Naked in the Promised Land (16 page)

I examined the black splash in the mirror. It was the size of a dime and made my nose look fat. Now I rubbed until the skin all around it colored like a rose, but the spot got no dimmer. "That's okay." I shrugged to hide how upset I really was. "Walt Disney will hire me to do Minnie Mouse."

Simone looked ready to cry, but the sob that escaped from her sounded like a laugh. That was all I needed. A guffaw broke through my lips, and then we chortled and snorted together until we hiccuped, and still we couldn't stop. "Let's try cold cream," Simone sputtered through her hysteria. She ran to bring it from her medicine cabinet. Biting her lip in concentration, she smeared it hard on my poor bespattered and berubbed nose. It did the trick. But for the rest of the afternoon we laughed like two schoolchildren over nothing, for the sheer fun of laughing. She was the girlfriend I'd never had as a kid.

"You look just like Elizabeth Taylor," generous Simone said as I was leaving.

I couldn't believe my good fortune. It was she who usually organized our treks to Tiny Naylor's, and now I sat next to her in the pink convertible, with the rest of the gang crowded into the back seat, as we sped down Wilshire Boulevard after classes or rehearsals. Almost everyone liked Simone, and she'd found something in me to like.
Oh, don't let anything ruin it.

"Simone has the emotional depth of a post when she tries to act," catty Babette whispered to me on a break when Jesse, the James Dean look-alike, held Simone's eyes with his as he lit her cigarette. "She's just here to find a great-looking guy, don't you think?"

"Simone's wonderful," I answered, defending my friend.

"Well, she still can't act her way out of a paper bag," Babette said with a smirk.

Simone swiped at Jesse's face, a playful slap.

I had secrets I had to keep, even from Simone, but she also had secrets she kept from me. For a while after the slap, she went around with a faint smile on her lips and a distant look in her eyes. It was about Jesse, I was sure, though she never mentioned him. Then the smile faded, the look became dark, and for the first time since I'd met her she wasn't chatty. I found out why, standing outside what I'd thought was an empty classroom, waiting for seven o'clock. Gloria, the older woman who called everybody "dahling," was already inside. "I've never seen Nick so pissed," I heard her say. "Jesse asked to borrow his apartment when Nick went to Vegas, and then, dahling, Nick came back to find bloody sheets. Blood all over his bed! Can you believe that Jesse? He didn't even bother to clean it up."

"Yuk! Well, she got more than she can handle, the silly bitch." It was Babette's voice. "He'll drop her now, 'cause all he wants is cherry."

It had to be Simone they were talking about. Poor Simone. How awful that Nick talked, and now Babette and Gloria were talking, and pretty soon everyone would know. This wasn't the first time I understood that girls can't get away with very much.

My mother cried a lot about me in those days. "What do you mean, you're not going any more to school? You used to be so good in school. Albert, hear what she wants to do!"

I'd had a summer of acting classes and performances and late nights at Tiny Naylor's and weekends at the beach with the gang. Albert and I had already had tiffs because I came home in the early morning hours, and my mother wouldn't let him sleep until she heard my key in the
door. "Every night I have to hear it. 'Something terrible happened to her!' 'She got killed by a car!' 'She got kidnapped!'" He mimicked my mother's frenzied pitch. "Enough already!"

"Well, she's stupid to worry," I tossed off. I knew how to live my life better than she did. In the beginning, I'd tried to reassure her. "We rehearse late, and then Simone always drives me home. I'm just learning to be an actress," I'd told her reasonably. "What are you worried about?" But I gave up.

"She says she's quitting school," my mother cried to Albert again.

"She can say all she wants, but she gotta go till sixteen. They throw you in jail if you don't go."

"I just got a job—I'm a receptionist—for this lawyer—downtown—a criminal lawyer," I embellished when Simone invited me to go window-shopping. I'd already spent four furtive days in the tenth grade, and I hated it. I'd heard that the prissy Lane's dresses the girls wore cost forty-five dollars apiece, and their fathers were dentists or CPAs or owned shops like the ones in which my mother used to work. They cracked their gum on their back teeth and had cowlike expressions on their faces, and all day long they brushed and primped at their beauty-par-lored hair as though it were their life's work. Jewish-American princesses. They never even saw me, but it didn't matter because I had my own gang.

