Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (40 page)

E
dna’s Custom Gowns and Hats was a small, elegantly appointed salon on the second floor of a building on Dayton Way, just north of Rodeo Drive. On the far side of the room, by the windows, there were three-way mirrors and a small felted box on which ladies could stand while their dresses were being pinned. To the left, Edna kept all her fabric swatches and supplies, her scissors and measuring tapes. To the right were two dressing rooms, each with its own heavy curtain on brass rings. It was Laura’s job to greet the customers when they came in, and to walk them through the process of having a gown custom-made. She went over the possibilities, the necklines and the hemlines and everything in between. For the first two years, Laura had only answered the telephone and made appointments for Edna and her assistant, but Laura loved being around the dresses as they were made and tweaked, the feeling of the silks she could no longer afford, and she found that having a place to go every day made her happy. Junior said it made her look younger, which made Laura wrinkle her nose in embarrassed pleasure.

Sometimes the women wanted something modern, a pantsuit made out of polyester, and Edna would tighten her lips and give her head a short shake. She didn’t make those kinds of things. Laura loved to watch Edna work. It wasn’t just film stars who came in, needing a dress for an event, it was also regular women, housewives and members of the working world, women with paychecks and birthdays and children and bodies that didn’t agree with off-the-rack dresses. There were women with enormous breasts or no breasts to speak of, women with hips three sizes larger than their shoulders. Edna wasn’t just making dresses, she was making women feel better about themselves. Laura saw their faces as they walked out the door with the dress bags over their arms, so careful not to muss them on the stairs. For most of the day, Laura sat at the small desk by the door and watched Edna work. In some ways, it felt to her as if she were back at the studio, waiting to be called to perform. The job paid her only slightly more than Gardner Brothers had paid for her first contract, three hundred dollars a week. That money, along with the sums contributed by Junior and Florence from their part-time jobs, was enough to pay the hotel maintenance bill on time, almost always.

No matter how much she enjoyed herself at work, the best part about having a job were the days off—Laura had Sunday and Monday to herself, when the shop was closed. Florence had moved into her own apartment, and so Laura had the master bedroom to herself, with a desk against the shared wall that she used to write her letters. Laura missed Harriet terribly, but felt it was rude to intrude too much on her position. She’d left the jackal-faced actress for a director’s family in Malibu, and Laura sent letters on a weekly basis. She called Ginger at the studio, and was put on hold for so long that she hung up. Ginger had Petunia written into the show, and so the two of them were always together, two redheads, the perfect Hollywood family, in
color. Bill had never been as popular with the viewers, and no one seemed to miss him when he left for the ranch life elsewhere. Things were moving in the right direction, the only direction they
could
move. It wasn’t healthy to think too much about the past. All of the good days that Laura had ever had were gone, as were the bad ones. She could think only about the future.

Laura wrote a letter to her mother with all the news she could muster. She wrote that Clara’s two children, Roy and Leslie, were still charming little blondes, and looked straight out of Door County. She asked after Josephine, whom she was more in touch with, but it seemed the polite thing to do. A phone call would have been easier, she supposed, but her mother wasn’t likely to answer, and if she did, she was even less likely to stay on the phone long enough to hear everything that was spilling out of Laura’s mouth. She hadn’t spoken to her mother for more than five minutes at a time since her father’s funeral, but she’d written a dozen letters, each of them pages long. It was almost better that her mother never wrote back—this way Laura could pretend she’d never sent the letters at all, and her mother had never rebuffed her. It was possible that the letters had never existed, but just vanished into thin air as soon as she’d slipped the sealed envelopes through the mailbox slot.

Junior knocked on her bedroom door.

“Hi, sweetie,” Laura said, and pointed to the bed. Junior’s hair was long, tickling his shoulders, and the glasses he wore were the perfectly round ones, like John Lennon’s. Junior’s job was at a natural-food store, where he unpacked boxes of avocados and tomatoes and different kinds of granola. He seemed perfectly content, even when the trucks were late and he had to sit in the store after dark, the smell of carob and sourdough bread clinging to his cotton vest.

“What are you doing?”

“Writing a letter to your grandmother.” Laura signed her name—
Elsa Laura
—and folded the pages, tucking them into the waiting envelope. She gave it a timid lick.

“Isn’t she pretty much an asshole?”

“Junior!”

“Well, isn’t she?” Her son moved a pillow so that it was behind his head, and lay back. He closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them long enough to make sure that Laura was paying attention. Once assured that he had his mother on alert, he curled up into a ball. Laura thought he slept so much because of his headaches—just like that, they’d shown up, the Emerson girls’ worst enemy, as bad as Hildy and her mother had ever had them.

“She is not, and don’t say that word.” Laura narrowed her eyes at her son. “Your grandmother likes to keep things simple. California just didn’t agree with her, that’s all.”

“You mean Dad.” Junior’s feet were bare, and his soles dusty from walking around the house.

“My father loved your father. It’s true that my mother didn’t quite understand him.”

“Because he was a Jew.” Junior sat back up. He took off his glasses, cleaned them with the tail of his shirt, and put them back on. Sometimes he looked so much like his father that it poked a hole straight through Laura’s heart, as precise and deadly as an arrow. Even with the straggly long hair, Irving was right there, staring back at her.

“Because he was older than me. And Jewish. And, I don’t know, different than they expected.”

