Marilyn Monroe, Veronica Lake, Jean Harlow — beautiful Marilyn Monroe, sexy, sweet Marilyn Monroe — Lana Turner, Carroll Baker, Dorothy Lamour in a sarong — these women populated my grandfather’s thoughts. In America there are blonde women. In America everyone has a big car, a Cadillac or a DeSoto or a Lincoln, with fins, with wings. They are the biggest and the fastest and the most beautiful cars that have ever been made, and the blonde women sit next to you in them. The windows arc rolled down and music plays on the radio. Everyone smokes cigarettes.
No one worries about cancer yet; no one wears seat belts. They cannot help this feeling: that no matter what they do, how fast the drive, nothing can hurt them. They are indestructible. This is America. Everyone will have a job. There will be plenty of money. They will bounce back when hit. Everything will be fine. When they are lonely or sad, they can call up the blonde women on the telephone and go for a ride.
My mother was not the blonde my grandfather wanted. She tied her hair back, kept her legs covered by pants, rarely smiled or spoke; still, all remarked to Sarkis what a beauty she was. He nodded proudly but received no joy from it anymore; it was not a true pride. She could not be pushed. She would not fulfill the dream.
California in those days was a long way to go, especially for a poor man. A movie filled with the stars of the day must have been playing in my grandfather’s head, maybe hospital scenes spliced between the dance numbers, as he packed the car and coaxed my mother out of the shadows of the sick house.
“There is always sun there, my little songbird. You will never be cold again.”
She was only ten then; by the time they reached Hollywood, she was eleven. She would be a child star, he thought, bigger than Shirley Temple, bigger than Judy Garland.
“Where are the bighorn sheep?” my mother must have demanded, looking out the window of the car. “Where are the carpets of flowers?” she wondered
And this got Sarkis to thinking. In America it was true, anything was possible. In America even he could have a beautiful baby. In America, and the thought came out whole as he drove home from work one late night, you can make movie stars.
My grandfather, a weaver in a silk mill in Paterson, New Jersey, could not afford his wife’s hospital bills. He must have lived in terror of them. He worked night and day, two and sometimes three shifts, and still it was not enough. I would like to think that it was this specific terror that made my grandfather’s dark eyes, darting around the house for something to sell for money, rest on my mother asleep in her crib. In America you can make movie stars, he thought, and at six months a baby can make diaper commercials. Beautiful babies could make money just for being beautiful. This is a good country, he thought, as his sick wife called him from the other room.
“A good country,” he said to his wife, Alice, and in desperation one wintry day he took the baby from her crib without Alice knowing and brought her to the commercial studios in New York City where photographers posed her in diapers, in other mothers’ arms — posed her in front of fields of flowers, backdrops of spring. “My sweet little silkworm,” he purred.
I hope my mother found comfort in the notion that perhaps she had prolonged her own mother’s life a little, that she provided her with a nurse when she needed one, that the medicine was always there, the tank of oxygen, the wav to the hospital. I hope she believed this and not the darker things which it undeniably suggested about her father. Diapers turned to pinafores. She did it for years.
As my mother grew more and more lovely, more radiant with each day, my grandfather’s plans for her grew, too. He dreamed she might be a beauty queen one day and took her every year as a little girl to the Convention I fall in Atlantic Citv, that cake of a building, to watch those hopeful women strut down the lighted runways: laurels and crowns; banners and bounce; red, w hite, and blue; Miss America.
“Look at Miss Mississippi,” my grandfather would say, nudging her. “Oh, Miss Horida, you’re breaking mv heart,” he shouted. “They’re like racehorses,” he sighed, “thoroughbreds.”
But mv mother, grow n out of pinafores, stepped back, awav from the toothy grin, the larger than life. My grandfather did not understand. Watching her walk onto the beach off the boardwalk, he shouted for her to come back, but it made my mother, only seven years old, walk faster and faster. As she ran in the sand, my grandfather dreamed her into a Rockette. He pictured the long line of women she would be a part of, lifting their legs in beautiful unison.
“That is my daughter,” he said, pointing to Christine who stood where the ocean met the beach. “One day you will see her in the Rockettes.” My mother turned to see him pointing at her and ran faster along the edge of the sea, kicking as she went — a different sort of dancer.
What was wrong with Christine? Silently, Sarkis blamed his wife. “You did not talk to her enough when she was in the womb,” he thought. “That’s why all this fuss about books, the need for so many stories. You were too weak, and it sapped the joy from her heart. You were too sick and it brought her inconsolable sadness.” Nearly immediately Sarkis regretted even thinking this, but it was too late; he could not call the thought back.
Marilyn Monroe, Veronica Lake, Jean Harlow — beautiful Marilyn Monroe, sexy, sweet Marilyn Monroe — Lana Turner, Carroll Baker, Dorothy Lamour in a sarong — these women populated my grandfather’s thoughts. In America there are blonde women. In America everyone has a big car, a Cadillac or a DeSoto or a Lincoln, with fins, with wings. They are the biggest and the fastest and the most beautiful cars that have ever been made, and the blonde women sit next to you in them. The windows are rolled down and music plays on the radio. Everyone smokes cigarettes.
No one worries about cancer yet; no one wears seat belts. They cannot help this feeling: that no matter what they do, how fast they drive, nothing can hurt them. They are indestructible. This is America. Everyone will have a job. There will be plenty of money. They will bounce back when hit. Everything will be fine. When they are lonely or sad, they can call up the blonde women on the telephone and go for a ride.
My mother was not the blonde my grandfather wanted. She tied her hair back, kept her legs covered by pants, rarely smiled or spoke; still, all remarked to Sarkis what a beauty she was. He nodded proudly but received no joy from it anymore; it was not a true pride. She could not be pushed. She would not fulfill the dream.
California in those days was a long way to go, especially for a poor man. A movie filled with the stars of the day must have been playing in my grandfather’s head, maybe hospital scenes spliced between the dance numbers, as he packed the car and coaxed my mother out of the shadows of the sick house.
“There is always sun there, my little songbird. You will never be cold again.”
She was only ten then; by the time they reached Hollywood, she was eleven. She would be a child star, he thought, bigger than Shirley Temple, bigger than Judy Garland.
“Where are the bighorn sheep?” my mother must have demanded, looking out the window of the car. “Where are the carpets of flowers?” she wondered as they walked into MGM for her screen test. Having been powdered and crinolined, perfumed and curled, all at great expense, she looked exactly like a movie star and Grandpa Sarkis swelled with pride. “Where are the bighorn sheep?” she asked as the camera rolled, and she began to cry. Having held it in across the entire United States she could not stop.