Naked in the Promised Land (39 page)

But this is a good job, I understand. I don't have to stand on my feet all day. The place is air-conditioned. I endure nothing like my mother's sweatshop labors, and I earn twice what she did. Yet how soul-eating, how dismal. This is work the way most young working women in America experience it—if they're lucky. The alternative to such drudgery is finding a man who would take all the wage-earning upon himself.

I must do well in graduate school. I must.

***

To step on the UCLA campus after three inkstained months at the
Hollywood Advertiser
was like filling yourself to the eyeballs with fresh water after a long desert trek, feeling your cheek cool after a burning fever, romping in gold-poppied meadows after a dark imprisonment. I'd made it back to the green haven. I could spend my days contemplating Donne's wit and Swinburne's word-music. Bliss.

But I was terrified. I watched my fellow students out of the corner of my eye that first day, and I sensed they watched me too. Did we all think
they
had made a mistake by letting us into this heavenly sanctum and that soon we'd be found out, sent packing back to places like the
Hollywood Advertiser,
where we belonged? Every afternoon I took the bus right home after classes, shut myself into my apartment, and read and read and read. I was certain they'd never before let anyone as stupid, as slow-witted, as ignorant as I into graduate school. Am I really going to be able to do this? I devoured everything on the reading list, all the critical sources I could find in the library. How much sleep did I need? Could I make it on six hours a night? Five?

"Why do you want more school? The head uses up the blood you need to have babies," Rae declared. But she bought yards of heavy blue silk and soft brown wool and crisp beige linen. She was working at Roth LeCover now, the factory that supplied I. Magnin's, and she paid the cutter to cut the lovely materials into patterns "like what the millionaires buy." She ordered me to stand statue-still while she drew hemlines below my knees with blue chalk or to turn round and round in small steps on her living room floor while she pulled pins from between her lips and stuck them here and there in the material with which she'd draped me. For the next weeks, whenever I climbed the stairs to her apartment, I could hear her sewing machine
whrrr, whrrr,
just as it had when she'd lived with us in the Bronx. She made me millionaires' clothes to wear to UCLA. With her help, I fooled them about that too: They never guessed I was poor as well as dumb.

She also paid my rent until I got a teaching assistantship. By November, the money I'd saved from my months at the
Hollywood Advertiser
was almost gone. I had sixty-three dollars to my name, and the landlady was coming to collect her seventy dollars in a couple of weeks.
I actually thought about calling Andy. ("Gigi Frost. Remember me?" I'd say. "The boyfriend dumped you again, huh?" he'd answer.
And the bogeyman would leer from behind his shoulder.)
Instead, I applied for a weekend position—countergirl at Schwab's. "No, no," Rae protested when I told her. "You'll make yourself sick with school and work together." Though she didn't want me to get a Ph.D. (she didn't even know what a Ph.D. was), on the first of every month she slipped into my hand a used envelope with a canceled stamp that now contained crisp green bills—three twenties and a ten.

"When are you getting the divorce like you said, and then we'll go to the
shadchen,
the matchmaker?" my aunt demanded.

"Okay, okay, I'll get a Jewish divorce," I told her. I was drowning in obligation and love. The next Sunday Mr. Bergman drove us to a white stucco duplex on Pico Boulevard; Rae rang a loud buzzer at the door.

"You'll feel a lot better, Lilly, you'll see," Mr. Bergman said as we stood waiting. He patted my back for courage, as though he were delivering me for a medical procedure. I patted his.

The door opened a crack, then wider. I could smell burnt toast. The rabbi had small watery eyes and a yellowed beard. "Come inside, come in," he said with a heavy accent, and led us slowly up creaky stairs into a room where the windows were covered by dark shades. One bare bulb, hanging from the ceiling, made a stark, unpleasant light. "Here you stand"—he motioned Rae and Mr. Bergman off to the wall. Me he took by the arm to the center of the room, under the bulb. On top of my head he settled a square of wrinkled lace kerchief that he'd drawn like a magician from the pocket of his black alpaca coat. Then he sat at a Formica table and with a fountain pen scratched words on a long sheet of paper. "Deserted?" he asked in the wavery voice of the very old, then shook his head
yes
in answer to his own question and wrote it down. "Your name?"

