Cheat and Charmer (22 page)

“A bed of r-r-r-roses. And it’s ‘days of wine and roses’—meaning happy, romantic days, days when you’re in love and life is sweet and all that sort of thing.”

“Oh God, what can I say? I’m an imbecile!”

They had a good laugh together as they returned, arm in arm, to Dinah’s car.

Dinah didn’t have much time before she had to get home. Probably Jake’s sister Elsinore and her husband and kids were already there, and then after four o’clock there would be a stream of people coming by for drinks and a buffet. In the den, the guys would shout at the top of their lungs over the Rose Bowl. Dinah would distribute gifts to the kids from under the Christmas tree. Later, Jake would run a couple of movies he’d brought from the studio. The only open grocery store was down on Pico, and she needed to pick up extra tonic and ginger ale. Nevertheless, she found herself instead driving straight up to Rabbit Hill, where she sometimes brought the children to fly kites. A plateau high above the UCLA football field, it was now covered in a fresh rippling green in celebration of what passed for winter in Los Angeles.

Dinah parked at the summit and gazed out over the redbrick Romanesque
Revival buildings of the university. She remembered when this was still open country—home to rattlesnakes, coyotes, and jackrabbits. In those days the area was covered with patches of lavender, wild mustard, and yucca, a word that had delighted her as a child, though she had found it then, and still found it, impossibly difficult to say. When she had first arrived in California and spent time roller-skating by herself up and down the streets of Hollywood, she used to stop now and then and ask the neighbors who stood there with hoses in hand spraying their flowers to identify the things that grew in their yards. They soon learned the name of the curious child. “Why, that’s bougainvillea, Dinah,” “That’s pittosporum,” “That’s wisteria,” “That’s a cherimoya,” they explained, and she saw how they tried not to flinch when they heard her struggling to say the words. Learned them, however, she had. She mastered the names of things growing in yards and gardens and mountains and canyons, and at night, after her sister had fallen asleep beside her, a tight curled crescent of lightly breathing child, Dinah would repeat them over and over to herself, without stuttering, in a low chant, remembering their scents and colors, and the way her fingers felt when she touched them:
jacaranda, eucalyptus, oleander, yucca, manzanita, cypress, ceanothus, purple sage
.

Now, as she sat smoking in the car, the windows rolled down, she said their names again. The words had spelled enchantment in those days, when she had practiced ballet, tap, and adagio on the sidewalk, knowing that one day she was going to be a famous movie star.

How long had that lasted, that brief eternity after the Milligans arrived in California, when she’d been happy day after day with a joy that coursed through her lithe and agile body? Two years, she remembered, exactly two years—1922 to 1924—and then her father had gone on his first California binge and come back without a job and they’d moved to a two-room apartment with peeling wallpaper in Boyle Heights, where Alice, their mother, had had to wash the lice out of their hair with kerosene. But like all Pop’s binges, this one passed, and soon they moved to a little stucco house in Hollywood, with wisteria hanging down over the porch and a big juniper tree in the front yard. Ed Milligan had found a job selling steel again, Alice’s diamond engagement ring was redeemed from the pawnshop, and, since her feet were one size bigger, Dinah got a new pair of roller skates. So you could be happy, she concluded, for a while. It never lasted—something would always wreck it. But then it could come back, and you sucked on it for as long as you could, as if it were an Eskimo Pie melting in the sun after
school. If you could roller-skate up and down Hollywood Boulevard by yourself, and get a chocolate soda because Pop was working and Mom gave you a nickel, and you didn’t have to look after your sister every minute of the day; if you could stop and talk to the three-thousand-year-old Egyptian guy who wore a turban and made pottery on a wheel in the courtyard of Grauman’s Egyptian, and listen to him tell stories about building pyramids and playing with King Tut, then that was happiness—and you could enjoy it and not worry about how long it would last.

But could she do that now? Dinah wondered as she sat tensely in the car, the smoke from her cigarette slowly curling out the window. So far so good: more than a year and a half had passed since she’d testified, and things were fine. It had rocked her, but she’d regained her equilibrium. Jake was working, the kids were growing, life was fine. There were people coming to the house today. So she’d lost her sister. That wasn’t a tragedy, was it?

Oh, come on, she said to herself. Forget it, forget it.

Yet she hunched behind the wheel, taking long drags on her cigarette, her heart pounding. The beautiful day oppressed her, even angered her. She remembered her father coming downstairs after their first six months in California and going out to the porch to pick up the newspaper and growling, “Another goddamn beautiful day.” That pure air outside seemed false, like an aging actress who had made herself up to have the color and eyes of an ingenue. Something inside her felt ready to burst with exasperation. Since her father’s death, everything had become muddled and complicated. Even after talking to Dorshka, she didn’t understand anything except that her father had died and that it was somehow her fault.

She had been remembering things from the past, thinking about them for months now, but she couldn’t bring herself to probe and resurrect those old days with Dorshka. It seemed that they mattered somehow, that they held clues, but she didn’t know to what. All she knew was that because of them, her fate had changed—that is, because of them she had emerged from some kind of invertebrate life and had found that she could pull herself out of the lower-middle-class muck and drag herself up, slowly and agonizingly, onto the beachhead of a larger world, which held out other possibilities—a picked-up education and love—consuming love.

