Naked in the Promised Land

by Lillian Faderman

  Our knockdown drag-out fight came near the end of the fall semester. “I read this really fascinating article in the Examiner today,” D’Or said as I was getting ready for bed after the Saturday midnight show at the President. “Are you too tired to listen? It’s pretty long.”

  “Yeah, I’m exhausted.” But I could tell she really wanted to share it with me.

  “That’s okay. I’ll just summarize. Listen to this: Dr. Steven Donnelly, a Cornell professor, studied a hundred women who were employed as exotic dancers—like you. He looked at their families, economic background, everything.” She was excited, as though she’d finally discovered the key to a giant puzzle.

  “Um-hmm.” I flopped onto the unmade bed.

  “Can you guess the primary thing they had in common?” D’Or asked, a ninth-grade teacher administering a quiz.

  “Not a clue.” I felt my stomach tighten. I had so little in common with the girls with whom I worked. I liked them because they worked hard for their bit of money, and they were always sweet to me, even though we didn’t say much to one another because my “nose was always in a book,” as Celestial Celeste had remarked the other day. But I was as different from them as a raven from a salmon.

  “The Cornell professor found that all the women in his study came from the lower socioeconomic classes and were rejected by their fathers,” D’Or enunciated, standing over my prone body. “Every one of them had those things in common,” she squealed.

  I sat up in bed, yanking the covers tight around me. “Look, I’m working at the President, not because I was rejected by my fucking father, but because somebody’s got to pay the rent and buy the fucking food around here.” I felt my face contort. How ugly I felt, how ugly she made me feel. “And as long as I’m going to school, there’s no other job I can get that will let me do that and have time left for study,” I yelled.

  D’Or still hovered above me. “The point is,” she said in the cool voice of a detached observer, “you wouldn’t have been able to conceive of such employment if you’d had a normal relationship with a father and if—”

  “What the shit does that mean?” She was telling me I was a victim. I’d struggled so hard not to be that, to exercise control over my life. I bounded out of bed, grabbed her shoulders, shook her. “Did you have a normal relationship with your father? You’re crippled, damn you!” I raged into her face. “At least I function in the world. I may be a bastard and low class, but who’s supporting the Daughter Goldenrod, you bitch? Who?”

  “I’m just explaining why you’re so willing to take your clothes off in front of strange men.” She shrugged me off with maddening calm. “There’s never anything wrong with the truth, Lillian.”

  “You go to hell with your truth!” I leapt at her again, claws extended, ready to throttle. She dodged and I tripped, and my head met the wall with a dull thud. “Go to hell,” I muttered, ashamed, disgusted, wrapping my arms around myself like a straitjacket. She would drive me to distraction, to deadly violence. I went to stare out the window. I will either jump or push her, I thought again. What a blessing it would be, what a satisfaction! The splayed brown bear was still down there. I could see it, nothing but a desiccated heap of rag after all these months. If I didn’t get out soon, that would be one of us.

  ***

  But then, before long, I’d watch how a beam of sun played with her hair as she sat at the red table. Or I’d think about the way her black leather jacket had flapped in the wind at her father’s funeral. Or some poem or piece of prose would move me to tears, and she’d let me read it to her. “Yes! I love that, yes!” she’d cry. Her gray eyes were beautiful to me again, and I’d forget, for a while, how she made me feel ugly and common, how she made me feel like committing mayhem.

  That’s the way three years passed on Washington Street.

  In the late winter Mara Karrara came to the President Follies. I’d never heard of her, but people who knew about burlesque knew her name. Mr. Chelton rented two huge searchlights to stand in front of the theater and send great beams to the sky that were visible for miles around. For the first time since I’d been at the President, the theater was packed for almost every show. Bathsheba, who’d watched the first crowd come in, reported, “Everybody dressed up fancy today, no guys carrying newspapers for their laps.”

