Naked in the Promised Land by Lillian Faderman

Author:Lillian Faderman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Educators, Women
ISBN: 9780299200145
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Published: 2004-04-01T07:00:00+00:00

"But ... doesn't she yell at you to come home when you phone her?" I remembered my own telephone booth calls to my hysterical mother.

"I only phoned once, when I got fired from the carhop job for stealing 'cause the pay was so lousy and I had no money and no place to go. I said, 'Mom, it's me, it's Nicole. I wanna come home, Mom.' 'I don't know any Nicole,' she says and hangs up. Bitch, huh?" Nicky grinned, but I saw her lower lip quiver.

"Can't I come in for a few minutes?" she asked, clutching my schoolbooks to her chest when I said I really had to get home now.

She was nothing like Jan, and I'd never met anyone who wanted to be a writer before. "You better tuck your shirt in and put on some lipstick," I said, handing her a tube of Red Hot Peppermint that I fished from my purse.

She looked horrified for a flash, but she took the lipstick. "I don't have a mirror," she said. "Tell me if I'm doing it right."

My mother was playing gin rummy in the kitchen with Albert and didn't even notice her. "I got a friend from school," I shouted in my mother's direction, and Nicky and I slipped into my room. "Okay," I heard my mother say. Albert said nothing. I closed the door and pulled from my cache of books a bunch with garish covers that I'd found on the twenty-five-cent paperback rack at the drugstore—Women's Barracks, Queer Affair, We Walk Alone, Odd Girl Out. "Take them," I told Nicky. "They're about lesbians, but your story is a zillion times more interesting. I know you'll get it published." My ambition for her was growing like a beanstalk.

My mother did catch a glimpse of her a little while later, as she was leaving, but she didn't seem to notice that Nicky looked like a boy. There'd been no butches in the shtetl, or in the movies she'd seen, or in the shops where she'd worked. "She's so tall for a girl. I never saw such a tall girl" was all my mother said.

Nicky came again on Saturday and then on Sunday, and when the workweek started she came the minute she was free in the late afternoons. Maury told me I needed to fill out college applications and write my essay on why any college should be happy to get me. I'd already decided to apply to all the good colleges in Los Angeles—UCLA, USC, Pepperdine, Occidental—because I wouldn't be too far from my mother at any of them. Nicky stayed with me in my room as I strained over my work. Sometimes she wrote a bit of "Walk With the Wind" or she read one of my drama books or novels, her big frame stretched out on the floor near me as I sat at my little desk. "Can I read you this?" she'd ask from time to time. I didn't mind the interruptions because usually she read passages I liked too, and I thought her comments were so smart, better than mine.

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