I LOST HER. I made myself an orphan by giving my mother up to a crazy man with holes in his head. They got married, and he moved in and slept in my bed; I suppose he slept in her bed too, where we used to snuggle and listen to “Your Hit Parade.” I was cast out of my shabby paradise and had to go sleep on the old army cot in the dining room, where Rae used to sleep before she left to marry Mr. Bergman. The first nights I stuck my knuckles in my mouth so my mother wouldn’t hear me sobbing, slobbering, because it was Albert and not I who’d rescued her from the shop.
Yet it had all gone just the way I’d planned. She’d quit her job the very day they went downtown to City Hall and became man and wife, and now she was safe and I’d be free. So why did I feel that she’d betrayed me, that I had to break away from her, just as she’d broken away from me?
I stare into the full-length mirror in the dressing room of the girls’ gym. A tough girl with a furious face stares back at me. I’ve shaved off the thin end of each eyebrow and replaced it with a penciled black line that aims straight up, two rapiers poised above my scowling eyes. My blood-red lipstick is drawn high on my upper lip to make it look socked-in-the-mouth full. My head is crowned by a huge pompadour. I might be hiding a knife in there, so you better watch out. My blouse is see-through nylon, and my skirt is pachuca-tight and pachuca-short.
“Is that the way you dress?” my aunt says with a voice that slides all the way up from her deep foghorn the first time she sees my transformation.
“Yeah, that’s the way I dress,” I tell her. What does she know about surviving at Hollenbeck Junior High? She’s never even been to school. She doesn’t know anything except how to take care of Mr. Bergman.
“Oy vey iz mir, oh, woe is me,” she says, slapping her cheek.
I’ve bought a silver metal belt at the 5&10, and I clasp it breath-quench-ingly tight around my waist. Why should I hide what I’ve got? I’ve measured myself with an old cloth tape measure that Rae left behind. I’m 36-22-36. The world can like it or lump it.
Most of the Jewish kids have moved west, to a nicer part of town, the Beverly-Fairfax area, away from the Mexican kids and the Negro kids and the Japanese kids who spent their first years of life in relocation camps. Only a handful of Jewish kids are left behind to graduate from Hollenbeck Junior High School. Who cares? What good did the Jewish kids ever do me anyway? I was always an outcast, an odd girl, with my crazy mother, no father, Fanny’s furnished room. With them or without them, I’m alone.
The Jewish kids that remain titter at the way I dress, and I don’t give a damn. I always liked the Mexican kids better anyway because they’re poor too, so why would they look down on me? Though I have no gang, I dress like the pachuca gang girls who look so tough, just the way I want to be.
Carlos used the current expression of admiration to introduce himself. “You built like a brick shithouse, baby.” His dimples and strong white teeth looked beautiful against his dark skin, and I liked the rolling shuffle of his walk, a tough guy bop. “Hey, ese, how you doin’ man?” I’d hear him say to other pachucos. I loved its lilt. I’d practice saying it too when I was alone. “Hey, ese. . .” How cool it sounded.
“I gotta rumble with them pinche cabrones alla time ’cause they call me a black Mexican,” he said with a sneer about the light-skinned Mexican boys who watched us with narrowed eyes as we walked past them holding hands. “Tu madre,” he muttered in their direction, but under his breath, and he raised a middle finger at them, though they were already behind us, so only I could see it. He seemed to be a loner, just like me, and that made me like him even more. I loved that he risked being seen with me though I wasn’t a real pachuca, not even a Mexican. I loved his clothes, the sharp-creased pachuco khaki pants, the dark, long-sleeve shirt with the collar raised in back. I loved his shiny black hair, a duck’s ass, slicked on the sides with Vaseline, and sex curls—that’s what the girls called them—dangling on his forehead.
“Hey, baby, I made this for you in shop.” He didn’t look at me as we walked, but he handed me a red and green plastic heart, like those I’d envied on other girls. When you wore a heart like that, everyone knew you had a boyfriend. “I don’t have no chain, but you get yourself one and wear this round your neck,” Carlos said in his pachuco rhythm. He grasped my waist as we bopped down the street together. “You don’t got to go home right now. Let’s go talk in the park,” he said.
“We can sit on my porch and talk,” I offered. It didn’t matter if I took him to Fanny’s ugly house because he probably lived in a bad place too; and I really didn’t want to go back to Hollenbeck Park. I had such a long history there already, swinging with my mother and My Rae, fighting Falix off. Did my mother see what Falix was doing? Did she?
