Short Story: Wendy Rainey 'You're So Beautiful, I Can't Breathe'

You’re So Beautiful, I Can’t Breathe

 

Francesca told me that when Rita Hayworth was old and infirm she had a caregiver who charged degenerates money to take turns having sex with her. She told me she knew a guy who knew a guy who had known the caregiver. Francesca had been an actress in the swingin’ sixties. One morning over coffee she told me that “Rod Serling was constantly on the make. They were ALL on the make. They didn’t give a damn that I was a married woman. By the time I read for Bonanza, I already had three daughters.”

I leaned in closer, “Was there any way around it?”

She made a gesture, inserting a cock into her mouth. “I didn’t want to boogie with Aaron Spelling so he decided to withdraw his offer to cast me in a Friday Night Movie.” 

She had done Summer-stock as a teenager and modeled in New York City in the late fifties. She brought glossies into the Hollywood call center where we both worked, laying them out on the breakroom table so everyone could ooh and aah at how beautiful she had once been. I stood with the others gazing at the movie stills. Francesca was a standout with her fresh face and flaxen hair falling below her shoulders. Her blue eyes were offset by dark brows. Her farm fresh good looks put the other hairdoo’d and heavily made-up actresses to shame. “Just a little Vaseline on my lips and cheeks is all the makeup guy ever had to do for me,” she told me one morning at work, her eyes narrowing to a slit, sizing me up. Her big break was a guest starring role in an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode. Then came regular roles on Peyton Place, Rawhide, Wagon Train, and The Virginian. But the roles eventually dried up and she gave birth to two more daughters. Five hungry mouths screaming in her ears. Five sets of sticky little hands clinging to her body.

 

I had been working at the call center for a month when my battered old Maverick finally broke down for good. I was on the way to work on the Hollywood Freeway when the engine died. I got out of the car and stood on the side of the road, stranded. This was before cell phones and Uber apps. Several guys in passing vehicles hooted and hollered as I walked from my car to the call box. I phoned, went back to the car, and waited an hour in the scorching heat before a guy showed up to haul my dead horse off to the junk heap. The guy gave me a ride to work even though he said it was against the rules. He nervously assured me that he was a nice guy, I had nothing to worry about, which made me wonder if I really did have something to worry about. Sweat broke out on my upper lip and forehead. It trickled from my armpit to my wrist. Tricia Toyota’s voice kept running through my head: The body of a twenty-two year old woman was found dumped on the side of the Hollywood Freeway today.

 

“Thanks for the ride,” I reached into my purse, pulling out my last twenty dollars, pressing it into the palm of his hand. “And thank you for not being a pervert or a serial killer,” I smiled as we approached the office building. We waved at each other as he pulled out onto the street, hauling my clunker off to the graveyard. 

 

A blast of arctic air hit me from the AC as I walked through the glass doors of the building. I took the elevator up to the third floor. Making my way to my desk, I saw Francesca talking to my supervisor.

They both turned around, “What happened?” Francesca asked, looking concerned. 

I told them about my jalopy dying on the freeway. “I’ll be taking the bus until I can get another car,” I told my supervisor. She smiled, nodded, and told me to get to work.

 

Francesca walked with me back to our desks. “Come, tow-headed warrior of the highway. We have work to do.” She wore her grey hair in an unruly bun with tendrils falling into her face. She dressed in a tweed coat from the fifties and men’s trousers she had bought at an El Monte thrift store. Her scent wafted through the room. She said it was a combination of “sage, myrrh, and the devil’s blood.”  At sixty-four, there were still traces of Frances Farmer in her face. Shades of Mary Tyrone, the morphine addicted mother from Long Day’s Journey into Night, infused the very air she breathed. When she caught me staring at the missing pinky on her left hand, she said it was payback from the mob. I gaped at her for a moment or two before she broke into raucous laughter. 

