14

How I Became a Burlesque Queen

WHEN I WROTE TO MY MOTHER and aunt near the end of my sophomore year to say I was going to stay in San Francisco until I graduated, Rae wrote back:

 

I CANT SEND YOU MONY NO MOR TIL YOU COM BAK TO LA LIK YOU SED. WHY YOU DONT GET A DIVORS LIK YOU SED. WHY YOU WANT TO RUON YOUR LIF. TAK CAR ON YOUR HELT. YOUR HELT IS VERY INPORTANT.

 

If my aunt stopped sending me money, how would we live? I might get summer work as a salesgirl or a waitress, but what would I do when school started again?

“I got a job!” D’Or announced when she returned to the apartment one afternoon while I was studying for finals. “I start tomorrow.” She’d be going from house to house to take the census. For one month.

I couldn’t go back to Big Al’s Hotsy Totsy Club because I’d quit without notice. Anyway, when school started again, I’d hate to give up all those hours every week to serving drinks and taking phony bubble baths when I needed the time to study. I was changing my major to English, and I had to make up the literature classes I’d missed as a psych major. I’d decided I really wanted to be a writer, and because I knew that writers didn’t always make a living, I would get a Ph.D. and become an English professor too. That way I’d be sure to have a salary, and I’d be teaching the works of other writers that I loved.

But I couldn’t think too much about long-range plans now; I had to think about how D’Or and I would get by when the San Francisco census was done.

 

“Girls wanted 21–28 for burlesque chorus. Some dancing. $55/wk.” The ad was in the HELP WANTED—WOMEN section of the San Francisco Examiner. Why shouldn’t I? Here, in San Francisco, away from my mother and Rae, why shouldn’t I use whatever I could if it would get me where I needed to go? Why shouldn’t I turn to coin whatever gifts I had to make up for the patrimony I would never have?

I’d see what a burlesque chorus did before I applied for the job, I decided. The President Follies was a faded old theater palace on McAllister Street, with big black letters on a cracked marquis that announced: TWO WEEKS ONLY THE FAN-TASTIC MISS BRANDY DEVINE. The redheaded woman in the booth looked suspicious. “Just for you?” Her orange lips pursed. She hesitated, then took my money and shoved a ticket at me.

In the chorus were about a dozen girls, and each time they came out on the stage they wore a different costume—shocking-pink harem pants with see-through bras; satiny black Apache-dancer dresses with a slit all the way to the bellybutton; pleated schoolgirl skirts so short that white panties winked at the slightest move; and, for the finale, pastel muslin gowns, debutante style, that broke away with one brisk pull. No matter what they were wearing, the point was to shed one piece of clothing after another. From my seat at the back of the big, musty-smelling theater I could observe the sparse audience—mostly middle-aged men alone; a couple of clusters of frat boy types; a few opposite-sex couples.

About the time the schoolgirls were wiggling out of their middy blouses, a stoop-shouldered man in a hat he never took off plunked himself down across the aisle from me and opened a newspaper on his lap. The schoolgirls shook their butts at the audience in a mock exercise until the little pleated skirts dropped to the floor. I could hear the man’s newspaper rustling in a steady rhythm, and I fought the impulse to gag, to bolt. No, I wouldn’t let him scare me off. Now the schoolgirls kicked high in time to drum rolls, pulled at the breakaway white panties, which came off in their hands, and, finally, faced the audience, bumping-and-grinding Lolitas, twirling panties in an arc above their heads, clad now only in G-strings and pasties that twinkled in the footlights. “Umff,” the man softly cried.

But from the stage, with the footlights shining up at you, you probably couldn’t see past the first rows. You’d just do your thing and you wouldn’t have to think about who was in the audience. You’d be onstage for a total of only twenty or twenty-five minutes during the whole show, and the rest of the time you could be sitting in the dressing room, doing your homework, reading Shelley and George Eliot and Theodore Dreiser.

There were other acts at the President Follies as well. There was a comic, Buddy LaRue, with a bulbous bright red nose, who honked on a horn in the pocket of his baggy clown pants after the punch line of each fatuous sex joke. And there were three or four “regular features” with names like Boston’s Blond Bombshell Miss Bathsheba, the Sexy Sultry Satana, and the Electrifying Electra (who, with a dexterous toe, triggered some motor in the drum on which she did her gyrations, causing a gush of wind to send her long, black hair flying straight up in the air). All these acts led up to the two-week star, “the Fan-tastic Miss Brandy Devine,” who had a white-blond Veronica Lake hairdo and danced around with a huge fan. Every time she opened it, another piece of clothing would drift to the floor, then she’d close it again so the audience could have a look at what she was exposing now. Miss Devine had long legs and well-formed buttocks, but her breasts and hips were boyishly flat. How much did she make? I wondered. More than fifty-five dollars a week, I was certain. And she had to come out onstage only once. I knew I couldn’t dance like her—in fact, I couldn’t dance at all—but didn’t I have a better body? And wasn’t that the main point?

