Lola Bensky

by Lily Brett

  ‘I did the things I always did,’ said Mama Cass. ‘I worked, I recorded, I went out, I had lots of friends over.’

  ‘You took acid five times when you were pregnant?’ Lola said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mama Cass. ‘Five times. I don’t feel I hurt my daughter in any way. I think you know instinctively what you can do. I just continued doing what I was doing before I was pregnant.’

  Lola wondered if Mama Cass had continued smoking joints and snorting cocaine. Probably, she thought. Mama Cass was very emphatic about not having changed any part of her life.

  ‘I gave birth to a very healthy little girl,’ Mama Cass said.

  ‘I know,’ said Lola. ‘I’ve heard she’s beautiful.’

  Mama Cass shifted around in her chair. ‘Does being fat disturb you?’ she said to Lola. ‘You’re not as fat as I am. I know that.’

  ‘I’m very fat,’ said Lola.

  ‘Not as fat as I am,’ said Mama Cass.

  ‘You’ve just had a baby,’ Lola said. She couldn’t believe she was arguing with Mama Cass about who was fatter than whom.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ said Mama Cass. ‘I was this big before I got pregnant.’

  ‘Does being fat disturb you?’ Mama Cass said again.

  ‘It must disturb me,’ said Lola. ‘I’m always planning a diet, or going on a diet, or breaking a diet. The fact that I’m fat drives my mother crazy. She plans all sorts of remedies for me. And issues all sorts of threats. And enlists her friends to harangue me about being fat.’

  ‘Being fat sets you apart,’ said Mama Cass. ‘You know you’re not like everyone else.’

  ‘It does shut you out,’ said Lola.

  ‘So does being famous,’ said Mama Cass. ‘When you’re famous, you really don’t get to know people any more. Everyone wants you to like them, to be their best friend, so they show you the best parts of themselves and you don’t ever see who they really are.’

  Renia was always emphasising how you couldn’t ever really know who people were. ‘You will never know what people are capable of doing,’ she would say. Lola knew that Renia knew. And that she, herself, never would know. Lola often wished she could erase that knowledge from Renia’s memory. She wished she could just wish it away. It was depressing to Lola that wishes didn’t work.

  ‘At least I don’t get perfect strangers taunting me,’ Mama Cass said. ‘When I worked as a waitress I’d have people call out things like, “Hey, Fatty, you forgot our orders – or did you eat them all yourself?”’

  ‘It sounds funny now,’ said Lola. ‘But I know it can’t have been funny then.’

  ‘I was a thin child and not a very good eater until my sister was born when I was seven,’ Mama Cass said. ‘I’d been an only child for seven years and I think sharing my parents wasn’t easy for me. I think I thought that I would please my parents by eating well. And I just didn’t stop. By the time I was seventeen, I weighed 180 pounds. Also, my grandmother who’d lived in poverty in Poland loved feeding everyone,’ Mama Cass said. ‘But no one else got fat.’

  ‘My parents are from Poland,’ Lola said. ‘From Lodz.’

  ‘Were you born there?’ said Mama Cass.

  ‘No,’ said Lola. ‘I was born in Germany. But I’m not German,’ she added. ‘I was born after the war.’

  ‘Were your parents in a camp?’ said Mama Cass.

  ‘Yes, they were in Auschwitz,’ Lola said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Mama Cass.

  ‘So am I,’ said Lola.

  ‘My parents took in refugees from Poland and Germany and Russia during the war,’ said Mama Cass.

  ‘The refugees must have got out just in time before it became impossible to leave,’ said Lola.

  ‘They did,’ said Mama Cass. ‘Most of them never saw their families again. I picked up Polish, German and Russian by listening to them.’

  Lola wondered if Mama Cass had also picked up Yiddish. There was something comforting about Yiddish, Lola thought. It was the language of a time when Renia had probably been happy and still had her parents and her siblings, and still thought that she was going to become a paediatrician.

  Lola had her favourite Yiddish words, which she sometimes repeated to herself. They were Fardrayt and Farblondjet, both of which meant confused, disoriented, not sound of mind. And Faflekt, which meant stained or dirtied, and Narish, which just meant stupid or foolish. If you said them together it sounded fabulous. Fardrayt, Faflekt un Narish, confused, stained and foolish. The words always made her laugh. She decided not to ask Mama Cass if she could speak Yiddish. Too much of the conversation had already been about being fat or being Jewish.

