Naked in the Promised Land

by Lillian Faderman

  “This is my last semester,” I said when Gene closed the door to his office.

  “What? You don’t want to leave now.” He peered at me darkly. “We’ve just been notified that you were promoted to associate professor.” I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came. “Yours was one of the few promotions that went through this year. Don’t quit now. At least think about it,” he said. Associate Professor. How many twenty-nine-year-old women were there—in the whole country—who were associate professors? “Incidentally, you won’t be the only woman in the department anymore,” he added. “They let us hire because we lost people, so we’re getting someone who just finished her Ph.D. at Stanford and two women in creative writing.”

  Back in my own office, I sank into a chair. It was as if I’d worked myself up to perform a demanding physical feat—every sinew was ready—and then I didn’t perform it after all. I felt limp. I had to figure things out. What if I stayed? Just for one more year. I could teach the material I was going to write about. I could call my course Women’s Liberation in Literature.

  Yet Binky and I had already plunked down our deposit for the wonderful house. What if I got a Tuesday–Thursday teaching schedule? I could fly to Los Angeles after my last class on Thursdays and fly back on Tuesdays. Five nights a week I’d be with Binky in our home. Why not? As associate professor, my salary would go up by about twenty-five percent, which would more than pay for the airfare and a little apartment I’d rent near campus.

  And the baby?

  I’d do it for just one year; then I’d return to the original plan.

  But what if I weren’t allowed to teach Women’s Liberation in Literature? I’d go to Gene’s office now and say, I’ll stay if I can teach a feminist class. It would be like rolling dice: If he said yes, I’d stay; no, and I’d be off to L.A. Either way would be fine.

  “Why not?” He shrugged. “We’ve never had such a class.” How simple he made it. “Here’s something else you might be interested in,” he said, handing me a memo that he pulled from a file. It was a call for semester-long classes that would go out to the Fresno community over television. “Why not do it as a television class also?” he suggested.

  “But we just bought a house,” Binky cried. She looked at me now as if I really were insane. “I thought that was what you wanted.”

  “I do. I do. But it’ll be just for one year. Love, listen to me, we’ll be together five nights a week.” I went over the whole litany again. The promotion. Women’s Liberation in Literature. The television program. Everything except what I didn’t want to say out loud because I was scared to admit it even to myself—that if our L.A. plans didn’t work, I’d have stopped being a professor, and who would I be? “It’s only for a year,” I promised again.

  Tuesday mornings at seven-twenty, Binky drops me off at the Los Angeles airport on her way to Marshall High School, and I race to catch the seven-forty puddle-jumper to Fresno—fifty minutes in the sky (where I keep checking my watch as I finish grading papers or review the class notes I’d written over the weekend; if we land late, I’m sunk), then another race out of the plane and through the terminal to the old clunker Plymouth that I keep at the Fresno airport parking lot (silent supplications to the god of heaps to make it start), and a zoom down Clinton Avenue, burning amber lights all the way to the college, where I dodge through a quad jammed with sauntering students, bound up the steps of San Ramon two at a time, and tear down the corridor to arrive, shaky-limbed, at my office door, no more than a minute or so late for my 9 A.M. office hour if I’m lucky.

  Every hour is packed—I teach American Ethnic Writing, Victorian Literature, Women’s Liberation in Literature. On Tuesday nights I go to one of the Fresno television stations and record Women’s Liberation in Literature in front of a camera, modulating my voice the way Irene showed me almost twenty years earlier, using body language like an actress, words like a scholar, zeal like a preacher. When I’m not teaching or holding office hours or going to department meetings or working with Omar on From the Barrio (we now have a contract with Harper and Row), I go back to my apartment across the street from campus and wander about the stuffy rooms like a small stone rolling around in a big, dark box. Why am I in Fresno when I want to be home, lounging in the Topsy room or writing in the garden cottage? I’m exhausted, but I can’t rest. I miss Binky.

  But when I get off the puddle-jumper in Los Angeles at eleven on Thursday evenings, we hug each other and fall into silence. It’s as if the week apart has made us shy with each other, as if we have to get acquainted all over again. But we’ve known each other for years, so the sweet buzz of beginnings is no longer there, and most weeks we even seem to forget to make love or we just don’t get around to it. I love her, but are we still lovers? Maybe that doesn’t matter so much because aren’t we family for each other?—family I’m still hoping will grow.

  There were now four women and twenty-eight men in the department. Ingrid was a young poet who inspired from the male faculty the chivalry I had already learned to suspect because they saw the woman before they saw the colleague. They addressed her in gentle voices, they almost bowed when they held doors open for her—and they didn’t renew her contract. But that year she gave a seminar on women poets. Here we were, in the fall of 1970, on a little campus in the middle of the agribusiness capital of the world, and two women professors were teaching feminist courses in the English Department. In the Art Department there was a visiting professor, Judy Gerowitz (who became Judy Chicago before the year was over), who taught courses in feminist art. Three of us at Fresno State College—what a happy irony, we agreed. It couldn’t happen at a place like UCLA or Berkeley, where the faculty was hidebound. It certainly wasn’t happening there.

