Naked in the Promised Land (42 page)

I wandered around the UCLA campus. Soon I'd be cast out of this paradise of brilliant sunshine and brilliant scholars—to what?

"Hotbox of the nation," Professor Booth said pleasantly when I told him a month later that I would have an interview at the Modern Language Association Convention for the job at Fresno State. I'd barely heard of Fresno before I saw the job announcement. It was farm country, about two hundred miles from L.A. and the coast. How do people breathe away from oceans? I'd lived only on coasts.

"So you think I shouldn't even bother with the interview?" I asked hopefully.

"Oh, I didn't say that." Professor Booth's smile was placid.

Of my few possibilities, it was only Wilberforce, a Negro college, that seemed at all interesting, although it was in Xenia, Ohio. "We're vaguely connected to Antioch College," the urbane Negro professor who interviewed me at the MLA Convention said. "Seven miles north, and another thousand miles below the stairs." He smiled ruefully. I imagined myself at Wilberforce, a political firebrand, fighting the good fight against presidents, deans, whomever, to help rescue the college from its second-class status.

But how would I teach, how would I write, if all my time were spent
in political battles? I had to figure out what I really wanted to do with the Ph.D. that I'd been struggling so hard to get.

I go to his office with a contract in hand. "Well, I guess I'm off to Fresno State College," I tell a jolly Mr. Pickwick.

"Fresno State," he chortles. "A girl who did the best graduate oral exam in the history of the UCLA English Department? A girl like that doesn't end up at Fresno State College. You're going to UC Berkeley: They're hiring you, sight unseen, on the basis of my glowing recommendation."

I'm speechless. I'm going to be a professor at UC Berkeley! I sink to the floor in a delirium of groveling obeisance. Professor Booth lifts me with gentle, paternal hands. "There, there," he sings, "no thanks necessary. It's only what you deserve." From his desk he takes a magnum of Veuve Cliquot—"Enjoy with Binky, your woman lover." He beams and then, with a fatherly wink, he pins a giant gold medal on my lapel.

I went to my adviser's office with the contract in hand. "I've been offered a job as assistant professor at Fresno State College," I said. The contract had been sitting in my desk for two weeks, and whenever I'd opened the drawer and came upon it inadvertently I was plunged into a dark funk. Fresno.

"Wonderful!" He smiled benevolently. "Is it a tenure track job?"

No one had ever told me what "tenure track" meant, and I wasn't really sure, but the contract did contain those words. "Yes," I answered.

"That's superb," he said, pumping my hand in hearty congratulations.

"So you think I should take it?" I asked, desperate still for rescue, as he walked me to the door.

"Oh, by all means, by all means," Professor Booth averred, bowing slightly as he ushered me out.

So Paula was right after all. That year and the next there was a boom in college hiring. The men who got Ph.D.'s from the English Department were offered jobs at places like Cambridge University, the University of Pennsylvania, Tulane, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Texas at Austin. There they would teach one or two classes a semester
and have research assistants and Ph.D. students working with them. The women, if they were lucky enough to get jobs at all, were hired at places like California State College at Northridge and California State College at Hayward, where they would teach four classes a semester to undergraduates and a few master's students, and they would do their research during the summer—if they could muster the energy and motivation to do it at all.

I wrote the conclusion to my dissertation in early March and passed my defense two weeks later. I was Dr. Faderman; I had finished my studies at UCLA. But the Fresno State contract still sat in my desk drawer, a fearsome monster in hiding—out of sight, but never out of mind.
You should be grateful to be offered a job as assistant professor,
I told myself.
Professor Faderman
—wasn't that what I'd worked for all these years? But one afternoon, before Binky got home, I peered into the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door and I stripped naked. The young woman who stared back was five years older than Mink Frost, but the waist was still small, the breasts still firm. Weren't there nightclubs that hired exotic dancers all up and down the Sunset Strip? Was it really better to leave everything I loved and go to the desert of Fresno for a mediocre academic career? In the name of what silly vanity did I need to be a professor when I knew other ways to make a living?

