Undying Witch, page 8
A cab jerked over to the curb and stopped for her
Two men sat in front. One man got out and placed her luggage in the trunk of the taxi. Dima slapped his hand when he grabbed her enormous bag. “It’s my purse,” she said.
He shrugged his shoulder and then walked away down the street while Dima and the cats piled into the taxi.
“Good afternoon,” the other man said. He had slid over to the driving seat and wasted no time in pulling away from the curb. Apparently, the other man had just gone off duty and lived nearby.
“Penn Station,” she told the driver.
He made a few comments about the lovely day. The man spoke Russian with a cultured accent, too cultured.
Dima shifted her eyes to the rearview mirror and he glanced at her and then glanced away.
She would know those eyes anywhere.
She leaned to the right and looked at the side of his face.
Prince Cheslav Romanov!
Once she got over her initial shock, Dima chuckled. It served the haughty prince right to be driving a taxi.
Dima laughed so hard that she disturbed the baby and felt a kick.
She shifted and screeched.
“Are you alright?” Prince Cheslav said.
“Yes,” Dima mumbled and covered her ancient head with a scarf.
When they got to Penn Station, she held a withered hand out to him with money to pay the fare.
Cheslav recoiled as he had the five times Dima confronted him outside the palace in St. Petersburg. “You looked young before,” he said.
“I just need to moisturize,” she responded.
He opened the trunk and Dima slammed it, nearly taking his hand off.
“I will get my own luggage,” she snarled. “Don’t you dare touch my trunk or I’ll sic my cats on you.”
Vodka bit him on the ankle and Gypsy growled at him, sounding a bit like a tiny lion.
Dima popped open the trunk and grabbed her trunk.
“Wait,” he said, “That’s Catherine the Great’s trunk.” He grabbed her shoulder and spun her around. “Do I know you?”
Dima clenched Pompeii in her fist, the rock cutting into her skin. She closed her eyes and shifted. “My name is Dima,” she cackled like the witch she was. “Dima Romanov.”
“My God, it is you!”
She swung her bag and knocked him on top of his head. The prince fainted and folded to the sidewalk.
Quick, she shifted back to her younger self.
Then the baby kicked her.
Uh-oh, she had shifted in front of witnesses. “Your eyes are playing tricks on you,” she told the bystanders. “How can a 97-year-old woman be pregnant? It is the lighting at Penn Station which bloats me and causes me to look wrinkled. For instance, the lighting causes a buzzing sound that fools the ears.” Dima muttered a quick spell and everyone knocked the sides of their heads with their hands. It sounded as if a bee was in their ear. “Write to the mayor and complain about the lights. Now, leave me alone.”
Dima dragged her trunk through a door of Penn Station.
The prince had come to his senses and ran after her.
She flipped him off. “No tip for you,” she yelled. “You are not so high and mighty now.”
“Give me that stolen trunk!” He walked towards her in a threatening manner.
The cats jumped in front of her, hissing at him.
Prince Cheslav, ran out the door, jumped in the taxi, and tore out of there, burning rubber.
“Well, New York City had a satisfying ending,” she said to Pompeii as she spun in a private corner.
Dima walked over to the ticket office and purchased what they called a Pennsy rail ticket to Chicago.
The volcanic rock was trembling in her purse.
“Don’t worry, Pompeii,” she said. “Our final destination is not so cold.”
Dima boarded the train to Chicago and quickly fell asleep.
Chapter 17
DIMA HELD POMPEII UP TO THE TRAIN WINDOW SO THE ROCK COULD ENJOY THE VIEW. “See,” she said, “this is as close as you will ever get to my homeland of Russia.”
After two days of traveling, the train pulled into the La Grande Station, the major railroad depot for leaving and departing Los Angeles. The station was between First Street and Second Street. There were a lot of people in the area. Odd, there were few hotels nearby, mainly wholesale businesses.
