Monty’s daughter Helene, who was spending a year as writer-in-residence at the Iowa Writers’ Program, was to visit from Iowa City, where she was living for the year with her boyfriend Clark, whom she had met when he was the chauffeur for Geraldine’s bachelorette party in Las Vegas.
Also at the festivities would be Lala’s best friend from high school, Brenda, and Brenda’s husband Frank, who would be visiting from New York City. Brenda, having been like family to Lala and her late parents, and subsequently to Geraldine and her late husband, and then to Monty and Helene and David, was always included in every celebration, and of course that feeling of family extended to Frank as well.
Helene and Clark were staying in Geraldine and Monty’s second bedroom. Brenda and Frank would be staying with Lala and David. The festivities were going to begin on Friday evening, with an outdoor movie screening at Will Rogers State Historic Park in the Pacific Palisades. It’s A Wonderful Life was showing.
“It’s A Wonderful Life?” Lala said.
“I know it’s not even close to Christmas, but I love that movie,” Monty said, and everyone agreed that the seasonal imbalance was irrelevant if the birthday boy was happy.
Food trucks of every variety would be at the screening in abundance. They all got there early to scope out a great location with a clear view of the screen, and to spread out their cushiony blankets and low-slung beach chairs. Chuck and Stephanie came and brought Trixie, who slept like a little angel in her papoose throughout the entire show. Because it was outdoors, dogs were allowed, and Lala brought all four of hers. Yootza insisted on staying in his papoose, and Chuck offered to keep the little dachshund slung to his chest while Trixie slept on her mom’s, so that the two best buddies could be next to each other. Thomas, a.k.a. Salman Rushdie, brought his new girlfriend, Marina, who was warm and gracious, and everyone instantly loved her. As soon as Thomas and Marina left the group to wander over to the bathrooms, Lala and Brenda and Helene got into a furtive huddle.
“Okay, is it just me?” Lala asked.
“Are we thinking the same thing?” Brenda wondered.
“I’m not going crazy, am I?” Helene demanded.
“I know Thomas isn’t really Salman Rushdie,” Brenda said. “No matter what Geraldine says.”
“Right,” Helene agreed.
“But,” Lala said, “is it just me, or does Marina look exactly like someone put a curly blonde wig on Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who was kept under house arrest for years by the military junta in Burma, now Myanmar?”
“I was thinking exactly the same thing!” Brenda said.
“Thank god I’m not going crazy,” Helene said.
“What are you three whispering about?” Geraldine yelled over from the far side of several blankets, where she and Monty were stretched out and had been mashing on each other since they all got there.
“NOTHING!” Lala and Brenda and Helene yelled back.
The next afternoon included bowling, one of Monty’s favorite leisure activities, after brunch at Monty’s favorite restaurant in Pasadena, one that of course served bottomless mimosas, which Lala deemed a necessary part of any celebration in a civilized and forgiving world.
Lala was not a good bowler even when sober.
“Honey,” David said, watching Lala’s intense concentration as she stood at the head of the lane clutching the bowling ball to her chin and shifting from the toes to the heels of her feet and back again in an offbeat rhythm, “are you—”
“Not now, David,” Lala hissed. “I’m bowling.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie, I don’t think I can manage to get the sarcasm out of my voice, but I really am genuinely curious. Are you trying to pitch them all in the gutter?
The plans for Saturday night were for everyone to relax at Geraldine and Monty’s place with Chinese food, champagne, and charades.
Lala was not good at charades even when sober.
“Cheek? Gouge? Cheek Gouge? Gouge Cheek?” Lala guessed.
“Scarface,” Frank sighed. “It’s the movie Scarface, Lala. If Cheek Gouge is in fact a movie, it’s not one I’ve seen.”
