Naked in the Promised Land (10 page)

A smile played around her lips, and I wanted to sink beneath my seat.

"Lillian, you have a lot of growing up to do," she said. She shook her majestic head, and despair shook me in its cruel claws: I was nothing but a silly child to her. "Well, anyway, Eddy misled me." She waved her hand dismissively. She was interested in me only if I was in trouble; maybe she just wanted to make sure I wouldn't leave the studio. I wanted to slam the dashboard with my fist, to make her jump.
Look at me, listen to me,
I wanted to shout.
Why can't you feel about me the way you felt about Tony Martinez?

"If you're not going to run off with him, there's no problem. So why are we here?" Irene laughed. "Better finish your hamburger; we should get going," she said absently, flashing her lights for the waitress to bring the check.

I sank, I crumbled, I was crushed. I'd ruined my golden opportunity. What had I hoped for? I didn't know. I just needed to hold her attention. I didn't expect from her what she gave Tony Martinez. There was nothing in me that could make her want me. But I just needed to be near her.

I would throw myself at her now, heedlessly. I'd have no other chance like this. "I love you," I would implore her. My heart raced at the vision. She would let me ... what? I sat frozen to the seat. I peered at her as she drove. She was a distant star, glittering always. She was a zillion miles away. She didn't even know I was in the car anymore.

I looked out the window, unable to make sense of anything before my eyes. It was over. "
You dumb dimwit ... dope ... nincompoop!
" I shouted at myself inside. "
I hate you! Drop dead with a cancer on your heart! Die!
"

I'
M AS TALL AS
my mother's waist, walking in open spaces between her and My Rae—Hollenbeck Park, the Moroccan desert (but no Gary Cooper is in sight). Where we are doesn't matter because we're together.

"Balance me!" I demand. They know the game and comply. Mommy on the right, My Rae on the left, every few steps their warm, upturned hands bear my forty pounds, and I swing my legs in the air. This is more delicious than a bottle of warm milk.

A pea green puddle pops into our path out of nowhere, and we pause to contemplate its mystery. We can't go straight ahead so we'll go around. "But we have to put you down," Mommy and My Rae say in one voice.

My feet hit the ground, and a snake pops out of the water. It is beautifully mottled, smiling as in a cartoon. I don't know whether to laugh or be scared. I blink, and my eyes open just in time to see My Rae dragged under the opaque water.

Again the snake pops up, ringed with power. I ready my mouth to scream, but before breath reaches my vocal cords, the snake arches, slashes like a whip, and my mother is gone.

In the daylight I knew it was only a dream, but for weeks the images came back so clearly that my stomach would contract to my spine. I felt bereft of something I had no power to keep for myself, though it was vital to me.

I did nothing about Chuck, but sometimes I wished he would be the one to say it was over. Yet if he did, wouldn't it be awful to be rejected? Every
time I thought I'd tell him that I couldn't see him anymore, another reason not to say it would pop into my head: What if I broke up with him and then I never found another person to love me, just like my mother never found anyone after Moishe? What if I really did love him now—like Rae once said I'd love a boy—but I didn't know it because all I'd ever seen of that sort of love was the crazy lose-your-head-and-ruin-your-life way my mother did it? I just couldn't figure out what was true or what to do. So I drifted.

A few weeks before the end of the year, Chuck told me over sodas that he'd made reservations for New Year's Eve at the Sinaloa Club. I knew exactly where it was—just a few doors away from the delicatessen on Brooklyn Avenue where my mother and I went to eat. Sometimes I'd see men with black jackets and ladies with beautiful long gowns step from sleek cars in front of the Sinaloa Club. When the men held the padded pink door open for their dates, the street would be filled with a woman's sultry voice belting songs that always rhymed
amor
with
dolor.
Though I never got a look inside, I was sure that the Sinaloa Club was the closest thing in East L.A. to what I'd seen in movie magazines of Hollywood nightspots like Ciro's or the Mocambo, where the stars met to sip martinis and be sophisticated. "I'm rentin' a tux and steppin' out wid ma baby," Chuck sang now in the empty soda shop and got up to do a goofy jig and a Charlie Chaplin bow in front of me. I could wear my pink satin Mistress of Ceremonies gown and the silver stiletto heels that Eddy had given me.

