YOU’RE THE SERIOUS ONE, the smart one. Maybe it was just a dig, a reminder that she was the pretty, popular sister, the one Danny loved. Yet there’d been a crack in her voice, I was sure of it. As I sat in the packed hall, waiting for the talk to begin, I wondered if I’d received a glimpse of what Barbara suffered by being constantly compared to me. Though how smart could I be, if in my resentment at being not-Barbara, I’d never imagined it might be hard for her to be not-Elaine?
It hit me that, of my two most important childhood companions, I had made an effort not to drift apart from Danny. And I knew Danny: I understood what he cared about and could easily fall into a conversation with him. When it came to Barbara, on the other hand, I guess I’d figured it was enough to live under the same roof and share a room. But it was my sister who’d become a mystery to me. We rarely talked about anything bigger than “Did you see my hairbrush?” And the occasional times when our conversation went beyond the mundane, how often did I belittle her—as, I realized with dismay, I had done just an hour earlier? Barbara didn’t get the grades I did, but that hardly meant she was stupid. As the speaker walked to the podium, I promised myself I was going to get closer to Barbara; I would make a real effort to find out what she thought about life and the world, and I’d take her ideas seriously.
Then the talk began, and I was riveted. The professor, Dr. Blum, wasn’t the gaunt, hollow-eyed refugee I’d expected but a portly man with a rather pedantic speaking style. His ordinariness made what he said more awful. He spoke about losing his university post with no protest from Christian colleagues he’d known for years, having his children barred from sports facilities, and being stripped of citizenship and even forbidden to fly the German flag by the Nuremburg Laws. And there was the constant fear of physical violence, but how could you complain when the attackers wore government uniforms?
The story had a familiar ugliness. Many people in Boyle Heights were immigrants who had experienced similar injustices. But those things had happened in eastern Europe and Russia, not in “civilized” Germany! And there was a relentless pettiness to the Nazis’ anti-Semitism. A relatively minor law that chilled me was a ban on the use of Jewish names to spell something to a telephone operator—you couldn’t, for instance, say “A as in Abraham”—a rule that burrowed so deeply into the minutiae of daily life, it was as if the Nazis wanted the Jews, and I suppose all Germans, to be aware of them from the moment they woke in the morning to when they lost themselves in sleep at night.
Soon I was dabbing at tears; so were many people around me.
Following the speech, the first people who asked questions were leaders of the youth groups that had sponsored the talk; they were in seats of honor onstage. Mike Palikow, a senior who was the president of Habonim, asked Dr. Blum about pressuring the British to allow more Jews to enter Palestine.
“Is this a Zionist organization?” The professor looked startled.
“My group is,” Mike said.
“Well,” Dr. Blum said, “I hope all of you here will pressure your government to allow more people to enter America. I’m sure you’re aware that the United States has a strict quota for immigrants from Germany, but did you know it is not even accepting half that number?”
Danny leaped to his feet in the front row and shouted, “How can you say that and then not support a Jewish state in Palestine?”
People shushed him, and Mike Palikow said, “Danny! We’re not taking questions from the audience yet.”
Dr. Blum smiled. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, young man. I don’t happen to be a Zionist. Next question, please?”
Danny persisted, his voice hoarse with emotion, “You got into America because you had friends who guaranteed you a job. What about all the people who don’t have important friends?”
Several people called out, “Show some respect!” and a burly boy—Dave Medved, a star of the high school football team—ran over and locked an arm around Danny’s shoulders.
As he was muscled out of the hall, Danny kept yelling, “There’s only one place where Jews can be safe—Palestine!”
On the stage, Mike Palikow began to apologize, but the professor said, “It’s good to see a young man who stands up for what he believes. And good to be in a country where such a thing is permitted.”
After a dozen more questions, posed with extreme politeness, the formal presentation ended, and there were refreshments. Dr. Blum particularly asked to talk to the ardent young Zionist, but apparently Danny hadn’t lingered outside the hall. Someone even ran over to the Berlovs’ rooming house but couldn’t find him there, either.