I had to become a double agent. Actually, when I wasn't scared that I'd be found out, it was almost fun. To Fairfax High School I wore dirty brown and white oxfords, with gray-white socks that bunched around my ankles, refusing to stay up on my calves. I camouflaged my body in long, drab skirts and wrinkled blouses that wouldn't remain tucked in at the waist. This was my costume, my disguise. In anticipation of my wonderful evenings, I set my hair in bobby pins and wore an old-lady babushka over my head.

"Ooh, where you going tonight?" a nosy girl might ask from a neighboring desk, surprised at my hairpinned head—as if such a sloppy creature could have anywhere to go.

"No place," I'd answer, barely lifting my eyes from my book of plays. Let them stew.

Each afternoon I went home from school and donned the other costume. This took a couple of hours: Max Factor base—dusky and mysterious; eye shadow and lipstick and rouge, the way Simone had taught me to apply them. I brushed the pincurls out into a sophisticated do, back behind my ear on one side, falling exottically over a mascaraed eye on the other—a raven-haired Veronica Lake, I hoped. "Diamond Lil," Simone had called me when I tried on the last pair of capris she gave me, stretch material in a harlequin effect, one leg all black, the other all white.

"Diamond Lil," I chuckled to myself in algebra class, snug in my slob disguise. I
loved
that name.

When I was with my Geller's gang, Fairfax High School was my shameful secret, because I could never let them know I was a kid. Sometimes I woke from a nightmare as if I'd been dropped into a pit:
They've discovered the truth. "She's only fifteen years old!" Babette points a shaming finger at me, and the others hoot, even Simone: "Baby, baby, kindergarten baby!
"

Okay, the less I talked the better: I'd be a silent, smoldering beauty. I was an actress, and I could act any role I wanted.

"How's your new job," Stan asked.

"Fabulous," I drawled, a mysterious smile playing around my lips. End of discussion. A snake vanishing between two rocks.

The truant officer came to our apartment two or three times. "Well, your daughter had twelve absences last month." I heard the precise nasal voice addressing my mother the first time. I peeked out from my room and saw the woman's lace ruff collar and tight blue-gray hairdo that sat like a helmet on her head, and I dashed back to my bed on noiseless tippy-toes. I buried my head under the pillow, simulating the high snores of deep sleep, but she didn't barge in.
Should I be scared? Could they really throw me in jail? Or reform school? They probably thought I was an immigrant girl, poor family. They wouldn't bother with me much because they'd figure Id be sixteen soon enough and quit to get married.

"She hasn't been feeling good," my mother said, excusing me another time.

"Then you need to take her to a doctor, and she has to bring a letter from him to school. In America, children have to go to school," the truant officer lectured, enunciating carefully. "She can go to work or get married or whatever you want her to do when she's sixteen."

"Okay," my mother said, tremulous before American authority. "I'm gonna tell her to get better." My mother screamed at my door when the truant officer left: "Lilly, what's the matter with you? You want to make me sick?"

"Leave me alone," I screamed back. "I know what I'm doing."

I hated it when the truant officer came to see my mother, who'd then get hysterical, but I couldn't bear to drag myself to school in the morning after I'd stayed out until 2 or 3
A.M.
And I wasn't learning anything from the teachers anyway. I'd sit in the back of the class and read plays. No one stopped me, or even noticed, and I could finish almost three a day. I knew more about Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Maxwell Anderson, and William Inge than anyone at Geller's.

Algebra—D,
my report card said,
English—C, Geography—D, History—D, Latin—F
(why in the world had I taken Latin?). But what did it matter? I only had a few more months to go, and then I could quit school and devote myself to my acting career.

Though I now gave my mother new things to worry about, the truth was that as soon as she'd married Albert, her old madness vanished—maybe because she didn't have to work anymore in an unventilated sweatshop, on her feet with her arms extended all day long; maybe because she didn't have to see the Hungarian woman and hear the tragic stories of lost brothers that made her think of her own; or maybe it was just that now she had new responsibilities—shopping for food, cooking supper every night—and they took up a lot of space in her mind. Whatever it was, though my mother never looked happy, she wasn't running around the room naked either, pulling her hair and screaming "Hirschel!" How could I not be grateful to Albert for that?

