Naked in the Promised Land (46 page)

"Okay, I'm announcing my resignation as soon as I get in," I promised Binky when she dropped me off at the L.A. airport the Tuesday after Easter 1971. I flew up the stairs of San Ramon as usual, but instead of going to my office I went to find the white-haired senior professor who was acting as the liaison between the dean and the department. "Russ, this is my last semester," I said as he reached for the mail in his box.

Russ turned around, blinking. "You're kidding," he said. "I was just talking to some other people in the department. We think you'd be our best shot for chairman."

I touched the cold wall behind me for balance.
Binky glared with ice blue eyes. "You promised,"she hissed. "No, you
gonif!
You liar, no," my mother and Rae hollered.
But in the entire college there was only one woman chair of an academic department. I'd complained about it in my classes, and here was my chance to begin to change it. How many women were there in the whole country who might be handed such an opportunity?

After three-thirty I began calling Binky, dialing the number in Los Angeles every fifteen minutes. I could see the black telephone on the desk in the Topsy room. In my head I could hear the ring, how it bounced off the walls in our empty house. I'd tell her how I'd found out that day that Judy Chicago was leaving and that Ingrid's contract hadn't been renewed. If I got elected chairman—"chair," I'd call it—I'd make the department replace Ingrid with another woman who could teach feminist classes. Where was Binky? She said she always went home right after school, to a lonely house.

She finally answered the phone around ten o'clock. "You said just
one year. You promised," she said when I told her. She sounded as glacial as she had in my imagination that morning in the mailroom.

"Binky, listen to me. Who'll teach the women's courses?" I recited all the reasons I had to stay. "The term's only three years, and I'll leave after two. By that time the department won't need me anymore."

"I need you," she said, unmoved. "I need you to live with me. Here. Seven days a week. Where you said you wanted to be."

But as chair I could defuse the terrible tensions—no warrior tactics, no press conferences about student spies in English classes. The department needed a calm style of leadership now, and there weren't many men who could bring it to them. I'd be quietly revolutionary by serving the cause of women. I'd make sure to fill every position with women; I'd promote a new curriculum that would include neglected women authors; through the prestige of the chair I'd fight for women's rights all over campus. No one else could do the things I would do.

I'd call Binky again when she was calmer, in the morning, and I'd tell her that if the department elected me, I had to stay—but for two years and no more.

The election was held the next day. Someone nominated a young man to run against me. The dean and Russ counted the ballots; Russ came to my office to tell me: I won by a vote of 28–4.

Despite the photos in the national news that made Fresno State look like an eastern European satellite, the department was inundated with job applications that spring because there was a glut of new Ph.D.'s on the market. We had only one position available, and I had to make it count. I practiced my spiel in front of the mirror in the women's bathroom until I could say it in a voice that was forceful and calm. "We've lost Ingrid, so I think it's only right that we replace her with another person who can teach women-in-literature classes," I told the department. "Judith Rosenthal." I picked a dossier from the top of the pile. "She looks great." I handed the file to Russ for him to pass around the room, then folded my hands on my lap so no one would see them trembling.

The vote to hire her was unanimous. I retreated to my office and sat
there, amazed. How easy it had been—perhaps because the time was right, perhaps because women's liberation had already invaded their homes through their wives and daughters. The reason didn't matter. Clearly they were going to give me a chance—to give women a chance.

Before the semester was over, it seemed that the whole campus wanted to give women a chance—through me, since my election as chair had made me the salient female academic. I was elected vice president of the faculty union—United Professors of California—and then the college representative to the statewide Academic Senate that was made up of the faculty leaders of all eighteen campuses in the California State College system. "Those three positions together make her the most powerful professor on campus," I overheard one male colleague matter-of-factly tell his officemate as I walked down the corridor. I loved it—suddenly these guys were thinking that a woman was the most powerful professor on campus.

