Naked in the Promised Land

by Lillian Faderman

  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.

  I did a soft-shoe up and down the aisle of our train as we sped west for four days: “California, here I come, right back where I started from.” I waved my arms and belted out my chant. “Where bow wows of flowers bloom in the sun, where birdies sing and everything.” No one had ever told me that songs had tunes that your voice was supposed to follow. When my mother had sung, on her good days as we walked together in Crotona Park, it was her words I heard, not the tune—she had no tune. She just let her voice slide up and down: “Oh, my man I love him so, he’ll never know,” she half sang and half said. “When he takes me in his arms the world seems swell.” I put great expression in my voice, like Jolson did. Some of my trainmates smiled at the intense, scruffy seven-year-old. Others looked irritated or buried their noses deeper into their magazines or embroidery. I continued regardless. How could you tell what a movie director looked like?

  I knew I’d failed when my aunt said we were arriving in Los Angeles early the next morning. No movie director had discovered me; my mother would have to find another job in a shop.

  But how could anyone feel like a failure in the Southern California sunshine? It had been cold when we left New York, but when we stepped off the train in Union Station it was springtime. He, her lover, was thousands of miles away. He would not come for her, I knew. And hadn’t she forgiven her sister? She’d agreed that we would go to California together. The future seemed as cheery as what I remembered of the end of All This and Heaven Too.

  Outside the station the lawns were green, like the ones in Crotona Park. In Los Angeles, I saw, the streets were like parks. Even better. There were tall, skinny trees with huge zigzaggy leaves that sprouted only on the trees’ very tops, like messy wigs on long giants. They were as enchanting as the pictures in the Dr. Seuss book that Miss Huntington read to the class for a special treat. I had been transported to another world, where the sun shone even when winter was not over, where everything looked magical and amusing. I would live happily ever after with my mother and My Rae. It was more wonderful than if I’d been given the doll with blond hair and blue eyes. What joy! What joy!

  And I would be discovered. I would learn to sing and dance and act, and maybe to ride horseback or play the violin, and I would become a child star. I would work hard. I would never be lazy. I would get up early in the morning and start practicing, and I would practice until late at night.

  Every nerve of me was set for the race
. Not just for that moment, there at Union Station, but forever. It might take a bit of time, but a movie director would discover me.

  And then I would rescue my mother from the shop.

  2. GOING CRAZY IN EAST L.A.

  THE NAME OF OUR NEW Missus was Fanny Diamond. That first evening, without teeth in her mouth, her nose and chin almost meeting, she looked to me like a scarier twin sister of the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz. (Her teeth, as I later discovered, always sat in a glass of water near her bed when it wasn’t mealtime.) While she showed the dining room with a cot where My Rae would sleep and the bedroom where my mother and I would sleep, I lagged behind because I wanted to examine a row of glass jars I’d spied on a living room shelf. They held floating objects that looked from a distance like marbles: Now I could see that they were blue or brown or green at their centers, and they had big borders that were wrinkled and yellowish or milky blue and smooth. The smooth ones looked as though they’d just been plucked from a person’s head. Yes. There was no mistaking what they were. Eyeballs! My stomach contracted. I ran at a gallop to find my mother, who was following Fanny to the kitchen now.

  “It’s all right. My Marty is a eye doctor,” Fanny cackled.

  “Can we go now?” I begged, grabbing at my mother’s arm, but she didn’t hear me because she was listening to Fanny tell her how to turn on the old gas stove.

  I tugged at the sleeve of My Rae’s blouse to make her bend down. “I don’t like it here,” I whispered in her ear.

  She stage-whispered back, “When we get some money for furniture, we’ll take an apartment. For now we have to live with a Missus.”

  There were twin beds in our room, but that first night I lay in my mother’s bed, clutching her arm until she said, “I have to turn over now, Lilly.” I glued my body to her back and wouldn’t let go of her because I couldn’t get the floating eyeballs out of my mind.

  When I awoke in the early morning, it was to an awful odor that I remembered from long before, in New York, when I’d burned my pinkie finger on an iron that my aunt kept hot so that she could press her piecework. Fanny’s house was on a corner, next door to a kosher chicken market, and when the wind was wrong, the smell of singed feathers and skin was powerful. That first Friday on Dundas Street, I went to the market with my mother and My Rae to select a chicken. I breathed through my mouth, trying vainly to block the smell. Live chickens, hundreds of them, were packed tightly into cages, to be freed only when a housewife pointed and said to the chicken man, “Gimme this one.” Then he extricated the chosen one by its legs while the other chickens squawked an uproar, and he handed it over to a shochet, a kosher slaughterer, who tied its legs to a noose that hung from the ceiling.

  I watched it all, unable to look away after My Rae had selected our chicken. Its mournful little head and beak pointed downward, and with one deft stroke of his razor, the shochet sliced its throat. The blood dripped and puddled onto the sawdust floor until the chicken was cut down and ran in little circles, its almost-severed head flopping grotesquely, ribboning blood, its still-undead wings beating frantically. When it finally collapsed on the sawdust floor, another man, wearing a big leather apron, singed its feathers off, wrapped the naked bird in a newspaper tied with string, and gave it to me.

  I carried home the warm bundle, a dead baby placed eerily in my arms by the big jolly executioner. Then my aunt unwrapped it, spread it on the drainboard, sawed it into pieces with a big knife, and sprinkled the dissected parts with the coarse salt that she poured into her hand from a yellow box bearing the word KOSHER in English and Yiddish. I ran out of the kitchen. But when I had to go back for a drink of water, I couldn’t help looking again at the nude, hacked-up thing that had been a white-feathered, squawking creature only a short while before. A couple of hours later, the pale yellow pieces were bobbing and dodging bits of carrots and onions in a big pot of water that sat over a flame on the gas stove.

