Belonging
John B. Friedman
Starting a new school is like walking into an ambush. On my first August day at Junipero Serra High, I saw that it was the kind of place where you had to belong or you were a roach. Just as I had been looking in from the outside before, so here I was likely to spend the whole of 1953 at that same window. I had no place on a team, no successes in musical theater or band. I needed an ally, someone to vouch for me, to ease my way socially. And quickly.
Serra was a fortress of two red brick four-story buildings housing the classrooms, laboratories, cafeteria, and auditorium. The buildings, from the last century, had a wide-roofed corridor at the base between them.
The ends of the two blocks were in the sun at noon, with decorative wooden benches where social club members hung out, basking like sea lions at Malibu. Jutting from the pediment above the corridor, a huge marble angel—her mottled cloak spread—guarded these groups. At the rear, the back courtyards were darker; there you were on your own.
During my first lunch break, I walked all around, trying to figure out how things went together. But it was clear. Sports guys and popular girls formed little tribes of social clubs. And then there was everyone else.
I could see right off these social club kids all wore some sort of label. During the school day, girls carried blue canvas-covered three-ring binders with the names of their clubs in large red nail-polish capitals on the spines. These names were always visible, and aimed right at you.
The guys were more subtle. Around their necks hung little gold and enamel medallions on chains. An initial indicated their club, D for the Dukes. Some wore heavy bi-color felt and leather athletic jackets over gingham shirts, their suede loafers flashing with bright pennies in slots over the instep. Sometimes a girlfriend draped one of these oversized jackets over her shoulders, the empty arms sagging, as if to say “I’m taken.”
/
I didn’t have a lot of choice about my classes. Having started Serra late, and having flamed out so badly where I was before, I didn’t get much guidance. At my other school, there had been a girl in my music class who got knocked up, so she said. There was someone’s father’s pistol sold during Home Room. I had nothing to do with this, but the L. A. School Board’s memory was long. So, here I was at Serra taking Senior Math at 9 AM.
By some trick of the alphabet, I sat next to Harriet Christensen. A substantial girl, her hair was parted into frizzy bangs cut high above her broad forehead, giving her a placid expression. I was nineteen, having been out of school off and on, and guessed that Harriet was about a year younger.
She was in one of the clubs, the Sans Souci, and later, I learned that by money and neighborhood Harriet easily swam along into it right from Junior high, without much work on her part. She’d give me some looks, and soon I was smiling back at her.
She could tell I was new to the way things worked at Serra and also understood little of the math in class. She began by nodding to me, and then, as we talked a little, often helped me by explaining concepts like “integer.” I thought right off I’d better get to know her, that I was not likely to do any better. If I went at it right, Harriet was going to be that ally.
We were soon flirting in class, making private little moments together out of how much neither of us wanted to be there. A tiny cross hung on a thread of a gold neck chain; it was the first thing I really noticed about her. Another was how often she whistled audible but tuneless notes under her breath.
With her sweater sleeves tied across her chest in an X she would lean in to my desk, her gold cross falling free, and break into a few teasing riffs of “September in the Rain,” which was big right then in George Shearing’s version.
Eventually, I learned that Harriet’s mother was Canadian, from Medicine Hat in the province of Alberta. This might explain Harriet’s slightly old-fashioned clothing style. For she often wore crisply ironed Peter Pan blouses or pastel wraparound dresses, while other girls appeared in cashmere sweater sets and pearls. Her saddle shoes had red rubber soles; the brown and white leather of the uppers gleaming with a kind of military polish promising she was in full control every day of her life. It was a control I hoped would rub off on me. I needed it.
“Hey, you want to walk around at lunch?” I asked after the first week of looking each other over.
“Nah, I’ve got to sell tickets for our beach dance.”
The Sans Souci and similar clubs put on regular dances at Malibu Beach resorts, often renting the spaces together, making contracts with the bands, and lining up the food and drinks. In the weeks before the dances the members spiraled outward from their benches during the lunch hour selling tickets to ordinarily invisible students like me.
A couple of times I went to these dances alone, as there were usually some unattached girls there. I danced well enough and I had a suit, a tan gabardine number with a one-button roll to the lapels. Wide shoulders were the style then. With the suit I wore a hand-painted silk tie; a cool Hickok pin looked like a sword stabbing through it.
I kept pushing it. “How about the Palladium this weekend?” I wrote on a piece of notebook paper to pass to Harriet one morning in class, as the Math teacher, Mr. Brauner, had his back to us. I could see her hesitating, gauging me, trying to figure out what I was before committing herself to dance. Could she do better? She was young, just learning to hide her feelings, but she was not quite there yet. She was curious about me, but perhaps I was too unknown a quantity. If I were “wrong” her friends would laugh, but then she was not getting a lot of male attention. They knew this as well. Thoughtfully, she folded and refolded my note several times.
