Naked in the Promised Land (3 page)

My heart sank. She was leaving it up to them. They would never choose me. I had no friend who would speak out for me.

"Barbara Ann," one girl said, naming the prettiest girl in class.

"Barbara Ann is a chatterbox," Miss O'Reilly said abruptly. "Lillian, come up here."

She had noticed. There was justice in America! My blood beat a joyful tattoo.

"Shlomo, you come up here, too." For him she pulled a big box out of the bag. "Shlomo, do you know who Albert Einstein is? This is a chemistry set. You work hard with this chemistry set and someday you,
Shlomo Schwartz, will be another Albert Einstein." There was a bored pattering of applause as Shlomo returned to his seat.

To me she said, "Now, Lillian, you have a choice. Would you like a toy or a useful present?"

She looked at me expectantly. I knew the answer I was supposed to give. But maybe she had a doll with blond hair and blue eyes that opened and closed in that bag. I had never had a doll before. Maybe it was a pair of skates, or a bow and arrow, or something else more wonderful than I could even imagine. My classmates held their collective breath along with me. They would have chosen the toy, I knew. And the toy, the lovely, frivolous luxury of it, was what I wanted.

"Come on, Lillian," she prompted. My name had never sounded so heavy, so adult before. I hated the way she pronounced it, impoverishing me even more by cutting a whole syllable out of it:
Lil-yun.
I could not open my mouth to say what I knew she wanted me to say, what a little girl who was so serious that she would sit for hours as still as a corpse in order to win a valuable present should say.

"I would like the toy, please," I blurted out.

"What?" she asked in disbelief, or perhaps to bully me into reconsideration.

"I would like the toy," I said again.

"Shame on you," she came back. "I know how hard your mother has to work to support you, a girl without a father. Don't you want to help her out? Don't you want something serious that will help her out?"

I expected my classmates to giggle at the news of my fatherless state, but they were silent, as solemn in the battle now as I was.

"I would like the toy, please," I repeated.

A half dozen of them clapped their hands; one cheered, "
Yeaa.
"

"Quiet," Miss O'Reilly admonished them. "All right, Lillian. I'm surprised at you. That was not a good choice, but you may have it." She took out of the sack a book with a worn gray cover. "The
Last of the Mohicans,
" she informed me. I sucked in my breath in disappointment, and it seemed to me that I heard the class echo my sound.

"And because your mother needs all the help she can get, I'm going to give you the serious present too." Now she handed me a little bag. I opened it just enough to see that it contained beige cotton stockings.
"But in the future, I want you to remember to make a wiser choice," she said, dismissing me back to my seat.

They applauded for me again, and this time all of them joined in. I couldn't decide if it was in commiseration over the way I'd been tricked or preached to or if I'd really won their admiration by standing firm for my desire.

When we went out to the playground at noon, I was alone again, as though their tribute had never happened. But I felt somehow that I'd tasted a victory over forces that weren't sympathetic to me. I'd learned that I could win, I could earn applause, but, even better, I could be strong enough to demand my desire. I might not get it, but I would get the satisfaction of knowing I couldn't be daunted.

Those Saturday evenings when my mother dressed up and left me I knew where she was going, though she never told me. I knew she would never be finished with him, that man she thought looked like Charles Boyer. The more I became aware of how overwhelmingly I loved her, the more I despised him.

"You have me, Mommy," I said one Saturday evening when she didn't make up her face to go out and I found her crying in our room.

"It's not the same thing." She made a sad little smile. And I knew for sure that she was crying now not about the lost relatives but about Moishe and how much she missed him when she wasn't with him. "To who can I let out my bitter heart?" she sighed to the air.

Moishe, that hated name. I wanted her not to need anyone else. I wanted to be everything to her.

