Naked in the Promised Land

by Lillian Faderman

  I would throw myself at her now, heedlessly. I’d have no other chance like this. “I love you,” I would implore her. My heart raced at the vision. She would let me … what? I sat frozen to the seat. I peered at her as she drove. She was a distant star, glittering always. She was a zillion miles away. She didn’t even know I was in the car anymore.

  I looked out the window, unable to make sense of anything before my eyes. It was over. “You dumb dimwit … dope … nincompoop!” I shouted at myself inside. “I hate you! Drop dead with a cancer on your heart! Die!”

  4. MEN I

  I’M AS TALL AS my mother’s waist, walking in open spaces between her and My Rae—Hollenbeck Park, the Moroccan desert (but no Gary Cooper is in sight). Where we are doesn’t matter because we’re together.

  “Balance me!” I demand. They know the game and comply. Mommy on the right, My Rae on the left, every few steps their warm, upturned hands bear my forty pounds, and I swing my legs in the air. This is more delicious than a bottle of warm milk.

  A pea green puddle pops into our path out of nowhere, and we pause to contemplate its mystery. We can’t go straight ahead so we’ll go around. “But we have to put you down,” Mommy and My Rae say in one voice.

  My feet hit the ground, and a snake pops out of the water. It is beautifully mottled, smiling as in a cartoon. I don’t know whether to laugh or be scared. I blink, and my eyes open just in time to see My Rae dragged under the opaque water.

  Again the snake pops up, ringed with power. I ready my mouth to scream, but before breath reaches my vocal cords, the snake arches, slashes like a whip, and my mother is gone.

  In the daylight I knew it was only a dream, but for weeks the images came back so clearly that my stomach would contract to my spine. I felt bereft of something I had no power to keep for myself, though it was vital to me.

  I did nothing about Chuck, but sometimes I wished he would be the one to say it was over. Yet if he did, wouldn’t it be awful to be rejected? Every time I thought I’d tell him that I couldn’t see him anymore, another reason not to say it would pop into my head: What if I broke up with him and then I never found another person to love me, just like my mother never found anyone after Moishe? What if I really did love him now—like Rae once said I’d love a boy—but I didn’t know it because all I’d ever seen of that sort of love was the crazy lose-your-head-and-ruin-your-life way my mother did it? I just couldn’t figure out what was true or what to do. So I drifted.

  A few weeks before the end of the year, Chuck told me over sodas that he’d made reservations for New Year’s Eve at the Sinaloa Club. I knew exactly where it was—just a few doors away from the delicatessen on Brooklyn Avenue where my mother and I went to eat. Sometimes I’d see men with black jackets and ladies with beautiful long gowns step from sleek cars in front of the Sinaloa Club. When the men held the padded pink door open for their dates, the street would be filled with a woman’s sultry voice belting songs that always rhymed amor with dolor. Though I never got a look inside, I was sure that the Sinaloa Club was the closest thing in East L.A. to what I’d seen in movie magazines of Hollywood nightspots like Ciro’s or the Mocambo, where the stars met to sip martinis and be sophisticated. “I’m rentin’ a tux and steppin’ out wid ma baby,” Chuck sang now in the empty soda shop and got up to do a goofy jig and a Charlie Chaplin bow in front of me. I could wear my pink satin Mistress of Ceremonies gown and the silver stiletto heels that Eddy had given me.

  But what would my mother do on New Year’s Eve if I went out with Chuck? Always, since we’d come to Los Angeles, we’d spent the last hours of the year drinking hot chocolate and listening to the radio—“Your Hit Parade” and then the midnight countdown at Times Square.

  I never really decided what to do, but when the sun went down on the last day of 1954, I found myself taking a bath and then standing at the mirror putting on rouge and eye shadow from little plastic boxes, remembering how I’d watched my mother in the mirror those Saturday nights in New York as she applied her makeshift cosmetics. How beautiful she’d been.

  I took my pink gown down from the hook behind our bedroom door.

  “You didn’t tell me you had a show tonight,” my mother said. She stood behind me while I examined a little tear in the gown’s netting.

