L.A.WOMAN (8 page)

When Helen ate a chip off it, her face despaired.

“Let's walk to the store and get M&Ms,” she said.

“The stores are all closed, it's eight
P.M
.,” I said.

“Ohhhhhhhh.” Helen at last nearly wept.

The next morning Helen went back to San Francisco but before she left she confronted Mort, her brother.

“Mort, you ought to have some candy here, what kind of a place is this!” she demanded.

“Aren't there any Life Savers in the—”

“That isn't candy!”

“Well, but—”

“Chocolate, I mean chocolate,” Helen demanded. “Sophie darling, this morning before I go back to San Francisco, I'll take you to See's.”

“See's!” I cried, See's Candy being L.A.'s most luscious chocolate.

“Yes, darling,” she said, looking toward me with a smile. I was a niece after her own heart and not, like my sister, some vapid child with wispy tastes who you'd expect springing from her brother's loins since his tastes were so peppermint too.

· · ·

(“. . . always buy those plums . . . ,” she'd said.)

· · ·

In those days, when I was only thirteen and my parents were both in their early forties, my mother and father had
become one of the most gorgeous couples ever established here on earth even in Hollywood.

My father's black wavy hair was getting gray and movie-star-distinguished and he wore tweeds and those loose men's pants they were still wearing—even Elvis Presley himself, during those first few years of Ed Sullivan when he was supposed to be too sexy for the folks to see down past his waist on TV. By this time my father was never without his violin in his left hand and his bow in his right—not
ever.
For in spite of the fact that most studio musicians like him were only required to work a few days a week, my father's obsession with Bach's six violin solos had taken hold never to fall by the wayside like most people's obsessions eventually do. In his determination to play Bach exactly as Bach himself might have expected his music played, my father began altering his Stainer violin (the other very finest make besides Stradivariuses still extant), paring off the improvements added over the centuries by people who couldn't play Beethoven on an instrument with a neck as short as it was in Bach's day for chamber music and a bow outwardly curved so you couldn't hear except in a chamber—and not the Hollywood Bowl. Yet in spite of how obvious it was that if you're going to play Bach, you better start on the instrument he wrote his music for, my father was never accepted at anyplace in America (except Harvard for some reason) because he didn't have a Ph.D. in musicology—even though people who had Ph.D.'s usually didn't play an instrument anyway so how in the hell could they
know
that it made a difference to the music. But in Europe they believed him even though he was a Hollywood studio musician and the research he did at the Bach libraries in Marburg and Tübingen in Germany (which he started in 1932 in Berlin at the library there too) was okay by them. Even if they thought he was crazy at UCLA.

(No wonder I grew up hating that place so much.)

In a photograph in which my mother was over forty, she sits at the outer edge of a gathering of Jewish relatives all huddled in someone's backyard. Three generations of squinting Russian exiles glare into the camera under the noonday sun and everyone is faded, hopeless, listless, and crabby-looking and either they are bulging or they are shrunken, clutching at something. Except that there sits my mother, her face looking away to the side, her neck so swanlike and her face so joyful, girlish, and tenderhearted and her expression so intelligent and gallant, that it's still a mystery to anyone who sees that photograph today how she came to be there.

“Your mother is a saint” is what everybody has told me since I was two.

“Your mother is an exceptional woman, a true angel, a beautiful truly marvelous woman, you are lucky to have a mother like that. Do you know how lucky you are?” they say.

“Yes,” they say, “a true saint.”

“Your mother . . . ,” they sigh.

“Yes,” I sigh back.

“What a lucky man he is, your father,” they say.

“He is, all right,” I say.

“Oh, if only my mother had been like Eugenia,” they also say a lot.

“Yeah,” I say, knowing what always comes next.

“My mother, boy, now she was a monster! A beast! She used to hold my head under water and try and drown me in the bathtub when nobody was home. Can you imagine your own mother like that, trying to kill you? Your own mother?”

“My
mother?” I gasp. “All my mother ever did when she got mad—”

“Your mother got mad?”

“All she ever did to me once she started talking in her Southern accent and calling me ‘a little piece of shit on a stick' was to—”

“Your mother? What accent?”

“—was to slam me up the side of my head and knock me clear across the room just like she said she would—once all of a sudden Sour Lake, Texas, came into things like ‘Ah'm gonna slam yew cleah 'cross thees heah room, kid, ri' up the side yo head, now you heah?' ” I'd mimic, “and before I could duck, there I'd be. Clear across the room landing against the wall.”

“The wall?” they'd ask. “Your mother?”

“With my mother if she knocked someone, the only way you were ever about to stop just about was if you got to a wall.”

“Your mother?”

“Of course, she would never do it unless she was sure you'd land against a wall. I mean, after all she is a saint you know.”

“After all . . .”

The only thing I've ever come across in nature that captured her spirit or did her the least justice, almost the way Giotto portrayed St. Francis and showed us the way to understand the whole picture, was when I was reading this book on snakes and discovered one called the black mamba. The black mamba, unlike my mother, lives in the West Indies. However, he whirls on his victim, chasing an entire horse going sixty miles an hour for just one bite. One bite from a black mamba can drop a horse dead in his tracks, the snake's venom is so deadly no grace period is allowed for heroic actions by men of destiny. The picture proposed by my brief brush with the awful image of a snake that goes sixty miles an hour to fell a horse made me nostalgic suddenly for the way my mother used to whirl into foul words in Southern hisses which warn too late of what is to happen
once the perfect saint in all divine grace and beauty decided to knock me clear across a room like she said she would before I could escape, landing me against the far wall with one bite of her hand, felled by my mysteriously perfect mother who, unlike the black mamba who is of the Elapidae family which includes the cobra, lived in L.A.