But her life was so hard, so full of losses, her work so exhausting. She had to stand on her feet the whole day, she told me, because it was her job to drape the dresses on the tall, stuffed mannequins. "No sitting," the forelady barked at any draper who might be weakened for a minute by her period or her troubles and tried to pull up a stool from the finishers' station. In the steaming New York summers it was especially bad: My mother's mannequin was next to the pressers, and she'd be bathed and scalded by vapors from their hot machines. And there was no escape: She had to support us. "My whole body is breaking from tiredness," she'd sigh as we walked the block and a half
together from my nursery school, and I could feel the tremor of her tiredness in the fingers I clutched. Once in our room, she threw off her clothes and stretched naked and immobile on our bed, where I, sitting on a corner of it, watched over her as she stared up at the ceiling until she could drag herself to cool off in the bathtub. "
Rateveh mich,
save me. Save me from the shop, Lilly," she said once, gazing at the ceiling with a little smile on her lips that confused me. My mother didn't joke. Was she joking now? "Save me from the shop," she said again and sighed.

"How, Mommy? What should I do?" I asked, primed to do anything in her service.

"You can't," she admitted. "How could you?" Then, "Become a movie star."

Did she mean it? Could I become a movie star? I would do it, I promised myself. That's what I would become! She needed my help, and I would not fail her!

One evening, when my mother and I returned home after our long day, a squat little person was waiting in our room, wearing a small brown hat and veil, balancing an enormous black patent leather purse on her lap, sitting stiffly on the edge of the room's only chair.

"She's back. My
Malech Hamovas
is back," my mother said to the air. "Angel of Death, now you come back, after you left us for so long alone!" she turned to the veil and yelled.

My Rae lifted her veil, gathered me into her arms, wet my cheeks with her tears. "
Shepseleh meine,
my little lamb."

"My Rae!" I threw myself at her, then pulled away. My mother wouldn't like it.

"The
mameh ohn a boich vaytik
is back, the mama without a bellyache," my mother translated bitterly for my benefit, though I didn't need the translation.

"Why you didn't answer my letters?" My aunt wept to my mother in English. "Why you disappear and my letters come back to me? Thank God the old super heard where you moved and took pity on me. You want to kill me? You almost killed me," she shrilled.

"You're the murderer, you!" My mother outdid her, resuming the
litany I hadn't heard in a while. "You cockroach, you. You bigmouth, you."

But after my mother emptied herself and my aunt shed all her renewed tears, after both women yelled themselves to hoarseness, My Rae suddenly declared, as though they hadn't been screaming about death and destruction for the last hour, "The baby needs eats."

We went to the Automat. Neither woman spoke to the other, but both piled my plate high. They had no family except each other, no children in the next generation except me, and they were signaling a kind of truce, one we would live with for a while.

"Look how pale and skinny she is." My aunt felt my ribs.

"I need you to tell me how to take care of my
kind?
Where were you when I needed you? Now we don't need you. Go back to California." My mother tossed her hand and grumbled, yet, it seemed to my ear, less vehemently than before.

My aunt did go back to California, but not alone.

I'll never know what got into my mother a few weeks later. I'd been watching her in the mirror, just as I had on so many Saturdays, while she put on her makeup. This time, though, I wasn't sad because My Rae had said she would take me to the Automat. She stayed with us now, sleeping on the Missus's couch in the living room. It hadn't taken me any time at all to remember how much I'd loved her.

"When you were a little tiny
puttzeh-ruttzehleh,
" she reminded me to my giggly glee, "I took you into my arms and I held you next to my heart. And you know what you did, little
gonif,
little thief? You crawled right in, and you never crawled out again."

Though I'd lost the image of her over the last couple of years, she had crawled deep into my heart too, I realized. I'd never stopped loving her. How I loved her now! But different from the way I loved my mother. My mother I would have to take care of. My aunt would take care of me. I needed them both, desperately.

"Can I have lemon meringue pie? And then can we go see the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall?" I'd asked for the biggest treats I could think of, and I knew as sure as I knew the sun would rise the next day that she would give them to me.

My mother looked distracted now as she put on a blue low-necked dress, but suddenly, as though she'd resolved something that was troubling her, her face in the mirror was suffused with a brightness, and she turned to me and cried, "Lilly, I'm taking you."

"Where am I going?" I asked.
What about the lemon meringue pie and the Rockettes?

She didn't answer. Instead she pulled me to her and passed a comb through my knotted hair. "Let's make you look nice." From somewhere she produced a big wrinkled bow that I remembered seeing only in a picture of me that My Rae had had a photographer take long before she'd left us. My mother pinned the bow to my head with a bobby pin that scraped my scalp.