"Liebe." Rae moved to his elbow, gave him my name in Yiddish, watched him write it.

"Husband?" the rabbi asked.

"Mark. I don't know the name in Jewish," my aunt muttered with distaste; "Lesson," she mispronounced my husband's last name. When
she was done, she went back to stand beside Mr. Bergman. They watched, hushed, with strained faces, ready to witness a life-saving operation.

The rabbi presented me with the paper on which he'd written, folded now into a square. Then with his bony fingers he clasped my hands and squeezed them together, the paper in between, breathing through his mouth as though it were difficult labor. His eyes seemed filled with tears. I felt bizarre, disoriented, outraged too. I'd been kidnapped into a quasi-medieval ghetto—I, a UCLA graduate student. I pushed the feelings down. Since I'd come, I would do it right; I would follow the ritual as he directed. With bent head, I paced slowly to the door, the paper still between my hands. ("You, Liebe Faderman," he en-toned, "got the
gett,
the divorce, in your own two hands, and you are free to leave from your husband's life.") Next I was to retrace my steps and hand him the paper. He took it from me as though he'd never seen it before, unfolded it, read it aloud in Hebrew, then mumbled an incantattion that he ordered me to repeat. "She is a free woman!" he told my aunt and Mr. Bergman triumphantly.

"
A dank Gott!
" Rae cried. I was halfway down the stairs already because I knew what she was going to say next.

Supper I eat across the street, with my mother and Albert. "It gives me so much pleasure to make you something nice," my mother says almost every evening those first months, hovering over me with solicitude. I'm the prodigal daughter, home at last, sitting down at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table that groans with food. Sometimes in the afternoons I'm in my apartment, writing a paper or reading the week's assignments, and I hear the creak of the wooden wheels of the shopping cart she pushes down the sidewalk. She's coming back from the stores on Fairfax Avenue, where she went to forage for my sake. Now she will spend the next hours cooking for my sake. I go to the window and look down on her bent form, her thickened shoulders, as she crosses the street. I remember myself as a little girl reaching for my beautiful mother's arm. "Mother and daughter," she'd say. I want to run into the street and take her arm again.

But the euphoria between us doesn't last. After a few months of suppers, I'm not the long-lost-daughter-returned anymore. Yet my mother needs me
there. She pulls out from her trunk of miseries all the old, worn complaints and drapes herself in them for me to witness. From my trunk of miseries I pull the old, worn pity and guilt. Except sometimes I refuse to don them. Instead I explode. Every word she says is an irritant now, like D'Or's words at the end.

"You know what the lady next door told me?" She didn't wait for me to ask what. "That I shouldn't let you go to college because soon you'll think you're better than me and you won't want anything to do with me no more." This, as I sat down at the table and she deposited a plate of chopped liver with eggs and onions in front of my nose.

I shoved it with an angry hand (harder than I'd intended), and it crashed to the floor, a mess of crockery and goop.
Let me go to college? What had she ever done to let me go to college?
"What did you ever give me in my life?" I leaped to my feet, glaring. "What kind of lousy childhood did you give me?" tumbled from my mouth.

She stared at the bits of plate and food on the floor, then at me, baffled. "What was missing from your childhood?" she cried. "What do other children have that you didn't have?"

She was serious, my crazy mother—she really didn't know! How could I begin to spill it out? The dance of the two beheaded chickens, Fanny's filthy furnished room, my filthy tangled hair, filthy Falix. I opened my mouth, then clamped it shut. There was no point. I stooped and gathered the pieces of crockery in my hand, then swiped at the floor with a wet rag. Albert came in, reeking from the cigarette he'd just smoked on the porch, and drew his chair up to the table, waiting to be served.

Every day my mother summons her energy and tries to give whatever she has to give by the food she prepares—and every evening I must eat every bite, the waterlogged lettuce with cucumbers and carrots and tomatoes and "scunions" (as she calls scallions), the leaden matzoh balls suspended between gobs of grease, a half-boiled chicken with green beans that are gray from too much cooking, and mashed potatoes that float in loose and lumpy gravy, then a great mound of apple strudel that laps over the perimeter of the cracked saucer on which she serves it to me. Albert chews noisily, smacks his lips, says nothing, and my mother looks at me hungrily, her knife and fork sitting on her plate. What
does she want from me? It's me she eats instead of her food. She devours me. Every inch of me.

