Hollywood
1931
Sally
“Don’t talk to strangers,” Daddy said when he hoisted me onto the train that moonless night back in Iowa. “Don’t trust anyone who doesn’t look like you or talk like you. You got that?” I nodded. He kept going: “And don’t act like a girl. You always make the wrong choice. Next time, whatever you’re about to do, do the opposite.”
My mother kissed my forehead and said only two words: “Be good.”
Over the next few months, I found Daddy’s advice a lot easier to follow. This afternoon, for example, I was standing at Franklin and Gower because Fountain and Vine was where I was going to stand. There isn’t really an opposite to Fountain and Vine, but I thought anywhere but my first choice was probably safe. Me? Well, I tell everyone I’m sixteen and small for my age, but really, I’m eleven. I know my clothes look like I got ’em off a scarecrow who had a few rough winters. I try to keep ’em nice, I do. Yeah, someone stole my shoes. It’s funny to be sweating in February—another upside-down thing about California. I probably should have moved to the other side of the street where there was shade.
My stomach was rumbling like a cement mixer, but I ignored it. How did I get there? I walked. Oh, you want to know how did I get there, like the whole shebang? Well, Daddy lost his job and the price of corn went into the basement and then Ma and Daddy didn’t have any more money to buy food and then the well went dry and Ma got sick and there’s five of us kids so they put me—the oldest—on a train and told me to find work and send money. That’s what happened. No, I didn’t cry. Neither did they—by that point, it was pretty clear crying wasn’t going to change anything. What was the trip like? Well, I could tell you some stories that’d put hair on your derriere, as Daddy used to say, but the main thing to know was that there was other kids on the train, and all of us helped each other steer clear of the bulls—that’s the railroad police and they carry clubs and they use ’em—all the way to Los Angeles. “There’s plenty to eat in California.” That’s what everyone said.
That part turned out to be true, though of course there was a catch, like there always is. My jaw hit the floor when I saw those huge orchards. Seemed like a miracle after the dusty, dry farmland and dead trees I’d watched go by from the trains. Don’t stick your legs out of the train door, by the way, or you’ll get yanked off by them signal levers. But you couldn’t get to the oranges and grapefruits and the fields of tomatoes, onions, and grapes. Men with guns and dogs chased us away. “Can barely feed ourselves,” they said. “Keep moving. Go home.” I offered to work and I meant it, but they laughed. I asked for work everywhere. I got nothing but no’s. I had a standard answer for anyone who asked where my parents were: “Over there,” I’d say confidently, thumb pointing over my right shoulder. Was I scared? Yes and no. I’d never been in a big city. Back home we don’t have electricity, heat, or piped water in the house. I’d never seen so many different flavors of people, not to mention all the tall buildings, streetlights that went on like magic, and so many cars. Apartments fascinated me. I walked along the streets at night looking up at the lighted windows, home upon home stacked on top of each other. I’d peep into the windows of Zukor’s, with all those fluffy chiffon dresses, and slide quietly into the marble Perfume Hall at Bullock’s just to sniff something good for a change. I loved the fancy columns, gold paint, and velvet seats of the movie palaces—I guess you could say every day was like the movie marquee that said TERROR AND DELIGHT. Terror and delight. Yeah, I was scared but also curious, lonely but never alone. There was no one telling me what to do, no rules except to find something to put into my belly.
That brings us to today. Was walking along Ivar, I think it was, and saw a flash of purple through the slats of a tall fence. Purple’s my favorite color, you see. I shimmied up a tree to get a better look and saw a big green yard. The coast was clear, so I dropped over that fence. My toes sank into the cool, deep grass. It was paradise—and only a few feet from that griddle of a sidewalk. There was a cute little blue wood house, like a dollhouse made big. A tall tree gave shade and the leaves whiffled and whooshed lightly in the breeze. A lounge chair was covered with plump, flowered, fringed cushions with a book on ’em. A Little Princess. Never read that one. Next to the book was an apple. Red. Shiny. Bite already out of it. Who bites into an apple and walks away from it? I heard a screen door creak and then slam. A girl my own age stared at me with saucer eyes. She was so … clean. Even though she was a stranger, I decided to talk to her.
“Hi,” I said. “Do you like Charlie Chaplin? I just love him. He makes me laugh and laugh. Can I finish your apple if you’re not gonna?” I did my best Chaplin imitation and waddled toward the table with the apple on it.
The pigtailed girl opened her mouth and started screaming, half in fear, half in rage, “A hobo! A hobo’s in the yard! A bum!”
I wanted to punch her right in the nose.
Footsteps clattered inside the house.
The apple or the flowers? It took two seconds to leap into the flower bed, yank a handful of flowers out of the ground, and vault back over the fence. I tell you, I didn’t stop running for a mile. Listened for footsteps the whole time.
