Naked in the Promised Land (35 page)

Yet I had to acknowledge that something else would keep me from joining Students for Civil Liberties, the protest organizers, even if I'd had the leisure: Wouldn't they be horrified if they really knew me? I couldn't tell those sons and daughters of the upper and middle classes about Gigi Frost, the Bubble Bath Girl. They'd never comprehend my life with D'Or in our sack- and newspaper-filled apartment, how I longed to rescue her from her sickness, my sorrow that so far I wasn't making a bit of difference. She still spent ten minutes looking under restaurant tables for invisible objects as I waited, embarrassed, at the exit; her hands were still raw and blistered from the fifty scrubbings with harsh soap and hot water to which she subjected them every day; the mysterious stuffed sacks and the newspaper stacks doubled, quadrupled, sextupled. Who among those radical kids could understand my life?

And who could understand the way I loved D'Or and how I loved to make love to her? I saw no other lesbians on the Berkeley campus, not even a single gay man. I was the only homosexual there—I was sure of it—though one of the personality tests all the entering students had to take the week before the start of classes had asked, "Have you ever kissed a person of the same sex?" and "Are you attracted to those of the same sex?" I answered no to all such questions. How dumb they were to think I'd fall for a shabby little trick like that. I'd be kicked out of Berkeley if they knew about my life, that was clear to me. So I kept my own counsel and talked only in class.

***

DER LILI YOU NO YOU AR DERER TO ME THEN THE EYS FROM MY HED. WY DO YOU LEV US LIK THAT AND GO TO SAN FRANSISCO. HOW DO YOU LIV. HOW DO YOU MAK A LIVNG. YOR NO GOOD HUZBAN DUZ NOT COM. I NO IT. PLEZ COM BAK TO LA. YOU CAN GET A DIVORS AND MARY A GOOD MAN. I WIL HELP YOU. COM BAK RIT AWAY. YOR LOVNG ANT THAT LOVS YOU MOR THEN THE MOON IN THE SKI.

It was the first letter I'd ever received from Rae. How excruciating it must have been for her to sound out the words and write them down in an alphabet she barely knew. I laughed at the letter's drollness, but I held the paper to my lips, and my eyes filled with tears.

No, I couldn't do what she asked. How could I leave D'Or? And if I returned to L.A., my mother would make me live with her and Albert again; I wouldn't be able to resist her pleas. All my elaborate schemes would have been for nothing. No, there was no way I'd go home again.

Dear Rae,

I've already started college at Berkeley and I can't leave. Please do not worry about me. I'm living with a good friend, and I have a job in the school library. I'll come to visit you and my mother this winter, when the semester is over.

DER LILI DU NOT WORK IN A LIBARY AND GO TO COLEDG AT THE SAM TIM. YOU WIL MAK YOURSELF SIK. YOUR HELT IS VERY INPORTANT. I WIL SEND YOU MONY EVRY MONT TIL YOU FINISH THE YER. THEN YOU COM BAK. I WIL HELP THE DIVORS. I WIL SEND YOU 150 DOLARS. WHAT DO I WORK FOR. YOUR LOVNG ANT. YOUR MUDER LOVS YOU TO.

Twice a month, a money order for seventy-five dollars arrived on Washington Street along with a phonetic note admonishing me to take care of my health, come home soon, and get a divorce. Now I could devote the four evenings a week I'd spent at the Hotsy Totsy Club to schoolwork and D'Or. A hundred and fifty dollars a month paid
the rent, our food bills, and my transportation back and forth across the bay. If I skipped a few lunches, on a Sunday we could even take a bus across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito, where we'd sit puffing on Turkish cigarettes and gaze at the city across the whitecapped bay.

"Creature" was D'Or's pet name for me now, "my glowering, brown-eyed creature." We both wore black turtlenecks; and I had a black leather jacket just like hers, which I'd bought when I was working at the Hotsy Totsy. "We're Gemini twins," D'Or said, glowing. "But why do you always look so sad?"

Did I look sad? When I was with her I didn't feel sad. "Get into the moment," she'd say with zest over glasses of mead at the Glad Hand Bar, which sat at the end of a dock that poked out over the bay in Sausalito. And I did, I thought, I did get into the moment.