“Okay, but only if you’ll buy a ticket to the Sans Souci dance,” she finally wrote back on my note, blushing. The i in Souci lightened the tone a little, with a fancy circle dot over it made into a smiling face. I took this as a “yes.”
The first morning in class I had sized Harriet up. The girls in her club valued her as a worker bee, a sure ticket seller, and no guy’s letter jacket adorned her shoulders. I saw her name in the Blue and White from last year. She had played tennis on a team and was in acting and honor societies. She was one of the yearbook’s editors. I had glanced at it in the library once I set my mind on getting to know Harriet and figure her out, as she looked to be my likeliest lifeline. She was a soft, naïve kid, but she did like to flirt.
I soon figured out as well, that she saw in her future a large engagement ring, a fantasy apartment with a sleek lacquered credenza in the foreground gleaming with white wedding China and crystal stemware, and a husband and a child vaguely glimpsed in another room. This was a model her older sister had just recently established for her. It hadn’t gotten to the point where she saw me as the guy in the other room. The reach of her imagination extended only to high school and not to life after it. Right now, it was her club, her dances, and only possibly, me.
/
So, at her club’s Malibu Beach extravaganza, I swayed with her in front of Ray Anthony’s band stand, keeping time to “September in the Rain,” during the last dance of the evening. A big mirrored ball turned lazily near the ceiling in the center of the room. Colored spot lights sparkled on it, bouncing reflections across the floor, flashing like bits of mica. Then the tempo picked up. After a moment, I spun Harriet around in a blare of trumpets and trombones with mutes stuck in their bright curving ends, my suit coat unbuttoned and the lapels swirling: “The leaves of brown/ Came tumbling down/ Remember.”
“I could do this forever,” she said in a whirl, breathing hard.
Still, I could see her wondering how far she ought to let herself enjoy being here with me, dancing like this in front of everyone. Doubt was all over her face.
As we walked to our cars in the parking lot high above the water, she asked questions to get a fuller idea of me. I knew what was coming and had to dodge a bit.
“So, um, where you were before, what was that school? Did you go out for anything, on a team or something?” The questions came. She was casual as we walked along, but I saw her glance was sharp and judgmental. She’d be telling her friends about me in the morning. I was vague, listening to the roar of surf on the beach below.
“At Hollywood High I worked after school to buy my car, so no teams,” I said, “but I tried out with some of the football guys, before I hurt my knee.”
“Do you live close to Serra?”
“Nah, I’m in Laurel Canyon, over by Schwab’s, above Sunset. It’s a good long walk.” I watched her.
“Um, I’m not sure I know that part.” This whole exchange was a little lame, but it soothed her, as she recognized that I had tried out for a sport somewhere, and that my parents had enough money to live North of Sunset Boulevard. She had, at least, heard of Hollywood High. She moved a little closer to me as we walked.
When we reached our cars, I showed her mine. It was a small, chocolate brown Volkswagen with an earnest, wavering chromium streak of aerial. Parked next to it was her father’s long funereal Buick, chrome portholes set in the hood, heavy as a locomotive, trunk big enough to hold all the clubs of the Los Angeles Open.
More than most things about me, my car was to stand between us. When I knew Harriet better and started to drive her places, I saw she felt the Volkswagen was frivolous, though she never said so directly, and that it was as mysterious to her as her gold cross was to me. That to her, it was one step up from a Cushman motor scooter. She sat in it without her full weight on the seat cushion, sometimes turning the radio dials as if tuning in to a different universe altogether.
/
A week or so after this beach dance, I was walking home from Serra my favorite way, through a part of East Hollywood that was around Sunset Boulevard and Western Avenue and South. I’d go by small shops and retail businesses. At one, Tommy Tedrow’s Body and Fender on Melrose, I’d worked regularly for some months after school doing some rough bumping out and sanding cars. I had left Tedrow’s on ugly terms.
This was a neighborhood on the way down. The houses had mournful chain link fences whose galvanizing was long rusted off. In a back yard you could see a Model A Ford, its flat tires sat on cinder blocks during wartime gasoline rationing and were never taken down.
I liked to wander these neighborhoods, stopping at the hot dog stand built in the shape of a cartoonish wiener. Or I went in the diner, Los Tres Gatos for menudo. On the façade was a bit of post-war prosperity: a sign in the shape of three cavorting cats, but parts of the gas-filled glass neon tubing were long burned out and at night the whiskers, ears, haunches and tails glowed randomly. I didn’t have too much else to do now, really no place to be after school.