 

“You’ll go in, ask for the manager, say you’re my agent.” I’d thought it all through. “Tell him that I’ve worked everywhere—New York, Chicago, L.A. How’ll he know I didn’t? Tell him you can bring me to town for three weeks at, say, $500 a week. Look, you’ll show him my magazine pictures. The King cover looks as if I do a sword act. We’ll get me a sword I can dance around with. And there’s one where I look like a belly dancer.”

“It’s sordid.” D’Or grimaced over a carton of chop suey that I’d brought back for our dinner.

“Then how will we live?” I asked, trying hard to be patient. Her census job would be over at the end of the week. She balanced a single bean sprout between her wooden chopsticks and didn’t answer. “Hey, what the hell happened to the iconoclastic, classless, self-defined original?” I snorted.

“What?” D’Or asked.

Now I was too upset to eat. I put my cardboard container down on the red table and went to stand at the front window and stare at the city beneath us. Didn’t she care about us? I would rather die than leave her and go back to Los Angeles, but how could I be a student at Berkeley and make enough money to stay with her? Why the hell couldn’t she get real work and take care of us until I graduated? No. D’Or can’t do what she can’t do, I lectured myself. It’s cruel to demand it.

That night, as she held her hands under the bathtub jet, scrubbing them with Lava until little drops of blood oozed from a palm, I told her, “I know how we’ll do it. Listen. When I’ve finished as the main feature at $500 a week, you’ll go in and tell them I want to stay in San Francisco and that I’m willing to take half the pay to be one of their regular features. If they hire me permanently at $250 a week, we’ll be getting about five times what the chorus girls make, and I’ll have loads of study time between my acts. There’s no other solution. Let’s work on this together,” I begged.

“Okay . . . okay,” she finally said, though her lip was raised in disgust.

But in the morning she was in high spirits. “We’ll do it right,” D’Or declared. My name would be Mink Frost, we decided together over our coffee, and my style would be cool and sophisticated. The Most Beautiful Body in Burlesque, my tag would be. I’d wear the rhinestone necklace and earrings I still had from the Simone days, and we’d find some fake fur that we could cut up into a mink stole. I’d do a classy under-a-streetlamp act. With my first paycheck, we’d get a dressmaker to cut me a fake-mink bikini that I’d wear under my gowns. We were laughing now. Inventing Mink Frost. It was an adventure. “Nothing sordid,” we recited together in punchy fun. I remembered Marlene Dietrich images—seductively cold and commanding, sophisticated, mysterious. It would be a role no harder for me to play than that of Blanche DuBois or Anna Christie. We hurried to a Thrifty Drug six blocks away and bought some cans of silver and gold spray. Then, on the dining room floor, we laid out a tight, white backless dress I’d once had made with my modeling money, and—craftswomen, businesswomen—we squirted the canned glitter all over it. My first costume. It looked pretty good by the time we finished.

 

“In my college briefcase, she carried my girlie magazine pictures.”

 

 

The next day we decked D’Or out—my high heels, a French beret I used to pose in, her black trenchcoat. We studied the effect together in the long bathroom mirror, delighted at how much like a real agent she looked. In my college briefcase, she carried my girlie magazine pictures.

She came back in an hour, breezing through the door, beaming with accomplishment. “I got you two weeks at $250 a week.” She laughed. “I thought $500 sounded like a lot, so I didn’t even ask, but he went for the $250 easily. Now do it with class,” she admonished me once again. “I saw some peroxided blonde on the stage, bumping her pelvis on the curtain as if she was having sex with it. Disgusting.”

…

It happens as I hoped. After my two weeks as the main feature, D’Or goes back to Mr. Chelton, the manager, and says I’ll stay on at half the pay, $125 a week. He thinks he’s getting a bargain. “Be a vamp, not a tramp,” D’Or instructs me for the hundredth time.

I work seven days a week—two shows on Monday through Friday evening, four on Saturday, three on Sunday—seventeen altogether. I do my act once each show, and I also appear in a half-time chorus number and the finale. The rest of the time I can sit in the dressing room and read novels and poetry. I don’t say much to the other girls, and they probably think I’m very odd. “How come you’re reading all the time?” Electra asks.