"Ouch!" I yelled, but she didn't seem to hear me.

"Where are you taking the baby?" My Rae cried.

"I have to try just one more time."

"Mary, you crazy, leave the baby here with me," My Rae yelled, her hands scrabbling for me.

But my mother clutched my wrist and pulled me down the stoop. "We're late!" She seemed like a different person—excited, worried, but happy too, all at the same time.

A big yellow car passed. "Taxi," my mother cried and waved at it until it pulled up to the curb.

I'd never been in a taxi before. "They're for rich people," she'd told me once, though now we were rattling along in one. I pressed close to her, but she seemed to have forgotten I was there. The taxi driver stopped in front of a restaurant that I'd never been to in all my excursions with her, and she clutched again at my wrist to pull me out. The strangeness of it all. My mother looked up and down the street and I looked with her, but none of the passing people was the one she wanted to see.

Who were we waiting for? It was him, I was sure, the one she dressed for every Saturday and left me for. I stood with her in front of the restaurant, squeezing her hand hard, leaning my weight on her arm, balancing on one foot, then on the other.

The El train roared above us. Now she freed her hand from mine and paced up and down.

I hopped to the lamppost near the curb and twirled round and round it, making myself dizzy. I didn't want to think. A starched pink and white little girl about my age walked by, snug between her father and mother. She stared open-mouthed, as though I looked funny, and I put my thumb to my nose and wiggled my four fingers at her, making a rude sound with my tongue and lips.

She did the same to me. "Stop that, Marsha." Her father slapped her hand down, and they walked on.

When I next looked at my mother, she was talking to a man who was wearing a gray suit and a pearl gray Homburg. Charles Boyer. I held tight to the lamppost, watching them.

I saw him glance over at me, and his lip curled before he turned back to my mother. "Why did you bring her?" I heard him say in Yiddish, his mouth twisting around the words.

The El train again roared overhead and I couldn't hear my mother answer, but her back was bent, her hands open, imploring.

He shook his head, then glanced at me again. Was this stranger my father?

My mother came to me and I clutched hard at the lamppost.

"Come, Lilly, come," she said and pulled at my hand. "Say hello to your father." She nudged my back.

Father. I knew what the word meant, but what did it mean to me? I stared at the gray cloth of the man's coat in front of my eyes. "Hello, Father," I said, raising my eyes, suddenly shy.

"I'm not your father. This is crazy," he snapped to my mother.

"No, Moishe, please," she cried.

"What are you trying to do?" His voice dripped distaste. Then he turned, and I watched his legs scissor away from us. He must have been wearing taps on his heels.
Tap, tap, tap, tap,
his shiny black shoes went, and my mother stood there weeping.

I was glad to see his form grow tinier and tinier. He hated us. I nuzzled hard into her chest, wrapped my arms tight round her waist, and she only sobbed louder.

That night My Rae tucked me into bed, but I wasn't asleep when she stood in the hallway with my mother and told her, "You leave and you'll see. He'll come after you. What do you have here? There we'll be
together." My mother answered with groans. "You stay here," my aunt kept on, "and he won't stop thinking you're his
kurveh,
his whore."

Then, a few weeks later, I was taken to Gimbel's department store, and My Rae bought me two dresses, dark plaid, "so they shouldn't show the dirt," and a dark green coat, "to travel," she told the saleswoman. And then my mother and I were sitting together with My Rae on a train, chugging across the continent.

"To California," my mother answered when I asked where we were going. "Where the movie stars are."

So she really had been serious! She did think I could do it. She did want me to become a movie star and rescue her from the shop!

My mother had taken me to see Al Jolson in the movies. He was a big star, she said, and he was Jewish. I knew enough about anti-Semitism by then to understand that being Jewish could be a handicap. But he had made it. With my Semitic hair and eyes and my nose that was slightly convex where it should have been slightly concave, I knew already that I would never be beautiful like the
shiksas,
Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck. But I could be like him. I had heard him sing "Mammy" and "California, Here I Come." I could do that just as he did, falling on one knee with my arms open wide. My mother told me that sometimes movie directors found their stars in the most unexpected places. Lana Turner was discovered at a drugstore soda fountain, she said.