  At supper I gagged with my first bite. I could still smell the singed feathers and skin, and I ran from the table out to the rickety front porch, my aunt running after me with a drumstick in her hand. I clamped my lips tight and shook my head violently until she retreated.

  “No appetite,” I heard her mutter as the screen door creaked shut behind her. “Wrists skinny like a chicken bone.”

  “Ooh, look, the witch’s daughter,” two passing boys about my age hooted at me as I stood on the porch. “Witch, witch, come out on your broomstick,” they shouted at the house through cupped hands.

  But the three of us were together again. On Saturdays my mother and My Rae and I took a bus to Hollenbeck Park and walked in the sunshine amid the lush California greenery, or we pressed close, I in the middle, on a silvered wooden swing the size of a loveseat that overlooked a dark pond alive with quacking ducks. “Lift your legs and I’ll swing you,” I ordered them, standing on my tiptoes to push us off. My mother had a dreamy look in her eyes and a faint smile on her lips.

  “Look at who’s Samson,” My Rae said.

  “Me!” I chortled, making our collective three hundred pounds swing back and forth.

  They left the house together every morning and took three buses to get to their shops in the downtown neighborhood of tall buildings where the garment manufacturers were. In the late afternoon they came back together, and when I heard their voices on the porch I rushed to throw myself at them, first my mother and then My Rae. I shadowed my mother through the house, happy that the long day at a strange school (where the funny way I said waata and singk had already been noted) was over and we were together again.

  But even before she put her purse down, she went to find Fanny. “Did I get any letters?” she asked.

  “Not a single thing.” Fanny’s answer was always the same.

  In the beginning my mother nodded and smiled. As the weeks and months went by she stopped smiling. “Nothing?” she’d ask again.

  “Listen, the only thing the letter carrier ever brings is big bills for me.”

  “Watch me do Eddie Cantor,” I’d beg my mother, pulling at her skirt, arresting her there in Fanny’s dark and dusty hallway. I made my big eyes bigger and rolled them round and round. “Oh, you beautiful doll, you great big beautiful doll,” I sang, and I gestured grandly, first to my heart and then to her person, with open-fingered hands.

  “I’m so proud of my little girl,” my mother said. But I knew her thoughts were elsewhere.

  “Watch me do Jack Benny now,” I demanded, following her in a soft-shoe dance, playing my air violin and humming a screechy tune that I ad-libbed. “Mommy, wait, look.” She flopped on her bed and stared up at the ceiling.

  “Can I read to you?” I asked, positioning myself at the side of the bed with one of the books I’d gotten from the Malabar Public Library. She moved over to make room for me, but she didn’t take her eyes from the ceiling. “Are you listening?” How could I pull her back from where she was in her head? I put all the expression I could muster into the words. “The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day,” I orated. “The score stood four to two with one inning left to play…”

  But she didn’t look interested in what Casey could do at the bat. I switched books. “Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream!” I didn’t understand all the words, and I knew that she understood even less than I did, but I put plenty of voice music into it, making solemn low sounds and then, for contrast, high happy sounds. I held the book with one hand and waved the other in the air. I declaimed to the end of the poem and then read her another and yet another. “Did you like it?” I asked anxiously.

  “I’m so proud of my little girl,” she said again, and she held me in her arms when I lay down next to her, but her face was like pale stone, and I knew I hadn’t taken away her sadness.

  More and more, as the months wore on, when My Rae came to say supper was ready, my mother told her, “I can’t eat” or “Who wants food now?”

  “Well, the baby needs to eat,” My Rae
said the first time my mother shooed her away. She took me by the hand and pulled me toward the torn oilcloth-covered kitchen table.

  “I’m not a baby anymore. Haven’t you noticed?” I sassed her and bucked free and scurried back to my mother, to put my arms around her, pat her soft dark curls, make her feel better. When would she stop missing him?

  My mother stopped putting lipstick on her beautiful lips. I never saw her burning a match anymore to make herself eye shadow. The blouse she wore to work had half-moons of yellowish stain under the arms, and the hem drooped and dangled threads from the bottom of her skirt, but she wore them that way week after week.

  “Fix yourself,” my aunt said gruffly, “for the sake of the baby. Forget about vus iz gevehn, what was. It’s over. Moishe, Europe, over and done with.”

  My mother bared her teeth at My Rae like a mad dog, like she used to do in New York. “I don’t need you to tell me nothing,” she growled.

  Something bad was happening to her, but how could I stop it? What if she drove My Rae away again? We’d be alone, in a strange house and a strange room in a strange city. I wanted the old times back, when the three of us pressed together on the wooden swing and my aunt called me Samson. But I couldn’t be with both of them at the same time, and it was my mother who needed me most, so it was in our bedroom, reading on her bed while she stared up at the ceiling, that I spent the evenings. Sometimes, though, when my mother was asleep or in her trance, I slipped out to find My Rae in the dining room. I’d throw my arms around her furtively and bury my head in her big, sheltering bosom, as I knew I mustn’t do in my mother’s presence. “I know, Lilly, I know,” My Rae said, and pressed her lips to my forehead before I broke away and ran back to my mother.

  At the end of the summer, my aunt bought some forest green worsted and paid a dollar to the cutter at Bartleman’s, her shop, to snip out the pattern for two dresses. For weeks she stayed late at work. “Who needs her to ride home with me on the bus,” my mother grumbled.