Lucky Us Read online

  IT WAS THE DAY before Labor Day and hot and there were no contests anywhere and no party to get ready for. Iris and I walked down to Paradise Lake, the big pond at the edge of Windsor College. I dragged my feet to make dust devils. Iris took off her shoes and socks and put her feet in the water. She lit a cigarette and I lay down next to her. Iris took two beers out of her bag and I took out last week’s Screen magazine.

  “There’s your heartthrob, Paulette Goddard,” she said. “I can do what she does.”

  I thought Iris probably could. I kept watch for my father while Iris smoked, her eyes closed.

  “Let’s get wet,” Iris said, and I ran back to my room to look for my bathing suit. My father was on his knees in my closet, one hand on my black party shoe.

  “I thought you girls were down at the pond.”

  “I have to change,” I said. “Iris’s already down there. She brought her suit with her.”

  “Your sister plans ahead,” he said. “You are more hey-nonny-nonny.”

  He tucked my shoe back into the closet and stood up, smiling a little absently, the way he did at breakfast, when I was talking while he was reading.

  When I told Iris she said, “That sonofabitch. You have to do what I tell you.”

  I said I would, whatever it was.

  IRIS AND I PRACTICED going up and down the honeysuckle trellis in the dark. My job was lookout. Iris packed her best outfits and makeup and the necessaries for me. She said we’d buy new clothes when we got to Hollywood. She said, What looks great in Windsor won’t cut the mustard in Hollywood. Neither of us had really thought about new clothes for me, or where I’d go to school. I was going into twelfth grade, I looked eleven, and I’d skipped two grades already. If you asked either of us, we would have said that I needed more education like a cat needs more fur. Iris made sure we could carry our bags and purses without help; she said she could just picture the kind of wiseguys who would offer to give us a hand and that if she ever went to the ladies’ room by herself for five minutes, I’d probably just hand over all our worldly possessions to some boob. I told Iris that no matter what my shortcomings, it’d still be better for her to have me along. I said I’d wear my glasses all the time and I’d wear the white anklets that I hated, and people would admire her like crazy for taking care of her sad-sack little sister. Men won’t be asking you out all the time because they don’t want to be saddled with me, I said. Old people will buy us meals.

  It was exactly like I said. Iris threw her jacket over me when we got on the bus, and I slept for hours at a time, curled up with my head in Iris’s lap, trying to look lovable and needy and keep my skirt tucked down over my knees, even when no one could see me. I hoped Iris was glad she hadn’t left me in Ohio. It was sixty hours from Ohio to the Hollywood Plaza Hotel, which Iris found for us in the Windsor library’s Guide to California, 1941.

  WE WALKED FROM THE bus station to the Hollywood Plaza Hotel and Iris told me about hotels. She’d stayed at one in Chicago, with her mother. They’d gone for a weekend with her mother’s sorority sisters and their daughters and they all had a big luncheon in the hotel, in a private dining room, with pink silk walls. They’d had shrimp cocktail and lobster Newburg and Shirley Temples. A doorman in a uniform had taken their suitcases. Iris and her mother called up for room service the first night. A man in a suit wheeled in a little table, full of china plates with silver domes. As Iris and her mother sat in pink armchairs, the man whisked away the domes and laid their napkins in their laps. The butter was shaped like rosebuds. After a chicken dinner and baked Alaska, Iris and her mother put on their nightgowns and robes, pulled back the curtains that the maid had closed, and watched the city lights.

  The Hollywood Plaza was nothing like that hotel. It was a two-story concrete u shape, with chipped red roof tiles and the saddest little brown bush in the middle of the courtyard, where the weedy concrete paths split off to two short wings. An older lady stuck her head out of the window. Gruber, she said. First floor.

  Iris finished eating her candy bar and wiped her hands on my plaid skirt. She spit into her handkerchief and wiped my face, which I absolutely hated. “Let’s shake a leg,” she said.

