Naked in the Promised Land (44 page)

We'd used his poems in our book, but it hadn't been easy to find other good Chicano writers. If he was right, what a treasure a textbook of Chicano literature would be to the Chicano Studies classes that were being established now at many colleges. There wasn't yet a single such book.

"We could do a collection of their work!" I exclaimed, more excited than I'd been about anything in a long time. "Let's you and I do it together. What do you think?"

He laughed. "That there are two crazy gypsies in this room if you believe we can get it published." But he agreed to do the book with me.

Two or three weeks later, as we were dressing for work, I told Binky about it. I'd been afraid to tell her earlier. "I have an idea for another book." I tried to make it sound offhand. "It'll be an anthology of Chicano literature.
From the Barrio,
we're calling it."

"What a great idea! Let's do it." Binky grinned now.

I busied myself putting on my nylons, fastening my garter belt. "I think it's important that I do it with someone ... with a Chicano ... with Omar Salinas." I stumbled over the words, but I had to say it all. I didn't dare look at her; I didn't have to. I could feel her shock, then her indignation.

"While you do that, what am I going to do?" she finally asked, her voice low and cold. Half naked still, I hurried my skirt on, my blouse, my jacket. "What am I supposed to do in this hellhole I came to because of you—because of us?" she shouted now.

"I don't know," I said, my head bent over jacket buttons. But I did
know that I couldn't do
From the Barrio
with her—I needed to do it with Omar, who could teach me the things I needed to know about his culture. But there was more that I didn't want to have to say: I needed to be free to develop my work in every way. How could that happen if we always had to work in tandem?

"You don't know? Well, I don't know either," she said tonelessly.

"Why can't you do your own book?" I snapped at her as I grabbed my briefcase.

"What am I doing here"—she stood on the threshold and snapped back—"teaching in a school I hate? I left Marshall High to come here." Then she slammed the door behind me so hard, I could feel the vibrations on the wooden stairs as I descended.

I drove a few blocks and then had to pull over because I'd narrowly missed a kid on a bicycle. I just sat in the parked car near an open field, my forehead against the steering wheel. I'd once said she was my sun; she'd said she hadn't lived before she met me.

That evening Binky was waiting for me at the door, dressed as she used to when she taught at Marshall. I couldn't remember when I'd last seen her look so lovely. "If you want to do books, fine, you can do them in L.A. Look, I've really thought about it." She was almost cheery. "I'll get my teaching job back at Marshall, and you can work on your projects. You said you wanted to write a book on the Harlem Renaissance. Do it. Do the book with Omar too. Only I want to go back to L.A."

So did I. Of course. Though I liked teaching, loved getting young people to open up to ideas, I hated being the only woman professor in a department of thirty-one dark-suited men. I hated having to hide my woman lover. I hated having to live in a town so alien to my urban Jewishness. "But what about money?"

"It's my turn to support us. I'm offering you the leisure to write." She looked soft and loving now. "Write for both of us," she said. It had been so long since she'd looked at me that way. "Let's not lose the wonderful things we have. I came with you three years ago, now come with me."

***

We drove to Los Angeles at Easter break to look for a house. Perhaps because it was springtime, the San Joaquin Valley, which had always seemed so deadly dull to me, was suddenly vibrant with fertile swaths of rich green fields, trees lush with fragrant pink and white blossoms, and big, open sky with rolling clouds. (
How beautiful,
I thought, with a quick prick of regret that this would be my last spring in the valley.
How had I not noticed before?)
We'd buy a house in L.A. instead of renting, we decided, because home ownership would be a symbol of the permanence of our love. We'd figured the finances and we could do it: I'd saved about five thousand dollars from my salary, which would be enough for a down payment, and the mortgage we'd pay with Binky's salary. "We'll find a place with an office. When I leave for work every morning you can go in there to write, and it'll be like having a regular job." Binky gripped the wheel and kept her eyes on the road as she recited the plans.

But what if I couldn't do it? What if I gave up my job and then found I couldn't write? I'd have nothing.

Suddenly the image of what I needed loomed over my head like the bubble in a cartoon: "Okay, we'll live in L.A., I'll write. But I also want to have a baby now" came out of my mouth. Binky laughed as though I'd told a joke. "I mean it. I'll write, but I want to get pregnant too. I'll be thirty years old this summer. If I don't do it now, when will I ever do it?"

She glanced at me and saw I meant it. "What are you talking about?" she cried. "You never said that before—that you wanted a baby."

I'd never been sure before, but now the logic and the imperative of it were absolutely clear. Of course I had to have a child. I was a remnant, all that was left of my mother's family. I remembered an image from a Steinbeck novel, about a turtle that struggles through the hazards of field and highway and barely makes it to the other side. Somewhere along its journey, an oat seed lodges in its shell, and on the other side the seed falls out and into the earth.
My mother is the turtle and I am the seed, and I've got to come to fruition. This gift of leisure that Binky wants to give me comes at just the right time. I must have a baby.

"You'll make a wonderful other mother," I said, sure of it all now. "Kids love you and you love them. A baby is what we really need in our lives," I implored.

"The kids that I love go home after a couple of hours." Binky took her eyes from the road to stare at me as though she suspected my sanity. "How do you plan to get pregnant?" She laughed hollowly.

I hadn't thought that far ahead. "There are choices," I said. "We could find some gay guy ... or I could go to a doctor for artificial insemination."

She seemed to consider it for a long while. I watched her as we drove. Her expression was mummy-rigid. "No," she said finally. "This is crazy. One reason I'm a lesbian is that I never wanted to have children."