They constructed the station with two domes and arched walkways, resembling a Russian Orthodox Church in St. Petersburg, now called Leningrad since the Bolsheviks took over Russia. Dima felt right at home as she dragged her trunk from the train, making her way to a street car. The 17 cats followed behind her
Dima had heard on the train that the Flats of Boyle Heights was an immigrant district of Molokan Russians, Mexicans, and numerous ethnic groups. She hired a car, called a jitney, to drive her to the Flats.
The driver was Irish and he spoke with a brogue. “Are you sure you want to go to the muddy Flats?” He eyed the royal monogram on her trunk. “You know Hollywood is a newer Russian colony of artists, former military soldiers and the aristocracy who all fled after the recent revolution.”
“No,” she screeched, “not Hollywood. Take me to the Russian Flats!”
The Flats was home to more peasant-like Russians and thus, the perfect place to become invisible. No one would notice that she was sometimes an old woman and at other times young, depending on the baby kicks. The poor and downtrodden never pay attention to the problems of others.
The poorer area of the Flats was known as Boxcarville due to the abandoned train cars that some Russians and Mexicans were living in.
Dima said no, to Boxcarville.
The driver then took her to an area in the Flats called Cholo Courts where some Mexicans lived in self-built wooden shacks.
Dima ordered him to continue driving.
The driver hollered, “Beardstown.” Her left her off at a tiny home with a For Rent sign. Los Angeles was known as the City of Angels, but the homes in the Flats were small and many were shacks. Industrial plants sprouted in between the homes, providing pollution and more stink.
The Russian Flats was known as Beardstown because the men were mostly bearded, like in old Russia. Most residents dressed in native-Russian clothing of puffy-sleeved shirts for men and tall boots with pants tucked in. The women wore long skirts and colorful blouses with their hair covered with handkerchief-like scarves tied beneath their chins.
Dima rented an apartment on Matthews Street which was the dullest in the Flats. The one-room apartment was really a makeshift kitchen with a bed. She slept stiff, smelling the ovens from the co-op bakery next door. Her eyes stung from the smog of the industrial plants. She slept restlessly as trains clattered across the railroad tracks.
She stayed hidden mostly. She filched the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogues from the community toilets to paper the holes in the wall, to keep the neighbor’s eyes out and their stink in.
Her two-room apartment squeezed in between the Vasiliev apartment on the right—with ten sniveling kids—and Mrs. Petrov’s apartment on the left. Mrs. Petrov snored when she was not crying in her sleep over her daughter who ran away with a plum picker. Dima shared the back wall with Mr. Sokolov. All night long he talked to his dead wife, yelling at her to shut up and cook him some solyanka, which was a Russian-peasant stew.
With each day of her pregnancy, as she ballooned with a baby, Dima came to resent the parasite within her that caused her to somersault between old Dima and young Dima. She only ventured out at night, occasionally to shop. Los Angeles was a combination of street cars, Model-T cars, and wagons pulled by horses. Dima wrinkled her nose at the stench of manure from the livery stables down the street while the ground shook from trolleys rumbling past.
Barking dogs and farm animals overran the neighborhood, but Dima’s 17 cats quickly became the terror of the Flats. Chickens and goats wandered in and out of houses, running with fearful eyes away from cats chasing them. Only the turkeys stood up to the cats, fluffing their feathers and scaring the cats.
Though Los Angeles was a metropolitan with nearly a million people, all the neighborhoods, except for the rich people, kept chickens, cows, turkeys, what have you, for fresh meat and milk. Poorer families kept a menagerie of animals in their yards for food and milk to supplement trips to the small, neighborhood grocery stores. Cows provided milk and chickens were killed for Sunday fried-chicken dinners.
Some neighbors invited Dima to celebrate an American holiday called Thanksgiving. She refused the invitation because she was six months pregnant and the baby kicked often. Several times a day she transformed into her old self.
She lowered her ear to her swollen stomach and could hear the heart beating loudly. She placed Pompeii against her belly, and each cat, also, listened to the baby’s strong heartbeat. If not for the swelling in her hands and feet, Dima might have loved the baby growing inside her. Plus, she was worried about giving birth because of her real age. She could not control the shifting and feared that the trauma of childbirth would cause her to give birth as a 98-year-old woman. For the first time since finding the shapeshifting stone, the thought of dying terrified Dima.