 

She had been assigned to train me at the call center. We were selling videos over the phone; PBS specials, documentaries, nature and science videos, cult classics, black and white movies, silent pictures, music videos, sitcoms from the seventies and the like. In the reception room, there was a display of videos in a glass case, a dedication to Francesca and her Hollywood career. She caught me studying it one morning. I had swiped several VHS tapes of The Virginian.  I took them home to my tiny apartment, watched them all weekend, then returned them behind the glass that Monday morning.

“Yes, that’s me,” she reached into the display, pulling out an episode of Wagon Train, barely glancing at it before shoving it back into the case. “I went from this,” she pointed to the shrine, “to this,” she threw her hands up in the air, motioning to the ten rows of headsetted telemarketers chit-chatting away. “A rather long fall, I’d say.” 

 

I imagined her travelling up a treacherously narrow trail in a covered wagon high in the chaparral.  Just as she looked up at the stars, one of the horses slipped, stumbling off of the mountainside, dragging the wagon with it. Flung like a rag doll into space, her blonde hair fanning out behind her as she fell, plummeting lower and lower, descending into the dark bowels of the earth, ending up at a Hollywood call-center, hustling some of the very programs she had been featured in. 

 

One day she pulled a paperback from her pocket, leaning in close, “Listen to me,” she held up a copy of Death on the Installment Plan. “Bring a book and read it on your break. Go outside and write a poem at lunch.” She looked over her shoulder at the workers yacking with customers, pecking on their keyboards. “It’s all so meaningless.” She scoffed, shaking her head, “Meaningless.”

 

Francesca was the company’s top seller. She had a deep theatrical voice. She made people laugh. She intrigued them. Some appeared to be spellbound by her, phoning in multiple times a week, asking for her by name. She knew how to make them feel like they were her close personal friend. She knew how to make them think that they couldn’t go on living unless they ordered that Riverdance video. She could talk about traditional Irish dance, Irish politics, Irish folklore. She’d throw in a quote from Keats in an Irish accent. She sold more Riverdance videos than any of the rest of us. Her winning numbers showed up on the teleprompter at the end of the day. Strutting her stuff down the aisle, breaking into a Funkadelic dance, she high-fived it to the crescendoing cheers of her coworkers. Smiling benevolently at her plebeian audience, putting her arms around the gift basket of assorted cheeses and sausages our supervisor presented her with. It was as if she were claiming the Oscar she never won.

 

As the weeks wore on, I found that living without a car was far more challenging than I ever could have imagined. I had to take two buses to get to work by 6:00 AM. I waited in the dark at 4:20 in the morning to catch my first bus, then had to transfer to another bus across the street from Gus’s porn shop. Urine hung on the warm breeze as a pair of neon tits flashed off and on while I stood at the curb waiting for the number 12 to Hollywood. One morning a drunk stumbled down the sidewalk from a nearby bar, yelling at me, asking me how much for a blow. I kept a cannister of pepper spray in the palm of my right hand and a buck knife in the left . He was making a beeline toward me. I didn’t even wait for him to start talking again. I held up the pepper spray and let him have it full force in the face. He was still screaming when the bus pulled up to the curb. The door swished open. 

“You okay, miss?” the bus driver asked as I showed him my bus pass. 

“Never been better,” is all I said, taking a seat, my heart pounding the rest of the way to work. 

 

Francesca’s daughter, Elizabeth, worked up front answering phones. Her cheerful, robotic voice filled the room. “Thank you for calling Video Detectives. How may I direct your call?”

Someone in the office calculated that Elizabeth repeated that line 852 times per shift on average. Liz told me over lunch in the breakroom one day that before this job she had worked in a meth lab in Riverside. She said she’d really needed a fresh start and was grateful her mom had gotten her this job. She used the word grateful a lot. She was grateful her mom let her live with her. She was grateful her sister had helped her buy a new car. And she was grateful she had a boyfriend who took her out to dinner every week. Then she reached over and grabbed half of my tuna sandwich, chomping down on it. I stared at her, my mouth falling open. That’s when I really gave her a good, hard look. She was at least thirty pounds overweight, while I was at least ten pounds underweight. By her own admission she hadn’t been able to get her own job or her own place to live. She didn’t even bother paying for any of her own food. 

