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Chapter Six

THE THING ABOUT OPHELIA – my cousin who was Goldie’s daughter and when Goldie quit being a dancer once she broke her leg so she married Mad Dog Tim (as I always thought of him), the mild-mannered union organizer who insisted on living in Watts to live among the populace and who insisted on working in the factory with the ordinary mortals, so even though he was often up for promotion he never would say yes because he was determined to be as fucked over as anybody till the day he died – was that she was old-fashioned.

And Ophelia – when her mother married Tim and she found herself at the age of twelve moving to Watts – changed her name from Andrea which it had been so far, making herself the character whose youth was sacrificed because some idiot couldn’t act nice.

Of course, when Ophelia was twelve she looked ten, and she was another one with black wavy hair and big brown eyes and the look of a Russian wolfhound about her when she laughed. And as she grew into puberty, she didn’t look much older because she was always so skinny and so half-crazed-by-anxiety-looking the whole time. Perhaps when she grew up, she might have found herself with a conscience like Lola’s and been able to throw herself into picketing, too, except that she’d been raised in the jaws of Mad Dog Tim and had gotten her youth filled up with Socialist Workers’ Party kids in camp, meetings, and benefits – and Ophelia wasn’t like that.

Whenever Ophelia came over to our house, she took the opportunity to luxuriate.

She luxuriated in the bathtub (because in Watts they only had a shower, even though they lived in a regular house which looked like it ought to have a bath).

In the days when Goldie had danced in New York before she broke her leg, Ophelia had lived there in a flat with cockroaches which made me green with envy. I had no idea until I lived in a flat with cockroaches in New York myself either what a flat was or what a cockroach was, never mind what New York was, and I’d get mad whenever my grand-mother got this weepy catch in her throat and said things like “Oi, poor Andrea, she’s suffered – how she’s suffered!”

Because I always thought, “Suffered! Hah! I don’t even know what a cockroach is!”

My grandparents – especially my grandfather, who liked Andrea (even after she became Ophelia) better than either Bonnie or me, probably because Andrea looked like a Russian Jew whereas Bonnie and I looked like goys with a vengeance – were always giving Ophelia things to assuage her for how much she’d suffered and never giving me anything.

Like I remember one time they gave her a set of pastels, an entire set of every color pastel – fifty or sixty at least – that there ever was, plus a huge pad of paper! My grandfather just gave it to her!

“But darling dear,” my mother would explain, “that’s all she’s got!”

“That’s all I want!” I’d insist.

“But Sophie, you have so many things,” people would try and make me see when I was nine and Ophelia got the pastels, “you have everything.”

“But I want pastels,” I’d point out.

I never believed for a moment that having a lovely home, lovely parents, and a cultural background made up for one single pastel and neither did Ophelia – at least not for the first two or three days after Grandpa gave them to her and she gloated around our house where she was staying over Easter vacation, dusting and polishing each separate crayon of chalk before she laid it down in its proper chronological place in the color spectrum. It made me sick.

And then Ophelia herself, after the fourth day – when she finally sighed with ennui over her still lifes and grew as desperately unsympathetic with them and their possibilities as I myself was about my lovely home, family and other advantages – then, but only then, would she sigh tragically over the books in my father’s bookcase where so much cultural wealth was in evidence, and say, “Oh, Sophie, how I envy you!”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “Then can I use the pastels?”

“No, no,” she gasped, “you’ll ruin them!”

“I’ll kill you,” I shrieked, “I’ll call the police! Mother!”

I’d finally complain to my mother.

“She still won’t let me use them,” I said, “and she isn’t even drawing anymore.”

My mother would look at Andrea and at the pastel box and at me and say, “Why won’t you let her use them, Andrea?”

“Because she’s not old enough, she’ll break them,” Andrea said in her well-modulated voice which sounded reasonable to adults. “They’re just chalk but I want to keep them perfect because they’re all I have. Just chalk!”

“You always get everything and everybody keeps saying it’s all you have,” I cried. “I wish you were dead!”

“So do I sometimes,” Andrea sighed wistfully, moodily all suffering and ready for the next present.

“Well just die then,” I urged her, to my mother’s dismay. “Now why don’t both you girls go for a nice walk down on the Boulevard?” my mother said. “You’ve been inside for too long.”

The Easter vacation when Andrea was still Andrea and got the pastels, we spent the first few days inside the entire time while Andrea amazed Bonnie and me drawing and smudging with her new pastels, which were so delicate and cloudy like a mist of color drifting over the pages that I drooled with desire to be the one smudging and blending those still lifes together. Every shade in the rainbow came out on paper the way cotton candy did only in pink. Cotton candy somehow in every single blue and all the greens, the reds, the yellows, the purples – even the blacks and browns and in-betweens bloomed into puffy clouds that had only till then been pink. And Andrea refused to let me touch one stick at all.

Bonnie and I were stuck making ourselves do with old broken crayons.

But whenever we actually drove to Watts, to 119th Street where the tract homes lined Andrea’s block and they were the only white family anywhere for miles, I realized that pastels were after all only chalk and all Andrea had to live for.

So no wonder whenever she was dropped off to stay with us, she went first to the bookshelves where she trailed her fingertips over the titles which were of novels and plays and art history and all kinds of subjects other than the history of the Russian Revolution by Trotsky or something pertaining to the workers. No wonder she sighed about Salinger and Sartre and Beerbohm and Shaw and Melville and Mark Twain. And no wonder she stood and looked at the drawings my mother hung on the walls, that she herself had done or artist friends or else were reproductions of da Vinci or Picasso or Ernst. And no wonder she would tiptoe into my father’s music room when he left so she could look at his collection of Dixieland 78s and feel she was in the presence of the ultimate sophistication.

And no wonder the way she looked at all we had sometimes made me see that it wasn’t just broken Crayolas after all. But of course I’d forget when she got a new neon pink Orlon sweater from Ohrbach’s which didn’t strike me as fair.

Andrea herself, most of the time when we were teenagers or children, seemed to pass through life like a pastel cloud smudged and blended into her surroundings. The quality of her voice became more reasonable too.

“I’m really an orphan,” she would explain to me. “My parents were the king and queen and when I grow up, I’m going to become the princess. That’s who I really am.”

“Really?” I asked, although I believed whatever Andrea told me without question since Andrea never lied and I was only ten.

“That’s right,” she said.

“Well, I always knew you didn’t belong living in Watts,” I agreed. “You’d be much more at home in your own castle. On your own throne. With lots and lots of gold and jewels and chocolate cake.”

“And my own library,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“And lots and lots of jazz musicians,” she added, “not just records. To play just for me.”

Since having musicians right there playing where I lived was what I grew up with, I preferred chocolate cake. They always let Andrea have all the chocolate cake she wanted, whereas Bonnie and I were stuck because all we had were advantages.