by Bill Albert
“Yes, I know, dear. I know. You see, it was my dressing room.”
She patted him on the arm. Harold tensed, but held his ground. He didn’t want to offend his aunt. He had no place else to go.
“As soon as we can, we’ll get rid of the roses. OK? Not the kind of wallpaper a big boy wants in his room. I know that. It’s just everything has been rather sudden. You understand, don’t you, darling?”
He didn’t like it when she called him “a big boy.” It made him feel like a kid and he was almost fifteen and three-quarters.
Harold sat on the bed and stared at the walls. Roses. He really hated roses. And the room smelled of Aunt Enid. In the hall the air cooler gurgled and groaned. He looked through the window. Outside it was diamond bright and very hot. He sighed deeply and put his head in his hands. He had become an exile in the desert. An exile in a stinky prison cell swarming with man-eating roses.
Until he had to face living with his strange aunt in a strange town he didn’t realize how easy the expectations of his life in Los Angeles had been. Before the accident when he had thought about his life at all, it was to think how much better it would be if his parents were different, if school was different, if they had a nicer place to live instead of the cramped two-bedroom apartment on the wrong side of La Brea. But at least then he had had his own room without stupid roses, all his stuff, his friends, the record shops, the movie theaters. He missed all that. He even missed school, the neighborhood and his parents. They had always been there. He had assumed they always would be.
He looked around him. At the room, at the suitcases, at the boxes on the floor. He tried to imagine the shape of his new life. He couldn’t. There was nothing to construct it out of, nothing really to expect. Nothing that is, except Aunt Enid and he didn’t know what to expect from her. She seemed to spend most of her time either out with her friends or sitting by the pool half-naked. That didn’t connect with anything he knew about. Exactly how, exactly where, was he going to fit in?
Aunt Enid. How was he going to live with Aunt Enid? She was so damn attentive. He couldn’t make a move without her fussing over him, grabbing hold of parts of parts of his body and telling him everything would be alright. On balance he preferred his mother’s nagging. He had been able to ignore that more easily. He couldn’t even escape to the movies or with his friends as he had in LA. Venturing out the door into the summer desert was dangerous, and he was blocks from the center of town. To make matters worse, what he had seen of the center hadn’t been very promising. Most of the stores were closed and there seemed to be no people. A ghost town.
He took his shirts out of the suitcase. They had been ironed and neatly folded. A white label with his name in faded ink was on the inside of one collar.
Y camp. His mother had packed for him. She spent days sewing labels on everything—shirts, underwear, socks, one label on each sock. H. ABELSTEIN. They rubbed his skin raw. When he waved good-bye from the window of the bus, his mother yelled at him to be careful, to write every week. Then as the bus pulled away she began to weep. She trotted a few yards alongside the bus shouting his name and more instructions. He looked away, hoping the other boys would think she was someone else’s mother.
He hated Y camp. Too much hearty outdoors stuff and all that forced Christian good fellowship. There was no way out even for the Jewish kids. At Blue Lake Y Camp everyone was a Christian, every Kaplan and Klein, every Abelstein and Zuckerman. The cabins were too small and smelled of unwashed bodies and camp-food farts. The outside toilets were worse, just wooden huts built over big holes in the ground, steaming in the summer heat with the accumulated shit of innumerable campers. At least now he wouldn’t have to go back to Blue Lake Y Camp.
Good-bye, good-bye our beloved Blue Lake
All winter long our hearts will ache
Until again the pine trees call
We will miss you, one and all.
He sighed and took more clothes out of the suitcase.
Each summer his father had talked about taking him fishing.
“Sure Harry, I’ll get a couple of days off and we’ll take the party boat out from Malibu. Get up early, have breakfast on the road. Just the two of us. Wadda you say?”
Like most of his father’s plans, the fishing never happened. Something always came up to postpone the trip. But Harold hadn’t minded then. He was no sailor. Even rowing in MacArthur Park made him nauseous.
