BINKY HAS HER OWN apartment, but most afternoons she comes directly to my place when she’s finished with her day at Marshall High School. I hear her footsteps on the stairs, and my heart begins its delirious gigue. She knocks, and I put down my Benjamin Farjeon notes and my pen and take a deep breath before I fling open the door. We clasp each other and kiss and grasp and gulp and gasp as though we’ve been tortured by a separation of months.
Most nights, after a short dinner and long hours of love, we fall asleep in each other’s arms, and at 6:45 A.M. we’re awakened by a love song on the little clock-radio she has given me that sits on the table beside my bed. Binky pulls away slowly, tiny millimeter by tiny millimeter. “It’s as excruciating as chopping off an arm, a leg,” we groan to each other every morning about our disjoining.
The bed is bereft of her warm skin and sweet flesh, but I lie there, eyes closed, engrossed by love images from the night before, imagining her beside me still. Then, to my sleepy delight she appears again, as in a dream, smart now in her teacher’s uniform—a tailored dress, high-heeled shoes, seamed nylons, her gold-tipped Kennedy hair neatly coifed. In her hands she’s holding two steaming cups of coffee. She sits on the edge of the bed while we sip and intertwine fingers and fill ourselves with last looks to carry us through the long day. Always, before she leaves, the radio disc jockey announces: “Comin’ up—my favorite start-the-mornin’-right song,” and the singer croons, “Sunny, yesterday my life was filled with rain. Sunny, you smiled at me and really eased the pain.” I set my coffee cup on the floor and nestle my head in Binky’s lap. The song is about Binky, who most certainly, as the words say, is my sunshine, my rock, my sweet, complete desire. She tells me I’m all those things for her too. “I can’t remember living before I met you,” she says.
She leaves for the day, and I take my place at my desk, where I concoct with renewed vigor one sentence after another about Farjeon’s stylistic shifts. I’m determined to finish this academic exercise quickly so that I can go on to more gratifying work.
I had only the vaguest idea of what such work might be, but Binky was at the center of that too. She asked me to spend the day at her school, “to see what I do that the UCLA English and Education profs turn their academic noses up at.” I was awed by what she did, how the students loved her, trusted her. “My little United Nations,” she called them. Four kids from her first-period American literature class—one Negro, one Oriental, one Mexican, one Jew—showed up in her room during morning break, lunch break, afternoon break.
“We’re just hanging out,” one of them said with a shrug when I asked, amused, if they had another class with her that day.
“We just like to shoot the bull with Miss B.,” another confessed. They looked at her—all of them—as though they were in love. They sat on the desks or on the floor near her, munched sandwiches or apples, and she gave them her attention, her little bit of free time, her wisdom. The “bull” was mostly literary because she’d made books come alive for them, opened a universe of ideas, told them to ponder what other teachers told them to take for granted, and they caught fire with what they learned from her. Long before Ivy League scholars thought of it, she taught them to question the canon that was sacrosanct in all American schools. “How come everyone has to read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, but you don’t get to read Black Boy unless you’re in Miss B.’s class?” Arthay asked. “Wright can write circles around Franklin,” Ian said. “The Japanese and Chinese have been in America for more than a hundred years. How come nobody tells us about Oriental writers?” Lloyd asked. “How come there’s no Mexican writers like James Baldwin?” Rafael wanted to know.
And I caught fire too with those novel ideas. “They’re right,” I said over the pizza Binky and I shared in Westwood Village. “In eight years of university courses, I’ve read just about nothing but white men, as though they’re the only ones who ever said anything important about the human experience.”
“I’d give anything to find good Oriental writers and Mexican writers and let them speak for themselves in my American lit classes,” Binky said.
“Wouldn’t that be a wonderful idea for a book? It could be poems and stories by writers of all colors.” No book like that existed, but why shouldn’t it? “Binky, why couldn’t we do it—together? Just as soon as I finish my dissertation?”
“God!” she shouted. The pizza-dough thrower behind the counter shifted his eyes to us and missed his catch. “Let’s do it,” she cried.
“By all means, I have absolute confidence,” Professor Booth told me in the fall of 1966 when I asked if he thought I was far enough along on my dissertation to begin my job search. “Absolute confidence,” he repeated, smiling his cordial Pickwickian smile. He ruffled through a little stack on his desk and pulled out several fliers to hand me: job announcements, I saw with a tremulous glance, for the 1967–68 academic year. “I’ll pass on to you whatever else comes up that’s suitable,” he said helpfully, holding his office door open with a slight bow as I left. Would somebody actually give me a job as a college professor?