  “The Queen of South American Burlesque” was Mara Karrara’s tag. She was a honey blond, with gleaming honey tones to her skin and a bearing that was regal despite her petite stature and voluptuous, pear-shaped breasts. Mara was a real dancer, with all the balletic skill and class that D’Or had once pretended I could put into my poor little numbers. Her costumes were extraordinary too—huge headdresses of exotic green and gold feathers, jeweled lamé capes, extravagant gowns of heavy satin. Toward the end of her act, when she had already rid herself of cape and gown and headdress and shaken out her honeyed tresses, she paused before the audience in only her golden skin and the patch of pink G-string; then she reached into a gigantic basket of colorful wax fruits on stage-left. Out came a live green snake, long and fat and penile, with which she danced an intricately choreographed ballet of love. Word got around that Chelton was paying her two thousand dollars a week and that she’d earned her entire salary on the first weekend.

  “You know what she does when she gets out on that runway?” Satana sneered. “She takes a picture. That’s how come they like her so much.”

  I knew what take a picture was supposed to mean, but I’d never seen it: The stripper pushes her G-string aside, pulls her labia open, and exposes her clitoris to the audience. “My boyfriend saw the show and he told me,” Satana insisted when I said, “Why would someone with such a great act do that?” I’d watched Mara from the wings whenever I could—she really was an artist—though of course I couldn’t see the end of the runway from the wings. But I decided the take a picture story was born out of jealousy, because Satana had also whined the night before, “What’s so great about that Mara Karrara for her to get two thousand bucks a week and us to get peanuts?”

  “You are very nice,” Mara said when I nervously complimented her on her act. “Very nice.” Her deep-red lips smiled vivaciously, and she molded her hands to suggest breasts and waist and hips. Our eyes connected, then she winked a long wink. She traveled with a man—“my manager,” she called him when I dared to ask if Sergio, a stomachy gentleman with thinning gray hair who looked like an insurance salesman, was her husband. “He make my costume, teach me the dances, everything,” she said, straightening with competent fingers a twisted shoulder strap on my new red gown, then patting my bare shoulder.

  “That Mara Karrara gets two thousand a week, can you imagine?” I exclaimed to D’Or. I just wanted to hear myself say Mara’s name out loud. Her bright smile kept playing itself over in my head. I kept feeling her long fingers as they smoothed my gown strap.

  “I’ve never heard of a woman making that much money.” D’Or’s eyes grew wide at the munificent sum. “Does she really have anything you don’t have?”

  “Nah.” I laughed. “Only that she’s beautiful, she knows how to dance, she has incredible costumes, a fantastic act, a manager who knows what he’s doing.”

  “Couldn’t her manager train you?” D’Or asked.

  “Why would he do that?” I shrugged.

  But why not? I hadn’t thought about it before. Maybe he would take me on. If I was going to be a stripper, even for a little while more, why shouldn’t I try to be a star? What couldn’t D’Or and I do with that kind of money? “Hmm, maybe it couldn’t hurt to try,” I said.

  We became almost giddy about the scheme. With Mara and Sergio, I’d get into big-time burlesque, travel the fancy circuit—Las Vegas, Rio, Paris, places like that. I’d spend a year or two at it, earn a real nest egg for us. I wasn’t even twenty-two. I had plenty of time to go to graduate school.

  “You’d be able to afford Harvard or Yale,” D’Or said, serious now. “I’d move east with you if you wanted an Ivy League,” she
promised.

  The more I thought about the idea, the better it seemed. I sat in my Milton seminar the next day, figuring out the details as a student droned his paper on “Eve’s Impaired Judgment.” If I earned a lot of money now, I wouldn’t have to work in graduate school, and maybe if I felt less pressure, D’Or and I wouldn’t have so many fights. I did love her. Whenever I’d been certain that it was over, that we were finished, I’d see a gesture of her hand, an angle of her head, or she’d say something like “Oh, Creature, what would I do without you?” and I’d feel the love well up all over again. I couldn’t leave her, but neither could I go to graduate school and keep living with her and fighting with her and working as much as I had been.

