My Life in Black and White (5 page)

T
he house I grew up in on Camrose Drive had been in my family for three generations. I was raised there when my parents divorced. Marjorie had grown up in it with her father and stepmother. But we all owed that roof over our heads to my grandmother Alice, who bought it after her role in
He Gave No Answer
and paid it off before she died.

Our house was only a five-minute walk from the famous High Tower Court, an enclave of five houses that were reachable by immense staircases built onto the hillside or an elevator that required a private key. Designed by Carl Kay in the thirties, the story goes that his wife was so fed up climbing the stairs that he built the elevator just for her. A tunnel led from a parking garage several storeys below, and only the homes’ owners had a key. Other people in the neighbourhood and gawking tourists alike could stroll up there on foot, and they often did. No matter what time of day, the area held an air of mystery, creeping with vines, bamboo and twisted prehistoric-looking ferns and palms. The steep staircases that twisted up through the hills and the glow from lamps seen peeking through the foliage and perimeter fences hinted at the private lives inside the house. I used to play along the pathways and pretend it was a jungle, as my mother had done when she was a child. It was a mystical place for a kid’s
imagination. It might be just what I needed as an abandoned wife.

But before sober reflection along High Tower Court, I had to first take what was coming to me from my mother. The precise form of attack varied visit to visit, the only certainty being that there would be one. This time around the ambush started after wine had been poured and dinner was under way. In other words, all the trappings of a warm welcoming were in evidence, enough to lull a wayward daughter into thinking sympathy was on the menu alongside casserole. But that was foolish thinking. On this occasion, she chose as a starting point a long-standing source of contention: my appearance. Marjorie was convinced that there wasn’t a problem in the world that couldn’t be solved by a makeover. I felt differently.

“Have you thought of colouring your hair? Or getting a different style?” My mother had a sly way of asking such questions, like it wasn’t something she’d given much thought to, when in fact she’d run the dialogue through her mind repeatedly like they were lines from Shakespeare.

I stared at my mother the bombshell, at the blonde tresses that she kept in a quasi–Marilyn Monroe style, loose curls that fell just below her chin, then flipped up at the ends. Her eyebrows were their usual pencilled-in perfection. Her lips were candy-floss pink. The trouble with glamorous mothers is that they want you to be as glamorous as they are. As usual, I fell into her trap and felt a surge of anger flush my cheeks. “What’s wrong with my hair?”

“Just thought you might be ready for a change,” said Marjorie as she shoved dinner in the oven. “A new hairstyle can do wonders for a woman.”

“Really?” I asked and grabbed a fistful of my long hair. “I’m loyal to the mousy look. It’s stuck by me all these years. Longer than Dean did, that’s for sure.”

When I saw the look on my mother’s face, I knew I shouldn’t have
said it. The look meant one thing: she’d known Dean was going to leave me and why. Her reasoning went far beyond hair colour. It was fate; a life philosophy that we didn’t share. Like most everything in this house, her beliefs were borrowed from another era. I waited for her to say what she had undoubtedly rehearsed.

“I discovered this new Cabernet last week,” she said instead.

Maybe this time I wouldn’t get the lecture. It was a false hope; still, I picked up my glass and swivelled around on the kitchen stool and took in the scenery. It always amazed me how nothing ever changed from what I remembered growing up. The furniture in the house was its usual eclectic mix of mid-century modern, art deco, and arts and crafts. The pieces were exquisite and cared for; a less discerning eye might take them for reproductions, like what you find in a Restoration Hardware store. But they were the real deal. The walls were covered with local artists’ watercolours and pencil sketches. The colour scheme was taupe, white and black with the odd punch of colour in a cushion, nothing flashy. The entire effect was art directed, like a set on a soundstage.

But the most striking object of all loomed large over the entire space. It was a giant, framed vintage movie poster from
He Gave No Answer
, the film that gave my grandmother her one big role. Alicia Steele was third from the left, staring straight at me. I raised my glass to her and wondered silently what words of comfort, if any, she would have had for me.

“The house looks good,” I said, hoping to neutralize the enemy long enough to escape the ambush. Besides, the house did look good. My mother had a knack for décor and it was one of the few things we had in common. I loved décor magazines and rummaging around the California antique shops. The apartment had some quality things. I didn’t expect Dean to put up a fight over any of it. The fine lines of a Dutch teak coffee table never held much fascination for him. After all, that sort of thing was nothing compared to the fine lines of a
blonde actress. I got up and crossed the room and stood in front of my grandmother’s poster. When I was a little girl, I used to stare at the poster and talk to her, usually to complain about Marjorie. I liked to think she protected me, looking out at the world from the poster, a sort of pulp-art heaven. Imagination is wonderful when you’re young, but how quickly it can turn to delusion as an adult. Like imagining Dean loved me and would come home. Such thoughts made me want to ask the question in spite of my better judgment. Bring on the ambush, I told myself; let’s get it over with. I called out to my mother.

