L.A. Woman. Eve Babitz

boring and very tiresome of you – those your age I mean – doing all that. Doing anything is really so bad, but you – your generation – you do everything. It must stop.”

      “I don’t believe you,” Shelly now laughed, relieved.

      “But it’s true,” Estelle said, her thumb impaled in a grape which was blacker than her nail polish, thank heavens. If it were green, Shelly might have never gotten out alive. “All of you doing what you’ll do. Not only is it silly, boring, and tiresome – it’s dangerous, of course, it’s bad and dangerous because you don’t know what you’re doing. But dangerous, bad . . . these things are details. Details give women wrinkles. I’m over fifty and I don’t have one line on my face. Details! Like good and bad!”

      “You’re so funny,” Shelly decided, consoled that this nice old lady was only trying to be wicked and witty but didn’t know how.

      “No, I’m not,” Estelle replied. Her face settled into a hitman’s closed mask. Not a wrinkle anywhere.

      “If I don’t go to UCLA I might come up to Berkeley this fall. I’ll call you, okay? And come over like this to see you again. . . . I like the older generation you know?”

      “How on earth can a grown woman spend the fall in a place like Berkeley?” Estelle demanded of me.

      “School,” I said. “You know, UC Berkeley? School?”

      “Oh, but all fall?” Estelle asked.

      “Oh, I’m going to be a lawyer one day,” Shelly smiled. “And help those more unfortunate than myself.”

      “And who might that be?” Estelle asked.

      “Why, the poor,” Shelly said, dripping brimfuls of her usual Gamma good intentions – the only sorority at Hollywood High that never got laid. “We’ve got to help.” Shelly went on, “I mean, we’ve got to do something.”

      “Darling,” Estelle turned to me and said, “I’m terribly sorry but it’s just too much trouble for me to get up. And show you out. Can you show yourselves out?”

      “Shelly, we’re going,” I told her.

      “Now?” She was in the middle of her first sip of tea and her first cookie.

      “Now!” I said. “Hurry up.”

      “That’s a good girl,” Estelle called out to me as I left, “and slam the door tight, sweetheart. Lock it!”