Naked in the Promised Land (14 page)

Hot and cold skipped around in me the rest of that afternoon while I bent over my English essay at the kitchen table. "I don't want anything," I told my mother when she came in to fix supper, and I left. I hid out on the weed-strewn patch of backyard, filled with dreamy longing, though I was unable to escape the dull sounds of pots and plates and forks coming through the kitchen window as my mother and Albert ate. All I could think of while I finished my homework on my cot later was how Carlos had kissed me; and when I went to sleep I could feel his body on top of me.

In homeroom the next day, I stood at the door waiting for Carlos until after the bell rang; then Miss Miller scowled at me and told me to take my seat. Carlos sailed in much later. I waved to him, smiling hugely, and he nodded, but his handsome face was expressionless, and when I looked back at him in the last row he seemed very intent on carving something on his desk with a big nail. As soon as the bell rang, he disappeared in the spin of milling bodies before I'd even gathered up my
books. Something bad must have happened. I had to find him and ask what was the matter.

"Hey, how you doin'?" It was Ramon behind me, one of the boys Carlos told me he was always rumbling with. "Wanna go out with me after school?" He leered at me, an insinuating grin that said he knew all about me.

"No, I'm busy," I said, squeezing as quickly as I could through the crowd.

"
Puta,
" I heard Ramon snigger.

I saw Carlos one other time that day, talking to Joe, another kid he'd said he always rumbled with. When he spotted me in the distance, he shifted his body with his back to me, as though to hide.

That was almost the end of it, except that two days later, when the kids in sixth-period art class lined up in front of the teacher's desk to claim the work that she'd graded for the last unit, I felt someone pushing at my back and pressing against my buttocks. I jumped away, bumping into the girl in front of me, then spun around into the crude grin of Martin, another one of the rumble guys. "Don't you like it?" he mouthed, then emitted a soft, mean laugh. "I heard you did."

So now I knew. Guys talked. If you let one of them paralyze you in sweet languor, they'd all swarm like scavengers to carrion. It was a nasty game.

Suddenly guys everywhere were acting like that, as though Carlos had telegraphed the whole male world about me or as though I gave off some scent only they could smell. In school, in the streets, on the bus, in the stores, it was impossible to escape their salvos: "Hey, girlie, want a lift? I'll drive you to heaven!" "You shake it like you gonna break it!" "Hey, sexy, you givin' me a heart attack!"
Smack, smack, whistle, whistle.
Was it the way I dressed? But I liked the way I looked—the grownup, been-around mask of my face, the drop-dead hourglass costume of my body. Why should I change because of those
pinche cabrones? Kiss my ass,
I thought
(but I'll be crafty enough to keep you from getting that close).

Still dark, maybe 5
A.M.,
only weeks into my mother's marriage. The smell of cigarette smoke that drifted in from the porch through the dining room window pulled me from sleep. "Ohboyohboyohboy," I heard, and the heavy shuffle of Albert's shoes back and forth across the loose porch planks. Then once more: "Ohboyohboyohboy."

I dozed off but was awakened again a few hours later. Fanny was banging loudly on the door of their bedroom. "Open up!" she yelled.

I dashed out to the hallway.

My mother, still in her light nightgown, bleary-eyed, opened the door. "Yes?" Over Fanny's shoulder I could see Albert's empty, unmade bed.

"Your crazy husband woke me up again," Fanny said, her long nose twitching, toothless jaws working, incensed. "Five o'clock in the morning, and I hear his 'ohboyohboyohboy.' Tell him I'm sick and tired of it."

My mother chewed her lip. "I'll tell him," she said in a little voice, "just as soon as he comes back from work."

That evening she sat on the milk crate on the porch, waiting for Albert. I perched on my cot doing homework, and through the dining room window I could see how worried she looked. What could I do about it? Did she understand now she'd married a crazy man? I'd resolved to be polite to him, but I wouldn't go near him unless it was absolutely necessary.

I saw her stand up as his car came down the street, and she paced on the porch till he parked. "Fanny says you woke her up," she stage-whispered to him frantically as he walked up the creaky stairs.

Fanny appeared from nowhere and threw open the screen door, letting it slam behind her. "Mister, you woke me up at five o'clock in the morning with your crazy 'ohboyohboyohboy.' This is the third time. What kind of man talks to himself at five o'clock in the morning?"