On Sunday, the actual day of Monty’s birth, Geraldine and Monty spent a long afternoon being pampered at a spa, the gift that Lala and David had gotten L’anniversaire Garçon, as Lala insisted on calling him. They got home, their muscles kneaded and their fingers pruney from spending so many hours soaking in the spa’s hot tub, just in time to change into elegant eveningwear for a visit to the Magic Castle in Hollywood, as guests of one of Helene’s friends who was a member there.
The last time Lala had been to the Magic Castle was when she and Brenda were in high school in Santa Monica and they went there with their then-boyfriends because Brenda’s boyfriend’s stepfather was a character actor who also did magic as a hobby. Lala eschewed all the shows and the rest of the delights of the place to spend the entire evening making out with Patrick Eliasoph, the star of the theatre department at Santa Monica High who had played Stanley to her, as Lala freely and cheerfully admitted in hindsight and after switching her career ambitions from acting to writing, unbelievably awful rendition of Blanche DuBois.
Though Patrick was, as Lala boasted at the time, “a superb kisser, world class, really, in my admittedly limited experience, and I’ll get back to you if my assessment changes with a widening of my reference pool,” Lala regretted missing seeing the much-heralded mysteries of the Magic Castle, and she was thrilled that she would be partaking that night.
Because they had all known that Monty’s special birthday weekend would include a visit to the Magic Castle, and because the dress code at the Magic Castle required elegant attire, and because Lala really, really, really, really hated shopping and really, really, really, really wasn’t especially good at picking out clothes, she fretted about what to wear. Lala didn’t share her concerns with Geraldine, because she didn’t want to drag her beloved aunt into “my ceaseless mishegoss,” despite the fact that Geraldine had always cheerfully offered to go shopping with Lala and had always been an excellent source of advice on what to try on.
“I can’t bring myself to take advantage of her kindness yet again,” Lala confessed to her dogs as they were all spread out on the couch while Lala worked on her laptop. “At some point, I am going to have to stand on my own two, boringly-clad in uninspired footwear, feet in terms of getting myself dressed like a big girl.”
So Lala snuck off to every department store and every chain clothing store at the classic American mall that is the Beverly Center in Los Angeles. She scoured the racks of fancy dresses at Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s and Banana Republic and Anthropologie, and when all the warm and helpful salespeople asked her if they could help her with anything, Lala answered as though she were channeling Eeyore.
“I’m okayyyyy. Thanks.”
If there was one constant in all this grief, Lala noted in each and every store, it was the cruel and mocking lighting in the dressing rooms.
Nothing worked. Absolutely nothing. Sheaths, off-the-shoulder, patterned, tea-length, a slew of little black dresses . . . Lala stood staring at herself in the legion of three-way mirrors and felt that she would have to pretend to have caught a sudden stomach virus on the day of the Magic Castle excursion. She came home from an entire day spent at the mall exhausted and devoid of any shred of hope.
David opened the door when he heard Lala’s key turning in the lock and grabbed her for a big hug. When he let go, he saw her face more clearly in the light of the entranceway.
“Are you . . . Is something . . . You look . . . What happen—”
“I’m okayyyyy. Thanks,” Lala sighed miserably. “I think I’ll take a bath. Do we have any vodka in the freezer? I mean, the good stuff, not one of those freakishly-large bottles from Trader Joe’s. Though I’ll certainly drink that if that’s all we’ve got.”
Lala knew
several people at her gym to smile at whenever they saw each other and to chat pleasantly with about whatever struck their fancies on any given workout day. It was to one of these people, a retired high school English teacher named Clarissa, that Lala blurted her dilemma when Clarissa came over to say hello while Lala was on the stair climber.
“Clarissa, apropos of nothing at all germane to us happily bumping into each other today, I need a fancy dress and can’t find anything, and so I’m working out my wardrobe angst by upping my climbing speed to a nine setting from my usual five. God, am I schvitzing.”
“Pin Up Girl,” Clarissa said. “It’s in the Valley, on Magnolia. Just go there. Trust me.”
