Literacy and Longing in L. A. (4 page)

The Wasteland

“I read much of the night and go south in the winter.”

~
T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)
The Waste Land, “The Burial of the Dead” ~

I
pull into my apartment building and one of four uniformed valets takes my car. The ads for this place describe it as L.A.’s only month-to-month, ultra-luxury high-rise oceanfront residence. They say it’s comparable to the finest five-star hotel, but I say it’s assisted living for the socially impaired. It’s certainly one of the first places West L.A. people think of when they get divorced and can’t figure out where to go for that sticky in-between time. I moved in a year ago, furnished it from Ikea (except for my antique iron bed), and haven’t had the energy or motivation to look for more suitable quarters. It was supposed to be temporary, like a brief vacation, but somehow inertia set in, not to mention getting seduced by the embarrassing number of amenities. Everything I hate to do is taken care of, including picking up my laundry, parking my car, carrying up the groceries, and reconnecting me to the Internet when my computer freezes up. There’s even a concierge that makes dinner reservations and arranges travel. So here I am in a place that grates on me every time I pull into the palatial circular driveway and walk through the marble entry. Oh well, maybe just a few more months.

Victor the Doorman greets me, “Hey Dora, how ya doin’? Your sister’s upstairs.”

My first thought is “Oh Christ, I don’t have the energy for this right now.” My sister, Virginia, drops by whenever her baby, Camille, is driving her crazy, which seems to be every other minute lately. Virginia is three years older than me and it took years of fertility treatments to have this baby. Right now there are sleep issues (like I don’t have any) and lately she’s been throwing the baby in the car, driving around, and ending up at my place.

As I walk through the door, the enormous amount of paraphernalia that my sister carries around with her is strewn all over the living room and the phone is ringing. My sister ignores it while trying to comfort her screaming, overtired child. She looks even more disheveled than usual and there is a large greasy spot in the middle of her stretched-out T-shirt. Virginia and I look so different that people always react with suspicion when we tell them we’re sisters. She is five foot two with olive skin and dark, inquisitive eyes. When she smiles, you can still see that one of her front teeth is slightly chipped, the result of the accident on the bridge years ago. You’d think she would’ve at least had the tooth capped, but she’s always made a point of saying looks aren’t important.

She’s let her hair go gray and when I tell her that she looks ten years older because of it, she argues that her girlfriends think her hair is a beautiful shade of silver. One should never rely on girlfriends for things like this. They tend to try to make you feel good. You should always rely on sisters, who tell you the awful truth no matter how bad it makes you feel. Then there is the issue of her weight. I wouldn’t say that she’s fat, but she’s a size 12, which in this part of town is considered politically incorrect, right up there with smoking, drinking, and eating desserts. It doesn’t help that sizes in the Beverly Hills stores start at 0 and usually end at 8. I must say that when I travel, it amazes me how much heavier everyone is. What seems normal in L.A. is anorexic anywhere else.

My sister avoids the shopping problem by sticking to oversized sweats decorated with animal decals, glitter, or rhinestones. I don’t comment on her wardrobe anymore. I’ve learned it’s easier to just shut up about it.

The baby’s shrieks are reaching fever pitch and the phone is still ringing. I pick her up and walk to the balcony so we can both look at the ocean. Camille releases a series of weak little staccato sighs and curls into me. I can feel her whole body relax.

In the midst of all this chaos, Virginia answers the phone. It’s my mother. Perfect timing. Why can’t we be like normal families and never talk to each other?

“Hi, Mom. Wait a minute. I’ll give you Dora.” I can hear my mother’s strong, stern voice still talking as Virginia gives me the phone and takes Camille. Mother is obviously annoyed. “Who’s this? Dora? Where’s Virginia? Am I disturbing you?”

“No, Mom. It’s okay,” I lie. “What’s up?”

“Well, the answer is ‘roast pig.’ It’s the subject of one of Charles Lamb’s most famous essays. Does it fit?”