I dashed to the desk, still naked, fumbled frantically, tossed the jumbled contents to the floor. Where was it? Had I thrown it out without thinking? My blood froze. There—it was under my
Bleak House
paper on which Booth had written two years before: "Shrewd and splendid insights." I pulled it from the mess and scribbled my name and the date in triplicate, then sealed the envelope along with my fate.

I'd put a white linen cloth on the table and lit white candles. "How beautiful," Binky said, and we smiled feebly at each other, then pushed the food around our plates in funereal silence. I put my fork down, sipped ice water, watched the flicker of the candles and the shadow her bent head made on the wall. Maybe in the morning I'd call the Fresno State English Department. "I sent you something in error," I might say.
"Could you please return the envelope unopened." Who cares if they thought I was crazy? I'd never have to see them.

"Can you really bear to give this up?" Binky bit her lip, blew her nose.

I pushed my dish to the side. In two months it would be our one-year anniversary. I'd been happy—happier with her than I'd ever been in my life. How could I leave to go to Fresno?

"I'm going with you," she said suddenly. Her strong chin was tilted upward, an Amazon ready for superhuman efforts. "I've made up my mind!"

"Fresno is two hundred miles from the nearest bagel or Ingmar Bergman movie or major library," I laughed mirthlessly. "The Fresno temperature gets up to a hundred and ten degrees in the summer. Paula gave me the full report. The tule fog socks the city in for months in the winter."

"I'm going. That's all there is to it. We'll do the book there, just as we planned, and you'll publish your way back to L.A. They must have heating and air conditioning in Fresno. It's still civilization. I'm going with you."

I put off telling my mother and Rae until the last minute because I couldn't bear their wailing on top of my own. "It could be a lot worse," I said from the same green chair on which I'd studied for my orals that had gone so spectacularly well because of the million cups of coffee and slices of buttered rye bread my aunt had kept me fueled with. "I could be off to Michigan or Ohio right now instead of Fresno, which is less than four hours away by car. I'll be back to visit every few weeks," I promised above my aunt's warnings about the ogre-filled world, the tragedy of the unwed, the ticking clock in my womb. "Sarah, after your grandmother," she reminded me irrelevantly. "Avrom, after your grandfather. You're almost twenty-seven years old!"

Then I planted a kiss on my mother's cheek and slipped from her grip.

Driving north on Highway 99, it was already a lot worse than we'd imagined—the flat yellow land that stretched in unrelieved dullness as
far as the eye could see; the thick, choking smell of cow dung and urine every few miles; the heat that wrapped around you like a rough, binding blanket and made your skin prickly and your lungs heavy. The car zoomed toward Fresno, relentless, inexorable. Binky and I held hands, two prisoners headed to the gallows. We had nothing to say to each other.

I look out on small seas of blondness, broken by only a few darker heads—occasional Mexican or Armenian students. I teach Victorian literature but—much more exciting to me—I teach a seminar in which I use the material that Binky and I are gathering for our book.

"Who won the Armenian beauty contest?" a raucous young voice says in the hall.

"I dunno," his buddy answers.

"No one!" Guffaw, guffaw, guffaw.

I storm out of my office, ready to put that dumb jock in his place with a withering stare, but there's only a knot of slight, cherub-faced blond boys standing there.

They really need me here,
I think.

In all my classes they listen quietly, obediently, used to professorial lectures from the podium—but from men. I am the only woman in the department.
"How come?" I asked a colleague, my lips curved in a pleasant smile that said
I'm not challenging, just curious,
when I encountered him in the mail-room at the end of my first week. "Oh, there were a lot of women in the department when I came here in 1959, because that's who was hired during the war, but we got rid of them." I must have looked startled. "Oh, because they didn't have Ph.D.'s," he explained. "We upgraded."
How will I be Professor Faderman if "professor" is a dark-suited, starched-collared middle-aged man?

But I am an actress. Just as I once played stripper, now I can play professor.

