L.A.WOMAN (4 page)

And I wanted my parents to invite their friends so the European accents could finally join up with all the other funny bohemians I knew in L.A.—and we could all sit down.

Naturally when I was in the school counselor's office for the yearly question “What do you plan to do when you graduate?” I always stuck to my guns and said, “Oh, I don't know.”

“But you've got to be careful that you don't just drift,” she'd always say.

“Drifting” sounded fine to me, but to a school counselor it was the Biggest Danger life had to offer.

And that's really all Lola cared about too until she was twenty-six when Vera Minsky discovered her.

T
HERE WERE PERHAPS
a hundred Teretsky dancers during the thirties and forties who passed through the troupe, but of course I only knew four when I was growing up. (My mother and Aunt Helen were not Teretsky dancers and my mother never ever swallowed Trotsky.)

There was Aunt Goldie, Lola, Estelle, and Molly—and of course Goldie was really the star of them all, since Lola and Estelle really only became dancers when it seemed like there was little else to do that was any fun during the Depression. And by the time Molly joined during Lola's last days, nothing on earth could have made her a star like Goldie for she was not foolish enough to put up with notions of such hogwash and, besides, she never could dance worth beans in the first place.

It was at this class that first day that one of the scouts for Teretsky discovered Lola, who looked like a Martha Graham dancer insofar as having black wavy hair (at least before it was hennaed redder and redder). Lola also managed to look like a dancer that day when she was just twenty-six because anything Vera Minsky (the coach) told them to do, Lola could do better than Minsky herself. Or at least longer. Lola never really was driven like Goldie—Goldie
was
a dancer. Lola became a dancer because there was nothing else for an artistic girl bent on adventure to
do
in those days. Lola in fact hadn't even been terribly interested in getting away from her mother—running away from a stifling home. For though Lola's home was probably just as stifling as anyone else's inside, outside it was okay with her.

T
HE THING ABOUT
O
PHELIA
—my cousin who was Goldie's daughter and when Goldie quit being a dancer once she broke her leg so she married Mad Dog Tim (as I always thought of him), the mild mannered union organizer who insisted on living in Watts to live among the populace and who insisted on working in the factory with the ordinary mortals, so even though he was often up for promotion he never would say yes because he was determined to be as fucked over as anybody till the day he died—was that she was old-fashioned.

And Ophelia—when her mother married Tim and she found herself at the age of twelve moving to Watts—changed her name from Andrea which it had been so far, making herself the character whose youth was sacrificed because some idiot couldn't act nice.

Of course, when Ophelia was twelve she looked ten, and she was another one with black wavy hair and big brown eyes and the look of a Russian wolfhound about her when she laughed. And as she grew into puberty, she didn't look much older because she was always so skinny and so half-crazed-by-anxiety-looking the whole time. Perhaps when she grew up, she might have found herself with a conscience like Lola's and been able to throw herself into picketing, too, except that she'd been raised in the jaws of Mad Dog Tim and had gotten her youth filled up with Socialist Workers' Party kids in camp, meetings, and benefits—and Ophelia wasn't like that.

Whenever Ophelia came over to our house, she took the opportunity to luxuriate.

She luxuriated in the bathtub (because in Watts they only had a shower, even though they lived in a regular house which looked like it ought to have a bath).

In the days when Goldie had danced in New York before she broke her leg, Ophelia had lived there in a flat with
cockroaches which made me green with envy. I had no idea until I lived in a flat with cockroaches in New York myself either what a flat was or what a cockroach was, never mind what New York was, and I'd get mad whenever my grandmother got this weepy catch in her throat and said things like “Oi, poor Andrea, she's suffered—how she's suffered!”

Because I always thought, “Suffered! Hah! I don't even know what a cockroach is!”

My grandparents—especially my grandfather, who liked Andrea (even after she became Ophelia) better than either Bonnie or me, probably because Andrea looked like a Russian Jew whereas Bonnie and I looked like goys with a vengeance—were always giving Ophelia things to assuage her for how much she'd suffered and never giving me anything.