“Mom lets me put groceries on her tab at the Beachwood Market.” 

“How nice of her!” I chimed. I looked at the width of her hips, the crows feet developing around her eyes. “How old are you, Elizabeth?” I asked. She ignored the question, but I could see she was at least ten years my senior. Changing the subject, she told me a story about how one of her sisters had bartered sex with the mechanic at the garage for a recent car repair.

“Lorelei was low on cash,” she giggled, snatching my bag of potato chips. She got up, waving goodbye. I watched her as she shoved Ruffles into her mouth on the way out the door.

“You’re welcome, lazy ass,” I mumbled under my breath.

 

One sweltering Saturday night, as I lay on sheets wet with my own sweat, listening to jazz on the radio, Francesca phoned me at my apartment, reciting Dylan Thomas in her low growl:

“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light.”  Then, without identifying herself, and before I had a chance to speak, she hung up. 

 

I saw her the following Monday morning at 6:00. Between sales calls to the East Coast, she told me that her first husband was Italian. Whenever he took her into his arms he’d look into her eyes and tell her, you’re so beautiful, I can’t breathe. That’s how the marriage started, but it ended with him smacking her around and cheating on her with several floozies. He called her a selfish bitch. She called him a dickless wonder. “The day before he left for good, I bleached his shorts, and didn’t rinse the Clorox out. I hung them on the line to dry, then folded them and put them in his drawer,” she smiled. He wore the shorts the next day, sweated in them, and got a horrible blood-red rash. When he showed her the rash she laughed and laughed and laughed. He smacked her some more, then left her and their five daughters high and dry. Fast forward, it’s 1969, and she’s at the welfare office in downtown L.A. with five little girls in tow. She’s wearing a black beret, her blond hair flowing, men’s trousers, and a men’s cardigan.

“Now, that’s a persona!” Her case worker said to her, smirking. Francesca said that the case worker told her not to worry too much. With a face and body like hers, she’d hook another man in no time flat. 

 

Of course, Francesca did find another man to marry faster than you can say, “I’m ready for my close-up.”  Ian was also an actor, and apparently a photographer. He had been in Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, an Ultra Brite commercial, several Uban commercials, and some Russ Myer films. When the rolls dwindled he parlayed his skills into a position as a crime scene photographer for the Los Angeles Police Department. Elizabeth told me that growing up, he was mean to her and her sisters. Once when she was eight, she had cut her leg on the wrought iron gate in their front yard. He stood looming above her laughing as she bled, telling her to rub salt in it. Crying, she went inside the house and got the salt shaker from the kitchen, but her older sister took the salt from her and helped her wash the wound with soap and water in the bathroom. Elizabeth said that Ian just stood there laughing like the goddamned ape that he was. She said that when she was little, she visited The Planet of the Apes movie set and saw him dressed in his monkey costume. She could never see him any other way after that. 

 

The girl who sat across from me at the call center told me that she had grown up in Francesca’s Beachwood neighborhood. She knew Francesca and Elizabeth and the other four daughters. It was known in the neighborhood that Francesca had purchased the expansive bungalow in the sixties with the money she had earned as a regular on Peyton Place. The girls ran wild. Some of them looked like they never combed their hair. She leaned in, “All they ever ate were cucumber sandwiches. They stole food from other kids’ lunch pails. They stole whatever they could get their hands on.” One of the daughters, Annabelle, had been raped in Griffith Park when she was ten years old, by two homeless guys. She wore a pair of her own underpants over her head on the school bus every morning, cracking jokes and singing. Some kids would share their lunch with the girls, give them apples and oranges, but most kids just thought they were weirdos and kept their distance.