The next day Lala, after having checked the store’s website and having been surprised to find herself feeling an odd and unfamiliar sense of optimism when she saw the pages and pages of vintage-inspired dresses and tops and skirts and pants that would have fit in perfectly on any sitcom of the 1950s and that—if the way they looked on the models in the photographs was any approximation of reality—were shockingly flattering, drove to Burbank. This would have been a long trip even on Southern California’s web of freeways, but Lala never drove on those freeways, and always and only took surface streets to get wherever she was going.
“Have you seen how people drive on the freeways here?” Lala would ask with incredulity whenever anyone stared at her with incredulity when they found out that she never drove on freeways. “They tailgate on the freakin’ freeways! They’re constantly an inch away from your butt going eighty miles an hour, and I need stress like that in my life?”
Lala found a parking spot very close to the store, right outside the legendary and insanely popular bakery Porto’s, where she went in to stand on line for almost half an hour to buy a large iced tea and a muffin that must have had a stick of butter all to itself baked in to fortify her for the merchandising task that was looming large.
Lala squeezed herself into a little corner table and sipped and ate while she read the unabridged, 1,500-page version of The Count of Monte Cristo for the “umpteenth time,” a designation which Lala often employed and which she maintained did in fact reflect an actual number, “and the fact that I don’t actually know exactly what that actual number is doesn’t make it any less valid as a description of quantity.”
“Well, Edmond Dantès,” Lala sighed when the muffin was consumed and the refill of iced tea had been savored, “you may have it rough as a prisoner in the Chateau D’If, but at least you don’t have to worry about what you’ll be wearing.”
The first thing Lala saw when she got to the store was a large sales rack filled with a rainbow of colors and styles in the center of the small courtyard entrance.
Lala studied dresses with patterns, dresses with sleeves, sleeveless dresses, short dresses and longer dresses, eschewing skirts and tops and pants because she wanted to wear a dress. She figured it would just be easier, because it was one thing rather than two and that had to be twice as uncomplicated. And just as Lala’s eye rested on something in a gorgeous shade of green and she picked a dress out of the rack, the door to the store opened and a tall, pretty young lady wearing a superb Pin Up Girl outfit consisting of red capri pants and a cropped white top, along with black pumps that looked to Lala like a modified version of stilts, exited.
Would you look at how fabulous she looks, and can you even imagine how awful that fabulous outfit would look on me with my short waist and my gnome-like stature? Lala silently asked herself, smiling at the young lady with genuine admiration. Plus, I would fall and break my ankle on those shoes in a New York Minute.
“You’ve got the Erin!” the young lady said.
“The clothes have names?” Lala said.
“I know, that’s fun, isn’t it? They all have names!”
“Wow,” Lala said. “That is fun! There wouldn’t be a dress named Lala, would there?”
“Hmm,” the young lady said. “I don’t think we have a Lala.”
“Okay. No problem.”
“But the Erin, that is going to look absolutely amazing on you!”
The young lady, who introduced herself as Kelly, took the dress from Lala and held the door to the store open for her.
“Come on, let’s go see.”
The lighting in the Pin Up Girl boutique, Lala was grateful to see, was calm and cozy. The other salespeople were also wearing the store’s styles, and they all looked sexy and beautiful.
The bar here, Lala thought, is set very high.
Kelly escorted Lala to one of the dressing rooms. Lala pulled the curtain shut and got herself out of her clothes and into the dress. She looked at herself in the mirror before she emerged. The green dress fell just below her knees. The skirt was full and had pockets. The top was tight, and the belt cinched her waist. Her cleavage was showing, and it was looking very sexy.
Wow, Lala thought.
Lala smiled and reflected that the last time she felt this good in a dress, other than in her wedding dress when she married Terrence, was probably back at Wesleyan when she played the sassy friend of the ingénue in She Stoops to Conquer.
“A role,” Lala whispered to herself in the dressing room, “that was mercifully simple and straightforward, with some darn funny lines, so my subpar acting abilities couldn’t make me screw it up too badly.”