Like I remember one time they gave her a set of pastels, an entire set of every color pastel—fifty or sixty at least—that there ever was, plus a huge pad of paper! My grandfather just gave it to her!

“But darling dear,” my mother would explain, “that's
all
she's got!”

“That's
all
I want!” I'd insist.

“But Sophie, you have so many things,” people would try and make me see when I was nine and Ophelia got the pastels, “you have everything.”

“But I want pastels,” I'd point out.

I never believed for a moment that having a lovely home, lovely parents, and a cultural background made up for one single pastel and neither did Ophelia—at least not for the first two or three days after Grandpa gave them to her and she gloated around our house where she was staying over Easter vacation, dusting and polishing each separate crayon of chalk before she laid it down in its proper chronological place in the color spectrum. It made me sick.

And then Ophelia herself, after the fourth day—when she finally sighed with ennui over her still lifes and grew as desperately unsympathetic with them and their possibilities as I myself was about my lovely home, family and other advantages—then, but only then, would she sigh tragically over the books in my father's bookcase where so much cultural wealth was in evidence, and say, “Oh, Sophie, how I envy you!”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “Then can I use the pastels?”

“No, no,” she gasped, “you'll ruin them!”

“I'll kill you,” I shrieked, “I'll call the police! Mother!”

I'd finally complain to my mother.

“She
still
won't let me use them,” I said, “and she isn't even drawing anymore.”

My mother would look at Andrea and at the pastel box and at me and say, “Why won't you let her use them, Andrea?”

“Because she's not old enough, she'll break them,” Andrea said in her well-modulated voice which sounded reasonable to adults. “They're just chalk but I want to keep them perfect because they're all I have. Just chalk!”

“You always get everything and everybody keeps saying it's all you have,” I cried. “I wish you were dead!”

“So do I sometimes,” Andrea sighed wistfully, moodily all suffering and ready for the next present.

“Well just die then,” I urged her, to my mother's dismay.

“Now why don't both you girls go for a nice walk down on the Boulevard?” my mother said. “You've been inside for too long.”

The Easter vacation when Andrea was still Andrea and got the pastels, we spent the first few days inside the entire time while Andrea amazed Bonnie and me drawing and smudging with her new pastels, which were so delicate and cloudy like a mist of color drifting over the pages that I drooled with desire to be the one smudging and blending those still lifes
together. Every shade in the rainbow came out on paper the way cotton candy did only in pink. Cotton candy somehow in every single blue and all the greens, the reds, the yellows, the purples—even the blacks and browns and in-betweens bloomed into puffy clouds that had only till then been pink. And Andrea refused to let me touch one stick at all.

Bonnie and I were stuck making ourselves do with old broken crayons.

But whenever we actually drove to Watts, to 119th Street where the tract homes lined Andrea's block and they were the only white family anywhere for miles, I realized that pastels were after all only chalk and all Andrea had to live for.

So no wonder whenever she was dropped off to stay with us, she went first to the bookshelves where she trailed her fingertips over the titles which were of novels and plays and art history and all kinds of subjects other than the history of the Russian Revolution by Trotsky or something pertaining to the workers. No wonder she sighed about Salinger and Sartre and Beerbohm and Shaw and Melville and Mark Twain. And no wonder she stood and looked at the drawings my mother hung on the walls, that she herself had done or artist friends or else were reproductions of da Vinci or Picasso or Ernst. And no wonder she would tiptoe into my father's music room when he left so she could look at his collection of Dixieland 78s and feel she was in the presence of the ultimate sophistication.

And no wonder the way she looked at all we had sometimes made me see that it wasn't just broken Crayolas after all. But of course I'd forget when she got a new neon pink Orion sweater from Ohrbach's which didn't strike me as fair.

Andrea herself, most of the time when we were teenagers or children, seemed to pass through life like a pastel cloud
smudged and blended into her surroundings. The quality of her voice became more reasonable too.

“I'm really an orphan,” she would explain to me. “My parents were the king and queen and when I grow up, I'm going to become the princess. That's who I really am.”