I stood outside his door and perused the announcements. There were four—Wilberforce College, Michigan State University, a small, regional campus of Purdue, and Fresno State College. I’d have to go to Xenia, Ohio, or East Lansing, Michigan, or Westville, Indiana, or some godforsaken town in the San Joaquin Valley of California if I wanted to be a professor. My cheeks burned as if they had been slapped. A Ph.D. would open great things to me, Maury had promised. Had I walked through a forest only to pick up a crooked stick? I’d have to live alone in some far-flung alien place where there was a college that would hire me. How could I leave Binky when I’d just found her, and my mother and Rae?
Paula was the last person I wanted to see at that moment, but she spotted me near Professor Booth’s door and dogged me down the stairs of Rolfe Hall. “So, is Booth recommending you for the Berkeley job? There’s one at Columbia too. Dr. Nix is recommending Ron Hommes for both,” she said with a smirk.
“Ron’s dissertation is on Henry James, so the position must be for someone in American lit.” I stopped to drink water at the hall fountain; I took slow sips, straightened up, bent down for more sips, but she wasn’t going to leave. “I do Victorian lit,” I mumbled to the faucet. Her snicker made me enormously despondent.
“You know Lois Damer? She’s Nix’s student too.” Paula trailed me from the building, hopping around a crunch of students to keep up with me. “Her dissertation’s on Edith Wharton. You know the job he’s recommending her for?” she asked with a meaningful sniff. “Long Beach State.” Finally she left to go off to the stacks, to labor the rest of the day and far into the night on her George Eliot dissertation.
I wandered around the UCLA campus. Soon I’d be cast out of this paradise of brilliant sunshine and brilliant scholars—to what?
“Hotbox of the nation,” Professor Booth said pleasantly when I told him a month later that I would have an interview at the Modern Language Association Convention for the job at Fresno State. I’d barely heard of Fresno before I saw the job announcement. It was farm country, about two hundred miles from L.A. and the coast. How do people breathe away from oceans? I’d lived only on coasts.
“So you think I shouldn’t even bother with the interview?” I asked hopefully.
“Oh, I didn’t say that.” Professor Booth’s smile was placid.
Of my few possibilities, it was only Wilberforce, a Negro college, that seemed at all interesting, although it was in Xenia, Ohio. “We’re vaguely connected to Antioch College,” the urbane Negro professor who interviewed me at the MLA Convention said. “Seven miles north, and another thousand miles below the stairs.” He smiled ruefully. I imagined myself at Wilberforce, a political firebrand, fighting the good fight against presidents, deans, whomever, to help rescue the college from its second-class status.
But how would I teach, how would I write, if all my time were spent in political battles? I had to figure out what I really wanted to do with the Ph.D. that I’d been struggling so hard to get.
I go to his office with a contract in hand. “Well, I guess I’m off to Fresno State College,” I tell a jolly Mr. Pickwick.
“Fresno State,” he chortles. “A girl who did the best graduate oral exam in the history of the UCLA English Department? A girl like that doesn’t end up at Fresno State College. You’re going to UC Berkeley: They’re hiring you, sight unseen, on the basis of my glowing recommendation.”
I’m speechless. I’m going to be a professor at UC Berkeley! I sink to the floor in a delirium of groveling obeisance. Professor Booth lifts me with gentle, paternal hands. “There, there,” he sings, “no thanks necessary. It’s only what you deserve.” From his desk he takes a magnum of Veuve Cliquot—“Enjoy with Binky, your woman lover.” He beams and then, with a fatherly wink, he pins a giant gold medal on my lapel.
I went to my adviser’s office with the contract in hand. “I’ve been offered a job as assistant professor at Fresno State College,” I said. The contract had been sitting in my desk for two weeks, and whenever I’d opened the drawer and came upon it inadvertently I was plunged into a dark funk. Fresno.
“Wonderful!” He smiled benevolently. “Is it a tenure track job?”
No one had ever told me what “tenure track” meant, and I wasn’t really sure, but the contract did contain those words. “Yes,” I answered.
“That’s superb,” he said, pumping my hand in hearty congratulations.