“I dunno. I just like it,” I say. How can I tell them that I’m a college student? Better to say nothing.

One day Bathsheba presents a quandary to us. She can buy this fantastic Chevy convertible—white leather upholstery, low mileage, practically brand new. The guy who lives next door to her will let her have it for five hundred bucks. “A real bargain,” she sighs and picks absent-mindedly at the tomato-red polish on her nails.

“So get it,” the new feature, Gilda the Golden Goddess, tells her, slipping into her sequined gold gown.

“I don’t have five hundred bucks,” says Bathsheba, brooding, as she stirs herself to take off her street clothes. “But there’s this guy who’s been coming around to the stage door all week. You probably seen him—wears a nice suit and tie and everything. He says he’ll give me the money if I go with him just one time.”

“Well, then what’s the problem?” Satana asks, zipping the black satin she’ll unzip onstage in a few minutes.

Aren’t they afraid of getting pregnant? How do you even find someone who’ll do an abortion? My mother had two abortions. And look how she ended up.

“I never did that before,” Bathsheba says and stares down at the floor.

I put my book down on the dressing table and look at Bathsheba. Don’t do it, is what I want to say, but she’s already told us that on the eighty-five dollars a week she gets, she’d never be able to buy a convertible, and she’d die for one.

Three days later Bathsheba says she got the pink slip on the car.

…

One night on my dressing room table there’s a vase holding a dozen yellow roses. “Dear Mink,” the note says, “If you will have dinner with me at the Mark Hopkins, I guarantee you will not regret it. Your admirer, John D.” There’s a telephone number at the bottom. Don’t the patrons understand that Mink Frost is a stage illusion, that I’m an actress and not the under-a-street-lamp vamp they see onstage? I’m repelled. I lift the note by a corner and drop it in the dressing room wastebasket. The yellow roses I give to Greta, a former stripper who choreographs the chorus numbers and loves flowers. Another night I’m getting into my street clothes after the last show, and Greta comes to say there’s a man waiting for me at the stage door. By now I’m a master of disguise. I wipe off my makeup, the scarf I wear around my neck becomes my babushka, I rub a bit of powder on my black coat to make it look soiled. Mink Frost has disappeared. I’m the cleaning lady. That’s the way I leave the theater from that night on.

But none of this is really scary, not the way it was when I was a model four years earlier, because I’m getting a college degree now. I know my life at the President Follies is only temporary . . . that, really, I’m safe.

 

D’Or’s washing-searching-counting-collecting got worse instead of better. “If you loved me more you’d stop that shit,” I yelled at her one day in the spring of my junior year. “I’m working myself to death—fifteen units a semester at Berkeley, seven days a week at the President Follies, and I don’t ask you to do a goddam thing but get over your sickness!” Sometimes I daydreamed a D’Or who was perfectly well. “You rescued me from dragons and devils,” she’d exclaim in the fantasy in which I became Mary Marvel again. “You brought me so much happiness that I don’t need to do those things now.” Then I’d hear the gush of water in the bathtub, where she always washed her hands because it made a stronger stream than the little faucet on the sink did.

We hardly ever made love anymore. Instead we fought, a lot, about anything.

One Sunday, before the three o’clock matinee at the President, we went to brunch at a place on Powell Street. Then, despite a San Francisco drizzle, we strolled arm-in-arm and stopped to press our noses on the shop windows around Union Square, and I felt lighthearted, being away from the manacle of the dressing room for a few precious hours. In a toy shop window was a stuffed bear that D’Or cooed over in a child’s voice: “Oh, oh, just like the one I wanted when I was a little girl! They’d never buy it for me.”

Monday, after classes, I skipped the usual quick dinner I got at the Berkeley cafeteria before hopping the buses that would take me to the President in time for the seven o’clock show. I headed straight to Union Square. But the teddy bear was gone from the window.

“They’re on order,” the salesgirl said. “Try us in ten days.”

I traipsed through the streets, a knight seeking a treasure for my lady love, until at last, thirty minutes before I absolutely had to get into my costume, I found it. Not a little bear like the one in the window, but a huge bear, a beautiful bear, with rich brown fur and a green satin ribbon and two tinkly little silver bells around its neck, a bear I too would have lusted after when I was a kid. The cashier put it in a big pink box with a white bow. Then I balanced the box in one hand, my briefcase stuffed with books and homework in the other, and dashed down Geary to the President. I felt silly but happy too, and as Mink Frost bumped and grinded and peeled off layers under the footlights, I saw myself handing D’Or the healing gift.

