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

squeeze babies and watch them smile so they could scream with delight. And apparently, even I was able to provide Leah with enough babylike qualities to captivate her and gradually subdue Russia’s hold on reality and make California’s version seem not so bad after all.
    And if I had not been baby enough to soothe the savage beast, then three years later my sister’s round little face, surrounded by bright blond curls the moment she hit the delivery room, was.
    By the time her second daughter was born and she and Mort were moving into a house in Hollywood where I grew up and where Lola came to stay with me when everybody went to New Jersey, Eugenia had so successfully lost all traces of Sour Lake that only when she was so mad she forgotherself did the girl ever appear as she had that first day on Billie’s doorstep—from Texas, the girl in blue.

A UNT H ELEN was nearly eight years younger than her brother Mort and only six when she left Brooklyn to take the train to L.A. For Helen, Southern California was not a privilege or a miracle, it was—as it was for Lola—perfectly okay. She was a true L.A. woman from the first week they lived near Hollenbeck Park when she suddenly disappeared and the family, especially her mother, Leah, who went white with irrational shadows of past pogroms in her mind, looked everywhere trying to find her. Finally, there she was, feeding popcorn to the swans under a tree when the rest of them found her. They stood and beheld her as their terror subsided and she said:
    â€œPapa got lost, Mama got lost, brother got lost, and sister got lost,” and she smiled and said, “but now they all got found.”
    Leah raised her eyes toward heaven to silently ask God the meaning of His latest scare when she was stopped by the skimpy tassel-top palm which all over L.A. made light of human suffering in a kind of half-baked attempt at humor.
    â€œOi,” she said, and shook her head.
    To her, these palm trees were no better than peasants, after this.
    She grabbed Helen and knocked the popcorn out of her hand, dragging her daughter to their Hollenbeck Park duplex to teach her what was what before it was too late. But it was too late already, Helen had succumbed to the swans.
    Â·Â Â·Â Â·
    â€œSophie darling,” Helen told me once, “always buy those plums they sell in Beverly Hills. Even though they cost twice as much as anywhere else. Because they are the best.”
    We were lying in the summer sunshine on the sand. Our striped canvas backrests were side by side and the noises of people and water were appropriate. However, we weren’t at a beach or a lake—we were at the Ambassador Hotel, where for a small price people who were not guests of the hotel could mingle with ritzy real rich people.
    My father was always taking me and Bonnie, my sister, to this place somewhere out in the valley called Pickwick Pool which—although much larger and more obvious as it was filled with kids, parents, everyone on earth just about—was not the Ambassador Hotel where Helen would take me.
    Â·Â Â·Â Â·
    â€œSophie darling,” Helen asked me once, “does your father have any candy?”
    â€œYes,” I instantly answered.
    My father had a wonderful Victorian chest of drawers which particularly fit music scores. When I first knew this chest of drawers existed, I hardly existed myself. In fact, it was taller than I until I became almost twelve. And in it was sheet music neatly divided by composer alphabetically into each of the twenty or thirty drawers, half on one side and half on the other.
    However, about three drawers down on the righthand side was a special space with my father’s gold medal for violin in it, little packets of gut strings, curiosities from out of Dickens, and although this drawer actually smelled of chocolate my whole life there was never really any chocolate there, there were only peppermint Life