Naked in the Promised Land (2 page)

I watch as she looks at her face in the speckled mirror. She burns a wooden match and the cooled tip becomes a brush that she draws across her lids once, twice, a third time. I hold my breath just as she does in her concentration. The smudges are uneven, and she rubs her fingers over them, smoothing them out. Now her eyelids look heavy over her eyes, which are luminous and large.

Next she takes her tube of lipstick and pokes her pinkie finger over the top of the worn-down stick, then dabs the color on each cheek. She rubs, rubs, rubs, rubs with her finger, and her cheeks become rosy. I know those cheeks well because I have kissed them with loud, smacking kisses and with soft, butterfly kisses. I don't know if I like the new color, but I know from movie posters that glamorous women must have rosy cheeks.

Her lips are next. She applies the blood red stick directly. I see she has not followed their lovely outline. The blood red laps over and makes her lips larger, like Joan Crawford's. For a moment I want their delicate pink back, the graceful shape I sometimes studied while she slept. But now they look like a movie star's lips, and she nods at them with satisfaction.

"Hubba, hubba," I say in my best Bud Abbott voice. She smiles, but I'm not sure whether she is smiling at me or something she sees in the mirror.

Next she combs her dark curls, then puts Pond's cold cream on her already creamy shoulders and neck.

My eyes do not leave her for a second; but after she kisses my cheek and slips out, they well up with tears.

Him I never see.

I watched her so many times as she made up her face to look right with her makeshift cosmetics. Did she see in the old mirror the beautiful face that I saw? Did he tell her how beautiful she was?

Her lovely figure should have clothes like the movie stars', I thought. But I knew, because she told me, that we were too poor for her to buy herself nice clothes. "Someday, I'll wear the beautiful dresses," I promised myself, trying to picture my grownup self in them and not remember the sound of the door closing behind her.

It was through the movies that I learned to think big: I would become a movie actress, since my mother admired them so much. Though she hardly read or wrote English, and she never lost her Yiddish accent, she knew the names and lives of all the actresses as though they were her sisters: Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Greer Garson, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck—those were her favorites. She remained in love with Charles Boyer. "He looks like Moishe," her lover she meant, my father. I hated Boyer and his big lips.

Her eyes and mouth almost always looked sad when she didn't make them up, but on Saturdays during the day and in the evenings during the week I had her to myself, and I was happy just being close to her. What else could I need? We had "kitchen privileges" with our furnished room, but she didn't like to cook, and we both loved to dine out, as she called it. Sometimes we went to the Automat, where you could put nickels in a slot and, like magic, the little window popped open so you could take out the wonderful
goyishe
dishes on display. Lemon meringue pie. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on squishy white bread. Mashed potatoes and gravy with ham steak—forbidden and for that reason delicious.

Or we went to a little restaurant on Southern Boulevard, with a menu in Yiddish and white tablecloths. Calves liver and fried onions.
Gedempfte flaysh
with apricots. Stuffed cabbage in a sweet and sour sauce. "What will madam have?" the waiter, who wore a little black bow tie, asked my mother, and me also. He wrote our order on a pad with the stub of a yellow pencil he pulled from behind his ear.

Or we took the subway all the way across the city, with me clinging to her skirt so I wouldn't lose her, and we went to the Katz Deli on Delancey Street, with sawdust on the floor and great bowls of sour pickles on the table. Huge corned beef sandwiches, so big that she and I could split one. Lox and cream cheese on Russian rye bread. Scrumptiously greasy potato latkes.

I was almost always the only child in those restaurants, and I forgot I was a child. I took my ordering very seriously. I saw how the men at the other tables did it for themselves and their wives, and I did the same: "I believe I will have..." I said, in a voice I tried to deepen so I would not be mistaken for a child.

How many dresses she must have had to drape for such outings. I think whatever money she had after paying for the furnished room and the sitting services of the Missus she spent on our entertainment. Though we could afford nothing better than a furnished room, we lived lavishly on movies and dining out.

"Mother and daughter," I said as we walked back home through the Bronx streets in 1946. Now I was six years old, and it wasn't so hard to reach her arm.