  Letter from Iris

  7 Queensberry Place

  South Kensington, London

  September 1946

  Dear Eva,

  I’ve been thinking about you. My show closed last night. I was good, if not great, and a bunch of us working girls and a few sweet old queens went out for Champagne and oysters. The war may be over, but you can by no means get everything you want here (a decent steak still requires more than I can manage). Happily, oysters from the north are no problem. As I am tipping one down my throat, who do I see but Mrs. Gruber, not in her housedress and broken loafers but in a blue taffeta dress and matching pumps, holding a pink gin. I almost choke. As it turns out, of course it’s not Mrs. Gruber—who might be dead by now and whom I can’t imagine ever leaving the Hollywood Plaza, let alone Hollywood. It was just Arlene Harrington, a producer’s wife, with a diamond brooch the size of the Chrysler Building, and I did not say to her, My goodness, you look like my long-suffering, extremely plain, possibly dead Jewish landlady.

  Do you ever think about Mrs. Gruber? As soon as she stuck her head out the window you skittered up to her, breathless and shy, the way you never actually were, and offered up the bus story about our late papa and brave mama and our languishing mid-western fortune. I can’t imagine she believed you but she liked you and she didn’t mind me. She took our money before she handed me the key. One tiny room with two beds, a half-fridge and a two-burner stovetop and the bathroom down the hall. I’ve seen worse—so have you, I imagine—but back then, it was the worst place I’d ever been. I knew we would have to struggle when we got to Hollywood but I’d thought it would be a struggle like in the movies: five girls in a couple of rooms, everyone putting their hair up in curlers and cleaning their faces with Pond’s and giggling when the hall phone rang and it was someone’s sweetheart. There was no hall phone and the whole time we were there, I never saw another person besides Mrs. Gruber. I found a dead mouse in the corner when we moved in and when you walked past, I gave it a little kick under the stove and I hope you never saw it.

  Those three months were hard, but you were a trouper. You kept the apartment nice and you made dinner on a dime. Do you remember, I’d spill out my tips and we’d make piles, pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and weren’t we tickled when there was a half-dollar. I still remember that night at The Derby. I did “You Are My Sunshine” and I knew I’d nailed it. I could tell. You thought so too, although you were such a little Doubting Thomas, you didn’t want to go for dinner until I was signed with MGM. And then Mr. Freed called and you wore my old blue dress and I got a new one and a real pair of heels and we went to Tubby’s for steak. Six months, five movies, three speaking parts: Passing Through, Something Special, Evening Romance. (Do you remember the Nile-green silk nightie Harpo sent me? Still have it.)

  Someone once said: God gave us memory, so we could have roses in December. Someone did not add, So we could have blizzards in June and food poisoning when there was nothing to eat.

  Please write to me.

  Iris

  2

  I May Be Wrong but I Think You’re Wonderful

  North Vine Street

  Hollywood

  January 4, 1942

  Dear Dad,

  Things are really changing around here.

  THIS WAS AS FAR AS I GOT. I’D STARTED A DOZEN LETTERS TO HIM and ripped them up and walked them to the corner trash can, while our landlady watched. I don’t know why I wrote at all. I didn’t expect my father to rescue me. I didn’t think I needed rescuing. It seemed to me that if you had to have a mother who’d dropped you off like a bag of dirty laundry and a father who was not above stealing from you (or your sister), you were pretty lucky to have that same sister take you to Hollywood and wash your underpants with hers and share her sandwiches with you. Mrs. Gruber, our landlady and handyman, was excellent company for me when Iris was working. Mrs. Gruber condemned the fraudulence and the trickery of Hollywood but she knew, from personal experience, that some of that stuff was necessary for survival. She would say to me, Your sister will not be crushed by life, and we must admire that. Mrs. Gruber’s own apartment was filled with duct tape and wrenches and half-pipes and wire coils. She wasn’t much of a housekeeper. I thought she was a good cook, of the fried-egg-and-cheese-sandwich variety, which was what the two of us ate together every day. Mrs. Gruber had asked me about school and I told her the truth, that I loved the books and hated the kids, and she said she understood. She said she spoke four languages and had left school in the sixth grade. Where I come from, she said, six years is plenty. If you can read Turgenev, you’re educated.

