Now I had to shed Irene too. I was supposed to take a singing lesson with her the next day. “I have to talk to you about an important matter,” I’d say, looking straight at her. “There’s something very important … extremely important … I need to say to you.” I rehearsed the lines out loud, pacing in the dining room between my unmade army cot and the lopsided lion’s claw table. But I couldn’t think of what I’d say next because the recollection of her statuesque form emptied my head.
I got there thirty-five minutes early, just to sit alone in the cool office for a while and listen through the partition to the lesson she was giving and think about how I used to pet her Orlon sweater. I stared at the old print of the tutued ballerinas that had been part of the furniture of my life for more than three years. “Every time we say good-bye, I die a little.” It was Jamie, one of her voice students, singing in a jazzy, syncopated rhythm as Irene pounded the piano. I’d come to say good-bye. It smote me like a cudgel on the heart.
“Okay, that’s it,” Irene announced, and they were coming out. I’d forgotten that Jamie had only half-hour lessons. I heard Irene’s high heels click against the wooden floor of the big room, then Jamie’s tapped heels and toes behind her, and I wanted to scurry under my chair like the scared mouse that I was.
“Hi!” Jamie waved at me and left.
“Your lesson’s not until four. What’s up?” Irene asked.
I didn’t answer because my tongue had stopped working again. I managed a deep breath.
“Don’t tell me it’s still that man? I thought it was over.”
Chuck, she meant. That seemed like a century ago. I shook my head.
She sat down behind her desk on our gray metal chair. “So what is it?” She’d sounded impatient about Chuck, but I must have looked tragic, because now she regarded me with softened eyes.
I couldn’t face those eyes. I studied my balled fists. When I looked up—after an eternity—her hand was extended across the desk, palm up. I dared, I grasped. At last, her silk skin, her warm clasp, I was touching Irene Sandman! I would never let go.
“You can tell me,” she said softly.
“I have a terrible crush on you” tumbled out of my mouth when I opened it—the ventriloquist’s dummy again—and I couldn’t stop: “I’m afraid this is how homosexuals begin.” I felt her fingers twitch in surprise but I held firm, a drowning clutch. “I think I’d better leave” bubbled out now (where had that come from?) “because I don’t want to be one of them.” I hadn’t rehearsed any of those lines that escaped from me. “And I know that’s what will happen if I stay here because I can’t help myself.” No, why was I saying that? There was Carlos. If he’d been different Id still be his girlfriend. I forced up the memory of his lips on my neck; then I inhaled her perfume and the scent filled my brain and washed everything else out. I just looked down at our clasped hands, my dark olive fingers against her pink-white palm, the miracle of it, and I clutched harder. I could hear the clock tick-ticking on the wall, right above my head. Tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick.
When I finally looked up, I saw tears in her beautiful eyes. I hadn’t seen anything like that since she’d said “wow” the first time she saw me do Rachel Hoffman. She sniffed. Or did she have a cold? No—the wonder of it—I’d moved her once again! It didn’t matter about being an actress anymore. There were tears in her eyes for me! I would stay, just to be near her.
“I know this is hard for you,” she murmured, and her fingers moved under my grip. “These things can be terrible. Sid and I had a good friend in the theater in Chicago who…” I fixed on her violet eyes, afraid of what she would tell me yet needing to hear. But she stopped.
“Who what?”
“You’re so young, Lillian,” she sighed. She’d changed her mind about telling me, I could see; she was retracting the tantalizing, scary tidbit. Now she wriggled her hand free of mine and dabbed at her nose with a Kleenex. “You’re probably right,” she said. “It would be better for you to go.”
What was she talking about? No, it’s a mistake, I wanted to cry out. I would fall to my knees and kiss the hem of her dress! I would grab her hand back. I would be her little dog! Please let me stay, I would beg.
But I couldn’t stay. I needed to become somebody else. And maybe it was true—that what I’d felt for her was the way homosexuals begin, and I didn’t want to be one.
I didn’t know what was true anymore.
She rose and extended her hand again, only for a handshake this time.
I rose too, weak with confusion. “Thanks for everything,” I said, struggling for the well-modulated tones I’d learned from her, and I touched her hand for the last time.
