Her name was Korbel (rhymes with “warble”). It was her surname, the name she insisted she be called. Even as a small child I knew this was unusual. I once asked, and she answered that she’d no use for her given names, Edna Violet.
Sixty-ish and gray-haired, Korbel was the formidable figure of a woman sometimes called a “battle-axe”. My parents had hired her, improbably, as a housekeeper when I was a toddler. Her influence was strong in my formative years. Appearance-wise — try to picture Jack Lemmon’s character in SOME LIKE IT HOT 25-30 years later.
I had to look up “battle-axe” and the definition fits. Korbel rarely smiled, unless it was at me. She could be forcefully blunt with her opinions. She wore sensible shoes and uniform-like dresses, accessorized with a cigarette. She had a low, gravelly smoker’s voice and walked with a subtle limp. Still, my memories of being held on her lap or just holding her hand distill down to a primal sense of safety and comfort. I knew she was crazy about me and that’s what mattered.
She was a retired, registered nurse and a widow. Or, so she’d said. She had one to two grown children: a daughter nearby and, if memory serves, a son. She never mentioned their father, which seems suspicious in hindsight. If she was in fact divorced, I’d bet $$$ she’d have denied and carried that to her grave. It was the 1950s, and respectability mattered to her.
At a friend’s Halloween party: Korbel came as herself.
Years later, my mother admitted that Korbel the housekeeper barely lifted a finger to keep house. Early on, she’d promoted herself to Nanny to my brother and me. Not finding the nerve to fire let alone confront Korbel, Mom just kept doing the shopping, cooking and housecleaning. Eventually, she hired a maid to help clean once a week.
Fortunately, Korbel did feed us when my mother wasn’t around. She made simple food like grilled cheese sandwiches or white rice with sugar, milk and cinnamon.
One of Korbel’s habits was taking me for lazy, morning strolls in our neighborhood. I’d run or skip ahead, then dutifully wait for her to catch up. The main event was combing the alleys, looking for treasure that other people had thrown out. She didn’t mince words about how wasteful our spoiled Beverly Hills neighbors were, discarding such perfectly good things.
She was right. Hard to imagine by today’s eco-correct standards, but we found chairs, refrigerators, lamps, books, birdcages — a defacto thrift store — in our alleyway. I looked forward to our scavenger hunts, in hopes of scoring some really good alley-swag. To this day, I can’t stand to throw out anything that shouldn’t be trash. I’m that recycle/reuse Nazi who rescues things (that my husband hoped I wouldn’t see) from out of the garbage can.
Another routine was watching the Lawrence Welk Show, often while my mother made our dinner a few feet away. My parents had installed a second, small TV at the head of our large, amoeba-shaped kitchen counter.
Korbel loved celebrity gossip… she’d keep a running commentary going. She’d fixated upon one of the Lennon sisters, whom she branded a Hussy (with a capital H). Something about an affair that busted up the guy’s marriage. Her view of it, anyway. Her source was undoubtedly some Hollywood tabloid or other.
Despite being a trained RN, she carried forward superstitions from her own upbringing. If I played outside on wet grass in bare feet, I was admonished to come in before I “caught cold”. (Yet, smoking in the house around young children was perfectly fine.)
Korbel might have been an insomniac. Once, when I awoke from a bad dream, I navigated my way through a dark house downstairs to her bedroom behind the kitchen pantry. I found her sitting in bed listening to talk radio, her lit cigarette glowing like a beacon in the dark. I crawled into bed with her and let the white noise of scratchy callers’ voices lull me to sleep. I woke up again at daybreak, magically back in my own bed.
At Muscle Beach in Santa Monica
On rare weekends, Korbel took Paul and me along to visit her daughter, Ruth, and grandkids, Scott and Carrie. They lived in a cookie-cutter, single story house somewhere in West LA, south of Santa Monica Blvd.
