Naked in the Promised Land (7 page)

"Okay. See you in the morning."

"Good night, Mommy." I waited for her response to the trinity again. "Sleep tight, Mommy." "See you in the morning, Mommy." And then a third time, "Good night, Mommy..." She had to chorus back each statement. If she didn't, she would be dead before the night was over. I was certain of it. She must have understood the unspoken rules because she always answered me.

I had another ritual for the mornings, before she left for work. "Watch the way you cross the street, Mommy," I said. "Look both ways, Mommy." "Don't come home late, Mommy." She had to acknowledge each warning, and I had to repeat this trinity three times as well. If we didn't do it right, I knew that something terrible would happen to her that day and I'd never see her again.

Even if we did do it right, most days I was afraid I'd never see her again. At four-thirty every weekday afternoon, I waited at the bus stop across from the Evergreen Cemetery until she came. I never let my toes point directly toward the cemetery because that would mean her death. The second the bus slowed, I peered through the windows, trying to decipher her form in the rush-hour crowd, feeling my face flush hot and hotter. I placed myself squarely in front of the door the instant the bus stopped, and the people who descended before she did had to walk around me or trip over me. When I saw her I was swept by a torrent of cooling relief, and I threw myself at her as though she'd been gone for a month.

If she wasn't on the four-thirty bus, I forced myself to pretend calm and wait for the four forty-five bus. If she wasn't on that one, waiting for the five o'clock bus was like being under a sentence of death and watching without hope for a reprieve. I paced up and down the sidewalk, running to the corner every couple of minutes to look at the big street clock whose hands dragged in diabolically slow motion. I was almost certain she wouldn't be on the five o'clock bus, and that could mean only one thing.

I learned the meaning of the expression "to be beside oneself" at that bus stop: when she wasn't on the five o'clock bus, my mind took leave of my body, which ran up and down the street, frenzied, possessed, the decapitated chicken cut loose from the noose, crying scalding tears that I was aware of only because I couldn't breathe through my nose, and my face smarted as though coals had pelted it. She'd been killed, I was certain of it. I would be sent to the Vista Del Mar Home now. I had nobody in the world anymore because Rae had left me to get married and my mother was dead.

W
HEN SHE CAME
to see me these days, Rae didn't say I was skinny like a stick anymore. Alone in bed at night, nightgown hiked up, I ran my hands over my body, and it felt as though it belonged to someone else. Where it had been flat and bony on the top part of me, now there was a startling, unfamiliar, soft roundness. Where it had been smooth on the bottom part of me, now I could feel tiny, wiry hairs.

One morning, after my mother left for work, I stripped my nightgown off and gazed at my naked self in the dresser mirror. The reflection confirmed what I'd felt even more than looking down at myself could. My waist was the same, but my hips had definitely grown out of their little-boy shape. And farther, down there, little tendrils spread from the center like delicate new twigs on a tree. But it was the flesh on my chest that awed me the most—not like my mother's full breasts, but beautiful in its own way, soft and so tender, almost like something seen through mist.

No doubt about it, I was on my way to becoming a woman. Standing there opposite the mirror, I envisioned myself in the ravishing trappings of womanhood that I'd adored on actresses—flounced and draped gowns and opulent furs, seamed nylons and high heels, glossy lips and come-hither eyes. But the pleasure in my new self was bittersweet, really. I was leaving childhood. I would never be a child star. I'd failed in my life's first mission.

***

In a decayed old building on the corner of Wabash and Evergreen avenues, there was a radio and phonograph repair shop, and in its window stood an ornate record player and a cunning statue of a dog whose head wagged perpetually at his master's voice coming from a giant horn. Most days on my way home from school I stopped to stare at the dog and the record player and, farther back in the window, the dusty assortment of wooden radios and tape recorders with big reels. Suddenly they were all gone. Through the window I could see that the shop was empty of everything but dust. For weeks it stood empty.

