L.A.WOMAN by Eve Babitz Page B

seemed to have flared on into the thirties in spite of the Depression and everybody else being so depressed they dressed depressed. Her curly hair was dark blond in those days and her lipstick was Tangee orange.
    In those days she turned out pies by the cloudful, bringing forth enormous lemon meringue specials for my father to indulge in because when you’re Jewish among Jews nobody gives you any pies, especially not lemon meringue, and nobody ever pulled pies out of heaven like my mother did when she was still the best baker on earth, but that was before she encountered Molly and Mitchell Craven, over for dinner the first time, when all my mother made was mere hamburgers and they were such hamburgers from above that Mitchell Craven loudly remarked, “Molly, why don’t you make food like this?”
    My mother never allowed cookbooks or directions to interfere with her impossible dinner parties, stuffing people into that claustrophobic mash of impending roses and ladening the table with more tamales on top of more tacos next to the rellenos and their sauce and everybody was all pink and florid as the roses and laughing insanely because more food just kept being brought forth and nobody could eat one more bite only they did and everybody was ready to be rolled home by dessert which was an Italian Giocino’s cake, a rum cake covered in flowers. We had coffee so strong it enabledpeople to actually rise from the table and manage to unravel themselves out of the space in order to go play Bach quartets, drunkenly smoking cigars and laughing their heads off until it was 11:30 and everybody had to go home until the next bolt.
    My mother’s parties never dropped a stitch and nobody came away wondering what on earth all that rose-petal wallpaper meant. Instead they believed it was what it really was which happened to be gorgeous and as perfect as possible struck like a bolt from the blue forever into their memories.
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    The summer Mitchell Craven got blacklisted and Shelly and I who were only in the third grade and used to walk home from school past the lawns on our block, one by one, beneath the chartreuse trees in June, was the summer the Cravens, not us, got to finally get a TV. But only to watch the people being blacklisted throughout the McCarthy hearings, not to watch Perry Mason which would have been why I would have wanted to have a TV.
    â€œMaybe Daddy’ll never work again,” Shelly used to laugh, bravely (like her mother), “and we’ll have to go to the Poor House. And nobody will come visit us.”
    â€œOh,” I said, “I’ll come visit you every day.”
    â€œMaybe the Poor House is too far away,” Shelly complained.
    â€œMy mother will drive me,” I said.
    â€œYeah,” Shelly brightened, “and she could bring us tuna sandwiches, okay? My mother’s are always the lowest. I wish we could just get my mother to disappear and only have your mother.”
    â€œWhy don’t you poison her?” I suggested.
    â€œYeah,” Shelly said, “but what would we poison her with?”
    â€œIodine,” I said.
    â€œOkay,” Shelly said thoughtfully.
    But we forgot.
    As if being blacklisted wasn’t enough, terrorizing Shelly into two years of the walks to school being occasionally spiked with visions of a Poor House somewhere out on the edge of L.A. where we’d bring her a tuna sandwich, then actual figments of Lillian Hellman’s imagination materialized and began making phone calls to Molly calling her a dirty Commie and anonymously threatening her with scary phone calls from honest real Americans who were proud of their country and therefore if she came and showed her face at the PTA meeting the next Friday, she’d get what she deserved and they were just warning her not to come, for “The PTA don’t allow no reds.”
    â€œOoooooo,” Molly cried, dropping the receiver like a horrible