  “Okay,” I told D’Or that evening, “here’s the plan. You go ask them. You’ll say you’re my manager. Go ahead and tell them I’m a college student and that I can join them in June, when I’ve finished school.” What if I did it for just one year? Say I made only half of what Mara got—I’d come out with around fifty thousand dollars. It would see us through graduate school and years after if we were even a little careful.

  Sergio watched my act from the wings after D’Or talked to him. I sensed how his serious eyes were trained on me, following me, like someone evaluating a business proposition, but when I glanced back and saw him in the shadows he had a tiny smile. The next morning, before I left for school, he called D’Or to say that both he and Mara would like it if I joined them. They’d be in Toledo, Ohio, in June, and I could meet them there.

  That evening Mara invited me into her dressing room, and I watched her in the mirror as she placed the huge feathered cap on her head. I’d travel with them, she said. Sergio would make costumes for me, she would teach me dances like hers, we would have a very wonderful time. We smiled at each other in the mirror. “Very wonderful,” she repeated. Then she turned to hug me, her green and gold feathers brushing against my cheek, and she hurried out to take her place in the wings before her music started up.

  Now, when I was drifting off to sleep at night, I saw Mara’s golden skin; I saw it in my dreams too, and when I awoke in the morning. I was discomfited by my fantasies, and suddenly I was badly confused. Was I going with them to make money for graduate school and for D’Or and me or was it because of Mara? My head rested on a pillow only millimeters from D’Or’s. What kept my perfidious thoughts from slithering out of my skull into hers? I wondered guiltily.

  Then Mara’s two weeks were over. “In Toledo!” Sergio wore the same smile I’d seen when he stood in the wings, and when I gave him my hand to shake, he squeezed it in a damp paw. We would meet on June 22, a week after I graduated. Sergio held the theater door open for Mara. She made him stand there at the door while she put her arms around me, and we hugged much longer than casual friends would. When I turned my lips to her silken cheek they brushed by chance near her mouth, and I felt her fingers tighten on my back. The look she gave me when we finally pulled apart was charged, sexual. It couldn’t have been anything else. But Sergio must have seen. In fact, it felt as though she’d wanted him to see. When I glanced at him, he was again smiling that mysterious little smile.

  Were they lovers? I wondered about it all the time now.

  And what would they expect of me? The question popped into my head days later, and I couldn’t get it out. She’d looked at me like that, knowing that he was watching. What kind of deal did they have between them? What if he wanted me too? What if that was their deal? Something was sure to happen between Mara and me, but what if he wanted to be a part of it too—and she wanted him to be a part of it? I’d be alone with them both in a strange city. Anything could happen. Anything. Did she really take a picture on the runway?

  ***

  The questions hung over me like a bogeyman’s threat. I think it was Dr. Jackson who kept me from getting the answers. Dr. Jackson was an elderly man with a great shock of white hair that fell over his forehead, dressed always in the conservative tweeds that were practically requisite for Berkeley professors in the early 1960s. All semester he’d made Victorian England come alive for me, and he’d made me understand that literature wasn’t just gripping characters or striking images or musical language. “Dickens, Kingsley, Disraeli—they entertained, but they also seduced their smug middle-class readers into caring about social problems that were right under their noses, though they couldn’t see them without the help of art.” That was Dr. Jackson’s lecture the week after Mara and Sergio left San Francisco. “We mustn’t denigrate other kinds of artistic goals; but theirs—to alleviate social injustice through art—that’s the artist’s most noble undertaking.” The class applauded, though lectures were never applauded at Berkeley except at semester’s end. Maybe because what Professor Jackson said made me remember how I felt standing on the street in Mexico City, watching the student demonstration, and how I felt about the HUAC protests, and how I loved the things Maury used to say about justice; or maybe it was because I was on an emotional edge over Mara and Sergio—whatever the reason, I sat there, intensely moved, not applauding but crying. Tears streamed down my cheeks, and though I felt like a fool I couldn’t stop them. I swiped at my face with the back of my hand. I was giving up the possibility of doing fine things … for what? To go to Toledo, Ohio, and be a stripper—and who knew what else? I couldn’t do it … not even for a year, not for money, nor love of D’Or, nor the fascination of Mara. I wouldn’t! Sitting there, runny-nosed, in the auditorium, I felt I’d been rescued from a hot fire just in time. It had almost gotten me … that thing that had always awaited me … just when I thought I was completely safe. But Dr. Jackson plucked me out at the eleventh hour.

