Naked in the Promised Land (6 page)

***

Every night as I'm trying to fall asleep I comfort myself with happy fantasies. Lights! Camera! Action! and I, dressed in star-spangled leotards and a star-spangled top hat, break into my whirling, twirling, high-kicking, splits-in-the-air tap dancing routine. Fred Astaire and Danny Kaye dance beside me, beaming broadly at their little co-star's brilliance.

But those child star images give way after a while to images from my comic books. Sometimes I'm clad in red tights, like Mary Marvel, sometimes in blue tights, like Supergirl. Lilly the Kid, that's who I am. Always I fly through the air with a muscled mighty man on one side of me and a muscled mighty boy on the other. I name our missions, and they follow. We grab up into the air the evil men with big lips and Homburg hats, and we deposit them behind jail bars before they can do more harm to women and children. We rescue emaciated and terrified victims, like those I've seen in the movie newsreels, who are only seconds away from their death in concentration camp ovens.

My mother doesn't know for a long time that I am Lilly the Kid, the real brain behind these great deeds that fill the movie newsreels and the Yiddish papers. And then I tell her. Mighty Man and Mighty Boy stand at my side and confirm what I say.

"I'm so proud of my big girl," she tells me every night in my fantasy before I drop off to sleep.

A half-dozen kids from my fourth-grade class stood in a knot on the playground, entranced by the story that Melvin Kaplan and his little sister were telling: "She was walking down the street all naked. Her titties and everything was showing." A couple of them tittered, the rest opened wide eyes. "Our dad saw her. It was like six o'clock in the morning." Melvin and his sister raced each other to tell it. "And then somebody calls an ambulance and says, 'There's a naked lady walking on the street,' and they came to take her away. My dad says they put her in a place for crazy people."

Now they all giggled, and I could hear my heart pounding as though some animal were trying to break out of it.

"And you know what else?" the sister shrieked. "She was sucking on her own titties when the ambulance came. On her own titties!" she yelled, outdoing her brother, relishing the detail.

The girls from my class let out sounds of disgust; a boy whooped.

It was Arthur Grossman's mother they were talking about. Arthur, a boy with curly black hair and large black eyes who looked so much like me that he could have been my brother. He wasn't in school the rest of that week, and when he returned the following Monday, he had a sheepish look, as though he'd done something wrong. On the playground he wandered around by himself, pretending to examine ant trails or little pebbles. I watched him. I wanted to say something to him, but I didn't know what words to use.

The other kids didn't leave him alone for long. "Hey, Arthur, how's your mom?" Sandra Schulman asked with a high-watt smile when we filed out for lunch. He ducked his head and moved off.

In class I couldn't stop watching him. I knew that if he'd been there with his mother that morning, he would have thrown a coat over her and led her by the hand back to their house and closed the door and hidden her from the eyes of the neighbors who told their kids about her shame. But he must have been sleeping the morning it happened. Probably he didn't even know she'd left the house. Probably the ambulance sirens woke him up.

A few weeks later he was absent again, and he never came back to school. Melvin Kaplan and his little sister said that Arthur's father couldn't take care of him, so he had to go live at the Vista Del Mar Home, which was for kids who didn't have any parents. Would I be sent to the Vista Del Mar Home someday?

But sometimes my mother seemed all right. She'd be with me and talk to me as though nothing terrible had ever been wrong, and I'd almost forget how sick she'd been. Sometimes she'd even talk about her family in Europe. We'd be in a restaurant maybe; I'd fiddle with my milkshake straw or try to act casual in some other way, but I'd hold my breath to listen. I yearned to know something—anything—about where I came from, though I never dared ask lest my questions trigger another bad episode.

"When I was ten years old," she reminisced on my own tenth birthday in 1950, when she took me to the Famous Restaurant on Brooklyn
Avenue, "I already worked in seven different jobs." She enumerated them on her fingers. First, she helped out in her
mameh's
tiny grocery store; then she sold onions and cabbages in the shtetl market; then she was a maid for a rich family in Prael; then she took care of children for a family in Dvinsk, the city fifty miles away; then she untangled balls of wool in a Dvinsk shop where they wove cloth; then she was a milliner's apprentice; then she was a tailor's apprentice.

