Necessity Read Free Page B

appeared in the ad pages of mass-circulation magazines.

7 The damnable wig has served well to disguise her on the road but it doesn’t go with her coloring or with her grey blue eyes. It’s hot and it itches.
    Her hair is naturally sandy and usually shoulder length but she’s worn it waved and blond for years; now she means to cut it short and let it hang straight and revert to color. At the moment the roots are showing and she’s going to have to help the naturalization process along at first with a good beauty shop coloring job to cover up the yellow past. Meanwhile the damnable wig.
    But changing the hair back to normal won’t in itself effect much reduction in the possibility of chance recognition. Some other aspect of her appearance will have to change. Lose weight? No; any thinner and she’d look anorexic. Gain weight, then? No; she’s too vain: she needs to go on liking herself.
    For a day on the highway she entertained the idea of plastic surgery but discarded it because she wouldn’t have time for the bruises to heal, and in any case it was a foolish idea and her life just now has quite enough melodrama in it without that.
    Happily there’s no town anywhere in the world where disguises can be obtained more readily than in Hollywood.
    A few blocks from Vine Street, beginning to wilt in the heat, she finds a parking space two blocks from her destination. Hollywood Boulevard has gone to seed and she must thread a pedestrian traffic of hookers and dangerous-looking adolescents and ordinary people going about their ordinary business.
    In the theatrical costume supply shop she tries on a pair of eyeglasses with plain clear lenses. She knows the lingo because some of the girls at the modeling agency in New York were always trying to make it as actresses. “I’ve got a callback for a workshop play—just a walk-on as a tough, no-nonsense secretary.”
    The clerk, a tanned blond young man with the pretty face and resentful pout of an actor between jobs, knows exactly what she requires; he simpers helpfully and goes to a drawer.
    The frames have uptilted corners and give her the severe look of a self-important office worker. She is very pleased by how markedly they change her appearance.
    â€œAnd I think a dark red wig, don’t you? Something I can do up in a tight bun at the back.”
    He says, “I’ve got just the thing, dear.”

8 Studying the map, she sits in a booth over cottage cheese and a diet cola. The glass shakes in her hand but all the same there is a singular fascination in having the freedom to choose not only where to live but who to be.
    She tries to recall what she learned about the area during her brief trips years ago. Not much comes to mind; but she’s heard enough casual talk in her lifetime to recognize some of the place names on the map.
    She knows, for example, that Malibu and Santa Monica are on the sea, that Bel Air and Brentwood are where the movie stars and million-dollar executives live, that the extravagant shops of Rodeo Drive are in the middle of Beverly Hills, that East Los Angeles is the barrio and that Marina Del Rey is where the boat people go—the sort of boat people who own 36-foot cabin cruisers and make an annual half-day voyage to Catalina Island and spend the rest of the year parked at the dock sitting on deck attired in tee shirts and shorts, swilling beer and watching ball games on color television.
    Through sunglasses her eyes explore the map. Not downtown Los Angeles: too slummy. Not Orange County: too stifled. Not West Hollywood or Beverly Hills or Santa Monica: not much likelihood someone from the past might be in town long enough to recognize her, but no matter how long the odds it is a risk to be avoided.
    But there. Just over the Hollywood Hills to the north—the San Fernando Valley.
    A hundred suburbs vainly in search of a city, indistinguishable but for their howler names: Burbank, Studio City,