The Acme Trophy Company’s window display was mostly full of sports stuff. Gold gilt victory cups with jug-eared handles. They had plaques with engraving too. They’re in those glass cases in the foyers of every high school.
But what got my attention was one of those heart-shaped enamel and gold color club medallions with an Old English letter S on it. It sat in the window on a little velvet cushion. I went in and bought it, asking if I could have it engraved later, as it was blank on the back.
“Sure,” the guy at the counter said, “this one was from a special order for a club from Fairfax High, but the guy never picked up all the medallions after he paid for them. Strange. You from there?”
/
I was now seeing Harriet pretty regularly, though not at school in front of the girls in her club, and we didn’t take lunch hour walk-arounds together. This was understood without a word from either of us. She never appeared with me in front of those benches.
She was sort of attracted to the secrecy of our meetings. And she liked me because I was older, knew stuff, and I was there in class every morning. Mostly, we passed notes, like some old-time lovers with a wall between us. We would plan to meet up after school to do math homework or do things at night, away from Serra altogether. I would phone her.
Now, my Friday and Saturday nights were taken up by a new job, a few hours working the cash register at Ray Avery’s Rare Records on Hollywood Boulevard. I usually got paid in demo jazz records, but I did get enough cash to take Harriet out, as well as visit places like the Clef Club.
On the weekends, as she often had Sans Souci pledge stuff in the evening, we saw afternoon movies. She liked this because she was not likely to run into anyone she knew. We went mostly to the Oriental and the Carmel, the ones with Bingo on Wednesday nights, closer to where I lived. I took her to see “Shane,” which had just come out. And I happened to like grainy Italian Realist films like Open City then at the Filmarte. But Harriet nodded off at the subtitles.
In the dark, we sometimes kissed through the dull moments, or I tried to slip my fingers under the iron grip of her rubber girdle edges. She never angled her body to help me, as if she was not sure what I had in mind.
After the movies we went for ice cream at Will Wright’s on Sunset. I tried to draw her out, ask about her plans at the end of her senior year. Harriet was not very reflective with me. As we sat with our cones, if I tried to get her to talk about anything except school trivia, she darted away. Yet, she was no dummy, which I could see from being in class with her.
She was really fixed on a job as a teller at a West Hollywood bank, and didn’t seem to have thought much beyond this. She was not going to move out of her parents’ home, when this happened, even if she complained about how oppressive they were. I realized she hoped, somehow, to be married after graduation, with the idea of a wedding a bit more important than the groom.
The oddest part of these conversations at Will Wright’s though, was her marriage pool. She told me about the guys her Sans Souci sisters fixed her up with these days, chiefly, their lonely loser cousins: round faced, pimpled, named Myron or Mervin. Several of them, she said, were shorter than she was. I could not tell if she was discounting me as a boyfriend with these stories, or why she was telling me this at all. Maybe it was to make me jealous.
I still couldn’t tell if she even wanted me. Or if she thought she did. But I thought I’d move it along, tie us more tightly together. When my parents away for the weekend, I took Harriet to my house in Laurel Canyon. She walked around and looked at things. She seemed more relaxed when she found that I came from a moneyed, comfortable hill-side neighborhood. She was taken by the display of my mother’s cymbidium orchids, as, she said, her mother grew them too.
I took her to my basement room for such gaudy Sunday-night behavior as her libido would entertain. I also wanted to play a record I’d just gotten and ply Harriet with some wine from my parents’ stash.
I’d just heard O’Day at the Clef Club up above Hollywood Boulevard and was full of the notes of her smoky and plangent voice. (Just as all my jazz friends, I had a fake draft card with my age changed to 21.) Though Harriet’s favorite song was Johnnie Ray’s “Cry,” I thought to make some inroads on her with these jazz standards on the new LP.
After several glasses of wine, we stretched out on my bed, Harriet’s ample body not easily following mine in the twists and turns needed to be comfortable as we listened over and over to O’ Day’s “My Funny Valentine” on my little Garrard record player with an auto-replay feature.
I had hoped that we would enter this music together as a path to love. But as I undid her wrap-around dress and put my face to her throat and moved to the deep folds of her breasts, I smelled not the marine passion I hoped for but the scent of a face powder like that I had often caught from the open compacts of my mother’s friends. I saw it was going to be difficult to continue my romantic efforts with Harriet. But I had a plan I was developing, and expected her to play a key role in it.