He finished putting his clothes away in the closet and the chest of drawers. Then he began to look over his most precious possession—his record collection. Four large cardboard boxes of 45s, carefully arranged in alphabetical order. He could remember every record down to the color of the label. It was his claim to fame at Fairfax High and had made him popular with, or at the least tolerated by, the few Negro guys at the school. It gave him a piece of territory and that was important, especially for a shambling, vulnerable-looking fat kid who didn’t run with any crowd. The hoods, the Brylcreemed, leather-jacketed hard cases, mostly left him alone.
“Hey, Red,” shouted Tyrone Price, “What you got for ‘Let the Good Times Roll’?”
A food fight was going on in one corner of the school yard. There was a rumble of shouting, kids running back and forth. A carton of milk arched high in the air and splattered against the wall near where Harold was standing. He moved to one side. Milk dribbled down the wall and onto the ground at his feet.
“Come on. Red! Come on, man, ‘Let the Good Times Roll’!”
It was an easy one for Harold. It was a brand new release.
“Shirley and Lee,” he said matter-of-factly. “Aladdin, 1956, maroon, flip side, ‘Do You Mean to Hurt Me?’”
None of this carefully accumulated knowledge would do him much good in Palm Springs. What would they know about real music in the sticks? He was going to have to start all over, finding new friends, marking out a new territory. He put on his favorite record of all time, lay down on the bed and closed his eyes.
‘Tutti Frutti,’ Little Richard, Specialty, 1955, yellow and white, flip side ‘I’m Just a Lonely Guy.’
Loud banging and screaming came from across the hall, muffled only slightly by the slurping grunt of the air cooler. Enid walked out of her bedroom and put her hand on the doorknob, but decided not to go in. After all, he had been through a lot in the last week or so. The hospital, then that awful funeral.
Only a few people had come to pay their last respects. A couple of neighbors, a colleague from the bank, and an old, senile rabbi who was persuaded to conduct the ceremony, although he didn’t know Sylvia or Norman. In fact, this was a minor problem, for the rabbi seemed to have only the faintest idea where he was or exactly what he was supposed to be doing.
“Abelstein!” Enid whispered harshly to him as he mumbled in Hebrew what she was sure simply had to be the bar mitzvah service, “not Abelman!”
The rabbi didn’t pay any attention. Maybe he couldn’t hear her over the traffic noise coming from the nearby Hollywood Freeway. Abelman, Abelstein, what does it matter, thought Enid. Rest in peace, Sylvia. Rest in peace, Norman. Rest in peace.
Not far from the small group of mourners, an old woman dressed in black, dragging a young boy by the hand, wandered among the rows of identical white tomb markers set like paving stones into the ground.
“Irving! Where are you, Irving? Where are you?” the woman wailed loudly.
Startled by the cry, the rabbi looked up. He stopped in the middle of a prayer. Thinking he had finished, he closed his prayer book, shook Harold’s hand and walked away. No one stopped him. There seemed little point.
Enid had driven Harold straight back to Palm Springs. He hardly said a word the entire trip. She figured he must still be in shock.
A Temporary Arrangement
Enid Cohen had been in Palm Springs for only a few days before she decided to change her name to Carlson. That was in 1949. Sh
e was 26. No one said anything to her, but the hotel, or Inn, as it was called, where she worked as a cocktail waitress, was restricted and she thought it would make life easier not to be too readily identified. She told herself that in any case she would have to change her name when she got married, so what difference did it really make if she did it before? Going from Cohen to Carlson was not much of a compromise, but it was important if she was to get ahead in Palm Springs. Enid wanted very much to get ahead.
Being a cocktail waitress had appealed to her. It was a step up from working at Lockheed assembling aircraft parts, which she had done for three years. Her friends said that all the movie people came to Palm Springs to relax. You could get closer to the right people there than in Los Angeles. Palm Springs was surely the place to be discovered. Discovered, like a gold mine—a Hollywood gold mine. She didn’t think much past being discovered. She was a very good-looking woman. All she needed was that one small break. The studio would do the rest. It said so in all the movie magazines. It had to be true.