  “I’m going to graduate school right away,” I told D’Or that night. “I can’t go touring. If I work as a stripper, I won’t be able to stop after a year.”

  “But … what will we do?”

  “I’ll figure it out,” I said, though I had no idea how.

  ***

  I’d written to my mother and Rae to say I wouldn’t be visiting during Easter break, because when I asked Chelton for time off he’d grumped, “If you’re leavin’ all the time, whadda I need you for?”

  A week later, I got to my Chaucer class early and settled into the empty room with an open text before me. “‘This child I am comanded for to take,’—And spak namoore, but out the child he hente Despitously,” I read, and the fourteenth-century English in my head was suddenly mixed with words in a Yiddish accent—my mother and Rae’s Yiddish accent—so real, it was as if they were standing in the hall.

  “The lady said Wheel Building, upstairs, thirty-three.” That was my aunt’s unmistakable voice.

  “Maybe we’re not in Wheel Building. There’s no thirty-three here.” My mother’s voice.

  “Excuse me, we’re looking for Lilly Faderman, in Wheel Building,” the foghorn blared.

  “Well, this is Wheeler Hall. There’s no thirty-three upstairs, but room two thirty-three is right there,” a young man’s voice said politely.

  I closed my book. This is what comes of always working, no rest, fighting all the time with D’Or. You hallucinate, like the times you saw Genghis and Khan slinking around the living room at Mark’s when they were asleep in the kitchen. I drifted out to the hall as though in a dream.

  But there they were. In the flesh! In their sweet flesh. My mother was wearing a new woolen suit and patent leather high heels, and I could tell she’d been to the beauty parlor because her hair was all brown now and in shiny waves. Her mouth was bright with lipstick. My aunt wore a purple coat and a green hat with a veil, such as nobody had worn for ten or fifteen years, and on her feet were her orthopedic shoes, a hole cut out on the left one for her bunion. They both looked so beautiful to me, even when Rae yelled at the top of her voice, “Lilly! Mary, look, she’s here!” and my mother jumped on me and wept, “Lilly! We haven’t seen you for so long! When are you coming home?” and everyone who passed stared at them and me and tittered.

  I gulped down
the sob that would betray my pretend composure. “Shhh,” I whispered, “classes go on here. We have to be quiet. Soon,” I promised my mother, my finger to my lips, my heart full with the miracle of these two old ladies, my treasure, standing right there in Wheeler Hall. “I graduate in June, and then I’m coming back for good. Soon.” I kissed them with my mother’s style of loud, smacking kisses. To hell with the tittering students.

  “Don’t work no more. You’ll make yourself sick with work and school. That’s what we came to tell you,” my aunt said, ignoring my shhh. “I’ll send money till you graduate. Only stop working,” she roared in the second-floor hall of Wheeler.

  I finally got the whole story: D’Or had attended Berkeley from 1949 to 1953. At the end of the four years she went to the graduation ceremony, just sat in the audience. “I thought it was my right,” she said.

  “But you didn’t graduate?” I tried to get it straight.

  “I don’t know. I just went for four years and got mostly A’s, but I don’t think I finished everything.”

  “Let’s order your transcripts and see,” I said.

  She’d gotten three incompletes in English classes and lacked one course for her foreign language requirement.

  I applied to graduate school at UCLA, just barely under the deadline. Though I’d failed to change D’Or’s life, I had to change my own. “If I’m accepted at UCLA I’m going,” I told her the next week, chomping on one of the corned beef sandwiches I’d brought back from David’s, avoiding those gray eyes that had made me forget iron resolves a hundred times before.