The Missing Person by Doris Grumbach

The Missing Person by Doris Grumbach

Author:Doris Grumbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497676725
Publisher: Open Road Media


5

The Stand-in

Dolores Jenkins lived in the heart of downtown Hollywood in a four-room apartment above a Viennese bakery. The rooms were hers, and her mother’s, in a way that few Southern Californians knew: They had lived in the same place for twelve years, renting it when they first arrived in the city and settling their small collection of family furniture and belongings there. Dolores never thought about moving. She had arrived in Hollywood with hopes for a career as an actress in films. She was too intelligent and too realistic to believe for very long that she was intended for miraculous stardom, but she clung to the hope that perhaps good minor parts might be offered to her.

Unlike many of the Golden Girls she was to encounter who were never able to abandon their dreams for stardom in order to earn even a modest living, Dolores settled for a job as a waitress in a studio commissary. She made enough to support herself modestly. After the first period of disillusion, that was all she asked of the outlandish Production that was Hollywood.

Dolores’s mother, Billie-Jo Jenkins, was a widow, a tall, spare, sternly religious, barren-looking southern woman. Her husband had died so soon after their wedding that he had left barely a mark on her memory. To her mind Dolores might have been not so much conceived during a sexual encounter as carried into life from a competent but undisturbed egg, given birth to, and then reared as her exclusive product.

Billie-Jo was a nominal Catholic. Her faith tended to bolster her conviction of her undisturbed purity. She developed a comfortable, virtuous forgetfulness that “the act” had ever happened to her. Her brief contact with her husband, whom she had married for now forgotten reasons, had not interested her in the slightest; she had no desire ever to repeat the experience, even in memory. She settled into grateful widowhood, her baby daughter proof to the outside world of her respectability. At least once, she had tried It.

Now she considered men to be auxiliaries to her comfort. They existed to hold her bundles on buses when they did not give up their seat to her, they were asked to repair light fixtures and plugs in her apartment, and to fix the toilet when it overflowed. They were services rendered to her, naturally, since she was a woman. She managed on occasion to appear fragilely feminine and southern, weak and somewhat helpless—her Alabama accent contributed to the effect—but under it there lived a single-minded, unsexed woman who bent the world and her daughter to her purposes.

The Jenkinses had arrived from Anniston with very little money and high hopes for Dolores’s success. Billie-Jo found a job almost at once in the basement corset department of the May Company. She “worked” heavy women into girdles. Seduced by her soft, lady’s manner and subservient air, women let themselves go under her sympathetic efforts on their behalf, easing their difficult passage into new “garments,” unaware that she despised them.



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