“No, it’s better in the park,” Carlos said, and led me with his firm grip on my waist. I let myself be led because I wanted to keep being his girlfriend. Near the familiar pond we lay side by side under a low willow tree, a droopy umbrella hiding us from the world. I willed myself to cast my mother and aunt from my memory and feel only how warm his breath was on me and how soft his lips were. His mouth lowered to my neck, and his teeth made gentle little bites and sucks on my exposed skin. Then his tongue found its way in and out of my ear, and he shifted to lie on top of me. A bird sang its heart out on the branches above us, and I was paralyzed by languor under his fifteen-year-old’s expertise. When I closed my eyes, I still saw the bright dizzy green, and the leaves were tangled with birdsong. “Hey, baby, let’s go in that boathouse. Don’t nobody come in there during the week.” Carlos looked down on me, a young boy’s look that surprised me with its sly hopefulness. Through all the layers of our clothes I felt him harden.
“No, let’s just stay here.” I knew I mustn’t go in there with him because outside I could control things a little, but in the boathouse there’d be nothing to stop us, and I wouldn’t be able to say no. I wanted it too, but what if I got pregnant? My mother’s fate.
“We can’t do nothing more here, and if the cops or them pinche cabrones come . . . Shit . . . Let’s go in there,” he said, the tough guy again, pressing down harder on my pelvis.
“No, let’s stay here,” I begged. “Please.” I planted a placating kiss on his shoulder. I was more scared than I cared to show.
He made an annoyed sound through clenched teeth, and I felt him moving on me, first slow, then fast and faster, his breath coming quicker and louder. I lay there stiffly, not knowing what to do, and in no more than a few minutes, before I could figure anything out, he uttered one soft cry and it was over. He lay perfectly still on top of me, a deadweight. My fingers pressed the rough grass, and under my nails I felt the dirt. A confused owl hooted from an invisible branch.
“Come on, I’ll walk you home.” He scrambled off me and onto his feet seconds later, then pulled me up abruptly. “Oh, shit, I can’t go now!” he exclaimed, looking down at a stain around the zipper of his pants. “Look, here’s a bus coupon, baby. You go. I’m gonna see you tomorrow.” He pecked my forehead, and I watched his retreating form until he vanished through the trees, his footsteps crunching the fallen leaves. I still tingled from him, but I felt relieved too, as though I’d gotten off easy.
Hot and cold skipped around in me the rest of that afternoon while I bent over my English essay at the kitchen table. “I don’t want anything,” I told my mother when she came in to fix supper, and I left. I hid out on the weed-strewn patch of backyard, filled with dreamy longing, though I was unable to escape the dull sounds of pots and plates and forks coming through the kitchen window as my mother and Albert ate. All I could think of while I finished my homework on my cot later was how Carlos had kissed me; and when I went to sleep I could feel his body on top of me.
In homeroom the next day, I stood at the door waiting for Carlos until after the bell rang; then Miss Miller scowled at me and told me to take my seat. Carlos sailed in much later. I waved to him, smiling hugely, and he nodded, but his handsome face was expressionless, and when I looked back at him in the last row he seemed very intent on carving something on his desk with a big nail. As soon as the bell rang, he disappeared in the spin of milling bodies before I’d even gathered up my books. Something bad must have happened. I had to find him and ask what was the matter.
“Hey, how you doin’?” It was Ramon behind me, one of the boys Carlos told me he was always rumbling with. “Wanna go out with me after school?” He leered at me, an insinuating grin that said he knew all about me.
“No, I’m busy,” I said, squeezing as quickly as I could through the crowd.
“Puta,” I heard Ramon snigger.
I saw Carlos one other time that day, talking to Joe, another kid he’d said he always rumbled with. When he spotted me in the distance, he shifted his body with his back to me, as though to hide.
That was almost the end of it, except that two days later, when the kids in sixth-period art class lined up in front of the teacher’s desk to claim the work that she’d graded for the last unit, I felt someone pushing at my back and pressing against my buttocks. I jumped away, bumping into the girl in front of me, then spun around into the crude grin of Martin, another one of the rumble guys. “Don’t you like it?” he mouthed, then emitted a soft, mean laugh. “I heard you did.”
So now I knew. Guys talked. If you let one of them paralyze you in sweet languor, they’d all swarm like scavengers to carrion. It was a nasty game.