"But you still look like you're carrying the weight of the world," she complained over quiche. "Take pleasure in this divine wine, this superb food, this fantastic view. Let's be sybarites," she urged. "What do you worry about so much?"

Doing well in school so that I can someday make a living without depending on my body's curves. Whether Rae's $150 will last until the end of the month. Whether the sacks and stacks will crowd us out of the apartment. How I can keep my aunt from trying to marry me off again once I get a divorce. How I left my mother to bear her miserable, lonely life alone.

"Nothing," I told D'Or. "I don' worry about nothin'." I grinned like a circus clown. "Let's have another mead."

That winter I drove to L.A. with a girl from my French class who wanted someone to share gas expenses on her way to Pasadena. She dropped me off in front of the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows, and there was my mother. I saw her before she saw me. She was pacing up and down the sidewalk, her wild hair gray for three or four inches past the scalp, then a fading, strawlike brown. She looked lost in some aching thought, distraught, as in the bad days of my childhood. How could she have become such an old woman in the seven months I'd been gone? "So long," she cried when she saw me, and her hug was the familiar old
breath-stopping pounce and octopus grip from which I had to break loose. "So many terrible months without seeing you!"

"Leelee." Albert swung open the screen door. "Since twelve o'clock your mother is driving me crazy. She thought you got killed."

"Mom, I told you I wouldn't leave until nine o'clock, and it takes about eight hours to get here."

"She's been walking in and out the house, up and down the sidewalk, the whole afternoon."

"I forgot you told me nine o'clock," my mother said.

How strange it feels to be sleeping in my old room. I'm not at all the same person I was before I left to get married. My spirits lift at the realization: I know where I need to go now. I really do, though I haven't quite mapped out the way.

But my mother has nowhere to go. Her life has been frozen, and I can't escape seeing it. Albert goes off to work with Dr. Friedman and the corpses every day, and what does my mother do? She sits in the little living room and watches television. The soap operas are her favorites—
As the World Turns, All My Children, The Days of Our Lives.
The tortured look around her eyes and mouth goes away when she watches other people's problems, stories about men who betray, children who disappoint. She shakes her head in commiseration at some other poor woman's troubles. "American children, what do they care about the aggravation they give?" she says when a soap opera actress shrieks her maternal grief.

Sometimes the soaps are about happy lovers, and then my mother gets the look in her eyes that I remember. It's the look she used to have after the Charles Boyer movies we watched together, when she still dreamed that Moishe would love her again. What does she have to dream about now? She's given up on dreams. She's had an aborted life, my poor mother. Nothing worked out for her. Not even me.

About four o'clock she turns off the TV and starts making supper. She wants me to sit in the kitchen to be near her. "Talk to me while I'm cooking,"she says. "Who do I have to talk to?"

But she never asks about my life, and I don't know what to tell her. "School's good. I made the dean's list last semester," I say. I know she's not really listening. She wouldn't know what a dean's list was even if she were.

When she talks, it's always a tirade of her grievances: "What kind of man is Albert? All he wants is supper and to play cards. He's the crazy one, and he has the nerve to say I'm crazy." She chops the onions for the chopped liver and brushes away a tear. "I didn't live to feel one whole good day in my life," my mother sighs as she cuts the carrots that she'll cook with the chicken. "That
cholerya
Rae, what kind of sister? She dragged me to this lousy Los Angeles, and now she lives with Mr. Bergman and that's all she knows! I can go to hell." She beats the matzoh ball mixture as though it were her sister's head. "What kind of daughter do I have? I see you once in nine months; you never call. I hardly get a letter. What do I have in the whole world?"

It's the same thing over and over. My mother is a broken record of suffering. She's been crippled by all the terrible things that have happened to her, and there's nothing I can do to help. My impotence feels unbearable to me.

"How come you want to run away so soon?" she sniffs when the two weeks are up. She hangs on to me in the street until Michelle's old green Nash pulls up and I break away from my mother's grip of death.

I hated the soporific statistics lectures and the silly white mice experiments that were a prominent feature of the psychology major at Berkeley, so the reading I did for my literature class was like eating a juicy sour pickle when you've had a long diet of cream of wheat. "
For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise." "During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day...
" Words on the page could do for me what D'Or said opera did for her: They could be luscious, harrowing, stirring. Mere written words could transport you to another world. I was high with the realization of it. "
O! Let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine!
...
Withhold no atom's atom or I die."