There was quiet for maybe three heartbeats as Albert stood glued at the top of the stairs. Then, "You go to hell," he roared, lunging with open claws, tripping on the air. "You're the crazy one. You!"

Fanny scampered back into the house as though running from a mad cat, and the screen door slammed. She held it to with one hand, shaking the other one at him in a fist. "
Mishugeneh!
I'll make you to move," she yelled.

"
Choleryeh,
" he hollered, "witch!" and his spittle hung on the screen door.

"A devil boils in you," Fanny yelled, "you
paskudnyak
you, you no-goodnik!"

"Your flesh should be torn from you in pieces," Albert one-upped her from the porch.

I heard Fanny's footsteps retreating at a run to her room.

"Mary, we're moving out," Albert hollered to my mother, who sat huddled on the milk crate.

Moving? Oh, yes! But where could we go if we left East LA.?

That same night, at about midnight, Albert's cigarette smoke and pacings and mutterings woke me up again, and the following morning too, and many other nights and mornings, but Fanny said nothing more; she just avoided him. Whenever he referred to her now, he called her "
choleryeh
witch," but he didn't seem interested in fighting with her again, and he and my mother never even began to look for a new place to live.

Every atom of me wanted to go. There was no reason to stay at Fanny's now. There was the whole world outside, and I wanted to know it. The only question was, how was I going to get out when I wasn't even fifteen years old and still had another month of junior high school?

"Do you think I can start going out on auditions?" I kept asking Irene, though I still felt like a mouse in her lofty presence.

"You have to be ready first," she kept answering me with an absent-minded shrug. "Any phone calls I need to return before I start teaching this morning?"

But I
was
ready. What was she waiting for?

Suddenly one Saturday, as she shrugged at me yet again while she read the neat list of phone messages that I'd printed for her, I saw right through my idol as clearly as if her flawless skin were cellophane. She didn't know any better than I how things were done in Hollywood. Why else would she be living in East L.A. and booking a bunch of kids at Thrifty Drug Store openings and Hadassah luncheons? I admitted to myself what I'd probably guessed for a long time: she and Sid had no more connections in Hollywood than my mother. If I wanted to move up, I'd have to find the way by myself—the Sandmans had nothing to offer but dreams. Yet I couldn't bear to go, never to see her again.

It was Sid who shoved me. "You have to convey a more wistful feeling: 'Ah've always relied on the kindness of strangehs.'" He modeled the intonation one afternoon at my lesson. "Arms out and palms up." He pulled at my wrists.

"'Ah've always relied on the kindness of strangehs,'" I repeated, twisting my lips into a wistful Blanche DuBois smile, with Blanche's fey tilt to my head. I sensed her easily. I had no trouble imagining what it would feel like to be so vulnerable, to allow yourself to yield to everyone. I could play her, though I would
never
be her.

My arms were extended and my palms were pointed up as he'd directed, but Sid still hadn't let go of my wrists. I glanced at him, breaking out of Blanche. His expression as he stared at me in the big room was not teacherly. "You know," he said in a voice I'd never heard before—low and sort of choked—"when you came here three years ago, I thought, 'My God, I've never seen such a pathetic-looking little girl.'" His face was close enough for me to see beads of sweat glistening on his thin mustache. "And now..."

He didn't finish his sentence, this husband of the gorgeous wife, but I knew very well from Jake Mann and Falix Lieber what he wanted. Should I laugh? Should I break away and run into the street? Could innocence or pathos save me? My mind bubbled and then cooled. I assumed a little-girl voice. "You've been like a wonderful father to me all these years," I squeaked. He was breathing as if he'd just run a marathon, and his hands moved to my shoulders. Words were my weapon, and I shot them. "You and Irene have been the mom and dad I never had." My voice rose higher, a child's grating whine. "I was going to tell her next time, when I see her in the office, how good you've been to me."

I could read the expressions on his face—surprise first, then fear, then cunning. His look shifted to a studied nonchalance. "Let's take that 'strangehs' line again," he said.

The whole incident hadn't lasted more than two minutes, and that was the end of it. But how could I keep on at Theatre Arts Studio now?

About a week later, close to my fifteenth birthday, I looked through the Yellow Pages of the Los Angeles telephone directory under "Theaters." "Geller Theatre and School of Dramatic Arts," the biggest ad said. "Professional Productions Staged by Our Students. The Stars of Tomorrow. Conveniently Located Steps from Hollywood."