“So you think I should take it?” I asked, desperate still for rescue, as he walked me to the door.
“Oh, by all means, by all means,” Professor Booth averred, bowing slightly as he ushered me out.
So Paula was right after all. That year and the next there was a boom in college hiring. The men who got Ph.D.’s from the English Department were offered jobs at places like Cambridge University, the University of Pennsylvania, Tulane, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Texas at Austin. There they would teach one or two classes a semester and have research assistants and Ph.D. students working with them. The women, if they were lucky enough to get jobs at all, were hired at places like California State College at Northridge and California State College at Hayward, where they would teach four classes a semester to undergraduates and a few master’s students, and they would do their research during the summer—if they could muster the energy and motivation to do it at all.
I wrote the conclusion to my dissertation in early March and passed my defense two weeks later. I was Dr. Faderman; I had finished my studies at UCLA. But the Fresno State contract still sat in my desk drawer, a fearsome monster in hiding—out of sight, but never out of mind. You should be grateful to be offered a job as assistant professor, I told myself. Professor Faderman—wasn’t that what I’d worked for all these years? But one afternoon, before Binky got home, I peered into the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door and I stripped naked. The young woman who stared back was five years older than Mink Frost, but the waist was still small, the breasts still firm. Weren’t there nightclubs that hired exotic dancers all up and down the Sunset Strip? Was it really better to leave everything I loved and go to the desert of Fresno for a mediocre academic career? In the name of what silly vanity did I need to be a professor when I knew other ways to make a living?
I dashed to the desk, still naked, fumbled frantically, tossed the jumbled contents to the floor. Where was it? Had I thrown it out without thinking? My blood froze. There—it was under my Bleak House paper on which Booth had written two years before: “Shrewd and splendid insights.” I pulled it from the mess and scribbled my name and the date in triplicate, then sealed the envelope along with my fate.
I’d put a white linen cloth on the table and lit white candles. “How beautiful,” Binky said, and we smiled feebly at each other, then pushed the food around our plates in funereal silence. I put my fork down, sipped ice water, watched the flicker of the candles and the shadow her bent head made on the wall. Maybe in the morning I’d call the Fresno State English Department. “I sent you something in error,” I might say. “Could you please return the envelope unopened.” Who cares if they thought I was crazy? I’d never have to see them.
“Can you really bear to give this up?” Binky bit her lip, blew her nose.
I pushed my dish to the side. In two months it would be our one-year anniversary. I’d been happy—happier with her than I’d ever been in my life. How could I leave to go to Fresno?
“I’m going with you,” she said suddenly. Her strong chin was tilted upward, an Amazon ready for superhuman efforts. “I’ve made up my mind!”
“Fresno is two hundred miles from the nearest bagel or Ingmar Bergman movie or major library,” I laughed mirthlessly. “The Fresno temperature gets up to a hundred and ten degrees in the summer. Paula gave me the full report. The tule fog socks the city in for months in the winter.”
“I’m going. That’s all there is to it. We’ll do the book there, just as we planned, and you’ll publish your way back to L.A. They must have heating and air conditioning in Fresno. It’s still civilization. I’m going with you.”
I put off telling my mother and Rae until the last minute because I couldn’t bear their wailing on top of my own. “It could be a lot worse,” I said from the same green chair on which I’d studied for my orals that had gone so spectacularly well because of the million cups of coffee and slices of buttered rye bread my aunt had kept me fueled with. “I could be off to Michigan or Ohio right now instead of Fresno, which is less than four hours away by car. I’ll be back to visit every few weeks,” I promised above my aunt’s warnings about the ogre-filled world, the tragedy of the unwed, the ticking clock in my womb. “Sarah, after your grandmother,” she reminded me irrelevantly. “Avrom, after your grandfather. You’re almost twenty-seven years old!”
Then I planted a kiss on my mother’s cheek and slipped from her grip.
Driving north on Highway 99, it was already a lot worse than we’d imagined—the flat yellow land that stretched in unrelieved dullness as far as the eye could see; the thick, choking smell of cow dung and urine every few miles; the heat that wrapped around you like a rough, binding blanket and made your skin prickly and your lungs heavy. The car zoomed toward Fresno, relentless, inexorable. Binky and I held hands, two prisoners headed to the gallows. We had nothing to say to each other.