I don't know why we moved to an even smaller furnished room on Longwood Avenue, but it was then that my mother enrolled me in P.S. 62. I went to school until three o'clock and then to a day care center a block away—a
nursery school,
it was called—until my mother came to collect me after five.

That first winter in day care I was taken with the other children to a holiday pageant, where a play was performed about an infant and a stable and wise men. "Jesus is God," the little actors shouted at the finale.

I'd been bored, but now I was troubled. My mother or aunt told me about words such as "Jesus" and "Christ" and "gentile," and I knew they meant some ancient horror, Cossacks galloping on fiery horses, running swords through women and children and setting fire to the shtetl at Eastertime after the village priest enraged them against the Jews. Whenever we passed two nuns on the street, my aunt said it meant bad luck and you were supposed to say "Tsu, tsu, tsu," like spitting something out. One nun could mean good luck, but it was safest not to pass any.

I was so shaken to hear the dangerous words in an auditorium that I must have been oblivious when my schoolmates were ordered to form a line and walk to the yellow bus on which we'd come. Soon I found myself surrounded by strange children in maroon uniforms.

I stood there, stunned, at the end of the row where I'd been sitting with my schoolmates. A harried woman wearing glasses that slid down her nose appeared out of nowhere and barked at me, "Underprivileged or Catholic?" I'd never heard either of those words, and I stared at her with an open mouth. "Underprivileged or Catholic?" she repeated.

One of the teachers who was herding a group of children out overheard her and peered at me. "She looks like a little Eye-talian or Porto Rican."

My inquisitor took my hand and rushed me toward a bus packed with more children in maroon uniforms. "Up you go," she said.

I obeyed her and squeezed into a seat near the front, next to a red-faced fat boy who stuck his tongue out at me and yelled, "Oooh, cooties."

I looked around, thinking I'd move to more hospitable ground, and there, in the middle of the bus, shooing children into seats, were two nuns in black, their gigantic crucifixes gleaming on their breasts. I burst into exasperated, horrified tears, which caught the attention of one of them.

"She's not Catholic Elementary," she said, and gruffly taking me by the hand led me out of her bus and finally settled me in the right one, with my underprivileged schoolmates.

I'd learned two new words.

Though I'd looked forward to going to school, I wasn't happy there. One day I cut my finger on the jagged edge of something in the playground, and the other children gathered around me to see the ooze of blood.

"Ooh, look how bright it is," one little girl observed. "Her blood looks so clean, and she's so dirty."

I must have been dirty. In the hot months, my mother came back from the shop sticky and dripping. She ran a cool bath for herself in the little bathroom we were allowed to use, pulled her clothes off, threw them in a pile on the floor. Then she sank into the tub while I sat on the edge.

Sometimes I cooled myself by placing my lips on the delicious wetness of her back. "Onekiss, twokiss, threekiss, fourkiss." I could count
up to a hundred and aimed to give at least a hundred kisses, though always she said, "Enough, Lilly, enough," before I could get out of the twenties.

But I don't remember ever being in the bathtub myself. Baths were to get cool in. Probably her mother had never cleaned her in a bath when she was a child either. They probably had had no baths in the shtetl.

The children at school must also have noticed my hair. It was a long time before I realized that a comb was supposed to go through one's hair with ease, that knots were not inevitable if you combed your hair every day, that most people in America washed their hair. My black head was a tangled mass of unruly curls. The hair seemed to grow out in a great bush rather than down. In the morning, when she got me ready for school, my mother sometimes passed a comb over my head, but if she combed deep enough to hit the knots, the pain was awful. "Stop, stop," I screamed at her, and she did, leaving my head to announce to the world the story of her hopeless parenting.

One day my first-grade class went to the Bronx Zoo on a field trip, and Victor, an immaculate blond boy who wore a clean, starched white shirt every day and a little gold ring on his pinkie finger, ended up next to me on the bus. "I'm not going to sit there," he proclaimed after one look at me and popped up, then cried when the driver yelled back at him to sit down and shut up.

