Lola Bensky Read online

  Apart from the feathers and glitter, the dancers wore a legless, flesh-coloured mesh leotard with a built-in sequined bikini bottom and small sequined caps to cover their nipples.

  There were also showgirls, who were distinguishable from the dancers by two things. Their nipples were uncovered. And they didn’t move. The nude showgirls stood very still. It was illegal, in Melbourne, to move on stage if you were nude.

  Lola used to wish she could be one of the dancers or showgirls and be part of it all. But she knew that she would have to slim down quite a bit and possibly would never be able to balance all those feathers and glitter on her head.

  The singers who appeared at the Tivoli never looked or sounded as though they had just flown in from La Scala or some other world-famous opera house. They were mostly breathy women. One of the most successful was Sabrina. She whispered her way through the songs. She didn’t need to do much more. Sabrina had a forty-two-and-a-half-inch bust, most of which was exposed, an eighteen-inch waist and thirty-six-inch hips.

  Lola had never seen a bust that size. The size of Sabrina’s breasts was amplified by the size of her waist. It was tiny.

  ‘She is very talented,’ Edek had said to Lola when Sabrina finished her act.

  ‘She’s got very big breasts,’ Lola said.

  ‘That is true too,’ Edek had replied.

  Sabrina’s talents had possibly not really been put to the test, Lola thought. Lola had seen Sabrina in the movie Blue Murder at St Trinian’s. Sabrina, who appeared in posters for the movie, had a non-speaking part. She sat in a bed, in a nightie, reading a book. No one had nominated her for an Academy Award for that role.

  At interval at the Tivoli, Edek would buy two ice-creams, a chocolate one for him and a vanilla ice-cream for Lola, and a packet of Fantales, chocolate-coated hard caramels with a biography of a movie star on each wrapper.

  All the way home in the car, Edek and Lola would talk about the show and finish the last of the Fantales. Edek would park the car outside the house. That was the demarcation line. After the car was properly parked, all conversation about the jugglers and magicians ceased. They would arrive home with no hint of where they had been. There were no stray feathers or remnants of perfume. Renia never asked where they had been or what they had been doing. Lola sometimes wished that Renia would, just once, come out with her and Edek. Maybe not to the Tivoli, but somewhere else. Anywhere else. But Renia never did. The three of them never went out together unless it was to a bar mitzvah, or a wedding or birthday.

  Lola loved going to the Tivoli. There was an underwater stripper who mesmerised Lola. Lola and Edek had seen the underwater stripper’s act three times. The underwater stripper had long blond hair that floated slowly as she swam, languorously disrobing, in a giant glass pool on the stage. She swam with her eyes wide open and a smile on her face. Every now and then she would press her face against the glass and blow kisses to the audience. A small trail of bubbles would float up after each kiss.

  The underwater stripper also danced as she stripped. She pointed her toes, elongated her arms and did horizontal pirouettes as she removed one item of clothing after another.

  She wore shorts, socks, a blouse, a camisole and several layers of undergarments. It can’t have been easy to remove wet socks, Lola thought.

  The underwater stripper stripped and danced to the sound of Bobby Darin singing ‘Beyond the Sea’. She never once came up for air. Listening to ‘Beyond the Sea’ often made Lola feel a bit sad. She had a feeling that beyond the sea was where she wanted to be. Somewhere. A vast somewhere with endless possibilities. Not here in North Carlton or St Kilda, to where she and Renia and Edek were about to move.

  Lola spent ages trying to work out how the underwater stripper could breathe, let alone take off her clothes, underwater. She persuaded Edek to let her go backstage one day. ‘I want to know how she can breathe underwater,’ Lola had said to Edek.

  ‘It is a big mystery to me too,’ Edek said. ‘I did watch her very carefully each time and I did not see how she was breathing.’

  At the stage door, a man with long black hair told Lola that the underwater stripper had gone home.

  ‘How did she have time to get dry and put her clothes on?’ Lola said.

  ‘She’s very quick,’ the man said.

  ‘Are you sure she’s gone?’ Lola said. She felt quite devastated.

  ‘I saw her leave,’ he said. ‘I said goodbye to her.’