For a moment I can’t figure out what she is talking about, but then I remember I was struggling with that crossword clue for two nights and finally couldn’t stand it anymore. I usually call Virginia when I feel like cheating because she used to do the
New York Times
Sunday crossword puzzle in about an hour and then cheerfully tell me how easy it was. But lately, with Camille, she’s so frazzled it’s a waste. So I called my mom, who doesn’t have Virginia’s graduate degree in the classics, but is the most avid reader of your basic moldy classics that I know and sometimes has an answer.

“Gee, Mom, that’s great. I knew you’d get it, you’re…” The baby is now howling so loud in the background that I can’t hear myself talk. “I’ll call you later, okay?”

“You know, your sister doesn’t know how to deal with that child. When you kids were babies—”

“Mom, I gotta go, okay? I’ll call you later.”

Virginia places Camille in her Portacrib in my bedroom and shuts the door. I look at her in disbelief. “What are you doing?”

“Well, she hasn’t slept a wink today and she is so strung out that I can’t stand it. Dr. Friedman says I just have to bite the bullet and let her cry it out or she’ll never get on a schedule and Andy and I will be walking zombies for the rest of our lives.”

“Not that I’m an expert, but Dr. Friedman isn’t here listening to the screaming, and maybe if you just held her and rocked her she’d nod off. I can’t stand it when she wails.” We look at each other and rush into the bedroom.

It always ends like this when Virginia comes over. I give her my opinion, which then gives her permission to do what she wants, which is to comfort the baby. It all seems so simple. But then I’m not there at two in the morning. Virginia rocks Camille, who eventually conks out, and we immediately hit the white wine and cheese. It’s at this point that Virginia says something sweet about her husband, Andy, a Ph.D. in psychology and an expert on aging (how depressing), who treats his wife with undying respect (she’s the one with the trust fund). It’s one of those marriages where there’s only the two of them, and, of course, now Camille. She gave up her job teaching Latin at a preppy boarding school to move out here with him and they’ve been happily married most of my adult life, something that neither my mother nor I could ever achieve.

Sometimes when we’re sitting together like this, the baby asleep, the afternoon clouds closing in, I flash on our tumultuous lives as kids. Mother was always recovering from her two-martini cocktail hour, which started at three in the afternoon and ended several hours after dinner, which she often missed, and Father popped in and out of our lives in a series of long separations.

I still have dreams about him that give Ginny and me a good laugh. He’s been abducted by evil aliens like Meg’s father in
A Wrinkle in Time,
kidnapped by terrorists, taken against his will, forced to leave us, but unlike Odysseus, he never braved the Fates to come home.

Growing up, my father was intimidating and demanding, but those qualities were tempered by an irresistible charisma. At dinner parties, he dominated the conversation and charmed all the women—he was always the star. My mother tolerated his celestial aura but would frequently describe him by repeating Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s quote about her father, Teddy: “He wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.”

My father was all that my mother wasn’t—maybe that was the attraction. And he loved to have a good time. She disapproved of the circus, the zoo, amusement parks, and even Christmas. And he relished those things. So she’d stay home while we’d all climb in his Seville and come home hours later, the car trashed with cotton candy sticks, Cracker Jacks, shriveled balloons, and the remains of whatever fast food we’d eaten.

But these idyllic days were rare. When he lived with us, he was either at the office or traveling to some exotic land, chasing down the latest woven chenille or ornate Aubusson, which he produced on hundreds of looms around the world. The owner of a textile mill, he was a self-made tycoon—absent six days a week and asleep on the couch on the seventh, lulled by the constant drone of the Phillies games. His fortunes rose and fell with the price of goods, but he managed to leave us each a modest trust fund, which Virginia tells me, at the rate I’m going, I’ve got maybe five years of left.

In those days, dinner was usually something the housekeeper would put in the oven at three in the afternoon and we’d take out whenever my father came home from work. During the meal, he would cover up my mother’s absences with games of twenty questions and “What in the World?” My brilliant sister would always excel in the current events category. She gobbled up every newspaper she could get her hands on, and before I could stumble onto the answer, she’d grin and throw it out in a stage whisper. But when it came to literature, I was the master. One night, I remember him asking us to quote something from a classic family saga. He was expecting something from
The Swiss Family Robinson
or
Little Women,
but the first thing that popped into my head was Lady Bracknell’s response to hearing that Jack had lost both his parents. “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
^*
It was a competition of sorts, but we both basked in his sense of pride and his undivided attention.