After the second show I rebalanced my load and hurried through the dark streets to hop the bus that took me down Market and then the cable car that took me up Powell. At Jones I jumped off and looked up at our window the way I used to when I first came to San Francisco to be with D’Or. The old feelings I’d almost forgotten came back with a wild rush. She’s up there, my beloved, I told myself now, and soon I’ll be holding her in my arms and kissing her. ‘You remembered!“ she’ll exclaim, her eyes overflowing with love.

I’ve been too hard on her, I thought, shamed now by my ongoing pettiness. If I can’t be sympathetic to her problems, who in the whole world can?

I bounded up the three flights feeling just a bit foolish. I was carrying a teddy bear to a thirty-five-year-old woman. Yet, why shouldn’t we do such things for each other? What did years matter between lovers? Lovers could do anything—they could take away the hurts of childhood. Here you are, little girl, I’d whisper as I gave her the present.

She did say “You remembered!” when she opened the pink box, and then she put the gift down and hugged me. But I’d seen something fleeting in her eyes when she’d pushed the tissue paper aside and glimpsed the fur. What?

“Well,” I laughed. “Do you really like it?”

“Yes,” she exclaimed, then her lips pursed analytically. “I love it, because it came from you . . . but . . . it’s not exactly . . . Do you really want me to say it?” Her voice was little-girl high.

“Yes. What?” She paused for a long time, as though considering whether to come out with it. “What?” I asked, impatient now.

“It’s not . . . Oh,” she squeaked, “it’s not like the one I wanted when I was a kid. The one I always wanted was a little panda bear—they’re black and white, just like the one in the Union Square window. They’re small and you can cuddle them,” she said wistfully.

I tore the brown thing from her arms. “Forget it!” What would I do with the absurd object? “It was dumb of me,” I snarled. I hid my childish grief in anger; then the anger became more real than grief, and my fingers itched to pull the bear’s head off, to rip the phony fur to pieces. I hated it!

“No, no. I love this bear. Really,” D’Or cried.

And I hated that grating little-girl voice! She tried to retrieve the stuffed animal from my arms, and I wrested it back from her. “I don’t want you to have it now,” I yelled, pushing open the side window that overlooked the alley. I hated her too. “You’ve reduced us both to infants!” I pushed at her grasping hands, hugged the ridiculous thing to my chest, then flung it out the window with all the force my arm could muster. It rebounded against the neighboring building, then somersaulted silently.

“No!” she screamed, as though it were a person. We both peered down in horror. By the light of a window on the first floor we could see it, splayed on the ground in a puddle of water, a dead child, a pathetic, broken thing.

“Why did you do that?” D’Or cried.

I slept on the bare dining room floor that night, my black coat my blanket. The next morning I left earlier than usual to catch my cable car and the three buses to the Berkeley campus.

…

But we didn’t always fight. San Francisco was gloriously warm and sunny the summer after my junior year. I stayed on at the President Follies, but since I wasn’t in school, from Monday through Friday I was free until the evening. Our favorite thing was to go to Tiburon and sit in some isolated spot near the water, gazing at the blue bay, chatting and dreaming about how someday we’d travel and see the Bay of Naples and the Bay of Rio, and all the other magnificent bays in the world, how we’d write books together and support ourselves as authors. We loved to drink mai tais at Tiburon Tommy’s that summer and wander around the green hills of Marin, our hands linked until someone approached. We’d jump apart, and when they passed we’d laugh and link hands again. At those times we were in love once more. I’d forget about our fights and how often after a rage I’d feel sickened, contrite, trapped; how I’d look down to the alley from the side window to see on the ground, not the brown bear, but a dead D’Or or a dead Lillian; how often I’d be sure that our life together would end in homicide or suicide.

 

Our knockdown drag-out fight came near the end of the fall semester. “I read this really fascinating article in the Examiner today,” D’Or said as I was getting ready for bed after the Saturday midnight show at the President. “Are you too tired to listen? It’s pretty long.”

“Yeah, I’m exhausted.” But I could tell she really wanted to share it with me.

“That’s okay. I’ll just summarize. Listen to this: Dr. Steven Donnelly, a Cornell professor, studied a hundred women who were employed as exotic dancers—like you. He looked at their families, economic background, everything.” She was excited, as though she’d finally discovered the key to a giant puzzle.

“Um-hmm.” I flopped onto the unmade bed.