So that’s how I came to be standing on this street corner, offering droopy purple flowers to passing cars, still thinking about the apple, how it would have crunched in my mouth, the way the tang of it would have made spit shoot up over my teeth. Daddy was right. Shoulda picked the apple.
I’m watching as the light turns red and green and red again, and the cars move and stop and move again like cows heading for the barn, and I approach a black car and just tap a little on the window. I hold up the flowers and smile. The lady inside looks away and hides behind her hat like I’m not there. I move to the next car. A man rolls the window down and growls at me to get lost. I stick my tongue out at him. Wrong choice. He opens the door and reaches for me, but the light changes and the cars move and I run back to the curb.
The flowers are pretty sad now. It’s gonna get dark soon. I hate the night.
The light turns red again and the cars stop. I hold out the flowers and paste on my best smile and say, “Pretty flowers for your love on Valentine’s! Get your Valentine some flowers!” and step off the curb.
“Hey!” I hear a voice. I turn and there’s a cop coming down the sidewalk. Charlie Chaplin’s scared of cops, and so am I. “Hey, kid,” he says, “I wanna talk to you.” I seen this happen to other kids and grown-ups too, hard fingers closing around a skinny arm. They disappear into paddy wagons and you never see ’em again.
I should run from this copper. That’s what I was thinking. I was really tired, really hungry. But maybe that was the wrong choice.
The light changes and the cars begin to move. I feel like my feet are rooted into the ground. The brass buttons on the copper’s dark-blue uniform sparkle in the sunlight. The copper grabs. I slip out of his meat hooks and run to a huge gleaming red Pierce-Arrow with a tan top and white sidewall tires that’s just started moving. I jump onto the running boards, open the back door, and hurl myself inside.
Siena, Italy
1931
Lapo
Lapo put down the heavy black telephone receiver. They had the only phone in the area. It had cost a fortune to run the line from the nearest exchange just outside Siena through dense forests full of wild boars and giant porcupines and across mosquito-infested swamps to Belsederino, the half-ruined castle he’d bought on a whim. The phone line was physical proof of his fears about moving his American bride to this remote, abandoned property far from everywhere on twisted mountain roads. He’d hoped that slim black wire and its connection to the larger world would keep her happy in this wild place. The whole endeavor was also financial folly, a two-thousand-acre property that hadn’t been farmed in a hundred years. A short time after the real estate deal closed, he had run through all the money his father had left him without making a dent in the work needed to make the place fertile and profitable.
“What’s the matter?” asked Eleanor in English. The day he met her in Florence, she was little more than a girl, a lost tourist in a summer dress with lemons on it. Now she wore tall rubber boots and a pair of his pants held up with baling twine. Somehow, she still looked impossibly gorgeous, though he had to admit the scent of pig manure was at this moment overpowering her French perfume.
“Niente,” he said. “Nothing.” They did this a lot, carrying on one conversation in two languages. When he looked at her, his heart actually hurt, he loved her so much. “Just Giorgio,” he said.
“Your book agent?” Her profile in the fading light was aquiline, her long neck accentuated by her bobbed hair. She still looked like that girl to him, though twelve years had passed since their wedding, and she was now mother to their three children. He had taken this beautiful exotic bird and caged her here in his castle using nothing but bonds of love, like a real-life Papageno. He felt terrible—she deserved a better life, the life of luxury and ease she was born to in Chicago, not the life of a farmer’s wife in a foreign country, hanging frozen diapers by the fireplace in what was little more than an unheated pile of rocks miles from the nearest town.
“What did he say? Did he have news?”
He nodded but didn’t elaborate. A couple of years ago, Lapo had published It’s a Dolce Vita, a novel that was a thinly veiled diary of his and Eleanor’s adventures restoring their run-down property. The comic story of a prosperous Florentine ex-playboy trying to convince the obstreperous Sienese peasants to embrace modern farming techniques, and inevitably getting his comeuppance by falling into pigpens, getting knocked over by sheep, and being stepped on by oxen, was a big hit. His favorite chapter was the scenting contest at a truffle festival, which went awry when a gruff gamekeeper’s tame turkey beat the prize hound of the province’s richest man, upsetting the local social order. It’s a Dolce Vita was a mild success that at least gave them some cash to keep going on the endless renovations of the six falling-down farmhouses that, along with the thousand-year-old castle, made up the Belsederino estate. Though he’d been writing on the side since his school days, Lapo had never won a single literary prize, or really expected to. He wrote to transport people to a pleasant landscape where nothing too awful would happen. And to pay the bills, which multiplied faster than the rabbits who consistently ate anything they tried to grow. He hadn’t told Eleanor the bank was threatening to foreclose. He couldn’t bear to.
“What? Tell me.” She sank down next to the sleeping Labrador on the sofa.