  Mrs. Gruber loved President Roosevelt as much as my father and I did. She worried all the time that someone would assassinate him, until the warm day in December when the Japs bombed us at Pearl Harbor and President Roosevelt declared war on this date which will live in infamy. Mrs. Gruber and I sat still, and when it was over, we cried and read up on Japan in her encyclopedia. When we finished the article, Mrs. Gruber said, We must be glad. Mrs. Gruber said no one would hurt the president now because we needed him. She said she remembered when Republicans compared President Roosevelt to Hitler and to Stalin and to Mussolini. She said she used to see people wearing I HATE ELEANOR buttons walk past her on the sidewalk and she wanted to spit, she wanted to kill them. When she was a young person just arrived in this country, Mrs. Gruber said she would cry from rage and frustration, because she couldn’t kill the people she wanted to kill. Sometimes, she said, men, who were often the people she wanted to kill, would misunderstand and try to comfort her.

  So, we got no more of those hateful buttons, she said, but it’s too bad—what’s going to happen to Japanese people, here and in their own country? She said President Roosevelt was nobody’s fool. Mrs. Gruber took her nap at two o’clock. I loosened her corset and shut her bedroom door. I read First Love or turned down the radio a little and listened to Fibber McGee and Molly or looked through Mrs. Gruber’s old letters and photographs, which were mostly in another language. In one photograph, she’s standing next to a short, wide man who has the Gruber nose and they’re both wearing cowboy hats and chaps. Ah, she said when she woke up, we were getting ready for America.

  IRIS GOT A CONTRACT. She had sung and shown her profile and her legs at every talent show in Hollywood and her screen test was a wow, she said, and now she was an MGM artist. She said that she’d be speaking lines before the month was out and she said we could move. I’d made Iris walk downstairs to Mrs. Gruber’s to announce her contract and our improved circumstances and to celebrate with Mrs. Gruber’s crème de menthe, which I knew we would have to do. Mrs. Gruber handed us each one of her three gold-stemmed liqueur glasses and sighed.

  “You don’t look happy for us,” I said.

  Iris finished her drink and examined her nails. She never had any trouble keeping her mouth shut. Plus, I could see she was done with the Hollywood Plaza. Mrs. Gruber had been tops, in her own frowzy, grumpy, foreign way but we were moving on to a nice one-bedroom at the Firenze Gardens on Sunset, and Greer Garson had said, Hello, dear, to Iris the second day on the set. The director had put Iris at the front of the crowd of girls walking down the sidewalk. Iris had pushed her hat forward a little and popped her collar, and after, the dresser said, Nice touch. For Iris, Mrs. Gruber was pretty much yesterday’s egg sandwich.

  Mrs. Gruber said that happiness was not something she aspired to, that when we had seen as much of the world as she had, we would know that what lies right behind the horseshit is not a prize pony, my dears, it’s more horseshit. Iris smiled and stood up. She straightened her stockings and hugged Mrs. Gruber. Thanks for being so good to Eva, she said.

  ONCE WE LEFT MRS. GRUBER’S, I had no one to talk to. I made up sequels to the books I’d read: David Copperfield and his wife and three kids, living at the seaside; Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester and their progressive boarding school for the blind.

  It was still winter, but in Los Angeles the days seemed longer than at home. Iris was gone twelve hours a day. There were no old people and no children at the Firenze Gardens. I waited until three o’clock every day and went to the library, and after, I walked through the park with books on my hip, like a regular kid. I read through the lives of Joan of Arc (three versions, including George Bernard Shaw’s, in which Joan seemed to me to be exactly the kind of bold, goofy girl you’d want for a best friend, voices or no voices) and Marie Curie, who seemed kind of crazy and noble in the same way. I read the biographies of Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale, and even in the books written for little girls, you could tell these women were so tough they’d take a bullet out of you with a fork and not blink.