Suddenly guys everywhere were acting like that, as though Carlos had telegraphed the whole male world about me or as though I gave off some scent only they could smell. In school, in the streets, on the bus, in the stores, it was impossible to escape their salvos: “Hey, girlie, want a lift? I’ll drive you to heaven!” “You shake it like you gonna break it!” “Hey, sexy, you givin’ me a heart attack!” Smack, smack, whistle, whistle. Was it the way I dressed? But I liked the way I looked—the grownup, been-around mask of my face, the drop-dead hourglass costume of my body. Why should I change because of those pinche cabrones? Kiss my ass, I thought (but I’ll be crafty enough to keep you from getting that close).
Still dark, maybe 5 A.M., only weeks into my mother’s marriage. The smell of cigarette smoke that drifted in from the porch through the dining room window pulled me from sleep. “Ohboyohboyohboy,” I heard, and the heavy shuffle of Albert’s shoes back and forth across the loose porch planks. Then once more: “Ohboyohboyohboy.”
I dozed off but was awakened again a few hours later. Fanny was banging loudly on the door of their bedroom. “Open up!” she yelled.
I dashed out to the hallway.
My mother, still in her light nightgown, bleary-eyed, opened the door. “Yes?” Over Fanny’s shoulder I could see Albert’s empty, unmade bed.
“Your crazy husband woke me up again,” Fanny said, her long nose twitching, toothless jaws working, incensed. “Five o’clock in the morning, and I hear his ‘ohboyohboyohboy.’ Tell him I’m sick and tired of it.”
My mother chewed her lip. “I’ll tell him,” she said in a little voice, “just as soon as he comes back from work.”
That evening she sat on the milk crate on the porch, waiting for Albert. I perched on my cot doing homework, and through the dining room window I could see how worried she looked. What could I do about it? Did she understand now she’d married a crazy man? I’d resolved to be polite to him, but I wouldn’t go near him unless it was absolutely necessary.
I saw her stand up as his car came down the street, and she paced on the porch till he parked. “Fanny says you woke her up,” she stage-whispered to him frantically as he walked up the creaky stairs.
Fanny appeared from nowhere and threw open the screen door, letting it slam behind her. “Mister, you woke me up at five o’clock in the morning with your crazy ‘ohboyohboyohboy.’ This is the third time. What kind of man talks to himself at five o’clock in the morning?”
There was quiet for maybe three heartbeats as Albert stood glued at the top of the stairs. Then, “You go to hell,” he roared, lunging with open claws, tripping on the air. “You’re the crazy one. You!”
Fanny scampered back into the house as though running from a mad cat, and the screen door slammed. She held it to with one hand, shaking the other one at him in a fist. “Mishugeneh! I’ll make you to move,” she yelled.
“Choleryeh,” he hollered, “witch!” and his spittle hung on the screen door.
“A devil boils in you,” Fanny yelled, “you paskudnyak you, you no-goodnik!”
“Your flesh should be torn from you in pieces,” Albert one-upped her from the porch.
I heard Fanny’s footsteps retreating at a run to her room.
“Mary, we’re moving out,” Albert hollered to my mother, who sat huddled on the milk crate.
Moving? Oh, yes! But where could we go if we left East LA.?
That same night, at about midnight, Albert’s cigarette smoke and pacings and mutterings woke me up again, and the following morning too, and many other nights and mornings, but Fanny said nothing more; she just avoided him. Whenever he referred to her now, he called her “choleryeh witch,” but he didn’t seem interested in fighting with her again, and he and my mother never even began to look for a new place to live.
Every atom of me wanted to go. There was no reason to stay at Fanny’s now. There was the whole world outside, and I wanted to know it. The only question was, how was I going to get out when I wasn’t even fifteen years old and still had another month of junior high school?
“Do you think I can start going out on auditions?” I kept asking Irene, though I still felt like a mouse in her lofty presence.
“You have to be ready first,” she kept answering me with an absent-minded shrug. “Any phone calls I need to return before I start teaching this morning?”
But I was ready. What was she waiting for?