  ‘My grandfather, my mother’s father, was a tailor and a cantor in Poland,’ Mama Cass said.

  ‘So he could sing, too,’ said Lola.

  ‘He had a beautiful voice,’ said Mama Cass. ‘Everyone in the family was musical. We sang and harmonised together. My father’s father, who came from Russia, would teach each of us our harmony parts and then he would conduct the whole family. I remember singing harmony when I was three or four years old.’

  That sounded like a blissfully idyllic picture of family life to Lola. Renia and Edek would have thought she was crazy if she’d suggested they all sing together. Lola tried to imagine the three of them singing together. Even in her imagination she couldn’t even place them all in the same room, let alone have them burst into song. Renia was always darting about. She could never stand still. She was always moving, cooking, polishing, scrubbing, cleaning. And Edek, when he wasn’t working or driving the car, was sitting in his armchair buried in the plot of one of his luridly bloody books of detective fiction. Singing would have seemed like an act of lunacy.

  ‘Did you complain when your sister was born?’ Lola asked Mama Cass.

  ‘No,’ said Mama Cass. ‘It wouldn’t have occurred to me. We didn’t talk about feelings. We were very close. My parents were committed socialists and we discussed politics a lot, but not feelings. Feelings were something that were supposed to be kept to yourself.’

  Maybe the Cohen family life wasn’t quite as idyllic as it seemed, despite the singing, Lola thought. ‘Were your parents upset when you said you wanted to go into show business?’ said Lola.

  ‘They weren’t pleased,’ said Mama Cass. ‘But they knew I was crazy about Broadway musicals and they let me move from Baltimore, where I’d grown up, to New York.

  ‘I narrowly missed out on getting the part of Miss Marmelstein in the musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale,’ said Mama Cass. ‘The part went to Barbra Streisand, who was as unknown as I was. I was too fat. Although Barbra Streisand, whose looks are not the standard acceptable version of female beauty, was an unconventional choice. I would have been an even more unconventional choice.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Lola.

  ‘I’m still annoyed,’ said Mama Cass.

  ‘Your parents must have been impressed that you almost got the part,’ Lola said.

  ‘Not really,’ said Mama Cass. ‘I was working as a hat-check girl and they thought I’d never make any money. My father was the second youngest of eleven children. Several of his brothers became doctors but my father wanted to be an opera singer, and when that didn’t work out he began the first of a series of catering business ventures. He went bankrupt ten times when I was young. He didn’t live long enough to see how rich I was going to be. He died, after a car accident. He was forty-two.’

  ‘That’s so sad,’ said Lola.

  ‘It is sad,’ said Mama Cass. ‘My father was a very charming, very easygoing man. He knew I wanted to be famous and he didn’t ever say to me that that would be impossible.’

  ‘Did you always want to be famous?’ Lola said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mama Cass, nodding her head with enthusiasm, the excitement of her early dreams still evident on her face. ‘I wanted to wear fabulous evening gowns and be on a stage.’

  ‘I wanted to be thin,’ said Lola. She felt embarrassed at the narrow scope of her
ambition.

  ‘I used to tell people that I was going to be the most famous fat girl who ever lived,’ Mama Cass said. ‘And I am.’

  She was right, Lola thought. Lola couldn’t think of another fat female who was as famous as Mama Cass.

  ‘I’m fat and I’m famous,’ said Mama Cass. ‘I weighed myself after I had my daughter and I weighed three hundred pounds. What do you weigh?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lola. ‘I’m too nervous to weigh myself. I gauge whether I’m putting on weight or not by how tight or loose my clothes are. They’re getting tighter at the moment.’

  ‘It’s not easy being fat,’ Mama Cass said. ‘John thought I was too fat to be in the group. The three of them were skinny and then there was me. Not even my fingers are skinny.’ She paused. ‘But then he heard my voice,’ she said. There was something odd about the way she said that, Lola thought.

  ‘John and I are both Virgos,’ Mama Cass said. ‘That could have been part of the problem, too.’

