small, sinking, the deadly vortex, your mother a wetback maid for the rich. Into her you must sink, be a fading beauty at twenty, acquiesce to anonymity, live on this earth through the lives of your children, be smoke, not flames. Postpartum blues. You are a woman being removed from the world. Along with her camera Bridgit is carrying a copy of The Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Suzanne. “Are you reading that book, too?” Raquel asks. “Oh, yes! I can’t put it down!” My sister can be chums with anyone. “ My mother gave it to me while I was in the hospital,” Raquel says. “ My mother’s so dumb she thinks because it shows Hollywood in a bad light I won’t want to be a movie star. It just makes me more determined than ever.” “ Me too!” Bridgit exclaims. “ But I can’.t even let my mother see I’m reading it.” They both laugh, talk about some scene or character they love. I’ve never read that book. Someday I must. I’m sure I’ ll learn some basic things that have always escaped me. But I still have the photo my sister took of me and Raquel that night. It’s as important as another one I carry, of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. A detective friend took it on a studio lot about the same time Bridgit took hers. The two famous sex queens are standing in very high heels and very low-cut dresses, facing the camera. Monroe has one arm around Mansfield’s deeply indented waist, the other slid into her enormous left breast. Mansfield has one arm around Monroe’s shoulders and the other plunged up her dress into her crotch. Both blondes are laughing uproariously at the joke, their big joke on the world. They are consummate comedians. When I think of their deaths, Jayne’s like my cousin Bobbie Sue’s, I think they were both murdered. Someone, the government, despite the world’s insistence on the Dumb Blonde, got wind of how smart these women were. And Raquel. In my sister’s photograph you can see the birthing of a person who must become an artist of her own body, personality and being. She is deciding in the very moment to become the world’s most beautiful woman. She will pay any price for this. You can see, any price is worth it. Years later when I can’t remember being the girl this story is about, when the world will have changed so much, I’ ll zip past newstands in supermarkets and drugstores all over Los Angeles, past two or three, sometimes as many as a half-dozen covers of Raquel’s midsection: the famous flaring navel, her trademark, (there was the letter to the editor of Playboy magazine in 1975 celebrating her navel as the most beautiful ever created, bemoaning the fact that no other woman’s belly button could make the writer as horny) the wide- swinged shoulders, the flaming bones of her face. THE MYSTERIOUS RAQUEL. WHO IS RAQUEL WELCH? Photographers know she’s had children from the marks on her famous belly (pregnancies being the cause of her stretched navel) but where the children are, where she has suddenly come from, how old she is, who her husband is will remain manipulated mysteries for years. I will always be sorry she didn’t come on as Raquel Tejada, a name more beautiful than Raquel Welch, but in shooting for Hollywood fame in racist Southern California she obviously had to erase her Latin American heritage, which in fact is Bolivian, not Mexican. Southern Californians consider anything south of San Diego Mexican: In a short and sweet presentation, Miss Congeniality, “ the girl who is easiest to get along with and helps the most,” is awarded to Lily Walker. Then the real announcements begin. By order of placement, the top seven that is, the Queen’s Royal Court and then the Queen. As each name is called a squeal comes from the girl and then the slow dawning that she isn’t Miss Ramona seems to overtake her as she arrives at the front of the room to receive her tiara and sash. Princess Six, Princess Five, Princess Four. When there is only the Queen to be announced and my name has not been called I know she is not me. I look across the faces of the four of us who remain. Diane explodes like a Fourth-of- July firecracker, each successive explosion more beautiful than the last as she jumps, cries out, stumbles ecstatically, tears falling in the spotlights and camera flashes, toward her robe and crown. The band is playing, “Ramona, I hear your mission bells ringing. . . . ” Annie, last year’s Miss Ramona, bawls as she forfeits her crown. The three of us, Ella, Susan and myself, the three of us who have not placed, are just standing here wondering what else is expected of us. Cal Johnson runs up, “ Now girls! Don’t be bad sports. Go up there and congratulate the new Queen and her Court.” Mechanically we start doing as we are told, when Cal grabs my arm. He looks into my eyes. “ Do you realize you came in last. Lash When are you ever going to learn to smile?” I’m bobbing for apples the last church Halloween party at his house, how sexual it is, nose and teeth in the water with the boys’. “And didn’t you promise me you’d have your hair thinned?” “ It’s just that the judges couldn’t see your pretty face, honey,” Cal’s wife is suddenly beside us, she who is The Coffee Merchant ♦ The finest imported coffee beans, teas, chocolates, and beverage brewing accessories. ♦ THE BROADWAY COFFEE MERCHANT 1637 N.E. Broadway • 284-9209 THE HAWTHORNE COFFEE MERCHANT 3562 S.E. Hawthorne • 230-1222
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