Luck was with Dima three months later when she read in the newspaper that the midwife Margaret Sanger, that same women’s rights activist Dima consulted with in New York City, was giving a speech in Los Angeles. She had not realized then that Margaret Sanger was the famous birth control advocate, who five years ago founded the American Birth Control League. The paper said that her speech about women being mistresses of their own bodies was unpopular with most men and religious groups, so the only place she could speak was on a soapbox on Pershing Square.
Dima rode a yellow street car towards Pershing Square, wobbling across the tracks to downtown Los Angeles, the electric lines sparking above. Due to a city requirement, Los Angeles was no taller than 150 feet, so the skyline was flat, giving the city a dull look, unlike the skyscrapers in New York City. Dima preferred Los Angeles to a city that made her feel small.
It was February and a cool day, which did little to cool the tempers of rush hour. People going to work packed the trolley. A few women wore skirts to mid-calf. A few Veterans from the Great War proudly wore their caps. Immigrants mainly from China, Japan, Russia, Mexico, and Italy, still dressed in their native clothing with their ethnic lunches in paper sacks adding to the stink of the trolley. The riders stuffed the street car like smelly cattle. Dima would zap whoever got too close to her with Pompeii. The ugly rock could let out an electrical shock as a defense mechanism to anyone who got too close. The cats learned this the hard way. The dumb felines still had bald spots where Pompeii scorched the fur.
The trolley rolled past the Bank of Italy at 7th and Olive Street. The bouncing made Dima want to urinate, which she had been doing a lot as she got closer to the birth of the baby.
Damn! The baby kicked and Dima shifted into an old woman.
At 7th and Grand, she dashed off the trolley, scurrying to the J. W. Robinson Department Store. “Where’s the lady’s room?” She performed a dance for the doorman.
“At the end of that corner, Madam,” he said, pointing.
She charged through the doors, barely making it to the stall.
Ay, but her rheumatism set in. She could barely roll the toilet paper due to arthritis. It was difficult to carry a baby in a 98-year-old body.
She washed her hands, gawking at crystal chandeliers hanging in the restroom. Los Angeles was the home of movie making and there was such elegance.
Dima spun with Pompeii and shifted back into a young pregnant woman.
This time the doorman tipped his hat to the gorgeous young Dima. Still, she dragged her feet out of the store. She dared not take another trolley in case the wobbling of the car upset the baby. Instead, she trudged up Grand to 6th, and then one block east to Olive Street.
Parked along both sides of Olive Street were Model-Ts and other makes of automobiles. Two sets of trolley tracks ran down the center between two lanes of car traffic. Dima stood at the corner of 6th and Olive. She drilled her shoulder blades into one of the Corinthian columns of the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance building. Snow-covered mountains in the distance made her shiver though it was merely cool in Los Angeles. In fact, the grass in Pershing square, which was a square park, was green. Dima liked the warm winter in Los Angeles compared to the freezing cold of St. Petersburg, and the cold winter of New York City.
She crossed the street to the park. Trees and lampposts with five globes in them lined the sidewalk of Olive. A walkway in the center of Pershing Square was wide, the park bursting with palm trees and other tropical foliage. Utility poles and electrical lines marred the park’s beauty. The decorative lamp poles when lit made the park look lovely at night.
Pershing Square was the perfect place to have a talk about birth control since it was near Skid Row. Sleepy-eyed prostitutes woke early to hear Mrs. Sanger speak and littered the park. Destitute women from the rescue missions huddled together, most of them with a hoard of hungry mouths to feed. Elderly women from Bunker Hill tenements had gathered to hear the talk, though they had no more worries about having babies.
Lucky old stiffs, Dima thought. She rubbed her swollen belly with one hand and her aching back with the other hand. She would have to practice birth control so she must listen carefully to Margaret Sanger’s speech. Like her great-grandmother, the nympho Empress of Russia, Dima liked men too much. That is because I need someone to love me, she thought and then wondered, surprisingly, for the first time if her child would love her. She did not trust in family so was skeptical of a child’s love.