“Can you guess the primary thing they had in common?” D’Or asked, a ninth-grade teacher administering a quiz.

“Not a clue.” I felt my stomach tighten. I had so little in common with the girls with whom I worked. I liked them because they worked hard for their bit of money, and they were always sweet to me, even though we didn’t say much to one another because my “nose was always in a book,” as Celestial Celeste had remarked the other day. But I was as different from them as a raven from a salmon.

“The Cornell professor found that all the women in his study came from the lower socioeconomic classes and were rejected by their fathers,” D’Or enunciated, standing over my prone body. “Every one of them had those things in common,” she squealed.

I sat up in bed, yanking the covers tight around me. “Look, I’m working at the President, not because I was rejected by my fucking father, but because somebody’s got to pay the rent and buy the fucking food around here.” I felt my face contort. How ugly I felt, how ugly she made me feel. “And as long as I’m going to school, there’s no other job I can get that will let me do that and have time left for study,” I yelled.

D’Or still hovered above me. “The point is,” she said in the cool voice of a detached observer, “you wouldn’t have been able to conceive of such employment if you’d had a normal relationship with a father and if—”

“What the shit does that mean?” She was telling me I was a victim. I’d struggled so hard not to be that, to exercise control over my life. I bounded out of bed, grabbed her shoulders, shook her. “Did you have a normal relationship with your father? You’re crippled, damn you!” I raged into her face. “At least I function in the world. I may be a bastard and low class, but who’s supporting the Daughter Goldenrod, you bitch? Who?”

“I’m just explaining why you’re so willing to take your clothes off in front of strange men.” She shrugged me off with maddening calm. “There’s never anything wrong with the truth, Lillian.”

“You go to hell with your truth!” I leapt at her again, claws extended, ready to throttle. She dodged and I tripped, and my head met the wall with a dull thud. “Go to hell,” I muttered, ashamed, disgusted, wrapping my arms around myself like a straitjacket. She would drive me to distraction, to deadly violence. I went to stare out the window. I will either jump or push her, I thought again. What a blessing it would be, what a satisfaction! The splayed brown bear was still down there. I could see it, nothing but a desiccated heap of rag after all these months. If I didn’t get out soon, that would be one of us.

…

But then, before long, I’d watch how a beam of sun played with her hair as she sat at the red table. Or I’d think about the way her black leather jacket had flapped in the wind at her father’s funeral. Or some poem or piece of prose would move me to tears, and she’d let me read it to her. “Yes! I love that, yes!” she’d cry. Her gray eyes were beautiful to me again, and I’d forget, for a while, how she made me feel ugly and common, how she made me feel like committing mayhem.

That’s the way three years passed on Washington Street.

 

In the late winter Mara Karrara came to the President Follies. I’d never heard of her, but people who knew about burlesque knew her name. Mr. Chelton rented two huge searchlights to stand in front of the theater and send great beams to the sky that were visible for miles around. For the first time since I’d been at the President, the theater was packed for almost every show. Bathsheba, who’d watched the first crowd come in, reported, “Everybody dressed up fancy today, no guys carrying newspapers for their laps.”

“The Queen of South American Burlesque” was Mara Karrara’s tag. She was a honey blond, with gleaming honey tones to her skin and a bearing that was regal despite her petite stature and voluptuous, pear-shaped breasts. Mara was a real dancer, with all the balletic skill and class that D’Or had once pretended I could put into my poor little numbers. Her costumes were extraordinary too—huge headdresses of exotic green and gold feathers, jeweled lamé capes, extravagant gowns of heavy satin. Toward the end of her act, when she had already rid herself of cape and gown and headdress and shaken out her honeyed tresses, she paused before the audience in only her golden skin and the patch of pink G-string; then she reached into a gigantic basket of colorful wax fruits on stage-left. Out came a live green snake, long and fat and penile, with which she danced an intricately choreographed ballet of love. Word got around that Chelton was paying her two thousand dollars a week and that she’d earned her entire salary on the first weekend.

“You know what she does when she gets out on that runway?” Satana sneered. “She takes a picture. That’s how come they like her so much.”

I knew what take a picture was supposed to mean, but I’d never seen it: The stripper pushes her G-string aside, pulls her labia open, and exposes her clitoris to the audience. “My boyfriend saw the show and he told me,” Satana insisted when I said, “Why would someone with such a great act do that?” I’d watched Mara from the wings whenever I could—she really was an artist—though of course I couldn’t see the end of the runway from the wings. But I decided the take a picture story was born out of jealousy, because Satana had also whined the night before, “What’s so great about that Mara Karrara for her to get two thousand bucks a week and us to get peanuts?”

