Hank wasn’t at the Open Door now, but there was a chance he’d be at the If Club, Jan said, and we jaywalked across the street, her hand steering the back of my neck. “Oh, shit, no,” she hissed between clenched teeth, and a black and white car made a U-turn and pulled up in front of the If Club before we’d stepped onto the curb. “The fuzz, goddammit,” she whispered.
A pudgy man in blue with a silver badge on his chest got out of the car. “Did you know jaywalking is against the law?” he asked, smiling.
“No, suh,” Jan said, quick and polite, with a heavy southern accent. “I’m not from heah, suh. I hail from Lu-siana, only been in L.A. a couple months.”
“I can give you both a ticket for this,” he said, looking at me.
“Yes, sir, I’m sorry,” I said, following Jan’s lead.
“Well, we can’t hold up traffic in the middle of the street. Step into the car, both of you,” he said, and opened the back door. I could hear a woman dispatcher’s voice, droning on the radio. Jan nudged me in, then got in herself, her face a blank despite the flush creeping up her neck. I was inside a police car, like a criminal, sitting where people who got sent to jail sat. For an instant I wondered if I’d faint. The officer drove around the block onto a residential street.
“Ah you goin’ to book us, suh?” Jan’s voice was high and almost feminine for the first time since I’d known her. “Book us” meant jail. Because of my stupid, dangerous ways, I was going to be arrested, and my mother really would have a heart attack. And Rae—I could hear her screaming in my ears: “Hitler didn’t do enough? You had to kill us?”
“So what’s the deal? You two together?” The police officer grinned affably.
“Yes, suh,” Jan answered, but it wasn’t her he wanted to talk to now.
“You go sit under that tree and shut up.” He reached back and opened the door for Jan, and I watched, helplessly, as she marched over to a pine in front of a white stucco house and slouched against it. She looked at the sky, at her shoes, anywhere but at the police car with me inside.
Would he rape me? My ears rang. I’d heard Tommi and Roseann tell Jan such a story only a few nights before at Harry’s. “This cop just picks us off the street when we’re walking along, minding our business, and he tells me to get in back and Roseann has to get in front. Then you know what that fucking sonofabitch does?” Tommi said, pounding the table with her fist. “Makes her go down on him!” Pale Roseann bit her lip and kept shaking her head.
“So how come you don’t like men?” the policeman asked me now, his tone curious, as if he were examining a lab specimen.
“I do, sir.” I strove for a tone that was unoffended and unoffending.
“Then why are you with that dyke over there?”
“Oh, she’s just a friend, sir.”
“I bet,” he chuckled. I could feel his eyes on me, though I was looking at my hands in my lap. “Do you work?”
What could I answer? If I told him I was a waitress or a clerk, he could check. “I’m a model.” It wasn’t illegal as long as he didn’t know my age. “My real name’s Arlene Knopflemacher, but I work under the name of Gigi Frost.” I could give Andy’s telephone number. Andy would say he was my agent.
“Well, Arlene or Gigi or whatever your name is,” the police officer drawled, “that one over there”—he pointed toward Jan with a fat thumb—“she’s bad news. And you better straighten up or you’ll end up like her.” He reached back and opened the door. He was letting me go! “Don’t ever let me catch you jaywalking again or I’ll take you in. You understand?” he said. Then he drove off as I shook, from relief first—I wasn’t going to be arrested—and then rage.
“Fucking bastard, what right does he have?” I growled, the tough girl now, when Jan came back.
“What are you getting so upset about? It happens all the time,” Jan snickered.
Hank was at the If Club and lent Jan five dollars. I knew he was smiling his sickly smile at me, trying to make eye contact, as he handed her a crumpled bill from his pocket. I looked down at the floor.
Two days later we were broke again.
“I’ve got to get out of this town,” Jan sighed as though she were thinking out loud. She leaned against the propped pillows, wearing the T-shirt and boxer shorts in which she always lounged around the hotel room. She sipped loudly from the glass of coffee I’d brought to her. “I just can’t make it in L.A. I’m calling Stormy—I’ll tell her to send me bus money back to New Orleans.”
I’d been lying on the bed next to her, but now I sat up. “No! What about us?” I cried.