The costume department had created an opulent Eighteenth-Century aristocrat’s dress in deep rust and yellow—two colors that Lala would have thought would look awful on her and ended up looking wonderful.
Lala dated the senior who was playing her love interest in the play throughout the production.
“Let’s be frank,” Lala whispered, tightening the belt on her Erin dress one notch, “plays are wonderful literature. Theatre is an art for the ages. And a lot of us majored in drama because it’s a great way to steep yourself in make-out sessions under the guise of rehearsing.”
“Wow!” Kelly said when Lala exited the dressing room. “You look even more amazing than I thought you would!”
Gosh, Lala thought. I guess I really do look good.
And then she very suddenly thought about how much Terrence would have loved to see her in this great dress. She didn’t know Terrence in college, so he didn’t see her in her She Stoops to Conquer costume. Other than her wonderful, simple wedding dress, Terrence hadn’t really seen her in another exceptional outfit. Shopping and clothes were never her thing. Terrence had loved her in jeans and tee shirts, most of them emblazoned with aggressively liberal political messages or quotations that paid homage to centuries of writers. He didn’t need much more than that to think she looked gorgeous. But he really would have loved this dress.
“Sorry,” Lala said. “I guess finding the perfect dress makes me all verklempt.”
“Happy tears, right?” Kelly said, handing her a tissue.
“Yup,” Lala said.
And also really, really, really sad ones, she thought.
“Wow,” David said. “You look absolutely amazing!”
Lala had gotten dressed in her new Erin while David, already looking quite handsome in his Hugo Boss suit, sat in the living room with the dogs and worked on an article on feral cat colonies for the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association.
David stood and swept Lala into a twirl that ended in a bent backward kiss. When they stood and Lala looked at him and started laughing, he looked down at himself and started laughing because his black suit was covered with dog hair. They rushed to find the masking tape roller that so miraculously removed all manner of stuff from clothes. Lala ran it over him again and again like she was a member of the TSA at airport security, until David was gleaming like hairless new.
When they left the apartment, everyone else was already downstairs in the courtyard having a cocktail before the car service van would come to pick them up. They all heard the door to Lala and David’
s apartment close, and they looked up toward the stairs as Lala and David were descending from the second floor.
“Wow! Lala! You look absolutely wonderful!” Geraldine said. “When did you buy that exquisite dress? And where? And without me? I am very impressed! Come, darlings, I’ve made a signature cocktail in honor of my beloved, and it’s got tequila and ginger and cayenne pepper, and I’m calling it The Full Monty, and we have to finish both pitchers before the car gets here!”
Geraldine handed each of them a large goblet filled to the top. Lala and David raised their glasses and blew a kiss to Monty. Lala took a big sip.
“Wow!” she said, gasping for air. “That is wicked, Auntie Geraldine! So tasty! And I think my sinuses just cleared up.”
There was a festive limousine ride over to the Magic Castle, and Helene’s friend Kirwan met them at the entrance wearing a tuxedo and a sweeping black cape. Kirwan had the debonair air of the Clark Gable era of Hollywood, complete with a pencil-thin black moustache.
“Welcome to the World’s Finest Emporium of Prestidigitation!” he said. He made a low bow, and then he hugged Helene, kissed the other women’s hands, and shook the hands of all the men. “First to the library, my dear guests, then to the bar!”
The happy party and their gracious host entered the richly-paneled lobby of the Castle. After driver’s licenses were shown at the front desk, they made their way through the door that blended within a wall of books to the large area that was surrounded by staircases leading up and down to the many fascinating levels of the building. The place was packed with people in elegant eveningwear and the atmosphere was thrilling.
Kirwan lead them through a lounge to the Castle library. A gorgeous Tiffany window was the first thing that they all saw. The next charming sight was a huge jug of treats on the main table.
A stately woman, whom Lala suspected might have been a descendant of exiled European royalty, approached the door to the library, essentially blocking the group from entering.
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