Naked in the Promised Land (38 page)

Then Mara's two weeks were over. "In Toledo!" Sergio wore the same smile I'd seen when he stood in the wings, and when I gave him my hand to shake, he squeezed it in a damp paw. We would meet on June 22, a week after I graduated. Sergio held the theater door open for Mara. She made him stand there at the door while she put her arms around me, and we hugged much longer than casual friends would. When I turned my lips to her silken cheek they brushed by chance near her mouth, and I felt her fingers tighten on my back. The look she gave me when we finally pulled apart was charged, sexual. It couldn't have been anything else. But Sergio must have seen. In fact, it felt as though she'd wanted him to see. When I glanced at him, he was again smiling that mysterious little smile.

Were they lovers? I wondered about it all the time now.

And what would they expect of me? The question popped into my head days later, and I couldn't get it out. She'd looked at me like that, knowing that he was watching. What kind of deal did they have between them? What if he wanted me too? What if that was their deal? Something was sure to happen between Mara and me, but what if he wanted to be a part of it too—and she wanted him to be a part of it? I'd be alone with them both in a strange city. Anything could happen. Anything. Did she really
take a picture
on the runway?

***

The questions hung over me like a bogeyman's threat. I think it was Dr. Jackson who kept me from getting the answers. Dr. Jackson was an elderly man with a great shock of white hair that fell over his forehead, dressed always in the conservative tweeds that were practically requisite for Berkeley professors in the early 1960s. All semester he'd made Victorian England come alive for me, and he'd made me understand that literature wasn't just gripping characters or striking images or musical language. "Dickens, Kingsley, Disraeli—they entertained, but they also seduced their smug middle-class readers into caring about social problems that were right under their noses, though they couldn't see them without the help of art." That was Dr. Jackson's lecture the week after Mara and Sergio left San Francisco. "We mustn't denigrate other kinds of artistic goals; but theirs—to alleviate social injustice through art—that's the artist's most noble undertaking." The class applauded, though lectures were never applauded at Berkeley except at semester's end. Maybe because what Professor Jackson said made me remember how I felt standing on the street in Mexico City, watching the student demonstration, and how I felt about the HUAC protests, and how I loved the things Maury used to say about justice; or maybe it was because I was on an emotional edge over Mara and Sergio—whatever the reason, I sat there, intensely moved, not applauding but crying. Tears streamed down my cheeks, and though I felt like a fool I couldn't stop them. I swiped at my face with the back of my hand. I was giving up the possibility of doing fine things ... for what? To go to Toledo, Ohio, and be a stripper—and who knew what else? I couldn't do it ... not even for a year, not for money, nor love of D'Or, nor the fascination of Mara. I wouldn't! Sitting there, runny-nosed, in the auditorium, I felt I'd been rescued from a hot fire just in time. It had almost gotten me ... that thing that had always awaited me ... just when I thought I was completely safe. But Dr. Jackson plucked me out at the eleventh hour.

"I'm going to graduate school right away," I told D'Or that night. "I can't go touring. If I work as a stripper, I won't be able to stop after a year."

"But ... what will we do?"

"I'll figure it out," I said, though I had no idea how.

***

I'd written to my mother and Rae to say I wouldn't be visiting during Easter break, because when I asked Chelton for time off he'd grumped, "If you're leavin' all the time, whadda I need you for?"

A week later, I got to my Chaucer class early and settled into the empty room with an open text before me. "'This child I am comanded for to take,'—And spak namoore, but out the child he hente Despitously," I read, and the fourteenth-century English in my head was suddenly mixed with words in a Yiddish accent—my mother and Rae's Yiddish accent—so real, it was as if they were standing in the hall.

"The lady said Wheel Building, upstairs, thirty-three." That was my aunt's unmistakable voice.

"Maybe we're not in Wheel Building. There's no thirty-three here." My mother's voice.

"Excuse me, we're looking for Lilly Faderman, in Wheel Building," the foghorn blared.

"Well, this is Wheeler
Hall.
There's no thirty-three upstairs, but room two thirty-three is right there," a young man's voice said politely.

