Naked in the Promised Land (43 page)

"But you don't,"she grumps. She turns to Binky to say "Make her take it." Then she cries, "I forgot something," and runs out the door. She returns a few
minutes later carrying a pink cardboard box that's freckled with gray grease spots.
CANTER'S BAKERY
is printed on it, and she opens the cover for me to look, though I already know what's inside: butter cookies, two dozen at least, crumbly and stale and dotted with cherries that glow and look as if they've been injected with red dye, also purchased the hour my aunt heard I was coming to Los Angeles. "Put it in the car now so you won't forget," she tells Binky, who takes the box. The charm of her wonderful Kennedy smile is lost on my aunt.

Friday and Saturday we close the libraries, then rush to Malibu, to the ocean, where the breeze is soft, where we wait like condemned women for one more look at the bittersweet sight of the gold sun kissing the water before it merges with it and leaves glorious silver streaks behind in the sky. "We'll come back to L.A., won't we?" Binky says wistfully.

"Are you that miserable in Fresno?" I ask.

"No." She shrugs, but I know she is.

(And I know too, though I don't want to think about it, that despite how much we love each other, her misery sometimes saps her energy. "Let's just cuddle," she often says now when I try to make love to her.)

On Sunday we must drive back to Fresno, as my aunt knows, and she watches from her living room window, starting at dawn probably. When she sees us come out of my mother's building, she hurries down her stairs. Before we can open the car doors, she is standing in front of us. "Watch how you drive with so many maniacs on the road," she says, giving her ritual admonishment to Binky.

"Oh, I will, don't worry about a thing," Binky patiently assures my aunt.

"Bayg arup dos kepele,
bend down the little head," Rae orders me now, and I do it (though my head hasn't been little for twenty years). She spreads her fingers over my crown and mutters words in Hebrew that I don't understand as she blesses me. I feel the pressure of her blessing hand all the way up Highway 99.

These are the ways my mother and aunt show me that though I live two hundred miles away, they have not forgotten.

"How many college students would you say there are in this country? Millions, right?" Binky sat at the kitchen table and worked figures with a green pen. "Let's say the book sells only fifty thousand copies—and
maybe a quarter of the students who read it go on to teach high school English."

"Yeah ... and let's say, modestly, that only half of them use material they've gotten from our book in their classes." I peered over her shoulder, helped divide and multiply. "Let's say they use it for only five years—and each teacher has three hundred students a year. That means our research will have touched—" We scrutinized the numbers together. Could it really be?

"Nine million kids!" we cried, hugging each in our double passion.
Maybe this will make up for how much she misses her students at Marshall.

My days were full—with the book, of course, and with teaching twelve units of Victorian literature and American ethnic literature, with department meetings and committee meetings, with advising students, grading papers, trying to make friendly small-talk with the men in my department so they wouldn't notice what an anomaly I was. But once we finished the book and sent the manuscript off to the publisher, Binky's days were mostly empty. When I came home, never before five or six o'clock, I'd find her sitting in half-darkness on the brown La-Z-Boy, still in her plaid bathrobe, bare legs flung out on the footrest, staring glassy-eyed into space or thumbing through
Time
or the
Atlantic.
A half-full cup of cold coffee flecked with spoiled milk and the bread-crust remains of a sandwich would be on the end table.

"Postpartum blues?" I tried to joke one day.

"There didn't seem any point in getting dressed," she said apologetically (but with a hint of something else, something new, in an undertone). "There's no place much to go here, is there?"

"The book will be out soon." I knelt beside her and rested my head on her lap. "And when that happens, I'll get a job in L.A. We'll get back there, I promise."

"I know," she said, patting my hair distractedly.

But what if I couldn't get a job in Los Angeles and we were stuck in Fresno forever? Didn't most of the men in my department have wives? What did they do all day? "Isn't there anyone interesting in the neighborhood to talk to?" I asked.

She stood up. "They're housewives. Fresno housewives, and I feel like I'm becoming one too. I have a profession, remember?"

