Naked in the Promised Land (4 page)

I did a soft-shoe up and down the aisle of our train as we sped west for four days: "California, here I come, right back where I started from." I waved my arms and belted out my chant. "Where bow wows of flowers bloom in the sun, where birdies sing and everything." No one had ever told me that songs had tunes that your voice was supposed to follow. When my mother had sung, on her good days as we walked together in Crotona Park, it was her words I heard, not the tune—she had no tune. She just let her voice slide up and down: "Oh, my man I love him so, he'll never know," she half sang and half said. "When he takes me in his arms the world seems swell." I put great expression in my voice, like Jolson did. Some of my trainmates smiled at the intense, scruffy seven-year-old. Others looked irritated or buried their noses deeper into their
magazines or embroidery. I continued regardless. How could you tell what a movie director looked like?

I knew I'd failed when my aunt said we were arriving in Los Angeles early the next morning. No movie director had discovered me; my mother would have to find another job in a shop.

But how could anyone feel like a failure in the Southern California sunshine? It had been cold when we left New York, but when we stepped off the train in Union Station it was springtime. He, her lover, was thousands of miles away. He would not come for her, I knew. And hadn't she forgiven her sister? She'd agreed that we would go to California together. The future seemed as cheery as what I remembered of the end of
All This and Heaven Too.

Outside the station the lawns were green, like the ones in Crotona Park. In Los Angeles, I saw, the streets were like parks. Even better. There were tall, skinny trees with huge zigzaggy leaves that sprouted only on the trees' very tops, like messy wigs on long giants. They were as enchanting as the pictures in the Dr. Seuss book that Miss Huntington read to the class for a special treat. I had been transported to another world, where the sun shone even when winter was not over, where everything looked magical and amusing. I would live happily ever after with my mother and My Rae. It was more wonderful than if I'd been given the doll with blond hair and blue eyes. What joy! What joy!

And I would be discovered. I would learn to sing and dance and act, and maybe to ride horseback or play the violin, and I would become a child star. I would work hard. I would never be lazy. I would get up early in the morning and start practicing, and I would practice until late at night.

Every nerve of me was set for the race. Not just for that moment, there at Union Station, but forever. It might take a bit of time, but a movie director would discover me.

And then I would rescue my mother from the shop.

T
HE NAME OF OUR NEW
Missus was Fanny Diamond. That first evening, without teeth in her mouth, her nose and chin almost meeting, she looked to me like a scarier twin sister of the wicked witch in
The Wizard of Oz.
(Her teeth, as I later discovered, always sat in a glass of water near her bed when it wasn't mealtime.) While she showed the dining room with a cot where My Rae would sleep and the bedroom where my mother and I would sleep, I lagged behind because I wanted to examine a row of glass jars I'd spied on a living room shelf. They held floating objects that looked from a distance like marbles: Now I could see that they were blue or brown or green at their centers, and they had big borders that were wrinkled and yellowish or milky blue and smooth. The smooth ones looked as though they'd just been plucked from a person's head. Yes. There was no mistaking what they were. Eyeballs! My stomach contracted. I ran at a gallop to find my mother, who was following Fanny to the kitchen now.

"It's all right. My Marty is a eye doctor," Fanny cackled.

"Can we go now?" I begged, grabbing at my mother's arm, but she didn't hear me because she was listening to Fanny tell her how to turn on the old gas stove.

I tugged at the sleeve of My Rae's blouse to make her bend down. "I don't like it here," I whispered in her ear.

She stage-whispered back, "When we get some money for furniture, we'll take an apartment. For now we have to live with a Missus."

There were twin beds in our room, but that first night I lay in my
mother's bed, clutching her arm until she said, "I have to turn over now, Lilly." I glued my body to her back and wouldn't let go of her because I couldn't get the floating eyeballs out of my mind.