He felt if he said it out loud, it would be real. If he said nothing, it would fade away like a puff of smoke. And maybe it was just a puff of smoke. Maybe it was nothing. “Mussolini just said in a radio interview that Dolce Vita is his favorite book.”
Eleanor’s eyes widened. “Mussolini. As in Benito Mussolini?”
“Our Beloved Leader.”
She jumped up. “Oh, my goodness! That’s wonderful.” She threw her arms around him, and the manure scent got stronger.
“Is it?” he said into her shoulder.
“Of course it is. It’s amazing publicity. It’ll be a number one bestseller. Congratulations!” She kissed his cheek.
“But.”
“No buts. You always do this. Something good happens and you turn it into something to worry about instead of celebrate. You do that thing.”
“What thing?” He knew exactly what she was talking about. A silly old superstition to ward off evil.
“This thing.” She raised her index and little finger and made the sign of the horns.
He grabbed her fingers. “The horns always go down, otherwise it’s unlucky. Caspita.”
She laughed and said, “This calls for a celebration.” She trotted out of the room, and he could hear her boots making the loose tiles clatter in the hallway. The floors shook and sighed in every wind. Maybe if the book did sell well, they could replace the beams, fix the broken windows instead of taping them. She returned with a bottle of wine, two glasses, and a corkscrew.
Lapo was staring out the window at the farmyard below them, where some chickens pecked at the dirt. Maybe they could fence the far pasture, maybe even try grapes in that field on the hill. Dig a new well instead of the one that produced salty, brackish water. “I suppose he’s done some good.”
“He’s done tons of good. I mean, the malaria rates have dropped way down. That’s a lot of lives saved. He’s given this country a sense of pride again. Roosevelt loves him, apparently.”
Lapo frowned. “But the violence…”
“He’s not responsible for everything his supporters do. They love him.”
“They worship him.”
She moved a stack of past-due notices on the table out of the way and set down the glasses. “They’re a little overly loyal.”
“It’s not healthy for the country. People should be able to disagree peacefully. We’re not Neanderthals.”
She worked the corkscrew until there was a satisfying pop. The wine gurgled as she filled two glasses with their own red. “Listen, tonight we’re celebrating.”
He managed to crack a small grin. “We might finally be able to afford all the things other people already have. Like indoor plumbing.”
He loved her so much. He always worried she would awaken from her spell of love, realize she was married to a balding, middle-aged Italian who was a middling writer and a hopeless farmer, and walk away from this godforsaken place like any sane woman would have done years ago.
She raised a glass. “To you. And to wild luxuries like flush toilets.”
He raised his glass. “To Dolce Vita.” He sipped the wine. It wasn’t terrible. With some French oak casks, they might even be able to age it properly and sell it abroad. “I wonder if he’s really read it,” he said.
“Does it matter?”
Behind his back, Lapo made the sign of the horns.
Hollywood
1931
Sally
I may as well have hurled myself onto another planet. I landed in the lap of Patsy Chen—yes, that Patsy Chen—who was on her way home from a frustrating day auditioning for a movie called Dragon’s Lair, a murder mystery. Later I found out she’d wanted the lead, the brainy wife of the detective, but instead was cast in the role she always played: the evil seductress. Or better yet, the evil attempted seductress: she didn’t have to read the script to know that Madame Wong would try to woo the handsome detective but fail and be exposed as a murderous viper.
The red quilted-leather interior of the Pierce-Arrow looked to my panicked eyes like the inside of a casket. I was still clutching my wilted flowers, speechless with terror at the sight of Patsy’s black bobbed hair and sharp row of bangs, arched and plucked eyebrows, those oval eyes lined in black, and her crimson mouth, all set against that famous white-powdered face.
“Are you afraid of me?” she demanded.
I sure was.
“Why? Why are you afraid of me?”
I was too scared to even utter a squeak.
“If you tell me why, I will let you go. If you don’t tell me why, I will … eat you!”
Patsy sounded more impatient than hungry, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I swallowed twice, then found my words.
“You’re Mrs. Fu Manchu!”
There was a long pause as palm trees zipped past the window when I thought for sure she would force poison down my throat or throw me to her dragon, but instead Patsy started laughing. She sat back in the red seat of the Pierce-Arrow and laughed and laughed. I didn’t peg it for a happy laughter, more of an “I knew that cow was going to kick me” kind of laughter. “Where do you want to be dropped off? Where do you live?”
I smiled my best smile and said in my sweetest voice, “I love flowers. Do you like flowers? Which ones are your favorites? Mine are those horn-shaped ones. I don’t know what they’re called, but they’re so pretty. Someday I’m going to live in a house covered with them.”
“Tecoma alata. Flaming bells. That’s what they’re called. My house is covered in them.”
“You don’t talk like Mrs. Fu Manchu.”
Copyright © 2023 by Christina Lynch