I had a hunch where he might have gone. I went upstairs to his father’s classroom in the Yiddische Folkschule. Gershon Berlov had set up a corner for Danny when he was little, with a few toys and a blanket where he could nap; he used to play there quietly while his father taught.
The room was dark except in his corner, where a cigarette glowed.
“Danny.” I inched toward him, feeling my way past desks as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.
“Elaine?”
“Yeah. He wants to talk to you.”
“That pompous yekke?”
“That’s not fair.” In our neighborhood of mainly eastern European immigrants, yekke was a slur, a term for German-born Jews who looked down their noses at us in both the Old World and the New. In Europe, the yekkes prided themselves on their urban, cultured ways, compared to Russian or Polish Jews who lived like peasants in shtetls. People who came to America from those shtetls at the turn of century discovered that yekkes had arrived decades earlier. They had established fine banks and department stores and carved out a place in America’s gentile society—and they offered charity but cringed at being associated with their crude eastern “cousins.”
“Cigarette?” he said.
“Thanks.” I sat on the floor next to him and took the cigarette he offered. “Aren’t you going to talk to him?”
“What, and apologize?”
“I don’t think that’s what he wants. He said he liked seeing a young person stand up for something.”
“Did he? Well, I’m not going to go back there.” Danny lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of his first. “What about everyone else? Are they all saying I’m a putz?”
“No one’s even talking about you.”
“Elaine Greenstein, if you lie to me, I won’t believe anyone for the rest of my life.”
“Some people thought you were rude.”
“Dave Medved told me I was a putz.”
“He did?”
“A little putz.” He started laughing, a kid’s release-of-tension giggle.
I laughed, too. And then I was crying, I didn’t know why—the distressing things I’d heard in the talk, the still-fresh loss of Zayde, my being alone with Danny in the dark?
“Elaine, are you okay?”
“Fine.” I shook with tears.
He wrapped his arms around me, in a way that started out as a comforting gesture between friends. Then the embrace became something else. I tried to shrug away, I swear I did. I pictured myself getting up and leaving. Virtuous, a good sister. I pictured the scene with that good Elaine as if it were a movie—detailed but two-dimensional, distant—while Danny kissed my teary cheeks and a shivering started inside me.
I tilted my face toward his, my mouth.
MY SEASON OF DUPLICITY began in earnest that night. For the first time I practiced the adult art of splitting myself into two Elaines, one who betrayed her sister and the other who—and this was the art—genuinely made nice with her. I had decided, on the night of the talk, to reach out to Barbara, to be not just a sister to her but a friend; and I did. We both did.
At first I tried to start the kind of probing conversations I got into with Danny or my friends in the Plain Brains. But Barbara didn’t mull over ideas or devour books the way I did. Nor did it help that the one burning subject I could have discussed with her, Danny, lay like a stone on my tongue.
; Perhaps because she noticed I was making an effort, however, she reciprocated. She invited me to her modern dance class. Me, dance? But she warmly urged me to give the class a try, and one Saturday afternoon I swallowed my self-consciousness and went with her to the community center, where Helen Tannenbaum taught the class.
Miss Helen, I learned, studied with Lester Horton. I had read about Lester Horton in the newspaper. He’d made a dance called “Dictatorship” about the evils of fascism, and another that celebrated the Mexican revolution. Miss Helen, too, combined dance and politics. After she led a series of warm-up exercises (which, despite my clumsiness, were fun), she told us to imagine we were garment workers, shackled to sewing machines but struggling to break free. I twisted and panted, so absorbed I didn’t even notice Miss Helen watching me until she said, “Yes, you’re a dancer!”—praise that made me giddy with pleasure.
“Why didn’t you tell me you did antifascist dances?” I asked Barbara on our walk home.
“Antifascist?” She rolled her eyes. “You can go for the politics. I go to dance.”
