Naked in the Promised Land (9 page)

"Now close your eyes," he demanded.

Billie Holiday intoned "Gloomy Sunday."

"Open!" Eddy cried, and I did. He stood decked out in a white feather boa and a black picture hat, with a woman's long cigarette holder between his fingers. For a minute it felt weird to see him like that, but then I liked it. He looked like a truly glamorous actress—like the ones I loved best. Billie Holiday's yearning, lazy tones came out of his mouth.

Evelyn, his older sister, threw the door open. "Eddy, I don't think Ma
-ma
wants you to entertain girls behind closed doors. No offense," she said to me with a smile and winked.

Evelyn was big and smiley. She sewed spangles and sequins on cheap sheath dresses for Eddy's secret costumes. She was good-natured too. In the Fromberg house there were always innumerable cats, with or without stripes, with or without tails, with or without whole ears, slinking around her feet and tripping her. They'd be attracted to the Frombergs' front porch by the saucers of milk she put out for them, and then she couldn't resist letting them inside. It was through Evelyn that I met Chuck.

I carried slim volumes of plays with me everywhere in those days. I was Laura, shyly telling her gentleman caller about her glass animals; I
was the girl in white, nostrils flaring, lips distorted in disgust, in the presence of the Hairy Ape. I was ready for the day Sid and Irene would say it was time for my Hollywood audition.

"Wadda ya know, a young girl that reads! You don't see that much nowadays," Chuck said in lieu of a wolf whistle. Eddy had invited me over to show off his new suede pumps and elbow-length black gloves. I could feel Chuck's gaze follow me down the hall. No male had ever done that to me before. It felt funny. Did I like it?

In the late afternoons, Chuck was almost always drinking coffee with Evelyn at the Frombergs' kitchen table. He wore a gray uniform with a Mason's Market logo over one shirt pocket and his name, Charles Augelli, monogrammed over the other. "So wadda ya reading today?" he'd ask me every time. "I'm a poet myself," he said. "Ya like poetry? Ever hear of Robert Service? William Rose Benét? Those guys are great."

I shook my head, memorizing the names. I'd look them up at the library.

"How about William Ernest Henley? That's my favorite. Out of the night that covers me black as the pit from pole to pole," he expostulated, waving his sloshing coffee cup in time to an irregular beat. "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul."

Chuck was short for a man, only a few inches taller than I. His face was long, and his black caterpillar eyebrows and marble-round eyes gave it an almost comical effect. But he was muscled, wiry, and had a certain feline grace to his movements. His uniform was starched and crisp, even though it was always the end of the day when I saw him, and I'd never met anyone else before who could recite poems by heart. I surprised myself at how I felt robbed of something when I went to visit Eddy and Chuck wasn't sitting in the kitchen.

"Lillian, I have to speak to you after your lesson today," Irene said. She looked disgruntled. Had I done something wrong in the office?

"You're not concentrating," Sid snapped after I'd repeated the same gesture he'd criticized for a third time. "Let's just cut it short for today," he said, dismissing me to my fate.

"Lillian," she began, as I stood before her in the little office. I
watched her full red lips, my throat dry. "I'm sorry to have to ask you this, but I'm afraid it's necessary." I will implode under her gaze, I thought. Where to put my eyes? How to hold my mouth? "The car is really crowded with eight people, and this Sunday we're going to Norwalk. Your mother really doesn't belong at these shows. You'll have to ask her to stay at home, all right?"

I stared at Irene, mute. I couldn't even pronounce the usual inane words I'd manage to muster in her presence. What would I tell my mother? I'd wanted to do all this in the first place just for her. I couldn't hurt her this way. I dragged myself out the door, down Wabash Avenue to Dundas Street, seeing nothing but the empty years ahead because I'd have to quit Theatre Arts Studio.

"I just won't go. I'll quit," I offered, looking at my hands instead of my mother's face. What if she said,
Yes. Quit?

Those words would kill me.

"I enjoyed myself so much," my mother said. "I always looked forward." She wasn't trying to disguise her disappointment. I tensed, waiting for the hammer blow.

"But I want you to keep going." Her rough palm stroked my cheek. "Don't worry for me," she said.