"So it's good riddance to the bottle blonde you were so maaad about, you fickle little thang." Eddy-as-Scarlett taunted me on the steps of his porch.

I ignored his calling my beloved a bottle blonde because I'd never been to the Westside except on the Tanner Grey Line Motor Tour of the movie stars' homes, and if Eddy went with me it wouldn't be so scary. "Come on," I begged. "This can be the break we've been waiting for."

"She's ready for her close-up, Mr. DeMille!" The spidery fingers spread in perfect and annoying imitation of a demented Gloria Swanson. "Batty, batty. She really believes that someone is going to put two little Jewish girls from East L.A. into the movies. But this little Jewish girl"—he pointed to himself—"is not as dumb as this one"—he rubbed an elegant forefinger into my collar bone.

"To hell with you," I said, slapping his hand away and stomping down the steps. Why couldn't he take serious things seriously? Why wouldn't he go on this brave adventure with me? "Stay here if you want," I tossed at him over my shoulder. "I'm going where there's a chance for something good to happen."

But how do you get to Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue from East L.A.? One bus from Wabash Avenue to Brooklyn Avenue, I discovered; another from Brooklyn Avenue to Olvera Street; a third down Wilshire Boulevard to another universe, on the border of Hollywood. I sat in the front seat of each bus, looking out the big window, traveling west. On the Wilshire bus I could see a gloriously gaudy crimson and platinum sunset that promised everything.

The lobby at Geller's was full of glamour. I'd never seen so many blondes at once. Almost everyone, men and women, had golden hair, even those with eyebrows and eyes darker than mine, even those with conspicuous black roots. Most of the men wore tight James Dean jeans and white T-shirts. A lot of the women wore shin-length capri pants and
high, high heels. A lone dark-haired beauty—Babette, everyone called her—was decked out in a lacy white dress that billowed over piles of crinoline petticoats, and she carried a Little Bo-Peep parasol to complete the little-girl-cum-southern-belle look. ("Her father is a big movie director," I heard one newcomer whisper.) Another woman batted Joan Crawford eyes at everyone and called them "dahling." She was much older than the others and was wearing a slinky black sheath; Hollywood dripped from her pores. My silver stilettos would not have been out of place, but I was in my silly pachuca garb, looking like an East L.A. barrio girl. What was I doing here? Eddy was right.

No! I wouldn't get scared off. They didn't have to know who I was or where I came from. I was an actress. I'd just act as though I were someone else. I sneaked into the ladies' room, where two women who looked like starlets were combing their shiny hair in front of the mirror, and I slipped into a stall.

"So this guy promised that he'd introduce me to somebody who works at the William Morris Agency," one said. I'd wait until they left.

When the doors swung closed behind them, I scrubbed the pachuca lipstick off my lips and started over, following the outline. I erased the black rapiers over my eyes and with my Maybelline eyebrow pencil drew new lines in to look more natural. I combed the wild pompadour down. I could do nothing about my pachuca clothes, but at least my face and hair looked less like those of a Hollenbeck Junior High gang girl.

The lobby was dense with blue haze. Everyone smoked. Some puffed away through ivory or ebony cigarette holders. The most muscled boy held his Chesterfield between a thumb and an index finger, eyes narrowed as he puffed. A rival dangled his own cigarette from his lips and puffed on it, a squint in his eyes that was at least as cool as the thumb-and-index-finger chap's. I smoked my first cigarette in the lobby of Geller's, offered to me from the pack of the lip-dangler. Before that summer was over I was smoking two and a half packs a day. Smoking made me look older.

That first evening I auditioned for the acting school with a dozen other people. When Mr. Lord, the director of Geller's, called my name, I walked onto the stage and did a monologue from
The Member of the Wedding.
Though I still wore my pachuca clothes, I knew how to hold
my body in Frankie's girl-boy stance, I knew how to make my voice sound boyish and confused and full of longing, a lost adolescent.

"I'm E. J. Smith," whispered a big, pink-skinned man who leaned over my chair as I took my seat in the audience again. "You were terrific." He offered me his great paw to shake. He was dressed in a striped three-piece suit and a tomato-red bow tie, and his hair and eyebrows and lashes were white-blond. I'd never seen anyone up close who looked like that. "A real
goy,
" my mother would have said of him. "I'm working in a talent agency," he told me. My head spun.
Was it happening already?