  The excitement was palpable in my Women’s Liberation in Literature course. “You know how students complain that their courses aren’t relevant to their lives?” a young woman in jeans came to my office to say. “This one is so relevant that night and day I can’t get it out of my head.” A bespectacled older woman student stopped by my table in the cafeteria to tell me “This class is making me question all the things that used to make me say ‘That’s the way life is and you can’t do anything about it.’”

  We were conspirators, Ingrid and I told each other, teaching dangerous, revolutionary ideas. “Are we getting away with this because we’re beneath their notice?” we marveled, “or maybe the guys just don’t understand what feminist means.” What we were doing really was dangerous and revolutionary—it was impossible to teach Women in Literature or Women in Art in 1970 and not be fiercely political. In later years our passion came to seem excessive, but in 1970 it felt exactly right. For me, it was about helping my students see the barely masked hatred, the stereotypes and mindless pusillanimity, in the images of women that some of the most revered male writers had concocted, and it was about discovering with my students neglected female genius. It was all angry-making stuff, for them and for me. What did it signal if not a call for a cataclysmic upheaval in thinking about literature? And, by an extension that the class couldn’t ignore, how could that not lead to an upheaval in how you thought about the male-female relationships in your own life? If the class was successful, the student who finished it in December would not be the same being as the one who began it in September. Ingrid’s and Judy’s classes were at least as political. But to the higher administration, revolutionaries were people with Adam’s apples and beards. We were blissfully safe.

  My department wasn’t. That winter, in the presence of newspaper and television reporters, our chairman accused the administration of placing student spies in the classes of radical professors. The dean of the school was not going to be upstaged for drama. He ordered the campus police to lock up the department files, bolt the door of the English office, and keep Gene out. A uniformed guard with a gun was stationed on the roof of San Ramon. Fresno State College made the national news.

  “This place is a laughingstock. Everyone is nuts,” I groaned to
Binky over the phone. “Except for my students, it’s torture to be here.”

  “Well, you’ll teach one more semester, and then you’ll never have to go back,” she said.

  Dottie invited us often to parties in Manhattan Beach, where she and Betty had a circle of friends who were nothing like the women I’d known at the Open Door. Some were film editors or set designers; most were teachers, social workers, nurses, real estate agents—serious members of the few professions that had been open to females ten or twenty years before, when these women first set out on their own. There were some gay men too in the circle—“honorary lesbians,” Dottie called them. Roger, my favorite, was Japanese, with a long, thin face and a lithe dancer’s body, like the kimonoed figures in ancient art prints. He loved to camp—to throw a lace armchair doily on his head, grab me by the arm, and strut me through the genial knots that were chatting and sipping beer from frosted mugs on Dottie’s bougainvillea-covered patio. “We’re getting married,” he announced with prissy lips.

  “Nope, I’ve already been there,” I laughed.

  He ignored my demurral. “Guess which one’s the bride.” He tossed his head and primped for his audience.

  He’ll never be my bride … but he’s hit a nerve, I realized. Why didn’t I think of it before? If I get pregnant without being married, how will my mother bear it? She’ll think some man has destroyed my life the way Moishe destroyed hers. She’ll be sick with worry and shame, and so will my aunt.

  But what if I told them I was getting married … to someone in Fresno … who was leaving right away to take a job back east … in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, say … and that I had to stay in California for my own job? Then, when Binky and I traveled in the summers with our baby, I could tell them that I was going east, to visit my husband in Pittsburgh.

  “Take a picture with me, Roger.” It wouldn’t work if you had a family who knew the world, who might hop a plane across the country to introduce themselves to the absent groom—but my mother and aunt had probably never even heard of Pittsburgh. “You’ll never have to meet them,” I told Roger. “Just lend me your image to show them.”

  “Haven’t you noticed I’m Japanese?” He frowned.

  He’s right. Why throw the complication of race into it? “Will you wear these?” I pulled a pair of sunglasses from my purse. Around my ring finger we wrapped a gold cigar band lifted from a Cubano that Thomas, his movie-extra boyfriend, smoked. I plucked one of Dottie’s daisies, and when Roger and I sat close together on the lawn, I held it up in my left hand so that the camera could not miss the wedding ring. He circled me with his arm, and Dottie snapped the picture.

  It’s the one I find after Rae is gone, fourteen years later, in a little falling-apart album she’d kept in the top drawer of her dresser and filled with photos of me, from my birth to her death.

  After Gene’s removal as chairman, the English Department became a protectorate, chafing under the uneasy jurisdiction of the same hated dean who’d stationed the armed guard on the roof of San Ramon. Three months later, he assembled us in the department meeting room—grim citizens of a defeated little country. His head swiveled on an Ichabod Crane neck as he eyeballed us from left to right and back again. “You have two choices,” he barked. “You can nominate a chairman who’ll be acceptable to me and our new president, Dr. Baxter, or we can find a chairman from the outside and bring him in.” White knuckles showed on the fists of the men around me, but they were silent. I too said nothing. I’d be turning in my resignation anyway, right after spring break, and then I’d get on with my life—with the baby, with the books I’d write. Sometimes, when I waited for Binky to pull the car out of our garage on Tuesday mornings, I’d look longingly at the little cottage in the back. I would put a cradle in there so that when I went to my desk every morning, I’d be able to take my baby with me. I’d rock her with one hand and write with the other.

