Naked in the Promised Land (11 page)

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.

Mr. Yehuda Cohen had a long white beard like the ones I'd seen in pictures of biblical patriarchs, and he wore the same long black overcoat in all seasons. He came to Dundas Street to examine us and set the terms—three dollars per introduction. He smelled of fried fish, but he sent a procession of potential
beshertehs.

In consideration of the novelty of a gentleman caller, Fanny let us take the dusty, yellowed sheets off the furniture in the living room, where we'd never been allowed to sit before. ("The couch is old. I don't have money to buy a new one when it falls apart," she had always said.) I piled stacks of library books in front of the jars of floating eyeballs to hide them.

On the morning of my mother's first date, I walked with her to the beauty parlor on Wabash Avenue so she could get a henna tint in her hair. That afternoon, as she let me dab my own rouge on her cheeks and brush her lashes with my Maybelline, I studied the face I'd loved so much. What would a suitor think? The years in East Los Angeles had really aged her. There were fine little wrinkles all around her eyes and deep lines between her eyebrows that gave her a permanently pained expression. Her cheeks, which had been firm and opalescent, looked saggy and sallow. I was stung by my love for her, which was even greater now
that she no longer looked young and beautiful. "Please let him be nice to her. Please let him be a loving man," I prayed to I-didn't-know-who.

Jake Mann's hair was marcelled into shiny, tight blond waves, and he wore electric blue or burnt sienna suits. "What a little doll!" he said in a gravelly voice as I went to the kitchen to fix him a glass of tea on his first visit. His fingers clasped my hand instead of the glass when I handed it to him, making the dark liquid slosh over the rim. "Oh, she burned her pretty fingers," he said to no one in particular, relieving me of the glass and then lifting my hand to his mouth for a wet kiss—"to make it feel good."

He invited my mother out for "cocktails." "You're invited too." He winked at me.

"He's a real sport," my mother said, glowing, when she came back after midnight. I'd waited up, sleepless, missing her cruelly. "He took me to a nice place for a Tom Collins. Then he took me to Chinatown for a big dinner." In her fingers she twirled a yellow toothpick-and-paper umbrella, which she proffered to me as though I were six years old. "It was in the Tom Collins," she said, beaming.

I took it from her, holding it awkwardly in my palm. What was I supposed to do with it?

Mr. Mann came to take my mother out again the next week. "So where's that little princess?" I could hear him from the bedroom.

"Why don't you go say hello?" my mother asked me when she came in for her purse.

If she married Mr. Mann, we'd all have to live together until I finished high school. More than three years. So I had to be friendly. I followed her out. "Say, give us a hug," Jake Mann said avuncularly. He pulled me to him, pressing himself against me for what seemed like a long time. I broke away, befuddled. My mother stood at the front door, purse in hand, smiling like a stranger, waiting for him. I'd never had a fatherly hug. Was I imagining things?

"He really knows how to treat a lady," my mother said at the end of the evening, and her face looked bright and a little excited. I marveled how quickly she'd gotten into the spirit of this thing. She sat on her bed, and I watched as she rolled her seamed nylons down her still-lovely
legs. "He's a nice dresser, too. Not like Moishe," she sighed, "but still nice. And he took me to an Italian restaurant, and then we went on a wonderful drive near the beach and saw the stars." She enumerated Mr. Mann's virtues and her pleasure. "On Sunday he wants to take us both to Ocean Park Beach," she said, pulling her pale pink nightgown over her head.

I remembered Mr. Mann's tight hug. "No, you go alone with him," I said lightly, rummaging through my mind for an excuse that would keep me home.

"He wants to take us both. You come too," my mother insisted, pulling the covers over herself. I got up to turn the light off, then lay in the dark in a muddle of feelings while my mother breathed softly in sleep.

"Whoop! Where's the bathing suit?" Jake Mann exclaimed on Sunday morning when he saw me in a white skirt and blouse. "We're all going swimming on such a beautiful day."

My mother wore her green one-piece bathing suit under a floral print dress. "Put your suit on underneath," she encouraged me. "It's a beautiful day to go in the water."

Jake Mann opened the rear door of his long automobile for me, and as I slid in, I felt his hand brush lightly against my buttocks. I turned to look at him, astonished. But what could I say there in his car, my mother in the front seat? Perhaps I'd imagined it, or maybe it was an accident.