When I awoke in the early morning, it was to an awful odor that I remembered from long before, in New York, when I'd burned my pinkie finger on an iron that my aunt kept hot so that she could press her piecework. Fanny's house was on a corner, next door to a kosher chicken market, and when the wind was wrong, the smell of singed feathers and skin was powerful. That first Friday on Dundas Street, I went to the market with my mother and My Rae to select a chicken. I breathed through my mouth, trying vainly to block the smell. Live chickens, hundreds of them, were packed tightly into cages, to be freed only when a housewife pointed and said to the chicken man, "Gimme this one." Then he extricated the chosen one by its legs while the other chickens squawked an uproar, and he handed it over to a
shochet,
a kosher slaughterer, who tied its legs to a noose that hung from the ceiling.

I watched it all, unable to look away after My Rae had selected our chicken. Its mournful little head and beak pointed downward, and with one deft stroke of his razor, the
shochet
sliced its throat. The blood dripped and puddled onto the sawdust floor until the chicken was cut down and ran in little circles, its almost-severed head flopping grotesquely, ribboning blood, its still-undead wings beating frantically. When it finally collapsed on the sawdust floor, another man, wearing a big leather apron, singed its feathers off, wrapped the naked bird in a newspaper tied with string, and gave it to me.

I carried home the warm bundle, a dead baby placed eerily in my arms by the big jolly executioner. Then my aunt unwrapped it, spread it on the drainboard, sawed it into pieces with a big knife, and sprinkled the dissected parts with the coarse salt that she poured into her hand from a yellow box bearing the word
KOSHER
in English and Yiddish. I ran out of the kitchen. But when I had to go back for a drink of water, I couldn't help looking again at the nude, hacked-up thing that had been a white-feathered, squawking creature only a short while before. A couple of hours later, the pale yellow pieces were bobbing and dodging bits of carrots and onions in a big pot of water that sat over a flame on the gas stove.

At supper I gagged with my first bite. I could still smell the singed feathers and skin, and I ran from the table out to the rickety front porch, my aunt running after me with a drumstick in her hand. I clamped my lips tight and shook my head violently until she retreated.

"No appetite," I heard her mutter as the screen door creaked shut behind her. "Wrists skinny like a chicken bone."

"Ooh, look, the witch's daughter," two passing boys about my age hooted at me as I stood on the porch. "Witch, witch, come out on your broomstick," they shouted at the house through cupped hands.

But the three of us were together again. On Saturdays my mother and My Rae and I took a bus to Hollenbeck Park and walked in the sunshine amid the lush California greenery, or we pressed close, I in the middle, on a silvered wooden swing the size of a loveseat that overlooked a dark pond alive with quacking ducks. "Lift your legs and I'll swing you," I ordered them, standing on my tiptoes to push us off. My mother had a dreamy look in her eyes and a faint smile on her lips.

"Look at who's Samson," My Rae said.

"Me!" I chortled, making our collective three hundred pounds swing back and forth.

They left the house together every morning and took three buses to get to their shops in the downtown neighborhood of tall buildings where the garment manufacturers were. In the late afternoon they came back together, and when I heard their voices on the porch I rushed to throw myself at them, first my mother and then My Rae. I shadowed my mother through the house, happy that the long day at a strange school (where the funny way I said
waata
and
singk
had already been noted) was over and we were together again.

But even before she put her purse down, she went to find Fanny. "Did I get any letters?" she asked.

"Not a single thing." Fanny's answer was always the same.

In the beginning my mother nodded and smiled. As the weeks and months went by she stopped smiling. "Nothing?" she'd ask again.

"Listen, the only thing the letter carrier ever brings is big bills for me."

"Watch me do Eddie Cantor," I'd beg my mother, pulling at her skirt, arresting her there in Fanny's dark and dusty hallway. I made my big eyes bigger and rolled them round and round. "Oh, you beautiful doll, you great big beautiful doll," I sang, and I gestured grandly, first to my heart and then to her person, with open-fingered hands.

"I'm so proud of my little girl," my mother said. But I knew her thoughts were elsewhere.

"Watch me do Jack Benny now," I demanded, following her in a soft-shoe dance, playing my air violin and humming a screechy tune that I ad-libbed. "Mommy, wait, look." She flopped on her bed and stared up at the ceiling.