“You aren’t surprised that Dean left me, are you?”

Marjorie crept up beside me. She took a long sip of wine and said nothing. The unfulfilled actress had never left her, so even everyday gestures took on a dramatic flourish. She looked at her mother’s face, maybe for inspiration, and shook her head.

“You know I’m not,” she paused, taking her time, drawing out the suspense like she was a character about to reveal a vital clue in a Hitchcock film, even though I knew what was coming. “It’s the family curse, Clara.”

It was precisely what I expected her to say. That didn’t stop me from snapping “Not that again!” as though I’d hoped it would be something new.

“I know you don’t believe in fate,” she said disappointedly.

“You’re right. I don’t,” I said. “Was it fate that Grandpa left Alice for Lillian? And that Dad left you for Emily? Chalk it up to fifty percent of marriages failing, not some character flaw that gets passed down generation after generation.”

After my diatribe I was spent, but Marjorie was just getting started.

“It wasn’t just Alice and me; her mother, your great-grandmother—she was divorced, too, in an era when that sort of thing was practically unheard of. It was quite the scandal. And if it was just the state of marriage, why haven’t any of the women in our family left their husbands?”

“We believe in love?” I answered feebly.

She went back to refill her glass and I followed her, a fool for punishment.

“You know you could have tried harder,” she said.

“Gotten a better haircut, you mean?” I said icily.

She looked at me with pity. I didn’t much care for that either.

“You gave up on yourself, Clara. Your writing …”

“I am a writer!”

“Let me finish, child. I mean your screenwriting. If that didn’t work out, then you could have tried something else in the business, not merely writing about movies.”

“Like you should have acted in movies?”

My attempt to get in a shot went unnoted. “And yes, a little bit of personal grooming might have kept Dean more interested.”

I wanted to say “fuck you” but I had been raised differently than someone from an episode of a Dean Lapointe reality show, so instead I said, “You’re always so quick to tell me what I’m doing wrong. I’m sorry I let you down, Marjorie. You and Dean should go to dinner and bemoan my lack of lipstick and lack of screenwriting credits.”

I snatched the bottle of wine off the counter and refilled my glass. Marjorie shook her head. “I don’t mean to quarrel.”

“Yes, you do,” I objected.

“I only want to be honest. You have to accept the fact that you’re exactly like Alice and me—your career and marriage weren’t meant to be.”

“I’m nothing like you and Alice. Isn’t that what you hate about me?”

For the first time my words hit home. She spoke softly but defensively. “I don’t hate anything about you. I’ve only ever wanted you to be happy.”

We were both quiet. Call it fate or coincidence, the brutal truth was
that she was right. Despite my rebelling against all that was glamorous and holy to them, my life turned out the same anyway. It wasn’t something I could admit, not now, if ever. As if reading my mind she said, “I know how much it hurts. Look what it did to my poor mother. She died of a broken heart.”

I wanted to resist contradicting her. Sometimes when she said it I was successful, but tonight, with my emotions running high on wine, it was no use. “No she didn’t. Alice died in a car accident.”

Silence dropped between us like a cinder block. We hardly ever spoke of how my grandmother died for this reason. The only thing we could agree on was that it was a sad and violent end to her life; one that was full of broken dreams, and yes, a broken heart. Alice had apparently kept a convertible jalopy on the road way past its prime. She was driving up near the Hollywood sign on a Sunday night in December. It had been unseasonably hot, so she had the top down. What she was doing or where she was going was a mystery that was never solved. The police report said she was speeding and lost control and went plummeting off the mountainside. According to the
LA Times
there was a witness, an actress who gave only her first name—Betty—who said she saw the car roll over and over, and with the top down, well, it doesn’t take much of an imagination … There was zero alcohol or any other funny stuff in the toxicology results. My mother was a little girl but she still remembers the funeral. A slew of bit-part actors and fellow seamstresses from the wardrobe department where Alice worked came, and Marjorie’s father, Lyle, and Lillian, who was his wife by then, hosted a reception afterwards. My mother said she stayed up late, not because of grief but simply because no one noticed her. They were too busy drinking brown liquor in cut-crystal glasses and telling stories from back in the day when everyone had hope for a happy ending. She thought they were ghosts. Part of her never believed Alice’s car crash was an accident, but she never told me what
she thought had actually occurred. Murder? Suicide? I always chalked it up to one too many movies. As time wore on, she seemed to give in to the police and witness accounts, except for occasional outbursts like this one.