I look out on small seas of blondness, broken by only a few darker heads—occasional Mexican or Armenian students. I teach Victorian literature but—much more exciting to me—I teach a seminar in which I use the material that Binky and I are gathering for our book.
“Who won the Armenian beauty contest?” a raucous young voice says in the hall.
“I dunno,” his buddy answers.
“No one!” Guffaw, guffaw, guffaw.
I storm out of my office, ready to put that dumb jock in his place with a withering stare, but there’s only a knot of slight, cherub-faced blond boys standing there.
They really need me here, I think.
In all my classes they listen quietly, obediently, used to professorial lectures from the podium—but from men. I am the only woman in the department. “How come?” I asked a colleague, my lips curved in a pleasant smile that said I’m not challenging, just curious, when I encountered him in the mail-room at the end of my first week. “Oh, there were a lot of women in the department when I came here in 1959, because that’s who was hired during the war, but we got rid of them.” I must have looked startled. “Oh, because they didn’t have Ph.D.’s,” he explained. “We upgraded.” How will I be Professor Faderman if “professor” is a dark-suited, starched-collared middle-aged man?
But I am an actress. Just as I once played stripper, now I can play professor.
On April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed, Binky and I signed a contract with Scott, Foresman to publish our book. For the rest of that week we moved between the glow of our achievement and the multiple shocks of external events—first the tragedy of King’s death and then riots in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago—in every city of any size. The sky filled with flame and smoke, as though the whole country, the whole world, were on fire. America was falling apart. How insignificant it was that we were passionate about our work and were going to publish a pioneering college text on multiethnic American literature.
“But it’s what we can do,” we told each other. “We can’t stop the riots or bring racial justice to America, but we can make a step toward integrating what’s taught in literature classes.”
“It’s obvious why I’m dedicated to this stuff, but how come you are?” I asked Binky one evening as we sat side by side writing our section introductions.
“I can’t remember when I haven’t been,” she said. “Maybe it was because I grew up in South Pasadena. They used to have a covenant about not selling to anyone but white Christians. Even when I was a kid I thought that was disgusting. Or maybe it’s being gay and seeing through different eyes because of it. I don’t know. It all seems connected somehow.”
“We’ll have fiction and poetry by writers of all colors—good works that have been neglected or forgotten—and we’ll let the writers speak for themselves.” “They’ll show what’s unique about their lives but also the similarities that blast through racial and ethnic differences.” “They’ll show that literary study has to be integrated just as society does, that white men don’t have a monopoly on eloquence.” We went on and on. We’d already gathered gems by Toshio Mori and Hisaye Yamamoto, Phillis Wheatley and Ossie Davis, Americo Paredes and Piri Thomas, N. Scott Momaday and Emerson Blackhorse Mitchell. Now we mined for more in the Fresno libraries, and when we ran out there, we trekked back to Los Angeles to search neighborhood libraries and the bowels of the UCLA library, which held forgotten books and magazines and newspapers.
My classes are over at 4 P.M. on Thursday, and we hurry down to Los Angeles for a long weekend of research. At night we’ll sleep on a bed that pulls down from the wall in my mother’s cramped, undusted living room. As always, she’s been waiting for our car to turn the corner hours before it could possibly happen, pacing the sidewalk, her face grief-stricken, as though she’s already mourning the loss of her only child in a fiery auto accident. When I step from the car, she pounces on me and weeps because I’ve returned from the dead. Nothing changes. It’s as if no time has passed.
Binky views it all with equanimity, as though everyone has a crazy mother and a stepfather with holes in his head who rises from his chair to declaim about the fabulous power of his boss, Dr. Nathan Friedman. “When he walks down the corridors of Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, the interns shiver in their shoes,” Albert declares with waving arms. He includes Binky in his audience, though sometimes he calls her Bessy—which is better than my mother, who doesn’t call her anything except, to me on the telephone, “the shiksa you live with.” “Binky, Binky, Binky,” I remind her. Binky, my good, generous love, acts as though she doesn’t even notice. (“My family’s worse,” she says when I ask if she wouldn’t rather we stay with her mother, a widow now, living still in the big pink house in South Pasadena that Binky drives me past. “She hated my teaching at Marshall—she hated the Negro kids because she knew how much I loved them.”)
The instant Binky excuses herself to go to the bathroom, my mother stands over me to say “Mrs. Sokolov’s daughter and the new baby came to visit her yesterday. Her third grandchild.” She sighs a huge sigh that says nu? “Such a cute little baby,” she remarks later, when Binky goes out to get our suitcase. “Some people have all the luck.” She hasn’t been one of the lucky ones, she wants me to know.
