Naked in the Promised Land (15 page)

"Can we see that
Member of the Wedding
again?" he asked with authority when the other auditions were finished.

"Sure, we have some time," Mr. Lord said amiably, and he called me up again. I saw the audience lean forward to watch, and I became Frankie once more. When I finished they all applauded, though they hadn't applauded for any of the others.

"Work-Study scholarship," Mr. Lord said, when I told him later that I could not afford the forty-dollar-a-month tuition. "You can address theater advertisement envelopes for us, ten hours a week."

I was on my way.

"You were
goood!
" a young woman said as I drifted ecstatically toward the bus stop. She had platinum blond hair and a high Judy Holliday voice with a New York Jewish accent. "Simone Deardon," she introduced herself. (Months later I caught a glimpse of her driver's license. Sonya Dubinsky, it read.)

"Lil Foster," I replied. I wouldn't be "Lilly"—that was the illegitimate girl who grew up in a scroungy furnished room and looked like a refugee child. And I couldn't be Lillian—that was such a somber name. I could be absolutely anyone I wanted to be here, I realized—acting was what it was all about. "Eighteen," I said when Simone asked how old I was. She was twenty.

"Lee-lee." Albert opened the door before I got up the steps. I saw my mother's pale face over his shoulder. "Your mother was driving me crazy. What's the matter with you, to stay out all night?"

"Don't yell at her," my mother yelled at Albert. "Do you want to make me sick?" she yelled at me. "Where were you?"

It was 1
A.M.
The buses had stopped running by the time I got to Olvera Street, but I'd waited a long time at the bus stop before I figured that out. When an elderly Mexican lady and her husband stopped at the traffic light, I asked them for a ride. She made her husband pick me up. They'd just closed their bar on Olvera Street, she said. Then she shook a motherly finger at me. "Terrible things can happen to a young girl alone on the street."

Now I had to shed Irene too. I was supposed to take a singing lesson with her the next day. "I have to talk to you about an important matter," I'd say, looking straight at her. "There's something very important ...
extremely
important ... I need to say to you." I rehearsed the lines out loud, pacing in the dining room between my unmade army cot and the lopsided lion's claw table. But I couldn't think of what I'd say next because the recollection of her statuesque form emptied my head.

I got there thirty-five minutes early, just to sit alone in the cool office for a while and listen through the partition to the lesson she was giving and think about how I used to pet her Orlon sweater. I stared at the old print of the tutued ballerinas that had been part of the furniture of my life for more than three years. "
Every time we say good-bye, I die a little.
" It was Jamie, one of her voice students, singing in a jazzy, syncopated rhythm as Irene pounded the piano.
I'd
come to say good-bye. It smote me like a cudgel on the heart.

"Okay, that's it," Irene announced, and they were coming out. I'd forgotten that Jamie had only half-hour lessons. I heard Irene's high heels click against the wooden floor of the big room, then Jamie's tapped heels and toes behind her, and I wanted to scurry under my chair like the scared mouse that I was.

"Hi!" Jamie waved at me and left.

"Your lesson's not until four. What's up?" Irene asked.

I didn't answer because my tongue had stopped working again. I managed a deep breath.

"Don't tell me it's still that man? I thought it was over."

Chuck, she meant. That seemed like a century ago. I shook my head.

She sat down behind her desk on our gray metal chair. "So what is it?" She'd sounded impatient about Chuck, but I must have looked tragic, because now she regarded me with softened eyes.

I couldn't face those eyes. I studied my balled fists. When I looked up—after an eternity—her hand was extended across the desk, palm up. I dared, I grasped. At last, her silk skin, her warm clasp, I was touching Irene Sandman! I would never let go.

"You can tell me," she said softly.

"I have a terrible crush on you" tumbled out of my mouth when I opened it—the ventriloquist's dummy again—and I couldn't stop: "I'm afraid this is how homosexuals begin." I felt her fingers twitch in surprise but I held firm, a drowning clutch. "I think I'd better leave" bubbled out now (where had that come from?) "because I don't want to be one of them." I hadn't rehearsed any of those lines that escaped from me. "And I know that's what will happen if I stay here because I can't help myself."
No, why was I saying that? There was Carlos. If he'd been different Id still be his girlfriend.
I forced up the memory of his lips on my neck; then I inhaled her perfume and the scent filled my brain and washed everything else out. I just looked down at our clasped hands, my dark olive fingers against her pink-white palm, the miracle of it, and I clutched harder. I could hear the clock
tick-ticking
on the wall, right above my head.
Tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick.