"But I'll be the one to have the child. Binky, please," I implored again. "We'll be a family that way—forever."

She drove for at least half an hour more before she shook her head and sighed, then said in a whisper I could barely hear, "Give me a few days to think about it."

W
E FOUND THE HOUSE
and the feminist movement on the same day.

In the lollipop-red Mercedes of Dottie Dorey, the real estate agent, we rode up and down the hills of Laurel Canyon, a funky enclave of artists and struggling actors. Before there were jets to whisk the rich off to Rio or the Riviera for a week, the Canyon was where the silent film stars built twenty-room vacation cottages, Dottie Dorey said, and she pointed out the ruins of dirty pink or moldy gray mansions still visible behind overgrown masses of trees. In between such bits of history, she chatted about her girlfriend in New York, a set designer, who was coming to Los Angeles to live with her.

"That must make you happy," I said.

"Oh, positively gay." She grinned, and with the uttered secret word we relaxed into sociability. "We'll have you to dinner as soon as Betty gets here. You'll like our crowd," she said, and turned her head half-circle to wink at me in the back seat. How good it felt to be back in civilization again. In Fresno we'd been so constricted, we'd been in hiding—the only lesbians in town. But here, in Los Angeles, we could breathe. Binky and I would have friends together. We'd make a real life.

The house Dotty showed us on Lookout Mountain Drive had four rooms rather than twenty, and one of them looked makeshift and bohemian, protruding at an odd angle as though it just growed, like Topsy. From its big window you had a view of the backyard, which was thick with blossoming trees as pretty as a stage set, but they were real—fragrant citrus flowers, I discovered when I stepped out. And beyond the trees was a lopsided little one-room cottage that would be mine, a room of my own where I could go every day to write. It was only the third house we'd looked at, but after a ten-minute tour Binky and I huddled together in a corner of the bedroom for a few quivering seconds. We emerged ready to make our bid—$37,000. "I'm coming back to Los Angeles to live!" I told my delighted mother that evening when we arrived to spend the night.

As though the house weren't enough to set me and Binky reeling, after my mother and Albert went to bed and Binky to her shower, I lounged on the Murphy bed and flipped through the magazine we'd brought from Fresno. "Women's Lib: The War on 'Sexism'" was the title of the cover article. I'd been hearing words like
women's liberation
and
sexism
over the past year or two, but somehow I'd paid them little mind—until I saw them in that March 1970
Newsweek.
Now I was riveted. Here was my story, not in exact detail but the gist of it: Whatever had angered me about men, about women's place in the world, had angered other women too, had made them unhappy with their lot and suspicious that the fault lay not with them but with forces beyond them. So it wasn't just my peculiar personal history, I realized. Thousands of other women were feeling the very same thing—millions, maybe. I read the long article again, caught up totally in the heady rhetoric of the feminists whom the reporter had interviewed. I felt transported—like the night I first stepped inside the Open Door. "Binky, you've got to read this! Hurry," I said, laughing and pounding on the bathroom door. "We're missing the revolution!"

Driving north on 99 after Easter break I felt positively wired with plans: I'd finish the semester and we'd move to Los Angeles, and I'd set up shop in the cottage in back of our new house. First I'd finish my work on
From the Barrio
and then I'd write—about women authors, women characters ... everything about women. Had anyone ever done it before? I'd dedicate my life to it—to that and to the family Binky and I would make. She hadn't returned to the subject of the baby yet, but I'd told her, right after we'd signed the papers Dottie had given us, about
how my mother was the turtle and I was the single oat seed that had managed to plant itself on this side of the road. Binky nodded slowly, as if she were really listening. I'd write while I was pregnant and while the child was growing up too. What better job for a mother, to be able to stay home and still be productive?

I was keen to announce my departure to Gene, the department chairman. "I'm leaving," I would say, just like that. Had anyone but my students even noticed I'd been there? Had the tenured faculty even bothered to look at my great teaching evaluations? I piled up grievances—not a word of congratulations from the department when Binky's and my book came out. "And in case you haven't noticed," I'd say, "seventy percent of our majors are female, and you won't have a single woman professor in the department when I leave."

Yet my feelings weren't quite so simple. I thought of Gene's rugged face that showed the moral blows he'd suffered at the hands of Falk and his henchmen—three radical professors fired, an attempt to hire another young man rebuffed because he was a political activist. The other men in the department had been egging Gene on, as though not only academic freedom was at stake—as though it were a monumental battle between the forces of good and evil, and I knew that he, a World War II combat veteran, would continue to fight to the death. "Our warrior," Earl Lyon, a crusty professor of about seventy, had called Gene in a department meeting, and the others had nodded solemnly or grunted their agreement. They were a tribe of warriors, young and old. And Gene stood there, slim-hipped and handsome, a warrior king, looking at that instant, there in the meeting room with the streaked blackboard behind him, as though he envisioned himself leaping from the pages of the
Beowulf
text he taught and set to slay the Grendel monsters with his fists. I felt bad about the fired professors, bad about him. Yet what had the overblown warrior tactics of the department to do with me? If I were in his place, I'd try to find a subtler way, I thought. How would a woman do it?

The day I returned from Easter break, I found a message from Gene in my department mailbox, asking me to come by at eleven. How had he known I wanted to see him? In the mild early spring sunshine, on the
way from my Victorian seminar to his office, I looked around the campus as though I were seeing the Spanish red tile roofs and the freshly leafed-out trees that shadowed them for the last time. I had only six weeks to go before I'd retreat to my little cottage once and for all. That was what I wanted, but now that I knew it was going to happen, the thought of it seemed bittersweet. I wouldn't be a college professor anymore.

"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.