  ‘I’m a Virgo, too,’ said Lola. ‘Not that I believe in astrology.’

  ‘I don’t either,’ said Mama Cass. ‘I don’t think that was part of the problem. When you’re fat, people find it easier to be rude to you, unless, of course, you’re rich and famous.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Lola. ‘Someone stopped me in the street in New York to ask me why I was fat.’

  Mama Cass laughed. ‘That’s one of the things I like about New York,’ she said. ‘People are so much more direct. They’re direct about everything. Your clothes, your hair, your politics. John is direct. He tells me I should have my own record label, which I could call Fat Records. The ads, he points out to me, could read Another obese release from Fat. I know that’s funny, but it’s not really funny. He also keeps saying that my eyes are really close together.’

  ‘Your eyes don’t look any closer together than anyone else’s eyes,’ said Lola.

  ‘I don’t really care what he says,’ said Mama Cass. ‘I’m used to it.’ Mama Cass looked a bit tired. As though all the slurs and slights and jokes had taken a toll.

  ‘What sort of diet are you on?’ Lola asked Mama Cass.

  ‘I haven’t been on it for long,’ Mama Cass said. ‘I fast for four days of the week, usually Monday to Thursday. I have nothing but water. On the other three days I have a cup of cottage cheese in the morning and steak and green vegetables or an apple for dinner.’

  ‘That’s a very strict diet,’ said Lola.

  ‘I plan to include some more food, gradually,’ said Mama Cass. ‘But I want to stick to a thousand calories a day.’

  ‘I could talk calories with you for days,’ said Lola. ‘I’m a walking encyclopaedia of calorie values. It’s a bit sad.’

  ‘I’m tired of being fat,’ said Mama Cass. ‘I’m tired of having my friends tell me that every man I go out with is only interested in my fame or my money.’ Mama Cass did look tired. ‘It’s as though most people I know who think I am great to hang out with and have fun with think that I am too fat for anyone to want to be my lover or to fall in love with me,’ Mama Cass said.

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ said Lola.

  In Monterey, Lola had only seen the side of Mama Cass that was cheerful, generous, enthusiastic and excited. Lola felt bad. She thought she must have brought out Mama Cass’s sadness.

  The studio apartment Lola had rented had a small courtyard near the front of the building. Half-a-dozen people were sitting in the courtyard smoking joints. To Lola, it seemed as though everyone in LA was smoking pot. Well, maybe not everyone. The people working in the nine banks she’d been to in an effort to locate her money didn’t look as though they were smoking pot. But here, on Sunset Strip, the air was dense with marijuana. Lola went into the apartment to write a postcard to Renia.

  Roger Daltrey’s line from The Who’s ‘My Generation’ about hoping to die before he got old was going round and round in Lola’s head. She couldn’t get rid of it. She tried humming ‘Humpty Dumpty’, a previously irritating tune that had stayed in her head for days but which she thought would be preferable to thinking about dying before she got old. It didn’t work.

  Lola had had enough of death. She had grown up with the dead ricocheting around her head. She didn’t want The Who’s lyric to join the chorus. What if there was a God and he took the lyric seriously? Lola didn’t want to die. Especially before she got old.

  Renia wanted to die after the war. She had tried to kill herself. She had walked to the middle of a bridge, somewhere in Germany, and tried to jump off. She couldn’t swim. She knew she would drown pretty quickly. She knew her parents and brothers and sisters were dead. Drowning didn’t seem a bad option. But she couldn’t jump, she told Lola, until she found out whether Edek was alive.

  Lola was sure that Renia often wished she had died. ‘Why did I live?’ Renia used to say to Lola when Lola was small. ‘Why did I live and they died?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lola would sometimes say.

  ‘I also don’t know,’ was always Renia’s answer.

  Renia, Lola knew, felt bad about surviving when everyone in her family died. ‘You should feel proud that they didn’t kill you, too,’ Lola had said to Renia when Lola was about thirteen. Renia had exploded.

  ‘I should be proud that I watched my sister and my father being murdered?’ she had half-screamed. ‘There is nothing to be proud of. What should I be proud of? That I could see thousands of bodies being burned in big pits, outside, when the crematoriums were too full to burn any more bodies? Should I be proud that I saw children sitting on the ground with gangrene in their legs, arms, toes and fingers? Gangrene that was caused by doctors for lunatic experiments?