But what would my mother do on New Year's Eve if I went out with Chuck? Always, since we'd come to Los Angeles, we'd spent the last hours of the year drinking hot chocolate and listening to the radio—"Your Hit Parade" and then the midnight countdown at Times Square.

I never really decided what to do, but when the sun went down on the last day of 1954, I found myself taking a bath and then standing at the mirror putting on rouge and eye shadow from little plastic boxes, remembering how I'd watched my mother in the mirror those Saturday nights in New York as she applied her makeshift cosmetics. How beautiful she'd been.

I took my pink gown down from the hook behind our bedroom door.

"You didn't tell me you had a show tonight," my mother said. She stood behind me while I examined a little tear in the gown's netting.

"I've got a date." I turned to face her. I hadn't said anything about it earlier because I didn't know myself what I was going to do. I'd never even said I had a boyfriend.
Stupid!
I should have told her I'd been invited to the Frombergs' party. I should have arranged to meet Chuck down the block. Now it was too late to say anything but the truth. It all came out—where I met him, that he was Italian, his age, his truck—and with every word I said she looked more upset.

"You're fourteen years old!" my mother yelled.

She'd never yelled at me in anger before.

"So what?" So what if I was fourteen? She'd never treated me like a child. I'd always been an adult.

She stomped from the room, and seconds later I heard her screaming into the telephone, "You know what she's doing?"

It didn't take twenty minutes. From the rip in the window shade I could see the black car pulling up in front of our house and Rae, in a little maroon hat, rushing out, then bending back in to wave a worried Mr. Bergman off, as if she didn't want him to witness this.

I returned to what I was doing, but now I was mad. I dusted talcum powder on my armpits in huge puffs, I pulled old socks and new movie magazines from under my bed and tossed them over my shoulder as I rummaged for Eddy's high heels.

My mother stormed in with my aunt behind her, both of them on the same side at last. "Are you
mishuga?
You're going out with a
Talyener goy
who's ten years older than you? On New Year's Eve yet?" My aunt bellowed each question louder than the last. "New Year's Eve, when the
goyim
get
schicker,
drunk? In a truck?"

"I'm not a baby!" I yelled. "I'm going." I grabbed the silver high heels I'd just found and the strapless gown from my bed, then locked myself into the bathroom, to dress and comb my hair in peace. What was this? All of a sudden they were going to tell me what to do? Since when?

"What's going on here? What's the commotion?" It was Fanny now, come to join the fracas because she'd heard Rae and my mother pounding on the bathroom door. "Are you crazy?" she said when they told her. "You'll let her go in a truck with a man?" I kept dressing.

My mother and aunt sobbed more words on the other side of the door; "
Goy
" was the one that came through clearest. I squirted some Emir on my hair.

Then the doorbell rang, and rang again, and then Chuck knocked on the screen door and called "Hello? Hello?" I threw open the bathroom door and ran past my mother and my aunt and Fanny, kicking a fusillade on the floor with my silver stilts, gripping the bottom of my gown so I wouldn't trip. "Let's go!" I shouted, banging the screen door behind me, pulling on Chuck's tuxedo sleeve. I ran, Chuck ran; my mother, Rae, and Fanny ran too.

"What's happening?" Chuck shouted, wheezing beside me. I glanced as we ran and saw his caterpillar eyebrows, a clear plastic box with a purple bow that he clutched in his hands, his tuxedo that shone a rust color by the light of the street lamp and looked high at his ankles. I didn't know if I felt like laughing or crying. Then I did both, at the same time, as we flew up Dundas Street. "What's wrong?" he shouted again, and I just shook my head and kept running and sobbing and giggling. The white carnation in his buttonhole dropped, and my silver heel trampled it.

His truck was all the way up the block. Over my shoulder I saw that my mother and Fanny had given up, but Rae was right behind us, then right behind me when I opened the door on the passenger side. She pushed me aside, hoisted herself like a gymnast up into the seat, then settled her squat frame there, arms folded and face stony. "You're not going!" she yelled at me.

"Lady, please get out of my truck!" Chuck cried.

She didn't budge.

How dare she carry on like this when she'd left me alone all those years with my mother in Fanny's furnished room? How dare she butt in now, when my childhood was over? "Rae, get out! Dammit! The whole neighborhood is looking," I hollered, though the streets were empty.

"Not till you go back into the house." She glared at me, unfolded her arms, then emphatically folded them the other way.