“Sid and I will miss you,” she answered. Then, head bowed, I limped out the door on rubber legs.
“I’ve lost the love of my life,” the mask of tragedy inside me bleated.
“Free, free,” the mask of comedy exulted.
“So you won’t have to take all those buses,” my mother said. We were moving to the Westside, where the famous corner of Hollywood and Vine was, where the movie studios were.
“So you can go to the high school with Yiddisheh kinder again,” Rae said. She and Mr. Bergman were moving to the Westside too.
For the first time in her life, my mother bought furniture. And now she and I and Albert would live in an apartment of our own, without a Missus. We were leaving Dundas Street!
I walked around Fanny’s house as in a spell. Would I really be free of this place? Good-bye to the floating eyeballs! Good-bye to the dusty yellowed bedsheets that covered the broken living room furniture! Good-bye to the room where I grew up, the beds in which I’d slept and dreamed before they became Albert’s beds! One last peek in the mottled mirror that had seen me as Betty Grable and Eddie Cantor and Mary Marvel. That mirror had also witnessed my mother’s flailing and screaming for her dead brother, and me, running behind her, year after year, two decapitated chickens. I’d been miserable in that room, yet it had been home to me and I’d been happy too. But all that was the past. Who would I be next year at this time, looking into a mirror somewhere else?
“Watch yourself with that crazy bastard,” Fanny told my mother when we stood together in the ugly living room for the last time. Albert paced the strip of sidewalk in front of the house, his hat pulled over his ears.
“I’ll miss you,” I said to Fanny. It was true. She’d been one of the few adults in my daily life. She’d lavished her granddaughters’ dresses on me as well as, for better or worse, her opinions and advice. I wanted to hug her now, but I was shy, despite our years together.
“No, you won’t miss me.” Fanny tossed her hand dismissively. She was dressed in her dead husband’s shoes and coat, ready to water the green patch of front lawn as soon as we left. “You’ll forget all about me and Boyle Heights in a week. That’s the way life is, little momzer. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’ll never forget Dundas Street,” I swore. “I grew up here. It formed me.”
“Formed, shmormed,” Fanny mocked. But then we did hug each other, for the first time in all those years.
I never saw her again. I left all of East L.A. behind me for a very long time.
LIL
6. HOLLYWOOD
PARAMOUNT STUDIO, RKO, the corner of Hollywood and Vine, all are only a few miles away from Geller Theatre and School of Dramatic Arts. You could almost reach out and touch those shimmery shrines.
“Someone has to make it,” Simone says logically. “They need talent, and we’ve got it.”
“Right,” we chorus. “Why shouldn’t it be us?” After class we crowd the booths at Tiny Naylor’s and talk Hollywood talk until 2 A.M. This is “the gang,” as Simone calls us, the dearest comradeship I’ve ever had (though my harrowing fear is that they’ll find out I’m only fifteen years old and think I’m a baby).
“John Wayne in a romantic comedy! For crying out loud, his agent is nuts if he lets him take that picture,” one of us says. The mo
vie stars are our glittering second cousins. We’re so close—by profession, by geography. Of course we worry about them, though they don’t yet recognize us as family. We keep up with their doings through the Hollywood Reporter or Variety—the family chronicles we read religiously.
“You guys,” Nick announces, still stunned by his luck, “my cousin’s agent just promised to get me on as an extra for The Ten Commandments. Twenty-five smackers a day for at least two weeks. Thirty-five if you get to say something or grunt.”
“Terrific!” Simone cries, patting him on the back, and we all cheer.
I don’t have a lot to add yet, but I’m new to the game. Most of them have been in Hollywood for years.
“Can I give you a lift home?” Simone asked the first time we all went to Tiny Naylor’s. She drove a new pink convertible with a white top. But what if she saw my mother? “This girl comes from a family of slobs,” she might tell them at Geller’s. Or Albert? “From a family of crazies,” she might say. She wouldn’t even be able to understand their Yiddish accents.
“You can just drop me off here,” I said at Stanley and Oakwood, my hand poised to open the car door the second she stopped, and I’d flee, like Cinderella at the ball, so she wouldn’t see which building I went into.