"Can I read to you?" I asked, positioning myself at the side of the bed with one of the books I'd gotten from the Malabar Public Library. She moved over to make room for me, but she didn't take her eyes from the ceiling. "Are you listening?" How could I pull her back from where she was in her head? I put all the expression I could muster into the words. "The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day," I orated. "The score stood four to two with one inning left to play..."

But she didn't look interested in what Casey could do at the bat. I switched books. "Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream!" I didn't understand all the words, and I knew that she understood even less than I did, but I put plenty of voice music into it, making solemn low sounds and then, for contrast, high happy sounds. I held the book with one hand and waved the other in the air. I declaimed to the end of the poem and then read her another and yet another. "Did you like it?" I asked anxiously.

"I'm so proud of my little girl," she said again, and she held me in her arms when I lay down next to her, but her face was like pale stone, and I knew I hadn't taken away her sadness.

More and more, as the months wore on, when My Rae came to say supper was ready, my mother told her, "I can't eat" or "Who wants food now?"

"Well, the baby needs to eat," My Rae said the first time my mother shooed her away. She took me by the hand and pulled me toward the torn oilcloth-covered kitchen table.

"I'm not a baby anymore. Haven't you noticed?" I sassed her and bucked free and scurried back to my mother, to put my arms around her, pat her soft dark curls, make her feel better. When would she stop missing him?

My mother stopped putting lipstick on her beautiful lips. I never saw her burning a match anymore to make herself eye shadow. The blouse she wore to work had half-moons of yellowish stain under the arms, and the hem drooped and dangled threads from the bottom of her skirt, but she wore them that way week after week.

"Fix yourself," my aunt said gruffly, "for the sake of the baby. Forget about
vus iz gevehn,
what was. It's over. Moishe, Europe, over and done with."

My mother bared her teeth at My Rae like a mad dog, like she used to do in New York. "I don't need you to tell me nothing," she growled.

Something bad was happening to her, but how could I stop it? What if she drove My Rae away again? We'd be alone, in a strange house and a strange room in a strange city. I wanted the old times back, when the three of us pressed together on the wooden swing and my aunt called me Samson. But I couldn't be with both of them at the same time, and it was my mother who needed me most, so it was in our bedroom, reading on her bed while she stared up at the ceiling, that I spent the evenings. Sometimes, though, when my mother was asleep or in her trance, I slipped out to find My Rae in the dining room. I'd throw my arms around her furtively and bury my head in her big, sheltering bosom, as I knew I mustn't do in my mother's presence. "I know, Lilly, I know," My Rae said, and pressed her lips to my forehead before I broke away and ran back to my mother.

At the end of the summer, my aunt bought some forest green worsted and paid a dollar to the cutter at Bartleman's, her shop, to snip out the pattern for two dresses. For weeks she stayed late at work. "Who needs her to ride home with me on the bus," my mother grumbled.

On the first morning of the High Holidays, before it was time to go to the synagogue, My Rae called me into the dining room. She was wearing a beautiful new dress, with gold disks running all the way down the front, and she held up its miniature, an exact copy, and buttoned me
into it with nimble fingers. "For Rosh Hashanah." She turned me round and round to examine her handiwork. "
Oy vee shayn,
how beautiful!" she exclaimed. "Who's the love of Rae's life?" she sang as she puffed my sleeves and fiddled with my collar.

I looked down at myself. I adored the Robin Hood color, the big gold buttons that were just a little smaller than hers, the way we matched. "Who's the love of Lilly's life?" I sang back, making sure to keep my voice low so my mother wouldn't hear.

The next week, I sat again with my mother and aunt in the cramped upstairs hall of the Breed Street Synagogue while the men downstairs droned their Yom Kippur pleas to Yahweh, and the women above who could read Hebrew bent over their prayer books and chorused along with them. When it was time to say
yizkor,
the memorial prayer for the dead, we kids were superstitiously ushered out. "Hurry, go," the mothers said, shooing us, because only those whose loved ones had died said
yizkor
or even remained in a room where it was being said. I hurried off, as superstitious as the grownups. I sat on the concrete steps, watching some girls play a quarreling game of hopscotch in front of the synagogue, until, twenty minutes or so later, a big kid came out and called to his little brothers down the street, "Hey, get back here, I think they're finished."