I drew air to my lungs to protest, then shut my mouth and threw my arms around her instead, ready to bawl with relief. But relief was followed by guilt: I'd betrayed my mother, there was no other way to see it. Now I admitted to myself as I held her that even if she'd said, "Without me you can't go," I would have kept going secretly if I had to. How could I give up Irene Sandman?

"It's probably just for a little while," I said, keeping my eyes to the ground, feeling black despair that Irene, the woman I would gladly have died for, had no compassion, that I had no honor. "Norwalk is so far away, and the car's not that big. But there'll be other shows," I chirped, hating myself for a lying magpie.

Boys were all that the girls in the eighth grade talked about. "Juan gave me this heart he made in shop," "Joe called last night," "Steve asked me out again for Saturday." They said the word
love
a lot. Who did I have to love that would love me back?

"Can I take you for a soda?" Chuck jumped up from the kitchen table as I was leaving Eddy's house. He said the words so quickly that I almost didn't understand him.

"Chuck!" Good-natured Evelyn was miffed. "She's fourteen," she huffed, as I stood awkwardly by the door.

"So? Don't fourteen-year-olds drink sodas?" he said.

After that first time, he waited for me in his Mason's Market truck a block away from Hollenbeck Junior High every afternoon, and we went to a malt shop nearby. He recited long poems that he knew by heart. Edgar Guest, Eugene Field, Rudyard Kipling.

"I'm deeply in love with you. You know that?" he said after we'd been meeting for about three weeks. We sat in his truck, parked under a dripping jacaranda tree up the street from Fanny's house. From his shirt pocket he pulled a little cardboard box that held a gold-colored heart on a long chain. "How about a kiss now?" he asked as he slipped it over my head.

There was a shock when I felt his scratchy stubble above my lips, and then I liked it. It was strange but also pleasant to have his wiry arms around me. Is that what Irene felt when Tony kissed her? I remembered Tony's big hands and the crisp black hairs that showed on his chest through his open shirt.

"I've never met a girl like you before," Chuck said.

"Do you know what Miss Lillian Dumdum is doing?" Eddy tattled to Irene. He disapproved, just like his sister, and I hated him. Why did he have to tell Irene?

"He's
how
old?" she asked, looking at me, her violet eyes darkening. I pulled at my nails under the desk.

"Well, we're just good friends," I defended myself, worried, but a little pleased too that she was interested in me enough to be upset.

"Doesn't your mother tell you not to go out with someone that old?" Irene sounded genuinely shocked, and I fought back the smile that wanted to pop out on my lips.

"This is for you." Chuck grinned the next Monday when I got into his truck. He placed a piece of lined paper that had been folded into small
squares in my lap. On top of the sheet was written: "Its Crazy But Its Grand!!!" and verses were penciled on both sides in his schoolboy handwriting. "I'm 24 yrs old and I've been down lifes strand," his poem began.

Tho your only 14 darling let me take your hand.
I know everyone says its crazy.
It may be crazy but its grand!!!

"It's really nice," I said, secretly pitying him. This wasn't the first time I'd realized that Chuck wasn't very smart.

"Let's not go for a soda today," he said. "Let's just talk," and he headed his truck up City Terrace. He parked in an empty lot with tall yellow weeds and gently pulled me to him. When he kissed me this time, he slipped his tongue into my mouth, and I jumped as from a bee sting and pushed at his arms, averting my head.

"It's okay, it's okay," he whispered, his fingers light on my chin, his brown eyes loving. I didn't fight him when he lowered his mouth to mine again, and this time I liked it. I could get lost in the sweet, new comfort of it. His mouth tasted like Sen-Sen. I'd heard girls talk about kisses like this—
french kissing,
they called it.

Chuck's hand slinked down from my shoulder and neatly cupped my breast. "No!" I jumped, and my hand clamped his, moving it off me, though not without a twinge of regret. That was called
second base.
He brought his fingers back and I let them rest there, only for an instant. He'd made a warm sensation flow all through me, but I couldn't let him lull me, because "second base leads to third base," the girls had said, "and third base leads to diapers and baby bottles." I shifted away from him.

"I'm sorry, sweet darling," Chuck crooned, "I won't do that. You can trust me." He turned me to him, and I let his tongue find mine again.