  “Okay, I’m announcing my resignation as soon as I get in,” I promised Binky when she dropped me off at the L.A. airport the Tuesday after Easter 1971. I flew up the stairs of San Ramon as usual, but instead of going to my office I went to find the white-haired senior professor who was acting as the liaison between the dean and the department. “Russ, this is my last semester,” I said as he reached for the mail in his box.

  Russ turned around, blinking. “You’re kidding,” he said. “I was just talking to some other people in the department. We think you’d be our best shot for chairman.”

  I touched the cold wall behind me for balance. Binky glared with ice blue eyes. “You promised,“she hissed. “No, you gonif! You liar, no,” my mother and Rae hollered. But in the entire college there was only one woman chair of an academic department. I’d complained about it in my classes, and here was my chance to begin to change it. How many women were there in the whole country who might be handed such an opportunity?

  After three-thirty I began calling Binky, dialing the number in Los Angeles every fifteen minutes. I could see the black telephone on the desk in the Topsy room. In my head I could hear the ring, how it bounced off the walls in our empty house. I’d tell her how I’d found out that day that Judy Chicago was leaving and that Ingrid’s contract hadn’t been renewed. If I got elected chairman—“chair,” I’d call it—I’d make the department replace Ingrid with another woman who could teach feminist classes. Where was Binky? She said she always went home right after school, to a lonely house.

  She finally answered the phone around ten o’clock. “You said just one year. You promised,” she said when I told her. She sounded as glacial as she had in my imagination that morning in the mailroom.

  “Binky, listen to me. Who’ll teach the women’s courses?” I recited all the reasons I had to stay. “The term’s only three years, and I’ll leave after two. By that time the department won’t need me anymore.”

  “I need you,” she said, unmoved. “I need you to live with me. Here. Seven days a week. Where you said you wanted to be.”

  But as chair I could defuse the terrible tensions—no warrior tactics, no press conferences about student spies in English classes. The department needed a calm style of leadership now, and there weren’t many men who could bring it to them. I’d be quietly revolutionary by serving the cause of women. I’d make sure to fill every position with women; I’d promote a new curriculum that would include neglected women authors; through the prestige of the chair I’d fight for women’s rights all over campus. No one else could do the things I would do.

  I’d call Binky again when she was calmer, in the morning, and I’d tell her that if the department elected me, I had to stay—but for two years and no more.

  The election was held the next day. Someone nominated a young man to run against me. The dean and Russ counted the ballots; Russ came to my office to tell me: I won by a vote of 28–4.

  Despite the photos in the national news that made Fresno State look like an eastern European satellite, the department was inundated with job applications that spring because there was a glut of new Ph.D.‘s on the market. We had only one position available, and I had to make it count. I practiced my spiel in front of the mirror in the women’s bathroom until I could say it in a voice that was forceful and calm. “We’ve lost Ingrid, so I think it’s only right that we replace her with another person who can teach women-in-literature classes,” I told the department. “Judith Rosenthal.” I picked a dossier from the top of the pile. “She looks great.” I handed the file to Russ for him to pass around the room, then folded my hands on my lap so no one would see them trembling.

  The vote to hire her was unanimous. I retreated to my office and sat there, amazed. How easy it had been—perhaps because the time was right, perhaps because women’s liberation had already invaded their homes through their wives and daughters. The reason didn’t matter. Clearly they were going to give me a chance—to give women a chance.

  Before the semester was over, it seemed that the whole campus wanted to give women a chance—through me, sin
ce my election as chair had made me the salient female academic. I was elected vice president of the faculty union—United Professors of California—and then the college representative to the statewide Academic Senate that was made up of the faculty leaders of all eighteen campuses in the California State College system. “Those three positions together make her the most powerful professor on campus,” I overheard one male colleague matter-of-factly tell his officemate as I walked down the corridor. I loved it—suddenly these guys were thinking that a woman was the most powerful professor on campus.

  Every Saturday afternoon I go back to Curson Avenue to visit first my mother and then my aunt. Sometimes when I get close to their street I hear a distant siren—an ambulance maybe, or a fire engine or police car. Los Angeles is a city of millions. But I’m certain the siren is speeding toward them. My mother has had a heart attack, Rae has been killed by a mugger, Curson Avenue has been leveled to rubble like a shtetl in a pogrom. They are dead, and they have died before I could present to them a Sarah or an Avrom, before I could assure them that Hitler hadn’t done his job completely, that they hadn’t lived in vain, that we would reach into another generation.

  Sometimes when I sit with Rae on her living room sofa and we haven’t spoken for some minutes, I see her eyes grow heavy, her head nod, and then she is very still in seated sleep. But what if it’s not sleep? What if I’ve waited too long? “Rae?” I stand before her, bend my head to her face, nudge her as gently as my fright permits. “Wake up, My Rae.”

  “Just two years, I swear it,” I promised as Binky drove me to the airport the first day of the fall semester, when I officially became chair of the English Department.