/
I heard from some older lefty friends about the Woody Guthrie concerts at the black-listed actor Will Geer’s compound in Topanga Canyon. I took Harriet to one of these, and as it turned out, the evening was fraught because Guthrie, already in the mania of the Huntington’s Disease that was soon to kill him, was rumored to be bolting with Geer’s wife. The crowd around the smoky and sparking firepit was full of gossip and drama.
We sat around in a large circle with the singer on a chair in the middle. I was particularly delighted by one of Guthrie’s more parodic songs in the set, “The Ladies’ Auxiliary”:
Oh, the Ladies' Auxiliary
It's a good auxiliary.
'Bout the best auxiliary
That you ever did see.
If you need an auxiliary,
See the Ladies' Auxiliary.
It's the Ladies' Auxiliary.
“Why do you think that’s so funny?” Harriet asked as I clapped with delight once the song was over. I realized then that it should have been self-evident why, so I didn’t try to explain. As she had once mentioned that her mother was in the Order of the Eastern Star, perhaps she felt I was making fun of her family. Often, this soup of half-understood humor and allusion spilled on the table between us, and Harriet was especially edgy at the concert.
Of Danish Lutheran stock, she was, by up-bringing, conservative, so she thought, among other things, that I was a Red and that she was living dangerously by consorting with me. Still, I don’t think she knew who Woody Guthrie was or had any idea of the politics of the crowd.
After the concert we went to the Christensens’ apartment. She insisted on this. Given all my phone calls, Harriet’s parents had long wanted to look me over, and I knew that passing this inspection was important to her. I must seem unthreatening and like someone whom the family could invite to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.
They lived in a high rise in the Hancock Park housing complex in the Wilshire area of Los Angeles. Just a few years earlier, the place had made the news through the residents’ attempts to invoke existing codicils to keep the Nat King Cole family from moving in. Near two miles long, the Park had Deco, Tudor Revival, and Spanish Mission buildings, and was an architectural wonder. Like my car, Hancock Park perfectly reflected the fault lines in my relationship with Harriet.
At the door was her father, Harry, standing arms akimbo, exactly as Harriet so often stood in school. He was a bulky, florid man with tones of steely grey in hair and eyebrows. As I stepped inside, a surprisingly small Pomeranian, given the size of all the Christensens, whirled around my ankles, snapping at me and barking. It looked like the beady glass-eyed end of a fox-fur stole.
A bag of clubs sat on a sort of chromed folding cart leaning altar-like by the door of the foyer. Each club was covered with a little jacket on the head appliquéd with the initial C. I assumed her father would ask if I played golf.
Harriet’s mother, Edith, brought us lemonade in a pitcher. Over the drinks, however, Harry soon questioned me on a different topic. With a one-man-to-another tinkle of the ice in his glass, as though we were intimate, he asked “What do you think about those Rams?”
As we chatted about what my father did at the Twentieth-Century Fox Studio, and my weekend work at Rare Records, I was ill at ease in this swank many-roomed apartment. Yet, I hid my discomfort. I didn’t want her parents to tell her to stay away from me.
As I looked around their rooms, I complimented Edith on her orchids and mentioned my mother’s successes and failures with her plants, which seem to help the atmosphere.
Very little was said of the concert in Topanga Canyon we had just come from, which I found hard to describe without its spontaneity sounding merely silly. I thought best to simply call it folk music. Harriet was quiet and not much help, as if her parents weighed on her. I listened to Mr. Christensen’s report of a golf outing with his son-in-law that afternoon at the Wilshire Country Club.
I also learned how he intended to get his daughter an advanced teller’s job through his pull with people from his country club, once she graduated, and how there would be managerial opportunities for her at the bank, as though these prospects would be part of her dowry. Both the Christensens talked about Harriet as if she were not present. He laughingly said that he was sure Senior Math was going to aid her work at the bank. I don’t think Harriet found this funny.
Harriet later said to me, only half- jokingly, “they thought you dressed like someone from the hillsides of Laurel Canyon—those sandals—though they said you were polite enough.” I looked at her. I had worn a corduroy suit to the concert, but my sandals were, admittedly, a mistake. I sensed from all this that her parents only tolerated me because Harriet hadn’t brought them anyone better.
/
On my walks home from Serra High, I had seen a long, low hedge of night-blooming jasmine, with white, tuber-like florets, filling the neighborhood with its thick, sickly-sweet scent. It became part of my plan.
A week after the look-over by Harriet’s parents, we were again at Will Wright’s, when I made my play. “Hey,” I said, “could you to do me a favor?”
“Yeah?” she looked puzzled, sipping from her straw, and pushing up her bangs, as if she couldn’t imagine what I would ask of her.