When I finally looked up, I saw tears in her beautiful eyes. I hadn't seen anything like that since she'd said "
wow
" the first time she saw me do Rachel Hoffman. She sniffed. Or did she have a cold? No—the wonder of it—I'd moved her once again! It didn't matter about being an actress anymore. There were tears in her eyes for me! I would stay, just to be near her.

"I know this is hard for you," she murmured, and her fingers moved under my grip. "These things can be terrible. Sid and I had a good friend in the theater in Chicago who..." I fixed on her violet eyes, afraid of what she would tell me yet needing to hear. But she stopped.

"Who what?"

"You're so young, Lillian," she sighed. She'd changed her mind about telling me, I could see; she was retracting the tantalizing, scary
tidbit. Now she wriggled her hand free of mine and dabbed at her nose with a Kleenex. "You're probably right," she said. "It would be better for you to go."

What was she talking about?
No, it's a mistake,
I wanted to cry out. I would fall to my knees and kiss the hem of her dress! I would grab her hand back. I would be her little dog!
Please let me stay,
I would beg.

But I couldn't stay. I needed to become somebody else. And maybe it was true—that what I'd felt for her was the way homosexuals begin, and I didn't want to be one.

I didn't know what was true anymore.

She rose and extended her hand again, only for a handshake this time.

I rose too, weak with confusion. "Thanks for everything," I said, struggling for the well-modulated tones I'd learned from her, and I touched her hand for the last time.

"Sid and I will miss you," she answered. Then, head bowed, I limped out the door on rubber legs.

"
I've lost the love of my life,
" the mask of tragedy inside me bleated.

"
Free, free,
" the mask of comedy exulted.

"So you won't have to take all those buses," my mother said. We were moving to the Westside, where the famous corner of Hollywood and Vine was, where the movie studios were.

"So you can go to the high school with
Yiddisheh kinder
again," Rae said. She and Mr. Bergman were moving to the Westside too.

For the first time in her life, my mother bought furniture. And now she and I and Albert would live in an apartment of our own, without a Missus. We were leaving Dundas Street!

I walked around Fanny's house as in a spell. Would I really be free of this place? Good-bye to the floating eyeballs! Good-bye to the dusty yellowed bedsheets that covered the broken living room furniture! Good-bye to the room where I grew up, the beds in which I'd slept and dreamed before they became Albert's beds! One last peek in the mottled mirror that had seen me as Betty Grable and Eddie Cantor and Mary Marvel. That mirror had also witnessed my mother's flailing and
screaming for her dead brother, and me, running behind her, year after year, two decapitated chickens. I'd been miserable in that room, yet it had been home to me and I'd been happy too. But all that was the past. Who would I be next year at this time, looking into a mirror somewhere else?

"Watch yourself with that crazy bastard," Fanny told my mother when we stood together in the ugly living room for the last time. Albert paced the strip of sidewalk in front of the house, his hat pulled over his ears.

"I'll miss you," I said to Fanny. It was true. She'd been one of the few adults in my daily life. She'd lavished her granddaughters' dresses on me as well as, for better or worse, her opinions and advice. I wanted to hug her now, but I was shy, despite our years together.

"No, you won't miss me." Fanny tossed her hand dismissively. She was dressed in her dead husband's shoes and coat, ready to water the green patch of front lawn as soon as we left. "You'll forget all about me and Boyle Heights in a week. That's the way life is, little
momzer.
Don't worry about it."

"I'll never forget Dundas Street," I swore. "I grew up here. It formed me."

"Formed, shmormed," Fanny mocked. But then we did hug each other, for the first time in all those years.

I never saw her again. I left all of East L.A. behind me for a very long time.

P
ARAMOUNT STUDIO,
RKO, the corner of Hollywood and Vine, all are only a few miles away from Geller Theatre and School of Dramatic Arts. You could almost reach out and touch those shimmery shrines.