“Yes, it was a car accident,” Marjorie repeated softly.

“Well don’t worry, I won’t drive near the Hollywood sign until I’m over Dean,” I said and felt like a jerk for saying it. Marjorie ignored me and went back to preparing dinner.

I raised my glass once more to Alice as Alicia and followed her.

“Maybe you need to get away. When your father left I disappeared for three whole weeks.” An odd expression came across her face, like she was remembering something, bad or good I couldn’t tell.

“I remember,” I said. “I went back and forth between Grandpa and Lillian and Granny Bishop because Dad was too busy at the hospital. But I can’t run away.” I dipped a hot tortilla chip into my mom’s homemade guacamole.

“Staying put and facing trouble head-on is overrated,” she countered and sipped from her glass. “What do you have to stick around for? You don’t think he’s coming back, do you?”

I shoved the tortilla chip so hard into the guacamole that it crumbled in my hand.

“No,” I protested a little too loudly, hoping my tone would cover any hint that in fact I was hoping very much he would come back.

“Good, because he won’t.”

“Marjorie!” I exclaimed. “I don’t need to hear that right now.”

“You do, Clara,” she insisted. “You do.”

D
espite the usual tension between Marjorie and me, I stayed there on Camrose Drive. She had her own life and I wanted to be left alone, so in essence it was perfect. During the day, I toured the paths on High Tower Court, peered down the elevator shaft and wondered if the people who lived up here were happier than I was.

At night I curated my own film noir festival. I watched
Out of the Past, The Big Sleep, Asphalt Jungle
and
Key Largo
, to name a few. Of course, there was also
The Postman Always Rings Twice
, with Cora, the hell cat, to remind me of the kind of woman I wasn’t. Eventually, I pulled out the DVD of
He Gave No Answer
. That’s when Marjorie joined me. We rarely watched it because of the effect it had on her. It seemed to revive her childhood longing for her mother. For my part, it always made me wonder what might have been if Alice had lived and had broken big into pictures, how different our lives would have been.

Seeing Alice as Alicia Steele taking on a wisecracking gumshoe was remarkable. She was so young and pretty with bright eyes filled with hope and stars. Her big scene came near the end where she confronts the femme fatale. My grandmother actually gets her face slapped by the other woman.

“See to it you can take a slap as easy as a kiss. That is, if you want to get anywhere in this world and not be anybody’s fool,” the femme fatale told her.

Alicia Steele fought back tears and turned on her heel to leave the room, but not before stopping in front of the leading man, a tall dark-haired fellow, and slapping him hard across the face.

“I may be a fool but I’m no longer your fool,” she said and stormed out. Marjorie and I applauded as we always did.

“Why don’t we slap people across the face anymore?” I mused as the credits rolled. “As a culture, I mean, not you and me necessarily.”

She grinned. “I think it’s considered a form of violence.”

I shrugged. “It’s more civilized than calling someone an asshole or a slut. More satisfying too.”

“No doubt,” she agreed. “Though you’d probably get arrested for assault, or at the very least get sued, so I don’t recommend it. Not in the era we live in now.”

“Didn’t Quentin Tarantino bitch-slap someone once?”

“I believe so. And I believe he was sued. Case in point.”

“Point taken,” I said. “But it’s awfully fun to think about.” I hit the menu button and replayed the slap scene again. Alicia Steele was tougher than the character she played, the so-called good woman. She wouldn’t have taken Amber stealing her husband lightly, like I had. Not according to Marjorie anyway. She told me how when my grandfather had left Alice for Lillian, Alice had packed little Marjorie into her car and drove over to their place and set his car on fire.

Though when I got older and asked Lillian—we visited her once in a while after my grandfather died—she always maintained that this was a fabrication and that Marjorie was too young to remember the truth. Lillian’s story was that Alice had been furious that certain items she felt were hers were taken by my grandfather, and in attempting to take them out of his car, her cigarette had fallen
inside accidentally and started the blaze. I preferred Marjorie’s version. As far as family legends go it was more dramatic. As for Lillian, she was a small, dark-haired woman who smelled like lavender and whiskey. She was always nice enough to me. Tried to spoil me too, but my mother wouldn’t let her. I knew it wasn’t because she was against grandparents spoiling grandchildren, but only that she was against Lillian.