Before long my aunt arrives, wearing an old blue dress and green sweater, hugging a heavy paper sack that comes up to her eyes. “I know you’re too busy to see me, go in good health. But take this back with you to Fresno.”
“Rae, I’m not going back for three days,” I protest.
“I’m afraid I’ll forget.”
The sack is smelly and ripping at a damp spot. It’s bulging with fruit—plums, peaches, honeydew, apricots, cherries, all of it squishy, overripe, leaking. I know that the moment my aunt heard I was coming, she ran to Fairfax Avenue to shop, and the fruit has been sitting in her kitchen ever since, for a week at least, ripening and rotting. “Rae, Fresno is the fruit capital of the world.” I struggle to keep my voice calm, but I’m losing the battle. “I can buy all the fruit I want there.”
“But you don’t,” she grumps. She turns to Binky to say “Make her take it.” Then she cries, “I forgot something,” and runs out the door. She returns a few minutes later carrying a pink cardboard box that’s freckled with gray grease spots. CANTER’S BAKERY is printed on it, and she opens the cover for me to look, though I already know what’s inside: butter cookies, two dozen at least, crumbly and stale and dotted with cherries that glow and look as if they’ve been injected with red dye, also purchased the hour my aunt heard I was coming to Los Angeles. “Put it in the car now so you won’t forget,” she tells Binky, who takes the box. The charm of her wonderful Kennedy smile is lost on my aunt.
Friday and Saturday we close the libraries, then rush to Malibu, to the ocean, where the breeze is soft, where we wait like condemned women for one more look at the bittersweet sight of the gold sun kissing the water before it merges with it and leaves glorious silver streaks behind in the sky. “We’ll come back to L.A., won’t we?” Binky says wistfully.
“Are you that miserable in Fresno?” I ask.
“No.” She shrugs, but I know she is.
(And I know too, though I don’t want to think about it, that despite how much we love each other, her misery sometimes saps her energy. “Let’s just cuddle,” she often says now when I try to make love to her.)
On Sunday we must drive back to Fresno, as my aunt knows, and she watches from her living room window, starting at dawn probably. When she sees us come out of my mother’s building, she hurries down her stairs. Before we can open the car doors, she is standing in front of us. “Watch how you drive with so many maniacs on the road,” she says, giving her ritual admonishment to Binky.
“Oh, I will, don’t worry about a thing,” Binky patiently assures my aunt.
“Bayg arup dos kepele, bend down the little head,” Rae orders me now, and I do it (though my head hasn’t been little for twenty years). She spreads her fingers over my crown and mutters words in Hebrew that I don’t understand as she blesses me. I feel the pressure of her blessing hand all the way up Highway 99.
These are the ways my mother and aunt show me that though I live two hundred miles away, they have not forgotten.
“How many college students would you say there are in this country? Millions, right?” Binky sat at the kitchen table and worked figures with a green pen. “Let’s say the book sells only fifty thousand copies—and maybe a quarter of the students who read it go on to teach high school English.”
“Yeah . . . and let’s say, modestly, that only half of them use material they’ve gotten from our book in their classes.” I peered over her shoulder, helped divide and multiply. “Let’s say they use it for only five years—and each teacher has three hundred students a year. That means our research will have touched—” We scrutinized the numbers together. Could it really be?
“Nine million kids!” we cried, hugging each in our double passion. Maybe this will make up for how much she misses her students at Marshall.
My days were full—with the book, of course, and with teaching twelve units of Victorian literature and American ethnic literature, with department meetings and committee meetings, with advising students, grading papers, trying to make friendly small-talk with the men in my department so they wouldn’t notice what an anomaly I was. But once we finished the book and sent the manuscript off to the publisher, Binky’s days were mostly empty. When I came home, never before five or six o’clock, I’d find her sitting in half-darkness on the brown La-Z-Boy, still in her plaid bathrobe, bare legs flung out on the footrest, staring glassy-eyed into space or thumbing through Time or the Atlantic. A half-full cup of cold coffee flecked with spoiled milk and the bread-crust remains of a sandwich would be on the end table.
“Postpartum blues?” I tried to joke one day.