“Sweetie, I gotta tell you somethin’, for your own good,” Simone began as she stopped the car at the corner. What did she know about me? My age! I’d been so careful—how could she know? “That striped blouse with that tweed skirt have gotta go,” she said, her Betty Boop eyes fluttering sympathetically. “You got talent, but you don’t know how to dress.”
Their house was a white-pillared mansion, with an upstairs and a downstairs and real oil paintings on the walls—sunsets and oceans and puppies, in big gilt frames. I followed Simone across the white brocaded carpet, fearful that my shoes might leave a smudge. “This is the greatest actress in the school,” she gushed to her elegantly coiffed mother.
“Well, isn’t that nice.” Her mother stretched tight lips over perfect teeth while she surveyed me, head to foot.
Her father, who wore a gray suit and steely businessman spectacles, came home later. Through the picture window in the living room, I could see the shiny, big car he parked in the driveway. “I’ll be upstairs till dinner,” he told his wife, sifting through his mail without looking up. He threw a “g’day” toward me when Simone told him who I was.
Simone’s room had a pink satin canopy bed; a thousand dolls left over from childhood were ranged against the wall on built-in shelves. Her walk-in closet, bigger than my whole bedroom in the new apartment, was stuffed with movie-star clothes. “These don’t fit me anymore. You try them on.” Simone pulled out one glamorous piece after another, tossing them munificently onto her bed. Form-hugging ankle-length capri pants; a red dress (“marvelous décolletage,” Simone said) made of soft, cloudlike material; a glittery black blouse, scooped low at the bosom, pinched tight with elastic at the waist. “I’m through with these, too. Betcha they’ll fit,” she said, her cheeks flush now with Pygmalion’s pleasure as she reached into a tower of shoes and fetched toeless three-inch heels, backless four-inch heels, clear plastic platform sandals that were almost invisible on the foot.
“Now you don’t look tacky at all,” she said, gratified by her efforts as I modeled the red dress and the four-inchers for her.
“So now we do somethin’ about that hair,” she told me when I next showed up at her house, wearing her purple capris and the toeless three-inchers. She wanted me platinum, like herself, but we compromised on raven’s wing black with a thin swath of copper running through the left side. She sat me on the pink padded stool in her marble bathroom and expertly draped my shoulders with a plastic sheet, then painted my head with the smelly black dye, dipping her brush into the bottle with the flourish of an artist dipping from a palette. She stepped back to examine her handiwork and noticed she’d accidentally gotten a splash of dye on the tip of my nose. She rubbed at it with a washcloth, her face straining in worry, but it remained. “What should we do?” she cried.
I examined the black splash in the mirror. It was the size of a dime and made my nose look fat. Now I rubbed until the skin all around it colored like a rose, but the spot got no dimmer. “That’s okay.” I shrugged to hide how upset I really was. “Walt Disney will hire me to do Minnie Mouse.”
Simone looked ready to cry, but the sob that escaped from her sounded like a laugh. That was all I needed. A guffaw broke through my lips, and then we chortled and snorted together until we hiccuped, and still we couldn’t stop. “Let’s try cold cream,” Simone sputtered through her hysteria. She ran to bring it from her medicine cabinet. Biting her lip in concentration, she smeared it hard on my poor bespattered and berubbed nose. It did the trick. But for the rest of the afternoon we laughed like two schoolchildren over nothing, for the sheer fun of laughing. She was the girlfriend I’d never had as a kid.
“You look just like Elizabeth Taylor,” generous Simone said as I was leaving.
I couldn’t believe my good fortune. It was she who usually organized our treks to Tiny Naylor’s, and now I sat next to her in the pink convertible, with the rest of the gang crowded into the back seat, as we sped down Wilshire Boulevard after classes or rehearsals. Almost everyone liked Simone, and she’d found something in me to like. Oh, don’t let anything ruin it.
“Simone has the emotional depth of a post when she tries to act,” catty Babette whispered to me on a break when Jesse, the James Dean look-alike, held Simone’s eyes with his as he lit her cigarette. “She’s just here to find a great-looking guy, don’t you think?”