M
Y SISTER AND
I began referring to our parents as Them the year we went to Paris and they went to Germany when we were actually separated from Them months on end.

The passion my father had been born into by growing up practicing violin in order to win the gold medal away from Lola had been broadened in Europe, where for two years he studied with a real master. In those two years he wised up, knew who the newest composers were, learned to play Stravinsky and what atonal music was supposed to be. The time we were in Paris was when they were hoping to see Sam Glanzrock (where he made his last two films on a Guggenheim grant) and missed him by one day in fact.

In the pictures Sam took of them on their honeymoon, they had hitchhiked up to San Francisco and were staying with Sam and Lola in Haight-Ashbury before the fall. In the photograph my mother looks like she's about to throw up and my father with his wavy black hair and mustache looks perfectly demure now that he has wrested my mother from her marriage to Pietro.

He is sitting demurely with his hand on her knee. Her knee is encased in a rayon stocking. The stocking is held up by a garter belt but the garter belt is kept together by a large safety pin. Like all her clothes, it is too small and her waist just way too large because now she is five months pregnant,
one week married, eight days divorced, and all she wants to do is just throw up.

My father wore clothes like one of those English movie stars with mustaches and voices like rose petals, though my father's mustache made his look much handsomer than theirs. His voice was more like nasturtium petals, some petals that grew only where it was always a little too hot. My father's passions for Trotsky, the violin, and my mother were always a little too hot, too.

For my sister and me after Paris, they were always whom we meant by Them.

T
HE FIRST MOVIE
I saw was
Bambi
and naturally I had to be removed from the theater before fifteen minutes had gone by since I was already so white with fear I hiccupped instead of wept and I couldn't even scream—the images on the screen drove me so crazy. But somehow later on, my sister and I managed to see musicals, although the first one I remember called
Cover Girl
with Rita Hayworth I couldn't stand except for looking at her face and the noise was so loud that finally when we got out I had to throw up, my inner ear was so gonged up. But when once again my parents attempted to see if we could make it through a Walt Disney family classic and Bonnie and I were ushered by both my mother and father into
Fantasia
with one of them on either side of us in case we had our usual nervous breakdowns, neither of us blinked, we were so utterly spellbound by the majesty of the sexy giant bat whose wings seemed to be made out of volcano eruptions.

Only of course when we tried to sleep that night we both woke up crazy with horrible terrible sexy volcano dreams and for two whole weeks we both woke up screaming so badly that finally my father, who'd been in Freudian analysis
fashionably early and thus knew all about everything, took us one morning into his study and showed us (my sister was seven and I was ten): one cardboard box about a foot and a half square, one can of black enamel paint, one paint brush, one newspaper, and one roll of rubber bands—oh, and some scissors and some construction paper in pink and yellow.

“Now,” he began, “I want you both to watch quietly.”

First he painted the box black (it must have been fast-drying paint—maybe it was India ink, not enamel). Then he cut out two triangles in the top of the box parallel to each other and about an inch or so apart. Then he cut a pink oval out of the construction paper and pasted it firmly below the triangles. Then he cut a yellow triangle out of the yellow paper and pasted it between the two first shapes.

“Now,” he said, “here, you hold these.”

He carefully rolled up two wands of newspaper and secured them with rubber bands, handing one to each of us. Then he stuck the box on his head and got down before us on his hands and knees. Then he said, “Now hit me.”

Bonnie and I were a hopeless shambles of embarrassment.

“Go ahead,” he said, “you know—like I'm the monster. From your dream. Hit
it.”

My sister began laughing hysterically.

“Now
what are you
doing,”
my father cried, annoyed, and he took off his head and led us out to the backyard where we had to stand in the Australian grass in our bare feet all day, he said, until we hit him—or he wouldn't let us go play.

Finally, daintily, and both at once, we pretended to slap him with our wands.

“Harder,” he said, “to make the monster go away.”

So we pretended he was the monster, hit him harder with the harmless newspaper, and that night we slept clear through totally cured.

He was positive his technique had worked.

But I was positive we were just doing it to be polite. After all, another vision of our father out in the crabgrass on all fours in the backyard was enough to keep your screams to yourself.

T
HE ONLY TIME
I remember seeing Sam Glanzrock was the time in about 1952 or so when he and Aunt Helen drove down from San Francisco high on peyote all night and showed up at our front door the next morning fried out of their minds, Aunt Helen laughing her virgin-spring laugh and Sam darkly creating a cloud in my memory which is all that I can recall today—for what was most important about meeting Sam that day was that I realized how much he loathed children, especially me.

Sam was out in the front yard where my father had dragged out one of the living room armchairs so they could drape this black velvet coat of my mother's over it, which would be used as a backdrop when Sam took a photograph of my father's left hand holding the neck of his restored eighteenth-century violin—which wouldn't have worked at all if the swing in our front yard were used as a background, even I as a child by then could understand—and the sight of two grown men that day who looked to me as though they were playing house with a chair in the yard, and the intensity with which they both stood back to look at the way the velvet fabric would drape, was too miraculous for most children, especially me, to stay inside.

As far as I was concerned, no man ever made me forget he was a shrimp any faster than Sam (except Stravinsky, of course, but then Stravinsky always made everyone else seem bloated). Just from meeting him once, when I was that young, I was so determined to overcome his hatred of me that all I remember feeling is that I'd do anything to be a
woman enough for him, like it was my job or something to grow up and try and soothe his savage eyes. Whatever color they were.

Everyone who knew him said they were a different color. My father insisted on gray.

“Yes, but he was so fascinating,” Goldie said, “he
looked
so hot. That dark skin, those lavender eyes!”

“Lavender?” I cried. “Daddy says gray.”

“Your father didn't know anything!” Goldie sighed, about her own brother.