  ‘Do you know how she breathes underwater?’ Lola said.

  ‘I don’t know how she breathes out of water,’ the man said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Lola.

  ‘Breathing is a complicated business,’ he said.

  ‘Do you have the underwater stripper’s phone number?’ Lola said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘I’m thirteen,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen the show three times and I can’t figure out how she can breathe underwater.’

  ‘Maybe you don’t need to know,’ he said. ‘Do you spend a lot of time underwater?’

  ‘No,’ said Lola.

  ‘Who did you see the show with?’ the man at the door asked her.

  ‘My father,’ she said. ‘He’s getting the car at the moment.’

  ‘If you’ve got a minute, do you want to meet my wife, Margot?’ he said. ‘She’s the other stripper, the above-water stripper.’

  ‘Yes please,’ said Lola.

  ‘My name is Jackie,’ he said. ‘Jackie Clancy.’

  Backstage, the Tivoli was organised chaos. The chaos of people, costumes, shoes, props, magic tricks and a performing dog. The hypnotist was removing his moustache in the hallway. Lola was agog at how unremarkable and un-hypnotic the hypnotist looked without his moustache.

  ‘Are you Jewish?’ Jackie Clancy said as they walked to his wife Margot’s dressing-room.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘You look Jewish,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t meet the underwater stripper,’ Lola said to Edek when she got into the car. ‘But I met the other stripper.’

  ‘She is very talented too,’ Edek said.

  ‘She is very nice,’ Lola said.

  Lola started meeting Jackie Clancy for coffee after school on Wednesdays. Jackie would buy Lola a hot chocolate with melted nougat at Hoagey’s on Collins Street, while they waited for Margot to join them when her Wednesday matinee performance was over.

  Jackie, a comedian who was formerly a boxer, sometimes looked depressed, almost on the verge of tears. Other times he would be so hilarious that Lola would kill herself laughing. They made a strange trio, the stripper in her street clothes, the schoolgirl in her University High School uniform and the former-boxer-turned-comedian, with his unkempt and often greasy black hair.

  Jackie and Margot Clancy were both English. They’d migrated to Australia in 1956. Lola felt at home with the two of them. Margot and Jackie listened to each other. And to Lola. And they laughed together.

  Lola started leaving school early on Wednesdays so she could spend more time with Jackie while they waited for Margot. A short, stout man, he was very unpredictable. He would argue with anyone, call out to strangers, mimic people and animals and ruminate on the end of the world, and the possibility of nuclear radiation or the invasion of the Chinese. ‘You better plant a rice paddy in your backyard,’ he said to Lola. ‘You’ll want to befriend the enemy.’ Lola adored him.

  Jackie Clancy seemed part of a larger universe to Lola. He wasn’t nervous. He wasn’t afraid to be provocative. He didn’t care about what anyone thought of him. All of the adults Lola knew were, even when they were out dancing or at the movies, clustered in small claustrophobic huddles. Jackie Clancy was out in the world, taking people on, taking a stand. He had big dreams and big ideas.

  By then Jackie Clancy was appearing regularly on radio and television in Melbourne. He was also regularly being fired from radio and television shows in Melbourne. Among other thi
ngs, he would be fired for not watching his language and arousing the ire of the Australian broadcasting censors.

  When Lola had told Jackie that she’d gone to see Psycho instead of sitting for her final-year high-school exams, she thought he would find it amusing. He didn’t. ‘That’s really going to upset your parents,’ he said.

  Lola hadn’t seen Jackie Clancy or Margot since she left high school. She would think about Jackie Clancy for years and years. He was the only adult who had ever suggested to Lola that her parents’ history was catastrophic. For her, as well as for them. Years later, she would pay more than one analyst a fortune to point out the same thing. And years after that, she would hear that Jackie Clancy had helped to smuggle Jews out of Germany.

