Free Enter Helen by Brooke Hauser

Helen described her Arkansas relatives as hillbillies who peed in the woods, she wasn’t thinking of Rosemary, with her lush dark hair and dreamy hooded eyes. Helen called her the Beautiful Princess.
    Lou also thought her mother was a natural beauty, but Helen was more glamorous. No one in the family understood why Helen considered herself unattractive, but Lou thought maybe it had something to do with living in California, the land of the gorgeous—all those girls with their blond hair and tans. Lou had blond hair and a bit of a tan herself from riding horses back home, but she also wore glasses. Her mother had bought her the frames, a pretty pale blue with tiny gemstones on the sides.

    Norma Lou, photographed in 1962, the year she came to visit Helen and David in California. ( Family photograph courtesy of Norma Lou Honderich. )
    Lou was wearing her glasses and a new travel suit when Helen picked her up at the shuttle stop downtown. She had made sure to pack her Brownie box camera in preparation for her trip, but nothing could have prepared her for the culture shock. From the moment she stepped into Helen’s Mercedes-Benz, she felt a long way from home, a feeling that further sank in as they drove to Pacific Palisades. Along the way, they stopped at an outdoor market so Helen could buy some big lemon leaves and flowers for the house, which to Lou’s eyes seemed more like a European villa. Helen told her that an entire Asian family took care of the terraced garden.
    And then there was Lou’s room, next to the library downstairs. It was spectacular, with arched ceilings and huge windows forming a semicircle of glass. Lou looked out at her view and felt suddenly overwhelmed. She’d never seen the ocean before.
    She didn’t want to be a bad houseguest, but a couple of days into her trip, Lou began to tear up unexpectedly. She had a hard time hiding her puffy eyes from Helen, as much as she tried. She missed her parents and her home—the farthest she’d ever traveled alone before was to her grandmother’s house and Girl Scouts camp, forty-five minutes away.
    â€œDo you think you might possibly be homesick?” Helen asked her that weekend. “David and I have been talking, and we think you need to get out of the house.”
    Helen knew that Lou loved horses, so she and David took her to the Will Rogers Polo Club to see a polo match, and afterward they went out to eat. Helen also knew that Lou went to church on Sundays, so she brought her to a service at a beautiful Methodist church, even though David was Jewish and she never went. “I won’t pretend that we go to church,” Helen told Lou. “I know that you go to church, and it might be fun to go someplace different.”
    Now that she’d finalized the film rights to Sex and the Single Girl , Helen wanted to celebrate, so she sought Lou out again one morning over breakfast.
    â€œWe’re going to go shopping!” Helen said.
    â€œWhat are you going to get?” Lou asked.
    â€œOh,” Helen said, “let’s shop for you.”
    Helen had seen Lou’s clothes. Other than her travel suit, Lou had sewn almost every piece of clothing she’d packed in her suitcase. After breakfast, they drove to the village shopping district to look around. As Helen parked her Mercedes, she suggested that they find Lou a new dress.
    â€œWell, I’ve got two dresses,” Lou said, admiring the lacquered cars lining the streets. She had packed both of her homemade shirtwaists for the trip and had chosen the light blue one for their outing.
    â€œYou know, a girl can always have more than two dresses,” Helen said, walking toward the stucco buildings.
    They went into one shop, a small, minimalist boutique. Glancing around the store, Lou felt uneasy. There were no racks of clothes—just a dress here and there on a form. She wondered where they kept the rest. They left after about a minute, and