Amy Bloom: Lucky Us

IT WAS THE DAY before Labor Day and hot and there were no contests anywhere and no party to get ready for. Iris and I walked down to Paradise Lake, the big pond at the edge of Windsor College. I dragged my feet to make dust devils. Iris took off her shoes and socks and put her feet in the water. She lit a cigarette and I lay down next to her. Iris took two beers out of her bag and I took out last week’s Screen magazine.

“There’s your heartthrob, Paulette Goddard,” she said. “I can do what she does.”

I thought Iris probably could. I kept watch for my father while Iris smoked, her eyes closed.

“Let’s get wet,” Iris said, and I ran back to my room to look for my bathing suit. My father was on his knees in my closet, one hand on my black party shoe.

“I thought you girls were down at the pond.”

“I have to change,” I said. “Iris’s already down there. She brought her suit with her.”

“Your sister plans ahead,” he said. “You are more hey-nonny-nonny.”

He tucked my shoe back into the closet and stood up, smiling a little absently, the way he did at breakfast, when I was talking while he was reading.

When I told Iris she said, “That sonofabitch. You have to do what I tell you.”

I said I would, whatever it was.

IRIS AND I PRACTICED going up and down the honeysuckle trellis in the dark. My job was lookout. Iris packed her best outfits and makeup and the necessaries for me. She said we’d buy new clothes when we got to Hollywood. She said, What looks great in Windsor won’t cut the mustard in Hollywood. Neither of us had really thought about new clothes for me, or where I’d go to school. I was going into twelfth grade, I looked eleven, and I’d skipped two grades already. If you asked either of us, we would have said that I needed more education like a cat needs more fur. Iris made sure we could carry our bags and purses without help; she said she could just picture the kind of wiseguys who would offer to give us a hand and that if she ever went to the ladies’ room by herself for five minutes, I’d probably just hand over all our worldly possessions to some boob. I told Iris that no matter what my shortcomings, it’d still be better for her to have me along. I said I’d wear my glasses all the time and I’d wear the white anklets that I hated, and people would admire her like crazy for taking care of her sad-sack little sister. Men won’t be asking you out all the time because they don’t want to be saddled with me, I said. Old people will buy us meals.

It was exactly like I said. Iris threw her jacket over me when we got on the bus, and I slept for hours at a time, curled up with my head in Iris’s lap, trying to look lovable and needy and keep my skirt tucked down over my knees, even when no one could see me. I hoped Iris was glad she hadn’t left me in Ohio. It was sixty hours from Ohio to the Hollywood Plaza Hotel, which Iris found for us in the Windsor library’s Guide to California, 1941.

WE WALKED FROM THE bus station to the Hollywood Plaza Hotel and Iris told me about hotels. She’d stayed at one in Chicago, with her mother. They’d gone for a weekend with her mother’s sorority sisters and their daughters and they all had a big luncheon in the hotel, in a private dining room, with pink silk walls. They’d had shrimp cocktail and lobster Newburg and Shirley Temples. A doorman in a uniform had taken their suitcases. Iris and her mother called up for room service the first night. A man in a suit wheeled in a little table, full of china plates with silver domes. As Iris and her mother sat in pink armchairs, the man whisked away the domes and laid their napkins in their laps. The butter was shaped like rosebuds. After a chicken dinner and baked Alaska, Iris and her mother put on their nightgowns and robes, pulled back the curtains that the maid had closed, and watched the city lights.

The Hollywood Plaza was nothing like that hotel. It was a two-story concrete u shape, with chipped red roof tiles and the saddest little brown bush in the middle of the courtyard, where the weedy concrete paths split off to two short wings. An older lady stuck her head out of the window. Gruber, she said. First floor.

Iris finished eating her candy bar and wiped her hands on my plaid skirt. She spit into her handkerchief and wiped my face, which I absolutely hated. “Let’s shake a leg,” she said.

7 Queensberry Place

South Kensington, London

September 1946

Dear Eva,

I’ve been thinking about you. My show closed last night. I was good, if not great, and a bunch of us working girls and a few sweet old queens went out for Champagne and oysters. The war may be over, but you can by no means get everything you want here (a decent steak still requires more than I can manage). Happily, oysters from the north are no problem. As I am tipping one down my throat, who do I see but Mrs. Gruber, not in her housedress and broken loafers but in a blue taffeta dress and matching pumps, holding a pink gin. I almost choke. As it turns out, of course it’s not Mrs. Gruber — who might be dead by now and whom I can’t imagine ever leaving the Hollywood Plaza, let alone Hollywood. It was just Arlene Harrington, a producer’s wife, with a diamond brooch the size of the Chrysler Building, and I did not say to her, My goodness, you look like my long-suffering, extremely plain, possibly dead Jewish landlady.

Do you ever think about Mrs. Gruber? As soon as she stuck her head out the window you skittered up to her, breathless and shy, the way you never actually were, and offered up the bus story about our late papa and brave mama and our languishing mid-western fortune. I can’t imagine she believed you but she liked you and she didn’t mind me. She took our money before she handed me the key. One tiny room with two beds, a half-fridge and a two-burner stovetop and the bathroom down the hall. I’ve seen worse — so have you, I imagine — but back then, it was the worst place I’d ever been. I knew we would have to struggle when we got to Hollywood but I’d thought it would be a struggle like in the movies: five girls in a couple of rooms, everyone putting their hair up in curlers and cleaning their faces with Pond’s and giggling when the hall phone rang and it was someone’s sweetheart. There was no hall phone and the whole time we were there, I never saw another person besides Mrs. Gruber. I found a dead mouse in the corner when we moved in and when you walked past, I gave it a little kick under the stove and I hope you never saw it.

Those three months were hard, but you were a trouper. You kept the apartment nice and you made dinner on a dime. Do you remember, I’d spill out my tips and we’d make piles, pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and weren’t we tickled when there was a half-dollar. I still remember that night at The Derby. I did “You Are My Sunshine” and I knew I’d nailed it. I could tell. You thought so too, although you were such a little Doubting Thomas, you didn’t want to go for dinner until I was signed with MGM. And then Mr. Freed called and you wore my old blue dress and I got a new one and a real pair of heels and we went to Tubby’s for steak. Six months, five movies, three speaking parts: Passing Through, Something Special, Evening Romance. (Do you remember the Nile-green silk nightie Harpo sent me? Still have it.)

Someone once said: God gave us memory, so we could have roses in December. Someone did not add, So we could have blizzards in June and food poisoning when there was nothing to eat.

Please write to me.

Iris

North Vine Street

Hollywood

January 4, 1942

Dear Dad,