Their house was a lot smaller and messier than ours with a postage-stamp sized yard. I liked going there. While Korbel and her daughter visited, we played outside or watched TV, eating lunch out of a box of Fruit Loops if we felt like it.
I don’t remember a Mr. Ruth, so Ruth might have been my first encounter with a single, working mother. She was either a nurse like Korbel or a schoolteacher. I was surprised the first time I met her. To my limited experience, she seemed too perky and pretty to be any child of Korbel’s, whom I couldn’t imagine ever being one minute younger. But, the two women did share the same mop of curly hair—Ruth’s brunette and Korbel’s battleship gray.
I barely remember Carrie since her brother Scott grabbed all my attention. When I was four to five years old, he was at least nine or ten—and my very first crush. Scott obliged my silent adoration by tossing me around and tickling me. Or, maybe that’s how my crush got started. Naturally, I wanted to marry him when I got old enough. I cheerfully told Korbel my intentions on the way home from one such visit. To her credit, she just smiled and/or chuckled and didn’t discourage me.
Before I started Kindergarten, Korbel and I sometimes dropped off or picked up Paul at school. One morning in early May, we found the school transformed. The front lawn had sprouted a raised dais (platform) with a lattice wall on one side and two very tall poles with streamers. Adults were scurrying around, decorating the lattice with flowers. Korbel explained that Paul’s school (soon to be mine) celebrated May Day. The school children performed dances around these “may poles”. The dais was where the Kindergarten king and queen would sit, presiding over the ceremony.
She added: “Next year you’ll be Queen.”
I didn’t question this. She was a grown-up so I figured she had the inside track to this and other Intel.
The following Spring, I came home from Kindergarten with a note pinned to the front of my dress. This was my teacher’s way of telling my parents I’d been chosen to be that year’s May Day Queen. My mother saved the note… I still have it somewhere.
OK. I don’t believe Korbel was clairvoyant. She was, however, SO partial to me that no other little girl deserved to wear the sparkly, dime store crown. How it must’ve pleased her, to have her opinion so validated.
Korbel and me all glammed up, the winter before she left us.
I was excited about being Queen. But, it turned out to be less than grand. For starters, it was hard to sit quietly for eight grades-worth of tumbling and dances. On top, the effects of squinting into the sun, the heat, dehydration, perfume from a gazillion flowers inches from my face—and my crown pinned so tight that it was pulling my hair—all converged, giving me one massive, thundering headache. I was near-nauseous by the time my parents collected me to go home.
Adding insult to injury, I’d just lost a front tooth. It didn’t seem fair that my King* was prettier than me. So much for my royal moment.
Over time, my mother became less and less comfortable with Korbel’s excessive doting and what she deemed negative influence, upon me in particular. During my first grade Christmas break, she sat us down and announced it was time for Korbel to go. We didn’t need her now that Paul and I were growing up and both in school.
This rocked my tiny world. I don’t recall getting to say Goodbye. Admittedly, this part of my memory drive is blurred, as if glimpsed through a rain-streaked windowpane (my tears).
I never saw Korbel again. The first few days, our house felt void of her large presence. But, sooner than I could’ve imagined, it was as if she’d never been there at all. As the weeks went by, I’d catch myself feeling guilty that I didn’t miss her more.
The world kept turning.
It would be years before I seriously thought about Korbel again. During my eighteenth summer, as an Au Pair in France taking care of a two year-old, I paused to wonder what had become of her. Whatever her life held after she left us, I was most likely Korbel’s last little girl.
I wish I had tried to find her… to thank her, for her fierce, unconditional love and support. She could’ve been long gone by then (if the cigarettes didn’t get her, something else likely did).
Her love, coming from one so “crusty”, made me feel special, but not superior; lovable, but not entitled.
That was my takeaway, and nothing else. I really cannot think of a better one.
* postscript: It makes me smile that I’m still friends to this day with the May Day King, Brad.
saidtheappletothetree 