Free Naked in the Promised Land by Lillian Faderman

uncountable gables and turrets. My mother and I devoured it all.

    "When you become an actress," she said to me dreamily as our bus lumbered up and down the glittering streets of Beverly Hills and spewed exhaust fumes into the rarefied air, "which house do you want us to buy? We have to find a tutor for you, you know, because if you're making movies you can't go to school regular. Then we'll both have a maid, and we'll have a chauffeur," she said, recalling movies she'd seen about the rich, who always had a whole staff of servants, "and a man butler to answer the door and the telephone—and what else?"
    "And I'll buy you the most beautiful winter coat in the world," I promised, remembering the shabby, thin jacket she'd worn every winter since we'd come to California.
    "Why just one? I'll need a long white ermine, and a brown mink stole, and maybe a Persian lamb jacket," she enumerated with a sweet smile.
    Did Irene have an ermine coat? I wondered. How splendid ermine would look beneath her spun-gold hair.

    "I'd like you to sing for me before your acting lesson," Irene announced when I arrived for my next session with Sid. I chose "Again," and I wasn't nervous because I'd been singing all my life. She played a little introduction on the piano and then nodded for me to begin. For a few seconds she scrambled around the keyboard, trying to find my key. Then she realized there wasn't any. She shook her head, and I cut off my caterwaul, puzzled. "Lillian, you need to listen to how the music sounds and match your voice to it."
    It was a revelation to me. I felt my skin prickle and beads of sweat form above my lip.
    "We'd better start you on singing lessons." Singing lessons? My dreams were crumbling like a dried mudpie! My mother gave me the $1.50 a week gladly for my acting lessons, but she couldn't afford singing lessons.
    "How about working in the office on Saturday mornings?" Irene
said, as though she'd read my despair, "and you can pay for all your lessons that way."

    I would have worked in the morning and the evening and on Sunday—and the rest of the week too—just to be around her. "Oh, yes, that would be wonderful," I managed to gulp in a torrent of gratitude. "Oh, yes."

    I loved Saturdays. I arrived before 8:00 A.M. to open the studio for the little kids' ballet class (taught by a Bulgarian woman with stringy hair and b.o.). By nine, Irene came to take my place behind the desk. "Will you go to the cleaner's and pick up some things for me?" she'd ask, and I'd run to fetch Sid's pants or a dress or blouse of hers (which I'd furtively kiss through the clear wrapping). "Will you go over to the Elite and bring me back a cup of coffee?" she'd ask next. Whatever she needed I carried as though it were a sacred chalice through grimy streets, and my lips moved in fervent prayer. "Irene, oh Irene, Irene," were the only words.
    She began teaching at ten o'clock, after the Bulgarian finished her Modern Dance for 12–'15-Year-Olds. I sat again in the gray metal chair, now warm from Irene's perfect bottom, and opened my nostrils wide to inhale Emir, her heady perfume that lingered in the purple Orlon cardigan she often left draped over the chair. Alone in the office, I ran my hands up and down the soft material. "Irene, oh Irene." I spoke it in my head.
    I listened intently, entranced by every syllable, as she instructed a pimply, bespectacled girl at the piano, then a dark and very handsome young man who was a singer, then a class of six adolescent tap dancers. With the handsome singer—Tony Martinez, his name was—she laughed a lot, though it never seemed to me that his remarks were very witty. ("Can I take that one again?" Tony would say.
Ha, ha, tee hee hee,
they'd carry on.) What did he do to make her so happy?
    Never did I permit dreamy passion to interfere with efficiency. "Hello, this is Theatre Arts Studio. May I help you?" I answered the phone in a low voice that sounded professional, as I'd heard Irene do. I collected