Read Online L.A.WOMAN by Eve Babitz - Free Book Online Page A

catching up on political and social gossip but Eugenia just thought Jews talked too much and made her sick and she threw up from morning sickness or Jews, either one, all the way home from San Francisco newly married, pregnant, and out of Texas for years.
    Going to meet Leah, Mort’s mother, whose Jewish heritage made it her solemn duty to keep her children free from goyim (non-Jews), especially when it came to marrying them, Eugenia and Mort knew it would not be easy going in there with the pregnancy already showing, the marriage a fait accompli, and the two of them so invincibly euphoric. But Eugenia, who was raised by her mother to know that she wasn’t trash because trash had no manners and didn’t know its ass from a hole in the ground whereas she had perfectmanners and upheld this code of her mother’s so she was a lady, knew that no lady ever made people feel bad no matter what. So Eugenia carefully chose a bouquet of flowers to bring to her new mother-in-law for their first meeting.
    Leah from Kiev, Boyle Heights, and now Hollywood opened the door frowning miserably.
    â€œHow do you do,” Eugenia smiled, nodding her head in a slight bow as she handed the bouquet to her husband’s mother.
    â€œHumph,” Leah said, hastily laying the flowers down on a hall table, “better you should bring scissors.”
    Eugenia and Mort stared at each other. Both were seeing an umbilical cord neatly cut in two with new scissors.
    â€œI am so happy to make your acquaintance,” Eugenia nevertheless went on, not stopping a single beat for pondering.
    When Mort and Mitzie, Mort’s first wife, were married, Leah had hated Mitzie because she had red hair and was a Polish Jew, which was worse than nothing, like a peasant. But when Mort not only married Eugenia but arrived with her radiantly pregnant in a loose, flowered silk blouse and three fresh flowers pinned to her hair, Leah was ready to have nothing to do with any of it and for the rest of her life to wash her hands of Mort like he was dead—though of course he was worse than dead to her.
    Knowing his mother, Mort had taken Eugenia to every single family friend and introduced her, letting the softness of her voice and the glow of her skin totally knock them to smithereens. Thus when Leah came to vent her spleen—“How could my Mort marry that shiksa?” —to everyone she knew, everyone would say, “But she’s wonderful, you are so lucky, I envy you.” And everybody did.
    By the time Eugenia had to go to the hospital and get it over with and have me, Leah was the envy of all her friends whose children had married nice Jewish husbands or wives and were in the throes of horrors, like Reno, where six-weekdivorces were simple as pie, which never happened back in Russia when the ghetto and pogroms made divorce a sophistication few could imagine. In Russia, young couples who got married got used to it or else.
    Here in America, Leah got used to Eugenia. After all, it wasn’t like Eugenia had red hair or anything.
    And when I was born nobody could say I had red hair either because I had no hair—just a head. Just a head was all I had for the first eleven months when I just sat around baldly wanting more this and more that, screaming from any room I was left in by myself and supposed to sleep, screaming baldly for louder music and madder milk and hotter entertainments performed live by adults all day and all night.
    When it became time for me to go to nursery school I was never old enough and though by then my hair was grown in and covering my bald head, my original bald attitude remained and never left.
    Nevertheless, the underlying fact that I was only a baby or only a tiny child later on caused Leah and all sorts of adults in general to ignore my bald head and nature and drool at my skin and fingers and perfect eyelashes like they did for all babies. They wanted to bite babies’ cheeks, they wanted to