What do I know of being a parent? To the gypsies I was simply of use to make money for the family piggy bank. The gypsies beat Dima as a child when she did not pickpocket her quota for the day. She had been a ragged little girl with her small hands in stranger’s pockets fishing for coins. When she grew into a lovely young woman, the gypsies required Dima to tell fortunes during the day and sell her body at night, all for the good of the family. The gypsies had forced Dima to pay them the fortune they believed the filthy-rich-royal Romanovs should have rewarded them with for saving her life. The only reason the gypsies had not pawned Dima’s royal trunk and her few rich possessions was because the pearls and royal blanket were proof that she was the great-granddaughter of Catherine-the-Great and so related to the Tsar. The gypsies never gave up the hope that they would profit from Dima being a Romanov.
Dima shook her head of the cobwebs of her so-called gypsy family.
Some of the crowd gathered at Pershing Square most likely wanted a glimpse of the activist daring enough to mail contraceptive devices and birth-control information that was punishable by the Comstock Law, which declared women’s birth control obscene. The religious busybodies should have kept their noses in Bibles and out of politics. The holy rollers were the harshest critics of women’s rights and even believed that women were the property of their husbands.
In any case, soapbox speakers at Pershing Square always drew a lot of listeners. Public speaking was a form of entertainment, like a live show, with audience participation. There was shouting, arguing, emotional appeals, and sometimes humor. Obnoxious loudmouths in the crowd always led the rabble.
The thrills and chills of the police probably showing up with belly clubs and bullying the crowd was the dessert of a soapbox speech. The danger of public speeches enthralled the public. The police were more likely to show up at Pershing Square than at the soapbox speeches in the Plaza because City Hall was close to Pershing Square and demonstrators, who spilled into the surrounding streets, could easily shut the government down, clogging the transportation system. Speakers at Pershing Square also posed a threat by the proximity of the city’s financial firms, classiest hotels, and luxury stores.
It was a Thursday and lunch time so drunken, alcoholic men staggered to the park from Skid Row. Other men dressed in suits and white shirts, munched on homemade lunches or street hot dogs. The men were taking a break from the many downtown office buildings.
A crowd of serious women huddled close by Dima, trying to avoid the shade trees. The benches were all claimed. Women in front sat sideways on the grass. Others stood, craning their necks to get a glimpse of the guest speaker.
Dima took a deep breath and elbowed her way to the front with the help of Pompeii and the yelps of the crowd who jumped back at the zapping by the volcanic stone. Pompeii turned a lovely lightning-pink color when he attacked a bystander with an electrical zap.
Margaret Higgins Sanger had a fair complexion with a big nose and large, puppy-dog eyes. She combed her hair straight across her forehead so it appeared as if she wore a cloche cap.
Mrs. Sanger began her speech with a bit of activist information. She once spent 30 days in prison for opening the first family planning and birth control clinic. Later, she discovered a loophole in the Comstock Law—if doctors dispersed birth-control pamphlets prescribed for medical reasons, they were exempt from prosecution. Thereafter, she opened birth control clinics across the country, staffed by women doctors.
She stood on the soapbox, speaking loudly. “Though I advocate birth control, I am against the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed yearly in the United States. Practice prevention instead. In the last five years, I have received over a million letters from women wanting information on preventing contraception. Find out how to enjoy sex, without fearing getting pregnant.” She waved some pamphlets at the crowd.
Some of the women in the audience blushed with embarrassment.
A few bravely clapped, including Dima.
A red-faced man screamed, “God will punish you for leading these women astray.” He waved his hands, as if he would push her from the soapbox.
Dima wrapped her coat tighter, hoping to avoid his scrutiny. The ugly man was obviously a religious fanatic and a woman hater. If she should shift in front of him, he would have her burned at the stake.
She heard whispers among the women who appeared scared of his religious fervor. The man often preached from a soapbox in the Plaza or in front of the churches, inciting the crowds to bring back the burning times, and torch women who went against his interpretation of the teaching of the Bible.
