Free L.A.WOMAN by Eve Babitz Page B

across the room just like she said she would—once all of a sudden Sour Lake, Texas, came into things like ‘Ah’m gonna slam yew cleah ’cross thees heah room, kid, ri’ up the side yo head, now you heah?’ ” I’d mimic, “and before I could duck, there I’d be. Clear across the room landing against the wall.”
    â€œThe wall?” they’d ask. “Your mother?”
    â€œWith my mother if she knocked someone, the only way you were ever about to stop just about was if you got to a wall.”
    â€œYour mother?”
    â€œOf course, she would never do it unless she was sure you’d land against a wall. I mean, after all she is a saint you know.”
    â€œAfter all . . .”
    The only thing I’ve ever come across in nature that captured her spirit or did her the least justice, almost the way Giotto portrayed St. Francis and showed us the way to understand the whole picture, was when I was reading this book on snakes and discovered one called the black mamba. The black mamba, unlike my mother, lives in the West Indies. However, he whirls on his victim, chasing an entire horse going sixty miles an hour for just one bite. One bite from a black mamba can drop a horse dead in his tracks, the snake’s venom is so deadly no grace period is allowed for heroic actions by men of destiny. The picture proposed by my brief brush with the awful image of a snake that goes sixty miles an hour to fell a horse made me nostalgic suddenly for the way my mother used to whirl into foul words in Southern hisses which warn too late of what is to happenonce the perfect saint in all divine grace and beauty decided to knock me clear across a room like she said she would before I could escape, landing me against the far wall with one bite of her hand, felled by my mysteriously perfect mother who, unlike the black mamba who is of the Elapidae family which includes the cobra, lived in L.A.

M Y SISTER AND I began referring to our parents as Them the year we went to Paris and they went to Germany when we were actually separated from Them months on end.
    The passion my father had been born into by growing up practicing violin in order to win the gold medal away from Lola had been broadened in Europe, where for two years he studied with a real master. In those two years he wised up, knew who the newest composers were, learned to play Stravinsky and what atonal music was supposed to be. The time we were in Paris was when they were hoping to see Sam Glanzrock (where he made his last two films on a Guggenheim grant) and missed him by one day in fact.
    In the pictures Sam took of them on their honeymoon, they had hitchhiked up to San Francisco and were staying with Sam and Lola in Haight-Ashbury before the fall. In the photograph my mother looks like she’s about to throw up and my father with his wavy black hair and mustache looks perfectly demure now that he has wrested my mother from her marriage to Pietro.
    He is sitting demurely with his hand on her knee. Her knee is encased in a rayon stocking. The stocking is held up by a garter belt but the garter belt is kept together by a large safety pin. Like all her clothes, it is too small and her waist just way too large because now she is five months pregnant,one week married, eight days divorced, and all she wants to do is just throw up.
    My father wore clothes like one of those English movie stars with mustaches and voices like rose petals, though my father’s mustache made his look much handsomer than theirs. His voice was more like nasturtium petals, some petals that grew only where it was always a little too hot. My father’s passions for Trotsky, the violin, and my mother were always a little too hot, too.
    For my sister and me after Paris, they were always whom we meant by Them.

T HE FIRST MOVIE I saw was Bambi and naturally I had to be removed from the theater before fifteen minutes had gone by since I was