Every Saturday afternoon I go back to Curson Avenue to visit first my mother and then my aunt. Sometimes when I get close to their street I hear a distant siren—an ambulance maybe, or a fire engine or police car. Los Angeles is a city of millions. But I'm certain the siren is speeding toward them. My mother has had a heart attack, Rae has been killed by a mugger, Curson Avenue has been leveled to rubble like a shtetl in a pogrom. They are dead, and they have died before I could present to them a Sarah or an Avrom, before I could assure them that Hitler hadn't done his job completely, that they hadn't lived in vain, that we would reach into another generation.

Sometimes when I sit with Rae on her living room sofa and we haven't spoken for some minutes, I see her eyes grow heavy, her head nod, and then she is very still in seated sleep. But what if it's not sleep? What if I've waited too long? "Rae?" I stand before her, bend my head to her face, nudge her as gently as my fright permits. "Wake up, My Rae."

"Just two years, I swear it," I promised as Binky drove me to the airport the first day of the fall semester, when I officially became chair of the English Department.

"Okay," she said with a sigh, "two years."

On the campus I found that mementos still remained of the past,
such as the wrecked Ethnic Studies program, but the big storms had subsided. A new dean and a new vice president for Academic Affairs were already in place, working on repairing the wreckage. The ambiance of the campus had changed too. The bearded and fiery radicalism of the last years had shifted the perimeter of what was radical. The rhetoric of the radicals would make my soft-spoken message seem tame, I realized. For what I needed to do, the times couldn't be better. "The college needs an affirmative action policy," I could say in a reasonable tone of voice. "We need an interdisciplinary women's studies program." I could make those things sound as though they weren't much, as though what I was asking for wouldn't bring upheavals to the academy that were even more revolutionary than the demands of the boycotters and protesters and marchers of the last few years.

Phyllis Irwin was about forty, with prematurely silver hair and blue eyes that seemed familiar though I knew we'd never before met. "I'm a horsewoman," she'd said, and told me she owned a ranch. Maybe that was why it took me so long to realize it was Rae's blue eyes that hers reminded me of. The idea made me laugh out loud: Rae as a cowgirl.

She was about Rae's height too, or maybe just two or three inches taller, and a lot trimmer; and she was a music professor and a pianist, and now assistant vice president for Academic Affairs. She called herself Scotch Irish and lived with Muffy, a silver schnauzer. No, Phyllis and My Rae were nothing alike, of course not. But the more I got to know her, the more it
felt
as if they were. Maybe she reminded me of Rae because they were both small and feisty.

Phyllis had called early in the fall semester to invite me to lunch. "I have you to thank for my new position," she'd drawled over the phone in a Texas twang. "I wouldn't have applied, but when I heard they made you chair of English I thought, 'Yeah, maybe things are finally going to change around here.'"

"We've got to push for more women and minority faculty," we'd said before our conversation was over.

"Right! At the least, fifty percent of new hires have got to be women and minorities."

"Right! We've got to get the college to set goals in that direction."

How fantastic, to have someone I could talk to about such things, an ally—two women administrators in a college, collaborating on behalf of women. Had that ever before happened in the history of the world?
I'll call Binky this evening, tell her how our sacrifice is already paying off.
"And we've got to get more courses about women in the curriculum," Phyllis and I agreed before we hung up.

Over lunch in the crowded faculty cafeteria we seemed to have less to talk about. "I first saw you about four years ago," she finally said. "Actually, it was right here. At this very table. I even remember what you were wearing." She laughed and looked down at her coffee cup as she said it. "A flared blue skirt with a white silk blouse. You were with someone ... a tall woman with light hair."

Binky. "Yes, my roommate." I didn't know this person. I wanted to work with her, but I'd have to be careful about what I told her.

She called again a week later. "The vice president said we ought to write an affirmative action faculty policy together and present it at the academic senate." We whooped. We'd change the campus.