On April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed, Binky and I signed a contract with Scott, Foresman to publish our book. For the rest of that week we moved between the glow of our achievement and the multiple shocks of external events—first the tragedy of King's death
and then riots in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago—in every city of any size. The sky filled with flame and smoke, as though the whole country, the whole world, were on fire. America was falling apart. How insignificant it was that we were passionate about our work and were going to publish a pioneering college text on multiethnic American literature.

"But it's what we can do," we told each other. "We can't stop the riots or bring racial justice to America, but we can make a step toward integrating what's taught in literature classes."

"It's obvious why I'm dedicated to this stuff, but how come you are?" I asked Binky one evening as we sat side by side writing our section introductions.

"I can't remember when I haven't been," she said. "Maybe it was because I grew up in South Pasadena. They used to have a covenant about not selling to anyone but white Christians. Even when I was a kid I thought that was disgusting. Or maybe it's being gay and seeing through different eyes because of it. I don't know. It all seems connected somehow."

"We'll have fiction and poetry by writers of all colors—good works that have been neglected or forgotten—and we'll let the writers speak for themselves." "They'll show what's unique about their lives but also the similarities that blast through racial and ethnic differences." "They'll show that literary study has to be integrated just as society does, that white men don't have a monopoly on eloquence." We went on and on. We'd already gathered gems by Toshio Mori and Hisaye Yamamoto, Phillis Wheatley and Ossie Davis, Americo Paredes and Piri Thomas, N. Scott Momaday and Emerson Blackhorse Mitchell. Now we mined for more in the Fresno libraries, and when we ran out there, we trekked back to Los Angeles to search neighborhood libraries and the bowels of the UCLA library, which held forgotten books and magazines and newspapers.

My classes are over at 4
P.M.
on Thursday, and we hurry down to Los Angeles for a long weekend of research. At night we'll sleep on a bed that pulls down from the wall in my mother's cramped, undusted living room. As always, she's been waiting for our car to turn the corner hours before it could possibly happen,
pacing the sidewalk, her face grief-stricken, as though she's already mourning the loss of her only child in a fiery auto accident. When I step from the car, she pounces on me and weeps because I've returned from the dead. Nothing changes. It's as if no time has passed.

Binky views it all with equanimity, as though everyone has a crazy mother and a stepfather with holes in his head who rises from his chair to declaim about the fabulous power of his boss, Dr. Nathan Friedman. "When he walks down the corridors of Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, the interns shiver in their shoes," Albert declares with waving arms. He includes Binky in his audience, though sometimes he calls her Bessy—which is better than my mother, who doesn't call her anything except, to me on the telephone, "the
shiksa
you live with." "Binky, Binky, Binky," I remind her. Binky, my good, generous love, acts as though she doesn't even notice. ("My family's worse," she says when I ask if she wouldn't rather we stay with her mother, a widow now, living still in the big pink house in South Pasadena that Binky drives me past. "She hated my teaching at Marshall—she hated the Negro kids because she knew how much I loved them.")

The instant Binky excuses herself to go to the bathroom, my mother stands over me to say "Mrs. Sokolov's daughter and the new baby came to visit her yesterday. Her third grandchild." She sighs a huge sigh that says
nu? "
Such a cute little baby," she remarks later, when Binky goes out to get our suitcase. "Some people have all the luck." She hasn't been one of the lucky ones, she wants me to know.

Before long my aunt arrives, wearing an old blue dress and green sweater, hugging a heavy paper sack that comes up to her eyes. "I know you're too busy to see me, go in good health. But take this back with you to Fresno."

"Rae, I'm not going back for three days," I protest.

"I'm afraid I'll forget."

The sack is smelly and ripping at a damp spot. It's bulging with fruit—plums, peaches, honeydew, apricots, cherries, all of it squishy, overripe, leaking. I know that the moment my aunt heard I was coming, she ran to Fairfax Avenue to shop, and the fruit has been sitting in her kitchen ever since, for a week at least, ripening and rotting. "Rae, Fresno is the fruit capital of the world." I struggle to keep my voice calm, but I'm losing the battle. "I can buy all the fruit I want there."