She blinked at me, surprised, as if she’d momentarily forgotten I was there. “Oh, baby, I wish it didn’t have to be this way. God, I hate to leave you. Don’t you know that?” She furrowed her brow and looked morose. “We’ve been so great together. Hey, you know what we’d do if I had some real bread? You’d come with me.” She smiled her beautiful smile and sounded little-boy excited now. “I’d get us a motorcycle, and we’d zoom off to New Orleans together. I can drive those suckers good, and you’d ride at my back. Wouldn’t that be a kick?”
New Orleans. She’d told me about the fabulous gay bars and drag queens and Mardi Gras and how the police never bothered you there. In New Orleans, seventeen was the drinking age. One more year, and there I’d be able to go to bars with no hassle.
She tore me from my idyll: “Gigi, baby, we can have it,” she cried, touching my cheek with a warm hand, gazing intently into my eyes. “We can have everything. Hey, you know how much money you can make us with that fantastic body of yours? You know how quick it would be?” I jumped from the bed as though she’d shoved me. “We’d have that cycle in no time.” She talked rapidly, earnestly, as if it were a life-or-death matter. “Hey, Hank said he would give us twenty bucks, and that’s just a start. You wouldn’t even have to touch him. Terri did it all the time. Please, baby. Baby, please,” Jan implored with eyes full of tears, her arms extended to me, “If you love me … if you love us … please.”
I did love us. I did. I’d never felt as alive as I had the past weeks. And all I wanted now was to sink into her arms and stay there. But I’d given up my cherished dream to be an actress because I was afraid it would lead me to the very place she was now urging me to go. “Don’t ask me to, Jan,” I begged weakly.
“Don’t be a dumb bitch!” She bounded up and raised a hand as though to slap me. I stared, mouth open, in disbelief. “Do you want to lose this?” she cried, dropping her hand. Then her face softened. “I’m sorry, baby. I didn’t mean that … but you hurt me if you don’t trust what I say. Baby, I want us to be together always,” she whispered.
I backed away from her and sank into the room’s one chair. Its knobby upholstery reeked with old odors of sweat and urine. Maybe I couldn’t escape what Jan wanted me to do. I covered my face with my hands, and Jan was quiet. After a while I could hear her trimming her nails with the clipper she kept beside the bed. Maybe what Jan wanted me to do was my destiny. Wasn’t it useless to fight your destiny? And if I did what she asked, we’d go to New Orleans together. New Orleans with Jan. But what about my mother, Rae?
“Jan,” I finally looked up and said, “it’s such heavy stuff. Give me a while.” I went to sit beside her, to rest my head on her shoulder, but she shifted away. “Look, Jan,” I said after long, silent minutes, “I haven’t been home or called for days, and I’ve got to go.” She leaned against the propped pillows and examined her nails. “I’ll be back,” I promised. She never looked at me as I threw on my clothes. I closed the door behind me softly.
The last time I’d called home, my mother had screamed at me to come back right away. “You’ve got to trust me,” I told her calmly. “I’m grown up and I know what I’m doing.” I gave her the rehearsal story again—King Lear. “I’ll be home as soon as I can,” I said, and hung up. But now, as the bus crawled west on Sunset Boulevard, I was wild with agitation, and when it finally stopped at Highland, I flew the blocks from t
he bus stop to the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows—ignoring street lights, dodging cars, stumbling on curbs—as though Beelzebub and Banshee were at my heels. What if she were sick? How had I been so cruel and crazy?
It was Mr. Bergman who held open the screen door. He bent his round, bald head away from me. “Lilly, Lilly,” he said, “I thought you were a good girl.” I started to guffaw at his righteous pronouncement, but a sob escaped my lips instead. I could hear my aunt and mother sobbing too, as if someone had died. The second they saw me they pounced, they clutched at me, they wet my face with tears. “We’re almost dead, both of us! You almost killed us!” they shrieked. They pulled at me, and I let myself be pulled, the three of us collapsing in one heap on the floor. “You’re all we have in the world!” Rae hollered in my ear.