“Simone’s wonderful,” I answered, defending my friend.
“Well, she still can’t act her way out of a paper bag,” Babette said with a smirk.
Simone swiped at Jesse’s face, a playful slap.
I had secrets I had to keep, even from Simone, but she also had secrets she kept from me. For a while after the slap, she went around with a faint smile on her lips and a distant look in her eyes. It was about Jesse, I was sure, though she never mentioned him. Then the smile faded, the look became dark, and for the first time since I’d met her she wasn’t chatty. I found out why, standing outside what I’d thought was an empty classroom, waiting for seven o’clock. Gloria, the older woman who called everybody “dahling,” was already inside. “I’ve never seen Nick so pissed,” I heard her say. “Jesse asked to borrow his apartment when Nick went to Vegas, and then, dahling, Nick came back to find bloody sheets. Blood all over his bed! Can you believe that Jesse? He didn’t even bother to clean it up.”
“Yuk! Well, she got more than she can handle, the silly bitch.” It was Babette’s voice. “He’ll drop her now, ‘cause all he wants is cherry.”
It had to be Simone they were talking about. Poor Simone. How awful that Nick talked, and now Babette and Gloria were talking, and pretty soon everyone would know. This wasn’t the first time I understood that girls can’t get away with very much.
My mother cried a lot about me in those days. “What do you mean, you’re not going any more to school? You used to be so good in school. Albert, hear what she wants to do!”
I’d had a summer of acting classes and performances and late nights at Tiny Naylor’s and weekends at the beach with the gang. Albert and I had already had tiffs because I came home in the early morning hours, and my mother wouldn’t let him sleep until she heard my key in the door. “Every night I have to hear it. ‘Something terrible happened to her!’ ‘She got killed by a car!’ ‘She got kidnapped!’” He mimicked my mother’s frenzied pitch. “Enough already!”
“Well, she’s stupid to worry,” I tossed off. I knew how to live my life better than she did. In the beginning, I’d tried to reassure her. “We rehearse late, and then Simone always drives me home. I’m just learning to be an actress,” I’d told her reasonably. “What are you worried about?” But I gave up.
“She says she’s quitting school,” my mother cried to Alb
ert again.
“She can say all she wants, but she gotta go till sixteen. They throw you in jail if you don’t go.”
“I just got a job—I’m a receptionist—for this lawyer—downtown—a criminal lawyer,” I embellished when Simone invited me to go window-shopping. I’d already spent four furtive days in the tenth grade, and I hated it. I’d heard that the prissy Lane’s dresses the girls wore cost forty-five dollars apiece, and their fathers were dentists or CPAs or owned shops like the ones in which my mother used to work. They cracked their gum on their back teeth and had cowlike expressions on their faces, and all day long they brushed and primped at their beauty-par-lored hair as though it were their life’s work. Jewish-American princesses. They never even saw me, but it didn’t matter because I had my own gang.
I had to become a double agent. Actually, when I wasn’t scared that I’d be found out, it was almost fun. To Fairfax High School I wore dirty brown and white oxfords, with gray-white socks that bunched around my ankles, refusing to stay up on my calves. I camouflaged my body in long, drab skirts and wrinkled blouses that wouldn’t remain tucked in at the waist. This was my costume, my disguise. In anticipation of my wonderful evenings, I set my hair in bobby pins and wore an old-lady babushka over my head.
“Ooh, where you going tonight?” a nosy girl might ask from a neighboring desk, surprised at my hairpinned head—as if such a sloppy creature could have anywhere to go.
“No place,” I’d answer, barely lifting my eyes from my book of plays. Let them stew.
Each afternoon I went home from school and donned the other costume. This took a couple of hours: Max Factor base—dusky and mysterious; eye shadow and lipstick and rouge, the way Simone had taught me to apply them. I brushed the pincurls out into a sophisticated do, back behind my ear on one side, falling exottically over a mascaraed eye on the other—a raven-haired Veronica Lake, I hoped. “Diamond Lil,” Simone had called me when I tried on the last pair of capris she gave me, stretch material in a harlequin effect, one leg all black, the other all white.
Naked in the Promised Land Page 12