"I'll ... I ... I'm calling the cops to get her out of my truck," Chuck sputtered. His face and ears were red. I could see the plastic box with an orchid corsage inside sitting on the sidewalk.

"You should be ashamed of yourself. A grown man with a fourteen-year-old girl!" My aunt yelled at him now, and her heavy jaw jutted forward like a bulldog's. "You think I don't know what you want?"

"I don't care what you say. I'm going out tonight!" I screamed at her.

"Do you know what men like that do?" she screamed back.

"Lady, get out!" Chuck banged on the hood with a mallet fist, and with each bang I could see Rae's maroon hat jump a little on her head.

An hour later my aunt descended from the truck, her eyes puffy with weeping. I stepped up to take her place, as though triumphant. But I was acting. By now I was really tired and miserable, and what I truly wanted was to go home, with her, to forget the whole awful scene and Chuck and New Year's Eve—all of it. I watched her walk down the empty street.

Chuck jumped behind the wheel, breathing as though he'd just done hard physical labor, and I could see his temple throbbing. As we drove off, I spied the orchid, still on the sidewalk in its clear plastic box with the big purple bow.

"Chuck ... I'm sorry." I was embarrassed for all of us that she'd accused him as she did. I touched his white-knuckled hand that gripped the wheel, but he pulled away as though he were disgusted with me. I sat, baffled about what to say or do next.

He drove to our spot on City Terrace. "I don't feel like going to a nightclub now," he muttered. "I didn't do anything to deserve that." His voice rose like a little boy's and he pounded his fist on the dashboard so hard that the truck shook.

It scared me a little, though I couldn't blame him for being so upset. "Chuck..." I opened my mouth to sympathize, to say how angry I was at my aunt, but he turned to me and grabbed me, his fingers digging into my bare arms, then his tongue thrusting down my throat, his stubble scratching my skin and hurting. I fought to break loose but he pinned me. With one hand he snatched at the long skirt of my gown, tugging it up. The more I struggled, the harder he gripped me. His fingers wrestled with my garter belt, with the band of my panties; his knees pushed at my thighs. "Chuck, stop!" I screamed.

And he did. He loosened his hold on me, then moved back to the driver's seat, his breath coming in whistles through his mouth. He gripped the wheel and banged his head on it, again, then again. "I'm an idiot," he moaned. "She just got me so angry." He slumped over the wheel and stayed that way for so long that I thought he'd fainted. My teeth chattered as if I were sitting in a refrigerator. What should I do?

When he snapped his head up, I jumped. "We're going to Evelyn's party," he announced, backing the truck out of the weeds so quickly that the tires spun. I pressed up against the passenger door, moving as far away from him as I could, and he didn't say another word. I wasn't scared of him now as much as I was angry. Where had that monster sprung from that tore at my clothes and hurt me with his hands and mouth? What had that been about?

I followed Chuck up the Frombergs' steps, and Evelyn swung open the door. Over Chuck's shoulder I could see that people were kicking in a conga line. Evelyn blew loudly at an orange noisemaker that snaked from her lips and then shouted, "Hap-py New Year!" She wore a tiny gold cardboard tiara on her head and a red and purple gown sausaged her big body. He entered first. Then she took one look at me and her jaw dropped. "You bastard, get out," she spat at Chuck. "You son of a bitch!"

How had she known?

"Okay, okay." He threw up his hands as if he were fending off a blow. "You're right. I'm a bastard son of a bitch." Then he slunk off like a kicked alley cat—even more pathetic because of the funny tuxedo. I could hear Evelyn breathing through her teeth. I kept my eyes on him till he turned the corner, and then she drew me to her big bosom in a motherly hug. "Sweetie, go change and then come back to the party," she said gently. I left, fighting back the rush of tears that her kindness had loosed. It wasn't really his fault. Rae had made him angry. But why did he have to terrify me? I was mad at him, but I was also sorry that he might lose Evelyn's friendship and, because of me, never sit in her kitchen and sip coffee again.

My mother was in bed with the light off, and the house was mausoleum-quiet. As a kid, I used to panic when I couldn't see her breathing or hear her snoring: What if she were dead? Standing now at the threshold, wide-eyed in the spook-filled dark, I listened as I used to. I shouldn't have left her alone. I heard a squeak of springs as she turned over.