I said, “I was worse than an animal.”
“I beg your pardon?” she asked, the summer I was seventeen.
“Well, remember that dog Tango we used to have when I was ten or eleven?” I asked. She nodded her head. “Well, Tango and I began having an affair on the bathroom floor, sort of – not that he deflowered me or anything, I mean I did have some sense of the fitness of things, but you know I did let that Tango lick me every time I could lock us in the bathroom and lie down. The tiles were so mint green, Mother had just had it done. Anyway, I had to give him away.”
“Don’t tell me your poor mother found out?” Lola cried.
“No, it was worse,” I said, “it was worse. You see, he began waiting for me to come home from school or the beach – he’d wait there by the window day and night. I was afraid they’d get suspicious. The poor thing was obviously in love with me. And I could see that – well, I had to give him away. That summer we were up in Lake Arrowhead I did it because we were far away.”
“The poor thing,” Lola sighed, “he loved you.”
“See,” I said, “so I was worse than an animal.”
Lola looked at me for a moment and turned away.
“You’re sure you aren’t just trying to be polite?”
“Me?” I cried.
“That little dog with one blue eye and one brown eye?” she asked. “Why, your poor mother!”
“So what else did you do?” I asked, expectantly, longing for anything else she could tell me about being an animal.
“Oh,” she said, “there was the time there I was, in the Model T, stopped at a light on Hollywood Boulevard.” When suddenly, she was “. . . so overcome, I just had to . . .” and she licked her fingers right then and there, shooting her hand up her skirt before the light turned green.
“When I was done, and I was putting it into first gear, just in the very nick of time,” she laughed, “I looked up and saw all the people from the streetcar next to me, all watching – they’d seen everything.” She laughed now over it all, not turning scarlet with shame in the least which is what I still do whenever things I did like an animal catch up with me – or at least what I did when I imagined no one was looking, finding out I was wrong when it was too late. But I’ll probably always be turning scarlet whereas I don’t think Lola ever did, even when she looked up and saw the whole streetcar full of faces looking straight down into her lap.
In my day growing up in Southern California meant you didn’t grow up, at least not like girls did elsewhere. Having not grown up myself, like Lola, I know what it was exactly – what it is – to be a woman-looking person in your twenties with none of the trials and tribulations bogging down your whole life, driving you from one predictable crisis of adult life to the next until it’s too late. I, like Lola, was unable to take adult life seriously in my twenties at all and in fact sometimes I wonder, when I look at adult life even now, how on earth I got myself anywhere past my teens.
Every time the school counselor’s office called me down and wanted to know why a girl with my grades wasn’t planning on going “on” (i.e., to UCLA), I felt like oatmeal from head to toe.
The idea of doing anything once I got out of the twelfth grade – provided I could even get out since my spelling was impervious to tradition – besides just lying on the beach seemed too much to ask.
“Mother,” I once asked, “you don’t want me to become anything, do you?”
“Only what you really want to be,” she said.
“But what if I don’t really want to be anything?” I asked.
“I’m sure everything will be just fine,” she smiled.
But of course in those days, the early sixties, girls could still get away with “getting married and settling down with some lovely young man,” and the school counselor didn’t drive me as crazy as she probably would have later. Since looking at Sheena sitting in an office in the Administration Building at Hollywood High, it didn’t take a trained L.A. city school expert to realize all I cared about anyway was fun and men and trouble.
Of course there was one thing I wanted to do when I grew up, which I had known all along, and that was to invite people over and have dinner, like my mother.
The thing about L.A. is that there really was no place to sit down. Well, maybe the Stravinskys and people like that had houses where people could come over but most of the people they invited outside of my parents and me all had accents too. It seemed a shame to me that there was no one in all of L.A. who could speak without an accent and be invited over for dinner, and I just knew that there were plenty of people without accents who’d love to come over for dinner and who probably didn’t even know what it was like to sit down since they’d spent their lives in L.A. and therefore had no idea how interesting they were.
Already I knew that my best friend in high school – Franny – could talk a perfect blue streak and be every bit as gripping as the people my grandmother always said were brilliant.
And anyway, I didn’t necessarily want brilliant people coming over to sit down. I more wanted people who were more or less peculiar, like artists or writers or people Franny and I met hanging around Schwab’s who spent their life at Santa Anita going to the races (of course they had accents like people in Guys and Dolls which was fine with me). And I wanted people like my friend Ollie from junior high who’d been kicked out of Virgil, L.A.’s toughest pachuco high school at that time, and dumped on us at Le Conte where suddenly we had this Japanese girl, Ollie, in the tightest skirt anyone had ever seen, with a razor blade in her hairdo, who sat in the back of Algebra calling it “obnoxious” and getting called down to the principal’s office for disturbing the peace. All the people I’d ever met so far in my life who’d struck me as the least bit out-of-the-way I’d managed to keep track of, even when Ollie had been sent to Betsy Ross – the local reform school – and even when she got kicked out of there at the age of sixteen and married a car thief I still always knew where she was. And I wanted all my L.A. people one day to be invited into a large crumbling L.A. mansion (exactly like Franny’s which was my dream of a crumbling mansion from the moment she first showed it to me) to eat burritos and drink Rainier Ale and all meet my parents.
And I wanted my parents to invite their friends so the European accents could finally join up with all the other funny bohemians I knew in L.A. – and we could all sit down.
Naturally when I was in the school counselor’s office for the yearly question “What do you plan to do when you graduate?” I always stuck to my guns and said, “Oh, I don’t know.”
“But you’ve got to be careful that you don’t just drift,” she’d always say.
“Drifting” sounded fine to me, but to a school counselor it was the Biggest Danger life had to offer.
And that’s really all Lola cared about too until she was twenty-six when Vera Minsky discovered her.
Chapter Five
THERE WERE PERHAPS a hundred Teretsky dancers during the thirties and forties who passed through the troupe, but of course I only knew four when I was growing up. (My mother