She glanced again at her watch and felt that she really had to get going, but instead she reclined against the seat. There were no other cars here this afternoon, but Rabbit Hill was a well-known spot for necking. Kids
drove up at night in their souped-up Fords and Chevys; sometimes, when she brought the children here to fly their kites, she saw used condoms in the dirt. She remembered her own years of high school groping, and then, later, the contorted postures of backseat sex. After she started going with Jake, it seemed that it had all happened to another person, although at parties she sometimes told the story of the Saturday night she had been necking with a boy in the living room of her parents’ West Hollywood bungalow, when her father woke up and decided to have a smoke. Noiselessly gliding up to the sofa in his bare feet and dressed in a long nightshirt, he sat down in the dark, right on top of Dinah and her date. “All hell broke loose,” she would say. “Pop screamed, I screamed, and the boy screamed. Then he ran out of the house and I never saw him again.”

Except that it hadn’t happened
quite
that way. The boy, like so many of the fellows Dinah went out with, happened to catch sight of Veevi the next time he came over, and that was the end of Dinah’s romance. In fact that boy, Lester Wooten, finding himself only one among a crowd of Veevi’s adorers, had made himself her valet, and would show up late on Saturday afternoons to iron her dress before she went out with someone else. For this constant display of devotion, Lester waited for his reward. And what was that? Nothing more than a look, a swift, patronizing glance that he took as assurance, even for the briefest instant, that he was the court favorite. He would never know that as he loped up the little brick path to their house, Veevi, all of fourteen and besieged with suitors, would murmur to Dinah and Alice from behind the screen door, “Oh God, here comes that drip Lester Wooten again.”

After that calamity, whenever Dinah and Veevi both had dates on a Saturday night, Dinah made sure the boy arrived at the house after Veevi left and always refused to invite him in later. She allowed no kissing at the front door, but agreed to drive somewhere to neck before her date took her home, and in this way discovered Rabbit Hill, though it hadn’t yet had a name.

Those first stirrings of pleasure, but also of strange waves of a nausea-like shame, had been shattering. And the surprise of it: so
this
was what Pop’s warnings and Mom’s evasions were all about! Dinah took to physical love as if it were a suddenly discovered and hitherto unsuspected talent. The swells of shame became weaker than the trances of pleasure that overcame her during long sessions of kissing and groping. She remained “good,” however, through the end of high school and for several years afterward,
mindful of Pop’s thoroughly unoriginal and oft-repeated warning that “familiarity breeds contempt.” That this was true, she and Veevi knew from what they called their parents’ “sex fights,” during which the girls would make faces at each other and cover their ears with their pillows as they overheard, late in the night, “Please, Alice, please,” from their parents’ bedroom and their mother’s muffled explosions of anger. The next morning they would see the red rubber douche bag and its revolting syringe hanging over the towel rack in the bathroom, and again they would make faces, because they sensed it had something to do with those fights during the night. Occasionally, they asked their mother to explain the facts of life to them. Her lemon-mouthed circumlocutions cracked them up; they would get into bed later and repeat what she had said until they doubled up with laughter, tears running down their cheeks. But for Dinah, everything about sex seemed nevertheless alien and scary. From whispered hints at school, she heard that the first time would hurt, and she became afraid. Then one night she sat on the toilet seat as Veevi, then thirteen, took a bubble bath and laughingly described, amid a sea of pink foam, how she had recently lost her virginity to a much older boy. Had it hurt? Dinah wanted to know. Yes, but not for long, Veevi had answered, and lifted her polished red toes to turn on the hot water again. The pain went away. Actually, doing it was sort of fun, she said, especially if you could be on top; it was like riding a horse (the new boyfriend had just given her one, at his family’s Topanga ranch). It wasn’t true, either, what their father had said, that boys didn’t respect you if you did it with them; the boyfriend was crazy about her and would do anything for her now that she had “gone all the way” with him. Dinah remained unpersuaded. The mechanics, as Veevi described them, seemed horrible, and she decided then and there that this was something she could easily postpone until some sublime great love would make it inevitable, painless, and glorious.

Later, Dinah necked and petted on Rabbit Hill with Dexter Cleary, the boy she won dance contests with. They did all but “it” in the backseat and the front seat of his Chevy, with her on her back, on her side, and on his lap, and when the interior of the car became steamy and she rolled down the window to drink in the wine of the California night, she marveled at the pleasure she was feeling and wondered what the things she
wasn’t
doing were like. But she wasn’t in love with Dexter, and in the end she found it easy to say no. She was going to high school and dancing in pictures and contests and planning to go to UCLA in the fall. On summer
nights when it stayed light until late, she could look out the front window while necking with a boy—and there were several after Dexter—and see the university, and imagine the boys she would meet in college—intelligent, ambitious, good-looking fellows, good dancers, who would tell her she was pretty, like her for having a sense of humor, and take her any day over her sister.

Then just as she graduated the Depression hit, her father got drunk, cracked up the car, and crushed his third, fourth, and fifth vertebrae. While he was convalescing as a charity case at the Shriner home, she said good-bye to her dream of UCLA and got a job; thank God she had taken typing at Hollywood High. Two years later, in the fall of 1932, driving west on Wilshire in the blinding sun after a dreary day’s work at Sprague Paper, she pulled into a gas station and was startled when a tall young man with wiry blond hair poked his head through the window. “Hey, Dinah Milligan! I’ve been wondering what happened to you!”

Everett Gilfillen told her he had admired her in high school but had never had the courage to ask her out. How ’bout now? When he picked her up in his Ford to take her to the movies, he told her she looked pretty, and, much to her astonishment, later in the evening over ice cream sodas he said that he liked her stutter. It was cute, he told her boldly, taking her hand across the table with a grown-up assurance that gave her flutters in the groin. When he finally met Veevi, he took no interest in her. Her sister called Everett “dull,” and Dinah wondered if there was something wrong with him for being so immune to Veevi’s dazzle. She said so to her mother, who put her plump arms around Dinah and said, “Sweetie pie, haven’t I always told you your time would come?”