Then, a few months before my twelfth birthday, two plaster masks—comedy and tragedy—appeared in that same window (spotlessly clean now), surrounded by pink satin toe shoes and black patent leather tap dancing shoes, and above, in a grand flourish with gilt paint, a sign announced,
THEATRE ARTS STUDIO! OPENING SOON! REGISTER NOW
! Next to it hung a picture of a woman—with blond hair that fell to her shoulders in shiny waves, full lips that turned up in a fetching smile, a scooped blouse that revealed creamy skin.
IRENE SANDMAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
, it said under the picture (the title alone dazzled me, though I had no notion what an executive director was). I could hear myself breathing through my mouth. Could it be true? Could there suddenly be a place like this in East Los Angeles, with a woman who looked like a movie star, an
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
who might show me the way to Hollywood?

I came back every afternoon to try to find out what register now! meant and to gaze, slack-jawed, at the beautiful picture, but the door was always closed.

One day, finally, though the inside was still dark, the door to the Theatre Arts Studio was open, and there stood the woman of the photograph, hanging a watercolor of little tutued ballerinas on the wall. My heart shook. I'd never seen anyone so splendid-looking in the flesh, so statuesque on her high heels and long legs, her deep slim waist clenched by a broad golden belt. I stood at the door and her heavy perfume reached me. My head whirled.

Her arms stretched gracefully to straighten the framed picture, then she turned. I'd startled her, and she blinked. Violet blue eyes with long
dark lashes. I hadn't known such eyes existed off the movie screen.

"May I help you?" Her voice was movie-actress rich. Later, when it played itself in my head over and over, I called it
liquid gold,
though I'd never seen such a thing. I imagined liquid gold would be as bright as a brand-new penny, yet mellow somehow, and smooth.

My cheeks felt stiff. My tongue—a dry, useless wad—must have mumbled something.

"We'll be starting classes on April first," she answered. "What aspect of theater arts are you interested in?"

I must have said acting. Later I remembered that she'd said I could take private lessons for $1.50 an hour. I must have left the magical dimness where Irene Sandman stood and gone back outside to the daylit street. I must have gotten home. But I know I didn't see anything that was in front of my eyes, and my ears were deaf to everything but her golden voice.

My mother gave me the money. I knew she would, because wasn't this the beginning of what we'd dreamed about for so long? My teacher was Sid Sandman—the Acting Director of Theatre Arts Studio, Irene called him. He was waiting for me the afternoon I went for my first lesson. He took me into the large room, which was separated only by a thin whitewashed partition from the little front office where I'd first seen Irene Sandman's gorgeousness. I recited "To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" for him, and he watched with judicious eyes, legs crossed, chin resting on the palm of his hand. With his black lacquered hair and pencil-thin mustache and his brown belted jacket with a scarf around his neck, which he tucked under his shirt like an ascot, he did look as I'd dimly imagined a director might. He nodded approvingly at my attempts to sound like Milo, in wonderment at the marvels of Mulberry Street. "I'll write a dramatic monologue for you," he declared.

At our next meeting, I pronounced the lines of the script he handed me with all the histrionics I'd been practicing for years: "My ... my name is Rachel Hoffman. My mother? I don't know where she is.
They
took her away. I haven't seen her in a long time." When I was eight years old, I'd overheard some woman in a store say about me, "Doesn't that child look like a little refugee?" Sid must have thought so too. Halfway
through the monologue, I was to push up my sleeve and display to my invisible, kind interlocutors the concentration camp number branded on my arm. "What? She's in the other room? Waiting for me?" I was to exclaim at the end of my four-minute performance before I ran off, joyfully shouting, "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!" I had no trouble imagining devastating separation from my mother. I had no trouble imagining emotional wounds inflicted on me by the Nazis.

For weeks we went over the piece, only he and I in the entire place, the office room dark. "Very fine!" Sid Sandman said solemnly, or "Take it from 'the number on my arm?'"

Always I listened for a noise in the outer room or hoped that the door would open. But I saw the luminous Irene only in my dreams.

One day, though, the light was on in the office when I arrived, and there at last, sitting at the desk and holding a receipt book, was Irene Sandman. I felt myself turn paler than dead grass.

"I'll just pay you now for the whole month," a woman said.

"One month for Sissy Simpson ... and that's for the Wee Ones Dance Movement Class," the lovely voice said.

I watched her elegant white hand with its well-shaped red fingernails writing out the receipt. The woman took it and left, brushing by me.