“There didn’t seem any point in getting dressed,” she said apologetically (but with a hint of something else, something new, in an undertone). “There’s no place much to go here, is there?”
“The book will be out soon.” I knelt beside her and rested my head on her lap. “And when that happens, I’ll get a job in L.A. We’ll get back there, I promise.”
“I know,” she said, patting my hair distractedly.
But what if I couldn’t get a job in Los Angeles and we were stuck in Fresno forever? Didn’t most of the men in my department have wives? What did they do all day? “Isn’t there anyone interesting in the neighborhood to talk to?” I asked.
She stood up. “They’re housewives. Fresno housewives, and I feel like I’m becoming one too. I have a profession, remember?”
I jumped to my feet, ready to rumble as I used to with D’Or. But this was Binky. What sour note was creeping between us?
“Binky, I want to get out of Fresno too,” I told her evenly. “Look, I’ll write to Long Beach State . . . L.A. State also.” Paula had been hired at a new state college that just opened in southwest Los Angeles, Dominguez Hills; maybe she could help. “I’ll write there too. As soon as the book is out, I’ll write to them all.”
“Yes, please, please!” Pleeeze was how she said it. How miserable she looked.
The next semester she got a job teaching a freshman composition course at Fresno State, but that made things even worse. I couldn’t risk my colleagues’ figuring out that I was a lesbian, so when Binky and I ran into each other in the department office we’d become secret agents, cocking heads and batting eyes to signal which one of us ought to leave so that no one would intuit we were lovers. On top of that, part-timers received the munificent sum of two hundred dollars a month per class. “Peon labor,” Binky called it when, after taxes, her check came to $183.
Even worse, part-timers were virtually invisible to the professoriate. “Listen to this: I’m reaching into my mailbox to pick up my students’ papers and this pompous ass comes in.” Over the salad I’d made, Binky screwed up her mouth and fluttered her eyelids to mimic him. “And he says to me, like I was trespassing, for God’s sake, ‘May I help you?’” She struck the table so hard that the flatware bounced. “You’re a professor here. You get to be important! But what do I get to be?”
The next year she got a job teaching in a Catholic high school. The pay was about two-thirds what she would have made in Los Angeles, and the students were spoiled and sheltered. They were bored by what Arthay and Rafael and the rest of them had loved.
What did raise Binky’s spirits a bit was that she’d been discovered by the neighborhood kids—a set of towheaded, front-toothless boy twins from across the street and a couple of little Chinese girls from next door who often wore matching red dresses that came just above their matching, knobby knees. The twins showed up whenever the sisters did, though they never talked among themselves. It was as though the boys and the girls didn’t know one another outside our house. It was Binky who brought them together—the Pied Piper of the neighborhood. “Binky,” they all called her, as though she was a kid too. “Binky, can we come in and play?” they’d shout at the door and scamper up the steps, the tousled towheads on one side and the smooth black heads on the other, and soon they’d all be dashing around together, hilarious, in some scary-fun game of hide-and-seek or Frankenstein’s monster that Binky devised, or she’d race them to the kitchen and they’d pull open the drawer where she kept the Tootsie Rolls and Milky Ways and they’d all—Binky too—be shrieking with candied laughter. She put immense energy into the kids, and they loved her. They threw their arms around her and nuzzled their heads on her chest like puppies when they heard their mothers calling them home; they left little bunches of daisies or dandelions at the door for her or crayon stick figures that they’d drawn at school and signed “i luv you.”
“You’d make a terrific parent,” I told her one evening, and out of nowhere tears pooled in my eyes. No, not nowhere. My mother’s envy of Mrs. Sokolov, my aunt’s nagging about my aging womb. They buzzed in my head and preyed on my peace as they never had before. I was almost twenty-nine.
“Are you crazy?” Binky laughed. “Look, most of my childhood was stolen from me because I had to take care of my brother and sister while my parents were doing business all over the country.” She shuddered as if parenthood were her bogeyman. “I did enough mothering to last a lifetime by the time I was fifteen.”
The editor’s note that came with our authors’ copies said: “Many advance orders. Congrats!” The cover of the book was perfect: shades of brown and beige in the background, and in the foreground an elderly, angry-looking Mexican or American Indian, his index finger held up as if punctuating the message: “Shut up and listen. I’m speaking now.” We planted copies all over the house so that we would come upon them unexpectedly, and our delight—we published a book together!—would be renewed over and over again. Binky was merry. “Is this how a man and woman feel when they look at the baby they made together?” she laughed.