In the beach parking lot he stripped down to his bathing suit, and my mother did the same. "We'll lock our clothes in the trunk," he said. "That way we don't have to worry about them when we go into the water." I disrobed, self-conscious, not knowing what else to do. He handed my mother a blanket to carry, and he took a little portable radio from the trunk.

I felt his eyes inspecting my black two-piece suit, my thighs, my breasts, as he walked between me and my mother down to the beach. I was aware of the oppressively huge expanse of his naked flesh next to me, the blond-gray hairs that covered his chest and legs and arms.

My mother spread the blanket, plopped down, snapped on the
radio. "
Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes,
" she hummed along with Frank Sinatra.

"Let's go for a swim!" Mr. Mann seized my hand and held me up just as I was about to sink down near her, onto the gay red and green stripes.

"I don't know how to swim," I told him, forcing myself not to sound sullen and pulling my fingers away. "Why don't you two go?" I turned to my mother.

"You never taught her to swim?" he scolded. "What's the idea of that? I'll teach her."

"Go, Lilly, let him teach you how to swim." My mother smiled contentedly at the sun.

He pulled at my arm. "Up-sy!" He grinned and lifted me to my feet, ignoring my protestations that the water was too cold for me. "Don't be a scaredy-cat," he said.

I walked down to the water with him. How was I supposed to act? Didn't my mother see that there was something funny in the way Mr. Mann behaved with me? And there was something else troubling me. I'd seen men in bathing suits before, of course, but the sight of Jake Mann down below was disquieting. His member looked huge under the flimsy red material of his trunks. Didn't everyone see the funny way it protruded? Wasn't he embarrassed by it? By the time we reached the water, the red strip looked like a little tent under his belly. Alarm fought with nausea inside me. Where could I put my eyes?

The water felt frigid on my feet. "Come on, don't act like a teeny, tiny baby," he mocked, dragging me by the hand. Would he drop my mother if I insulted him? How could I keep him for her but keep him away from me? I half went and half was pulled deeper into the water. I couldn't protect my thighs, my belly, my chest, from its iciness. My teeth chattered.

"I'm going to teach you to swim," he said, his voice still jovial and booming above the waves. "You're old enough to know how, for God's sake. Now lay down against my hand and I'll show you to kick." He pushed the back of my head down and my legs went up, then he held me afloat with his hand on my belly. At least the lower part of him was covered by the water and I didn't have to see it. "Okay, keep your legs
straight and kick. I've got you. Nothing to worry about," he said now in a businesslike manner.

I couldn't stop shivering. It was hard to breathe. I kicked as he commanded me to, and he moved us some steps farther from the shore. What if I couldn't touch the ocean floor with my feet? What if the water was above my head? I would be at his mercy. The ocean was huge around us, and I didn't know how deep it was below me now. I swiveled my head quickly to look at him, and water filled my nose. I coughed and sputtered and clutched at his arm.

"Don't get scared. You're doing good," he told me. I relaxed my clutch and kept kicking. "Atta girl!" he said.

Then he righted me and dropped his hand from my belly. I could feel the bottom with my feet and sighed in relief. I stood on tiptoe to keep my head well above the water.

"Now, how about a little thank-you kiss for your first lesson." He grinned hideously, a huge shark in the middle of the ocean. He pulled my chin up with one hand and clamped his mouth down on mine. With the other hand he pulled my buttocks toward his member.

I struggled, and the undulating water pushed me off balance. His mouth was hard on mine, his hand firm on my buttocks, keeping me upright. I felt him rub against me.

"Stop it," I freed my mouth and shouted. There were other people in the water but no one close by. If I broke away from him, would I drown?

"Come on, be a good girl," he said, knocking his hips against me, not relinquishing his hold on my buttocks. "Don't you like it?"

"Goddammit, leave me alone!" I snarled in the most menacing voice I could muster. He tightened his grip, and my nails raked down his wet back with all the strength in my fingers. He dropped his hand, looked surprised and startled. I broke free and landed on tiptoe, my chin barely above the water. I swerved toward the shore, not looking back, my arms and hands flailing to push the ocean aside until I got to the shallow water.