When
He Gave No Answer
was finished, I checked my cell phone again. There was nothing from Dean. He had cut me off entirely. I had called him, sent text messages and even tried Facebook. But there was only silence.

“You have to stop obsessing over Dean,” Marjorie scolded. “It’s unbecoming.”

“Leave me alone, Mother,” I said and stomped off to bed, although since Dean left, it was anxiety that kept me warm at night and sleep was a luxury I couldn’t afford. Tossing and turning, I managed a few fitful hours but was woken up the next day by the sound of something falling from a great height and my mother’s shriek. I ran to find her standing over a large cardboard box that had fallen from a top shelf. It looked like it had exploded.

“Closet terrorist?” I said dryly.

“You could say that,” she said equally dryly. “I thought it was time to start going through the family wardrobe department and get rid of some things.”

The family wardrobe department was the in-joke for my mother’s oversized walk-in closet that was really a converted bedroom. It was stacked to the rafters (if the room had rafters, but really it had fifteen-foot ceilings) with clothes, shoes, coats and accessories. There was an old wooden screen that my mother used to change behind and I used to hide behind. Marjorie kept everything, or it looked like she did. She still had her favourite dresses from high school right up to
what she wore to her friend’s wedding last summer. If I had been a girlie-girl, then this room would have been heaven to me growing up. But as I said, I was a tomboy, and so I avoided it like homework and Brussels sprouts.

The only part of the closet that ever held my attention was one special section that was entirely devoted to my grandmother. It was like a shrine to her style. Painstakingly packed in acid-free tissue in carefully labelled boxes were every suit, cocktail dress, evening gown, piece of lingerie and every pair of shoes and slippers she either wore when she was a struggling starlet in the 1940s or when she worked as a wardrobe assistant on film sets in the 1950s. Marjorie had inherited the entire collection when she was old enough not to wreck them. And through the years, she had tracked the origin of most of the items, partly from Alice’s notebooks and partly from her own research. It was a time capsule and probably worth a small fortune.

I found the formless clothes kind of sad, once alive with my grandmother’s vibrancy, a woman I never knew except for a few flickering images on a videotape, but with no life in them now. Growing up, Marjorie told me how she played dress-up with them when she was younger; it made her feel close to the mother she barely remembered. I never played dress-up once, not a chance … until today. The box that had fallen and exploded was one of my grandmother’s. Marjorie and I stood staring down at the spilled mound of chiffon and satin like it was pixie dust.

“You were going to get rid of Alice’s dresses?” I asked in disbelief.

Marjorie kneeled down and began to fold the pile, and I kneeled down to help. It was a box full of dresses, yellow ones, pink ones, green and purple.

“There are so many great pieces but I never wear them, and neither …” She stopped short but I knew what was coming, so I finished it for her.

“I’ll never wear them either,” I said. “Another reason I’m a disappointment.”

“I had hoped you would have the same passion as I did,” she admitted sullenly. “Like Alice had too. But there’s no point hanging onto them. I can get a pretty penny for the collection.”

I wanted to shout to save them for a granddaughter, but I kept quiet and let the guilt bear down on me as it had for as long as I could remember, no less heavy for the span of time. There was little point in objecting on behalf of a daughter that didn’t exist, and may never exist, like some twisted version of a hope chest. Nor was there any point arguing that my life wouldn’t have turned out any differently if I had dressed better or pursued acting or any of the things that had, in effect, brought only unhappiness to Marjorie and Alice. As I watched her painstakingly handle each item, I realized that my mother, for all her vibrancy and wit, was aging. She wouldn’t be around forever, and something inside her seemed to tell her it was time to clean house, especially since she’d long ago given up on me ever living up to expectations. From deep inside I couldn’t let her be right, not entirely, and unlike my marriage or writing an award-winning film, feigning an interest in fashion was an easy win.

“Tell me about that one?” I asked when she held up a bottle-green bouclé shift dress. “It’s so bright.”

“You can’t be afraid of colour.” She smiled slightly. “Though I know how you love black. This was one your grandmother made for an early fifties film noir. It was worn by the femme fatale, that’s why it’s so sexy. She was dangerous!” My mother laughed raucously. She had folded the dress up neatly when I said something that shocked us both.

“Can I try it on?” The words came out quickly, as if whatever part of me that was willing to do it was afraid the other part would slam on the brakes.

She looked at me in amazement but didn’t hesitate. “Of course!”

