L.A.WOMAN by Eve Babitz Page A

why everybody stayed out of the kitchen and left my mother alone to contend with the icebox door since it was her party and all her parties were struck by the same bolt streaking through the tacit understanding from the beginning to the impossible-for-anything-to-go-wrong ending.
    But of course it was impossible for anything to go right about my mother’s crammed parties because when we moved into the house in Hollywood when I was five, the little dining room just right for four people perhaps had been relentlessly wallpapered with gigantic roses in overblown pink which were woven in a trellis of gray all enlivened by green leaves much too large like the roses which were five or six inches across. The pink petals flopped like they were swooning over true romance and nobody but my mother would have allowed that wallpaper to remain in her home defiling her walls and being in such questionable taste that maybe she herself might be from Texas after all, maybe people in fact looking at that wallpaper would become unsure my mother was really a saint and perhaps she was simply an impossible person like Elmer Gantry passing herself off as an innocent dainty miracle but really just a vulgar shiksa like my grandmother had deduced all along, a nobody who’d just used her feminine wiles to catch the sensitive genius my father was believed to embody in those circles because nobody could get to first base with him, the girls died for him, he never even threw them down on their backs carelesslyand used them for his own lust like men did in those days when they only wanted one thing and my father was not even willing to endure their company long enough to get the one thing and then wish he hadn’t. Not like Sam Glanzrock.
    â€œI came,” Sam Glanzrock used to announce, “where’s my shirt?”
    â€œYou mean, ‘I came, where’s my shirt?’ was what he actually told them?” I asked Lola.
    â€œIt was his eyes,” Lola remembered, “his eyes were that gray. That gray he could say anything and look at you and you quick ran and got him his shirt.”
    â€œWhat color gray does that?” I asked.
    â€œAll I remember,” Lola said, “is that that gray in his eyes was why you’d get him his shirt.”
    â€œBut gray . . . ,” I dubiously grumbled.
    â€œBut that gray,” Lola explained so I’d never forget. “Don’t think you know everything because you’re from Hollywood. After all you’re only eighteen.”
    (I was seventeen, but it didn’t matter, I was from Hollywood and I was positive I knew everything and gray eyes were not included in what I knew.)
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    Half the girls seemed to want my father to give them a tumble and then drop them so they could experience that pain of life like Anna Karenina, though he probably was too conceited to slum around riffraff hoi polloi he probably thought dancers were, while the other half decided any genius so sensitive simply could not dally with just anybody unless it was true love because after all he was a violinist and a man who played the violin was simply inviolate with sensitivity and no woman on earth was probably good enough for such a dashing tormented figure.
    Only suddenly walking down the street one day my Aunt Helen told me, “There was Eugenia, dressed like a flapper,you know, the cutest thing with those little feet she had, her dress was silk and it had flowers all over it and she was wearing real flowers right in her hair—real ones. . . . Oh, I didn’t think my dumb brother had sense enough to ever find a . . . a daffodil like your mother but your mother didn’t seem to mind him, you know? And she was smart too. And she still didn’t mind him. And she was wearing yellow shoes. Yellow! Ohhhhh, with little heels, what an adorable darling thing she was.”
    I could imagine her flapping down the street, her flapper look