  Lola had been walking across Fourteenth Street. It wasn’t easy to work out which stores might even stock recording tapes. Fourteenth Street had a particularly rundown quality about it. A shabbiness that seemed both at odds with and an integral part of the intellectual core of New York City. There were dilapidated doorways and stores and foyers that looked worn down. She passed a dimly lit luncheonette with a sign painted above the front window that said ‘Furs Sold Upstairs’. An arrow pointed to a hallway at the side of the luncheonette. Lola looked inside the hallway. It didn’t look as though those stairs could lead to a fur salon. But New York was full of surprises. Shabby exteriors were not a good indicator of the interiors they contained.

  Lola really liked this part of New York. She liked the fact that you could have a twelve-storey building right next to a three-storey building and a vacant lot. And that cheap luncheonettes seemed to have very good food, and there seemed to be a Jewish deli on almost every block. You could buy a chopped liver sandwich or matzoh balls and chicken soup at any time of the day or night. Lola had never seen either of these items anywhere other than in a private house in Melbourne. It was a strange feeling to think that a lot of people here knew what chopped liver was.

  One of the storekeepers on Fourteenth Street suggested that Lola try Canal Street. She began walking in that direction. The short sleeves of her dress were digging into her upper arms. Lola thought the sleeves felt tighter than they were the last time she had worn this dress. Maybe it was just the humidity.

  She tried to stretch the sleeves with her hand. The air was so humid she had been sure the fabric would stretch. But the rickrack edging on the end of the sleeves wouldn’t budge. Her efforts to dislodge her flesh from the tight vise of the sleeves had left red circles around the tops of her arms.

  She must have put on weight, she thought. She never weighed herself. The only way she could tell whether she was putting on weight was when various parts of her clothes got a little snug or more than a little snug.

  Lola never looked at her body. Other girls would notice a bruise on their leg or a mark on their knee. Lola noticed nothing. She made every effort not to look at herself below the neck. It wasn’t that hard. She just had to avoid most mirrors, look up when she was in the shower and look away when she was in the bath.

  Lola concentrated on her hair and her face. Especially her false eyelashes. She felt they decorated her and covered some of her discomfort. Decades later, Lola would read that children of survivors were beset by fears of bodily damage and illness. She would also read that children of extermination-camp survivors, who were typically more traumatised than other survivors, tended to be more tormented by the traumas of their parents’ past than children of other survivors.

  When Lola finally noticed her body, everything about it terrified her. A twinge in an arm signified a stroke or heart attack. A mouth ulcer looked like oral cancer, a callus on her foot metamorphosed into a tumour. Any ache or pain made her heart pound. She felt nauseated as soon as she made a doctor’s appointment, aged ten years over every medical test and planned her funeral over and over again. Life had been much easier when her body didn’t seem to be attached to the rest of her.

  Lola found recording tapes in a store that sold bulbs, screwdrivers, tape measures, saucepans and strainers. She bought a box of twenty tapes. She looked at her watch. She would have just enough time to get to midtown, where she had to meet Lillian Roxon. The other fat Australian journalist, as Linda Eastman had so bluntly put it.

  Lillian had asked Lola to help her choose some new summer clothes at a large department store. Lillian was almost fifteen years older than Lola and quite beautiful. She had dark-blond hair and large green eyes with pale purple shadows under them. This dark area under her eyes added a mysteriousness to her already exotic looks. It suggested late nights and intriguing encounters. She also had flawless porcelain skin and a smile that uplifted and embraced friends and perfect strangers.

  Lillian was quite short and fluctuated between being plump and just plain fat. At the moment, she’d been on a strict diet for about four weeks, she’d told Lola. ‘I’ve got a new very young boyfriend,’ Lillian had said to her on the phone last night. ‘I lied to him and said I’ve always been skinny but have just let myself go a bit in the last year.’ She shrieked with mirth and said, ‘I’ve never been skinny in my life, not even for a day. But I can’t bear to say to him that this, for me, is thin.’

  ‘How old is he?’ Lola said.

  ‘He’s nineteen, your age,’ said Lillian.

  ‘I’m twenty now,’ Lola said.

  ‘Oh, no, he’s even younger than you.’ Lillian said.

  Lillian was Australia’s first female foreign correspondent. She was the New York correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. She covered arts, entertainment and women’s issues, areas she would stick to for the rest of her life.