Two men sat in front. One man got out and placed her luggage in the trunk of the taxi. Dima slapped his hand when he grabbed her enormous bag. “It’s my purse,” she said.
He shrugged his shoulder and then walked away down the street while Dima and the cats piled into the taxi.
“Good afternoon,” the other man said. He had slid over to the driving seat and wasted no time in pulling away from the curb. Apparently, the other man had just gone off duty and lived nearby.
“Penn Station,” she told the driver.
He made a few comments about the lovely day. The man spoke Russian with a cultured accent, too cultured.
Dima shifted her eyes to the rearview mirror and he glanced at her and then glanced away.
She would know those eyes anywhere.
She leaned to the right and looked at the side of his face.
Prince Cheslav Romanov!
Once she got over her initial shock, Dima chuckled. It served the haughty prince right to be driving a taxi.
Dima laughed so hard that she disturbed the baby and felt a kick.
She shifted and screeched.
“Are you alright?” Prince Cheslav said.
“Yes,” Dima mumbled and covered her ancient head with a scarf.
When they got to Penn Station, she held a withered hand out to him with money to pay the fare.
Cheslav recoiled as he had the five times Dima confronted him outside the palace in St. Petersburg. “You looked young before,” he said.
“I just need to moisturize,” she responded.
He opened the trunk and Dima slammed it, nearly taking his hand off.
“I will get my own luggage,” she snarled. “Don’t you dare touch my trunk or I’ll sic my cats on you.”
Vodka bit him on the ankle and Gypsy growled at him, sounding a bit like a tiny lion.
Dima popped open the trunk and grabbed her trunk.
“Wait,” he said, “That’s Catherine the Great’s trunk.” He grabbed her shoulder and spun her around. “Do I know you?”
Dima clenched Pompeii in her fist, the rock cutting into her skin. She closed her eyes and shifted. “My name is Dima,” she cackled like the witch she was. “Dima Romanov.”
“My God, it is you!”
She swung her bag and knocked him on top of his head. The prince fainted and folded to the sidewalk.
Quick, she shifted back to her younger self.
Then the baby kicked her.
Uh-oh, she had shifted in front of witnesses. “Your eyes are playing tricks on you,” she told the bystanders. “How can a 97-year-old woman be pregnant? It is the lighting at Penn Station which bloats me and causes me to look wrinkled. For instance, the lighting causes a buzzing sound that fools the ears.” Dima muttered a quick spell and everyone knocked the sides of their heads with their hands. It sounded as if a bee was in their ear. “Write to the mayor and complain about the lights. Now, leave me alone.”
Dima dragged her trunk through a door of Penn Station.
The prince had come to his senses and ran after her.
She flipped him off. “No tip for you,” she yelled. “You are not so high and mighty now.”
“Give me that stolen trunk!” He walked towards her in a threatening manner.
The cats jumped in front of her, hissing at him.
Prince Cheslav, ran out the door, jumped in the taxi, and tore out of there, burning rubber.
“Well, New York City had a satisfying ending,” she said to Pompeii as she spun in a private corner.
Dima walked over to the ticket office and purchased what they called a Pennsy rail ticket to Chicago.
The volcanic rock was trembling in her purse.
“Don’t worry, Pompeii,” she said. “Our final destination is not so cold.”
Dima boarded the train to Chicago and quickly fell asleep.
Chapter 17
DIMA HELD POMPEII UP TO THE TRAIN WINDOW SO THE ROCK COULD ENJOY THE VIEW. “See,” she said, “this is as close as you will ever get to my homeland of Russia.”
After two days of traveling, the train pulled into the La Grande Station, the major railroad depot for leaving and departing Los Angeles. The station was between First Street and Second Street. There were a lot of people in the area. Odd, there were few hotels nearby, mainly wholesale businesses.
