“There’s such a resonance between us,” D’Or murmured one mellow morning of that first week, after we’d made love on the dining room floor. We could hear the cable cars clanging down the hill every few minutes. “Don’t you feel it?”
“Yes, oh yes,” I murmured. “It’s so … ineffable … so rarefied.”
“That’s it!” she laughed, delighted, I knew, that her words were now in my mouth.
With her father’s death, she got no more money from her family. How would we eat and pay the rent—seventy-five dollars a month? What kind of job could I get? I spent the second week in San Francisco walking into one North Beach nightclub after another, asking for the manager, saying I’d had experience in L.A.—as a waitress, hat check girl, cigarette girl. Would they call the places I said I’d worked and ask for a reference?
D’Or’s lips curled as though she’d swallowed something foul when I told her that the owner of Big Al’s Hotsy Totsy Club said he’d hire me as a waitress but only if I would also be the Bubble Bath Girl. “It’s so tawdry!” She shuddered.
“I guess we could both get little jobs,” I offered reluctantly, remembering the $1.25 an hour I’d earned at the library. “What have you worked at before?” I asked.
She batted her big, light eyes for an uncomfortable minute. “I’ve worked at election polling places,” she said finally. “You know,” she added when I looked blank, “checking to see that people are registered, and then giving them a ballot.” But there wouldn’t be another election for more than a year, I calculated. “My father was sending me money for a long time,” she sniffed, and her eyes welled up.
Of course she can’t hold down a regular job with her compulsive disorder. I have to take care of her. I want to! “D’Or, if I took the job at the Hotsy Totsy Club it would just be a source of income,” I argued. “There’s no sexual component in that kind of thing.” We agreed, finally, that I’d work there only until school started in September. We’d save up a nest egg.
“But … you won’t make it blatantly vulgar, will you?” she said at the Buena Vista over Irish whiskeys that we’d paid for with the last twenty-dollar bill I’d earned at Andy’s. “It needs to be aesthetically pleasing,” she lectured me. “Try for delicacy … and grace.” Her enthusiasm for the project waxed. “You can do it with balletic insinuations, with refinement.”
“Yes,” I said, nodding to everything she said. “Yes, I will.”
“Be subtle,” she said, “be classy!”
On the walls of Big Al’s Hotsy Totsy Club were murals—Prohibition gangsters holding machine guns with one hand and blond molls in minks with the other and, in the background, Keystone Kops with googly eyes and giant phallic batons. The gangsters all had the face of the nightclub’s owner—Big Al, as we waitresses were supposed to call him. We dressed in knee-length jazz-age red shifts with black fringe that shimmied when we moved. As soon as the nightclub filled with customers, a siren would go off as though the Prohibition police were about to burst through the door, but it was only my signal to put my tray down, pass my last order on to another waitress, and run upstairs and change into a pink see-through negligee with a black faux-fur collar and cuffs. Underneath I wore only glittering silver pasties over my nipples and a pink patch of material, a G-string, around my pubes. Downstairs, the colored bubbles were already popping out of a machine and up through a gleaming white lion’s claw bathtub in the middle of a little stage. As I walked down the stairs, I struggled to imagine refined ways of removing a see-through negligee onstage and stepping naked into a bathtub without water. I was supposed to saunter on to the tune of “Night Train,” test the nonexistent bathwater with a provocatively graceful bare toe, disrobe, then slide into the bubbles and cavort charmingly for five minutes until the police siren went off again and the whole place was dark enough for me to scamper out of the tub and out of sight. A tardy pattering of applause usually followed me. For this I was paid an extra five dollars a night, which meant that, working Wednesday through Saturday, I could take back to Washington Street about a hundred dollars a week—no small sum in 1959.
I tear out of Big Al’s after my last bath and run to hop a bus. Then, if I’m lucky, I make the transfer to the final cable car of the night; if not, I have to spend money on a cab that will take me up the hills. I love it when I make the cable car: I jump off at Washington and Jones and look up to our window on the third floor. She’s in bed, I know, warm with sleep, and in two minutes my arms will be holding her, and her mouth will taste like bread fresh from the oven. If I felt stupid or exploited that evening or my feet or my head hurt, I’ve forgotten it by now. I bound up the celestial pathway of stairs.
By the close of summer, though, I was loathing the end of the afternoon, when I’d have to put mascara and rouge on my face, change from blue jeans to my sheath and high heels, and gird myself for the long trip to North Beach and the inanity of the noisy patrons to whom I carried drinks, people who could be titillated by fake gangsters in a fake speakeasy and a girl taking a fake bubble bath.
Without the Hotsy Totsy Club, would I have loved school so intensely, been so grateful for it? I perused the catalogue, craving almost every course that was offered—Cultural Anthropology, Hebrew Literature, Pottery Making, Criminal Law. Once the semester started, I felt cheated because I couldn’t be part of student life outside class. Berkeley students were surrounding City Hall in San Francisco, shaking righteous fists at white-haired old men who subpoenaed public school teachers and sat in the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, ruining careers and lives. I remembered the marchers in Mexico City whose absorption in the cause of preventing a two-centavo bus fare hike I’d envied, and I yearned to join the students in San Francisco. But I was taking Zoology and Sociology and Abnormal Psychology and French 3 and fake bubble baths four nights a week, riding at least eight different public conveyances most days, and living with D’Or. When was there time to fight against the HUAC and the San Francisco police, who washed the students off the steps of City Hall with fire hoses?
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 honeydew 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.
“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!”
14. HOW I BECAME A BURLESQUE QUEEN
WHEN 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:
Naked in the Promised Land Page 27