  “I’ve got a date.” I turned to face her. I hadn’t said anything about it earlier because I didn’t know myself what I was going to do. I’d never even said I had a boyfriend. Stupid! I should have told her I’d been invited to the Frombergs’ party. I should have arranged to meet Chuck down the block. Now it was too late to say anything but the truth. It all came out—where I met him, that he was Italian, his age, his truck—and with every word I said she looked more upset.

  “You’re fourteen years old!” my mother yelled.

  She’d never yelled at me in anger before.

  “So what?” So what if I was fourteen? She’d never treated me like a child. I’d always been an adult.

  She stomped from the room, and seconds later I heard her screaming into the telephone, “You know what she’s doing?”

  It didn’t take twenty minutes. From the rip in the window shade I could see the black car pulling up in front of our house and Rae, in a little maroon hat, rushing out, then bending back in to wave a worried Mr. Bergman off, as if she didn’t want him to witness this.

  I returned to what I was doing, but now I was mad. I dusted talcum powder on my armpits in huge puffs, I pulled old socks and new movie magazines from under my bed and tossed them over my shoulder as I rummaged for Eddy’s high heels.

  My mother stormed in with my aunt behind her, both of them on the same side at last. “Are you mishuga? You’re going out with a Talyener goy who’s ten years older than you? On New Year’s Eve yet?” My aunt bellowed each question louder than the last. “New Year’s Eve, when the goyim get schicker, drunk? In a truck?”

  “I’m not a baby!” I yelled. “I’m going.” I grabbed the silver high heels I’d just found and the strapless gown from my bed, then locked myself into the bathroom, to dress and comb my hair in peace. What was this? All of a sudden they were going to tell me what to do? Since when?

  “What’s going on here? What’s the commotion?” It was Fanny now, come to join the fracas because she’d heard Rae and my mother pounding on the bathroom door. “Are you crazy?” she said when they told her. “You’ll let her go in a truck with a man?” I kept dressing.

  My mother and aunt sobbed more words on the other side of the door; “Goy” was the one that came through clearest. I squirted some Emir on my hair.

  Then the doorbell rang, and rang again, and then Chuck knocked on the screen door and called “Hello? Hello?” I threw open the bathroom door and ran past my mother and my aunt and Fanny, kicking a fusillade on the floor with my silver stilts, gripping the bottom of my gown so I wouldn’t trip. “Let’s go!” I shouted, banging the screen door behind me, pulling on Chuck’s tuxedo sleeve. I ran, Chuck ran; my mother, Rae, and Fanny ran too.

  “What’s happening?” Chuck shouted, wheezing beside me. I glanced as we ran and saw his caterpillar eyebrows, a clear plastic box with a purple bow that he clutched in his hands, his tuxedo that shone a rust color by the light of the street lamp and looked high at his ankles. I didn’t know if I felt like laughing or crying. Then I did both, at the same time, as we flew up Dundas Street. “What’s wrong?” he shouted again, and I just shook my head and kept running and sobbing and giggling. The white carnation in his buttonhole dropped, and my silver heel trampled it.

  His truck was all the way up the block. Over my shoulder I saw that my mother and Fanny had given up, but Rae was right behind us, then right behind me when I opened the door on the passenger side. She pushed me aside, hoisted herself like a gymnast up into the seat, then settled her squat frame there, arms folded and face stony. “You’re not going!” she yelled at me.

  “Lady, please get out of my truck!” Chuck cried.

  She didn’t budge.<
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  How dare she carry on like this when she’d left me alone all those years with my mother in Fanny’s furnished room? How dare she butt in now, when my childhood was over? “Rae, get out! Dammit! The whole neighborhood is looking,” I hollered, though the streets were empty.

  “Not till you go back into the house.” She glared at me, unfolded her arms, then emphatically folded them the other way.

  “I’ll … I … I’m calling the cops to get her out of my truck,” Chuck sputtered. His face and ears were red. I could see the plastic box with an orchid corsage inside sitting on the sidewalk.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself. A grown man with a fourteen-year-old girl!” My aunt yelled at him now, and her heavy jaw jutted forward like a bulldog’s. “You think I don’t know what you want?”

  “I don’t care what you say. I’m going out tonight!” I screamed at her.

  “Do you know what men like that do?” she screamed back.