Dancing turned out to be reason enough, a balm for my inner voice that relentlessly analyzed, interpreted, and judged. Not that dancing was mindless. Watching Miss Helen demonstrate a movement and working to reproduce it in my body, I discovered a realm of physical intelligence; she called it “muscle memory.” Yet dance was also intoxicating and primal, my bare feet on the wooden floor, the occasional exhilarating times when I didn’t just do steps but inhabited a dance’s essence—it was like the lines from Yeats I loved, “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance / How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
I experienced that blissful state in rare glimpses. Barbara, however, had a gift for immersing herself in an emotion or character. She could shed her identity like shrugging off a sweater and transform into someone or something else. Our class did a recital, and a woman ran up to her afterward and gushed that seeing her dance was like watching an angel. We giggled over that for weeks. Still, I thought the gushy woman had a point. Barbara was an artist.
Our shared love of dance—and my recognition that in the world of physical intelligence, Barbara was the smart one—helped us regain some of our childhood closeness; it even made us willing to be vulnerable with each other. She came to me for help with her schoolwork. I quizzed her for tips on attracting boys, which I applied with surprising success. Not that I ever became the bright, chatty girl she was, but I got in the habit of taking off my glasses around boys and casting glances at them; the boys didn’t have to know that until they got close, I saw them as blurs. It didn’t hurt, either, that I got breasts. In the fall they weren’t much more than hopeful bumps, but by the time I turned sixteen in March I had a figure. Although there was no one special, I got asked out on dates.
Between my brighter social life and my renewed friendship with Barbara, it was inconceivable that I would go behind her back with Danny again.
Inconceivable but true. At first, like the time at the playground and after the speech, it happened only when circumstances threw us together. He came by one night in January to see Barbara, but she was at a friend’s, I said; I was sitting outside on the porch, my retreat even on winter nights from the chaos in our cramped house. “I’ll visit you, then,” he said, and sat beside me, and …
The next time, a few weeks later, Mama had sent me to Chafkin’s to pick up a few last-minute things for dinner. Danny was just getting off work. “I’ll walk with you,” he said. “Just come back for a minute while I sweep the storeroom.” We ended up on a cushion of potato sacks. His tongue darted into my mouth. Danny had tried this in the past; so, by now, had a couple other boys. But this time, I didn’t pull away; I French-kissed him back.
Soon we dropped all pretense and simply arranged to see each other. And even though I necked with boys I dated, Danny was always the first: my first French kiss, the first boy I didn’t swat away when he put a hand on my breast through layers of sweater, blouse, and underclothes, and later the first to slide his hand under my clothes and actually touch my breasts. Our trysts took place every two or three weeks, often in Chafkin’s storeroom—where else could we have privacy?
I didn’t split completely in two. I felt guilty and insisted that we discuss how we were wronging Barbara. But he maintained that he didn’t love Barbara any less because he cared for me, too.
“So you wouldn’t mind telling her about us?” I said. “Or going to the movies with me sometime, instead of sneaking around?”
“If we were in Palestine, I would. The pioneers in Palestine are creating an entirely new society.”
“But we’re not in Palestine.”
“What about your cousin Mollie?” he countered.
“What does Mollie have to do with—”
“Bet she believes in free love.”
Mollie did believe in free love, and in one of the stories I told myself I was a forward-thinker, a revolutionary. Alternatively, I was an ironic intellectual who had no patience for the silly conventions of high school courtship, the dates and moony looks and fantasies of marriage. These were identities I struggled to claim on evenings when Barbara and Danny stole a few private moments on the living room sofa while I lay in bed with a book in front of my face, unable to take in a word. Or when I swam up from dizzy kisses into Chafkin’s storeroom, into the shame of being kissed in secret amid the dark odors of root vegetables and slightly rotten greens.
FOR MONTHS AFTER WE MET AUNT PEARL’S BOYFRIEND, SWEET-VOICED Alberto Rivas, Barbara and I spun elaborate fantasies about their wedding. We imagined every detail of our roles—and our outfits—for the grand event, and we privately referred to Pearl’s beau as Uncle Bert.