I closed my book.
This is what comes of always working, no rest, fighting all the time with D'Or. You hallucinate, like the times you saw Genghis and Khan slinking around the living room at Mark's when they were asleep in the kitchen.
I drifted out to the hall as though in a dream.

But there they were. In the flesh! In their sweet flesh. My mother was wearing a new woolen suit and patent leather high heels, and I could tell she'd been to the beauty parlor because her hair was all brown now and in shiny waves. Her mouth was bright with lipstick. My aunt wore a purple coat and a green hat with a veil, such as nobody had worn for ten or fifteen years, and on her feet were her orthopedic shoes, a hole cut out on the left one for her bunion. They both looked so beautiful to me, even when Rae yelled at the top of her voice, "Lilly! Mary, look, she's here!" and my mother jumped on me and wept, "Lilly! We haven't seen you for so long! When are you coming home?" and everyone who passed stared at them and me and tittered.

I gulped down the sob that would betray my pretend composure. "Shhh," I whispered, "classes go on here. We have to be quiet. Soon," I promised my mother, my finger to my lips, my heart full with the miracle of these two old ladies, my treasure, standing right there in Wheeler
Hall. "I graduate in June, and then I'm coming back for good. Soon." I kissed them with my mother's style of loud, smacking kisses. To hell with the tittering students.

"Don't work no more. You'll make yourself sick with work and school. That's what we came to tell you," my aunt said, ignoring my
shhh.
"I'll send money till you graduate. Only stop working," she roared in the second-floor hall of Wheeler.

I finally got the whole story: D'Or had attended Berkeley from 1949 to 1953. At the end of the four years she went to the graduation ceremony, just sat in the audience. "I thought it was my right," she said.

"But you didn't graduate?" I tried to get it straight.

"I don't know. I just went for four years and got mostly A's, but I don't think I finished everything."

"Let's order your transcripts and see," I said.

She'd gotten three incompletes in English classes and lacked one course for her foreign language requirement.

I applied to graduate school at UCLA, just barely under the deadline. Though I'd failed to change D'Or's life, I had to change my own. "If I'm accepted at UCLA I'm going," I told her the next week, chomping on one of the corned beef sandwiches I'd brought back from David's, avoiding those gray eyes that had made me forget iron resolves a hundred times before.

"You know I'm not going back to Los Angeles," D'Or cried. "You know I can't live near my mother and brother."

"Let's worry about that later," I said quickly. I'd made a plan. "For now we'll worry about your college degree."

"Why? I haven't done schoolwork for ten years!" She was dismissing the idea. I couldn't let her.

"Look, D'Or, I'll help you write the papers to make up your English incompletes." I'd do anything. I had to.

"I wouldn't even know where to begin," she said, and shook her head.

"Okay, okay, look ...
I'll
write them. You just convince them to let you into a French class, even though it's late in the semester." I gave her
my best encouraging smile. "You're a great saleswoman, D'Or: You convinced Chelton and Sergio about me."

The next day I waited for her outside the dean's office. She emerged smiling triumphantly. The dean would let her enroll late in a French reading class. "But it meets four days a week," she cried seconds later, a mountain of impossibility on her frail shoulders. "How am I going to come here for classes four days a week?"

"Present," I answered each day when the teaching assistant went down the list in the rollbook and at the end called "Shirley Ann Goldstein." Miss Goldstein earned a B in French.

"D'Or, we have to talk." The night after my last final I stood behind her as she held her hands under the bathtub faucet. "D'Or, I've got to find my way, because unless I do I'm nothing. And I can't find my way by going off to be a stripper with Mara."

She whirled to face me, holding her dripping hands up like a surgeon after a scrub. "But that was your idea!" she shrieked. "It's not fair of you to imply that I was the one who wanted you to be a stripper!"

"You're right, D'Or, of course you're right." I couldn't blame her for it. But now, finally, I wanted out. I had to get out. "It was my idea, but I can't keep doing stuff like that. I want my life to be different, but I've been so exhausted for the last years, with work and school and everything else, that I haven't been able to think clearly."

