Amy Bloom: Lucky Us

Things are really changing around here.

THIS WAS AS FAR AS I GOT. I’D STARTED A DOZEN LETTERS TO HIM and ripped them up and walked them to the corner trash can, while our landlady watched. I don’t know why I wrote at all. I didn’t expect my father to rescue me. I didn’t think I needed rescuing. It seemed to me that if you had to have a mother who’d dropped you off like a bag of dirty laundry and a father who was not above stealing from you (or your sister), you were pretty lucky to have that same sister take you to Hollywood and wash your underpants with hers and share her sandwiches with you. Mrs. Gruber, our landlady and handyman, was excellent company for me when Iris was working. Mrs. Gruber condemned the fraudulence and the trickery of Hollywood but she knew, from personal experience, that some of that stuff was necessary for survival. She would say to me, Your sister will not be crushed by life, and we must admire that. Mrs. Gruber’s own apartment was filled with duct tape and wrenches and half-pipes and wire coils. She wasn’t much of a housekeeper. I thought she was a good cook, of the fried-egg-and-cheese-sandwich variety, which was what the two of us ate together every day. Mrs. Gruber had asked me about school and I told her the truth, that I loved the books and hated the kids, and she said she understood. She said she spoke four languages and had left school in the sixth grade. Where I come from, she said, six years is plenty. If you can read Turgenev, you’re educated.

Mrs. Gruber loved President Roosevelt as much as my father and I did. She worried all the time that someone would assassinate him, until the warm day in December when the Japs bombed us at Pearl Harbor and President Roosevelt declared war on this date which will live in infamy. Mrs. Gruber and I sat still, and when it was over, we cried and read up on Japan in her encyclopedia. When we finished the article, Mrs. Gruber said, We must be glad. Mrs. Gruber said no one would hurt the president now because we needed him. She said she remembered when Republicans compared President Roosevelt to Hitler and to Stalin and to Mussolini. She said she used to see people wearing I HATE ELEANOR buttons walk past her on the sidewalk and she wanted to spit, she wanted to kill them. When she was a young person just arrived in this country, Mrs. Gruber said she would cry from rage and frustration, because she couldn’t kill the people she wanted to kill. Sometimes, she said, men, who were often the people she wanted to kill, would misunderstand and try to comfort her.

So, we got no more of those hateful buttons, she said, but it’s too bad — what’s going to happen to Japanese people, here and in their own country? She said President Roosevelt was nobody’s fool. Mrs. Gruber took her nap at two o’clock. I loosened her corset and shut her bedroom door. I read First Love or turned down the radio a little and listened to Fibber McGee and Molly or looked through Mrs. Gruber’s old letters and photographs, which were mostly in another language. In one photograph, she’s standing next to a short, wide man who has the Gruber nose and they’re both wearing cowboy hats and chaps. Ah, she said when she woke up, we were getting ready for America.

IRIS GOT A CONTRACT. She had sung and shown her profile and her legs at every talent show in Hollywood and her screen test was a wow, she said, and now she was an MGM artist. She said that she’d be speaking lines before the month was out and she said we could move. I’d made Iris walk downstairs to Mrs. Gruber’s to announce her contract and our improved circumstances and to celebrate with Mrs. Gruber’s crème de menthe, which I knew we would have to do. Mrs. Gruber handed us each one of her three gold-stemmed liqueur glasses and sighed.

“You don’t look happy for us,” I said.

Iris finished her drink and examined her nails. She never had any trouble keeping her mouth shut. Plus, I could see she was done with the Hollywood Plaza. Mrs. Gruber had been tops, in her own frowzy, grumpy, foreign way but we were moving on to a nice one-bedroom at the Firenze Gardens on Sunset, and Greer Garson had said, Hello, dear, to Iris the second day on the set. The director had put Iris at the front of the crowd of girls walking down the sidewalk. Iris had pushed her hat forward a little and popped her collar, and after, the dresser said, Nice touch. For Iris, Mrs. Gruber was pretty much yesterday’s egg sandwich.

Mrs. Gruber said that happiness was not something she aspired to, that when we had seen as much of the world as she had, we would know that what lies right behind the horseshit is not a prize pony, my dears, it’s more horseshit. Iris smiled and stood up. She straightened her stockings and hugged Mrs. Gruber. Thanks for being so good to Eva, she said.

ONCE WE LEFT MRS. GRUBER’S, I had no one to talk to. I made up sequels to the books I’d read: David Copperfield and his wife and three kids, living at the seaside; Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester and their progressive boarding school for the blind.

It was still winter, but in Los Angeles the days seemed longer than at home. Iris was gone twelve hours a day. There were no old people and no children at the Firenze Gardens. I waited until three o’clock every day and went to the library, and after, I walked through the park with books on my hip, like a regular kid. I read through the lives of Joan of Arc (three versions, including George Bernard Shaw’s, in which Joan seemed to me to be exactly the kind of bold, goofy girl you’d want for a best friend, voices or no voices) and Marie Curie, who seemed kind of crazy and noble in the same way. I read the biographies of Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale, and even in the books written for little girls, you could tell these women were so tough they’d take a bullet out of you with a fork and not blink.

The Firenze Gardens was much nicer than the old place, every apartment with its own toilet and a big and a little courtyard in the back, where people lay out on beach chairs. Once I lay in a beach chair too, in my shorts and blouse. I tied up my hair with a big bandanna and tried to look like a child actress, while I read about the great nurses. A real actress came over and said, firmly, that that was her chair and would I mind, and I avoided the big courtyard after that. Most of the people were up-and-coming actors, like Iris, working at Fox or MGM all day, with no interest in a flat-chested girl with glasses who wasn’t in the business. I ate dinner whenever Iris got home, and sometimes she brought back sandwiches and cookies from the commissary, which sounded like heaven on earth to me. I would make Iris tell me everything that happened, on and off the set. For about a month, she went to makeup and costume in the morning and then she played a girl reading the newspaper in the bus station, then a girl in the bakery, handing out loaves of bread and making change, then a girl pushing a baby carriage down Main Street. After a few weeks, it was just as she said. The director from the bakery scene noticed how she did her hair (“Hair up, blouse down,” Iris said) and he gave her a couple of lines, way ahead of the girls who’d started when she did. In the morning, I helped Iris pick out her outfit and talked about who she might see, and who might talk to her (“I don’t just say, ‘What’s up, kiddo,’ ” Iris said. “I wait. And I’m helpful.”), and she would practice saying her one line a bunch of different ways. Iris saw Miss Garson kiss Clark Gable. Harpo Marx patted Iris on the fanny and she ate cheeseburgers with pickles and relish (“Never any onions,” she said, “because of the close-ups.”) with women dressed like mermaids, who had to eat standing up, with their feet sticking out behind their tails, in sparkling green ballet slippers. Iris told me all the gossip that the hair stylists told her. The hairdressers told everybody everybody’s business. Iris told me about Francisco Diego, who was the head of makeup and never gossiped about anyone. Francisco told Iris that she had not gone unnoticed and one time, after he did Lana Turner, he put Iris in his chair and did her face the same way. She had to wipe it off before she went back on set but everyone stood around her chair and Francisco gave her a brush and a jar of Ben Nye’s special-blend face powder, for herself, for when she was shiny. When she had a day off, Iris put the Ben Nye powder on my face and a little red lipstick and the two of us went out for waffles. There was a high school about six blocks from Firenze Gardens and Iris and I steered clear.