“You are very nice,” Mara said when I nervously complimented her on her act. “Very nice.” Her deep-red lips smiled vivaciously, and she molded her hands to suggest breasts and waist and hips. Our eyes connected, then she winked a long wink. She traveled with a man—“my manager,” she called him when I dared to ask if Sergio, a stomachy gentleman with thinning gray hair who looked like an insurance salesman, was her husband. “He make my costume, teach me the dances, everything,” she said, straightening with competent fingers a twisted shoulder strap on my new red gown, then patting my bare shoulder.

“That Mara Karrara gets two thousand a week, can you imagine?” I exclaimed to D’Or. I just wanted to hear myself say Mara’s name out loud. Her bright smile kept playing itself over in my head. I kept feeling her long fingers as they smoothed my gown strap.

“I’ve never heard of a woman making that much money.” D’Or’s eyes grew wide at the munificent sum. “Does she really have anything you don’t have?”

“Nah.” I laughed. “Only that she’s beautiful, she knows how to dance, she has incredible costumes, a fantastic act, a manager who knows what he’s doing.”

“Couldn’t her manager train you?” D’Or asked.

“Why would he do that?” I shrugged.

But why not? I hadn’t thought about it before. Maybe he would take me on. If I was going to be a stripper, even for a little while more, why shouldn’t I try to be a star? What couldn’t D’Or and I do with that kind of money? “Hmm, maybe it couldn’t hurt to try,” I said.

We became almost giddy about the scheme. With Mara and Sergio, I’d get into big-time burlesque, travel the fancy circuit—Las Vegas, Rio, Paris, places like that. I’d spend a year or two at it, earn a real nest egg for us. I wasn’t even twenty-two. I had plenty of time to go to graduate school.

“You’d be able to afford Harvard or Yale,” D’Or said, serious now. “I’d move east with you if you wanted an Ivy League,” she promised.

The more I thought about the idea, the better it seemed. I sat in my Milton seminar the next day, figuring out the details as a student droned his paper on “Eve’s Impaired Judgment.” If I earned a lot of money now, I wouldn’t have to work in graduate school, and maybe if I felt less pressure, D’Or and I wouldn’t have so many fights. I did love her. Whenever I’d been certain that it was over, that we were finished, I’d see a gesture of her hand, an angle of her head, or she’d say something like “Oh, Creature, what would I do without you?” and I’d feel the love well up all over again. I couldn’t leave her, but neither could I go to graduate school and keep living with her and fighting with her and working as much as I had been.

“Okay,” I told D’Or that evening, “here’s the plan. You go ask them. You’ll say you’re my manager. Go ahead and tell them I’m a college student and that I can join them in June, when I’ve finished school.” What if I did it for just one year? Say I made only half of what Mara got—I’d come out with around fifty thousand dollars. It would see us through graduate school and years after if we were even a little careful.

 

Sergio watched my act from the wings after D’Or talked to him. I sensed how his serious eyes were trained on me, following me, like someone evaluating a business proposition, but when I glanced back and saw him in the shadows he had a tiny smile. The next morning, before I left for school, he called D’Or to say that both he and Mara would like it if I joined them. They’d be in Toledo, Ohio, in June, and I could meet them there.

That evening Mara invited me into her dressing room, and I watched her in the mirror as she placed the huge feathered cap on her head. I’d travel with them, she said. Sergio would make costumes for me, she would teach me dances like hers, we would have a very wonderful time. We smiled at each other in the mirror. “Very wonderful,” she repeated. Then she turned to hug me, her green and gold feathers brushing against my cheek, and she hurried out to take her place in the wings before her music started up.

Now, when I was drifting off to sleep at night, I saw Mara’s golden skin; I saw it in my dreams too, and when I awoke in the morning. I was discomfited by my fantasies, and suddenly I was badly confused. Was I going with them to make money for graduate school and for D’Or and me or was it because of Mara? My head rested on a pillow only millimeters from D’Or’s. What kept my perfidious thoughts from slithering out of my skull into hers? I wondered guiltily.

Then Mara’s two weeks were over. “In Toledo!” Sergio wore the same smile I’d seen when he stood in the wings, and when I gave him my hand to shake, he squeezed it in a damp paw. We would meet on June 22, a week after I graduated. Sergio held the theater door open for Mara. She made him stand there at the door while she put her arms around me, and we hugged much longer than casual friends would. When I turned my lips to her silken cheek they brushed by chance near her mouth, and I felt her fingers tighten on my back. The look she gave me when we finally pulled apart was charged, sexual. It couldn’t have been anything else. But Sergio must have seen. In fact, it felt as though she’d wanted him to see. When I glanced at him, he was again smiling that mysterious little smile.