They constructed the station with two domes and arched walkways, resembling a Russian Orthodox Church in St. Petersburg, now called Leningrad since the Bolsheviks took over Russia. Dima felt right at home as she dragged her trunk from the train, making her way to a street car. The 17 cats followed behind her
Dima had heard on the train that the Flats of Boyle Heights was an immigrant district of Molokan Russians, Mexicans, and numerous ethnic groups. She hired a car, called a jitney, to drive her to the Flats.
The driver was Irish and he spoke with a brogue. “Are you sure you want to go to the muddy Flats?” He eyed the royal monogram on her trunk. “You know Hollywood is a newer Russian colony of artists, former military soldiers and the aristocracy who all fled after the recent revolution.”
“No,” she screeched, “not Hollywood. Take me to the Russian Flats!”
The Flats was home to more peasant-like Russians and thus, the perfect place to become invisible. No one would notice that she was sometimes an old woman and at other times young, depending on the baby kicks. The poor and downtrodden never pay attention to the problems of others.
The poorer area of the Flats was known as Boxcarville due to the abandoned train cars that some Russians and Mexicans were living in.
Dima said no, to Boxcarville.
The driver then took her to an area in the Flats called Cholo Courts where some Mexicans lived in self-built wooden shacks.
Dima ordered him to continue driving.
The driver hollered, “Beardstown.” Her left her off at a tiny home with a For Rent sign. Los Angeles was known as the City of Angels, but the homes in the Flats were small and many were shacks. Industrial plants sprouted in between the homes, providing pollution and more stink.
The Russian Flats was known as Beardstown because the men were mostly bearded, like in old Russia. Most residents dressed in native-Russian clothing of puffy-sleeved shirts for men and tall boots with pants tucked in. The women wore long skirts and colorful blouses with their hair covered with handkerchief-like scarves tied beneath their chins.
Dima rented an apartment on Matthews Street which was the dullest in the Flats. The one-room apartment was really a makeshift kitchen with a bed. She slept stiff, smelling the ovens from the co-op bakery next door. Her eyes stung from the smog of the industrial plants. She slept restlessly as trains clattered across the railroad tracks.
She stayed hidden mostly. She filched the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogues from the community toilets to paper the holes in the wall, to keep the neighbor’s eyes out and their stink in.
Her two-room apartment squeezed in between the Vasiliev apartment on the right—with ten sniveling kids—and Mrs. Petrov’s apartment on the left. Mrs. Petrov snored when she was not crying in her sleep over her daughter who ran away with a plum picker. Dima shared the back wall with Mr. Sokolov. All night long he talked to his dead wife, yelling at her to shut up and cook him some solyanka, which was a Russian-peasant stew.
With each day of her pregnancy, as she ballooned with a baby, Dima came to resent the parasite within her that caused her to somersault between old Dima and young Dima. She only ventured out at night, occasionally to shop. Los Angeles was a combination of street cars, Model-T cars, and wagons pulled by horses. Dima wrinkled her nose at the stench of manure from the livery stables down the street while the ground shook from trolleys rumbling past.
Barking dogs and farm animals overran the neighborhood, but Dima’s 17 cats quickly became the terror of the Flats. Chickens and goats wandered in and out of houses, running with fearful eyes away from cats chasing them. Only the turkeys stood up to the cats, fluffing their feathers and scaring the cats.
Though Los Angeles was a metropolitan with nearly a million people, all the neighborhoods, except for the rich people, kept chickens, cows, turkeys, what have you, for fresh meat and milk. Poorer families kept a menagerie of animals in their yards for food and milk to supplement trips to the small, neighborhood grocery stores. Cows provided milk and chickens were killed for Sunday fried-chicken dinners.
Some neighbors invited Dima to celebrate an American holiday called Thanksgiving. She refused the invitation because she was six months pregnant and the baby kicked often. Several times a day she transformed into her old self.
She lowered her ear to her swollen stomach and could hear the heart beating loudly. She placed Pompeii against her belly, and each cat, also, listened to the baby’s strong heartbeat. If not for the swelling in her hands and feet, Dima might have loved the baby growing inside her. Plus, she was worried about giving birth because of her real age. She could not control the shifting and feared that the trauma of childbirth would cause her to give birth as a 98-year-old woman. For the first time since finding the shapeshifting stone, the thought of dying terrified Dima.