  “Lady, get out!” Chuck banged on the hood with a mallet fist, and with each bang I could see Rae’s maroon hat jump a little on her head.

  An hour later my aunt descended from the truck, her eyes puffy with weeping. I stepped up to take her place, as though triumphant. But I was acting. By now I was really tired and miserable, and what I truly wanted was to go home, with her, to forget the whole awful scene and Chuck and New Year’s Eve—all of it. I watched her walk down the empty street.

  Chuck jumped behind the wheel, breathing as though he’d just done hard physical labor, and I could see his temple throbbing. As we drove off, I spied the orchid, still on the sidewalk in its clear plastic box with the big purple bow.

  “Chuck … I’m sorry.” I was embarrassed for all of us that she’d accused him as she did. I touched his white-knuckled hand that gripped the wheel, but he pulled away as though he were disgusted with me. I sat, baffled about what to say or do next.

  He drove to our spot on City Terrace. “I don’t feel like going to a nightclub now,” he muttered. “I didn’t do anything to deserve that.” His voice rose like a little boy’s and he pounded his fist on the dashboard so hard that the truck shook.

  It scared me a little, though I couldn’t blame him for being so upset. “Chuck…” I opened my mouth to sympathize, to say how angry I was at my aunt, but he turned to me and grabbed me, his fingers digging into my bare arms, then his tongue thrusting down my throat, his stubble scratching my skin and hurting. I fought to break loose but he pinned me. With one hand he snatched at the long skirt of my gown, tugging it up. The more I struggled, the harder he gripped me. His fingers wrestled with my garter belt, with the band of my panties; his knees pushed at my thighs. “Chuck, stop!” I screamed.

  And he did. He loosened his hold on me, then moved back to the driver’s seat, his breath coming in whistles through his mouth. He gripped the wheel and banged his head on it, again, then again. “I’m an idiot,” he moaned. “She just got me so angry.” He slumped over the wheel and stayed that way for so long that I thought he’d fainted. My teeth chattered as if I were sitting in a refrigerator. What should I do?

  When he snapped his head up, I jumped. “We’re going to Evelyn’s party,” he announced, backing the truck out of the weeds so quickly that the tires spun. I pressed up against the passenger door, moving as far away from him as I could, and he didn’t say another word. I wasn’t scared of him now as much as I was angry. Where had that monster sprung from that tore at my clothes and hurt me with his hands and mouth? What had that been about?

  I followed Chuck up the Frombergs’ steps, and Evelyn swung open the door. Over Chuck’s shoulder I could see that people were kicking in a conga line. Evelyn blew loudly at an orange noisemaker that snaked from her lips and then shouted, “Hap-py New Year!” She wore a tiny gold cardboard tiara on her head and a red and purple gown sausaged her big body. He entered first. Then she took one look at me and her jaw dropped. “You bastard, get out,” she spat at Chuck. “You son of a bitch!”

  How had she known?

  “Okay, okay.” He threw up his hands as if he were fending off a blow. “You’re right. I’m a bastard son of a bitch.” Then he slunk off like a kicked alley cat—even more pathetic because of the funny tuxedo. I could hear Evelyn breathing through her teeth. I kept my eyes on him till he turned the corner, and then she drew me to her big bosom in a motherly hug. “Sweetie, go change and then come back to the party,” she said gently. I left, fighting back the rush of tears that her kindness had loosed. It wasn’t really his fault. Rae had made him angry. But why did he have to terrify me? I was mad at him, but I was also sorry that he might lose Evelyn’s friendship and, because of me, never sit in her kitchen and sip coffee again.

  My mother was in bed with the light off, and the house was mausoleum-quiet. As a kid, I used to panic when I couldn’t see her breathing or hear her snoring: What if she were dead? Standing now at the threshold, wide-eyed in the spook-filled dark, I listened as I used to. I shouldn’t have left her alone. I heard a squeak of springs as she turned over.

  Then I tiptoed into the bathroom, closed the door behind me, and turned on the light. For an instant I didn’t recognize the girl in the mirror. Now I saw what Evelyn had seen. My cheeks and chin were blotchy red from the friction of Chuck’s stubble, my lips blurry with lipstick smear, my hair wild. I looked like I’d been raped.