But the book didn’t help me get another job. “Bad timing,” Paula said sympathetically when I called to ask if she’d recommend me for a position at Dominguez Hills State College. “When I came aboard, last September, four people were hired in the department, but this year we’re not hiring anyone.”
“We’re cutting back,” the chair at Long Beach State College wrote in answer to my letter, and at Los Angeles State College I was told that the department was overstaffed and the days of big expansion were gone.
I was lucky to have a tenure track job anywhere. Within a year or two, most new Ph.D.’s in English were getting hired only for temporary lectureships or part-time work, or they were going back to school for degrees in business, or they were driving cabs.
For those of us who did have teaching jobs, it was, as Dickens wrote, the best of times and the worst of times, an age of wisdom and an age of foolishness. It was an era when campuses around America erupted in fury—against the draft, institutional racism, organized paternalism—and Fresno State was only a little tardy in catching fire. By the end of the fall 1969 semester, large segments of the student body and faculty were smoldering. After our president, Fredrick Ness, quit under pressure, almost all the blacks who’d been hired to teach in a newly formed Ethnic Studies Program were fired by the new administration for “lacking proper academic credentials,” and many of the untenured left-leaning white activists weren’t rehired. Maybe I continued to be safe because my own brand of activism was too academic to be threatening to our new acting president, Karl Falk, who’d been the head of a local bank before he was pressed into service as CEO of FSC. (Or maybe I was safe because those in power thought I was the department secretary.)
In any case, it was the campus dramas of the next semester that taught me once and for all what kind of activist I was. It was not the kind I’d envisioned twelve years earlier in Mexico City. Fresno State students staged a boycott of classes that February after the acting president had gutted the new Economic Opportunities Program for poor students, dismissed more minority faculty, and begun to dismantle the School of Arts and Sciences, which he believed to be a hotbed of leftists. The huge crowd of students and faculty at a morning rally bristled with anger and testosterone. I believe I was the only woman professor there. (Most of the women faculty taught in areas such as nursing, home economics, and women’s physical education—disciplines not noted for their radicalism.) Banners that read “ARE YOU GOING TO STAND BY AND GET FALKED? ” were everywhere. On the lawn in front of the administration building, Chicano students were camped in a hunger strike because the new La Raza program had been completely destroyed by the administration.
The rally organizers had pledged nonviolence, but it couldn’t last long. Agriculture students in cowboy hats ragged the striking Chicanos, and a free-for-all followed, with flying fists and cheers and blood and girls huddled off to the side. The bloodshed made the mood ugly. A bearded, tie-dyed young man next to me cupped his hands to his mouth and howled, “Fuck Falk!” and a knot of students picked it up and made it a chant. The speakers on the platform punctuated their seething words with raised fists, and hoarse cheers went up all around, as though the fists were smashing the enemy’s noggin. The crowd turned into a roaring, multiheaded monster. To me it felt like mass hysteria, like a football crowd, like the Nazis. I was surrounded by it—male voices screaming “Fuck Falk!” and cheering mindlessly. I felt it in my gut. They were the radicals I liked rather than the reactionaries I hated, but it didn’t matter. The frenzy triggered in me primal anguish, like a racial memory—the violence used on those who belonged to me. I hurried back to my office as though pursued by a pack, and I locked the door against that part of human nature that filled me with fear and loathing.
I’d learned something about myself that was surprising and even disappointing—but immutable. Demonstrations frightened me. I was terrified of their resemblance to the acres of hypnotized spirits who had thrust up their arms in sieg heil ecstasy. That’s okay, I assured myself later. My activism would be my scholarship. I’d do more books. I’d work for the causes that stirred me deeply through my editing and writing and teaching.
At home, a dull discontent settled on our lives like the dust on our furniture. Nothing could blow the monotony of it away except occasional outbreaks of rage, different only in substance from the ones I’d had with D’Or; they would leave us both shaken and unsure. The first major storm was over my student Omar Salinas, a sweet-faced, fragile man of twenty-nine, a poet who wrote magical realism long before García Márquez became popular in the United States. He called himself Omar the Crazy Gypsy and spent many hours in my office complaining about his rejection slips from magazines. “I know great Chicano writers all over the U.S.,” he told me one day, “and no one is publishing them.”
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.”