She gave parties. People drank Dago red. She made pots of chile. People danced, sang, got drunk, slept on Theda’s floor. Often she worked on her reading assignments while her guests moved around her, talking and shouting and occasionally fighting. Theda paid no mind. She seemed to like the noise. Sometimes, when there was no one around, she went to a bar a few blocks away and sat at a table, her notebook open, her pencils sharpened, a gin drink at hand.

Annie continued to work at the ceramic shop until Max called her and told her to come out to the plant and be interviewed for a training job. It was a long way, the streetcar, then a bus. The training shop was in a shed reeking of metal and oil, with machines standing in two threatening rows. People worked at them, several wearing isinglass masks. There were only a few women. She would make more at the school than she was making now. The course lasted six weeks.

“It’s a long way,” she told Max on the phone later. “It took me hours.”

He would manage something, he said, when she was through the training school. If they got on the same shift, he’d drive her to the plant.

She began, on Saturdays, to look for a place of her own. Theda’s life was an enchantment, a thrall, but it filled every inch of the apartment. Theda’s strange hours, her work habits, her morning lust for the newspaper obituary page, her fits of black melancholy, her wisecracks, her broodings, her demands for conversations in the middle of the night—“Let’s have a little conversation,” she would say, waking Annie up and dragging her to her feet, feeding her pieces of the cake she’d suddenly decided to make at one in the morning—it was like one drunken spree. For the first time in her life, Annie wanted a room of her own.

Wandering around Hollywood on these Saturdays, she began to know its sun-dried puniness, the depthless quality of the little shoddy houses that lined streets which could have been anywhere, the plaster flamingos, ducks, geese, dwarfs, squirrels, cats, stuck into the grass of the small lawns which each house had, a domestic apron of yellowing green that proclaimed its owner’s good fortune. She found a boulevard lined with old frame houses, like swollen invalids with half-shut eyes. It was the place of the fortunetellers, the astrologers, the spook cults whose members she glimpsed limping down the stairs to the sidewalk, old women most of them, maggot-faced old ones in print dresses and ugly small hats nailed to thin skulls. Miles away were the canyons where the movie people lived, the hills where their houses hung above the valley, the dream castles of money, half-baked Moroccan and Spanish delights, houses of eighteen and twenty and fifty rooms.