Were they lovers? I wondered about it all the time now.

And what would they expect of me? The question popped into my head days later, and I couldn’t get it out. She’d looked at me like that, knowing that he was watching. What kind of deal did they have between them? What if he wanted me too? What if that was their deal? Something was sure to happen between Mara and me, but what if he wanted to be a part of it too—and she wanted him to be a part of it? I’d be alone with them both in a strange city. Anything could happen. Anything. Did she really take a picture on the runway?

…

The questions hung over me like a bogeyman’s threat. I think it was Dr. Jackson who kept me from getting the answers. Dr. Jackson was an elderly man with a great shock of white hair that fell over his forehead, dressed always in the conservative tweeds that were practically requisite for Berkeley professors in the early 1960s. All semester he’d made Victorian England come alive for me, and he’d made me understand that literature wasn’t just gripping characters or striking images or musical language. “Dickens, Kingsley, Disraeli—they entertained, but they also seduced their smug middle-class readers into caring about social problems that were right under their noses, though they couldn’t see them without the help of art.” That was Dr. Jackson’s lecture the week after Mara and Sergio left San Francisco. “We mustn’t denigrate other kinds of artistic goals; but theirs—to alleviate social injustice through art—that’s the artist’s most noble undertaking.” The class applauded, though lectures were never applauded at Berkeley except at semester’s end. Maybe because what Professor Jackson said made me remember how I felt standing on the street in Mexico City, watching the student demonstration, and how I felt about the HUAC protests, and how I loved the things Maury used to say about justice; or maybe it was because I was on an emotional edge over Mara and Sergio—whatever the reason, I sat there, intensely moved, not applauding but crying. Tears streamed down my cheeks, and though I felt like a fool I couldn’t stop them. I swiped at my face with the back of my hand. I was giving up the possibility of doing fine things . . . for what? To go to Toledo, Ohio, and be a stripper—and who knew what else? I couldn’t do it . . . not even for a year, not for money, nor love of D’Or, nor the fascination of Mara. I wouldn’t! Sitting there, runny-nosed, in the auditorium, I felt I’d been rescued from a hot fire just in time. It had almost gotten me . . . that thing that had always awaited me . . . just when I thought I was completely safe. But Dr. Jackson plucked me out at the eleventh hour.

“I’m going to graduate school right away,” I told D’Or that night. “I can’t go touring. If I work as a stripper, I won’t be able to stop after a year.”

“But . . . what will we do?”

“I’ll figure it out,” I said, though I had no idea how.

…

I’d written to my mother and Rae to say I wouldn’t be visiting during Easter break, because when I asked Chelton for time off he’d grumped, “If you’re leavin’ all the time, whadda I need you for?”

A week later, I got to my Chaucer class early and settled into the empty room with an open text before me. “‘This child I am comanded for to take,’—And spak namoore, but out the child he hente Despitously,” I read, and the fourteenth-century English in my head was suddenly mixed with words in a Yiddish accent—my mother and Rae’s Yiddish accent—so real, it was as if they were standing in the hall.

“The lady said Wheel Building, upstairs, thirty-three.” That was my aunt’s unmistakable voice.

“Maybe we’re not in Wheel Building. There’s no thirty-three here.” My mother’s voice.

“Excuse me, we’re looking for Lilly Faderman, in Wheel Building,” the foghorn blared.

“Well, this is Wheeler Hall. There’s no thirty-three upstairs, but room two thirty-three is right there,” a young man’s voice said politely.

I closed my book. This is what comes of always working, no rest, fighting all the time with D’Or. You hallucinate, like the times you saw Genghis and Khan slinking around the living room at Mark’s when they were asleep in the kitchen. I drifted out to the hall as though in a dream.

But there they were. In the flesh! In their sweet flesh. My mother was wearing a new woolen suit and patent leather high heels, and I could tell she’d been to the beauty parlor because her hair was all brown now and in shiny waves. Her mouth was bright with lipstick. My aunt wore a purple coat and a green hat with a veil, such as nobody had worn for ten or fifteen years, and on her feet were her orthopedic shoes, a hole cut out on the left one for her bunion. They both looked so beautiful to me, even when Rae yelled at the top of her voice, “Lilly! Mary, look, she’s here!” and my mother jumped on me and wept, “Lilly! We haven’t seen you for so long! When are you coming home?” and everyone who passed stared at them and me and tittered.