Luck was with Dima three months later when she read in the newspaper that the midwife Margaret Sanger, that same women’s rights activist Dima consulted with in New York City, was giving a speech in Los Angeles. She had not realized then that Margaret Sanger was the famous birth control advocate, who five years ago founded the American Birth Control League. The paper said that her speech about women being mistresses of their own bodies was unpopular with most men and religious groups, so the only place she could speak was on a soapbox on Pershing Square.
Dima rode a yellow street car towards Pershing Square, wobbling across the tracks to downtown Los Angeles, the electric lines sparking above. Due to a city requirement, Los Angeles was no taller than 150 feet, so the skyline was flat, giving the city a dull look, unlike the skyscrapers in New York City. Dima preferred Los Angeles to a city that made her feel small.
It was February and a cool day, which did little to cool the tempers of rush hour. People going to work packed the trolley. A few women wore skirts to mid-calf. A few Veterans from the Great War proudly wore their caps. Immigrants mainly from China, Japan, Russia, Mexico, and Italy, still dressed in their native clothing with their ethnic lunches in paper sacks adding to the stink of the trolley. The riders stuffed the street car like smelly cattle. Dima would zap whoever got too close to her with Pompeii. The ugly rock could let out an electrical shock as a defense mechanism to anyone who got too close. The cats learned this the hard way. The dumb felines still had bald spots where Pompeii scorched the fur.
The trolley rolled past the Bank of Italy at 7th and Olive Street. The bouncing made Dima want to urinate, which she had been doing a lot as she got closer to the birth of the baby.
Damn! The baby kicked and Dima shifted into an old woman.
At 7th and Grand, she dashed off the trolley, scurrying to the J. W. Robinson Department Store. “Where’s the lady’s room?” She performed a dance for the doorman.
“At the end of that corner, Madam,” he said, pointing.
She charged through the doors, barely making it to the stall.
Ay, but her rheumatism set in. She could barely roll the toilet paper due to arthritis. It was difficult to carry a baby in a 98-year-old body.
She washed her hands, gawking at crystal chandeliers hanging in the restroom. Los Angeles was the home of movie making and there was such elegance.
Dima spun with Pompeii and shifted back into a young pregnant woman.
This time the doorman tipped his hat to the gorgeous young Dima. Still, she dragged her feet out of the store. She dared not take another trolley in case the wobbling of the car upset the baby. Instead, she trudged up Grand to 6th, and then one block east to Olive Street.
Parked along both sides of Olive Street were Model-Ts and other makes of automobiles. Two sets of trolley tracks ran down the center between two lanes of car traffic. Dima stood at the corner of 6th and Olive. She drilled her shoulder blades into one of the Corinthian columns of the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance building. Snow-covered mountains in the distance made her shiver though it was merely cool in Los Angeles. In fact, the grass in Pershing square, which was a square park, was green. Dima liked the warm winter in Los Angeles compared to the freezing cold of St. Petersburg, and the cold winter of New York City.
She crossed the street to the park. Trees and lampposts with five globes in them lined the sidewalk of Olive. A walkway in the center of Pershing Square was wide, the park bursting with palm trees and other tropical foliage. Utility poles and electrical lines marred the park’s beauty. The decorative lamp poles when lit made the park look lovely at night.
Pershing Square was the perfect place to have a talk about birth control since it was near Skid Row. Sleepy-eyed prostitutes woke early to hear Mrs. Sanger speak and littered the park. Destitute women from the rescue missions huddled together, most of them with a hoard of hungry mouths to feed. Elderly women from Bunker Hill tenements had gathered to hear the talk, though they had no more worries about having babies.
Lucky old stiffs, Dima thought. She rubbed her swollen belly with one hand and her aching back with the other hand. She would have to practice birth control so she must listen carefully to Margaret Sanger’s speech. Like her great-grandmother, the nympho Empress of Russia, Dima liked men too much. That is because I need someone to love me, she thought and then wondered, surprisingly, for the first time if her child would love her. She did not trust in family so was skeptical of a child’s love.
