L.A.WOMAN by Eve Babitz Read Free Book Online Page A

friendshipsurvived Lola’s politics and Estelle’s lack of them. And since Lola’s radicalism was for The Cause—The Cause being the overthrowing of oppressors known as pigs by the splinter groups, groups Lola and Luther, her black second husband, the present one, were not in now. They were now outsiders from everything because Luther hoped to unite them and attempted to bridge differences and turn splinter groups from hating each other into one large mass of leftists packing clout—Luther was accused of being a tool of the pigs and The Man and got his ceiling filled with bullet holes at lunch. But Lola nevertheless believed the radical ideal that anyone not overthrowing the oppressors was an oppressor by default. And that people who did nothing were going to be sorry after the revolution.
    Yet even today I bet Lola’s and Estelle’s blackened eyelashes and hideous caked little eyelash brushes never ever once rinsed off—they just built until finally, in the end, they were tossed into the trash, forgotten, while a new cake of Maybelline began life, spit and eyelashes were caked blackly, the way Lola and Estelle made sure they were. For Lola and Estelle at seventy still weren’t about to settle for one of those new eyelash wands that claimed to make your eyelashes separate and natural and not clotted into bunches and totally unnatural, old-fashioned, and not really nice. But Lola and Estelle at seventy still knew that not really nice, unnaturally blackened eyelashes were good enough for Theda Bara and certainly good enough to steal other women’s husbands right out from under them. Other women who didn’t wear black mascara and who were confident that the natural look that had blasted its way into being all the rage and forced old-fashioned lipsticks in red and purple to lose their power. And natural flesh tones were unequal to the power they’d gotten from being new. Like natural eyelashes and women who allowed their hair to just go gray without doing something, anything—depending on thenatural look to keep their beds filled with men—were blaming men for everything. When Lola’s and Estelle’s beds were nice and warm. Because their eyelashes were risqué and not nice, just the way men liked them.
    Knowledge as primal as Lola’s and Estelle’s could, I think, have bridged the gap—the deepening gap crevassing between them and all their differences—on the sheer force of the way things really are, which was never ever about men liking gray hair or nature.
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    It must have been the day I was in San Francisco to see Lola when the woman downstairs with two children who was thirty-two years old came over to tell Lola she’d joined a women’s group.
    â€œHow sickening,” Lola volunteered, looking up from the photo album we were always looking through.
    â€œBut we are oppressed,” the girl named Joanne said, full of oppressed rage.
    â€œHow awful,” Lola went on.
    â€œAnd in our group we are going to learn to have an orgasm. To learn about our own bodies,” Joanne marched on further. “To free ourselves from our oppressors.”
    â€œThat’s just awful.” Lola’s widening eyes comprehended what she’d just heard. “You mean you have never had an orgasm, you’re going to a women’s group to learn? All of you? On the floor? Like the Hollywood School for Girls.”
    â€œWhere’s that? Hollywood? Well, I went to a Catholic school with nuns and we never even took our clothes all off to bathe. . . . So! It’s time to free ourselves from our oppressors. Today was my first group consciousness-raising session.”
    â€œWhere’s Dale?” Lola asked. Joanne’s husband was Dale.
    â€œOh,” Joanne said, “he left. He left when he found out I was going to tell people I had never come. He got mad. He said it was a reflection on him. He