"Lillian, hello," Irene Sandman said.

She remembered my name!

"Sid says you're making terrific progress."

I barely squeaked out an "Oh, thanks," though I could have wept for joy.

"I'll sit in on your session today," she said, smiling brilliantly at me. Neon spots swirled before my eyes. How would I be able to speak if those radiant violet eyes were upon me?

But I did. I was Rachel Hoffman in every inch of me, with only the tiniest fraction of my mind aware that Irene was poised elegantly on the bench next to her husband. When I ran out of the room shouting, "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!" in my eyes there were real tears that sprang miraculously from nowhere.

"Wow!" Irene let out as I came back to stand before them.

Could I believe what I was seeing? There were tears in her eyes too. I'd moved Irene Sandman to tears! In Mary Marvel's cape I floated just under the ceiling.

"Lillian." The mellow tones arrested me a half-hour later as I floated still, now out the door. "I'd like you to bring your mother with you next week."

I landed with a thump. Dear God, my mother! Whatever for? My mother never wore lipstick anymore. The shadows under her eyes had become even darker, and there was so much gray in her hair now. And her accent! I loved her more than my own life, but how could I bring her to stand in the presence of this glorious personage?

"I've had our lawyers draw up a personal management contract, which Theatre Arts Studio will sign with our most gifted students." Irene's exquisitely lipsticked lips smiled. "And you're one of them."

I have no idea how I maneuvered the streets that day again, but I know I must have galloped because I was panting as I bolted up the porch steps on Dundas Street. I had just enough breath left to shout toward the bedroom, where my mother was lying down, "I've been discovered! I made it!"

"We're from Chicago," Irene said to my mother, but my mother was staring at the tutued ballerinas on the wall and her mouth was ajar. I was mortified. Why didn't she know how to behave in such a momentous situation? What would Irene think? Fanny's furnished room showed on us, I was sure. I'd selected my mother's dress from out of her now-unused New York collection. I'd made her wear lipstick and go to the beauty parlor to get her hair done, but still she looked shabby and dim next to Irene Sandman. Who wouldn't?

"Both of us were very involved in Chicago's theater arts, but we decided to come to Los Angeles because that's where the theater world has moved."

My mother looked at her now and made little "Dat's nice" sounds.
We must seem like dolts to Irene Sandman.
Though she didn't address me, I nodded my head vigorously at whatever she said to make up for my mother's virtual silence. I arranged my face into what I hoped was an intelligent expression, and I kept it plastered there.

"The theater used to be very alive in Chicago. Mel Tormé was my best friend in high school," Irene said, laughing. So charmingly. My toes curled. My mother was looking at the picture on the wall again. Was she even listening to Irene? "Steve Allen was our buddy too. He was always very funny, but he didn't know how to play the piano. I'm the one who taught him. Though he was very quick to catch on," Irene added demurely. "He didn't need much teaching."

My mother recognized the name Steve Allen. "Iz dat soll," she said, and I shrank as I heard her mispronounce the American idiom. It was better when she said nothing. We were lost here, in the presence of this heavenly being who had a direct pipeline to Hollywood.

"Do you have any questions?" Irene asked. My mother shook her head.

"What if one of us has to end the contract?" I said in a wavery voice. I couldn't imagine such an eventuality on my part, but I hoped that if I asked an adult-sounding question Irene would think I was thoughtful and worldly and wouldn't notice my mother's incompetence.

Irene looked at me without expression. I wanted to evaporate. "You don't get married thinking about divorce," she finally said. "We'll need a stage name for her," she said in my mother's direction. "Lillian Faderman doesn't sound much like an actress."

"How about Lilly the Kid?" It had been my fantasy name for so long, the words just blurted out of me.

To my mortal shame, those beautiful lips now spread and seemed to begin a guffaw, but she arrested it. "I was thinking of something more along the lines of Lillian Foster."

My contract stated that our arrangement would last for seven years, renewable in perpetuity. I knew what
perpetuity
meant, and I prayed for it in association with Irene Sandman. It also said that Irene would be my sole representative and would receive ten percent of my earnings. That sounded wonderful—there would be earnings!