L.A.WOMAN by Eve Babitz

nose was scary close up. This was just when Monroe had become a star in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes but I had already seen her in River of No Return nine times and I had a record of her singing “River of No Return” and now she was just right here in the smog before me.
    We emerged from the crowd a half an hour later having watched both her feet in high heels and both her hands cemented. You were able to stare into her cleavage while she smiled. Bombs bursting in air couldn’t have been more like American poetry.
    Shelly and I were too exhausted to speak. I had to take the bus home I was so drained.
    We walked up our street under the chartreuse leaves of the trees and one by one passed the lawns before the one in front of Shelly’s house and everything was quiet and silent, likable but not right of course with Molly standing there ominously.
    â€œYou are never to make my daughter late again,” Molly said. “From now on I’m picking Shelly up from school and if you wish to get a ride home too then very well but I’m not letting Shelly do anything she wants like you, is that clear, Sophie?”
    â€œI didn’t make her late,” I said.
    â€œWe saw Marilyn Monroe,” Shelly said.
    â€œAnother one of those stories,” Molly deduced, yanking her child inside where she could decompress from smog among other bad influences. But, after all, I preferred dawdling down Hollywood Boulevard by myself to going straight home after swimming sensibly and since I wasn’t the one who learned the cello or stood up straight while L.A. stayed the same and Hollywood High got worse, I was prepared.
    Walking home down Hollywood Boulevard past streetslike Cherokee I was already pretty sure Hollywood was doomed long before the smog first killed off all the pepper trees lining the streets north of Hollywood Boulevard, which had created rosy clouds overhead before the smog, but after the smog, well. . . . People in their thirties would shake their heads and sigh, remembering how beautiful things had been before they went downhill.
    People in L.A. just had no real sense of what a true city was, but since I was not prepared for a true city it was hard to imagine what people with real sense were like. Unless they were all like Molly.
    The funny thing was that if anything had ever happened to me I know Molly would have flown to the rescue without a second thought—but luckily she never had to save my life, otherwise I’d never have forgiven her.

E VERY NOW AND THEN my mother and father simultaneously seemed to have a tacit understanding that struck both of them like a bolt from the blue and all of a sudden they would have a party and would instantly telephone the people they were going to invite, and before anybody knew what hit them my mother had amassed so much food that if you opened the icebox the house would collapse because first the tamales tilted over and smashed headlong into the whole slipshod game plan laid out on the kitchen table piled up with too many pots and too many stacks of damp paper wrappings to keep the handmade tortillas fresh in a package of a dozen each, and of course too many tomatoes were toppling around onto whole onions lying all over everything and then packages of jack cheese kind of lay there in rectangles thrown down any which way like meaningless books, and a bulb of garlic would roll out from under the cans of chili my mother used for rellenos because wedecided that chili rellenos were actually better made from canned chilies because fresh ones were intractable and too hard like rock on one end and canned ones were divine, diviner, but once the cans began rolling off the table onto the floor and all the large soup pans came down if they got knocked over by the tamales because someone had tried to open the icebox, then no wonder our entire house would simply end in collapse along with all hopes and dreams glut-onously shaping up for the party, which was