I jumped to my feet, ready to rumble as I used to with D'Or. But this was Binky. What sour note was creeping between us?

"Binky, I want to get out of Fresno too," I told her evenly. "Look, I'll write to Long Beach State ... L.A. State also." Paula had been hired at a new state college that just opened in southwest Los Angeles, Dominguez Hills; maybe she could help. "I'll write there too. As soon as the book is out, I'll write to them all."

"Yes, please, please!"
Pleeeze
was how she said it. How miserable she looked.

The next semester she got a job teaching a freshman composition course at Fresno State, but that made things even worse. I couldn't risk my colleagues' figuring out that I was a lesbian, so when Binky and I ran into each other in the department office we'd become secret agents, cocking heads and batting eyes to signal which one of us ought to leave so that no one would intuit we were lovers. On top of that, part-timers received the munificent sum of two hundred dollars a month per class. "Peon labor," Binky called it when, after taxes, her check came to $183.

Even worse, part-timers were virtually invisible to the professoriate. "Listen to this: I'm reaching into my mailbox to pick up my students' papers and this pompous ass comes in." Over the salad I'd made, Binky screwed up her mouth and fluttered her eyelids to mimic him. "And he says to me, like I was
trespassing,
for God's sake, 'May I help you?'" She struck the table so hard that the flatware bounced. "You're a professor here. You get to be important! But what do I get to be?"

The next year she got a job teaching in a Catholic high school. The pay was about two-thirds what she would have made in Los Angeles, and the students were spoiled and sheltered. They were bored by what Arthay and Rafael and the rest of them had loved.

What did raise Binky's spirits a bit was that she'd been discovered by the neighborhood kids—a set of towheaded, front-toothless boy twins from across the street and a couple of little Chinese girls from next door who often wore matching red dresses that came just above their matching, knobby knees. The twins showed up whenever the sisters did,
though they never talked among themselves. It was as though the boys and the girls didn't know one another outside our house. It was Binky who brought them together—the Pied Piper of the neighborhood. "Binky," they all called her, as though she was a kid too. "Binky, can we come in and play?" they'd shout at the door and scamper up the steps, the tousled towheads on one side and the smooth black heads on the other, and soon they'd all be dashing around together, hilarious, in some scary-fun game of hide-and-seek or Frankenstein's monster that Binky devised, or she'd race them to the kitchen and they'd pull open the drawer where she kept the Tootsie Rolls and Milky Ways and they'd all—Binky too—be shrieking with candied laughter. She put immense energy into the kids, and they loved her. They threw their arms around her and nuzzled their heads on her chest like puppies when they heard their mothers calling them home; they left little bunches of daisies or dandelions at the door for her or crayon stick figures that they'd drawn at school and signed "i luv you."

"You'd make a terrific parent," I told her one evening, and out of nowhere tears pooled in my eyes. No, not nowhere. My mother's envy of Mrs. Sokolov, my aunt's nagging about my aging womb. They buzzed in my head and preyed on my peace as they never had before. I was almost twenty-nine.

"Are you crazy?" Binky laughed. "Look, most of my childhood was stolen from me because I had to take care of my brother and sister while my parents were doing business all over the country." She shuddered as if parenthood were
her
bogeyman. "I did enough mothering to last a lifetime by the time I was fifteen."

The editor's note that came with our authors' copies said: "Many advance orders. Congrats!" The cover of the book was perfect: shades of brown and beige in the background, and in the foreground an elderly, angry-looking Mexican or American Indian, his index finger held up as if punctuating the message: "Shut up and listen. I'm speaking now." We planted copies all over the house so that we would come upon them unexpectedly, and our delight—we published a book together!—would be renewed over and over again. Binky was merry. "Is this how a man
and woman feel when they look at the baby they made together?" she laughed.

But the book didn't help me get another job. "Bad timing," Paula said sympathetically when I called to ask if she'd recommend me for a position at Dominguez Hills State College. "When I came aboard, last September, four people were hired in the department, but this year we're not hiring anyone."