“I’m back! I’ll be good!” I wept. I kissed at their wet cheeks. “I won’t do it. Don’t cry!” I struggled up from the tangle of us. I stumbled to the bathroom, locked the door, ran scalding water in the tub, threw off my dirty clothes, sank into water up to my nose. I didn’t care how my skin reddened and hurt. I wanted it to hurt.
“You’ll get sick if you stay in the bathtub so long! It weakens the heart!” my aunt yelled, banging on the door a half-hour later. I sat there doggedly for another few minutes before I got up and rubbed my skin dry with rough strokes of the towel. Then I bolted to my room and locked the door.
“Are you in there, Lilly?” my mother called.
When I said, “Yes. I have to sleep now,” they didn’t bother me anymore. But I was happy they were close by, in the next room.
I lay on top of my bed, too exhausted to cover myself, and closed my eyes. When I awoke it was dark, the middle of the night, and I missed Jan—the smell of her clean hair, her knowing hands. I imagined her holding me now. I felt her on top of me, her teeth on my neck. There was a recklessness in me that resonated mindlessly to what was savage in her. But I had to control it or I’d do something crazy. I’d known how to fight the men, because everything in my life had primed me for that struggle: I wouldn’t be their rabbit. But a woman was more insidious for me. I wouldn’t know how to keep resisting Jan, though she too was a coyote.
If I was too dumb to dash for my own sake, I told myself as I drifted off again to troubled sleep, I had to do it for my mother and My Rae. So I wouldn’t be their worst and final tragedy.
9. GETTING THE GIFT OF WISDOM
ONCE THERE WAS a young girl who went into the forest with a big basket to pick mushrooms because her sick mother said, “My poor child, we have nothing to eat and we’re going to starve.” Just as the girl was about to start she saw a fat, glossy fox lying under a tree. He was fast asleep because he’d stuffed so many mushrooms into his greedy belly.
“I’m going to catch this fox and sell him for his fur,” the young girl thought craftily, “and then I’ll be able to buy a lot of good food for my mother and me.” Quickly she threw her basket over him and sat on it, waiting for a hunter or somebody to come by and help her. Hours passed, but no one came.
Finally the fat fox woke up and realized his predicament. “Hey, lemme out,” he called to the girl.
“No,” she replied. “I know this isn’t a very nice thing to do, but I can sell your fur for enough money to keep us going for a year. We’re desperate at home, and I don’t have a choice. I’m just waiting for a little help.”
“Look,” the fox said. “I can be a lot more valuable to you than what you can get for my fur. If you release me I’ll give you the gift of wisdom—three profundities that’ll keep you going, not just for a year, but for your whole life.”
That sounded like an offer she couldn’t refuse. What precious gems of wisdom would he bestow on her? “Okay, it’s a deal,” she said. “Tell, and then I’ll let you free. I’m all ears.”
“Number one,” the fox began. “Never regret the past.”
“Hmmm,” the young girl thought, and she nodded without committing herself.
“Number two,” he said. “Never be credulous.”
That made some sense. “Got it,“she said.
“And here’s the last one: ‘Never desire the impossible’”
She sighed. Truth be told, she was pretty disappointed, but she stood up from the basket. “A bargain’s a bargain,” she thought, and let the fox slither out.
Then—quick as a fox—up the tree he shinnied. “Little fool,” he taunted her from a high limb above her reach. “Don’t you know I’m a magic fox with great powers? In exchange for my freedom, you could have asked for a castle; you could have demanded a hundred gold apples; you could have gotten two tickets to America from me. And instead all you got was those paltry maxims.”
“You damn sly fox!” the young girl cried. “You tricked me! I’ll capture you again, and this time I won’t be so dumb!” The basket under her arm, she took the tree at a run and shinnied up, just as he’d done. But she fell and broke two arms and a leg.
The fox practically split his belly open laughing. “Boy, are you an idiot,” he sputtered between guffaws. “Here I give you these important rules to live by, and right away you turn around and forget them. Remember, I told you ‘never regret the past’? But immediately you regretted letting me go without asking me for more than I gave you. Remember I said ‘never be credulous’? Silly child, have you ever heard of a fox who has a castle or gold apples or steamship tickets to America to give away? And what was the last thing I said? Remember? ‘Never desire the impossible.’ Girl, you have a lot to learn.”