"You know what we're doing when you're sixteen?" he asked on the drive back to Fanny's house. "You and me are gonna get married."

My breath caught. Could he be serious? I didn't want to contradict him because he was nice to me and seemed so sincere, but how could I be an actress, married to him?

***

As I lay in the dark at night, ignoring my mother's soft snores, I thought about what it would be like to kiss Irene the way Chuck kissed me. I became Tony Martinez again. I saw myself, with Tony Martinez's hands, touch Irene where Chuck wanted to touch me. I saw the perfect shape of her upturned breasts in the lavender pullover she often wore. What would it mean to get to
third base
with her? My mother turned over in her bed, and I cast Irene out of my head until the little
puff-puff
sounds resumed. Then my thighs clamped together. I tingled where I never had before.

But those night visions didn't stop me from liking Chuck's kisses and wanting the next afternoon to come quickly so I could get more of them.

The lines between Irene's eyebrows knitted a lot when she looked at me now. I was thrilled. If she worried, it must mean she thought I mattered, at least to Theatre Arts Studio. Or maybe she was being a concerned grownup because she thought that my mother was crazy and there was no one else to be concerned. It didn't matter. All that mattered was that she noticed me. I wanted her to worry, though I was certain that there wasn't anything worrisome about what I did with Chuck in his truck on City Terrace.

"Are you still going around with that man?" she asked before my singing lesson. She was ruffling through sheet music, but I could tell by her frown that she'd been thinking about it a lot.

"Yeah," I said innocently. "I see him after school every day. He just dropped me off."

"I'm worried, Lillian. We need to talk. I'll take you to a drive-in for a burger and a milkshake," she said the next Saturday after the last student left.

Delirium! To be in Irene's car with nobody else to share the small, closed space with us ... It had never happened before. I was near enough to hear the swish of her nylons as she shifted her legs to press the clutch, the brake. Her Emir permeated the air. I was near enough to reach out and touch the smooth rayon of her dress. What if I were brave enough to do it? My fingers stroked her thigh in my mind.

I sipped the milkshake, but the smell of food was nauseating. The
burger she ordered for me tasted like raw oats, and I chewed and chewed before I could swallow. She didn't touch her own salad. I stared at her manicured deep red fingernails as they thrummed on the wheel.

"You're very young, Lillian, and I know you don't have the happiest life with your mother." I looked up. She'd turned her magnificent eyes on me, and now I swam in them. But I wished she would leave my mother out of it; I still smarted from the thought of my treachery. Yet if Irene thought that my mother was a normal person, I'd never be sitting here with her.
Let her think what she wants about my mother,
I decided; I'd luxuriate in every second I could be near Irene.

"Unhappy young people sometimes do unfortunate things," she said, and my face muscles shaped themselves into a mask of tragedy. How could I prolong these moments? I felt like a klutz in the gazellelike grace of her presence. Could she see the nervous tic that had started just under my eye? "I don't want you to make a mistake, like I did," she went on. "I married very young."

Oh, the wonder of the moment! Irene Sandman was confiding, in me, about her life. Once, when we did a talent show at the Wabash Playground and Sid, decked out in a white suit and black bow tie, was the Master of Ceremonies, he introduced her to the audience as "my gorgeous wife" (
gorgeous,
I thought;
you can say that again!
). She glided onto the stage wearing a diaphanous summer dress, a flowing flowered scarf around her neck, and she and her husband seemed to lock eyes in mutual admiration. Could it have been an act? When he sometimes came into the studio on Saturday mornings, Irene looked at him as though she were annoyed. Except for the fight about Tony, I'd never even heard them say more than five words to each other. Oh, what would she tell me now about their life together?

"I met Sid when I was eighteen and he was thirty. I know how it is to get carried away, and I wanted us to talk because Eddy got me worried about you. You mustn't run off with this man."

"Run off with him?" I was stupefied.

"Elope."

"I don't even like him that much," I blurted out.

Irene looked puzzled.

"Well..." I'd said the wrong thing. "I mean..." What could I tell her now that would impress her? Interest her? "I don't ever want to get married. I'm going to devote my life to the theater."

"To what?"

"You know ... acting."