"We're cutting back," the chair at Long Beach State College wrote in answer to my letter, and at Los Angeles State College I was told that the department was overstaffed and the days of big expansion were gone.

I was lucky to have a tenure track job anywhere. Within a year or two, most new Ph.D.'s in English were getting hired only for temporary lectureships or part-time work, or they were going back to school for degrees in business, or they were driving cabs.

For those of us who did have teaching jobs, it was, as Dickens wrote, the best of times and the worst of times, an age of wisdom and an age of foolishness. It was an era when campuses around America erupted in fury—against the draft, institutional racism, organized paternalism—and Fresno State was only a little tardy in catching fire. By the end of the fall 1969 semester, large segments of the student body and faculty were smoldering. After our president, Fredrick Ness, quit under pressure, almost all the blacks who'd been hired to teach in a newly formed Ethnic Studies Program were fired by the new administration for "lacking proper academic credentials," and many of the untenured left-leaning white activists weren't rehired. Maybe I continued to be safe because my own brand of activism was too academic to be threatening to our new acting president, Karl Falk, who'd been the head of a local bank before he was pressed into service as CEO of FSC. (Or maybe I was safe because those in power thought I was the department secretary.)

In any case, it was the campus dramas of the next semester that taught me once and for all what kind of activist I was. It was not the kind I'd envisioned twelve years earlier in Mexico City. Fresno State students staged a boycott of classes that February after the acting president had gutted the new Economic Opportunities Program for poor students,
dismissed more minority faculty, and begun to dismantle the School of Arts and Sciences, which he believed to be a hotbed of leftists. The huge crowd of students and faculty at a morning rally bristled with anger and testosterone. I believe I was the only woman professor there. (Most of the women faculty taught in areas such as nursing, home economics, and women's physical education—disciplines not noted for their radicalism.) Banners that read "
ARE YOU GOING TO STAND BY AND GET FALKED
? " were everywhere. On the lawn in front of the administration building, Chicano students were camped in a hunger strike because the new La Raza program had been completely destroyed by the administration.

The rally organizers had pledged nonviolence, but it couldn't last long. Agriculture students in cowboy hats ragged the striking Chicanos, and a free-for-all followed, with flying fists and cheers and blood and girls huddled off to the side. The bloodshed made the mood ugly. A bearded, tie-dyed young man next to me cupped his hands to his mouth and howled, "Fuck Falk!" and a knot of students picked it up and made it a chant. The speakers on the platform punctuated their seething words with raised fists, and hoarse cheers went up all around, as though the fists were smashing the enemy's noggin. The crowd turned into a roaring, multiheaded monster. To me it felt like mass hysteria, like a football crowd, like the Nazis. I was surrounded by it—male voices screaming "Fuck Falk!" and cheering mindlessly. I felt it in my gut. They were the radicals I liked rather than the reactionaries I hated, but it didn't matter. The frenzy triggered in me primal anguish, like a racial memory—the violence used on those who belonged to me. I hurried back to my office as though pursued by a pack, and I locked the door against that part of human nature that filled me with fear and loathing.

I'd learned something about myself that was surprising and even disappointing—but immutable. Demonstrations frightened me. I was terrified of their resemblance to the acres of hypnotized spirits who had thrust up their arms in
sieg heil
ecstasy. That's okay, I assured myself later. My activism would be my scholarship. I'd do more books. I'd work for the causes that stirred me deeply through my editing and writing and teaching.

***

At home, a dull discontent settled on our lives like the dust on our furniture. Nothing could blow the monotony of it away except occasional outbreaks of rage, different only in substance from the ones I'd had with D'Or; they would leave us both shaken and unsure. The first major storm was over my student Omar Salinas, a sweet-faced, fragile man of twenty-nine, a poet who wrote magical realism long before García Márquez became popular in the United States. He called himself Omar the Crazy Gypsy and spent many hours in my office complaining about his rejection slips from magazines. "I know great Chicano writers all over the U.S.," he told me one day, "and no one is publishing them."