  ‘Should I be proud that the Americans and the British couldn’t be bothered bombing the railway lines into Auschwitz?’ said Renia. ‘Especially before the Hungarians arrived. The Hungarians were in good condition, not skeletons like us. They would have survived. Beautiful mothers and beautiful children walking to the gas. Because nobody cared. Is that something to be proud of?’

  ‘You should be proud that you didn’t die,’ Lola had said, quietly.

  ‘That is nothing to be proud of,’ Renia had retorted.

  Renia, Lola knew, felt she had to atone for not having died. She would never be free of that atonement. It would be as imprisoning as any prison. Renia ate her meals, mostly made from scraps and leftovers, by herself, sitting facing the sink. She ate with her back to the table, after Edek and Lola had finished their meals.

  Renia rarely laughed. She rarely felt joy. She felt fear and shame in abundance. Lola felt that Renia didn’t want her dead mother or father or any of her dead brothers or sisters to think she had had a moment’s happiness in being the one who was left alive.

  It wasn’t that Renia looked miserable, Lola thought. She just looked alone, aloof and a little out of reach. Renia had looked a little sad when Lola had boarded her flight out of Australia. Lola had been startled by that. She usually only saw Renia agitated by her. Agitated by what Lola was eating. And by what Lola wasn’t eating.

  Lola sat on the bed in her Sunset Boulevard studio apartment and began to write a postcard to Renia. Lola had found a postcard of the giant Hollywood sign perched on top of Mount Lee, the tallest peak in Los Angeles. The sign was 450-feet long and the letters were forty-five feet high. The sign had thousands of light bulbs, and every day a large number of them had to be changed by a caretaker who lived in a house behind one of the Ls. Lola thought Renia would find the Hollywood sign interesting. Renia liked going to Hollywood movies, although she often missed the beginning and the end of the movie as she would only put on her glasses when the cinema was totally dark and she would take them off again well before the lights came back on.

  Lola couldn’t understand why Renia did this, as her glasses were beautiful cat’s-eye glasses with small fake rubies embedded in the frames. But Renia didn’t want to be spotted wearing glasses. She came from the old school of ‘Men don’t mak
e passes at women in glasses.’ The truth was plenty of men made passes at Renia. Renia exuded glamour. And the glamour and the admiring looks did give Renia some pleasure.

  In her postcard, Lola told her mother about the sixteen-year-olds driving huge cars, Cadillacs and Pontiacs and Chevrolets. She described the size of the cornflake packets and the huge cartons of milk. She was going to write about the enormous buckets of ice-cream, but decided against it. ‘I have a very small fridge in my room,’ she wrote. ‘It is so small it can hardly hold anything except some milk and a few apples.’ Lola hoped that that would placate Renia and not have her imagining that Lola was drinking gallons of milk or wolfing down giant boxes of cornflakes.

  Cher was sitting in the living room of her house. She was wearing a one-piece pantsuit that looked as though it must have been stitched on to her. There was no room at all between Cher and the pantsuit. It followed the contours of her body, which had no ripples or bulges or bumps. Everything about Cher looked smooth. Her hair was smooth, thick and lustrous. Lola thought that each individual hair was probably shiny and incandescent. Cher’s arms and what Lola could see of her legs were perfectly toned and polished. Lola wondered how anybody could have a body that unmarked, unscarred, unscraped or grazed.

  Cher looked pleased to see Lola. So did Sonny. ‘Hi, we saw you in London, didn’t we?’ said Sonny.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lola. She looked around her. Sonny and Cher’s house looked very large. ‘This is a beautiful house,’ she said. She hoped Sonny would offer to show her around, but he didn’t. Lola wondered if either of them remembered the diamante-lined false eyelashes Cher had borrowed from Lola. Lola thought they probably had no recollection of the eyelashes. Dozens of pairs of false eyelashes must have passed through Cher’s hands or been glued to her eyelids since then. Lola decided not to bring up the diamante-lined lashes. They suddenly seemed inconsequential. She didn’t think that having her false eyelashes back was going to help her to lose weight or write better articles.

  ‘Your pantsuit looks gorgeous on you,’ Lola said to Cher.