The first time I’d met Bert, I was shocked that Pearl was dating a Mexican. It was enough of a scandal when the son or daughter of one of our Jewish neighbors married a Christian; there were religious families that sat shiva as if the person had died.
But my initial shock soon switched to admiration for the modern American woman who was my aunt. Like the forthright movie heroines for whom she designed costumes, Pearl wasn’t going to be bound by musty, undemocratic conventions. She would follow her heart. As for Uncle Bert, he was charming and funny and handsome, and I adored it when he sang.
Clearly, however, the other adults in my family weren’t as open-minded as Pearl. Bert came to our house with her only a handful of times and never again with the giddy joy of that first night, when he’d borne Audrey safely home after the earthquake. Papa in particular, for all that he preached American acceptance for people of all races and backgrounds, always acted tense and cold when Bert was around.
Barbara and I had enough sense to keep our mouths shut. But one day when Pearl and Bert had joined us for a picnic, Audrey blurted out, “When are you getting married?”
“Audrey!” Mama gasped.
Bert winked at Audrey. “I’m waiting for you to grow up so I can marry you.”
“Audrey, come with me,” Papa said.
“But—”
“Now!” Papa grabbed her hand to lead her away for a private talk. And he glared at Bert with so much anger it shocked me.
At least Papa was willing to speak to Bert. Zayde had refused to shake his hand, even after he’d rescued Audrey. Barbara and I eventually concluded it was Zayde’s opposition that kept Pearl from marrying Bert. It was one thing for her to defy Zayde by living on her own after her divorce, but she must have felt she couldn’t get married again without his blessing. And as time passed with no hint of an engagement, we had let the subject drop.
But now, four years later, Zayde was gone, his absence a rip in my awareness that cruelly occurred again and again—when I caught an astringent, vinegary whiff from the pickle barrels at Canter’s and had an impulse to buy a kosher dill and take it to Zayde at Melansky’s. Or I heard a great joke on the radio and started repeating it to myself, and only then realized I had lost my audience. Sometimes, I was so certain I heard his voice in the nex
t room I had to go look and prove to myself that he wasn’t there.
The one consolation was that Pearl was at last free to marry Bert. Not that she had said anything about it. But wasn’t she planning to buy her own house in Boyle Heights?
“A whole house, for one person!” I heard Mama say to Papa.
“She could afford a house in Hollywood or Westwood if she wanted to live there,” Papa said.
In fact, Pearl was doing so well designing clothes for the movies that she no longer worked out of her apartment but rented an entire floor of a building in the garment district. She employed half a dozen people and had set aside a room for Papa’s business of supplying shoes to go with her costumes. She had even bought a car and learned to drive! She needed the car, a Plymouth sedan, to carry samples and so forth. But those were all requirements for her business. Why would Pearl want to buy a house, except to live in it with Bert? Barbara and I concurred, and we happily resumed our fantasizing about Pearl’s wedding.
“Will they make some kind of announcement?” Barbara said one evening when we were on our way to Pearl’s apartment. This was just after we’d entered our junior year in high school, and we were going to Pearl’s to choose fabric for new dresses; Pearl still did some sewing for the family at home, often using remnants from the outfits she made for movie stars. “Or will she just start wearing a ring and wave her hands until we notice?”
“Waving her hands won’t get any special attention.” I laughed. “She does that all the time.”
“What if she stre-e-etches?” Mimicking our dance teacher, Miss Helen, at her most dramatic, Barbara thrust her arms above her head and skipped down the street. “Come on!” she called, and I danced beside her, my self-consciousness mixed with the thrill of acting like an uninhibited, madcap girl.
We tumbled into Pearl’s apartment giggling and sweaty, and when she asked why we were in such good moods, it spilled out.
“We’re planning your engagement,” I said.
The Tin Horse: A Novel Page 21