"I can't eat the dessert," I say. "I've had enough." My mother is making me fat. What if I flunk out of graduate school and have to go back to modeling to support myself?

"I try to make nice things for you and you don't even appreciate," my mother complains loudly. "You come and eat supper, and then right away you disappear."

"I've got to study, dammit! Let me live my life," I scream at her, and throw my paper napkin down on the table.

"Shaddup, the two of you, and let me eat in peace," Albert says, spewing food in all directions from his full mouth.

"Where are you going?" she yells after me.

"Home!" I slam the apartment door and stomp up the block, my heels clicking furiously on the concrete. All she knows how to do is stuff me, complain, stuff me, complain. Never once does she ask me about how I'm doing in school, my ambitions, who's in my life, whether I'm lonely. Nothing. I'm too upset now to go home and study. My feet head toward Fairfax Avenue. There I go to Canter's, where I can find a decent cup of coffee and calm down.

I made a friend in the English Department, Paula Huffermann, a thickset woman of thirty with a mezzo-rich speaking voice that sounded her brightness, and with frowzy hair and rumpled dress as untidy as that of Alice's White Queen. Paula invited me to her book-cluttered rabbit warren of an apartment in Santa Monica to study with her for our History of the English Language exam. She lived with Tsatska, a lugubrious mongrel whose long white fur had turned pinkish because of some disease. "My main companion," she called Tsatska, who placed a big woolly head on her lap as we sat cross-legged on the floor, sipping tea from old jelly jars before we settled down to work.

What Paula really wanted, she confided as her fingers absent-mindedly stroked Tsatska's discolored coat, was a man who was a good lover, who'd be a comfortable hubby and give her four kids and a sprawling house on a ranch in Wyoming. "But since I can't seem to get those things," she said, "I'm getting a Ph.D. so I can teach instead."

"I'll choose a Ph.D. and a professor's job over a husband and a farm any day," I ventured.

"Oh, we'll get the Ph.D., all right; they won't stop us from that. But they won't let us become real professors," she added. I looked at her blankly. "Well, how many women do you see on the UCLA faculty?" she asked.

I hadn't really thought about it. I'd noticed that at least half the graduate students in the department were women, so I took it for granted that there were jobs for us when we graduated. But Paula was right, I realized now. How could I have missed what was so obvious? Out of an English faculty of sixty at UCLA, only two were female, Florence Ridley and Ada Nesbitt. At Berkeley I hadn't had a single woman professor. Who would hire me after I got my degree?

"Of course, who knows, maybe you'll get lucky like Ridley or Nesbitt." Paula shrugged her plump shoulders and spread her History of the English Language notes on her generous lap. "But neither of them is married," she added. "Is that a life?"

The job situation couldn't be as bad as she was making it sound. Ridley and Nesbitt were proof that women could get fine positions—I just needed to find out how. "Harvard, something like that," Paula said when I asked if she knew where they'd gotten their Ph.D.'s. "Rich Episcopal daddies," she said with a shrug, "like we ain't got. I expect if the man with a hoe doesn't come along, I'll be working at a junior college. They hire women for that, or maybe a good private girls' school. Don't frown like that, my dear," she said. "It's just the way it is."

We studied late into the night, calling out for pizza about ten o'clock, oblivious to our lusterless futures and slaphappy as junior high school girls by midnight. "Why don't you stay over?" she asked around two o'clock, and she made up a Murphy bed, which came down from the wall. Tsatska jumped up to join me, landing on my belly, panting in my face, around 4
A.M.
I wasn't sleeping anyway because I kept thinking about Paula's saying, "We'll get the Ph.D., but they won't let us do much with it."

We studied again in the morning, then she drove me back to my apartment. I was about to flop on the couch to review my notes again
when, through the open window, I heard my mother and Rae. "If she's still not up there, something terrible happened," Rae said, and I realized with a start that I hadn't told them I'd be staying at Paula's overnight.