When she was a little girl, Laura would have conversations with her father in the barn, with him on the stage, or on the benches, and her in the hayloft above him. There was a safety in that, in being able to say whatever she wanted without having to look him in the
eye—just like writing her mother letters that might go unread was easier than calling and having a difficult conversation. Junior wasn’t like that—he wanted to see the expression on his mother’s face when he said something difficult.

“And it wasn’t like that with Clara and Florence’s father.”

“First of all, their father is your father—you know that—but yes. Of course it’s different. It’s very different.” Laura didn’t want to say too much. She didn’t want to say anything at all. She half wanted Junior to forget he’d ever had a father, and herself to forget she’d ever had a husband. It wasn’t that hard to play a part, once you understood the role. Maybe she needed another name, another skin to slip inside. She was a new woman now.

“That’s what I thought,” Junior said, satisfied.

I
t was Laura’s birthday, and at her request, no one was allowed to say the number. The party was at Ginger’s house, and everyone was invited. Clara came over early with Jimmy and the children to help set things up, though of course Ginger had hired people to do everything, and so Clara just mimed helping for a few minutes and then accepted a glass of champagne and sat down. Despite the aforementioned catering, Harriet brought her famous chocolate cake, and Laura cried when she walked through the door, looking slender and beautiful.

“I’m so terribly fat,” Laura said, but she was in truth only a bit rounder than she had been ten years previous.

“You are a drama queen,” Harriet said. “Same as ever.”

Clara scooped a heap of icing off the top of the cake with her finger and plopped it into her mouth before the thing had even been served, and no one said peep.

When Laura married Irving, she thought that he was rich because he was the head of a studio, but when she met Christos she understood that she had not begun to see what money could mean. It wasn’t the studio; it was the city block. It wasn’t the cigarettes; it was the tobacco. It wasn’t the fancy cars; it was the gasoline that powered them. Ginger was like that now, in the stratosphere. And so when Junior’s spiritual guru told him that he should learn how to surf, Ginger offered to close the beach for miles. When Leslie, Clara’s youngest, wanted to paint, live models were brought in for her and Petunia to sketch. There were no limits. Ginger gave Laura’s children what they wanted, and never asked for anything in return. She was their benefactress, except for Laura: Laura would never let Ginger give her a job again, no matter how badly she wanted it. It was more important for her to have a friend.

“This really is something, Mama,” Clara said. She was wearing a royal blue dress made out of some stretchy new material that clung like Scotch tape to her wide hips and large breasts. Laura had a newly critical eye for fabric and cut, but she wouldn’t criticize her daughter, either in public or in private. Clara had had her blond hair curled, and it bounced around her head. Laura didn’t like to think uncharitable thoughts about her daughter. Maybe it was the burden of being first, and always having to be the one to plow forth into uncharted territory. Before Clara, Laura had been a girl herself, and she supposed that some part of her had always blamed her daughters for taking her youth away. It wasn’t a fair thought, and it made Laura sad to think it, but it was true.

“Yes, my dear,” Laura said.

Clara stuffed a cocktail wienie into her mouth. While she was still chewing, she pulled two cigarettes out of her purse and held one toward her mother. Laura shook her head—she’d been trying to stop, especially around the children. But that didn’t stop Clara, who was
clicking open her gold lighter and exhaling smoke over the top of the cake and the rest of the food already laid out on the table. “You know, not all of us are as lucky as you are.”

Lucky
. Laura had never thought of herself as lucky, not since Irving had spoken to her at that party a thousand years ago, not since she’d shed the skin of Elsa Emerson and become this other, more glamorous beast. For that was how she thought of herself: the snake that had lived inside the body of a kitten. What was it for? Laura thought of Hildy, her beautiful sister, the one who should have been adored. It was Hildy who had wanted to be a movie star, whose face had called out for cameras to follow her every move, whose body begged to be watched—even as a teenager! It was so hard to understand that Clara and Florence and even Junior were now all older than Hildy had ever been, and would ever be. Laura was lucky, then; she was lucky to have lived when Hildy had not. She was lucky to have three healthy, beautiful children. And she was lucky that she could get to choose what happened next.

Jimmy was across the buffet table, his blond hair now almost all gone, except for around his ears. He looked like a teenage athlete who had gotten tired and decided to swallow the basketball. “No, my love, you’re the lucky one,” Laura said, and meant it. Jimmy looked up at his wife and winked, piling his plate full of macaroni salad, the love on his face as clear as it was when they were teenagers. Laura squeezed Clara’s elbow. “You really are.”

Clara’s son, Roy, and Petunia threw a football back and forth in the back. There were patio chairs set up in the small grassy area beside the pool, and Laura could see Ginger sitting there, watching the children. It had happened late for Ginger, motherhood. She and Bill hadn’t even been trying; it was too late by all the standard biological markers. Ginger had long since given up on having children of her own, and then, out of nowhere, a baby. It didn’t even matter that she
and Bill had split, or that Ginger worked as much as she did. It was the baby who’d brought Ginger back to her, Laura knew, the baby who’d helped bridge the gap between them. Laura watched Ginger watching the kids, her big red mouth open wide with laughter. Petunia made her happy—it was that simple; she was happy. All of the hard things in her life had prepared her for this happiness with her daughter. She’d been wild; she’d been bad; she’d been famous; she’d been powerful. Now she was this: still funny and so
happy.
Laura thought that if she spent the entire party just looking at Ginger, she might be okay.