“Really?” I asked, although I believed whatever Andrea told me without question since Andrea never lied and I was only ten.

“That's right,” she said.

“Well, I always knew you didn't belong living in Watts,” I agreed. “You'd be much more at home in your own castle. On your own throne. With lots and lots of gold and jewels and chocolate cake.”

“And my own library,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“And lots and lots of jazz musicians,” she added, “not just records. To play just for me.”

Since having musicians right there playing where I lived was what I grew up with, I preferred chocolate cake. They always let Andrea have all the chocolate cake she wanted, whereas Bonnie and I were stuck because all we had were advantages.

“D
ID YOU TAKE THE
P
IERCE
arrow to rehearsal?” I asked Lola on our walk up Canyon Drive.

“I walked,” Lola said. “Right over that hill there. Through the coyotes.”

We paused and looked toward Bronson Canyon and west toward the hill Lola had once crossed on foot at dawn. It would have been at least two miles over coyote- and rattlesnake-infested hills till you came down past Valentino's old house to where the Hollywood Bowl was. But to Lola, after so many hikes up Mount Hollywood, these low hills might
have seemed nothing in the days when they weren't covered with the houses built on them now.

“On Sunday mornings when your Aunt Goldie spent the night, I'd bring her breakfast in bed,” Lola said. “I was so surprised the first time I did this.”

“Surprised?”

“Because she'd never had breakfast in bed before,” Lola said. “She didn't even know there was such a thing. And I was so unconscious, I just did it without thinking. Because I couldn't conceive of what being poor meant—or even lower middle class. We always had Fraulein to do everything for us before we asked.”

“Well,” I said, “Goldie sure must know what breakfast in bed is now, thanks to you.”

“You know who knew all about being rich? Before anyone had to tell her, she just knew? Goldie's sister, the younger one.”

“You mean Aunt Helen?”

“Helen knew everything,” Lola nodded. “Just everything. And she sang like an angel. What a voice that gorgeous beauty had, what richness—everything about her just had a glow—golden, that's how she was. And she knew it.”

“Before she moved to New Jersey,” I said, “and ruined the whole thing.”

“These things happen,” Lola said philosophically.

“To dumb people, not Helen,” I said. “Every time she comes to visit us, you know what she says? She is driving up La Cienega to our house from the airport—you know La Cienega, that hideous street filled with ugly Lowry's Prime Rib restaurants?—and she lets out this musical note sigh like a bell. ‘Ooooooo,' she says, ‘I'd forgotten how
green
and beautiful L.A. is.' She says that when we're not even anywhere green and beautiful yet. She should get a divorce.”

“You selfish girl.” Lola casually shrugged.

“Well, she should,” I insisted.

Lola looked up toward the entrance to the park where Bronson Canyon now lay before us. A thin buzzing mass of sound came twisting from that direction.

“What
is
that?” Lola asked.

“Bagpipes,” I said. “A guy practices his bagpipes here because he can't in his apartment, his landlord won't let him. So he practices here.”

“Well,” Lola said, a birdlike alertness on her intently focused face as she listened for a moment, “he sure does need it.”

T
HE TOWN WAS SO MISERABLE
, even for Texas, that once it had been named “Sour Lake,” nobody had the nerve to suggest it be improved. Or the energy. The energy it took to suggest the town at all was about all the miserable place seems to have once known. Attracting tourists by claiming the healthful waters of the sour lake were a cure was the idea behind Sour Lake, but few were attracted and the entire place would have folded, except so much oil was suddenly discovered (which was what had caused the lake to be sour, it turned out) that the wretched town of Sour Lake was still alive.

And Eugenia Crawley was twenty-three years old and still in it—stuck there in Texas, washing the dishes in her mother's restaurant where she waited on tables and was wearing a pink checked outfit, a waitress uniform, she'd made herself. She made all her own clothes on the sewing machine, the kind you pumped—anyway, who needed an electric machine in Sour Lake? There wasn't much reason to sew faster, sewing was all there was to do.