Naked in the Promised Land

by Lillian Faderman

  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 mailroom 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 e
xcuses 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.”

  “But you don’t,“she grumps. She turns to Binky to say “Make her take it.” Then she cries, “I forgot something,” and runs out the door. She returns a few minutes later carrying a pink cardboard box that’s freckled with gray grease spots. CANTER’S BAKERY is printed on it, and she opens the cover for me to look, though I already know what’s inside: butter cookies, two dozen at least, crumbly and stale and dotted with cherries that glow and look as if they’ve been injected with red dye, also purchased the hour my aunt heard I was coming to Los Angeles. “Put it in the car now so you won’t forget,” she tells Binky, who takes the box. The charm of her wonderful Kennedy smile is lost on my aunt.

  Friday and Saturday we close the libraries, then rush to Malibu, to the ocean, where the breeze is soft, where we wait like condemned women for one more look at the bittersweet sight of the gold sun kissing the water before it merges with it and leaves glorious silver streaks behind in the sky. “We’ll come back to L.A., won’t we?” Binky says wistfully.

  “Are you that miserable in Fresno?” I ask.

  “No.” She shrugs, but I know she is.

  (And I know too, though I don’t want to think about it, that despite how much we love each other, her misery sometimes saps her energy. “Let’s just cuddle,” she often says now when I try to make love to her.)

  On Sunday we must drive back to Fresno, as my aunt knows, and she watches from her living room window, starting at dawn probably. When she sees us come out of my mother’s building, she hurries down her stairs. Before we can open the car doors, she is standing in front of us. “Watch how you drive with so many maniacs on the road,” she says, giving her ritual admonishment to Binky.

  “Oh, I will, don’t worry about a thing,” Binky patiently assures my aunt.

  “Bayg arup dos kepele, bend down the little head,” Rae orders me now, and I do it (though my head hasn’t been little for twenty years). She spreads her fingers over my crown and mutters words in Hebrew that I don’t understand as she blesses me. I feel the pressure of her blessing hand all the way up Highway 99.

  These are the ways my mother and aunt show me that though I live two hundred miles away, they have not forgotten.

  “How many college students would you say there are in this country? Millions, right?” Binky sat at the kitchen table and worked figures with a green pen. “Let’s say the book sells only fifty thousand copies—and maybe a quarter of the students who read it go on to teach high school English.”

  “Yeah … and let’s say, modestly, that only half of them use material they’ve gotten from our book in their classes.” I peered over her shoulder, helped divide and multiply. “Let’s say they use it for only five years—and each teacher has three hundred students a year. That means our research will have touched—” We scrutinized the numbers together. Could it really be?

  “Nine million kids!” we cried, hugging each in our double passion. Maybe this will make up for how much she misses her students at Marshall.

  My days were full—with the book, of course, and with teaching twelve units of Victorian literature and American ethnic literature, with department meetings and committee meetings, with advising students, grading papers, trying to make friendly small-talk with the men in my department so they wouldn’t notice what an anomaly I was. But once we finished the book and sent the manuscript off to the publisher, Binky’s days were mostly empty. When I came home, never before five or six o’clock, I’d find her sitting in half-darkness on the brown La-Z-Boy, still in her plaid bathrobe, bare legs flung out on the footrest, staring glassy-eyed into space or thumbing through Time or the Atlantic. A half-full cup of cold coffee flecked with spoiled milk and the bread-crust remains of a sandwich would be on the end table.

  “Postpartum blues?” I tried to joke one day.

  “There didn’t seem any point in getting dressed,” she said apologetically (but with a hint of something else, something new, in an undertone). “There’s no place much to go here, is there?”

  “The book will be out soon.” I knelt beside her and rested my head on her lap. “And when that happens, I’ll get a job in L.A. We’ll get back there, I promise.”

  “I know,” she said, patting my hair distractedly.

  But what if I couldn’t get a job in Los Angeles and we were stuck in Fresno forever? Didn’t most of the men in my department have wives? What did they do all day? “Isn’t there anyone interesting in the neighborhood to talk to?” I asked.

  She stood up. “They’re housewives. Fresno housewives, and I feel like I’m becoming one too. I have a profession, remember?”

  I jumped to my feet, ready to rumble as I used to with D’Or. But this was Binky. What sour note was creeping between us?

  “Binky, I want to get out of Fresno too,” I told her evenly. “Look, I’ll write to Long Beach State … L.A. State also.” Paula had been hired at a new state college that just opened in southwest Los Angeles, Dominguez Hills; maybe she could help. “I’ll write there too. As soon as the book is out, I’ll write to them all.”

  “Yes, please, please!” Pleeeze was how she said it. How miserable she looked.

  The next semester she got a job teaching a freshman composition course at Fresno State, but that made things even worse. I couldn’t risk my colleagues’ figuring out that I was a lesbian, so when Binky and I ran into each other in the department office we’d become secret agents, cocking heads and batting eyes to signal which one of us ought to leave so that no one would intuit we were lovers. On top of that, part-timers received the munificent sum of two hundred dollars a month per class. “Peon labor,” Binky called it when, after taxes, her check came to $183.

  Even worse, part-timers were virtually invisible to the professoriate. “Listen to this: I’m reaching into my mailbox to pick up my students’ papers and this pompous ass comes in.” Over the salad I’d made, Binky screwed up her mouth and fluttered her eyelids to mimic him. “And he says to me, like I was trespassing, for God’s sake, ‘May I help you?’” She struck the table so hard that the flatware bounced. “You’re a professor here. You get to be important! But what do I get to be?”

  The next year she got a job teaching in a Catholic high school. The pay was about two-thirds what she would have made in Los Angeles, and the students were spoiled and sheltered. They were bored by what Arthay and Rafael and the rest of them had loved.

  What did raise Binky’s spirits a bit was that she’d been discovered by the neighborhood kids—a set of towheaded, front-toothless boy twins from across the street and a couple of little Chinese girls from next door who often wore matching red dresses that came just above their matching, knobby knees. The twins showed up whenever the sisters did, though they never talked among themselves. It was as though the boys and the girls didn’t know one another outside our house. It was Binky who broug
ht them together—the Pied Piper of the neighborhood. “Binky,” they all called her, as though she was a kid too. “Binky, can we come in and play?” they’d shout at the door and scamper up the steps, the tousled towheads on one side and the smooth black heads on the other, and soon they’d all be dashing around together, hilarious, in some scary-fun game of hide-and-seek or Frankenstein’s monster that Binky devised, or she’d race them to the kitchen and they’d pull open the drawer where she kept the Tootsie Rolls and Milky Ways and they’d all—Binky too—be shrieking with candied laughter. She put immense energy into the kids, and they loved her. They threw their arms around her and nuzzled their heads on her chest like puppies when they heard their mothers calling them home; they left little bunches of daisies or dandelions at the door for her or crayon stick figures that they’d drawn at school and signed “i luv you.”

  “You’d make a terrific parent,” I told her one evening, and out of nowhere tears pooled in my eyes. No, not nowhere. My mother’s envy of Mrs. Sokolov, my aunt’s nagging about my aging womb. They buzzed in my head and preyed on my peace as they never had before. I was almost twenty-nine.

  “Are you crazy?” Binky laughed. “Look, most of my childhood was stolen from me because I had to take care of my brother and sister while my parents were doing business all over the country.” She shuddered as if parenthood were her bogeyman. “I did enough mothering to last a lifetime by the time I was fifteen.”