"If you like literature so much, why don't you major in English?" D'Or suggested when I asked her to turn the phonograph off so I could read to her Keats's yearning lines to his mistress. D'Or had majored in English at Berkeley, which she'd attended for four years, though she wasn't sure she'd actually graduated.

I laid my book down. "How do you make a living with an English major," I asked, a rhetorical question. But she stared at me with the same look I'd seen when I asked her what jobs she'd had. "There's more
to life than making a living," she instructed me soberly before setting the needle back on Papageno and Papagena's duet.

"Yeah, but who's going to pay our bills?" I said above the music, trying to keep exasperation out of my voice.

"The bills will get paid one way or another," she said patiently over Papagena's bliss. "What's important in life? Beauty. Subtlety. Nuance—the things of art." She pronounced the words reverently. "The rest is bourgeois. Unworthy of the artist's sensibility."

"But an artist's sensibility is a luxury." No, I couldn't keep my voice down! "Before you can have luxuries, you need to attend to practicalities."

She lifted up the record needle; Papagena screeched and fell silent. "You sound like my brother," she snickered. "All my life I've had to argue with people like that. Why can't you understand what I'm saying? I want to be classless. The artist is always classless."

"But I can't be classless!" I wanted to shake her. Why didn't she understand me? "If I don't become somebody, you know what choices I have? I can work in a garment factory or I can use my body to make a living."

"There are always other possibilities."

"Like what?"

Her nostrils flared at my obtuseness. "I want you to be a natural aristocrat, just as I am. That's what I thought I saw in you when we met. The natural aristocrat has nothing to strive for. The natural aristocrat lives in essences, in sensibilities. I never knew anybody to study as much as you do," she suddenly cried, accusingly. "You're so disciplined ... and organized!" She said it in the tone someone else might have used to exclaim "You're a scoundrel ... a thief!"

W
HEN
I
WROTE TO MY MOTHER
and aunt near the end of my sophomore year to say I was going to stay in San Francisco until I graduated, Rae wrote back:

I CANT SEND YOU MONY NO MOR TIL YOU COM BAK TO LA LIK YOU SED. WHY YOU DONT GET A DIVORS LIK YOU SED. WHY YOU WANT TO RUON YOUR LIF. TAK CAR ON YOUR HELT. YOUR HELT IS VERY INPORTANT.

If my aunt stopped sending me money, how would we live? I might get summer work as a salesgirl or a waitress, but what would I do when school started again?

"I got a job!" D'Or announced when she returned to the apartment one afternoon while I was studying for finals. "I start tomorrow." She'd be going from house to house to take the census. For one month.

I couldn't go back to Big Al's Hotsy Totsy Club because I'd quit without notice. Anyway, when school started again, I'd hate to give up all those hours every week to serving drinks and taking phony bubble baths when I needed the time to study. I was changing my major to English, and I had to make up the literature classes I'd missed as a psych major. I'd decided I really wanted to be a writer, and because I knew that writers didn't always make a living, I would get a Ph.D. and become an English professor too. That way I'd be sure to have a salary, and I'd be teaching the works of other writers that I loved.

But I couldn't think too much about long-range plans now; I had to think about how D'Or and I would get by when the San Francisco census was done.

"Girls wanted 21–28 for burlesque chorus. Some dancing. $55/wk." The ad was in the
HELP WANTED
—
WOMEN
section of the
San Francisco Examiner.
Why shouldn't I? Here, in San Francisco, away from my mother and Rae, why shouldn't I use whatever I could if it would get me where I needed to go? Why shouldn't I turn to coin whatever gifts I had to make up for the patrimony I would never have?

I'd see what a burlesque chorus did before I applied for the job, I decided. The President Follies was a faded old theater palace on McAllister Street, with big black letters on a cracked marquis that announced:
TWO WEEKS ONLY THE FAN-TASTIC MISS BRANDY DEVINE.
The redheaded woman in the booth looked suspicious. "Just for you?" Her orange lips pursed. She hesitated, then took my money and shoved a ticket at me.