"So you
are
blaming me." She glared at me as she rubbed her hands brutally on a clean white towel that was soon dotted with drops of blood. "You're making me your scapegoat, just like my mother and brother always do!"

It would explode. We'd have another knockdown drag-out fight, I'd feel guilty for my rage and I'd apologize, and we'd be right back at the beginning. I couldn't let it happen again. I had to make her see, once and for all. "D'Or, look at me." She wouldn't face me, though I followed at her heels. "D'Or, I need to find out what I can do in the world, and—it's like what you once told me about your writing—that kind of discovery takes a certain frame of mind that I don't have yet. For now, I need to travel alone."

Finally she looked. Her smile was bitter. "After everything you promised," she sneered.

"I know. I failed," I said. "D'Or, I'm sorry. I'm really sorry I'm not Mary Marvel."

I was accepted in the English graduate program at UCLA, and D'Or and I graduated from Berkeley at the same time. The day her diploma arrived in the mail, I got on a Greyhound bus and headed back, toward my mother and aunt.

I
RECITED THE LESSONS
of the past three years as the bus lumbered south in the night, through Tracy, Stockton, Merced, Bakersfield, and the teenage girl in a baseball cap sitting next to me cracked her gum and puffed on mentholated cigarettes and stared into space.
Here's what I know that I didn't know before I went to San Francisco: (1) I can't rescue women like D'Or (any more than I could rescue my mother), and I've got to give up that Mary Marvel fantasy. Point to think about: If love with a woman is so full of wrenching extremes—such unreal ecstatic highs, such too-real murderous lows—do I really want to be a lesbian? Do I have a choice? (2) There's a bogeyman lurking in wait for me out there (I'd smelled his breath on Mara and Sergio), and if I don't stop placing my naked self in full view, one of these days he'll surely pounce and drag me off to the fate prepared for girls like me. Point to think about: How will I get the money for graduate school if I don't work as a nude model or a stripper? How will I even get through the summer? (3) I'm in love with poetry and fiction. Point to think about: What do poetry and fiction have to do with the noble causes that stir me, with what Maury once called
justice?
Should I live in a high tower? Can I?

It was number 2 that I had to deal with immediately. Back in my old room on Fountain Avenue, I spread the
Los Angeles Herald
out on the bed and scanned the
HELP WANTED—WOMEN
section. The pickings were slim in the summer of 1962 for a young female with a B.A. from Berkeley in English. I could be a telephone operator; I could sell magazines door-to-door (as Nicky had, without even a high school diploma);
I could be an ad-taker; I could be a desk clerk at the Ambassador Hotel or a hostess at Googie's restaurant. I had to take something and fast. I had to get my own apartment before my mother got too used to my living with her again and I felt trapped. I went to work for the
Hollywood Advertiser,
a throwaway newspaper with a dozen pages of "Apartment for rent" and "Used dishwasher for sale" ads.

With my first two weeks' salary I moved out of Fountain Avenue and rented a little apartment at 420 North Curson—but before I knew it, my mother and Albert moved into 401 North Curson and Rae and Mr. Bergman were occupying 404 North Curson. My living alone was pretty much over before it had really begun.

I have given up the sex trades for good. Now I am a member of the legitimate labor force, from eight to five, with a half-hour off for a sack lunch gobbled on a couch in the ladies' room and two fifteen-minute cigarette breaks puffed away on the same couch. We sit in narrow cubicles made of thin gray board, just high enough to block each of us off from her neighbors. We wear wire headsets that clamp at one ear and reach around to our lips. Every few minutes an operator at the main switchboard buzzes one of us and we click on, ready to write down the ad dictated by a new disembodied voice. Our pens are always leaking, and by the end of the day our stiff fingers are purple with ink, our faces streaked with it, our skirts splotched with it. "No talking!" The clean-fingered, clean-skirted supervisor appears at my elbow, shaking her head as if at a naughty kindergartner, when I lean around my cubicle's partition to ask Judy, who'd complained at our cigarette break of bleeding right through her Kotex, how she was feeling. At five, we drag ourselves to the bus stops for the sardine ride home in the rush-hour buses. At seven the next morning we are back at the bus stops.