  It had been three years since Irene signed me to an exclusive management contract, and though Lillian Foster had done scores of shows in the pink gown, Irene had called them all “charity performances.” “It’s good experience and exposure,” she told the troupe in her mellow amber voice. Despite my crush, I wondered what good the experience and exposure could do when she didn’t send me out on a single Hollywood audition. How would I ever earn money to help my mother? Years had passed, and I’d accomplished nothing toward her rescue. The hot seasons were still the worst, when she came home dripping and exhausted from Schneiderman’s unventilated top floor and the steam of the pressing machines. “Save me from the shop!” she cried, flopping on her bed in a dress wet with sweat, as in New York; but now it was to the ceiling that she cried, as though she’d lost faith in our dream. I’d lost faith too.

  One Saturday, tacked on the wall above the briny pickle barrels in the grocery store, I saw a penciled message in Yiddish and English, “Shadchen, Matchmaker,” it said. “I will find you Your Besherteh, Your Destined Mate. Reasonable Rates!” It was signed “Mr. Yehuda Cohen.”

  My mother had sent me to get a quart of milk, but I almost forgot. I stared at the wrinkled piece of paper with the shaky handwriting for a long time. My mother needed rescuing, and as hard as I’d tried, I hadn’t been able to do it. What if I gave her into someone else’s loving hands now—like a poor woman who couldn’t take care of her baby might give it to a rich woman who’d be so happy to have it? A few days later, I went back to the grocery store after school and wrote Mr. Cohen’s telephone number on the inside cover of my geography notebook. For a week or more I kept looking at it as I sat in my classes. By now, though I could scarcely admit it to myself, I knew there was another reason too that made me want to call Mr. Cohen: I’d begun to understand that if I were all she had in the world, I’d never be able to live my own life. Someday I’d want to do things, to travel places … like Chicago, maybe … or France. With my mother in tow, how far could I travel? I wouldn’t even be able to go to college if I always had to take care of her. I hated my selfish thoughts, but I couldn’t help them: I needed to give her to someone else—a husband.

  My mother sat on the milk crate looking out at nothing, her face blank, as if she were a million miles away. She wore a torn plaid wrapper—her weekend uniform these days.

  “Mommy? I’ve been thinking a long time about something.” I knelt at her feet, pausing dramatically, to impress on her the seriousness of what I was about to say. “You can’t keep working in the shop. We need to find you a husband.”

  “A husband?” She jumped as though I’d
waved something noxious in front of her nose. “What do I need a husband for?”

  “Mommy, listen to me,” I kept on: “I don’t think I’ll ever get my break in Hollywood; I can’t help you.” I came back to it every hour; I dogged her. “We don’t want to live in a furnished room at Fanny’s forever.” “Your spells are worse when you get so tired out by your work. It’s killing you!” It was all true.

  “Who’d even want me now?” she said that afternoon in front of the dresser mirror, turning her head at different angles to scrutinize the extent of the wrinkles on her face, the extent of the sag under her chin. I could tell she’d started thinking seriously about it, though she was still far from convinced.

  That evening she poured borscht from a Manischewitz bottle into two bowls for our supper. “Moishe…” she began.

  I didn’t want to hear it. “Mommy, he’ll never want us. And I hate that bastard! I hate him!” I screamed. Slam went my hand on the table, and my mother cringed, and the red liquid jumped from the bowls and puddled on the oilcloth. I didn’t care. I had to convince her!

  I searched the kitchen counter for a rag to sop up the spilt borscht. Finding none, I wadded old newspapers from the stack Fanny kept to put on the floor after she mopped on Friday afternoons. How could I make my mother understand? I blotted and rubbed at the spill, but my efforts left red streaks on the table. I threw the newspaper wad down, defeated, and sank onto a chair, covering my head with my hands. “I want a father in my life!” It popped out of my mouth as if I were Charlie McCarthy, and I stopped, shocked. Did I really, after fourteen and a half years without a father, feel that I needed one now? I’d always been happy there’d been no man to come between us. Then why had I said it?

  “You want a father?” she cried.

  I looked my mother in the eye. I couldn’t back out now. “Yes. I need a father.”

  She sipped at her soup, taking quick, nervous slurps. I stared at the red liquid in my bowl. After that day, I always hated borscht.