go back and then go to a barbershop to get it cut. “Just to start with,” she said. They washed each other's hair in the sink. The oil used to press it slid down the drain in thickened swirls. Angela felt Sheila's hair rise up beneath her fingers like bread dough, thick and pliable. She rubbed Sheila's scalp, finding it curiously comforting. She remembered when her mother used to wash her hair over the sink. Every Saturday, the hot comb sizzling in wait on the stovetop, her mother humming to herself, usually an old hymn. Angela dreaded the comb—her mother liked a hard press and usually burned her at least twice—but she enjoyed those soft moments before, the quiet of the kitchen, the sound of her breath in her lungs. There was no smell of burnt hair and oil yet, no infinity of sitting still. Just a quiet hymn and her mother's hands moving on her, getting her ready. It was odd to find herself in the opposite position with Sheila, her hands moving through her friend's hair. “OK, I think I'm about done now. You can sit up.”