 

As Elizabeth approached my desk one day, I felt guilty hiding the meatloaf sandwich I was going to eat for lunch, but I was on a strict budget and didn’t have any extra food to share. Liz pulled up a chair. I could tell she was feeling chatty. She told me that her mother ended up having five kids because everyone always told her that she was the most beautiful woman they had ever known.  “She thought she was doing the world a huge favor by having all of us. But the joke was on her ‘cuz none of us ended up looking like her at all.” She ran her fingers through her long, dark hair, looking over at me. “My mom said you were really cute. But you’re not better looking than me. You’re just blonde,” she said dismissively.

I didn’t know how to respond. Finally I said, “I didn’t know there was a contest going on, Liz.”

She stood up, angry. “You don’t know my mother.”

 

I ran into Francesca at lunchtime the next day. She was reading Falkner at a secluded table outside the office that looked out onto a water fountain. I didn’t want to interrupt her, but she saw me before I could leave. Smiling, she motioned for me to sit down. I pulled out my sandwich and began eating. 

“I love my daughters. I don’t like them,” she announced. I put the turkey on rye down, looking at her.

 “I don’t see myself in any of them. None of them are readers,” she shook her head. “None of them have any artistic inclination whatsoever. They all take after their father, and you know what I think of him.” I didn’t know what to say. I remembered Liz using the phrase doomed womb. She said one of her sisters, Josephine, used it to describe their mother’s uterus. Josephine said that they all sprang from the same doomed womb, and none of them were going anywhere. They were all doomed. Francesca turned her head away from me, falling silent for a few moments. Then a squirrel jumped onto the table, looking for food. He ran off with a couple of almonds she had been nibbling on from a baggie. She burst into laughter at his cockiness. It wasn’t long before she was telling me about some of the different jobs she’d taken when she was younger. She had worked as a dancer at a Sunset Boulevard club called The Tiger Room. She and another girl shared the same skimpy costume. The girls were required to pay for their own uniform. They didn’t want to shell out all that money, so they went half and half on it. They hid the get-up in a plastic bag, shoving it behind a toilet at a gas station around the block. One of them would use it, then bag it, and put it back so the other could wear it the next day. They also rolled drunks. They’d work as a team, get friendly with some lonely chump at a bar, lure him out into the alley, then take the guy for all he was worth. Francesca had also worked as a phone sex operator. With that low purr, she had no problem getting steady clients. Most of them loved being insulted, screamed at, and emasculated. She shook her head, shuddering.

“You wouldn’t believe the money some of those guys threw at me,” she laughed. “ I worked that job when my daughters were just kids. I was in the back bedroom with the door shut while they were watching Bugs Bunny,” she shrugged, “I had to pay the bills.” I nodded silently. Pushing away from the table, she said, “It’s all about this,” she cupped her hand bouncing it over her mouth, “and this,” she then moved her cupped hand, bouncing it over her private area. “Remember, that’s all life is to most people. This and this,” her cupped hand furiously bouncing over her mouth first, then her privates. We both laughed all the way back to our desks.

 

A couple of weeks later,  I was sitting outside at a table, eating a mango on break. She came up to me and sat down. I offered her a slice of the fruit. She recoiled, cringing. She said it reminded her of her Southern upbringing. She began telling me about the orphanage she and her brother grew up on in Mississippi. The heat, the humidity, the mosquitos, the beatings. How one of their foster mothers shoved her little brother’s head into a shit-filled toilet, nearly drowning him. A few years later he ran away. He was lost, died young. She looked at her watch. We both got up and walked back to our desks.

“I can see his blonde hair shining in the sun,” she smiled.  “I’d push him on the swing by the river out back. I still hear him laughing sometimes.” She looked at me, “he’s always with me.” She sat down at her desk, her phone lighting up.  She paused a few moments before pressing the button, answering cheerfully, “Yes, we’ll get that video right out to you, Jan. Have a delicious day, my dear!” Her mouth was trembling. Her eyes were wet with tears.

The next day at lunchtime Elizabeth sat down beside me at a table outside. I put down my book, my fingers tightening around the submarine sandwich already shoved into my mouth. I slid my Hostess apple pie under my purse, grabbed my pint of milk, clutching it with my free hand. 