I gulped down the sob that would betray my pretend composure. “Shhh,” I whispered, “classes go on here. We have to be quiet. Soon,” I promised my mother, my finger to my lips, my heart full with the miracle of these two old ladies, my treasure, standing right there in Wheeler Hall. “I graduate in June, and then I’m coming back for good. Soon.” I kissed them with my mother’s style of loud, smacking kisses. To hell with the tittering students.

“Don’t work no more. You’ll make yourself sick with work and school. That’s what we came to tell you,” my aunt said, ignoring my shhh. “I’ll send money till you graduate. Only stop working,” she roared in the second-floor hall of Wheeler.

 

I finally got the whole story: D’Or had attended Berkeley from 1949 to 1953. At the end of the four years she went to the graduation ceremony, just sat in the audience. “I thought it was my right,” she said.

“But you didn’t graduate?” I tried to get it straight.

“I don’t know. I just went for four years and got mostly A’s, but I don’t think I finished everything.”

“Let’s order your transcripts and see,” I said.

She’d gotten three incompletes in English classes and lacked one course for her foreign language requirement.

I applied to graduate school at UCLA, just barely under the deadline. Though I’d failed to change D’Or’s life, I had to change my own. “If I’m accepted at UCLA I’m going,” I told her the next week, chomping on one of the corned beef sandwiches I’d brought back from David’s, avoiding those gray eyes that had made me forget iron resolves a hundred times before.

“You know I’m not going back to Los Angeles,” D’Or cried. “You know I can’t live near my mother and brother.”

“Let’s worry about that later,” I said quickly. I’d made a plan. “For now we’ll worry about your college degree.”

“Why? I haven’t done schoolwork for ten years!” She was dismissing the idea. I couldn’t let her.

“Look, D’Or, I’ll help you write the papers to make up your English incompletes.” I’d do anything. I had to.

“I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” she said, and shook her head.

“Okay, okay, look . . . I’ll write them. You just convince them to let you into a French class, even though it’s late in the semester.” I gave her my best encouraging smile. “You’re a great saleswoman, D’Or: You convinced Chelton and Sergio about me.”

The next day I waited for her outside the dean’s office. She emerged smiling triumphantly. The dean would let her enroll late in a French reading class. “But it meets four days a week,” she cried seconds later, a mountain of impossibility on her frail shoulders. “How am I going to come here for classes four days a week?”

“Present,” I answered each day when the teaching assistant went down the list in the rollbook and at the end called “Shirley Ann Goldstein.” Miss Goldstein earned a B in French.

 

“D’Or, we have to talk.” The night after my last final I stood behind her as she held her hands under the bathtub faucet. “D’Or, I’ve got to find my way, because unless I do I’m nothing. And I can’t find my way by going off to be a stripper with Mara.”

She whirled to face me, holding her dripping hands up like a surgeon after a scrub. “But that was your idea!” she shrieked. “It’s not fair of you to imply that I was the one who wanted you to be a stripper!”

“You’re right, D’Or, of course you’re right.” I couldn’t blame her for it. But now, finally, I wanted out. I had to get out. “It was my idea, but I can’t keep doing stuff like that. I want my life to be different, but I’ve been so exhausted for the last years, with work and school and everything else, that I haven’t been able to think clearly.”

“So you are blaming me.” She glared at me as she rubbed her hands brutally on a clean white towel that was soon dotted with drops of blood. “You’re making me your scapegoat, just like my mother and brother always do!”

It would explode. We’d have another knockdown drag-out fight, I’d feel guilty for my rage and I’d apologize, and we’d be right back at the beginning. I couldn’t let it happen again. I had to make her see, once and for all. “D’Or, look at me.” She wouldn’t face me, though I followed at her heels. “D’Or, I need to find out what I can do in the world, and—it’s like what you once told me about your writing—that kind of discovery takes a certain frame of mind that I don’t have yet. For now, I need to travel alone.”

Finally she looked. Her smile was bitter. “After everything you promised,” she sneered.

“I know. I failed,” I said. “D’Or, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry I’m not Mary Marvel.”

 

I was accepted in the English graduate program at UCLA, and D’Or and I graduated from Berkeley at the same time. The day her diploma arrived in the mail, I got on a Greyhound bus and headed back, toward my mother and aunt.

 

Lillian, 1962, UC Berkeley