In other ways, though, her life was still horrible. I knew from the movies and the songs she'd loved and the way she'd pined over my father for all those years after he betrayed her that she'd been a very romantic, very sexual person. But I couldn't imagine her making love with my stepfather. Did they ever have sex? On the nights I was home I listened from my bed, curious and ready to be repelled, but no sounds
came through the thin plasterboard that separated the two bedrooms except for Albert's wall-rattling snores and my mother's tossing and turning, her pillow or head hitting the wall.

On weekend mornings I was often awakened by Albert's voice from the kitchen: "
Nu,
are you gonna deal today or tomorrow?" Then a long silence. "So, your turn! Am I playing this game by myself or with somebody else?" Then with passion: "Hah, I got you!" and I could hear him slam his victorious cards on the table. Did they play gin rummy instead of having sex?
Why, oh why, had she made me push her into this? Why, why, with all her voluptuous beauty, wasn't she able to get Moishe to marry her?

During the week, the minute Albert came home from work he sat at the kitchen table, dealt out a solitaire hand from his grubby deck, and waited for my mother to deposit his food in front of him. When she stood beside him with his plate, he pushed the cards aside to clear a space and lifted his knife and fork without a word, without a nod of acknowledgment.
What if he goes crazy again and does something violent to her?
But he never did. He wasn't a normal person, but he worked and brought home the money, and she cooked his suppers. It was a businesslike arrangement. They never talked.

I never talked either when I was home for supper. The table was silent except for Albert's
chomp
and
slurp
and my mother's
crunch
and
crack.
It was her sounds, even more than his, that grated in my ear, set my teeth on edge, like steel screeching on steel. Sometimes, sitting there at the table, I hated her with a visceral fury that made me clench my fists.
Why hadn't she managed to make her life any better? I would never lead a life like hers!
But my hatred was followed almost always by a gush of pity. I'd loved her so passionately once, when we were the center of each other's world. And now she was stuck.

We never walked arm-in-arm anymore, the way we used to on the streets of the Bronx or East L.A. We never went anywhere together anymore. "Mother and daughter," we'd said in New York. I tried not to let myself think about it. Whenever I remembered I felt a claw in my gut, but I could escape in my mind by thinking about Geller's and my friends and my hoped-for career. I had to make my own life.

***

"I hear that William Morris himself came to see
Anna Christie
here last month, and he actually signed one guy on," somebody whispered on audition night, the first time I went to Geller's.

"Elia Kazan was in the audience a couple of years ago. That's when he discovered Eva Marie Saint here," somebody else whispered.

Did we all wait with secret hope after each performance for the fabulous knock on the dressing room door? "William Wyler's out front and says he has to talk to Lil Foster!"

But though we were practically next door to them, the big shots weren't coming around to the school productions. So where did they find their talent? How did you get discovered? I still hadn't a clue, and there was no one at Geller's to advise us. We took classes and were on our own. Jack Lord auditioned the students, but then, like a god in a mechanistic universe, he virtually disappeared. We joked about the appropriateness of his name.

I'd thought, the night of my audition, that I'd already been discovered by E. J. Smith because he worked in a talent agency and told me I was terrific, but he never said anything more after that night. What could it hurt to talk to him now? "Oh, that's when I was at the Mel Kaufman Agency. I quit there," he told me when I asked how I could get an appointment. "I'm trying to get started someplace else. But you can just go into the Mel Kaufman Agency on your own. Take some photos," he said easily.

"Did you go?" he asked weeks later when we ran into each other in front of Geller's. I'd given up right away because I had no money for professional photographs. I'd seen the kind you were supposed to take around with you. Gloria had had some done. "Publicity pictures," she said they were called: black-and-white glamour shots, moody large eyes staring intently into space, glossy wet lips. The photos were backlit, with shadows that spoke of high drama and mystery. She told me what they cost. A fortune.