"Someone has to make it," Simone says logically. "They need talent, and we've got it."

"Right," we chorus. "Why shouldn't it be us?" After class we crowd the booths at Tiny Naylor's and talk Hollywood talk until 2
A.M.
This is "the gang," as Simone calls us, the dearest comradeship I've ever had (though my harrowing fear is that they'll find out I'm only fifteen years old and think I'm a baby).

"John Wayne in a romantic comedy! For crying out loud, his agent is nuts if he lets him take that picture," one of us says. The movie stars are our glittering second cousins. We're so close—by profession, by geography. Of course we worry about them, though they don't yet recognize us as family. We keep up with their doings through the
Hollywood Reporter
or
Variety—
the family chronicles we read religiously.

"You guys," Nick announces, still stunned by his luck, "my cousin's agent just promised to get me on as an extra for
The Ten Commandments.
Twenty-five smackers a day for at least two weeks. Thirty-five if you get to say something or grunt."

"Terrific!" Simone cries, patting him on the back, and we all cheer.

I don't have a lot to add yet, but I'm new to the game. Most of them have been in Hollywood for years.

"Can I give you a lift home?" Simone asked the first time we all
went to Tiny Naylor's. She drove a new pink convertible with a white top.
But what if she saw my mother? "This girl comes from a family of slobs," she might tell them at Geller's. Or Albert? "From a family of crazies," she might say. She wouldn't even be able to understand their Yiddish accents.

"You can just drop me off here," I said at Stanley and Oakwood, my hand poised to open the car door the second she stopped, and I'd flee, like Cinderella at the ball, so she wouldn't see which building I went into.

"Sweetie, I gotta tell you somethin', for your own good," Simone began as she stopped the car at the corner.
What did she know about me? My age! I'd been so careful—how could she know?
"That striped blouse with that tweed skirt have gotta go," she said, her Betty Boop eyes fluttering sympathetically. "You got talent, but you don't know how to dress."

Their house was a white-pillared mansion, with an upstairs and a downstairs and real oil paintings on the walls—sunsets and oceans and puppies, in big gilt frames. I followed Simone across the white brocaded carpet, fearful that my shoes might leave a smudge. "This is the greatest actress in the school," she gushed to her elegantly coiffed mother.

"Well, isn't that nice." Her mother stretched tight lips over perfect teeth while she surveyed me, head to foot.

Her father, who wore a gray suit and steely businessman spectacles, came home later. Through the picture window in the living room, I could see the shiny, big car he parked in the driveway. "I'll be upstairs till dinner," he told his wife, sifting through his mail without looking up. He threw a "g'day" toward me when Simone told him who I was.

Simone's room had a pink satin canopy bed; a thousand dolls left over from childhood were ranged against the wall on built-in shelves. Her walk-in closet, bigger than my whole bedroom in the new apartment, was stuffed with movie-star clothes. "These don't fit me anymore. You try them on." Simone pulled out one glamorous piece after another, tossing them munificently onto her bed. Form-hugging ankle-length capri pants; a red dress ("marvelous décolletage," Simone said) made of soft, cloudlike material; a glittery black blouse, scooped low at the bosom, pinched tight with elastic at the waist. "I'm through with these, too. Betcha they'll fit," she said, her cheeks flush now with Pygmalion's
pleasure as she reached into a tower of shoes and fetched toeless three-inch heels, backless four-inch heels, clear plastic platform sandals that were almost invisible on the foot.

"Now you don't look tacky at all," she said, gratified by her efforts as I modeled the red dress and the four-inchers for her.

"So now we do somethin' about that hair," she told me when I next showed up at her house, wearing her purple capris and the toeless three-inchers. She wanted me platinum, like herself, but we compromised on raven's wing black with a thin swath of copper running through the left side. She sat me on the pink padded stool in her marble bathroom and expertly draped my shoulders with a plastic sheet, then painted my head with the smelly black dye, dipping her brush into the bottle with the flourish of an artist dipping from a palette. She stepped back to examine her handiwork and noticed she'd accidentally gotten a splash of dye on the tip of my nose. She rubbed at it with a washcloth, her face straining in worry, but it remained. "What should we do?" she cried.