What do I know of being a parent? To the gypsies I was simply of use to make money for the family piggy bank. The gypsies beat Dima as a child when she did not pickpocket her quota for the day. She had been a ragged little girl with her small hands in stranger’s pockets fishing for coins. When she grew into a lovely young woman, the gypsies required Dima to tell fortunes during the day and sell her body at night, all for the good of the family. The gypsies had forced Dima to pay them the fortune they believed the filthy-rich-royal Romanovs should have rewarded them with for saving her life. The only reason the gypsies had not pawned Dima’s royal trunk and her few rich possessions was because the pearls and royal blanket were proof that she was the great-granddaughter of Catherine-the-Great and so related to the Tsar. The gypsies never gave up the hope that they would profit from Dima being a Romanov.
Dima shook her head of the cobwebs of her so-called gypsy family.
Some of the crowd gathered at Pershing Square most likely wanted a glimpse of the activist daring enough to mail contraceptive devices and birth-control information that was punishable by the Comstock Law, which declared women’s birth control obscene. The religious busybodies should have kept their noses in Bibles and out of politics. The holy rollers were the harshest critics of women’s rights and even believed that women were the property of their husbands.
In any case, soapbox speakers at Pershing Square always drew a lot of listeners. Public speaking was a form of entertainment, like a live show, with audience participation. There was shouting, arguing, emotional appeals, and sometimes humor. Obnoxious loudmouths in the crowd always led the rabble.
The thrills and chills of the police probably showing up with belly clubs and bullying the crowd was the dessert of a soapbox speech. The danger of public speeches enthralled the public. The police were more likely to show up at Pershing Square than at the soapbox speeches in the Plaza because City Hall was close to Pershing Square and demonstrators, who spilled into the surrounding streets, could easily shut the government down, clogging the transportation system. Speakers at Pershing Square also posed a threat by the proximity of the city’s financial firms, classiest hotels, and luxury stores.
It was a Thursday and lunch time so drunken, alcoholic men staggered to the park from Skid Row. Other men dressed in suits and white shirts, munched on homemade lunches or street hot dogs. The men were taking a break from the many downtown office buildings.
A crowd of serious women huddled close by Dima, trying to avoid the shade trees. The benches were all claimed. Women in front sat sideways on the grass. Others stood, craning their necks to get a glimpse of the guest speaker.
Dima took a deep breath and elbowed her way to the front with the help of Pompeii and the yelps of the crowd who jumped back at the zapping by the volcanic stone. Pompeii turned a lovely lightning-pink color when he attacked a bystander with an electrical zap.
Margaret Higgins Sanger had a fair complexion with a big nose and large, puppy-dog eyes. She combed her hair straight across her forehead so it appeared as if she wore a cloche cap.
Mrs. Sanger began her speech with a bit of activist information. She once spent 30 days in prison for opening the first family planning and birth control clinic. Later, she discovered a loophole in the Comstock Law—if doctors dispersed birth-control pamphlets prescribed for medical reasons, they were exempt from prosecution. Thereafter, she opened birth control clinics across the country, staffed by women doctors.
She stood on the soapbox, speaking loudly. “Though I advocate birth control, I am against the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed yearly in the United States. Practice prevention instead. In the last five years, I have received over a million letters from women wanting information on preventing contraception. Find out how to enjoy sex, without fearing getting pregnant.” She waved some pamphlets at the crowd.
Some of the women in the audience blushed with embarrassment.
A few bravely clapped, including Dima.
A red-faced man screamed, “God will punish you for leading these women astray.” He waved his hands, as if he would push her from the soapbox.
Dima wrapped her coat tighter, hoping to avoid his scrutiny. The ugly man was obviously a religious fanatic and a woman hater. If she should shift in front of him, he would have her burned at the stake.
She heard whispers among the women who appeared scared of his religious fervor. The man often preached from a soapbox in the Plaza or in front of the churches, inciting the crowds to bring back the burning times, and torch women who went against his interpretation of the teaching of the Bible.