"All those different jobs I had by the time I was ten years old. Then when I knew what I needed to know, I went to work by a tailor as a regular seamstress." She held her teacup with delicacy, her pinkie finger raised like some fine lady's in the movies, and sipped. "So that's what I did in my life until I was eighteen and came to America," she sighed.

"But why did your parents let you go away to work when you weren't even ten?" I knew she'd never
ever
let me go away from her.

"We had no food. If I lived somewhere else, the people there had to feed me. If I lived at home, my
tateh
and
mameh
had to feed me, and they had plenty other mouths to feed without me," my mother said without rancor. "At home, most of the time we got only black bread and potatoes to eat, and maybe a few carrots or cauliflower. Maybe, if we were lucky, on Friday night everybody got a little piece of fish or some meat in a tablespoon."

It had never occurred to me that anyone could be that poor. Though we lived in an ugly furnished room, I always had food, and here we were in the Famous Restaurant and I'd just filled my belly almost to bursting with lamb chops and potato latkes and chocolate cake.

One evening in a Brooklyn Avenue delicatessen she'd ordered a plate of chopped herring for herself. That was when she talked about Hirschel, whose name I'd heard before only through her shrieks. "I was maybe nine years old," my mother said now, "so that means Hirschel was a year old, and my
mameh
gave me a few kopeks and told me go to the market and buy a herring." Enchanted now, I saw my mother as a little girl, a nine-year-old with big dark eyes and curly black hair. "I always carried Hirschel around with me in my hands when I was at home because he was the baby, and my
mameh
was busy with everything else she had to do and couldn't watch him all the time. He was so darling, with
his round little head and his little hands with dimples on them." We laughed together at this sweet vision, as though he, a baby still, were happily cooing before our eyes, and I adored them both, my mother, who was a child, and my uncle, the baby, whom I would never see at any age. "We loved each other like I was the one who was the
mameh,
" my mother said.

"So I go to the market and I'm carrying Hirschel, and I buy a herring just like my
mameh
told me, and the lady wraps it in a little piece of paper. I carry Hirschel, but I'm so hungry that I can't stand it no more. With my teeth I unwrap the piece of paper, and I just lick at the herring. It's so good, just to have at least a little bit of the salty taste. I lick and lick—and Hirschel falls out of my hands. Right away I got worried, because he was crying till his little face was red like fire. When I get home with him and the herring, he's still crying, and I'm crying too. We're both crying our heads off, and it's black in front of my eyes. I have to tell my
mameh
what happened, but she didn't say much because it didn't look like he was hurt bad, only a few scratches. Except that when he started walking, he had a big limp. And my
mameh
said it was because of me, that I dropped him because I was busy licking the herring and I was the one who made him a cripple." I leaned my head against her bare arm and stroked her fingers that rested on the table. So that was why it was always his name that she cried. If I'd been her
mameh,
I'd never have said those things to hurt her.

When my mother wasn't sick, it was sometimes hard to believe that there would be crazy times again. She bought a little radio, a brown plastic box, and on Friday nights we cuddled on her bed, my leg draped over hers, and we listened together to Dorothy Collins or Snooky Lanson or Gisele MacKenzie sing the romantic songs she loved on "The Lucky Strike Hit Parade." Later I rose on my knees in the bed and sang them again for her, or sometimes I hopped down and did a tapless tap dance or a wildly acrobatic ballet to accompany my singing. "Again" was her favorite. I was pretty sure she was thinking of my father when she heard it, but it didn't really matter because she was looking at me and listening to me and he was thousands of miles away. I pirouetted around
as I sang, and my mother moved her lips along with me, bobbing her head in agreement at the important phrases. "Again, this couldn't happen again," we sang. "This is that once in a lifetime. This is that thrill dee-vine."

"I'm not a good mother to you," I heard her say one night after she turned the lights out and I lay in my own bed, waiting for sleep, the words of songs still going through my head.

"Don't say that!" I scolded in the dark. "You're the best mommy in the world."