I could feel her beaming from behind the wooden screen as I took off my pyjamas. The dress was heavier than I expected, but given it was made by my grandmother out of natural fabrics and not a micro-fibre sewn by a sweatshop worker in China, that wasn’t altogether surprising.

“I need help with the zipper,” I said and stepped sheepishly out from behind the screen in the bright green dress.

Marjorie rushed to my side and zipped me as I held my hair up. She stood back.

“You need the right shoe,” she said, examining me like a prize calf that needed its hoofs polished. Then she was off into my grandmother’s boxes, which seemed less precious all of a sudden, and was at my side in a flash with a pair of black patent shoes with, thankfully, a thick heel that was only an inch and a half high. I slid them on. Remarkably, the three of us were all of a size, including shoes.

“Oh, Clara!” Marjorie clasped her hands together. “You look stunning.”

I walked towards the strategically placed three-way mirror. In the heels my hips swung more than I’d ever noticed. “It does look pretty good, doesn’t it?”

“You’d knock them dead in that dress if you wore it out,” she said confidently.

I contemplated this. I could think of at least one person I’d like to knock dead.

Still wearing the green dress, I felt hours pass as we sifted through the boxes. We didn’t talk much; it was mostly oohs and aahs from me and more Alicia Steele tidbits from my mother. Stories I’d heard before, some more riveting than others, yet, perhaps because I was so full of grief myself, I saw once more how bittersweet this was for Marjorie.

“You must have missed her a lot when you were little,” I said softly. Marjorie’s fingers tightened on a dusty rose blouse and for a moment I thought she might cry. But she didn’t. Her pain wasn’t new like mine.

“I missed her more when I got older. I mean, obviously I missed her when she died. Terribly so. But when I became old enough to comprehend what I’d lost, what might have been …” Her voice trailed off for a moment before she continued. “It wasn’t meant to be.”

I kept quiet as she continued to fuss about, unpacking and repacking our distaff family history, all the while wondering where the idea that wouldn’t leave me alone had come from. Yet it couldn’t be helped, so I said it, though it made no sense at the time.

“Would it be okay if I borrowed some of Alice’s clothes?”

Marjorie stopped her folding and stared down at the garment in her hand, another satin dress the colour of eggplant. I thought maybe I’d overstepped my bounds because her expression was so serious, the kind of look normally reserved for discussions about taxes.

“You can’t borrow them,” she said sternly. I looked down at my feet, feeling even more rejected. “Keep them. They were always meant to go to you.”

I looked up to see my mother beaming at me as though I’d just been born. And if I didn’t know better, I’d even say I beamed at her for an instant.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll be very careful not to spill anything on them. I can’t imagine I’ll wear them.” And I couldn’t, any more than I could fathom why I wanted them in the first place.

“I understand.” She smiled knowingly. “Perhaps you need them, like I once did.” Her mind drifted off somewhere, no doubt somewhere in the distant past. Then she was back with a wide smile again. “It’s time they left this closet and went out on the town for a bit.”

We spent some time selecting my favourites, and afterwards I had a new wardrobe of very old clothes. Talk about dressed up with no
place to go. The selection of pencil skirts, blouses, cocktail dresses, evening gowns, coats and day dresses weren’t me at all. Then again, I didn’t want to feel like Clara Bishop anymore. There was a tiny part of me that wondered what Dean would say. He always admired the vintage clothes my mother kept. One time when we were first married, Marjorie showed him many of the same outfits that I was going to take. I remembered he said that it took a certain kind of woman to pull off clothes like these. “Women like that don’t exist anymore,” he’d said, and at the time I agreed with him.

“Clara, I have just the thing you need to make your transformation complete,” Marjorie announced hopefully before disappearing into another room. I wasn’t so sure transformation was possible but I’d take my chances. I heard some more thumping and banging, as though she was retrieving something from deep inside a cave. She emerged carrying an enormous vintage suitcase. It was robin’s egg blue with a white polymer handle and white vinyl trim and absolutely pristine.

“It belonged to Alice too. It came with a matching train case but that got destroyed in the car accident,” she said sadly, remembering. Then perking up, she said, “It hasn’t been used since I went away after your father left. I can’t think of a better way for you to take the clothes home than in this.”

The suitcase was gorgeous, and I was touched that my mother trusted me with it. The suitcase was stuffed as well as you could stuff luggage that didn’t give at the seams. I practically had to sit on it to shut it and fought with the clasp until, at last, it clamped down. My mother had found the key, so I locked it up and shoved the key into my faithful knapsack. The morning had whittled by in a haze of chiffon and silk, and I’d managed to string together an hour or two without thinking about my empty apartment and emptier life.