Suddenly one Saturday, as she shrugged at me yet again while she read the neat list of phone messages that I’d printed for her, I saw right through my idol as clearly as if her flawless skin were cellophane. She didn’t know any better than I how things were done in Hollywood. Why else would she be living in East L.A. and booking a bunch of kids at Thrifty Drug Store openings and Hadassah luncheons? I admitted to myself what I’d probably guessed for a long time: she and Sid had no more connections in Hollywood than my mother. If I wanted to move up, I’d have to find the way by myself—the Sandmans had nothing to offer but dreams. Yet I couldn’t bear to go, never to see her again.
It was Sid who shoved me. “You have to convey a more wistful feeling: ‘Ah’ve always relied on the kindness of strangehs.’” He modeled the intonation one afternoon at my lesson. “Arms out and palms up.” He pulled at my wrists.
“‘Ah’ve always relied on the kindness of strangehs,’” I repeated, twisting my lips into a wistful Blanche DuBois smile, with Blanche’s fey tilt to my head. I sensed her easily. I had no trouble imagining what it would feel like to be so vulnerable, to allow yourself to yield to everyone. I could play her, though I would never be her.
My arms were extended and my palms were pointed up as he’d directed, but Sid still hadn’t let go of my wrists. I glanced at him, breaking out of Blanche. His expression as he stared at me in the big room was not teacherly. “You know,” he said in a voice I’d never heard before—low and sort of choked—“when you came here three years ago, I thought, ‘My God, I’ve never seen such a pathetic-looking little girl.’” His face was close enough for me to see beads of sweat glistening on his thin mustache. “And now . . .”
He didn’t finish his sentence, this husband of the gorgeous wife, but I knew very well from Jake Mann and Falix Lieber what he wanted. Should I laugh? Should I break away and run into the street? Could innocence or pathos save me? My mind bubbled and then cooled. I assumed a little-girl voice. “You’ve been like a wonderful father to me all these years,” I squeaked. He was breathing as if he’d just run a marathon, and his hands moved to my shoulders. Words were my weapon, and I shot them. “You and Irene have been the mom and dad I never had.” My voice rose higher, a child’s grating whine. “I was going to tell her next time, when I see her in the office, how good you’ve been to me.”
I could read the expressions on his face—surprise first, then fear, then cunning. His look shifted to a studied nonchalance. “Let’s take that ‘strangehs’ line again,” he said.
The whole incident hadn’t lasted more than two minutes, and that was the end of it. But how could I keep on at Theatre Arts Studio now?
About a week later, close to my fifteenth birthday, I looked through the Yellow Pages of the Los Angeles telephone directory under "Theaters.” “Geller Theatre and School of Dramatic Arts,” the biggest ad said. “Professional Productions Staged by Our Students. The Stars of Tomorrow. Conveniently Located Steps from Hollywood.”
“So it’s good riddance to the bottle blonde you were so maaad about, you fickle little thang.” Eddy-as-Scarlett taunted me on the steps of his porch.
I ignored his calling my beloved a bottle blonde because I’d never been to the Westside except on the Tanner Grey Line Motor Tour of the movie stars’ homes, and if Eddy went with me it wouldn’t be so scary. “Come on,” I begged. “This can be the break we’ve been waiting for.”
“She’s ready for her close-up, Mr. DeMille!” The spidery fingers spread in perfect and annoying imitation of a demented Gloria Swanson. “Batty, batty. She really believes that someone is going to put two little Jewish girls from East L.A. into the movies. But this little Jewish girl”—he pointed to himself—“is not as dumb as this one”—he rubbed an elegant forefinger into my collar bone.
“To hell with you,” I said, slapping his hand away and stomping down the steps. Why couldn’t he take serious things seriously? Why wouldn’t he go on this brave adventure with me? “Stay here if you want,” I tossed at him over my shoulder. “I’m going where there’s a chance for something good to happen.”
But how do you get to Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue from East L.A.? One bus from Wabash Avenue to Brooklyn Avenue, I discovered; another from Brooklyn Avenue to Olvera Street; a third down Wilshire Boulevard to another universe, on the border of Hollywood. I sat in the front seat of each bus, looking out the big window, traveling west. On the Wilshire bus I could see a gloriously gaudy crimson and platinum sunset that promised everything.