“My Mom said you guys really enjoy talking to each other.” Liz looked amused. “Tell me, what could you possibly have in common with someone else’s sixty-four year old mother?” she shrugged. “Why don’t you find someone your own age to talk to?” Liz spotted the apple pie under my purse. “How ‘bout I heat that up for you? I’ll zap it in the microwave.” Elizabeth grabbed my pie, but I didn’t let her get away with it this time. I reached over, yanked it from her paws. She clamped down, crushing it in the package. Some of the pie filling spilled out of the torn wrapper. She licked it. Then ripped the rest of the package open, offering me the crushed desert.

 “What’s your problem, Liz?” 

“I just want to know what you guys talk about, that’s all.” There was pie crust in the corners of her mouth. I passed her a napkin. She didn’t wipe her face. “What were you talking about with her yesterday? I wanted to come out and have lunch with her, but nooooooo, you were there the whole time.” She glared at me.

“I don’t know, Liz. She tells me about her jobs, books she’s read, Hollywood, her brother, the orphanage she grew up in. That kind of thing.”

Elizabeth laughed, throwing the remnants of the mangled pie into the air. 

“She didn’t grow up in an orphanage and she never had a brother.” I stared at her. Her pupils were enlarged. Her face was flushed. “My mother was never in an orphanage. She’s lying to you. She’s a fuckin’ actress, okay?” I started gathering my things, throwing my empty milk carton into a nearby trash can. “You know, there was another girl Mom got all buddy buddy with. Blonde, of course. Always the blondes. What the fuck is that?” She took a cigarette from her bag, lit it, took a drag, and threw the matches onto the table. “Anyway, they got into an argument one day. Mom accused the girl of stealing from her.” Liz took another drag off her cigarette. “That chick stood up for herself. She did not back down.” Elizabeth leaned in, pointing at me, “Mom got her fired anyway.”

“Did she steal from your Mother?” I asked, grabbing my bag, making a move to leave.

“No, idiot!” Liz screamed, “My Mom is crazy.”

“I have to go, Liz.”

“That girl almost ended up homeless because of Mom. The higher ups looooove the great Francesca. Just sayin’”.

“Okay. Well, this has been . . . real enlightening.” I looked at Elizabeth, “Thanks . . . I think.” I walked back to my desk, avoiding Francesca and Elizabeth as much as I could for the rest of the week.

 

That Sunday, Francesca called me on the phone. Without identifying herself she asked, “Why did you upset my daughter? Don’t you know she’s fragile?”

“Francesca,” I don’t know what’s going on between you and your daughter. I think I better stay out of it.”

“When Elizabeth had the miscarriage, I told her she could start again, fresh, clean slate.”

A piano concerto played in the background. “Where are yourparents?” she asked, “Where is yourmother?” 

“Francesca, I think it’s best we not get into that right now.”

“Why are you out there all alone in the world? Waiting in the dark for some God forsaken bus at four in the morning?” She paused to light a cigarette, take a drink. “Where is your mother?” She hung up the phone. A few minutes later it rang again, but I didn’t pick up. The phone rang four more times that night, but I just turned up the stereo and lay on my bed, staring up at a spider in the corner of the ceiling, sitting patiently in the middle of its web, surveying the room.  Plotting, hungry, waiting for its prey.

Read also Wendy Rainey’s poems on Bold Monkey here: https://georgedanderson.blogspot.com/2023/01/new-poems-wendy-rainey.html

Bio

 

Wendy Rainey is author ofHollywood Church: Short Stories and Poems and Girl On TheHighway. She is acontributing poetry editor on Chiron Review. Herpoetry has appeared in Nerve Cowboy, Trailer Park Quarterly, Misfit Magazine and beyond. She is a 2022 recipient of the Annie Menebroker Poetry Award, and a runner-up in the 2022 Angela Consolo Mankiewicz Poetry Prize. She studied poetry with Jack Grapes in Los Angeles and creative writing with Gerald Locklin at California State University, Long Beach.