“You know when I was at Hollywood High, I was pledging a club when I left, the Squires. All of this has been going on a long time. And the guys still want me, even if I’m not at their school anymore. But they have a sort of pledge initiation thing, where they beat you, cover you with dog shit or something, generally make your life miserable. And then you’re in.” I worked on my cone a while to let this settle with her. “Maybe it was the same with you and the Sans Souci kids.”
“Nah. Not a chance. They don’t do stuff like that. We just had to wash some cars on a Saturday afternoon was all,” she said, smiling.
I came back to it now. “So, could you pick me up when it’s all over, and help me clean up before I go home? There’s a phone booth on Heyworth near the bottom of my hill, where they’ll probably dump me. Maybe you could come get me? Put a sheet on your seat. Could you do that?”
“Fine. Sure. But that’s some pretty odd stuff. When will you see these guys? It sounds more like a gang than a club.”
“Yeah, well, there’s some of that, too.”
We arranged for me to call her about nine or ten on Thursday night from the phone booth, a little way from my neighborhood.
In the morning before my parents got up, I cooked up a mess of oatmeal and, putting it in a plastic bag, I left it in the bottom of the night-flowering jasmine hedge on my way to school. I left a note that I had some social stuff after dinner and would be home late.
When it got dark, I walked down the hill, took off my tee shirt, and rubbed the oatmeal in my hair and all over my chest, my shoulders, and my back. I pushed into the base of the shrubs, and curling into a ball, rolled around on the ground there. Then I wriggled up through all the florets to get the jasmine sap all over me. I could tell now I really stank. It was a meaty smell like some sort of corruption. I had put some charcoal powder from my dad’s barbeque around my eyes and cheeks. So, I looked pretty strange. Then I phoned Harriet. I told her to bring me a tee shirt. She turned up in about thirty minutes.
“God,” she said, when she saw me, “you’re a mess. You stink. What’s that smell?” She handed me a towel and I wiped off a lot of the stuff. We drove to Crystal Springs in Griffith Park and I walked out into the water in my Levi’s and washed off as best I could.
When I turned around, hearing sloshing in the pond, Harriet had taken off her saddle shoes and socks, tucked the hem of her dress up into her waistband and waded out to me. With a gentleness I had never seen in her, she picked the oatmeal out of my hair and washed off much of the jasmine’s smell. She held me as I crouched in the water and stroked my matted hair, as if I had somehow suffered for her. That she had long owed me something, and now she finally knew it.
We held hands as we walked silently back to the Buick to get the tee shirt. I took the little medallion from my pocket. It had my name and the date engraved by Acme Trophy. I put the chain around my neck. In the headlights, Harriet fingered the medallion, turned it to see the words on the back and then ran her finger over the old English S. “Squires,” I said to her proudly. Then Harriet kissed me, her lips softer, more lingering, than they had ever been. She seemed more open to me, as if I had passed some sort of initiation with her as well.
I had her drop me off at the bottom of the hill. Then when I got home, I took a shower and cleaned my hair more thoroughly. I was very uneasy, though my plan to make Harriet my entry into Serra High’s social world had gone so much better than I expected. I wondered if I had hurt Harriet in some way, diminished her. Still, she was not all that serious about me, so far as I had been able to tell.
I knew she was now my only route into Serra for the rest of the year. And that I had to do what I did just the way I did it. That I could never have asked for her help openly. The parties, the dances, the casual waves and nods. That’s what I’d been missing for a long time. You could grow up with people, or you could merely turn up. Maybe the result was the same. I’d meet people now. I was never going to be a big wheel at Serra. I didn’t even want it. And I knew I had too much history if anyone were to ask around. But I didn’t want to sit back behind the building during my last semester and steal smokes with the girls with the big hair and shiny plastic purses. That was no kind of life.
The next morning in Math, Harriet, leaning over to me, whispered, “You sure smell a whole lot better than you did last night. Let’s walk around at lunch.” I wore the medallion on its chain over a fresh white tee shirt, and she slowed to chat before a bench full of her club members, colorful as parakeets.
She did not show me off or introduce me to these girls, but her manner, the way she stood, her hip against mine, possessively, her arms akimbo, made it clear to them that we were together and that she was somebody. I smiled at them and some smiled back; others talked with Harriet easily. As if she had suddenly shot up in their estimation. She had a guy. I looked at Harriet, remembering the night on my bed, trying to make out with her to the melody of “My Funny Valentine.” “Maybe,” I thought. I felt oddly pleased with myself, with fewer worries, now that we belonged, now that I was a Squire at Serra High.
John B. Friedman’s work has appeared in Accent, December, Inland, Northwest Review, October Hill Magazine, Oregon Centennial Anthology, Parker Pages, Perspective, and Quartet.
