was so hot that Saturday that two men, perched on stools at the counter, were in undershirts. With pots of collards and potatoes simmering on the stove it was hotter inside than out.
Lil and I each got half of a bright, orange sweet potato smeared with butter and, as we nibbled timidly, afraid to look up, Louise passed me a slip of paper with joined-up writing scribbled on it and said, ‘I’ll be going back East at Christmas and my friend who came to class today said to give y’all’s mama this.’
I couldn’t yet read joined-up writing anyway, but Lil and I didn’t consider inspecting it until Miss Taylor had waved us goodbye. I feared it was about money, because money was always the worse thing that I could think of – owing it. Needing it. The word money seemed to be on grown-up lips all the time and it had a harrowing effect on me.
When I tried to goad my sister into reading the contents to me, she said, ‘This is Mother’s and you know it’s a sin to read her mail.’
I wonder what would have happened had I listened to her?
It’s possible that had we not known what those few words had said the course of our lives might have been different.
The sun was glorious that afternoon and we had a lot to be thankful for by all accounts. It was a Saturday. No school, a tap class, that warm feeling of tummies satisfied with a sugary sweet potato. And we’d just been sitting like grown-ups in Taylor’s Café and Grill. With our tap shoes under our arms, it should have been enough for us two to hold hands and dawdle to the room that was temporarily home.
But that note had tickled my curiosity.
‘If I could read joined-up writing, I’d read it to you. Suppose it’s about money?’
My sister put her tap shoes on the ground and opened the note reluctantly. It went against her nature to do anything sinful. We could have been in the middle of an orange grove and she wouldn’t have picked fruit off the ground even if we were starving.
Nonetheless, that afternoon she read that note from Bessie Lovell to our mother: ‘I give classes for a dime per session and can offer Irene a place.’
Refolding it along the creases, Lil said, ‘I’ll get in trouble for reading this, so we have to act surprised when Mother tells us what it says.’
Although I denied it until I had more than she did, I guess as kids I was as jealous of Lilian as she became of me. I’m ashamed to say it, but hair and skin colour mattered so much to me that I envied her braids being an inch longer than mine and her skin being a couple of shades fairer. It’s strange, because I was jealous and yet proud of her at the same time. She always seemed to get the best of everything, whether it was the socks handed down to us by Mrs Herzfeld or the compliments Mother received about us when we did our church recitals. But tap had been different.
Although Mother got the note, she just looked at it and tucked it in her bra with, ‘Y’all go out and play.’
Every day I waited for the glory of hearing that I had been singled out for tap lessons, but the glory never came, because Mother never mentioned it. After two more sessions with Miss Taylor, dancing was to end for me for a couple years.
Is it that Mother couldn’t afford the dime or decided that if both Lil and I couldn’t receive tap lessons from Bessie Lovell, neither of us would have them?
I wish I had the answer.
What I know is that I blamed Lil. First I shunned her and by the time I was ready to make up, she wouldn’t play with me. If we walked down the street together, I would lag behind so that I didn’t have to speak to her or vice versa. In time I couldn’t remember what our feud was about, but we were enemies.
Overnight, she stopped playing big sister, never taking my side when she normally would with Mother or other children in the street. A chasm grew between us which became too great to bridge.
She would mention Camden and I would tease her for it. I would talk about Miss Taylor, and Lil would laugh about Louise’s slightly bowed legs.
Tap dancing had started a family feud.
During the past two days, when I least expect it, faces that I hardly recognize float through my mind. A disturbing number have appeared. People who were of no consequence. Some I can’t identify. Yesterday, while I was having my lunch, for no reason I recalled the face of the Mexican kid who manned the cash register at the late-night drugstore on Hollywood Boulevard where I used to get my tranquillizers. That was thirty-odd years ago and he was irrelevant even back then, but his image came to me so sharply, I wonder if it means something.
Then last night, while I was trying to read my book, in comes the face of that old woman who used to clean the toilets at St Anthony’s. I don’t think I ever said two words to her when I was at school there, so why, nearly seventy years later, should her face come to me out of the blue? Crystal clear, it was.
I’ve heard that this sort of thing happens to people before they go.
Dammit, I hope I’m not dying.
Who’d look after the dog …
This morning, when I took her for her walk, I was watching her do her business and in came the face of that Japanese butler who gave Mother her first full-time job after we got to Los Angeles. I couldn’t decide whether I was glad to be reminded of him or not, because there were times, back before the war, when I used to wonder if, in the short time she’d known him, he hadn’t had a worse affect on Mother than Mamie.
Having met him only once when I was eight, it’s eerie that I could envision him so precisely. I actually saw the fine black hairs which he had missed shaving on his Adam’s apple. Had they been there when I’d met him in 1931?
He appeared in my mind as a complete figure, not just a face. Bowing from the waist he was and smiling, without showing his teeth. His white jacket had a high collar and looked very stiff, somehow formal, although the cut was sort of sporty. He could have been a waiter in a Chinese restaurant …
I think his full name was Ben Toguri but Toguri was all Mother called him. His boss was a German architect Dieter Meyerdorf, who was renting that house east of Hollywood for a year. It was beyond Griffith Park which was still a wilderness back then though a stone’s throw from down town. The district that became Los Feliz, where people built big fancy houses with acres of land around them.
Mother had landed that job on the rebound, because arriving without a uniform to help serve at Meyerdorf’s New Year’s Eve party, the catering boss relegated her to dishwashing. She said even in the kitchen she looked out of place in her brown chemise, so it was her miracle that she was singled out for a full time job.
What really happened is that the other catering staff, refined in their fancy black uniforms, snubbed her. She got on with her work and Toguri noticed her because of it.
The guests at that party left after dawn and Mother stayed on her feet until noon, mopping up booze and scraping off food which had been mashed into the carpets. Having never seen caviar or profiteroles, lobster or mango, she couldn’t