"I don't know why I get so crazy sometimes," she sighed. "I can't help it."

For a while, Rae and Mr. Bergman would come to take us for a Sunday drive to Ocean Park Beach, but he didn't like it when my mother said my aunt was a
choleryeh,
and finally he wagged his finger at her and told her that in the future she'd have to ride the streetcar if she wanted to go to the beach. But he was really a kind man, and when it came right down to it, he'd do anything my aunt wanted. He'd drive her across town to East L.A. so she could bring us some dish she'd made, and no matter how mad he was at my mother, he'd always slip her five dollars and instruct her, "Buy something nice for
Lilileh,
" little Lilly, as he called me. "She's a good girl. Good as gold," he said.

"Good as gold." My aunt bobbed her head, defending me now and against all future incidents and slipping a dollar bill into my own pocket before she left. "What else do I still work for?" she said when I once tried to give it back because I was afraid my mother wouldn't like it.

But most weeks Rae was a ghostly memory. She lived far away, on the other side of town, and I was alone with a sick mother. I could tell by looking at my mother's face when a bad time was coming: there would be a deep flush on her cheeks and neck and chest, and her mouth would change. She'd keep swallowing her lips, or she'd spit out an imaginary speck that would not be gone from her tongue. Her eyes would change too. Someone else looked out from them, a person who barely saw me, not even when I stood in her line of sight to distract her attention from the terrors in her head.

"I did a bad thing!" she howled, and I knew—I had figured it out now—that it wasn't just because she'd dropped her baby brother. It was also because she'd been busy with Moishe when she should have been finding a way to rescue her family. "God punishes me," she wept. She beat her head, her chest.

"Mommy, stop it, stop it, you'll hurt yourself!" I groped for her banging hands. "You have to be all right—what will I do if they take you away?" I cried, hunting for the words that would make her stop.

Something always triggered the spells; often it was a May Company bag. The women at Schneiderman's, her shop, brought their work dresses with them and changed from their street clothes. One woman, a Hungarian whose three brothers had been killed by the Nazis, carried her work dress in an old May Company bag, and that created an excruciating dilemma for my mother. If she carried her own work dress in a May Company bag it would mean that, like the Hungarian woman, she didn't have a brother anymore. But maybe her own brother hadn't been killed. Nobody knew for sure that he had. No one knew anything except that the Jews who were in Prael the summer of 1941 were all murdered. But maybe Hirschel wasn't in Prael that summer, or maybe he escaped and hid somewhere. Maybe he was a displaced person now and would show up in America soon.

But if she carried her work dress in the May Company bag, she was "making" him be dead. It didn't mean that! It did mean that! She forced herself to shop at the May Company, fighting her superstitions. The bags sat in a folded pastel green heap on the dresser and she eyed them, tormented. She put her work dress in a May Company bag with trembling hands, she took it out, she put it in again, she took it out again.

Through the whole ordeal, no matter how long the spell lasted or how bad it was, she got up at six-thirty and was out the door by seven. She almost never missed a day of work. How she controlled herself, how she steadied her hands enough to drape dresses on a mannequin so that she could support us, I can't imagine.

From the Malabar Public Library I borrowed "adult section" books. "They're for my mother," I swore to the blue-haired librarian who
wanted to foist
The Secret Garden
and the Nancy Drew books on me when I brought up to her desk for a check-out stamp
Personality Maladjustment and Mental Hygiene, You and Psychiatry, Keeping a Sound Mind.

I didn't understand most of what I read, but, sitting on my bed or on the milk crate that Fanny kept as a chair on the front porch, I kept reading as though it were a matter of life and death. On the next page might be the simple answer, and I'd learn what to say or do to help my mother. Someone had to do something. Who else was there but me?

I grew up in the shadow of my mother's tragedy.

And, for a while, I caught her sickness. It didn't take the same form; it wasn't full-blown, but the germs were there.

"Good night, Mommy," I said every night from my bed to hers.

"Good night, Lilly."

"Sleep tight, Mommy," I said.

"You too. Sleep tight."

"See you in the morning, Mommy."