  The Firenze Gardens was much nicer than the old place, every apartment with its own toilet and a big and a little courtyard in the back, where people lay out on beach chairs. Once I lay in a beach chair too, in my shorts and blouse. I tied up my hair with a big bandanna and tried to look like a child actress, while I read about the great nurses. A real actress came over and said, firmly, that that was her chair and would I mind, and I avoided the big courtyard after that. Most of the people were up-and-coming actors, like Iris, working at Fox or MGM all day, with no interest in a flat-chested girl with glasses who wasn’t in the business. I ate dinner whenever Iris got home, and sometimes she brought back sandwiches and cookies from the commissary, which sounded like heaven on earth to me. I would make Iris tell me everything that happened, on and off the set. For about a month, she went to makeup and costume in the morning and then she played a girl reading the newspaper in the bus station, then a girl in the bakery, handing out loaves of bread and making change, then a girl pushing a baby carriage down Main Street. After a few weeks, it was just as she said. The director from the bakery scene noticed how she did her hair (“Hair up, blouse down,” Iris said) and he gave her a couple of lines, way ahead of the girls who’d started when she did. In the morning, I helped Iris pick out her outfit and talked about who she might see, and who might talk to her (“I don’t just say, ‘What’s up, kiddo,’ ” Iris said. “I wait. And I’m helpful.”), and she would practice saying her one line a bunch of different ways. Iris saw Miss Garson kiss Clark Gable. Harpo Marx patted Iris on the fanny and she ate cheeseburgers with pickles and relish (“Never any onions,” she said, “because of the close-ups.”) with women dressed like mermaids, who had to eat standing up, with their feet sticking out behind their tails, in sparkling green ballet slippers. Iris told me all the gossip that the hair stylists told her. The hairdressers told everybody everybody’s business. Iris told me about Francisco Diego, who was the head of makeup and never gossiped about anyone. Francisco told Iris that she had not gone unnoticed and one time, after he did Lana Turner, he put Iris in his chair and did her face the same way. She had to wipe it off before she went back on set but everyone stood around her chair and Francisco gave her a brush and a jar of Ben Nye’s special-blend face powder, for herself, for when she was shiny. When she had a day off, Iris put the Ben Nye powder on my face and a little red lipstick and the two of us went out for waffles. There was a high school about six blocks from Firenze Gardens and Iris and I steered clear.

  I did miss Mrs. Gruber. I missed my father too. I refused to think about my mother, except when she showed up in my dreams, lost in the desert or dying by the side of a highway, every couple of nights. I kept writing to my father and tearing up the letters, even though I knew what he was and I knew he wasn’t worrying about me. I knew he didn’t give a tinker’s dam—which is what he said all the time, and he’d explained that it wasn’t a curse, it wasn’t “damn,” it was “dam,” which was a very small piece of something you use before the soldering of tin takes place, and so I used the expression all the time and felt that I was cursing like crazy—but secretly. I wrote him once a month, and saved the pieces until my feelings passed, and then I threw the pieces away.

  3

  Dirty Butter

  IRIS WASN’T SURE WHAT KIND OF PARTY IT WAS. TWO WOMEN IN matching pink silk jackets and long black dresses stepped in front of her, up the stairs to a big house. The doorman or butler was a very large Negro man, in a white satin suit from the eighteenth century and a white powdered wig tied with a black ribbon. He had two gold teeth and he acted like he was not just pleased, but completely delighted to see every woman who walked through the door. He held the door open for Iris and winked.

  The women in front of Iris handed their jackets to another man in a white powdered wig and white satin suit and Iris followed them into the larger room. She kept her face still. This was a living room the way Cleveland Stadium was a baseball field. Three girls wearing white satin tap pants and white satin court shoes, and no tops, with pink ribbons around their necks and pink bows in their towering white wigs, walked past Iris, offering pigs in blankets and scallops wrapped in bacon. The girls had little mouche marks near their eyes and rouge on the tips of their nipples. Iris followed the two women in the long black dresses past big satin poufs on the floor and the pale-pink satin divans. (“My goodness, those things’ll stain like crazy,” a girl standing behind Iris said.)

  Two tall men in white breeches held giant horns of fruit. Iris guessed they were blond under their white wigs, because their chests were smooth and their eyes were blue. They were barefoot. A woman in front of Iris took a grape and pinched one of the fruit holders’ nipples until he winced a little. Iris gasped. “What a nice party,” the woman said, and she reached under her dress and unsnapped her garters. The woman looked around and put her black pumps and her stockings and panties under one of the divans.