My mother’s parents died without knowing of my entrance into the world, and of course I never knew my paternal grandparents. So there was no wise, white-bearded zaydeh or homey, kerchiefed bubeh to sit me down and tell me this shtetl fable that had been passed on, in one version or another, through the ages. If my mother remembered such tales, or any of the useful bits of wisdom from our ancestors’ Book, she never told them to me. Maybe her first vision of the green lady’s heaven-pointing torch burnt the old stories from her mind, or maybe they were crowded out by all the movies she saw and all the pop tunes she heard. In any case, her losses and her struggle for existence here in the promised land must have made all the old wisdom seem useless. So what she handed on to me were not those stories her people were supposed to live by but tragic stories of pogroms and other annihilations and sweatshops and a bad man. And she unwittingly gave me the antithesis of the fox’s advice never to desire the impossible. What could she know, after all, about what was impossible or possible for her American child?
My aunt handed me another kind of story. When I was little and cried because I’d scratched myself in some childish game, My Rae always tried to comfort me by saying, “By the time your chusen, your bridegroom, comes, it won’t show anymore.” This was an early preface to the fabulous tale she told me through my growing-up years—that a Jewish prince would someday marry me, rescue me from life’s harshness, and give me many children to make up for those our family had lost. And now that I was grown, the time had come, as far as Rae was concerned, for me to find the prince.
“I see so many girls with such fine Jewish boys, it’s a heartache for me,” Rae had said when my nose job didn’t immediately yield a prince. “You’re better looking than those girls. Why can’t you find a nice Jewish boy?”
“I don’t want a nice Jewish boy,” I callously muttered through the new nose she’d helped pay for, and, because I still had hopes for a Hollywood career, I stuck that nose back into The Complete Works of Eugene O’Neill.
She would not give up. “Why do you want to make us miserable? Why do you want to make yourself miserable?” she would cry, begging me to attend to real business instead of acting lessons and play rehearsals. When I stopped going to Geller’s, her hopes blossomed. “Sophie from the Litvisheh Verein’s daughter just got engaged to a wonderful dentist,” she told me.
“I’m only sixteen, Rae.”
“When me and your mother goes you’ll have nobody. Sweet sixteen’s the righ
t time to get engaged, especially a poor girl like you. You’re better off married to a nice serious boy—a dentist, a doctor, an accountant.” She’d mastered that American fable, all right.
Though I still hadn’t a clue about how to maneuver in the world, I knew with certainty that the Jewish prince dream she tried to fill me full of was as much the antithesis of fox-advice as the dream of Hollywood stardom that my mother had planted in me. Yet how could I convince Rae she had to give it up? Not by telling her that except in fairy tales, Jewish dentists or doctors or accountants don’t marry poor girls who have no father, whose mother had been crazy, and whose stepfather still was. Nor by explaining that though I was sweet sixteen, I was a woman who already had a considerable history in an era when princes’ brides were supposed to have no history whatsoever. And certainly not by insisting that I had no interest in princes. She couldn’t hear such things.
Nor did she, any more than my mother, have any real idea of either the limits or the possibilities of lives in America in the middle of the twentieth century. My mother and aunt had barely known thirty years earlier how to survive as immigrants, and their worlds never got much bigger than the shops they worked in or the homes they kept for their husbands. So what tools to help me flourish, what wisdom, could they possibly pass on to me? What besides the example of their failure? What coin that I could turn to good use?
Only the most valuable gem in the universe, much more precious than what the sly fox pretended to offer: the knowledge that I was deeply loved, that I was the most important being in the world to them, all that was left to them. And because I was the cherished remnant, I couldn’t let myself be destroyed. My life was important, and I had to find a way to do something with it.
What false starts, what near-disasters, what lows and what highs I’d already known and would continue to know. I had no neatly wrapped fables or maxims from the past to live by (in that, I was actually lucky, though I didn’t see it that way for a long time). I would have to start from scratch. I would have to create my own fables, my own dreams, unique ones that I could tailor to myself and live by here in America. Yet where would I get the wisdom to figure it all out?
Naked in the Promised Land Page 18