The lobby at Geller’s was full of glamour. I’d never seen so many blondes at once. Almost everyone, men and women, had golden hair, even those with eyebrows and eyes darker than mine, even those with conspicuous black roots. Most of the men wore tight James Dean jeans and white T-shirts. A lot of the women wore shin-length capri pants and high, high heels. A lone dark-haired beauty—Babette, everyone called her—was decked out in a lacy white dress that billowed over piles of crinoline petticoats, and she carried a Little Bo-Peep parasol to complete the little-girl-cum-southern-belle look. (“Her father is a big movie director,” I heard one newcomer whisper.) Another woman batted Joan Crawford eyes at everyone and called them “dahling.” She was much older than the others and was wearing a slinky black sheath; Hollywood dripped from her pores. My silver stilettos would not have been out of place, but I was in my silly pachuca garb, looking like an East L.A. barrio girl. What was I doing here? Eddy was right.
No! I wouldn’t get scared off. They didn’t have to know who I was or where I came from. I was an actress. I’d just act as though I were someone else. I sneaked into the ladies’ room, where two women who looked like starlets were combing their shiny hair in front of the mirror, and I slipped into a stall.
“So this guy promised that he’d introduce me to somebody who works at the William Morris Agency,” one said. I’d wait until they left.
When the doors swung closed behind them, I scrubbed the pachuca lipstick off my lips and started over, following the outline. I erased the black rapiers over my eyes and with my Maybelline eyebrow pencil drew new lines in to look more natural. I combed the wild pompadour down. I could do nothing about my pachuca clothes, but at least my face and hair looked less like those of a Hollenbeck Junior High gang girl.
The lobby was dense with blue haze. Everyone smoked. Some puffed away through ivory or ebony cigarette holders. The most muscled boy held his Chesterfield between a thumb and an index finger, eyes narrowed as he puffed. A rival dangled his own cigarette from his lips and puffed on it, a squint in his eyes that was at least as cool as the thumb-and-index-finger chap’s. I smoked my first cigarette in the lobby of Geller’s, offered to me from the pack of the lip-dangler. Before that summer was over I was smoking two and a half packs a day. Smoking made me look older.
That first evening I auditioned for the acting school with a dozen other people. When Mr. Lord, the director of Geller’s, called my name, I walked onto the stage and did a monologue from The Member of the Wedding. Though I still wore my pachuca clothes, I knew how to hold my body in Frankie’s girl-boy stance, I knew how to make my voice sound boyish and confused and full of longing, a lost adolescent.
“I’m E. J. Smith,” whispered a big, pink-skinned man who leaned over my chair as I took my seat in the audience again. “You were terrific.” He offered me his great paw to shake. He was dressed in a striped three-piece suit and a tomato-red bow tie, and his hair and eyebrows and lashes were white-blond. I’d never seen anyone up close who looked like that. “A real goy,” my mother would have said of him. “I’m working in a talent agency,” he told me. My head spun. Was it happening already?
“Can we see that Member of the Wedding again?” he asked with authority when the other auditions were finished.
“Sure, we have some time,” Mr. Lord said amiably, and he called me up again. I saw the audience lean forward to watch, and I became Frankie once more. When I finished they all applauded, though they hadn’t applauded for any of the others.
“Work-Study scholarship,” Mr. Lord said, when I told him later that I could not afford the forty-dollar-a-month tuition. “You can address theater advertisement envelopes for us, ten hours a week.”
I was on my way.
“You were goood!” a young woman said as I drifted ecstatically toward the bus stop. She had platinum blond hair and a high Judy Holliday voice with a New York Jewish accent. “Simone Deardon,” she introduced herself. (Months later I caught a glimpse of her driver’s license. Sonya Dubinsky, it read.)
“Lil Foster,” I replied. I wouldn’t be “Lilly”—that was the illegitimate girl who grew up in a scroungy furnished room and looked like a refugee child. And I couldn’t be Lillian—that was such a somber name. I could be absolutely anyone I wanted to be here, I realized—acting was what it was all about. “Eighteen,” I said when Simone asked how old I was. She was twenty.
“Lee-lee.” Albert opened the door before I got up the steps. I saw my mother’s pale face over his shoulder. “Your mother was driving me crazy. What’s the matter with you, to stay out all night?”
“Don’t yell at her,” my mother yelled at Albert. “Do you want to make me sick?” she yelled at me. “Where were you?”
It was 1 A.M. The buses had stopped running by the time I got to Olvera Street, but I’d waited a long time at the bus stop before I figured that out. When an elderly Mexican lady and her husband stopped at the traffic light, I asked them for a ride. She made her husband pick me up. They’d just closed their bar on Olvera Street, she said. Then she shook a motherly finger at me. “Terrible things can happen to a young girl alone on the street.”
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.