We had dinner together, usually at her place, every night that I wasn't in L.A. We talked mostly about what we'd do for women on campus. "I'm so happy you're here. I hate to eat alone," she said one evening. She was standing near the sink, wrapping bacon slices around thick filets. She looked up at me, then quickly back at the steaks. I began to say "Me too," but I stopped myself and said nothing. I didn't stay long after we ate. I slipped out the door, into the black night, and drove back to my apartment at fifty miles an hour, though the posted speed limit was thirty. The rooms were dark and mausoleum-still. I switched on a light in the kitchen; then, so lonely for a voice, I picked up the wall phone and started to dial my number in Los Angeles. Halfway through I hung up. I dialed Phyllis's number, but I replaced the receiver after one ring. I sat at the table and stared into space.

One night, in Los Angeles, in the bed I share with Binky, I dream about Phyllis. She's invited me to lunch at her ranch, and I lean against the kitchen counter, watching while she shucks oysters. Outside the window two white horses stand gleaming in the sunshine—a mare and her baby. The colt nuzzles and
nurses while its mother licks at its fur in voluptuous content. Now Phyllis is slicing apples, and from where I stand I can smell their freshness and sweetness. I know if I do it, some great change will happen—there'll be no going back—but I can't stop myself: I put my arms around her, draw her to me. Her mouth tastes like fresh apples.

I jumped awake as though I'd been slapped. In the darkness I could see Binky's head, inches from mine, and I turned over guiltily and closed my eyes again, but my sleep was over.

"The vice president said we ought to plan a women's studies program together," Phyllis came by my office to say at the beginning of the next week. "He's making it part of my assignment." I remembered with a rush of heat to my face how she looked in my dream, bent over the apples.

Sheila, my secretary, buzzed me and said, "Uhh, line 2." She sounded confused.

"Who is it?" I asked.

"Wouldn't give a name or say what they wanted..."

The voice on line 2 was unfamiliar, boyish, but I was sure it belonged to a woman. "Lil?" it said.

No one had called me
Lil
in ten years.
Lil
had absolutely no connection to
Lillian.
"Who's this?" I demanded.

"Remember Nicky?" She laughed.

"Just a minute," I said quickly. I jumped up to close my office door. Sheila didn't need to overhear my conversation with somebody from another life.

"You're easy to find," the voice said when I returned to the phone. "This is only the fourth call I had to make."

"So, have you written your novel?" That I said in a loud and friendly voice, just in case Sheila was listening through the door.

"Been busy doing other things. Remember what you once told me about Jan?" I jumped again and pressed at the door, to make certain it was closed. "That's the way my life has been." She wanted to tell me all about it—the women she'd lived off, the clothes and jewelry they'd bought her, the opium she'd tried, the crystal she'd been addicted to.
She sounded jolly, flippant. I listened, nervous, but morbidly fascinated as well.
I've got to hang up,
I kept thinking. "Now I'm a madam," she laughed and spun another story about the house she managed in San Francisco.

Why had she called to tell me this? And what did I have to say to her now, this creature from another universe? "You're not what you think you are, Nicky," I told her. I felt foolish as soon as I uttered it.

"I'd better be what I think I am. Otherwise what's it all for? Besides, I've had a damn good time, Lil."

"So why are you calling?" I forced a laugh.

"I just wanted to hear your voice. Lil, can I call you from time to time?" she asked softly.

Suddenly I saw her as though it had been fifteen days instead of fifteen years and she was still that big galumpf of a girl who was so bright and naive and unlucky. And if there'd been no owl, no tiger, no weeping, clinging creature crying in my wilderness years before, wouldn't the bogeyman have pounced and carried me away as he had her?

"Lil?" she repeated when I didn't answer right away.

I went to the faculty senate with my nails biting into my palms, but there was almost no resistance to the proposal Phyllis and I had drawn up to establish a women's studies program at Fresno State College. When the senate president called for a vote, it was adopted by a large majority. Two faculty slots would be set aside for instructors, who would teach the introductory courses. The rest of the program would be interdisciplinary.

Phyllis and I kept plotting. We'd get the college to allow the Intro to Women's Studies class to satisfy a General Education requirement, along with Intro to Ethnic Studies. We holed up in the assistant vice president's office and planned more strategies. We continued to plan in the evening, as I watched her feed the horses, and as we sat with Muffy on the ditch bank and looked at the sunset, and as I helped her make dinner.