It didn’t work out. The only movie people she ever met were a couple of bit part actors who hung out in the hotel bar telling each other drunken stories. Even they weren’t interested in Enid. She found out later that they were homosexuals. That didn’t make her feel any better about not being discovered.
Instead of being discovered, she was on her feet for hours, having to smile at the customers’ crude remarks, often made to her in front of their wives. Nights were spent fending off pawing hands and politely turning down not-so-politely whispered propositions.
“They’re down here to have a little harmless fun,” said the manager, solicitously. “Come on, sweetheart, it happens to all the girls. You shouldn’t get yourself so upset about it.”
It was more of an order than a bit of friendly advice. For weeks she cried herself to sleep. Then she met Archie.
She was with Charlene, the girl with whom she shared a dark, tiny room at the back of the hotel. It was their day off, and they had gone to the driving range on Highway 111.
“I don’t know shit from spit about golf,” said Charlene, picking a worn driver out of a barrel by the side of the wooden hut, “but I love to smack these here balls. You gotta picture in your mind them creeps, saying that shit at you behind their hands, grabbing at you. You know what I mean, honey. Right? You got that picture? Good. Well, now you take this club and you put this little ol’ white ball down on the ground here, and you think it right into their pants. See it laying up alongside their little ol’ shriveled-up peckers and then . . .”
WHACK! The ball sailed on a high straight arc and disappeared into the sand behind a bull’s-eye with 150 painted in the center.
Enid giggled. She had never had a golf club in her hand. She watched Charlene and tried to copy her. It was hopeless. At first she couldn’t hit the ball. When she finally did, it bounced off the tee and rolled ten feet across the sand.
It was Archie who came over and offered to give her some pointers. A week later she gave up her job at the hotel, said goodbye to Charlene and moved out.
Archie Blatt was in his early fifties. He was in the rag trade in St. Louis and had come to Palm Springs to escape the winter, his invalid wife and the consuming angst of his two young teenage daughters. When they were little their crying and whining had driven him crazy, now they filled the house with noisy friends and noisier music. When he complained about it they sulked. They clearly resented his being in his own house. He spent as much time as he could at work or at his club. In Palm Springs he found complete freedom. It was far from all those things which made him so unhappy, and he could be alone with Enid.
“I never really wanted any . . . you know, kids. ‘Who needs the bother at our age,’ I said to her. ‘We’ve been living all right, just you and me, for the last fifteen years. I don’t want to share you with anyone else. I don’t want to start with diapers and all that stuff at forty.’ But, Sarah, she was, well you know, she thought if she didn’t then she never would . . . and, anyway, so she had the twins. Thirteen years ago it was. It went wrong, you see, the birth. Complications. I don’t know what exactly. Had to have everything out, and then she got depressed and sick and well, so it went on. If only we’d . . .”
What had once been indifference changed into a fierce hatred of children. For Archie they were destroyers, invaders, another species. He thought when his daughters were grown up and out of his house, maybe then he would like them. But, he confessed to Enid, in his blacker moments he knew they would never grow up and never leave home.
Archie’s difficulty with children hadn’t bothered Enid. It had never been very important to their relationship. From the beginning she felt completely at ease with him. He was a short, round man with bandy legs. Enid was two inches taller. He was almost totally bald and had the hairiest body she had ever seen. Arms, chest, back, legs were all coated with a dense mat of curly black hair. She thought of him as a small cuddly gorilla. He was kind, paid attention to her, treated her like a lady, and most importantly for Enid, he made her laugh.
The ease and the laughter seemed to be important for Archie as well, almost more so than sex. He was obviously not a ladies’ man, which was one reason Enid liked him. When he had picked her up he stumbled self-consciously over his words. He had looked weak-kneed when he asked her to go for a drink and when she agreed to come his relief was audible.
