Sublime

Forty years after Deborah,

Eve Babitz, and Joan’s longtime friend, Earl McGrath, who was married to an Italian countess and introduced the Dunnes to tout L.A.

Sometimes a stranger asks me for one of the stories I’ve mined, shaped, and carried over the years. As the keeper of these stories, given to me on the basis of promises asked

wilderwoman

old beyond time. She is an archivist of feminine intention. She preserves female tradition.

Grace Macaulay, then: seventeen, small and plump, with skin that went brown by the end of May. Her hair was black and oily, and had the hot consoling scent of an animal in summer. She disliked books, and was by nature a thief if she found a thing to be beautiful, but not hers. She didn’t know she couldn’t sing. She was inclined to be cross.

"Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether. But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother.

Even though they’re wearing a ski mask, have a knife between their teeth, and a sack of money slung over their shoulder, we believe them when they tell us they’re in the banking business.

indignities