I squeezed myself toward the window, trying to give him as wide a berth as possible so there would be no further protests, and I clamped my lips together so I wouldn't cry too.

It didn't matter, I tried to tell myself. Because what did matter to me, passionately, was Miss Huntington, my teacher—a blond
goya,
my mother would have called her. She was a woman in her forties, not beautiful the way the movie actresses were beautiful, I knew, but to me totally captivating. Her eyes were blue, as I remembered My Rae's had been, and she was tall like my mother. But in no other way was she like them. She was an American. Her voice was low and cool. She had no accent when she spoke, and she could read English. She smiled a lot and laughed at things. Someone like that didn't carry heavy burdens on her heart, dark sorrows that made her whimper in the night. Though I felt a
little guilty toward my mother and maybe even toward the memory of My Rae, I was madly in love with Miss Huntington.

Would I have been so attentive to learning otherwise? I hung on her every word. I watched her lips form the letters she had written on the board and I copied her accent; I modulated my voice to imitate her tones. Ay, Bee, Cee—it was easy for me. Many of the letters looked like they sounded,
S
like a snake,
K
like a crash,
L
like a leap,
O
like an oooh. I memorized them right away, hearing her voice in my ears.

"Who can say the whole alphabet?" she asked, and my arm shot up.

"Me, Miss Huntington. I can." I ripped the letters off at great speed while some of the children tittered at my intensity.

One day she explained silent letters to us, and cases when letters made unusual sounds: "'
G-h
' sometimes has a
fff
sound," she told us. Then she wrote letters on the board. "Who knows what this word is?" The class was silent.

"E-n..." I struggled with the code. I knew it! "
Enough!'
" I shouted, floating through the air on diaphanous wings. The secret of reading was mine. The class murmured, awed by my miracle. "Wonderful, Lillian," she said, beaming at me, pronouncing my name in American, making it sound as wonderful as she was.

One morning we lined up in the schoolyard, waiting for Miss Huntington to come and take us in to class as she always did. Instead the vice principal, Miss O'Reilly, came, a no-nonsense woman of great girth and steely gray hair. "Miss Huntington is sick," she announced, "and I will be with you today."

But Miss O'Reilly had important administrative papers to tend to, so she had no time to stand in front of the class and deliver lessons. "You must be very good boys and girls, very quiet," she told us, passing out the picture books that were reserved for reward days.

She sat at Miss Huntington's desk, absorbed in writing and figuring, ignoring the din until it couldn't be ignored any longer, then rapped on the desk with a ruler. "Silence. Do I have to give out demerits?" The roar died down briefly, then rose on a wave again.

"All right," she announced. "We're going to have a contest. Whoever can be the quietest for the longest will get a very valuable present, a
toy that you'll love." The class tittered, but she had struck a chord. There was silence for a while, then only occasional whispering. From time to time she looked up. "It's something everyone would love to have," she reminded us.

The boy in the row next to me was sitting with his hands folded, eyes straight ahead, lips sealed. "Look at Shlomo," she said. "Are you going to let Shlomo be the one to get the valuable present?" Some imitated his posture for a few minutes, then tired of the game.

Shlomo's shoes had low tops and were made of the smooth, rich, dark brown leather such as I had lusted after, not like my cheap-looking, scuffed high-tops. He carried his lunch and his homework to school in a leather satchel with a picture of Pinocchio on it. I had seen him one day walking with his father and a happy-looking mother and sisters. He had everything. It was I who needed the valuable present.

I folded my hands and extended them in front of me, much farther than Shlomo's. I peered into the distance with glazed eyes. I pressed my lips together tightly, as though I never cared to open them again. I became as rigid as a soldier, a corpse. A fly buzzed around me and I did not acknowledge it. Only once in a while did I dare to glance over at Shlomo to see if he were still in the running. I mustn't let him beat me—he couldn't beat me.

It felt like hours later when Miss O'Reilly announced that it was time for our nutrition break. "I have finished my work," she said. "And now I will keep my promise." She left as the monitor passed out milk and graham crackers, and she returned with a large paper bag. "Class, which student do you think should get the present?"