Long after the dishes were cleared, Mother would come floating downstairs, giving me a lovely smile and rummaging through the shelves for a can of Campbell’s soup or kidney beans. There were periods, however, when she was glorious. She had a long, patrician nose and dark, wavy, lustrous hair swept back with diamond-studded tortoiseshell combs and hairpins. When we were in grade school she would announce her own schedule of holidays and we would take turns skipping school. We’d go downtown to the Philadelphia Museum of Art or to a concert with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra and then to the Crystal Tea Room at Wanamaker’s department store, where we’d get cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off and rice pudding. We were her little pets for the day, and she’d buy us ribbons, hair clips, or a new pair of shoes.

On weekends, we went to the library, where I’d roam around bored and restless while my mother would sink into a cubicle and hunker down for what seemed like hours. She was a masterful reader and, next to gin, it was the most important thing in her life. It was of paramount importance to her that I read too and often she’d say to me, “No matter what happens to you, Dora, you can always pick up a book,” in the way I imagined other mothers would comfort their daughters with words of endearment. Or at the very least, advise them to get off the couch and do something.

Incidentally, it’s no accident that my mother named me Dora. I don’t tell many people, but Dora is short for Eudora Welty, one of my mother’s idols. It all sounds so, well, bookish, but at the time, my mother identified with Welty’s voracious literary appetites and used to proudly tell me that she and Welty had the same literary background, from Chaucer and Virgil to Yeats, Matthew Arnold, and Virginia Woolf (guess who was named after her). I think she also admired Welty’s intensely private persona and secretly envied the fact that she was an independent, eccentric woman who gloried in books and her camellia garden and was quite content to live alone.

Some biographers claim that Welty’s mother was so obsessed with books that she once rushed into a burning house not to save the children, but to save a set of valuable Dickens volumes. I don’t think my mother would go to that extreme, but she certainly admired the single-mindedness of it all. Anyway, Welty was said to be genteel and straightforward and that’s the way my mother usually comes across.

After my father left for good, my mother stopped doing much of anything and the locked-bedroom-door incidents grew longer. We were never quite sure if she was reading, recovering, sleeping, or drinking. During this period, Virginia became the caretaker: shopping, cooking, tidying up; while I mimicked my mother’s retreat to the only safe harbor I knew, my books.

We’ve become even closer since she moved to L.A. I look at her sitting on my white wicker rocker. The sun is just about to plop into the ocean, my favorite time. She smiles at me.

“Thanks for the rescue. It’s so peaceful here, I hate to leave. Plus, as soon as I walk in the door, Andy is on me to help type his Alzheimer’s speech. He’s such a pain.”

This is my favorite subject and I’m rolling. “Why doesn’t he just hire someone? He can afford it. Why do husbands take their smart wives and turn them into secretaries?”

Virginia laughs. “Tolstoy’s wife copied
War and Peace
in longhand three times.”

“No offense, Virginia, but Andy isn’t Tolstoy.”

“Oh well, Dora. What can I say? Do you want to come over for dinner? Andy’s probably home wondering which bridge I drove off of.” (We give each other a knowing look—and laugh.)

“I can’t,” I lie. “Meeting some friends.”

“Oh, who?”

“Just some old friends from work.”

“I know a nice guy. Friend of Andy’s.”

As if that would be an asset. “No thanks.”

“You know, Dora, L.A. isn’t like New York. You have to make an effort here. You can’t just walk into a bar on East Fifty-seventh Street and start talking to your neighbors. It’s not that kind of town.”

“And what? You want me to join a dating service? Go on the Internet? I’d rather shoot myself. Anyway, I’m not looking” (except at the bookstore, but no need to mention that here). “I’m fine.” Even to me, I sound defensive.

“You’re turning into a hermit. Even Andy says so.”