They quickly came to an arrangement. He would rent a small house and send her a check every month. The only thing she had to do was be there when he came out from St. Louis, three, maybe four times a year. What she did the rest of the time, whom she saw, was up to her. Maybe Archie realized that he couldn’t hold her if he laid down too many conditions.
“You shouldn’t worry, doll,” he explained helpfully. “I’ll get the accountant to figure out some way to get you down as a tax write-off.”
Being a tax write-off didn’t make Enid feel any better about Archie’s offer. But, when she thought of the immediate alternatives—the hotel, the dingy room, the succession of men “down to have a little harmless fun,” she figured she didn’t have anything to lose. She would try it, strictly as a temporary deal, until something better came along.
Nothing better did come along, and more than seven years later she was still in his house, still dependent on the monthly checks from St. Louis. Now she had to figure some way to tell Archie about her nephew’s new living arrangements. She was beyond worried. If he hated his own kids, how was he going to react to Harold? Big, inarticulate, noisy Harold.
It was too late in life to go back to waitressing, although if that was really true, why were there so many middle-aged waitresses? Enid preferred not to think about too much about middle-aged waitresses.
The music from Harold’s room was now much softer.
Deep purple . . . sun . . . lingers . . .
She sat down on her bed, opened the drawer of her bedside table, reached in and took out a pack of Salems. Her record six non-smoking days had ended with the accident. A few more days, she thought, then I’ll try to stop again. She tapped out a cigarette and put it in her mouth. She picked up a book of matches from a white bowl full of matchbooks. Chi-Chi, The Doll House, Ruby’s Dunes, The Biltmore, and others—Palm Springs’ nightlife. She threw the matches and the unlit cigarette on the table, pulled her knees up and hugged them.
What was she going to do about Harold? Do with Harold? After the accident, when it dawned on her that she had inherited him, she dismissed her initial misgivings with the thought that it might actually be nice not to live alone. That thought didn’t last very long. As soon as he moved into her house the misgivings returned and when they did they were Haroldly substantial.
The music reminded her that he was there. He was going to be there now all the time, at least for another three years until he got out of high school and maybe after that, living with her, so obviously just across the hall from her bedr
oom. A stranger sharing her bathroom, invading her house, threatening to derail her life. She felt guilty about thinking of Harold that way, but couldn’t help herself. When she touched him, asked him how he was or whether he needed anything, the resentment of his being there threatened to collapse her concerned-aunt’s smile. She knew she should like Harold, even love him. These contradictory feelings made Enid feel bad about herself and she was not used to feeling bad about herself.
When he had come to visit with Sylvia and Norman, it had been easy for her. Then she had enjoyed the idea of having a nephew, someone calling her “Aunt Enid.” It was like being part of a family. But then they never stayed more than a few days. A permanent Harold was something else.
What the hell did you do with a fifteen-year-old? Enid had no experience with kids. There was school to worry about and clothes, regular meals, and a lot of other things she had never wanted to have to think about.
She got up from the bed and went out into the hall. The music was blasting out again. She imagined she could see the door to what until recently had been her dressing room vibrating.
Enid walked into the living room and opened the sliding glass door which led onto the patio. She went out and sat down in a canvas chair by the pool. It was about six o’clock and although the pool was in the shade it was still very hot. She pulled off her slacks and blouse, then after checking to make sure Harold was not around, she undid her bra, took off her panties and slipped naked into the cool water. Everything seemed easier when she was in the pool and could feel the water against her skin. She closed her eyes, floated on her back and thought about Archie.
She never really loved him in the way she had imagined love was going to be. There was no real romance. Although she enjoyed making love with Archie, she had never had a strong physical desire for him. Not in any way could he be considered a sexy man, but he was warm, generous, and amusing—a comfortable man. And, he loved Enid seemingly with unreserved devotion. Even after seven years he acted as if he was genuinely overwhelmed, grateful that such a woman should be his woman. Archie Blatt’s woman. She laughed when he called her that one night. Until then she had never thought of herself as “Archie Blatt’s woman.”