  In her first week on the job, Lillian was interviewing Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and Rock Hudson. Soon she would be interviewing Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, scouting out talent in the newly exploding rock world, writing a weekly column, ‘Top of the Pops’, for the New York Sunday News and dispensing psychological theories and views about sex in the monthly column ‘Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Sex’, for Mademoiselle magazine.

  Lillian was the first Australian journalist to establish a high profile in America. Lola liked her enormously. She was warm and generous. And she could be so bitchy. Lola admired well-executed bitchiness. She admired it in her mother. Renia would say anything. And so would Lillian.

  Lillian had called Lola on her first night in New York, when Lola was trying to accustom herself to the company of cockroaches and the sounds coming from the public toilet in the shared bathroom located right next door to her room.

  ‘Hi,’ Lillian had said. ‘Do you want to come over? I’ve got a cake of soap stuck in my vagina.’

  ‘Oh, how awful,’ Lola said. She couldn’t bring herself to ask why Lillian would have even tried to insert a cake of soap in her vagina. ‘You could try sitting in some water. That could dislodge it,’ Lola said.

  ‘I’m in the bath,’ Lillian said. ‘And it’s not moving. It’s stuck.’

  ‘Maybe you should get someone to take you to the hospital,’ Lola said.

  ‘There are quite a few people here,’ Lillian said. ‘I’m having a small party.’

  Lola didn’t feel there was much she could do for Lillian. Frankly, she was puzzled and bothered by how you could end up in the bath, in the middle of a small party, with a cake of soap stuck up your vagina.

  ‘I’m really tired,’ Lola said. ‘I think I’ll go to bed.’

  ‘You can’t be tired. You’re only nineteen,’ Lillian said.

  ‘I’m twenty now, remember,’ Lola said. ‘And twenty-year-olds seem to need more sleep.’

  ‘Okay, okay. I better keep working on the soap,’ Lillian said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t forget, we’re going shopping. Don, come and help me,’ Lola heard Lillian call out as she hung up the phone. Who was Don? There was an Australian disc jockey, Don Dunlap, in town. Maybe it was Don Dunlap.

  Lillian was waiting outside the department store when Lola arrived. Lillian looked fresh and animated. She sho
wed no sign of having had a bar of soap stuck in her vagina. She took Lola to the section of the store where she liked to shop. It was called the Chubby Teens department. ‘You get the best deal in the Chubby Teens department,’ Lillian said.

  Yes, but did you get the best clothes, or even acceptable clothes, Lola wondered. She had never seen a Chubby Teens department. She didn’t think there was one in Melbourne. Or possibly anywhere else in the world. She bet chubby teenagers hated the Chubby Teens department.

  All Lola could see in the girls’ section of the Chubby Teens department were flounces and frills. She didn’t think that chubbiness needed to be amplified with trails of frills and mountains of flounces. All the merchandise was brightly coloured and vividly patterned. The cacophony of clashing colours and geometric and floral prints was enough to give the most detached Buddhist a headache.

  ‘I think you’re too tall for the Chubby Teens department,’ Lillian Roxon said. ‘I love this place.’ Lola was surprised at Lillian’s enthusiasm. She didn’t want to say anything that might dampen it.

  ‘I think I’m definitely too tall,’ she said. Her height had finally saved her, she thought. Renia was always telling her that she was too tall. Lola was five-foot-nine and that did seem tall for a girl. But whether it constituted too tall, unlike whether too fat was too fat, was something Lola was unsure about.

  Once, when Renia was looking at Lola, she had sighed and said, ‘You are too tall.’

  Lola had tried to answer her. ‘I thought you like tall,’ Lola said. ‘You’re always saying you weren’t short like the other Jewish girls.’

  ‘I’m not short,’ Renia said. ‘But you are too tall. It is because you ate so many sweets.’

  Even at twelve Lola knew there was no correlation between a person’s height and how many sweets they ate. If there were a correlation, all of the kids at her primary school would have been giants. Australia had a candy culture. There were stores on almost every block that sold dozens of varieties of candies for just a few pennies per bag. Lola hadn’t really minded the height conversation. It had been a relief to get away from the subject of being fat.